More Stories by Japanese Women Writers: An Anthology

An Anthology

Kyoko Siden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317464358
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

This anthology introduces sixteen modern Japanese women writers spanning a century in time and a wide range of life circumstances and literary styles. No other collection offers usch a diversity of women's voices

1

This Child

Higuchi Ichiyō

If I were to speak up and say that my child is adorable, surely everyone would enjoy a good laugh. They would laugh because there is no one who thinks her own child uncomely, and it is comical for one to carry on as if only she possessed a splendid jewel. And so I will refrain from putting into words such an ostentatious thought, yet in my heart it is not even a matter of adorable or uncomely—I must restrain myself from bringing my hands together and offering up a prayer of thanksgiving!

This child could be called my personal guardian angel. Yes, he wears an adorable smile on his face and he passes the time in carefree play; still I cannot possibly describe the immensity of everything his carefree, smiling face has taught me. Certainly, the many books I read in school and the things my teachers taught have helped me, and when I am in the thick of events I often look back on them and think, “Yes, that was so,” or “This was just so”; yet none of those things can equal the way this child’s smiling face can immediately, before my eyes, stop my rushing feet dead in their tracks or calm my hysterical heart. Unlike a great scholar’s loud, brainy exhortations, the face of this child when he is asleep, innocently resting on his pillow, both hands drawn up toward his shoulders, causes my eyes to fill with tears that well up from the bottom of my heart, and in spite of my stubborn self-pride, I become unable to make my usual boasts about how I don’t much like children.

He uttered his first cries in this world late last year, as the year’s end approached. When I think of it now, I find it shameful, but since at that point I still felt lost, as though I were drifting through space, when I first saw this red face, I thought, “Oh, why did you have to be born healthy? If only you had died, I could have returned to my parents’ home as soon as I had recuperated and not have to spend another minute at this husband’s side. Why did you have to be born so healthy? I hate it! I hate everything! Now must I be chained to this marriage come what may and live for all ages in this darkness without even a glimmering of hope?” In this spiteful way, I pitied myself. Though people congratulated me, I myself felt not the slightest happiness. I could only think it sad that my life was gradually going to grow more and more unbearable.

Try putting another person in the position I was in then—no matter how well resigned she had been to her fate, she too would find this world tiresome and uninteresting. Without a doubt, yes, I am certain she could not stop the words from escaping her lips; brazen hearted me would not be the only one to exclaim, “Brutal! Cruel! How can heaven allow this?” I was certain I had done not even the slightest wrong, nor made any mistakes—all our clashes had arisen out from my husband’s heart alone. I hated him with a fury. Furthermore, I resented my own father (actually, my stepfather, an uncle to whom I ought to have felt grateful) because he had purposely picked out this sort of husband, turning my entire life into agony. I most resented the gods or whoever it was that had decided my fate, like tossing the blind off a cliff—me, who in the first place had never done any wrong, who had obediently gone off to be married as she was told. I decided that the world was a loathsome place.

An indomitable spirit is a good thing. Without it, one cannot overcome difficulties. If you have a spineless, gentle disposition, there will always be some who will say you are like a sea slug. But there are also times and circumstances when it simply will not do to display an indomitable spirit. I suppose it would be fine if one could understand the particulars of a situation and keep one’s strong-spirited nature bound up inside. From the perspective of someone watching, my sort of unconcealed opposition to any yielding must have appeared disgraceful. My husband must have felt even more keenly than I did about him that his wife was unworthy. Even so, at that time I was unable to reflect on myself, much less to guess what was in the heart of my husband. When he displayed an unhappy face, it instantly offended me, and the slightest rebuke from him set off a blazing annoyance. Although I would not dare to rebut his words, for a time I would fall silent and would eat nothing. I would also often burst into anger at the maidservants, and more than a few times I left the bedding out and spent the whole day lying supine on it. I am a crybaby, and for all my stubbornness, I cried my eyes out, biting the hem of my quilt. Mine were tears of utter bitterness, bitter tears brought on by my own stubborn spirit, with neither rhyme nor reason.

When I first came here as his bride three years ago, we were quite friendly for a time, and neither of us had any complaints. But growing used to each other is both a good thing and a bad thing, for both our selfish wills came out. Any number of whims and desires bubbled up to the surface, causing all sorts of grumbling, and furthermore, because I am by nature impertinent, against my better judgment I even went so far as to complain about those things my husband did away from home. “You always conceal things from me, and never tell me even the slightest bit about things going on outside our house. Your heart is miles away from me!” I said spitefully. “I do not treat you like a stranger. Don’t I tell you everything?” he answered, laughing off my complaint. But I could plainly see he was hiding something, and my heart could not bear it. When you become suspicious about one thing, you begin to question ten or twenty others. Morning and night, I began to think, “What? Another lie!” Everything somehow became strangely jumbled in my mind, and I could not come to any resolution. When I look back now, I am certain that he was concealing things. But, after all, I was a woman, a chatterbox, and he wasn’t about to speak to me about his work and such. Surely, even now he is hiding a great many things. I accept and believe that to be a certainty, yet now I feel no bitterness. I know that refusing to discuss such matters is my husband’s strong point, and that his refusal to take heed of my tears and my anger was owing to my husband’s fine character. If by any chance he would have spoken of his official business to the frivolous woman I was then, what silly things I might have done! Even with that not being the case, a great many people, plaintiffs and defendants both, used our servants to relay dubious gifts to my hands, along with messages that they were in great distress over such and such a circumstance and that the judge’s decision was a matter of life and death to them. That I did not accept any of the gifts was not some just refusal by the proper wife of Justice Yamaguchi Noboru. To the contrary, it was because, engrossed in our domestic quarrels, I had no space in my heart to even think of broaching such topics with my husband. Rather than taking up such matters with him and receiving meaningless hackneyed answers in return, simply remaining silent I thought was by far the smarter course. In this way, fortunately, I was able to escape the stain of having accepted bribes. Still, the distance between my husband and me only grew, the clouds between us thickened, and we became two who could no longer understand each other’s hearts. When I think of it now, I realize that this all stemmed from the way I treated him, and there is no doubt that I handled things badly. The reason my husband’s heart wandered astray was that my own heart had departed from its proper path, and now I shed unending tears of regret.

At the very worst point in our relationship, when we had utterly turned our backs on each other, I didn’t ask and he didn’t tell me where he was going when he stepped out. If, during his absence, a message arrived for him from somewhere, no matter how urgent the matter, I never cut open the seal. Instead, I sent the messenger away with a note acknowledging receipt, as if some blockhead, rather than a dutiful wife, was watching the house during the master’s absence, and I indifferently tossed the message somewhere. When he returned, my husband was of course furious. He at first scolded and admonished me, he remonstrated, and then attempted to console me, but the roots of my obstinacy were sunk too deep. Using the words “You hide things from me!” as a shield, I descended into a sulk where a few kind words could no longer move me, and then my husband would get disgusted. It is fine when a house reverberates with quarrelsome words, but when it reaches the point of silent mutual hatred, when the house becomes nothing more than a roof, ceiling, and four walls, it is colder and more desolate than a night spent with the evanescent dew in a field. It is a mystery that the tears I shed in those days did not freeze.

When you think about it, people are self-centered creatures. During good times, they remember nothing, and only in trying and unpleasant times do they dwell on the past or on the future they are facing—on how very promising, outstanding, and satisfying it was or will be. As a person thinks such things, the present becomes more and more hateful, and she wants somehow to escape from it, to cut away these fetters. Without fail, she thinks that if she could only be freed from this, how beautiful and good would be the place at which she could arrive. Because of this, I too was lost in dreams such as this—I was certain that it was not my destiny to end up in such misfortune; in the days before I married, when I still lived the life of the adopted daughter of the Komuro family, how many people kindly made arrangements for me and arranged introductions to potential suitors (among whom were the distinguished navy man Ushioda and the fair-complexioned Dr. Hosoi, whom I nearly married). To then be married off to this taciturn husband must have been some sort of temporary mistake. Simply to carry on with this mistake and to pass a worthless life was wretched, I thought. I made no attempt to rectify my own warped heart, but instead looked with hostility upon the people who had arranged these matters.

