When I was a teenager, I read newspaper accounts of the ritual suicide of the writer Yukio Mishima after he his bizarre, horrific attempt to overthrow the government of Japan. Later, I read his short story “Swaddling Clothes.”
Warning: If you haven’t read the story and think you might, stop here. This note is full of spoilers.
The story is narrated by Toshiko, a young wife who is put off because she’s been put in a cab by her husband, an actor, after dinner with friends at a restaurant.
This is one of the great early lines in any story: “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.”
Ah, those bloodstains.
Toshiko’s husband had regaled the table with a story of “the incident.”
The couple had hired a nurse for their son. The woman had squatted on the floor and given birth to a boy.
Toshiko was shocked. Her husband wasn’t. His concern was to save the good carpet.
A doctor was summoned, but the circumstances of the birth were such that the doctor just wrapped the baby in bloody newspapers and went on.
Toshiko was overwhelmed by the sordidness of the event: a child, born out of wedlock, born on a floor, wrapped in newspapers. She couldn’t get it out of her mind that the baby’s birth was shameful, so debasing, that it would ruin his life.
She imagined telling the baby when he grew up and became curious about how he came into the world. But she was so sure his life would end badly she imagined him growing up to be a criminal, the kind who might kill her own son, perhaps even her.
She was the only person who’d seen the child wrapped in newspapers. She quickly wrapped him in flannel.
Toshiko rode toward home in the cab. Though it was 10 p.m., she was upset and got out to walk through a park. She saw a young homeless man sleeping on a bench. She imagined that would be what the unfortunate baby would look like in 20 years.
She was fascinated by the young man and got too close to him. He awoke and grabbed her.
She wasn’t frightened or alarmed. All that was foreseeable. The only surprise was that the 20 years had passed in a flash.
To me, a good story gets at the way human beings think. Sometimes, our thoughts are just bizarre, even horrific.
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