Хироми Каваками - Record of a Night Too Brief

One morning, as Nishiko was making coffee, I asked her directly:

“So have you got over your snake now?”

She thought about it a little, then said:

“No. I don’t think I’ll ever be completely over it.”

“Oh.”

“If another snake ever appears in my life, this time I really am going to commit and go over.”

“Really?”

“Well, I suppose it will be a different snake. I’ll have to wait and see.”

And that was the only time we referred to it. After that Nishiko set about teaching me the fine technique of threading prayer beads.

Since the last trip to Ganshinji Temple, I’d felt a kind of continual ringing in my head. Not actually ringing—there was no sound; it was like a little nodule, which vibrated, emitting faint signs of its presence. These signs at first didn’t arouse any particular concern, but gradually they started to exert pressure. As the pressure built up, the nodule became enlarged and firm.

Every so often the woman paid a visit to the shop. Pressing her face up against the beautifully polished glass in the door, she would peer in at us. The first person to notice her would be Mr Kosuga, and he would studiously pretend to ignore her. A moment later, Nishiko would look up, and she would gaze steadily at the woman. The two of them would look thoughtfully at each other for a few moments. Nishiko’s eyes would get narrower, while the woman’s eyes would do the opposite, opening wide. As I watched this exchange, I would feel the nodule inside me vibrate insistently.

“Miss Sanada, she’s here again,” Nishiko would say. “Why not ask her to come in?”

I shook my head, without answering. Twisting the thread, clumsily threading the beads, I concentrated on not looking at the woman outside. The more I tried not to look, the more that nodule vibrated. As she pressed her face hard against the glass, the woman’s nose, eyelids, and forehead appeared stretched and flat, making the upper part of her head seem very snakelike. It was uncanny how, whenever she made her visits, we would have no customers in the shop.

If we pretended we didn’t notice her, eventually she would go away.

After these visits, we would find fragments that looked like moulted skin on the ground. Nishiko carefully swept it all into a dustpan. While she did that, Mr Kosuga and I got on with tasks in the shop. The last and busiest month of the year was approaching.

“Hiwako, dear, I can’t wait any more!” the woman said. She grabbed hold of my legs, forcing me over onto my back. Sitting astride me, she put her fingers round my throat.

“Don’t strangle me. You want me to die?” I yelled.

“But I can’t wait any more!” she yelled back, a crazed look in her eyes.

She was squeezing, tighter and tighter; my body was becoming flushed. An energy field filled the room. Everything seemed to be shuddering. Thrashing around with my legs, I looked for a weak, vulnerable spot on her to attack. The woman was steadily applying more and more pressure with her fingers. I couldn’t get out of her grip.

Saying my name over and over, she squeezed even tighter. Through squinting eyes, I saw the carpet under me flattened, as if wet, and steam was rising from it. The entire room seemed to be boiling.

From the wide-open windows various objects came flying in, hitting the woman as she sat astride me. The woman, hair flying, knocked them aside—shards of metal, crumpled fruit, dead birds… When a blur of confetti in five colours—the five celebratory colours of purple, white, red, yellow, green—blew into the room, the woman momentarily weakened her grip. Quickly I thrust my thumbs between her fingers and started to prise them up, using her hand like a lever. No sooner had I unstuck her fingers than she sprang off and leapt up on the desk.

“ Why won’t you wait?” I shouted.

“Because I know you’ll just continue playing the innocent for ever !” she yelled, her eyebrows drawn in an expression of pain.

The words seemed to give her the advantage. I drew back, and immediately she lunged straight onto my head and started pummelling it in a circular motion with her feet. The rough drumming sent me into a warm daze. I was expecting her to try getting my neck into some kind of chokehold, but she simply kept pummelling me with her feet.

It started to seem to me that this fight between us had been going on for hundreds of years. She struck, and I sat there and took it.

I was sick of the unending cycle—I wanted it to be over. Those vibrations, which had been steadily increasing in strength, felt as if they might explode out of me.

With a yell of resolve, I started striking the woman with my fists. My fists entered her body smoothly, getting absorbed within her. She seemed infinitely deep, of infinite capacity. The deeper my fists went into her, the more overpowered I was with that sense of a warm daze. I longed just to close my eyes, to fall against her breast, to hear her calling my name. I longed to turn into a snake, to have her coiling around my hips.

I opened my eyes wide, pulled my fists back, and now tried to strike her face with the flat of my hand. But it was the same. No matter how many times I struck, her face remained where it was, white, transparent, undistorted.

“Hiwako, dear, please come! Why won’t you?” she pleaded.

I was at a loss. I don’t know, I don’t know , I replied silently. But I did know. It was just that I was so tired. I mustn’t let myself be defeated now. l was being defeated, though, so easily. You must want to be defeated. If it’s what you want, why make yourself refuse? Was I saying that, or the woman? It’s so unclear, so unclear , I thought, and suddenly this combat that had lasted for centuries struck me as incredibly stupid and I decided to put a stop to it once and for all.

“There is no snake world!” I declared, as firmly as I could manage.

There, I had said it. In a trice I had brought clarity to the whole messy thing I’d let fester for so long. I understood what I had been pretending not to understand. What a ridiculously simple thing to have spent hundreds of years struggling over. Why hadn’t I been able to say it before?

“Really?” the woman asked, smiling. “You think it’s that simple?” And she set about strangling me again.

I became conscious of a loud zapping sound. The energy that had been generated was filling the room with an electric charge, producing flashes of intensely blue and white light; soon, droplets of water started to fall from the ceiling. The droplets became drops that fell faster and faster, and the room started to fill with water. The water rose from our heels to our knees, from our knees to our hips, and the woman and I continued to thrash around in it. Soon the room became totally submerged in water, and we were still fighting. The entire apartment building became engulfed, and started to drift away, joining the muddy stream that cut though Midori Park heading towards the Kanakana-Dō. But still neither of us would concede.

“Just come over. You’ll see that I’m right. You don’t know what you’re refusing!”

“I’m telling you—it doesn’t exist.”

“But Hiwako, dear, you should listen to me. I am your mother!”

“You are not!”

“Well, let me explain!”

“No.”

“How will you understand, if you don’t listen?”

“I don’t want to understand!”

“See what I mean? Putting on your little act!”

As we yelled, the room and everything in it was being swept away. It was early morning, and the Kanakana-Dō’s shutter had been raised. Mr Kosuga was sweeping the pavement in front of the shop. I could see Nishiko sitting at her desk, quietly threading strands of prayer beads. In front of the shop a festival float crammed with flowers and girls in traditional dancing costumes was being pulled merrily along on its way, and from the float came a song, the song of the credit association, playing loudly over the speakers: