Woman

The female spider, bathed in the light of a midsummer sun, sat motionless at the bottom of a crimson kōshin rose, as if deep in thought.

Then there came the sound of wings in the air, and in an instant a single honeybee dropped into the rose as though hurled there. The spider raised her eyes at once. In the still air of noon, the fading buzz of the bee's wings still left behind a faint vibration.

Before long, the female spider began, soundlessly, to move from the bottom of the flower. By then the bee, dusted all over with pollen, had already lowered its proboscis toward the nectar hidden beneath the stamens.

A few seconds of cruel silence passed.

Then the crimson petals of the kōshin rose slowly gave up the shape of the female spider behind the bee, drunk on nectar. In the next moment the spider sprang savagely at the bee's throat. Desperately beating its wings, the bee tried frantically to sting its enemy. The pollen, stirred up by those wings, whirled up thick into the sunlight. But the spider would not loosen her bite.

The struggle was brief.

Soon the bee lost the use of its wings. Then its legs went numb. At last its long proboscis convulsively jabbed at the empty air two or three times. That was the end of the tragedy. It was the merciless end of a tragedy no different from a human death. An instant later, the bee lay at the bottom of the crimson kōshin rose, its proboscis still outstretched. Wings and legs alike were all buried in fragrant pollen...

The female spider remained perfectly still and quietly began to suck the bee's blood.

The shameless light of the sun broke once more into the loneliness of noon that had returned to the rose, and shone upon the spider, triumphant in slaughter and plunder. Her belly, uncannily like gray satin; her eyes, recalling black glass beads; her ugly, jointed legs, stiff as though diseased with leprosy: the spider, almost like evil itself, crouched over the dead bee for what seemed forever in a sinister weight.

Such a cruel tragedy was repeated again and again after that. Yet amid the suffocating light and heat, the crimson kōshin roses went on blooming in wild beauty every day.

Then one noon, as if struck by an idea, the female spider slipped through the gaps between rose leaves and blossoms and climbed to the tip of a branch. There, at the end, was a bud withered by the steaming heat of the earth, its petals scorched by the sun and giving off a faint sweetness. When the spider had climbed all the way there, she began going back and forth tirelessly between the bud and the branch. At the same time, countless glossy white threads, partly entangling that half-withered bud, gradually wound themselves around the tip of the branch.

After a while, there hung a single cone-shaped sac, as though of stretched silk, dazzlingly white, blazing back the light of the midsummer sun.

When the web was finished, the spider laid countless eggs in the bottom of that delicate sac. Then she wove a thick carpet of thread across its mouth and, making her seat there, stretched above herself yet another ceiling, a gauzelike curtain. Like a domed pavilion, the curtain shut off the fierce gray spider from the blue noon sky, leaving only one small window. But the spider, now a mother after giving birth, lay her wasted body in the middle of that white chamber and seemed to have forgotten the rose, the sun, and the buzz of bees' wings. Alone, utterly alone, she simply sank into thought.

Several weeks passed.

Meanwhile, inside the spider's sac, the new lives asleep within the countless eggs awoke. The first to notice was that mother spider, lying unfed in the middle of the white chamber, now utterly aged. When she sensed the new lives stirring beneath the carpet of thread, she slowly moved her weakened legs and bit through the ceiling of the sac that separated mother and young. Innumerable spiderlings came pouring up into the chamber. Or rather, it was almost as if the carpet itself had broken apart into a hundred tiny living particles and begun to move.

The spiderlings at once slipped through the window of the domed pavilion and streamed out onto the branches of the kōshin rose, where sunlight and wind passed through. One cluster crowded together on the rose leaves, bearing the blazing summer heat. Another, as if curious, wandered into the rose blossoms, layered over and over with nectar's sweetness. Still another had already begun spinning threads, so fine they were almost invisible, between the rose branches that crisscrossed the blue sky. If they had possessed voices, that kōshin rose in the broad daylight would surely have rung and trembled, like violins hung in the treetops singing of themselves to the wind.

But before the window of that domed pavilion crouched the mother spider, thin as a shadow, all alone and desolate. More than that, no matter how long one waited, she did not so much as seem inclined to move a single leg. In the loneliness of the white chamber, beside the shriveled rosebud, the female spider that had given birth to countless young had, beneath the gauzelike ceiling of that place which was both birthing room and grave, died before anyone knew it, filled with the boundless joy of a mother who had fulfilled her calling. She, the woman of midsummer nature who had bitten that bee to death, almost like evil itself.

(April 1920)