Shadow

Yokohama.

Chen Cai, proprietor of the Nikka Trading Company, leaned both elbows of his suit against his desk and, with an extinguished cigar still between his teeth, was once again exposing his busy eyes to a towering mass of business papers.

Inside the room, where chintz curtains hung over the windows, the same lingering desolation of late summer still held sway, almost oppressively. The only thing that broke that desolation was the faint clatter of a typewriter that drifted in from time to time from beyond the door smelling of varnish.

After one stack of papers had been dealt with, Chen suddenly seemed to remember something and lifted the receiver of the desk telephone to his ear.

"Put me through to my house."

The words that escaped Chen's lips were Japanese spoken with a strangely deep reserve of force.

"Who is it? The nursemaid? Ask madam to come for a moment. Fusa? I'm going to Tokyo tonight. Yes, I'll stay there. Can't I come back? I won't possibly make the train. All right then, I'm counting on you. What? You had the doctor come? That's nothing but nervous exhaustion. Very good. Goodbye."

When Chen replaced the receiver, he clouded over for some reason, struck a match with his thick fingers, and began smoking the cigar he had been holding in his mouth.

...Cigarette smoke, the scent of flowers, the sound of knives and forks touching plates, off-key strains of Carmen welling up from a corner of the room—amid all that bustle Chen sat alone, stunned, with a glass of beer before him and his elbows on the table. Around him everything—customers, waiters, the electric fan—was in ceaseless motion. Yet only his gaze remained fixed, staring all the while at the face of the woman behind the cashier's desk.

To judge by her looks, the woman was not yet twenty. With a mirror hung on the wall behind her, she kept her pencil moving without pause, busily writing out bills. The curls on her forehead, the faint rouge on her cheeks, the subdued celadon-blue collar at her neck—

Draining his beer, Chen slowly rose with his great bulk and walked over to the cashier's desk.

"Mr. Chen, when are you going to buy me a ring?"

Even as she spoke, the woman's pencil kept moving.

"When that ring is gone."

Feeling in his pocket for change, Chen tilted his chin toward her finger. There, for the last two years already, was the engagement ring: a plain gold band with both ends clasped together.

"Then buy me one tonight."

In an instant the woman slipped the ring off her finger and tossed it down before him together with the bill.

"This is only a ring for self-defense."

On the asphalt outside the café, a cool summer night wind was flowing. As Chen mingled with the crowd, he looked up again and again at the stars in the city sky. And tonight every one of those stars seemed...

The sound of someone knocking at the door called Chen Cai's mind back to the reality of one year later.

"Come in."

Before the words had fully faded, the varnish-smelling door opened softly, and the pale-faced clerk Imanishi entered with a stillness almost eerie in its quiet.

"A letter has come."

Chen nodded in silence. There was such ill temper in his face that it did not allow Imanishi to say a word more. Imanishi gave a cool bow, left a single envelope behind, and noiselessly returned to the room beyond the door.

After the door had closed behind Imanishi, Chen threw his cigar into the ashtray and picked up the envelope from the desk. It was a white Western-style envelope with the address typed on it, a letter outwardly no different from an ordinary piece of business correspondence. Yet the moment he took it in hand, an expression of inexpressible disgust rose in Chen's face.

"Again."

Frowning beneath his thick brows, Chen clicked his tongue in irritation. Even so, he braced the heel of one shoe against the edge of the desk, leaned almost flat back in his swivel chair, and tore the envelope open without even using a paper knife.

"Sir: As your wife does not preserve her chastity, and though I have warned you repeatedly... the fact that up to this day you have taken no decisive measures whatsoever... therefore your wife continues day and night with her former lover... I, as a Japanese, cannot but feel boundless sympathy for Madam Fusa, once a waitress in a coffeehouse, now the wife of a Chinese gentleman such as yourself... If, henceforth, you do not divorce your wife... you will become the laughingstock of all... I trust you will not take my humble sincerity ill... Respectfully, from your faithful friend."

The letter slipped helplessly from Chen's hand.

...Leaning over the table, Chen gazed in the evening light filtering through the lace curtains at a woman's gold watch. Yet the letters engraved inside the lid were apparently not Fusa's initials.

"What's this?"

Fusa, only a few days married, stood before the Western dresser and sent a smile across the table to her husband.

"Mr. Tanaka gave it to me. Didn't you know? From the warehouse company—"

Next, two ring boxes appeared on the table. When he opened the white velvet lids, one held a pearl ring, the other a turquoise one.

"Mr. Kume and Mr. Nomura."

Then came a coral-bead netsuke.

"Old-fashioned, isn't it? Mr. Kubota gave it to me."