With so irrational a wife, one who treated him coldly, no husband could be so fine as to treat her with kindness. When my husband returned home from his office, I went out to greet him, according to the rules of conduct, yet when I met him I spoke not one heartfelt word, but instead I put on the blunt airs of one ready to say, if you mean to be angry, go ahead and be angry, do anything you please—until my husband could no longer bear it and suddenly rose to his feet and left the house. His destination was always the same: some red lantern in the licensed quarter, or a tiny assignation room at some rendezvous teahouse. This angered me and intensified my bitterness, but to tell the truth, it was I who had poorly pleased him. He went off to seek such amusements because he could not bear the unhappiness in our home. In this way, I drove him to profligacy. My husband became a noted man-about-town outside our house.

My husband was not like the pampered son of some wealthy family, floating off into ecstasy while being flattered by geishas; his heart was not in it. Instead, you could say he was only doing it to check his temper, as a sort of diversion, and when he drank sake, he did not become pleasantly intoxicated; instead his face would grow pale and blue veins would appear on his forehead.

When he returned home, his speaking voice was hard-hearted and loud, and he would fly off the handle and scold the maidservants on the slightest pretext. Although he did not scold me, he would glare angrily at my face with his grouchiness (of which my gentle husband now has none) and his terrifying, horrid expression, and with me at his side also seething in anger, our servants couldn’t bear it. Generally, we changed maidservants about twice a month. On each occasion, more of our belongings would disappear, so that the destruction and filching of our property was enormous. I lamented to myself, “Why is it that only unfeeling people gather around me? Is the whole world such an unfeeling mass? When people draw near me, do they all purposely labor to annoy me? Whether I look right or left, I see not a single trustworthy face. It’s horrible!” I abandoned myself to despair and made no attempt to treat those I met with due civility. When my husband’s colleagues came to pay a call, I wouldn’t lift a finger to serve them until he specifically ordered me to do so, and even then I sent only the maidservants into the parlor, making some excuse about a headache or a bad tooth, I carried on with my selfish conduct regardless of whether or not we had visitors. I didn’t even respond when he called for me! I wonder how people looked on me; some may have gone so far as to judge me with words such as “No doubt, Yamaguchi married himself into a hundred years’ blight!” or “His wife is the most despicable woman!”

Around that time, if my husband had said he would divorce me, I would have taken leave of him without giving it a second thought, and shutting my eyes to my own wrongdoing, I would have concocted some nonsensical reason such as, “If the gods have decided to make me such an ill-fated, pitiful wretch, then I can do nothing about it. Do what you will; I will follow my own dictates, and if things should turn out badly, then they will turn out badly. If they should turn out well, it will be a godsend.” I shudder now when I think what would have become of me. Thankfully, my husband did not take the drastic step of serving me with notice of divorce, and for some reason decided to keep me around. I don’t know whether he thought that, instead of simply divorcing me in a fit of mounting anger, he could better torment me by forcing me to remain forever in this cage. But now, when I have no bitterness, and especially none toward my husband, I know that the reason today’s pleasures are pleasing, the reason I have come to understand things, is that he made me suffer so—it became possible only by my passing through that experience. When I think of these things, I realize that not one person did me any harm—not even Haya, the serving maid who walked about hurriedly and pertly, revealing my faults to the world; nor even Katsu, the cook who served no purpose other than to talk back to me. I ought to refer to them all as my benefactors. Now I am surrounded with only good maids, and I hear their compliments (even if they may be lies) about how no mistress treats her maids better than I do. If this is so, it is because I realized that the maids’ poor service was a reflection of my own heart. There is no villain in this world who torments people without any reason, and even the gods do not send misery down on people who from head to toe contain not one whit of wickedness. The reason I can say this is that even someone like me, who handled everything around her unwisely, who was a good-for-nothing with no redeeming feature, yet whose heart remained stainless: even one such as I could be granted something as adorable and beautiful as this boy.

When I was about to give birth to this boy, I was still enveloped in a fog. It didn’t appear that this fog would lift easily even after the birth. But for some reason, when he raised his first cry at birth, my body was filled with adoration and love, and though I bemoaned my fate, if someone had made to take him away, I would have abandoned my obstinacy and not allowed anyone to touch him—he belonged to me and no one else—and I would have smothered him in hugs.

