Modern Japanese Stories/The Decoration

Kunshō

The Decoration

by Tokuda Shūsei

She had no great expectations. All she hoped was that she would attain a degree of economic security befitting her modest station in life and, when she got married, an average amount of conjugal happiness. Unlike her younger sisters, who had all succeeded in finding jobs with good prospects, she was in the dismal position of having to get married in order to live. Worse still, the years were passing rapidly as she wavered and soon she would be too old to make a satisfactory marriage.

At the moment she was working as cashier in a cheap restaurant on the Ginza. The waitresses were all about the same age as her youngest sister and they vividly brought home to Kanako the fact that she herself had already passed the prime of her youth. It had been different in the hosiery factory where she had worked before.

She often thought about that factory. It specialized in the manufacture of tabi.^[1] Unfortunately the owner had started to run after women. As a result he had neglected his factory and business had fallen off badly. Just then he had died. His widow was a clever woman. Rising to the occasion, she had taken charge of the management herself. Gradually the factory had been restored to its former prosperity and Kanako had again found it a pleasure to work there.

Everything had been all right until another factory-girl, who was her best friend, had a terrible accident. She had been washing her long hair and as she stood near one of the machines a few strands were caught in the cogwheel. An instant later her hair was being pulled into the machine with a fearful swishing sound. Everyone rushed up to her and someone managed to stop the machine. But it was too late. Just like a piece of lawn that has been torn out of the earth, her hair had been dragged out by its roots and nothing was left but a bleeding scalp. It had of course been the girl’s fault, yet Kanako could not help being tormented by the wretched fate of her friend. The awful groaning of the machinery now made her unbearably nervous and the factory, once so enjoyable, began to strike her as gloomy and oppressive. The owner was generally considered solicitous about her workers; but Kanako now regarded her as a monster and could not bear to look at her. Her friend had returned to her home in the country immediately after the accident. Kanako did not know the details, but she understood that the amount of compensation the girl received from the factory as a result of ruining her entire life had been nothing short of derisory. Yet even this, she was told, was more than the girl would have received torn most other employers. Whatever the truth of the matter might be, Kanako no longer felt like setting foot in the factory.

During the following year she lived at home and helped her mother with the housework. Kanako’s mother was a fierce, dauntless woman who had been brought up in the hinterland and who after many long years had still not been softened by city ways. She was a stubborn old realist and when she was not preparing for the morrow she was making sure that not a grain of today’s rice was being wasted. Even when Kanako sat down to do her sewing she felt her mother’s eagle eyes on her and she could not relax for a moment.

In the end the atmosphere in the house became unbearable and Kanako went to Shitaya where her elder sister ran a little tea-shop. There she was able to help in the kitchen and with the clothes and the bedding. When it came to waiting on customers in the shop, however, Kanako was too heavy and sluggish by nature to be of much use. Not that she did not try. The relative gaiety of her sister’s life filled her with envy and she did her best to mix with the male customers. Yet she was not sufficiently self-confident about her looks or her manners. She tried copying the other waitresses by powdering her face and curling her hair, but it all struck her as rather pointless. As soon as she began to make herself amiable, she felt that she was in some way betraying her own nature.

“Your eyes are just like Madam’s,” the girls in the shop used to tell Kanako. “You’ve got a nice round face and lovely white skin like hers, too.” She could not help smiling at these compliments; yet she was well aware that, much as she might resemble her sister in some ways, she had none of the elder girl’s attraction. Never once was Kanako flattered into believing that she possessed any real charm. Her face was always slightly crooked as though she were about to cry; it reminded one of Chōjirō, the actor.

One of the waitresses in the tea-shop had formerly been a dancer and she told Kanako about the easy life in the dance halls. Kanako decided to take some lessons, but at her first visit to a dance hall she was thoroughly disillusioned. She could not bear the idea of being dragged round the floor in the arms of one man after another, all complete strangers.

Kanako was afraid that if she continued her present life she might succumb to temptation. She was therefore glad to accept the job as cashier in a Ginza restaurant that one of her sister’s patrons, a wool draper, mentioned to her. Here at least she was safe. But it was no easy job to stand by the cash register all day and late into the night.

