“Swaddling Clothes”
by Yukio Mishima
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.
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“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 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 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
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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 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 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.
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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 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 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 figure.
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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. 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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Mishima, Yukio. “Swaddling Clothes.” The International Story. Ed. Ruth Spack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 132136. Print.