That my husband and I think the same way was first shown to me by this child. I would hug the child, I would kiss his cheeks and say, “Baby is not Dada’s, Baby is Mama’s alone. Even if Mama goes off somewhere, Mama won’t leave Baby behind. Baby is mine, mine!” The baby smiled, as if he somehow understood, and I thought that this cheerful adorable boy was not at all like his cruel-hearted father. I had decided that the child was mine, but when my husband returned home from somewhere with an unhappy expression, he would sit down at the baby’s pillow side, and with an unsteady hand he would hold up a pinwheel or shake a rattle, and, rubbing his dark face as though he were afraid he might weep, my husband would say, “In all our house, only Baby cheers me.” As I watched this, worrying that the baby might cry or be afraid, I found that the baby smiled and grinned at my husband in the same way he had at me. One time, my husband, twirling his beard between his fingers, said, “Do you think this child is adorable?” “Of course,” I answered. “In that case, you’re adorable too,” he said, a pleasantry entirely out of his usual character. He laughed in a loud voice, and his face at that moment bore an undeniable resemblance to this child’s features. He was adorable; how could I have spent all this time hating my husband? If I treat him well, he treats me well. They say that children are sometimes the wisest teachers; I have been taught everything about life by this child, a boy who has yet to speak his first words!

________________

“Kono ko” (1895). Translated from Nihon no Katei magazine (1895) by Michael K. Bourdaghs. Translation copyright 2011 by Michael K. Bourdaghs.

2

Her Daily Life

Tamura Toshiko

I

She was twenty-one years old when she married Nitta.

After they came to know each other by chance at a certain place, Nitta began to fall in love with her. Masako too was in love with the man. He wished to marry her, but around that time Masako was feeling doubts about marriage because of apprehensions not uncommon among intelligent, modern young women who were capable of thinking about their ego. It was not that she was afraid of marriage; rather, she was thinking too hard about her postmarital self. Misgivings about how she would be treated by the man after marriage, in particular, made the young Masako turn an inquiring eye toward all sorts of married lives in society.

There, all she found were cases of humiliation of women, about which she could only feel indignant. She noticed a thick chain that wound around each woman’s waist. Masako saw nothing but the pale, ghostly faces of those who had completely lost themselves. One woman was so busy washing baby diapers all day from morning to night that she panted unhealthily when pumping a mere bucket of water. Another was the man’s absolute servant. In each case, the woman’s heart was compressed by her husband or children, and the blood of all those living women, which should course freshly through the veins, was made muddy and sour like sewer water. They had no leisure to think reflectively about such things as pure love. They knew nothing else but to busily direct attention toward their children with the kinds of vulgar, instinctive love that dogs and cats lavish on the young they bore. Moreover, women had no leisure to think about their responsibility for their homes. Even for their housework they felt no responsibility. They merely laid hands unconsciously, as if in a daze, on chores that pressed on them. Indeed, miscellaneous duties were heaped like a mountain before family women. The tattered clothes of men’s lifetime piled up day after day before women without a moment’s pause. Daily chores endlessly continued hour after hour with hardly any boundaries. Thus, women were too exhausted to discover the greatest meaning called responsibility in their lives. Like a doll on a float that advances in swimming motions as it is pulled from the front and pushed from the back, women, with their souls totally closed, passed one blind day af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. This Child
• 2. Her Daily Life
• 3. The Song the Owl God Himself Sang: “Silver Droplets Fall Fall All Around”
• 4. Miss Cricket
• 5. Thorn
• 6. Masks of Whatchamacallit
• 7. Water’s Edge
• 8. Cherry Blossom Train
• 9. The Strange Story of a Pumpkin
• 10. Mama Drinks Her Tea
• 11. Transit
• 12. The Tidal Hour
• 13. The Tale of Wind and Water
• 14. Stars Scintillating in My Eyes
• 15. Fiction Within Fiction: “Shōno Yoriko, Fiction”
• 16. You People’s Love Is Near Death
• About the Authors
• About the Editors and Translators