EARLY LIGHT

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 STORYBOOK ND
CU RAT ED BY G INI A LHA D EF F

César Aira, The Famous Magician

Osamu Dazai, Early Light
Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool
László Krasznahorkai, Spadework for a Palace
Clarice Lispector, The Woman Who Killed the Fish
Yoko Tawada, Three Streets

F O RT H C O M I N G
Natalia Ginzburg, The Road to the City
Rachel Ingalls, In the Act
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Copyright © 2022 by New Directions Publishing Corporation
Translation copyright © 1991, 2022 by Ralph McCarthy (“One Hundred Views of
Mount Fuji,” “Early Light”)
Translation copyright © 1955 by Donald Keene (“Villon’s Wife”)

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine,
radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the Publisher.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: “Early Light” (Hakumei) and “One Hundred Views of Mount
Fuji” (Fugaku hyakkei) are selected from Self Portraits, first published in 1993 by
Kodansha USA, and are published by arrangement with Ralph McCarthy. “Villon’s
Wife” (Viyon no tsuma) originally appeared in New Directions in Prose and Poetry
15 (New Directions, 1955) and is published by arrangement with the estate of
Donald Keene.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First published clothbound by New Directions in 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Dazai, Osamu, 1909–1948, author. | McCarthy, Ralph F., translator. |
Keene, Donald, translator. | Dazai, Osamu, 1909–1948. Hakumei. English. |
Dazai, Osamu, 1909–1948. Fugaku hyakkei. English. | Dazai, Osamu, 1909–1948.
Viyon no tsuma. English.
Title: Early light / Osamu Dazai ; translated by Ralph McCarthy & Donald Keene.
Other titles: Early light (Compilation)
Description: New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2022. | Series: A
storybook ND
Identifiers: LCCN 2022005823 | ISBN 9780811231985 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780811232319 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dazai, Osamu, 1909–1948—Translations into English. | LCGFT:
Short stories.
Classification: LCC PL825.A8 E1713 2022 | DDC 895.63/44—dc23/eng/20220209
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005823

