A Strange Reunion

I

O-Ren was set up in a kept house at Yokoami in Honjo in the early winter of 1895.

The house, overlooking the river by Okurabashi Bridge, was a very cramped one-story place. But if you looked across the water from the little garden, there were thickets and woods spreading over the whole stretch of Otakegura, where Ryogoku Station stands now, shutting out the drizzly sky; so for a place in the middle of town, it offered a view unusually quiet and not without a certain charm. Yet for that very reason, on nights when her patron did not come, it often felt unbearably lonely.

"Nanny, what is that cry?"

"That, ma'am? That's a night heron."

Keeping watch over the lamp with the half-blind old serving woman, O-Ren would sometimes exchange such uneasy words as these.

Makino, her patron, came almost every other day, even in the daytime, stopping by on his way back from the office in the sturdy figure of an army first lieutenant paymaster. Of course it was no rarity, either, for him to slip away after dark from his main household on the far side of Umayabashi Bridge. Makino had not only a wife already, but also two children, a boy and a girl.

At this time O-Ren, her hair dressed in a marumage style, spent nearly every evening pouring sake for Makino across the long brazier. On the little table between them there were usually neat small dishes of dried mullet roe and sea-cucumber entrails.

At such times her former life was apt to rise vividly in O-Ren's mind. When she remembered that lively house and the faces of her companions there, she felt all the more keenly how helpless she was, having drifted to this distant foreign place. And sometimes the body of Makino, who had grown even stouter than before, would suddenly stir in her a strange blaze of hatred.

Makino, cheerful all the while, would sip away little by little from his cup. And one of his drinking habits was to say something joking, peer into O-Ren's face, and then burst out all at once in a loud laugh.

"Well then, O-Ren. Tokyo isn't so bad after all, is it?"

Even when Makino said things like that, O-Ren would usually do no more than let a faint smile escape while attending to warming the sake.

Because Makino had his office duties, he rarely stayed the night. When he saw the hands of the clock by the pillow nearing midnight, he would at once begin thrusting his thick arms into his knit undershirt. O-Ren, sitting there slovenly with one knee raised, always merely watched with dull, languid sidelong eyes as Makino busied himself getting ready to leave.

"Hey, hand me my haori."

There were times when Makino, his greasy face lit by the midnight lamp, would call out in an impatient voice.

After seeing him off, O-Ren could hardly help feeling worn out, almost every night. At the same time, being left alone also made her feel a little lonely.

Whether it rained or the wind blew, the thickets and woods across the river easily filled the night with forlorn sounds. O-Ren, burying her cold cheek in the collar of her sake-smelling quilt, would lie listening to them in silence. As she did, her eyes would sometimes fill before she knew it. But usually, before long, a heavy sleep would descend upon her mind in a deep, dark flood, a sleep itself like a bad dream.

II

"What happened to your face? That scratch."

One quiet rainy night, while pouring sake for Makino, O-Ren glanced at his right cheek. There, in the blue shadow of his shaving stubble, was a large raised welt.

"This? My wife clawed me."

Makino said it with such an easy face and voice that it might have been a joke.

"What a nasty wife. Why on earth did she do that?"

"Why? How should I know? She put up the usual horns. Even I only got off this lightly. If you were to meet her, she'd go straight for your throat. In plain words, she's a Manchurian dog."

O-Ren gave a little laugh.

"It's no laughing matter. The day she finds out you're here, she may come storming over tomorrow."

To O-Ren's surprise, Makino's words carried a note of genuine seriousness.

"If she does, then I'll deal with it then."

"Well now, you've got nerve."

"It's not that I have nerve. People in my country..."

O-Ren dropped her eyes thoughtfully to the charcoal in the brazier.

"People in my country all know how to give things up."

"So you mean you wouldn't be jealous?"

For an instant, a sly look came into Makino's eyes.

"People in my country are all jealous. Especially me..."

At that moment the old woman came in from the kitchen carrying broiled eel that had been ordered in.

That night, after a long while, Makino decided to stay over.

After they had gone to bed, the rain changed into sleet. Long after Makino had fallen asleep, O-Ren could not sleep for some reason. In the depths of her sharpened wakeful eyes there rose image after image of Makino's wife, a woman she had never seen. But O-Ren felt neither sympathy nor hatred nor jealousy. What accompanied her imaginings was only a little curiosity. What sort of quarrels did they have as husband and wife, she wondered. Listening to the thickets and woods outside rustling under the sleet, she seriously found herself thinking such things.

Still, when she heard the clock strike two, drowsiness finally began to come over her.

Before she knew it, she was in a dim ship's cabin with a great many fellow passengers. Looking out through a round porthole, she saw beyond the piled-up black waves a strangely red-glowing sphere that was neither clearly moon nor sun. For some reason all the other passengers sat in the shadows without opening their mouths. Little by little O-Ren began to find this silence terrifying. Then she felt as though someone had come up behind her. She turned involuntarily. Standing there was the man she had parted from, gazing down at her steadily, a sorrowful smile on his face...

"Kin-san."

O-Ren woke from her dawn sleep to the sound of her own voice. Makino still lay beside her, breathing quietly, his back turned toward her; but whether he had really been asleep, O-Ren could not tell.

III

Makino seems to have realized that O-Ren had once had a man. But he never showed any sign of caring about such a thing. And in fact the man himself had vanished completely at just the time when Makino began losing his head over her, so it was only natural, perhaps, that Makino felt no jealousy.

But the man was always in O-Ren's thoughts. It was not so much longing as a harsher feeling. Why had he suddenly stopped coming to her altogether? She could not make sense of it. Of course O-Ren had tried any number of times to find the whole cause in the fickle heart of men. But when she considered the circumstances before and after he ceased visiting, that explanation alone did not seem enough. On the other hand, even if something unavoidable had happened on his side, for him to leave her without a word would still be impossible to reconcile with how deeply involved they had been. Then had some unforeseen calamity fallen upon him? It was dreadful for O-Ren to imagine that, yet also somehow something she wished to believe...

