Читать книгу Still Life and Other Stories - Junzo Shono - Страница 7

a crisis in the home is like the gecko you find clinging to the overhead vent in the kitchen.

You never noticed it creeping up on you, but there it sits, looking ominous and putting you on edge. And it settles there as if it belongs, like any other fixture in the house, until pretty soon you get used to it and stop paying attention. Besides, we all prefer to avert our eyes from unpleasantness.

Take this home, for example.

The husband and wife have been married for five years, and they have one three-year-old daughter. The family of three lives meagerly on what the husband brings home from his job at city hall.

The husband loves his wife, and the wife loves her husband, yet the husband dreams of a carefree life all by himself, while the wife suffers from a nagging but inexplicable sense of loneliness.

For reasons we need not go into, the husband is estranged from his family. As for the wife, she lost her parents when still a child, and the grandmother who raised her in their stead passed away soon after her marriage, leaving her all alone in the world. The husband sometimes wondered what his wife would do if he were to get run over by a streetcar and die. How would she manage without him?

But nothing could be gained from worrying about it, so his dire imaginings never went very far.

One night in early summer, the husband came home from work to find on his desk a single sheet of white stationery. The hand was his wife’s.

In the darkness of night, you fly off into a sky filled with twinkling stars. I gaze after you as your cape grows smaller and smaller, until it disappears. “Take me with you!” I want to shout, but my voice will not come.

Hiroko

The husband read the note, crumpled it into a little ball, and dropped it gently into the wastebasket. When he emerged from his room he gave no hint that he had encountered anything out of the ordinary. But the first line of the note had sent an icy chill up and down his spine. His conscience, he had to admit, was not entirely clear.

The wife had a way with her premonitions: they proved correct with uncanny frequency. It had happened again not long ago, when her best friend from girls’ school showed up unannounced at their front door one afternoon. She had lived in faraway San’in since getting married.

The two women did not correspond regularly, writing only when something chanced to make one of them think of the other, and no word had come of an impending visit. But for some reason that morning the wife had decided to do the laundry and clean the house and take care of an errand at the post office before noon. And all the while she busied herself with these tasks, she repeated in her mind like a refrain:

“This way, if T comes to visit, we can sit down and talk to our hearts’ content without having to worry about anything else.”

When shortly after noon a voice called at the door, she practically flew to the front hall.

“It’s T, right?” she cried out from her side of the door even before she could see who it was. “I’m so glad you came!”

She slid the door open, and there stood her friend, smiling cheerfully.

T, for her part, assumed they had gotten the letter she sent before leaving home. But in fact the letter hadn’t arrived until the next day. Since the husband had seen his wife’s premonitions work this way before, it was no wonder that the note on his desk made his blood run cold.

The husband had a secret: he was in love with a girl of nineteen who worked in his department at city hall. They went to movies together after work, or strolled about town in the evening twilight.

Now his wife had apparently guessed his secret. But how was he to respond? To say the wrong thing would be to stir up a nest of snakes. And besides, what did she expect him to do? He had fallen in love, and he could hardly change how he felt about the girl just because he’d found out that his wife wasn’t happy.

It was a hard thing to fall in love, and harder still to actually win the heart of the one you loved. It happened once in a lifetime. Maybe. If you were lucky. Now a nineteen-year-old girl, so beautiful, so innocent, had given him her heart—even knowing that he had a wife and child. How could he simply abandon a love that brought him such intoxicating joy? And besides, this was only what any wife in any home ought to expect—that sometime in her long married life, perhaps even several times, she would experience the loneliness of realizing that her husband’s heart had wandered away from her. Recognizing this and accepting it as inevitable was what life was all about. He now turned his inward voice directly toward his wife: Look, I know you love me, and you devote your whole life to me. And I love you, too. Just because I’ve fallen in love with another woman doesn’t mean I’m dissatisfied with you or I’ve grown tired of you. It’s simply one of those things that happens. It doesn’t make me never want to see your face again. You are still my good wife, and I still love you as before.

Having delivered this self-serving tirade in his mind, the husband came out to the dining room for his supper, determined to ignore his wife’s desperate plea.

The wife, too, said nothing about her note. She merely chattered on in her usual way about the sundry trifling things that had occurred while he was away. Much relieved, the husband responded with similar benign talk, playing with his daughter on his lap to avoid meeting his wife’s eyes. Supper concluded without incident.

After the husband had fallen asleep that night, the wife wept in silence over the letter that had failed to reach her husband’s heart. Beside her lay her daughter, her face soft with the unguarded innocence of a sleeping child, but the wife felt no different than if she were utterly alone.

