Not long before, a certain celebrated musician had been in the habit of asking her to go out with him from time to time
Liking to equate his own fame with sexual attractiveness, he had become disgruntled at her failure to fall for his name, and had recently transferred his attentions to another. And to make sure that she realized the fact, he had invited her to a meal with the other woman present.
He was a world-famous cellist, and the better known record companies were falling over each other to get his performances onto disk.
Occasionally, he would let slip references to the wild enthusiasm of his fans, or the welcome he had received in foreign capitals, or things that had happened in recording sessions, but this life of his was hardly relevant to her own, nor was she herself a specialist in music, so she could only nod obligingly and murmur inconsequential replies.
For a while, he had if anything been titillated by her relative indifference to his celebrity, but this soon turned to dissatisfaction, and he began to feel her lack of rapt attention to his conversation as a serious defect.
She was duly impressed, of course, by his ability to move large numbers of people with his playing, but as to how far she herself was enraptured by his music-making, there were considerable doubts.
It was pleasant, no doubt, to be made much of by such a famous man, but she was the type that is less interested in a man as a famous name than in a man as a man.
Admittedly, she was not unmoved when someone or other praised to the skies his prowess with the cello, but she never felt really sure as to how, precisely, all this related to herself.
Although he had a wife, he was fond of parading her in public, and had no qualms about introducing her to people. To behave in this way, he felt, was rather smart.
In all likelihood, the fact that she was a poet and lived with another man tickled his sense of novelty, and he liked letting everyone know that he had such a woman in tow.
Or possibly, it was simply that men were driven by a sense of duty to try to make any woman they came across, whoever she might be.
She was not lacking, of course, in respect for him as a man. Whatever reservations she might have, he was a male, and as such had something in him, both spiritually and physically, that was drawn toward women—something that, for all his talk, was lost without them, and which her own body, quite naturally, went out to meet.
Nevertheless, he began to be irritated by her refusal to give up the man she lived with and devote her attention exclusively to himself. Since she felt the man she lived with almost as an extension of her own being, she was puzzled by this irritation: a man who himself lived with another woman—his wife—ought to be able to appreciate the way she felt.
Either way, he was also the type of man who like to do what society expected of him, and sometimes it seemed merely that he was less interested in selecting the ideal woman for himself than in keeping a number of reasonably conspicuous women hanging around him.
And she on her side felt that if she should be of some use to him, even as an accessory, then there was nothing particularly for her to object to; besides, if you looked at it in that way, then he too might be considered an accessory to herself.
Either way, he had a great desire to watch a number of different women vying at the same time for his favors, and by going out of his way to let her know that the new woman (she might not in fact be all that new) had had a husband but had actually got a divorce on his own account, he was aiming to demonstrate their relationship to her.
Finding it odd that he had never in talking of human beings used any expression that seemed to go below the surface, she had sought to confirm the whereabouts of his penis—only to feel, against her thighs, the chilly wings of a black, flapping, ghostly bird. It was a deformed, menacing creature that had swallowed up the characteristics of both sexes, transforming the tangled pubic hairs into wings.
The woman who had got a divorce, even though the man didn’t, had no special characteristics, but was, she supposed, a capable type, the type that looked as though she could do anything tolerably well. She was a pianist, not as well-known as he, and prided herself on being his accompanist. Looking at her, she could perceive instantaneously that she had given him no inspiration.
The woman herself, however, seemed to get an extraordinary kick out of the fact that he was celebrated, and gave every sign of delight that such a man should have found her worthwhile as a woman.
An uncomplicated woman, she thought, gazing at the other’s dainty little eyes and nose and lips with no feeling of ill-will of any kind.
She found it strange that she should feel neither jealous nor erotically stimulated by the sight of a man with whom she had once been to bed sitting close to another woman, their arms around each other’s shoulders. It made her concerned for his sake: if she was really as unemotional as this suggested, she must have hurt him in the past since, being a musician, he must certainly have sensitivity in him somewhere. And she felt a desperate urge to find some way of eliciting a response, but with lamentable lack of success.
