Record of a Night Too Brief

A SNAKE STEPPED ON

ON MY way to Midori Park through a thicket I stepped on a snake.

Once you cut through Midori Park, if you go up and over the hill, then carry straight on through a maze of narrow alleys lined with little shops, you’ll come to my place of work: a Buddhist prayer-bead shop, the Kanakana-Dō. My previous job was as a science teacher at a girls’ school. I was not a good teacher—I wasn’t cut out for it—and after trying for four years to stick with it I quit. I survived for a while on unemployment insurance payments, and then I got this job at the Kanakana-Dō.

At the Kanakana-Dō, I work as the “help”. Mr Kosuga, the owner, takes care of the stock, and the orders and deliveries of the prayer beads, and assists the Buddhist priests who come into the store, while Mrs Kosuga threads the beads into rosaries and bracelets. My job—if I can call it that—is simply to sit in the shop and “help” in small tasks.

I realized the snake was there only after I’d stepped on it. It seemed languid, maybe because it was autumn. Surely a snake would know to hurry to get out of the way.

Under my foot, the snake felt so soft. So porous and borderless and infinite.

“You know, once you’ve stepped on me, it’s all over,” the snake said, after a few moments.

Its body started slowly to disappear, and then it was gone. Something indefinable, like smoke, or a fine mist, hung for a few seconds in the space where it had been. I heard it repeat:

“It’s all over.”

I looked again, and saw a human being.

“Well, you stepped on me,” the human being announced, “so now I don’t have a choice.”

And with that, the snake-turned-human being walked briskly off, in what seemed to be the direction of my apartment. As far as I could tell, she was a woman in her early fifties.

I arrived at the Kanakana-Dō just as Mr Kosuga was raising the shutter. Mrs Kosuga—or Nishiko, as she said I could call her—was in the back of the shop, grinding beans for coffee.

“I’m driving to Kōfu today. Do you want to come along with me, Miss Sanada?” Mr Kosuga asked.

I occasionally accompanied him in the van on his deliveries, but only to places nearby. Kōfu. That was going to be miles.

In recent days Nishiko had been threading dozens and dozens of the prayer beads for the followers of the Pure Land sect. Yesterday we had put the two hundred rosaries and bracelets she had finally finished into boxes, and packaged them up. Today, it appeared, we’d be delivering them to Ganshinji Temple.

“After we drop the beads off, we could take a detour and go on to Isawa hot springs,” said Mr Kosuga. He just came out with this. And then, immediately, this: “Why not come too, Nishiko? Take a little break from the shop…”

Nishiko smiled, and didn’t reply.

Although over sixty, Nishiko looked younger, her hair black with only a few strands of white—and in fact she looked considerably younger than her husband, despite being, I’d been told, eight years older than he was. A few weeks after they hired me, I learnt that she had once been the wife of the young master of a long-standing prayer-bead shop in Kyoto, and Mr Kosuga had been the live-in apprentice. Watching her toiling ceaselessly noon and night—threading prayer beads, keeping the shop running—while her husband hardly came in at all, preferring to fritter away his time on other pursuits, Mr Kosuga fell in love with her, and several years later, on finishing his apprenticeship, he persuaded her to run away with him.

The story of their elopement was common knowledge to most of the customers—mainly Buddhist priests who had been clients for years—and the couple were still the target of teasing remarks because of it.

“Such connubial bliss,” the priests would declare dryly.

At this, Mr Kosuga would mutter namandabu namandabu under his breath, while Nishiko would say nothing and smile. Despite Nishiko’s reputation as one of the most skilled prayer-bead makers in the whole of the Kantō region, the Kanakana-Dō was only limping along. The couple had had to flee all the way up to Tokyo, far away from all previous ties, as a consequence of their past.

“I stepped on a snake,” I said to Mr Kosuga, casually. We were in a diner in a motorway service area, on our way back from the temple, drinking iced coffees.

“What?” Mr Kosuga yelped. Then, carefully, he asked, “And… what did the snake do?” He brought a filterless Peace cigarette to his mouth, and slowly started rubbing his forehead and temple, where the hair was receding, with the palm of his hand.

“It got up and walked off.”

“Where to?”

“I’m really not sure.”

It was late afternoon and the light of the setting sun streamed into the diner. The muffled roar of the traffic outside could be heard intermittently.

The chief priest of Ganshinji Temple, whom we’d delivered the prayer beads to, was a serious collector of antiques, and everywhere in his living quarters was decked with pieces of valuable pottery—Shigaraki, Shino—as well as other wares and antique display shelves. For three hours we were subjected to a long series of stories on the history behind every object. Even during a brief moment when the priest’s wife, who seemed in some vague way to look like her husband, brought in trays of soba for lunch, the priest continued to spout forth on how each of the pieces had fallen into his hands. Please, do eat, his wife urged gently, or your soba will go soft. But the stories were flowing so continuously it was difficult to judge the right moment to begin. Mr Kosuga managed, nodding attentively and murmuring “oh” and “ah”, to polish off what was on his tray, and I tried my best to do the same, but I couldn’t make a dent in mine. Finally, the priest applied himself to his food, a brief respite ensued, and I seized the small cup to dip a few noodles and bring them to my mouth—but the sight of the cup set the priest off again. “Ah, that cup now…” The chopsticks, the dipping cups, the teacups, the lacquer coasters, the low tables on which the coasters lay, even the cloth of the cushion on which I sat—everything had a story.

After listening to a story about an Edo-period criminal who was executed by a beheading followed by a story about a son who built a storehouse for his parents out of filial loyalty followed by a tale about a big man about town who was elected mayor followed by a story of a wealthy patron of a sumo-wrestler stable who fell on hard times and couldn’t afford even to live in a hovel built on the ground followed by a tale about an ill-natured woman who scalded herself followed by a story about a dog who dug up some gold coins in a vegetable patch followed by a tale about a widow who made a fortune by inventing a special cup for people unable to get out of bed… finally, when the priest had seemingly told his fill, Mr Kosuga rose and proceeded serenely out to the van, unloaded the boxes containing the two hundred rosaries and bracelets of prayer beads, brought them in and laid them out in front of the priest, and, when he received the payment, tore off a receipt with care and handed it over. The figures on the receipt had been transcribed in the traditional Chinese numerals. Nishiko wrote out all the shop’s formal documents in her impressive calligraphic hand.

“Incidentally,” the priest said to Mr Kosuga in a relaxed tone, folding up the receipt, “know any stories about snakes?”

At that precise moment, the priest’s wife entered the room. It seemed the priest had to get ready to attend a memorial service.

“Lots of snakes are turning up at the temple these days,” the priest drawled. “It’s all the land reclamation, even out here in the sticks. Seeking refuge, you know.”

Right there in front of Mr Kosuga and me, he started to remove the strip of black brocade draped around his neck.

“And snakes,” he continued, emphatically, “often pretend to be what they’re not.”

The priest slipped an iridescent blue surplice over his head, put on a gold hat, and, pressing his lips together as if he’d eaten something tart, smirked.

Mr Kosuga took his leave and I followed, bowing our thanks deeply, and the priest’s wife came out and bowed farewell as we drove away.

This was what had inspired me to mention my snake story to Mr Kosuga.

“Miss Sanada, do you mind telling me what the snake was like?”

The distant honk of a truck sounded, like the foghorn of a ship. We could have been sitting in a beachfront cafe.