She had written the letter like a prayer. After much agonizing and crossing out, after several times nearly giving up, she had finally come up with those few lines. But now, before her eyes, the letter had become a tiny bird shorn of its wings, wavering, then tumbling toward the black surface of the sea.

As she watched her husband coming home each day like a man who’d lost his very soul, the wife’s feelings of affliction advanced from loneliness to painful despair. She’d never seen her husband behave this way before.

True, it was not unusual for him to come home in a state of distraction, lost in some deep and impenetrable contemplation. But you could say that was a longstanding habit with him. Once, in grade school, he got so wrapped up in thinking about fish on his way to the streetcar that he held out his money and said “Fish” when the ticket lady asked him where he was going. And he’d done similar things as an adult, any number of times. In fact, this occasional absentmindedness was one of the things the wife liked about her husband. People who were always on their guard and never missed a beat made her feel creepy.

Her husband’s recent behavior was quite a different matter, though, going well beyond what could be called occasional absentmindedness. He had come to seem as weightless and unreliable as an empty cicada shell, and this was what had sent the wife plunging into the deepest kind of anxiety. Her husband acted like a man who had learned a terrible secret, and whose entire life had been taken over by that secret because he could not tell it to anyone.

She was reminded of an old children’s story called “The King’s Ears.” A young barber is summoned to the palace and commanded to cut the king’s hair. When he enters the king’s chambers and the king removes his crown, he is astonished to find donkey’s ears protruding from among the royal locks. Having learned the king’s shocking secret, the barber must now keep it tightly hidden within his heart for the rest of his life, for he is under the threat of death if he should ever reveal it. In time, the anguish of not being able to tell anyone grows too great for him to bear, and he falls ill. His condition worsens day by day, and it seems certain he will die. His grieving family does everything they can to determine the cause of the illness, but the barber never says a word. Then one day he staggers out of his house and into the nearby woods, where he finds a tree with a small hollow at the base of the trunk. He puts his mouth to the hole and shouts three times, “The king has donkey’s ears!” as loud as he can. From that very day, his health takes a turn for the better, and in no time at all he has recovered his former strength.…

The wife repeated the phrase to herself: “The king has donkey’s ears. The king has donkey’s ears.” If only my husband would open his heart to me, she thought, how much happier I would be! Even if his words meant my devastation, even if they thrust on me the full burden of his secret and made me waste away day by day until finally I died—still I would be content. How much easier that would be than the pain of watching helplessly as my husband agonizes over a secret he cannot tell!

I can pretty well guess what he’s trying so hard to keep from me. So why won’t he just come out and tell me? Any woman who can make him change as much as I’ve seen him change must surely be a very special woman. I can’t think of any other explanation. So why won’t he share with me the joy of having met such a remarkable person? Why does he go on trying to hide it. Can he really believe I haven’t noticed? Of course, it hurts to think that he loves another woman. But it hurts even more to see him struggling so painfully all by himself like that, day in and day out, never saying a word. It makes me feel like I’m nothing but a burden to him, and that I’m the one responsible for all his torments. That’s what really hurts.

Every night after dinner, he goes straight to his room, and I never hear another peep out of him all evening. I used to take him some tea after a while, but now I feel like there’s a tight web of invisible threads stretched across his doorway, and I’m afraid to touch the door. I don’t know how many times I’ve carried the tea tray halfway up the stairs only to turn back. Once when I slid the door open after saying “May I come in?” I saw him hastily pushing the stationery he had spread on his desk under a book. I pretended I hadn’t noticed and forced a cheerful voice:

“Hey! Stop working so hard, you rascal.”

But actually it was all I could do to keep my face from showing my wretchedness.

Now I’m scared to go into his room. Even in the daytime, when I go in there to dust, I get this eerie feeling that he’s still there, sitting at his desk like the night before, and I’m scared to look that way. What if I were to see something I shouldn’t? When I play with our daughter alone in the evening, the silence from my husband’s room upstairs weighs heavier and heavier on my mind until I begin to wonder how much more I can take.

My wife has the child, was the husband’s attitude. She may have no other comfort, and she may feel my heart drifting away from her, but she at least has the child. Even when her happiness as a wife is incomplete, a woman can still find a measure of meaning to her life in nurturing and protecting her child. The husband sought excuses for his behavior in convenient clichés.

Though intoxicated with love, he had not failed to notice the new look of desolation on his wife’s face. Especially after finding the letter on his desk, he made a point of trying to say nice things to her as often as possible. It pained even him to see his wife looking so unutterably forlorn.

