Counterfeiter and Other Stories (10 page)

Of course, the setting is in ancient times. I do not see the flourish of modern homes which dot the hillocks at the foot of the mountain and extend out over the bleak plain. Besides, it is night and the moonbeams are falling, blue over the surrounding area, just like in the illustration in the
Obasute-Yama
picture book. Only my mother's shadow and mine are black.

"Where on earth do you say you'll leave me?" asks my mother.

She is past seventy and her entire body has become miniscule. Her body is so light that it is depressing, but nevertheless I am tired anyhow, exhausted from walking around all over with a human being on my back. There is a giddiness in my legs with every step I take.

"How about here?" I ask. "If I build a small hut around here . . ."

"A place like
this?
Ugh!" My mother has a young voice. Her body is frail but she is strong-willed, and not the slightest abatement in her uncompromising nature shows through even under circumstances like these, when I'm in the process of abandoning her. "Isn't it dangerous beside the cliffs when it rains? What if there are landslides? I wonder if there isn't a more sensible place?"

"I don't think so. Your demands are too extravagant, Mama. Still, how would it be if I rented the outhouse of that temple we just saw?"

"Oh, no! No! No!" Mother, on my back, kicks her feet and pounds with her hands like a spoiled child. "There would be lots of mosquitoes there in the summer. Besides, the building is old. And wouldn't that room be dark and gloomy? You're unkind. Really you are!"

I am bewildered, at a loss.

"If that's the case," say I, "I'd just as soon take you back home again. I don't know why it wouldn't be better to go back home to a crowded, noisy place with everybody around rather than to be here in a place like this."

"Again you're talking like that! Now that I've purposely left home, I wouldn't return for anything in the world. I wouldn't be back with everybody again for anything. 1 don't like the people at home; I don't like the people in the village. I only have a few years left, so I won't be satisfied unless I'm allowed to live alone and do as I please."

"You're just like a spoiled child. You really are, Mama."

"Then I'm a spoiled child. It's my nature to be spoiled, so I can't help it. Even so, you just look me in the face and say 'you're spoiled, you're spoiled!' What's 'spoiled' about being abandoned?"

"Damn!"

"'Damn' all you want, but I'm not going back home. So hurry up and get rid of me."

"Even if I
wanted
to get rid of you, the problem is that I can't find a suitable place for you."

"You can't find one if you don't look for it. You won't be punished for looking for a place to leave your mother!"

"Didn't I just walk my feet off looking all this time? You probably realize that I'm staggering. I wonder just how far I
have
walked. We've gone to see ten houses already."

"But I don't fancy any of them. Was there a single house that looked habitable to
you?"

"So, I've given up trying to rent a house. I said I would find a place that suited you and would build a hut for you, didn't I? But you complain wherever I go."

"'Complain,' you say! I'm an old woman. Oh, I wonder if there really is any place where I can live quietly alone. Couldn't you look harder? Oh! My back hurts! Couldn't you carry me on your back somehow so I'd be more comfortable? It's gotten cold! It feels as if the moonbeams are making my skin prickle."

"Be still, please, Mama, and don't kick up such a fuss. I'm tired too. It's fine for you, Mama. You're getting carried, but I'm the one who's doing the carrying, huh? Please, I beg you. Please, let's just go back home. It'll be a relief to everybody."

"No," snaps my mother.

"I don't understand your no's. We're not going to wander around like this all night. Honestly, we're going back home." When I say that, my mother raises her weak voice in a sudden and drastic change.

"Show a little bit of patience. Just in this, show a little bit of patience. All you want to do is take me home. I won't say anything else. Anything at all will be fine with me. Just leave me. You won't have to call me 'spoiled.' Over there you can see a hut. That one will be fine too. Just leave me there."

"Just a little while ago when we looked at that hut, didn't you say it was drafty and cold and that, besides, it leaks when it rains?"

"It doesn't particularly appeal to me, but that can't be helped. I'll put up with it. It's a house and secluded, and I possibly can live in it quietly and free from all worries and cares."

"But it's awful there. As your child, I can't leave you there."

"It doesn't matter to me if it's awful. Now hurry, go ahead and leave me there," says my mother. Then, as I linger there, the moonbeams bite their way into my body.

This is the sort of play-act I imagined taking place with my mother. My conversations with my mother coursed smoothly and naturally through my brain. My mother is spoiled, but there is a look of real earnestness on her face. Reality breaks through to me as I am being badgered by my mother—"Go ahead and leave me; go ahead and leave me; go ahead . . ."

It was strange how really naturally a character resembling my mother had been fused into the mother of my vision. This visionary one-act play—with me serving as the stage for this
obasute-
drama—was fairly far removed from the theme of the Legend of Obasute on which it was patterned because, in my case, it was the wish of the mother herself to be abandoned; because she persisted in saying that she wanted to be left and then did not agree to anything; and because I remained there carrying my mother on my back as I wandered around the Obasute hills. But that strangeness in particular, I felt, had set something like a small lump of ice somewhere in my heart. But when that funny feeling had vanished, in its stead chills spread all over my body.

It was awful to have imagined my mother badgering me about wanting to be left. But, perhaps, imagining such a scene as this in which I was abandoning my mother might have been a way of getting something off my chest.

Even so, why did I imagine my mother like that? I have often thought about this for long periods of time. And I have tried putting myself on my own back in place of my mother. And I have thought that when I get to be an old man, I may be just like the mother of my vision.