Since there was no help for it, she concentrated on looking despondent, shrinking into herself so as to be as inconspicuous as possible; she stole keen glances at each of them in turn, but however much she looked, they were still no more than a couple of moving objects.
They so completely lacked any suggestion of anything gross, in fact, that she felt she could even strike up a pleasant friendship with the woman. At least, she felt, the woman was preferable to the man to the extent that there was no need to be sexually ingratiating to her.
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Admittedly, where conversation was concerned the woman didn’t look as though she’d have a great deal to offer. As a human being, the man—ambitious and with a head stuffed full of all kinds of plans—was more interesting. Looking back on it, the chief things that had attracted her to him were his lust for fame and a certain, innocent, unthinking power of expression that somehow one couldn’t dislike; it seemed to her a kind of symbol of modern man. The sexual life force that one would have expected to come into play between a man and woman had been no more than a half-collapsed, drifting balloon.
And by now the balloon was just a blurred speck of red, far away beyond the hills.
His arm around the new woman’s shoulders, he looked at her with eyes that said, “I’ve finished with a second-rate cello like you. I’ve found a splendid new instrument that responds to my every whim.”
He hadn’t, she recalled, shown all that much desire for her—probably, she thought with self-reproach, because she herself hadn’t been passionate enough. It was only natural, the way things had turned out.
She did remember sensing a kind of sadness, of struggle in him. And because of the memory she couldn’t blame him for his rudeness now.
In all likelihood, she had pretended not to notice the sadness, as though it were something distant, unrelated to herself, and she supposed he wanted to get his own back for that now.
She ought to do anything she could to alleviate the feeling of let-down he almost certainly must be experiencing by now; and she lowered her gaze dejectedly, as though to say how much she regretted having been so lukewarm, and what a pity it was she had let slip something so precious. Not, of course, that such a conventional gesture was going to produce much effect on him; but it would at least satisfy his self-esteem.
The autumn breeze was so peaceful, and the man and woman who sat there were like two trees swaying among the waving silver stretches of autumn grasses, brushing their yellowing leaves together.
Although the other woman was hardly sexy, she was vital enough in her own way, and gave the impression of wanting to be left alone with the man just as soon as possible. So she withdrew as soon as they’d finished their meal.
On reflection, though, it occurred to her that she’d been far too good-natured about it; there’d been no call for her to go specially to meet them. Feeling a need to take her mind off things, she went to a telephone in a corner of the lobby and called two men she met occasionally.
They always came together: the presence of a partner made them feel safer.
They couldn’t enjoy themselves alone, they said, because of the fear that she might become a real, flesh-and-blood woman.
If she was something abstract to them, she believed, it was just because she was transparent and uncloying, like a piece of glass.
They’d be right along, they said. But there was still a while to go, and she was sitting alone having a brandy when a man sitting diagonally across from her began busily giving her what might either be the come-on or a stare.
She knew from past experience that if she made any direct response he would probably try to strike up an acquaintance. But even that was a bore, so she looked abstracted, as though she hadn’t noticed.
She knew perfectly well, of course, what people said: that a woman who drank alone couldn’t complain if she was mistaken for a tart. But it occurred to her now that she’d survived so far by ignoring that kind of talk completely.
She was sick and tired of all those little verbal incantations laying down that a woman is this or a man is that.
Not that she’d had any idea, in any case, of taking money from the men who had made advances to her, but whenever something had happened to catch her fancy and she talked to them, she had soon found that, just as women were under a spell, so were men too.
Thus she began to get a kick out of waving her wand like a sorceress and breaking their spell. They shuddered, cast off the chain mail that had encased them till now, shed the shackles from their ankles, and stood up. But they had gone so long without walking in a normal way that most of them couldn’t walk properly, their shin muscles having atrophied.
At such times, they had the faces of boys and the wasted bodies of old men.
The pitifully atrophied, yellow-withered trees had forgotten where their roots were, no doubt because the soil around them was trodden too hard to admit even a breath of air to reach them, and a fearful strength was need to restore them to vigor.
If the way the branches grew appealed to her, or if she sensed the man’s almost panic-stricken struggle, she could never resist stretching out a helping hand.
