Illustration by Molly Heng CheangThe first time I met Omitsu was the summer before my third year of elementary school, in the seventh or eighth year of the Taisho era, 1918 or 1919.I had been left in the care of my uncle, who brewed sake in Shinano, a small farming village a couple of miles outside the city of Nagano, in order to be able to attend the local school. My father, who was a government official, had been posted in Taiwan, and my mother had accompanied him there. But I had been prone to glandular ailments since I was a baby, running a fever at the slightest illness, so my parents left me with my relatives, certain that the southern climate in Taiwan would not be good for my condition. During my uncle’s busy season, a large number of young men and women stayed with us to help, and the house would become as chaotic as a battlefield. But during the rest of the year there were only four of us—my uncle, my aunt, a taciturn young maid, and me—so the spacious house was quiet.One day in late August, I had gone out with the neighborhood children in the morning to play at the edge of the village. The long school holiday was coming to an end, and though the sunlight still offered the brightness of summer, the breeze that blew suggested the sombre quality of autumn. I returned home close to noon to eat. I took one step into the earthen-floored entryway and stopped. An unfamiliar woman of twenty-three or twenty-four was standing there talking with my aunt, who was sitting on the stoop.Read an interview with the translator for the story behind the story.This must be the woman they call Omitsu, I thought. My aunt and the woman were exchanging polite remarks, but there was a cold, unpleasant air between them.“This is merely a token of my gratitude. Please accept it.”The woman spoke in a clear, delicate voice that seemed to match her delicate build. The trace of rouge on her lips caught my eye.“Oh, no. We can’t accept this. Let’s just leave it at that.”My aunt, who was one of the heaviest women in the village, spoke in a suitably heavy voice. What looked like a box of cakes sat between them. I sensed that the two women had faced off over the item.“Is this your son?” the woman said, turning toward me. I just stared at her face, stunned at how gentle and beautiful she was, forgetting even to bow my head. I wondered how something called a “mistress” could have such a face.My aunt always told me to bow when I appeared before guests, but this time was different. She made no indication that she would later scold me for failing to lower my head. She just motioned with her chin for me to leave. I started to back out of the entryway.“Here, young man.” The woman gestured toward me, and in an instant I found myself holding the box. Both the woman and my aunt said something, but my ears had ceased to function. I stood there half dazed. The mistress’s approach had struck me dumb; something luxurious and sweet was emanating from her body and had rendered me unable to move. By the time I came to my senses, Omitsu had already cut through the front garden and was about to turn down the stone path toward the road, offering a retreating view of her slender figure in a kimono.“We’ve ended up with quite a gift.” My aunt, stepping into the entryway, cast a fearful eye down at the box. “Open it,” she finally said.I did as I was told. The box appeared to be filled with candies wrapped in silver paper, a sort that one rarely saw except in Nagano. They were chocolates, but at the time neither my aunt nor I knew that. My aunt gazed at them in wonder for a long while. Then she gave me one, ate one herself, and took the rest inside.I had heard rumors about Omitsu for some ten days before I met her. Every child in the village knew about Omitsu and had learned the unfamiliar word “mistress.” Sometimes on the road or in the rice fields we would shout “There’s the mistress!” and scramble off, pretending to be pursued by her. We imagined that a mistress would look something like an ogre, and though a mistress was not as powerful as an ogre, we considered it a creature of greater treachery and evil.Because we had only heard rumors of a mistress and had never seen one, we played every day near the house in which she was to live. It was the old storehouse of a farming family named Tamura, who had been using it as a junk shed. But now the mistress had rented the place and would be living there. In the preceding decade, the younger members of the Tamura family had died off, one by one, leaving only an elderly grandmother. The old woman was criticized by the villagers, who said she had been blinded by greed when she agreed to rent the storehouse to a