Pathway to Japanese Literature

Buying Tofu

Author: Okamoto Kanoko

She eagerly opened the side door of the front gate.
The Japanese road surface that abruptly confronted Kanako differed from the Western stone pavements with their grid-like joints she had grown accustomed to treading over years—unmistakably Tokyo's Yamanote ground bearing two or three chipped pebbles atop it, blown by the wind's edge.
Excuse me!
So intensely did she want to voice this thought that treading upon the earth felt almost sacrilegious to Kanako.
Her shoe tips sought spots beneath the ground's skin where no veins might run, stepping modestly as a heron.
Kanako caught her slipping shawl with her right hand near her chest, then extended through the floral-vine patterns of her layered collar a gloveless left hand—rounded and bare—to hold it sunward.
Compared to the perpetually overcast West she'd inhabited, even sunlight felt rare enough to Kanako that she wanted to cup it in her palms.

Kanako returned to Japan late at night.
From the next day, she remained shut inside the house for about three days doing what seemed like tidying up, and on the fourth day when she first ventured out, the scenery of Japan she saw had not yet regained in her heart either the familiarity or depth from four years before her departure.
It was merely flat and novel.
But after walking a short while, everything came to be compared with the Western streets and landscapes she had grown accustomed to over the years.

In the ditch along the boundary with the neighboring house—lewdly exposed like an exhibitionist's genitals—a handful of fish scales lay discarded between festering mud and water. Cast-off pot linings came washing down, pushing through accumulated debris that floated like tattered rags. The pot linings sold at London's Rokuben Kin'itsu-ten had been thick enough to feel heavy—an extravagant iron luxury during those global depression years. The Japanese versions now flowing here had skillfully thinned them down to the essentials. Japan remains ever swift to mimic and absorb any foreign culture. The discarded pot linings collided with the base of the scale mound. As the scaly cliff crumbled and slid into the water, countless fragments streamed away like scattered fine-patterned cloth. Through milky water pierced the scales' glitter, stimulating Kanako's eyes until she felt that first Japanese "distance"—about one meter eight and a half inches between ditch and pupil.

When Kanako, having finally begun to perceive distance, raised her eyes and looked at the street ahead, the rows of houses on both sides were low, their ends attempting to burrow into the sky's hem.
Everything in the town was low.

In the tall Western cities where she had always felt so short, Kanako now felt absurdly tall and gangly here.
Moreover, sunlight reached even her shoe tips.
I felt embarrassingly conspicuous—as though bathed in reserved golden lighting meant only for stars while background dancers retreated behind shadowy partitions—am I appearing arrogant?

Kanako recalled the exchange between the Mayor of London and a citizen’s wife.
The woman said,
“London’s alleys only sell us small scraps of light.”
The Mayor sighed and replied,
“For sunlight and air that ought to be free, London still pays the world’s highest procurement price.”

The vastness of Japan’s sky beneath its low buildings.
The Tourism Bureau ought to add “Japan is the world’s premier city of skies” to their promotional materials for foreign tourists.

The beauty of the sky.
It could be sipped by one's lips like a gauze veil held close and carried thoughts all the way to Neptune’s farthest reaches.

The sky of Paris was an agar jelly mold; Berlin’s sky was made of glass; London’s sky was asbestos.
And now this Japan’s sky—

Kanako extended her hand and tried to grasp a handful of the sky's texture.
It was not silk.
It was not water.
It was not paper.
A dream?
It seemed somehow terrifying.

If this were a dream, who could be dreaming such an immense vision, and where?
This was neither February's nor April's—a March sky befitting March itself.
In comparison, the contractual arrangement between Western cities and their skies seemed crude.
They divided the year into two seasonal skies—summer and winter—and alternated them overhead.

Kanako walked five or six steps while sensing the ordinariness of the road through the window and the child beneath it. She looked up at the utility poles. So that was it. The lively townscape she had intermittently envisioned since earlier—this vibrant streetscape—all stemmed from these utility poles functioning as arboreal sentinels. These very trees might exist exactly as they stood on some distant mountain. Their crowns extended branches meticulously aligned side by side, sporting white buds devoid of leaves. Telegraph workers would uproot such trees from mountainsides, strip their bark like bananas, and plant them unceremoniously into the earth. Among nations so cherished by nature and permitted to wield its raw forms, none could rival those of the Orient in cultivating such vegetal artifices—a gourd dangling bottles from its vine; bamboo housing ranked chambers of air within its trunk. How fascinating the Orient was. Parisian suburbs too had utility poles, yet those clung parasitically to house walls and roofs along roads—stunted things resembling hairpins tucked behind a coiffure's temple. She had contemplated this during tedious drives toward Versailles, trying to reconcile it with French frugality.