A few days after dreaming of the man, O-Ren was on her way back from the public bath when her eye happened to catch a banner hanging outside a latticed house: "Fortune-Telling of One's Fate, Master Genzo." Instead of the usual tally-sticks, the banner bore the design of a red old coin with a square hole in it, something rather unusual to see. But no sooner had O-Ren passed it than she suddenly felt like asking this Master Genzo to divine what had become of the man lately.

She was shown into a sunny parlor. The owner must have been a man of taste, for there were things like a Chinese bookshelf and pots of orchids, decorations in the style of a sencha enthusiast, and they lent the room an agreeable atmosphere.

Master Genzo was a well-fed old man with a shaved head. But the gold tooth set in his mouth and the way he puffed away at his cigarette made him look not at all like a holy man, but rather coarse and vulgar. O-Ren told him that she had a relative who had disappeared last year, and that she wished him to divine the person's whereabouts.

The old man at once brought out a small rosewood table from the corner of the room and set it carefully between them. Then on top of it he arranged with solemn care a celadon incense burner and a gold-brocade pouch.

"How old is this relative of yours?"

O-Ren gave the man's age.

"Aha, still young, still young. When people are young, mistakes of all sorts are apt to happen. Once you become an old fellow like me..."

Master Genzo shot O-Ren a sidelong glance and gave a few vulgar chuckles.

"Do you know the year he was born? No? Very well. Year of the Rabbit, First White."

From the brocade pouch the old man drew out three old coins. Each coin was wrapped separately in pale red silk.

"My method is called coin-casting divination. Long ago, Jing Fang of Han is said to have first devised it in place of yarrow-stalk divination. As you may know, with the yarrow stalks there are three changes in each line and eighteen changes in each hexagram, so it is not easy to judge good or ill fortune. That is where the advantage of coin-casting lies..."

While he spoke, smoke began to rise from the incense he had kindled in the burner, drifting into the bright room.

IV

After unwrapping the pale red silk and passing each coin through the smoke of the incense burner, the old man bowed his round head respectfully before the hanging scroll in the alcove. The scroll showed, apparently in the Kano style, the Four Great Sages: Fu Xi, King Wen, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius.

"August Supreme Emperor, divine spirit of the universe, hear this precious incense and descend, I pray. My hesitation is unresolved; what I doubt I ask of the spirits. I beg you, let your mercy fall upon us and swiftly reveal fortune or misfortune."

When this liturgy was done, the old man scattered the three coins across the rosewood table. One landed face up with its characters showing; the other two showed the reverse. He immediately took up his brush and copied down the order on a roll of paper.

He cast the coins and determined yin and yang. This was repeated exactly six times. O-Ren kept her anxious eyes fixed on the order of the coins.

"Now then..."

When the casting was over, the old man gazed at the paper for a while, thinking.

"This is the hexagram Kai, Thunder over Water, Deliverance. It says that matters will not go as one wishes..."

Timidly, O-Ren shifted her gaze from the three coins to the old man's face.

"It seems you are not likely ever to meet that young relative of yours again."

As he said this, Master Genzo began wrapping the coins once more, one by one, in the pale red silk.

"Then... is he no longer alive?"

O-Ren felt her voice tremble. The feeling of "I knew it" and the feeling of "that can't be" had come out together in spite of herself.

"Whether he is living or dead is a little hard to judge. But in any case, you should assume you will not meet him again."

"Is there truly no way I can?"

Pressed by O-Ren, the old man closed the mouth of the brocade pouch, and a faintly mocking expression flickered over his greasy cheeks.

"There are such things as great changes in the world. If this Tokyo were to turn into woods and forest, perhaps you might meet him after all. In any case, that is how the hexagram stands. The hexagram says so plainly."

O-Ren paid the high fee and went home feeling even more forlorn than when she had come.

That evening she sat blankly before the long brazier, resting her cheek on her hand and listening to the kettle sing. Master Genzo's divination had, in the end, given her no interpretation at all. No, more than that, it had actively crushed the hope she had secretly harbored: however frail it might have been, it was still hope, a feeling that clung to the one chance in ten thousand. Was the man really no longer alive, as the diviner had darkly suggested? Now that she thought of it, the district where she had lived had been dangerous enough at the time. Perhaps on his way to the house where O-Ren was staying he had run into some disaster. Otherwise, how could he have stopped coming so completely, as if he had forgotten her? Feeling the heat of the charcoal fire on one cheek whitened with powder, O-Ren became aware that she was toying with the fire tongs.

"Kin, Kin, Kin..."

On the ash she wrote that character again and again, only to erase it again and again.

V

"Kin, Kin, Kin..."

As O-Ren went on writing, the old serving woman in the kitchen suddenly let out a faint cry. In that house, kitchen though it was called, one had only to open a single paper screen and there it was, immediately adjoining the wooden-floored room.

"What is it, Nanny?"

"Oh, ma'am, please come look. I truly thought it was..."

O-Ren went out into the kitchen.

In the wooden-floored space, most of it taken up by the cooking stove, the lamp shining through the paper screen made a quiet dimness. In that dimness the old woman, bending at the waist in her hanten jacket, was just then lifting up some little white creature.

"A cat?"

"No, a dog, ma'am."

Drawing the sleeves of her kimono together at her breast, O-Ren peered intently at it. The dog, held in the old woman's arms, moved its fresh, moist eyes and kept snuffling busily.

"It's the puppy that was whining this morning by the garbage pit. How ever did it get in here, I wonder?"

"You didn't notice it at all?"

"No, and all the while I've been here washing bowls. But when your eyes are bad, there's nothing to be done about it."

Opening the lower sliding door by the sink, the old woman made as if to throw the puppy out into the dark.

"Wait a moment. I want to hold it too."

"Please don't, ma'am. It might dirty your clothes."

