The Cannery Boat/Cocoons
Cocoons
by
Fusao Hayashi
Cocoons
Whenever I see cocoons I am reminded of Yasuo Sakai. Of late I have become so completely a city-dweller that it is only by the patterns of autumn grasses on fabrics in the shop-windows that I know the autumn has come. No longer can I wander along country lanes where migrant crows drop seeds as they fly, the baskets of live cocoons swaying on the carts as if they would topple off at any minute. ····· Sakai and I were bosom pals in the middle school. We shared a room and with our two little desks, side by side, were as inseparable as Siamese twins.
At the back of the school rose hills covered with low pines; whenever summer drew near wild flowers blossomed round the roots of these trees.
“Funny little guys; beauties, aren’t they?” I remember him remarking solemnly one day as we watched a little snake, all its scales shining in the sunlight, disappear noiselessly under a bush.
There was a tinge of bitterness in his words. He himself was always called “the dirty guy” by the bullies of the class, as he was always in rags. Were he a spineless chap, that nickname alone would have been enough to humiliate him. Their scorn, however, probably contained a strain of jealousy since he was unusually intelligent, and was generally at the top of the class. He combined the extremes of cleverness and poverty. In this we were strongly contrasted, for I was remarkable neither for brains nor poverty. I was his only friend and whenever he got behind with his school fees I would offer part of my allowance as a matter of course.
Yes, in that class-room at the foot of those hills, with our desks side by side, we were as inseparable as twins.
From the hills you could see the sea. We two boys would often climb up and, lying down facing that blue paint-dish of sea under the sky, try vainly to throw stones into it, or hallo down at it the duet “River of Love” in voices strangely out of tune.
One day, under a wild briar bush, we found a snake eating a grass-green frog. Out of the open jaws of the snake only the little suckers on the end of the frog’s hind legs stuck out, waving as if sending out S.O.S. signals. I noticed Sakai’s eyebrows twitch, and then he let fly with his dusty boot and kicked the snake fiercely right in the belly. Then, squashing it with his heel, he watched it intently as a thin trickle of crimson blood came out of the yellow distended mouth.
“The devil,” he snarled.
The frog had been rescued and it lay motionless on the grass with the snake’s slimy saliva still clinging to it.
“The rotten devil,” he repeated. ······
I remember another incident.
One of the abuses of middle school life was that the older boys invariably bullied the younger ones. One practice they delighted in was to get their miserable victim in some lonely field and, on some trumped-up charge, lay into him savagely with their fists. As were were wandering over the hills one day we had the bad luck to be caught by a gang of bullies.
One of them—his father owned a silk mill in our town—a rough, stupid fellow, called Okawa, came rushing at us.
“Look here, Sakai, you’ve been getting too cheeky lately.”
Sakai gazed into this face for some time and then blurted out impulsively, “How do you make that out?”
The big boy suddenly gave him a punch in the chest.
“I’ll teach you to answer back a senior. That’s cheeky.”
Sakai rolled over on the grass, but soon picked himself up and made a mad rush at his assailant’s chest. But he was much smaller and, anyhow, it was three to one. The next minute he was on the ground again and was beaten like a dog. When he rose a second time I saw the glint of steel. It was his new penknife he held in his right hand.
The colour left Okawa’s lips. Sakai’s face, too, seemed to go a shade paler. Swiftly as a rat Okawa scurried, but Sakai ran him down near the place he had once squashed the snake. The patch stopped there. Okawa stood waiting with the strength of one at bay.
“Stab me if you dare.” Peeling off his coat, Okawa threw it on the grass and in the manner of all bluffers he bared his breast and extended both arms.
“You think I won’t stab you?” Sakai’s voice sounded strangely calm and collected. The gleam of cold steel rent the air.
“Oh!” All my blood went cold within me and this cry sprang from me as I saw how Okawa fell prone on the grass.
His fellow bullies ran to him to pick him up and carry him away. Sakai, limp and apathetic, followed them with his eyes, but once their figures had disappeared behind the bushes, he collapsed and lay motionless on the grass.
When I regained my presence of mind I hurried anxiously over to him. His face was buried in the summer grass and his shoulders were heaving.
Why?—I could not understand the reason.
Talking about not understanding reasons, there was another thing about Sakai that I could never fathom. In his desk he always kept a single white silkworm cocoon. Once I asked him why he kept it, but he refused to answer, so out of spite I cut it up into little bits with my scissors. For a whole day after that he did not speak to me. A week later a similar cocoon was in his drawer again.
