Ah, she’s burning them already!
I murmured these words out loud, feeling somehow as if it had been decided all along that things would happen this way, and that I had known it, and then I got up and took my diary from its place at the back of my desk. Shōko was burning leaves in the garden today so she could burn my diary along with them. How could it be otherwise? I took my diary out onto the verandah, sat down on a wicker chair, and spent a little while leafing through it. That notebook, full of columns of “sin” and “death” and “love”. The confessions of a wicked woman. The three words I had gone on carving into those pages for thirteen years had completely lost the sparkling vibrancy that had been in them yesterday; they were ready, now, to join the purplish smoke rising into the sky from the pile of leaves Shōko was burning.
I made up my mind to die after I’d given my diary to Shōko. In any event, I told myself, the time has come for me to die. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, in this instance, not that I had made up my mind to die, but that I lacked the energy to live any longer.
Kadota had been single all those years, ever since our divorce. That was only because he had gone abroad to study and then been shipped off to the south during the war, so he had missed his chance to get married again, but none of that changed the fact that he had never taken another wife. I realize now that in some way I couldn’t perceive, his remaining single had been a tremendous support to me, to the woman I am. You will have to believe me when I say that, while I had occasionally heard bits and pieces of news from relatives in Akashi, I never saw him again after we divorced, or wanted to. For years, his name never even entered my thoughts.
Night fell. When Shōko and the maid had retired to their rooms, I took one of the photo albums from my bookshelf. This album contained twenty-odd photographs of Kadota and me.
One day several years ago, Shōko had surprised me by saying, “Look, all the pictures of you and Father are pasted in so your faces overlap!” She hadn’t meant anything by it, but it was true: purely by coincidence, those pictures, taken soon after we were married, had been pasted in on opposite pages, so that we would be face-to-face when the album was shut.
“Oh, you say such ridiculous things!”
We said no more about it, but Shōko’s words stuck in my heart, and once a year or so, at the oddest moments, they would pop into my mind. I had left the photographs as they were, though, until now — I never removed them, or replaced them with others. But today I felt that it was time for me to take them out. So I lifted all the photographs of Kadota from the pages and slipped them into Shōko’s red album, so that she would have them to keep, as pictures of her father when he was young.
*
This was the other me, then, whose existence even I knew nothing about. In this fashion, this very morning, the Australian snake you once said I had hiding inside me, covered with little white speckles, revealed itself. And I realized, too, come to think of it, that all this time, for thirteen years, that sepia-coloured southern snake of Midori’s had been hiding what it knew. It had swallowed the secret of our being in Atami together with a flick of its red tongue, quick as a ripple of heat in the air, and then acted as if nothing had happened.
What are these snakes we carry inside us? Egotism, jealousy, destiny… the sum of all these things, I guess, a sort of karma too strong for us to fight. I regret that I will never have the occasion to learn what you meant. At any rate, these snakes inside us are pitiful creatures. I remember coming across the phrase “the sadness of living”, or something close to that, in a book; as I write these words, I feel my heart brushing up against a similar emotion, irredeemably sad and cold. Oh, what is this thing we carry inside us — intolerably unpleasant, yet at the same time unbearably sad!
Having said this much, though, I realize that I still haven’t shared my true self with you. When I first took up my pen to write this letter, my determination was easily blunted; I kept trying to escape, to run away from the things that scared me.
The other me, the one I didn’t know about — what a nice excuse that is. I said just now that I noticed the white snake inside me for the first time today. That this was the first time it let me see it.
I was lying. That is not the truth. I have known about it, I’m sure, for ages.
*
Oh, when I recall that night, the night of 6th August, when the entire Hanshin region was transformed into an ocean of flames, I feel as though my heart could burst. Shōko and I spent the night in the air raid shelter you had designed for us, and at one point, when the B-29s returned yet again and plastered the sky overhead with their droning, I found myself suddenly plunged into a sense of pointlessness and loneliness so fierce I couldn’t do anything against it. I felt so direly alone I can’t even describe it. Terribly, miserably alone. After a while I couldn’t bear just sitting around any longer, so I got up and stepped outside. And there you were, standing there.
The whole sky, to the west and the east, looked raw, brilliant red. The flames were moving towards your house, and yet even so you had come running to me, you were standing by the shelter’s entrance. I went back into the shelter with you, and then, the second we were inside, I burst out sobbing. Both Shōko and you assumed an excess of fear had made me hysterical. I was never able to explain to you what I was feeling, not clearly — not then, not later. Forgive me. Even as I basked in the embrace of your great love, a love greater than I deserved, I was wishing I could be like you, coming to check on us in our shelter — that I could have gone and stood outside the shelter at Kadota’s hospital in Hyōgo, with its clean white walls, which I had seen just once from a train window. The desire was so strong my body shook with it, and it took all my energy to hold it in, even as I choked on my tears.
And yet that wasn’t the first time I noticed this sort of feeling inside me, either. To tell the truth, years earlier, in the building at the university in Kyoto, I was so taken aback when you pointed out the existence of that small, white snake inside me that I couldn’t even move. Your eyes have never scared me more than they did then. I’m sure you didn’t really mean anything when you spoke those words, but I felt as if you had seen straight into my heart, and it made me wince. I had been feeling ill on account of all those snakes, the real ones, but now, all at once, the queasiness vanished. I lifted my eyes slowly to your face, terrified, and as it happened— for some reason, I don’t know why — you were just standing there with an unlit cigarette in your mouth, something you had never done before, gazing off at some point in the distance, a dazed look on your face. Maybe I was just imagining it, but your expression seemed emptier than any I had ever seen you wear. It lasted only a second, though; by the time you turned to look at me, you were your usual, mild self again.
Until that day, I had never managed to get a clear sense of the other me inside me, but you gave it a name, and ever since then I’ve thought of that second self as a little white snake. That night, I wrote about the snake in my diary. Small white snake small white snake… I filled up a page with those words, column after column, endlessly, all the while picturing the little snake, like a statuette, coiling around and around in perfect, taut circles, each tighter than the last, its small, pointy, drill-like head sticking straight up above the uppermost ring. Imagining the frightening, disagreeable thing I had inside me in that way — as something so clean, and in a form that seemed in some way to capture the sadness, the headlong intensity of being a woman — gave me some slight consolation. God himself, I was sure, would look upon a snake like that with tenderness and sorrow. He would pity it. Well, that was the nice story I told myself. And that night, my wickedness grew a full size larger.