After that—whatever came out—Chen simply kept looking steadily at his wife's face and said thoughtfully,

"These are all your spoils of war. You must take good care of them."

At that, in the evening light, Fusa gave him another brilliant smile.

"Then your spoils of war too."

At the time he had been happy. But now...

Chen shuddered once and lowered the feet he had propped on the desk. The bell of the telephone had suddenly startled his ears.

"It's me. All right. Put me through."

Facing the telephone, he wiped the sweat from his brow irritably.

"Who is this? I know it's the Satomi Detective Agency. Who from the office? Mr. Yoshii? Good. Your report? What came there? A doctor? And after that? That may be so. Then come meet me at the station. No, I'll certainly return on the last train. Be sure not to make a mistake. Goodbye."

After setting down the receiver, Chen Cai sat silent for a while, as if stunned out of himself. Then, when he looked at the hands of the clock on the desk, he pressed the bell-push half mechanically.

Clerk Imanishi responded at once, extending his thin upper body from behind the slightly opened door.

"Mr. Imanishi. Tell Mr. Zheng this: tonight, if possible, I must ask him to go to Tokyo in my place."

At some point Chen's voice had lost all force. But Imanishi, as always, merely gave a cool bow and at once disappeared beyond the door.

Meanwhile, the veiled western sunlight, gradually striking the chintz curtains, began to add a dull redness to the light in the room. At the same time a large fly, strayed in from who knew where, began tracing irregular circles around Chen, who sat vaguely resting his cheek on his hand, making a heavy buzzing with its wings.

...Kamakura.

In the reception room of Chen Cai's house too, with lace curtains hanging inside the windows, the end of a late-summer day was drawing near. Though the daylight had faded, the oleanders still in full bloom beyond the curtains gave the cool-seeming air of the room a pleasant brightness.

Leaning back in a wicker chair by the wall, Fusa stroked the calico cat on her lap and let her languid gaze wander over the oleanders outside the window.

"Master won't be coming home tonight either, ma'am?"

The speaker was the old maidservant, who was clearing away the tea things from the table beside her.

"Yes, tonight will be lonely too."

"If only you were not ill, ma'am, it would be easier to bear—"

"But my illness, you know, is only tired nerves—that's what Dr. Yamauchi said again today. If I only sleep well for two or three nights—oh!"

The old servant lifted startled eyes to her mistress. For on Fusa's childlike face there had suddenly appeared, for no clear reason, a look of fear unlike any before, flooding unmistakably into her eyes.

"What is it, ma'am?"

"No, it's nothing. Nothing at all, only—"

Fusa forced herself to smile.

"Just now someone seemed to be peering into this room from that window—softly—"

But when, a moment later, the old woman looked out through the window, all she saw was the oleander hedge trembling in the breeze, visible through the empty lawn of the deserted garden.

"How unpleasant. It must be that young gentleman from the villa next door playing tricks again."

"No, it wasn't the boy next door at all. Somehow it seemed like someone I've seen before—yes, when nurse and I went to Hase once, that young man in the hunting cap who followed behind us. Or perhaps... perhaps I imagined it."

As if thinking something over, Fusa spoke the last words very slowly.

"If it was that man, what shall we do? Master isn't coming home—and perhaps we should send old manservant to the police?"

"My, how timid you are. Let that fellow come by the dozen—I am not frightened in the least. But if—if it was only my imagination—"

The old woman blinked in puzzlement.

"If it was only my imagination, perhaps I may go mad just like this."

"Ma'am, you are always joking."

Smiling in relief, the old servant began once more to put away the tea things.

"No, it's because you don't know. Lately, whenever I'm alone, I feel as though someone is standing behind me. Standing there, staring fixedly at me—"

Fusa broke off mid-sentence; perhaps drawn in by her own words, her eyes suddenly took on a gloomy look.

...In the upstairs bedroom, where the electric light had been turned off, a dimness faintly scented with perfume spread through the room. Only the uncovered window looked vaguely bright, no doubt because the moon was out. Bathed in that light, Fusa stood alone by the window, looking down at the pine grove below.

Her husband would not return tonight either. The servants had all gone to bed. In the moonlit garden outside, the wind too had fallen still. The dull distant sound that came at long intervals from within that stillness must be the sea continuing to roar.

Fusa remained standing for some time. Then, little by little, a strange sensation began to awaken in her. It was the feeling that someone stood behind her, concentrating a fixed gaze upon her.

But there was no reason for anyone to be in the bedroom besides herself. If there were someone—no, she had certainly bolted the door before bed. Then why did it feel like this? Of course. It had to be because her nerves were exhausted. Looking down at the pale pine grove, she tried again and again to reason herself back into calm. Yet the sense that someone was watching her only grew stronger, however desperately she denied it.

