Yasushi Inoue - Counterfeiter and Other Stories

I of course had practically no interest in Obasute as a moon-viewing site. True enough, I recognized that there undoubtedly was a splendor in looking at the moon filling the clear Shinano air and shining across the entire panorama of the open country which contained the Chikuma and Sai Rivers, but I didn't believe that the Obasute moon could ever surpass the moon I had watched shining over the bleak flatlands of Manchuria during the war. Without exception, when I passed through the vicinity around Obasute, a deep emotion began to take hold of me — that my aged mother was certainly sitting up there. One time, when I passed Obasute Station, there floated before my eyes an apparition of me tramping around in that area carrying my mother on my back.

Of course, the setting is in ancient times. I do not see the flourish of modern homes which dot the hillocks at the foot of the mountain and extend out over the bleak plain. Besides, it is night and the moonbeams are falling, blue over the surrounding area, just like in the illustration in the Obasute-Yama picture book. Only my mother's shadow and mine are black.

"Where on earth do you say you'll leave me?" asks my mother.

She is past seventy and her entire body has become miniscule. Her body is so light that it is depressing, but nevertheless I am tired anyhow, exhausted from walking around all over with a human being on my back. There is a giddiness in my legs with every step I take.

"How about here?" I ask. "If I build a small hut around here. ."

"A place like this? Ugh!" My mother has a young voice. Her body is frail but she is strong-willed, and not the slightest abatement in her uncompromising nature shows through even under circumstances like these, when I'm in the process of abandoning her. "Isn't it dangerous beside the cliffs when it rains? What if there are landslides? I wonder if there isn't a more sensible place?"

"I don't think so. Your demands are too extravagant, Mama. Still, how would it be if I rented the outhouse of that temple we just saw?"

"Oh, no! No! No!" Mother, on my back, kicks her feet and pounds with her hands like a spoiled child. "There would be lots of mosquitoes there in the summer. Besides, the building is old. And wouldn't that room be dark and gloomy? You're unkind. Really you are!"

I am bewildered, at a loss.

"If that's the case," say I, "I'd just as soon take you back home again. I don't know why it wouldn't be better to go back home to a crowded, noisy place with everybody around rather than to be here in a place like this."

"Again you're talking like that! Now that I've purposely left home, I wouldn't return for anything in the world. I wouldn't be back with everybody again for anything. 1 don't like the people at home; I don't like the people in the village. I only have a few years left, so I won't be satisfied unless I'm allowed to live alone and do as I please."

"You're just like a spoiled child. You really are, Mama."

"Then I'm a spoiled child. It's my nature to be spoiled, so I can't help it. Even so, you just look me in the face and say 'you're spoiled, you're spoiled!' What's 'spoiled' about being abandoned?"

"Damn!"

"'Damn' all you want, but I'm not going back home. So hurry up and get rid of me."

"Even if I wanted to get rid of you, the problem is that I can't find a suitable place for you."

"You can't find one if you don't look for it. You won't be punished for looking for a place to leave your mother!"

"Didn't I just walk my feet off looking all this time? You probably realize that I'm staggering. I wonder just how far I have walked. We've gone to see ten houses already."

"But I don't fancy any of them. Was there a single house that looked habitable to you?"

"So, I've given up trying to rent a house. I said I would find a place that suited you and would build a hut for you, didn't I? But you complain wherever I go."

"'Complain,' you say! I'm an old woman. Oh, I wonder if there really is any place where I can live quietly alone. Couldn't you look harder? Oh! My back hurts! Couldn't you carry me on your back somehow so I'd be more comfortable? It's gotten cold! It feels as if the moonbeams are making my skin prickle."

"Be still, please, Mama, and don't kick up such a fuss. I'm tired too. It's fine for you, Mama. You're getting carried, but I'm the one who's doing the carrying, huh? Please, I beg you. Please, let's just go back home. It'll be a relief to everybody."

"No," snaps my mother.

"I don't understand your no's. We're not going to wander around like this all night. Honestly, we're going back home." When I say that, my mother raises her weak voice in a sudden and drastic change.

"Show a little bit of patience. Just in this, show a little bit of patience. All you want to do is take me home. I won't say anything else. Anything at all will be fine with me. Just leave me. You won't have to call me 'spoiled.' Over there you can see a hut. That one will be fine too. Just leave me there."

"Just a little while ago when we looked at that hut, didn't you say it was drafty and cold and that, besides, it leaks when it rains?"

"It doesn't particularly appeal to me, but that can't be helped. I'll put up with it. It's a house and secluded, and I possibly can live in it quietly and free from all worries and cares."

"But it's awful there. As your child, I can't leave you there."

"It doesn't matter to me if it's awful. Now hurry, go ahead and leave me there," says my mother. Then, as I linger there, the moonbeams bite their way into my body.

This is the sort of play-act I imagined taking place with my mother. My conversations with my mother coursed smoothly and naturally through my brain. My mother is spoiled, but there is a look of real earnestness on her face. Reality breaks through to me as I am being badgered by my mother—"Go ahead and leave me; go ahead and leave me; go ahead. ."

It was strange how really naturally a character resembling my mother had been fused into the mother of my vision. This visionary one-act play — with me serving as the stage for this obasute- drama — was fairly far removed from the theme of the Legend of Obasute on which it was patterned because, in my case, it was the wish of the mother herself to be abandoned; because she persisted in saying that she wanted to be left and then did not agree to anything; and because I remained there carrying my mother on my back as I wandered around the Obasute hills. But that strangeness in particular, I felt, had set something like a small lump of ice somewhere in my heart. But when that funny feeling had vanished, in its stead chills spread all over my body.

It was awful to have imagined my mother badgering me about wanting to be left. But, perhaps, imagining such a scene as this in which I was abandoning my mother might have been a way of getting something off my chest.

Even so, why did I imagine my mother like that? I have often thought about this for long periods of time. And I have tried putting myself on my own back in place of my mother. And I have thought that when I get to be an old man, I may be just like the mother of my vision.

III

THIS SUMMER, I went to deliver a lecture at a coal-mining town on the bank of the Enga River in northern Kyushu. There, at a Japanese-style inn, I met my younger sister Kiyoko whom I hadn't seen for two years. Kiyoko is the youngest of the four children in our family. She was married during the war and had two children, but there had been some sort of incident and she had fled from her husband's house, leaving him and the two children; for a while she returned to our parents' home; but now she had fled from that too on the grounds that she wanted to make her own way of life.

Even since I was small, I had liked this sister best of all my brothers and sisters, but I felt that there was something unpardonable in her selfish behavior. It wasn't anything like a cardinal sin, anything worth breaking relations over or never speaking to each other again — but Kiyoko, with her innate sensitivity, apparently realizing how I felt, did not write me a single letter after leaving home. For my part, all I even knew about her now was that she was working in northern Kyushu.