Хироми Каваками - Record of a Night Too Brief

“How is Nishiko?” I asked, sipping my coffee.

Mr Kosuga’s eyes grew moist.

“You know, she’s recovering much quicker than I thought.” Despite his relieved tone, he still looked very pale.

Nishiko had emerged from her bed, he explained, at first dragging herself around with her arms, then holding on to furniture like a baby making its first steps. Now she was able to walk slowly without any support.

“You haven’t had any other visits?”

“So far, no.”

“Does Nishiko really not mind, being without her snake?”

“She doesn’t seem too bothered.” Mr Kosuga seemed dazed.

Snakes were now coming round to my apartment to pester me, night after night, hanging around in varying numbers. Had Nishiko really escaped from her snake’s spell? Had she managed to separate herself once and for all from the snake world?

Mr Kosuga was to make a delivery to Ganshinji Temple in Kōfu. It had been some time since our last visit. He seemed to be stifling yawns all day, and I asked him if he was short of sleep. He admitted he was fatigued, and was worried he might not be able to keep awake during the drive. At his suggestion we closed up shop and went off in the van together.

When we arrived at Ganshinji Temple, the priest eagerly launched into stories about his possessions. Mr Kosuga, sitting there in an uncharacteristically slouched pose, was giving little nods, clearly off in his own world. We both found ourselves so drowsy that several times in the course of the priest’s stories one of us dozed off and had to be nudged by the other to stay awake.

“And speaking of snakes …,” the priest now began.

Suddenly, the topic had shifted, catching both of us unawares.

“There was once a man who took a snake for a wife. Well, actually, that man was… me.”

The priest observed both of us steadily.

After a moment of silence, he resumed:

“Snake wives make the very best kind of wife. They look after their husbands devotedly, they do housework swiftly and skilfully, and they’re also excellent at keeping accounts. And when it comes to certain night-time activities, well, they’re perfection itself. They don’t have the hot temper you find in so many women, and, best of all, they don’t speak much. When you give them their instructions, they listen, looking at you steadily, with those big, crystal-clear eyes. They have something stubborn about them, but not stubborn like human women: human women get stubborn for emotional reasons; snakes are stubborn because that’s their nature. But then again, this means they’ll keep any promise they make. As for children, you won’t get any human children with a snake: you’ll only get eggs, and from those eggs, juvenile snakes. But as long as my snake’s happy, I have no complaints. I’ve never liked children anyway.”

The priest paused, and clapped his hands together. In a few moments the priest’s wife appeared, carrying trays of soba, as on our previous visit. She had her hair bound in a low bun, and she wore a long-sleeved apron over her dark kimono.

“Please start,” she said, after she had set the trays in front of us.

But instead of retreating to the kitchen, she sat down where she was.

“I’m now completely used to my snake’s ways,” the priest said. He turned to his wife: “From what I can tell, though, that’s not the case with our guests.”

The priest’s wife gazed back at him, widening her big eyes. Her eyes were crystal-clear, a bluish-white, and they were wet all over. Eyes that drew you into them.

The priest’s wife hesitated. “If I may say something…,” she said, in a low, husky voice.

Mr Kosuga, bewildered, stared at her.

“Some snakes take a little more getting used to, sir.”

The priest’s wife’s gaze was fixed on the priest. She did not cast so much as a glance at Mr Kosuga or me.

Then she continued: “I don’t think we can say a thing about these people’s snakes, sweetie pie, unless we’ve met them face-to-face.”

The moment she was done speaking, the antique ceramics and knick-knacks that were lined up on the antique display shelves of the room started to rattle. Nobody said a word. When the cabinet with gold latches that was shaking violently came at last to a standstill, the priest’s wife got up and switched on the light. It was not until then that I realized that it was quite dark outside. Although it was early afternoon, black clouds were hanging over the sky.

Still nobody said a word. Suddenly, without a sound, the drawer of the gold-latched cabinet slid open, and from it dozens of little snakes came slithering out. Each glided across the floor to the priest’s wife, who picked them up one by one, and deposited them into the bosom of her kimono. A moist, warm breeze was blowing all around the temple. When she’d stowed all the snakes away, the priest’s wife slid smoothly over the floor, going first to Mr Kosuga. She wrapped herself around him, and gave his head a lick. Then she came and did the same to me.

“What do you think? Could you learn to like a snake like me?” the priest’s wife asked, in a husky voice.

The priest looked on, with an expression of satisfaction.

“Such a question. I wouldn’t know how to,” Mr Kosuga, turning bright crimson, said in confusion.

“Don’t you like me?”

Mr Kosuga, now sweating profusely, managed to reply:

“It’s not a question of that. I’ve never been comfortable with this kind of thing.”

“And what about you?” The priest’s wife fixed her big eyes on me. “Am I so different from other snakes you know?”

Was she different? I’d never been all that interested in snakes. I still wasn’t all that crazy about them. It was just that she kept coming at me, insistently begging me to go over to her world. I had no desire to go over. Despite my resistance, though, she didn’t stop trying, and camfe and pestered me again and again. If she kept this up, maybe the day would come when I’d surprise myself and go over to her.

The woman in my apartment was a much fiercer, more demanding creature than this priest’s wife, it seemed to me. With the woman in my apartment coiling herself around me, I never felt cool-headed, the way I was feeling with the priest’s wife right now. But there was some quality that she and I had in common. For me, the tense, tingling feeling that overtook me when she and I were entwined contained something I found thrilling.

“What about you?” the priest’s wife asked me again.

I shook my head from side to side, slowly. The priest and his wife exchanged a look.

The priest’s wife’s body started to get longer and longer, and after a moment or two she transformed into a snake. The snake glided smoothly over to the priest’s lap and then up onto his shoulders, where she proceeded to coil herself around his neck three times. Draped in his snake, the priest launched into yet another story about how one of his possessions had fallen into his hands.

I hadn’t been sure if I’d ever see Nishiko again, but one day there she was, back in the Kanakana-Dō. Incongruously, she seemed full of pep. “Shall I teach you how to thread prayer beads?” she said to me. “You never know—you might be really good at it.” Once again she busied herself around the shop, quietly getting on with her tasks, producing many prayer-bead bracelets. With Nishiko back, the orders for beads, once seemingly in danger of petering out, started to come in again. Mr Kosuga regained a bit of his former colour.

The fine weather continued, and the snake staying at my apartment was once again a woman. As a woman, she was quite ordinary. She had a few snake-ish traces, but she was still much more human than snake. Winter was approaching, so she knitted things and hung the bedding out to air. Any free time she had she seemed to spend out on walks.