The day of the autopsy, as always, everyone seemed depressed and couldn’t get up. I received a letter from my husband
While I was wondering why the baby hadn’t come yet, this morning I heard from the guard there was news of your birth in the paper. Does the baby look like me? Does it have normal toes?
I’d been emotional since the morning, and the part about the toes being normal inevitably brought me to tears. My husband’s big toe has a birth defect and is as thin as his pinky toe. And in the letter, likewise inevitably, he told me about his life in prison. I felt indignant that even in the life of my captive husband, his wife on the outside and his just born child were his primary concern. But I also felt an unbearable nostalgia that I wanted to cling to.
That evening, the child was afflicted with terrible diarrhea, her stool a copper-green mixture of water and grain. I’d been checking her diaper constantly, bringing her lips to the breast to measure her temperature, but I was exhausted and soon I’d turned my back to my child and closed my eyes.
When I brought her lips to my breast, she shook her neck in displeasure. She seemed delirious with fever. What I’d been clearly all too afraid of was manifesting. I’ve tried to trick her into swallowing some red grape-colored medicine by bringing it to my breast, but as she won’t even swallow the milk, I can hardly make her take the medicine.
After crinkling up her mouth and vomiting, her throat became inflamed. When I requested they examine her for illness, the nurse made an annoyed face, grabbed my child by the diaper, and carried her to the second floor. I stayed up through the night, straining my ears listening for any sound from the second floor. Until midnight, I could hear the voice of a paying patient in the room next to the nurse’s station singing the words to a popular song without pausing for breath to such an extent I didn’t believe he was sick. Until it got late, I couldn’t even hear the sound of the nurses’ footsteps.
Upon returning downstairs, I passed the night waiting for the sound of the nurses’ footsteps.
When the night broke, the apprentice nurse came to my bedside with a friendly smile. That grin seemingly matched perfectly my intuition.
“I’m very sorry; she passed at precisely four o’clock.”
“Is that so?” I replied in a calm voice, as if to cover the hushed voice of my interlocutor, as if nothing were wrong. Truthfully, no feelings beyond that have awakened in me.
“I’d certainly like to see her face, but I’m having difficulty walking.”
“No, you can’t.”
At this point, begrudging her smile, whatever I said wasn’t an answer. The nurses, whose primary obligation was to entertain the paying male patients, how far would they actually go? For them, these sorts of things are merely perfunctory.
As if I were in the second-floor exam room where the nurses play, waiting for the pus in the beriberi-infected milk, I drew a sketch of a small child, puffy and drowsy. When I close my eyes, I feel as though I’m moving between my dreams and reality. However, it is as though all I can see is a solitary fabric fluttering back and forth like a flag, just visible in the darkness. All my senses are dead. Is this unhappiness?
When she noticed that the corpse was being carried to the morgue, the former prostitute, who was ambulatory, offered to go buy incense in my stead. Actually, frankly I asked her. Lying down as I am, instead of the memory of my child’s face, the sound of dripping of the tap in the morgue came to me. Already the autopsy begins.
The autopsy will almost certainly show that the infant died because I had no money for infant formula, I was helpless and had to feed her milk contaminated with beriberi. And moreover, more and more the evidence will tell the medical community: “Beware of beriberi-contaminated milk. When the mother has beriberi, the child must be raised with a wet nurse or on infant formula.” Nevertheless, from the autopsy of my sweet child’s corpse they’ll never be able to draw the conclusions about what the sorts of people who can’t afford formula ought to do.
The next day, I received a call from the prosecutor stating my imprisonment proceedings had concluded. That night, it was raining, a rare downpour in the colony. At the front entrance, where the lights are shut off at 8 p.m. to save power, the sabers worn by two police officers glimmered. I was helped into a carriage by a Chinese rickshaw driver. My destination was Lushun Prison in Port Arthur. On the hill climbing into the suburbs, the carriage trembled driving into the blinding wind. Every time the carriage shifted, bright red light in the distance flickered on the hood’s celluloid windows. It’s the prison gate.
translator’s note: By 1927, Japan’s so-called “Taishō democracy” had begun to give way to the imperialism of the early Shōwa era. The death of the reformist Emperor Meiji initially brought political turmoil via the Taishō political crisis of 1912, but the ultimate outcome was a period of fairly peaceful, democratic government. Subsequently, the 1910s and early 1920s brought to Japan the proliferation of various forms of political thought, including socialism, communism, and anarchism, and in 1922, on the heels of the success of the Bolsheviks, the Japanese Communist Party was formed. However, the newly-established parliamentary government was not yet rooted enough to withstand major upheaval, and the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 was the beginning of the end of any pretense of liberal democracy in the prewar era.
