*
But oh, oh, who would ever have suspected that, beside this happy person I have been speaking of — you’ll find this a pretentious figure of speech, darling, but I don’t know how else to express it — there was another, different me. It’s the truth. Another woman lived inside me, of whose existence even I was unaware. Another me you didn’t know, and could never have imagined.
I remember you told me once that each of us has a snake living inside him. You had gone to see Dr Takeda, in the science department at the university in Kyoto, and I passed the time while you were with him looking one by one at all the different snakes on display in a row of cases tucked away in a corner of a long hallway in that dismal brick building. By the time you came out of Dr Takeda’s office half an hour or so later, the snakes were starting to get to me, and I felt a bit queasy. That was when you told me about the snakes — peering into one of the cases, you joked, “This is you, and this is Midori, and this is me… everybody has one of these inside him; there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Midori’s snake was a small, sepia-coloured one from some southern region; the one you said was mine came from Australia, and while it was small, too, its body was covered all over in white speckles, and its head came to a point, sharp like a drill. I still don’t know what you meant then. I never spoke with you about the snakes again, but somehow what you said stayed lodged in my chest, I remembered it, and every so often, when I was alone, I would wonder about what those snakes inside us were. Perhaps on some occasions they are egotism, and then jealousy, and then at other times destiny.
I haven’t understood about the snakes, even now, but I know that you were right that day, because there really was a snake living inside me. It revealed itself to me for the first time today. I can’t think of a better way to describe the other self I carried inside me, without knowing.
*
It happened this afternoon. Midori dropped by to look in on me, and when she arrived I was wearing that greyish-blue Yūki haori you had had sent up from Mito for me all those years ago — the one that used to be my favourite when I was younger. She seemed taken aback when she walked into the room and saw it, and for a second I thought she might comment on it, but she didn’t, she just sat there without saying anything. I supposed even she was shocked at my admittedly inappropriate choice of clothing, and so, since I was in a somewhat mischievous mood, I intentionally kept silent.
Suddenly she shot me an oddly icy look. “Isn’t that the haori you wore when you and Misugi went to Atami?” she said. “I was watching you that day, you know.” Her face was terrifyingly ashen, and her tone was so sharp she might as well have been jabbing at me with a short sword.
At first I failed to grasp the implications of what she had said, but soon the enormity of it hit me. Without really thinking I straightened the front of the kimono and then, as if being more formal was the only appropriate response in this context, I sat up as tall as I could.
She’s known everything, all these years!
I felt oddly calm, as if I were gazing at the ocean at dusk from far away, watching the tide come in. So you knew, you knew it all, I thought, feeling an urge, almost, to take her hand in mine and comfort her. The moment whose anticipation had cast me into such terror had at last come, it was happening right now, and yet when I looked around me there wasn’t a trace of fear to be found. There was nothing between us but the quiet lapping of water, like waves on the seashore. The veil behind which we had hidden our secret for thirteen years had been brutally ripped away, but what I saw underneath it was not the death that had obsessed me so, but something I can hardly think how to describe, something like peace, quietness — yes, a peculiar feeling of release. I felt relaxed. It was as if some dark, oppressive weight had been lifted from my shoulders, and in its place I had been asked to carry nothing at all but an oddly moving emptiness. I felt that I had an enormous amount of thinking to do. Not about dark, sorrowful, frightening things, but about something vast and futile, and yet at the same time quiet and fulfilling. I was in a sort of drunken ecstasy, that’s what it was — a feeling of liberation. I sat in a stupor, gazing into Midori’s eyes, but seeing nothing. My ears heard nothing of what she was saying.
When I came to, she had just left the room and was scampering down the hall.
“Midori!” I called. Why, I wonder? I don’t know. Maybe I wanted her to come sit with me some more, for ever. And maybe if she had come back, I would have said to her what I was really thinking, without any posturing: “Please let me be formally united with Misugi.” Or perhaps I would have said the opposite, but with exactly the same feeling: “The time has come for me to return Misugi to you.” I can’t say which of those sentences would have come from my mouth. Midori kept going; she didn’t come back.
I’ll die if Midori ever learns! A comical daydream. And all that SIN SIN SIN—such vain prickings of conscience. I guess once you’ve sold your soul to the devil, you can only become a devil yourself. Perhaps these last thirteen years I have been deceiving God, deceiving even myself.
After that I sank into a deep, untroubled sleep. When I awoke Shōko was shaking me, and my joints ached until I could hardly move; it was as if thirteen years of weariness were finally taking their toll. I realized that my uncle from Akashi was sitting by my pillow. You met him once — he’s a contractor, and he had stopped by to see me for just half an hour on his way to Osaka on business. He chatted aimlessly about this and that for a few minutes and then he had to leave. As he was tying his shoes in the entryway, though, he called out, “Kadota got married, by the way.” Kadota… how many years had it been since I had heard that name? He was referring, of course, to my former husband, Kadota Reiichirō. As far as my uncle was concerned he was only sharing a bit of news, but I was stunned.
“When?” Even I could hear my voice shaking.
“Last month, or the month before. I hear he built a house in Hyōgo, next to the hospital.”
“Oh?” It was all I could do to speak this one word.
After my uncle had left, I made my way slowly down the hall, one step at a time, until all of a sudden I swooned and fell sideways, clinging to one of the posts. Feeling my hands tighten themselves, all on their own, I stood staring out through the glass doors. It was windy, the trees were swaying, yet it was unsettlingly quiet; I felt like I was at an aquarium, peering through the glass at an underwater world.
“Oh, it’s no good,” I said, unsure myself what I meant.
Shōko was beside me by then. “What’s no good?”
“I don’t know, something.”
Shōko giggled, and I felt her supporting me gently from behind. “Sometimes you say the oddest things! Come, you need to lie down.”
With Shōko helping me I was able to walk more or less normally as far as my futon, but the second I sat down I felt everything around me crumble to the ground, just like that. I half knelt on the futon, my legs angled to the side, steadying myself with my hand. Overwhelmed as I was, I still struggled to contain myself while Shōko was there, but when she went off to the kitchen the tears began streaming down my cheeks like water wrung from a rag.
Until that moment, it would never have occurred to me that I’d be so stricken to hear that Kadota had married. I don’t know why I reacted that way. After a time — I don’t know how long it was — I spotted Shōko through the glass doors, burning fallen leaves in the garden. The sun had set by then, and the evening was quieter than any I had ever experienced in my life.