Sometimes, when he was in his room, he would hear his wife open the front door and step outside. Holding the fussy child in her arms, she would walk back and forth in the street, singing gently, for as much as an hour. Or if the child was already in bed, he might hear the slap-slap of a jump-rope against the pavement. Ahh, she’s skipping rope again, he’d think. This image of his wife, skipping on and on in the dark, deserted street, pressed in on him like some desperate appeal. The staccato slap of the rope as it whipped through the air and the tap of her feet springing from the pavement seemed to fly at him like a million invisible needles piercing his entire body. He tried to hide from the needles.

The husband’s thinking went something like this: I’ve never considered abandoning my wife and child to run off with the girl. The last thing I want is to destroy my home for the sake of this love, and I really don’t feel I’m in danger of making that happen. All I’m saying is that I want to be left alone for a while. Let me follow my heart, wherever it may lead. It’s not as if a paltry wage earner like me could do anything all that outrageous.

If I invited the girl to go on a trip with me, I doubt she’d refuse. In fact, I can already see her eyes lighting up with excitement. She’s always dreaming about traveling to unknown places. But could I actually take such a trip? My wife and I can’t even go somewhere for a single night without risking the total collapse of our household finances; how could I possibly afford a major trip? I’ve never even bought the girl a present. She doesn’t go around dropping hints like most girls these days, but I know she’d be as happy as any to get a new purse. Her family’s no better off than mine. But some of the purses in the window come close to my entire salary for a month, and even the small ones that look more like toys than anything else would take all my spending money for the month and then some.

Love on empty pockets is like trying to light a cheap match: it takes forever to burst into flames. I could never simply forget about my family and abandon myself to whim. There’s nothing quite so pathetic as being poor. I’ve felt that to the quick. But please, just let me be for a while. Don’t ask me any questions, and just let me be.

One evening, the husband took the girl to a movie, and afterward they strolled around talking for another hour. It was past nine by the time he got home. His wife did not come rushing out to greet him as she normally did.

He went on inside and heard her muffled voice upstairs. It sounded like her usual greeting, but her voice had an odd note to it, like the pleading of a spoiled child or like someone on the verge of falling asleep. Following this for a time came the sounds of trying to get the child to go down for the night, and then everything became silent.

Only a few minutes before, he had been with his girlfriend, holding her hand in his as they said goodbye, so he was hardly in a position to scold his wife for failing to greet him at the door. He sat down to the dinner laid out for him on the table and began eating by himself. His wife’s dinner was there, too, untouched. She had probably been waiting to eat until he got home but went to put the child to bed when she got fussy.

“You’re like a boarder,” his wife had joked a few days before, and a sour smile came to his lips as he recalled it. Indeed, more often than not he skipped breakfast. Either he didn’t feel very hungry when he got up, or there wasn’t enough time before he had to leave for work, so he just grabbed his lunch box and headed for the office. When he got home in the evening it was straight to dinner. If his daughter was still awake, he’d spend a little time with her, and then he went right to his room upstairs. He could easily be accused of coming home only to eat and sleep.

“Let’s play some shogi,” he had suggested one evening upon seeing his wife’s long face. With immediate cheer she went to get the dust-covered game board from the closet and began setting it up. Two pieces were missing, so she cut some replacements out of paper and wrote “pawn” on them with a pen.

“Here goes. You just watch. You’re going to wonder what hit you,” she said spiritedly as she made her first move. If truth be told, the wife had no interest in shogi, and the husband knew it. The husband didn’t like it much either. He never played games like go or shogi or mah-jongg. Their shogi board was one they’d inherited from his brother when he died, and, in fact, the husband barely even knew the moves well enough to keep from making a mistake. His wife’s skill was about the same.

Twice the husband won after a protracted battle. They started a third game, but when he looked up from the board he found his wife starting to nod off. He threw in his pieces in exasperation and stood up. His wife was too tired. After that he never wanted to play shogi again.

“I wish we had a Ping-Pong table,” his wife sometimes said, and he thought it might be nice, too. He wasn’t especially fond of this game either, because it always seemed like such a game of cunning, but having a Ping-Pong table might cast a different hue on their inert and desolate home. For something like badminton you had to have more open space. When it came down to it, what amusements were possible in the contemporary Japanese home?

Waiting to begin her own dinner until her husband’s return, the wife had fallen asleep beside the child. This hadn’t prevented the husband from starting in on dinner, yet he didn’t feel like he should just leave her sleeping indefinitely, so he went upstairs to wake her. But what could be the matter? She would not wake up. Normally, no matter how tired she was when she dozed off, she’d spring right up as if hit by a jolt of electricity. He never had to call her more than two or three times.

