“So much!” my wife exclaimed to no one in particular. The unseemly loudness of her voice made her seem like a schoolgirl again,4 as if seven years had suddenly dropped off her age. I glanced at Dr. S.
“It’s dysentery, isn’t it, doctor?”
“No, it isn’t dysentery. The children’s variety never happens before the infant is weaned.”
Dr. S was surprisingly calm.
After he left, I went back to work. I was writing a story for a special issue of the Sunday Mainichi, and the deadline was the next morning. I had little enthusiasm for the piece, but I forced myself to keep my pen moving. Takashi’s crying was getting on my nerves, though, and no sooner would he stop than his elder brother Hiroshi would start wailing.
Nor was that the only thing that grated on my nerves. A young man I had never met before arrived in the afternoon to ask for a loan. “I’m a manual laborer, but Mr. C wrote me this letter of introduction to you, so I was hoping you could help me,” he blurted out. I had no more than two or three yen in my purse at the time, so I handed him two books I could spare and told him to turn them into cash. The young man immediately opened the books and examined the publication data. “This one says ‘Not for Sale.’ Can you get money for ‘Not for Sale’ books?” I felt sorry for myself for having to put up with this, but I simply answered that he should be able to sell it. “Do you think so? All right, then, I guess I’ll be going.” Clearly dubious, the young man left without a word of thanks.
Dr. S came again that evening to do an enema. This time the volume of mucus had decreased significantly. “Oh, good, there’s so much less,” my mother said as she offered the doctor hot water to wash his hands. Her triumphant look almost suggested that she herself was responsible for the improvement. Not exactly relieved, I nevertheless felt something close to relief. This had to do not only with the amount of mucus but Takashi’s color and behavior, which were both normal.
“The fever will probably go down tomorrow,” Dr. S said to my mother as he washed his hands, looking pleased. “Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to be needing to throw up, either.”
When I awoke the next morning, my aunt was already awake in the next room and folding up her mosquito net. I thought I heard her say something about Takashi over the clanking of the net’s hardware. “What about Takashi?” I asked, my head still in a fog.
“He’s much worse. I think we have to take him to the hospital.”
I sat up in bed. This took me off guard after yesterday’s improvement. “Doctor S?”
“He’s here now. Hurry up. Get out of bed.” She wore a strangely stiff expression as if hiding her emotions. I went immediately to wash my face. The weather outside looked bad, overcast as usual. Somebody had thrown two gold-banded lilies into the bucket in the bathing room. I felt as if their fragrance and their brown pollen were going to stick to my skin.
In the space of a single night, Takashi’s eyes had become sunken. My wife said that when she went to pick him up this morning, his head dropped back and he vomited some kind of white stuff. He was yawning constantly as well, another bad sign. I felt a stab in the heart. At the same time, I felt a wave of revulsion. Dr. S was kneeling by the baby’s pillow, mute, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He looked up at me and said, “I have to talk to you.”
I showed him upstairs to my study. We sat on the matted floor, the unlighted hibachi between us. “I don’t think it’s bad enough to kill him,” he began, “but his whole digestive tract has shut down.” The only thing to do was starve him for a few days. “Probably the most convenient thing would be to put him in the hospital.”
I suspected that Takashi was in much greater danger than Dr. S was saying, that it was probably too late to do anything for him, even in the hospital, but this was no time to start confronting him with such doubts. I asked him to have the baby admitted. “Let’s make it U—— Hospital, then,” he said, “it’s so close by.” The doctor refused a cup of tea and went off to telephone the hospital. I called my wife to come upstairs. We decided to have my aunt go to the hospital with them.
This was my day to receive visitors. I had four starting first thing in the morning. I was conscious of my wife and aunt hurriedly preparing for the hospital as I carried on polite conversation with my first visitor. I suddenly became aware of something that felt like a grain of sand on the tip of my tongue. I had recently had a tooth filled and I wondered if some of the cement had broken off. Picking it out, I saw that it was a piece of the actual tooth. This gave me a superstitious twinge, but I went on smoking and trading remarks with my guest about a samisen that was up for sale. It was said to have belonged to the painter Hōitsu.5
Next came the young laborer who had called on me the day before. Standing in the entryway, he announced that he had been unable to get more than ¥1.20 for the books I gave him and started pressing me for another four or five yen. I refused, but he showed no sign of leaving. I finally lost my temper and shouted at him, “I don’t have time to stand here listening to this nonsense. Get out!”
