It was a winter's day, several years ago. An elderly man, tall and solid-shouldered, turned up at my clinic in Tsuchiura, a town about an hour away from Tokyo by train. His face was a good deal larger than the average person's, with a forehead deeply lined with dark creases, thick, purplish lips, and a muddy, yellowish tinge to the eyeballs: the kind of face that at first glance set him apart from most people.
I got him to strip to the waist. His whole back was covered with a tattoo -- a dragon-and-peony design, though the colors had faded with the years, leaving the dragon's scales pale, like stylized clouds, and its whiskers almost at vanishing point. Even so, the design was striking and, in its way, oddly attractive. Inside the petals of the peony stood a woman. The dragon was about to swallow up the peony, and the woman with it. Her eyes were half-closed and her palms joined in prayer but an enigmatic smile played around her lips.
I would have liked to photograph it if possible, but I'd never seen the man before in my life, and something about his air of absolute assurance made me hesitate, so in the end I never got around to making the suggestion.
Examining his abdomen, I found the liver enlarged. It was obvious that there was fluid collected in the abdominal cavity. As I waited for him to get up from the examining table, I said,
"I'll give you an introduction to a general hospital; I think you'd better get treated there. "
But he smiled slightly and said,
'I'm seventy-three, doctor. I've done pretty much as I pleased all my life, and I don 't expect to be cured at this stage. "
The inside of his mouth was black with nicotine, so that it was like peering into a small cave. His voice was low and hoarse.
"I was a bit wild when I was young, I'm afraid, and now my body refuses to do as I say any more. So I decided to hand the gambling place over to one of my younger men and retire here to the country. You know the massage woman who lives below the embankment? I had her give me a rubdown two or three times; quite a hand at it, she is. She was the one who recommended me to come to you."
"I see."
"I'm not going to get better whoever treats me, am I?"
"Did they tell you that at some hospital or other?"
"I can tell myself. To be honest, I didn't come here with any high hopes. I just thought maybe you could give me a shot sometimes when it hurt. Now, don't worry -- I'm not asking for drugs or anything. I expect it's because of the diabetes, but my legs hurt like hell at times. I thought perhaps you'd take a look at me then, and make things a bit easier."
Since he seemed unwilling to accept any fuller treatment, I decided to do what I could to help. I had my own reasons, though, for agreeing to this arrangement. I see dozens of different people every day in the course of my work, but I'd never come across anyone like this man before. There was something intriguing about him. And privately I decided to get him to tell me all about himself someday.
He began to come to my clinic twice a week. Fortunately, the abdominal fluid didn't increase as much as I'd thought it might, and the pain in his legs, too, continued for a while to give him little real discomfort. Then, one day about a month later he asked me if I'd care to go and see him at his place when I had the time.
"It s just a shack, I'm afraid," he said, "but I can manage a cup of tea and a warm place to tuck your feet in. I imagine you've had a normal, decent sort of life so it might be interesting for once to hear about something a bit different."
Early the next evening, in a cold, driving rain, I went to visit the man at his house. He was waiting for me, with a pile of mandarin oranges in a bowl on the small table covering the sunken hearth, ready for his guest. Occasionally, the faint sound of someone playing a shamisen was audible through the drumming of the rain.
"It s the girl amusing herself, " he explained.
As to whether it was his daughter though, or how old she was, he told me nothing. That evening, I listened to him for about three hours. Every thirty minutes or so he seemed to get tired, and we would take a break for a cup of tea; politely, he would invite me to take one of the mandarins, then peel one carefully for himself and eat it before proceeding in his hoarse voice with the next short section of his tale.
In this way I came to visit him, with a tape recorder at least once ewery three days. And by the time I had more or less heard him out, the cold winter had slipped away and spring breezes were blowing across the land.
What follows is a part of his story as he told it to me. Now I come to set it down, I find myself wishing that I had questioned him more closely about all kinds of things; but he is gone, and it is too late now.
His voice was quiet as he began to talk, but he spoke carefully, so there was no problem catching what he said.
My father at the time owned one of the best general stores in Utsunomiya, selling salt and sugar, fabrics, bedding, and so on. The farmers from the country round about used to come pulling handcarts and buy everything they needed there, from ordinary household things to gifts for people on special occasions. He must have had at least fifteen employees; the young assistants would be dashing around among the piles of goods, and the clerks clicking away at their abacuses. We used to give our best customers their midday meal in a separate room; the maids kept a great pot of rice going for the purpose. It's years ago now, but I can see it all as if it was just the other day.
