Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

  “You don’t have to worry. I have deceived you for more than ten years myself. We are even.”

  And I smiled. What splendid silence! She sat without uttering a word, so quiet that she might have stopped breathing. The trial was over. She could go ahead and do what she liked.

  I left her room, fully aware of the briskness of my pace.

  “Midori!”

  It was her first word, but I turned the corner without looking back.

  “What’s the matter, Aunt Midori? You look so pale.”

  Shako was bringing tea. I knew that the color had fled from my cheeks too.

  Now I think you understand why I must leave you. Or, rather, why you cannot help feeling you must leave me. I have written about many things, and it seems that our relationship has at length come to an end. I think I have told you all I have on my mind. I would appreciate it if you could give me your consent to a divorce while you are in Izu.

  I remember one thing more. Something pleasant. Today I took the maid’s place and cleaned the study in the cottage for the first time in years. It is nice, quiet study. The long sofas are comfortable. The Ninsei vase on the bookshelf is so strong that one thinks its flowers are on fire. I am writing this letter in the study. Gauguin does not exactly fit it, so I have taken him away and without your permission replaced him by a Vlaminck snow scene. I should like to hang Gauguin in the Yasé house. I also cleaned your closet and hung out three winter suits with ties I like. I wonder if you will like them.

  AYAKO’S LETTER

  By the time you read this, I shall no longer be alive. I do not know what death is like, but one thing is definite—that neither my joy, nor my suffering, nor my agony will continue to exist in this world. The thoughts of you and thoughts of Shōko that come one after another will disappear from the earth. There will be nothing left to tell of me.

  Still, you will be reading this letter hours, or days, after I die. And it will convey to you the thoughts I had while still alive. It will tell you of thoughts which you do not yet know, thoughts the same as if I were still living. And you will listen to me. You will be surprised at me, ‘grieve for me, and scold me just as though I were alive. You will not shed tears, but you will look sad as only I have seen you (Midori has not), and say: “What a fool you are!” I can see your face and hear your voice.

  I think that my life will hide itself in this letter until you read it, and it will flame up again the moment your eyes fall upon the first word. And it will pour into your whole being and fill your heart until you finish the last word. What a strange thing a suicide letter is! Even the life that will last only the fifteen to twenty minutes you are reading this—even that life I wish with all my heart to give you, and give you honestly. I am afraid to tell you: I do not think I have shown you my real self even once in my life. The one who writes this is my true self. Only she is my true self. My true self!

  The maples of Tennozan after the autumn rain still linger before my eyes. Why were they so beautiful? We sheltered ourselves from the rain under the closed gate of a famous tea cottage in front of the railroad station. Looking up at the mountain that stood like a titan before us, its steep slope rising from the station, we were astounded by its beauty. I wonder if it was because of the play of light at that particular time of day. It was November, and growing dark. Or was it because of the weather that particular autumn day, a succession of brief showers? The mountain was so lovely that we were almost afraid to climb it together. That was thirteen years ago. The almost painful beauty of the maples is still vivid before my eyes.

  We were alone for the first time. Having been taken by you from one place to another in the suburbs of Kyoto from early that morning, I was exhausted in body and mind. You were tired too. Climbing the steep mountain, you were now saying foolish things. “Love is attachment. Is there anything wrong with my being attached to a rare teacup? Well, then, why shouldn’t I be attached to you?” And: “It’s only you and I that have seen such beautiful maples. Only two of us have seen them, and at the same time. There’s no help for it.” It was like the pouting of a spoiled child.

  These fretful words made my heart crumble as if before a violent shove—my heart, which had desperately been trying to fly from you all day. Your threats and your boundless sadness crystallized like a flower the happiness of a woman who is loved.

  What an easy thing for me to forgive my own inconstancy—when I had been unable to forgive my husband’s!

  It was at the Atami Hotel that you used the word “evil.” You said that we would be evil persons. Do you remember?

