Book Editor’s Biographical Note: Kaiko Takeshi (b. 1930-1989) belongs to the generation of Japanese whose youthful prime coincided with the period of social turmoil that immediately followed the end of the Second World War. His college days were spent in war-ravaged Osaka, where he struggled to survive by taking any job that came his way: he worked at a factory, sold lottery tickets, taught English, even dealt in black-market goods. Although he was a law student, he did a great amount of reading in literature—especially modern French literature. After graduation, he began working in the sales promotion department of a whiskey maker and for many years edited a highly successful PR magazine for the company. His reputation as a writer was established in 1958, when one of his early stories, “The Naked King”(Hadaka no ōsama, 1957; trans. 1977), won the Akutagawa Prize. The story, a critical comment on the current state of education in Japan, is already indicative of his deep commitment to social reform, a commitment that has also motivated him to write most of his later stories. In these stories he seems to take a liberal leftist stand, but his basic faith is not so much in a specific ideology or political system as in the potentially explosive power of the masses. The harrowing experiences of his youth also made him an ardent pacifist, and he was one of the most vocal antiwar writers during the Vietnam War. His trips to Southeast Asia were sometimes overly adventurous—once he was almost killed on the front line—but they resulted in several novels, including Darkness in Summer (Natsu no yami, 1971; trans. 1973) and Into a Black Sun Kagayakeru yami, 1968; trans. 1980).

Let me tell you about my room. I am living outside the city in a farmer's storehouse. I have a small room on the second floor, like an attic. The building, once a granary, was reconstructed during the war to house evacuees. There is a young woman living in the room below me. The U.S. Army has a hospital and barracks in the next town and American soldiers often come to visit her. She still seems very girlish. Whenever she smiles the tip of her small pink tongue appears in the space between her front teeth. She has no friends and seldom speaks to anyone. When she is alone she shuts herself up in her room. When she goes out to shop she walks timidly along the edge of the road, her eyes downcast. As soon as her errands are finished she hurries back. Two or three times I've written a letter for her to an American soldier named Henry, but I know next to nothing about her.

The farmyard is quite large. In one corner is the storehouse where I live. It is hidden from view of the main house by the animal shed and a cluster of sycamore trees. I can come and go through the nearby garden gate rather than using the gate to the farmhouse. Behind the storehouse is a bamboo grove. No one passes through there, except for an occasional chicken or rabbit which has strayed from its pen in the wheat threshing area near the main house. The wind whistles softly through the bam-boo. In the distance the sound of a bucket being raised and lowered into the well can be heard. In such seclusion one could, if he wished, pass his days never speaking to a soul.

When I look down from the little window of my room on a summer afternoon, the fragrance of straw, the smells of barnyard manure and fresh grass, all waft silently through the area bounded by the bamboo grove and the cluster of sycamores. The heat is intense. It is so quiet that I imagine I hear the sunlight bubbling like boiling liquid. A thicket ablaze with red and gold canna and sunflowers adds a touch of brilliance to this sunny enclave, like a single clash of cymbals breaking the silence of an air pocket.

Sometimes a lizard makes its way up the thick, ivy-covered wall, its small, dry claws clicking as it flickers across my window like a green-gold flame. Not an inch of wall is visible through the dense ivy. Countless leaves and vines tangle and twine, covering even the window. They bury the wall, crawl up over the eaves, scale the roof, and stretch even beyond, toward the sky. It was winter when I moved here with a friend, and only dead vines, like the network of blood vessels in an old man's hand, covered the entire surface of the rough gray wall. When I first entered the farmyard through the garden gate, the wall in the distance looked as if it were covered by a rusty wire netting. Right now if one were to pluck off some leaves and tear away the surrounding vines, for two or three days that bare patch would stand out like a gaping white wound. But in no time at all the vines would be back coiling around, the leaves as luxuriantly thick as before. Such resilience!

So one could say that I am living in the shade of the ivy leaves, peeping at life through the meshes of a vine net. But during the day I lower the blinds and sleep. I am working as a proofreader for a second-rate newspaper company. It's a temporary position. These days I work only the night shift. I return from the office at eight or nine in the morning, eat a quick breakfast, sleep until four in the afternoon, get up at dusk, and go back to the city, where in that dimly lit, disorderly proofreading room I wander through a jungle of words until the dawn. After two or three months of this schedule I began feeling utterly run down. But my boss has never offered to make me a regular employee. My eyesight has deteriorated, so I have managed to scrape together enough money for a pair of glasses.

