桜桃 English

I lift up my eyes to the hills.

——Psalms, 121.

I want to believe that parents matter more than children.

One may piously tell oneself, in the fashion of an old-fashioned moralist, that one lives for one's children—but no, it is the parents who are the weaker ones.

At least, that is how it is in my household.

I harbor no shameless, self-serving hope of being helped and cared for by my children when I am old, yet this parent is forever trying to read the moods of the children in the home.

Children—though I say that, the children in my house are all still dreadfully young.

The eldest daughter is seven, the eldest son is four, and the second daughter is one.

Even so, each of them is already beginning to overwhelm their parents.

Father and mother present the aspect of servants to the children.

In summer, the whole family gathers in the three-mat room for a great noisy, chaotic dinner, and the father wipes the sweat from his face with a towel again and again,

"Eating a meal and breaking into a heavy sweat is the mark of a low fellow—so the Yanagidaru has it—but really, with the children making such a racket, even the most refined of fathers cannot help but drip with sweat."

he grumbles to himself.

The mother, nursing the one-year-old second daughter at her breast while serving father, the eldest daughter, and the eldest son, wiping up spills, picking up dropped things, blowing noses—working with breathtaking, eight-armed fury—says,

"Father, it seems you sweat most of all on your nose. You are always busily wiping your nose."

The father gives a wry smile and says,

"Well then, where do you sweat? The inner thighs?"

"What a refined father you are."

"No, no—it is simply a matter of physiology. There is nothing refined or vulgar about it."

"As for me,"

the mother says, her face growing a little serious,

"here, between this breast and this breast—……the valley of tears——"

The valley of tears.

The father fell silent and continued eating.

At home, I am always making jokes.

Perhaps it is because my heart is so often "troubled and afflicted"

that I must, on my face, put on "mirth and pleasure,"

or so one might say.

No, it is not only when I am at home; even when I am with people, no matter how heavy my heart or how much pain my body is in, I strive almost desperately to create a cheerful atmosphere.

And after parting from a guest, I stagger with exhaustion and think about money, about morality, about suicide.

No, it is not only when I am with people.

It is the same when I am writing fiction.

When I am sad, I make an effort to create a light and pleasant story.

I myself consider it the finest kind of service I can offer, but people do not notice this, and they scorn me, saying that the writer Dazai has become frivolous of late, that he baits readers with nothing but entertainment, that he has grown exceedingly facile.

Is it such a bad thing, for a human being to serve other human beings?

Is it such a good thing, to put on airs and refuse to laugh?

In short, I simply cannot endure the utterly solemn and the deadening awkwardness of things.

In my home as well, I am forever making jokes, cracking jokes as though treading on thin ice, betraying the imaginings of some of my readers and critics—the tatami in my room is new, the desk is tidy, husband and wife are tender and respectful toward each other, the husband has never struck the wife, of course, nor have they ever once had the kind of violent quarrel where words like "get out" or "I'm leaving" are thrown about, and father and mother both dote on the children with equal warmth, and the children are cheerfully fond of their parents.

But this is all outward appearance.

When the mother opens her breast, there is the valley of tears; the father's night sweats grow ever worse; husband and wife each know the other's suffering, yet they strive not to touch it, and when the father makes a joke, the mother laughs.

But at that moment, when the mother said "the valley of tears," the father fell silent; he tried to think of some joke to deflect it, but no good words came to him quickly, and as he continued to say nothing the awkwardness accumulated, and even the "man of the world" father at last let his face go serious and said,

the father at last let his face go serious and said,

"Hire someone. No matter what, you must do that."

muttering it almost to himself, timidly, so as not to upset the mother.

Three children.

The father is utterly useless at housework.

He does not even put away his own bedding.

And he only ever makes foolish jokes.

He knows nothing of ration distributions or registration paperwork.

He is entirely like a man lodging at an inn.

Visitors come.

They must be entertained.

He may go off to his workroom with a packed lunch and then not return home for a whole week.

He is always making a fuss about work, work, yet it seems he manages only two or three pages a day.

The rest is drink.

When he drinks too much, he wastes away dreadfully and takes to his bed.

And on top of all that, it appears he has young female acquaintances here and there.

The children—the eldest daughter, who is seven, and the second daughter, born this past spring, catch cold rather easily, but are otherwise more or less ordinary.

The eldest son, however, who is four, is gaunt and still cannot stand.

His speech is limited to sounds like "ah" and "dah"; he cannot speak a single word, nor can he understand what is said to him.

He crawls about and gives no warning before soiling himself.

And yet he eats a truly enormous amount.

But he remains always thin and small, with sparse hair, and does not grow in the least.

Father and mother avoid speaking to each other in depth about this eldest son.

To say even one word—idiot, mute——and have the two of them confirm it together would be too devastating.

The mother sometimes holds this child tightly in her arms.

The father is often seized, in sudden fits, by the urge to take this child in his arms and throw himself into a river to drown.

"Mute second son slain. After noon on such-and-such a day, in such-and-such ward, such-and-such town, at such-and-such number, such-and-such merchant, one so-and-so (53) struck his second son, so-and-so (18), on the head with a wood-splitting axe in the six-mat room of the family home and killed him; the man then stabbed himself in the throat with a pair of scissors but could not complete the deed and was taken to a nearby clinic in critical condition. The family had recently taken in a son-in-law for the second daughter (22), but having been driven beyond endurance by love for his daughter and the fact that the second son was a mute and also somewhat feeble-minded."