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, NY 10011

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 EARLY LIGHT

When our house in Mitaka, Tokyo, was damaged in the

bombings, we moved to Kōfu, my wife’s hometown. Her
younger sister had been living alone in the family house
there.
This was in early April of 1945. Allied planes passed
frequently enough through the skies over Kōfu but hardly
ever dropped any bombs. Nor was the war zone atmosphere
as intense as it was in Tokyo. We were able to sleep without
our air raid gear for the first time in months. I was thirty-
seven. My wife was thirty-four, my daughter five, and my
son two, technically, though he’d just been born in August of
the previous year. Our life up to that point had not been
easy by any means, but we had at least remained alive and
free of serious illnesses or injuries. Having survived so much
adversity, even I felt a desire to go on living a bit longer, if
only to see how things would turn out with the world.
Stronger than that, however, was the fear that my wife and
children would be killed before I was, leaving me alone. Just
to think about that possibility was unendurable. I had to see
to it that they survived, and that meant adopting the most
prudent measures. I had no money, however. Whenever I
did get my hands on a fair sum, I would promptly drink it
away. I have the serious defect known as a drinking habit.
Liquor at that time was an expensive indulgence, but
whenever friends or acquaintances visited me, I was unable
to stop myself from whisking them off to guzzle great
quantities of the stuff, just as I had in the old days.
So much for prudent measures. Even as I envied those
who’d long since evacuated their families to the distant
countryside, I, for lack of means and out of sheer indolence,
remained forever dillydallying in Mitaka, until at last we
were visited by a bomb and I lost all desire to stick it out
any longer and moved the family to Kōfu. Now, sleeping
without my air raid gear for the first time in nearly a
hundred days, I was able to breathe a small sigh of relief,
reflecting that, though further hardships undoubtedly lay
ahead, for the time being at least there’d be no need to
bundle up the children in the middle of a cold night and
scramble into the bomb shelter.
We were now, however, a family who’d lost their own
home, and this put us in an awkward position. I felt as
though I’d been through my share of tribulations in life, but
moving into someone else’s house with two small children in
tow allowed me a taste of various distinctive new ones. My
wife’s mother and father had both passed away, her elder
sisters had married and left, and though the youngest of the
siblings, a boy, was officially the head of the household, he
had entered the navy right after graduating from university
two or three years before, leaving the youngest sister, a girl
of twenty-six or twenty-seven, alone in the house in Kōfu.
She corresponded regularly with her brother, apparently
consulting with him in minute detail about all the household
affairs. I, of course, was the elder brother-in-law of these
two, but, elder or not, I obviously had no voice in managing
those affairs. Far from being in a position of authority, in
fact, I’d been nothing but a burden to this family ever since
my wife and I had married. I was not, in other words, a man
to be relied upon. It was only natural, therefore, that I be
excluded from consultation, and since I, for my part, had not
the slightest interest in the family “assets” or whatever, this
was a mutually satisfactory arrangement. But, being older
than both the navy boy and his twenty-six or twenty-seven-
year-old sister (twenty-eight, maybe—I never really
checked), I was worried that we might unintentionally
trample on their pride, or that they might be leery of my
trying to outsmart them and get my hands on those assets
—though surely no one would be that distrustful—and the
truth is that I felt constantly on guard, as if I were moving
through a lush, moss-covered garden, hopping gingerly from
one stepping-stone to the next. I even thought how much
easier it would be on all of us if only there were a still older
man in the house, one who’d accumulated more experience
in the real world.
This negative sort of concern for the feelings of others
can wear a man out. I borrowed the six-mat room facing the
rear garden to work and sleep in and arranged for my wife
and children to sleep in the room that housed the Buddhist
altar. I paid a fair rent for the rooms and made sure that I
contributed our share to the purchase of food and what not,
and when I had visitors I took care not to use the parlor, but
showed them into my workroom. I am a drinker, however,
and visitors from Tokyo were not infrequent, the upshot of
which was that, even as I maintained every intention of
honoring the privileges due the actual owners of the house,
I in fact ended up taking any number of inexcusable
liberties. My sister-in-law actually treated us with
considerable diffidence and was a great help with the
children, but, though there was never an unpleasant, head-
on confrontation, we were a family that had lost its home,
and while oversensitivity to that fact may have been the
true cause of my discomfort, there was, nonetheless, the
feeling of forever walking on thin ice. What this all added up
to was that, thanks to our evacuation to the country, both
the sister and ourselves were put under a debilitating strain.
Still, our situation was better than most, it would seem; one
can only guess what it was like for those evacuees in even
worse circumstances.
“Don’t evacuate. Stick it out in Tokyo till your house is
burned to the ground: you’ll be better off.”
I wrote this advice in a letter to a close friend who
remained with his family in Tokyo.
 We’d come to Kōfu in early April, when it was still chilly
and the cherry blossoms, considerably later than those in
Tokyo, had just begun to open. We were there throughout
May and June, when the heat unique to the Kōfu basin
began to make itself felt. The deep green leaves of the
pomegranate trees took on an oily sheen in the intense
sunlight, and soon their bright red flowers burst into bloom,
and the little green grapes grew plumper each day,
gradually forming long, rangy bunches that hung heavily
from the trellises; and it was just at about that time that a
commotion began to sweep through the city of Kōfu. The
entire town was abuzz with the rumor that the bombings
were to be directed at small and medium-sized cities, and
that Kōfu, too, would burn. Everyone began making
preparations to flee, loading their carts with household
goods and dragging their families off into the mountains;
you heard the sounds of footsteps and carts incessantly,
even late at night. I had from the beginning been resigned
to the fact that Kōfu too would eventually be hit, but to load
our belongings on a cart and evacuate to the mountains
with my wife and children to beg lodging from strangers
when I’d scarcely had time to enjoy the relief of sleeping
without air raid gear—that was asking too much.
I thought we should stay where we were. If the
incendiary bombs started dropping, my wife, carrying the
baby on her back and leading the five-year-old by the hand,
could flee to the fields on the outskirts of town while my
sister-in-law and I stayed behind and protected the house,
fighting the flames as best we could. If it burned down, it
burned down; working together, we could build a little shack
on the ruins and make our stand.
This was the plan I suggested, and everyone agreed to it.
We dug a pit to bury food, a set of kitchen utensils,
umbrellas, shoes, toiletries, a mirror, needles and thread—
all the barest necessities, to avoid being reduced to utter
wretchedness should the house be destroyed.
 “Bury these, too.” My five-year-old daughter held out a
pair of red geta clogs.
“Ah, yes. In they go,” I said, taking the clogs and stuffing
them into one corner of the pit. I felt for a moment as if I
were burying a person.
“At least now we’re all together,” my sister-in-law said.
She was, perhaps, experiencing the faint glow of happiness
one is said to feel on the eve of annihilation. No more than
four or five days later, in fact, the house went up in flames.
It came a good month earlier than I’d expected.
For the previous ten days or so, the two children had
been going to a doctor for eye problems, namely epidemic
conjunctivitis, or “pinkeye.” The boy’s condition wasn’t all
that bad, but his sister’s grew steadily worse. Within about a
week—two or three days before the bombing—she had
temporarily lost all use of her eyes. Her eyelids were so
swollen it distorted her features, and when you forcibly
pried the lids apart, you saw an inflamed, festering mess
that resembled the eye of a dead fish. Thinking that perhaps
this was no mere pinkeye but a virulent bacterial infection of
some sort that had already done permanent damage, I took
her to a different doctor, but again it was diagnosed as
conjunctivitis. It would take quite a while to clear up
entirely, we were told, but it would clear up. Doctors
frequently make mistakes, however. In fact, they’re
mistaken more often than not. I’ve never been one to put
undue faith in anything doctors say.
I just hoped she’d regain her eyesight soon. I drank
heavily, but couldn’t get drunk. One night I even vomited on
the way home from a place I’d been drinking at, and I’m not
joking when I say that as I squatted there by the roadside I
pressed my palms together in prayer. Please let her eyes be
open when I get home. When I reached the house I heard
her singing innocently. Thank God, I thought, dashing inside,
only to find her standing there alone with her head bowed in
the dimly lit room, singing to herself.
 I couldn’t bear to watch her. My child went blind because
I’m a penniless drunk. If I had led the life of a proper,
upstanding citizen, perhaps this calamity would never have
occurred. The sins of the father are visited on the child. It
was divine retribution. I went so far as to tell myself that if
this child’s eyes remained closed for the rest of her life, I
would give up all thoughts of literature and personal glory to
be permanently at her side.
“Where are your footsies, baby? Where are your
handsies?” When she was feeling happy she’d play with her
baby brother like this, groping for him blindly. What if there
were an air raid now, with her in this condition? The thought
made me shudder. We’d have no choice but to run for it,
with the baby on my wife’s back and this child on mine. But
it would be impossible for my sister-in-law to protect the
house all by herself. She, too, then, would have to flee with
us. Judging by what the Allied planes had done to Tokyo, one
had to assume that the city of Kōfu would be completely
destroyed, including, surely, the doctor’s office we were
taking the girl to. And the other clinics as well; there
wouldn’t be a single doctor left in town. Then where would
we be?
“I don’t care what they do to us. It just seems to me they
might be so kind as to wait another month or so before they
do it.”
Later on the very night I’d smilingly announced this
opinion at the dinner table, we heard the air raid sirens for
the first time, simultaneous with the familiar thundering
explosions and a lighting up of the sky all around us. They’d
begun dropping the incendiary bombs. I heard a series of
splashes: my sister-in-law was throwing tableware into the
small pond near the veranda.
It was the worst possible time for the attack to come. I
boosted my blind child up on my back. My wife did likewise
with the baby boy, and we each ran outside clutching a
futon. We ran about ten blocks, taking shelter in ditches two
or three times along the way, before we came to open
fields. No sooner had we spread both futons out on a field of
freshly mown barley and sat down to catch our breath than
a shower of fire fell from the sky directly overhead.
“Get under the futon!” I shouted to my wife and threw
my own futon over me, lying face down with my daughter
still clinging to my back. I thought how painful a direct hit
would probably be.
We were spared that, but when I threw off the futon and
sat up for a look, I saw that we were surrounded by a sea of
fire.
“Get up and put out the fire! Put out the fire!” I yelled,
not only to my wife but in a voice loud enough for all the
others lying on the ground around us to hear, and we began
smothering the flames with our mats and blankets. It was
almost amusing how easily they went out. Though my
daughter could see nothing, she must have sensed that
something extraordinary was going on; she clung silently to
my shoulders, without uttering so much as a whimper.
“Are you all right?” I asked my wife, walking up to her
once the flames were pretty much under control.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Let’s hope this is as bad as it
gets.” For her, apparently, incendiary bombs were nothing
compared to the explosive variety.
We moved to another spot in the field to rest, and no
sooner had we done so than it began to rain fire again. This
may sound strange, but it occurred to me that perhaps
there is a splinter of divinity in each of us after all. Not only
our family but everyone who’d taken refuge in that field
escaped injury. We all busied ourselves snuffing out the
sticky, greasy, flaming globs with futons or blankets or dirt,
then sat back down to rest.
My sister-in-law left for the house of a distant relative in
the hills some four miles from the city to try to get food for
the following day. My wife and the children and I sat on one
of the futons and used the other to cover ourselves. We
decided this was as good a place as any to hold our ground.
I was exhausted. I’d had just about enough of running hither
and thither with the girl on my back. The children were now
lying quietly on the futon, asleep, while their parents gazed
vacantly at the glow of Kōfu going up in flames. The roar of
the airplanes had decreased considerably.
“I guess it’s about over,” my wife said.
“Yeah. Well, none too soon for me, I’ll tell you.”
“I suppose the house burned down.”
“Well, you never know. It’d be nice if it was still there.”
I figured it was hopeless, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if
by some miracle the house was still standing?
“Not likely, though,” I said.
“No, I suppose not.”
It was hard to abandon the last flicker of hope, however.
A farmhouse was blazing away right before us. It took an
incredibly long time to burn to the ground. One could almost
see the history of that house going up in flames along with
its roof and pillars.
The night faded into a pale dawn.
We carried the children to the national school, which
hadn’t burned. They let us rest in a classroom on the second
floor. The children began to wake. Even after waking up, of
course, the girl’s eyes remained closed. Groping about, she
amused herself by climbing up on the lecturer’s platform
and what not. Her condition seemed scarcely to weigh on
her mind.
I left the wife and children there and set out to check on
the house. It was a tremendous ordeal just walking through
the streets, what with the heat and smoke from the
smoldering houses on either side, but by following a
roundabout path, changing course any number of times, I
somehow managed to reach our neighborhood. How happy I
would be if the house were still standing! But, no, it couldn’t
possibly be. I told myself I shouldn’t get my hopes up, but
the phantom of that one-in-a-million chance kept raising its
head. I came in sight of the black wooden fence around the
house.
It was still there!
But it was only the fence. The house itself was
completely destroyed. My sister-in-law was standing in the
ruins, her face black with soot.
“Hi. How are the children?”
“They’re fine.”
“Where are they?”
“At the school.”
“I’ve got some riceballs. I had to walk like mad, but at
least I got some food.”
“Thanks.”
“Let’s keep our spirits up. Look at this. Most of the things
we buried are fine. We’ll be all right for the time being.”
“We should have buried more stuff.”
“It’s all right. With all this, we’ll be able to hold our heads
up high wherever we go for help. I’m going to take some
food to the school. You stay here and rest. Here, have some
riceballs. Take as many as you like.”
A woman of twenty-seven or twenty-eight is in some
ways more mature than a man of forty or more. She was a
rock, a model of composure. Her perfectly worthless
brother-in-law proceeded to rip a few planks from the fence,
lay them on the ground in the field in back, and sit down
with legs crossed to stuff his cheeks with the riceballs she’d
left. I was completely without resources or plan. But,
whether good for nothing or just plain stupid, I didn’t give a
thought to what we were to do. The only thing that really
concerned me was my daughter’s eye problem. How in the
world would we go about treating it now?
Before very long my wife and sister-in-law arrived. My
wife had the baby on her back, and my sister-in-law was
leading my daughter by the hand.
“Did you walk all the way here?” I asked my daughter.
“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding.
 “Is that right? That’s really something. The house burned
down.”
“Uh-huh.” She nodded again.
“It looks like the doctor’s place is gone, too,” I said,
turning to my wife. “What are we going to do about her
eyes?”
“We had them washed out this morning.”
“Where?”
“A doctor came by the school.”
“Really? That’s great.”
“No, just the best they could do. A nurse did it.”
“Oh.”
We took shelter for the day at the house of a schoolfriend
of my sister-in-law’s on the outskirts of town. With us we
carried the food and the pots and pans we’d unearthed from
the pit. Smiling at my sister-in-law, I pulled a watch from my
pocket.
“We’ve still got this. I grabbed it before I ran out of the
house.”
It was my brother-in-law’s pocket watch. I’d found it in
the desk some time before and taken it out for my own use.
“Good going.” She smiled back at me. “You surprise me.
This really adds to our assets.”
I was rather proud of myself. “It can be pretty
inconvenient if you don’t have a timepiece, you know.” I
pressed the watch into my little girl’s hand. “See?” I said.
“It’s a watch. Put it up to your ear. Hear it go tick-tick-tick?
Look at that,” I told my wife and her sister. “It even makes a
good toy for blind kids.”
My daughter was standing perfectly still with her head
cocked and the watch pressed against her ear when
suddenly it slipped from her hand. It made a clear, tinkling
sound as it hit the ground. The crystal was smashed to
pieces. It was beyond repair. One could hardly expect to find
a shop selling watch crystals.
“Oh, no,” I said, my heart sinking.
 “Dummy,” my sister-in-law muttered, but I was relieved
to see that she didn’t seem particularly distressed about
suddenly losing what was virtually the only “asset” she had
left.
We cooked dinner in a corner of the garden at the
schoolfriend’s house, then retired early in a six-mat room
inside. My wife and her sister, tired as they were, seemed
unable to sleep and were quietly discussing what we should
do.
“Hey, there’s nothing to worry about,” I told them. “We’ll
all go to my family’s place up north. Everything’s going to
be fine.”
They fell silent. From the beginning, neither of them had
put much stock in any opinions of mine. They were
apparently devising plans of their own now and didn’t even
deign to reply.
“All right, I know you don’t have any faith in me.” I smiled
sourly. “But, listen, trust me just this once. That’s all I’m
asking.”
I heard my sister-in-law giggle in the darkness, as if I’d
said something totally outlandish. Then she and my wife
continued their discussion.
“Fine. Suit yourselves,” I said with a chuckle of my own.
“Not much I can do if you won’t trust in me.”
“Well, what do you expect?” my wife suddenly snapped.
“You say such preposterous things, we never know if you’re
joking or serious. It’s only natural that we don’t rely on you.
Even now, with things the way they are, I bet all you can
think about is sake.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“But if we had some, you’d drink it, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, I don’t know, maybe I would.”
The two ladies decided that, at any rate, it wouldn’t do to
impose on our present hosts any more than we already had,
and that, come morning, we’d have to look for somewhere
else to stay. The following day we loaded our things on a
large cart and went to the house of another of my sister-in-
law’s acquaintances. This house was quite a spacious affair.
The man who owned it was about fifty and seemed a
gentleman of sterling character. He lent us a ten-mat room.
We also found a hospital nearby. The gentleman’s wife told
us that the prefectural hospital in Kōfu had been destroyed
and had relocated to a building here on the outskirts of
town. My wife and I each shouldered a child and set out,
taking a shortcut through the mulberry fields, and reached
the hospital, at the foot of the mountains, in about ten
minutes.
The opthalmologist was a woman.
“The girl can’t open her eyes at all. We’re thinking about
heading for my family’s house in the country, but it’s a long
trip by train, and we don’t even want to attempt it if her
condition might get worse on the way. We’re really at our
wits’ end.” Wiping the sweat from my face, I fervently
described the girl’s symptoms, hoping to induce the lady
doctor to do everything in her power to help us.
“What, this?” she said breezily. “This will clear up in no
time.”
“Really?”
“It hasn’t affected the eyes themselves at all. I’m sure
you’ll be able to travel in four or five days.”
My wife broke in to ask if there were any injections that
could be given for this sort of thing.
“There are, yes, but . . .”
“Please, Doctor,” said my wife, bowing deeply.
Whether the injection worked or the infection had simply
run its natural course I couldn’t say, but my daughter’s eyes
opened on the afternoon of the second day after we visited
the hospital.
“Thank goodness, thank goodness,” was all I could say,
and I said it over and over. The first thing I did was take her
to see what was left of the house.
“See? It burned all up.”
 “Yeah,” she said, with a big smile on her face. “Burned all
up.”
“Everything’s gone. Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Odagiri
house, the Chino house, they all burned up.”
“Yeah, they all burned up,” she said, still smiling.

