The Story of a Single Woman by Uno Chiyo

Author:Uno Chiyo [Chiyo, Uno]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 1993-04-19T17:00:00+00:00

18

That night marked an end. Kazue never spoke of Shinoda again. And she certainly did not confide in anyone the sorrow she felt at having been abandoned. But this does not mean she simply swallowed her suffering. Her love for Shinoda had ended in that temple garden. She understood as much. It would seem that Kazue’s heart had hardened. But such was not the case. She and Shinoda were finished, and she did not mention him to her mother or to her brothers and sister.

‘Okaka, I’ve got good news.’

Kazue had not seen her mother for quite some time. What else could she tell her if not ‘good news’?

‘I’ve returned from Korea because the magazine publisher wants me to go a hand for him right here.’ (‘Go a hand’ means ‘help out’ in the local dialect.)

Half of what she said was true, and half was not. Just before she left Korea she had remembered to stuff a few subscription forms into her suitcase. It was this attitude of hers to be constantly at work on something that led her to do as she did. Where had this attitude originated? Kazue was not sure. But from the spring of her sixteenth year, when she first became a teacher, to her present age of over seventy, Kazue has always been at work on something. She has worked as a piecemeal seamstress and as a chamber-maid. Any kind of work would do, and her goal was always money. But that wasn’t all there was to it. Kazue was constantly involved in something. And it wasn’t that she was particularly diligent. She did what she did for the same reason a bug will crawl or a bird will fly. Maybe you could say this is just the nature of a country girl, a nature she isn’t even aware she has. For Kazue, work was a way of putting her mother at ease. This is what Kazue felt, and no one would have believed by looking at her that just the day before she had bought a knife and called on a man.

This new job Kazue conjured up was bolstered by the respect Kazue’s mother and her younger brother Satoru, then a middle-school student, gave her line of work. Country folk, some sixty years ago, admired those who worked with newspapers, magazines or publications of any sort with an awe that is beyond belief. After all, what could be more insignificant than fishing around for magazine subscribers—why, even those insurance salesmen, who were soon to sweep the country, had a more worthwhile job! No, you could hardly call magazine sales a job at all. But there was no point in telling this to Kazue’s mother.

‘You ought to go to Takamori. That’s right, you ought to ask them at Takamori to write you an introductory letter or something that you can send to all the branch member Yoshinos, asking them to subscribe,’ Satoru suggested excitedly.

It seemed her relatives at Takamori were willing to comply with Satoru’s proposal. When Kazue went there she found her aunt quite unchanged from when her father was living.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.