At night, if anyone walked along the creaking passage to the toilet, he would invariably be startled by a voice from the darkness: "Who's there?" It was not the eager voice of someone longing to establish a human contact in the lonely night; nor was it the surprised voice of a person suddenly shaken from sleep. No, it was a cool, wide-awake voice and one could tell that its owner had not slept a wink all night. They all knew that the voice was old Umé's, and yet they could not help feeling a wave of revulsion.

The passer-by would identify himself—"It's I, Granny"—and that normally was the end of the exchange. Umé's granddaughters Senko and Ruriko had adapted themselves to this nightly ritual; their replies had become mere reflex actions. But in the case of Senko's husband, Itami, things did not always go so smoothly.

One night as footsteps sounded along the passage and Umé called out her usual challenge, an irritated voice shot back: "It's I—Itami. What do you want?"

Old Umé had expected no more than a word of identification, her question having been as automatic a reaction to footsteps as the creaking of the floor boards in the passage. Now in the darkness of her tiny room she sat up in bed, somewhat taken aback.

"All right, Granny," repeated Itami, "tell me what you want." Still no reply. There was, in fact, nothing for Umé to say. "It's intolerable!" cried Itami, growing angry. "Whose house do you think this is? It's my house, let me tell you, and I don't have to give an accounting if I want to go to the toilet at night. What's the matter with you, any-how? You sleep all day long like a dead person, and then at night you stay awake spying on us. It gives me the creeps to think of you sitting there with your goggle-eyes listening to us breathing while we're peacefully asleep. Why can't you behave yourself like other old women?"

By this time the whole household was awake. The neighbors, whose house was separated only by a board partition, had also been disturbed by the angry shouts.

Itami strode back to his room, breathing heavily. His wife had turned on the light and was sitting up in bed.

"What's Granny done now?"' she said.

"I'm fed up," shouted Itami. "Fed up! I don't even feel I'm in my own house any longer. Why on earth should I have to get that old hag's permission every time I go to the toilet?"

"Of course you don't have to get permission," said Senko in a conciliatory voice. "Granny just calls out like that automatically whenever she hears footsteps. I suppose she gets bored lying awake all night. So she says `Who's there?’ to break the monotony."

"Well, you're her granddaughter," said Itami, pacing up and down the room, "so I suppose you can make allowances for her. To me she's just a hateful old woman. And an old hypocrite too. When people are watching, she pretends she's half crippled, and totters about groaning if every step were pure torture. But when she thinks no one's looking, she walks along briskly enough. Then she's got this delightful habit of stealing. The moment we're out of our room, she rushes in, opens the drawers and helps herself to whatever she happens to find. I'm a pretty broad-minded fellow but I really don't see why I should have to support a thief in the house."

"But, Itami, you've got to remember she's eighty-six years old. She really doesn't know what she's doing half the time."

"I'm not so sure about that. I caught her taking money out of my wallet yesterday. All I know is that in that little body of hers the spite and hypocrisy and dishonesty of eighty-six years have coagulated into a solid core of wickedness. If she needs money, why on earth can't she tell me? What I can't stand is to have her stealing behind my back." Itami sat down on the bed. His face was livid. "That old woman is a real cancer. She's destroying our whole family. Your sister Sachiko and her husband shoved her on to us after their house was bombed and they moved to the country. They said they didn't have enough room, but of course the long and short of it is that they couldn't stand her any longer. So now you and your sister quarrel whenever you meet. She's a regular disease, that old woman."

"Oh come now, Itami," said Senko, "don't exaggerate."

"I only wish I were exaggerating. No, there's only one thing for us to do: get rid of her before she destroys us. If she starves on the streets—well, that's too bad. People who don't work and spend their time eating and being a nuisance don't deserve to live these days. In any case, she can't stay here any longer!"

"But if you throw her out, she'll simply go to the police and give our name and they'll bring her right back. There's no point trying to put her into an institution either; nowadays they only take people who have no families to look after them. It's not as easy as all that to get rid of her, you know."'

"And don't think she doesn't realize it. She's a shrewd old thing and she knows that someone in the family is going to take care of her, no matter what she does. Well, it isn't going to be me any more! The greedy, ungrateful, dirty old pig! `I want more rice, I want more rice!'—I can just hear her whining away at table. The other day I heard her say that we were trying to starve her and that she was going to get even with us by putting a curse on us all. `My curses never fail,' she said. `When I curse people, they die!"'

"She said that?" said Senko, sitting up abruptly. "Well, this time she's gone too far—even for me. I spend half my time looking after her and then I get cursed for my pains. We've done our duty for three months. Now Sachiko and her husband can take over again."

"Excellent," said Itami. "I'm glad you see things my way. There's no reason they should get out of their responsibilities, just because they've moved into the country. Your trouble, Senko, is that you're too kind to people."

With this comforting thought in mind, Senko began to make preparations the very next morning to transfer old Umé to her sister's place in the mountains. The practical problem of getting her senile grandmother to an unknown village hundreds of miles away was far from simple. Certainly the old woman never could have managed the trip by herself, even assuming that she had been willing to try. If only one could hang a label around her neck and hand her to the postman for delivery!

Yes, thought Senko, Granny was just like some sort of a disease, visited permanently on the family, and now afflicting the third generation. Umé had outlived not only her husband, but her daughter as well. Now Senko and Sachiko, the two older granddaughters, were saddled with the care of someone who should have died years ago. As Senko thought of her comfortable existence with Itami menaced by that malicious old woman, she began to grow very sorry for herself. They had had luck, Itami and she: luck in that their house was not bombed to smithereens like that of Sachiko and her husband; luck in that absence of children allowed them living space enjoyed by few of their compatriots; luck in that they could still afford the luxury of a maid. But now their good luck was about to run out because she could think of no way of transferring her grandmother to Sachiko.