Meanwhile marriage plans were being discussed. A couple who came from the same village as Kanako’s mother called separately on her parents with the suggestion that she should marry Sōichi, the father’s son by his first wife. Originally it had been intended that she should be the bride of Sōichi’s stepbrother, Shinichi (who was the wife’s son from her first marriage), and negotiations had gone on for some time between Kanako’s parents and Shinichi’s mother. Shinichi was a fairly pleasant young man. He often used to call at Kanako’s house with a bundle of clothes for repair and he would sit for hours discussing horses with her father, who was a great racing fan. Kanako came to know him quite well. Shinichi’s position as a shopkeeper was entirely to her taste and she grew used to the idea that in due course she would become his wife.

Then in the middle of it all Shinichi’s stepfather, Wasao, proposed to Kanako’s parents that she should instead marry his own son, Sōichi, who was three years younger than the stepbrother. Her parents made no objection. At first Kanako felt that she was somehow acting wrongly towards Shinichi, but since he did not seem to care particularly, she silently resigned herself to the new arrangement and exchanged the traditional betrothal cups with Sōichi, about whom she knew next to nothing.

Sōichi, who worked in a large clock factory where his father was a foreman, had recently come back from military service in Manchuria. Before entering the army, he had fallen in with a set of bad companions who were employed in the same factory under his father’s superintendence. Through their influence he had started gambling and had also visited bars and brothels. It was with the aim of having his son settle down that Wasao arranged for him to be married immediately on his return from Manchuria. There was no pressing need for his wife’s son, Shinichi, to get married and Wasao had therefore substituted Sōichi as Kanako’s bridegroom.

After the marriage the young couple moved into Wasao’s house. The father gave them the second storey, one six-mat room and one three-mat room.^[2] For himself, his wife and their two daughters he reserved the six-mat room and the four-mat room on the ground floor. Despite this arrangement, Kanako soon found that the crowded house prevented her from enjoying the happiness of married life to which she had so eagerly looked forward.

The younger of the two sisters, who had just turned sixteen, had suffered from an attack of pleurisy and since her recovery had been hanging about the house doing nothing. Yoshiko, the other sister, was eighteen. She had recently started to learn sewing. After the marriage she announced that it was too crowded for her to work downstairs and she installed her sewing-machine in the three-mat room on the second storey. Kanako soon became accustomed to the whirring of the machine, but when Yoshiko took to spreading her bedding next to the room where she and Sōichi slept, she really found it intolerable. She felt that strange eyes were peeping into the happy world which they shared at night, and soon she became extremely reserved with her husband.

Yoshiko, on the other hand, felt as if Kanako were an elder sister who had been added to the family and for a time she tried to make friends. It soon became clear, however, that they had little in common. Kanako, thanks to her mother’s training, had an eminently practical approach, whereas Yoshiko thought of nothing but films and revues. The young girl was a great fan of Chōjirō, the film actor. Not long before, Chōjirō had made a personal appearance at the nearby Kinshi Hall. Yoshiko had pushed her way through the throng of girls and young wives who flocked from the neighbourhood to admire him. When she saw that the actor was going to step into his car, she leapt out in front of the crowd and tried to approach him as he stood there in his formal crested kimono. With a frenzied look in her eyes she seized his hand and screamed out his nickname, ‘Chōsan’. There was a stir among the onlookers and they broke into loud applause. Even Chōjirō, accustomed though he was to over-enthusiastic fans, was taken aback by this and he looked at the girl in blank amazement.

When Kanako heard the story, it gave her a strange feeling. She realized that such giddy behaviour was fairly frequent among the younger generation, yet it seemed odd that she should be living in the same house with so uncontrolled a girl. Every time that Kanako looked at Yoshiko’s freakish features, which she had obviously inherited from her mother, she felt amused and at the same time deeply sorry for her.

In order to show her friendliness, Yoshiko said that she would make a light dress for Kanako to wear in the early spring. From then on she began pestering Kanako about the exact sort of material and pattern that she wanted. It was all the more annoying in that Kanako did not have the remotest intention of wearing the dress. She would gladly have had an extra kimono to add to her wardrobe, but Western-style clothes were utterly out of character.