But when, tiring of holding her magic wand up in the air, she dropped her hand, they would immediately be shut up in the magic temple again.
A little later, when she knocked at the door of a room in the same hotel where she had dined with the others, the two men were already there.
The room was all white inside, looking oddly like a stretch of snow-covered countryside, and the two men were two rabbits with red berries for eyes in their egg-smooth faces and long leaves for ears.
But when they rose and started moving they suddenly changed into smelly, floppy, cold and rubbery creatures of protein, and the snow-covered country side was sunk in a profound gray shadow.
When she came into the room, they were seated neatly on opposite sides of a small round table eating what looked like soft chocolate candy. They told her to have one, and though she objected that she wasn’t hungry, they insisted on putting one in her mouth.
She was the kind of woman who always felt guilty about rejecting other people’s kindness, and would drink and eat even when she didn’t want to.
Then, before long, all three of them turned into creatures in some unidentified depths, with mouths and shining eyes like squids, and tangled their warty tentacles lined with suckers.
There was light blue water all around them; the seaweeds swayed to and fro and bloomed in flowers of scarlet and ultramarine and rusty red. Crabs and flounder heaved their white bellies ever so slightly, and blinked moistly gleaming eyes.
The strength of the powerful fins and tails of the fish that swayed through the water,’ their sharply pointed teeth, their rosy gums, buried her deep in a hole in the sand.
She saw the stirred-up sand of the sea-bed rise like smoke through the blue water and disperse in the far-distant light of the sun.
One of the men was panting through slimy, blemished lips set in a bristly red-gleaming beard.
The other man seemed to be crouching, pursing his small, withered mouth. Yet the jet black of the ink he spewed floated her away on its smooth flow.
She thought of nothing; even if the sun light had spread through the thick mist and the drops of mist had borne down on her like a shoal of piranhas, she would have let them feed their fill on her softly decaying flesh.
She was obliged to draw her legs up sharply, to support her weight and theirs with her knees, so that she could hear deep down in her ears the engorging blood as it roared and swirled through one part or another of her body, and prayed that the swift flow would purge away the older and staler blood.
The two men had clearly distinguished bodies.
Where one of them was a wave that swept power fully over her with a rough abandon, the other was the small waves on the shore, an eternal, never-spent murmur.
The two male organs thrust alternately before her eyes, now in one form, now in another, made her feel how stupid men were in the way they prided themselves on the size and shape of their penises, or got obsessed with them and developed complexes.
Sometimes the penises seemed beautiful, sometimes pointless and rather frivolous, but the thought of how the owners worried themselves over them, tried in vain to control them, or felt them as a source of burgeoning life made them endlessly fascinating to watch.
Why, in heaven’s name, did this possession of theirs, this smooth, blood-filled projection, oblige them to boast of it so insistently and at such length, or to explain it away in such apologetic, almost tearful detail? Almost certainly, it was because the most important vital participant, the woman who received its benefits or its evil effects, didn’t even look at it properly, much less subject it to detailed inspection.
She found them rather pleasant; it was reassuring, somehow, just to gaze at them and touch them, but at the same time they were dreadfully inorganic, as insipid as a set of bowling pins lined up, filling up every bit of available space.
And if, she felt, one slipped over them the plastic cover with all the holes in it, the same space would be instantly converted into something colorless and of indeterminable mass.
Then it was as if she were walking all alone through a fully automated, deserted factory listening to the clatter of her own footsteps. This was the scene, she suspected, that robbed so many men and woman of their sex and turned them, eventually, into that black, ghostly bird.
She shut her eyes, rejecting the world of sight.
Immediately, she remembered how as a child, during an experiment in biology class, she’d been blindfolded, told to hold her nose, and made to take alternate bites of a rather hard, crunchy pear and an apple, and hadn’t been able to tell which was which.
And she was beset with a still fiercer uneasiness.
Even so, she reached after sound and touch in an attempt to trace, through some melody or other, her memory of living things.
