Хироми Каваками - Record of a Night Too Brief

Then, suddenly, there was my brother no. 1. Hiroko awoke: in the early hours after the night of the wedding, as she lay there in her gold wedding dress, she was in pain—she was gasping in agony. Something was weighing heavily on her chest. Everyone else rushed out of bed and tried to calm her, stroking her, rubbing her, but her pain continued unabated.

Only I could see my brother no. 1. There he was, sitting astride Hiroko’s chest, looking quite unconcerned and kissing her. He looked very happy as he put his lips to hers. Perhaps my brother no. 2 got an inkling of his presence because he was calling out to him, Nii-san, Nii-san , and trying now to shake Hiroko. But he couldn’t see my brother no. 1, I could tell, because he was addressing his attentions to entirely the wrong spot.

“Hey,” I said softly to my brother no. 1, “you’re hurting her.”

“No, I’m not. She likes what I’m doing,” he said. And kissed her again. Hiroko started to get flushed and swollen in the places where he put his lips. Her cheeks, the area under her arms, her breasts, everywhere swelled up, in exactly the same way as the people who’d been stung by the insects. My mother and father and my brother no. 2 paced around the room in a dither.

“Don’t you think you should stop?” I asked.

My brother no. 1 replied sadly:

“I’m only doing it because by rights she’s my wife.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

“Are you still sad?” I asked.

My brother no. 1 didn’t answer, but only started to kiss Hiroko more passionately. Hiroko creased her forehead in pain. In a few minutes she fainted, and the tension left her body. In that instant my brother no. 1 vanished from sight.

My brother no. 1 was no longer visible to anyone now, and we all busied ourselves with caring for Hiroko. I found myself feeling a little envious of her. I wanted to be kissed by my brother no. 1 like that too. I wanted to curl up on his lap and have him kiss me like that, passionately.

“I can hear a crane crying,” Hiroko started to say. She would say it as she stood next to my mother at the sink polishing our tin cutlery, or as she was massaging my father’s stiff shoulders. She would suddenly tilt her head at an angle and interrupt our conversation to come out with it. As soon as she said it, her body would shrink one whole size smaller, with an accompanying throbbing sound: hyun .

No one else in the family could hear the sound of the crane—none of us could recognize the cry of a crane in the first place. My father and my mother and my brother no. 2 stared at Hiroko in bewilderment. With her body now appreciably smaller, Hiroko kept mumbling those words as she continued with her tasks—as she polished the cutlery or kneaded my father’s shoulders. Since she was now considerably reduced in size, the tin cutlery was far too unwieldy for her, and her tiny hands were quite ineffective for massaging. My brother no. 2 had stopped exchanging love talk with her once the wedding was over. My mother tried whispering to him discreetly that Hiroko had probably started mentioning the crane’s cries because she was unhappy about not getting sweet nothings from him. After listening to this with an impatient look on his face, my brother no. 2 made a perfunctory attempt at murmuring into Hiroko’s ear, but Hiroko simply listened with a blank look in her eyes. My brother no. 2’s sweet nothings didn’t have the passion they’d had during their engagement. Hiroko wasn’t the only one—the whole family no longer cared to listen.

These days, though I heard no crane, I frequently heard another sound: Goshiki muttering kuna-nira, kuna-nira . The words would reach my ears as I walked the frozen paths in the early morning, or the dark roads behind the housing development at dusk. Goshiki! Goshiki! I would call, and Goshiki’s voice would get a little closer. Every time I heard Goshiki calling, in the exact opposite way to Hiroko, who would shrink when she heard the cry of the crane, I got fatter. As I walked along the frozen paths, Goshiki’s voice came pouring into me, and my body got bigger and bigger, swelling up like a bag getting filled with warmth.

Hiroko was diminishing in size by the day; my brother no. 1 hadn’t appeared again, and it began to seem that Hiroko was having difficulty fitting in with our family. She became so tiny that she could be held in the palm of a hand. At night when we went to bed we would have to pick her up in our fingers and place her gently in her hammock. And she became completely useless at kitchen tasks. The few times my brother no. 2 tried to talk to her, she would stick her fingers in her ears and tell him: “You’re too loud!” All she did was sweep the tatami room from dawn till dusk using a tiny broom. But no matter how energetically she swept, it would be night by the time little Hiroko had finished. At supper, we would find it unbearable to see her listlessly eating her carrot and mustard-cress salad, repeating that sentence, “The crane is crying.” In the end my mother decided that it was time to call Ten.

Everyone listened in intently on the conversation.

“Hiroko’s shrunk!” my mother said.

All of us heard Ten huff and puff on the other end of the line.

“So she hasn’t matched up, then.”

“No, she hasn’t matched up.”

During this conversation, my brother no. 2 was lying in a corner of the room, chiselling a bit of wax. Hiroko was in the tatami room, still her diminutive self, sweeping the floor.

“Well, maybe we should return her,” said Ten.

And it was decided that’s what we would do.

“I wonder why all my recent marriages have gone bad!” Ten grumbled.

“Is it just the recent ones?” my mother said, her voice curious. Ten huffed and puffed grumpily again.

“I haven’t had a single success in all of ten years !”

We’d never heard any talk of her record of matchmaking failures before, so this was quite a jolt. Ten carried on huffing and puffing for a while, then reverted to her usual tone.

“How about letting me try with your girl ?”

By girl , of course, she was referring to me. I’d been suspecting this might happen. Ever since I’d started to hear Goshiki call to me more frequently and my body had started to swell, I had been pretty much resigned to it. Immediately Ten and my mother started discussing how to get me out of the family and off into a new one.

As soon as my mother and Ten had decided on how to settle the matter of Hiroko, they began discussing a suitable family to whom I could go in one month’s time. My father and I listened in on the conversation between my mother and Ten, but my brother no. 2 gave his attention completely over to his piece of wax, and all Hiroko did was sweep the tatami room. It almost seemed as if there was no sense of their presence—as if they had disappeared. Even things that have disappeared leave some trace of their presence, but these two were still visible to the eye and yet seemed to have vanished completely. As if to take the place of these two presences that were absent, my brother no. 1 now appeared by my side and started listening in attentively on the conversation between my mother and Ten. My brother no. 1 started kissing me passionately and caressing my breasts, and I began to swell up like a bag filled with water, making soft liquid sounds, and swayed in pleasure from side to side.

Matters with Hiroko were settled with a minimum of fuss. She had now shrunk so much she was as tiny as an aubergine seed, and so we put her into a glass container with a gauze cover to make sure she wouldn’t be crushed, and waited for her family to come to retrieve her. Hiroko’s family brought back the kelp and the dried cuttlefish that we had taken over to them, and we carefully handed over Hiroko in her glass bottle.