Finally she hit on a solution which satisfied the demands both of practicality and of social convention. Ruriko, her younger sister, was the answer. Yes, Ruriko, it seemed to Senko, had been put into the world for the express purpose of fulfilling this delicate mission. As the woman was incapable of walking more than a few yards, Ruriko, a strapping girl of twenty, would carry her up the mountain road on her back. After all, old Umé weighed little more than a sack of charcoal. True, it would be a bit embarrassing for the girl to be seen walking along with a dirty old crone perched on her shoulders, but a desperate situation called for desperate measures.

"You've always taken a lot of trouble over Granny," said Senko to Ruriko that same morning. "Surely you won't mind doing this last thing for her. After all, we do give you a nice home here, don't we? You don't want it all to be ruined."

After much cajoling, abetted by sisterly authority, Senko prevailed on Ruriko to undertake the task.

And now came the morning of departure. Old Umé sat in the kitchen, seemingly unaware that a major change was impending. Senko and Ruriko busied themselves packing a bundle of their grandmother's clothes and her other scanty possessions.>"All right," said Senko, when they had finished, "we can start strapping her on now. Don't worry, Ruriko," she added, noticing her sister's accusing expression. "It'll all be ancient history by this evening. Remember, whatever Sachiko and Minobé say, you must leave her there. If they get angry with us—well, it can't be helped. They passed her on to us on the pretext of having lost their house. Well, that excuse is beginning to wear thin. Itami and I stayed here in Tokyo right through the war at the risk of our lives and managed to save our house from incendiary bombs. We didn't do it just to be saddled with Granny for the rest of our days."

Meanwhile old Umé sat with a blank look on her wrinkled face. Impossible to tell how much of this conversation she had heard or absorbed.

"Just look at her!" said Senko with disgust. "She hasn't even bothered to thank us for all the trouble we've taken over her. Itami's right. She really is a cancer. All she can do is destroy things."

"It's time to go," said Ruriko, standing up. Senko lifted Umé and trapped her to her sister's back.

"Well, here are the tickets," she said. "They're our parting gift to Granny."

As Ruriko trudged toward the station, she soon realized that though Granny weighed no more than a child, her body with its long legs and relatively short trunk was very much harder to carry. The thin lanky legs were clamped like a painful brace around Ruriko's waist, and by the time they approached the station, walking had become an agony. The ordeal was not only physical. In carrying someone eighty-six years old, one is supporting not just a body, but all the weight of a personal history that has accumulated ponderously over the decades.

The compartment was crowded, but one of the passengers, seeing Ruriko enter with her peculiar burden, offered his seat. Directly opposite her was a woman in her thirties, also accompanied by an old lady. Soon after the train started she addressed Ruriko:

"Excuse me, but where are you taking yours?"

"I'm leaving her at my sister's place in the country."

"Well, we seem to be in the same boat," said the woman, with a sigh. She and Ruriko exchanged the bitter smiles of people who share some painful illness. "How old is she?" the other woman asked. "Eighty-six."

"Mine's eighty." She glanced about the carriage and went on in a lower voice. "Why on earth do they live on to be eighty? I just can't make it out. They live on and on and on, until they're of no use to anyone—until even they themselves are fed up with living. All that mine cares about nowadays is food, and she can't get it into her head that rice is rationed. She's always accusing us of being mean to her, even though she gets her full ration."

"Mine's the same," said Ruriko. "She's got the appetite of two normal people. I really don't know how she can eat so much, just sitting still all day."

"They're rice-eating spooks!" said the woman, with venom. "Just rice-eating spooks!"

Meanwhile the two "spooks" sat gazing vacantly out of the window at the changing scenery, evidently unaware that they were being discussed. The other passengers had overheard the conversation and were staring with undissembled curiosity at the two old women. From their expressions it was clear that they did not feel they were looking at human beings at all but rather at some strange species of superannuated plant or animal.

Apparently it did not occur to them that they all shared a common destiny with these old women, that unless their lives should be cut short by illness or accident, they too were condemned to become nothing but troublesome baggage carted along by their resentful families. With a little more imagination they might have regarded these two octogenarians not as members of some grotesque genus but as living warnings that they themselves would become old and useless, bereft all joy of living and with only death to look forward to—yet still requiring three good meals a day. For some reason, the onlookers seemed to assume that they alone were immune to the scourge of senility.

After several uneventful hours, the train arrived at its destination. Gathering her courage, Ruriko set off on the four-mile trip to the farm where her sister and brother-in-law had made their home since leaving Tokyo. Soon she found herself on a rough country road which wound its way steeply over the hills; after less than a mile, her whole body was perspiring and her breath came in painful gasps. She set her teeth and trudged doggedly on. Abruptly she was startled by her grandmother's croaky voice.

"Oh, my legs hurt! Put me down by the road, child. I've got to rest while."

"What's that?" said Ruriko. "I'm the one that needs a rest, not you. I'm not stopping now till we get there."

"It hurts all over," said Umé. "My legs feel as if they're being torn right off. The straps are eating into my armpits."

I'm sorry," said Ruriko, panting as she trudged up the hill, "but it's your own fault. If you hadn't threatened to put a curse on the family, you'd still be living comfortably in Tokyo with Senko. And I wouldn't going through this agony."

"It hurts . . . it hurts!"

"Oh, stop it!" said Ruriko, giving her back such a shake that they both almost fell over in the dust.

It was a cold winter's afternoon, but Ruriko was unaware of the temperature; her face was flushed and beaded with perspiration. A man passed in the opposite direction and gaped at the girl.

Let me down, for mercy's sake!" cried Umé. "My legs hurt so terribly. I beg you-dear little Ruriko, please let me down just for a minute."

"You needn't think you can get round me with that honeyed voice," said Ruriko. "You always speak like that when you want something."