This was a completely abstract, scarcely any longer a physical world, but in it she found a definite memory of a beach where the heavens slowly revolved and the tide ebbed and flowed, and where the white sand, washed clean, held the mark of the waves.
And the memory was something akin to an accumulation of human life, something unspeakably vast with little relation to her own senses, something like the Milky Way in the summer night-sky, so that it never occurred to her to wonder who the owners of the penises were, while their size and shape and motion too had become no more than a great, abstract, pillar of heaven, mere matter whose only function was to stir up memories of these things.
Eventually, all three of them began to flag; gradually the suckers lost their power, and they fell asleep.
There was a sound of pouring rain, but in their drowsiness they felt as though they were in a boat floating at anchor in a thick mist, in the very center of a lake on which they had come fishing, listening to the rain falling on the pitch dark shore.
Awakening from slumber, the big man donned his clothes one by one, unhurriedly, knotted his tie, slicked his hair down in front of the mirror, rinsed his mouth, brushed his teeth even, and, with mouth refreshed, drank some chilled fruit juice.
The fragments of ice floating in the juice no longer, he reflected, held the light of the sea.
They were on land; a yellow, muddied sun hung its-head ill-temperedly; there was a cry as of a tired cicada—but it was the cooing of a pigeon, a black shape pressing its wings against the window frame outside.
”Do they keep pigeons at this hotel?” he asked.
Running his fingers back through his soft hair, the small man went to the window and gazed down.
After a while, he shook his head.
”Seems they’ve got quite a lot of space for parking,” he said irrelevantly.
The big man telephoned his home. “How’s the kid?” he asked his wife. Their son had a temperature.
He wondered whether his wife and son really loved him, and felt a bit depressed. But he kept a cheerful expression, closely watching the small man and the woman all the while.
The small man had a melancholy expression, but he wasn’t really melancholy. It was just a habit, since he was convinced that such an expression showed him to best advantage.
The woman sat abstractly, relaxed, her face blotchy. She looked a nice, eminently straight forward woman.
The small man opened his pocket-book, determined the time of the next meeting, and wondered whether it would be all right without the big man. He was a student, and somewhere in his mind he cherished a vision of independence.
Finally, though, he dismissed the question: it didn’t matter either way.
It didn’t matter: every time, he told himself the same thing.
The woman got up, looking suddenly businesslike.
Standing up, she found that the small man looked somehow forlorn yet determined to maintain his pride, and she had an ill-defined urge to comfort him. But then, she felt, it might only have the reverse effect of offending him, and besides he seemed to be bright, so in the end he’d probably succeed in finding some other means to the art of being arrogant.
The big man, his face radiating confidence, stood there upright, like a great black rock. His face proclaimed his possession of an unshakable philosophy of life and the ability to carry that philosophy into practice.
In fact, he would probably go home now and perform his duty as a husband for his wife.
He was the type of man who made an effort over such things.
Such things were far from the small man’s mind.
Slightly built and thin, he was never tired but was forever foraging for something, like a small fish constantly swimming hither and thither, though he was not making any effort in doing so.
Such things apart, the two men were looking at the woman now without emotion.
With a meek expression she sat so as to avoid as far as possible turning her face from the light of the sun, pallid though it was, like an aged deep-sea fish hiding itself in the shadow of a rock. She wondered, suddenly, how fishes in the sea died when they got old, and what happened to their remains.
For some reason, she felt terribly giddy, with an uneasy feeling as though she were walking on clouds. Yet in spite of the uneasy feeling, she had an odd conviction that she could manage anything, however alarming.
It was an odd, defiant feeling: as though, for instance, she might as well throw herself out of the window, and as though it wouldn’t matter if she did, as though it was as simple as that.
And the next instant a flash of common sense told her that if her head was going to swim like this she’d better go and see a doctor.
”I don’t feel well,” she told the big man. “I’d Ike to go to the hospital and go to sleep on a bed without anything to worry about. And I’d like them to put me in a room with a barred window. Then I shan’t be able to jump out of the window even if I want to.”
He grasped her wrist tight, his expression suddenly ugly.