Lately I haven't been sleeping well during the day. I sweat profusely, and my underwear is drenched. The lethargy I feel upon awakening makes it briefly impossible for me to move my limbs. The window blinds are so hot they nearly burn to the touch. When I raise them even a crack, the summer sunlight, like molten metal, floods the room. My room faces south, and since there are no eaves or awnings over the windows, there is no respite from the light. My only defense is to keep the blinds lowered and sit motionless facing the wall in the semidarkness. I futilely wonder what would become of me if my body ceased to function properly except in the gloom.

On Sundays I occasionally take a stroll through the city. The sunlight reflecting off the pavement and the walls of the buildings stings my eyes like a hypodermic needle until the tears begin to flow. At times I am driven to take refuge in one of those back-street cafes that play music by candlelight even in the daytime. I grow nostalgic just thinking of that part of town where symphonies reverberate in rooms behind gold-lettered doors, where through the chinks of windows under red and white striped awnings the aroma of freshly brewed coffee seeps out and winds through the narrow cobblestone streets. Be that as it may, the thought of trudging along the country paths into town, the sunlight reflecting brilliantly off the tile roofs, leaves me limp with fatigue. So usually, even on Sunday, I lie prostrate in my room beneath the roof, like one of the animals in the shed outside. No one comes to visit and no one writes to me here. When evening comes I raise the blinds, switch on my hot plate, and prepare a meager meal. I toast bread and put jam on it. Sometimes, on a day when the rain has just stopped, I glance up to see a little frog stuck to the window pane like a green splash of rain water. It has come waddling up the wall through the thick ivy toward the light outside my window, intent on the mosquitoes and birdlice which gather there. Blinking its eyes encircled by thin gold rims, it opens and shuts its mouth with imperceptible speed and engulfs a victim. Then it leaps suddenly away from the window and vanishes from sight. Even after it has grown completely dark, if I shine a light from above I may see it still clinging stubbornly out there, its small, white belly amazingly bloated.

After dinner I either take a walk into town or I open up an atlas. My roommate often tried to cure me of this habit by bringing home various novels and magazines, but I would delve into the travel accounts and guides without so much as a glance at the rest. Not that I am planning to travel. I am perfectly content with a map of any place, even if I know nothing about it. When I am in a bookstore it is only the set of atlases that inspires me with a desire to collect every volume. I can pore over a single map for an entire day without losing interest. I tried any number of times to explain this to my baffled roommate. Although to him a map depicting mountain ranges and their elevations was nothing but a conglomeration of curving lines, to my eyes those curves delineate luminous shapes of splendid mass and volume. No matter how exhausted I feel, when I look at a map someplace inside me responds immediately, like light-sensitive paper that retains an image when exposed. My friend never did understand. He saw in me simply an escapist tendency combined with an attraction to the exotic. Any discussion of the matter would end with his declaring in exasperation, "What it comes down to is surrogate satisfaction. You're a prisoner gazing through bars at the blue sky."

Opening the window wide to let in the evening breeze, I stretch out on the worn and prickly straw-matted floor and smoke one cigarette after another, surrounded by an electric heater and a rice cooker, tea cups and medicine bottles, neckties and a wristwatch, all jumbled together and strewn around me. It is Saturday and I am free until Sunday night. I open up the world atlas, now tattered and soiled from so much handling.

In the past a certain American soldier used to visit the girl downstairs on Sunday evenings. Sometimes he just came and spent the night, and at other times the two of them went out for the evening. As I lay there absorbed in my maps I would hear him enter the garden gate, run to the place beneath the girl's window, and begin to whistle. I don't remember him very clearly any more except for his slight frame, blond hair, and boyish cheeks. The girl would rush across her room, peer through the darkness, and answer his calls. Her voice was short and clear, and it resounded with emotion. She would wait all day for him, cooped up in her stuffy room. The soldier would call cheerfully to her, then he would begin a thin, high-pitched whistle that pierced the air as clearly as the song of a little bird. Whenever I heard that sound I felt as though the vibrating column of air was scratching like a metal tip against the thin window pane and boring into it.