“It was medium-sized. And soft…”

A slightly hapless look crossed Mr Kosuga’s face, but he said nothing more and, giving his broad brow one more rub, got up to leave. In the van he switched on the radio. The stock-market report came to an end, and a lesson in Portuguese started, but by then I was feeling quite drowsy, and all thought of the snake left me. When we arrived back at the shop, we were in the middle of an English lesson.

I returned to my apartment, cutting back through Midori Park in the dark, to find everything tidied and put away. An unfamiliar woman in her early fifties was sitting in the middle of the carpet in the room.

It was the snake, I saw immediately, but I didn’t let on that I knew.

“Welcome home,” the woman said to me, as if I wasn’t expected to register any surprise.

“Thank you,” I replied.

The woman got to her feet and went to the stove in the small galley kitchen. She lifted the lid off a saucepan and a delicious aroma wafted out.

“Hiwako, dear, I’ve prepared a favourite of yours. Tsukune dumplings in broth,” she said. She bustled about the kitchen and wiped the table with a damp cloth.

I watched as she, clearly clued up on which utensils I use and which are reserved for guests, set the table, placing chopsticks alongside rice bowls, not needing to ask which end of the table I prefer. She was acting like someone who’d lived here for years. In a matter of minutes, dinner was laid out: the dumplings, with green beans in the broth, and plates of okara and sashimi. She brought out two glasses, and opened a bottle of beer.

“Let’s have a drink. Why not, once in a while?”

She sat herself down in the chair next to me.

At her prompting, I raised my glass, took a sip, and, finding myself suddenly very thirsty, drained it to the last drop. I waited to see if she’d fill it up again, but she didn’t. Did she know I don’t like it when people try to pour for me?

“Aah, that tastes good!” the woman exclaimed as she finished her glass and proceeded to refill it. Seeing this, I refilled mine, and just like that, the bottle was empty.

“There are another two bottles chilling,” she said, transferring some dumplings to her bowl with her chopsticks. She started tucking into them.

With uneasiness, I did the same—since they did look rather delicious. The slightest squeeze of the chopsticks made the dumplings ooze with juice, so I popped a whole one straight into my mouth. The taste was just like one of my own. After polishing off another dumpling, I drank some beer, then ate some beans, and then had another gulp of the beer. But I couldn’t bring myself to touch the sashimi. The thought of raw fish prepared by a snake was simply too creepy to take.

The woman quickly worked her way through the sashimi, swabbing each slice with wasabi and soy sauce.

“You’re home late today,” she observed.

“We drove to Kōfu.”

I hadn’t meant to engage. My defences must have been down because of the drink. Then, immediately, “What are you?” I asked.

“Ah. I’m your mother, Hiwako, dear,” she said.

“Huh?”

The woman had said she was my mother as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and now, going to the refrigerator, she took out a second bottle of beer. She tapped the cap, opened the bottle and filled her glass and mine to the same level, creating thick heads of foam.

My mother was still alive, living in my home town of Shizuoka. Likewise my father. I had two younger brothers. One brother was enrolled in the local college; the other was still at high school. My mother had a typically Japanese face—she looked a bit like that actress, whose name escapes me, the one who often plays mothers in TV dramas. The woman sitting in front of me, however, had a much more angular, Western face. Her eyelashes were terribly long. She had high cheekbones, and the tiny wrinkles around her mouth and eyes accentuated her rather sharp features.

Suddenly concerned about my mother in Shizuoka, I stood up and picked up the telephone to call home. I couldn’t remember the number, and twice dialled it incorrectly. It was like one of those dreams when you’re desperately making a phone call but you’re all thumbs.

“Hello?” On the third try I got my mother on the other end.

“Hiwako, dear!” she exclaimed, when she realized who was calling.

“Hi.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I wondered… if you’re OK.”

“Oh, we’re fine. And you?”

“I’m OK.”

“Is something wrong?”

As I’m not particularly fond of the telephone anyway, I rarely call home, except on the occasional Sunday. My family knows I don’t like it, so our conversations last two minutes.

“Dad and everyone doing OK?”

“Not too bad. Same as always, you know. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I just…” I managed to mumble a few words more, then hung up.

The woman had taken no notice as I talked, and carried on munching food and tossing down her drink.

When I returned to the table, nearly all the food was gone. The woman was sitting, chin in hand, elbow propped on the table, and on the third bottle of beer.

“Hiwako, dear, why did you give up being a teacher?” she asked, sipping her beer, without directing her chopsticks at any of the plates.

With my mother’s voice still ringing in my ears, I was wide open to the question. The situation still struck me as weird, but I resigned myself to having to answer.

“I couldn’t get into it.”

“Into what?”

“Teaching.”

“Is that all?”

I didn’t reply.

“That’s not the real reason, is it?”

“Maybe not.”

“What was the real reason?”

The woman drank some more beer, and again refilled her glass. Her arm had come out in goosebumps, and the flesh looked dry and white.

“Maybe I was burnt out.”

My students didn’t ask all that much of me in the class-room, but more often than not I would get the feeling that they must require something, and I would give them something that turned out not to be what they wanted at all. Then I would get into a muddle about whether I had needed to foist it on them. That’s what burnt me out. The whole thing was a charade.

“Well,” the woman announced suddenly, “time to hit the sack,” and then, without bothering to clear away any of the dirty dishes, she pressed herself against the wooden post in a corner. How she did it I’ll never know, but she managed to flatten herself out completely, wind herself against the surface of the wood, and slither round up to the very top. Once she reached the ceiling, she stopped, and, when I looked at her a second later, she was a snake. Looking just like an image that someone had painted of a snake curled up there, she closed her eyes.

After that, she didn’t budge, and nothing I did—calling up at her, even bringing a long stick and giving her a poke with it—had any effect.

The next morning, the snake was still there, in the same spot. I wondered if I wasn’t being a bit reckless, but I decided to leave her as she was, and set off to work.

When I arrived, Mr Kosuga was standing outside raising the shutter. I could hear a sound like gunshots in the near distance.

“Bird-scaring rockets,” Mr Kosuga said, before I’d even said a thing about the noise. “Do you know about bird-scaring rockets, Miss Sanada?”

“No,” I said, and he proceeded to give me an explanation.

Bird-scaring rockets, Mr Kosuga explained, are a kind of device—like guns but without bullets—that produce loud bangs, used by farmers to deter unwanted animal visitors from the rice paddies. They are about eighty centimetres long.

“When we first set up shop, we had wild boars coming out of the forest. We’d hear shots all the time. It was like a full-blown battle raging. Huge bangs going off in the early morning.”

He told me, chuckling, that for a time after he and Nishiko arrived in the area, whenever he heard the sound, he’d think her ex-husband had come after them and was taking potshots at him. Brought up in the city, he wasn’t used to the noise.

And that was three years after Nishiko had left her Kyoto home, Mr Kosuga added. He left the filterless cigarette in his mouth unlit.

“I assumed it was some sort of practice,” I told him.

Mr Kosuga looked puzzled.

“The Self-Defence Forces,” I added.

“Ohhh,” he mouthed. The cigarette, stuck to his upper lip, made an upward movement in tandem.

“Practice. Training. For battle,” he said. “Yes, I see.” He went on: “You can’t be too careful.”