mistress even though there were others to whom she could have rented it.The children even knew that the mistress’s name was Omitsu. Following the adults’ example, we referred to her as “Omitsu” or “Miss Omitsu,” talking about her before she had ever moved into the Tamura family’s storehouse.Omitsu was originally from a village about five miles from our own. She had gone to work at an inn in Nagano, and had recently become the mistress of a middle-aged construction contractor who had acquired much through his influence in the area. There seemed to be circumstances that prevented her from living in Nagano, so she was to stay in our village. Word of Omitsu immediately spread through our village, it being a rural area and Omitsu coming from nearby. Whenever villagers gathered, gossip that a not very nice woman was moving in never failed to surface.Soon after she arrived, Omitsu paid the courtesy call to my house, because my uncle and aunt were influential people in the village, and the place she was renting stood just behind the building where my uncle kept the sake he brewed. Later that afternoon, some neighbor children asked me to go with them to spy on her at the storehouse, but, having already met the woman, I had lost all my curiosity about mistresses.“A mistress is no big deal.”That is what I told the other children, but they could not be convinced and needed to confirm it with their own eyes. They climbed the chestnut tree or the walnut tree or the persimmon tree outside the storehouse to try to glimpse a mistress in its true form through her window.One of the children fell from the chestnut tree and twisted his ankle. After the incident, it occurred to us that perhaps we should not approach the storehouse so casually. That was what you might get from a mistress. She might even use black magic. We children discussed matters like this with grave looks on our faces.By the time autumn came, we had resumed playing near Omitsu’s house. This mistress was not as frightening or as weird as the adults had claimed. Indeed, we found it somehow more enjoyable to play with Omitsu close by.Sometimes, when we were playing flip cards, Omitsu would come out of the storehouse and stand silently beside us, watching. Our eyes gleamed. It excited us strangely, but we set our jaws firm. We were not going to lose the game.We children were not the only ones who let down our guard. Adults no longer spoke ill of Omitsu, either. Despite what they might have expected of a mistress, there was nothing at all disagreeable about her. Also, the contractor who kept her never showed himself in the village.“Perhaps she has been abandoned.” “Maybe her lover is in jail.” These were the rumors that the villagers now whispered.Omitsu occasionally came to my house. My stubborn, old-fashioned uncle never changed his mind about her. “That worthless woman.”But she impressed my aunt. “Even a mistress can be a well-mannered woman like her,” my aunt often said at suppertime, which invited a scolding from my uncle.Just after the first of October, my aunt sent me to deliver some sushi to Omitsu. It was the time of day when evening shadows began to creep onto the white road.I carried the unwieldy bundle out the back and around the sake warehouse, emerging in front of the place where Omitsu lived.I could see a light in the second-story window of her house, but the heavy door was closed tight.“Miss Omitsu,” I called. There was no answer. I was about to call again when I heard the rumble of footsteps coming down the stairs. Finally, a man I had never seen before stuck his head out. I could not see his face very well in the dark.“Is Omitsu here?”“Yes.”“I brought some sushi.”“Sushi? Oh, well, then thank you. And where do you live?” the man asked.Omitsu came downstairs. “Oh, it’s you. Please do come up. I’ll give you something good as a reward.” I did not want to go upstairs. I wanted to run straight home.The man spoke again. “Hey, boy, come on upstairs.” His words sounded coarse to me. But I feared that something bad might happen if I didn’t go upstairs, so I did as I was told. I took off my clogs. The storehouse was dark inside.“Be careful. The stairs are dangerous,” Omitsu called from below, as I ascended the steep steps to the second floor, which had been made into a parlor. An electric light that must have been installed when Omitsu moved in glowed in the middle of the room.A small round eating table had been placed under the light. Sake bottles, teacups, and plates lay in a jumble, as if Omitsu and the man had just finished supper. And, beyond the table, the bedding had been left spread out from the night before. There was little else, other than a cupboard.The man was wearing a white shirt, long underwear, and a woven belly warmer. His voice had made him seem frightening, but in the light he looked pleasant, even to a child like me. He had a big round face, gentle eyes, and a pale, stout body. He struck me as the kind of person that children would take to. He had a heroic crewcut, and sat cross-legged at the table.