On September 1, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck just outside of Tokyo, killing over 140,000 and leaving millions more homeless. In the aftermath, ethnic violence was rampant as unfounded rumors spread that Koreans living in the area were committing robberies and engaging in violence and sabotage. The Japanese government reported over 200 deaths of ethnic Koreans, though some sources place the number much higher. The ethnic violence spilled over to other populations as well, including Chinese and Ryukyuan (indigenous Okinawan) people. Ultimately, the event would lay bare the violence underlying the apparent “peace” within the rising imperial nation. At the time of the quake, Japan already formally held Taiwan and Korea as colonies and, in practice, it ruled over much of Manchuria as well. As the decades wore on, its methods of colonial administration became increasingly brutal. The Japanese government took advantage of the crisis to pass the 1925 Peace Preservation Law, which was targeted specifically toward socialists and carried a penalty of up to ten years’ imprisonment for involvement with socialist organizing.
This history forms the backdrop of Taiko Hirabayashi’s story, a famously semi-autobiographical tale. Hirabayashi was a member of the proletarian writers’ movement and active in the Japanese leftist community more broadly. In the aftermath of the earthquake, she and her anarchist lover were arrested and jailed for a month. Subsequently, they struggled to find work and were in the constant sights of Japanese police. This experience led them to move first to Korea and then to Manchuria. In the latter locale, Hirabayashi began working for a railway company until she and her lover were again arrested. While she was questioned and quickly released, unlike her lover, she was then already eight months pregnant and suffering from the effects of beriberi. Like her protagonist, she was held in a charity hospital to give birth, and her only biological child died after a scant few weeks. This incident would greatly affect Hirabayashi, and would inform much of her work, including this text as well as her 1926 breakout work “Self-Mockery.”
At the time that Hirabayashi was in Manchuria, the region was still nominally under Chinese control. Influence in the region, however, had been one of the causes of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Japan had initially acquired a lease in perpetuity over a small portion of the territory known as the Kwantung Leasehold as a result of the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War, but as a consequence of the Triple Intervention in the war’s aftermath, the lease was then ceded nearly immediately to Russia. Ten years later, Japan regained the lease after the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905. During the era of Russian control, a railway had been built within the territory, which was ceded to Japan in the terms of the treaty, and Japan further established rights of extraterritoriality in the areas immediately surrounding the railroad. In administering this area and in state policy more broadly, Imperial Japan employed formalized tactics of settler colonialism which served the twin purposes of expanding the Japanese sphere of influence and disposing of unwanted populations that could potentially drain government resources and contribute to political instability. In other words, that Hirabayashi and other dissidents like her ended up in Manchuria was no accident.
What is perhaps most notable about Hirabayashi’s work broadly is its depiction of the oppression borne by working-class women at the hands of capitalism and patriarchy. In “At the Charity Clinic,” she viscerally portrays the choicelessness and oppression faced by working-class women, focusing particularly on the ways in which these circumstances are marked on the body. She, however, spares room to criticize even leftist men for their treatment of women, from their adherence to patriarchal systems to their minimization of women’s contributions. Other of her works, such as “Beating,” (1929) take on feminist themes such as domestic violence more explicitly. In the postwar era, she became associated with Tenkō literature. Tenkō was a political conversion in the postwar period whereby socialist and communist figures renounced their radical beliefs and embraced a more reformist outlook. Such “conversions” often took place under duress. Whether Hirabayashi’s was sincere or in the service of self-preservation, her work is remembered today as important not only in the sphere of proletarian literature, but also for its feminist ethos and its portrayal of working-class women’s subjective, embodied experience.
a note on the translation: The historical present appears much more frequently in Japanese writing than it does in English. Many writers in English may recall their early compositions marked in red with the note “tense inconsistency.” Japanese, however, has no such stricture, and within a paragraph an author may move seamlessly between the past and present tenses, the present irrupting in the middle of a paragraph in order to communicate a sense of immediacy within a text otherwise unfolding in the past. In “‘At the Charity Clinic’” and many other stories besides, Hirabayashi makes particularly effective use of this form in conveying the embodied experience of working-class women. While translating the text, I found that attempts to bring it in line with English conventions surrounding tenses removed something fundamental from the reading experience and flattened the emotional impact. There are certainly risks in leaving the Japanese historical present intact when brought into English. Perhaps most pressing, in its strangeness to the Anglophone ear, is the risk of Orientalization and exoticization. Additionally, it may appear from the English translation that Hirabayashi’s writing was more experimental in form than it was in reality. These risks, however, pale in comparison to the risk of draining the very life from the text itself.
TAIKO HIRABAYASHI was born in Suwa, Nagano in 1905. A prolific author and literary critic, she continued publishing until soon before her death in 1972. The Taiko Hirabayashi Prize for Literature was established in her honor after her death and ran for 25 years until 1997. Although in Japan many of her stories were adapted into films, she remains little known and little translated in the English-speaking world.
AMY OBERMEYER is currently a postdoctoral fellow at New York University. She researches gender and subjectivity in Japanese and Latin American literatures and is also a founding member of the Barricade editorial collective.