the lady
by Christopher Hallenbrook
The Lady carried herself with an effortless old-world elegance that had exited this age a generation or more before she entered it. Raised for the court of Victoria long after the Nuclear Age had given way to the stifling dominance of suburbia, she was repulsed by the inauthentic intimacy of 21st century life and felt its earnest atomization as acutely as a rapier between the 6th and 7th ribs. Forced to engage with its intimate hypocrisy and falseness, even to itself, created a pain more severe than twisting that blade, one from which only Death himself held the promise of sweet relief. Those fortunate, few lucky enough to see her soul considered her a gift to this world of contradictions. She could only see this as a reflection of their weak perception and own inner demons. What else could explain their attraction to the very things she hated with an intensity that no human can direct at anything other than the self?
The men who truly knew her knew this as well. I say men for while the men in her life were few, the women were even fewer. This was not the all-too-common “I’m not like other women” sneer from those who build themselves up by pulling others down. Rather, the insidious societal cross-currents that batter modern women were simply alien to her. The commercialized sexuality of Teen Vogue and modern pop might be a model of liberation and autonomy for some, but to her it was simply . . . unseemly. The Career Woman was indecipherable to her. Accomplishment. The Cult of Productivity. Worldly Ambition. None of the questions they could ask or the concerns they could have made sense to her. Your job is unfulfilling? The paycheck clears. You have ambitions? Why? These were as alien to her as the Rules of Acquisition. She could no more understand the appeal of such a life than she could turn into a bird and fly to Catalina. And power suits didn’t suit her figure.
Don’t misunderstand me. She wasn’t a paragon of domesticity. At least not as you understand that term. June Clever was too common. The Pioneer Woman a commercialized distortion of home life from a guest house larger than The Lady’s apartment on a ranch larger than several U.S. states. None of the versions of modern womanhood, the contradictions and external pressures of which too often knocked down women seeking to define themselves, fit her. The children are on your last nerve? Discipline them. Your husband’s attentions are waning? Well, perhaps if you weren’t a cold and emasculating . . . no, a Lady does not say such things. A Lady of her pedigree and breeding could oversee a great household, host a reception of ambassadors and cabinet officials, or entertain a sultan with the ease of fish swimming in the sea. But where could she do that outside of the Royal Museum?
To escape the pain of existence required retreating inward. Not into the self, she was repulsed by what she found there. Into books. Not ebooks, audio books, podcasts, and the infinite electronic diversions forced upon the world by “content creators” (a barbarous neologism if there ever was one). Books. Physical books. Great books. Literature. The art of men long dead who reacted to the same cleavages, pressures, and hypocrisies present in their respective ages – there is nothing new under the sun after all – and raged, despaired, mourned, and dissected them with sagacious insight and passionate rejection of their tortured psyches. It was in these works of art that she found her kin. Soseki. Akutagawa. Mishima. She understood these men, and they her. Men raised for the court of the Tokugawa Shogunate, living in the tumultuous Meiji Era, when Japan rejected centuries of tradition and raced at breakneck speed into Modernity, or, in Mishima’s case, after Japan’s unconditional surrender to Allied Forces, when the samurai was irrevocably replaced by the man of commerce, they understood her displacement, her obsolesce, her inability to fit herself into the world without distorting her essence into something she considered vulgar. With these men she spoke; with these men she belonged.
This is where I come in dear reader. I own a small bookshop (you haven’t heard of it) in a small coastal community in California (you have heard of it). Literature is my passion, and I’m fortunate enough that my passion is my business. Before opening the shop each day, I pick up a breakfast burrito and iced latte, then begin my day at the beach. The waves and the pier. The sand and the pelicans. The sun or the fog. They all fed my soul while the chorizo and caffeine fed my body. But I digress. This is her story, not mine.
It was during these breakfasts that I first saw The Lady. Impeccably dressed. Alone. Gliding along the sidewalk along the shore. Tall and thin, she cut an Aubrey Hepburn figure. Her suit was impeccable. Not a wrinkle or stray cat hair to be found. Black, with a slight pinstripe. She was a one-woman rearguard action for timeless elegance. She always walked the same route, at the same pace, with the same elegance. And she always had a book in hand. Reading. Always reading, without breaking stride, noting the sublime natural scenery, or catching her . . . where those geta??? in the wooden blanks of the pier.