“Hey, wake up,” he said again, this time poking her on the shoulder. She went on sleeping. If he raised his voice, he might disturb the child, so he called the same way again but tried grabbing her shoulder and shaking it as well. Still no response. His irritation mounting, he got rougher. “Wake up I said! Hey!” he shouted, shaking her shoulder hard enough to make the flesh on her face jiggle limply. Her eyes remained closed.

The thought that flashed through his mind at that moment made the blood drain from his face.

“Hiroko!” he cried, his voice now at high pitch. He brought his face close to hers. She was breathing. He put his hand to her fore head. It felt normal. She had not changed out of the dress she’d

worn that day. He leaned over her and shook her again.

“Hey, Hiroko, what’s wrong?”

Finally she stirred. She opened her eyes a crack and looked at him. Her lips moved as if she were trying to say something, but he couldn’t tell what.

“What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong.”

Twisting her head back and forth as though in pain, she groped for his hand. When she found it, she said, “I drank . . . some . . .”

“Some what?” he demanded sharply, and this time his voice woke his daughter. Sitting up, she stared at her father for a few seconds before starting to crawl up onto her mother lying next to her.

“Ohhh. I feel like I’m gonna die,” his wife groaned, writhing back and forth in pain and sending the child tumbling. The child wailed. That moment, for the first time, the husband noticed the smell of alcohol.

“Was it whiskey?” he demanded.

She nodded.

“And nothing else but whiskey?”

She nodded again. A surge of relief spread through his body. The child wailed louder and louder.

He went to check the closet downstairs. The bottle of the cheapest whiskey was missing. He’d had doubts about that whiskey when he first bought it and tasted it, so he’d always been careful to drink only small amounts at a time. Even then, it gave him headaches, and his worried wife had finally gone to buy him a better brand. The last third of the cheap brand had remained untouched since he’d gotten the second bottle.

When he found the bottle in the kitchen, completely empty, it sent a shudder through his body. Is she out of her mind? he thought. Even I played it safe and never drank more than three shots at a time. I don’t suppose it’ll kill her, but it sure wouldn’t be funny if it did. What could she have been thinking?

When she first failed to respond, he’d turned blue in the face with the thought that she might have taken a massive dose of sleeping pills. Back in college the wife of a friend in his apartment house had tried to kill herself with Calmotin, and the things his friend had told him then had suddenly flashed through his mind. It hit him at once that his own wife was acting just like his friend’s wife had acted. His friend’s wife had finally come back to life after being in a coma for two full days and nights. The dose had been barely short of fatal.

No! he’d screamed inwardly as the worst fear burst upon his mind. Not suicide!

Panic ripped through his body like the lash of a savage whip. A moment later, when he discovered it was not suicide at all, his alarm and dismay quickly changed to indignation.

“Mrs. So-and-so, age twenty-something, died at approximately such-and-such o’clock on such-and-such a day, of methyl alcohol poisoning from the whiskey she drank while waiting for her husband to return home from work. She and her husband were the parents of a three-year-old daughter. Their home had always been a peaceful one, with nothing to suggest a possible suicide.”

Some such article would appear off in the corner of the newspaper, drawing the final curtain. The headline: “Methyl Alcohol Kills Housewife.” Could anything be more absurd than this? His neighbors and colleagues at work would see him and not know what to say. Some would express their sympathies; others would stare at him suspiciously, as if wanting to know what he had to hide.

He would learn to endure such stares from the world at large, no doubt, but he couldn’t bear to think what a blow his wife’s death would be to his girlfriend. It would instantly and cruelly shatter all the sweet memories he and the girl shared, and then the wounded girl, irreparably scarred, would leave him. Deprived of both wife and girlfriend in a single stroke, he’d find himself standing alone, in an utter daze, with a child in arms. How was he to build a life for himself after that? The rest of his life would proceed under a curse. A brand would be burnt upon his forehead, and all he could do would be to contritely endure his punishment. But what about the child? Why should she have to suffer?

Such were the husband’s visions of the unhappiness that would follow his wife’s suicide. They were quite predictable, for the most part, but they lacked one crucial element: reverence for the individual human life. And in place of this reverence stood nothing but a fearsome personal egotism. The husband was oblivious to this truth.

In a fit of temper, the husband took the more expensive bottle of whiskey from the closet, knocked back ten shots one after the other, wildly shoveled down the rest of his dinner, and went to bed.

The wife woke up in the middle of the night and pulled herself precariously to her feet, propping herself against the wall. She almost fell several times on her way down the stairs, but made it safely to the kitchen, where she gulped down a glass of water. When she started to fill her glass a second time, she suddenly felt sick, and she barely managed to stagger into the bathroom before vomiting. A dark, tea-colored liquid came up, over and over and over, and her nausea did not subside even after there was nothing more left to come.

