Anthony H. Chambers
August 8, morning
To Tokyo on the Ideyu Express. There are four of us: my wife and I, Tamako, and the maid Fuji. Throughout July the heat was the worst in recent memory, but late at night on the fourth of this month we finally saw some rain, and the temperature fell nine degrees to endurable levels. We thought the worst was over, but this morning the high temperatures returned. Having bought the Ideyu tickets last night, we braved the intense heat and set out. At 10:27 we got off at Shimbashi Station, then came directly to the Hasegawa inn at Toranomon and had a rest. For the last several years I’ve tried to avoid Tokyo at the height of summer, but this year my blood pressure has gradually improved. I came once last month; this is my second visit. In the old days one expected Tokyo to be cooler in the summer than Osaka and Kyoto, but this is no longer the case. As we headed from Shimbashi to Toranomon along the street where the trolley runs, our automobile stopped again and again, and with each stop the heat inside rose to unbearable levels. After a short rest at the inn, my wife, Tamako, and Fuji went out to shop and have lunch at Ketel’s in Ginza, promising to return at 1:30. I watched the second half of Blue Continent at the Marunouchi Nikkatsu, then came back to the inn, had a piece of toast and a bottle of orange juice, and settled in for my daily nap. As if the sweltering heat weren’t enough, though, the inn is being enlarged, and the construction noise is terrible. A building of many stories is going up across the street too. The constant din of concrete being poured and iron rods being hammered is deafening. Automobiles and motorcycles, too, produce a lot of noise and vibration as they pass the inn; traffic is probably heavy here because the Mutual Aid Hall and the former Manchurian Railroad Building are nearby. Reluctantly I take a little of the sleeping drug I brought along just in case but haven’t used in a long time and doze for thirty or forty minutes.
Our main purpose in coming to Tokyo this time is to visit the KR Company warehouse in Kyōbashi tomorrow morning to sort out Etsuko’s wedding robes and chests, which had been stored separately in our Kyoto and Atami houses and at a relative’s place in Tokyo and then were put together in the warehouse with some of her other household furniture and effects. We’ve nothing in particular to do today. For some time my wife and Tamako have been saying they want me to take them to a strip show. Apparently they’ve decided to force me to accompany them this afternoon to the Nichigeki Music Hall. They began to pressure me last year to take them, saying it was awkward for women to go alone. Then, if my guess is correct, they developed a sudden desire to attend a live performance after seeing a burlesque film called Naked Goddesses (original title Ah! Les Belles Bacchantes!)—a hit in Paris—at the Kyōgeki on Kawaramachi this spring. I told them that the few women who patronize such places are good-time girls keeping foreigners company and that I’d never seen a respectable married or single woman there; it would be best if they gave up the idea, but, if they were so determined to go, they should go with someone else. It would be in poor taste, I thought, for the head of a household to escort his wife and her younger sister there. Until today, then, I’ve excused myself from accompanying my family, though I have gone by myself. But last month Mitsuko (Tamako’s daughter-in-law), who lives in Kitashirakawa, couldn’t endure any more of the Kyoto heat and escaped with Miori to Izu Heights. Leaving Miori with Tamako one day, she went to Tokyo and bravely entered the Music Hall, where she saw There Are Seven Keys to Love, which included in its credits such names as Tōgō Seiji, Muramatsu Shōfū, and Mishima Yukio. When she came back, she said that it may be called a strip show, but there was nothing that improper about it; the dancers were adorable, the audience included a number of women, and the girl called Gypsy Rose was especially pretty. “It wouldn’t be odd at all for you to go to a show like that,” she told her aunt and mother-in-law. With this prompting, they turned to me—“There, you see? Now will you take us?”—which explains how our present undertaking came about.
