The Wild Geese - Mori Ougai

Chapter Four

Although the events of this story that have Okada for their hero took place before I learned the earlier history of the woman of the window, it will be convenient to give an outline of that story here. 

The narrative goes back to the days when the medical school of the university was located at Shitaya, and the old guardhouse of Lord Todo's estate was turned into a student dormitory. Its windows, of vertical wooden bars as thick as a man's arms, were set at wide intervals in a wall of gray tiles plastered in checkerboard fashion. If I may phrase it this way, the students lived there like so many beasts, though I'm sorry to make such a comparison. Of course you can't see windows like those now except in the castle turrets of the emperor's palace, and even the bars of the lion and tiger cages in the Ueno Zoo are more slenderly made than those were. 

The dormitory had servants whom the students could use for errands. They usually sent out to buy something cheap to eat, like baked beans or roasted sweet potatoes. For each trip the servant received two sen. One of these workers was called Suezo. The other man had loud mouths buried in bur-like beards, but this man kept his mouth shut and always shaved. The others wore dirty clothes of rough cotton; Suezo's were always neat, and sometimes he came to work wearing silk. 

I don't know who told me or when, but I heard that Suezo lent money to needy students. Of course it only amounted to fifty sen or one yen at a time. But when the debt gradually grew to five or ten yen, Suezo would make the borrower draw up a note, and if it wasn't yet paid at the end of the term, a new one was written. Suezo became what can really be called a professional money-lender. I haven't had any idea how he obtained such capital. Certainly not from picking up two sen for each student errand. But perhaps nothing is impossible if a man concentrates all of his energies on what he wants. 

At any rate, when the medical school moved from Shitaya to Hongo, Suezo no longer remained a servant, but his house, newly located on Ike-no-hata, was continually visited by a great number of indiscreet students. When he began working for the university, he was already over thirty, was poor, and had wife and child to support. But since he had made quite a fortune through moneylending and had moved to his new house, he began to feel dissatisfied with his wife, who was ugly and quarrel-some. 

At that time he remembered a certain woman he had seen every so often while he was still going to the university through a narrow alley from his house at the back of Neribei-cho. There was a dark house whose ditch boards in that alley were always partly broken and half of whose sliding shutters were closed all year round. At night, when anyone passed, he had to go sideways because of a wheeled stall drawn up under the eaves. 

What first attracted Suezo's attention to this house was the music of the samisen inside. And then he learned that the person playing the instrument was a lovely girl about sixteen or seventeen years old. The neat kimono she wore was quite different from the shabby appearance of her house. 

If the girl happened to be in the doorway, as soon as she saw a man approaching she went back into the dark interior. Suezo, with his characteristic alertness, though without particularly investigating the matter, found out that the girl's name was Otama, that her mother was dead, and that she lived alone with her father, who sold sugary, sticky candies molded into figures in his stall. 

But eventually a change took place in this back-street house. The wheeled stall vanished from its set place under the eaves. And the house and its surroundings, which were always modest, seemed suddenly attacked by what was then fashionably called "civilization", for new boards over the ditch replaced the broken and warped ones, and a new lattice door had been installed at the entrance. 

Once Suezo noticed a pair of Western shoes in the doorway. Soon after, a new name plate bearing a policeman's title was put up. Suezo also made certain, while shopping on the neighboring streets and yet without seeming to pry, that the old candy dealer had acquire a son-in-law. 

To the old man, who loved his daughter more than sight itself, the loss of Otama to a policeman with terrifying looks was like having her carried off by a monster with a long nose and a red face. Otama's father had feared the discomfort he would incur by the intrusion of such a formidable son-in-law, and after meeting the suitor, had consulted with several confidants, but none of them had told him to reject the offer. 

Someone said: "You see, I told you so, didn't I? When I took the trouble to arrange a good match, you were too particular, saying you couldn't part with your only child, so that finally a son-in-law you couldn't say no to is going to move in on you!"

And another said threateningly: "If you can't stand the man, the only other solution is to move far away, but since he's a policeman, he'll be able to catch up with you and make his offer again. There's no escaping him."

A wife who had a reputation for using her head was believed to have told the old man: "Didn't I advise you to sell her off to a geisha house since her looks were good and her samisen master praised her skill? A policeman without a wife can go from door to door, and when he finds a pretty face, he takes her off whether you like it or not. You can't do anything but make the best of the bad luck that such a man took a fancy to your daughter."

No more than three months after Suezo had heard these rumors, he discovered one morning that the doors of the old candy dealer's house were locked and that attached a piece of paper gave notice that the house was for rent. Then, on inquiring further into the neighbors' talk while shopping, Suezo heard that the policeman had in his own native place a wife and children who had turned up on a surprise visit, whereupon a fight followed, and Otama ran from the house. A neighbor who overheard the quarrel stopped the girl from doing something rash. Not one of the old man's friends had enough knowledge about legal matters, so the old man had been quite indifferent about seeing if the marriage had been legally registered, and when the son-in-law told him he would completely handle the legal end of the marriage, the old man had had no suspicions or fears. 

A girl at Kitazumi's grocery said to Suezo: "I really feel sorry for Taa-chan - she's honest and she had no doubt about the policeman, but he said he was only looking for a place to live."

And with his hand circling his cropped head of hair, the storekeeper interrupted her: "It's a pity about the old man too. He moved away because he couldn't stand meeting his neighbors and he couldn't stay here as before. But he still sells candy where he used to, saying he can't do business in places where there are no little customers. A while back he sold his tall, but now he has it again from the second-hand dealer, after telling him the situation. I think he's got financial troubles because of the moving and such. It's as though the old man lived for only a short time in a world of dreams, freeing himself into easy retirement and keeping company with the police man, who drank sake, acting like a god, while, in fact, he starved his wife and children in the country."

After that, the candy dealer's daughter slipped from Suezo's mind, but when he became financially well off and could do more of what he wanted, he happened to remember the girl. 

Suezo, now with a wide circle of acquaintances to do his bidding, had them look for the old candy dealer and finally located his mean quarters next to a rickshaw garage behind a theater. He learned also that the daughter wasn't married. So Suezo sent a woman to make overtures with an offer from a wealthy merchant disposed to have the girl for his mistress. In spite of Otama's objections at first, the old woman kept reminding the meek and reluctant girl of the advantages her father would get from the arrangement, and the negotiations reached the point where the parties agreed to meet at the Matsugen restaurant.