waiting: three chambers
Some power, outside herself, had given life to her and determined the course that she should take.[i]
dramatis personae
Yukitomo Shirakawa –Chief Secretary prefectural office Fukushima
Tomo – wife to Yukitomo
Michimasa – son to Yukitomo, husband to Miya, brother to Etsuko
Suga, Yumi, Miya et al – concubines
antechamber
Love steeps in memory. It is only fitting that Yukitomo, who serves as Chief Secretary at the prefectural office of Fukushima, should be accorded the use
of concubines. And so our 30-year-old Tomo—somewhat discombobulated—heads to Tokyo to procure a suitable candidate for her husband. Chosen is sweet 15-year-old Suga, her bodily movement like ‘a boy’s in its innocence of female sexuality’. Such, authoress Enchi intimates, is the lot of pubescence in Meiji era Japan, where the samurai code prevails. Soon new instructions are issued, and Suga—now formally adopted as a member of the family—blends into the background. On this occasion Tomo returns with ‘pretty, graceful’ Yumi, 16, with a ‘boyish face’ and ‘a touch of masculinity’. Other women similarly appear and disappear as companions in the master’s chamber. Most flagrant—and startling in its gamesmanship—is the seduction of their daughter-in-law Miya by Yukitomo, none thinking it to be anybody else’s business. Lavishing pocket money on Matsumoto or despatching him to Echigo on holiday, Yukitomo happily beds the daughter and cuckolds the husband, his son. We learn subsequently, with our own feeling of shame, that any of the eight children born to Miya may in fact be the progeny of our libidinous, ‘elderly roué’—mistakenly reckoned by Enchi to have already ‘sown too many wild oats to be a father again’. She’s not on his side; nor for that matter on anyone else’s—because what the novel seeks is something altogether more penetrating within the Japanese soul, beyond biological or historical imperative. To be sure, the reader is rightly aghast at Yukitomo’s sexual indulgence, along with the complicity of those around him. We become aware that the cultural map and the moral compass used to navigate it are cruelly misaligned. For example, on page 170, Takao, Michimasa’s son to a previous brief marriage, fantasises about taking to bed his half-sister, Fumiko. Her brother Kazuya, meanwhile, actually seduces Kayo the family maid and we learn, a few pages on, that she carries his child: like grandfather, like son, like grandson—in a ring of women. O, depravity; o subjection! Our long-suffering Tomo—enabler of such debaucheries, including her own—all the while continues to administer with meticulous care the estates and financial affairs of her lord. Their bond of intimacy is an ‘unswerving allegiance to the feudal code of feminine morality’ stipulating ‘the chaste wife who grudged no sacrifice to her husband and family’. For us, for Tomo, for Enchi—ouch! The pressing question is will the couple destroy each other? And will the novel upset the entire Tokugawa table at which Yukitomo and Tomo take their food?