“All right, but give me streetcar fare at least. Just fifty sen.”
When he saw that this wasn’t going to work either, he slammed the door and retreated through the gate. I promised myself never to respond to any such requests for money in the future.
Before long, my four visitors had become five. The fifth was a young scholar of French literature. As he entered my study, I excused myself and went downstairs to see what the situation was. My aunt was ready to leave, pacing up and down the veranda holding Takashi, whose thick wrap made him look chubby. I pressed my lips against his pale forehead, which was quite hot. His eyelids were twitching as well.
Instead of commenting on this, I asked in a near-whisper, “Did you call the rickshaws?”
“Pardon me? The rickshaws are already here,” she said with unusual formality as if speaking to a stranger.
At that point my wife came out. She had changed her clothes and was carrying a down comforter and a basket. She knelt before me with her hands on the floor mats. “We will be going now,” she announced with strange seriousness.
I suggested she change Takashi into his new hat—a summer hat I had bought him a few days earlier.
“I did that,” she said, peeking into the mirror on the clothes chest and pulling her kimono straight at the neck. I didn’t stay to see them off but went back upstairs.
With the new visitor, I talked about George Sand among other things. The canopies of the two rickshaws were visible through the young green leaves of the garden trees. Then suddenly they passed before my eyes, swaying above the fence. “The early nineteenth-century writers—Balzac, Sand—are far superior to the writers of the late nineteenth-century, don’t you think?” I remember with absolute clarity the passion with which the young man said this.
The stream of visitors continued into the afternoon. The sun was going down when I finally found the time to go to the hospital. The overcast skies had begun dropping rain. While I was changing into a better kimono, I ordered the maid to put out my rain clogs. Just then the Osaka editor N showed up to collect my manuscript. He wore mud-smeared boots, and his overcoat glittered with rain drops. I received him in the entryway, where I explained to him how the situation had prevented me from writing anything.
He expressed his sympathy and concluded, “I guess I’ll have to give up on this one.” I felt as if I had coerced his sympathy. I felt, too, that I had exploited my son’s critical condition as an excuse.
N had barely left the front door when my aunt arrived from the hospital. Takashi had thrown up his milk twice, she said. Fortunately, his brain did not seem to have been affected by the illness. She went on to talk about what a nice person the nurse was, that tonight my wife’s mother would be staying at the hospital with the baby, and so forth. “As soon as we got Taka there, they gave us a bunch of flowers, supposedly from some Sunday school pupils. I don’t know, it was creepy, like for a funeral.” This reminded me of my broken tooth of t
hat morning, but I said nothing.
It was dark by the time I left the house, and a misty rain was falling. As I walked out through the gate, I realized I was wearing fair-weather clogs, not the rain clogs I had asked the maid to put out for me. To make matters worse, the left one’s thong was loose in front. I couldn’t help feeling that if the thong snapped my son’s life would end, but I was too annoyed to go back and change clogs. Angry at the maid, I walked along with great care to avoid overturning the loose clog.
I got to the hospital after nine. Soaking in water in a wash basin outside Takashi’s door were the flowers my aunt had mentioned—five or six lilies and pinks. Inside, the room itself was almost too dark to see faces: someone had put a piece of cloth over the light bulb. Still in their kimono, my wife and her mother were lying on a futon with Takashi between them. He was sound asleep, pillowed on my mother-in-law’s arm. When she saw me come in, my wife sat up on her heels and, with a bow, whispered, “Thank you for coming.” Her mother said the same thing to me. They seemed almost cheerful, which took me by surprise. I felt somewhat relieved and knelt down by their pillows. My wife said she was suffering doubly: since she wasn’t allowed to give Takashi her milk, she had to listen to him cry for it; and her breasts were so full they hurt. “A rubber nipple doesn’t help, either. I finally had to let him suck my tongue.”
