Swaddling Clothes

by Yukio Mishima (1925-1970)

HE WAS ALWAYS BUSY, Toshiko’s husband. Even

tonight he had to dash off to an appointment,
leaving her to go home alone by taxi. But what
else could a woman expect when she married
an actor—an attractive one? No doubt she had
been foolish to hope that he would spend the
evening with her. And yet he must have known
how she dreaded going back to their house,
unhomely with its Western-style furniture and
with the bloodstains still showing on the floor.
Toshiko had been oversensitive since
girlhood: that was her nature. As the result of
constant worrying she never put on weight, and
now, an adult woman, she looked more like a
transparent picture than a creature of flesh and
blood. Her delicacy of spirit was evident to her
most casual acquaintance.
Earlier that evening, when she had joined
her husband at a night club, she had been
shocked to find him entertaining friends with
an account of “the incident.” Sitting there in his
American-style suit, puffing at a cigarette, he
had seemed to her almost a stranger.
“It’s a fantastic story,” he was saying,
gesturing flamboyantly as if in an attempt to
outweigh the attractions of the dance band.
“Here this new nurse for our baby arrives from
the employment agency, and the very first thing
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 I notice about her is her stomach. It’s enormous
—as if she had a pillow stuck under her
kimono! No wonder, I thought, for I soon saw
that she could eat more than the rest of us put
together. She polished off the contents of our
rice bin like that....” He snapped his fingers.
“ ‘Gastric dilation’—that’s how she explained
her girth and her appetite. Well, the day before
yesterday we heard groans and moans coming
from the nursery. We rushed in and found her
squatting on the floor, holding her stomach in
her two hands, and moaning like a cow. Next to
her our baby lay in his cot, scared out of his
wits and crying at the top of his lungs. A pretty
scene, I can tell you!”
“So the cat was out of the bag?” suggested
one of their friends, a film actor like Toshiko’s
husband.
“Indeed it was! And it gave me the shock of
my life. You see, I’d completely swallowed that
story about ‘gastric dilation.’ Well, I didn’t
waste any time. I rescued our good rug from the
floor and spread a blanket for her to lie on. The
whole time the girl was yelling like a stuck pig.
By the time the doctor from the maternity clinic
arrived, the baby had already been born. But
our sitting room was a pretty shambles!”
“Oh, that I’m sure of!” said another of their
friends, and the whole company burst into
laughter.
Toshiko was dumbfounded to hear her
husband discussing the horrifying happening
as though it were no more than an amusing
incident which they chanced to have witnessed.
She shut her eyes for a moment and all at once
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 she saw the newborn baby lying before her: on
the parquet floor the infant lay, and his frail
body was wrapped in bloodstained
newspapers.
Toshiko was sure that the doctor had done
the whole thing out of spite. As if to emphasize
his scorn for this mother who had given birth to
a bastard under such sordid conditions, he had
told his assistant to wrap the baby in some
loose newspapers, rather than proper
swaddling. This callous treatment of the
newborn child had offended Toshiko.
Overcoming her disgust at the entire scene, she
had fetched a brand-new piece of flannel from
her cupboard and, having swaddled the baby in
it, had laid him carefully in an armchair.
This all had taken place in the evening after
her husband had left the house. Toshiko had
told him nothing of it, fearing that he would
think her oversoft, oversentimental; yet the
scene had engraved itself deeply in her mind.
Tonight she sat silently thinking back on it,
while the jazz orchestra brayed and her
husband chatted cheerfully with his friends.
She knew that she would never forget the sight
of the baby, wrapped in stained newspapers
and lying on the floor—it was a scene fit for a
butchershop. Toshiko, whose own life had been
spent in solid comfort, poignantly felt the
wretchedness of the illegitimate baby.
I am the only person to have witnessed its
shame, the thought occurred to her. The mother
never saw her child lying there in its newspaper
wrappings, and the baby itself of course didn’t
know. I alone shall have to preserve that terrible
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 scene in my memory. When the baby grows up
and wants to find out about his birth, there will
be no one to tell him, so long as I preserve
silence. How strange that I should have this
feeling of guilt! After all, it was I who took him
up from the floor, swathed him properly in
flannel, and laid him down to sleep in the
armchair.
They left the night club and Toshiko
stepped into the taxi that her husband had
called for her. “Take this lady to Ushigome,” he
told the driver and shut the door from the
outside. Toshiko gazed through the window at
her husband’s smiling face and noticed his
strong, white teeth. Then she leaned back in the
seat, oppressed by the knowledge that their life
together was in some way too easy, too
painless. It would have been difficult for her to
put her thoughts into words. Through the rear
window of the taxi she took a last look at her
husband. He was striding along the street
toward his Nash car, and soon the back of his
rather garish tweed coat had blended with the
figures of the passers-by.
The taxi drove off, passed down a street
dotted with bars and then by a theatre, in front
of which the throngs of people jostled each
other on the pavement. Although the
performance had only just ended, the lights had
already been turned out and in the half dark
outside it was depressingly obvious that the
cherry blossoms decorating the front of the
theatre were merely scraps of white paper.
Even if that baby should grow up in
ignorance of the secret of his birth, he can never
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 become a respectable citizen, reflected Toshiko,
pursuing the same train of thoughts. Those
soiled newspaper swaddling clothes will be the
symbol of his entire life. But why should I keep
worrying about him so much? Is it because I
feel uneasy about the future of my own child?