chamber: hers
He whom I dutifully serve I loathe. Unable to bear separate things, I loathe everything, not least myself. I, Enchi’s mask, in a first unfettered speaking-to-truth,
near the close of the novel, have determined that my cadaver should be ‘dumped’ at sea, within view of our ample Shinagawa estate. Four times I repeat the word ‘dumped’. This brief missive, at my insistence, niece Tokoya must deliver to my soon to be widower. My vengeance; his comeuppance. I loathe mortality and the means-of-purpose I possess in order to attend to Yukitomo’s affairs, not to mention the barrenness I endure through gratification of his whims. It is true two times in the course of the novel I am moved to fancy sexual intercourse with him. Once after he has been shot by a democracy agitator (a beacon!), when we both need and take our respite, something later to be spat out. On an earlier occasion the aberration occurs after a three months’ separation during my sojourn to Tokyo in order to procure our young Suga, and on my return home I distinguish—to a surprising delight—that telltale boyish ‘intensity’ in his eyes which once had so enthralled me. Even the two children I have borne him I retain no fondness for, taking only Takao, my motherless grandson, to my bosom. Otherwise, I desire nothing. And no thoughts of amour, except for one anomalous urge, ‘deflected to the same sex’, when I ‘looked at Miya’—prior to her burial in my husband’s lust—not with a woman’s eyes [sic] but with the eyes of a desiring man [sic], seeking all unawares the enveloping softness, free of all sharp angles, that only a woman [sic] could offer’. The repeated [sic] interpolation signifies our author’s perversity in matters of gender, and her fondness for us females, which Geraets here rightfully highlights. As also is my own fin-de-siècle ‘unswerving allegiance to the feudal code’: I am judge and judged, charging and sentencing myself.[ii] In the end, turning resolutely away, I invoke the Lord Amida of my deceased mother: Namu Amida Butsu. One resides in quietude, imbibing disdain. One sees that each moment constitutes an entirety, not as microcosm but as life forever marooned. I open and close my hands like heart valves, in an action of devastation. Earlier, I had contemplated the damson tree with its ‘unripe’ fruit, excitedly shaken down by the children and servants and preserved in jars in order to retain a ‘special, tart sweetness’, to be served up at the master’s breakfast table. Such sweetness evades these lips. Now, in the south-facing room, from my deathbed I observe an ‘unusually bright winter sun […] swelling the buds on the white damson tree in the garden’ whose shadow imprints itself as an effigy on the ‘translucent white paper of the sliding doors’. I seek leave of the earth, and embrace instead the figures of mother and dear Enchi with whom I am to be reunited. We are seed that must unseed women’s repudiation. Bitterness is the content of this discarded gourd.
chamber: his
I am of samurai stock, as is known; within this stock I reign. Tomo, to whom I am obliged, is no less vassal to this code. What is love is ordained order. And into this order is ushered a carousel of nubile youngsters for whom to love or be loved is beyond
necessity—unless it be that by which I stand. When a bound is sundered, even slightly tilted, chaos ensues. Consequently, my intolerance of political (or indeed any) dissent, my toilette, my impeccable attire—my entire deportment—eschews reproach. Like my wife, my daughter is foreign to me and my son I spurn, even as I pillow his wife and seed his children. Others I debauch without qualm. Indeed, all fills with satisfaction the maw of the gods in whose hands I am borne. My debauch of Tomo when I am accosted and wounded by one of the new team of reprehensible beggars-of-reform is assuaging. I retire between the legs of the women with whom my life is rightfully adorned. Like the honeyed plums from the damson tree which at breakfast I am daily served. And now Tomo is ill. Silken Nihonbashi quilts befitting the occasion are to be ordered. When niece Toyoko reports to me Tomo’s insistence that her corpse be unceremoniously disposed of (‘dumped’ is the vulgarity heard) at sea, I rebel: it affronts the heavenly order that bears us and to which I am bound and uphold. Upward and downward, a common line—a single shared axis. According to tradition, the ceremony at Tomo’s demise will be suitably elaborate and conducted as befits the house that has bound our mature life together. Such travesty is not to be contemplated: we perish first.
moralitas / back door
I am my mother’s paddle. In the beginning I was unseen and am so still except to my husband Shinohara and our one child. Subjected to a binding ‘purity of outlook’, at the centre of the novel I disappear into my own interior and our marriage, only to reappear unbidden at my ailing mother’s arms’ length ‘to presume on her affection’. Distraught, I console all that
perishes yet I am devoid of either remonstration or care. Tomo’s last wish to be ‘dumped’ at sea is fated by authoress Enchi at the outset. Her love is for us women. That I know. The novel is not a line but many circles running round each other that are one by one burst, heedless bubbles.
notes
[i] Fumiko Enchi, The Waiting Years, Kodansha International (1957/1971, 1988), 188.
[ii] One wishes that Enchi, or perhaps her translator, had been less inclined to decorousness in their use of language.