At last Fusa made up her mind and, trembling with fear, looked back over her shoulder. But in the bedroom there was indeed no one—not even the familiar calico cat. So the feeling that someone was there had simply been the work of diseased nerves—or so she thought, but only for a single instant. At once, as before, she felt that some unseen thing was hidden somewhere in the dimness filling the room. Worse still—far worse than before—the eyes of that unknown thing were now burning a direct stare into her face as she stood with the window behind her.

Fighting the trembling in her whole body, Fusa reached for the nearest wall and in a flash twisted the electric switch. At that instant the familiar bedroom cast off the half-dark mingled with moonlight and sprang into reassuring reality. The bed, the Western dresser, the washstand—everything now stood out in the light as clearly as daytime, almost joyfully so. And not one thing had changed since before she married Chen a year ago. Faced with such happy surroundings, even the most sinister apparition—no, yet the mysterious something, undaunted by the dazzling electric light, still kept those eyes fixed unwaveringly upon her face. She covered her face with both hands and tried in a frenzy to cry out. But for some reason no voice came. At that moment there rose over her heart a terror beyond all experience...

Fusa escaped with a sigh from the memory of a week before. At the movement, the calico cat on her knees jumped down, arched its beautiful back, and yawned contentedly.

"Anyone can get such feelings," the old servant said, as though soothing a child. "That old manservant was pruning the pine in the garden one day, broad daylight it was, and he said he heard a crowd of children laughing up in the sky. And yet, as you see, far from going mad, he spends his free time scolding me as much as ever."

Hearing this, something like a smile finally touched Fusa's cheeks.

"That too must have been the young gentleman next door up to mischief. If he startles you with things like that, then old manservant is timid too. Oh, and while we've been chatting, night has fallen at last. It's all very well since Master isn't coming home tonight—but the bath? Nurse?"

"It's all ready, ma'am. If you like, I'll just go and see how it is."

"Very well. I'll go in at once."

At last looking somewhat lighter of heart, Fusa rose from the wicker chair by the wall.

"I wonder whether the young gentlemen next door will set off fireworks again tonight."

After the old woman quietly went out behind Fusa, the reception room was left in dim emptiness, the oleanders now no longer visible. Then the little calico cat, forgotten by them both, suddenly seemed to discover something and sprang at once to the doorway. There it made a motion as though rubbing its body against someone's legs. But in the twilight spread through the room, nothing appeared to be there except the two eyes of the cat, giving off an eerie phosphorescence.

...Yokohama.

In the night watch room of the Nikka Trading Company, the clerk Imanishi lay stretched on a long bench under a dim electric light with the latest magazine spread open before him. Presently, however, he flung the magazine with a slap onto the nearby table, then carefully drew a photograph from the inner pocket of his jacket. Gazing at it, he kept a smile of evident happiness on his pale cheeks.

The photograph was of Chen Cai's wife Fusa, posed half-length with her hair dressed in a peach-split style.

Kamakura.

When the whistle of the last down train rose into the starry moonlit sky, Chen Cai came out of the ticket gate and remained standing alone behind the others, carrying a folding bag, looking over the desolate station grounds. Then from a bench against the dimly lit wall an unusually tall man in a suit rose, dragging a thick rattan cane, and ambled over to Chen. Removing his hunting cap briskly, he offered a greeting in a low voice.

"Mr. Chen? I am Yoshii."

Chen looked almost expressionlessly at the man's face.

"You've gone to some trouble today."

"I telephoned a little while ago, but—"

"After that, nothing happened?"

There was a force in Chen's tone that seemed to knock the other man's words aside.

"Nothing. After the doctor left, madam talked with the old nurse until dusk. Then she bathed and ate, and until around ten o'clock she seemed to be listening to the gramophone."

"No visitors came?"

"No, not one."

"When did you stop watching?"

"At eleven twenty."

Yoshii's replies were crisp.

"There are no trains after that until the last one, are there?"

"None. Neither up nor down."

"Good, thank you. When you get back, give my regards to Mr. Satomi."

Touching the brim of his straw hat, Chen strode out toward the gravel outside the station without so much as looking at Yoshii as he removed his cap again. His manner was so excessively abrupt that Yoshii, watching his retreating figure, gave a slight shrug. But at once, as though he thought nothing of it, he began whistling cheerfully and dragged his thick rattan cane off toward the inn in front of the station.

Kamakura.