As they promised, my wife and the others came back to the inn after one o’clock. The four of us set out immediately. Arriving at the Nichigeki, we disposed of Fuji by sending her off to see a movie of her choice. The three of us then bought tickets for the back row of reserved seating in the Music Hall, where we’d be as inconspicuous as possible. The program, having changed since Mitsuko was there, featured The Pleasures of Temptation in twenty scenes, produced and written by Maruo Chōken, including “Aqua Girl’s Bottom-Up Mambo.” About fifteen minutes after we entered the theater, the show began. At most, 60 or 70 percent of the seats in front of us were occupied, all by foreigners. The other Japanese people sat in the unreserved section, which was 70 or 80 percent full. A few more customers trickled in after the show began. A man and woman, apparently Americans, entered the reserved section and sat in our row. Then two or three GIs, with girlfriends in tow, lined up in the row ahead of us. Aside from the American lady and the GIs’ girls, my wife and Tamako appeared to be the only women in the hall. No doubt it was a rare event here to see not just one but two kimono-clad ladies beyond middle age. To reach this theater, you have to take the elevator to the top of the Nichigeki and then climb a flight of stairs. With its low ceiling, the place is as stuffy and cramped as an attic. The OSK Music Hall in Osaka is more comfortable. Our establishment was air-conditioned but only enough to make us feel a momentary chill when we entered; once we took our seats it got muggy, and we waved our fans continuously. From the opening scene—the mambo contest—to the grand finale nineteen scenes later, the program consumed a full two hours. The many luscious nude figures linger in my memory only as a jumbled kaleidoscope—I have no idea which girl played what role in which episode. This sort of thing is probably best seen once and then forgotten completely. Halfway through, my wife began to doze off. “Naked Goddesses was better,” she grumbled. “These can’t compare with French nudes.” She added, “The dancing girls are pretty, but I didn’t expect to see so many men onstage.” I agreed with her in this—the production included far too many male roles for my taste. Gypsy Rose, whom Mitsuko had praised to the skies, seems to be the prima donna here, but she’s past her prime and has too much fat on her, and there’s a Eurasian cast to her features. All in all, she’s not my type, and my wife and Tamako say they feel the same way. I found a girl called Harukawa Masumi far more attractive. (I didn’t mention this to my wife.) I’ve forgotten all the other scenes except number sixteen, “The Back Window.” An old man, after checking into his hotel room, happens to look at the window across the way and is thrilled to see a nubile beauty in the bath, displaying her torso, bottom, back, legs, and feet, from the tips to the soles, as she washes herself. Then a bald man, apparently her husband, joins her in the bath, where a certain amount of sweet talk ensues. Utterly deflated, the hotel guest collapses in a heap. The bathing beauty in this skit is Harukawa Masumi. Even in Japan, such well-developed breasts, buttocks, and legs are not uncommon these days, but generally I feel no particular attraction unless they’re accompanied by a feline sort of face, the kind that Simone Simon used to have.
In the evening, back to the Hasegawa for a short rest. We went for dinner to a Chinese restaurant in Tamurachō. Because I tend to overeat, I gave up Chinese food for a long while, after developing high blood pressure, and had it again for the first time only last month, at the Tōtōtei. This, then, was my second time. We had a platter of hors d’oeuvres, including jellyfish steeped in sesame oil and soy sauce, shiitake mushrooms, white chicken meat, abalone, tomatoes, and cucumbers; shrimp wrapped in paper and deep-fried; a soup called “lotus and fish-wings,” made of shark fins and egg whites; walnuts and seared chicken simmered in soy; braised tofu and chicken; almond soup and “eight-treasures” rice with date jam; and, finally, tea on boiled rice with sharp Chinese pickles. I used to love these pickles, but I don’t touch them now as they’re bad for hypertension. According to Fuji, whose father works in a Kyushu coal mine, similar pickles are eaten around Fukuoka. They make her homesick, she said, wolfing them down. After dinner I went straight back to the Hasegawa, while my wife and Tamako took a turn around the Ginza. We sent Fuji to the relative’s place in Akasaka.