TRANSLATED BY RALPH McCARTHY

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 ONE HUNDRED VIEWS
OF MOUNT FUJI

The slopes of Hiroshige’s Mount Fuji converge at an angle of

eighty-five degrees, and those in Bunchō’s paintings at
about eighty-four, but if you study survey maps drawn by
the army, you’ll find that the angle formed by the eastern
and western slopes is one hundred twenty-four degrees, and
that formed by the northern and southern slopes is one
hundred seventeen. And it’s not only Hiroshige and Bunchō
—most paintings of Fuji, in fact, depict the slopes meeting at
an acute angle, the summit slender, lofty, delicate. Some of
Hokusai’s renditions fairly resemble the Eiffel Tower, peaking
at nearly thirty degrees. But the real Fuji is unmistakably
obtuse, with long, leisurely slopes; by no means do one
hundred twenty-four degrees east-west and one hundred
seventeen north-south make for a very steep peak. If I were
living in India, for example, and were suddenly snatched up
and carried off by an eagle and dropped on the beach at
Numazu in Japan, I doubt if I’d be very much impressed at
the sight of this mountain. Japan’s “Fujiyama” is “wonderful”
to Westerners simply because they’ve heard so much about
it and yearned so long to see it; but how much appeal would
Fuji hold for one who’s never been exposed to such popular
propaganda, for one whose heart is simple and pure and
free of preconceptions? It would, perhaps, strike that person
as almost pathetic, as mountains go. It’s short. In relation to
the width of its base, quite short. Any mountain with a base
that size should be at least half again as tall.
 The only time Fuji looked really tall to me was when I saw
it from Jukkoku Pass. That was good. At first, because it was
cloudy, I couldn’t see the top, but I judged from the angle of
the lower slopes and picked out a spot amid the clouds
where I thought the peak probably was, only to find, when
the sky began to clear, that I was way off. The bluish
summit loomed up twice as high as I’d expected. I was not
so much surprised as strangely tickled, and I cackled with
laughter. I had to hand it to Fuji that time. When you come
face to face with absolute reliability, you tend, first of all, to
burst into silly laughter. You just come all undone. It’s like—
this is a funny way to put it, I know, but it’s like chuckling
with relief after loosening your belt. Young men, if ever the
one you love bursts out laughing the moment she sees you,
you are to be congratulated. By no means must you
reproach her. She has merely been overwhelmed by the
absolute reliability she senses in you.
Fuji from the window of an apartment in Tokyo is a painful
sight. In winter it’s quite clear and distinct. That small white
triangle poking up over the horizon: that’s Fuji. It’s nothing;
it’s a Christmas candy. What’s more, it lists pathetically to
the left, like a battleship slowly beginning to founder. It was
during the winter three years ago that a certain person
caught me off guard with a shocking confession. I was at my
wits’ end. That night I sat alone in one room of my
apartment, guzzling sake. I drank all night, without sleeping
a wink. At dawn I went to relieve myself, and through the
wire mesh screen covering the square window in the toilet I
could see Fuji. Small, pure white, leaning slightly to the left:
that’s one Fuji I’ll never forget. On the asphalt street below
the window, a fishmonger sped by on his bicycle, muttering
to himself (“You can sure see Fuji good this morning . . .
Damn, it’s cold . . .”), and I stood in the dark little room,
stroking the mesh screen and weeping with despair. That’s
an experience the like of which I hope never to go through
again.
 In the early autumn of 1938, determined to rethink my
life, I packed a single small valise and set out on a journey.
Kōshū. What distinguishes the mountains here is their
gentle and strangely aimless rise and fall. A man named
Kojima Usui once wrote, in The Landscape of Japan, that “to
these mountains come many cross-grained, self-willed sorts
to disport themselves like wizard monks.” As mountains go,
these are, perhaps, freaks. I boarded a bus in Kōfu City and
arrived, after a boneshaking, hour-long ride, at Misaka Pass.
Misaka Pass: one thousand three hundred meters above
sea level. At the top of the pass is Tenka Chaya, a small
teahouse, in a room on the second floor of which my mentor
Ibuse Masuji had been holed up writing since early summer.
I’d come with the knowledge that I’d find him here. Provided
it wouldn’t be a hindrance to his work, I, too, intended to
rent a room in the teahouse and do a bit of disporting amid
those mountains.
Mr. Ibuse was hard at work. I received his permission and
settled in, and spent each day from then on, like it or not,
face to face with Fuji. This pass, once a strategic point on
the road to Kamakura that connected Kōfu with the Tokaido
Highway, offers a prospect of the northern slope that has
been counted as one of the Three Great Views of Mount Fuji
since ancient times. Far from being pleased with the view,
however, I found myself holding it in contempt. It’s too
perfect. You have Fuji right before you and, lying at its feet,
the cold, white expanse of Lake Kawaguchi cradled by
hushed, huddling mountains on either side. One look threw
me into blushing confusion. It was a wall painting in a public
bath. Scenery on a stage. So precisely made to order it was
mortifying to behold.
On a sunny afternoon two or three days after I’d arrived,
when Mr. Ibuse had caught up on his work somewhat, we
hiked up to Mitsu Pass together. Mitsu Pass: one thousand
seven hundred meters above sea level. A bit higher than
Misaka Pass. You reach the top after climbing a steep slope,
more or less on all fours, for about an hour. Parting the ivies
and vines as I half crawled toward the summit, I presented a
spectacle that was far from lovely. Mr. Ibuse was in proper
hiking clothes and cut a jaunty figure, but I, having no such
gear, was clad in a dotera—a square-cut, padded cotton
kimono—that the teahouse had provided me with. It was too
short and left a stretch of hairy shin exposed on either leg. I
was also wearing a pair of thick, rubber-soled workshoes
lent me by an old man at the teahouse, and was acutely
aware of how shabby I looked. I’d made a few adjustments,
securing the dotera with a narrow, manly sash and donning
a straw hat I’d found hanging on the wall, but the only result
was that I looked even more bizarre. I’ll never forget how Mr.
Ibuse, a person who would never stoop to belittling
someone’s appearance, eyed me with a compassionate air
and tried to console me by muttering something about it not
becoming a man, after all, to concern himself very much
with fashion.
At any rate, we eventually reached the top, but no
sooner had we done so than a thick fog rolled over us, and
even standing on the observation platform at the edge of
the cliff provided us with no view whatsoever. We couldn’t
see a thing. Enveloped in that dense fog, Mr. Ibuse sat down
on a rock, puffed slowly at a cigarette, and broke wind. He
looked decidedly out of sorts. On the observation platform
were three somber little teahouses. We chose one that was
run by an elderly couple and had a cup of hot green tea. The
old woman felt sorry for us and said what a stroke of bad
luck the fog was, that it would surely clear before long, that
normally you could see Fuji right there, looming up before
you, plain as day. She then retrieved a large photograph of
the mountain from the interior of the teahouse and carried it
to the edge of the cliff, held it high in both hands, and
earnestly explained that you could generally see Fuji just
here, just like this, this big and this clear. We sipped at the
coarse tea, admiring the photo and laughing. That was a
fine Fuji indeed. We ended up not even regretting the
impenetrable fog.
It was, I believe, two days later that Mr. Ibuse left Misaka
Pass, and I accompanied him as far as Kōfu. In Kōfu I was to
be introduced to a certain young lady whom Mr. Ibuse had
suggested I marry. Mr. Ibuse was dressed casually, in his
hiking clothes. I wore a kimono and a thin summer coat
secured with my narrow sash. He led me to the young lady’s
house on the outskirts of the city. A profusion of roses grew
in the garden. The young lady’s mother showed us into the
parlor, where we exchanged greetings, and after a while the
young lady came in. I didn’t look at her face. Mr. Ibuse and
the mother were carrying on a desultory, grown-up
conversation when, suddenly, he fixed his eye on the wall
above and behind me and muttered, “Ah, Fuji.” I twisted
around and looked up at the wall. Hanging there was a
framed aerial photograph of the great crater atop the
mountain. It resembled a pure white waterlily. After studying
the photo, I slowly twisted back to my original position and
glanced fleetingly at the girl. That did it. I made up my mind
then and there that, though it might entail a certain amount
of difficulty, I wanted to marry this person. That was a Fuji I
was grateful for.
Mr. Ibuse returned to Tokyo that day, and I went back to
Misaka Pass. Throughout September, October, and the first
fifteen days of November I stayed on the second floor of the
teahouse, pushing ahead with my work a little at a time and
trying to come to terms with that Great View of Fuji until it
all but did me in.
I had a good laugh one day. A friend of mine, a member
of “The Japan Romantics” who was then lecturing at a
university or something, dropped by the teahouse during a
hiking excursion, and the two of us stepped into the corridor
on the second floor to smoke and poke fun at the view of
Fuji we had through the windows there.
 “Awfully, crass, isn’t it? It’s like, ‘Ah, Honorable Mount
Fuji.’”
“I know. It’s embarrassing to look at.”
“Say, what’s that?” my friend said suddenly, gesturing
with his chin. “That fellow dressed up like a monk.”
A small man of about fifty, wearing a ragged black robe
and dragging a long staff, was climbing toward the pass,
turning time and again to gaze up at Fuji.
“It reminds you of that painting Priest Saigyō Admiring
Mount Fuji, doesn’t it?” I said. “The fellow has a lot of style.”
To me the monk seemed a poignant evocation of the past.
“He might be some great saint or something.”
“Don’t be absurd,” my friend said with cold detachment.
“He’s a common beggar.”
“No, no. There’s something special about him. Look how
he walks—he’s got style, I tell you. You know, they say the
priest Noin used to write poems praising Fuji right here on
this pass, and—”
I was interrupted by my friend’s laughter. “Ha! Look at
that. You call that ‘having style’?”
Hachi, my hosts’ pet dog, had begun to bark at Noin,
throwing him into a panic. The scene that ensued was
painfully ludicrous.
“I guess you’re right,” I said, crestfallen.
The beggar’s panic increased until he began to flounder
disgracefully about, threw away his staff, and finally ran for
dear life. It was true, he had no style at all. Our priest was
as crass as his Fuji, we decided, and even now, thinking
back on that scene, it strikes me as laughably absurd.
A courteous and affable young man of twenty-five named
Nitta came to visit me at the teahouse. He worked in the
post office in Yoshida, a long, narrow town that lies at the
base of the mountains below the pass, and said he’d
learned where I was by seeing mail addressed to me. After
we’d talked in my room for a while and had begun to feel at
ease with each other, he smiled and said, “Actually, I was
going to come with two or three of my friends, but at the
last moment they all pulled out, and, well, I read something
by Satō Haruo-sensei that said you were terribly decadent,
and mentally disturbed to boot, so I could hardly force them
to come. I had no idea you’d be such a serious and
personable gentleman. Next time I’ll bring them. If it’s all
right with you, of course.”
“It’s all right, sure.” I forced a smile. “But let me get this
straight. You came here on a sort of reconnaissance mission
on behalf of your friends, summoning up every ounce of
courage you could muster, is that it?”
“A one-man suicide corps,” Nitta candidly replied. “I read
Satō-sensei’s piece again last night and resigned myself to
various possible fates.”
I was looking at Fuji through the window. Fuji stood there
impassive and silent. I was impressed.
“Not bad, eh? There’s something to be said for Fuji after
all. It knows what it’s doing.” It occurred to me that I was no
match for Fuji. I was ashamed of my own fickle, constantly
shifting feelings of love and hatred. Fuji was impressive. Fuji
knew what it was doing.
“It knows what it’s doing?” Nitta seemed to find my
words odd. He smiled sagaciously.
Whenever Nitta came to visit me from then on, he
brought various other youths with him. They were all quiet
types. They called me “Sensei,” and I accepted that with a
straight face. I have nothing worth boasting about. No
learning to speak of. No talent. My body’s a mess, my heart
impoverished. Only the fact that I’ve known suffering,
enough suffering to feel qualified to let these youths call me
“Sensei” without protesting—that’s all I have, the only straw
of pride I can cling to. But it’s one I’ll never let go of. A lot of
people have written me off as a spoiled, selfish child, but
how many really know how I’ve suffered inside?
Nitta and a youth named Tanabe, who was skilled at
composing tanka poems, were readers of Mr. Ibuse’s work,
and perhaps because of this they were the ones I felt most