Unsure how I ought to respond, I just looked off to one side slightly.

Mr Kosuga started singing some sort of song, in a nasal tone.

The song seemed somehow familiar.

The bird-scaring rockets went off faintly in the distance.

When I went inside the shop, the air still had a chill about it. There was no sign of Nishiko. Every so often she didn’t come in, and today was probably one of those days. Her big toe was probably acting up. Nishiko suffered from gout.

I dusted the items on the shelves, and sprinkled water over the pavement in front of the shop, carrying out Nishiko’s daily tasks. Then, rather than coffee, since that would be encroaching too much, I made green tea for two, sat down in front of the desk, and with nothing else to do, just sipped my tea.

In a while the telephone started ringing, I had to note down orders, and go back to check what we had in stock—and before I knew it, hours had passed. Mr Kosuga came back from his deliveries, and as we were having our third cup of green tea the sun started to go down. In the hours I spent sitting there, the thought of the snake occasionally flitted through my mind, but whenever I tried to focus on it, the thought dissolved. Just once, during a telephone call from a priest from Shōsenji Temple, one of our long-time customers, I was sure I heard him say the word “snake”. But in fact he’d said “simple vestment”, slurring some of the syllables.

However, Mr Kosuga brought the topic up as soon as he came back.

“You know that snake that you mentioned,” he said, checking the items customers had ordered in the ledger. “If it comes to your place, you will send it packing, won’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“That snake that you mentioned.”

I looked at him. He looked back. I could see it dawning on him that the snake had already moved in with me.

“So it’s too late,” he said.

“Yes.”

“So you’re really sure you can’t do anything about it.”

He was being a little insistent, it seemed to me, but the next instant he began to croon, in that high little voice, the same ditty he’d been singing that morning.

Was he dreaming—engrossed in his own thoughts? Or was he in some sort of a tight spot? With Mr Kosuga, it was always difficult to tell. Maybe it was a bit of both. I was on the point of asking myself whether I’d been stupid to be so heedless, carrying on with my tasks, delaying coming to any decision about what to do with the snake, when it suddenly occurred to me where I’d heard that song. It was at a local festival, coming out of a float sponsored by a credit union near the station. Those lyrics, You can’t be too careful, set somehow to a musical arrangement, and recorded on a tape that ran on and on, had blared out while the float paraded through the streets. I had sat daydreaming inside the shop, which despite the festival had remained open for business, trying to stop the words of the jingle from entering my brain. But it seemed they had found their way in after all.

“Send it packing.”

“You think?”

“If you can, I’d advise, yes.”

“But can I?”

Mr Kosuga rubbed his brow with the palm of his hand, and didn’t reply. He put some banknotes in a linen drawstring bag, and locked up the till. Facing a figure of the Buddha inside one of the glass cases, he muttered namandabu namandabu, then switched the gas taps to the closed position, and placed a little saucer with a mound of purifying salt by the door of the washroom. Finally, he pulled down the shutter and turned off the lights.

“I’m not the wisest man in the world,” he said, “but there’s no need to take on responsibility for every stray that comes your way.”

All very well, I thought. But sometimes you only know what you should take on and what you should not when you don’t have the choice. But I didn’t say this out loud to Mr Kosuga.

I made my way home, wondering whether the snake would have left or whether she’d still be there. Already the snake was at the centre of my thoughts.

The snake was there. She was in her human form.

“Welcome back, Hiwako, dear,” she said.

“Yes, I’m home!” I replied, feeling as if we’d been greeting each other like this for years.

After that, she didn’t say anything else. I took a bath and did my laundry. Unwilling to take my clothes off in front of her, I did all my changing inside the bathroom, which was a bit cramped. When I emerged, in pyjamas that were still damp from the steam, the woman immediately brought out a beer.

“Come, let’s have a drink,” she said.

I was about to refuse, but the sight of the beer made me want to have some. Once I’d had a drink, the dishes of food started to tempt me, and then I had to have another drink. I glanced at the woman. She was looking completely relaxed.

“Hiwako, dear, I wonder if you remember,” she began. The area around her eyes had started to flush a deep red colour. “That time you fell out of a tree?”

Fell out of a tree? This was the first I’d heard of it.

“Your little friend Gen from next door ran round yelling, ‘Hiwako’s mum! Hiwako’s had a fall. She’s fallen out of a tree!’ It gave me such a fright, I almost collapsed!”

She was staring steadily at the air a few inches in front of her face, and her voice got a little loud. “I rushed over, and there you were sitting right underneath it. ‘So you’re OK,’ I said, and you said, ‘No, that’s the end of me.’ That’s so typical of you, Hiwako dear, to give that kind of an answer.”

I had no recollection of any such incident. “Are you sure you haven’t mixed me up with someone else?”

“No. How could I be mistaken—your very own mother?”

“My mother is in Shizuoka.” This was beginning to annoy me.

The woman went on, regardless: “Yes, that’s true, but I’m also your mother.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Hiwako, darling. Trust me. I know.”

I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

The woman’s skin had a glossy, damp sheen. She was looking remarkably like a snake. The thought went through my mind that I had, just this minute, taken on responsibility for this woman, like it or not. I’d had this feeling any number of times, but the specific details had faded from memory.

The woman gazed at me with a doting expression.

“Hiwako, dearest. I want to take care of you,” she said, in a cloying voice, and curled herself round into a ball. Then, before I knew it, she’d reverted to being a snake, and slithered up to the ceiling. She became like the image of a snake that someone had painted up there, and she wouldn’t be budged no matter how much I prodded and pulled.

I laid out my futon in a corner of the room, as far away as possible from the snake. I didn’t expect to be able to sleep, but I dropped off immediately and slept soundly all night.

“Miss Sanada, your voice seems weak today,” I heard Nishiko say from behind me as I sat checking sales slips, sipping my tea. I paused to take this in. She had only arrived in the shop a moment before, and we hadn’t yet said a word. Every so often Nishiko would come out with such statements. I’d arrive at work in the morning to be told as soon as she saw me, “You ate too much last night, Miss Sanada, didn’t you?” or “Today you’re going to feel down in the dumps all day.”

But she was often on target. Today my voice was little more than a peep, and my eyes wouldn’t open wide.

“Good morning,” I said, over my shoulder.

“What did I tell you?” she said, and smiled.

Mr Kosuga entered the shop, making a loud noise. The racket came from the object he carried in his hands. It was covered in a cloth. He put the object up on the glass counter of the case, and removed the cloth. It was a box. There was the sound of something moving around inside it, frantically.

“What’s that?” Nishiko asked.

Mr Kosuga put a finger to his lips: “Shh! You know—that.”

“Oh, that.”

I pretended to be taken up with the sales slips, and waited for what they would say next, but that was it. The smell of a lit cigarette reached me. I heard Mr Kosuga sigh.

For lunch Nishiko called a local restaurant for delivery of three orders of tempura over rice, and the three of us sat in the little room in the back and had our meal. About once a month, they would treat me to a large deluxe order of ten-don, with one extra prawn and an extra-generous heap of pickled aubergine.

Mr Kosuga recounted a story he had learnt from the priest whom he had made a delivery to that morning. The priest had told him about his son, whom he had been hoping to hand down his priesthood to, but who had, much to his concern, gone off to live in America. The boy was buying up quantities of old clothes, he said, sending them back to Japan, and selling them off at an exorbitant price. Is there really such a demand in Japan, nowadays, for old clothes? Mr Kosuga had enquired. And the priest had assured him that, yes, anything, so long as it was vintage, was a hot ticket for young people, who snapped it all up for huge sums of money.

