Husband in a Box
Tomoko Yoshida, trans. Margaret Mitsutani
Thank you to Two Lines Press for a review copy of their short story collection Unusual Fragments! I plan to review each story here individually, starting with Husband in a Box.
“The white flowers stood out under the dark green of the leaves. From far away, the plants looked just green, but when you got up close, you saw a deep purple like blood in the leaves and stems.”
Yoshida’s prose, as translated by Mitsutani, comes across as simple and straightforward, like it has nothing to hide. But with every sentence, you realise something is hidden. Or maybe not hidden, but never fully explained. There’s something about this story you can’t grasp.
Husband in a Box is about a household of three. Seems normal so far. But then, details accumulate, slowly becoming stranger.
The narrator’s husband seems to be the focal point of the strangeness. It’s not said what his job is, but he uses the living room as his study. Early every morning, his mother reads various newspaper articles and brings them to him. It’s unclear if he uses this information for his job. His wife always brings him water in the same cup. She does this very carefully. It has to be filled up to the same amount, with “no water droplets clinging to the outside,” and placed on a dry tray. He listens to music on “cassette tapes with the sound turned down low. At that volume, you couldn’t really hear it, but he never turned it up.”
And then, the narrator reveals something really strange:
“I had never seen him leave the house, not even once.”
The more she says, the more it seems like her husband isn’t human. Or at least, not like other humans. He is small enough to fit in a box or basket. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The narrator’s husband has finally decided to leave the house. He wants to see a concert with his wife, but leaves it up to her how to bring him along when she only has one ticket. She works out in her mind what box she could use to safely and conveniently carry her husband. Simultaneously, she thinks about what to make for dinner, and what outfit she should wear to the concert.
“My matching skirt and short-sleeved blouse with the little yellow flowers would go nicely with the new Josette summer coat I hadn’t worn yet.”
This is a special occasion. Going out with her husband is a big deal. But her husband acts curiously detached. And meanwhile, she still has to handle her everyday tasks.
Despite living with her husband and mother-in-law, there’s a sense of absence. She doesn’t seem to know or understand much about who they are or where they are from. She has little idea how these two lived before she became part of the household. She doesn’t know how things worked before then.
“It was hard to hear him from inside the box. His voice is normally very soft.”
After taking her husband to the concert, things change. He wants to go out more. She brings him on walks, with a hole cut in his box for him to peek through. It works out at first, but then things go wrong. Soon the narrator’s world makes less sense than it did before. Just when you think you’ve finally figured out what her story is about, things take a U-turn.
“I’d been happy, wrapped in the existence of my tiny husband. But where was he now?”
I’ve read phrases like “a girl in a box” before. In Toshiko Kishida’s 1883 speech Daughters in Boxes (trans. Rebecca L. Copeland and Aiko Okamoto MacPhail), she explains: “It is the daughters of middle-class families and above who are often referred to as such. Why such an expression? Because these girls are like creatures kept in a box.” Kishida wanted “to create a box without walls.”
So what about a husband in a box? Does his box have walls? Or are his walls always changing size and shape? His house is one box. The box his wife carries him in to the concert is another.
Despite his size, the narrator’s husband seems to have some level of control over their household. In fact, his mother believes his tininess gives him more authority. This makes him very different from the “daughters in boxes” that Kishida describes. The way both women in the house arrange and prepare things for him is a little unsettling. But then, as the story ends, his position in the family becomes deeply ambiguous, going from unsettling to uncomfortable.
How does a normal-sized girl kept in a stifling but human-sized box compare to a tiny man who moves from one box to another? His boxes have a lot more space.
