The wife repeated the phrase to herself: “The king has donkey’s ears. The king has donkey’s ears.” If only my husband would open his heart to me, she thought, how much happier I would be! Even if his words meant my devastation, even if they thrust on me the full burden of his secret and made me waste away day by day until finally I died—still I would be content. How much easier that would be than the pain of watching helplessly as my husband agonizes over a secret he cannot tell!
I can pretty well guess what he’s trying so hard to keep from me. So why won’t he just come out and tell me? Any woman who can make him change as much as I’ve seen him change must surely be a very special woman. I can’t think of any other explanation. So why won’t he share with me the joy of having met such a remarkable person? Why does he go on trying to hide it. Can he really believe I haven’t noticed? Of course, it hurts to think that he loves another woman. But it hurts even more to see him struggling so painfully all by himself like that, day in and day out, never saying a word. It makes me feel like I’m nothing but a burden to him, and that I’m the one responsible for all his torments. That’s what really hurts.
Every night after dinner, he goes straight to his room, and I never hear another peep out of him all evening. I used to take him some tea after a while, but now I feel like there’s a tight web of invisible threads stretched across his doorway, and I’m afraid to touch the door. I don’t know how many times I’ve carried the tea tray halfway up the stairs only to turn back. Once when I slid the door open after saying “May I come in?” I saw him hastily pushing the stationery he had spread on his desk under a book. I pretended I hadn’t noticed and forced a cheerful voice:
“Hey! Stop working so hard, you rascal.”
But actually it was all I could do to keep my face from showing my wretchedness.
Now I’m scared to go into his room. Even in the daytime, when I go in there to dust, I get this eerie feeling that he’s still there, sitting at his desk like the night before, and I’m scared to look that way. What if I were to see something I shouldn’t? When I play with our daughter alone in the evening, the silence from my husband’s room upstairs weighs heavier and heavier on my mind until I begin to wonder how much more I can take.
My wife has the child, was the husband’s attitude. She may have no other comfort, and she may feel my heart drifting away from her, but she at least has the child. Even when her happiness as a wife is incomplete, a woman can still find a measure of meaning to her life in nurturing and protecting her child. The husband sought excuses for his behavior in convenient clichés.
Though intoxicated with love, he had not failed to notice the new look of desolation on his wife’s face. Especially after finding the letter on his desk, he made a point of trying to say nice things to her as often as possible. It pained even him to see his wife looking so unutterably forlorn.
Sometimes, when he was in his room, he would hear his wife open the front door and step outside. Holding the fussy child in her arms, she would walk back and forth in the street, singing gently, for as much as an hour. Or if the child was already in bed, he might hear the slap-slap of a jump-rope against the pavement. Ahh, she’s skipping rope again, he’d think. This image of his wife, skipping on and on in the dark, deserted street, pressed in on him like some desperate appeal. The staccato slap of the rope as it whipped through the air and the tap of her feet springing from the pavement seemed to fly at him like a million invisible needles piercing his entire body. He tried to hide from the needles.
The husband’s thinking went something like this: I’ve never considered abandoning my wife and child to run off with the girl. The last thing I want is to destroy my home for the sake of this love, and I really don’t feel I’m in danger of making that happen. All I’m saying is that I want to be left alone for a while. Let me follow my heart, wherever it may lead. It’s not as if a paltry wage earner like me could do anything all that outrageous.
If I invited the girl to go on a trip with me, I doubt she’d refuse. In fact, I can already see her eyes lighting up with excitement. She’s always dreaming about traveling to unknown places. But could I actually take such a trip? My wife and I can’t even go somewhere for a single night without risking the total collapse of our household finances; how could I possibly afford a major trip? I’ve never even bought the girl a present. She doesn’t go around dropping hints like most girls these days, but I know she’d be as happy as any to get a new purse. Her family’s no better off than mine. But some of the purses in the window come close to my entire salary for a month, and even the small ones that look more like toys than anything else would take all my spending money for the month and then some.
Love on empty pockets is like trying to light a cheap match: it takes forever to burst into flames. I could never simply forget about my family and abandon myself to whim. There’s nothing quite so pathetic as being poor. I’ve felt that to the quick. But please, just let me be for a while. Don’t ask me any questions, and just let me be.
One evening, the husband took the girl to a movie, and afterward they strolled around talking for another hour. It was past nine by the time he got home. His wife did not come rushing out to greet him as she normally did.
He went on inside and heard her muffled voice upstairs. It sounded like her usual greeting, but her voice had an odd note to it, like the pleading of a spoiled child or like someone on the verge of falling asleep. Following this for a time came the sounds of trying to get the child to go down for the night, and then everything became silent.
Only a few minutes before, he had been with his girlfriend, holding her hand in his as they said goodbye, so he was hardly in a position to scold his wife for failing to greet him at the door. He sat down to the dinner laid out for him on the table and began eating by himself. His wife’s dinner was there, too, untouched. She had probably been waiting to eat until he got home but went to put the child to bed when she got fussy.
“You’re like a boarder,” his wife had joked a few days before, and a sour smile came to his lips as he recalled it. Indeed, more often than not he skipped breakfast. Either he didn’t feel very hungry when he got up, or there wasn’t enough time before he had to leave for work, so he just grabbed his lunch box and headed for the office. When he got home in the evening it was straight to dinner. If his daughter was still awake, he’d spend a little time with her, and then he went right to his room upstairs. He could easily be accused of coming home only to eat and sleep.
“Let’s play some shogi,” he had suggested one evening upon seeing his wife’s long face. With immediate cheer she went to get the dust-covered game board from the closet and began setting it up. Two pieces were missing, so she cut some replacements out of paper and wrote “pawn” on them with a pen.
“Here goes. You just watch. You’re going to wonder what hit you,” she said spiritedly as she made her first move. If truth be told, the wife had no interest in shogi, and the husband knew it. The husband didn’t like it much either. He never played games like go or shogi or mah-jongg. Their shogi board was one they’d inherited from his brother when he died, and, in fact, the husband barely even knew the moves well enough to keep from making a mistake. His wife’s skill was about the same.
Twice the husband won after a protracted battle. They started a third game, but when he looked up from the board he found his wife starting to nod off. He threw in his pieces in exasperation and stood up. His wife was too tired. After that he never wanted to play shogi again.
“I wish we had a Ping-Pong table,” his wife sometimes said, and he thought it might be nice, too. He wasn’t especially fond of this game either, because it always seemed like such a game of cunning, but having a Ping-Pong table might cast a different hue on their inert and desolate home. For something like badminton you had to have more open space. When it came down to it, what amusements were possible in the contemporary Japanese