Death Register by Akutagawa Ryunosuke

One

My mother was a madwoman. I have never felt a mother’s warmth from her. She would do her hair up in the kushimaki style, sit alone in her house in Shiba and puff at her long pipe. If her face was small then so too was her body. Moreover, her face was a somewhat lifeless grey colour. I was once reading The Story of the Western Wing, and when I came across the phrase ‘smells of the earth, tastes of mud,’ I immediately imagined my mother’s thin face in profile.

I, having such a mother, have never been looked after by her. I remember once my foster mother and I going up to the first floor just to see her, and suddenly having my head struck by her pipe. But usually my mother was a fairly quiet madwoman. Whenever pressed by myself and my sister to paint a picture, she would paint us something on calligraphy paper folded into four. She didn’t just use ink. She would also use my sister’s watercolours to paint flowers and children’s clothes. However, every single person in her paintings would have the face of a fox.

It was the autumn of my eleventh year when my mother died. Her death was more from a breakdown than from illness. I only have relatively clear memories of before and after her death.

It must be because a telegram about her critical condition came. On a certain windless, deep night, I rode a rickshaw with my foster mother and rushed from Honjo to Shiba. I had still never worn a so-called scarf by this point. But I especially remember that on this night alone, I had wrapped around my neck a pale, silk handkerchief with some kind of landscape from the Southern School (*of Chinese painting). I also remember that that handkerchief smelled of a perfume called Iris.

My mother was lying down in the eight mat tatami room below the first floor. I sat at her bedside with my four-mistakes-sister and the two of us cried out and wept constantly. Especially when someone behind me said, “she’s nearing the end,” I felt my heart wrench with pain. But then suddenly, my dying, corpse-like mother opened her eyes and said something. We all gave a slight laugh in spite of our sadness.

The next night, I sat by my mother’s bedside until dawn. But, just like the night before, I shed not a single tear. I felt ashamed sitting beside my sister crying her eyes out, so tried my best to feign tears. At the same time, not only was I unable to cry, but I was sure that my mother would not die.

My mother died on the third night with almost no pain.  She seemed to return to herself before she died, and cried ceaselessly when she looked upon our faces. But, as always, she didn't utter a single word.

After she had been placed in her coffin, sometimes I couldn't help but cry. Then an old, distant relative of mine, ‘the prince’s aunt’ said, “I really admire you.” I just thought she must be someone who admires strange things.

On the day of my mother’s funeral, my sister and I rode in a rickshaw, with her carrying the tablet and myself carrying the incense burner. I sometimes dozed off, waking up with a start and nearly dropping the burner. But we were still not in Yanaka. The long funeral procession paraded slowly through the streets of Tokyo under the clear autumnal sky.

My mother died on the 28^th November. Her posthumous name is Sister Kimyouin Myoujou Nisshin. Yet, I cannot remember my father’s date of death or posthumous name. Perhaps as an eleven year old boy, being able to remember these things was a source of pride for me.

Two

I have one sister. My mother was the mother of two children despite her ill health. Of course, it is not this sister who I would like to add to my ‘death register.’ Rather, it is my sister who died prematurely before I was born. She was the cleverest of the three of us.

I call her the first child because she was born as the eldest daughter. There is still a photograph of Sho-chan in a small frame on the altar in my house. She didn’t look weak in the slightest. Her tiny, dimpled cheeks were plump like ripe apricots.

In any case, it was Sho-chan who received my mother and father’s love most excessively. Sho-chan went from Shige’s Shinzenza to Tsukiji especially to go to Mrs. Summers’ kindergarten or something. But, from Saturday to Sunday, she would stay in my mother’s – the Akutagawa house, in Honjo. When she went out, she was dressed in western clothing fashionable for the Meiji 20’s (*1887-1896). When I went to primary school, I received Sho-chan’s kimono hand-me-downs, and I remember dressing up a rubber doll. As agreed, those kimonos were only imported calico, with small flowers and instruments scattered over the fabric.

On a Sunday afternoon in the beginning of spring, Sho-chan walked around in the garden and called out to our aunt sitting in the tatami room.

“Aunty, what’s this tree called?”

“Which tree?”

“This one with the flower buds.”

There was one low flowering quince tree in my mother’s garden, and its branches drooped down towards an old well. Perhaps Sho-chan, with her big eyes and her hair flowing loose, was looking at this prickly quince tree.

“It’s got the same name as you.”

Unfortunately, my aunt was not very funny.