Not heeding the old woman's warning, O-Ren took the dog into both her hands. In her grasp the dog trembled all over. In that instant it carried her heart back to the world she had left behind. In that lively house, when there were no customers at night, she had once kept a little white dog that slept with her.

"Poor thing... I wonder if I should keep it."

The old woman blinked oddly.

"Please, Nanny. Let's keep it. It won't be any trouble to you..."

Setting the puppy down on the wooden floor, O-Ren showed a childlike smile and, perhaps already intending to find it something to eat, reached for the cupboard in the kitchen.

From the next day on, the kept house had a dog with a red collar among the tatami rooms.

The cleanliness-loving old woman, of course, was not pleased by this change. When the dog came back in from the garden with muddy paws, she would sometimes stay angry all day. But O-Ren, having nothing else to do, doted on it like a child. Even at mealtimes the dog was always beside her tray. At night too it was literally an every-night occurrence to see the dog curled up asleep by the hem of her quilt.

"From then on I kept thinking I didn't like it, didn't like it at all. Why, in the dim lamp light that white dog would sometimes stare fixedly at Madam's sleeping face..."

About a year later, the old woman is said to have told such things to a doctor friend of mine, a man called K.

VI

The little dog did not torment the old woman alone. When Makino saw it sprawled on the tatami, he too knit his thick brows in displeasure.

"What the devil is this? You brute. Get over there."

Still in his army paymaster's uniform, Makino roughly kicked at the dog. Whenever he came into the room, the dog would bristle the white hair along its back and start barking furiously.

"I'm amazed at how fond you are of dogs."

Even after sitting down to his evening drink, Makino kept glaring at it irritably.

"Didn't you used to keep one about this same size before?"

"Yes, that one was white too."

"Now that you mention it, when you insisted you couldn't bear to part from that dog, it gave us quite a bit of trouble."

Stroking the puppy on her lap, O-Ren let out a helpless little smile. She understood perfectly well that it would have been troublesome to drag a dog along through all that travel by steamer and train. But now that she had also parted from the man, leaving that white dog behind and going off to an unknown foreign land had been lonely beyond words. So on the night before she was finally to leave, she had taken the dog in her arms and rubbed her cheek against its nose, swallowing back her sobs again and again without end...

"That dog was quite clever, but this one seems rather stupid. To begin with, its face... no, not face. Dog-face, I should say. Its dog-face is terribly ordinary."

Makino, now well warmed with drink, seemed to have forgotten his initial displeasure and tossed bits of sashimi to the dog.

"Oh, but it looks just like the other one, doesn't it? The only difference is the color of its nose."

"What, the color of its nose? That's an odd place for a difference."

"This dog's nose is black, you see. That dog's nose was reddish-brown."

As she poured for Makino, O-Ren felt as though the nose of the dog she had once kept were clearly before her eyes. It was always wet with drool, with kite-brown mottling on it, like the breast of a woman who has borne children.

"Well now, then perhaps the reddish nose is the mark of beauty in dogs."

"Not beauty, handsomeness. That dog was a fine fellow. This one's black, so I suppose he's an ugly one."

"Male, both of them? I thought I was the only male that came to this house. This is a bit suspicious."

Poking at O-Ren's hand, Makino collapsed into laughter, delighted with himself alone.

But he could not keep up that good humor for long. Once they had gone to bed, the dog began making mournful sounds again and again on the far side of the old fusuma door that alone separated them. Before long it even scratched at the fusuma with its front claws, scraping noisily. At last Makino, wearing a strange wry smile in the deep-night lamp light, called out to O-Ren.

"Hey, open that for it."

But when she slid the door open, the dog came in unexpectedly slowly to their pillows. Then, settling its belly there like a white shadow, it began staring at them.

O-Ren could not help feeling there was something human in its eyes.

VII

A few days later, one night, O-Ren went out with Makino, who had slipped away from his main household, to a nearby vaudeville theater.

The place, offering nothing but tricks, sword-dances, magic-lantern shows, and juggling, was so full that one could hardly move. After being kept waiting for a while, the two of them finally managed to squeeze into seats far from the stage. When they sat down, the people around them all seemed by prior agreement to turn curious looks toward O-Ren, with her hair dressed in a marumage knot. To her it felt both dazzling and, for some reason, lonely at the same time.

On the brightly lit stage, beneath a hanging lamp, a man in a white headband was whirling a long naked sword. And from backstage there rose a ringing chant of verse: "breaking through a thousand mountains and ten thousand peaks of smoke," and the like. O-Ren found not only the sword-dance but the chanting itself merely tedious. Makino, however, lighting a cigarette, watched it with evident enjoyment.

After the sword-dance came the magic-lantern show. Across the curtain lowered on the stage, scenes of the Sino-Japanese War appeared and vanished in succession. There was the sinking of the Dingyuan, throwing up a great column of water. There was Captain Higuchi, holding an enemy baby in his arms, directing a charge. Whenever the rising-sun flag happened to appear in one of the images, the audience would inevitably burst into loud applause. Some even shouted in cracked voices, "Long live the Empire!" But Makino, who had actually seen combat, merely grinned to himself, untouched by that sort of excitement.