When she raised her head, a face as ashen as a corpse stared back at her from the mirror. With her head spinning, she stumbled back into the kitchen, where she fell to her knees, then collapsed full length onto the floor. Was she going to die? she wondered, as she felt her consciousness slipping away. She did not awaken again until morning.

When she could no longer suppress her desire to paint, the wife would leave the child with the lady next door and set out with her box of watercolors and drawing board.

Attending art exhibits had always been her greatest pleasure, and even after the birth of her child she had done her best to make time for them. Though she had no favorite artist, she usually found one painting she really liked at every exhibit she visited. Finding that single painting always brought her an indescribable joy. When she was especially fond of the painting, she would go back for another look. The second time, she would go straight to that painting, and then go straight home again without looking at any others.

Of all the paintings she had admired, a seascape by Dufy remained most vividly imprinted on her memory: sky and water, the same deep blue; smoke rising from the stacks of a steamship in the distance; sailboats like white butterflies; red-parasoled figures standing on the beach and gazing out to sea; a large starfish on the sand. No doubt the actual picture was somewhat different, but these were the images that came back to her. Two or three people were looking at the sea, she thought.

She had been strangely moved by that painting, and the emotional currents it had stirred within her still flowed. What had moved her so? she wondered. Was it perhaps a recognition of human loneliness?

People who stand looking at the sea are people deep in thought.

They gaze as though without concern, and before them stretches the vast expanse of deep, blue water. The wife liked the idea of standing on the beach and gazing at the sea with no thought for anything else. She could feel the loneliness of the sea. Or should she call it the loneliness of the starfish? . . . It seemed a frightening picture, but then again it seemed to evoke such gentleness and nostalgia that it made her want to cry. What could have been going through Dufy’s mind as he painted that picture?

She entered the gate of the nearby high school. The hush of evening had settled over the schoolyard. As she passed through the quadrangle, three young boys appeared from the opposite direction, chasing dragonflies. The large, grass-covered playground stood empty. Clear on the other side, by the clump of oleanders framing the back gate, she saw a tall man in a white summer kimono with two little girls in tow. He had a birdlime pole and was looking up into the trees.

She cut across the playground toward the swimming pool. Beside the pool stood three tall poplars. These three poplars were what she had come to paint. She had come to paint them once before, during summer vacation last year, but she’d found the swim team using the pool and watched their practice instead. Today no voices came from the pool. She broke into a run and dashed up the embankment.

“Oh no!” she exclaimed.

The pool was dry. She stood there gaping in surprise and disappointment.

“I can’t believe it! There’s no water.”

Suddenly it all seemed funny, and she started to laugh. Eggplant and sesame grew in a tiny little garden someone had planted on top of the embankment. Who would be tending a garden in a place like this?

She decided to draw the three poplars from a position diagonally across the pool and sat down at one corner. The pool without water would make an interesting effect, actually. The far end was shallow, to about half way, and then there was a steep drop that made this end much deeper. Tiles in dotted white lines marked the lanes on the bottom, and a few stray pebbles lay here and there. She would have expected the empty pool to be encrusted with dried moss, but it looked as though someone had polished it clean. Perhaps they really did that.

A popular song blared from the coffee shop behind the school:

We’ll meet again tomorrow Under the apple tree.

A steady breeze blew through the early evening light. The branches of the poplars swayed and rustled without pause, their leaves in rapid motion like the vibrating of a stringed instrument. How she loved to watch the poplars swaying tall in the wind! They seemed to blow the murky gloom in her heart completely away. No, that wasn’t true. They didn’t blow it completely away, but somehow they softened it. As she watched the leaves fluttering in the wind, she had the feeling that they were all speaking some fervent message—though she could not tell what that message might be.

Do thoughts like these come to me because I’m depressed? she wondered. I can’t understand my own behavior anymore. I mean, look at the other night, when I made myself so sick guzzling all that whiskey, one glass after another. Looking back on it now, I can’t think why I would have done such a thing. And I wonder that I didn’t die of alcohol poisoning. No matter how desperately alone I might have felt, how could I have been so reckless and vulgar as to swill down the whole rest of that bottle by the glassful?—especially when I knew it might not be safe. I really can’t understand myself anymore. It frightens me that I could do such a thing.

My husband really lit into me the next morning. Why had I gone and done such a fool thing? he demanded over and over, and the more I didn’t answer, the angrier he got, until finally he stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him. But I just couldn’t answer. “You could think about Michiko a little, too, you know,” he said. I guess I really was being a bad mother.