“It’s called a stupid tree.” (*quince is boke, whilst stupid is baka so it’s a bad play on words)

Whenever Sho-chan comes up in conversation, my aunt will still repeat this dialogue. But actually, there is nothing else left other than this story of Sho-chan. She was put into her coffin just a few days later. I don’t remember the posthumous name carved into her tablet. However, strangely, I remember clearly that she died on the fifth of April.

For some reason, I feel a certain affection for this sister I never knew.

If Sho-chan was still alive, she would be over forty years old by now. Perhaps her forty-year old face would resemble that of my mother’s face as she smoked, dazed, on the first floor of her home in Shige. Sometimes, I feel like someone is watching over me, a woman in her forties, though not my mother or sister. Could this be the work of my nerves, worn out from coffee and cigarettes? Or, by chance, could it be the work of a supernatural force, subtly declaring its presence in the real world?

Three

Since I went to live with my foster parents (my uncle on my mother’s side) almost as soon as I was born due to my mother going insane, I was fairly indifferent to my father as well. My father was a milkman and he seemed to be fairly successful. It was my father who taught me about fresh fruit and drinks back in those days. Banana, ice-cream, pineapple, rum – perhaps there are others besides. I remember drinking rum back then, under an oak tree just outside a farm in Shinjuku. The rum had a very low alcohol content and was tinged with a shade of orange.

My father would offer me novel things such as this, though I was still young, and he tried to get me back from my foster home. I remember one night, being given ice-cream in Uoei, Ōmori, and him trying to persuade me to run away back home. My father would try to flatter me into it. But unfortunately, his solicitations never had the desired effect, as I loved my foster parents – especially my aunt.

Since my father was short-tempered, he would sometimes pick fights. When I was in the third year of middle school, I took sumo with my father, and I once managed to knock my father over using a sweeping leg throw, which was my forte at the time. When he got up, he said, “it’s still round one,” and faced me. Again, I knocked him down without any difficulty. On the third time, he said, “it’s still round one,” his expression changed, and he sprang at me. My aunt watching this sumo match – my mother’s sister and my father’s second wife – winked at me a couple of times. After jostling with my father, I purposely fell onto my back. If I had not lost, I am certain my father would have grabbed me afterwards.

When I was 28 – when I was still a teacher – I received a telegram saying ‘dad hospital’ and I hurried from Kamakura to Tokyo. My father was in Tokyo Hospital with influenza. For more or less three days, I stayed in the corner of the hospital room with my foster mother and my aunt. Eventually, I started to get bored. Then a certain Irish newspaper reporter phoned and asked if I’d like to come to eat at a certain teahouse in Tsukiji. With the excuse that this reporter was about to go to America, I went out to the certain teahouse in Tsukiji, leaving my father at death’s door.

We delighted in a Japanese meal with four or five geishas. Dinner must have finished at about ten o’clock. I left the reporter and went down the narrow staircase. Then someone called out “A-“ from behind me. I stopped halfway up and looked round to the top of the stairs. One of the geishas with whom I had just met was staring down at me. I climbed down the stairs in silence and got into a taxi outside the entrance. The taxi moved off immediately. But rather than my father, I was thinking of the face of that radiant, young woman with her hair tied up in a western style, I thought especially of her eyes.  

When I returned to the hospital, my father was struggling to wait for me. The others had withdrawn behind the folding screen, so my father clasped my hand and caressed it and spoke of things I didn’t know, from the time when he was married to my mother. It was nothing more than trivial stories of my mother and him going to buy a dresser or eating sushi. But while I was listening, my eyelids started to feel warm. Tears also streamed down my father’s gaunt cheeks.

My father died the next morning without much pain. He seemed to go insane before he died, and he said things like, “the warship with the hoisted flag has come. Everybody cheer!” I cannot remember what kind of funeral my dad’s was. I just remember that when we moved his corpse from the hospital to his home, a large spring moon shone atop of his hearse.

Four

In the middle of March this year, still carrying a hand-warmer, I finally visited their graves again with my wife. Even though it had been so long, neither the small graves nor the red pine tree which grew above them, had changed.

The three who I have included in this “death register” are all buried in a corner of a graveyard in Yanaka, all below the same stone pagoda. I recalled the time when my mother’s coffin was quietly lowered into her grave. It must have been the same for Sho-chan. Just my father – I remember his gold tooth mingled in with his pale, slender, broken bones…

I dislike visiting graves. However, if I could forget to do it, I may want to forget my parents and sister as well. But on that day alone, perhaps it was because I was feeling physically weak, but while I was looking at the stone pagoda, dark in the afternoon sunlight, I thought that someone of the three must be happy.

Just living beyond the shade and mounds.

In all honesty, I’ve never felt such a sense of emotion rush over me as I did at that time.