On the morning of the ninth we waited for Fuji to come to the Hasegawa at about nine o’clock, whereupon the three women set off to sort out the items in the warehouse. Staying at the inn for the morning, I asked several publishers to come and discuss some business. When we had finished, a little before noon, I went to the Hibiya Motion Picture Theater to see the controversial film Les Diaboliques. Atami has movie theaters too, four of them, but they rarely show foreign films that don’t appeal to a general audience, nor are they air-conditioned or heated, which makes them unbearable for an elderly person in midsummer and midwinter. I wait for opportunities to go to Tokyo—indeed, in my case the main reason for coming to Tokyo is usually to see plays and films. Les Diaboliques was written and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, who specializes in thrillers and previously made The Wages of Fear. One doesn’t know until the last moment who the villain is, and the film is preceded by a courteous message asking viewers not to discuss the plot so as not to spoil the enjoyment of those who have yet to see it. The tale revolves around three people: Michel, headmaster of a private elementary school called the Institut Delasalle in a suburb of Paris; his wife, Christina, who owns the school and teaches there; and Nicole, another teacher there, who is the headmaster’s mistress. Michel, the headmaster, is played by Paul Meurisse; Christina by Véra Clouzot, the director’s wife; and Nicole, the mistress-teacher, by Simone Signoret. Christina is a wealthy South American who has invested in the school; suffering from heart disease and timid by nature, she does whatever her cruel, despotic husband, Michel, demands. In addition, as she and every other instructor and pupil in the school are aware, she has lost her husband to her colleague Nicole. Although Michel appears to prefer his mistress to his wife, he doesn’t treat her with much affection: his abuse of her is little different from the way he treats his wife. Just when Christina, the wife, can no longer bear her husband’s brutality, Nicole, the mistress, proposes that the two of them kill him. Christina is shocked at the idea but is finally persuaded.
Nicole invites Christina on a three-day holiday, loading a wicker trunk just large enough to hold a person into the school’s baggage truck before going to stay at her house in a rural village called Niort. From there she has Christina telephone Michel and ask for a divorce. Since Michel has no intention of divorcing his financial backer, he rushes to the house to dissuade her. Nicole, saying that this is an opportunity they can’t miss, mixes a few drops of a powerful sleeping drug into some whiskey, hands it to Christina, and, when Christina hesitates, urges her angrily to give it to her husband to drink. Carrying the drugged Michel to the bathroom, the two women dump him in the tub, and Nicole holds his head underwater to drown him. They then stuff his body in the wicker trunk, place it in the truck, and drive through the night back to the school, where they heave him into the swimming pool. No one is the wiser, and everything has gone according to plan: drunk, Michel has fallen into the pool, and his body will soon rise to the surface. But by dawn, it still hasn’t appeared. A series of mysterious events follows.
Christina deliberately drops her room key into the pool and has a pupil search for it. The pupil emerges from the water with a key, but the key is not Christina’s; it’s the one to Michel’s room. Christina instructs the janitor to drain the pool, but the body has disappeared without a trace. Several days later a familiar suit is delivered from the cleaners: it’s the one Michel wore that night. The faculty and pupils gather in front of the schoolhouse for a commemorative photograph, which, when developed, shows the headmaster’s face reflected dimly in a window. One of the pupils says that he has been punished by the headmaster for breaking a window. Late at night, footsteps that sound like Michel’s can be heard, and the pecking of a typewriter comes from the headmaster’s office. Tormented by fear day and night, Christina, who has a bad heart, becomes a semi-invalid. Finally, one night she discovers Michel—is it his ghost?—submerged in the bathtub, just as he was that night. The moment Michel rises from the tub, water streaming from his body, Christina cries out, falls back against the door, and, her eyes turning up in their sockets, expires. Nicole, who has been away, suddenly reappears. Michel hugs and kisses her. “Even with heart disease, she was a tough one. She put us to a lot of trouble,” he says. At this point a private detective, who has been suspicious all along, enters and arrests the pair, saying as he leads them away, “You’ll get out after you’ve served fifteen or twenty years.”