But I simply had no room for Michiko in my mind. It was all I could do to think about my own problems. What might affect my child ten or twenty years in the future is hardly my first concern when I can barely sustain myself from one day to the next right now. So even if people say I’m a bad mother, there’s really nothing I can do about it. Of course, I love Michiko. She’s such a good-natured child, and she’s been learning so much so fast recently that watching her grow isn’t just a pleasure, it’s endless amazement. If I were to lose her now, I’d be so devastated, I can’t begin to imagine what it would mean. But I’ve come to doubt even my ability to go on living, and stumbling through each day as it comes is the best I can do. Maybe I went terribly astray somewhere along the way. Maybe I got spoiled growing up in my grandmother’s care and turned into an incurable egotist. Maybe all my suffering comes simply from loving myself too much.

It was thoughts like these that had made her life seem an impossible burden to bear. She had come to the school ground with her watercolors precisely to forget such thoughts, but here she was caught up in them again, her palette and brushes abandoned at her side. Four or five damselflies had appeared in the sky above the poplars, circling round and round.

She heard voices and turned to see three boys walking from the dormitory toward the tennis courts, swinging their rackets as they went. One of them wore no shirt. Were they going to play tennis with three? Oh, if only I could play, too, she thought. To run back and forth across the court, chasing the ball, laughing without restraint, soaking myself in perspiration—just think how refreshing that would feel! Oh, how I wish I could be a student again! When I was young I had a world of my own, and everything in the larger world matched up perfectly with my own world. I was the ruler of that world. There, in complete abandon, I could bask in the sunshine and breathe the air and fly on the wind like a bird. Surrounded constantly by benevolence and love, I never knew a moment’s despair. If only I could go back to that world! If only I could be like the monkey magician Songoku and fly back instantaneously to that wonderful, lost world!

No, no, forget all that. It’s not true. Wanting to go back to my school days is nothing but sour grapes. But I’ll tell you, oh dear God, what I truly do want. One thing, and one thing alone: I want my husband to love me. When I say all that stuff about doubting myself and barely being able to go on living—those are just ways of avoiding the real issue. I want my husband to love me, and to love me alone. That’s the real issue. Let me say it now without hiding the truth. I want my husband to love me. That’s my whole life.

The husband was writing in his diary when he became aware of muffled sobs coming from the kitchen downstairs. He felt a sharp stabbing in his heart but decided to wait and see what might happen.

At that moment he had been writing about going to the symphony with his girlfriend last night, so he had good cause to be startled when the house suddenly filled with his wife’s late-night sobs. Indeed, it was a concert his wife had wanted to attend. She hadn’t said so directly, but her hints had been clear enough. And, in fact, he could have taken her; at one point he had even thought he might. But one day as he and the girl were leaving the office together, he found himself making a date with her instead. She had mentioned the concert first—speaking very much as though she wished she could go, needless to say. Thinking of his wife, he hesitated. If he had already made a definite date with his wife by then, he would no doubt have let the girl’s remarks pass unanswered. In retrospect, though, he had to admit that he’d probably delayed saying anything to his wife precisely because he thought he might want to ask the girl, and he wanted to keep that possibility open.

The husband himself was not that much of a music lover. Without someone else to nudge him into action, he wasn’t one to go and buy expensive tickets to a concert on his own. Even if he had decided to go with his wife, it would have been essentially as a favor to her. So you could say his decision to go with his girlfriend rather than his wife simply reflected the natural inclinations of his heart. At any rate, silencing his guilty conscience as best he could, he had lied to his wife and invited the girl to the concert. He discovered that the mixture of thrill and anxiety he experienced from going out in public with the girl—just the two of them, where anybody could see them—easily eclipsed the pain of lying to his wife. His earlier qualms remained almost entirely forgotten until the concert was over and he returned home.

As he listened, the sobs came faster and at a higher pitch—like a child cutting loose after some catastrophic disappointment. His twenty-four-year-old wife was crying with her whole body, a body that had not yet lost all its girlishness. He had never heard her cry like this before.

Now she’s really getting hysterical, he thought with a grim frown. This is serious; it’s going to be troublesome. But he could not immediately decide whether he should go down and tell her to stop it, or just ignore her and let her cry herself out.