"If war were really like that,\nit’d be easy enough, but..."\n\nAs he looked at the picture of the fierce fighting at Niuzhuang, he said this to Oren in a voice loud enough for even the neighbors to hear. She, however, without changing in the least, kept her eyes fixed intently on the screen and gave only the faintest nod. Of course, any picture would have interested her, since the magic lantern itself was a novelty to her. But more than that, the scenes on the screen too had their own special power to move her: the roofs of fortress towers heaped with snow, the little horse tethered to a withered willow, the Chinese soldiers with their queues hanging down.\n\nThe entertainment ended at ten. The two of them walked home shoulder to shoulder through a deserted town where every house had already shut up for the night. Above the town hung a half moon, pouring its cold light over the frost-covered roofs. Now and then Makino blew cigarette smoke into that light, and, perhaps still thinking of the sword dance from earlier, softly chanted old-fashioned lines of verse like, "The crack of whips falls solemnly as the army crosses the river at night."\n\nBut when they turned one corner into a side street, Oren suddenly gave a start and tugged at the sleeve of Makino’s overcoat.\n\n"You startled me. What is it?"\n\nWithout yet stopping, he turned to look at her.\n\n"It sounded as if someone was calling."\n\nClinging close to him, Oren looked thoroughly uneasy.\n\n"Calling?"\n\nMakino stopped in spite of himself and listened for a moment. But in the lonely street there was not even the sound of a barking dog.\n\n"You imagined it. Who would be calling?"\n\n"Do you think I was mistaken?"\n\n"Maybe it’s because of that magic-lantern show we just saw."\n\nEight\n\nThe next morning after they had gone to the vaudeville theater, Oren, with a toothstick in her mouth, went out to the veranda to wash her face. As usual, a copper washbasin filled with hot water had already been set in front of the washstand.\n\nThe winter-withered garden was desolate. Beyond it, the landscape too, together with the river reflecting the cloudy sky, was bleak in the extreme. But the moment that view entered her eyes, Oren, as she rinsed her mouth, remembered the dream from the night before, which until then she had completely forgotten.\n\nIn the dream, she was all alone, wandering through some dark thicket or forest. As she followed a narrow path, she kept thinking, "At last my will has reached it. Tokyo, as far as the eye can see, has turned into an unpeopled forest. I’m sure now I’ll be able to meet Kin-san again." Thoughts like these stayed with her the whole time. Then, after she had walked a while, she began to hear the sound of cannon fire and gunshots coming from nowhere she could tell. At the same time, the sky above the trees gradually took on a reddish murk, just as if it were reflecting a fire. "War. It’s war." Thinking this, she tried with all her might to run. But no matter how hard she strained, for some reason she could not run at all. ...\n\nWhen she had finished washing her face, Oren loosened her clothing to splash water over herself. Just then something cold pressed flat against her back.\n\n"Oh!"\n\nShe was not especially startled. She merely cast a glossy glance behind her. There was the little dog, wagging its tail and busily licking its black nose.\n\nNine\n\nTwo or three days later Makino came earlier than usual to the house where he kept his mistress, bringing along a man named Tamiya. Tamiya was a senior clerk at the shop of a certain famous purveyor to the government, and he was also the man who had taken various steps to arrange for Oren to be kept by Makino.\n\n"Isn’t it strange? Seeing her dressed with her hair in a marumage like this, I just can’t take her for the old Oren."\n\nHis lightly pockmarked face flushed in the bright lamplight, Tamiya held out a sake cup to Makino across from him.\n\n"Really, Makino. If it were just that she used to wear a shimada or an akakuma style, maybe she wouldn’t seem so different. But considering what she used to be..."\n\n"Hey, hey. The old woman here may be a little hard of sight, but she’s not hard of hearing."\n\nMakino said this by way of warning, but he was grinning with obvious pleasure.\n\n"It’s all right. Even if she heard, she wouldn’t understand. Isn’t that so, Oren? When you think back on those days, doesn’t it all seem like a dream?"\n\nOren kept her eyes averted and toyed with the puppy on her lap.\n\n"Makino asked me, so I agreed to do it once, but I worried a great deal all the way until you reached Kobe safely. If it had been found out, it would have been a serious matter."\n\n"Hmph. If it’s a dangerous bridge like that, I’d think you’d be used to crossing it by now."\n\n"Don’t joke. Smuggling a human being in was my first time."\n\nTamiya tossed back a cupful and deliberately made a grim face.\n\n"Still, Oren owes what she is today to you, that’s the truth."\n\nStretching out his thick arm, Makino pushed a small cup toward Tamiya.\n\n"Well, I’m flattered to hear you say that, but I really was in a fix then. On top of that, the ship we were on happened to hit the Genkai Sea, and we were caught in a terrible storm. Isn’t that right, Oren?"\n\n"Yes. I truly thought the ship was going to sink."\n\nAs she poured sake for Tamiya, Oren at last fell into step with the conversation. But if that ship had sunk, perhaps it might have been better than things were now. Such a thought crossed her mind.\n\n"And yet here we are like this, so I suppose we’ve both been lucky. But say, Makino, now that a marumage suits Oren so well, doesn’t it make you want to dress her once more as she used to be?"\n\n"Even if I wanted to, there’s nothing to be done about it."\n\n"No, but tell me this. Didn’t she bring any of her old clothes with her?"\n\n"Not just clothes. She brought all her combs and hair ornaments too. No matter how much I told her not to, she absolutely refused to give them up."\n\nOver the brazier Makino shot a quick glance at Oren’s face. Oren, as if she had not heard a word, was concerned only with the kettle, which had grown lukewarm.\n\n"That makes it even better. Well then, Oren, one of these days won’t you change back into your old style and pour for us?"\n\n"And while you’re at it, you can remember one of your old acquaintances too."\n\n"Well now, if that old acquaintance happened to be as pretty as Oren, then she’d be worth remembering..."\n\nWith a tickled smile on his lightly pockmarked face, Tamiya wound a strip of grated yam around his chopsticks. ...\n\nAfter Tamiya left that night, Makino told Oren, who had known nothing of it, that he intended to leave the army soon and become a merchant. The story was that as soon as permission to resign came through, the very famous government purveyor for whom Tamiya worked would hire him at once on a handsome salary.\n\n"Once that happens, there’ll be no reason to stay here. Why don’t we move to a larger house somewhere?"\n\nMakino, looking thoroughly tired, lay stretched out in front of the brazier, smoking a Manila cigar Tamiya had brought as a gift.\n\n"This house is plenty big enough. There are only the old maid and me here."\n\nOren was busy feeding scraps to the greedy dog.\n\n"If that happens, I’ll be here with you too."\n\n"But don’t you have your wife?"\n\n"My wife? I’ll be parting from her before long."\n\nFrom his tone and expression, this astonishing piece of news did not seem to be a joke.\n\n"You ought not do something so cruel."\n\n"Why not? What goes out from oneself returns to oneself. I’m not the only one in the wrong."\n\nMakino, his eyes hard, puffed fiercely on the cigar. Oren kept a desolate look on her face and said nothing for a while.\n\nTen\n\n"That little white dog took sick the very next day after Mr. Tamiya came, yes, exactly the day after."\n\nThe old woman employed by Oren later described the circumstances of that time to my friend K, a doctor.\n\n"Probably it was food poisoning or something of the sort. At first it just lay absentmindedly in front of the brazier all day long, but before long, every so often, it began fouling the tatami. Madam doted on that dog like a child, so she went so far as to get milk for it and even put Hootan medicine in its mouth. She took the greatest care of it. There was nothing strange in that, really. No, there wasn’t. But still, wasn’t it unpleasant? As the dog’s illness got worse, it became less and less unusual to hear madam talking to it.\n\n"Even when I say she talked to it, what I mean is that she would make long speeches to the dog as if it were her companion. But if you happened to hear that voice late at night, why, you’d start to feel as though the dog, like a person, must be speaking back. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling at all. And besides, there was this one time. On a day when a terrible dry wind was blowing, I had gone out on an errand and then came back. The errand itself was to a fortune-teller nearby, to have the dog’s sickness looked into. When I returned, I heard madam’s voice coming from the room where the paper doors were rattling. I thought perhaps the master had come, and so I peeked through the crack in the sliding door. But there she was after all, quite alone. And then, because clouds driven by the wind kept passing in front of the sun, the figure of madam with the dog on her knees was brightening and darkening without pause. Even now, at my age, I can’t remember ever encountering anything quite so eerie a second time.\n\n"So when the dog died, of course I felt sorry for madam, but privately I was relieved. And I wasn’t the only one glad of it because I had to clean up every time the dog made a mess. When the master heard of it too, he came smiling as if he had gotten rid of a nuisance. The dog? Well, before either madam or I was even up, it had collapsed in front of the dressing stand, vomited something blue, and died there. By then it had already been about half a month since it started doing nothing but lie listlessly by the brazier..."