“Now he’s drinking my milk,” my mother-in-law said with a laugh, showing me her withered breasts. “He sucks so hard—look how red I am.”
I found myself laughing with her. “But really, he’s doing much better than I expected. I figured he’d be done for by now.”
“Taka? Taka’s just fine. We’re cleaning him out, that’s all. His fever will go down tomorrow for sure.”
“Thanks to the Sainted Founder’s awesome powers, no doubt,” my wife teased her mother, a believer in the Lotus Sutra.6 Her mother seemed not to hear her, though, as she pursed her lips and blew hard at Takashi’s head, probably hoping to bring his fever down that way.
Takashi finally eluded death. When he was doing a little better, I thought about writing a sketch of the events surrounding his stay in the hospital, but I decided against it because of a superstitious feeling that if I let my guard down and wrote such a piece, he might have a relapse. Now, though, he is sleeping in the garden hammock. Having been asked to write a story, I thought I would have a go at this. The reader might wish I had done otherwise.
(July 1923)
DEATH REGISTER
1
My mother was a madwoman. I never did feel close to her, as a son should feel toward his mother. Hair held in place by a comb, she would sit alone all day puffing on a long, skinny pipe in the house of my birth family in Tokyo’s Shiba Ward.1 She had a tiny face on a tiny body, and that face of hers, for some reason, was always ashen and lifeless. Once, reading The Story of the Western Wing,2 I came upon the phrase “smell of earth, taste of mud,” and thought immediately of my mother—of her emaciated face in profile.
And so I never had the experience of a mother’s care. I do seem to recall that one time, when my adoptive mother made a point of taking me upstairs to see her, she suddenly conked me on the head with her pipe. In general, though, she was a quiet lunatic. I or my elder sister would sometimes press her to paint a picture for us, and she would do it on a sheet of paper folded in four. And not just with black ink, either. She would apply my sister’s watercolors to blossoming plants or the costumes of children on an outing. The people in her pictures, though, always had fox faces.
My mother died in the autumn of my eleventh year, not so much from illness, I think, as from simply wasting away. I have a fairly clear memory of the events surrounding her death.
A telegram must have arrived to alert us. Late on a windless night, I climbed into a rickshaw with my adoptive mother and sped across the city from Honjo to Shiba. Otherwise in my life I have never used a scarf, but I do recall that on that particular night I had a thin silk handkerchief wrapped around my neck. I also recall that it had some kind of Chinese landscape motif, and that it smelled strongly of Iris Bouquet.3
My mother lay on a futon in the eight-mat parlor directly beneath her upstairs room. I knelt beside her, wailing, with my four-year-older sister. I felt especially miserable when I heard someone behind me say, “The end is near.” My mother had been lying there as good as dead, but suddenly she opened her eyes and spoke. Sad as everyone felt, we couldn’t help giggling.
I stayed up by my mother through the following night as well, but that night, for some reason, my tears simply wouldn’t flow. Ashamed to be so unfeeling while right next to me my sister wept almost constantly, I struggled to pretend. Yet I also believed that as long as I was unable to cry, my mother would not die.
On the evening of the third day, though, she did die, with very little suffering. A few times before it happened, she would seem to regain consciousness, look us all in the face, and release an endless stream of tears, but as usual she said not a thing.
Even after her body had been placed in the coffin, I couldn’t keep from breaking down time and again. The old woman we called our “Ōji Auntie,” a distant relative, would say, “I’m so impressed with you!” My only thought was that here was a person who let herself be impressed by very strange things.
The day of my mother’s funeral, my sister climbed into a rickshaw holding the memorial tablet,4 and I followed her inside, holding the censer. I dozed off now and then, waking with a start each time the censer was about to drop from my hand. Still, we seemed never to reach Yanaka. Always I would wake to find the long funeral procession still winding its way through the streets of Tokyo in the autumn sunlight.