”You don’t have to worry, we’ll stay right here with you,” he said in a gruff, almost threatening voice. “It’s all right—we’d never leave you alone. You mustn’t even think of going to a doctor—you’ll have all three of us in jail. Understand? If you don’t do as I say, I can’t guarantee what we mightn’t do to you!”
It was then that she realized for the first time that they must have tricked her into taking something she shouldn’t have done.
And somewhere in her blurred consciousness, she had a fierce, angry sense of insult.
A fine thing, indeed, for the sorceress herself to be tricked into taking some peculiar herb!
She fumed with irritation at the way they had ‘trespassed on her own territory, but a glance at the other’s harmless, self-consciously manly face took the wind out of her sails. What did it matter, after all ? It was all part of relations with people.
All the same, though—with renewed irritation—to think they’d made her so uneasy she’d wanted to throw herself out of the window! Why, in trying to stop her feeling unsetted they’d achieved precisely the opposite! Yet though she could put absolutely no trust in two men who had behaved so outrageously, her helplessness at the moment was such that she had no choice but to depend on them.
In her fuddled brain, she was borne up by a childish resolve: once they’d gone, she would straightway call up someone real and ask them for help.
And to lull their anxiety she pretended to be in a kind of dreamy stupor which before long turned into the real thing, so that they finally stopped worrying and began busily trying to humor her.
Even after all this time, it seemed, they had no real intention of submitting to the sorceress, but were themselves hoping to become malevolent deities, princes of darkness. She couldn’t understand why it hadn’t occurred to them to do so earlier and without resorting to herbs, but since the boyish charm of the devil was something she had dreamed of for years, she was content.
A considerable while later, after they had left, she realized that she had lost her powers as a sorceress, that she was in the plight of a pitifully bleating animal—a black goat, perhaps, the sorceress’s familiar at best—that had twisted its ankle. She had an anxious sense that it might be better to get someone to tie its legs up, or at least to tether it somewhere lest the poor creature, having lost sight of its owner, should clamber up to some window and throw itself out.
As she was now, she was no better than a helpless animal concerned only with the desire to survive.
And in a kind of daze she went to the phone and dialled.
But no one answered.
With the receiver still in her hand, she wept loudly and bitterly. As she wept, she invoked the name of a fictional almighty.
She forced three glassfuls of water down her parched throat, went to the toilet, stuck a finger down her throat, and was sick.
Even so, she was sure it was too late. Her blood vessels were swollen to bursting point.
A fear gripped her that if she went to sleep now she might never wake up again. And she forced her eyes to stay open in order to keep awake.
The pleasant drowsiness of such a short while ago seemed like the impossible memory of a former existence.
Nevertheless, she recovered.
When she arrived home, the man she lived with was sprawled on the floor watching baseball on the TV.
Gazing at him, she decided that his profile wasn’t bad at all. It occurred to her that he must be hungry, and she was overtaken by a sense of duty: she must rustle up something to eat and join him in a bottle of sake.
Cucumber, celery, and squid, blended with a salad dressing—her mouth was still dry, and to clean it up she put in more vinegar than usual, then had the bright idea of chopping up some shiso leaves and putting them in too.
She put the leaves in and then, imagining to herself the crunchy texture of the seeds, stripped some off and mixed them in as well. The pungent fragrance seemed to clear her head.
The man went on watching the T.V., his expression unguarded.
Suddenly, she wanted to be near him, and getting up from what she was doing went and snuggled up to him.
He found her cute when she did that, and he patted her body in the manner of someone chucking a cat under the chin. She looked up at his face through half-closed eyes.
After a while, she got up again and went on preparing the meal.
As she sprinkled salt on the slices of pork, it occurred to her that the meat probably wouldn’t be very good, and let her gaze rove over the spice shelf, with the idea of doing something to cover up the taste.
She remembered the sweetness of the chocolate candy she’d eaten five hours before. The effect of the herb mixed in it had all but completely worn off.
Pulling herself together, she arranged the slices of pork in hot butter and sprinkled it with paprika.