  It was a windy night. The wooden shutters facing the sea kept rattling. At midnight you opened the window to tighten them. I saw a small fishing boat in the offing, burning like a torch. Several souls were in danger of death, yet I felt no fear. Only the beauty of the fire caught my eyes. When the window was closed, however, I suddenly felt uneasy. I opened the window again, but could no longer see that spot of fire. Probably the boat had burned to the water. The dark surface of the sea spread heavy and quiet.

  Until that night I had been struggling to leave you. After I saw the fire in the fishing boat, a strange fatalism came over my thoughts.

  “Let’s be evil, the two of us,” you said. “Join me and we will deceive Midori all our lives.”

  I answered without hesitation: “Let’s become completely evil, now that we are determined to become evil. Let’s deceive everyone, not only Midori.” That night I slept well for the first time since we had begun our secret meetings.

  It was as if I had seen the helplessness of our love in that boat, devoured completely by fire. As I write, the fire against the shroud of night lingers before my eyes. What I saw on the sea that night must have been the agony of a woman’s life, brief and real and trying.

  It is no use, however, to indulge in such memories. Despite the sufferings of the past thirteen years, I know I was happier than anyone else. I was so happy, shaken by your expansive love, that I hardly knew how I could bear it.

  I went through my diary today. There I saw too many words like “death” and “sin” and “love.” I felt I had to make note once again of the dangerous situation we were in. The weight of the notebook on my palm was the weight of my happiness under the burden of sin. I faced death day after day, thinking that I would die when the secret was discovered by Midori. Yes, that I would have to compensate with my life. For this very reason my happiness was so intense that it was unbearable.

  Who would imagine that there was another “I” besides the one described here? (I may sound affected, but I know of no other way to express it.) Yes, another “I” lived within me. The other “I” you do not know and you cannot imagine.

  Once you told me that everyone has a serpent within him. It was when you visited Dr. Takeda of the Science Faculty at Kyoto University. While you were talking to him, I killed time by looking at the serpents in a case at the end of the long, gloomy passage. When you came out after about half an hour, I was somehow sick of serpents. Looking into the specimen case, you said to me jokingly: “This is Ayako, this is Midori, and this is I. Every man has a serpent in him.” Midori’s was a little sepia snake from the South Seas. Mine was a small one from Australia with white specks all over it and a sharp, pointed head like a gimlet. I wonder what you meant. Although I never spoke to you about it again, your remark remained in my memory. Occasionally I asked myself about the serpent that each man has in him. I answered sometimes that it was egotism, sometimes that it was jealousy. Even now I do not know. In any event, a serpent did indeed dwell within me. The other self, which I do not understand, can only be called a serpent.

  It happened this afternoon. When Midori came into my room, I was wearing that cloak of purple-gray from the Yuki looms. You had it sent from Kumamoto and it was my favorite when I was young. The moment Midori stepped into the room and saw me, I knew that she was about to say something. She stopped as if in surprise and kept silent for a while. I thought she must be surprised at m
y somewhat unusual choice of cloaks. Half in fun, I too was silent.

  Suddenly Midori turned her eyes, peculiarly cold eyes, toward me and said: “It’s the cloak you were wearing when you were in Atami with Misugi. I saw you that day.”

  The words stabbed me like a dagger. Her face was resolute and pale.

  For a moment I did not understand what she meant. When the seriousness of the meaning came to me, I brought my hand to my throat and drew myself up as if upon command.

  She had known everything for such a long time!

  I felt strangely quiet, like the tide rising on an evening sea. I even thought I should take her hand and say: “Oh, so you knew it. You knew everything.” Although the moment which I had been so afraid of had come, I felt no fear. Between us there was only quiet, as of water lapping against a beach. The veil of thirteen years had now been stripped off, and there remained not the death I had been thinking about but peace, yes, and quiet rest. The dark and heavy burden which had lain on my shoulders for such a long time had been removed and replaced by a strangely appealing blankness. There were so many things I had to think about. I felt not fear but something remote and vacant and yet quiet and satisfying. I was indulging in a kind of rapture that might be called liberation. Looking into Midori’s eyes (yet I was not seeing anything), I sat there vacantly. I did not catch what she was saying.