That whistle often revived my memories of the previous war. At the time of the labor mobilization I was a high school student working at a shipbuilding yard in Kobe. Four or five American air force men who were prisoners of war were also working there. When evening came they were handcuffed and escorted back to solitary confinement cells. When we students passed beneath their windows on our way home they would always be whistling the same piece of jazz. The sound of that whistling, too, lingered clearly on the air, like a stream of pure, sparkling liquid. Even at the time I did not know the name of the song, and when the war ended I completely forgot about it. But once in Kyoto’s Kamo River area a friend and I were making the rounds of the yakitori shops, drinking cheap ake; when he suddenly began to whistle and my memory revived. “What’s that song?” I asked. “You don’t know? `St. Louis Blues,’ of course,” he answered, as if annoyed. I later learned that the piece had originally been a Negro gospel song. I remembered all that whenever the American soldier who visited the girl downstairs began whistling in the dark garden below.

The girl downstairs certainly lives quietly. Since I work the night shift I leave the house at dusk. In the daytime I lower the blinds and sleep like a log, so I have no idea how she spends her time. It was usually only on Sunday evenings, when that particular American soldier used to come, that I would be reminded of her existence. Occasionally I did run into her on the stairs, in the garden, on a path in the field, or on one of the village roads. In town I might spot her in front of a bean curd shop or grocery store where she had been shopping. At those times she would pretend not to notice me. Or if she was simply unable to avert her glance, she would greet me with a timid smile, the tip of her tongue showing through the space between her white teeth. She is terribly shy and seems to be a loner.

She is thin, her coloring poor. She wears shoes with run-down heels or worn-out wooden clogs whose red straps have faded from many washings. She seems very fastidious; not a day passes that her fresh laundry isn't hanging out to dry in the corner of the garden. And how discreetly she dries it. In a sunny corner of the bamboo grove that is plunged into shade when the sun moves, she hangs two or three pairs of underwear, carefully hiding them from public view.

At times I strain my ears. Particularly since I witnessed a certain scene, I am alert to any sound which may be coming from the room below me, but in vain. The walls and floor of the storehouse are too thick. I try to go out on evenings when she has a man staying with her. She and I live side by side, so we try to stifle all the warm and vibrant, soft and spontaneous things that betray our presence: the scent of a body, the sound of breathing, footsteps across the room, someone turning over in bed, a sigh. I am vaguely aware of her unhappiness and misfortune, but am helpless to do anything about it. Sometimes I picture myself descending from my loft, entering her room, and starting to speak with her. But I cannot imagine having the power to effect a positive, organic change deep inside another person by means of my words and voice. My life has been a series of failures. Each time I have tried to crystallize my feelings in some way, or to seize the moment at hand, my efforts have fallen short. I am unable to make her aware of horizons and lights, warm currents and whirling eddies. I could perhaps find words to describe the quiet process of disintegration and decay that is taking place inside me, invisible to anyone. But that would only make matters worse for her.

When my friend and I lived here together, we used to pick up a little money by writing letters to American soldiers for their girlfriends who lived in the town. Neither of us had prospects for a job after graduation, so we felt unmotivated to begin our senior theses. We ran around presenting ourselves to various companies here and there, but while our fellow students were being snatched up all around us, we were invariable passed over, like fallen leaves left to wither on the ground. By translating the prostitutes' letters we at least made enough money to drink cheap saké.

Once my friend caught a stray cat, picked it up as if it were a log or a sandbag, and flung it against a rock in the garden. The corpse stayed in a corner of the grove, and after a while gangrene set into its lungs and it began to emit a foul odor. Finally the carcass dried up in the sun, leaving a small pile of white bones. After my friend had been drinking for a few hours he would look at me and inquire bitterly, "Each time you stumble and fall, do you really think you're getting fatter as you roll, like a snowman?"

