It was a custom that the two-yen allowance she received at the start of each month be placed in Yoshiko’s purse by her mother’s own hand in the form of four silver fifty-sen pieces. The number of these coins in circulation had been declining in those days. They looked light but felt heavy, and they seemed to Yoshiko to fill her red leather string purse with a solid dignity. Careful not to waste her allowance, Yoshiko often kept the coins in the purse in her handbag until the end of the month. She did not actively spurn such girlish pleasures as taking in a movie or going to a coffee shop with her friends from work, but she simply saw those diversions as being outside her life. Never having experienced them, she was never tempted by them. Once a week, on her way back from the office, she would stop off at a department store and spend ten sen on a loaf of the salted French bread she liked so much. Other than that, there was nothing she particularly wanted for herself.
One day, though, in the stationery department at Mitsukoshi’s, a glass paperweight caught her eye. Hexagonal, it had a dog carved on it in relief. Charmed by the dog, Yoshiko took the paperweight in her hand. Its thrilling coolness, its unexpected weightiness gave her a sudden pleasure. She loved this kind of delicately accomplished work and found herself captivated. She weighed it in her palm, looked at it from every angle, and then, reluctantly, she placed it back in its box. It cost forty sen. She came back the next day and examined the paperweight again the same way. She came and looked at it again the day after that. After ten days of this, she finally made up her mind.
‘I’ll take this,’ she said to the shop assistant, her heart beating fast. When she got home, her mother and elder sister laughed at her. ‘How could you spend your money on such a toy?’ But when each of them had taken it in her hand and looked at it, they said, ‘You’re right, it is rather pretty. And it’s so well made.’ They held it up to the light. The polished clear glass surface harmonized delicately with the misty frosted glass of the relief, and there was an exquisite rightness in the hexagonal facets. To Yoshiko, it was a lovely work of art. Having taken seven days, eight days and more to determine that the paperweight was an object worth making her possession, Yoshiko didn’t care what anyone else might have to say about it, but still she felt some pride in receiving this recognition of her good taste from her mother and sister.
Even if she was laughed at for her exaggerated carefulness – taking those ten days to buy something for a mere forty sen – Yoshiko could not have done it any other way. She would not have to regret having bought something on the spur of the moment. The seventeen-year-old Yoshiko did not possess such meticulous discrimination that she had spent so many days looking and thinking before arriving at her decision. She was simply afraid of carelessly spending the silver fifty-sen pieces that had taken on such deep-seated importance in her mind. When the story of the paperweight came up three years later and everyone burst out laughing, her mother said with real feeling, ‘I thought you were so lovable that time.’ An amusing anecdote like this was attached to every single one of Yoshiko’s possessions.
They started by taking the lift to Mitsukoshi’s fifth floor because it was easier to shop from the top storey down. Yoshiko had agreed to accompany her mother on a Sunday shopping trip for a change. The day’s shopping should have been over when they reached ground level, but her mother continued down to the bargain basement as though it were a matter of course for her. ‘It’s so crowded, Mother. I hate that place,’ Yoshiko grumbled, but her mother was already immersed in the basement’s competitive atmosphere, it seemed, and didn’t hear her. The bargain basement was a place set up for the sole purpose of making people waste their money, but perhaps her mother would find something. Yoshiko followed her at a distance to keep an eye on her. It was air-conditioned so not oppressively hot. First her mother bought three packs of stationery for twenty-five sen, then turned to look at Yoshiko. They shared a grin. Lately her mother had been using her stationery, much to Yoshiko’s annoyance. Now we can rest easy, their looks seemed to say.
Drawn towards the counters for kitchen utensils and underwear, her mother was not bold enough to thrust her way through the mobs they attracted. She stood on tiptoe, peering over people’s shoulders, or reached between their sleeves, but didn’t buy anything, heading instead towards the exit, moving hesitantly as if not entirely convinced she should give up. ‘Oh, these are just ninety-five sen? My …’ Her mother picked up one of the umbrellas for sale near the exit. Surprised to find that every umbrella she dug out of the pile bore the same ninety-five-sen price tag, she said with suddenly regained energy, ‘They’re so cheap, aren’t they, Yoshiko? Aren’t they cheap?’ as if her reluctance to leave had found an outlet. ‘Well, don’t you think they’re cheap?’ ‘They really are.’ Yoshiko picked one up, too. Her mother took it and opened it alongside her own. ‘The ribs alone would be cheap at the price,’ her mother said. ‘The fabric – well, it’s rayon, but it’s well made, don’t you think?’
How was it possible to sell such a decent item at this price? No sooner had the thought flashed through Yoshiko’s mind than a strange resentment welled up inside her of being tricked into taking a defective product. Her mother rummaged through the pile, opening one umbrella after another in a grim search for one suitable to her age. Yoshiko waited several minutes before saying, ‘Mother, don’t you have one for everyday use at home?’ ‘Yes, I do, but that one …’ She glanced at Yoshiko. ‘It’s ten years, no, more. I’ve had it fifteen years. It’s worn out and old-fashioned. Or if I passed this one on to somebody, think how happy they would be.’ ‘True. It’s all right if you’re buying it as a gift.’ ‘Anybody would be delighted to get this, I’m sure.’ Yoshiko smiled, but she wondered if her mother was really choosing umbrellas with someone else in mind. Certainly, it could not have been anyone close to them. If it were, her mother would not have said ‘anybody’.
‘How about this one, Yoshiko?’ ‘Hmm, I wonder.’ Yoshiko couldn’t drum up much enthusiasm, but she stepped closer to join in the search, hoping to find an umbrella that would be suitable for her mother. Other shoppers, wearing thin summer rayon dresses, streamed past, quickly snapping up umbrellas as they remarked on the items’ cheapness. Yoshiko felt a little sorry – and angry at herself – for having hesitated to help her flushed and tense-looking mother. Yoshiko turned towards her, prepared to say, ‘Why not just buy one, any one, quickly?’ ‘Let’s stop this, Yoshiko.’ ‘What?’ Her mother smiled weakly, placed her hand on Yoshiko’s shoulder as if to brush something off and moved away from the counter. Now it was Yoshiko’s turn to want more, but five or six steps were all it took for her to feel relief.
Taking hold of her mother’s hand on her shoulder, she squeezed it hard and gave it one big swing, the two of them shoulder to shoulder as they hurried towards the exit. This had happened seven years before, in 1939.
When the rain pounded against the roof of her scorched sheet-metal shack, Yoshiko found herself wishing they had bought an umbrella that time, and that she could joke with her mother about the one or two hundred yen such an umbrella would cost now, but her mother had died in the firebombing of their Kanda, Tokyo, neighbourhood. Even if they had bought an umbrella, it probably would have been consumed in the flames. By chance, the glass paperweight had survived. When her in-laws’ house had burnt down in Yokohama, the paperweight was among those things that she’d frantically stuffed into an emergency bag, and now it was her only souvenir of life in her girlhood home. From evening on, in the alley, she could hear the strange cries of the neighbourhood girls. Rumour had it that they could make a thousand yen in a single night. Now and then she would find herself holding the forty-sen paperweight she had bought after ten days of indecision when she was these girls’ age, and as she studied the sweet little dog in relief, she would realize with a shock that there was not a single dog left in the whole burnt-out neighbourhood.