“What?” he said, turning round. He looked a bit like a featureless ghost: the colour had quite drained out of his eyes, nose, and lips.
“Is something the matter?” I asked.
Mr Kosuga looked puzzled. And then he asked me in his turn: “Miss Sanada, isn’t your colour strangely dark today?”
Moving away from the altar, he came over to me and gave my lower jaw a few strokes with the palm of his hand. He might as well have been petting an animal.
“You’ve changed, Miss Sanada,” he said, stroking my jaw a bit more. “There’s a prickliness in the air all around you.”
On the day Nishiko had been sitting there with her snake, she remained in the shop till evening. Mr Kosuga hadn’t made an appearance at all. Not one customer came into the shop, and Nishiko and her snake continued to sit, not making a single movement. I spent the day doing odd tasks, finishing up what was left to take of the inventory, noting the accounts, as Nishiko had instructed me, in an old ledger. No sign of life came from Nishiko or the snake. As the hours passed, they came to seem more and more like some sort of statue.
When closing time came, Nishiko rose, unsteadily, and took an envelope that she’d apparently prepared beforehand out of the bosom of her kimono. “Your bonus,” she said, and handed it to me.
I took the envelope, bowed my thanks, and asked whether I should close up the shop. Nishiko nodded absently, as if she didn’t care one way or the other. Conscious of their two presences, I locked up, turned off the lights, except for the one in the area where they sat, and prepared to leave. Sitting there in a pool of light, Nishiko and the snake were once again like a statue. This might be the last time I ever see her, I thought as I left.
And she did stop coming into the shop after that.
“How is Nishiko doing these days?” I asked Mr Kosuga.
“Well, a lot better than she was. She still can’t walk properly, though. The doctor says she should try to get up, move about. But she says she doesn’t want to.”
The day after Nishiko and her snake had sat like a statue, Mr Kosuga informed me that Nishiko had suffered an injury. She had been going upstairs with the snake draped around her, when she lost her footing and tumbled down the stairs.
“The snake was crushed to death underneath her,” he told me, in a flat tone of voice. “She’s now in the garden. I asked Nishiko where she wanted her buried, and she told me somewhere close by.”
He rolled his head helplessly a few times, and with a small grunt hoisted a box of prayer beads onto his shoulder. Single-stranded oval bodhi seeds, bound for a nearby temple—they were the last beads Nishiko had threaded. I remembered how with her usual total absorption she had strung them together, her legs tucked under her, on a raised section of the floor.
“I’m wondering whether Nishiko is now going to die,” Mr Kosuga said.
Shocked, I looked at him. He was even paler than before, and seemed quite lacking in energy.
“You can’t mean that.”
“It’d be a terrible loss if she did,” Mr Kosuga said, rubbing his forehead in his usual manner.
The smell of incense was suddenly strong, and the air seemed to throb with energy. It was as if several invisible creatures, foxes perhaps, had just dashed through the shop. Mr Kosuga rubbed his forehead again.
“It’d be a terrible loss. I really don’t want her to die,” he muttered, though to whom I wasn’t sure, then adjusted the position of the box, and walked out the door.
That day, left to my own devices, I made tea, ordered myself a deluxe bowl of tempura on rice for lunch, and when I was not attending to customers, I wrote entries in the ledger. From time to time, I thought about my snake.
My entire apartment was charged with the presence of snake. When I say snake, I mean pure snake, not woman.
The woman was nowhere to be seen, but a meal had been prepared and laid out on the table. So, I thought, I’d see no sign of the woman tonight.
I opened a drawer—and scores of little snakes came slithering out from between the notebooks and pens. Gliding up my arms, they reached my neck, and from there they burrowed straight into my ears. I nearly jumped out of my skin. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but the instant they’d penetrated my ears, they changed into a liquid and carried on streaming in, deeper and deeper. They were ice-cold. In an effort to keep out the little snakes that hadn’t yet got into my ears, I shook my head fiercely. But that only made the snakes that had turned into liquid in my ears become more viscous as they pushed on inwards, into my inner ears.
The viscous fluid filled my semicircular canals. It worked its way through to my auditory ossicles. My ears were now so crammed with snake I could hear nothing, only a distant tiny sound somewhere deep inside as the snakes pushed stickily farther in. The liquid snake brushed against nerves in my ears, and the sensation of being touched there spread outwards, getting into my head. When my head filled with snake, the idea of snake transmitted itself centrifugally to every part of me. My fingertips, my lips, my eyelids, my palms, my feet, my ankles, my calves, my soft belly, my back, the hair on my body—everything that was exposed to the air apprehended snake and broke out in goosebumps. My flesh crept in horror.
Then it passed, all signs of the presence of snake ceased, and I was released. But after five minutes, the sensation of snake took over again. It was as if every few minutes I was breaking out in cyclical malarial fever.
This was not something I wanted to spend time doing.
Rousing the body that was feeling so much discomfort, I made my way towards the dining table. Despite my unusual state, I was hungry, and I crammed the food the woman had prepared down my gullet. Boiled spinach with a tasty ground-sesame seasoning. A sour-sweet vinegar salad of grated carrot and seaweed. Mackerel marinated in sweet miso broth. Simmered yam. A bowl of white rice topped with tiny white fish, minced scallions, and a sprinkling of white sesame seeds. As the food was going down, the soft tissues of my mouth were changing back and forth, now into those of a snake, now into those of a human.
I’d never had so much going on before.
I will not become a snake, I will not. Even as I was saying this to myself, I was devouring the food prepared by a snake, swallowing every last morsel. I worked my jaws onto the food, got it down and swallowed, devoured more of it, got that down too, licked the plates, and then paused and listened for the sounds of all the things that cry in the night. Then I lay down and waited for the next snake onslaught, and then for it to pass, directing my mind away from where I was, forward, forward to a distant horizon, as far away from snake as possible. Stretching out as far as it would go, small and long and thin, my mind tried to feel out any nook or cranny, searching for an exit, but everything was sealed, snake filled every crack, and I was simply thrust back, defeated.
This was uncomfortable in the extreme.
Hiwako, dear, you’d love being a snake. It’s so cosy and comfortable… The voice rained down on me from all the skies of the world. I was soaking-wet with what it was telling me. The second drawer I opened was packed with a mediumsized snake that was prettily coloured, and when I closed it, hurriedly, the drawer below it sprang open to reveal a gigantic snake, coiled up. Suddenly, there were snakes slithering over my prone body, gliding all over the room, and once they’d tired of that, they got back on top of me, where they proceeded to form shapes of towers and rafts, and lock into puzzles.
Hiwako, de-e-a-r! Hiwako, de-e-a-r! How long are you going to just lie there? Hearing my mother’s voice, I sat up immediately and tried to get to my feet, but then I thought it could be the snake trying to ensnare me, and I found myself unable to move. Don’t become a snake, Hiwako, dear! What’s the point! You’re your own person! my mother continued. This had the effect of sickening me. Since she was so against it, I felt almost as if I should try it. That’s right, Hiwako, dear—isn’t that what I’ve been saying? I’m the one who’s your mother, and if your mother’s a snake, it stands to reason you’re a snake too… That was the snake speaking. The snake and my mother started to quarrel with each other. On and on they quarrelled, looming, enormous presences, the snake trying to shrink my mother by hurling at her any snakes in the room—little snakes, wriggling snakes, any snakes within reach—and my mother trying to beat the snake back by hurling incantations, imprecations, and prayers.