Kanako’s main occupations were washing and sewing. As a rule she would spend the greater part of the day working in her room on the second storey without saying a word to anyone. The cooking was the responsibility of the mother and her daughters. Kanako would have liked occasionally to prepare a meal with a variety of dishes that she could enjoy with her husband. But the household stuck strictly to the rule of having only one kind of food with the rice each day. If there were potatoes, there would be nothing but potatoes for all three meals; if they had cod, there would be nothing but slices of cod. There was never the slightest effort to combine different dishes and Kanako could not help feeling depressed as she sat down with the family to their monotonous meals. To make things even more trying, they never had vegetable pickles. Whatever else she might have missed during her life, Kanako had always had plenty of pickles, and rice without pickles struck her as extremely insipid. Her parents’ house was fairly near and she now began stopping by on her way back from the hairdresser’s or the public bath. She would slip in by the back door and ask for some pickles, which she then mixed in a bowl with rice and tea and gulped down greedily. Yet the knowledge that she now belonged to another family made her ashamed of these visits and took away most of the pleasure.

Her husband liked Kanako’s hair best when she did it up in a marumagé.^[3] At first she used to take great trouble in arranging it and would tie the chignon with a red band. Yet gradually she became imbued with the drab, gloomy atmosphere of the household. The mood that had buoyed her up during the early months of her marriage disappeared and she no longer took any pains with her coiffure. Why make her hair beautiful when everything else was so unlovely?

It was just at this time that Sōichi came home late one night thoroughly drunk. Earlier in the evening Kanako had sat downstairs with the younger sister and listened to records. Then she had heated the saké for her father-in-law to sip when he came back from the bath-house. Wasao returned and said that he would wait for his son to join him at his saké, as was their habit in the evenings. Time went by, but still the young man did not return. Wasao was reminded of his son’s nocturnal outings in the past and the saké failed to produce its usual enlivening effect. He began to mumble some half-hearted apology on behalf of Sōichi. It made Kanako rather uncomfortable and she took the first opportunity to leave him and go upstairs. Ten o’clock passed, then eleven, and still there was no sign of Sōichi. Kanako became impatient. She emptied some old photographs out of a drawer and examined them. Then she began to rummage through some old magazines and story books which had been gathering dust in a cupboard. At that moment she was aware of a pungent smell of saké. Sōichi was back. Without a word he sprawled out on the floor like a refractory child and fell into a drunken sleep. This was Kanako’s first experience of such behaviour and she felt that in a flash she had been confronted with the true nature of men.

Some time after this incident the young couple moved into a little rented house not far from the parents’ home. Wasao, who would normally have objected strongly to the change, was in no position to do so. For on a certain evening while Kanako was pouring saké for him he had made an objectionable suggestion that had utterly infuriated her.

His wife had gone out that evening to the local cinema. She had taken along the youngest daughter, but Yoshiko had stayed behind. The elder girl’s mental condition had been growing steadily worse and when the time came for the cherry-blossoms she had lapsed into real lunacy. After the worst period had passed, they found that her nature had completely changed. The girl, who had formerly suffered from manic frenzy, now became extremely subdued. Occasionally she fell into fits of fearful depression, but most of the time she was reasonably calm. The genesis of Yoshiko’s disorder appeared to lie in her obsession with her beloved Chōjirō. One night she had jumped out of bed, crying that Chōjirō was passing outside the window, and she had tried to rush into the street. Evidently she had been aroused by the sound of a group of factory-girls walking by after a visit to the cinema; this had in some way stirred up images of the memorable occasion when she had seized Chōjirō by the hand. Wasao was well aware that his daughter’s tendency to madness was shared by his wife, who loved him so frenziedly, and he felt that he was imprisoned by bonds of cause and effect from which he could never escape. He sighed deeply and took another sip of saké. Until that year Wasao had always observed the strictest economy. He never made any objections, however, when his wife used to dress up and go out shopping. She used to get terribly lonely when he left for work and sometimes she could not bear to stay in the house. His wife really adored him. Even in front of the children she would nestle up amorously to her solemn-faced husband and cause him the liveliest embarrassment. The fact that she was a couple of years older than Wasao made her affection all the keener.

“You know, my girl,” he said to Kanako, “I really love the old woman. So long as she’s alive I won’t do anything to cause her unnecessary worry. But when she’s dead I’m going to find myself someone better. After all, what’s the use of sweating away and making a pile if I can’t get any pleasure out of it? The way things are now, I come straight home from work every day. I never set foot in a tea-house, I never go to the races or have any real fun. I just have a bottle or two of saké, get a little tipsy, turn out the lights and go to bed. Sometimes I feel pretty fed up, I can tell you. There are lots of ways a man can enjoy himself in this world if he’s got a little money. Why shouldn’t I want to do the same things that Sōichi likes doing? Most men of my age when they’ve made a decent position for themselves keep a mistress or two. Now don’t get the idea that I’m waiting for the old woman to die. But sometimes I can’t help feeling that it would be a good thing if she did die fairly soon. It’s not simply that I want my freedom. Just think what would happen if I died first! It would be terrible for my poor wife and the rest of the family would be in a pretty bad state, too.”