Sometimes we translated the letters which the women received from the soldiers into Japanese, too. We took care to translate those parts which were sure to please the women. But the bad news—a man's change of heart, his return to the States, a transfer brought about by a shift in the battle front or a change in his rank—we would either omit or render ambiguously. Most of the women, with the unfailing instinct of wild animals, grasped the real situation, shrugged off their disappointment and went after a new man. But there were others whose man had long been dead or had returned permanently to the States who persisted in believing that he was still out in the front lines. They continued to write their letters, attach the translation fee, and bring them over to us. This was at the height of the Korean War.

My friend, too, was sometimes asked by the girl downstairs to translate letters for her. They were all addressed to a Henry Fairchild who was living in the barracks in the next town. In her letters she lamented their plight of being engaged but unable to marry while the confusion of wartime lasted. The soldier's letters were written in unusually correct and refined English. The girl, unable to read or write any English, would approach one of us in the garden or the hall with her request, hand over the letter, and disappear as if she were escaping. Since I became familiar with her personal circumstances through the letters, I tried to devise ways of striking up a conversation with her the next time I delivered her translation. But when that time came she would invariably lower her gaze shyly, her fragile body would stiffen like a schoolgirl's, and she would be gone.

On his free days Henry came to visit his small, timid fiancée. I would look down at him as he entered the garden, his blond hair shining like silk under the rays of the sun. His slender build and boyish face gave a wholesome impression. When the weather was fine they went out together. I watched them walk away, the girl in her plain, sturdy clothes looking more like a bank teller than what she actually was. And when Henry changed into civilian clothes, he didn't come wearing those Aloha shirts like the other American soldiers. They were economizing, putting away money for their marriage. He began teaching her some English and she taught him some Japanese, in faltering tones.

My roommate finally gave up on finding regular employment here and resigned himself to returning to his home town. When we parted at the station there was a rare seriousness in his voice as he murmured, "I hope things go well for that Fairchild pair." But things did not go as we had hoped.

In Korea the war effort was intensifying by the day. The town around the next station had grown boisterous. Soldiers moved in and out of the barracks and hospital more frequently, and the women who lived in the town changed accordingly. It was said that on an evening when a new group of American soldiers arrived, a great number of women carrying suitcases would alight at the station, having come from the town near the base that the soldiers had just left. Posters on which roman letters had been carelessly splashed in paint sprang up by the dozen around the station. They advertised bars, cabarets, teashops offering "special services," "love hotels," souvenir shops, camera shops with developing and printing facilities. Violent incidents perpetrated by American soldiers were common.

Just after my friend had gone home I learned from a letter brought to me by the girl downstairs that Henry had been sent to Korea. I saw the weariness and dejection in the girl's eyes, her plans having gone awry. Fatigue had made her skin dry and left dark circles under her eyes. I silently translated the letter and waited until she was out to slip it through the paper screen doors to her room.

About a week later I learned by chance that Henry had died. Since there is no mail box on the garden gate, the farmer’s children bring our mail to our rooms. When we are out they slide it through our doors. One day I picked up a letter lying on my floor which had been sent from a friend of Henry’s to the girl downstairs. I read it and learned of the blond youth’s death. Henry must have given his girlfriend’s address to this friend. With that blue stationery spread out in front of me, I laid down and got up, started to stand but sat down again, my mind in turmoil. I opened up the world atlas but could focus on nothing. I recalled how my roommate and I had made a practice of always concealing any bad news, and I decided not to take the letter downstairs to the girl. Instead, I placed it in my ashtray and carefully burned it. I had become acutely sensitive to any sound from the room below, but on that evening there was total silence. I glanced down into the garden from my window, but her light was not on. As I smoked one cigarette after another, I pictured the frail young girl sitting there in the darkness, her eyes shut tight, listening to the sounds of life inside her.