\n\nOn one of the market days at Yagenbori, Oren found the dead dog in front of the large dressing stand. Just as the old woman had said, the dog lay cold in a stream of blue vomit. This was something she had steeled herself for long ago. She had been parted from the previous dog while both were still alive; from this one she had been parted by death. Perhaps it was simply her fate never to be able to keep a dog. That thought alone pressed upon her heart with a despairing stillness.\n\nOren sat where she was and stared blankly at the dog’s corpse. Then she raised her weary eyes and looked at the cold surface of the mirror. In the mirror, the dog lying sprawled on the tatami was reflected together with her. As she gazed fixedly at the dog’s image, Oren suddenly covered her face with both hands, as though stricken with vertigo. Then she let out a faint cry.\n\nIn the mirror, the dead dog’s nose, which should have been black, had somehow turned a reddish brown.\n\nEleven\n\nThe New Year at the mistress’s house was lonely. Bamboo stood at the gate and a ceremonial tray was displayed in the parlor, yet Oren sat alone before the brazier, resting her cheek on her hand in gloomy dejection, her weary eyes fixed only on the fading sunlight on the paper doors.\n\nEver since the dog died at the year’s end, her spirits, already low enough, had become especially prone to sudden attacks of melancholy. She brooded not only over the dog but over the whereabouts of the man whose fate she still did not know, and sometimes even over Makino’s wife, whose face she might not have recognized if she saw it. At the same time, from about that period on, she also began to suffer now and then from strange hallucinations.\n\nSometimes, after she had gone to bed and was just about to fall asleep, the hem of her bedding would suddenly grow heavy, as though something had climbed onto it. While the little dog was still alive, it would often come up onto her quilt and flop down there. This was exactly the same sort of soft weight. Oren gently lifted her head from the pillow at once and looked. But there was nothing there except the checked pattern of the quilt, showing in the lamplight. ...\n\nAt other times, while Oren was fixing her hair in front of the dressing stand, something white would flicker past behind her in the mirror. Even then she paid it no mind and continued smoothing back her glossy side hair. Then the white thing would flash past once more in the opposite direction. Still holding her comb, Oren finally turned around. But in the bright room there was no sign of any living creature. So it was just her eyes, she thought. Yet when she faced the mirror again, after a little while the white thing passed behind her a third time. ...\n\nAt other times again, as Oren sat alone before the brazier, she would hear a voice from the distant street outside calling her name. Mixed with the rustling of the bamboo leaves at the gate, it was heard only once. But there was no mistaking it: it was the voice of the man who had remained on her mind all through her time in Tokyo. Oren held her breath and listened intently. Then once more from the street came that beloved man’s voice, this time nearer than before. And before she knew it, it had turned into the sound of a dog crying in the wind. ...\n\nAt still another time, when she happened to wake, a man who could not possibly have been there was asleep in the same bed with her. His prominent brow, his long eyelashes, everything was unchanged in the midnight lamplight down to the smallest detail. There had been a mole at the outer corner of his left eye. Even checking such things, she knew it was certainly him. More than puzzled, Oren was filled with joy, and, as though her body itself were melting away, she clung to the man’s neck. But the voice that muttered in annoyance at having his sleep disturbed belonged, unexpectedly, to none other than Makino. And in that very instant Oren found herself in reality with both arms tightly wound around the neck of Makino, who reeked of alcohol.\n\nYet besides these hallucinations, events from the real world too arose to trouble Oren’s heart. Before even the pine decorations had been taken down, the wife of Makino, of whom she had heard rumors, suddenly came to visit.\n\nTwelve\n\nUnfortunately, when Makino’s wife came, the hired old servant woman happened to be out on an errand. Startled by the voice asking to be shown in, Oren had no choice but to rise unwillingly and go to the dim entryway herself. There, beyond the north-facing lattice door that showed through the New Year decorations under the eaves, stood a woman with a terribly pale face and spectacles, wearing a not particularly new shawl and standing with her eyes cast down.\n\n"Who might you be?"\n\nAs she asked, Oren had already guessed who the visitor was. She stared fixedly at the somewhat shadowy face of this woman with her limp-looking marumage and the sleeves of a patterned haori drawn together.\n\n"I am..."\n\nAfter hesitating a moment, the woman continued, still looking downward.\n\n"I am Makino’s wife. My name is Taki."\n\nNow it was Oren who faltered.\n\n"Is that so? I am..."\n\n"No, I know very well who you are. Makino is always in your care, I hear, and I have come to offer my thanks as well."\n\nHer words were gentle. There was, strangely enough, not the slightest hint of sarcasm in her tone. That only made Oren all the more uncertain what to say in reply.\n\n"And with that, today, while making New Year’s calls, I have also come to ask a small favor of you..."\n\n"What is it? If it is something I can do..."\n\nStill on her guard, Oren felt she could almost guess what the "favor" would be. At the same time, if it was spoken aloud, she felt she had many possible answers ready. But when she heard the quiet words that fell from the downcast lips of Makino’s wife, it became clear that her expectations had been wrong from the very start.\n\n"It is really nothing so very important. But I have heard that before long all of Tokyo is going to turn into a forest. When that happens, I beg you to let me stay in your house too, just as you do Makino. That is the favor I have come to ask."\n\nThe woman said this slowly. Her manner was as though she had no awareness at all of how deranged her words sounded. Oren could only stare at her in astonishment for a while, at this gloomy woman standing with the daylight at her back.\n\n"What do you say? Will you let me stay?"\n\nOren’s tongue seemed frozen stiff, and she could not reply at all. The other woman had now raised her face and was gazing at her through her spectacles with narrow, chilly eyes. That only made the whole thing feel still more to Oren like a single hideous dream.\n\n"As for me, I do not mind what becomes of me. But if anything should happen and I were left without a place to go, my two children would be pitiful indeed. Please, however troublesome it may be, let us stay in your house."\n\nWith this, Makino’s wife hid her face in her worn shawl and suddenly began to weep softly. For some reason Oren, who had remained silent till then, was suddenly overcome with sadness as well. At last the time had come when she could meet Kin-san again. I’m happy. Happy. Thinking this, she nevertheless found herself shedding tears too onto the knees of her New Year’s dress.\n\nBut after several minutes had passed, when Oren happened to come to herself, the dim north-facing entryway was empty. At some point the visitor had gone home, and not a soul was there.\n\nThirteen\n\nOn the night of the Festival of Seven Herbs, when Makino came to the mistress’s house, Oren immediately told him what had happened when his wife came to visit. But Makino listened with unexpected calm, doing nothing but smoking his Manila cigar.\n\n"Your wife is not in her right mind."\n\nOren, now stirred up, drew her irritated brows together and went on stubbornly.\n\n"If something isn’t done for her while there’s still time, it will turn into something beyond repair."\n\n"Well, if it does, then it does."\n\nFrom behind the cigar smoke, Makino looked at her through narrowed eyes.\n\n"Instead of worrying about my wife, you’d do better to take care of yourself. Every time I come these days, you’re always depressed, aren’t you?"\n\n"As for me, it doesn’t matter what becomes of me, but..."\n\n"It does matter."\n\nOren darkened her face and kept silent for a while. Then suddenly, lifting tearful eyes, she said,\n\n"Please, I beg you, don’t abandon your wife."\n\nMakino, perhaps taken aback, made no reply.\n\n"Please, I beg you, please..."\n\nAs though to hide her tears, Oren buried her chin in the black satin collar of her kimono.\n\n"For your wife, there is no one in the world more precious than you. If you don’t think of that, then it is too heartless. In my country too, when it comes to women..."\n\n"All right, all right. I understand what you mean, so don’t trouble yourself with such worries."\n\nMakino, forgetting even to smoke his cigar, said this as if soothing a child.\n\n"This house is gloomy, that’s what it is. And then, just the other day, the dog died too. So naturally your spirits sink. If we find some better place before long, let’s move right away, shall we? And then you can live cheerfully. Why, in another ten days or so I’ll have left government service altogether..."\n\nAlmost the whole night through, no matter how much Makino tried to comfort her, Oren never lost that clouded expression. ...\n\n"The master too worried a great deal over madam’s condition..."\n\nWhen K asked her various questions, the old woman is said to have described the circumstances at the time once more in this way.