comfortable with and became closest to. They took me to
Yoshida once. It was an appallingly long and narrow town,
dominated by the mountains that loomed above. Cut off
from the sun and wind by Fuji, it was dark and chilly and not
unlike the meandering, spindly stem of a light-starved plant.
Streams flowed alongside the streets. This is characteristic,
apparently, of towns at the foot of mountains; in Mishima,
too, steadily flowing streams are everywhere, and people
there sincerely believe that the water comes from the snows
melting on Fuji. Yoshida’s streams are shallower and
narrower than those in Mishima, and the water is dirtier. I
was looking down at one of them as I spoke:
“There’s a story by Maupassant about a maiden
somewhere who swims across a river each night to meet
some young scion of the nobility, but I wonder what she did
about her clothes. Surely she wouldn’t have gone to meet
him in the nude?”
“No, surely not.” The young men thought it over. “Maybe
she had a bathing suit.”
“Do you suppose she might’ve piled her clothes on top of
her head and tied them down before she started
swimming?”
The youths laughed.
“Or maybe she swam in her clothes, and when she met
the scion she’d be soaking wet, and they’d sit by the stove
till she dried. But then what would she do on the way back?
She’d have to get the clothes all wet again swimming home.
I worry about her. I don’t see why the young nobleman
doesn’t do the swimming. A man can swim in just a pair of
shorts without looking too ridiculous. Do you suppose the
scion was one of those people who swim like a stone?”
“No,” Nitta said earnestly. “I think it was just that the
maiden was more in love than he was.”
“You may be right. The maidens in foreign stories are
cute like that—very daring. I mean, if they love somebody,
they’ll even swim across a river to meet him. You won’t see
that in Japan. Just think of . . . what was the title of that
play? In the middle there’s a river, and on one bank stands
a man and on the other a princess, and they spend the
whole play weeping and moaning. There’s no need for the
princess to carry on like that. Why doesn’t she just swim to
the other side? When you see it on stage, it’s a very narrow
river—she could probably wade across. All that crying is
pointless. She won’t get any sympathy from me. Now, in the
Asagao Diary it’s the Ōi River—that’s a big river, and
Asagao is blind, so you feel for her to some extent, but,
even so, it’s not as if it’d be impossible for her to swim
across. Hanging on to some piling beside the river, ranting
and blaming it all on the sun—what good is that going to
do? Ah, wait a minute. There was one daring maiden in
Japan. She was something. You know who I mean?”
“Who?” The young men’s eyes lit up.
“Lady Kiyo. She swam the Hidaka River, chasing after the
monk Anchin. Swam like hell. She was something, I tell you,
and according to a book I read she was only fourteen at the
time.”
We walked along the road chattering drivel like this until
we came to a quiet old inn on the outskirts of town that was
run by an acquaintance of Tanabe’s.
We drank there, and Fuji was good that night. At about
ten o’clock, the youths left me at the inn and returned to
their homes. Rather than going to sleep, I walked outside in
my dotera. The moon was astonishingly bright. Fuji was
good. Bathed in moonlight, it was a nearly translucent blue,
and I felt as if I’d fallen under the spell of a sorcerer fox.
Such a sparkling, vivid blue. Like phosphorus burning. Will-
o’-the-wisp. Foxfire. Fireflies. Eulalia. Kuzu-no-Ha, the white
fox in human form. I followed the road, walking a perfectly
straight line, though I could have sworn I had no legs. There
was only the sound of my geta clogs—a sound that had
nothing to do with me but was, rather, like a separate living
thing—reverberating with exceptional clarity: clatter, clop,
clatter, clop. Stealthily I turned to look back. Fuji was there,
burning blue and floating in space. I sighed. A valiant Meiji
Royalist. Kurama Tengu. That’s how I saw myself. I rather
cockily folded my arms and marched on, convinced I was an
awfully dashing fellow. I walked quite a long way. I lost my
coin purse. It held about twenty silver fifty-sen pieces—it
was heavy and must have slipped from the folds of my
dotera. I was strangely indifferent. If my money was gone,
all I had to do was walk to Misaka Pass. I kept walking. At
some point, though, it occurred to me that if I retraced my
steps I’d find my purse. Arms folded, I ambled back the way
I’d come. Fuji. The Meiji Royalist. A lost coin purse. It all
made, I thought, for a fascinating romance. My purse lay
glittering in the middle of the road. Of course; where else
would it be? I picked it up, returned to the inn, and went to
bed.
I’d been bewitched by Fuji that night, transformed into a
simpleton, a mooncalf, completely without a will of my own.
Even now, recalling it all leaves me feeling peculiarly weary
and languid.
I stayed in Yoshida just one night. When I got back to
Misaka Pass, the woman who ran the place was all knowing
smiles, and her fifteen-year-old sister was standoffish. I
found myself wanting to assure them I’d been up to nothing
naughty, and, though they asked me no questions, I related
in detail my experiences of the previous day. I told them
everything—the name of the inn I’d stayed at, how Yoshida’s
sake tasted, how Fuji looked in the moonlight, how I’d
dropped my purse. The little sister seemed appeased.
“Get up and look, sir!” One morning not long afterwards,
this same girl stood outside the teahouse shouting up to me
in a shrill voice, and I grudgingly got up and stepped out
into the corridor.
Her cheeks were flushed with excitement. She said
nothing, only pointed toward the sky. I looked, and—ah!—
snow. Snow had fallen on Fuji. The summit was a pure and
radiant white. Not even the Fuji from Misaka Pass is to be
scoffed at, I thought.
“Looks good,” I said.
“Isn’t it superb?” she said, triumphantly selecting a
better word. She squatted down on her heels and said, “Do
you still think Misaka’s Fuji is hopeless?”
I’d often lectured the girl to the effect that this Fuji was
hopelessly vulgar, and perhaps she’d taken it more to heart
than I’d realized.
“Let’s face it,” I said, amending my teaching with a grave
countenance. “Fuji is just no good without snow.”
In my dotera I walked about the mountainside filling both
my hands with evening primrose seeds, which I brought
back to the teahouse and scattered in the back yard.
“Now, listen,” I said to the girl, “these are my evening
primroses, and I’m coming back next year to see them, so I
don’t want you throwing out your laundry water and
whatnot here.” She nodded.
I’d chosen this particular flower because a certain
incident had convinced me that Fuji goes well with evening
primroses. The teahouse at Misaka Pass is what one might
call remote, so much so that mail isn’t even delivered there.
Thirty minutes’ bouncing and swaying on a bus brings you
to the foot of the pass and Kawaguchi, a poor little village if
ever there was one, on the shore of the lake; it was at the
post office here that my mail was held for me, and once
every three days or so I had to make the journey to pick it
up. I tried to choose days when the weather was good. The
girl conductors on the buses don’t offer the sightseers
aboard much in the way of information about the scenery.
But once in a while, almost as an afterthought, in listless
near-mumble, one of them will come out with something
dreadfully prosaic like: “That’s Mitsu Pass; over there is Lake
Kawaguchi; freshwater smelt inhabit the lake.”
 Having claimed my mail one day, I was riding the bus
back to Misaka Pass, sitting next to a woman of about sixty
who wore a dark brown coat over her kimono, whose face
was pale and nicely featured, and who looked a lot like my
mother, when the girl conductor suddenly said, as if it had
just occurred to her, “Ladies and gentlemen, you can
certainly see Fuji clearly today, can’t you?”—words that
could be construed as neither information nor spontaneous
exclamation. All the passengers—among them young
salaried workers with rucksacks, and silk-clad geisha types
with hair piled high in the traditional style and handkerchiefs
pressed fastidiously to their lips—simultaneously twisted in
their seats and craned their necks to gaze out the windows
at that commonplace triangle of a mountain as if seeing it
for the first time and to ooh and ah like idiots, briefly filling
the bus with a buzzing commotion. Unlike all the other
passengers, however, the elderly person next to me, looking
as though she harbored some deep anguish in her heart,
didn’t so much as glance at Fuji, but stared out the opposite
window at the cliff that bordered the road. Observing this, I
felt a sense of almost benumbing pleasure and a desire to
show her that I, too, in my refined, nihilistic way, had no
interest in ogling some vulgar mountain like Fuji, and that,
though she wasn’t asking me to, I sympathized with her and
well understood her suffering and misery. As if hoping to
receive the old woman’s motherly affection and approval, I
quietly sidled closer and sat gazing vacantly out at the cliff
with her.
Perhaps she felt somehow at ease with me. “Ah! Evening
primroses,” she said absently, pointing a slender finger at a
spot beside the road. The bus passed quickly on, but the
petals of the single golden evening primrose I’d glimpsed
remained vivid in my mind.
Facing up admirably to all 3,778 meters of Mount Fuji, not
wavering in the least, erect and heroic—I feel almost
tempted to say Herculean—that evening primrose was good.
Fuji goes well with evening primroses.
Mid-October came and went, and I was still making very
little progress with my work. I missed people. Sunset
brought scarlet-rimmed clouds with undersides like the
bellies of geese, and I stood alone in the corridor on the
second floor smoking cigarettes, intentionally not looking at
Fuji, my eyes fixed instead on the autumn leaves of the
mountain forests, crimson as dripping blood. I called to the
proprietress of the teahouse, who was sweeping up fallen
leaves in front.
“Good weather tomorrow, Missus!”
Even I was surprised by the shrillness of my voice; it
sounded almost like a cry of joy. She rested her hands on
the broom a moment and looked up at me dubiously,
knitting her brow.
“Did you have something special planned for tomorrow?”
She had me there.
“No. Nothing.”
She laughed. “You must be getting lonesome. Why don’t
you go mountain climbing or something?”
“Climb a mountain and you just have to come right back
down again. It’s so pointless. And whatever mountain you
climb, what is there to see but the same old Mount Fuji? The
heart grows heavy just thinking about it.”
I suppose it was a strange thing to say. The proprie­tress
merely nodded ambiguously and carried on sweeping the
fallen leaves.
Before going to sleep I would quietly open the curtains in
my room and look through the glass at Fuji. On moonlit
nights it was a pale, bluish white, standing there like the
spirit of the rivers and lakes. I’d sigh. Ah, I can see Fuji. How
big the stars are. Fine weather tomorrow, no doubt. These
were the only glimmerings I had of the joy of being alive,
and after quietly closing the curtains again I’d go to bed and
reflect that, yes, the weather would be fine tomorrow—but
so what? What did that have to do with me? It would strike
me as so absurd that I’d end up chuckling wryly to myself as
I lay on my futon.
It was excruciating. My work . . . Not so much the
torment of simply dragging pen over paper (not that at all,
in fact, since the writing itself is actually something I take
pleasure in), but the interminable wavering and agonizing
over my view of the world, and what we call art, and the
literature of tomorrow, the search for something new, if you
will—questions like these left me quite literally writhing in
anguish.
To take what is simple and natural—and therefore
succinct and lucid—to snatch hold of that and transfer it
directly to paper, was, it seemed to me, everything, and
that thought sometimes allowed me to see the figure of Fuji
in a different light. Perhaps, I would think, that shape was in
fact a manifestation of the beauty of what I like to think of
as “elemental expression.” Thus I’d find myself on the verge
of coming to an understanding with this Fuji, only to reflect
that, no, there was something about it, something in its
exceedingly cylindrical simplicity that was too much for me,
that if this Fuji was worthy of praise, then so were figurines
of the Laughing Buddha—and I find figurines of the
Laughing Buddha insufferable, certainly not what anyone
could call expressive. And the figure of this Fuji, too, was
somehow mistaken, somehow wrong, I would think, and
once again I’d be back where I started, confused.
Mornings and evenings gazing at Fuji: that’s how I spent
the cheerless days. In late October, a group of prostitutes
from Yoshida, on what, for all I knew, may have been their
only day of freedom in the year, arrived at Misaka Pass in
five automobiles. I watched them from the second floor. In a
flurry of colors, the girls fluttered out of the cars like carrier
pigeons dumped out of baskets, and, not knowing at first in
which direction to head, flocked together, fidgeting and
jostling one another in silence, until at last their curious
nervousness began to dissipate, and one by one they
wandered off their separate ways. Some meekly chose
