Хироми Каваками - Record of a Night Too Brief

Mr Kosuga recounted a story he had learnt from the priest whom he had made a delivery to that morning. The priest had told him about his son, whom he had been hoping to hand down his priesthood to, but who had, much to his concern, gone off to live in America. The boy was buying up quantities of old clothes, he said, sending them back to Japan, and selling them off at an exorbitant price. Is there really such a demand in Japan, nowadays, for old clothes? Mr Kosuga had enquired. And the priest had assured him that, yes, anything, so long as it was vintage, was a hot ticket for young people, who snapped it all up for huge sums of money.

“So is that the kind of thing young people go for now?” Mr Kosuga asked me.

I had no idea, so I replied, “Who knows?”

Mr Kosuga looked at me in wonderment. “Come to think of it, Miss Sanada,” he said, “your fashion isn’t exactly typical of the youth of today.”

Not quite understanding what kind of people he was referring to with that phrase “the youth of today”, I didn’t grace this with a reply.

“Times have changed, dear,” Nishiko chimed in. “It’s not like the old days, when we’d get all dressed up just to stroll round Shijō Kawaramachi in case we ran into someone we knew.”

“Mm, maybe,” Mr Kosuga replied, crunching on his prawn tempura.

I was silently pondering how things were between the snake and me. With the snake, I never felt that sense of distance, of being separated by a wall, which I felt when I was in conversation with Mr Kosuga and Nishiko. Even when I was with people who might count as “the youth of today”, the students I taught when I was a teacher, for example, or my peers and colleagues—or even with my mother, my father, and my brothers—some sort of a wall would be there. Perhaps we only managed to get along because of the wall.

Between the snake and me, though, there was no such wall.

As usual, the tempura over rice sat heavy in my stomach. My voice was weak, and I felt lacking in energy, until evening time.

As I walked through Midori Park, I recalled the story of my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather had been a peasant farmer, with just over an acre of rice paddies and tea bushes. One day he just disappeared. No news came, and my great-grandmother found herself having to fend for a family of five, and to work in the fields. Three years later, in the spring, my great-grandfather came back, and who knows what transpired between him and my great-grandmother, but they took up with each other again as if nothing had happened. Years passed without incident, and long after, when their children had grown up and had children of their own, and my great-grandmother had died, and my great-grandfather was old and frail, he began to tell people what he’d done during the time he’d been away.

Apparently, he had gone off to live with a bird.

The bird had come to my great-grandfather in the form of a woman one autumn day and seduced him, bewitching him with her lovely perfume and delicate hands. So he went off with her, abandoning his family. They lived together for two years somewhere far away, but by the third winter the woman started to treat him coldly.

“It was the bird in her revealing its true nature,” my great-grandfather told people. “She started saying things like, ‘How am I ever going to lay eggs with a feckless husband like you!’ And one day she flew away, with a flutter of her wings, saying, ‘I want to build a nest!’ And so it was that I came back to my family.”

I’d heard this story from my mother when I was a student in middle school, and I remember thinking it was a very odd fable. It didn’t seem to have any point to it. Even now I can’t really see any moral to be drawn. Was it that frustration inevitably awaited a man who abandoned his family for a beautiful but worthless woman? But my great-grandfather seemed to have enjoyed his life with her too much for that. Perhaps it was that women are utterly strange and unpredictable? But the woman’s reaction to my great-grandfather seemed, if anything, rational and understandable. Was it, then, that patriarchal authority in the Meiji period was so strong that a woman could say nothing, even when her husband left her for several years—and that modern women should be sure to assert themselves more? But my great-grandmother had not been exactly submissive to her husband, from what I had heard.

Even if it wasn’t a fable, and was absolutely true, what was happening to me was a little different, I decided. Nevertheless, I remembered it the way a person who had once been nearly devoured by a shark might recall a story of someone who was swallowed by a whale.

The dried leaves of Midori Park raced across the ground, blowing about in the wind. It was close to nightfall, but there were lots of children out in the park, playing and yelling. Some on bikes pedalled at breakneck speed on the park promenades. Any number of times a child on a bike came racing up behind me and whizzed by, and my hair would be whipped along in the air stream.

I was conscious of something at the back of my throat, catching, making it difficult to breathe.

“What are you?” I demanded, as soon as I set foot inside the apartment. I wouldn’t be able to ask once she started plying me with food and drink.

“Your mother, of course! How many times do you want me to say it?” the woman replied. She was absorbed in checking her hair for split ends. Though she normally wore it up, tonight she had let it down. Her hair was very long. When she wore it down, it made her look slightly older.

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You don’t understand?”

She opened her mouth wide. I assumed that because she was a snake, her tongue would be forked, so I averted my gaze quickly. But my glimpse of it told me it wasn’t forked. It was an ordinary human tongue.

“You’re always playing the innocent , aren’t you, Hiwako, dear. It doesn’t impress me.”

All right, but I still didn’t understand.

“I went for a little walk around here today,” she said, changing her tone. “It’s a nice area, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“There are too many children, though. Children these days are very badly behaved.”

“Do you think so?”

“I saw a goat. In a house belonging to a family by the name of Narita. Did you know they had a goat, Hiwako, dear?”

While we talked, she brought out a bottle of beer, and we ended up having a meal. As I ate and drank, I felt sure she was secretly grinning to herself, laughing at me playing the innocent, and I stole glances at her, over and over. She was smiling, in fact, keeping my glass filled, and then heating up the clear soup on the stove. She looked lovely. I liked her face.

Two weeks had passed since the snake had come to my place. In the shop, we were taking inventory. We did this every spring and autumn. There were three shelves from floor to ceiling arranged with supplies. I had to write down everything that was on these shelves, as well as everything on display, on memos made by Nishiko from scraps of paper clipped together.

“Ten Indian rosewood with agate spacer beads.”

“Seven single strands of clear crystal.”

“Twelve strands of sandalwood.”

I would give the memos to Nishiko, who would transfer the information to the ledger. It was the way they had done it in the old days.

“Do you think we might use a computer, Miss Sanada?” Mr Kosuga would sometimes say. “We don’t need one—our turnover is too small,” Nishiko would reply, and Mr Kosuga would immediately agree and the subject would be dropped. But he would pick it up again shortly. “Wouldn’t using a computer make things easier, Miss Sanada?” The subject never went any further.