“How old are you, boy?” His tone was the only rough thing about him.“Nine.”“Have you ever seen a moving picture?”“Yes.”“Did you like it?”“Yes.”“O.K., then I’ll take you to see one sometime. And, in return, you bring dinner to this lady every once in a while, the way you did today.”Omitsu sat beside him wrapping some sponge cake. “Don’t be silly,” she said, reproving the man. “Stop that.” I was dazzled by Omitsu, who was in an unkempt state, her sash loose.I left as soon as Omitsu handed me the wrapped cake. I did not tell my uncle or aunt that another person had been at her place. I felt it was somehow best for Omitsu that I say nothing.My concern for Omitsu was in vain. Early the next morning, the man went out walking through the whole village, carrying an air rifle and wearing the same white shirt, long underwear, and woven belly warmer from the night before. And he said the same thing, in the same tone, to everyone he met.“I am certainly feeling good today!” he called out. His manner could be taken as either arrogance or openheartedness. We children tagged along behind Shinjo Shinsuke. That was his name.When Shinsuke readied his gun, we all held our breath, and when he pulled the trigger, we shouted and ran toward the rice field, where the sparrows had scattered.With the appearance of Omitsu’s lover, her reputation among the villagers, which had improved, took an unfavorable turn. When the village women saw Omitsu now, they’d turn away, as if to avoid something unclean.From then on, Shinsuke appeared in the village about once a week. When he was here, the children would gather in front of the storehouse early in the morning and wait for him to come out with his air rifle.“I don’t come here that often. Can’t you at least let me sleep in with my lady?” He made crude remarks like this to the children, peering at each of them.“Your faces. Have you washed your faces? I won’t take you with me if your faces are dirty.”The children would all run to the stream at once to clean up.Although Shinsuke became popular with the village children, the adults regarded him with a cold eye.One of Shinsuke’s visits happened to coincide with the autumn festival. A stage had been built in the middle of the village, where an amateur talent show was to be held, attracting everyone’s attention.Shinsuke performed old narrative songs in the show. He was so talented that one could hardly imagine he was a mere amateur. We children sat toward the front and enjoyed watching Shinsuke lean over and extend his face toward the audience.Shinsuke returned to the stage time after time. “More! More!” people cried, and Shinsuke kept performing.The talent show continued for three nights, and Shinsuke appeared every evening. On the third night, Omitsu brought a big teacup to Shinsuke onstage. “Miss Omitsu!” the adults called, their voices showering on the young woman, who was blushing.Following their example, we children shouted, too: “Miss Omitsu!” We called her name as loudly as we could until she left the stage.To the child that I was, this image of Omitsu left a good impression. In her appearance, I saw nothing resembling humiliation at her peculiar status as a mistress. How clear it was that she was a woman diligently serving her lover! There were criticisms that emanated from some of the adults, voices that deemed her brazen or presumptuous, but in general her attitude seemed to be met with unquestioning good will.After the festival was over, the villagers gave neither Omitsu nor Shinsuke any of the judgmental looks they had before. It was as if the couple had somehow become regular members of the village.One day in late November, I got home from school at about two o’clock and went out past the storehouse to take a look at a digger wasp’s nest, which I had found recently at a dike down by a rice field. There I ran into Omitsu. It seemed she had been standing at the spot for a while. She looked sheepish.“Would you go to the storehouse,” she asked me, “and check whether there are any women’s clogs sitting at the foot of the stairs?” Then she added, “They’re new ones with red straps.”I did as I was told, running straight to the storehouse. I immediately recognized the new clogs, so I picked them up and raced back to Omitsu.