ヴィヨンの妻 English

One

There came the hurried sound of the front door opening, and the noise woke me; but knowing it could only be my husband returning drunk in the middle of the night, I lay still and said nothing.

My husband switched on the light in the next room and, breathing in great, harsh gasps, pulled open the drawers of his desk and bookcase and rummaged through them, apparently searching for something; then came the dull thud of him dropping down to sit on the tatami, after which there was only that labored, rasping breath, and I lay in bed wondering what he was doing.

"Welcome home. Have you eaten? There are rice balls in the cupboard."

I called out to him, and he replied,

"Oh, thank you."

He answered me with an unusual tenderness, then asked, "How is the boy? Does he still have a fever?"

He asked.

That too was rare.

The boy would turn four next year, but whether from malnourishment, or from the poison of his father's drinking, or from some other sickness, he was even smaller than other children of two, unsteady on his feet, and could say little more than "Num-num" and "No-no" — so much so that I feared something might be wrong with his mind; once, when I took him to the public bath and undressed him and lifted him up, he looked so pitifully small and thin and wretched that a loneliness came over me, and I wept right there in front of everyone.

The boy was forever suffering from stomach upsets or fevers; my husband was hardly ever at home, and what he thought of his child I could not tell — when I said the boy had a fever, he would say, "Oh, really? You should take him to the doctor," and hurry off somewhere, pulling on his cape as he went.

Even had I wished to take him to the doctor, we had no money whatsoever, so all I could do was lie beside the boy and stroke his head in silence.

But that night, for some reason, my husband was strangely gentle — asking after the boy's fever, which he had never done before — and rather than feeling glad, I felt a cold premonition run down my spine.

I had nothing to say and kept silent. For a while there was only the sound of my husband's violent breathing, and then

"Excuse me,"

came a thin woman's voice from the entrance.

I felt as though cold water had been poured over my entire body.

"Excuse me. Mr. Otani."

This time the voice was a little sharp.

At the same moment the front door opened, and

"Mr. Otani! I know you're in there!"

came a voice, clearly angry.

My husband seemed to finally go out to the entrance, and

"What do you want?"

he replied, in a flustered, hollow-sounding way.

"'What do you want?' indeed,"

said the woman, lowering her voice. "A fine home you have here, and yet you go and steal from us. Stop playing these nasty jokes and give it back. Otherwise I am going straight to the police."

"What are you talking about? Don't say such outrageous things. This is no place for the likes of you. Get out! If you won't leave, I'll be the one to report you."

At that, a man's voice broke in.

"You've got some nerve, sensei. 'No place for the likes of you' — that's rich. I'm speechless. This isn't some trifling matter. You took money from our home — there's a limit to how far a joke can go. All these years, my wife and I have endured so much on your account, more than you could ever know. And now you pull a low trick like this tonight. Sensei, I've lost all respect for you."

"This is extortion,"

my husband declared with bravado, but his voice was trembling.

"Blackmail. Get out! If you have a complaint, bring it tomorrow."

"Listen to him talk. Sensei, you're a proper villain now. Then there's nothing left but to go to the police."

The words carried such vicious hatred that every hair on my body stood on end.

"Do as you please!"

my husband shouted, his voice already shrill and hollow.

I got up, threw a haori jacket over my nightclothes, and went out to the entrance to greet the two visitors.

"Welcome,"

I said in greeting.

"Oh — you are the wife?"

A round-faced man of over fifty, wearing a short overcoat that came to his knees, gave me a small, unsmiling nod.

The woman was around forty, slight and small, neatly dressed.

"Calling at such an hour of the night —"

said the woman, equally unsmiling, unwinding her shawl and returning my bow.

Just then, my husband abruptly shoved on his clogs and made to bolt outside.

"Hold on — not so fast."

The man seized my husband by one arm, and the two grappled briefly.

"Let go! I'll stab you."

A jackknife gleamed in my husband's right hand.

It was a knife my husband treasured; I was certain it had been in the drawer of his desk — so that had been what he was rummaging for when he came home earlier; he had clearly anticipated something like this and gone looking for it to slip into his breast pocket.

The man stepped back.

In that instant my husband swept his great coat-sleeves like the wings of a crow and flew out into the night.

"Thief!"

the man shouted, and made to rush outside after him; but I leapt barefoot into the entryway, threw my arms around the man to hold him back, and said,

"Please don't. Someone may be hurt on both sides. I will deal with the aftermath."

From beside me, the woman of forty also said,

"He's right, dear. A blade in the hands of a madman — there's no telling what he'll do."

she said.

"Blast it all! The police. I won't stand for this."

He muttered this to himself, staring blankly out at the darkness, but all the strength seemed to have already drained from his body.

"I am sorry. Please come in and tell me what happened."

I stepped up onto the entryway platform and crouched down, saying,

"Even I may be able to set things right. Please, come in. It is a poor place, but please."

