"What's the matter? Don't you feel well?"
There was no answer. Perhaps the old woman was hard of hearing, perhaps she did not want to talk. The housewife attacked a second ball of rice, and, crunching away at a pickle, licked her fingers. The old woman was teetering forward, her head between her knees. There was a loud snore. No one like a child or an old person for snoring, no mat¬ter where you are, the housewife seemed to be thinking.
"Wake up. It's time we got started."
There was no answer.
"Well, I'll be on my way, then," she said, hoisting up her pack. Just then the old woman fell forward, and the housewife sensed for the first time that something was desperately wrong. Lifting the other from behind, she saw that the eyes were closed and there was foam at the mouth.
"What's the matter? What's the matter? Come on, now, pull your-self together." She shook the old woman. There was no answer. The old woman slipped from her arms and rolled over.
The housewife looked around. As far as the eye could reach, over fields of radish and spinach and onions, there was not a person, not a farmhouse, in sight. There was only the shimmering autumn sunlight. A horse cart approached and went off again, paying no attention to the two. The housewife thought of an old person who had lived next to her, and who, while talking of this and that after a bath one evening, had fallen over dead.
“So she’s gone and done it.”
She looked around. Then she took off her knapsack again. Dragging it and the woman’s bundle in under the eaves, she quickly changed her sweet potatoes for the polished rice the old woman had been carry8ng. By weight, rice brought more than sweet potatoes.
She retied the old towel around her face, and, without a glance back¬ward, started off down the road.
It dipped and gradually rose again, to disappear in a pine grove atop a distant hill. There was a lowing of cattle from generally that direction. Panting desperately and bathed in sweat, the woman hur¬ried along as if someone were chasing her. However often she wiped her forehead, sweat came pouring into her eyes an instant later. She had to rest. If she overtaxed herself she would meet the old woman's fate. But, stumbling in a rut from time to time, she was determined to get as far as that pine grove. She was terrified at the thought of being left anywhere along the road she had come. She would get beyond the pine grove, even if she had to crawl.
Once there, once beyond the pine grove, she would somehow have passed a boundary. She would somehow be at a sufficient distance that the scene of the crime no longer concerned her. She felt that if only she could get beyond the grove, then no one walking in the same di¬rection would know where she had come from.
She was not wrong. Perhaps it was her imagination, but when she climbed the rise, shoulders heaving, and entered the pine grove, the scenery ahead beyond the trees and the dwarf bamboo, the aspect of the trees themselves, seemed completely different. The crops in the fields were different. Here and there among the thatched roofs was the tiled roof of a two-story house with glass doors and an imposing
gate. The grove was shady and the breeze cool. She heaved a sigh, and as she squatted down to rest, the weight of the rice threw her forward. She was not able to get up for a time.
A middle-aged man came up the rise on a bicycle. Stopping near her to wipe away the sweat, he lighted a cigarette. She glanced at him. He would be a scavenger himself, on the way back from looking for food. On the luggage stand of his bicycle was what appeared to be a folded knapsack.
"Are you out buying ?" the woman asked timidly.
"No luck at all. Things are completely out of sight."
"It's not easy, is it, when they don't want to sell."
"It's not easy at all. With rice you don't get anywhere. They ask whatever comes into their heads and aren't satisfied with just money."
"They put the squeeze on me, too, but I was finally able to get a little."
"Women seem to do better than men. Two hundred yen a quart they want. Can you believe it?"
"But there are places in Tokyo where you can get more than that. If you make me a good offer, I might let you have some of mine here."
"Thank you. That would be very kind of you. How much do you have?"
"Maybe half a bushel. It's pretty heavy, and I'm afraid I'm coming down with a cold. You can have it if you want it."
"How would one eighty a quart be?"
“That's what I bought it for. You ought to let me make a least five a quart."
The man felt the weight of the pack. Then, looking to see that no one was coming, he untied his knapsack and took out scales.
The transaction was soon finished.
Freed of her burden, the woman tucked the roll of bills into the breast of her kimono. She looked at the man's receding back as she left the grove. Birds were singing in the trees, and insects in the grasses.
.........................
Reference:
"The Scavengers." Kafu the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafu, 1879-1959. Trans. Edward Seidensticker. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965, 339-349.
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