The anniversary of my mother’s death is 28 November. The priest gave her the posthumous name of Kimyōin Myōjō Nis-shin Daishi.5 I can remember neither the anniversary of my birth father’s death two decades later nor his posthumous name. Memorizing such things had probably been a matter of pride for me at the age of eleven.
2
I have just the one elder sister. Not very healthy, she is nevertheless the mother of two children. She is not, of course, one of those I want to include in this “Death Register.” Rather, it is the sister who died suddenly just before I was born. Among us three siblings, she was said to be the smartest.
She was certainly the first—which is why they named her “Hatsuko” (First Daughter). Even now a small framed portrait of “Little Hatsu”6 adorns the Buddhist altar in my house. There is nothing at all sickly-looking about her. Her cheeks, with their little dimples, are as round as ripe apricots.
Little Hatsu was by far the one who received the greatest outpouring of love from my parents. They made a point of sending her all the way from Shiba Shinsenza to attend the kindergarten of a Mrs. Summers—I think it was—in Tsukiji.7 On weekends, though, she would stay with my mother’s family, the Akutagawas, in Honjo. On these outings of hers, Little Hatsu would probably wear Western dresses, which still, in the Meiji twenties, would have seemed very modish. When I was in elementary school, I remember, I used to get remnants of her clothes to put on my rubber doll. Without exception, all the cloth patches were imported calico scattered with tiny printed flowers or musical instruments.
One Sunday afternoon in early spring, when Little Hatsu was strolling through the garden (wearing a Western dress, as I imagine her), she called out to our aunt Fuki in the parlor, “Auntie, what’s the name of this tree?”
“Which one?”
“This one, with the buds.”
In the garden of my mother’s family, a single low boke8 trailed its branches over the old well. Little Hatsu, in pigtails, was probably looking up at its thorny branches with big round eyes.
“It has the same name as you,” my aunt said, but before she could explain her joke, Hatsu made up one of her own:
“Then it must be a ‘dummy’ tree.”
My aunt always tells this story whenever the conversation turns to Little Hatsu. Indeed, it’s the only story lef
t to tell about her. Probably not too many days later, Little Hatsu was in her coffin. I don’t remember the posthumous name engraved on her tiny memorial tablet. I do have a strangely clear memory of her death date, though: 5 April.
For some unknown reason, I feel close to this sister I never knew. If “Little Hatsu” were still living, she would be over forty now. And maybe, at that age, she would look like my mother as I recall her upstairs in the Shiba house, blankly puffing away on her pipe. I often feel as if there is a fortyish woman somewhere—a phantom not exactly my mother nor this dead sister—watching over my life. Could this be the effect of nerves wracked by coffee and tobacco? Or might it be the work of some supernatural power giving occasional glimpses of itself to the real world?
3
Because my mother lost her mind, I was adopted into the family of her elder brother shortly after I was born, and so my real father was another parent for whom I had little feeling. He owned a dairy and seems to have been a small-scale success. That father was the person who taught me all about the newly imported fruits and drinks of the day: banana, ice cream, pineapple, rum—and probably much more. I remember once drinking rum in the shade of an oak tree outside the pasture, which was then located in Shinjuku.9 Rum was an amber-colored drink with little alcohol.
When I was very young, my father would try to entice me back from my adoptive family by plying me with these rare treats. I remember how he once openly tempted me into running away while feeding me ice cream in the Uoei restaurant in ōmori.10 At times like this he could be a smooth talker and exude real charm. Unfortunately for him, though, his enticements never worked. This was because I loved my adoptive family too much—and especially my mother’s elder sister, Aunt Fuki.
My father had a short temper and was always fighting with people. When I was in the third year of middle school, I beat him at sumo wrestling by tripping him backwards using a special judo move of mine. He got up and came right after me saying “One more go.” I threw him easily again. He came charging at me for a third time, again saying “One more go,” but now I could see he was angry. My other aunt (Aunt Fuyu, my mother’s younger sister—by then my father’s second wife) was watching all this, and she winked at me a few times behind my father’s back. After grappling with him for a little while, I purposely fell over backwards. I’m sure if I hadn’t lost to him, I would have ended up another victim of my father’s temper.