The Wild Goose by Mori Ōgai

Author:Mori Ōgai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies
Published: 1995-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

When Otsune, having cleared away the breakfast things, went out shopping in the early morning, she had left Suezō smoking and reading the newspaper. But when she returned, she found him gone. She had come home determined that, if he was still there, she would thrash things out with him. She wasn’t sure just what she would say, but she fully intended to face up to him this time and speak out. His absence thus left her feeling flat.

But there was lunch to prepare, and the lined kimonos that the children would soon be needing for the cooler weather. And as she went about these activities in a mechanical manner, the fury with which she had meant to confront her husband gradually abated. More than once in the past she had rushed at him, determined if need be to dash her head against the stone wall of his resistance, only to find to her surprise that he offered little or no resistance at all. Instead he would begin in his glib way expounding on the whys and wherefores of the situation until, though not really convinced by his reasons, she would find herself somehow talked into meek submission. And she was not at all sure that the attack she had planned to launch today would fare any better than had those earlier ones.

Otsune ate lunch with the children, intervened in their squabbles, stitched together their fall kimonos, and got their supper ready. Pouring water in a tin tub, she gave them a simple bath and took one herself. Then, lighting a smudge coil to keep off the mosquitoes, she ate supper with them. When they returned from their after-supper play, the maid, finished in the kitchen, spread the sleeping mats in the usual places and put up the mosquito net, after which Otsune, having supervised a final washup, put the children to bed. Then she arranged her husband’s supper on a tray, covered it with a net to keep off the flies, and, putting a kettle on the charcoal brazier so he would have hot water, placed these things in the next room. This was what she always did when he was late coming home.

Having carried out these chores in her mechanical manner, Otsune picked up a fan and seated herself in the middle of the mosquito net. That woman I saw this morning—right now he’s at her place! she thought. She could picture it clearly. She couldn’t go on just sitting there—what should she do? What should she do? She felt like dashing off to the house on Muenzaka and having a look for herself.

Once, when she was on her way to Fujimura to buy some of the bean cakes that the children were so fond of, she had gone by Muenzaka and had looked at the house next to the sewing teacher’s, thinking, This must be it, the one with the lattice door! She would just go now and have a look at it. Perhaps she could see a light shining from it, or perhaps catch the faint sound of voices.

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