picture postcards from a rack at the front of the teahouse;
others stood gazing at Fuji. It was a dismal and all but
unwatchable scene. Though I, a solitary man on the second
floor, might feel for those girls to the extent that I’d be
willing to die for them, there was nothing I could offer them
in the way of happiness. All I could do was look helplessly
on. Those who suffer shall suffer. Those who fall shall fall. It
had nothing to do with me, it was just the way the world
was. Thus I forced myself to affect indifference as I gazed
down at them, but it was still more than a little painful.
Let’s appeal to Fuji. The idea came to me suddenly. Hey,
look out for these girls, will you? Inwardly muttering the
words, I turned my gaze toward the mountain, standing tall
and impassive against the wintry sky and looking for all the
world like the Big Boss, squared off in an arrogant pose,
arms folded. Greatly relieved, I forsook the band of
courtesans and set out in a lighthearted mood for the tunnel
down the road with the six-year-old boy from the teahouse
and the shaggy dog, Hachi. Near the entrance to the tunnel,
a skinny prostitute of about thirty stood by herself silently
gathering a bouquet of some dreary sort of wildflowers. She
didn’t so much as turn to glance at us as we passed but
continued picking the flowers intently. Look after this one,
too, I prayed, casting an eye back at Fuji and pulling the
little boy along by his hand as I walked briskly into the
tunnel. Reminding myself it all had nothing to do with me, I
strode resolutely on as the cold water that seeped through
the ceiling dripped down on my cheeks and the back of my
neck.
It was at about that time that my wedding plans met with
a serious hitch. I was given to understand, in no uncertain
terms, that my family back home was not going to lend their
assistance. Once married, I fully intended to support my
household with my writing, but I had been selfish and
presumptuous enough to assume that my family would, at
this juncture, come to my aid to the tune of at least a
hundred yen or so, allowing me to have a dignified, if
modest, wedding ceremony. After an exchange of two or
three letters, however, it became clear that this would not
be the case, and I was thoroughly at a loss as to what to do.
Having come to terms with the fact that, as things stood, it
was entirely possible that the young lady’s side would call
the whole thing off, I decided there was nothing for it but to
make a clean breast of everything, and came down from the
mountain alone to call at the house in Kōfu. I was shown
into the parlor, where I sat facing the girl and her mother
and told them all. At times it sounded, disconcertingly
enough, as if I were reciting a speech. But I thought I at
least managed to describe the situation in a relatively
straightforward and honest manner.
The young lady remained calm. “Does that mean your
family is opposed to the idea?” she asked, tilting her head
to one side.
“No, it’s not that they’re opposed.” I pressed softly down
on the table with the palm of my right hand. “It just seems
to be their way of telling me I’m on my own.”
“Then there’s no problem.” The mother smiled
graciously. “As you can see, we’re not wealthy ourselves. An
extravagant ceremony would only make us feel awkward. As
long as you have real affection for her and you’re serious
about your work, that’s all we ask.”
Forgetting even to bow my head in reply, I gazed
speechlessly out at the garden for some time. My eyes felt
hot. I told myself I’d make this woman a devoted and dutiful
son-in-law.
When I left, the young lady accompanied me to the bus
stop. As we walked along, I said, “Well, what do you think?
Shall we continue the relationship a while longer?” Sheer
affectation.
“No,” she said, laughing, “I’ve had enough.”
 “Aren’t there any questions you want to ask me?” I said.
A confirmed fool.
“Yes.”
I was resolved to answer with the plain truth any
question she might choose to ask.
“Has snow fallen on Mount Fuji yet?”
That threw me.
“Yes, it has. On the summit . . .” My words trailed off as I
glanced up and spotted Fuji before us. It gave me an odd
feeling. “What the hell? You can see Fuji from Kōfu. You
trying to make a fool of me?” I was suddenly speaking like a
hoodlum. “That was a stupid question. What kind of fool do
you take me for?”
She looked down at the ground and giggled. “But you’re
staying at Misaka Pass, so I thought it wouldn’t do not to ask
about Fuji.”
Strange girl, I thought.
When I got back from Kōfu, I found that my shoulders
were so stiff I could hardly breathe.
“You know, you’re lucky, Missus. Misaka Pass is a pretty
good place after all. It’s like coming back home.”
After dinner, the proprietress and her little sister took
turns pounding on my shoulders. The woman’s fists were
hard and penetrating, but the girl’s were soft and had little
effect. Harder, harder, I kept saying, until at last she got a
stick of firewood and whacked on my shoulders with that.
That’s what it took to relieve the tension, so keyed up and
intent on my purpose had I been in Kōfu.
For two or three days after that I was distracted and had
little will to work; I sat at my desk and scribbled aimlessly,
smoked seven or eight packs of Golden Bat cigarettes, lay
around doing nothing, sang “Even a Diamond, Unpolished”
to myself over and over, and didn’t write so much as a page
of the novel I’d been working on.
“You haven’t been doing so well since you went to Kōfu,
have you, sir?” One morning as I sat at the desk with my
chin propped up on my hand, my eyes closed, turning all
sorts of things over in my mind, the fifteen-year-old sister,
who was wiping the floor in the alcove behind me, said
these words with a tone of sincere regret, and a touch of
bitterness.
Without turning to look at her, I said, “Is that so? I
haven’t been doing so well, eh?”
“No, you haven’t,” she said, still wiping the floor. “The
last two or three days you haven’t gotten any work done at
all, have you? Every morning, you know, I gather up all the
pages you’ve written and left lying around, and put them in
order. I really enjoy doing that, and I’m glad when you’ve
written a lot. I came up here last night to peek in and see
how you were doing—did you know that? You were lying on
your futon with the quilt pulled up over your head.”
I was grateful to her for those words. This may be
overstating it a bit, but to me her concern seemed the
purest form of support and encouragement for one making
every effort to go on living. She expected nothing in return. I
thought her quite beautiful.
By the end of October, the autumn leaves had become
dark and ugly, and then an overnight storm came along and
left nothing behind but a bare, black, winter forest.
Sightseers were few and far between now. Business dropped
off, and occasionally the proprietress would go shopping in
Funazu or Yoshida at the foot of the mountain, taking the
six-year-old boy with her and leaving the girl and myself
alone for the day in the quiet, deserted teahouse. On one
such day I began to feel the tedium of sitting alone on the
second floor and went outside for a stroll. I saw the girl in
the back yard, washing clothes, went up to her, flashed a
smile, and said, in a loud voice, “I’m so bored!” She hung
her head, and when I peered at her face I got quite a start.
She was nearly in tears and obviously terrified. Right, I
thought, doing a grim about-face and stomping off along a
narrow, leaf-covered path. I felt perfectly miserable.
 I was careful from then on. Whenever the girl and I were
alone in the place, I tried to stay in my room on the second
floor. If a customer came, I would lumber downstairs,
partially with the intention of watching out for the girl, and
sit in one corner of the shop drinking tea. One day a bride,
escorted by two elderly men in crested ceremonial kimonos
and haori coats, arrived in a hired automobile. The girl was
alone in the shop, so I came downstairs, sat in a chair in one
corner, and smoked a cigarette. The bride was decked out in
full wedding regalia: long kimono with an elaborate design
on the skirt, obi sash of gold brocade, and white wedding
hood. Not knowing how to receive such singular guests, the
girl, after pouring tea for the three of them, retreated to my
corner as if to hide behind me and stared silently at the
bride. A day that comes but once in a lifetime . . . No doubt
the bride was from the other side of the mountain, on her
way to be married to someone in Funazu or Yoshida, and
had decided to rest at the top of the pass and gaze at Fuji. It
made for a scene that, even to a casual observer, was
provocatively romantic. In a little while the bride rose and
quietly left the shop to stand near the edge of the cliff and
take in the view at her leisure. She stood with her legs
crossed—a bold pose. Awfully sure of herself, I was thinking,
admiring her, Fuji and her, when suddenly she looked up at
the summit and gave a great yawn.
“My!” Behind me, a small cry showed that the girl, too,
had been quick to notice. Before long the bride got back in
the car with her escorts and left, to scathing reviews.
“She’s used to this, the hussy. Must be her second, no, at
least her third time. The groom’s down at the foot of the
mountain waiting for her, no doubt, but she has them stop
the car and gets out to look at Fuji. Don’t tell me a woman
getting married for the first time would have the nerve to do
that.”
“She yawned!” the girl eagerly concurred. “Stretching
open that big mouth of hers . . . She ought to be ashamed of
herself. Whatever you do, sir, you mustn’t marry anyone like
that.”
It hardly befitted a man of my years, but I blushed. My
own wedding plans were progressing smoothly, thanks to a
certain mentor of mine who was taking care of everything.
The ceremony, a dignified if meager affair with only two or
three close family friends attending, was to be held at this
man’s house, and I, for my part, felt almost like a child
inspired and encouraged by the affection of others.
Once November arrived, the cold at Misaka became hard
to bear. A stove was set up downstairs.
“You must be freezing on the second floor. Why don’t you
work down here, beside the stove?” the lady of the house
suggested, but I find it impossible to work with people
watching, and declined. She continued to worry about me,
however, and one day she went to Yoshida and came back
with a kotatsu for my room. Snuggling beneath the coverlet
of that little footwarmer, I felt grateful from the bottom of
my heart for the kindness of these people. But gazing at
Fuji, which was already covered with two-thirds of its full
winter cap of snow, and the desolate trees on the nearer
mountains, I began to see the meaninglessness of enduring
much more of the penetrating cold at Misaka Pass and
decided it was time to head for the lowlands. The day before
I left, I was sitting on a chair in the shop wearing two dotera,
one over the other, and sipping cheap green tea, when a
pair of intellectual-looking young women in winter overcoats
—typists, I guessed—approached on foot from the direction
of the tunnel. Shrieking with laughter about one thing or
another, they suddenly caught sight of Fuji and stopped as
dead in their tracks as if they’d been shot. After consulting
each other in whispers, one of them, a fair-skinned girl
wearing glasses, came up to me with a smile on her face
and said, “Excuse me, would you snap a photo of us,
please?”
 This flustered me. I’m not very good with gadgets, and I
haven’t the least interest in photography. What’s more, I
presented such a squalid figure in those two dotera that
even my hosts at the teahouse had laughed and said I
looked a proper mountain bandit, so I was thrown into quite
a panic to be asked to perform such a fashionable act by
those two gay flowers from (I presumed) Tokyo. But then,
rethinking the situation, it occurred to me that even as
shabbily dressed as I was, a discerning observer might
easily detect in me a certain sensitivity and sophistication
that would indicate at least sufficient dexterity to
manipulate the shutter of a camera, and, buoyed up by this
reflection, I feigned nonchalance as I took the instrument,
casually asked for a brief explanation of how to work it, and
peered into the viewfinder, inwardly all atremble. In the
middle of the lens stood Fuji, large and imposing, and below,
in the foreground, were two little poppies—or so the girls
appeared in their red overcoats. They put their arms around
each other and looked at the camera with sober, solemn
expressions. It all struck me as very funny, and my hands
shook helplessly. Suppressing my laughter, I peered through
the finder again, and the two poppies grew even more rigid
and demure. I was having a difficult time aiming and finally
swept the two girls out of the picture entirely, allowing Fuji,
and Fuji alone, to fill the lens. Goodbye, Mount Fuji.
Thanks for everything. Click.
“Got it.”
“Thank you!” they said in unison. They’d be surprised
when they got back home and had the film developed: only
Fuji filling the frame, and not a trace of themselves.
The next day I came down from Misaka Pass. I stayed the
first night at a cheap inn in Kōfu, and the following morning I
leaned against the battered railing that ran along the
corridor there, looking up at Fuji, about one-third of which
was visible behind the surrounding mountains. It looked like
the flower of a Chinese lantern plant.
 TRANSLATED BY RALPH McCARTHY
OceanofPDF.com
 VILLON’S WIFE