Wasao muttered away affectedly. He drained his cup and handed it to Kanako.

“Here, have some saké,” he said.

Kanako found it irritating enough to have to pour the saké; to be asked to drink it was doubly annoying.

“Me?” she laughed. “How absurd!”

“Too shy to drink, eh, my girl? That’s rather sweet.”

He pressed the cup on her, but when she again refused he gave up and resumed his rambling monologue. “That boy of mine’s an awful fool,” he said, “but I still love him the best, you know. Of course, my children are all the same and there’s no real reason I should love one of them more than the others. But Sōichi is the living image of my dead wife. I suppose that’s why I worry about him most of all. If only you could have a child by him, my girl, I could pass on my money with a free mind. The trouble is—well, I suppose it’s something you should have been told about before you got married, but it was a terribly hard thing to mention at the time. Now that you’re a wife you’ll understand quite easily and you’ll realize it’s nothing so bad. The fact is that Sōichi led too wild a life before he went into the army and as a result he can’t have any children. It’s not all that bad, is it? Still, it makes me rather sad that my family is going to end when Sōichi dies. Now please don’t think I’m using all this as an excuse. I’d hate you to think that. But suppose you were to have a child for Sōichi. You know what I mean, girl, don’t you?”

Kanako had been listening carefully to what her father-in-law had to say, but suddenly her expression changed. She jumped to her feet and ran upstairs without paying the slightest attention to Wasao’s apologies. A few moments later he heard her quietly leaving the house. He did not even try to stop her.

Thus Wasao’s plans for a united family life in which all the money remained secure were abruptly shattered. The young couple rented a separate house and the family was split.

Kanako was happy about the change. She thought that at last she and her husband would be able to live a life of their own. She remembered the hosiery factory, which she had not thought about for a long time. When she worked there before, she had given part of her earnings to her mother and this had been a great help for the household expenses. Why should she not help her husband by doing some work now? As soon as they were settled in the new house, she visited the proprietress of the factory and discussed the matter. It was agreed that she could very well work at home on mending the tabi which came out of the machine with tangled threads, tears and other imperfections.

Kanako promptly set to work and to her satisfaction found that she was earning enough to pay for their rent and their rice. So long as Sōichi handed her his monthly pay packet intact, they would have enough to pay a visit to the cinema a couple of times a month, to have a meal in the restaurant of one of the big department stores when they went shopping and even to deposit something in the postal savings account.

“I’m not going to stop you two from living apart if that’s what you’ve decided to do,” Wasao had told them when they left, “but you’ll have to manage your own finances from now on. Of course if you get ill or something I’ll try to help out, but you’d better not count on me too much.”

Kanako determined not to ask him for money whatever happened, and she made her plans for their new budget accordingly. Everything would have been all right if Sōichi had given her his full pay as agreed. But he did so only in their first month. Towards the end of the second month Sōichi took on someone else’s work in the factory and Kanako was happily looking forward to the extra money that he would be earning. When pay day came, however, Kanako found that all her household plans had been in vain. Profiting from the fact that his father no longer was watching him, Sōichi had gone back to his old habit of gambling and had succeeded in losing over half his month’s pay. He came home drunk and without a word threw his pay envelope on the floor. Kanako picked it up and emptied the contents.

“Is this all?” she said, holding up two notes.

Sōichi did not answer. He merely stood there, smoothing his unkempt hair.

When they had moved into their new house, Sōichi had taken out his tool box and busied himself with putting up shelves, installing the wireless that he had brought from his father’s place and other odd jobs. Occasionally he had taken his wife to a shrine festival and they had bought themselves something at a stall—a little potted tree or a cage of singing insects. Or again, he had locked up the house and taken her out to a film. Once they had been to see some Western-style dancing at the pleasure pavilion in Sumida Park and had been so captivated by the gaiety of the event that they had not returned home till quite late in the evening.