They had reached the top of the hill now. Ruriko could see the rice fields, hills, and forests spread out under a lambent sky; she breathed in the clear country air. How she could have enjoyed it all had she not been saddled with an eighty-six-year-old crone!

"Put me down! Put me down! I'm dying, I tell you!"

Ruriko walked steadily on, paying no attention to her grandmother's desperate cries, which reached a crescendo as a man approached from the opposite direction. "Help, help! I'm dying!" she screamed at him. The man stopped, nonplussed by the hysterical voice and by the extraordinary apparition of an old woman riding on a girl's back far out in the country.

Ruriko looked at him with a wry smile. "Really, Granny, you must try and be patient," she said. "We aren't nearly there yet."

The man grinned sympathetically and continued on his way. Old Umé's first maneuver had failed, but she had evidently sensed a certain open kindliness among these countryfolk and the next time someone passed, she uttered her appeal with redoubled vigor. "Help! I'm dying! I'm being murdered! Help me, sir!"

Again the man stopped and again Ruriko had to smile reassuringly. After this had happened three or four times, she felt that her face was fixed into a sort of grimace.

"All right, Granny," said Ruriko, stopping suddenly. "I'll let you down, if that's what you really want. But don't think I'm going to pick you up again. I'm through!"

She unfastened the straps and roughly put Umé down by the side of the road. When the old woman tried to get to her feet, she promptly lost her balance and fell headlong into the ditch; though she struggled to raise herself, her arms were too weak to be of any use. The road was at an incline and Umé's head was pointing downward. She lay there at last without moving, as helpless as a trussed chicken. Her body was covered with mud and a dirty stream of water trickled over her; the ,blood oozed from her cheek and forehead, where she had grazed herself.

Ruriko stood by the road wiping the perspiration from her face; then she put a handkerchief under her dress and wiped her arms and breasts. The hair above her forehead was drenched, as if she had been caught in a rainstorm.

After a few minutes, Umé began to wriggle about in the ditch. She lacked the energy to call for help and her movements were so uncoordinated that she could not possibly sit up, let alone crawl onto the road. One of her legs stuck out at an odd angle, looking like an emaciated arm-and, indeed, for old Umé, the distinction between arms and legs seemed little more than academic. Her body had attained that peculiar thinness which denotes not starvation but a state in which food can no longer nourish the flesh and muscles. If one were to pinch her leg, the mark would remain for several minutes, and if one pulled the flesh on her arm, it would remain folded over, flaccid and inert.

"What's happened, miss?"

A man's voice startled Ruriko, and when she looked up she saw a middle-aged peasant standing by the ditch staring at Umé.

"Granny fell in," said Ruriko. "I'm carrying her to my sister's at the Shimomura farm."

"The Shimomura farm, eh?" said the farmer in his rustic dialect. "That'll be about another mile and a half, I reckon. Look miss, I'll be going most of the way myself. I'll carry her for you, if you like."

The man bent over and without any effort picked old Umé out of the ditch. She shook her long arms, as if to make sure that they were still properly attached, and her movements were as jerky and disconnected as those of a badly manipulated puppet. Lifting her onto his shoulders without a word, the man started walking briskly down the hill; he strode along freely, as if he were simply carrying a sack of rice.

"That'll be your sister's place," he said after about half an hour, pointing to a farm on the top of a nearby hill. "I'll leave you here." Ruriko thanked him profusely and bent down while he shifted Granny to her own back. She climbed the hill with new vigor and soon reached the gate of the farm, where her three small nephews caught sight of her.

"Ruriko's here, Mummy! She's brought Granny. Is Granny coining to stay?" they shouted.

Ruriko quickly unfastened the straps and lowered the old woman to the floor. She was propping her against the wall as the door opened and Sachiko burst out:

"What do you mean by this? How could you bring Granny without even giving us warning?"

"Senko told me to."

"She did, did she? How old are you anyway, Ruriko? I should think you'd have enough sense not to bring a helpless old woman into the mountains like this without at least letting us know beforehand. Do you realize how we live here? There are five of us in two rooms. There isn't space for an extra chair, let alone for an old woman who needs constant attention."

"I had to bring her," repeated Ruriko dully.

"Had to! What do you mean, had to? Senko and Itami have a lovely big house; they don't have any children and they've even managed to keep a maid. We all know that Itami has made plenty on the black market. As for us, we have one eight-mat room full of cupboards, trunks, and packing cases where we all sleep. Then we've got a six-mat living room where we keep Minobé's painting equipment, the food stores, the tea chest, and the bookcases. Where on earth do you expect us to put Granny?"

Ruriko's face was red with indignation. After the four hours in the train and the grueling walk over the hills, this was more than she could bear. Her face twisted and she burst into tears.

"It's not my fault! It's not my fault!" she repeated between sobs.

The door opened and Minobé stepped onto the porch. After nodding to Ruriko, he glanced at Umé with a horrified expression.

"I really don't know how they could do such a thing," he murmured. "What goes on inside such people's minds, I wonder?"

"Itami threatened to move into his office if Granny stayed any longer," Ruriko said, still sobbing. "He swore that Granny was driving him mad."

"Well, so she probably was," said Sachiko. "But this was Senko's responsibility and she's got no right to wriggle out of it. A few years ago, when Granny could still be of some use for errands, Senko didn't mind having her around; now that she's become just a burden, Senko throws her out like a worn-out glove. . . ."

"Well, there's no use going into all that," Minobé interrupted. She's here and I suppose we'll have to make the best of it. One's always at a disadvantage when dealing with people like your sister and Itami; patience, kindness, self-sacrifice—those are all so many words for them. As I said, though, we'll manage somehow. But good heavens, Ruriko, where did all that blood and dirt on Granny's face come from?”

"She fell into the ditch."