The two visitors exchanged glances, gave each other the faintest nod, and then the man composed himself and said,

"No matter what you say, our minds are already made up. Nevertheless, I should at least tell you the circumstances up to now."

"Yes, please. Do come in. Take your time."

"Well, there is no time to be leisurely,"

he said, and began to take off his overcoat.

"Please keep it on. It is cold, truly — please, keep it on. There is not a single source of heat in the house."

"Then I will keep it on, if you'll forgive me."

"Please do. And you as well, madam — please keep yours on."

The man entered first, then the woman, into the six-mat room that was my husband's study, and upon taking in the scene — the tatami half-rotted, the shoji screens torn wherever they would tear, the walls crumbling, the fusuma doors with the paper peeling away and the inner frame exposed, a desk and bookcase in one corner, and even the bookcase entirely empty — both of them seemed to catch their breath.

I offered our two guests some zabuton cushions that had burst at the seams and were trailing their stuffing, and said,

"The tatami is filthy, so please, use these, poor as they are."

Then I properly introduced myself to them.

"How do you do. My husband has apparently caused you a great deal of trouble over the years, and tonight, whatever he did — that dreadful behavior — I cannot apologize enough. He is simply a person of such peculiar nature."

I broke off midsentence, choked, and let the tears fall.

"Madam. Forgive my asking, but how old are you?"

The man sat cross-legged on the torn zabuton without a hint of self-consciousness, set his elbows on his knees, propped his chin on his fists, and leaned his upper body forward as he asked.

"Oh — you mean me?"

"Yes. The husband is thirty, if I recall?"

"I am, um... four years his junior."

"Then twenty-six — no, this is dreadful. Still that young? Well, of course — if the husband is thirty, it stands to reason, but still, what a shock."

"I too, from a while back,"

said the woman, leaning her face around from behind the man's back, "have been impressed. A fine wife like you — how can Mr. Otani carry on the way he does?"

"It's an illness. That's what it is. He wasn't quite this bad before, but he's been getting worse and worse."

The man let out a long sigh and said,

"The fact is, madam,"

he began formally, "my wife and I run a small restaurant near Nakano Station. We are both from Joshu, and I was, in my own way, an honest merchant — though restless by nature, if you will, and tired of the petty trade of selling to country farmers. About twenty years ago I brought this woman up to Tokyo, and we went into live-in service together at a restaurant in Asakusa, and after the usual ups and downs that everyone goes through, we managed to save a little money. In — it must have been Showa eleven — we rented a small, dingy place near Nakano Station, just a single six-mat room with a narrow earthen floor, and opened a modest little eating and drinking establishment catering to customers whose pleasure money ran to perhaps one or two yen a time. My wife and I were frugal and worked steadily, and as a result we were able to lay in a fair stock of shochu and gin, so that even when the shortage of sake came along afterward, unlike other eating places we did not have to close or change our business — we held on somehow. And holding on as we did, our regular customers became all the more enthusiastic in their support, and certain people helped us open a channel by which some of the sake and food that circulated among the military and the officials began to flow our way, just a little. Even as the air raids against America and Britain grew more and more intense, we had no children to be a burden to us, felt no urge to evacuate to the countryside, and thought we would stay until our house burned down — so we clung to this one business of ours, and somehow we came through without being bombed out, and when the war ended we breathed a sigh of relief and began selling black-market liquor openly. In short strokes, that is who we are. But told this briefly, you might think we are people who have coasted through without any great hardship or particular bad luck. Yet a man's life is hell, truly — an inch of happiness, a foot of misfortune, as the saying goes, and how true it is. For every inch of good fortune, a demon of a foot's length comes following after.

"Out of three hundred and sixty-five days, if a man can find one — even half a day — without some worry, he is a fortunate man.

"Your husband, Mr. Otani, first came to our shop in the spring — or thereabouts — of Showa nineteen. Around that time the war against America and Britain did not yet look so obviously like a losing battle — or rather, it was already turning bad, but we had no way of knowing the real state of things, and we thought that if we could hold out another two or three years, we might somehow manage a peace on equal terms. When Mr. Otani first appeared at our shop, he was wearing a Kurume kasuri kimono with a cape thrown over it, as I recall — though that was true of everyone, not just him; in those days few people in Tokyo were yet going about in air-raid clothing, and most still ventured out in ordinary dress —

so we thought nothing particular of Mr. Otani's appearance at the time.

"Mr. Otani was not alone on that occasion.

"Forgive me, speaking in front of you, his wife — but I will hold nothing back and tell you everything: your husband was brought by a certain older woman, and they slipped in through the back service entrance.