I was awakened by the sound of the front door being flung

open, but I did not get out of bed. I knew it could only be my
husband returning dead-drunk in the middle of the night.
He switched on the light in the next room and, breathing
very heavily, began to rummage through the drawers of the
desk and the bookcase, as if he were searching for
something. After a few minutes there was a noise that
sounded as if he had flopped down on the floor. Then I could
hear only his panting. Wondering what he might be up to, I
called to him from where I lay, “Have you had supper yet?
There’s some cold rice in the cupboard.”
“Thank you,” he answered in an unaccustomedly gentle
tone. “How is the boy? Does he still have a fever?”
This was also unusual. The boy is four this year, but
whether because of malnutrition, or his father’s alcoholism,
or sickness, he is actually smaller than most two-year-olds.
He is not even sure on his feet, and as for talking, it’s all he
can do to say “yum-yum” or “ugh.” Sometimes I wonder if
he is not feebleminded. Once, when I took him to the public
bath and held him in my arms after undressing him, he
looked so small and pitifully scrawny that my heart sank,
and I burst into tears in front of everybody. The boy is
always having upset stomachs or fevers, but my husband
almost never spends any time at home, and I wonder what
if anything he thinks about the child. If I should mention to
him that the boy has a fever, he says, “You ought to take
him to a doctor.” Then he throws on his coat and goes off
somewhere. I would like to take the boy to the doctor, but I
don’t have any money. There is nothing else I can do but lie
beside him and stroke his head.
But that night, for whatever reason, my husband was
strangely gentle, and for once asked me about the boy’s
fever. It didn’t make me happy. I felt instead a kind of
premonition of something terrible, and cold chills ran up and
down my spine. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I lay
there in silence. For a while there was no other sound but
my husband’s furious panting.
Then there came from the front entrance the thin voice
of a woman, “Is anyone at home?” I shuddered all over as if
icy water had been poured over me.
“Are you at home, Mr. Otani?” This time there was a
somewhat sharp inflection to her voice. She slid the door
open and called in a definitely angry voice, “Mr. Otani. Why
don’t you answer?”
My husband at last went to the door. “Well, what is it?”
he asked in a frightened, stupid tone.
“You know perfectly well what it is,” the woman said,
lowering her voice. “What makes you steal other people’s
money when you’ve got a nice home like this? Stop your
inhuman joking and give it back. If you don’t, I’m going
straight to the police.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I won’t stand for
your insults. You’ve got no business coming here. Get out! If
you don’t get out, I’ll be the one to call the police.”
There came the voice of another man, “I must say,
you’ve got your nerve, Mr. Otani. What do you mean we
have no business coming here? You really dumbfound me.
This time is serious. It’s going beyond the limits of a joke
when you steal other people’s money. Heaven only knows
all my wife and I have suffered on account of you. And on
top of everything else you do something as low as you did
tonight. Mr. Otani, I misjudged you.”
“It’s blackmail,” my husband angrily exclaimed in a
shaking voice. “It’s extortion. Get out! If you’ve got any
complaints I’ll listen to them tomorrow.”
“What a revolting thing to say. You really are an out-and-
out scoundrel. I have no alternative but to call the police.”
There was in his words a hatred so terrible that I went
gooseflesh all over.
“Go to hell,” my husband shouted, but his voice had
already weakened and sounded hollow.
I got up, threw a wrap over my nightgown, and went to
the front hall. I bowed to the two visitors. A round-faced
man of about fifty wearing a knee-length overcoat asked, “Is
this your wife?” and, without a trace of a smile, faintly
inclined his head in my direction as if he were nodding.
The woman was a thin, small person of about forty,
neatly dressed. She loosened her shawl and, also unsmiling,
returned my bow with the words, “Excuse us for breaking in
this way in the middle of the night.”
My husband suddenly slipped on his sandals and made
for the door. The man grabbed his arm and the two of them
struggled for a moment. “Let go or I’ll stab you!” my
husband shouted, a jackknife flashing in his right hand. The
knife was a pet possession of his, and I remembered that he
usually kept it in his desk drawer. When he got home he
must have been expecting trouble, and the knife was what
he had been searching for.
The man shrank back and in the interval my husband,
flapping the sleeves of his coat like a huge crow, bolted
outside.
“Thief!” the man shouted and started to pursue him, but
I ran to the front gate in my bare feet and clung to him.
“Please don’t. It won’t help for either of you to get hurt. I
will take the responsibility for everything.”
The woman said, “Yes, she’s right. You can never tell
what a lunatic will do.”
“Swine! It’s the police this time! I can’t stand any more.”
The man stood there staring emptily at the darkness outside
and muttering as if to himself. But the force had gone out of
his body.
“Please come in and tell me what has happened. I may
be able to settle whatever the matter is. The place is a
mess, but please come in.”
The two visitors exchanged glances and nodded slightly
to one another. The man said, with a changed expression,
“I’m afraid that whatever you may say our minds are
already made up. But it might be a good idea to tell you,
Mrs. Otani, all that has happened.”
“Please do come in and stay for a while.”
“I’m afraid we won’t be able to stay long.” So saying, the
man started to remove his overcoat.
“Please keep your coat on. It’s very cold here, and I don’t
have any heating in the house.”
“Well then, if you will forgive me.”
“Please, both of you.”
The man and the woman entered my husband’s room.
They seemed appalled by the desolation of what they saw.
The mats looked as though they were rotting, the paper
doors were in shreds, the walls were beginning to fall in, and
the paper had peeled away from the storage closet,
revealing the framework within. In a corner were a desk and
a bookcase—an empty bookcase.
I offered the two visitors some torn cushions from which
the stuffing leaked, and said, “Please sit on the cushions—
the mats are so dirty.” And I bowed to them again. “I must
apologize for all the trouble my husband seems to have
been causing you, and for the terrible exhibition he put on
tonight, for whatever reason it was. He has such a peculiar
disposition.” I choked in the middle of my words and burst
into tears.
“Excuse me for asking, Mrs. Otani, but how old are you?”
the man asked. He was sitting cross-legged on the torn
cushion, with his elbows on his knees, propping up his chin
with his fists. As he asked the question he leaned forward
toward me.
“I am twenty-six.”
“Is that all you are? I suppose that’s only natural,
considering your husband’s about thirty, but it amazes me
all the same.”
The woman, showing her face from behind the man’s
back, said, “I couldn’t help wondering, when I came in and
saw what a fine wife he has, why Mr. Otani behaves the way
he does.”
“He’s sick. That’s what it is. He didn’t use to be that way,
but he keeps getting worse.” He gave a great sigh, then
continued, “Mrs. Otani. My wife and I run a little restaurant
near the Nakano station. We both originally came from the
country, but I got fed up with dealing with penny-pinching
farmers, and came to Tokyo with my wife. After the usual
series of hardships and breaks, we managed to save up a
little and, along about 1936, opened a cheap little
restaurant catering to customers with at most one or two
yen to spend at one time for entertainment. By not going in
for luxuries and working like slaves, we managed to lay in
quite a stock of whiskey and gin. When liquor got short and
plenty of other drinking establishments went out of
business, we were able to keep going.
“The war with America and England broke out, but even
after the bombings got pretty severe, we didn’t feel like
being evacuated to the country, not having any children to
tie us down. We figured that we might as well stick to our
business until the place got burnt down. Your husband first
started coming to our place in the spring of 1944, as I recall.
We were not yet losing the war, or if we were we didn’t
know how things actually stood, and we thought that if we
could just hold out for another two or three years we could
somehow get peace on terms of equality. When Mr. Otani
first appeared in our shop, he was not alone. It’s a little
embarrassing to tell you about it, but I might as well come
out with the whole story and not keep anything from you.
Your husband sneaked in by the kitchen door along with an
older woman. I forgot to say that along about that time the
front door of our place was shut every day, and only a few
regular customers got in by the back door.
“This older woman lived in the neighborhood, and when
the bar where she worked was closed and she lost her job,
she often came here with her men-friends. That’s why we
weren’t particularly surprised when your husband crept in
by the kitchen door with this older woman, whose name was
Akichan. I took them to the back room and brought out
some gin. Mr. Otani drank his liquor very quietly that
evening. Akichan paid the bill and the two of them left
together by the back door. It’s odd, but I can’t forget how
strangely gentle and refined he behaved that night. I
wonder if when the devil makes his first appearance in
somebody’s house he acts in such a lonely and melancholy
way.
“From that night on Mr. Otani was a steady customer. Ten
days later he came alone and all of a sudden produced a
hundred-yen note. At that time a hundred yen was a lot of
money, more than two or three thousand yen today. He
pressed the money into my hand and wouldn’t take no for
an answer. ‘Take care of it please,’ he said, smiling timidly.
He looked as if he had already been drinking quite a bit, but,
as you know, no man can hold his liquor like he can. Just
when you think he’s drunk, he suddenly becomes serious
and engages in a perfectly rational conversation. No matter
how much he drinks I have never seen him unsteady on his
feet. They say that a man around thirty is in the prime of life
and can hold his liquor best, but it is very rare to find
anyone like Mr. Otani. That night he seemed to have drunk
quite a bit before he came, and at my place he downed ten
glasses of gin as fast as I could set them up. All this was
almost entirely without a word. My wife and I tried to start a
conversation, but all he did was smile rather shamefacedly
and nod vaguely. Suddenly he asked the time and got up.
‘What about the change?’ I called after him. ‘That’s all
right,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to do with it,’ I insisted, to
which he smiled wryly and said, ‘Please save it until the
next time. I’ll be coming back.’ He went out. Mrs. Otani, that
was the one and only time that we ever got any money from
him. Since then he has always put us off with one excuse or
another, and for three years he has managed without
paying a penny to drink up all our liquor almost without
assistance.”
Before I knew what I was doing I burst out laughing. It all
seemed so funny to me, although I can’t explain why. I
covered my mouth in confusion, but when I looked at the
lady I saw that she was also laughing unaccountably, and
then her husband could not help but laugh too.
“No, it is really no laughing matter, but I’m so fed up that
I feel like laughing. Really, if he used all his ability in some
other direction, he could become a cabinet minister or a
Ph.D. or anything else he wanted. When Akichan was still
friends with Mr. Otani she used to brag about him all the
time. First of all, she said, he came from a terrific family. He
was the younger son of Baron Otani. It is true that he had
been disinherited because of his conduct, but when his
father, the present baron, died, he and his elder brother
were to divide the estate. He was brilliant, a genius in fact.
In spite of his youth he was the best poet in Japan. What’s
more, he was a great scholar, who had gone from the Peers’
School to the First High School and the Tokyo Imperial
University. He was a perfect demon at German and French.
To hear Akichan talk, he was a kind of god, and the funny
thing was that she didn’t make it all up. Other people also
said that he was the younger son of Baron Otani and a
famous poet. As a result even my wife, who is getting along
in years, was as wild about him as Akichan. She used to tell
me what a difference it makes when people have been well
brought up. And the way she pined for him to come was
quite unbearable. They say the day of the nobility is over,
but until the war ended I can tell you that nobody had his
way with the women like that disinherited son of the
aristocracy. It was unbelievable how they fell for him. I
suppose it was what people would nowadays call ‘slave
mentality.’
“For my part, I’m a man, and at that a very cool sort of
man, and I don’t think that some little peer—if you will
pardon the expression—some member of the country gentry
who is only a younger son, is all that different from myself. I
never for a moment got worked up about him in so
sickening a way. But all the same, that gentleman was my
weak spot. No matter how firmly I resolved not to give him
any liquor the next time, when he suddenly appeared at