I observed her this way for many months before we spoke. She walked into my shop one sunny Tuesday at precisely 11:03am. Verne wrote that Impey Barbicane was as punctual as a chronometer. The people of Konigsberg are said to have set their clocks by Kant’s walks. If she entered my shop at 11:02 or 11:04, I reset my watch. If she was not there by 11:06 I knew she wasn’t coming that day because my watch was never that off. “OCD?” you ask. Obviously. But the acronyms and formal diagnoses of the DSM-5 cannot fully capture the demons that tortured The Lady. A good day was a Soseki day. Depressed, isolated, profoundly alienated from a turbulent and rapidly changing society that cared not for a second about the old ways and “old-fashioned” people it relegated to the dustbin of history in the blink of an eye. Bad days. Those were Akutagawa days. “Cogwheels” lays bare the horrific torment of a day of the life of a man who killed himself at age 35 to take out of the world, and his children’s lives, the schizophrenia he inherited from his mother. A better man than me wouldn’t wish an Akutagawa day on his worst enemy. She endured it all with such stoicism that it took years of discussing Japanese literature to discover her truth.
She wished she had my gift for languages when she learned I could passably make conversation in several Romance languages thanks to all those years of Latin with the nuns. But, unlike her, I wouldn’t notice a mistranslation in Soskei, let alone be irritated by it. At first, I tried to persuade her of her gifts, reminding her that all the romance languages are but dialects of Latin, written in a script I’ve known as long as I can remember. This earned me nothing but reproach and stern instance that she could read neither Kanji, nor Hiragana, nor Katakana, totally unimpressed by her own knowledge of Japanese’s three main character systems. So how could she bristle at mistranslations? She could see patterns. She put the characters into an internet translation service, knew when the patterns were off, and could insert the appropriate words to render it in Soseki’s voice, or Dazai’s, or Ooka’s. I wish I were lying, that would make more sense to me than this reality. I eventually came to realize that I could no more make her impressed with herself than I could make a penguin fly. So, I returned to procuring her books and letting the conversation proceed on her terms.
The Lady spoke of her husband infrequently. When she did it was with something akin to pity. For someone to find her interesting was curious. For someone to like her, puzzling. But for a man to love her, want to spend his life with her, and state that she was the best thing that ever happened to him was bizarre. She doubted not his sincerity, which made it all the more incomprehensible. Either it was true, and his life before her was horrific. Or it was not true, and he had clinical delusions. If it was true, he deserved our compassion as someone who had been dealt the worst of hands by Fate. But he had grown up in neither a Third World orphanage nor a Newcastle coal mine, so it was not true. Since it was not true, he deceived himself. His delusions were deep. He needed help. Someday he would receive it, or his grasp of reality would improve on its own. He would then see his mistake and leave her. When he did so, the thin thread of sentimentality that tied her to this world would be severed, and she would be free to exit life on her own terms. Her logic was impeccable. Her conclusions inevitable. His departure would be sensible, and it was inevitable as the tides. It was not to be mourned. It was unavoidable. He would be better off for it.
This saddened me at first. In time I came to realize that even if I had the power to make her understand, in doing so I’d erode something of herself. Of Her Self. She could neither see herself as a gift to the life of another nor see her own gifts of translation. Other gifts she could see. She was a writer in addition to a translator and a reader. A gifted one. A true genius. And she knew it. But didn’t I say she hated herself? Yes. I don’t contradict myself. My subject is complex, so my terms must be precise. The Lady liked to distinguish between self-respect and self-esteem. The former required dignity, composure, a sense of manners and decorum. That latter simply stemmed from the Cult of Me. Me. Me. Me. I’m Special. The Lady had no shortage of self-respect. She respected what she was. A Lady. A descendant of Fulk, King of Jerusalem. Her ancestors conquered England and were the first to go beyond The Pale. Her aristocratic manner was no accident. It was centuries of good breeding. But as for self-esteem, that involves valuing oneself as a unique and precious gift to the world. She saw herself as no such thing and believed that very few people truly are. So, her abundance of self-respect was more than matched by a deficit of self-esteem.
No, that’s not right. The Lady insisted on those terms in her discussion of we moderns, but they don’t quite capture her. She was proud, vain even. (I don’t doubt her claim that not even her husband got to see her without makeup on.) But she’d respond with the same matter of fact “yes” if you asked if the sun still rose in the East, if the pope wears a funny hat, if you called her a genius, or if you said she was beautiful. These were facts. Facts of the universe. Fish swim. Birds fly. Rain falls. She writes. You wouldn’t say a fish was excellent and worthy of praise because it swam; in the same way she wouldn’t accept that her writing made her anything other than a writer. A writer for whom the march of time was agonizing. Each second mercilessly following one after the other. Each day an eternity to be endured. Her gifts were merely a distraction that made existence almost bearable. Don’t be sad for her. She couldn’t be any other way. If she were, she wouldn’t be The Lady.