“So is that the kind of thing young people go for now?” Mr Kosuga asked me.

I had no idea, so I replied, “Who knows?”

Mr Kosuga looked at me in wonderment. “Come to think of it, Miss Sanada,” he said, “your fashion isn’t exactly typical of the youth of today.”

Not quite understanding what kind of people he was referring to with that phrase “the youth of today”, I didn’t grace this with a reply.

“Times have changed, dear,” Nishiko chimed in. “It’s not like the old days, when we’d get all dressed up just to stroll round Shijō Kawaramachi in case we ran into someone we knew.”

“Mm, maybe,” Mr Kosuga replied, crunching on his prawn tempura.

I was silently pondering how things were between the snake and me. With the snake, I never felt that sense of distance, of being separated by a wall, which I felt when I was in conversation with Mr Kosuga and Nishiko. Even when I was with people who might count as “the youth of today”, the students I taught when I was a teacher, for example, or my peers and colleagues—or even with my mother, my father, and my brothers—some sort of a wall would be there. Perhaps we only managed to get along because of the wall.

Between the snake and me, though, there was no such wall.

As usual, the tempura over rice sat heavy in my stomach. My voice was weak, and I felt lacking in energy, until evening time.

As I walked through Midori Park, I recalled the story of my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather had been a peasant farmer, with just over an acre of rice paddies and tea bushes. One day he just disappeared. No news came, and my great-grandmother found herself having to fend for a family of five, and to work in the fields. Three years later, in the spring, my great-grandfather came back, and who knows what transpired between him and my great-grandmother, but they took up with each other again as if nothing had happened. Years passed without incident, and long after, when their children had grown up and had children of their own, and my great-grandmother had died, and my great-grandfather was old and frail, he began to tell people what he’d done during the time he’d been away.

Apparently, he had gone off to live with a bird.

The bird had come to my great-grandfather in the form of a woman one autumn day and seduced him, bewitching him with her lovely perfume and delicate hands. So he went off with her, abandoning his family. They lived together for two years somewhere far away, but by the third winter the woman started to treat him coldly.

“It was the bird in her revealing its true nature,” my great-grandfather told people. “She started saying things like, ‘How am I ever going to lay eggs with a feckless husband like you!’ And one day she flew away, with a flutter of her wings, saying, ‘I want to build a nest!’ And so it was that I came back to my family.”

I’d heard this story from my mother when I was a student in middle school, and I remember thinking it was a very odd fable. It didn’t seem to have any point to it. Even now I can’t really see any moral to be drawn. Was it that frustration inevitably awaited a man who abandoned his family for a beautiful but worthless woman? But my great-grandfather seemed to have enjoyed his life with her too much for that. Perhaps it was that women are utterly strange and unpredictable? But the woman’s reaction to my great-grandfather seemed, if anything, rational and understandable. Was it, then, that patriarchal authority in the Meiji period was so strong that a woman could say nothing, even when her husband left her for several years—and that modern women should be sure to assert themselves more? But my great-grandmother had not been exactly submissive to her husband, from what I had heard.

Even if it wasn’t a fable, and was absolutely true, what was happening to me was a little different, I decided. Nevertheless, I remembered it the way a person who had once been nearly devoured by a shark might recall a story of someone who was swallowed by a whale.

The dried leaves of Midori Park raced across the ground, blowing about in the wind. It was close to nightfall, but there were lots of children out in the park, playing and yelling. Some on bikes pedalled at breakneck speed on the park promenades. Any number of times a child on a bike came racing up behind me and whizzed by, and my hair would be whipped along in the air stream.

I was conscious of something at the back of my throat, catching, making it difficult to breathe.

“What are you?” I demanded, as soon as I set foot inside the apartment. I wouldn’t be able to ask once she started plying me with food and drink.

“Your mother, of course! How many times do you want me to say it?” the woman replied. She was absorbed in checking her hair for split ends. Though she normally wore it up, tonight she had let it down. Her hair was very long. When she wore it down, it made her look slightly older.

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You don’t understand?”

She opened her mouth wide. I assumed that because she was a snake, her tongue would be forked, so I averted my gaze quickly. But my glimpse of it told me it wasn’t forked. It was an ordinary human tongue.

“You’re always playing the innocent, aren’t you, Hiwako, dear. It doesn’t impress me.”

All right, but I still didn’t understand.

“I went for a little walk around here today,” she said, changing her tone. “It’s a nice area, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“There are too many children, though. Children these days are very badly behaved.”

“Do you think so?”

“I saw a goat. In a house belonging to a family by the name of Narita. Did you know they had a goat, Hiwako, dear?”

While we talked, she brought out a bottle of beer, and we ended up having a meal. As I ate and drank, I felt sure she was secretly grinning to herself, laughing at me playing the innocent, and I stole glances at her, over and over. She was smiling, in fact, keeping my glass filled, and then heating up the clear soup on the stove. She looked lovely. I liked her face.

Two weeks had passed since the snake had come to my place. In the shop, we were taking inventory. We did this every spring and autumn. There were three shelves from floor to ceiling arranged with supplies. I had to write down everything that was on these shelves, as well as everything on display, on memos made by Nishiko from scraps of paper clipped together.

“Ten Indian rosewood with agate spacer beads.”

“Seven single strands of clear crystal.”

“Twelve strands of sandalwood.”

I would give the memos to Nishiko, who would transfer the information to the ledger. It was the way they had done it in the old days.

“Do you think we might use a computer, Miss Sanada?” Mr Kosuga would sometimes say. “We don’t need one—our turnover is too small,” Nishiko would reply, and Mr Kosuga would immediately agree and the subject would be dropped. But he would pick it up again shortly. “Wouldn’t using a computer make things easier, Miss Sanada?” The subject never went any further.

At midday, Mr Kosuga returned to the shop with a box again. Something was moving around inside it, frantically, again. Nishiko went to put the box in the storeroom. Half the inventory had been accounted for, and she decided we could do the rest tomorrow.

I set off to buy some cakes to have with our tea. Mr Kosuga came out after me.

“Miss Sanada, let’s go to a cafe. Don’t bother buying anything today.”

As I sat opposite Mr Kosuga in a cafe by the station, I remembered how we had sat like this together before, that time in the motorway service area, on the way back from the temple in Kōfu.

“Is that snake still living with you?” he enquired, as I had expected he would.

“Mmm… sort of.”

The snake had settled in comfortably in my place. Maybe I felt grateful now for the way my dinner would be cooked and ready to eat when I got back in the evenings. I had never minded returning at night to a dark apartment, but once you try living with someone, I could see, you do get thoroughly used to it.

Mr Kosuga put talk of my snake aside. “There’s something I’d like to tell you.”

