Masks by Fumiko Enchi

Author:Fumiko Enchi [Enchi, Fumiko]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Grass for your pillow, on a far journey you leave;

Despairing, I awake before dawn from my dream.

At the time I belittled them, calling them outdated lyricism of the New Poetry school, but tonight I walked the deck reciting them aloud. I saw your face again as you stood quietly among the people from Clear Stream who saw me off at the station, and my heart stirred. I truly have only gratitude for you. You forgave all my selfishness and capriciousness.

Only now does it occur to me that scarcely ever did I make you happy; it seems all I did was abuse you. And always, with a mother’s generosity, you forgave me. Perhaps your very leniency brought out the tyrant in me. Knowing full well you were not in a position to declare our love openly, yet provoked by the underhandedness of it all, I deliberately acted in front of you as if I were in love with someone younger, like S. It even gave me a sadistic pleasure, of which I was quite aware, to imagine how much I had hurt you. Surely you knew that it was only your refusal to leave your husband that made me so unkind—and still, with never a word of protest, as gracious as a goddess, you forgave me everything. Your forgiveness, together with your appearance of submissiveness to your husband, made it all the harder for me to guess your innermost feelings. That it was your despair, the rage which you had every right to feel toward T. that first brought us together, I cannot deny, but I should like to think that the love which later grew between us had nothing to do with your feelings of resentment or revenge.

To satisfy myself that it was so, I begged you to show your passion, to confess all to T. and come running to me with the two children. But you stubbornly refused. You said that you lacked the courage to take action in real life, and therein, you said, lay the explanation for your literary gifts as well as for the darkness of your fate as a woman (that was after you had conceived Harumé and Akio, when you first told me that I was their father).

To put it another way—you contain a curious ambiguity that enables you to get along without distinguishing between the truth and falseness of your actions in the real world. Because of that trait you seemed at once incomprehensible and unclean to me (I admit to the unreasonable fastidiousness of the Japanese male, to whom the blood of menstruation is of all blood the dirtiest). Even so, I was profoundly drawn by the intense emotion engendered in your mysterious body and soul.

To have fathered two children—the boy, especially—with you fills me at this moment, as I leave Japan for the war, with a great and living joy far outweighing the unpleasantness of any veil of lies. That Akio will grow up a Toganō means nothing to me. The

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