Holding On to the Past

Happy to see Yoko Ogawa's 'Beauty Contest' published in The New Yorker on November 20, 2023. This is translated from Japanese to English by Stephen Snyder. Read of it what we will. What our mothers' expectations of us are, versus what we think ourselves to be.

The narrator lost her father in a traffic accident slightly after she turned one. Her mother took her to the grandmother, went to work and raised her on her own. For some reason, her mother likes sewing her clothes and entering her into beauty contests. She won one at eight months old and was made to enter another at ten years old.

It was the day of the beauty contest, chockfull of entrants who are maybe ten and eleven years old. The narrator was given the tag No. 34. She said hi to the girl given the tag No. 33 (who was alone and unaccompanied) next to her and they began a conversation about dead pet dogs. The narrator seemed to have stage fright and couldn't speak. Many thoughts ran through her head, but she couldn't articulate them aloud. A No. 46 or 47 won, a girl with long legs who kept rolling her eyes. 

I laughed at the final paragraph in the story. The narrator is still haunted by the newspaper clipping that her mother kept of her winning a baby beauty contest at eight months old. She wasn't keen on the contents details, she was very taken by the story on the flipside about a family being poisoned to death by mushrooms, and how the six-year-old girl died eating them.

My mother said nothing at all on the bus ride home. She made a point of sitting a few seats away from me, clutching her purse to her chest and staring out the window. I realized I owed her an explanation, but I had no idea how to describe what had happened, so I, too, remained silent.  

When the bus reached the end of the line, at the roundabout in front of the station, my mother stood up and got off without looking back. I followed quickly after her. She marched into the candy shop and bought a container of Starry Night.

In the end, Starry Night wasn’t as delicious as I’d imagined. I put the container on the table and dug in with a spoon. The bits of ice left an unpleasant, gritty feeling in my mouth, and, no matter how much I ate, the amount in the container never seemed to decrease. Colorful stars appeared one after another.

“Still,” I muttered, “it’s better than poisonous mushrooms.” No one answered, and I stuffed another spoonful into my mouth.