The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [63]
—Well, he went and took his job.
—And after that?
—Well, after that he probably got his pay on payday, and on Sundays I suppose he put on a clean shirt and went to the movies.
—And then …?
—We’ll never know unless we put the question to him directly, will we?
—And when he saved up some money, he probably bought himself a radio, didn’t he …?
At last, he thought, he had finished his climbing, but he had come only halfway. No, that was wrong. It was already flat here. Where had the lights that he had fixed on gone to? He continued walking with a feeling of disbelief. The place where he stood was apparently the ridge of a rather high dune. Why ever couldn’t he see the lights from here? A feeling of apprehension paralyzed his legs. Perhaps his previous laziness was the cause of his failure. He slid down the steep slope, heedless of the direction. It was an unexpectedly long ravine, not only deep but wide too. Many lines of rippling sand lay tangled and confused at the bottom; they troubled his judgment. Even so, he couldn’t understand at all why the lights of the village were not visible. His margin of error was not more than a half mile on either side of his line of advance. He may have missed his way, but it could not be serious. He wanted to go left, but, perhaps because of his fear of the village, he also felt he should strike out boldly to the right in order to get nearer to the lights. Soon the mist would lift and the stars would come out. The quickest way, in effect, would be to climb up to any elevated place, regardless of where it was, and get the best perspective he could.
Still, he couldn’t understand. He did not understand at all the reason why the woman had to be so attached to that River of Hades.… Love of Home and obligation have meaning only if one stands to lose something by throwing them away. What in the world did she have to lose?
(Radio and mirror … radio and mirror.…)
Of course he would send her a radio. But wouldn’t it work out, to the contrary, that she would lose more than she would gain? For instance, there would be no ceremony of giving him a bath, which she liked so much. She always used to save water for washing him, even at the expense of the laundry. She would splash warm water between his legs and, quite as if she were doing it to herself, bend over squealing in laughter. There would not be another chance for her to laugh like that again.
No, she shouldn’t be under any misapprehension. From the beginning there had been no contract between him and her, and since there had been no contract there could be no breach of contract. Furthermore, he too was not completely untouched. For instance, the stink of the cheap saké that came once a week and seemed as if it had been squeezed from a compost heap … the flexing of the flesh on the inner side of her thighs where he could see the muscles standing out in ridges … the sense of shame in scraping away, with a finger he had wet in his mouth, the sand like burnt rubber that had gathered on the dark lips of her vulva.… And her bashful smile that had made these things appear more indecent. If he added them all up, they would come to quite a lot. Even if his involvement seemed unbelievable, it was nonetheless a fact. A man, more than a woman, tends to abandon himself to bits and pieces of things.
When he thought about what the villagers had done, he realized that it would be almost impossible to calculate the harm he had suffered. The relationsip between him and the woman was of little importance. He intended sometime to take a full measure of revenge on them. He hadn’t yet decided what would be the worst. At first he had thought of setting fire to the whole village, or putting poison in the wells, or laying a trap to lure them one by one into a hole in the sand. He had spurred himself on, whipping up his imagination by thinking up such direct measures. But now that he would have the opportunity of actually putting them into practice, he couldn’t continue thinking such childish things. After all, the violence of a single person wouldn’t amount to