And this is what he said:

“We have had, as a matter of fact, a snake living with us now for, well, it must be more than twenty years. She seems to have come along with Nishiko—she claims to be her aunt. At first I did everything I could to get rid of her, she was a nuisance, she gave me an unpleasant feeling. But I couldn’t, in the end. Somehow, every time I tried, some twist of fate, something, would always happen—a relative would suddenly be on the verge of death, things between Nishiko and me would get out of joint, one of us would get an injury. A Shinto priest even came and conducted a purification ceremony, but he said there was no sign of an evil spirit haunting us. So even after we had an exorcism, the snake was still hanging around. After a while, her presence came to seem almost natural, and I managed not to let her bother me. But, recently, she seems close to death, and she can no longer take human form—or if she does, it’s only for brief periods. She just lies there, insisting that we cater to her every need. She won’t eat anything but freshly killed birds and frogs. Today I went out and bought some birds to feed her. I don’t understand Nishiko. ‘Just throw her out,’ I tell her. But she shakes her head obstinately, and carries on feeding her, happily. This isn’t the woman I thought I married. It’s scary.”

Mr Kosuga rubbed his forehead three times.

“I mean it. It’s scary,” he said.

What exactly was he referring to? It did sound a little scary, it was true, but whether it was the snake or something in Nishiko that scared him, probably even Mr Kosuga would have found it hard to say. Those words of my snake flashed in my mind. “You’re always playing the innocent, aren’t you, Hiwako, dear.”

At the cafe, Mr Kosuga asked for fluffy pancakes, and I ordered a slice of pear charlotte. We stayed for about an hour, and then returned to the Kanakana-Dō.

The woman tapped me on the shoulder. When I glanced around, she leant forward and rubbed her face against mine. Her cheek was very cold. I felt a sense of completeness—like when you hug a pet, or when you’re snug under a covering. The woman wrapped her arms tightly around me. Her arms, too, were quite cold, and I noticed the flesh on her fingertips seemed to have become a little reptilian. But it didn’t put me off that she was reverting to her snake form. If anything, it put me at ease. If there had been nothing snakelike about her and she had coiled herself around me in her human form, I would have had much more difficulty. She and I were exactly the same height. We formed a perfect pair, our arms tightly wrapped around each other’s body.

As we coiled, she said:

“Hiwako, dear, it’s so cosy and comfortable in the snake world…”

I nodded, and she continued:

“Hiwako, dear, wouldn’t you like to come over?”

Shaking my head, I gently extracted myself from her embrace.

The snake world didn’t hold much appeal for me. Perhaps sensing this, the snake stopped coiling round me, backing off, and sitting in front of me, hugging her knees with her arms.

“Have you ever been betrayed, Hiwako, dear?” she asked, looking up at me seductively.

To be betrayed, you probably first have to be deeply involved. Had I been deeply involved with anything in my life?

I could recall a number of times when I’d been close to people, men, women, sometimes emotionally, sometimes physically, and also a certain period of time when I’d had some sort of conflict with someone, though I couldn’t really remember whom, in a place where I had gone in to work every day. But I hadn’t ever been deeply involved. Maybe there were times that might have counted as involvement and I was unconsciously trying to forget them. But if I could forget them, they probably didn’t mean that much.

“I don’t remember.”

At this, the woman opened her mouth wide and laughed.

I waited for her to ask something else, but she didn’t. Instead, she slithered up to the ceiling. Staring down at me, she called out, “Hiwako, dear! Hiwako, dear!” and reverted to her snake form.

And she kept on calling out: “Hiwako, dear! Hiwako, dear!” That voice of hers would not stop. It reverberated unceasingly in my ears, merging with a swishing sound. The sound of a snake’s scales rubbing up against each other. “Hiwako, dear! Hiwako, dear!” Shu-ru-ru-RUUU, shu-ru-ru-RUU.

A strange, unearthly sound. Like the sound of a strong wind blowing at night.

Arriving at the shop one morning, I found Nishiko sitting idly gazing into space.

The pavement in front of the shop had been sprinkled with water, the saucers with salt heaped even higher than usual, and the interior thoroughly dusted and cleaned.

Mr Kosuga was nowhere to be seen.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Oh, it’s you, Miss Sanada.” Nishiko’s voice was like that of a person who has been adrift at sea and only just made it back to dry land. Something was at her feet. There was a slight sense of a presence.

“I opened up the shop early today,” she continued, in the same listless voice.

“What time was that?”

“Oh, I suppose four or so.”

Suppressing my surprise, I took a step back, and a bamboo basket beside her on the floor came into view. The presence was inside it.

“Somehow I couldn’t sleep. These days it takes ages to get light in the mornings. I got bored lying there in the dark.”

So she had come in at four o’clock, opened the shutter, turned on the lights, and then busied herself quietly in the shop? And when she’d got tired of that, she’d just sat there completely motionless, staring out into the darkness?

“Has Mr Kosuga gone out?”

“You tell me. He hasn’t come into the shop yet. He’s probably still sleeping. Recently, he’s been sleeping like a log. All he ever does is sleep. I sometimes wonder whether he’ll ever wake up.”

Her tone was oddly cold. Whatever was inside the basket stirred.

“Er…” I hesitated.

Nishiko looked up. Her eyes were two shining spots. Narrow slits at first, they gradually widened, protruding, swelling. They were brimming with tears.

“That basket. What’s in it?”

Nishiko’s eyes were getting bigger and bigger. Now they seemed almost to be bursting, half out of their sockets, the pupils surrounded by white. But in the next instant, all returned to normal.

“That?” she said. “Oh, just a basket.”

Once more her eyes started to protrude. Her eyeballs seemed to have taken on a life of their own, and were expanding with speed.

“There’s a snake in there, isn’t there?”

“Want to look?” The moment she said the word “look” her eyeballs went back to normal.

The atmosphere in the shop was definitely peculiar today. Where on earth was Mr Kosuga? Was he really simply lazing lethargically about… or sleeping like a log?

Nishiko lifted the lid of the basket. Inside was a large blue-black snake, limp as if dead.

I gasped. With that, the snake raised its head and stared at me with shining eyes that resembled Nishiko’s.

Nishiko had a slight smile on her face. And then she said this to me:

“That’s right, it’s a snake. I heard you have one in your place too, Miss Sanada. That’s rather unfriendly of you, not to have told me. So, you’re a snake person too. I’m sort of relieved to know it. It makes me like you better. You know, I might seem like a mild-mannered woman, but the truth is that, when it comes to people, I have extreme likes and dislikes. I bet that surprises you, doesn’t it, Miss Sanada? To you I was simply someone who puts salt in the saucers every day, who threads together the prayer beads, and who many years ago eloped—someone who is basically irrelevant to you. You don’t like me particularly, nor dislike me. You just wanted to continue with your happy, humdrum life. But you know, when I take a liking to someone, I take a strong liking. Look at my husband: I was once madly in love with him. But he no longer loves me. He thought he liked me, perhaps loved me, changed his mind, changed his mind again, then changed his mind three more times, and now finally he finds he dislikes me. But even amid his feelings of dislike, he has a few patches of attraction. That’s what makes him so unwell. That’s why all he does is sleep.”

As Nishiko talked on in a low voice, the snake glided its way over the edge of the basket, got into her lap, then draped itself over her shoulders.

