Хироми Каваками - Record of a Night Too Brief

At midday, Mr Kosuga returned to the shop with a box again. Something was moving around inside it, frantically, again. Nishiko went to put the box in the storeroom. Half the inventory had been accounted for, and she decided we could do the rest tomorrow.

I set off to buy some cakes to have with our tea. Mr Kosuga came out after me.

“Miss Sanada, let’s go to a cafe. Don’t bother buying anything today.”

As I sat opposite Mr Kosuga in a cafe by the station, I remembered how we had sat like this together before, that time in the motorway service area, on the way back from the temple in Kōfu.

“Is that snake still living with you?” he enquired, as I had expected he would.

“Mmm… sort of.”

The snake had settled in comfortably in my place. Maybe I felt grateful now for the way my dinner would be cooked and ready to eat when I got back in the evenings. I had never minded returning at night to a dark apartment, but once you try living with someone, I could see, you do get thoroughly used to it.

Mr Kosuga put talk of my snake aside. “There’s something I’d like to tell you.”

And this is what he said:

“We have had, as a matter of fact, a snake living with us now for, well, it must be more than twenty years. She seems to have come along with Nishiko—she claims to be her aunt. At first I did everything I could to get rid of her, she was a nuisance, she gave me an unpleasant feeling. But I couldn’t, in the end. Somehow, every time I tried, some twist of fate, something , would always happen—a relative would suddenly be on the verge of death, things between Nishiko and me would get out of joint, one of us would get an injury. A Shinto priest even came and conducted a purification ceremony, but he said there was no sign of an evil spirit haunting us. So even after we had an exorcism, the snake was still hanging around. After a while, her presence came to seem almost natural, and I managed not to let her bother me. But, recently, she seems close to death, and she can no longer take human form—or if she does, it’s only for brief periods. She just lies there, insisting that we cater to her every need. She won’t eat anything but freshly killed birds and frogs. Today I went out and bought some birds to feed her. I don’t understand Nishiko. ‘Just throw her out,’ I tell her. But she shakes her head obstinately, and carries on feeding her, happily. This isn’t the woman I thought I married. It’s scary.”

Mr Kosuga rubbed his forehead three times.

“I mean it. It’s scary,” he said.

What exactly was he referring to? It did sound a little scary, it was true, but whether it was the snake or something in Nishiko that scared him, probably even Mr Kosuga would have found it hard to say. Those words of my snake flashed in my mind. “ You’re always playing the innocent, aren’t you, Hiwako, dear.”

At the cafe, Mr Kosuga asked for fluffy pancakes, and I ordered a slice of pear charlotte. We stayed for about an hour, and then returned to the Kanakana-Dō.

The woman tapped me on the shoulder. When I glanced around, she leant forward and rubbed her face against mine. Her cheek was very cold. I felt a sense of completeness—like when you hug a pet, or when you’re snug under a covering. The woman wrapped her arms tightly around me. Her arms, too, were quite cold, and I noticed the flesh on her fingertips seemed to have become a little reptilian. But it didn’t put me off that she was reverting to her snake form. If anything, it put me at ease. If there had been nothing snakelike about her and she had coiled herself around me in her human form, I would have had much more difficulty. She and I were exactly the same height. We formed a perfect pair, our arms tightly wrapped around each other’s body.

As we coiled, she said:

“Hiwako, dear, it’s so cosy and comfortable in the snake world…”

I nodded, and she continued:

“Hiwako, dear, wouldn’t you like to come over?”

Shaking my head, I gently extracted myself from her embrace.

The snake world didn’t hold much appeal for me. Perhaps sensing this, the snake stopped coiling round me, backing off, and sitting in front of me, hugging her knees with her arms.

“Have you ever been betrayed, Hiwako, dear?” she asked, looking up at me seductively.

To be betrayed, you probably first have to be deeply involved. Had I been deeply involved with anything in my life?

I could recall a number of times when I’d been close to people, men, women, sometimes emotionally, sometimes physically, and also a certain period of time when I’d had some sort of conflict with someone, though I couldn’t really remember whom, in a place where I had gone in to work every day. But I hadn’t ever been deeply involved. Maybe there were times that might have counted as involvement and I was unconsciously trying to forget them. But if I could forget them, they probably didn’t mean that much.

“I don’t remember.”

At this, the woman opened her mouth wide and laughed.

I waited for her to ask something else, but she didn’t. Instead, she slithered up to the ceiling. Staring down at me, she called out, “Hiwako, dear! Hiwako, dear!” and reverted to her snake form.

And she kept on calling out: “Hiwako, dear! Hiwako, dear!” That voice of hers would not stop. It reverberated unceasingly in my ears, merging with a swishing sound. The sound of a snake’s scales rubbing up against each other. “Hiwako, dear! Hiwako, dear!” Shu-ru-ru-RUUU, shu-ru-ru-RUU.

A strange, unearthly sound. Like the sound of a strong wind blowing at night.

Arriving at the shop one morning, I found Nishiko sitting idly gazing into space.

The pavement in front of the shop had been sprinkled with water, the saucers with salt heaped even higher than usual, and the interior thoroughly dusted and cleaned.

Mr Kosuga was nowhere to be seen.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Oh, it’s you, Miss Sanada.” Nishiko’s voice was like that of a person who has been adrift at sea and only just made it back to dry land. Something was at her feet. There was a slight sense of a presence.

“I opened up the shop early today,” she continued, in the same listless voice.

“What time was that?”

“Oh, I suppose four or so.”

Suppressing my surprise, I took a step back, and a bamboo basket beside her on the floor came into view. The presence was inside it.

“Somehow I couldn’t sleep. These days it takes ages to get light in the mornings. I got bored lying there in the dark.”

So she had come in at four o’clock, opened the shutter, turned on the lights, and then busied herself quietly in the shop? And when she’d got tired of that, she’d just sat there completely motionless, staring out into the darkness?

“Has Mr Kosuga gone out?”

“You tell me. He hasn’t come into the shop yet. He’s probably still sleeping. Recently, he’s been sleeping like a log. All he ever does is sleep. I sometimes wonder whether he’ll ever wake up.”

Her tone was oddly cold. Whatever was inside the basket stirred.

“Er…” I hesitated.

Nishiko looked up. Her eyes were two shining spots. Narrow slits at first, they gradually widened, protruding, swelling. They were brimming with tears.

“That basket. What’s in it?”

Nishiko’s eyes were getting bigger and bigger. Now they seemed almost to be bursting, half out of their sockets, the pupils surrounded by white. But in the next instant, all returned to normal.

“That?” she said. “Oh, just a basket.”

Once more her eyes started to protrude. Her eyeballs seemed to have taken on a life of their own, and were expanding with speed.

“There’s a snake in there, isn’t there?”