  When I came to myself, I saw her staggering toward the hall.

  “Midori!” I called after her. Why? I do not know.

  Maybe I wanted to have her sit before me forever. I might have asked her bluntly, if she had come back: “May I have Misugi?”

  Or I might have said something entirely different, yet with the same feeling: “The time has come when I must return Misugi to you.” I really do not know which I would have chosen. Anyhow Midori did not come back.

  What a ridiculous thought, dying because we were found out by Midori! Sin, sin. What a meaningless sense of guilt! Has the person who sells his soul to the devil no choice but to become a devil? Had I been deceiving myself and God for thirteen years?

  I fell into a deep sleep. When Shōko woke me, I was aching all over, as if the fatigue of thirteen years had made itself felt all at once. Then I found my uncle from Akashi sitting at my bedside. He is a contractor whom you once met, and he stopped by to inquire about my illness on his way to Osaka. He left after a certain amount of small talk. Then, tying his shoes at the door, he said: “Kadota married again not long ago.”

  Kadota! How long since I had last heard that name? Of course he meant Kadota Reiichirō, my ex-husband. He spoke casually, but his words shook me.

  “When?” I knew my voice was trembling.

  “Last month. Maybe it was the month before last. They say he had a new house built near the hospital in Hyōgo.”

  “Is that so?” That is all I could say.

  After my uncle had left, I pulled myself along the veranda step by step. Holding to a pillar, I felt as if I were sinking. Although it was windy outside and the trees were swaying, it seemed as if I were gazing at a still underwater world through the glass of an aquarium.

  “Ah, it’s all over!” I was not aware myself that I had spoken, but Shōko, whom I had not noticed, answered:

  “What’s over?”

  “I don’t know.”

  With a laugh, Shōko took me lightly from behind. “Don’t be silly. Suppose you go back to bed.”

  Urged on by Shōko, I walked to my bedroom. As I sat up in bed, however, I felt everything come crumbling down around me. Propping myself up on one hand, I managed to control myself while Shōko was there. When she left for the kitchen, tears came streaming down my cheeks.

  Why should the simple fact of Kadota’s getting married be such a blow? What was this all about? I do not remember how much time passed. Through the window I saw Shōko burning leaves in the garden. The sun had already set. It was a quiet evening such as I had never seen before in my life.

  “You are already burning leaves.” I spoke softly, and, as if the whole thing had been previously arranged, I rose and took my diary from the bottom of the desk drawer. Shōko was burning leaves to burn my diary. How could it be otherwise? Going out to the veranda with the diary, I sat on the cane chair and turned over the pages. A diary with an array of words like “sin,” “death,” and “love.” Confessions of a sinner. The words “sin,” “death,” and “love,” inscribed in the course of thirteen years, had lost the fire which they bore until yesterday, and were ready to share the fate of the leaves that rose in purple smoke.

  As I handed the diary to Shōko, I made up my mind to die. I thought the time had come for me to die. It might be more appropriate to say that I had lost the power to live.

  Kadota had been living alone ever since we were divorced. He had missed chances to remarry because of his study abroad and his service in the South Seas during the war. At any rate, he had remained unmarried. It seems to me now that his being unmarried is what made life bearable for me. I would like to have you believe this much, however, that I never met him again nor wanted to meet him after I left him. Except for fragmentary gossip about him from my relatives in Akashi, years had passed during which I was completely unaware of his existence.

  Night fell. After Shōko and the maid had retired to their rooms, I pulled out an album from the bookshelf. About two dozen pictures of Kadota and myself were pasted in it.

  It was several years ago that Shōko had startled me by remarking: “The pictures of Mother and Father are pasted so that their faces meet.”