All this came to an end now that Sōichi had fallen in with his old gambling associates. A small group would get together during the lunch break and secretly play their game behind a pile of crates in one of the factory warehouses. In the evenings they would go to some house and gamble until late at night and sometimes even until dawn. Most of them worked under Wasao. In theory the foreman was supposed to prohibit gambling by his subordinates, but in fact Wasao usually turned a blind eye to what was going on. He had got into the habit of advancing money at interest to those who could not pay their gambling debts, and this obliged him to settle Sōichi’s losses out of his own pocket when his son fell hopelessly in arrears. Wasao secretly fumed at the stupidity and shiftlessness of this son who, despite his utter lack of skill, had let himself become involved with experienced gamblers. But there was nothing that he could do. As a matter of fact, he himself was far from being ignorant about the game, and he would not have minded Sōichi’s gambling if only the young man had been able to win a little money from time to time—money enough, for instance, to pay for an occasional visit to a brothel. But even on those rare occasions when Sōichi did manage to win, his fellow gamblers, who were well aware that his father had saved up a good sum of money over the years, were far too shrewd to let him leave while he was ahead.

Once Sōichi stayed away from home for two whole days. Kanako waited up till late at night, repairing tabi that had come from the factory with imperfections. Now all their household expenses had to come out of her own earnings. The New Year’s holidays were only a few days off, yet she did not even have enough money left over to buy herself a new collar for her kimono. Sōichi had started to run up debts. He had borrowed money left and right, thirty yen from one man, fifty from another, until his debts, including interest, amounted to some 400 yen. Whatever happened, he would have to pay this sum before the end of the year. He had been cudgelling his brains about how he could extract the money from his father. The trouble was that Wasao had deliberately entrusted the responsibility for all such matters to his wife. Sōichi found it extremely difficult to approach his stepmother. Despite her good heart she had a very sharp tongue, and any request for money was bound to be met with shouts of “You stupid fool!” or “You good-for-nothing trash!” Sōichi did not relish the prospect.

As she sat sewing her socks, Kanako remembered what her husband had intimated a few days before. “If I don’t pay back that money,” he had said, “I can’t possibly go on living.” He was a rather weak-kneed fellow, to be sure, but Kanako could not help worrying lest in a moment of desperation he might have decided to take his life. Perhaps at that very moment he was lying on some railway line waiting for the train to run over him. Since his attack of appendicitis this autumn, he had become more uncontrolled than ever. “I shan’t live long anyhow,” he had blurted out, “so I might as well enjoy the short time that’s left and do just what I feel like.”

Kanako was half awake all night, listening for his footsteps at the door. Finally dawn broke and she heard the sound of shutters being opened in the nearby houses and of people going out to empty their buckets. Next to her house was a large yard where a construction company stored stones and rocks, and behind this a small house shared by an umbrella mender and an industrious Korean scrap pedlar with a Japanese wife. Directly on the other side of the wall was a widower with two children. Until recently he had been a traffic policeman and he had made a good reputation for himself. Now he was confined to bed with tuberculosis and had been obliged to leave the force.

Kanako noticed that the Korean scrap pedlar used to change into a neat cotton kimono every evening as soon as he came home from work and that he would then take his children out to the public bath. It looked like a happy family. People say a lot of unflattering things about Koreans, thought Kanako, but Koreans can be much kinder than Japanese men. The scrap pedlar’s wife often used to speak to Kanako at the back door, and Kanako began to wonder whether this woman’s marriage to a foreigner wasn’t far happier than her own.

She also began to observe the other neighbours. The tubercular policeman received regular calls from the ward physician, and various members of the neighbourhood committee would also come to see him. She heard that one of his children had died of tuberculosis that winter and that the father had caught the disease from him. The other two children were no doubt doomed to catch the illness themselves in due course.

In the next house lived a woman of about fifty. After working for twenty long years as a charwoman in an oil company, she had received a retirement allowance of one thousand yen. This piece of luck had completely unhinged her and during the following year she had spent the entire sum on visits to department stores and theatres. Now she scraped along by doing various odd jobs and by using the minute wages of her fifteen-year-old step-daughter.

Kanako had seen all these people from morning till night, but it was only now that she began to think about them. Their fates struck her as an ironic commentary on human existence. Life, it seemed to her, was a very gloomy business indeed.

