For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a husband construes his stubbornness as miscommunication in Kaori Ekuni’s “Night, wife, detergent.” Ekuni’s trademark wit guides us through this unreliable narrative: a self-assured husband thinks he’s tried everything to understand his wife—everything, that is, except actually listen to her. This messy “misunderstanding” reveals an even more unsettling truth about our narrator: he sees his relationship as a contest for dominance. A probingly comic take on gender dynamics and dysfunctional relationships.
My wife said she wanted to leave me. “We have to talk,” she said.
It was after 10:00 p.m. I was tired. We’ve been married five years, no kids.
“You can get along by pretending not to notice,” my wife said. “But pretending not to notice won’t make it go away.”
When I didn’t reply and kept looking at the TV, she turned it off. I had no idea what I was supposed to be pretending not to notice, or what wouldn’t go away. As always.
As she stood over me, glaring at me, I noticed that her pedicure was chipped. “Do you need nail polish remover?” I blurted out, with hope and relief mingled in my voice. You can’t remove nail polish without nail polish remover. Is that why she’s upset?
My wife shook her head.
“Well, then it must be those square cotton wipes. The ones you said you couldn’t do without, when I told you to use tissues instead—you’ve run out of those wipes.”
My wife sighed. “No. I don’t mean anything like that. I have nail polish remover and cotton wipes. The only reason my nail polish is chipped is that I’m so busy I haven’t had time to do my nails.”
Time. There was nothing I could do about that. I love my wife, I thought, and I want to help her. But if she’s asking for something that they don’t sell at the convenience store, I don’t know what to do.
“Hey, listen,” she said. “I think we should go our separate ways. We’ll be good friends.”
I’d had enough. It didn’t look like she was going to let me sleep at all. “How many trash bags do we have left?” I decided to do my best as a husband. The key to my wife is that she will answer a question. No matter if she’s angry or crying, if you ask her a question she’ll answer. “Detergent? Milk? Diet Pepsi?” I listed off her basic essentials, one after another.
“We have tons of trash bags. We’re down to our last bottle of detergent, the one we’re using now, but we have milk and Diet Pepsi. But that has nothing to do with what I’m trying to tell you. Please, I’m begging you, listen to me properly.”
I wasn’t listening. I was already putting my shoes on at the door. Stop, etc, listen, etc, my wife was saying behind me as I went outside and headed for the convenience store. Lights glowed in the windows of the houses.
The detergent my wife likes comes in a pink bottle. There are lots of pink bottles, but it’s the one that has a pink cap too. I bought five bottles of it. I bought Diet Pepsi and milk too. And trash bags, and nail polish remover. Square cotton wipes. And rice balls, while I was at it.
The bags were really heavy. The creaking white plastic bags were so full I thought they’d break on the way back.
Inside the door, my wife looked sad. “Why did you get so much again?”
The quantity is important.
My wife sighed again, as one by one she took the things out from inside the bags and put them on the table. “You really don’t listen to what I say at all, do you? Didn’t I tell you we had Diet Pepsi? And milk. And trash bags.”
And suddenly she started laughing. “Why are you like this? You don’t listen to a single thing I say.” In her hand was the nail polish remover.
I had won.
Translated from the Japanese by Sharni Wilson
Kaori Ekuni is an award-winning, prolific Japanese author known as “the female Murakami”, who has not been much translated into English. She is a writer who works somewhat outside the traditional Japanese literary canon, often portraying complex, dysfunctional relationships.
Sharni Wilson is a Japanese-to-English literary translator and a writer of fiction. Her work has appeared in Takahē, the Tokyo Poetry Journal, the Stockholm Review of Literature, and various anthologies, including the forthcoming Best of Auckland. She holds an MA in Japanese literature from the University of Auckland. She can be found at sharniwilson.com.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: