I opened my eyes wide, pulled my fists back, and now tried to strike her face with the flat of my hand. But it was the same. No matter how many times I struck, her face remained where it was, white, transparent, undistorted.
“Hiwako, dear, please come! Why won’t you?” she pleaded.
I was at a loss. I don’t know, I don’t know, I replied silently. But I did know. It was just that I was so tired. I mustn’t let myself be defeated now. l was being defeated, though, so easily. You must want to be defeated. If it’s what you want, why make yourself refuse? Was I saying that, or the woman? It’s so unclear, so unclear, I thought, and suddenly this combat that had lasted for centuries struck me as incredibly stupid and I decided to put a stop to it once and for all.
“There is no snake world!” I declared, as firmly as I could manage.
There, I had said it. In a trice I had brought clarity to the whole messy thing I’d let fester for so long. I understood what I had been pretending not to understand. What a ridiculously simple thing to have spent hundreds of years struggling over. Why hadn’t I been able to say it before?
“Really?” the woman asked, smiling. “You think it’s that simple?” And she set about strangling me again.
I became conscious of a loud zapping sound. The energy that had been generated was filling the room with an electric charge, producing flashes of intensely blue and white light; soon, droplets of water started to fall from the ceiling. The droplets became drops that fell faster and faster, and the room started to fill with water. The water rose from our heels to our knees, from our knees to our hips, and the woman and I continued to thrash around in it. Soon the room became totally submerged in water, and we were still fighting. The entire apartment building became engulfed, and started to drift away, joining the muddy stream that cut though Midori Park heading towards the Kanakana-Dō. But still neither of us would concede.
“Just come over. You’ll see that I’m right. You don’t know what you’re refusing!”
“I’m telling you—it doesn’t exist.”
“But Hiwako, dear, you should listen to me. I am your mother!”
“You are not!”
“Well, let me explain!”
“No.”
“How will you understand, if you don’t listen?”
“I don’t want to understand!”
“See what I mean? Putting on your little act!”
As we yelled, the room and everything in it was being swept away. It was early morning, and the Kanakana-Dō’s shutter had been raised. Mr Kosuga was sweeping the pavement in front of the shop. I could see Nishiko sitting at her desk, quietly threading strands of prayer beads. In front of the shop a festival float crammed with flowers and girls in traditional dancing costumes was being pulled merrily along on its way, and from the float came a song, the song of the credit association, playing loudly over the speakers:
You can’t be too careful.
Keep hold of the things you love…
The words rose up around the Kanakana-Dō in an endlessly coiling loop of sound, while inside the shop I could see Mr Kosuga and Nishiko, unperturbed, busy with their tasks. Miss Sanada, it’s important to practise, to keep on your guard, Mr Kosuga told me, watching me as I floated by, giving me a wink. This isn’t “practice”, I retorted—and even on your guard, things can still catch you when you’re unawares! But Mr Kosuga merely rubbed his head, a filterless cigarette in his mouth, his usual impassive self.
“Hiwako, dear, stop being so stubborn, open your eyes!” the woman was saying.
“You should open your eyes!”
“Oh, that’s so hypocritical.”
The woman was squeezing her fingers tighter and tighter. She still had that expression on her face, an indeterminate mixture of pleasure and pain. Well, if she is strangling me, I thought, placing my fingers around her neck…
In the flashes of intense blue and white light, everything around became dazzlingly, searingly bright, and surrounded by that brightness, pitting our equal strengths, the woman and I struggled, locked in a battle to throttle each other, as the apartment hurtled away at an unbelievable speed.
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About the Author
HIROMI KAWAKAMI was born in Tokyo in 1958. She has written numerous novels—among them Strange Weather in Tokyo, The Nakano Thrift Shop and Manazuru—and short-story collections, and has garnered many of Japan’s top literary prizes. Kawakami was shortlisted for both the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize, and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages. Her story “A Snake Stepped On” in this collection won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1996.
LUCY NORTH, born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University and has a PhD in modern Japanese literature. Her translations of Taeko Kōno were published in Toddler Hunting and Other Stories. Lucy lived for many years in Boston and Tokyo, and is now based in Hastings, on the south coast of England.
Copyright
Series Editors: David Karashima and Michael Emmerich
Translation Editor: Elmer Luke
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HEBI O FUMU © Hiromi Kawakami, 1996
English language translation © Lucy North 2017
Record of a Night Too Brief was first published as Hebi o Fumu in 1996
First published by Pushkin Press in 2017
Parts of “Record of a Night Too Brief” appeared, in slightly different form, in Words without Borders, July 2012.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Centre for Literary Translation and the Nippon Foundation
ISBN 9781782272724
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