  Shōko said it innocently, but I found that pictures taken at the time of our marriage happened to be pasted on opposite pages, so that our faces indeed met each other when the album was closed. I let it go that time. Her words, however, remained in my heart and once or twice a year emerged to consciousness. But for the time being I neither removed the pictures nor pasted them otherwise. Finally today I thought the time had come for me to strip them off. I would take Kadota’s pictures from the album and paste them in Shōko’s red album, so that she might keep them as images of her father as a young man.

  My other self was such a person. The little serpent from Australia which you said was lurking in me made its appearance this morning, speckled white all over. I wonder if the little sepia serpent from the South Pacific, its red tongue like a filament, kept pretending for thirteen years not to know of our meeting at Atami.

  What, after all, is the serpent that every man has? Is it something like karma, relentless, ready to swallow up all, egotism, jealousy, and destiny? It is a pity that I will have no more chance to learn of this from you. What a sad creature, the serpent each man has! I remember reading in a book about the “sadness of life.” As I write this letter, I find my heart touching on something so sad and cold that it is beyond help. What does man have that is so unbearably hateful and so unbearably sad?

  It occurs to me that I haven’t presented you with my real self even yet. It seems that my first resolution has weakened and fled from the horror.

  The other self that I am not aware of—what a good excuse! I told you that today I had discovered the little white serpent lurking in me. I told you that it had made its first appearance today.

  A lie, a lie. I should have noticed it all along.

  My heart breaks to think of the night of August sixth, when the area between Osaka and Kobe turned into a sea of flames. Shōko and I were hiding ourselves in the air-raid shelter you designed. As the waves of B-29s passed over, I was thrown into a loneliness that I was absolutely incapable of helping. It was such an intense loneliness that it was beyond description. I found it impossible to stay there any longer. I was about to leave the shelter when I saw you standing before me.

  The entire sky was red. You had run to my house and you stood at the entrance to the shelter. Your neighborhood was already in flames. I went back into the shelter with you and burst into tears. Both Shōko and you seemed to take my hysteria for terror. I do not think I was able to explain t
hen or afterwards. Forgive me. While I was wrapped in your generous, much too generous, love, I wished I could stand before the air-raid shelter of Kadota’s hospital in Hyogo, that hospital, white and clean, that I had seen only once from the train window. I wanted to stand there just as you stood at the entrance to my air-raid shelter. I was trembling with an unbearable longing and resisting it with tears.

  But this was not the first time I had noticed. Several years before, I was transfixed when you told me that I had a little white serpent in me. Never before had I been so afraid of your eyes. Although you may not have meant to be serious, I felt as if my mind had been read and I shrank back with fear. My revulsion at actual snakes had gone. When I timidly looked into your face, I saw that you seemed to be looking into the distance with your unlit pipe in your mouth. You had never done that before. Perhaps it was my imagination, but you wore the most vacant face of all your faces that I knew. It was a matter of a moment. When you looked toward me, you had the usual gentle expression.

  Until then I had never grasped my “other self” clearly. Since then I have seen it as a little white snake. That night I wrote about the white snake in my diary. Filling a page with the words “white snake,” I imagined the little snake in my heart, coiling tightly into a cone, its gimlet head pointed straight to heaven. It brought me quiet to compare the most detestable part of myself to such a form, pure and somehow expressive of a woman’s sorrow and honesty. God will regard it with mercy. I am selfish even now. I seemed to have become a still more evil person.

  Yes, I shall write everything, now that I have written this much. Please do not be angry. This happened that windy night at the Atami Hotel thirteen years ago, the very night when you and I determined to become thoroughly evil and to deceive everyone while we nurtured our love.

  That night, just after we had exchanged our oaths of love, I found that there was nothing more to say. I lay on the well-starched bed sheet, and I gazed up into the darkness in silence. I do not recall any more impressively quiet hour. Was it only five or six minutes? Or was it for half an hour or an hour that we were silent?