"H'm. She'll certainly need a good washing," said Minobé, studying Umé's battered face. "Hello, Granny," he addressed her. "I'm afraid you're going to find life a bit primitive here after Tokyo. We don't have any electricity, you know."

Umé had been gazing with a bored expression at the unaccustomed fields and mountains. Now realizing that she was being addressed, she blinked vaguely at Minobé, put both hands on the porch, and began to lower and raise her head, rhythmically striking her forehead on the floor in the old-fashioned ceremonial manner.

"I'm just a nuisance," she said. "Forgive me, forgive me."

Everyone was amazed at this remarkable access of lucidity. "Don't worry, Granny," said Minobé and went indoors.

Ruriko spent the night at the farm and left for Tokyo the following morning. She was delighted to be returning to Senko's household, where a large circle of acquaintances enlivened the days; also, she was glad to escape from the unpleasant atmosphere that had prevailed at the farm since Granny's arrival. She remembered that she was going back to a house with no old woman inside, and her step was springy as she hurried down the hill.

For some days after her arrival in the country, Umé complained of pains in her legs, in her chest, in her arms-in fact almost everywhere. Actually, her fall into the ditch had caused no more than a few bruises and after about a week she was as fit as ever. It would take more than a little fall to kill Granny!

They installed a bedroll for her next to the charcoal brazier in the living room and put a folding screen round it. The door of this room opened on the back porch, which the family had improvised as a kitchen. Now and then, Granny would peep from behind the screen and, if no one was about, shuffle out stealthily to the porch and appropriate whatever she happened to find-a box of matches, a dishcloth, a kitchen knife. At such times she would acquire a speed of locomotion and a nimbleness of gesture quite remarkable for a woman in her eighties; as her hand darted out toward the coveted object, she looked like someone whose whole life had been devoted to the art of pilfering. Stealing had become such a habit with her by now that she was hardly conscious of it.

On warm days, Sachiko used to carry her grandmother onto the front porch and leave her to bask in the sun. One morning as she sat there dozing, she suddenly rolled off the porch, hit her head on the ground, described a complete somersault in her sleep, and woke up—quite unscathed. Then she toddled back to her room and began poking the charcoal brazier. She was evidently unaware that anything had happened; nor had it occurred to her to wonder why she had awakened lying flat in the grass.

Often Minobé used to sit looking intently at old Umé for minutes on end, as though studying a model for his painting. The hair on top of her head was no more than a fuzz, but at the sides it grew in thick white tufts; her eyebrows, too, were white and bushy. She had an oval face with deep-set eyes, an aquiline nose, and a small, elegant chin. It was not hard to imagine that it had once been a beautiful face. Recently freckles had begun to spread from her forehead to the crown of her head.

After a while, becoming aware that she was being observed, Umé would laugh awkwardly. Then she would turn aside and gaze into the distance, as if she were quite alone. To Minobé there was something almost frightening about this instinctive movement of Umé's. It made him think of animals who can from one moment to another disregard the human onlooker. He felt that only someone who had lived an immense number of years could effect a gesture of such strange, almost inhuman aloofness; never could it be acquired by deliberate study or imitation.

One day a young friend come to visit Minobé from Tokyo. They were talking in the living room when Umé tottered out from behind screen. The guest gave a start-indeed, anyone would have been shocked at this strange, ghost-like figure.

"Is he from Echigo?" Umé demanded, and stared straight at the visitor.

"I'm afraid not, Granny," answered Minobé. "This is a friend of mine from Tokyo."

"Are you sure I didn't know him in Echigo?"

"Yes, quite sure, Granny," said Minobé. "You've never met him before."

After that, Umé was forever asking if people came from Echigo. It was her home province, which she had left over sixty years before, at the time of her marriage. Anyone whom Umé had known there would by this time be at least in his eighties. But such a detail did not bother her. Minobé wondered whether the approach of death brought vague memories of her distant youth to Granny.

Studying her with almost scientific objectivity, Minobé became more and more interested in his aged grandmother-in-law. Often he used to question Sachiko about her. It seemed that Umé's family was of ancient lineage; there was even a tradition that in the twelfth century the great military leader Minamoto no Yoshitsuné had lodged at their house. After her marriage Umé had moved to Tokyo, where her husband had died when she was thirty-two, leaving her with an only daughter. The next fifty-four years had been spent as a widow.

Now widowhood was certainly a worthy state, thought Minobé. But would not a woman be ashamed to face her husband in the grave after outliving him even for twenty years? By then she would have changed beyond recognition and, besides, her own memory of the man would be growing very dim; they would meet like two embarrassed strangers. Yet Umé had had the audacity to linger on more than fifty years, and even now there was no telling when she would take her place beside her husband. Their names had been engraved next to each other on the tombstone, with Umé's name colored in red, as tradition demanded, to show that she was still alive. The red had long since worn away-and still Umé survived. She was a stubborn old woman!

Among her more valued possessions had been a photograph of her husband taken shortly before his death. As she belonged to the Lotus sea of Buddhism, Umé had for years been in the habit of making offerings before this photograph; when she shared Minobé's house in Tokyo, he had often seen her prostrating herself before the dead man's image. Yet she had outlived her husband so long that any stranger would have taken this to be a picture of her son, or even her grandson. When the house was bombed, the photograph had disappeared, and from that moment Umé seemed to forget completely about it.

Apparently she had also forgotten the Lotus Sutra and religion in general. Perhaps she had passed the age when religion could any longer have real meaning. There were quite a few old women in the village where Minobé now lived in whom religion, and indeed all moral emotions, had long since atrophied. Bereft of higher feelings, some of them had sunk to levels of almost unbelievable squalor.