“What! Oh, no! You brought them here? They belong to another woman. Put them back where you found them.”I took the clogs back to the storehouse and placed them neatly on the stoop, then I returned to Omitsu.“Thank you,” Omitsu said. “Now do your studies. Go on back home.”I always obeyed Omitsu. This time, too. I went straight home and sat at my desk. But I was uneasy. I wondered why Omitsu had been standing in a place like that.About an hour later, I went back out past the storehouse. And, sure enough, Omitsu was still there, the same awkward look on her face.“Would you go to the storehouse again and see if the clogs are still there?” Omitsu asked.“Sure.”I ran toward Omitsu’s house but stopped in my tracks when I saw Shinsuke sitting on the stoop, talking loudly with a woman I didn’t know. She was much older than Omitsu, and her bloodless face was screwed into an irritated look.I approached them. Shinsuke glanced at me but continued speaking to the woman as if I did not exist. He looked like a completely different person. His face soon took on an air of annoyance.“Anyway, I’m going home, so come with me. Let’s go. You come with me,” Shinsuke said.“No. I’m staying here until that woman gets back.”“There is nothing for you to do, even if you do meet her.”“I have something to say to her.”“It makes no difference whether or not you meet her, so I’m saying I’ll go with you.”“It won’t do me any good if you go home with me now, then come back here again,” the woman said.“What kind of foolish talk . . .”“I am not going to be deceived,” she said.Shinsuke went on and on, but the woman did not listen. She kept her face turned away.I thought Shinsuke might speak to me, but he paid me no attention, so I left. I went back to Omitsu.“He and the woman are fighting,” I reported.“He? Who are you talking about?”“Shinsuke. Who else?”Omitsu suddenly looked flustered. “Oh, no. That’s awful. When did he get here?” she said.Then she mumbled, “This is the end of everything.”She looked terribly sad. I didn’t understand the situation. I knew only that Omitsu was troubled, and I felt sorry for her.“You go back home and study,” Omitsu said.“I did all my homework a little while ago.”Then Omitsu seemed to come up with an idea. “Shall we go to see a moving picture in Nagano?”When I heard her say “moving picture,” my heart danced. I got to see a movie only once a year, during the Obon festival in the summer. I told her I wanted to go.“Tell your family that you’ll have to be late. If they give you permission, I’ll take you,” Omitsu said. My aunt happened to be away at a memorial service for a relative in a village nearby, so I just told the maid I was going to Nagano, then I returned to Omitsu. She walked down toward the highway without going home first.I followed after her. She stopped every now and then to wait for me to catch up, but she did not say much. After we had walked a bit, a truck came along and we hitched a ride to the train.When Omitsu and I reached Nagano, we ate chicken and egg rice at a cafeteria in front of the station. Then we went to the theatre, in the business district. I didn’t understand the plot of the movie, but just watching people move on the screen was interesting enough. Halfway through, Omitsu asked if we should leave, but I did not listen to her.By the time the movie ended, it was past ten o’clock. We went outside, and Omitsu took me to have sweet bean soup at a shop near the theatre. She did not have any, so I ate alone.It was 11:30 P.M. when we got off the train at the station in the next village. “We have to walk from here. It will take half an hour to get home. It doesn’t matter if you’re tired. You can’t sleep yet.” Omitsu made certain I understood. She had fed me dinner, taken me to a movie, and treated me to sweet bean soup, so my sense of gratitude certainly didn’t allow me to complain that I was sleepy.Omitsu took me by the hand. The road was narrow and ran through flat fields. There were no houses along the way, but it did not seem all that desolate. There was no moon, but stars were scattered in profusion across the black sky. The night air felt more like winter than autumn.I kept moving, without rest. Even so, it seemed to take more than thirty minutes to get to the entrance to our village.“I wonder what that is over there?” Omitsu said.I saw two fires burning near the fire station. Before we had gone another fifty yards, someone questioned us harshly.“Is that you, Omitsu?”