"Mind you, by that time our shop had its front door shut every day as a matter of course — what they called in those days 'closed for business but open for trade' — and only a small number of regulars would come in quietly through the back entrance; and there was no sitting at the bar on the earthen floor to drink, but rather going up to the back six-mat room, dimming the lights, keeping one's voice down, and drinking discreetly. As for that older woman: until shortly before, she had been working as a waitress at a bar in Shinjuku, and during her waitress days she had an arrangement with me of bringing in good-quality customers and steering them to my shop as regulars — the kind of understanding that goes with the trade. Her apartment was just nearby, so even after the Shinjuku bar closed and she quit the waitress work, she would occasionally bring acquaintances by, male friends; and with our supply of liquor growing ever thinner, we did not really welcome more drinkers however well-heeled, and it was becoming more of an imposition than a favor — but she had brought us so many free-spending customers in the four or five years before that, we felt the obligation, and so we had agreed to serve without a sour face anyone introduced by her.

"So once that bar in Shinjuku had closed and she had given up the waitress work, she would still drop in from time to time with male acquaintances; and with the liquor supply at our shop growing ever thinner, we were not so grateful for new drinkers, however respectable — it was more of a nuisance, if anything. But in the four or five years before that she had brought us so many extravagant customers that we owed her a debt, and so we had agreed to serve anyone she introduced without making a face.

"So when your husband arrived that time, brought by that older woman — her name was Aki — slipping in through the back service entrance, we thought nothing of it, and as always, showed them up to the back six-mat room and served shochu.

"That evening your husband drank quietly, had Aki pay the bill, and left with her through the back again — but I cannot forget the strangely quiet, refined manner he had about him that night.

"Is it that when a demon first appears in someone's home, it comes in just such a still, innocent-seeming guise?

"From that evening, our shop was singled out by Mr. Otani.

"About ten days later, Mr. Otani came alone through the back entrance, and without preamble produced a hundred-yen note — a hundred yen was still serious money then, worth two or three thousand yen now or more — and pressed it forcibly into my hand, said 'please,' and gave a weak little smile.

"He was already fairly well along, it seemed, but at any rate — as you know, madam — there has never been anyone who could hold his drink like your husband.

"You would think he was drunk, and then he would suddenly speak with perfect clarity and logic; and no matter how much he drank, his legs never seemed to go unsteady — not once in all the time we knew him.

"A man in his early thirties is at the peak of his vigor, and drinking is part of that — but even so, he was something rare.

"That evening, too, he had clearly been drinking heavily somewhere else beforehand, and yet he went on to drink ten cups of shochu in a row at our place, staying almost entirely silent — whenever my wife and I tried to start a conversation, he would just smile shyly and nod vaguely, then suddenly ask what time it was, stand up, and when I told him I had change for him, said no, never mind; I insisted firmly that it would not do, and he grinned and said, then hold onto it for the next time, I'll be back — and he went off; but, madam, the only time Mr. Otani ever paid us was that one time, right there at the start; after that, by one excuse or another, three full years went by without a single sen from him, and he practically drank down our entire stock of liquor by himself —

aren't you astonished?"

I burst out laughing before I knew it.

A laughter whose reason I could not explain welled up inside me.

I quickly pressed a hand over my mouth and looked at the wife, and she too bent her head with a strange smile.

Then the husband also gave a helpless, rueful smile and said,

"Well, it's really no laughing matter, but it's so outrageous you can't help it. Honestly, if he put those abilities of his to any normal use, he could be a cabinet minister, a professor, anything he wanted. Not just us — there are apparently others, too, who have been picked out by that man and left with not a stitch to their names, weeping in this cold. Take Aki, for instance: ever since she met Mr. Otani, her good patron left her, her money and her kimono disappeared, and now by all accounts she's living in some dirty tenement room like a beggar. It's true that when Aki first got to know Mr. Otani, she was absurdly infatuated and used to boast about him to us on every occasion. His pedigree, for one, was spectacular — second son of Baron Otani, a branch family of some lord in Shikoku, currently disowned for dissolute conduct, but when the baron father dies, he and the eldest son will divide the estate. Brilliant, a genius, they say. At twenty-one he wrote a book surpassing even that great genius Ishikawa Takuboku, and since then some ten-odd more books, and young as he is, he is the finest poet in Japan. And moreover a great scholar — Gakushuin, First Higher School, Imperial University, German, French, and more — terrifying, Aki said, a god among men; but it was not all fabrication, because from others one heard the same thing, that he was the second son of Baron Otani and a celebrated poet. So even my old wife, at her age, caught the fever right along with Aki and waited eagerly for Mr. Otani's visits, saying that a man of good breeding is different in some ineffable way — it was beyond bearing. Titles and nobility may mean nothing anymore now, but before the war ended, when it came to winning over a woman, nothing worked like the trick of being a disowned son of the aristocracy. It seemed to make women go strangely wild.

"I suppose that is what they call nowadays the slave mentality.

"A man like me, and a weathered one at that — a mere branch of a noble family, a second son at that, from some lord in Shikoku — I couldn't see that there was any difference in station between them and us; I certainly was not going to make a fool of myself and go wild over such a thing.

"Even so, there was something about that man I could never quite get the better of — even when I had firmly resolved that this time, no matter how he begged, I would not give him another drop of sake, he would appear at some unexpected hour like a man being chased, come into our shop and visibly relax as though he had finally reached safety, and at that sight my resolve would soften and I would pour him a drink.