Thus the plot takes a sudden turn when Christina dies and Michel embraces Nicole, and, until a few minutes before this, the viewer is gripped with suspense over the outcome. In retrospect, though, one sees that this film concentrates too much on thrilling the viewer and contains too many implausibilities. In particular, it’s absurd for the headmaster and his mistress to believe they won’t be found out, even as they employ such complicated, laborious methods to murder his wife. It would make for better theater to have the crime go undetected. It’s also absurd for the pair to be exposed and arrested immediately. The process by which the detective sniffs out their vicious plan is unclear. In his attempt to shock his heart-patient wife to death, the headmaster plays dead in the tub, is tossed around for hours in a trunk, and is dumped into a pool. That’s fine if the outcome is successful (as it is here), but things could have gone wrong: the conspiracy might have come to light before she died of shock or the shock might have been insufficient to cause her death. Would he and his mistress have become so absorbed in their troublesome project that they failed to consider such risks as these? It’s also unclear where Michel hides from the time he’s thrown into the pool until he reappears before his wife as a ghost. In short, this is a film that frightens its audience for a time, but once the scary gimmicks are understood it is clearly nothing but an empty sham. Nevertheless, it’s the fine acting and the ingenious processes by means of which the audience is strung along that account for the popularity and high praise the picture has won. One magazine called it “a thriller with a perfect score for terror,” “a truly creepy film,” “a film so frightening that timid women won’t want to go home alone at night.” Viewing a trailer for the film last month, when I went to see Nana, I was drawn to Simone Signoret’s extraordinarily cruel look as she plays Nicole. The Japanese translation of the film title—Akuma no yō na onna (A Diabolical Woman)—suits that look well. A large, faintly unclean face; dull, weary skin; a woman who looks unfeeling, unafraid, and devious—without this type of woman cast in the central role, the picture could never be as spine chilling as it aims to be. Here is a woman, one feels, capable of grasping her lover’s head with both hands and pushing it underwater. Véra Clouzot, too, is well suited for the role of Christina, looking the part of a sickly wife oppressed by her husband and his mistress. The highlight of her performance is in her movements and expression at the instant she suffers a heart attack and collapses. This was the first time I’d seen a Western woman die in this way, even in a motion picture. Losing consciousness, she gradually slides down the closed door and slumps to one side. This posture affords the audience the best possible view of her face in her last moments, and the sight is as memorable as would be the corpse of a huge insect whose life has abruptly been cut short. Her eyes, in contrast to Nicole’s venomous, glittering orbs, are the frightened, narrow, weak eyes of a constantly tyrannized woman; but suddenly they open wide to reveal the whites, the pupils roll to the upper right, and all movement ceases. Michel steps calmly from the tub, as if to say, “That did the trick,” comes to her side, gazes at her face, grasps her arm and then releases it with a looks that says, “Finally!” The scenes that arouse the greatest sense of horror are those in which Nicole pushes Michel underwater in the tub, Christina dies of shock, and Michel, having risen from the tub, removes the false eyes he has inserted to frighten his wife. These eyes are thin, convex lenses designed to fit snugly against the real corneas. Michel, playing dead, wears them to make his dead face look all the more ghastly. Even I was startled when he stuck both hands into his eyes and pulled out those lenses; the woman sitting next to me gasped and covered her face.
I left the theater at about two o’clock. On the street, the temperature was as high as yesterday’s. Because of the heat, I’d had a soft ice cream inside the theater; now I felt extremely thirsty again. Going to the basement level of the Sanshin Building, across the street, I had another ice cream and two slices of cake, then hailed a taxi and returned to the Hasegawa. There I found that my wife and the other two women had wrapped up their business at the warehouse early and gone to the Hibiya Motion Picture Theater, where, until shortly before, they had been watching the same film as me; but, afraid they might keep me waiting beyond our appointed time, they had left the theater in the middle of the film and come back here forty or fifty minutes ago, they said. They were, then, in the theater at the same time I was. Since my wife herself has been told by the doctor that her heart is weak and has always been scared of getting a shock of some kind, she’d been in two minds about this film, both wanting to see it and afraid to; but in time she learned the story from people who had seen it already, and she began to say, “It doesn’t bother me anymore, I want to see it, too.” Nevertheless, considering that she left halfway through, I suppose she was still nervous about her heart. When I told her that the second half was more frightening than the first, and that Christina’s death and Michel removing his false eyes were genuinely hair-raising, she said, “In that case, I’m glad I didn’t stay.”