One evening I went to the office as usual, but realizing that I was too exhausted to work, I found someone to substitute for me and left early. I got off the train at the next town intending to pick up some bread and butter. It was around eleven o'clock at night. Dozens of fishy-eyed prostitutes loitered around the ticket collector's gate waiting for American soldiers. Their painted eyebrows and thick applications of lipstick and eyeshadow made their cheeks and mouths glisten as if smeared with raw animal fat. Impish, brazen children with shoeshine kits, vying with each other for business, rushed up to long-legged soldiers, grabbed their feet, and tried to force them up on their own shoe stands. Even when a child was hit or kicked away, the light that gleamed from his eyes like the blade of a knife continued to shine undaunted. One exasperated soldier peeled away a boy who was clinging to his trousers and threw him like a sandbag across the pavement. Fragile bones and meager flesh thudded as the ragged lump of a child rolled along and landed in a ditch. He jumped out nimbly, snatched up his nearby shoeshine box, faced the soldier and spat at him. "You goddamn fucking bastard... !" By the time the soldier noticed him and made a move, the boy had vanished.

The street in front of the station overflowed with drunken American soldiers and prostitutes. After finishing my grocery shopping I stopped to look in two or three book stores, then I returned to the station. As I walked past the ticket gate, I noticed a girl leaning against the gray wall, staring out blankly. There was something familiar about the hair with its unhealthy reddish cast, the weak chin, the delicate neckline, and the sunken shoulders, so I went back. She was resting against the wall as if tired from walking, and gazing at the brightly lit ticket gate. Her vacantly parted lips revealed, as ever, the small tongue peeping through the space between her teeth.

Her clothes were terribly shabby and rather soiled, the area around her eyes and cheeks gaunt and wasted; her appearance had totally changed. Yet I recognized without a doubt the girl who lived in the room below me. The red polish on her nails had been carelessly applied. She squinted incessantly, perhaps because of the bright lights. A clump of false eyelashes, too big for her, trembled on each of the delicate eyelids and seemed ready to drop off at any moment. Just then she made a clumsy attempt to adjust them, and on her raised hand I could see even at a distance white patches of fingernail beneath the peeling red nail polish. So at last.... I was overtaken by fatigue and I left.

Two or three days later, on a Sunday evening, I saw her again. It was in a little field some distance from the village. I had gone out for a walk and was passing by there on my way home. A crowd had gathered and was making quite a clamor, so I approached to have a look. I peered over the shoulders of the onlookers and saw that five or six women, obviously prostitutes, had formed a circle around a young girl and were abusing her. The girl was lying face down on the ground, her arms and feet smeared with mud. Pieces of straw and grass poked through her hair, and her thin dress was badly torn.

"You already have a man, don't you? Do you think you can fool around with someone else's and get away with it?"

"Just a young thing but she can't get enough of it, eh?"

"She's trying to make fools of us."

The older prostitutes were all calling her names and tormenting her. They kicked her with their clogs and slapped her face. One of them grabbed the object of their contempt roughly by the hair and twisted her head back and forth while the others shouted insults at her and slapped her small face without restraint. The girl was pinned down and she writhed desperately, but she kept her mouth shut tight and never uttered a sound.

"Tougher than you'd expect, isn't she?"

"She hasn't had enough yet."

"Never mind. Here's one way to make her cry."

Suddenly one of the women crouched down and shoved her hand under the girl's dress. Her claw-like nails were on that secret, soft place. I smelled something that reminded me of a rain-soaked bitch. The girl's face was distorted, her lips trembled, her head moved violently from side to side. A little cry escaped from between her clenched teeth.

"That's enough, isn't it? Even guys wouldn't be so rough.... "

The remark had come from someone in the crowd of spectators. A woman watching the scene with folded arms whirled around, glared fiercely in our direction and barked, "You shut up!" The man closed his mouth, grinned sheepishly and withdrew from the crowd.

The girl kept trying to escape those sharp, probing claws. She began to roll over and over on the ground, twisting her skirt but desperately holding it down to keep the others from tearing it off. Each time her face approached the feet of one of the women, her chin would be kicked or her face slapped. They taunted her mercilessly.

"Don't you ever fool around with Joe again. If you're after a man, you'd better look for him in another town."

When the women had gone, the lingering smells of their bodies and perfumes pervaded the entire area. The spectators drifted away one by one, as if bored, leaving the girl lying there on the ground. When she sat up she was panting, her shoulders heaving. Through dishevelled hair she looked around in my direction and I saw that her eyes were dry. They were like two burnt holes. She lifted her body up slowly, brushed the dirt from her slender elbows and knees and pulled down her skirt. A delicate network of blood vessels was visible on her long white calves. She picked up her worn-out pair of clogs by their torn red straps, and began gingerly walking home barefoot on the path through the field.