Anyway, the money rolled in, and we lived in style. My old man was fond of buying watches. He'd have them sent from Tokyo, and kept a whole bunch of them on show in a special corner. Then, at the summer Bon festival and New Year's, he'd give them out to clerks and assistants who'd been working well. It was different then from now, watches weren't to be had for the asking, and these were gold watches into the bargain, Swiss-made, so they were worth a fair amount. My old man would sit there like a feudal lord, with his back to some fancy flower arrangement. The staff would be sitting in front of him, red-faced from bowing down till their foreheads touched the floor. When the chief clerk called out a name, the man who was to get the watch would come crawling up on all fours, and my dad would say "You've worked hard" or something of the kind, then he'd hand over the watch, taking his time about it. The younger lads used to get so excited they'd shake all over -- you could tell at a glance how pleased they were. I reckon he carried on with this routine just for the pleasure of seeing their faces.
My dad had a big house and garden just outside the town, which his parents used. Around the time when I first went to middle school, he had an extra house built to rent out at the back of the garden. When I say "to rent out," you mightn't think it was anything much, but it was a big two-story place, decently built, with its own entrance hall and an alcove for flower arrangements in the best room at the back. This house I live in here is two-storied too, but it's a shoddy affair compared with that one. Houses in those days were almost all one-story. The only exceptions were local government offices, schools, and so on, so an ordinary house that had a second floor was something pretty special.... Anyway, when I was in fourth grade at middle school, a young woman came to live there. She was the mistress of the chief judge in Utsunomiya, barely over twenty and, as I remember, very pretty.
My earliest memory of her was one day in autumn. I was coming in at the back gate when I saw this woman I didn't know looking out of an upstairs window. She had her hair done up in one of the traditional styles, all black and glossy, and was leaning on the rail outside the window, with her left hand up to her forehead and her right hand dangling outside the railing. It looked just like something in an old woodblock print. I stood watching her for a long time from behind a tree, wondering why someone like her should be there. After a while, my father came out of the front entrance, with a well-dressed fellow right behind him. He was showing him around, talking too much all the time and bobbing his head up and down. He wasn't much of a one for making up to people, and it was the first time I'd ever seen him behave like that.
The young woman joined them outside and said something to her well-dressed friend, who just nodded and grunted. For some reason this really turned me off him.
That was the day the judge came to look at the house; the woman herself moved in about ten days later.
It was always on a Sunday, in the daytime, that the judge came to visit her, never on a weekday, not even Saturday. He used to turn up in a rickshaw. He was a stout, imposing-looking man somewhere around his mid-forties. He'd climb down from the rickshaw in his formal kimono, wearing wooden clogs and carrying a cane; and while he was standing there, the woman would have a quick word with the driver and give him a tip.
The judge stayed with her till it began to get dark, when the rickshaw came to fetch him again, with a paper lantern hanging on one of its shafts. As he moved off along the dark road, leaning against the cushions, the girl used to watch him go.
I had to go to the woman's place once every month to collect the rent. Being a tradesman, my father couldn't live in a good residential area himself. My younger sister and my mother lived with him over at the shop, but I myself was with my grandparents, who were living in retirement there in the suburbs.
So it was my job to get the monthly rent and take it to my father's place. As she handed the money over, the woman would just say, "Here you are, thank you." I never heard another word from her until one day in winter, toward evening. When I arrived for the rent and stepped into the hall, her voice came from the other side of the paper sliding doors: "Gome on up, Eiji."
I didn't say anything, so a door opened, and there she was, sitting in the sunken hearth with a pair of chopsticks in her hand.
"I'm just toasting some rice cakes. Do you want some? Don't just stand there -- come on inside! Come and get warm. Come on, get in!... Tell me -- how old are you?"
"Why?"
"It doesn't matter. Just tell me."
She looked me full in the face, smiling slightly. Then she picked up a rice cake that she'd just toasted in her dainty fingers.
"Now, open your mouth...," she said.
The white fingers flashed in front of my eyes, I felt dizzy and couldn't breathe properly.... And that was when my life started to come unstuck.
I went completely overboard, as you can probably guess. The woman was lonely, and I was fifteen at the time, so everything apart from her stopped existing for me. So far, my grades at school had been among the best, but now they suddenly crashed to somewhere near the bottom of the class.
