The Mole

At a glance:

 First Published: 1940
 Type of Plot: Epistolary
 Time of Work: The twentieth century
 Setting: Japan
 Characters: Sayoko, Her husband, Her mother
 Genres: Psychological fiction, Short fiction
 Subjects: Husbands, Wives, Twentieth century, Dreams, Domestic violence, Japan or
Japanese people, Anatomy, Human anatomy
 Locales: Asia, Japan

The Story
The text of “The Mole” is an undated letter written by Sayoko to her husband of some years. She
tells him about a dream that she has had. The night before, during a visit to her mother’s home,
Sayoko reports that she dreamed of the mole located high on the upper right side of her back, near
her shoulder. Through her reflections on her marriage and life and her account of her dream about
her mole, Sayoko reveals both her past and present. She knows that her husband will know about
the mole about which she has dreamed because it has been the focus of dissension between them
from the earliest days of their marriage. When she lay in bed, her left arm across her chest, playing
with the mole, her husband scolded her. It was a bad habit. The mole would grow larger. She should
have it removed.

Sayoko’s letter tells her husband of the shame she felt when he first began scolding. Even more
important, she says that she first became faintly conscious of the oppression of her marriage; her
lack of privacy, her lack of refuge, her total vulnerability to his control. Although she then tried to
dismiss his attention to her habit of playing with the mole as inconsequential, now that she has been
away from him for many years, she sees its importance.

Thinking through her life as she writes, Sayoko tells her husband the history of her relation to her
mole—a history that is also the story of her own inner life. As a child she began to play with the
mole, perhaps because her mother and sisters had noticed it—perhaps even finding it charming—
and drew her attention to it. She remembers, however, that her mother also scolded her during
puberty for her habit of rubbing the mole and staring absently into space. Her husband’s dislike for
her habit grew during their marriage until it became a metaphor for their relationship. Sayoko tells
her husband, “it was as though I were warding you off, as though I were embracing myself.” All
attempts by her husband to change or stop her habit failed, and his dislike for her habit grew into a
dislike for her. Conflict over the mole turned into abuse. Her husband beat and kicked her.
Nonetheless, her habit continued. His caring ceased. One day Sayoko realized that her habit had
disappeared of its own accord, but by then her husband no longer cared one way or the other.

Now regarded as a bad wife on the verge of divorce, Sayoko is surprised to find herself thinking of
her husband and feeling grief. In her mother’s home she is again free to play with her mole but
cannot. When she sleeps she dreams of the mole. Drunk and pleading with her husband in her
dream, she touches her mole and it comes off in her hand. She beseeches him to put her mole in
the pit of the mole beside his nose. Awake and weeping, she finds that her mole is still on her back.
She imagines her husband’s mole swelling with the addition of hers; she imagines with pleasure that
he might dream of her mole.

Her letter concludes by suggesting to her husband that playing with her mole began in her childhood
as a fond expression of her connection to her family. Perhaps, she suggests, playing with the mole
was a young girl’s expression of a love that she did not know how to speak. Perhaps the mole is a
symbol of her love that has gone unrecognized and that has turned malignant and destructive. Like
the countless “little things” that might combine to poison a relationship, the mole, seemingly
insignificant in itself, has been a sign that cannot be deciphered, a language that cannot be
understood.

The letter resolves nothing; like the mole, it does not appear to be read by its intended audience.
Like the mole, the letter remains visible but mysterious, contemplated but never fully understood.

Themes and Meanings

Like many of Yasunari Kawabata’s stories, “The Mole” captures the mind and heart of a woman at a
critical moment—here the moment that a woman is breaking with her husband. First-person
reflections on her body, her family, her marriage, and her life blend in this brief letter to reveal her
maturing awareness of herself, her motives, her anger, and her love. Unaddressed, perhaps unsent
or unanswered, this letter written in painful isolation captures the loneliness, estrangement, and
failures of communication that have characterized the woman’s life with her family and with her
husband. The letter without an audience also represents her own powerlessness and inability to
communicate her feelings. Even the message of her dream itself is cryptic, condensed, and—like
her letter—her dream cries receive no response.
In her letter Sayoko is working on her life, trying to make sense of it, trying to explain how it is she
has come to be defined as a bad wife. She struggles against long years of feeling worthless and
searches her life for some experience or emotion that might redeem her self-esteem. The letter,
however far removed from direct communication of her feelings, is at least an attempt to reach out,
to tell her husband what she has felt and thought and how she is trying to come to terms with her
feelings of loss and failure.

The central image of the story is the mole. During Sayoko’s exploration of her own experience, the
mole gains many levels of meaning as it comes to represent the woman and her relationship to her
own body. The mole represents a kind of deformity that makes her the object of others’ pity and
disgust. It elicits others’ arbitrary negative assessments of her and her body that are destructive of
her well-being. The mole comes to represent the way in which she is turned in on herself, unable to
communicate, as well as her husband’s refusal to accept and love her and the failure of their
marriage. Although physically harmless, the enigmatic mole is emotionally malignant in Sayoko’s life.

Style and Technique

The story’s epistolary form offers Sayoko distance to put her experience in perspective and gives her
privacy for serious reflection. The letter that she writes does not at first glance appear well
organized. Its purpose is to report a dream to her husband, but she begins it by discussing her
married life and her husband’s physical and emotional abuse. The epistolary form evokes an intense
awareness of the audience addressed while at the same time preserving the interiority of the
narrator’s stream of consciousness. The letter reveals how little the husband with whom she has
lived so long knows of her life. Even her mother has never seen any of the misery, uncertainty,
shame, guilt, or love that is revealed in the letter.

Although the structure of the letter initially appears chaotic, it is quite logical, even though the dream
that is its declared subject is not described until very late. Meanwhile, by describing her husband’s
familiarity with her mole and their conflict, the letter establishes context for him and provides the
reader with an essential comprehension of the dream itself. Sayoko shows her husband how
strongly she thought and felt and suffered as the result of his annoyance with her habit. She now
sees that the habit of wrapping herself in her own arms absently was itself a defense against him, a
form of self-protection.

The change of scene that occasions the letter also provides the perspective that Sayoko needs to
investigate the original cause of her mole. She has been able to go back in time and question her
mother on the origin of the mole. When did it begin to grow? Babies do not seem to have moles.
Moles seem to develop with age, as stigmata of experience. Perhaps her mole grew as her sense of
worthlessness grew, bit by bit during childhood, until it was “bigger than a bean.” In this second
component of Sayoko’s letter, she offers her husband and the reader the additional context for the
dream in her dialogues with her mother on body image and feelings of self-worth.

Only near the end of the letter does Sayoko tell her husband the story of her dream that she
mentions in the first line. Although the dream’s message is cryptic, it reveals Sayoko’s pain and
anger. Her offer of the liberated mole “like the skin of a roast bean” and her demand that her
husband take it into his own body express the beginning of her new capacity for physical and
emotional self-assertion. Truly the dream is the climax of her life to this point, just as it is the climax
of her letter.