He turned the situation over in his mind: Had she perhaps managed somehow to find out about last night’s concert? Maybe one of her friends had seen him there, and came by today especially to tell her. It wasn’t impossible. If so, what a fool thing he’d done. Or maybe something about the way he’d acted yesterday had tipped off that uncanny intuition of hers. There had been that time the other day when the girl had taught him a new song as they took an evening stroll along the river. “On fields and hills of tender grass, a thousand flowers bloom; their radiant colors of every hue, alive with sweet perfume.” It was an old folk song from England, as he recalled. He and the girl had sung it together in two-part harmony. Then, later that evening, when he was playing with his daughter after dinner, his wife had started singing the exact same song, as she did the dishes. Talk about spooky. It could have been pure coincidence, but it had given him quite a turn.

Even if it were true that she’d found out about last night, though, he’d be better off not to say anything. He couldn’t undo what he’d already done. Yes, he had lied to his wife, but it had all happened in the natural course of things, kind of like water seeking it’s own level, and there really wasn’t anything he could have done to stop it. Besides, what could he possibly say to his distraught wife that would actually make her feel better? At times like this, the thing to do was to act as though nothing were amiss, rather than to risk saying the wrong thing by trying to comfort her or cheer her up. If he responded to this outburst, she might start making a habit of such behavior, and he’d never see the end of it. Now there was a depressing thought. He’d never survive. She might be hurting, but his best bet at this point was to turn a cold shoulder. Surely she wouldn’t ever actually try to kill herself.

Rationalizing first one way, then another, the husband held his ground, but his wife’s sobbing showed no sign of abating. Though the sobs were far too deeply colored with the tones of despair to be regarded as a momentary fit, they were persistently deflected by the tough surface of the husband’s heart and failed to touch its inner core. Yet, could the husband really have been unaware of how deep his wife’s anguish had become? Was it not rather that he deliberately closed his eyes to her pain, to the blood spurting from her wounds, so as to save his own self from injury?

As the wife’s sobbing continued endlessly, on and on, the husband’s annoyance grew. What if Michiko should wake up and start crying? he scolded her in his mind. How could you respond to her needs when you’re in such a state yourself? Enough is enough already. What’s the idea, anyway—bursting out like this for no reason at all? It’s practically an act of violence, if you think about it.

He got to his feet and stomped loudly down the stairs, where he found his wife with both hands pressed to her face, leaning against the sliding doors that divided the kitchen from the dining room.

Her shoulders shook out of control with each sob, and she did not let up even when she knew he had come down.

An icy chill swept over the husband’s heart. He watched her in silence for a few moments, and then spat out venomously:

“You’re acting like some homesick housemaid just come down from the mountains—crying in the kitchen like this. Stop it! It’s stupid!”

Without waiting for a response, he turned on his heels and stomped back upstairs. The sobbing below changed to sniffles, but the sniffles still went on for quite some time before finally fading away.

By the next morning the husband was feeling sorry about how he’d treated his wife. He spoke to her at breakfast, this time in gentle tones.

“I’m sorry for the way I yelled at you last night. Please forgive me. I apologize. I think you’ve been under a lot of stress lately, and you’re tired. Isn’t that right? When you’re tired, it’s easy to let little things bother you more than they should—things that don’t mean anything at all. You have to realize, there isn’t a person on this earth who’s not unhappy. Everyone bears his own particular burden of unhappiness. That burden may not be obvious to others, but it’s always there, and even if it were obvious, no one else could really feel the unhappiness the way the person does himself. So what can you do? Basically, whatever may happen, you have to stop thinking that you’re the only one who’s unhappy. Everyone’s alone in this world, and everyone goes through life enduring his own unhappiness. That’s the way it is. You can’t be looking only at yourself. If you do that, then your own unhappiness starts to seem a lot bigger than it really is. You have to realize that there are lots of other people who are much, much more unhappy than you ever were. In fact, that’s the only way you can endure your own unhappiness. You have to go on living. No matter what happens, you have to go on living. Do you understand? I don’t want you to cry like you did last night anymore. It’s too depressing. It’s through things like this that you learn what life’s all about, little by little. You can’t let it get you down. You have to live on, strong and unflinching. You have to become invulnerable, and live a long, long life. Okay? Do you hear?”

Stringing together the kinds of phrases he’d read in books, the husband spoke as if with the wisdom of generations. They were selfish words, spoken very much for his own advantage. But they were also words that expressed his genuine feeling for his wife. His wife listened silently, nodding her head over and over, looking as meek and complaisant as a child after an outburst of tears. Seeing his wife this way brought the husband a small measure of relief. But as her husband’s words flowed over her, the wife could do nothing to stop the feeling that she was plunging deeper and deeper into a bottomless void.

“We’re eating upstairs today,” the wife said when the husband arrived home wiping perspiration from his brow. Making no response except an unimpressed snort, he ducked into the washroom to strip down to his undershorts and splash cold water over his head. Then he climbed the stairs.