The smoke from the bathhouse chimney descended, carrying an uneasy smell.
Was it from burning scraps?

She imagined the interior of the bathhouse.
Western women who would cover their breasts when seen naked yet leave their lower halves exposed.
The women inside Japanese bathhouses hung their breasts like succulent ripe fruits from their chests - jiggling them as they washed facing each other in groups of two or three.
Women's breasts were such lively things.
Those were fleshy medals adorning female chests.
Were one to imagine chests without breasts - should that occur - men would likely stop embracing women altogether.
There had been a young Frenchman who declared visiting a woman was like going to ring a bell.
Indeed breasts resembled bells.

An anxious scent lingered as if there were a fire somewhere.

Of course, that was the smell of smoke from the bathhouse chimney, but even after turning past the rice shop corner and emerging onto the broad downtown tramway, she came to perceive how this anxiety peculiar to Japan’s cities was threaded through by an underlying connection to that smoky scent.
Anxious feelings stirring the youth and vigor of Japan’s urban centers.

A dented vintage taxi came charging at Kanako as if to knock her down; even when brakes were applied, it skidded an inch or two across the parched earth with an eerie screech.

“How about it? Where to?” called an impatient young man’s voice.

“No, Monsieur,” blurted Kanako—her face flushing crimson—the words colliding head-on.

If Kanako’s negotiation with this vintage taxi didn’t settle, then behind them two more—and another beyond the tram tracks—differently shaped vintage taxis lay waiting to poach customers.

Kanako lifted the handled sweet dish she had concealed beneath her shawl and waved it in refusal toward all the vintage taxis; four pairs of sharp eyes withdrew from four vehicle windows, and the road was rent again by merciless engine roars.

The handle of this serving dish was one she had purchased in Florence, Italy.
The Arno River, where Dante and Beatrice were said to have met, lay blanketed in winter mist.
A bridge lined with shops on both sidewalks arched over the fog.
Twilight.
Through the eaves where necklaces and earrings hung like bamboo blinds, explosive light filtered through.
It had been one shop in that row.
An antique store stood there.
Of course there were counterfeit Byzantine stone carvings and Etruscan terracotta dishes—clearly merchandise for foreign tourists—but among these displayed items, it was the iron handle with its grapevine motif that had captivated Kanako.
The pattern's vines and leaves intertwined with medieval tenacity and ruggedness, their blackened forms seeming to ooze something like dried blood.
At the time it had been attached to a makeshift glass plate, but one could detach it to serve as a handle for any dish.
Kanako purchased it.
Then she found a dish to match from a German ** company's line of hard-fired ceramics, assembling them into a single handled vessel.
When I return to Japan, first thing I'll go buy tofu myself.
There's likely no food more quintessentially traditional.
I'll put tofu in this container, lift it with my round hand, and show this sight to poor mad Ms. Kyō.
Then perhaps Ms. Kyō might actually smile.

Even the seemingly mundane row of buildings—a barbershop next to a sweet potato vendor—struck Kanako as novel. Across the street stood a flimsily built Western-style house selling all manner of gas appliances.

Until four years before her departure abroad, this house had been an old structure warped by an earthquake that sold charcoal and firewood. From charcoal merchant to a store selling gas appliances—the natural course of cultural progress. But the proprietress sitting on the chair, disproportionately holding a child, was undoubtedly the original proprietress, yet her countenance had completely transformed.

In the past, she had enveloped—without any apparent wonder—in thick fat the female process by which the food she had merely eaten in excess was digested through her intestines, absorbed entirely into fallopian tubes, and transformed into ova. Now emaciated, thick anxious-looking veins entwined on her forehead. Was it her husband’s neglect, the hardships of managing a household, or ill health stemming from childbirth? The most plausible primary cause might be that having borne a child whose allotted lifespan had already been fulfilled, she had been deemed unnecessary by nature.

When that happened, a strangeness she had never before noticed now appeared to manifest across everything—in that darting, wide-eyed gaze of hers, in the proprietress’s demeanor that showed a neurotic restlessness, as though she had been stripped of purpose yet remained unable to settle into resignation.