Towards morning Kanako managed to doze off for a while. When she awoke Sōichi had still not returned. It occurred to her that he might have gone to her sister’s tea-shop, and asking one of the neighbours to look after the house, she set out for Shitaya. But he was not there.

“I’m fed up with him,” she told her sister. “I want to leave him and work here with you.”

Her sister laughed. “It’s funny,” she said. “You’re the one who was always talking about marriage. But look, Kanako, surely the sensible thing would be to go and talk to his parents.”

“I don’t want to see those people.”

“Well, in that case why don’t I phone Wasao at the factory for you? He certainly ought to be told about his son’s debts.”

As a result of the telephone call, Wasao came directly from the factory in his overalls. It was evening when he reached the tea-shop in Shitaya. Hearing about the debts, he instantly surmised who had lent his son the money.

“Ah well,” he said, “I should have kept Sōichi living with me. I’d have stopped him from this nonsense. I’m not saying that I won’t settle for him, but I don’t see how I’m going to hide it from the old woman. She’ll make a terrible fuss when it comes to paying off those debts. I suppose you think I’m too easy on my wife—letting her control the money like that. But that’s how I keep things peaceful and happy at home. Well, I’ll manage somehow. Still, it’s terrible to have this idiot son of mine fleeced of the money that I’ve sweated for all these years.” He sat there sunk in thought and did not touch the whisky and the plate of cheese that they set before him.

With the help of his first wife’s brother, Wasao started making discreet inquiries about his son’s whereabouts. Perhaps there was some basis for Kanako’s concern. It was just possible that Sōichi might have jumped under a passing train or thrown himself into the crater on Ōshima Island.^[4] Tragic as this would be, it would not, Wasao told himself, be an unmitigated disaster: at least it would save him from having to worry about his feckless son.

There was no news on the following day, but on the evening of the twenty-eighth, just at the beginning of the New Year’s holiday, Kanako’s parents sent word that Sōichi had returned. So after three days’ absence his boy was safe and sound. Wasao hurried off to see him, bringing along the money that he had secretly put aside.

Sōichi was in the middle of supper when his father arrived. He had evidently been involved in a long bout of gambling. His face was unshaved, his cheeks were pale and emaciated; but there was a glitter in his sunken eyes.

“You’re safe, my boy,” said Wasao. “That’s all I care about. I don’t know what I’d have done if anything had happened to you. What do 400 or 500 yen matter so long as you’re all right?”

The tears streamed down his face as he seized his son’s hands in his own.

One day the following summer Kanako appeared by herself at the back entrance of her sister’s tea-shop. Since the crisis in December she had only been there twice, once to pay a New Year’s call, once at the cherry-blossom season. On both occasions she had been accompanied by her husband. The sister had assumed that Kanako’s married life had improved. In view of Sōichi’s character this had surprised her somewhat, but at the same time she had felt greatly relieved.

Now a glance at Kanako’s dejected face made her realize that her optimism had been unjustified. She put aside her cinema magazine and turned off the electric fan that had been cooling her plump body.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing … nothing really,” answered Kanako, looking aside awkwardly. It soon turned out that she had come once again to speak to her sister about separating from Sōichi. Kanako’s desire for a separation, however, was rather vague and as soon as she was confronted with her direct, efficient sister she felt that her resolution was ebbing.

After the December crisis Sōichi had made a show of controlling himself. He still did not turn over his full salary, but Kanako decided that she too should try to change her attitude and she avoided speaking about money matters. Sōichi lost no time in taking advantage of this.

One day Sōichi announced that he was being granted a decoration of the eighth rank and war medal, together with a small pension for his overseas service. He was as delighted as a child who has received a toy sabre from his parents.

“I happened to see it in a copy of the Official Gazette at the milk bar,” he told Kanako.

Kanako was overjoyed. “That’s splendid,” she said. “Really splendid. Don’t forget to buy me a little souvenir, will you?”

“Hm,” replied Sōichi dubiously. “I don’t expect I’ll have much money left over. You see, I’ve promised to stand all my friends a treat.”

“What? Already?”

“Yes. But I’m waiting till they’ve given me the decoration.”

A few days later Sōichi received the official notice. He went to the Military Affairs Section of the War Office and was handed a box containing the Order of the White Paulownia and the war medal. On his way home he took them round to show his acquaintances.