After that, we rested for an hour or two. Checking out of the Hasegawa at five o’clock, we stopped by the Komatsu Store and some other shops in the Ginza, then, arriving at the Yaesu side of Tokyo Station, ate dinner at Tsujitome, in the basement of Daimaru. The Kyoto cuisine at Tsujitome is one of the delights that draws us from Atami to Tokyo. In recent years, especially, having business in the Tokyo area and unsure when we might be able to go back to Kyoto, we’ve keenly looked forward to it. What we most covet at this time of year are ayu trout and hamo eel. In the summer at Atami there’s plenty of bonito and tuna, but the ayu come from the Hayakawa and Kanogawa rivers and can’t compare with the ayu from the Hozu Gorge. Hamo, too, can sometimes be had in the Izu Heights region now, and we occasionally try it, but the taste is inferior and the bones aren’t cut properly, so we end up longing for Kansai hamo all the more. Recently my wife, who doesn’t eat bonito because it smells fishy, has been saying she wanted to go to Tokyo soon for the “peony” hamo at Tsujitome. Peony hamo, consisting of eel boiled in arrowroot starch and served with shiitake and greens in the soup bowls Tsujitome is noted for, is rather thick and mellow for a Japanese clear soup. Tonight’s menu at Tsujitome was slices of raw, young sea bass rinsed in cold water; red miso soup with loach and burdock root sliced as thin as bamboo leaves; a small dish of eggplant and black-eyed peas dressed in sesame and sardines simmered with ginger and pickled plum; a small dish of fried young taro with simmered chicken and yellow wheat-gluten dumplings; a small dish of fine, cold noodles; a small dish of rice pressed from a round mold and garnished with Nara pickles and ginger; hamo broiled with soy and the long-awaited peony hamo; and, on top of all that, large ayu, which they said they had ordered from Kyoto, grilled with salt and served with knotweed vinegar—an unexpected treat. Finally, we were offered arrowroot cakes from the Tsuruya Hachiman in Osaka, but we were too full to touch them. With Japanese food, I don’t normally worry about overeating, but after all this I felt as though I’d consumed more calories than I would have with Western or Chinese food and worried that my blood pressure might have risen. After dinner we hurried straight to the station platform and boarded an 8:21 train, which, apparently because of an accident of some kind, was delayed for a few minutes. At that hour the second-class coaches shouldn’t have been crowded, but tonight they were full as far as Ofuna, the ripe smell of humanity making the damp heat all the worse. We arrived at Atami just before eleven o’clock. As soon as we reached the house, I bathed, changed into a light summer kimono, stepped onto the garden grass, and, reclining in a deck chair, gazed at the night view of the Izu Peninsula. A waning moon hung in the sky; Izu Heights, Atami, Ajiro, and Kawana were dotted with lights. Recalling the heat of Tokyo yesterday and today, I felt as though this hilltop cottage was in another world.
After we went to sleep, I was woken by the sound of my wife moaning at around two or three o’clock and quickly tried to wake her. With several strong shakes I finally succeeded. Recently she’s been complaining of nightmares and shortness of breath during the night, and she often lets out sudden, alarming groans. One possible cause is her bedsprings, which, by sagging under the torso, might be putting pressure on her heart. Though I use a bed of the same design, I don’t experience this problem, so it must be the particular defect in her heart that accounts for the difference. In any case, we intend soon to have someone from the furniture store adjust the springs. Because a small night table stands between our beds, my hands can’t reach her immediately, even when I’m in a hurry to wake her; I have to get out of my bed and step over to hers. In the excitement, I sometimes wake up completely and find myself unable to go back to sleep. My wife says she’s gripped with an indescribable sensation when she has a nightmare: she can hardly breathe for two or three minutes, however much she tries, and she feels as though she might die on the spot. It’s not uncommon, then, for her to stay awake after one of these episodes, propping herself up and reading until dawn. Even without the problem of the springs, the strain on her heart must have been excessive tonight, after we’d feasted two evenings in a row on Chinese cuisine and the delicacies at Tsujitome. I, too, had trouble falling asleep after being roused by those groans and tossed about uncomfortably. Normally a sound sleeper, I’m able to doze off again quickly when I’ve had to use the toilet during the night; but tonight my stomach felt extremely full from overindulging like that. Then I suddenly realized that my pulse was skipping a beat, something that hasn’t occurred for some