III

T
HIS SUMMER
, I went to deliver a lecture at a coal-mining town on the bank of the Enga River in northern Kyushu. There, at a Japanese-style inn, I met my younger sister Kiyoko whom I hadn't seen for two years. Kiyoko is the youngest of the four children in our family. She was married during the war and had two children, but there had been some sort of incident and she had fled from her husband's house, leaving him and the two children; for a while she returned to our parents' home; but now she had fled from that too on the grounds that she wanted to make her own way of life.

Even since I was small, I had liked this sister best of all my brothers and sisters, but I felt that there was something unpardonable in her selfish behavior. It wasn't anything like a cardinal sin, anything worth breaking relations over or never speaking to each other again—but Kiyoko, with her innate sensitivity, apparently realizing how I felt, did not write me a single letter after leaving home. For my part, all I even knew about her now was that she was working in northern Kyushu.

When I decided to make the trip to Kyushu, however, I considered going to see my sister. Accordingly, before I left Tokyo, I asked my mother for her address and sent her a telegram saying that I wanted to meet her. "Kiyoko might come to meet me, and then again she might not come," I thought.

That night when I returned to the inn from the lecture hall, my sister was sitting in a corner of my room near the veranda. Her face was brighter than I expected; her figure was trim; she was wearing a grey skirt and a pure-white sweater; her hair was cut fashionably short. While she actually was thirty-four years old, at first glance she looked as if she was only twenty-four or twenty-five.

"As far as my living goes, well, I'm eating—but I'm not living in luxury," said Kiyoko.

Her present job was at a beauty parlor at the air base in a coastal town near the mouth of the Enga River. There, Kiyoko had somehow or other come to be in charge of several girls who were around twenty years old, and she was working catering to foreign women.

We talked along lines that I guess were appropriate enough for a brother and sister who had not seen each other for a long time. There were many things that I, from the standpoint of being her older brother, could have said—about her separation from her family and about her behavior since then—but I didn't touch on these subjects at all. All of those things were problems about which nothing much could be done any more. Because she had run away from home even at the cost of leaving her two children, I felt that she must be a very resolutely strong-minded woman, a woman unto herself, with her own reasons for what she did.

I only chose matters concerning our parents and our brother and sister to talk about.

"Mama's still acting that way about
obasute
," I said.

Ever since the time when our mother had said that she wanted to be left at Obasute, the term
obasute
had been used by my brothers and sisters and me when we were talking amongst ourselves. It was a convenient word for us to use. Actually, it was just like my mother to say that she wanted to be left at Obasute—she was likely to say this at any time—and this illustrated both the best that was in her and the worst. Nevertheless, inherent in the words "still acting that way about
obasute
," there was some implied mild criticism of Mama's pride and her spoiled and unreasonable nature. On the other hand, for her children, who were able to accept the fact that she was all of these things, the phrase also embraced a feeling of sympathy toward her.

At my words, there was a look on Kiyoko's face for a moment as if she were biting her lips to restrain some oncoming laughter, but she only said, "Talking about
obasute
, I wonder if at that time Mama didn't mean that she really wanted to be left on Mount Obasute."

"Why?"

"Why? Just because I felt that way. I honestly wonder if she didn't really want to be left by herself, to get entirely away from constantly becoming involved in everything that was happening around her, to be left alone in the mountains somewhere."

"Aw, cut it out!" said I, rather thoughtlessly. There was something in the way Kiyoko spoke that somehow startled me.

"Was that your impression even way back then?"

"No. It just came to me now. When you used the word "
obasute
" I suddenly got that impression—just now."

I again began to visualize the scene in that vision of mine when I was wandering about in the vicinity of Obasute carrying my mother on my back. And at the thought of it, I felt shivers come over me for a second time, just as they had then.

As if she had been thinking this matter over for a while, Kiyoko a bit later said, "In my case, I had that kind of feeling too when I ran away from home. It was like this—how should I put it?—I just had to be alone, to get away immediately and completely from all the annoyances, so . . ."

"So, you too wanted to be left alone—
obasute
-style?"

"Well. . ."

"But you make such a
young
grandma."

"Yes, it'll still be quite a while before I'm seventy."

Then and only then did Kiyoko smile, but it was a sad smile. I could have taken all this to mean that she was obliquely using this conversation of ours to justify her own past behavior, but on the other hand, her real attitude at the time might very well have been something completely different from that.

About the children whom she had deserted I said nothing. She too may have wanted to make some passing reference to the children, but she acted as though she was well able to endure not talking about them.

If Kiyoko had said she was worried about the children, I would have had no alternative but to tell her that this was natural but that she should have known from the start that such would be the case. She knew that—and I did too.

She stayed overnight with me, sharing my room. Like so many inns at these coal-mining villages, the building had all sorts of labyrinthine annexes lumped together under one roof, and there must have been a banquet or something going on in a section somewhere off in the distance. The sounds of a
samisen
, the loud voices of men, and charming feminine voices could be heard until very late.

The next morning I went down to the station with my sister to see her off. It would take her about an hour to get back to her place by electric train. Although it was early in the morning, the sooty streets were already filled with lots of people walking around. It was a town of about sixty thousand, but according to what the maid at the inn said, it was in a constant state of flux, and if you added the suburbs, the population would probably be about double that figure. To be sure, the same restlessness that seemed to fill the streets was also to be found in the make-up of the stores on both sides of the avenue and in the way the pedestrians moved about. The smoke that came pouring out of the chimneys of the briquet factories was clouding up the sky and making the air murky.