An hour later Chen Cai found himself pressing his ear against the door of the bedroom he shared with his wife, listening like a thief for any sign within. In the corridor outside, a suffocating darkness sealed off everything around him. In that darkness there was only one point of faint light: the glow from the electric lamp beyond the door leaking through the keyhole.

Struggling to suppress the pounding of a heart almost fit to burst, Chen focused all his attention into the ear pressed flat against the door. But from within the bedroom he heard no voices at all. That silence itself became, for Chen, an even more unbearable torment. In the depths of the darkness before him he seemed to see once more, in perfect clarity, the unexpected event that had taken place on his way here from the station.

...Beneath interlacing pine branches stretched a narrow path, the sand upon it damp with dew. Though innumerable stars shone clear in the great sky, they rarely cast any light into this place where the pine boughs overlapped. Yet the nearness of the sea was evident from the salt breeze flowing through the sparse pampas grass. For some time Chen had been walking there alone, breathing the scent of pine resin, stronger with the night, treading carefully through that lonely darkness.

Then he suddenly stopped and peered suspiciously ahead. It was not only because the brick wall of his house had come into sight a few steps before him, black against the dark. It was because around that old-fashioned wall overgrown with ivy he had just heard the stealthy sound of footsteps.

But however hard he peered, the figure itself could not be seen, the darkness among the pines and grass being too deep. What he realized at once was only that the footsteps were not coming toward him but going away.

"Fool. It's not as though I'm the only one with the right to walk this path."

Chen tried inwardly to scold himself, already beginning to give way to suspicion. Yet this path led nowhere except to the rear gate of his house. If that was so—just as he thought it, Chen's ear caught, mingled with the sea breeze then flowing by, the faint sound of the rear gate opening.

"Strange. When I saw it this morning, that rear gate was certainly locked."

At that thought, Chen Cai, like a hunting dog that has caught scent of its quarry, moved softly toward the rear gate, keeping his senses tautly alive. But the gate was shut. Even when he pushed it with all his might, it showed no sign of yielding; apparently sometime in the meantime it had been locked again just as before. Leaning against the gate, Chen stood blankly for a while in the pampas grass burying his knees.

"Was the sound of the gate opening only some delusion of my ears?"

But the footsteps from before no longer sounded from anywhere. Above the wall crowded with ivy, his house rose quietly into the starry sky, no light falling on it. Then, all at once, sadness welled up in Chen's heart. He could not clearly say why it was so sad. Only, as he stood there listening to the scant cries of insects, tears began of themselves to run coldly down his cheeks.

"Fusa."

Chen almost groaned aloud the beloved name of his wife.

At that very instant, in one of the rooms on the high second floor, a brilliant electric light unexpectedly flared on.

"That window—that is—"

Chen caught his breath sharply and, clutching the nearest pine trunk, stretched upward to look at the second-floor window. The window—the bedroom window upstairs—stood with its glass door flung completely open, revealing the brightly lit room beyond. And the light pouring from it made the tops of the pines growing inside the wall seem to float against the dim dark sky.

But that was not the only strange thing. Before long, at that second-floor window, there appeared the hazy outline of a single figure, seemingly turned this way. Unfortunately, with the electric light behind him, it was impossible to make out whose face it was. But at least one thing was certain: the figure was not a woman. Chen involuntarily seized the ivy on the wall, and, bracing his collapsing body against it, let out a broken, anguished whisper.

“That letter—surely not—no, not Fusako—”

A moment later, Chen Ts’ai climbed over the wall with ease, slipped through the pines in the garden, and successfully crept beneath the second floor to the parlor window below. There, a thick clump of oleander, fresh and wet with dew on its flowers and leaves, . . .

In the pitch-dark outer corridor, Chen bit his dry lips and strained to listen with a jealousy sharpened still further. For just then, beyond the door, there came two or three cautious footfalls, like the ones he had heard a moment before, sounding on the floor.

The footsteps vanished at once. But to Chen’s overwrought nerves, before long there came the sound of a window being shut, stabbing his eardrums. After that—there was another long silence.

That silence, like a garrote, wrung cold greasy sweat out onto Chen’s colorless brow. With trembling hands he fumbled for the doorknob. But the knob at once told him the door was locked.

Then this time there came the sudden clatter of something falling—perhaps a comb or a hairpin. Yet no matter how intently he listened, Chen could not hear the sound of anyone picking it up.

Each of these noises struck Chen’s heart, literally, one by one. He shuddered every time, yet stubbornly kept his ear pressed to the bedroom door. That his agitation had reached its limit was clear even from the mad, wild glances he cast about him now and then.

After several agonizing seconds had passed, he heard, faintly, a sigh from beyond the door. And immediately after that, it seemed that someone quietly climbed onto the bed.