I decided not to go back to my room and instead went to the next town. I wandered here and there, drank some strong liquor at an outdoor stand, and finally, after about three hours, I went home. I opened the garden gate. There was no light on in the girl's room. I thought of the letter that I had burned, but went straight to my own room on tiptoe. I opened the window. In the dark the ivy leaves rustled constantly in the night breeze. To my drunken ears the sound was like the feet of millions of tiny crabs scuttling around the roof. After a while I realized that I was waiting for the dark garden to reverberate with that bird-like whistle that used to summon the girl.

There was no let-up in my busy schedule. I dragged my weary body through my nightly routine, then withdrew to my room beneath the roof and slept until dusk, like a lobster in its shell. Thus my solitary existence continued. The money that the soldier used to send had long since stopped, so the girl downstairs was forced to join the other women in the street at night. Whenever I looked, the light in her room was off. I never knew whether she was in there or not. Even if she was, she did not make a sound. I pictured her frail, thin body as she nibbled like a mouse at a portion of suffering too great for her, trying to digest it bit by bit. Since the day I witnessed her being attacked by the prostitutes in the field, I tried to ignore any sound that came from the thick, old, crumbling storehouse walls. Anyway, there was no sign of life from her room.

I was anemic, and one evening a couple of weeks after that incident I blacked out in the men's room at the newspaper office and came home early. A dissolute looking youth was playing a guitar in front of the village grocery store. The smell of warm soap rose from the dark ditch outside the public bath. The wind was whistling through the grove of bamboo behind the storehouse. As I walked past the farmhouse, I heard the dull sound of a cow's hoof kick against the side of its wooden stall in the animal shed.

I started to open the garden gate, then stopped short. There was a light on in the girl's room and I could see a person's shadow moving. Someone had apparently just passed by, because the smell of cheap cigar smoke floated on the air. I hid in the clump of bushes near the gate. The girl left her room and came out to the garden. Her footsteps clicked along the stone path, then she softly opened the gate. She leaned against it and stood facing the darkness. After a few moments I heard her soft, low voice begin to call, "Henry. . . ." A wide, hazy halo of light spread out from the lamp above her head. Her face was startlingly close to me. If I were just to stretch out my arm I could probably touch that distraught little cheek, shining now with a peculiar light, and feel its warmth.

"Henry, come back," I heard her whisper in a hesitant, childlike voice. She spoke slowly, in English, saying each word deliberately, as if attempting the correct pronunciation. It had a strange effect on my ears.

"I want you."

She spoke in a husky, warm murmur, heedless of her surroundings now, and her words had changed to a daring and urgent appeal.

"I want you!"

She practically shouted it out. It seemed to me the words had acquired the physical density of wood or stone. The girl's appearance was totally transformed. Beside her mouth a deep, scar-like crease had formed. Her nose stood out sharply from her gaunt face and her dark eyes were suffused with a passionate light. She stared unblinkingly toward the dark road where an American soldier had just gone, puffing on his cigar, having absorbed the warmth of her body. I felt overwhelmed. She had stopped speaking and simply stood under the light with her head lowered. I sensed in her bowed neck and the line of her shoulders a ripeness and a raw power that excessive suffering must have yielded. It was that power which had torn those ardent words from deep within her body where the blood ran warm and dark. (Could my own voice ever resonate with such fervor?!)

The girl, her head still bowed, finally laughed softly. She shut the gate behind her and left the lamplight. She continued to laugh as she rushed back across the garden toward her room. Her voice caught in her throat, its shrill echo pierced the darkness and slowly died away. Was she crying?

I came out from the bushes, practically kicked open the gate, and raced across the garden in the direction of the light coming from her room. As I ran I tried desperately to recapture the exact timbre of those clear, newly-learned words, spoken to no one at all. Again and again I forced my mouth to shape them: "I want you! I want you!"

Translated by Maryellen Toman Mori

Kaiko, Takeshi, “A Certain Voice.” The Mother of Dreams and Other Short Stories: Portrayals of Women in Modern Japanese Fiction. Ed. Makoto Ueda. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha International, 1986; 151-163.