Later these two riddles were solved together. ······
I think it was on the second or third day after this incident. Sakai suddenly asked me to go with him to the town, and took me to a small silk mill that stood near the water-front. He seemed to be no stranger there, for with just a nod to the doorkeeper he hurried into the mill. I followed after him.
Inside the mill, murky with steam and dark like the inside of a kitchen on a rainy day, the old-fashioned spindles turned noisily. The foul smell of dead grubs and the heavy humid air almost suffocated you. Before each girl stood two pots full of boiling water, one big and one small; in the small pot white cocoons kept bobbing up and down. One or two boiled cocoons would be transferred by the girl’s hand into the bigger pot and, as they danced round in the hot water, they gradually became thinner. At the same time an almost invisible thread passed from them, above the girls’ heads, and was wound round the droning spindles behind. With the revolutions of the belt the reels of silk became fatter and the cocoons thinner. When one cocoon had been completely unwound, the little black grub would appear floating dead on the surface. I watched it all with unaccustomed eyes.
“Wait just a minute.” Sakai hurriedly disappeared behind the machines, coming back after a time with an elderly woman wearing a mill-girl’s uniform.
“This is my mother.”
“Eh?” I was completely taken back and bowed my head in confusion.
“Now, mother, thank him.”
Sakai’s mother was about fifty and had smooth brows, unlike the woman of to-day. Bowing her head, in which white hairs had begun to show, she kept thanking me for my kindnesses to Sakai, and implored me to remain his friend. This made me very bashful. I blushed scarlet, and could do nothing but keep bowing too, unable to look up into that face, so full of brooding and humility.
One the way home Sakai related his early history. Of how, during his fourth year at the primary school, his mother and he had been left alone through his father’s death and reduced from comfortable circumstances to poverty; of how she had started working in this mill to help him enter the middle school. He had stuck out against going, but the teachers urged it on him, saying it was a pity to leave off at that point, and his mother, her eyes full of tears, tried to persuade him, saying there was no one but him to restore the fortunes of the Sakais, so he finally yielded; but when he saw his mother wearing out her aged body in that unhealthy mill in order to pay his school fees, he could not feel much like school; with her whole month’s wages they just managed to pay the minimum fees; but if he left school it would only sadden his mother, who was straining herself to keep on working, and would shatter her last hopes; so partly as there seemed no way out of it, and partly out of gratitude to her, he kept on at school.
“I’ve never told anyone these things. I’ve never felt it necessary. But you—you’ve always been so decent to me. And then sometimes I’ve told my mother about you and she has said, with tears in her eyes, how much she wanted to meet you and thank you, and that’s why I brought you to day.
“And also,” he soon continued, “there was another reason for bringing you to the mill. Perhaps you know that the owner of that mill is the father of that Okawa I knifed the other day?”
“Yes,” I nodded.
“That’s why I think I was in the wrong the other day. Of course, it’s mean to bully younger boys, but defiance, when a personal grievance enters into it, is worse, it seems to me. If Okawa had been alone that day—that Okawa who is always jeering at me just because my mother works in his mill—I don’t think I would have gone so far as to use a knife. When I realized what I had done, I howled at my own meanness.”
I watched the red evening sun between the roofs of the town as it sank into the sea. ····· Two or three years passed. We both became students of the same high school. Sakai received a scholarship from the prefecture, while I, somehow or other, succeeded in passing the entrance examination.
We were lying in the grass on a hill that overlooked the school building and talking idly as the summer sun shone down pleasantly on our faces and our new gold buttons.
“I still keep my cocoon,” said Sakai, as if he had suddenly called it to mind.
“Do you? Is your mother still in that mill?”
“I can’t get her to leave. She says she’ll keep on, no matter what happens, until I graduate. Of course in a way she has reason on her side, for as long as I stay at school there is no other way for her to live except the mill.”
Sakai bit his lips as he plucked stalks of grass, and his voice became thoughtful.
“Lately I’ve begun to have doubts about life,” he said. “For instance, take that mill: now there are about 300 girls working there. They’re mostly from fifteen to twenty-four years of age, all farmers’ daughters from the neighbouring villages. When they come they’re young, country girls with good strong bodies, but after a year or two they begin bandaging up their throats and coughing suspiciously; their eyes become red and swollen, and their fingers whitish and rotten, and then they return home. Some of them wither and die while in the mill, and you hear sometimes of girls getting their hair caught in the machines.
“The humid air; the long hours from morning right on into the night; insufficient food—when I see those girls under such conditions, wearing out their young bodies before my very eyes, I think of the kettles and of the cocoons which the girls reel.