time. The pauses came at regular intervals, after every three beats, and an artery would twitch each time. Though no pain accompanies this event, the feeling is not a pleasant one, as the clear implication is that something is wrong with my heart. I always feel the twitching in an artery—now in the upper chest, near the shoulder; now farther down, on the side; now on the right side of the left breast or on the left side of the right breast—but tonight I felt it in the solar plexus, right above my stomach. I’ve been warned by the doctor that overeating is likely to bring on an irregular pulse. It goes without saying that the sensation in my solar plexus was retribution for two days of ayu, peony hamo, “eight-treasures” rice, and “lotus with fish wings.” Knowing that it’s best at such times to use sleeping pills to blur the consciousness and relieve the anxiety, I swallowed one tablet of Rabona and two of Adalin and gradually slipped into a state of half wakefulness, half sleep. It’s a quirk of mine to enjoy a fuzzy state like this, in which I’m not quite sure whether I’m asleep or awake. Half conscious at first, I enjoy the myriad vague imaginings, now forming, now vanishing, like foam on the sea, until at some point they merge with real dreams. Now they’ll turn into dreams, I say in my semiconscious state as I watch them unfold. What explanation Freud offers in The Interpretation of Dreams, or how it is with other people, I don’t know, but I feel as though I’m able, to some extent, to sense in advance what my dreams will be and even at times to control them. There will be those who say that the whole thing is a dream, that when I wake up I’ll realize that I’ve been dreaming within a dream; but I can’t necessarily agree . . . As I turn this way and that, conscious of the pressure in my overfull stomach and wishing that the sleeping pills would quickly take effect, I think of last night’s peony hamo: the pure white flesh of the eel, the limpid, slippery semiliquid that encased it. It feels as if it’s thrashing about in my stomach, unchanged in form. From the white flesh floats an image of Harukawa Masumi in the bathtub, washing the various parts of her body. Arrowroot-starch dressing . . . that slimy sauce coating not hamo but her—Harukawa Masumi . . . wait, now it’s Michel, the headmaster of the Institut Delasalle, in the tub. Simone Signoret, his mistress, is pushing him under. Michel is dead. Wet hair clings to his forehead and covers his eyes; through gaps in the hair I can see the dead man’s huge eyeballs, turned up in their sockets.
Then another weird figment makes its entrance. In my library I have my own, private, Western-style toilet, on which I think up marvelous things as I do my business every morning. This toilet came to mind. Installing a Western-style fixture has to do with the views of Dr. Fuse, of the Osaka National Hospital: he advises anyone with high blood pressure to avoid Japanese toilets, because when an old person bears down in a squatting position he’s likely to suffer a cerebral hemorrhage. On this basis I’ve installed a toilet with a seat; but it has the added advantage of being most convenient for inspecting one’s own excrement. A Japanese flush-style fixture displays its contents so openly that one can’t bear to look; in the Western design, however, the feces are submerged in water, so that one can observe them at one’s leisure, as though viewing something that’s been surgically removed and preserved in alcohol. One can detect a bloody stool, for example—the result of a stomach ulcer or uterine cancer—at an early stage. Recently I noticed that the water turned bright red whenever I had a bowel movement, and I passed several anxious days suspecting an ulcer until I was relieved to learn that the source was the red beets I enjoy eating at breakfast. I assume that bloody stool from a stomach ulcer has a blackish tone, but in the case of red beets, beautiful crimson threads ooze from the excrement and tint the surrounding water, so that it looks like pale manganese-dioxide water. The color is so lovely that I sometimes gaze at it for some time, captivated. The feces floating in this crimson solution are not at all repulsive. At times a fecal lump will suggest the shape of something else, such as a human face. Tonight one looks like Simone Signoret’s diabolical face, glaring at me from the red liquid. I study it, reluctant to flush the water away . . . Like fluid clay, it contorts and twists and congeals again, now into the form of a sculpted, Grecian torso. “The Basic Annals of Empress Lü,” in Records of the Grand Historian,1 reads, “Finally, the empress dowager cut off Lady Ch’i’s arms and legs, gouged out her eyes, deafened her ears with poisonous smoke, gave her a potion to drink, which made her mute, and had her placed in a latrine pit, calling her a ‘human sow.’” Simone Signoret’s face has turned into a human sow, I see . . .