Only the other day an old hag had died at the age of eighty-eight. For the last two years she had spent nearly all her time by the manure piles, which seemed to have acquired a strange fascination; half blind and covered with dirt, she sat for hours rooting about in the filth. When finally she died, the neighbors did not bother to make the usual inventory of her possessions but took everything from her room, including the straw mats, and burned them by the side of the paddy fields. For the rest of the day the air was redolent with the smell of death and excrement.

Another old woman of seventy-nine, who lived with her family on a nearby farm, was equally sunk in filth. She used to take lumps of night soil and mold them into different forms as if they were clay. Then she would call to her grandchildren: "Come along, kiddies, here are some nice toys for you to play with." It was as though all that gives beauty to human existence had passed out of these old women into the hearts of younger, more sensitive people. Was it, Minobé wondered, that they had ended by rejecting the finer feelings of life, or did the feelings themselves abandon people when they became too old and too ugly?

It soon became clear that Umé was going to be at least as much of a nuisance in the farmhouse as they had feared.

"You'll be the death of us all, Granny" moaned Sachiko. "We haven 't had a proper night's sleep since you've been here. When will get it into your head that the toilet is directly to the left when you go into the passage?"

Despite frequent injunctions of this kind, Umé almost invariably ended by going astray in the unlit house. Old age had evidently deprived her of all sense of direction, and as soon as she got out of bed, she began groping helplessly for the door to the passage. The room was small, but as she crawled around in all directions, it was like some vast deserted plain. She stretched her hands out into the darkness, hoping to touch the brazier, the table, in fact any object that would rescue her from this dreadful sense of isolation and link her once more to the world of human beings. Yet, though the room was crowded with furniture, she somehow managed to crawl about for minutes on end without finding anything.

"Where on earth can I have got to?" she muttered, as she changed r course once again. Then her forlorn voice echoed through the darkness: "Sachiko, Sachiko! For mercy's sake, child, come and help! I'm completely lost! Help!"

In the next room, Sachiko and Minobé had already been awakened by the noise and were sitting up in bed. Suddenly there came a thump on the door and a moment later the sound of a handle being turned.

"Oh, Granny, that's the wrong door!" cried Sachiko, jumping out of bed. "You really are hopeless!"

Striking a match, she hurried into the next room, where she found Umé in a state of utter disarray, desperately grasping the handle of the door that led to the porch. With a sigh of resignation, Sachiko took the old woman by the hand, led her to the toilet, and then brought her back to bed.

On the following night they were awakened on three separate occasions; the routine was almost identical each time. When Umé had finally found the sliding door that opened to the passage, she would clutch the handle and lift herself to her feet, almost pulling the door out of its groove. Once in the passage, she started shuffling toward the toilet, dragging her left hand along the wall to orient herself. As soon as she felt the door of the toilet, she knew that she was nearing her goal. However, this did not end her trouble; the next hurdle was to find the door handle and that meant moving her hand all over the door, a process lasting several minutes. By this time Sachiko and her husband were wide awake. They would hear a voice croaking in the darkness: "Ah, here it is. Now all I've got to do is to turn it. Then I open the door—so—and walk right in."

Finally they heard the toilet door shut and all was blessedly silent. But not for long. A moment later Umé was again in the passage, lost and bewildered. She stretched out her left hand, remembering that she had used it on the journey from her room. Since she had turned round, however, what she now touched was the wall beyond the toilet, and this led her not to her door but to another wall, into which she bumped regularly every night. Thereupon she would let out a dismal wail: "Help, help, Sachiko! I'm lost! Which way do I go?" Once again Sachiko had to get up and rescue her.

These nightly excursions were only one of Umé's unpleasant habits. Despite strict orders to the contrary, she insisted on tampering with the charcoal brazier, with the result that she invariably managed to put it out. Then her querulous voice could be heard through the apartment: "The fire's gone out, Sachiko. Do come and light it, child. I'm cold. I'm dying of cold!"

Almost every morning when Sachiko made Umé's bed, she would come upon some object—a button, an envelope, a ball of string—that Granny had stolen and carefully sequestered under the bedding. The fact that these things would eventually be retrieved did not deter the old woman; the habit of stealing had become far too deeply ingrained for the most strenuous reprimands to have effect. Moreover, there seemed to be little use in lecturing her, as Umé apparently failed to hear or to understand; she simply stared ahead with a blank, bewildered look, and Sachiko assumed that in her old age Umé was becoming deaf. However, the children were not so easily deluded, and they took great delight in exposing their great-grandmother's pretense.

"Would you like a raw onion, Granny?" said one of the little boys, standing at the other end of the room, and speaking in a low voice which would normally fail to make the slightest impression on Umé. Onions were the old lady's favorite food and she immediately rose to the bait.

"An onion?" she said. "Oh yes, I'd love one."

"I caught you that time, Granny!" cried the boy, and ran out of the room laughing.

Umé was a tough old woman, but before long the strain of life in a primitive mountain village began to tell even on her. She missed the good food and comfort of Senko's house, and made no bones about telling everyone so.

"Oh, I wish I was back in Tokyo!" she muttered one day, as she sat with Sachiko and Minobé by the charcoal brazier.

"If you'd behaved yourself properly you'd still be there," said Sachiko. "You've got no one to blame but yourself."

"I want to go back to Senko's," continued Umé in a plaintive whine.

"If that isn't adding insult to injury," said Sachiko to her husband. "Well, it doesn't worry me," said Minobé, and laughed. "If I let your grandmother annoy me, I'd have lost my sanity long ago."

A few days later occurred an incident which reduced still further Umé's popularity in her new home. The children were playing with toy dragonflies and one of the missiles by chance flew off in the wrong direction and struck the old woman on the forehead. Crying out, she glared into the garden and there caught sight of the young culprit. In a tone that would have sent shivers down the spine of a tough samurai, let alone a small child, she screamed: "Curse you, you little fiend! Curse you, I say!" Taking from the folds of her dress a recently stolen dishcloth, she began to wipe the blood from her forehead.

