Yasushi Inoue - The Izu Dancer and Other Stories

IV

"I DON'T know whether you know it or not, but making fireworks in the winter can be very unpleasant. Chilean nitrate can be awfully cold when it's cold." As she said this, Hosen Hara's widow looked at the palm of her right hand as if she were recalling the chapped hands she had in those days. Then she dropped her gaze.

My talk with her took place at the end of November, the year the war ended.

Although the war had ended, life in the city was still shrouded in great post-war confusion and anxiety, and almost every day newspaper articles were reporting on the gangs of robbers, so I kept my family at their evacuation site where they were. I had intended in any case to have them spend the rest of the year there. The seasons changed in that mountain village as much as a month earlier than in other places, and toward the end of September, piercing blasts from the bleak and dismal autumn winds came whistling incessantly up the slopes of the mountain range, producing terrific drafts which blew all the way from Mimasaku to Hoki. At the beginning of October, the continual late-autumnal rains that are characteristic of the highlands arrived as the first harbingers of winter.

As that time approached, my wife seemed to develop a feeling of panic over spending the winter snowbound in an unfamiliar place. When I went to visit her there at the beginning of October, she suddenly broke the news to me that she wanted to move out of this place of refuge, and the sooner the better. After I returned to Osaka, my wife urged me persistently in letter after letter to move them out of their evacuation place. She lacked the self-confidence, she wrote, to spend the winter here. . surrounded by an old woman and two infants. . and without heating equipment. . and if the children caught pneumonia, there wasn't a doctor, and. .!

About the middle of November, I took a fairly long leave of absence from my company and left for that hamlet in the highlands of Tottori Prefecture in order to move my family. There I encountered a whole series of various and sundry impediments to getting things like transportation and shipment of effects taken care of. By the time I had taken the last step and managed to arrange some means for shipping our effects and transporting the family, November was almost over.

On the last afternoon, in order to arrange for the shipment of our baggage via the San-in Line, I set out for the station at Shoyama, a place whose name I had so often heard but which I had never visited. If I could have sent our things from the neighboring mountain-top station, which I always used and where I knew the station master, I would have had no problem. But those two steep ridges on the mountain road leading to our house were a formidable obstacle.

Negotiations over the baggage at Shoyama station were settled much more simply than I had expected. According to the conversation I had with the station personnel, if I waited until evening, a truck could be sent from there to the hamlet where I lived. So, since I thought that I might just as well save myself the trouble of walking that five-mile mountain road again, I decided to go back with the truck when they sent it.

As I was wondering how I might best kill the two hours until the truck left, I suddenly remembered hearing that Hosen Hara's widow was living here supported by her elder brother. I tried to think of some particular reason why I had to visit Hosen Hara's widow, but I couldn't come up with one. I did eventually come up with an idea. Rather than approach her to talk about Hosen or anything connected with him, I would ask her instead about anecdotes or anything else I might not yet have heard concerning Keigaku Onuki, whose biography I had to write. With this excuse in mind, I got up the courage to go and visit her.

I asked about Hosen Hara's wife at the general store in front of the station and got an immediate answer. I was told that until two or three years ago Asa had run a little store selling cheap sweets in front of the station, but as the intensity of the war increased and the things she sold became so scarce, she had to close the store. They didn't know what she was doing now, but she was being supported by her elder brother who had a lumber yard or something. I met Asa at the porch of this house, which, while it could not be considered luxurious, was a well-built and excellent house.

I was unable to tell, of course, whether she was happy or unhappy living with her elder brother. She had a trim figure, and as the late afternoon sun fell on her there on the narrow porch, she was peeling persimmons with a kitchen knife getting them ready to dry. The young proprietor of the saké distillery in Wake had told us that she was of small stature and beautiful. And indeed she must have been beautiful when she was young. Even as a woman of sixty, there was still left in her that chicness in both appearance and expression that is usually met in entertainment people. But when she showed her profile, her earlobes were shallow, and here and there, there were traces of tragedy and an air of extreme poverty. I had thought that she would have an aversion to talking about Hosen because he had spent his life dishonestly as a painter, but she showed no such tendency whatsoever.

"It might

look

as if he had some close association with Keigaku-

sensei

when he was young, and after I married him he may have gone up to Kyoto on occasion and visited the

sensei's

home at Hyakumamben. But he did not have any connection that could really be called a

close

association. Anyhow, the fact is that he counterfeited the

sensei's

works inordinately, and so he couldn't show himself in front of Keigaku-

sensei

"

It was surprising, the degree to which this woman had disassociated herself from Hosen. She gave me the impression that as far as she was concerned all the bad acts of this man to whom she had been married for so long were already past, gone, and forgotten, and she had no connection with them.

"I separated from that man in 1935. From then until the time he died, he only came to visit me once. That was on the day the newspapers announced Keigaku-

sensei's

death."

Asa told me that on that day when Hosen came to visit her he had said something like, "Why won't you substitute for me and go and burn some incense at Keigaku's altar instead of me, because I can't hold my head up even at his funeral." Asa told me that she had wondered at the time why, instead of feeling the need to go and apologize for the great trouble he had caused Keigaku, he had acted as though a sadness over the death of an old friend was gripping him.

"No matter what anyone else says, I believe that his spirit was broken after coming to these mountains. Even though he had no reason for it, he held a grudge against Keigaku until then. When he used to drink, he would say that if

he

wanted to paint,

he

could paint pictures as well as the other fellow; when he was young,

he

was the more skillful of the two;

he

also had talent. But, after coming to these mountains, when mentioning Keigaku, he would sometimes say, 'It's such a great thing that he's so famous.' "

That was Asa's story. And the image that then drifted into my mind of Hosen who after reading the news of Keigaku's death had come up to this hamlet to visit the wife who had deserted him, the image of him moving along the winding, hilly road which I myself had just that very day walked, that image curiously crystallized as one of a little person together with the late autumn winds crossing the marvelous bamboo thickets that filled the slopes of the mountain range. However, thinking about it later, I recalled that the anniversary date of Keigaku's death was March third. So, it would have been a time when one side of these mountains was still covered with snow, and Hosen might have been wearing straw snowshoes and trudging stolidly across the snow packed mountain road to get to Shoyama. And