While loosening his scarf, the husband returned home and found the baby's red feet from within the hem of the kimono on the proprietress's lap, grasping them. For some reason, he briefly smelled the sole of the baby's foot. He was a good-natured husband with a dominant physical presence. This type of person seemed to perceive affection through grasping objects and assessing their weight. Kanako recalled Stockholm's Encouragement Exhibition for Exemplary Children where a naked baby's warmth had fogged the polished brass chain of a weighing scale. She also recalled the freckled mother who, before measuring to increase that slight weight, had been made by the father's orders to fill the baby's stomach with milk.

Five or six shops ahead, the gutter planks of a hardware store clattered with buckets and earthenware pans atop them, and a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boy came darting out.
He darted across behind a train passing on the right, then stopped mid-tracks to let a left-side train grazing his nose pass by, stroking the train's undercarriage with his palm as it went.
The stroked train’s undercarriage left behind a single clear streak of glossy varnish, shining brilliantly in the spring light where dust had been wiped away, undulating onward with a clatter toward the green signal at the intersection.
The boy, using a high-hurdle technique, leapt high and far over the subsequent tracks, landing precisely on the tip of Kanako’s shoe as she began to step forward.

A boy on the cusp of adolescence and manhood stood slightly sullen and flushed as he stepped aside for Kanako passing by, staring curiously at the blue shaved mark on her bobbed neck while humming a popular tune, his hips swaying in time with the song as he remained planted there.

The popular song that had been all the rage until just recently had already been translated into Japanese and was now on the lips of the town’s children.
How swiftly Japan moved!
But more than that, what lingered vividly in Kanako’s vision were the hands and feet of this boy who had earlier darted out like a bullet and executed several swift maneuvers with agility.
Kanako turned to look back at him after five or six steps.
Still tossing a match packet and chopstick wrapper skillfully between his hands, his hips keeping rhythm with the tune, he continued staring unwaveringly in her direction.

There had been a time when a Japanese play was performed in London.
The troupe leader was a third-rate actor from Osaka, and apart from two or three core members, the rest were amateurs trained in America, making it utterly nerve-wracking to watch.
But there she saw a strange Japan.
In the Fox Tadanobu scene where young Japanese girls danced as Hana Shiten flower deities, their limbs—coiling and twisting like arabesque patterns to eyes accustomed to foreign dances—transcended human movement.
Their faces and bodies were dolls while only their limbs brimmed with vitality surpassing human limits.
Come to think of it, what passed for Japanese tango in Parisian ballrooms possessed such peculiar persistence and technique in its hip movements that it looked to observers like women practicing judo.
When Kanako turned around for the third time, the boy abandoned his intended path and began following her.
Kanako gazed at the hardware store from which the boy had darted out.

The petty bourgeoisie of Berlin, crumbling day by day.
In Berlin, hardware stores of this caliber could never sustain themselves through hardware sales alone, so most took on amateur laundry work as a side business.
One parent, one child.
There was a daughter, but she had moved out to rent lodgings elsewhere and become a working woman.
While working as a professional woman, she tried to befriend wealthy foreigners on the side.
Just when she seemed to make friends, they fled from her clumsiness.
Though it was amateur laundry done solely by the mother's hands, the wax treatment had to be handled with expert care given that it involved Western undergarments.
Thus she had installed a full set of ironing machines in the narrow earthen-floored area.
Whenever she had free time, she remained attached to them, and she herself had become completely dried out.
She chattered away about her husband, who had inhaled poison gas during the Great War and slowly wasted away from ruined lungs, as if recounting someone else’s affair—but when faced with the usual emergency decrees that kept raining down before her eyes, she glowered resentfully and fell silent.
Even while keeping this business running, taxes just kept increasing anyway.
And the son was a Nazi.
He had finally managed to scrape together the tuition fees to attend gymnastics school with the intention of obtaining a secondary teacher’s license, but even if he were to acquire that license, there was almost no prospect of employment.
If there were road construction or snow-shoveling jobs available, he skipped school and went to them.
However, being a son raised in a household that had invested at least some capital and engaged in commerce, he couldn’t fully become a pure laborer.
That was why he became a Nazi.
He would often gather at the alleyway liquor store branch and help with raising and lowering the branch flag.
When there were tournaments at the skating hall, he would become one of the suicide squad, turn his back to the podium, and stand in line glaring at the entrance.
When the Linden street trees shed their leaves in a single day and Berlin’s sky—appearing expansively open for a time—soon became crowned with snow clouds, the entrance of an old-fashioned liquor store displayed a sign for new beer.
The nighttime town’s pavements suddenly came alive.