"In any case, this illness of hers had already been showing signs back in those days, so really there was nothing for the master and the others to do but resign themselves to it. Why, even when the young mistress from the main house suddenly came out to Yokozuna, when I came back from an errand, the young mistress here was just sitting absentmindedly by the entranceway, while the young mistress over there glared at her through her spectacles and, without even making any move to go up inside, poured out every last bit of spiteful, over-polite sarcasm she could manage.

"Of course, hearing the master cursed like that was no pleasure even for me, listening from behind the scenes. But if I had gone out there, it would only have made things worse. You see, four or five years earlier I had been employed at the main house myself, so if that young mistress over there had caught sight of me, it might only have stirred up her anger all the more. That would have been a serious matter, so until the young mistress from the main house had finished hurling abuse and finally gone home, I stayed hidden behind the entrance sliding door without once showing my face.

"And yet when the young mistress here saw me, she said, ‘Nurse, the young mistress was here just now. Even when she comes to a place like mine, she doesn’t say a single spiteful thing. That must be what a truly fine person is like, don’t you think?’ And then, laughing, she even said, ‘She was saying that before long all of Tokyo would turn into a forest. Poor thing, there’s something a little wrong with her mind.’ She really said things like that...."

14

Yet Oren’s melancholy showed no sign of clearing even after, early in February, she moved into a spacious two-story house in Matsui-cho, Honjo. She scarcely spoke even to the old woman, and for the most part sat alone in the sitting room all day, listening to the kettle boil.