“What’s your snake like, Miss Sanada? I want to know all about it. My own snake, you know—well, she’s about to take leave of this world. How will I endure life without her? How can something die, when I love it so much? At one time I wanted to become a snake. I wish now I had taken the chance. My snake did ask me to go over. I’m sure your snake asks you to go over too. Snakes will keep asking you, again and again. But I refused each time. I guess I thought it would be unnatural. Not that I know well what natural is. So my snake must have resigned herself. Eventually, she gave up asking. I’ve lost track of how long ago that was. If I were asked now, of course I’d say yes. I’m sure it’s lovely in the snake world. All warm, with nothing to make you feel different. The kind of place you can relax into, and sleep on and on. Why haven’t you gone over, Miss Sanada? It must be so cosy and comfortable…”

Cosy and comfortable. Nishiko’s voice reminded me of that of the woman in my apartment. Her voice was utterly different in quality, but they seemed to come from the same source. After a while, I lost track of whether I was in the shop or in my apartment. Of course, in reality I knew where I was and that it was Nishiko, talking away in her tremulous voice, Nishiko, telling me her thoughts. But I longed to swallow what she was saying, swallow it whole. Maybe if I did that, I would be able to go straight over. Over to the snake world, where I could pretend I knew nothing, and just sleep on and on…

A chill ran up my spine as I realized what I was thinking.

Nishiko’s eyes were no longer distended. They were back to the shape they were normally. The snake was coiling about her body, droopingly, almost lifelessly. Soon Nishiko stopped talking, and the Kanakana-Dō returned to the way it always was. The snake’s scales were jagged and rough.

Speaking of snakes, there’s something I’ve often thought about.

It has to do with being intimate, skin-to-skin, with another person. The first time I bring my body close to another person’s, I cannot close my eyes. The person’s arms wrap around my body, my hands entwine with theirs, and together we are on the verge of feeling that we’re losing our human form. Only, I will be unable to let go of mine. I remain locked within my human body, unable, despite all efforts, to get to that point. If I could close my eyes, I would be able to sink into the other person, merge my form with theirs. But my eyes will not close.

All I can do is watch, eyes open, while the other person moves, or resists me, or submits to what I desire.

If, after the first time, we bring our bodies together a number of times, little by little my eyes will droop, the taut outer layer of my skin will start to loosen, and very slowly, it begins to happen. I reach the point when, without having to try, without even having to think about trying, I am almost there.

And then, just when I am on the cusp, I see the other person change into a snake, for an instant. The change doesn’t happen to me. It happens to the other person—whoever it is that I am skin-to-skin with. It can be a red snake, a blue snake, a grey snake—a snake of any colour.

This is how it always is. Some people I have stopped getting close to at too early a stage for them to turn into snakes. But anybody I have been with for any length of time has turned into a snake once. Why do they make the change, while I don’t? Perhaps I do turn into a snake, in fact, while they are having their snake moment. But I remember so vividly the horror I feel when I see the person I am with make their change. Surely, I would never feel like that if I had become a snake myself.

The woman in my apartment takes the form of a snake every night. And with her, I feel no horror. Was she referring to this when she teased me for “playing the innocent”? Was this what she meant when she urged me, making that shu-ru-ru-RUU sound, to stop putting on my act and come over and join her in the snake world?

Mr Kosuga was starting to look thin and pale.

One day I glanced at him from behind, opening the doors of the Buddhist family altar. It was as if I was viewing him through a ripple of hot air. I could almost see the rosewood of the door through him.

“Mr Kosuga!” I exclaimed.

“What?” he said, turning round. He looked a bit like a featureless ghost: the colour had quite drained out of his eyes, nose, and lips.

“Is something the matter?” I asked.

Mr Kosuga looked puzzled. And then he asked me in his turn: “Miss Sanada, isn’t your colour strangely dark today?”

Moving away from the altar, he came over to me and gave my lower jaw a few strokes with the palm of his hand. He might as well have been petting an animal.

“You’ve changed, Miss Sanada,” he said, stroking my jaw a bit more. “There’s a prickliness in the air all around you.”

On the day Nishiko had been sitting there with her snake, she remained in the shop till evening. Mr Kosuga hadn’t made an appearance at all. Not one customer came into the shop, and Nishiko and her snake continued to sit, not making a single movement. I spent the day doing odd tasks, finishing up what was left to take of the inventory, noting the accounts, as Nishiko had instructed me, in an old ledger. No sign of life came from Nishiko or the snake. As the hours passed, they came to seem more and more like some sort of statue.

When closing time came, Nishiko rose, unsteadily, and took an envelope that she’d apparently prepared beforehand out of the bosom of her kimono. “Your bonus,” she said, and handed it to me.

I took the envelope, bowed my thanks, and asked whether I should close up the shop. Nishiko nodded absently, as if she didn’t care one way or the other. Conscious of their two presences, I locked up, turned off the lights, except for the one in the area where they sat, and prepared to leave. Sitting there in a pool of light, Nishiko and the snake were once again like a statue. This might be the last time I ever see her, I thought as I left.

And she did stop coming into the shop after that.

“How is Nishiko doing these days?” I asked Mr Kosuga.

“Well, a lot better than she was. She still can’t walk properly, though. The doctor says she should try to get up, move about. But she says she doesn’t want to.”

The day after Nishiko and her snake had sat like a statue, Mr Kosuga informed me that Nishiko had suffered an injury. She had been going upstairs with the snake draped around her, when she lost her footing and tumbled down the stairs.

“The snake was crushed to death underneath her,” he told me, in a flat tone of voice. “She’s now in the garden. I asked Nishiko where she wanted her buried, and she told me somewhere close by.”

He rolled his head helplessly a few times, and with a small grunt hoisted a box of prayer beads onto his shoulder. Single-stranded oval bodhi seeds, bound for a nearby temple—they were the last beads Nishiko had threaded. I remembered how with her usual total absorption she had strung them together, her legs tucked under her, on a raised section of the floor.

“I’m wondering whether Nishiko is now going to die,” Mr Kosuga said.

Shocked, I looked at him. He was even paler than before, and seemed quite lacking in energy.

“You can’t mean that.”

“It’d be a terrible loss if she did,” Mr Kosuga said, rubbing his forehead in his usual manner.

The smell of incense was suddenly strong, and the air seemed to throb with energy. It was as if several invisible creatures, foxes perhaps, had just dashed through the shop. Mr Kosuga rubbed his forehead again.

“It’d be a terrible loss. I really don’t want her to die,” he muttered, though to whom I wasn’t sure, then adjusted the position of the box, and walked out the door.

That day, left to my own devices, I made tea, ordered myself a deluxe bowl of tempura on rice for lunch, and when I was not attending to customers, I wrote entries in the ledger. From time to time, I thought about my snake.

My entire apartment was charged with the presence of snake. When I say snake, I mean pure snake, not woman.

The woman was nowhere to be seen, but a meal had been prepared and laid out on the table. So, I thought, I’d see no sign of the woman tonight.

I opened a drawer—and scores of little snakes came slithering out from between the notebooks and pens. Gliding up my arms, they reached my neck, and from there they burrowed straight into my ears. I nearly jumped out of my skin. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but the instant they’d penetrated my ears, they changed into a liquid and carried on streaming in, deeper and deeper. They were ice-cold. In an effort to keep out the little snakes that hadn’t yet got into my ears, I shook my head fiercely. But that only made the snakes that had turned into liquid in my ears become more viscous as they pushed on inwards, into my inner ears.