Around the time when the voices of lingering drunks past midnight would intermittently begin to fade, there would always be a pair that passed beneath Kanako’s eaves with disorderly footsteps. It was the mother and child from the hardware store five or six shops away. There were times when the son carried the mother on his back. There were times when the mother carried the son. When the son was being carried by the mother, he was too drunk and acting up wildly. When the mother was carried home by her son, she was usually too drunk and crying. By the freshly lit fireplace, Kanako keenly felt the earth's chill seep through the floorboards—a memory of Germany.

Though still a child, being followed by a Japanese person felt unsettling.
In contrast, when Westerners followed her, it gave a cloying sensation.
Is it because even delinquent men in the West had become permeated with feminism?
Kanako was the sort of woman people often followed.

“It’s because every part of you moves to a different rhythm than ordinary people, making you stand out,” a certain friend said to Kanako with a laugh.

“Ugh, this is unbearable!” Kanako flailed her limbs, at which the friend pointed and,

“That’s precisely where you’re already extraordinary,” she said.

Kanako had learned through various experiences that not giving any clues to those who followed her was paradoxically the way to avoid becoming preoccupied with them; to maintain this unaffected demeanor, she continued surveying the townscape as she walked.

On walls and roofs alike were plastered the gaudy advertisements of a Dr. specializing in dermatology and urology. Not to be outdone, magazine shops armed their stores with standing signs and colored noren curtains. When made aware of this and looking closely, she realized Japanese towns were places teeming with advertisements. At the alley entrance where old timbers lay felled—their tops crowned with straw mats peeking out—signposts jostled like bamboo shoots vying for prominence. Pediatricians, patent attorneys, another internal medicine/respiratory specialist, dispatched housewives associations, name-divination fortune-tellers—and modestly protruding its slender neck from the rear, the nagauta teacher's signpost bore an indigo mallet crest. “Old Soil - Free Giveaway.” The woman who entered the alleyway—its roof plastered with nailed-up signs—kept walking in her Azuma geta, flip-flopping them so vigorously that the rat-gray lining of her white tabi became fully visible.

It was precisely in a house within this kind of alleyway that Ms. Kyō had last fled and hidden from her French husband Henri.
After the two of them had gone shopping in town and eaten dinner, when it grew dark and she tried to take Ms. Kyō back to her hideout—upon entering that alleyway entrance—Ms. Kyō made the sign of the cross over her chest with her convulsing right hand.
When she asked why,

“May I successfully cross that puddle crowned with straw bags,” she said. And if she carelessly stepped into it, she would huff with irritation, return to the alleyway entrance, recalculate her steps, and begin the alley entry anew. She stepped in again. And then she would stubbornly repeat the process however many times it took until she accomplished it. In the end, her face—with eyes fixed, nostrils flared wide, and breathing heavily—was terrifying under the eaves light. However, even when told to buy a flashlight, she wouldn’t agree. She had already gone mad by that point. However, if Ms. Kyō successfully crossed the puddle, she would become her usual self—a woman of raw silk—and take Kanako’s hand, who followed behind, to safely guide her across. At that moment, in a beautiful voice,

“Attention!” she said.
“And then—”

“Be careful,” she also said.

Ms. Kyō loved her French husband very much.
Moreover, her French husband loved Ms. Kyō even more.
But then why did Ms. Kyō flee from her husband?
She fled and went mad.
Even after Ms. Kyō made Kanako cross the puddle, she continued holding Kanako's hand without letting go all the way to the entrance and said:

“Holding your hand truly feels just right to my heart. Your hands aren’t even wearing gloves of skin.”

There was a wooden fence on the left side.
The wood grain, weathered by rain and wind, lay stacked like lotus petals.
It appeared to be the residence of some retired official.
During the time when this area was still interspersed with farmland, someone had purchased a slightly larger plot at low land prices and built a house; before they knew it, it had become part of the town center—noisy, but land values had risen.
The residence presented an appearance that seemed to blend bewilderment and reverence.
At the corner of the old main house, the ridge of a Western-style building that appeared to have been reluctantly added on was visible.
It seemed this addition had become necessary for propriety’s sake now that the grown son was starting to receive guests.
The portable phonograph from the London Siemens Company was grinding out a jingle as an advertisement for visitors.
“Let’s switch on bright candlelight bulbs!”
"And then, your face—"
Why had such a record made its way into Japan?
Could it be that the son here worked for a trading company affiliated with that electric company?

The pine tree shed its aged needles onto yellow dogwood blossoms. At the gate stood a petition officer's booth flanked by zelkova rows along both sides of the path; beyond where the curve obscured the wealthy residence's entrance distance, near the fifth or sixth tree in this colonnade, an old man in faded khaki trousers turned drying shiitake mushrooms on their racks. Could shiitake truly be cultivated in such urban confines?

The mansion's winding approach road had created a crescent-shaped void between its arc and the main street's straight edge. Survey markers for a trust company's subdivided lots stood sentinel. Only two plots at the thoroughfare's far right showed occupancy—the remainder lay open and littered with discarded shoji screens and straw bundles over which children played baseball. Youngsters across nations share this vacant-lot fascination.

One sweltering London summer day came to mind—children queuing beneath a hooded fireman's hose spray in just such a demolition-site clearing. Another London lot surfaced in memory where they'd pitched tents to shield children from witnessing a dog's labor.

On the gaudy Western-style houses occupying two adjacent plots of land that appeared both friendly and rivalrous—their shoddy construction glaringly evident—one bore a dentist's sign while the other displayed a dance studio's brass plaque. Ms. Kyō was a woman prone to indecision; were she shown these storefronts, she would likely agonize over whether to first visit the dentist for treatment before going to the practice studio, or complete her dance lesson before seeing the dentist. Kanako thought she would grow earnest and consult me.

Another wall.
This one was built with gray cement and bore horizontal mouse-gray lines across its top.
The gray surface had formed cloud-like white patches that resembled a dry skin condition appearing thoroughly itchy.
People’s shadows trailed along in a connected line as they passed.
There were men who bumped into Kanako too.
Before she knew it, a great number of people who had gotten off the train at the intersection below the slope and walked up without transferring had increased.

After four o'clock, did Tokyo's overpopulated heart disperse its blood to the limbs for respite? Otherwise this city's viscera would surely become engorged and fester.

A modest march against human currents—unexcited yet musical. Volts of bodily electricity brushing past in varied charges. Dust and pomade odors lingering. Kanako felt an inexplicable nostalgia for post-four PM hours. In Paris too she'd invariably felt this way when attempting walks from the Arc de Triomphe along Champs-Élysées' right sidewalk—past Restaurant Bouquet toward the park gates. The jingle of coins from apache-style men in hunting caps walking hands-in-pockets. Sudden diagonal swerves creating faint air vortices around Paris Matin buyers. Having successfully breasted upstream, respite came at Café L'Opéra's pink-and-white haven. There she'd eaten walnut candies.

But even when Japanese pedestrians appeared to hurry, the tempo was slow.
And yet the sense of intensity grew stronger.
Pairs of dark eyes came toward her.
An intelligence of unfathomable depths.
Kimono-clad figures lacking collars and ties, shirts and chest flesh peeking through collar openings.
Men looking like women in Inverness coats.
A silent pair.
American-style Western clothing on women.

The boy who had been following Kanako was swept away by the current’s force and had already vanished from sight.
Instead, an even smaller thirteen- or fourteen-year-old middle school student walked along the stones by the gutter beside Kanako, pretending to stare at a ball clutched in his hand to avoid detection.
The way he kept stealing frequent sidelong glances at Kanako confirmed he was indeed following her.

Kanako extended a hand with short fingers from between her shawl, spread it out, and showed both sides.
Then, his face flushing crimson, he suddenly broke into a run.

Before Ms. Kyō ran away from her husband Henri, Ms. Kyō had said such things to Kanako.

When I'm with the Foreigner, I have to be on guard all the time.
"Because you never know when lips might come flying at me."

When I'm with the Foreigner, even acting selfishly requires scheduling.

“Henri tries to consume me completely with fire.”
“He tries to power a car with rapeseed oil.”
“If only he’d love me without touching me.”

“On quiet nights when we’d sit facing each other, I’d suddenly realize—oh no, I’m with the Foreigner,” she said. “There are times I just want to run away.”

“Have you seen the Foreigner when he’s dejected? He’s just like a child.”

“The Foreigner’s awkwardness—those large, clumsy steps he takes to avoid hitting his head on Japanese house lintels—was truly endearing at first. But once you grow accustomed to it and start finding it irritating, it becomes utterly unbearable.”

“The Foreigner is such a jealous person.”

"He started practicing how to eat nori, you know."

"The Foreigner's love is so cloying you get full immediately, yet it doesn't last."
"That's why you have to keep taking little nibbles all the time."

"Lately even when I eat tofu, my tongue can't taste it properly anymore."
"It's from constantly keeping company with greasy things."