“Yes.”As soon as she answered, the person shouted in the darkness, “She! . . . is! . . . here!” One word at a time, in a ridiculously loud voice.There was a shout in response and then another echoed it, and another, and another, all rising up from the dark fields. Gradually, they grew more distant—fainter, quieter, lonelier. Several villagers surrounded us.When Omitsu realized that the commotion concerned her, she brought her face close to my ear. “Don’t say anything about seeing a movie, O.K.? It’s better if you don’t tell anyone. All right? Do you understand?” I nodded. I would never say anything about it, I thought, even under pain of death. We kept walking. Along the way, I left Omitsu so that I could take a shortcut home. I ran toward the house.When I got home, no one scolded me. I had other relatives in Nagano, so my aunt and uncle figured that I had probably got a family member to take me there. I told them that I had gone with Omitsu and that she treated me to dinner and sweet bean soup, but I did not mention that we had seen a moving picture.As for Omitsu, the whole village had been searching for her. Shinsuke had worried that she might have committed suicide, as she had left during the day and had not come back. That was the reason the village had been in an uproar.After the ridiculous false alarm, it appeared that Omitsu and Shinsuke’s stock among the villagers dropped once again.For a long time afterward, Shinsuke did not show his face in the village. The general consensus was that Shinsuke could not visit Omitsu because his hysterical wife was keeping him under surveillance.We children sometimes visited Omitsu upstairs on the second floor, but she seemed sad and lost in thought. We would jump and run around, but Omitsu just looked at us and smiled. She made no attempt to reprimand us.Winter that year was extremely cold. In December, snow glistened almost every day. After the New Year, we had several big snows. One of those was said to be the heaviest in some decades.Shinsuke reappeared briefly at New Year’s, but then he did not come again until late January. As soon as I heard that Shinsuke was in town, I went out to Omitsu’s storehouse. At New Year’s, Shinsuke had told me that he would buy me a boys’ magazine the next time he came, so I thought he had perhaps brought one.By then, I was completely accustomed to the storehouse and would enter without invitation. This time, I just called out “Omitsu” and shuffled up the stairs. When I reached the top, I realized that I should not have come. The electricity in the village had been out for two or three days because of the snow, so the lights were off. Twilight was creeping into the dim room, and I sensed two bodies intertwined. It sounded as though they were cursing each other.Finally, Omitsu stood up. “You idiot!” she said to Shinsuke as she lit the lamp. Her hair was dishevelled and her kimono was open.“Oh, you’ve come at just the right time. Stay here,” Omitsu told me. She sat down. About three feet away, Shinsuke sat cross-legged as if sulking, still gasping.“I’m going home,” I said. This was no time to ask about magazines. I did not know why, but I knew that I should not be there.Just then, Omitsu pulled me toward her. “No, I want you to stay here with me. Shinsuke’s giving me trouble, so I want you to protect me,” she said.“Don’t make jokes,” Shinsuke bellowed. “It doesn’t matter what you say—I love you.”“I know you do. And I love you, too. Wasn’t it because we love each other that we decided to part? Have you forgotten how firm a pledge we made at New Year’s? Being apart is much more painful for me than it is for you. But didn’t we resolve to part, just as if I were dead . . . for your sake?”Then Omitsu fell face down on the floor, her shoulders heaving.“I’m going home,” I said.“No, don’t,” she implored, sitting up. She continued to speak, looking at my face as if talking to me, but her words were clearly intended for Shinsuke.“Shinsuke is weak-willed, and I don’t know what to do. Isn’t that right, boy? At the end of last year, Shinsuke failed at work and had no money left. So he got someone to scrape together some money with a promise that he would break with me. He’s forgotten all about that. What a fool he is!”After that, she turned directly toward Shinsuke. “If it gets out that you haven’t broken with me, you’ll be in real trouble. You’ll be ruined.”“It will be all right as long as no one finds out.”“How could they not know?”“All right. This will be the last night.”“What are you saying? No. No. It won’t work. If you stay tonight, I’ll be the one who won’t let you go. I’m telling you this because I’m afraid of that side of me. All right? Let’s just end with a handshake. You’ll have to make do with that.”Omitsu extended her delicate white hand toward Shinsuke, who sat sullen, arms folded. Looking angry, he put out his hand, grabbed Omitsu’s, and tried to pull her toward him.