"Drunk, he never made a fool of himself; and if he had just paid his bills properly, he would have been a fine customer.

"He never talked up his own background; he never bragged about being a genius or anything of the sort; and when Aki, sitting beside him, would advertise his greatness to us, he would say something entirely beside the point, like, 'I want money — I want to pay the bill here,' and that would kill the mood.

"He never paid us for the sake, but Aki sometimes paid in his place, and besides Aki there appeared to be a secret woman whose existence he was anxious to hide from Aki, someone who seemed to be the wife of a man of some standing; she too would come with Mr. Otani from time to time, and she sometimes left more than enough money on her way out. We are merchants, after all, and without those occasional payments, however great a poet Mr. Otani might be, or even a prince of the blood, we could not have kept pouring free drinks indefinitely.

"But those sporadic payments were nowhere near enough, and we were well in the red; and having heard that there was a proper house in Koganei with a proper wife — that would be you, madam — I thought once of going there to discuss the debt, and hinted as much by asking Mr. Otani where his home was; but he saw through me at once and said, 'There's nothing there, there's nothing — why are you getting so worked up? A quarrel that ends a friendship is a loss for everyone,' and said other unpleasant things.

"Still, we did our best to find out at least the address of his house, and two or three times tried following him, but each time he gave us the slip.

"Then Tokyo became subject to one air raid after another, and everything descended into chaos; Mr. Otani would show up wearing an air-raid cap, help himself to a bottle of brandy from the closet, drink it straight down standing up, and disappear like the wind without any talk of payment; then the war ended, and now we were openly buying and selling black-market liquor, putting up a fresh shop curtain, hiring a girl to charm the customers even though we were poor — and once again that demon of a man appeared, and this time not with a woman but always with two or three newspaper or magazine reporters, and apparently, the reporters were saying, now that the military had fallen, poets and such who had been poor until now were going

to be welcomed by society; and Mr. Otani would say strange things to those reporters — foreign names, or English, or philosophy, or something incomprehensible — and then get up suddenly and walk out, never to return.

"The reporters would look deflated and start saying, 'Where the devil did he go? Shall we be heading back too?' and I would say, wait a moment, please — the sensei always pulls this trick — I'll be collecting from you gentlemen.

"Some would quietly pool their money and pay, but others would get angry and say, 'Make Otani pay — we're living on five hundred yen,' and refuse.

"Even when someone got angry, I would say: do you have any idea how much Mr. Otani's debt has come to?

If any of you can extract even a portion of it from him, I will give you half — and the reporters' faces would go blank with astonishment. 'Good grief, we didn't know Otani was such a scoundrel — we're done drinking with him. We haven't got a hundred yen between us tonight — we'll bring it tomorrow, hold onto this for us,' and they would dramatically strip off their overcoats.

"Journalists have a bad reputation in the world, but compared to Mr. Otani, they were honest and straightforward; if he was the second son of a baron, then the reporters were worth the equivalent of a duke's eldest heir.

"After the war ended, Mr. Otani drank even more and his appearance grew fierce; he began to say coarse, vulgar things he had never said before, and then he would suddenly punch one of the reporters he had brought along and start a brawl; and he seemed at some point to have taken advantage of the young girl we employed in our shop, who was not yet twenty, by insinuating himself with her and seducing her when no one was watching — we were shocked and troubled, but since the deed was already done there was nothing to do but accept it in silence, and we calmed the girl down and quietly sent her back to her parents.

"When I begged him, said I was through talking about it, just please never come back, Mr. Otani said vile, threatening things like, 'Don't lecture me about decency when you're making money from the black market — I know everything,' and then came back the very next night without a care in the world.

"We may have brought this on ourselves by running a black-market business all through the war, earning our punishment in the form of having to put up with a creature like him — but what happened tonight was too much; poet or sensei or whatever he may be, he is a thief, a man who stole five thousand yen from us and ran.

"By now our capital is all tied up in stock, and we're lucky to keep five hundred or a thousand yen in cash in the house — that is the honest truth, for the day's receipts must go straight back into purchases the very same day.

"The reason there was such a large sum as five thousand yen in our house tonight was that with the year-end drawing close, I had been making rounds to our regular customers collecting what they owed, and had finally gathered that much together; it was money we had to hand over to our suppliers that very night, or else we would not be able to carry on with our business come the new year — that important, that critical — and my wife had counted it out in the back room and put it in the drawer of the sideboard; and he had apparently been watching from his seat at the bar while he drank alone, and all at once he stood up, walked straight into the back room, shoved my wife aside without a word, opened the drawer, grabbed the whole bundle of five-thousand-yen notes in his fist, stuffed it into his cape pocket, and before we could

collect ourselves he had stepped down off the floor and walked out of the shop, so I shouted and called after him, and together with my wife chased him down the street, and I thought to myself, now it has come to this — 'Thief!'