Say twenty years from now, when our boy will
have grown up into a fine, carefully educated
young man, one day by a quirk of fate he meets
that other boy, who then will also have turned
twenty. And say that the other boy, who has
been sinned against, savagely stabs him with a
knife....
It was a warm, overcast April night, but
thoughts of the future made Toshiko feel cold
and miserable. She shivered on the back seat of
the car.
No, when the time comes I shall take my
son’s place, she told herself suddenly. Twenty
years from now I shall be forty-three. I shall go
to that young man and tell him straight out
about everything—about his newspaper
swaddling clothes, and about how I went and
wrapped him in flannel.
The taxi ran along the dark wide road that
was bordered by the park and by the Imperial
Palace moat. In the distance Toshiko noticed the
pinpricks of light which came from the blocks
of tall office buildings.
Twenty years from now that wretched child
will be in utter misery. He will be living a
desolate, hopeless, poverty-stricken existence—
a lonely rat. What else could happen to a baby
who has had such a birth? He’ll be wandering
through the streets by himself, cursing his
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 father, loathing his mother.
No doubt Toshiko derived a certain
satisfaction from her somber thoughts: she
tortured herself with them without cease. The
taxi approached Hanzomon and drove past the
compound of the British Embassy. At that point
the famous rows of cherry trees were spread out
before Toshiko in all their purity. On the spur of
the moment she decided to go and view the
blossoms by herself in the dark night. It was a
strange decision for a timid and unadventurous
young woman, but then she was in a strange
state of mind and she dreaded the return home.
That evening all sorts of unsettling fancies had
burst open in her mind.
She crossed the wide street—a slim, solitary
figure in the darkness. As a rule when she
walked in the traffic Toshiko used to cling
fearfully to her companion, but tonight she
darted alone between the cars and a moment
later had reached the long narrow park that
borders the Palace moat. Chidorigafuchi, it is
called—the Abyss of the Thousand Birds.
Tonight the whole park had become a grove
of blossoming cherry trees. Under the calm
cloudy sky the blossoms formed a mass of solid
whiteness. The paper lanterns that hung from
wires between the trees had been put out; in
their place electric light bulbs, red, yellow, and
green, shone dully beneath the blossoms. It was
well past ten o’clock and most of the flower-
viewers had gone home. As the occasional
passers-by strolled through the park, they
would automatically kick aside the empty
bottles or crush the waste paper beneath their
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 feet.
Newspapers, thought Toshiko, her mind
going back once again to those happenings.
Bloodstained newspapers. If a man were ever to
hear of that piteous birth and know that it was
he who had lain there, it would ruin his entire
life. To think that I, a perfect stranger, should
from now on have to keep such a secret—the
secret of a man’s whole existence....
Lost in these thoughts, Toshiko walked on
through the park. Most of the people still
remaining there were quiet couples; no one
paid her any attention. She noticed two people
sitting on a stone bench beside the moat, not
looking at the blossoms, but gazing silently at
the water. Pitch black it was, and swathed in
heavy shadows. Beyond the moat the somber
forest of the Imperial Palace blocked her view.
The trees reached up, to form a solid dark mass
against the night sky. Toshiko walked slowly
along the path beneath the blossoms hanging
heavily overhead.
On a stone bench, slightly apart from the
others, she noticed a pale object—not, as she
had at first imagined, a pile of cherry blossoms,
nor a garment forgotten by one of the visitors to
the park. Only when she came closer did she
see that it was a human form lying on the
bench. Was it, she wondered, one of those
miserable drunks often to be seen sleeping in
public places? Obviously not, for the body had
been systematically covered with newspapers,
and it was the whiteness of those papers that
had attracted Toshiko’s attention. Standing by
the bench, she gazed down at the sleeping
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 figure.
It was a man in a brown jersey who lay
there, curled up on layers of newspapers, other
newspapers covering him. No doubt this had
become his normal night residence now that
spring had arrived. Toshiko gazed down at the
man’s dirty, unkempt hair, which in places had
become hopelessly matted. As she observed the
sleeping figure wrapped in its newspapers, she
was inevitably reminded of the baby who had
lain on the floor in its wretched swaddling
clothes. The shoulder of the man’s jersey rose
and fell in the darkness in time with his heavy
breathing.
It seemed to Toshiko that all her fears and
premonitions had suddenly taken concrete
form. In the darkness the man’s pale forehead
stood out, and it was a young forehead, though
carved with the wrinkles of long poverty and
hardship. His khaki trousers had been slightly
pulled up; on his sockless feet he wore a pair of
battered gym shoes. She could not see his face
and suddenly had an overmastering desire to
get one glimpse of it.
She walked to the head of the bench and
looked down. The man’s head was half buried
in his arms, but Toshiko could see that he was
surprisingly young. She noticed the thick
eyebrows and the fine bridge of his nose. His
slightly open mouth was alive with youth.
But Toshiko had approached too close. In
the silent night the newspaper bedding rustled,
and abruptly the man opened his eyes. Seeing
the young woman standing directly beside him,
he raised himself with a jerk, and his eyes lit up.
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 A second later a powerful hand reached out and
seized Toshiko by her slender wrist.
She did not feel in the least afraid and made
no effort to free herself. In a flash the thought
had struck her, Ah, so the twenty years have
already gone by! The forest of the Imperial
Palace was pitch dark and utterly silent.
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