News articles like this are also what drive me to drink in despair.

Oh, if only it were simply a matter of delayed development!

If only this eldest son were to suddenly grow one day, and come to resent and mock the anxieties his parents had felt!

The couple, without telling any relative or friend or anyone at all, silently pray for this in their hearts, while outwardly appearing not to mind at all, teasing the eldest son and laughing.

The mother must be living with every last ounce of her effort, but the father too was doing his utmost.

He was not, at bottom, the kind of novelist who could produce a great deal.

He was an extreme coward.

Yet he had been dragged out before the public and was writing while stumbling about.

Writing is agony, and he seeks relief in drinking himself into the gutter.

Drinking into the gutter is the drink one drinks out of the chagrin and frustration of being unable to assert what one truly thinks.

Anyone who can always state plainly what he thinks does not drink like that.

(This is why there are few women who drink heavily.)

I have never once won an argument.

I invariably lose.

I am overwhelmed by the other person's conviction, by the ferocity of their self-assertion.

And so I fall silent.

But as I gradually think it over, I come to notice the other person's selfishness, and I grow more certain that I was not the only one in the wrong—yet to resume battle after having already been defeated once would be grim, and besides, for me a quarrel lingers as an unpleasant hatred just as lasting as a fistfight, so trembling with anger I smile, I fall silent, and then I think over this and that and the other thing, and inevitably end up drinking in despair.

Let me speak plainly.

I have written in a roundabout way, moving here and there, but in truth this story is a story of a marital quarrel.

"The valley of tears"——

that was the fuse.

This couple, as I have already described, is a remarkably quiet pair who have not merely never been physically violent with each other but have never even exchanged a foul-mouthed tirade—yet for that very reason there was also a trembling, hair-trigger danger between them.

The danger of both parties silently accumulating evidence of the other's faults; of each glancing at a card and turning it face-down, then glancing at another and turning it face-down, until suddenly, without warning, the hand would be revealed, laid out before one's eyes—this danger had, in its way, made husband and wife mutually restrained with each other.

As for the wife, I will leave that aside, but the husband was the sort of man who, the more you beat him, would produce more and more dust.

"The valley of tears"——

Hearing those words, the husband brooded.

But he did not like quarreling.

He fell silent.

You may have said that with some intent to reproach me, but you are not the only one who weeps.

I, too, no less than you, think about the child.

I believe my own home matters.

If one of the children makes a strange cough in the middle of the night, I invariably wake up and am overwhelmed by an unbearable feeling.

I want nothing more than to move to a somewhat better house and give you and the children some joy, but I simply cannot manage to reach that far.

This is already the full extent of what I can do.

I am not a violent demon.

I do not have the "nerve" to leave my wife and children to their fate and feel nothing——

I do not possess that.

Rations, registration—it is not that I don't know about them; I have no time to attend to them.……

The father murmured this to himself in his heart, yet had no confidence to say it aloud, and also felt that if he did say it and the mother countered with something, he would be left with nothing to say,

"Hire someone."

so he merely managed that small assertion, as if to himself.

The mother too was, on the whole, a quiet person.

But in what she did say, she always had a cool confidence.

(Not only this mother—most women are largely the same.)

"But it is quite difficult to find anyone willing to come."

"If you search, you will surely find someone. It is not that no one is willing to come—perhaps no one is willing to stay?"

"Are you saying I am bad at managing household help?"

"No, no, it's not that——"

The father was silent again.

In truth, that was exactly what he had thought.

But he said nothing.

Oh, if only someone could be hired.

When the mother goes out on errands carrying the youngest on her back, the father must look after the other two children.

And guests come every day, reliably, about ten of them.

"I'd like to head over to the workroom."

"Now?"

"Yes. There is some work I absolutely must finish tonight."

That was not a lie.

But he also wanted to escape the gloom of the house.

"Tonight, I was thinking of going to visit my sister."

That too, I already knew.

Her younger sister was gravely ill.

But if my wife went to visit her, I would have to stay and mind the children.

"That's why, if we could just hire someone——"

I started to say it, then stopped myself.

The moment anything touching on my wife's family is raised, even slightly, the feelings between us become terribly tangled.

Living is an enormously difficult thing.

Chains are entangled from every direction, and if you move even a little, blood spurts out.

I stood up without a word, took from the drawer of the desk in the six-mat room the envelope containing my manuscript fee, stuffed it into my sleeve, then wrapped my manuscript paper and dictionary in a black furoshiki, and floated out of the house as if weightless.

Work was already out of the question.

My thoughts were filled entirely with suicide.

And I went straight to a place where I could drink.

"Welcome."

"Let's drink. Today you're wearing a remarkably lovely striped pattern——"

"You don't think it's too much? I thought it was a stripe you liked."

"Had a marital spat today—the kind that festers inside and is unbearable. Let's drink. I'm staying the night. Absolutely staying."

I want to believe that parents matter more than children.

It is the parents, not the children, who are the weaker ones.

Cherries appeared.

At my house, we do not give the children luxurious things to eat.

The children may never have seen cherries before.

If they were given some to eat, they would be delighted.

If their father brought some home, they would be delighted.

If you threaded the stems together on a string and hung them around your neck, the cherries would look like a necklace of coral.

But the father ate the cherries heaped on a large plate with an expression of extreme distaste, spitting out the pits, eating and spitting, eating and spitting, eating and spitting—and the words he murmured in his heart, like a kind of bravado, were: parents matter more than children.