some unexpected hour, looking like a hunted man, and I
saw how relieved he was at last to have reached our place,
my resolution weakened, and I ended up by giving him the
liquor. Even when he got drunk he never made any special
nuisance of himself, and if only he had paid the bill he would
have been a good customer. He never advertised himself
and didn’t take any silly pride in being a genius or anything
of the sort. When Akichan or somebody else would sit
beside him and sound off to us about his greatness, he
would either change the subject completely or say, ‘I want
some money so I can pay the bill,’ throwing a wet blanket
over everything.
“The war finally ended. We started openly doing business
in black-market liquor and put new curtains in front of the
place. For all its seediness the shop looked rather lively, and
we hired a girl to lend some charm. Then who should show
up again but that damned gentleman. He no longer brought
women with him, but always came in the company of two or
three newspaper and magazine writers. He was drinking
even more than before, and used to get very wild-looking.
He began to come out with really vulgar jokes, which he had
never done before, and sometimes for no good reason he
would strike one of the reporters he brought with him or
would start a fistfight. What’s more, he seduced the twenty-
year-old girl who was working in our place. We were really
dumbfounded, but there was nothing we could do about it at
that stage, and we had no choice but to let the matter drop.
We advised the girl to resign herself to it, and quietly sent
her back to her parents. I begged Mr. Otani not to come any
more, but he answered in a threatening tone, ‘People who
make money on the black market have no business
criticizing others. I know all about you.’ The next night be
showed up as if nothing had happened.
“Maybe it was by way of punishment for the black-
market business we had been doing that we had to take
such a monster on our hands. But what he did tonight can’t
be passed over just because he’s a poet or a gentleman. It
was plain robbery. He stole 5,000 yen from us. Nowadays all
our money goes for stock, and we are lucky if we have 500
or 1,000 yen in the place. The reason why we had as much
as 5,000 yen tonight was that I had made an end-of-the-
year round of our regular customers and managed to collect
that much. If I don’t hand the money over to the
wholesalers immediately, we won’t be able to stay in
business. That’s how much it means to us. Well, my wife
was going over the accounts in the back room and had put
the money in the cupboard drawer. He was drinking by
himself out in front but seems to have noticed what she did.
Suddenly he got up, went straight to the back room, and
without a word pushed my wife aside and opened the
drawer. He grabbed the 5,000 yen in bills and stuffed them
in his pocket.
“We rushed into the shop, still speechless with
amazement, and then out into the street. I shouted for him
to stop, and the two of us ran after him. For a minute I felt
like screaming ‘Thief!’ and getting the people in the street
to join us, but after all Mr. Otani is an old acquaintance, and
I couldn’t be too harsh on him. I made up my mind that I
would not let him out of my sight. I would follow him
wherever he went, and when I saw that he had quieted
down, I would calmly ask for the money. We are only small
business people, and when we finally caught up with him
here, we had no choice but to suppress our feelings and
politely ask him to return the money. And then what
happened? He took out a knife and threatened to stab me!
What a thing to happen!”
Again the whole thing seemed so funny to me, for
reasons I can’t explain, that I burst out laughing. The lady
turned red, and smiled a little. I couldn’t stop laughing. Even
though I knew that it would have a bad effect on the
proprietor, it all seemed so strangely funny that I laughed
until the tears came. I suddenly wondered if the phrase “the
great laugh at the end of the world” that occurs in one of
my husband’s poems didn’t mean something of the sort.
And yet it was not a matter that could be settled just by
laughing about it. I thought for a minute and said,
“Somehow or other I will make things good, if you will only
wait one more day before you report to the police. I’ll call on
you tomorrow without fail.” I carefully inquired where the
restaurant was and begged them to consent. They agreed to
let things stand for the time being, and left. Then I sat by
myself in the middle of the cold room trying to think of a
plan. Nothing came to me. I stood up, took off my wrap, and
crept in among the covers where my boy was sleeping. As I
stroked his head I thought how wonderful it would be if the
night never never ended.
My father used to keep a stall in Asakusa Park. My
mother died when I was young, and my father and I lived by
ourselves in a tenement. We ran the stall together. My
husband used to come now and then, and before long I was
meeting him at other places without my father’s knowing it.
When I became pregnant I persuaded him to treat me as his
wife, although it wasn’t officially registered, of course. Now
the boy is growing up fatherless, while my husband goes off
for three or four nights or even for a whole month at a time.
I don’t know where he goes or what he does. When he
comes back he is always soused, and he sits there, deathly
pale, breathing heavily and staring at my face. Sometimes
he cries and the tears stream down his face, or without
warning he crawls into my bed and holds me tightly. “Oh it
can’t go on. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. Help me!”
Sometimes he trembles all over, and even after he falls
asleep he talks deliriously and moans. The next morning he
is absentminded, like a man with the soul taken out of him.
Then he disappears and doesn’t return for three or four
nights. A couple of my husband’s publisher friends have
been looking after the boy and myself for some time, and
once in a while they bring enough money to keep us from
starving.
I dozed off, then opened my eyes before I was aware of it
to see the morning light pouring in through the cracks in the
shutters. I got up, dressed, strapped the boy to my back and
went outside. I felt as if I couldn’t stand being in the silent
house another minute.
I set out aimlessly and found myself walking in the
direction of the station. I bought a bun at an outdoor stand
and fed it to the boy. On a sudden impulse I bought a ticket
for Kichijoji and got on the tram. While I stood hanging from
a strap I happened to notice a poster with my husband’s
name on it. It was an advertisement for a magazine in which
he had published a story called “François Villon.” While I
stared at the title “François Villon” and at my husband’s
name, painful tears sprang from my eyes, why I can’t say,
and the poster clouded over so I couldn’t see it.
I got off at Kichijoji and, for the first time in I don’t know
how many years, I walked in the park. The cypresses around
the pond had all been cut down, and the place looked like a
construction site. It was strangely bare and cold, not at all
as it used to be.
 I took the boy off my back and the two of us sat on a
broken bench next to the pond. I fed the boy a sweet potato
I had brought from home. “It’s a pretty pond, isn’t it? There
used to be many carp and goldfish, but now there aren’t any
left. It’s too bad, isn’t it?”
I don’t know what he thought. He just laughed oddly with
his mouth full of sweet potato. Even if he is my own child,
he did give me the feeling almost of an idiot.
I couldn’t settle anything just by sitting there on the
bench, so I put the boy on my back and returned slowly to
the station. I bought a ticket for Nakano. Without thought or
plan, I boarded the tram as though I were being sucked into
a horrible whirlpool. I got off at Nakano and followed the
directions to the restaurant.
The front door would not open. I went around to the back
and entered by the kitchen door. The owner was away, and
his wife was cleaning the shop by herself. As soon as I saw
her I began to pour out lies of which I did not imagine
myself capable.
“It looks as if I’ll be able to pay you back every bit of the
money tomorrow, if not tonight. There’s nothing for you to
worry about.”
“Oh, how wonderful. Thank you so much.” She looked
almost happy, but still there remained on her face a shadow
of uneasiness, as if she were not yet satisfied.
“It’s true. Someone will bring the money here without
fail. Until he comes I’m to stay here as your hostage. Is that
guarantee enough for you? Until the money comes I’ll be
glad to help around the shop.”
I took the boy off my back and let him play by himself. He
is accustomed to playing alone and doesn’t get in the way
at all. Perhaps because he’s stupid, he’s not afraid of
strangers, and he smiled happily at the madam. While I was
away getting the rationed goods for her, she gave him some
empty American cans to play with, and when I got back he
was in a corner of the room, banging the cans and rolling
them on the floor.
About noon the boss returned from his marketing. As
soon as I caught sight of him I burst out with the same lies I
had told the madam. He looked amazed. “Is that a fact? All
the same, Mrs. Otani, you can’t be sure of money until
you’ve got it in your hands.” He spoke in a surprisingly
calm, almost explanatory tone.
“But it’s really true. Please have confidence in me and
wait just this one day before you make it public. In the
meantime I’ll help in the restaurant.”
“If the money is returned, that’s all I ask,” the boss said,
almost to himself. “There are five or six days left to the end
of the year, aren’t there?”
“Yes and so, you see, I mean—oh, some customers have
come. Welcome!” I smiled at the three customers—they
looked like workmen—who had entered the shop, and
whispered to the madam, “Please lend me an apron.”
One of the customers called out, “Say, you’ve hired a
beauty. She’s terrific.”
“Don’t lead her astray,” the boss said, in a tone which
wasn’t altogether joking. “She cost a lot of money.”
“A million dollar thoroughbred?” another customer
coarsely joked.
“They say that even in thoroughbreds the female costs
only half price,” I answered in the same coarse way, while
putting the sake on to warm.
“Don’t be modest! From now on in Japan there’s equality
of the sexes, even for horses and dogs,” the youngest
customer roared. “Sweetheart, I’ve fallen in love. It’s love at
first sight. But is that your kid over there?”
“No,” said the madam, carrying the boy in her arms from
the back room. “We got this child from our relatives. At last
we have an heir.”
“What’ll you leave him beside your money?” a customer
teased.
 The boss with a dark expression muttered, “A love affair
and debts.” Then, changing his tone, “What’ll you have?
How about a mixed grill?”
It was Christmas Eve. That must be why there was such a
steady stream of customers. I had scarcely eaten a thing
since morning, but I was so upset that I refused even when
the madam urged me to have a bite. I just went on flitting
around the restaurant lightly as a ballerina. Maybe it is just
conceit, but the shop seemed exceptionally lively that night,
and there were quite a few customers who wanted to know
my name or tried to shake my hand.
But I didn’t have the slightest idea how it would all end. I
went on smiling and answering the customers’ dirty jokes
with even dirtier jokes in the same vein, slipping from
customer to customer, pouring the drinks. Before long I got
to thinking that I would just as soon my body melted and
flowed away like ice cream.
It seems as if miracles sometimes do happen even in this
world. A little after nine a man entered, wearing a
tricornered paper Christmas hat and a black mask which
covered the upper part of his face. He was followed by an
attractive woman of slender build who looked thirty-four or
thirty-five. The man sat on a chair in the comer with his
back to me, but as soon as he came in I knew who it was. It
was my thief of a husband.
He sat there without seeming to pay any attention to me.
I also pretended not to recognize him, and went on joking
with the other customers. The lady seated opposite my
husband called me to their table. My husband stared at me
from beneath his mask, as if surprised in spite of himself. I
lightly patted his shoulder and asked, “Aren’t you going to
wish me a merry Christmas? What do you say? You look as if
you’ve already put away a quart or two.”
The lady ignored this. She said, “I have something to
discuss with the proprietor. Would you mind calling him here
for a moment?”
 I went to the kitchen, where the boss was frying fish.
“Otani has come back. Please go and see him, but don’t tell
the woman he’s with anything about me. I don’t want to
embarrass him.”
“So he really has come after all?” The proprietor had half
doubted my lies, and yet he seemed nevertheless to have
placed quite a bit of trust in them. Now he simply had
concluded that my husband had returned as the result of
some instigation on my part.
“Please don’t say anything about me,” I repeated.
“If that’s the way you want it, it’s all right with me,” he
consented easily, and went out front. After a quick look
around the restaurant, the boss walked straight to the table
where my husband was. The beautiful lady exchanged two
or three words with him, and the three of them left the shop.
It was all over. Everything had been settled. Somehow I
had believed all along that it would be, and I felt
exhilarated. I seized the wrist of a young customer in a dark-
blue suit, a boy not more than twenty, and I cried, “Drink
up! Drink up! It’s Christmas!”