Two days later he invited seven of his friends for dinner. He ordered the food from a nearby restaurant and also provided a generous supply of saké. After everyone had had plenty to drink, they turned on the wireless and listened to a programme of popular songs. One of their group who, despite his rough appearance and raucous voice, pretended to some artistic talent, was inspired to give a solo recital. Next a few of the guests sang folk songs. After a time someone complained loudly about the absence of a samisen accompaniment.

“Let’s go somewhere and have a good time. What about it, Sōichi?” said one of his friends.

“Good idea,” chimed in another of the guests. “Let’s get some girls to play for us.”

“No, better stay here,” someone demurred. “The Order of the White Paulownia will start weeping if it sees us celebrating like that.”

Meanwhile the saké was flowing freely and soon their supply was exhausted. Kanako was wondering whether she should go and buy some more when she noticed that a couple of the guests had stood up and were about to leave. Wasao got to his feet, stuffed his purse securely in his pocket and hurried out. Just then Sōichi came up to her.

“Money,” he whispered into her ear. “For God’s sake, let me have some money!”

Kanako went to her drawer and took out the thirty-three yen that she had been planning to deposit in their postal savings account. Even as she handed the sum over to her husband, she knew that she was throwing good money away on the spur of the moment, and afterwards she cursed herself for having been so spiritless.

Now as she sat in her sister’s room with a bowl of sherbet in front of her, Kanako felt the hot tears welling up in her eyes.

“Of course he didn’t come home that night,” she said. “Three yen and a few coppers—that’s all he left me with. Then a couple of days ago he told me that on his next half holiday he was planning to go to the seaside. I haven’t been away a single time all summer and I was sure that he would offer to take me along. But no, it turned out that he had arranged to go to Enoshima with some friend and that he couldn’t take me. It’s really more than I can stand. I even have to go to the cinema by myself now. And those thirty yen—I never dreamt he’d go and spend the whole lot.”

Kanako pressed a handkerchief to her eyes.

“You’re partly to blame yourself,” said her sister impatiently. “You should do things in a more clearcut way.”

As usual, they telephoned the factory and in the evening Wasao appeared at the tea-shop. He was accompanied by his brother, who was the exact image of Sōichi. It was extremely hot, but Wasao did not touch the iced coffee that was placed before him. Instead he sat there wiping his forehead and complaining of his parasitic children.

“I’m not going to try to keep you from leaving him,” he said after he had been told of Sōichi’s latest behaviour. “All the same, my girl, you were very foolish to give him such a large sum of money. I know how a woman feels in a case like that. She hands over the money before she knows what she’s doing. But that’s exactly the point I’d like to advise you about. You must be a little firmer, Kanako. You must take a strong attitude with Sōichi instead of just moping. The reason he behaves badly isn’t that he dislikes you but that you’re too easy with him. I wish you’d give him another chance. But I’m through with him myself and I really don’t have the right to ask you.”

The uncle, who until then had said nothing, announced his opinion. “I strongly believe that you should go back to your husband,” he said.

At this, Kanako’s sister took a firmer stand.

“Yes, Kanako,” she said, “you really can’t continue like this. Each time something goes wrong and you’re unhappy, you slip into this sort of irresponsible talk about separation. After all, marriage is a very different thing from what you find in cinemas and novels.”

“Yes, I know it is,” said Kanako. “But I can’t believe it’s meant to be like ours. My husband has never shown me the slightest appreciation. Never once. And now I suppose he’s got someone else on the side. What a fool I’ve been!”

“But really, Kanako, you should listen to what everyone’s telling you. There’ll always be the time later on to break up the marriage if it turns out to be completely hopeless.”

In the end Kanako was won over by the uncle’s firm attitude and she decided to try again.

A few days later a large photograph of Kanako and her husband arrived at the tea-shop. Sōichi was in uniform; the Order of the White Paulownia and the war medal were neatly pinned to his chest. Kanako had her hair in a marumagé and was wearing a silk kimono with a splashed pattern. Behind them was a Shinto shrine sacred to the spirits of the war dead.

Tokuda Shūsei (1870–1943)
This story was first published in 1935
Translated by Ivan Morris

1. Japanese-style socks.
2. All Japanese-style rooms are measured by the number of straw mats (tatami). A mat is about 6 ft.×3 ft.
3. Normal old-fashioned hair style for married women.
4. The crater of Mt Mihara, a truncated volcano on Ōshima Island (some sixty miles south-west of Tokyo), is a popular place for suicides.