"And yet I can't forget tofu's flavor."
"That's why I just keep watching."

"He gets angry even if I merely talk to Japanese men."

"He learned how to pinch from me and then used it on me."

"But I absolutely wanted to make friends with Japanese men, so I thought children might be acceptable and tried making friends—sixteen-year-old boys didn’t work out, fourteen-year-old boys didn’t work out—until I found a thirteen-year-old friend, an ill-bred boy who turned beet red at the drop of a hat."
“His name is Senji.”

Kanako looked at Senji once or twice.
Ms. Kyō had been applying white powder to the child's face, placing him beside a French doll.
That had been a spring afternoon in Japan four or five years before Kanako went abroad.

The road had become a downhill slope.
The congestion at the tram intersection rising above people's hats; and beyond that, the view of the slope that climbed gently upward.
On the right corner was a fruit shop whose colors were covered by a tiled roof, and on the left stood a small public market that appeared like a stage backdrop - the whole scene seemed unreal.
Having grown accustomed to Western countries' tall structures and wide expanses, and moreover having crossed twenty days of endless sea, Kanako's eyesight once again lost its sense of spatial perception there.

Had there not been the glistening blue horse mackerels and even bluer mackerels flashing at the storefront of the small fish shop on the left side of the slope ahead, Kanako might have stepped into her dream and planted her shoe within the painted backdrop of that opposite slope.
But those small fish awakened Kanako's visual perception, and she noticed the next soba shop, then the pharmacy beyond it.
What had become of the powder spray brush she'd left at the pharmacy on Kaiser Wilhelm Street in Berlin for repairs when she departed the city?

There, she turned into a side street. Kanako's mind was now occupied solely with thoughts of the tofu shop. Was that shop still there? Having long lived as a widow grinding beans alone, she had found someone to care for her and taken in a married couple as her adoptive children, but according to neighborhood rumors, once they were officially registered, the adoptive children began severely abusing their adoptive mother. And yet, those adoptive children had such innocently blank faces that seemed to radiate kindness, while the adoptive mother being bullied was rather a middle-aged woman with a face as fierce as a demonic roof tile.

Behind the vehicles emerged an aged reed screen; though the oil-paper sliding door bearing the character "Koto" in its corner had been replaced with a painted glass door, beside the shopfront's sansho tree where a bleached cloth sack hung lay a fallen child crying face-up as a mother hen and her chicks hastily stepped across their back.

――A moment passed.

Kanako placed her hand on the old reed screen.

“Welcome.”
“My, what a rare sight!”

There stood Okoto, the widow.
She held a beer cup in her hand.

"Is everyone safe?"

"Ha ha ha ha ha! I finally drove out those demonic brats.
I won the lawsuit.
I heard you went abroad—when did you return?"

She hid the beer-holding hand slightly behind her body.

"Four days ago."

"Oh? Is that so?
Do have a seat."

Okoto briskly brushed the dust from the edge of the entrance step.

“But Auntie.
You really went through with it decisively, didn’t you.”

“If you act meekly around youngsters these days, they’ll start getting above themselves—that’s what I concluded.
I finally ran to the courthouse.
Of course before that I tried hanging myself two or three times, you know.
If those brats saw this ugly woman’s death scene, I thought they’d surely make fresh gossip material—so I couldn’t bring myself to die properly.
So I resolved myself to die and flipped my reasoning around, you see.”

She had always been a woman who could handle some drink, becoming more talkative than usual when imbibing, but today, excited from reuniting with Kanako after so long, she seemed even more eager to speak.

“Of course, if I’d been straightforward about it, those demon brats would never have let me leave the house. I kicked over the charcoal brazier, you see. While they were panicking and making a fuss, I fled the house. Barefoot, you know. And at first, thinking it was the courthouse, I rushed into the Navy Ministry, you see.”

“Auntie, are you drinking alcohol every day lately?”

Okoto deliberately clicked her tongue two or three times.

“Well yes—I drink every day now, you know. And I’ve got a husband too, you know. Ha ha ha ha ha!”

“Auntie, you’ve really opened up, haven’t you.”

At that moment, a young small-statured man in Western clothes entered, carrying a briefcase and looking burdened.

“Are you back? You—this belongs to our household.”

The man bowed his head awkwardly while glaring sideways at Okoto’s cup.

“We’ve had your loyal patronage for ages now. You should kowtow properly and give thanks.”

Then turning to Kanako:

“This one here styles his hair all cocky-like—acting high and mighty even though he’s got himself a wife already, this old woman.”