I wonder how the human sow came to mind. The passage “Though she might not meet as sad an end as Lady Ch’i” appears in the main text of “The Sacred Tree,” on page 150 of my revised translation of The Tale of Genji, and the note reads, “Wife of the Han emperor Kao Tsu. After Kao Tsu’s death, she incurred the jealousy of Empress Lü, who cut off her arms and legs, plucked out her eyes, and placed her in a privy.” Did my desire one day to write something based on this account chance to merge with the image in the flush toilet?
Empress Dowager Lü was Kao Tsu’s consort when he was a commoner. She bore him Emperor Hui the Filial and the queen mother, Princess Yuan of Lu. When Kao Tsu became king of Han he acquired Lady Ch’i of Tingt’ao and loved her dearly. She bore him Ju Yi, the Melancholy King of Chao. Hui the Filial was kind-hearted and weak. Kao Tsu thought him different from himself. . . . The beloved Lady Ch’i always accompanied the emperor when he went east of the Pass, and day and night wept and wailed, begging that her own son be set up in place of the heir apparent. Empress Lü, being advanced in years, always stayed behind, rarely saw the emperor, and was more and more neglected. . . . In the Fourth Month, the day chia-Ch’en in the twelfth year of his reign, Kao Tsu died in the Palace of Lasting Joy. . . . Empress Lü nurtured the greatest hatred for Lady Ch’i and her son, the king of Chao. She immediately had Lady Ch’i confined to her apartments and summoned the king of Chao. . . . Emperor Hui the Filial, compassionate and aware of the empress dowager’s anger, went himself to meet the king of Chao at the Pa River, accompanied him to the palace, and protected him, eating and sleeping with him. The empress dowager wanted to kill the king of Chao, but could find no opportunity. In the Twelfth Month of the first year of Hui the Filial’s reign, the emperor went out at dawn to hunt pheasants. The king of Chao, being young, could not get up so early. The empress dowager heard that he was alone and sent someone with poison to give him to drink. When Emperor Hui the Filial returned, the king of Chao was already dead. . . . Finally, the empress dowager cut off Lady Ch’i’s arms and legs . . . calling her a “human sow.” After a few days, she summoned Emperor Hui the Filial and showed him the “human sow.” Hui the Filial looked at her and asked who it was, and only then did he realize that it was Lady Ch’i. He wept bitterly, fell ill as a result, and for more than a year was unable to rise from his bed. He sent someone to the empress dowager to say, “This was not the act of a human being. I, as your son, can never govern the empire.” From then on, Hui the Filial indulged every day in drink and dissipation and paid no heed to governance.
This is what Records of the Grand Historian has to say. A note in the Compilation of Han Writings in Japanese Translation explains that the character chih means “sow” or “mother hog,” and “human sow” refers to a person who has become like an “old female pig.” The Compilation clarifies other unusual terms as well.
There, floating in the beautiful, crimson, manganese-dioxide water, is an object resembling a limbless torso or a lump of pork. As I’m examining it, someone says, “Look, that’s a human sow in there.” I turn to see a woman standing at my side, dressed in the robes of a Han empress dowager. “Oh, no!—the ‘human sow’ must be Lady Ch’i,” I exclaim, quickly covering my eyes. I realize that the aristocratic lady beside me is Empress Dowager Lü and I am Emperor Hui the Filial. . . . Suddenly I’m awake. It’s 4:30 a.m., and a pale light glows beyond the shoji. I hear the drum of the Kōa Kannon Temple on top of the hill. My stomach is still uncomfortably distended. At some point my wife has fallen into a peaceful sleep. Where did the real dream begin? When Simone Signoret’s face started to twist and crumble? . . . And thinking these thoughts, I drift off to sleep again.