If things had continued in that state for one minute more, Chen might have fainted where he stood frozen before the door. But just then, a dim thread of light leaking from the door, fine as a spider’s strand, caught his eye like a revelation from heaven. In an instant Chen dropped to the floor and fixed an avid gaze through the keyhole beneath the knob into the room.

At that instant, before Chen’s eyes there opened a scene accursed forever. . . . . . . .

Yokohama.

The secretary, Imanishi, returned Fusako’s photograph to the inner pocket of his jacket, then quietly rose from the sofa. Then, as usual without making a sound, he went into the next room, which was completely dark.

With the sound of a switch being turned, the next room at once lit up. The light of the desk lamp there illuminated Imanishi, who, no one knew when, was already seated before the typewriter.

Imanishi’s fingers immediately began moving with dizzying speed. At the same time the typewriter, hammering out an unbroken clatter, began to spit out a sheet of paper covered with broken lines of text.

“Dear Sir, I believe there is no further need to inform you that your wife has not preserved her chastity. Yet you, blinded by excessive devotion . . .”

At that instant Imanishi’s face was a mask made entirely of hatred.

Kamakura.

The door to Chen’s bedroom had been smashed open. But beyond it, the bed, the wardrobe, the washstand, and even the bright electric light were all exactly as they had been an instant before.

Chen Ts’ai stood motionless in the corner of the room, gazing at the two figures collapsed together before the bed. One of them was Fusako—or rather, what until a moment ago had been Fusako. That “thing,” its whole face swollen purple, stared at the ceiling through half-open eyes, its tongue protruding a little. The other was Chen Ts’ai. Chen Ts’ai identical in every fraction to the Chen Ts’ai standing in the corner of the room. This one, sprawled atop what had been Fusako, had buried the fingers of both hands in the other’s throat so deeply that even the nails could not be seen. And upon her exposed breasts he rested a head whose life or death could not be told.

After several minutes of silence had passed, the Chen Ts’ai on the floor slowly raised his heavy body, still gasping painfully. But just as he managed to sit up, he sank down again onto a chair beside him, almost collapsing into it.

At that moment the Chen Ts’ai in the corner quietly left the wall and walked over to what had been Fusako. Then he lowered eyes of immeasurable sadness upon that face, swollen purple.

The Chen Ts’ai on the chair noticed the other presence at once and sprang up from the chair like a madman. On his face—in his bloodshot eyes—there flashed a dreadful murderous intent. But the moment he got a clear look at the other, that murderous intent visibly changed into an indescribable terror.

“Who are you?”

He stood rigid before the chair, his voice choked almost to suffocation.

“The one who was walking in the pine grove a moment ago—the one who slipped quietly in through the back gate—the one who stood by this window looking out—and the one who killed my wife—Fusako—”

His words broke off once, then rose again in a harsh, hoarse voice.

“It was you, wasn’t it? Who are you?”

But the other Chen Ts’ai said nothing in reply. Instead he lifted his eyes and looked sadly at the other Chen Ts’ai. Under that gaze, the Chen Ts’ai standing before the chair seemed transfixed; with eyes grotesquely wide, he began inch by inch to back toward the wall. Yet even then his lips kept moving soundlessly from time to time, as if repeating, “Who are you?”

Meanwhile the other Chen Ts’ai knelt beside what had been Fusako and gently slipped a hand around her slender neck. Then he pressed his lips to the cruel finger marks still left there.

In the bedroom, filled with bright electric light and stiller than a tomb vault, there soon began to be heard a faint sound of weeping, broken and intermittent. And there, the two Chen Ts’ais—the Chen Ts’ai standing by the wall as well as the Chen Ts’ai kneeling on the floor—both had buried their faces in their hands . . .

Tokyo.

When the film “Shadow” suddenly vanished, I was sitting beside a woman in a box seat at a movie theater.

“Is that picture over already, I wonder?”

The woman turned melancholy eyes toward me. They reminded me of Fusako’s eyes in “Shadow.”

“Which picture?”

“That one just now. The one called ‘Shadow.’”

Without a word, the woman handed me the program that lay on her lap. But no matter where I looked, there was no title called “Shadow” to be found in it.

“Then maybe I was dreaming. Even so, isn’t it odd that I don’t remember falling asleep? And besides, that ‘Shadow’ was such a strange picture.—”

Briefly, I told her the outline of “Shadow.”

“I’ve seen that picture too.”

When I had finished, the woman replied in a voice almost too soft to hear, a trace of a smile moving in the depths of her lonely eyes.

“Let’s both try not to mind a thing like ‘Shadow.’”

(July 14, 1920)