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“I wonder.”
I felt happy, so happy; it was as though my body had dissolved into smoke and was being drawn up into the sky. Do you understand? Why I was so happy? If you don’t, I’ll hit you!
Won’t you come here sometime? I would ask Naoji to bring you back with him, but there’s something unnatural and peculiar about askin
g him. It would be best if you suddenly dropped in, as if acting on some whim of yours. It wouldn’t matter much if you came with Naoji, but still, it would be best if it were by yourself, when Naoji is away in Tokyo. If Naoji is here, he is sure to monopolize you, and you will be taken off to Osaki’s place to drink, and that will be that.
My family for generations has always been fond of artists. Korin himself lived for years in our old family house in Kyoto and painted beautiful pictures there. So I am sure Mother will be very pleased to have you come. You will probably stay in the foreign-style room on the second floor. Please do not forget to turn off the light. I will climb the dark stairs with a little candle in my hand. You don’t approve? Too fast, I suppose!
I like dissolute people, especially those who wear their tags. I would like to become dissolute myself. I feel as if there is no other way for me to live. You are the most notorious example in Japan of a tagged dissolute, I suppose. Naoji has told me that many people say you are dirty and repulsive, and that you are hated and often attacked. Such stories only make me love you all the more. I am sure, considering who you are, that you must have all kinds of amies, but now you will gradually come to love only me. I can’t help thinking that. When you are living with me, you will be happy in your work. Ever since I was small, people have often told me that to be with me is to forget one’s troubles. I have never had the experience of being disliked. Everyone has called me a “nice girl.” That’s why I am so sure that you could never dislike me.
It would be so good if we could meet. I no longer need an answer from you or anything else. I want to meet you. I suppose that the simplest thing would be for me to go to your house in Tokyo, but I am Mother’s nurse and servant in constant attendance, and I couldn’t possibly leave her. I beg you. Please come here. I want to meet you just once. Then you will understand everything. See the faint lines that have etched themselves on both sides of my mouth. Behold the wrinkles of the malheur du siècle. I am sure that my face will express my feeling to you more clearly than any words.
In my first letter I wrote of a rainbow in my breast. That rainbow is not of the refined beauty of the light of fireflies or of the stars. If it were so faint and faraway, I would not be suffering this way, and I could probably forget you gradually. The rainbow in my breast is a bridge of flames. It is a sensation so strong that it chars my breast. Not even the craving of a narcotics addict when his drugs run out can be as painful as this. I am certain that I am not mistaken, that it is not wicked of me, but even when most persuaded, I sometimes shudder at the thought that I may be attempting to do an extraordinarily foolish thing. And I often wonder if I am not going mad. However, sometimes even I am capable of making plans with due self-possession. Please come here just this once. Any time at all will suit me. I will wait here for you and not go anywhere. Please believe me.
Please see me again and then, if you dislike me, say so plainly. The flames in my breast were lighted by you; it is up to you to extinguish them. I can’t put them out by my unaided efforts. If we meet, if we can only meet, I know that I shall be saved. Were these the days of The Tale of Genji, what I am saying now would not be anything exceptional, but today—oh, my ambition is to become your mistress and the mother of your child.
If there is anyone who would laugh at letters like these, he is a man who derides a woman’s efforts to go on living, he mocks at a woman’s life. I am choking in the suffocating foul air of the harbor. I want to hoist my sails in the open sea, even though a tempest may be blowing. Furled sails are always dirty. Those who would deride me are so many furled sails. They can do nothing.
A nuisance of a woman. But in this matter, it is I who suffer the most. It is nonsensical for some outsider who has never suffered the least of what I have been going through to presume to make judgments while slackly drooping his ugly sails. I have no desire for others to take it on themselves to analyze my thoughts. I am without thoughts. I have never, not even once, acted on the basis of any doctrine or philosophy.
I am convinced that those people whom the world considers good and respects are all liars and fakes. I do not trust the world. My only ally is the tagged dissolute. The tagged dissolute. That is the only cross on which I wish to be crucified. Though ten thousand people criticize me, I can throw in their teeth my challenge: Are you not all the more dangerous for being without tags?
