This is what I want: never to see either you or Aunt Midori again. I can’t take advantage of your kindness the way I used to, in all my innocence, before I read that diary, and I can’t continue to be as trustingly selfish as I’ve always been with Aunt Midori. I want to get away from here, from the rubble of words that crushed Mother, all that sin. I don’t have the energy to say anything more.
I plan to leave this house in Ashiya in the care of a relative in Akashi, a man named Tsumura, and then, at least for the time being, go back to Akashi and open a small dress-making shop so that I can support myself. In the letter Mother left for me when she died, she said I should go to you whenever I needed help or advice, but if she had known me as I am now I know she would not have said that.
I burned Mother’s diary in the garden today. That single college notebook was reduced to almost nothing, just a handful of ash, and while I was off fetching a bucket to douse it a little whirlwind blew up and carried the ash away somewhere with the fallen leaves.
I will send a letter Mother wrote to you under separate cover. I found it when I was going through the things in her desk the day after you left for Tokyo.
MIDORI’S LETTER
Mr Misugi Jōsuke,
Writing the characters of your name in this proper manner, I find, despite my age — not that thirty-three is all that old — that my heart begins to flutter, as if this were a love letter. Looking back over the past decade, I am puzzled to realize that, while I have written dozens of love letters, some in secret but others quite openly, not one was ever addressed to you. One finds it difficult to comprehend. I do not mean this as a joke; I have been mulling earnestly over this, and it has left me feeling an odd, rankling sort of incomprehension. Does it amuse you, perhaps, that I should feel this way?
Some time ago, Mr Takagi’s wife — you remember her, I am sure… the woman whose face makes her look like a fox when she gets all dressed up — offered her appraisal of various notable personages of the Hanshin region, and when she arrived at you she made several very impolite pronouncements: that you were not a man to make a woman happy; that you hadn’t a clue about the delicate workings of the feminine heart; that you might fall for a woman, but no woman could possibly fall for you. It goes without saying that Mrs Takagi uttered these unfortunate words under the influence of some degree of inebriation, and you need not take her evaluation so very seriously; still, you know as well as I do that there is that side to your character. You live, I think it is fair to say, a life entirely free of loneliness. You are not one to yearn for companionship the moment you are on your own. You may sometimes look bored, but never lonesome. And you have a tendency to see things in an oddly clear-cut fashion, and to be absolutely convinced of the superiority of your own views. You may say this is merely a sign of confidence, but watching you one is possessed somehow by an urge to seize you and give you a shake. In a word, I suppose one might describe you as a man utterly intolerable to women, completely devoid of an endearingly human side, who in no way makes it worth the trouble of doing you the favour of falling for you.
Perhaps, then, I am demanding too much of you in my fretful attempts to communicate some sense of my befuddlement at the absence, among the dozens of love letters I have penned, of even one bearing your name. Nevertheless the feeling remains. Surely I could have written you one or two, at least? To be sure, from a certain perspective one might argue that, while the epistles were not addressed to you, the emotions I felt during their writing were—they simply ended up in the wrong hands, and thus, as far as my sentiments were concerned, I might as well have been addressing you. My retiring nature inhibited me, a grown woman, from plying my husband with cloyingly intimate letters of the sort one might expect of a young and inexperienced girl, that was the difficulty — and so I dashed off letters to other men, men towards whom I felt no such diffidence. I suppose in the end the stars simply were not aligned in my favour, so to speak — I was born to this misfortune. And it was yours, as well.
What are you doing now
I wonder, knowing full well
that if I were to approach
your lofty repose might
crumble
This is a poem I composed last autumn as an outlet for my mood on a day when you were holed up in your study and my thoughts kept turning to you. You were staring at a Yi-dynasty porcelain or some such thing, waiting to see which of you would blink first, and I was unwilling to disturb your peace — or rather, I knew of no means by which I could possibly disturb it, much as I may have liked to… Oh, my dear husband, how maddeningly well you hold your fortress, impenetrable on every front!.. and this work brims with your poor wife’s sorrow at that moment. You will say I am a liar, no doubt. But even if I do stay up all night playing mahjong, there is still time enough for me to turn my feelings, like surreptitious glances, towards the annexe and your study. Needless to say, even this poem did not find its way to you: in the end, I left it in Dr Taue’s apartment, laying it softly on his desk — Dr Taue, the young philosophy buff who, I suppose, is no longer simply a young philosophy buff, having been happily promoted this spring from his post as a lecturer to become a fully fledged assistant professor — with the result, as you are aware, that the young scholar’s lofty, spiritual repose does indeed seem to have been pointlessly ruined. My name turned up in tabloid gossip columns, causing you some degree of inconvenience. Earlier I noted the urge that comes upon me as I look at you to give you a vigorous shake; this little incident may, perhaps, have succeeded slightly in that direction; or it may not.
*
Carping on about such things will, however, only heighten your displeasure. Better to move on to the main argument.
I wonder what you think of all this. Looking back, it occurs to me that quite a long time has passed since we became husband and wife in name only. Does it not strike you that it would be a profound relief to put an end to our relationship? True, it is sad that it has come to this, but in the absence of any substantial objections on your part, I cannot help feeling that it would be best to devise some means of setting both of us, you as well as me, at liberty. How does this sound?
Now that you will be resigning from active participation in all your business activities — it came as a deep shock, I might add, to learn that your name was on the list of purged businessmen — it seems like the ideal moment, from your perspective, as well, to end this unnatural relationship. Here, briefly, is what I desire: our homes in Takarazuka and Yase. Those two will be sufficient. Lately I have been mulling, presumptuously enough, over the various possibilities open to me, and I have arrived at the conclusion that I would like to live in Yase, as the house there is of a fitting size and the environment is congenial to me, and to support myself for the remainder of my life with funds raised by selling the house in Takarazuka, for which I would ask two million yen or thereabouts. Think of this as one final illustration of my selfishness, and simultaneously as the first and only time I have ever allowed myself, or ever will allow myself, to lean upon you, asking for evidence of your affection.
The fact that I am making this unexpected proposal should not be taken to indicate that I have at present anything as stylish as a lover, let alone more than one. There is, therefore, no need for you to fret over the possibility that someone might relieve me of the money. Indeed, I regret to say that I have never yet found a potential lover who would not shame me. Seldom does one encounter a man who satisfies even my two most basic requirements: that he tend properly to the hairline on the nape of his neck, keeping it fresh as the cut edge of a lemon; and that the line of his waist be as clean and strong as a serow’s. Sadly, the joy your bride took in her beloved husband a decade ago, when you first made her heart yours, remains to this day sufficiently overpowering. And speaking of serow: I remember a story I once read in a newspaper about a young man found living naked with a flock of those wild goats out in the middle of the Syrian desert. How ravishing he was in that photograph! His cold profile, capped by a tangle of unkempt hair; the powerful allure of his lanky legs, capable, as the paper observed, of running at fifty miles an hour. To this day, the memory of that youth inspires a peculiar surging in my blood, unlike anything I have ever known with another man. It strikes me that the word “intellectual” was invented to describe that face; the word “wild” to describe that form.