Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/61

lot of unflattering things about Koreans, thought Kanako, but Koreans can be much kinder than Japanese men. The scrap pedlar’s wife often used to speak to Kanako at the back door, and Kanako began to wonder whether this woman’s marriage to a foreigner wasn’t far happier than her own.

She also began to observe the other neighbours. The tubercular policeman received regular calls from the ward physician, and various members of the neighbourhood committee would also come to see him. She heard that one of his children had died of tuberculosis that winter and that the father had caught the disease from him. The other two children were no doubt doomed to catch the illness themselves in due course.

In the next house lived a woman of about fifty. After working for twenty long years as a charwoman in an oil company, she had received a retirement allowance of one thousand yen. This piece of luck had completely unhinged her and during the following year she had spent the entire sum on visits to department stores and theatres. Now she scraped along by doing various odd jobs and by using the minute wages of her fifteen-year-old step-daughter.

Kanako had seen all these people from morning till night, but it was only now that she began to think about them. Their fates struck her as an ironic commentary on human existence. Life, it seemed to her, was a very gloomy business indeed.

Towards morning Kanako managed to doze off for a while. When she awoke Sōichi had still not returned. It occurred to her that he might have gone to her sister’s tea-shop, and asking one of the neighbours to look after the house, she set out for Shitaya. But he was not there.

“I’m fed up with him,” she told her sister. “I want to leave him and work here with you.”

Her sister laughed. “It’s funny,” she said. “You’re the one who was always talking about marriage. But look, Kanako, surely the sensible thing would be to go and talk to his parents.”

“I don’t want to see those people.”