Then one night, not even a week after they had moved there, Tamiya, already drunk somewhere else, drifted in to visit the mistress’s house. Makino, who had just started drinking, saw his drinking companion’s face and at once pointed with the cup in his hand. Before accepting it, Tamiya pulled a red tin from inside his kimono, where the lining of his shirt showed at the breast. Then, while receiving sake from Oren, he said:

"A little present, Lady Oren. This is a present for you."

"What is it?"

Before Oren had time to thank him, Makino picked up the tin and looked at it.

"Read the label. Sea otter. Canned sea otter meat. Since they say what ails you is low spirits, I present this to you. Good for everything: before childbirth, after childbirth, all women’s complaints. That’s what a friend of mine told me, anyway. He’s the one who started making these cans."

Tamiya licked his lips and looked from one of them to the other.

"Can you even eat something like sea otter, you?"

Even when Makino said this, Oren only forced a slight smile to her lips. But Tamiya, waving his hand, immediately took it upon himself to answer.

"No problem. None at all. Listen, Oren. This sea-otter fellow, wherever there’s one male, there are a hundred females clinging to him. If he were a man, he’d be Makino here. Come to think of it, the face is rather similar too. That’s why. So just imagine it’s Makino, your darling Makino, and eat him up."

"What nonsense are you talking?"

Makino had no choice but to smile awkwardly.

"Wherever there’s one male, eh? Listen, Makino, doesn’t it sound just like you?"

A broad grin spread over Tamiya’s pockmarked face, and without minding anything at all he went on talking.

"Today I asked my friend, the one from the cannery, and apparently when male sea otters fight over a female... though rather than sea otters, tonight I’d like Oren to show us what she used to be like. What do you say, Oren? I may be calling you Oren now, but Oren is only a temporary name to conceal yourself from the world. Tonight we ought to go with Otowaya. As for Oren..."

"Hey, hey, what happens when they fight over a female? I’d like to hear that part first."

Makino, looking troubled, finally managed once more to steer the conversation back to sea otters, away from dangerous ground. But the result did not seem likely to be as convenient as he had hoped.

"Fight over a female? They have a tremendous fight, apparently. But they do it openly and fair. They don’t go in for sneak attacks the way you do. Ah, pardon me. Forbidden topic, forbidden topic. Was it Jinkuro of the golden signboard? Oren, let me offer you another cup."

When Tamiya caught the sharp glance Makino shot at him, he held out a sake cup to Oren as a cover for his embarrassment. But Oren, in a way almost eerie, simply stared fixedly at him and made no move to take it.

15

It was after three that night when Oren slipped out of bed. Leaving the upstairs bedroom, she quietly descended the dark staircase and felt her way to the dressing stand. From one of its drawers she took out a razor case.

"Makino. Damn Makino."

Muttering this, Oren quietly drew out what was inside the case. As she did so, the faint smell of the sharpened steel grazed her nose.

At some point a savage wildness had begun to stir within her heart. It was the same wildness that, before she sold her body, had driven her on in her bitter fights with her cruel stepmother. It was the wildness that the life of these past several years had concealed, just as face powder hides the bare skin beneath....

"Makino. You devil. I won’t let you see another sunrise..."

With the razor hidden in the sleeve of her gaudy under-kimono, Oren rose before the dressing stand.

Then suddenly a faint voice entered her ear from somewhere.

"Don’t. Don’t."

In spite of herself, she caught her breath. But what she had taken for a voice seemed to be only the clock’s pendulum, ticking away the seconds in the darkness.

"Don’t. Don’t. Don’t."

Yet just as she started up the stairs, the voice caught her once more. She stopped there and peered through the darkness of the sitting room.

"Who is it?"

"Me. It’s me."

It could only be one of the women who had once been close companions of hers.

"Is that you, Ichi?"

"Yes, it’s me."

"It’s been a long time. Where are you now?"

Before she knew it, Oren was seated before the brazier as if it were broad daylight.

"Don’t. Don’t do it."

Without answering her question, the voice repeated the same thing over and over.

"Why should even you stop me? Why shouldn’t I kill him?"

"Don’t. He’s alive. He’s alive."

"Alive? Who is?"

There was a long silence. Even within that silence the clock’s pendulum kept sounding without rest.

"Who’s alive?"

After some more silence, when Oren asked again, the voice finally whispered a beloved name into her ear.

"Jin... Jin-san. Jin-san."

"Is it true? If it’s true, I’d be so happy, but..."

Still resting her cheek on her hand, Oren’s eyes grew thoughtful.

"If Jin-san is alive, then surely he’d come to see me, wouldn’t he?"

"He will. He says he will come."

"Come? When?"

"Tomorrow. He says he’ll come to meet you at Miroku Temple. At Miroku Temple tomorrow night."

"Miroku Temple... you mean Mirokuji Bridge, don’t you?"

"At Mirokuji Bridge. At night. He’ll come, he says."

After that the voice could no longer be heard. But Oren, wearing nothing but her under-kimono, sat there for a long while as if unaware even of the chill before dawn.

16

Oren did not leave the upstairs bedroom until past noon the next day. But when she finally rose around four o’clock, she made herself up more carefully than usual. Then, as if going to the theater, she began putting on her very best clothes, every garment from outer robe to underlayers.

"Hey, hey, why are you dressing yourself up like that again?"

Makino, who had not gone to the shop at all that day and had been idling around the house, called to her suspiciously over the pages of Fuzoku Gaho.

"I have somewhere to go for a bit...."

Seated coolly before the dressing stand, Oren was tying a spotted silk sash scarf.

"Where to?"

"As far as Mirokuji Bridge."

"Mirokuji Bridge?"

Makino seemed to be growing not merely suspicious now but uneasy. For Oren there was something indescribably pleasurable in stirring that feeling.

"What business do you have at Mirokuji Bridge?"

"What business...?"

