The Best Japanese Short Stories by Lane Dunlop

Author:Lane Dunlop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 2022-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

One Woman

and the War

坂口安吾

ANGO SAKAGUCHI

The old man, the one I called the Mantis, called me Madam or Sister. The fat old man just called me Madam. That’s why I liked him better. Each time the Mantis called me Sister, I would look unconcerned, as if I hadn’t noticed, but I made up my mind to give him a hard time for it soon after.

Both the Mantis and Fatty were around sixty years old. The Mantis owned a factory in the neighborhood, and Fatty had a well-cleaning business. Getting together in the intervals between sirens, we shot craps. Usually Nomura and Fatty won, and the Mantis and I usually lost. The Mantis would get all excited, call me Sister, and make awful faces. Sometimes he would make a lewd, slobbering face at me. The Mantis was a terrific miser. When he paid the money he’d lost, he would take out the bills and one by one smooth out the wrinkles in them. He couldn’t let go of them. When the other players said, “It’s dirty to put spit on them, come on, hand them over,” he would scrunch up his face as if he were about to cry.

Sometimes I would get on my bike and go over to invite the Mantis and Fatty out. We all believed that Japan was going to lose, but the Mantis believed it with a vengeance. He seemed to be happy about Japan’s impending defeat. Half the Japanese, eight-tenths of the men and two-tenths of the women, were going to die. He counted himself among the babies and tottering old geezers of the surviving two-tenths of the men. In his scheme he promised to remember me and treat me nice among the hundreds or thousands of his concubines.

The terror of these old guys under an air raid was something to see. It overflowed with the lewd tenacity of life. And yet their interest in the destruction of others was more active than any young person’s. When Chiba or Hachioji or Hiratsuka had been bombed, they would go to see the sights. If the damage had been light, they would come back looking disappointed. They would lean over the half-burned corpse of a woman and examine it so closely that they couldn’t help but touch it, even though others were watching.

Each time there was an air raid, the Mantis came to invite me to see the sights of the area that had been bombed, but after the second time I no longer went. Both Fatty and the Mantis hated the war because there were no sweet things to eat and no good times, but in this poverty of life they felt sorry only for themselves. They felt nothing for anyone they knew or any of their countrymen. Their thought was “let everyone be killed except me.” As the raids grew more and more intense, their true natures were stripped bare layer by layer. Toward the end they shamelessly came out and said it. Their eyes, strangely glittering, became demoniacal.

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