“No. We’re not going to lay a hand on each other. Let’s take another pledge.”Omitsu slowly removed Shinsuke’s hand, which he had placed on her shoulder, and linked her little finger with his in the manner of a solemn promise. “The boy here is our witness,” she said, as she brought my right hand to theirs. She placed my palm over their linked fingers.“I’m going home,” I said again.“Well, then I’m going to take Shinsuke to the station, so shall we all go out together?”I stood, then Omitsu. Shinsuke, last of all, reluctantly rose to his feet. Then we went out into the snow, the wind rising. I parted company with the two of them in front of my house.I watched from the entryway as they headed off through the snow toward the train station. Shinsuke was in front, wearing an overcoat and a brown hat like the ones Mongolians wear. Just behind him was Omitsu, with an overcoat and a scarf wrapped around her face.I found this out later, but after they saw me home, Omitsu and Shinsuke went to the only tavern in our village. Shinsuke had three bottles of sake and Omitsu ate some noodles. They left the shop at ten, around the time that the snow turned into a raging blizzard. It would have been just a twenty-minute walk to the station, but the path ran through fields that offered no protection from the wind.The next day, Omitsu’s and Shinsuke’s frozen bodies were found, about half a mile apart, in the snow-covered fields. It was assumed that they had been caught in the blizzard, lost their way, got separated, and, finally, died in the snow.The day after the blizzard that claimed their lives, the sky was clear and cloudless. Shinsuke’s body was taken by car to Nagano, and Omitsu’s to her home village. As the truck carrying Omitsu’s body lumbered along through the drifts, the villagers walked beside it, occasionally helping to sweep away snow.There were a number of perspectives on the incident. Some villagers speculated that it might have been a premeditated lovers’ suicide, while others thought that Omitsu had been forced into a double suicide as they walked along the road. The prevailing assumption, though, was that the two had been punished. There was evidence to support all these interpretations. Shinsuke’s enterprises had taken a bad turn, and when you considered the triangle between Shinsuke, his wife, and Omitsu, it didn’t seem so strange for old-fashioned village people to conclude that the couple’s fate was divine retribution.Now, thirty-odd years later, Omitsu has become small and faint in my memory, and the incident in which the young mistress died with a man in a blizzard a distant story. Even for the people who were there back then, it remains just a vague shadow. The question of whether it was a premeditated lovers’ suicide, a forced double suicide, or a punishment from heaven has faded over the years. It now seems that all that happened was that a fearsome blizzard engulfed the two in death.As a child at the time, I could not help but feel that the cause of Omitsu’s death was none of the things that people imagined. Yet I could not express clearly what I sensed. All I could do was cry out in my heart, “That’s not it!”Ten, twenty years passed with me harboring this irritation. It was only recently that the significance of the two deaths came to me in vivid color, just like fireworks exploding in the sky.It happened when I came across the German word Ringwanderung, as I was reading a book about mountain climbing. Ringwanderung is what mountain climbers in a blizzard or a fog must guard against most. Even when they are certain that they are walking in a straight line, they are apt to wander in a circle, some people veering left, others right. The book said that the best way to avoid Ringwanderung was for several people to walk abreast, moving forward while staying in contact.When I read this, I slapped the book shut, immediately recalling Omitsu and Shinsuke. People had felt it odd that the bodies were discovered half a mile apart. Perhaps the two had fallen victim to Ringwanderung, unable to wander in the blizzard together.Surely Omitsu had gone her own way and Shinsuke his.Had she refused Shinsuke’s hand in the blizzard, just as she had brushed it away in the storehouse? Perhaps she had had to refuse his hand. I recall the feeling of my small hand on top of Omitsu and Shinsuke’s linked fingers. My own small child’s hand.The love of two people wandering in the whirling blizzard, each in their own circle.I am now more than twenty years older than Omitsu was then. Two or three years ago, when I drove past the rice field where they died, I discovered that it had been turned into an apple orchard. ?(Translated, from the Japanese, by J. Martin Holman.)