As time went on, she gave me more opportunities to marshal my skills as a procurer in addition to merely a purveyor of great books. When an author captured her heart, she wanted to read everything that had ever come from his pen. This was no small desire when he had been dead for one hundred years, out of print for fifty years, and rarely translated into English at all, let alone well. If Leo Strauss was right about one thing, it is that if ours were a properly organized society, poor translators would be flogged!!
When she was consuming the complete works of Takeo Arishima, Labyrinth and The Agony of Coming into the World were especially difficult to find. The former was an account of his four years in America at the turn of the last century (a phrase that always makes me feel insufferably old) and his experience in a society he found as bewildering as she does. If you don’t know why the latter appealed to her, well, I see reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit. Thankfully, I’m a man with many connections, not all of whom you’d expect from a simple bookseller. So, while Arishima was last published in the United States during the Eisenhower administration, I was able to find copies in a rare bookshop in Peoria, where Bradley University’s Japanese literature professor had recently died in the classroom. The proprietor owed me a favor, so he threw in Soseki’s The Three Cornered World to settle his debt. I was able to present her with all three one sunny Kappa Memorial Day. I was pleased with myself, but not foolish enough to expect an outpouring of emotion from The Lady. While pleased to finally be able to finish the complete works of these two literary masters, she was quite emphatic that I shouldn’t have troubled myself on her account. This was not affect or false modesty. As she headed for the door, I realized she was completely sincere in her belief that she was not worthy of the presence of such art, or even the effort it took to procure it.
I can’t say I know why she finally agreed to become a published author. She had written four novels, twice as many novellas, scores of haikus, and over a hundred short stories before her debut novel was published. I was certainly pleased. I’d had the pleasure, and indeed the privilege, of reading her art long before she chose a novel to gift to the world. Perhaps her husband convinced her to share her art with the hoi polloi. Perhaps she read a Mary Sue novel one day and decided to engage in a bit of one-upmanship. Maybe she lost a bet on spring Saturday at Churchill Downs. Whatever the reason, her debut novel was the best debut novel in years. Some especially cantankerous critics suggested she must have published previously under a different name because no debut could be so good. A brilliant collection of short stories followed, and no bookshop, my own included, could possibly keep her work in stock.
It thus came as a shock to not just to the town but to the whole literary establishment when she abruptly ended it. Her suicide baffled the local busybodies and the literary critics equally. She was found in her bed in her most gorgeous ensemble. A classic little black dress with a revealing, yet classy, neckline over her favorite corset. Her makeup was impeccable. Her pearl necklace and emerald earrings older than the United States and orders of magnitude more elegant. The finest pantihose and, of course, her geta. An empty body of Veronal was on her nightstand next to her favorite translation of Kokoro. The gossips, critics, publishers, and literary groupies couldn’t understand why she’d do it now that she was having such smashing success. I knew what they didn’t: they already had the answer. She had followed Mishima’s example and chosen her moment of death to correspond with the height of her beauty and talent.
These days I find myself executor of her literary estate. I zealously guard her reputation and public imagine, two things that meant as little to her as a rin and a sen would to Tadashi Yanai. I manage her royalties, publish her manuscripts, nominate her for awards posthumously, and damn the Swedes for only waiving their Academy’s ban on honoring the deceased for one of their own. She would have cared not for either, given she possessed an indifference to worldly success of a kind that only the old families can have, so ancient that an ancestor sitting at the right hand of Elizabeth I was equidistant between today and when the family crossed to England with William during The Conquest. I still run my shop and have breakfast on the beach. Sometimes I sit where I did when I first saw her and remember the truest individual I’ve ever known. When my mind inevitably drifts to how it all ended, sorry, how she ended it all – she’d insist I not diminish her agency with the passive voice – I smile. For having known her and because, like Camus did of Sisyphus, I imagine her happy.
Photo of Christopher R. Hallenbrook
BIO: Christopher R. Hallenbrook is a political science professor. He was born and raised in New England, but relocated to the Los Angeles area for work. He has published on political theory, politics, teaching, and sports. His first piece of fiction, “The Bog,” is a horror story published in Portrait of New England in July 2024. See what he's up to at chrishallenbrook.wordpress.com