In just thirty minutes—no, it was even sooner than that, so

soon it startled me, the boss returned alone. “Mrs. Otani, I
want to thank you. I’ve got the money back.”
“I’m so glad. All of it?”
He answered with a funny smile, “All he took yesterday.”
“And how much does the rest of what he owes you come
to altogether? Roughly—an absolute minimum.”
“Twenty thousand yen.”
“Does that cover it?”
“It’s a minimum.”
“I’ll make it good. Will you employ me starting tomorrow?
I’ll pay it back by working.”
“What! You’re joking!” And we laughed together.
Tonight I left the restaurant after ten and returned to the
house with the boy. As I expected, my husband was not at
home, but that didn’t bother me. Tomorrow when I go to the
restaurant I may see him again, for all I know. Why has such
a good plan never occurred to me before? All the suffering I
have gone through has been because of my own stupidity. I
was always quite a success at entertaining the customers at
my father’s stall, and I’ll certainly get to be pretty skillful at
the restaurant. As a matter of fact, I received about 500 yen
in tips tonight.

From the following day on my life changed completely. I

became lighthearted and gay. The first thing I did was to go
to a beauty parlor and have a permanent. I bought
cosmetics and mended my dresses. I felt as though the
worries that had weighed so heavily on me had been
completely wiped away.
In the morning I get up and eat breakfast with the boy.
Then I put him on my back and leave for work. New Year’s is
the big season at the restaurant, and I’ve been so busy my
eyes swim. My husband comes in for a drink about once
every two days. He lets me pay the bill and then disappears
again. Quite often he looks in on the shop late at night and
asks if it isn’t time for me to be going home. Then we return
pleasantly together.
“Why didn’t I do this from the start? It’s brought me such
happiness.”
“Women don’t know anything about happiness or
unhappiness.”
“Perhaps not. What about men?”
“Men only have unhappiness. They are always fighting
fear.”
“I don’t understand. I only know I wish this life could go
on forever. The boss and the madam are such nice people.”
“Don’t be silly. They’re grasping country bumpkins. They
make me drink because they think they’ll make money out
of it in the end.”
 “That’s their business. You can’t blame them for it. But
that’s not the whole story is it? You had an affair with the
madam, didn’t you?”
“A long time ago. Does the old guy realize it?”
“I’m sure he does. I heard him say with a sigh that you
had brought him a seduction and debts.”
“I must seem a horrible character to you, but the fact is
that I want to die so badly I can’t stand it. Ever since I was
born I have been thinking of nothing but dying. It would be
better for everyone concerned if I were dead, that’s certain.
And yet I can’t seem to die. There’s something strange and
frightening, like God, which won’t let me die.”
“That’s because you have your work.”
“My work doesn’t mean a thing. I don’t write either
masterpieces or failures. If people say something is good, it
becomes good. If they say it’s bad, it becomes bad. But
what frightens me is that somewhere in the world there is a
God. There is, isn’t there?”
“I don’t have any idea.”

Now that I have worked twenty days at the restaurant I

realize that every last one of the customers is a criminal. I
have come to think that my husband is very much on the
mild side compared to them. And I see now that not only the
customers but everyone you meet walking in the streets is
hiding some crime. A beautifully dressed lady came to the
door selling sake at 300 yen the quart. That was cheap,
considering what prices are nowadays, and the madam
snapped it up. It turned out to be watered. I thought that in
a world where even such an aristocratic-looking lady is
forced to resort to such tricks, it is impossible that anyone
alive has a clear conscience.
God, if you exist, show yourself to me! Toward the end of
the New Year season I was raped by a customer. It was
raining that night, and it didn’t seem likely that my husband
would appear. I got ready to go, even though one customer
was still left. I picked up the boy, who was sleeping in a
corner of the back room, and put him on my back. “I’d like
to borrow your umbrella again,” I said to the madam.
“I’ve got an umbrella. I’ll take you home,” said the last
customer, getting up as if he meant it. He was a short, thin
man about twenty-five, who looked like a factory worker. It
was the first time he had been a customer since I was
working in the restaurant.
“It’s very kind of you, but I am accustomed to walking by
myself.”
“You live a long way off, I know. I come from the same
neighborhood. I’ll take you back. Bill, please.” He had only
had three glasses and didn’t seem particularly drunk.
We boarded the tram together and got off at my stop.
Then we walked in the falling rain side by side under the
same umbrella through the pitch-dark streets. The young
man, who up to this point hadn’t said a word, began to talk
in a lively way. “I know all about you. You see, I’m a fan of
Mr. Otani’s and I also write poetry myself. I was hoping to
show him some of my work before long, but he intimidates
me so.”
We had reached my house. “Thank you very much,” I
said, “I’ll see you again at the restaurant.”
“Goodbye,” the young man said, going off into the rain.
I was wakened in the middle of the night by the noise of
the front gate being opened. I thought that it was my
husband returning, drunk as usual, so I lay there without
saying anything.
A man’s voice called, “Mrs. Otani, excuse me for
bothering you.”
I got up, put on the light, and went to the front entrance.
The young man was there, staggering so badly he could
scarcely stand.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Otani. On the way back I stopped for
another drink and, to tell the truth, I live at the other end of
town, and when I got to the station the last tram had
already left. Mrs. Otani, would you please let me spend the
night here? I don’t need any blankets or anything else. I’ll be
glad to sleep here in the front hall until the first tram leaves
tomorrow morning. If it wasn’t raining I’d sleep outdoors
somewhere in the neighborhood, but it’s hopeless with this
rain. Please let me stay.”
“My husband isn’t at home, but if the front hall will do,
please stay.” I got the two torn cushions and gave them to
him.
“Thanks very much. Oh, I’ve had too much to drink,” he
said with a groan. He lay down just as he was in the front
hall, and by the time I got back to bed I could already hear
his snores.
The next morning at dawn without ceremony he took me.
That day I went to the restaurant with my boy as usual,
acting as if nothing had happened. My husband was sitting
at a table reading a newspaper, a glass of liquor beside him.
I thought how pretty the morning sunshine looked, sparkling
on the glass.
“Isn’t anybody here,” I asked. He looked up from his
paper. “The boss hasn’t come back yet from marketing. The
madam was in the kitchen just a minute ago. Isn’t she there
now?”
“You didn’t come last night, did you?”
“I did come. It’s got so that I can’t get to sleep without a
look at my favorite waitress’s face. I dropped in after ten but
they said you had just left.”
“And then?”
“I spent the night here. It was raining so hard.”
“I may be sleeping here from now on.”
“That’s a good idea, I suppose.”
“Yes, that’s what I’ll do. There’s no sense in renting the
house forever.”
My husband didn’t say anything but turned back to his
paper. “Well, what do you know. They’re writing bad things
about me again. They call me a fake aristocrat with
Epicurean leanings. That’s not true. It would be more correct
to refer to me as an Epicurean in terror of God. Look! It says
here that I’m a monster. That’s not true, is it? It’s a little
late, but I’ll tell you now why I took the 5,000 yen. It was so
that I might give you and the boy the first happy New Year
in a long time. That proves I’m not a monster, doesn’t it?”
His words didn’t make me especially glad. I said, “There’s
nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we
can stay alive.”

TRANSLATED BY DONALD KEENE

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