At lunch time a few days later, the boy said to his father: "Granny's keeping that cloth with the blood on it."

"Really?" said Minobé. "Why?"

At that, Umé again extracted the dish cloth from her dress and held it up for all to see. In the center was a dark stain that could be recognized as blood.

"I'm keeping this as a memento," she said. "I'll show it to people so that they'll realize how I've been treated here."

"You know perfectly well that it was a mistake, Granny," said Minobé.

"I'm not so sure about that," Umé said. She had abandoned her usual deferential tone and spoke defiantly, almost harshly.

"All right," said Minobé, "if that's going to be your attitude, I can be just as disagreeable as anyone else."

At once Umé lowered her head and gave out an old woman's cackle. "Of course it was a mistake," she said. "I was only joking." Staring at Umé, Minobé suddenly remembered the Confucian teachings on filial piety and respect for one's elders. Was it possible that the Master had had sly, wicked old women like this in mind when he expounded his noble precepts? To respect an insensitive old woman like Umé, conscious as she was of only the physical aspects of life, was like worshiping a stone idol. Umé had become just a body, in which it was impossible to detect the slightest trace of soul, spirit, conscience, or anything that makes human beings worthy of respect. Her greatest worry in life was that her grandchildren or great-grandchildren might be getting better food than she herself.

To be sure, thought Minobé, there were people like Kōda Rohan, the great scholar, whose intellectual powers remained unimpaired until his death at the age of eighty. Such people, indeed, seemed as they grew older to become constantly more sensitive and intelligent. They were one in a thousand. The remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine were destined to become distasteful, useless lumps of flesh, the scourge of relatives and a burden to society. There was hardly a family in Japan that did not suffer from the system in which old people had to be either cared for by their children or committed to primitive and sinister institutions. People had been complaining for years, but the traditional family system still lingered on, with all its inefficiency, hypocrisy, sentimentality, and injustice. It was high time for something to be done—not by sociologists, but by people all over Japan who were themselves suffering from these anachronistic traditions. "Study the demeanor of your parents," Confucius had told Tzu-hsia, "and never fail to treat them with true deference and affection." That, thought Minobé, might be all right in the case of people like Kōda Rohan, but for old Umé and her kind the maxim seemed totally inappropriate.

That very evening Minobé was dismayed to hear a farmer's wife say to Sachiko: "My, my, your old lady's looking fit as a fiddle, isn't she? She seems to be putting on a bit of weight too."

"Are you sure she isn't swelling up with water?" said Sachiko hopefully.

"Oh no," said the woman, "it's the clean country air and plain food that's done it. She's good for another five or six years, mark my words."

"The question is," said Sachiko with a sigh, "are we?"

Not long afterward, Minobé was able to take over a house in Tokyo from a friend. He hired a van for the day and piled it high with furniture, luggage, and the six members of his family. The people whom they passed on the road stared in amazement at the huge load, and occasionally Minobé detected a look of sympathy on their faces. Umé sat on a packing case, her body shaking rhythmically in response to the vibration. After a few hours, she began muttering querulously, and Sachiko had to lift her up like a baby and hold her over the side of the truck while she relieved herself. At that moment Sachiko could not help feeling bitter hatred for this old woman with her withered body and long, chicken-like legs.

In the new house Umé was assigned a small room of her own next to the toilet. Here she would sit quietly and give herself over to a new and particularly annoying habit that she had acquired since her return to Tokyo: taking any piece of material she could lay hands on—clothes, towels, or sheets—she would systematically tear it to shreds. In the case of clothes, she would first rip the material from the hem upward into strips about one centimeter in width, and then start on the sleeves; by the time she had finished, the pieces were so small that they could not even be used for dusters. Her usual expression while she did this was one of guileless vacancy, though as she tore up a particularly long piece or sat contemplating a huge pile of tatters, one could observe an enigmatic smile playing on her lips.

No one could make out the origin of this new quirk. Was it that Umé, whose entire youth had been devoted to the art of needlework (one of the few accomplishments then considered suitable for women of breeding), felt in some paradoxical way that by tearing material she was at least persevering in her specialty, even though she was now too old to do so constructively? Or was it that in an access of spite she had resolved that none of her clothes or other possessions should ever accrue to this family which had treated her so heartlessly in her declining years? Or was it just the sheer joy of vandalism? The result, in any case, was that, despite Sachiko's best efforts, Umé's wardrobe had soon dwindled to nothing. Because of the strict rationing, it was impossible to replace the shredded garments, so Sachiko had to give her grandmother some of her own castoff clothes. With their modern pattern and bright colors, they produced a somewhat ludicrous effect on the old lady. In the end they too were, of course, torn to bits.

"It's funny how Granny only likes things with salt," said Sachiko one day, "Most old people like sweet things, but she'll only eat things when they're salted or spicy."

"Let's hope she doesn't get pickled and live forever," said Minobé.

"Yes," said Sachiko, "the kindest thing she could do for herself and everyone else would be to die. Why do you suppose she goes on living like this?"

Minobé shrugged his shoulders. "In the Far East, longevity's supposed to be a wonderful thing," he answered. "For some reason it's considered a feat to grow very old, even though one doesn't have the slightest pleasure in being alive and is just a nuisance to everyone around. Take that old dog next door. Its owners go around boasting to everyone that they've got a dog who's lived to be fifteen. And yet the poor old thing is blind and lame, and should have died years ago. Evidently in Japan we can't even let animals die at the proper time.

"The fact is that once people are wrecks, like Granny, life becomes a spiteful force which turns on its owner, as if to punish him for hanging on to it so long. The blessings of old age, indeed! All Granny really cares about is eating, but because she's over sixty, the government will let her have only a reduced ration. That's what I mean by life turning on people if they live too long. And when they finally do die, what sort of memory do they leave behind? Just the memory of their last ugly, unhappy years. Granny once was a lovely woman, to judge from her photos, but what we'll remember is a hideous, wicked old hag. Surely people should fade out like music, leaving a beautiful melody in the air."