I thought of shouting and gathering the passersby to seize him, but after all we did know each other, and it seemed too severe; so I resolved that tonight whatever happened I would not lose sight of him, would follow him all the way to wherever he settled, confirm the address, and then calmly ask for the money back — we are a weak class of people, we merchants; my wife and I joined forces and tonight at last tracked down this house, and suppressing every feeling of outrage, we came quietly to ask for the money back; and then, what do you know — out comes a knife, 'I'll stab you' — what kind of —"

Again a laughter I could not account for rose up, and I laughed out loud.

The wife too reddened a little and laughed.

My laughter would not stop; I knew it was unkind to the husband, but it struck me as inexplicably funny, and I went on laughing until the tears came, and I thought, fleetingly, that perhaps that line in one of my husband's poems — "the great laughter at the end of civilization"

— described this very feeling.

Two

In any case, however, that great laughter could not be the end of the matter. I thought it over, and that night told the two of them: then I will do whatever I can to settle this affair — please wait one more day before going to the police; tomorrow I will come to your place. I had them tell me in detail where the Nakano shop was, prevailed upon them both to agree, and with that, for the time being, I managed to send them home; then I sat alone in the middle of the cold six-mat room and turned things over in my mind, but no good plan came to me, so at last I stood up, took off my haori, slipped in under the covers next to the sleeping boy, stroked his head,

and thought, on and on and on, how I wished the night would never end.

My father had long ago kept an oden cart at the edge of the Hyotan Pond in Asakusa Park.

My mother had died young, and my father and I lived alone together in a tenement, and we ran the cart together, the two of us; my husband would sometimes stop at the cart, and gradually I began deceiving my father to meet my husband secretly, and I became pregnant with the boy, and after much confusion I found myself more or less in the position of this man's wife — though of course we were not properly registered, and the boy was legally fatherless; my husband would leave the house and not return for three or four nights, or even a whole month, and I never knew where he was or what he was doing; when he did come back he was always dead drunk, his face deathly pale, breathing those labored, rasping gasps, and he would stare at my face in silence and let the tears fall

drop by drop, or else slip suddenly into the bedclothes where I lay sleeping and hold my body tight, saying,

"Oh, it's terrible. I'm frightened. I'm so frightened. Frightened! Help me!"

and sometimes he would be trembling all over; even after falling asleep he would mutter and groan, and in the morning he would be blank and vacant, like a person whose soul had departed, and then suddenly he would be gone again, not returning for three or four nights more; two or three people who had known my husband since the old days, in publishing, worried about the boy and me and sometimes came with money, and thanks to them we had managed to live until today without starving to death.

I dozed off and then suddenly opened my eyes to see morning light filtering through a crack in the rain shutters, and I got up, made myself ready, strapped the boy onto my back, and went out.

I felt I could no longer bear to stay quietly inside.

With no particular destination in mind, I walked toward the station, bought some candy from a street stall in front of it, gave it to the boy to suck on, and then, on a sudden impulse, bought a ticket to Kichijoji and got on the tram; hanging from a strap, I happened to glance at a poster hanging from the ceiling of the car, and there was my husband's name.

It was an advertisement for a magazine, and my husband had apparently published a long essay in it under the title "François Villon"

— such, at any rate, was the appearance of things.

As I stared at the title "François Villon" and my husband's name beside it, tears of some inexplicable sadness welled up and the poster blurred before my eyes.

I got off at Kichijoji and walked, for the first time in what felt like years, to Inokashira Park.

The cedar trees that had lined the edge of the pond had been completely cut down, and the place had a strangely bare, cold look, like land about to be built on — utterly changed from how I remembered it.

I took the boy off my back and sat the two of us on a half-broken bench by the pond, and fed him the sweet potato I had brought from home.

"Look at the pretty pond, dear. A long time ago this pond had lots and lots of carp and goldfish, but now there's nothing, is there. It's dull, isn't it."

The boy, for some reason best known to himself, stuffed his mouth full of potato and gave a strange little giggle: "Heh-heh."

Even as his own mother, I thought him very nearly an idiot.

Sitting on the bench by the pond would not settle anything, so I strapped the boy on my back again and sauntered back toward Kichijoji Station, looking over the lively rows of stalls, then bought a ticket for Nakano at the station and, with no deliberation or plan, as though drawn smoothly toward some fearful abyss, boarded the tram, got off at Nakano, walked the way I had been told, and arrived in front of the little restaurant.

The front door was shut, so I went around to the back and entered through the service entrance.

The husband was out, and the wife alone was sweeping the shop.

The moment I met the wife's eyes, I heard myself, to my own surprise, smoothly and effortlessly tell a lie.

"Auntie, I think I can repay the money cleanly. Tonight, or if not, tomorrow — I have a sure prospect, so please don't worry anymore."

"My, goodness me."

The wife looked briefly pleased, but a faint shadow of unease that did not quite believe me lingered somewhere in her face.