The viscous fluid filled my semicircular canals. It worked its way through to my auditory ossicles. My ears were now so crammed with snake I could hear nothing, only a distant tiny sound somewhere deep inside as the snakes pushed stickily farther in. The liquid snake brushed against nerves in my ears, and the sensation of being touched there spread outwards, getting into my head. When my head filled with snake, the idea of snake transmitted itself centrifugally to every part of me. My fingertips, my lips, my eyelids, my palms, my feet, my ankles, my calves, my soft belly, my back, the hair on my body—everything that was exposed to the air apprehended snake and broke out in goosebumps. My flesh crept in horror.

Then it passed, all signs of the presence of snake ceased, and I was released. But after five minutes, the sensation of snake took over again. It was as if every few minutes I was breaking out in cyclical malarial fever.

This was not something I wanted to spend time doing.

Rousing the body that was feeling so much discomfort, I made my way towards the dining table. Despite my unusual state, I was hungry, and I crammed the food the woman had prepared down my gullet. Boiled spinach with a tasty ground-sesame seasoning. A sour-sweet vinegar salad of grated carrot and seaweed. Mackerel marinated in sweet miso broth. Simmered yam. A bowl of white rice topped with tiny white fish, minced scallions, and a sprinkling of white sesame seeds. As the food was going down, the soft tissues of my mouth were changing back and forth, now into those of a snake, now into those of a human.

I’d never had so much going on before.

I will not become a snake, I will not. Even as I was saying this to myself, I was devouring the food prepared by a snake, swallowing every last morsel. I worked my jaws onto the food, got it down and swallowed, devoured more of it, got that down too, licked the plates, and then paused and listened for the sounds of all the things that cry in the night. Then I lay down and waited for the next snake onslaught, and then for it to pass, directing my mind away from where I was, forward, forward to a distant horizon, as far away from snake as possible. Stretching out as far as it would go, small and long and thin, my mind tried to feel out any nook or cranny, searching for an exit, but everything was sealed, snake filled every crack, and I was simply thrust back, defeated.

This was uncomfortable in the extreme.

Hiwako, dear, you’d love being a snake. It’s so cosy and comfortable… The voice rained down on me from all the skies of the world. I was soaking-wet with what it was telling me. The second drawer I opened was packed with a mediumsized snake that was prettily coloured, and when I closed it, hurriedly, the drawer below it sprang open to reveal a gigantic snake, coiled up. Suddenly, there were snakes slithering over my prone body, gliding all over the room, and once they’d tired of that, they got back on top of me, where they proceeded to form shapes of towers and rafts, and lock into puzzles.

Hiwako, de-e-a-r! Hiwako, de-e-a-r! How long are you going to just lie there? Hearing my mother’s voice, I sat up immediately and tried to get to my feet, but then I thought it could be the snake trying to ensnare me, and I found myself unable to move. Don’t become a snake, Hiwako, dear! What’s the point! You’re your own person! my mother continued. This had the effect of sickening me. Since she was so against it, I felt almost as if I should try it. That’s right, Hiwako, dear—isn’t that what I’ve been saying? I’m the one who’s your mother, and if your mother’s a snake, it stands to reason you’re a snake too… That was the snake speaking. The snake and my mother started to quarrel with each other. On and on they quarrelled, looming, enormous presences, the snake trying to shrink my mother by hurling at her any snakes in the room—little snakes, wriggling snakes, any snakes within reach—and my mother trying to beat the snake back by hurling incantations, imprecations, and prayers.

I no longer knew where I was, what I was doing, but my body continued intermittently to turn into a snake, regardless, and after a while that physical sensation of snake began gradually to feel quite comfortable. Wondering whether this meant that at some point all of me was going to become snake, I lay there experiencing in equal parts a sense of dread and a sense of calm expectation, the tears falling, as the night continued to deepen.

“Miss Sanada, you seem a bit tired recently,” Mr Kosuga remarked, as he ground the beans for morning coffee. Since Nishiko had been bedridden, he had assumed responsibility for this task.

I was indeed extremely sleep-deprived since I now had to deal with the threat of snake onslaughts on a nightly basis. More than once I considered throwing in the towel and just going straight over, but some obstinacy deep inside me refused to let me give in.

“How is Nishiko?” I asked, sipping my coffee.

Mr Kosuga’s eyes grew moist.

“You know, she’s recovering much quicker than I thought.” Despite his relieved tone, he still looked very pale.

Nishiko had emerged from her bed, he explained, at first dragging herself around with her arms, then holding on to furniture like a baby making its first steps. Now she was able to walk slowly without any support.

“You haven’t had any other visits?”

“So far, no.”

“Does Nishiko really not mind, being without her snake?”

“She doesn’t seem too bothered.” Mr Kosuga seemed dazed.

Snakes were now coming round to my apartment to pester me, night after night, hanging around in varying numbers. Had Nishiko really escaped from her snake’s spell? Had she managed to separate herself once and for all from the snake world?

Mr Kosuga was to make a delivery to Ganshinji Temple in Kōfu. It had been some time since our last visit. He seemed to be stifling yawns all day, and I asked him if he was short of sleep. He admitted he was fatigued, and was worried he might not be able to keep awake during the drive. At his suggestion we closed up shop and went off in the van together.

When we arrived at Ganshinji Temple, the priest eagerly launched into stories about his possessions. Mr Kosuga, sitting there in an uncharacteristically slouched pose, was giving little nods, clearly off in his own world. We both found ourselves so drowsy that several times in the course of the priest’s stories one of us dozed off and had to be nudged by the other to stay awake.

“And speaking of snakes…,” the priest now began.

Suddenly, the topic had shifted, catching both of us unawares.

“There was once a man who took a snake for a wife. Well, actually, that man was… me.”

The priest observed both of us steadily.

After a moment of silence, he resumed:

“Snake wives make the very best kind of wife. They look after their husbands devotedly, they do housework swiftly and skilfully, and they’re also excellent at keeping accounts. And when it comes to certain night-time activities, well, they’re perfection itself. They don’t have the hot temper you find in so many women, and, best of all, they don’t speak much. When you give them their instructions, they listen, looking at you steadily, with those big, crystal-clear eyes. They have something stubborn about them, but not stubborn like human women: human women get stubborn for emotional reasons; snakes are stubborn because that’s their nature. But then again, this means they’ll keep any promise they make. As for children, you won’t get any human children with a snake: you’ll only get eggs, and from those eggs, juvenile snakes. But as long as my snake’s happy, I have no complaints. I’ve never liked children anyway.”

The priest paused, and clapped his hands together. In a few moments the priest’s wife appeared, carrying trays of soba, as on our previous visit. She had her hair bound in a low bun, and she wore a long-sleeved apron over her dark kimono.

“Please start,” she said, after she had set the trays in front of us.

But instead of retreating to the kitchen, she sat down where she was.

“I’m now completely used to my snake’s ways,” the priest said. He turned to his wife: “From what I can tell, though, that’s not the case with our guests.”

The priest’s wife gazed back at him, widening her big eyes. Her eyes were crystal-clear, a bluish-white, and they were wet all over. Eyes that drew you into them.

The priest’s wife hesitated. “If I may say something…,” she said, in a low, husky voice.

Mr Kosuga, bewildered, stared at her.

“Some snakes take a little more getting used to, sir.”

The priest’s wife’s gaze was fixed on the priest. She did not cast so much as a glance at Mr Kosuga or me.

Then she continued: “I don’t think we can say a thing about these people’s snakes, sweetie pie, unless we’ve met them face-to-face.”