Almost all day, apart from mealtimes, Umé lay half-asleep by the charcoal brazier in the living room. At night, however, she was wide awake. As soon as the family had gone to sleep, she would wander out into the passage and start complaining raucously of hunger. Finally someone would have to get up and give her a piece of bread, a potato, a rice ball.

She now visited the toilet four or five times a night; they left the light on permanently. Sometimes she would go and stand in the lavatory for ten or fifteen minutes, peering out the window. They could hear her muttering loudly to herself. "Ah, that's the moon over there. It's getting pale. It'll soon be time for breakfast. . . ." As she was gradually becoming incontinent, the first person to visit the toilet in the morning would usually find it in an appalling mess. Minobé wondered if this, too, was not an unconscious attempt to punish the family for imagined ill-treatment.

She occasionally suffered from hallucinations. One night Minobé awoke to the sound of fearful cries from Umé's room: "Help, help, "I'm dying! Oh, they're killing me! Help, help!"

Jumping out of bed, he rushed to the rescue, but found Umé sitting up in bed as if nothing had happened. "What's wrong, Granny?" he asked, but she only shook her head, staring at him blankly. Minobé gave her a glass of water and went back to his room. He wondered if the old woman had been confronted with some horrible vision of death.

A few days later, she grabbed one of her great-grandsons by the arm as he was walking by, and held out a ten-yen note.

"Run down and buy me one yen's worth of rice and a yen's worth of tobacco," she said.

"I can't, Granny," answered the boy. "Everything's rationed. Besides, one yen wouldn't buy even a button."

"Nonsense, child!" said Umé. "Well, if you won't go, you can open the window and call for the errand boy down there by the corner. He did my shopping for me yesterday."

Evidently her mind had gone back to a time fifty years before when she had lived in Tokyo with her husband, and errand boys used to wait on the street corners. Now, understanding that she could expect no help from her great-grandson, Umé took down a small basket from the shelf; she wrapped her tattered dressing gown tightly about her and tottered out into the passage, clasping her ten-yen note.

"Where are you off to, Granny?" said Minobé, as he saw her passing the living room.

"I'm going out shopping."

"You'll have quite a job!" said Minobé. "But don't let me stop you."

This seemed to discourage her, for instead of going out, she visited the toilet, and no more was heard of the shopping expedition.

Later that day, Minobé heard the old woman's voice droning away monotonously in her room. He stopped and listened.

"Isn't that the Lotus Sutra Granny's reciting?" he said to Sachiko.

"No," she said, "it's The Greater Learning for Women. They had to learn it by heart at school. I suppose she's trying to see how much she can remember."

The Greater Learning for Women! That eighteenth-century classic which claims to set forth in one volume the essentials of a woman's moral training seemed to have profited Umé little in her long life. Minobé remembered the opening sentences: "Parents, rather than to bestow upon your daughters fine garments and divers vessels, better were it to teach them these precepts, which will guard them as precious jewels throughout their days. . . ."

She had begun reciting again, in a toneless, hurried chant which seemed almost entirely bereft of meaning. Only once in a while would an intelligible phrase emerge: "Not because of its height is yon mountain august. . . ." This, it seemed, was all that remained of Umé's arduous years of rote learning.

Then suddenly, with scarcely any change of expression, Umé said: "What about lunch? Haven't I missed my lunch?"

"Of course not, Granny," said Minobé. "You finished lunch an hour ago."

"Really?" said Umé. "I feel as if I hadn't eaten for ages."

The suspicion that she might have missed a meal, and was now being tricked into believing that she had eaten it, showed clearly on her face. And yet it was hardly surprising that Granny had forgotten about lunch, reflected Minobé. During her life she must have eaten almost one hundred thousand meals, and over thirty thousand of them had been lunches.

As soon as Umé awoke from one of her naps, she would start wailing: "Oh, I'm hungry! I'm dying of hunger! Bring me something to eat, for pity's sake—a rice ball, an onion pickle, anything. Only hurry!" Sometimes there were variations: "Help, the fire's gone out! I'm dying of cold. Come and light the fire, someone." Or: "Water, water! For mercy's sake, master, bring me a glass of water!"

An especially irritating habit was her referring to people in terms of exaggerated obsequiousness, as if to imply that only so could she prevail them to help her. Thus Minobé became "master," Sachiko was "madam" or "mistress," and her great-grandchildren "young sirs." As he stood painting in his studio room, Minobé would hear her shrill voice: "Oh, my dear mistress, may I crave a few grains of rice to calm hunger?" or "Young sir, have mercy on an old woman and bring a glass of water." Despite his resolutions, Minobé would sometimes fling his paintbrush to the floor.

Her pilfering continued, and indeed had grown worse. If, on waking, saw no one about, she would hurry over to one of the cupboards and take whatever she could find. Formerly, stolen objects had always been retrieved in her room, but Umé's pilfering had become far more voracious since she had taken to tearing things to pieces.

"It's really going too far, Granny," said Sachiko one day. "You've gone and helped yourself to one of the best towels from the bathroom. Didn't I give you your own towel to play with?"

"A bath towel?" said Umé with an air of injured innocence. "I don't know anything about it."

"It's no use pretending, Granny. It's right there behind your foot warmer. At least you haven't started tearing it yet."

"My goodness!" said Umé. "So it is. I must have caught it on my shoulder by mistake when I went to the bathroom."

"That's quite an achievement," said Sachiko, "considering that it was firmly fixed to a towel rail."

Her appetite seemed to become more voracious as the weeks went by.