A vision of a flayed pig’s head grinning fixedly at her got mixed up with the faces of the two men. She wasn’t in the least hungry herself, but the abounding appetite of the man watching TV transmitted itself to her, and she felt she ought to say something on his behalf:
”Say, do you remember that time in the market at Florence?” she said to him in a musical voice, poking at the marinated pork with her finger. “When we saw a skinned pig’s head staring at us ? I suppose for the meat-eating races it’s like the way the Japanese serve a fish on a big dish with its head on, wide open eyes and all, and the tail spread out all stiff, to make it look more appetizing.”
He always liked to hear her go on like this. And she liked the way he liked it.
Yet at the same time she was always indulging her bad habit—thinking of something else, standing in the desert-like landscape that was hers and no one else’s, lifting up her lighted sea-weed lantern the better to see her companion.
As he ate the food she had prepared, the man gazed at the teeth marks and bruises left on her body, but did not linger over the anger and hatred he felt for the world she had apparently come from.
Not that he did not feel a vague threat from the fearful natural calamities that lurked in that world; but one look at her mild face dispelled this uneasiness on the spot.
If one laid a thin poppy petal on the bruises, then by the time the petal had been blown away in the breeze the bruises would have quite disappeared, he believed.
He had a feeling, too, that her body, its bruises! gone, might suddenly become weightless and be wafted away like dandelion down, till it disappeared behind the hills.
The thought brought with it a fit of sadness, a sense, perhaps, of the ephemerality of life. If she too was intimidated by the same feeling, he wished at least that they could get as close as possible together and fly away through the sky, like two pieces of down together.
He sometimes pictured to himself the other men who might chase her, but they were abstract loveobjects for women, and though he tried coupling them with her in his mind, only the most perfectly ordinary scenes were conjured up. If they could give her, perhaps, pleasure of some kind, then he was glad for her sake. …
”Because we live together, I don’t find them a bit erotic, those two . . . Funny, isn’t it?”
She put her legs up on his belly and turned down the light.
Two beautiful, shining creatures tangled in the darkness.
”Two happy worms, living in the dark earth,” he said, pleased with his fancy: yes, worms in the dark earth was more appropriate than dandelion down floating in the breeze.
(Translated by John Bester)
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Ōba Minako (1930-2007)
Novelist. Her father was a naval surgeon, and she frequently changed schools as his duties took him from place to place. She was in Hiroshima Prefecture when the war ended. She saw the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb, while the horrors of the stricken city that she witnessed when she was mobilized to help in relief work “will,” she has said. “stay in my mind’s eye forever.” As a student at the Tsuda Juku University, she became president of the theatrical club, developed a taste for Chekhov, and at one stage toyed with the idea of becoming an actress, but plumped for literature instead and started writing verse. She married, on condition that she could go on writing, and has one daughter. She moved to Sitka, the old capital of Alaska, when her husband, a technologist for a pulp company, was transferred there. During a stay of more than ten years, she traveled through Canada and U.S., attending summer school at university and writing Kōzu no Nai E and Niji to Ukihashi. She contributed Sambiki no Kani to the magazine Gunzo, and with it won the magazine’s New Writers’ Prize. Next, she won the Akutagawa Prize; her work awoke a great response among general readers also, and she rapidly became famous. Her subsequent works included Yūreitachi no Fukkatsu, Sambashi Nite, and the full-length Funakui-mushi. Her style, with its strong element of fantasy, her poetic prose, and her increasingly apparent anarchic radicalism have given her a unique position somewhat apart from orthodox literary circles. Works apart from those already mentioned include Uo no Namida; a collection of verse, Sabita Kotoba; full-length novels, Tsuga no Yume; and a play, Shikai no Ringo. Many of her works deal with the complexities of relationships between men and women, always from the latter’s point of view and with a structure that is, essentially, that of the allegory. It is this allegorical quality, given a brilliant economy and backed up with solid images from reality, that distinguishes Tankō, translated in this issue.
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SEA-CHANGE translated by John Bester is published in Japanese Literature Today No.5. ©1980. Japan P.E.N. Club. All Right Reserved. SEA-CHANGE is digitized from its appearance in J.L.T. No.5. ©2020. Japan P.E.N. Club. All Right Reserved.