"I mean it, auntie. There's someone who will certainly bring it here. Until then I'll be a hostage and stay right here. That's reassuring, isn't it? Until the money comes I'll help out in the shop."

I slid the boy off my back, left him to play alone in the back six-mat room, and bustled about showing that I could be useful.

The boy was accustomed to playing alone, so he was no trouble at all.

Perhaps because his mind was a little slow, he was not shy with strangers; he even smiled up at the wife, and while I was out fetching the household's ration allotment in her stead, he seemed to have been given empty American tin cans by the wife for toys, and was happily banging and rolling them in the corner of the six-mat room.

Around noon the husband returned, having been out buying fish and vegetables.

The moment I saw his face, I told him the same lie I had told his wife, just as quickly.

The husband looked blank for a moment and said,

"Is that so? Still, madam, money is not to be counted on until you have it in your hand."

He said it in a surprisingly calm, instructive tone.

"No, really, it's definite, truly certain. So please trust me and wait just today before making it public. I'll stay on and help in the shop in the meantime."

"If the money comes back, then there's nothing —"

said the husband, almost to himself, and then, "With only five or six days left in the year, as it is."

"Yes, that's why — that's exactly — oh? A customer. Welcome, welcome!"

I smiled at a group of three workmen who had just come into the shop, then said in a low voice, "Auntie, I'm sorry — could you lend me an apron?"

"Ha, he's gone and hired a beauty. That's something."

said one of the customers.

"Don't try to entice her,"

said the husband in a tone that was not entirely joking, "she's a costly body."

"Million-dollar racehorse, is she?"

another customer offered a crude jest.

"For a thoroughbred mare, they say the price is half,"

I replied, warming the sake, matching him crude jest for crude jest —

"Don't be so modest. From here on, in Japan, horse or dog, it's equal rights for men and women, so they say,"

the youngest customer bellowed, "Miss, I'm smitten. Love at first sight. But — you've got a kid, haven't you?"

"No,"

said the wife, coming out from the back carrying the boy. "This child has just come to us from a relative. Now we finally have an heir of our own."

"A windfall, indeed,"

teased one of the customers, and the husband said seriously,

"A beautiful one to boot, and debts besides,"

he murmured, and then abruptly shifted his tone: "What will it be? Shall I make a hotpot?"

he asked the customers.

At that moment I understood one thing.

So that's how it is, I thought to myself, nodding inwardly, while outwardly I carried a flask of sake to the customers without any show of having noticed.

It happened to be the evening of what they called Christmas Eve, and because of that, perhaps, the customers never stopped coming, one after another; I had eaten almost nothing since morning, but my heart was too full to feel it, and whenever the wife pressed me to eat something, I said no thank you, and only kept moving lightly, as though wrapped in a single feather robe and dancing — vain as it may sound, the shop that evening seemed to have an unusual vitality about it, and the number of customers who asked my name or reached out for a handshake was well more than two or three.

But what would come of all this?

I had not the faintest idea.

All I did was smile, match the crude jests of the customers with cruder ones of my own, glide from table to table pouring drinks, and think, vaguely, that I wished this body of mine would melt and flow away like ice cream.

Miracles do, it seems, occasionally appear even in this world.

It was perhaps a little past nine o'clock.

There arrived a pair of guests: a man wearing a paper triangular Christmas hat and a black mask that covered the upper half of his face like Lupin, and a slender, handsome woman of thirty-four or thirty-five; the man sat down on a chair in the corner of the room with his back to me, but the moment he came through the door I knew who he was.

My thieving husband.

He appeared not to notice me, so I pretended not to notice him either, joking with the other customers; and when the woman, sitting facing my husband, called out,

"Miss, a moment."

I answered,

"Yes?"

and went over to their table.

"Welcome. Sake?"

When I said this, my husband glanced at me from under the mask and was clearly startled; I lightly patted his shoulder and said,

"Merry Christmas — is that what you say? Looks like you could manage another bottle or so."

I said.

The woman took no notice of this, composed herself, and said,

"Excuse me, miss, but I need to have a private word with the proprietor — could you bring him over?"

she said.

I went to the back where the husband was frying things, and said,

"Otani is back. Would you see him? But please don't let the woman he's brought know who I am. It would only embarrass Otani."

"So he's finally come."

The husband seemed to have half-doubted my lie yet nonetheless put considerable faith in it, and appeared to take Otani's return simply as confirmation that I had somehow arranged it.

"Remember — keep quiet about me,"

I said once more, and

"If that is what is best, I will,"

he readily agreed, and went out to the floor.

The husband swept his gaze briefly around the customers on the floor, then walked straight to my husband's table, exchanged a few words with the elegant woman, and all three of them went out of the shop together.

It's all right now.

Everything has been resolved — for some reason I was certain of this, and I felt a genuine relief; I suddenly seized the wrist of a young customer of not quite twenty, wearing a dark kasuri kimono, and said,

"Let's drink, come on, let's drink. It's Christmas, after all."