“Each one, boiled in the hot water, becoming thinner and thinner; its life drained from it by that single invisible thread, until finally the black grub—now a useless dead thing—is cast up on the surface of the water.
“But on the other hand—and this is what you’ve got to notice isn’t there—exactly corresponding to the reels winding and winding above the girls heads a group of men who grow continually fatter and fatter!”
Sakai paused for a minute to wipe the sweat from his brow, and then in a voice deliberately lowered, went on.
“And you know, I have a feeling—it’s horrible to think about it—but still I have the feeling that something will happen to mother in that mill before I get safely through the university. My mother holds to it almost like a religion that the ruin of the Sakai family is our fault and that we must somehow restore it. Not only that, but, as a mother, she naturally feels a deep joy and an object in life is giving a proper education to her only child. I can understand that feeling quite well.
“But so long as she’s in that mill, isn’t she, too, just one of those miserable silkworm cocoons? An invisible silken thread is drawing, drawing at her life, too…”
Words seemed futile as an answer.
We were third-year high school students. It was a winter’s day with graduation close at hand. Late at night, in spite of the snow, Sakai came to my lodgings.
“What’s the matter?” Looking at his face, bloodless and like that of a man just come from a tomb, I felt intuitively that something serious was wrong.
“My mother is dead. … Too late, too late.”
Almost snatching from him the telegram he had received, I recalled his prophetic words and a cold shiver ran down my spine.
My voice failed to utter a word. For a moment that face which I had seen in the silk mill, among all those droning spindles, with its smooth brows, so unlike the women of to-day, rose before me and then was gone.
“Too late. In the New Year vacation I begged her to let me leave school. I told her no son could bear to send his mother out into a mill like that, and that there was no rest for me while I knew she was surrounded by all sorts of dangers, and helpless against them. It was the first time I’d been back home for a long while and I realized with a shock the great change in her. She wept, but would not hear me.”
His lips quivering, he brushed away the tears that welled up.
“But talking like this won’t do any good now. I’m going home by the night train. Would you mind lending me the fare?”
I put together all the money I had and gave it to him, and walking through the snow saw him off at the station.
About a week later I got a letter from him.
“This morning we gathered up my mother’s ashes. They all went nicely into an urn less than seven inches high. Sitting with it before me, I realize more deeply than ever the terrible blow I have suffered. More than ten girls from the mill came to the funeral. They were girls whom my mother had been kind to. More had asked to be allowed off just to attend the funeral, but, as you can imagine, permission was not granted. Those who came had managed to escape knowing they would be punished for it. I was deeply moved by this.
“When in the New Year vacation I was stopped by mother from leaving school, I thought out a plan of my own. Were I to enter university, I would try to find work to do in my spare time. If I succeeded, even if I got mother to leave the mill, we would have enough for the two of us. But as things turned out, this too has ended in nothing.
“Sitting before this urn, my thoughts turn to the system which silently, with subtle force, destroyed my mother’s life.
“The cocoons getting thinner, the reels fatter—the dead black body of the grub.
“My mother wanted me to get on in the world. That was her only wish. I, too, tried to comply with it and exerted all my energies towards that goal—and see what’s happened.
“But I will not despair. In the crematorium in the hills, just as I was getting together her ashes by the light of a candle, suddenly an idea came to me. It seemed a new road opened up before me. There was not only one cocoon. My mother was not the only sufferer.
“In this land of ours alone, how many millions, no, tens of millions of human beings, like the cocoons in the boiling water, are having their life blood sucked away from them?
“It may sound funny to you to say it abruptly like this. But I know the enemy I have to fight. I expect I shall have a chance of talking this out with you more in detail some time. I remember how once in our middle school days I used my knife against one fellow who bullied me. The road I am taking now is not a mean, cowardly one like that. This work is work fit for men which I must give up my whole life to. It would please mother, too, I think.
“I’m not coming back to school. It will be some time before I’m able to meet you again, probably. I hope you’ll take care of yourself and study hard.
“One other thing—in the left-hand drawer of my desk you will find a white cocoon. It’s a funny sort of keepsake, but I’d like you to keep it in memory of my mother.” ····· That must have been ten years ago.
Whenever I see cocoons I am reminded of Yasuo Sakai. But there are few chances for me to see them, since I have become so completely a city-dweller, knowing that the autumn has come only by the patterns of grasses on fabrics in the shop-windows.
There is no need of cocoons to remind me of Sakai now. I, too, have joined the ranks of those he calls “Comrades.”