Casting him a sidelong glance full of contempt, she quietly fastened the metal clasp of her obi.

"Still, don’t worry. I’m not going to throw myself in or anything...."

"Don’t talk nonsense."

Makino flung Fuzoku Gaho down onto the tatami and clicked his tongue in annoyance....

"It seems it was around seven that evening...."

After telling me all that had happened so far, my friend K, a doctor, slowly went on:

"Oren paid no attention to Makino’s attempts to stop her and went out alone. The old woman was worried sick and kept saying she wanted to go along, but Oren, like a child, stubbornly insisted that if she weren’t left alone she would die, so there was nothing to be done. Of course they couldn’t simply let her go out by herself, so Makino decided to follow her at a distance, staying in and out of sight.

"When they stepped outside, it happened that a festival fair for Yakushi was being held near Mirokuji Bridge that night. So the street toward the second block, even in such a cold season, was crowded with people shoulder to shoulder. That must have made it easier to trail Oren. The fact that Makino walked right behind her and yet she never noticed him was, in the end, thanks to the festival.

"Stalls lined both sides of the street all the way along. By the light of their lanterns and lamps, the spiral signboards of the candy sellers and the red parasols of the bean vendors flickered to right and left. But Oren seemed not to cast so much as a sidelong glance at any of it. With her head slightly bowed, she simply kept weaving briskly through the crowd. Makino too found it hard work keeping up without falling behind, so she must have been in a great hurry.

"At last, when she came to the foot of Mirokuji Bridge, Oren finally stopped and looked blankly around her. Just where the road bent toward the riverbank there was a row of plant shops. Since it was only fair-day stock there was nothing especially grand among the plants, but still, pines and cypresses and the like spread their fresh branches there, and in that stretch alone, where foot traffic thinned out, the foliage looked lush and green.

"What had she come here for, anyway? Makino wondered that as he watched his mistress for a while from the shadow of a lamppost at the bridgehead. But Oren, just as before, stood absentmindedly there staring at the row of plants. So Makino crept quietly up behind her. And then, they say, Oren was murmuring to herself again and again in a voice full of delight: ‘So it really has become a forest. At last Tokyo has become a forest.’..."

17

"If that had been all, it would still have been one thing, but..."

K continued.

"Then a little dog, white as snow, happened to come trotting out of the crowd, and Oren suddenly stretched out both arms and picked it up. And what do you suppose she said? ‘So you came too? It must have been terribly far all the way here. After all, there were mountains on the way, and a great sea too. Truly, ever since I parted from you, there has not been a single day when I did not cry. And the dog I kept in your place died on me the other day.’ She started talking like someone in a dream. But the little dog must have been friendly by nature, for it neither yelped nor bit. It merely snuffled through its nose and licked Oren’s hands and cheeks all over.

"At that point it was impossible just to stand by and watch, so Makino finally showed himself. But Oren declared that no matter what anyone said, she would never go home until Jin-san came there. Since it was a festival, a crowd quickly gathered around them. Some even cried out in loud voices, ‘Hey, a beautiful madwoman!’ Still, for dog-loving Oren, holding a dog again after so long must have given her some comfort. After arguing back and forth for quite a while, she at last agreed, in accordance with Makino’s wishes, to return home for the time being. But even once they had started back, the gawkers were slow to disperse. Oren too would every now and then try to turn back toward Mirokuji Bridge. By the time Makino had coaxed and soothed her all the way back to the house in Matsui-cho, even he, it seems, was drenched in sweat beneath his overcoat...."

When Oren returned home, she went upstairs to the bedroom still holding the little white dog in her arms. Then, in the pitch-dark room, she gently set the poor little creature down. Wagging its tiny tail, the dog walked happily about the room. It walked exactly as the dog she had once kept used to walk when it leaped down from her bed onto the stone pavement below.

"Oh..."

Remembering how dark the room was, Oren looked around in wonder. And then, before she knew it, there hung from the ceiling above her a single blue glass lamp, brightly lit.

"How beautiful. It’s just as if I’d gone back to the old days."

For a while she sat entranced, gazing up at the splendid light. But at length, when she saw her own figure in its glow, she sadly shook her head once or twice.

"I’m not the old Lian anymore. Now I’m a Japanese woman called Oren. No wonder Jin-san doesn’t come to see me. Still, if only Jin-san would come..."

Suddenly Oren lifted her head and let out another cry of astonishment. Where the little dog had been, there now lay a Chinese man, reclining at ease with one elbow propped on a square pillow, leisurely smoking opium. The broad brow, the long eyelashes, the mole at the outer corner of the left eye: everything was unmistakably Jin. More than that, when he looked at Oren, he too, still holding the pipe between his lips, let a faint smile pass across his cool eyes exactly as he had in the old days.

"Look. Tokyo has become just like that now. Everywhere you look, it’s nothing but forest."

And indeed, outside the upstairs balcony, unfamiliar trees spread their branches, and birds like something embroidered in a pattern chirped lightly here and there among them. Gazing at such a scene, Oren sat beside the beloved Jin all through the night in a trance of rapture....

"A day or two after that, Oren, whose real name was Menglian, had become one of the patients here at K Mental Hospital. During the Sino-Japanese War, it seems, she had been taking customers at a brothel in Weihaiwei or somewhere of the sort. What kind of woman was she? Wait a moment. I have a photograph here."

In the old photograph K showed me, there was a solitary woman in Chinese dress, pictured together with a white dog.

"When she first came to this hospital, no matter what anyone said, she absolutely refused to take off her Chinese clothes. And unless that dog was beside her, wouldn’t she cry out endlessly for Jin-san, Jin-san? When you think about it, Makino too was a pitiable man. Even if he had made Lian his mistress, he was only a broken-down remnant of an imperial soldier, and to bring a woman of the enemy nation into Japan proper right after the war must have caused him no end of hidden hardship. Eh? What became of Jin? Asking that is vulgar. I even suspect the dog’s death may not have been natural at all."

(December 1920)