The young small-statured man suddenly raised his head and shouted in a low voice.

"You idiot—!"
"You're drunk again."

Then he briskly took off his shoes while still facing away on the ladder-like stairs leading from the earthen floor and went up to the mezzanine where a merino curtain hung.

"Even when he makes such an angry face, it disappears right away."
"I've completely learned men's tricks by now."
"Looking back, had I handled things differently, I could've kept both my former husband and that adopted brat from getting so full of themselves."
"Truth is, men hate quiet women."

“Auntie, what became of the tools for making tofu?”

“The world changed while you were abroad,”
“Nowadays small tofu shops like ours don’t make things ourselves anymore.”
“There’s a company now—they prepare it all grand-like and parcel it out.”
“We’re both shareholders and a branch of that company, see.”
“We do natto too.”

After curiously examining the hand-carried confectionery bowl Kanako had offered, Okoto slid a brass knife into faintly murky water and deposited a quivering white cube into the bowl.
Using the knife’s flat side to press the block’s surface, she carefully drained off water.

“Oh, I was so nervous. This is the first time I’ve put tofu into something so splendid, you know. But when you do it like this, it really stands out, doesn’t it. It doesn’t look like tofu at all, does it.”

When Kanako paid and was leaving the shop, Okoto hurriedly stood up and chased after her.

“That tofu shop in London you mentioned—it doesn’t seem likely to close down or go out of business anytime soon, does it?”

“Well now—why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason really.
If something like that were to happen, I thought I might push through and start a tofu shop over there, you see.
Men are relatively fond of oddities, you know.
Keeping them from getting bored is quite a task, you know.
It’s not like we’re likely to have a child or anything, you know.”

Kanako no longer wished to remain at this garrulous old woman's place. She yearned to see Okyō-san without delay. Concealed in Kanako's pocket lay a Florentine marble mosaic brooch - housed in a small box - purchased as a gift for Kyō. Weary of the crone's prattling, Kanako tapped the box with a faint clink from one hand. With her other hand, she grasped the black iron handle fitted to the dish holding tofu. Through the thin membrane of her shawl-emerged hand, faintly branching veins showed translucent beneath dusk-thinned skin. A rod-stiff wind that had scoured the impoverished town set the tofu aquiver. Kanako gazed through eyes faintly blurred with nameless sorrow, mourning the fourth-day sun since her homecoming as it sank behind the cliffside tennis court.

He wanted to formally marry a Japanese young woman.
From this wish of the Frenchman Henri, Ms. Kyō was taken in marriage by Henri.
Henri had been a royalist in Lyon, but due to his radical conduct, he temporarily took on the job of exporting French crepe to the Orient.
While there were no significant exports from France to Japan, among them Western dress fabrics were considered the most sublime.
Therefore, he came to Japan following the path of sublime trade.
After coming to Japan, he appeared as a dutiful young man who showed no signs of the radical behavior he had exhibited in his home country.
He frequently praised the pine trees of Chiyoda Castle.
Even so, he did not reject the American-style buildings being stacked up in Marunouchi without scaffolding for expansion.
Even those still clearly showed where Japanese hands had crafted them.
"The way the details are so thoroughly attended to—that’s Japanese architecture for you," he would remark with practiced tact.

Ms. Kyō's house had been a moderately large dairy shop.
They imported ××× breed cattle and placed photographic advertisements in newspapers.
They also delivered milk to Henri's house.
Ms. Kyō, at an age when she harbored an unusual interest in Westerners, would tie picture postcards of Japanese landmarks to the milk bottles the deliveryman carried.
Such things had only occurred once or twice; however, the deliveryman who received a tip from Henri on those occasions continued afterward to buy postcards himself, tie them to delivery bottles, and collect tips by claiming they represented Ms. Kyō's goodwill.
When Ms. Kyō had largely forgotten about Henri during this period, Henri—believing himself thoroughly acquainted—invited Ms. Kyō and her parents to dinner.
The three attended.

After they had truly become acquainted, Henri became able to express his desire for Ms. Kyō to become his bride.
Ms. Kyō had been off guard.
Her parents—who had been samurai before pioneering the shift to dairy farming—felt pride in their daughter being desired by a foreigner and, moved by chivalrous sympathy for what appeared to be the young Westerner’s lonely circumstances, resolved to give their only daughter.

—Our third generation is a mixed-race child.

The father scratched his head and boasted about the marriage to everyone he met.