Do you understand?
There is no reason in love, and I have gone rather too far in offering you these rational-seeming arguments. I feel as if I am merely parroting my brother. All I want to say is that I await your visit. I want to see you again. That is all.
To wait. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one per cent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine per cent is just living in waiting. I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness. Empty. Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.
Thus every day, from morning to night, I wait in despair for something. I wish I could be glad that I was born, that I am alive, that there are people and a world.
Won’t you shove aside the morality that blocks you?
To M.C. (These are not the initials of My Chekhov.
I am not in love with an author. My Child.)
CHAPTER - FIVE / THE LADY
This summer I sent three letters to him. But no reply came. It seemed at the time that there was nothing else I could possibly do, and I put into the three letters all that was in my heart. I posted them with the feeling of one who leaps from a promontory into the raging billows of the sea, but although I waited a very long time, no answer came.
I casually inquired of my brother Naoji how that man was. Naoji replied that he was much the same as usual—that he spent every night in drunken carousals, that his literary productions consisted exclusively of works of an increasingly immoral nature, and that he was the object of the scorn and loathing of all decent citizens. Moreover, he had urged Naoji to start a publishing house, a suggestion which Naoji eagerly accepted. As a preliminary step, Naoji persuaded two or three novelists besides that person to appoint him as their agent, and the question now was whether or not they could unearth someone with capital to lend the project. As I listened to Naoji’s words, it became increasingly evident that not a particle of my odor had seeped into the atmosphere around the man I loved. It was not so much shame that I experienced as the feeling that the actual world was an unfamiliar organism utterly unlike the world of my imagination. I was assailed by a sensation of desolation more intense than anything I had previously known, as if I had been abandoned at dusk in an autumnal wasteland where no answering sound would ever come, however often I called. Is that, I wonder, what is meant by the pat phrase “disappointed love”? I asked myself if I were doomed to die, numbed by the night dews, alone in the wasteland as the sun dropped completely from sight. My shoulders and chest were fiercely shaken, and I was choked by a dry sobbing.
There is nothing left for me now but to go up to Tokyo, cost what it may, and see Mr. Uehara. My sails have been lifted, and my ship has put forth from the harbor. I can not wait any longer. I must go where I am going. These were my thoughts as I began secretly to prepare for the journey to Tokyo, only to have Mother’s condition take an unexpected turn.
One night she was racked by a terrible cough. When I took her temperature, it was already 102 degrees.
“It must be because it was so chilly today,” Mother murmured in between spasms of coughing. “Tomorrow I’ll be better.” But somehow it didn’t seem just a cough, and to be on the safe side I decided to have the village doctor pay a call the following day.
The next morning Mother’s temperature dropped to normal and her cough had much abated. All the same, I went to the doctor and asked him to examine Mother, describing her sudden weakening of late, her fever of the previous night, and my belief that there was more to her cough than a mere cold.
“I shall be calling presently,” the doctor said, adding, “and here is a gift for you.” He took three pears from a shelf in the corner of his reception room and offered them to me. He appeared a little after noon in his formal clothes. As usual he spent an interminable time in ausculation and percussion, at last turning to me with the words, “There is nothing to excite alarm. If your mother takes the medicine which I shall prescribe, she will recover.”
I found him curiously comic but controlled my smiles to ask, “How about injections?”
He answered gravely, “They will probably not be necessary. We have here to do with a cold, and if your mother remains quiet, I think we can get rid of it shortly.”
But even after a week had passed Mother’s temperature did not disappear. Her cough was better, but her temperature fluctuated between 99 in the morning and 102 degrees at night. Just at this juncture the doctor took to bed with an upset stomach. I went to his house for some medicine and took the occasion to describe Mother’s discouraging condition to the nurse, who transmitted my words to the doctor. “It’s an ordinary cold and should cause no anxiety,” was his reply. I was given a liquid medicine and a powder.