Three

Barely thirty minutes — or even less; I had just thought "oh?" when the husband came back alone and came over to me, saying,

"Madam, thank you. The money has been returned."

"Good. All of it?"

The husband gave an odd smile.

"Yes — yesterday's, that is."

"How much is the full amount altogether — roughly, at the very least?"

"Twenty thousand yen."

"Is that all?"

"That is the very least."

"I'll pay it back. Uncle, let me work here starting tomorrow, won't you? Yes, do let me! I'll work and pay it off."

"My goodness, madam — a regular Ohatsu you are."

We both laughed together.

That night, a little past ten, I took my leave of the Nakano shop, strapped the boy on my back, and returned to our house in Koganei.

My husband had not come home, but I did not mind.

Tomorrow, if I go to that shop again, I might see him.

How had I not thought of this before?

All my hardships until yesterday had simply been because I was too slow to think of something so obvious.

I had been good with customers at my father's stall in Asakusa — I was never clumsy about it — so I was sure to manage well enough at that Nakano shop from now on.

And hadn't I earned nearly five hundred yen in tips this very evening?

According to the husband, after leaving last night my husband had apparently gone to a friend's house and spent the night, and then early that morning descended on the bar in Kyobashi run by that elegant woman, and started drinking whisky from the morning; and he gave each of the five girls working in the bar a gift of money, calling it a Christmas present, and then around noon had a taxi called and went off somewhere, and after a while came back bringing paper Christmas hats, masks, a decorated cake, and a turkey, had calls made in all directions, assembled his acquaintances for a grand party — and the bar madam, always puzzled by this man who never had any money, discreetly asked him about it, and my husband, with perfect composure, told her everything about the previous

night, just as it had happened — and the madam, evidently not a stranger to Otani, in any case said earnestly to him that if this became a police matter and a big fuss, it would be pointless, and he must return it; so the madam put up the money herself, had my husband lead the way, and came to the Nakano shop; and the Nakano shop's husband said to me,

"Roughly that's what I figured had happened — but, madam, you had a good instinct for which direction things would go. Did you ask a friend of Mr. Otani's?"

He seemed to assume that I had foreseen all along that my husband would return this way, and had simply come to the shop to wait — so I laughed and said,

"Yes, well, something like that,"

and left it at that.

From the day after, my life changed completely from before, buoyant and cheerful.

I went straight to the hairdresser's and had my hair put in order; I bought cosmetics, had my kimono re-sewn, and was given two pairs of new white tabi socks by the wife — the heavy feeling I had been carrying in my chest all this time was swept clean away.

I got up in the morning, ate breakfast with the boy, made a box lunch, strapped the boy on my back, and headed off to my post at Nakano; the year-end and New Year's being the busiest season for the shop, Sacchan — that was the name they gave me at the shop, after Tsubakiya — Sacchan was kept so busy every day her head spun, and my husband came to drink every other day or so, left his bill for me to pay, and then vanished again; sometimes he would look in at my shop late at night and

"Shall we go home?"

he would murmur softly, and I would nod and begin getting ready, and we would walk home together happily, side by side.

"Why didn't we do this from the start? I am so happy."

"Women have neither happiness nor unhappiness."

"Really? When you put it that way, I feel you might be right — but then what about men?"

"Men have only unhappiness. They are always fighting against fear."

"I don't understand that. But I want to go on living like this forever. The uncle and auntie at Tsubakiya are such good people."

"They're naive, those people. Country folk. And quite greedy, actually — they pour me drinks hoping to profit from me in the end."

"Well, that's business, of course. But there's more to it than that, isn't there? You've taken advantage of the wife."

"That was in the past. What about the husband — has he noticed?"

"He seems to know quite well. Once, with a sigh, he said something like, 'A new beauty, and new debts.'"

"You know, I may sound affected saying this, but I want to die — desperately. I have been thinking of dying ever since I was born. It would be better for everyone if I died. Of that I am certain. And yet I cannot die. Some strange, frightening, godlike thing holds me back from dying."

"You have your work."

"Work means nothing. There is no such thing as a masterpiece or a poor piece. If people say it is good, it becomes good; if they say it is bad, it becomes bad. It is just like breathing in and breathing out. What is terrifying is this: that somewhere in this world there is a god. There is one, isn't there?"

"Hmm?"

"There is one, isn't there?"

"I really don't know."

"I see."

As ten days and twenty days passed working at the shop, I came to notice that without exception every customer who came to drink at Tsubakiya was a criminal.

My husband, I began to think, was still among the gentler ones.

And not just the customers of the shop — every person walking down the street seemed to be hiding some dark sin of their own.

A dignified woman of about fifty came to the service entrance at Tsubakiya to sell sake at three hundred yen a sho, which was below the going black-market rate, so the wife bought it at once — but it turned out to be watered down.

Even a woman who appeared so refined is reduced to scheming like that, I thought, and concluded that in a world like this, it must be impossible to live with not a single dark deed to one's name.