The moment she was done speaking, the antique ceramics and knick-knacks that were lined up on the antique display shelves of the room started to rattle. Nobody said a word. When the cabinet with gold latches that was shaking violently came at last to a standstill, the priest’s wife got up and switched on the light. It was not until then that I realized that it was quite dark outside. Although it was early afternoon, black clouds were hanging over the sky.

Still nobody said a word. Suddenly, without a sound, the drawer of the gold-latched cabinet slid open, and from it dozens of little snakes came slithering out. Each glided across the floor to the priest’s wife, who picked them up one by one, and deposited them into the bosom of her kimono. A moist, warm breeze was blowing all around the temple. When she’d stowed all the snakes away, the priest’s wife slid smoothly over the floor, going first to Mr Kosuga. She wrapped herself around him, and gave his head a lick. Then she came and did the same to me.

“What do you think? Could you learn to like a snake like me?” the priest’s wife asked, in a husky voice.

The priest looked on, with an expression of satisfaction.

“Such a question. I wouldn’t know how to,” Mr Kosuga, turning bright crimson, said in confusion.

“Don’t you like me?”

Mr Kosuga, now sweating profusely, managed to reply:

“It’s not a question of that. I’ve never been comfortable with this kind of thing.”

“And what about you?” The priest’s wife fixed her big eyes on me. “Am I so different from other snakes you know?”

Was she different? I’d never been all that interested in snakes. I still wasn’t all that crazy about them. It was just that she kept coming at me, insistently begging me to go over to her world. I had no desire to go over. Despite my resistance, though, she didn’t stop trying, and camfe and pestered me again and again. If she kept this up, maybe the day would come when I’d surprise myself and go over to her.

The woman in my apartment was a much fiercer, more demanding creature than this priest’s wife, it seemed to me. With the woman in my apartment coiling herself around me, I never felt cool-headed, the way I was feeling with the priest’s wife right now. But there was some quality that she and I had in common. For me, the tense, tingling feeling that overtook me when she and I were entwined contained something I found thrilling.

“What about you?” the priest’s wife asked me again.

I shook my head from side to side, slowly. The priest and his wife exchanged a look.

The priest’s wife’s body started to get longer and longer, and after a moment or two she transformed into a snake. The snake glided smoothly over to the priest’s lap and then up onto his shoulders, where she proceeded to coil herself around his neck three times. Draped in his snake, the priest launched into yet another story about how one of his possessions had fallen into his hands.

I hadn’t been sure if I’d ever see Nishiko again, but one day there she was, back in the Kanakana-Dō. Incongruously, she seemed full of pep. “Shall I teach you how to thread prayer beads?” she said to me. “You never know—you might be really good at it.” Once again she busied herself around the shop, quietly getting on with her tasks, producing many prayer-bead bracelets. With Nishiko back, the orders for beads, once seemingly in danger of petering out, started to come in again. Mr Kosuga regained a bit of his former colour.

The fine weather continued, and the snake staying at my apartment was once again a woman. As a woman, she was quite ordinary. She had a few snake-ish traces, but she was still much more human than snake. Winter was approaching, so she knitted things and hung the bedding out to air. Any free time she had she seemed to spend out on walks.

One morning, as Nishiko was making coffee, I asked her directly:

“So have you got over your snake now?”

She thought about it a little, then said:

“No. I don’t think I’ll ever be completely over it.”

“Oh.”

“If another snake ever appears in my life, this time I really am going to commit and go over.”

“Really?”

“Well, I suppose it will be a different snake. I’ll have to wait and see.”

And that was the only time we referred to it. After that Nishiko set about teaching me the fine technique of threading prayer beads.

Since the last trip to Ganshinji Temple, I’d felt a kind of continual ringing in my head. Not actually ringing—there was no sound; it was like a little nodule, which vibrated, emitting faint signs of its presence. These signs at first didn’t arouse any particular concern, but gradually they started to exert pressure. As the pressure built up, the nodule became enlarged and firm.

Every so often the woman paid a visit to the shop. Pressing her face up against the beautifully polished glass in the door, she would peer in at us. The first person to notice her would be Mr Kosuga, and he would studiously pretend to ignore her. A moment later, Nishiko would look up, and she would gaze steadily at the woman. The two of them would look thoughtfully at each other for a few moments. Nishiko’s eyes would get narrower, while the woman’s eyes would do the opposite, opening wide. As I watched this exchange, I would feel the nodule inside me vibrate insistently.

“Miss Sanada, she’s here again,” Nishiko would say. “Why not ask her to come in?”

I shook my head, without answering. Twisting the thread, clumsily threading the beads, I concentrated on not looking at the woman outside. The more I tried not to look, the more that nodule vibrated. As she pressed her face hard against the glass, the woman’s nose, eyelids, and forehead appeared stretched and flat, making the upper part of her head seem very snakelike. It was uncanny how, whenever she made her visits, we would have no customers in the shop.

If we pretended we didn’t notice her, eventually she would go away.

After these visits, we would find fragments that looked like moulted skin on the ground. Nishiko carefully swept it all into a dustpan. While she did that, Mr Kosuga and I got on with tasks in the shop. The last and busiest month of the year was approaching.

“Hiwako, dear, I can’t wait any more!” the woman said. She grabbed hold of my legs, forcing me over onto my back. Sitting astride me, she put her fingers round my throat.

“Don’t strangle me. You want me to die?” I yelled.

“But I can’t wait any more!” she yelled back, a crazed look in her eyes.

She was squeezing, tighter and tighter; my body was becoming flushed. An energy field filled the room. Everything seemed to be shuddering. Thrashing around with my legs, I looked for a weak, vulnerable spot on her to attack. The woman was steadily applying more and more pressure with her fingers. I couldn’t get out of her grip.

Saying my name over and over, she squeezed even tighter. Through squinting eyes, I saw the carpet under me flattened, as if wet, and steam was rising from it. The entire room seemed to be boiling.

From the wide-open windows various objects came flying in, hitting the woman as she sat astride me. The woman, hair flying, knocked them aside—shards of metal, crumpled fruit, dead birds… When a blur of confetti in five colours—the five celebratory colours of purple, white, red, yellow, green—blew into the room, the woman momentarily weakened her grip. Quickly I thrust my thumbs between her fingers and started to prise them up, using her hand like a lever. No sooner had I unstuck her fingers than she sprang off and leapt up on the desk.

“Why won’t you wait?” I shouted.

“Because I know you’ll just continue playing the innocent for ever!” she yelled, her eyebrows drawn in an expression of pain.

The words seemed to give her the advantage. I drew back, and immediately she lunged straight onto my head and started pummelling it in a circular motion with her feet. The rough drumming sent me into a warm daze. I was expecting her to try getting my neck into some kind of chokehold, but she simply kept pummelling me with her feet.

It started to seem to me that this fight between us had been going on for hundreds of years. She struck, and I sat there and took it.

I was sick of the unending cycle—I wanted it to be over. Those vibrations, which had been steadily increasing in strength, felt as if they might explode out of me.

With a yell of resolve, I started striking the woman with my fists. My fists entered her body smoothly, getting absorbed within her. She seemed infinitely deep, of infinite capacity. The deeper my fists went into her, the more overpowered I was with that sense of a warm daze. I longed just to close my eyes, to fall against her breast, to hear her calling my name. I longed to turn into a snake, to have her coiling around my hips.

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:

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.