The wedding was conducted in the Shinto tradition at Daijingu, as they had insisted on a purely Japanese style. Henri sat stiffly in his black formal kimono bearing five white lily crests. Ms. Kyō's Takashimada bridal hairstyle held an amber kougai hairpin that gleamed with crystalline clarity.

Outside the shrine corridor, women and children had gathered, their shrill voices rising in commotion. Kanako joined their number. A few close friends among the attendees found themselves transfixed by an uncanny beauty permeating the scene.

Without giving those around them any particular cause for concern, the couple passed six months as smoothly as any Japanese bride and groom might. Henri's faltering Japanese. Kyō's stumbling French. Only these linguistic stumbles would be recounted to friends later, wrapped in the sheen of amusing anecdote.

One day after six months had passed, Kanako visited Ms. Kyō's house carrying bush clover rice cakes.
Ms. Kyō was practicing calligraphy with a fountain pen at the table.
An old Western-script calligraphy copybook from her girls' school days lay atop the hemp tablecloth.
Ms. Kyō said while dividing the bush clover rice cakes with a fork onto a Western plate.

“A foreigner remains a foreigner after all.”

When Kyō went to store the divided plate in the triangular cupboard, Kanako noticed the disappearance of neatness in her kimono’s drape from waist to hem.
She had taken on the semblance of a Western actress portraying Madame Butterfly.
Kanako was struck by a sudden realization.
Thereafter, with each visit grievances would surface anew until at last Ms. Kyō fled from Henri.
Only her mother and Kanako knew her whereabouts.
The father remained constrained by his wife from inquiring about her refuge.

Henri searched like a man possessed.
He appealed to Ms. Kyō's parents.
There was nothing to be done.
Having never filed the nationality paperwork, he couldn't make it official.

After hiding in the alleyway dwelling for about two months, Ms. Kyō relocated to a seaside sanatorium for her health.
To that place, as the timing of Ms. Kyō’s departure and Kanako’s voyage abroad nearly coincided, the two managed to meet amidst their mutual busyness and bade farewell with reluctance on the second floor of an eel restaurant along the Sumida River.

“Ms. Kyō said.”

“Do humans even have souls?”

Kanako couldn’t properly answer this.
Seeing this, Ms. Kyō stopped waiting for a reply and said:

“Even if humans have souls, mine seems to have completely formed some kind of shell around it.”
“So no matter which way I turn, I’ve lost all sense of touching another soul.”
“Ah—what does it feel like for souls to truly touch each other?”

With that, Ms. Kyō took Kanako’s round hand.

“Now only this hand feels like it can truly grasp anything real.”

With those words, Ms. Kyō wept bitterly.
White seagulls tumbling head over heels through the rising tide's debris dyed the beer company’s red bricks in dusk’s hues.
The lonesome smoke of Honjo-Fukagawa.

In any case—she would go and properly discern what Westerners were.

At least this was the one and only consolation Kanako could offer Ms. Kyō.

Each time Kanako moved to a new city among the three European cities, she sent a brief letter to Ms. Kyō.
From Ms. Kyō, there were almost no replies.
However, upon receiving word of her impending return home, she sent a childishly insistent letter urging her to come back quickly.
Moreover, it seemed she had rented a house in a backstreet about seven or eight blocks from Kanako’s home and begun living there with her mother.

Henri, fully aware of the circumstances, was said to be waiting alone for Ms. Kyō to recover from her illness and return.

When she ran lightly along the tracks glowing in the post-train twilight - roaring echoes lingering - trembling for some reason so that a dent formed in the tofu inside her handbag, then entered the opposite alleyway leaving it unrepaired and asked at the dye shop about Ms. Kyō's house, she found it immediately.
Outside the bamboo fence stood a single-story house with chabohiba plants where a Yamada-school koto resonated.
Kanako opened the lattice door and spoke.

“Ms. Kyō. It’s me.”
“I’m back.”

Immediately, the koto stopped.

Entrez!

And due to Ms. Kyō lunging over to embrace her, the hard-earned tofu was crushed to pieces.
Ms. Kyō’s illness was not yet completely healed.
And a slightly deranged, pathological ripeness rendered the middle-aged beauty’s complexion all the more eerily alluring.

“I’m happy about everything now that I’ve met you.”

And then, turning toward the boy who had opened the sliding door there and come out, she said.

“Kiyoshi-san, shake hands with this person.”

Kanako’s round hand and the boy’s small supple hand—damp as if wet—gripped each other.
Kanako discovered this was the boy who had followed her twice before.