Like a card game where collecting all the minus points turns them into plus points — could such a thing ever happen in the morality of this world?

If there is a god, come out and show yourself!

At the end of New Year's, I was violated by one of the customers at the shop.

That night, it was raining.

My husband did not appear, but Yajima — an acquaintance who had known my husband since the old days in publishing, one of those who occasionally brought money for the boy and me — came with someone who seemed to be in the same trade, a man of roughly Yajima's own forty-odd years, and the two of them drank and argued loudly between themselves about whether it was appropriate or not appropriate for Otani's wife to be working in a place like this, half-jokingly, and I said with a smile,

"And where is that wife?"

I asked, and Yajima replied,

"I don't know where she is, but she is at least more refined and more beautiful than Tsubakiya's Sacchan."

to which I said,

"That's hurtful. If it were with someone like Otani, I'd gladly spend even one night with him. I like that kind of crafty man."

"There you have it,"

said Yajima, turning to his companion and twisting his mouth in a wry expression.

By that time it had become known among the reporters who came with my husband that I was the wife of the poet Otani, and there were even curious visitors who came specially to tease me after hearing this from those reporters, and the shop grew livelier than ever, and the husband's mood was, all in all, not displeased.

That evening, Yajima and his companion eventually finished their business conversation about some black-market paper deal, and it was past ten when they left; I, too, thought that with the rain coming down tonight, my husband seemed unlikely to appear, so even though one customer remained, I began getting ready to go and lifted the sleeping boy from his corner in the back six-mat room onto my back.

"Let me borrow an umbrella again,"

I said quietly to the wife, who replied,

"I have an umbrella. Let me walk you home."

The one remaining customer — a lean, slight man of twenty-five or six, who looked like a factory worker — stood up with a serious face.

This was the first time I had seen him in the shop.

"That's very kind, but I'm quite used to walking alone."

"No, your house is far. I know. I'm from near there, near Koganei. Please let me walk you. Auntie, my bill."

He had only drunk three bottles in the shop and did not seem particularly drunk.

We got on the tram together, got off at Koganei, and walked side by side sharing an umbrella along the pitch-dark rainy road.

The young man, who had been almost entirely silent until then, began to speak in hesitant fragments:

"You see, I know who you are. I'm a fan of Sensei Otani's poetry. I write poetry myself, actually. I was thinking I'd have Sensei Otani look at it sometime. But somehow, Sensei Otani frightens me."

We arrived at the house.

"Thank you so much. See you at the shop."

"Yes, goodnight."

The young man went home through the rain.

Deep in the night I was awakened by the rattling sound of the front door opening; thinking it was my husband's usual drunken homecoming, I lay still and said nothing — but then

"Excuse me. Mr. Otani — excuse me,"

came a man's voice.

I got up, turned on the light, and went to the entrance to find the young man from earlier, swaying so badly he could barely stand straight.

"Madam, I'm sorry. On the way back I had another drink at a street stall — you see, my home is in Tachikawa; I went to the station and the last tram was already gone. Madam, please — let me stay the night. I don't need bedding or anything. Even this entryway platform would do. Just let me sleep here until the first tram in the morning. If it weren't raining I'd sleep under any eave I could find, but in this rain I can't do that. Please."

"My husband is not home, and if this entryway is good enough, please do."

I said this, and brought out two worn zabuton cushions and laid them in the entryway for him.

"Thank you. Ah, I'm drunk."

He said this in a pained, small voice, lay down right there on the entryway platform, and by the time I had returned to my bed, loud snoring could already be heard.

And then, in the gray early morning of the following day, I was taken, helplessly, by that man.

That day I went to the shop as usual on the surface, with the boy strapped to my back.

In the earthen floor of the Nakano shop, my husband was sitting alone, a cup of sake on the table, reading a newspaper.

The morning sunlight fell on the cup of sake, and I thought it looked beautiful.

"Is there no one here?"

My husband looked around at me and said,

"No. The old man hasn't come back from buying supplies yet, and the old woman seemed to be in the kitchen just now, but is she not there?"

"Didn't you come last night?"

"I did. I can't sleep lately without seeing Tsubakiya's Sacchan's face, so I looked in a little after ten and was told you had just gone home."

"And then?"

"I stayed the night here. The rain was pouring."

"Maybe I'll start staying here at this shop all the time too."

"That would be fine too."

"I'll do that. There's no point keeping on the house."

My husband turned his eyes silently back to the newspaper, then said,

"Ha — they're writing badly about me again. 'Epicurean false aristocrat,' they call me. That's not right. 'Epicurean haunted by God' would be more like it. Look here, Sacchan — it says here I am an 'inhuman wretch.' That's wrong. Let me tell you now — when I took that five thousand yen from here at the end of last year, it was because I wanted to give you and the boy a proper New Year's for once with that money. It is precisely because I am not an inhuman wretch that I did something like that."

I felt no particular joy at this, and

"You may be an inhuman wretch for all I care. We just have to keep on living."

I said.