When I was with her, I was always horribly on edge, my heart pounding with fright at the idea that the judge might turn up at any moment. I actually thought that if I was caught in the act there, a policeman would come for me and I'd be put in jail -- sentenced to death, maybe.
This made her laugh, and she'd tease me about it: "If it bothers you so much," she'd say, "why don't you just shove off? The only thing is, if you do, I won't let you in here tomorrow or ever again." All it took was one tug on the leash and she knew I'd come trotting back to her.
There were a couple of things, though, that bothered her as well: the judge's wife and the big house they lived in. I used to pass the house on my way to school. It had a moat about six feet wide all the way around it just like a castle. On the far side of the moat was a thorny hedge and a wall, to stop people getting in. A pine tree in a tub stood on each side of the front door.
Inside the entrance hall there was a big step-up made of a single piece of wood. There was always a rickshaw waiting to one side of the entrance, with a man sitting next to it. They had a tennis court on the east side of the grounds. This was in the 1910s, mind you, and I'd never seen anyone playing tennis in a country town like that. Socially, a judge in those days was really something; he ranked alongside the prefectural governor, so I expect this one wanted a residence to match his position.
But it wasn't so much the house as the wife inside it that made her ask me all about it when I got home.
I remember a little thing that happened once. It was an early evening in summer with a hot wind blowing, and the woman, who'd had a bath, was lying on the tatami in the living room in nothing but a shift. I'd just got out of the bath myself too; I came into the room with nothing on but a loincloth and the steam rising all aver me. All of a sudden, the girl chucked her fan down on the floor.
"She's an awful nag," she said. "She's always going on at him. Like this --" She made a kind of frown between her eyebrows with her two forefingers.
I wondered who she meant.
"His wife!" she said bad-temperedly, picking up the fan again and fanning herself for all she was worth.
"I wish she'd just hurry up and die," she added.
"You ever met her?" I asked.
"Oh, yes! Just the one time. He took me to the Kabuki once when I was still in Tokyo, and his wife and daughter were in the next seats. The daughter was about the same age as me."
"That's a funny thing to do, isn't it?" I said.
"Funny? Ridiculous, I call it!"
She may really have been hoping the wife would die. But even if this had happened, there was no guarantee at all that she would have stepped into her shoes -- which was another thing that made her fret. The judge had rented a house for her and gave her everything she wanted, but it didn't seem to satisfy her. It made my blood boil when I saw her like that. I don't know why, exactly -- I was just furious.
Then, one evening near the end of summer, I was sitting there with my mind blank, trying to think of something to do about it but getting nowhere. Outside the window was one of those little bells that tinkle in the breeze in summer. I was looking at it when suddenly I felt I couldn't stand things any longer. So I pulled the bell off its string and slammed it down on the paving stones outside in the garden.
"What's up with you?" she said. "You scared the life out of me." She glared at me as if she found the sight of me disgusting.
"What's it matter to you?"
"Oh, cut it out! "
"I'm asking you."
"Don't be stupid! "
She took my chin in her fingers and twisted it sharply, then smiled brightly. Then she looked straight into my eyes and said it again, in a whisper: "You're stupid," she said, "like all the rest of them! "
Well, the same sort of thing went on for I don't know how many months, till the woman suddenly upped and ran off to Tokyo. The judge had been shifted to a better post, and she was moving so as to be with him. When we said goodbye, she said she'd write after she got to Tokyo, so I was to be sure to go and see her there. But I waited and waited, and it was three months before a letter came -- then when it did, it didn't have any address on it.
It must have been about six months later that I went to Tokyo myself. My one aim was to see the woman -- I had this idea that so long as I got there I was bound to meet her somewhere. When I told my father I wanted to find work in Tokyo, he agreed with surprisingly little fuss. Seems he felt it wouldn't be a bad thing for me at that point to depend on someone else for a change. I mean, I was in fourth grade at middle school, but it was obvious I wasn't going to pass my exams. In those days, it was normal to fail students who didn't do their work, so he probably thought it would do me good to find some way to support myself away from home.
"However tough things get, though, don't come here complaining." Those were his parting words; I don't expect he had any inkling of why I wanted to go. The young woman's first name was Oyoshi -- it's funny, but I don't remember ever hearing her surname.