“What in . . . ?” When he entered the room, he stopped short and turned around. His wife, following close behind, looked at him with a radiant sparkle in her eyes and let out a tiny giggle. She had brought up the small round table and folding chairs from the front hall and got everything ready for dinner. From the ceiling hung three cute little lanterns, red and yellow and light blue.

“Do you get it? Today’s the—”

“Oh, that’s right, it’s Bastille Day.”

This was the fourteenth of July.

Spread colorfully on the table was the kind of feast normally seen in this house only on one of their birthdays or on their wedding anniversary. A moment later the wife returned from downstairs with a bottle of ice-cold beer.

“Wow! This is great!” the husband exclaimed. But then he thought of their household finances, and his face turned sour.

“Now hold on just a minute,” he said. “If we start celebrating every time there’s a Bastille Day or an Independence Day we’ll go broke before we know it. There’s no sense in getting so carried away about foreign holidays. You should be thinking more about the long term.”

The wife smiled gently. “The long term?” she said, her tone a question.

But the first glass of cold beer quickly revived the husband’s initial cheer. He could hardly go on sulking in the face of so much fine food. With a special place set just for her, his daughter, too, had started eating amidst repeated squeals of delight. The husband felt the effects of the beer beginning to spread through his body and looked up at the evening sky beyond the sycamore tree outside the wide-open window. What a beautiful shade of blue it was!

“I’ll bet Paris is really hopping tonight,” he said. “Fireworks shooting up one after the other. Dancing everywhere.”

“I wish I could be there!”

“Nah, forget it. If you actually went, you’d be disappointed. Paris isn’t like it used to be.”

“As if you would know,” she mocked.

“The Paris of old in all its splendor doesn’t exist any more. Sure, it may look the same on the outside. But the people’s hearts have changed. The citizens of Paris are mostly no different from us, scraping along, trying to make ends meet. They limp from one day to the next thinking what a hard life it is. And that’s exactly why on a night like tonight they really whoop it up. They dance all night long. They kick up their heels and dance. People like us can know just how they feel.”

The husband tended to turn commiserative when he got drunk.

“I’ve made up my mind,” the wife declared. “I’m going there to live—among those people.”

“They’d say you’ve got to be kidding. You’d only be an added drain on the city’s food supply.”

“I don’t care what they say. I’ll live in the old part of town and work as a seamstress.”

The husband shrugged his shoulders at the absurdity of it. The wife went down to the kitchen and came back with a second bottle of beer. Grabbing it away from her, the husband opened it with an exaggerated flourish.

“I’ll let you have just one glass,” he said.

“Merci, monsieur.”

“Ooh! I’m impressed! Cheers!”

When he finished his beer, his daughter was chewing on a wedge of tomato. Carrying her to the window rail, he began to sing:

Gin-gin gira-gira, the burning sun goes down. Gin-gin gira-gira, the sun goes down. Red as red as red can be, the clouds in the sky; And all the people’s faces, too, red as red can be. Gin-gin gira-gira, the sun goes down.

The child begged him to sing the song again so he started in a

second time. A dragonfly flew by overhead, skimmed past the leaves of the paulownia tree next door, and disappeared, but not before the sharp-eyed girl had caught sight of it.

“Butterfly! Catch it!” she cried in a rising voice, looking up at her father’s face.

“Not a butterfly. A dragonfly.”

“Dramfly? Catch butterfly!”

“All gone.”

The wife, who had been listening to the exchange between her husband and daughter, now went downstairs and came back with the portable record player.

“Shall we dance?”

“Oui, Madame.”

The lovely glow of the lingering light slowly melted away into the summer night. A waltz began to play. The husband, still wearing only his shorts, turned to his wife in her white dress.

“Pardon,” he said, and took her in his arms.

“What?”

Ignoring her question, he drew her close and started to dance. The fragrance of a fine perfume tickled his nose. In his wife’s hair was a small white ribbon. He thought how nice his girlfriend would look if she wore a brown ribbon in her hair. As they turned, their cheeks touched.

The child tried to approach but bumped into the wife’s leg and fell down. She had been taught not to cry when she fell.

They danced to five or six tunes, and the husband’s face dripped with sweat.

“Are we stopping already?” the wife asked.

“It’s just too hot,” the husband said.

“In Paris they go all night long.”

The husband went downstairs, and the wife could hear him pouring water over himself in the washroom. She stood by the window and gazed up at the stars beginning to twinkle in the sky. The child lay on her stomach on the tatami, fast asleep. The wife continued to gaze at the sky in silence, but the sound of her husband coming back up the stairs brought her out of her reverie with a start, and she quickly moved away from the railing.