Modern Japanese Short Stories by Ivan Morris

Author:Ivan Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

“Buy a bird?” said a policeman, glancing up from a bowl of noodles. “To eat, do you mean? Or to keep in a cage?”

“It’s a beautiful songbird,” the woman replied. “A nightingale.” And, looking thoroughly pleased with herself now, as if she had already found a buyer, she advanced further into the room and began to untie a cloth-wrapped bundle.

“Well, look at this!” The policemen, sitting or standing idly about and delving with chopsticks into their lunch boxes, peered into the smoke-blackened wooden cage resting on the floor. “It’s a nightingale, right enough. But, does it sing?”

“Well, really, would I try to sell a bird that doesn’t sing?” The woman looked genuinely shocked.

They asked her the price.

“Well, now, how much is it worth, I wonder?” she said, looking inquiringly around at their faces. “I don’t know what they sell for, myself, but if any of you gentlemen will say what you think is a fair price, anything will do.”

“Anything will do, eh?” laughed one of the policemen. “You’re the first hawker I’ve met who doesn’t know the price of his goods!”

“I’ll give you fifty sen,” said another.

“How much did you say?” The woman’s face fell. “Can you buy a nightingale for fifty sen?”

“I thought you said you didn’t know about these things,” said the policeman who had just named the price. “In any case, you can’t expect much from poor fellows like us.”

But the woman was not to be put off so easily.

“If officials like you, with monthly salaries, haven’t got any money,” she retorted, “just where is the money in this town, I should like to know.”

Constable Miyoshi had meanwhile joined the group, and now, catching sight of the woman’s face, he looked suddenly annoyed and shouted: “You again! Have you come to talk more of that silly nonsense?”

“Oh, no, not this time, sir—I’m trying to sell a bird,” she said, evidently flustered.

“You are, eh? Well, if that’s all….” Miyoshi peered into the cage.

Miyo was the woman’s name, and when her husband had been arrested two months back for the unlicensed brewing of saké and had been given a spell in the workhouse in place of a fine, Miyo had come along to the police with the awkward request that she and her children, since they now had no idea where tomorrow’s meals might come from, should be sent to the workhouse too. She had argued obstinately in this room for the best part of half a day, giving Miyoshi no end of trouble. The brewing of a rough, cloudy saké from crushed rice was a time-honored custom among the impoverished petty farmers roundabout, any form of refined saké being hopelessly beyond their means; since it was impossible to stop this practice, the police had abandoned imposing fines and, instead, merely consigned offenders to the workhouse. Miyoshi, recalling now the pinched, sad-eyed faces and soiled kimono of the three children Miyo had brought with her on that occasion, felt strongly inclined to make some sort of offer for the bird himself.

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