"Oh, good madam, take pity on me! I'm so hungry it hurts!" she started wailing one morning.

"Really, Granny!" said Sachiko, hurrying into her room. "I gave you five big rice cakes just a couple of hours ago. What have you done with them?"

"Rice cakes?" said Umé. "I don't remember any rice cakes."

Sachiko looked behind the foot warmer, under the bed, and in all the usual hiding places, but there was no trace of the rice cakes.

"Have you forgotten where you hid them?" said Sachiko. "Surely you can't have eaten them all already."

"Well, since you can't find them," said Umé dubiously, "I suppose I must have."

Sachiko left the room, shaking her head. And behind her Umé was sticking out her tongue contemptuously.

One day the children discovered a large piece of fresh bread in the dustbin and brought it to their mother.

"If that isn't the limit!" said Sachiko. "This is the piece I gave Granny a few hours ago. I know she doesn't like this cheap rationed bread, but it's all any of us can get these days. And I salted it specially for her."

She went into Umé's room and scolded her severely, but the old lady denied all knowledge of the bread. The following day a whole bowl of rice was found in the dustbin.

"How can anyone throw away rice these days when millions are starving!" cried Sachiko, glaring at Umé. "Such waste deserves to be punished."

"Good gracious!" said Umé. "Who could have done such a thing?"

"You know perfectly well it was you, Granny. You're the only one who throws things like this in the dustbin."

"Mercy one, no!" said Umé indignantly. "I'd rather die than throw rice away. It's a sacrilege. Let me tell you, I'd like to get my hands on whoever did it. . . . "

At this point Sachiko gave up.

In the evening she mentioned the matter to Minobé. "She's lost all judgment, hasn't she? If she wanted to get rid of the rice, all she had to do was to throw it down the toilet and none of us would have been the wiser. This way we were bound to find out."

"She was probably furious because the rice was cold," said Minobé. "We all had cold rice today," said Sachiko. "She had the same as the rest of us."

"Yes, but nothing will ever convince her that we aren't getting better food than she is. I expect she purposely put the rice where we'd find it, as a sort of protest."

"I wonder if her mental powers are up to that," said Sachiko.

"When it comes to food, they certainly are," said Minobé. "Look at that awful habit she's got of bowing and scraping to us all, in the hope that we'll give her extra things to eat."

"Yes, I suppose she'll sink to anything to fill her belly. It's all that she lives for these days. It's as if she were under a curse. It really makes me sad, you know, when I think that she's my own grandmother."

When visitors came to the house, they would invariably be startled by the sudden apparition of old Umé, with her weird, white, wrinkled face and fuzzy hair.

"Are they from Echigo?" she would ask, and having been assured to the contrary, she would raise a piteous cry: "Oh, I'm so hungry! or mercy's sake, good people, let me have something to eat! I haven't a morsel since last night. Help! I'm starving!"

Sachiko and Minobé would then be obliged to explain matters to the bewildered guests.

One day, when Umé had made a particularly ugly scene of this kind, Sachiko lost her temper and shouted harshly at the old woman. Umé listened in blank silence, vaguely shaking her head. That afternoon when Sachiko was doing the laundry at the garden well, she noticed a strange, spectral figure standing by the front gate; it was Umé, who had managed for the first time in years to make her way out of doors unaided. When the old woman realized that she was being observed, she raised one hand in a gesture of supplication and held the other to her throat as if about to slash it. She was barefoot and had thrown an old overcoat over her dressing gown. Obviously the aim of her maneuver was to have one of the neighbors discover her in this pathetic garb.

"Good heavens, Minobé," shouted Sachiko, "Granny's gone out!"

Minobé threw down his paint brush and ran to help her, but his wife had already managed to get the old woman back into the house. Umé stood by the door with a tragic look of frustration on her face, obviously exhausted by her feat. With one hand she was affecting jerky movements of obeisance; in the other, she held a gimlet menacingly. The end of the gimlet was broken off and Minobé recognized it as the one t that he used to open his tins of paint and that had been missing for some days. No doubt it was part of Granny's recent loot.

"I'm afraid you won't be able to cut your throat with that, Granny, he said to her. "It's too blunt."

"What a hateful old woman you really are!" cried Sachiko bitterly. "All you wanted to do was to get even with me for scolding you this morning. The one emotion you haven't forgotten in all these years is spite!"

In his spare time Minobé unpacked the numerous trunks and cases which they had brought from the country. One day he came upon a small photograph that had lain hidden for years among some old papers. He examined it for a moment, then took it to Umé's room.

"I expect you'll remember this, Granny," he said.

Old Umé was busy tearing to pieces a pair of her great-grandson's pants. She was having some trouble with the elastic band around the waist. She looked up and took the photograph which Minobé handed her, and suddenly a strange, choked cry escaped her throat.

"Oh, Oh, I've missed her so terribly! It's my darling little girl. My only daughter! I've missed her for so long!"

She put her hand to her forehead and rubbed her cheek against the photograph of the daughter, who had died more than thirty years before; her whole body was shaking.

"Why did you have to leave me? Life has never been the same since. How I miss you!"

Minobé was deeply moved. Now at last he seemed to have discovered, beneath all the physical and moral ugliness with which age had marked old Umé, a human heart that felt and suffered. Bowing his head he left the room. He did not want to intrude on her terrible grief.

As soon as he closed the door, the sound of sobbing appeared suddenly to stop. He stood listening in the passage. There seemed to him something ominous about this silence following directly on the old lady's desperate weeping. Opening the door quietly, Minobé looked in. With an air of rapt concentration, Umé was removing the rubber band from her great-grandson's pants. The photograph lay discarded upon a heap of tattered cloth.

Translated by Ivan Morris.

Fumio, Niwa. "The Hateful Age." Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology. Ed. Ivan Morris. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co, 1962; 320-248.