“The trip he just made to Kobe,” she went on, “was all bound up with this new business of his, you see. Something about a com-buschon engine or con-bustion engine that gets attached to a bonito boat somehow . . .”
Not understanding a word of this, Oyone nevertheless murmured politely inquisitive monosyllables, which were enough to encourage her visitor.
“Well, I don’t have the faintest idea myself what it is. The first time Yasu tried to explain it to me, all I could say was ‘My, my!’ and ‘Oh really?’ and even now I don’t have a clue about the com-buschon engine.” The repetition of the unfamiliar term was accompanied by a raucous laugh. “Anyhow, the general idea seems to be some sort of machine that you fire up with gasoline in order to make the boat move on its own, which as far as I can gather is the big advantage to it. Evidently, when one of these machines is attached, nobody has to bother much with rowing the boat anymore—a dozen miles, two dozen miles out to sea, it doesn’t matter; it still just keeps going like the wind. Do you have any idea how many bonito boats there are in this country? Well, my dear, it’s truly staggering. And if you could fit out every one of them with this machine, why, Yasu says you could make a killing. Lately he’s been in a perfect frenzy, working constantly on it with no time left for anything else. Just the other day I told him, ‘Huge profits are all well and good, but if you keep on at this rate and ruin your health, what’s the point?,’ and even he had to laugh.”
The aunt went on and on about Yasunosuke and the bonito boats. Bursting with pride and, for all her protestations, supremely confident in her son’s venture, she never brought up Koroku’s predicament. There was still no sign of Sōsuke, who should have been home long since, leaving Oyone to wonder what possibly could have happened to him.
On his way home that day Sōsuke got off the streetcar at Surugadai-shita and from there, with his cheeks puffed out and his mouth puckered as if with something vinegary, made his way on foot a couple of blocks farther to the gate of a dentist’s office. At the dinner table with Oyone a few days earlier, he had taken up his chopsticks as he chatted and somehow managed to bite down hard the wrong way on a front tooth, which immediately erupted in pain. The tooth wobbled when he grasped it with his fingers, and it stung when sipping tea or exhaling. This morning as he cleaned his teeth with a toothpick, avoiding the one that was troubling him, he examined the inside of his mouth in the mirror and found two coldly glinting silver-filled molars, relics of the Hiroshima years, and an irregular row of front teeth, so worn that they might have been filed down. Changing into his office clothes he had said to Oyone, “I must have been born with bad teeth—see how this one moves,” and stuck his finger in his mouth to show her the wobbly lower tooth.
“That comes with age,” Oyone said with a smile as she adjusted his detachable collar and fastened it at the back of his shirt.
Thus it had come about that Sōsuke resigned himself to visiting the dentist. Entering the waiting room, he found there a large table flanked by velvet-covered benches on which three or four patients sat waiting, all hunched over, their chins tucked in. They were all women. Nearby stood a handsome brown gas stove, as yet unlit. Waiting his turn, Sōsuke cast his gaze at the white wall reflected from where he was sitting in a full-length mirror; then, out of boredom, he turned his attention to the magazines piled up on the table. He leafed through one, then another. They were all women’s magazines. He looked repeatedly at the images of women adorning the photogravure sections in front. Then he picked up a magazine with the title Success. On the first page appeared a list of “secrets to success,” among which he noted one directive exhorting readers to charge full speed ahead in any undertaking, and another cautioning them that it wouldn’t do simply to charge ahead in one’s endeavors—a firm foundation must first be laid. He put the magazine down. “Success” and Sōsuke were poles apart. Indeed, he had been unaware up to this moment that a magazine of this name even existed. Presently, his curiosity revived, he opened the magazine again. Two lines of block-printed Chinese characters, uninterrupted by any Japanese script,[23] caught his eye: “The wind blows across azure skies; drifting clouds disperse / The moon climbs o’er the eastern hills: a great shining sphere.” Normally Sōsuke was not one to take much interest in poetry, whether Chinese or Japanese, but somehow this couplet appealed to him deeply. It had nothing to do with the nice parallelism between the two lines or anything of that sort. Rather, he felt a mild thrill at the thought of how happy a person would be if he could feel at one with the state evoked by the landscape of the poem. His interest piqued, he read the essay to which the poem was appended but found it totally irrelevant. After he put the magazine aside, the poem alone continued to reverberate in his mind. Certainly, in his day-to-day life over the past four or five years, he had encountered no such landscape.
Just then, the door opened across from where he sat and an intern with a slip of paper in hand summoned him by name to the treatment room. The room turned out to be twice the size of the waiting room, and of a brightness that suggested it had been designed to maximize natural light. Four dental chairs were arrayed on either side of the room; at each of them stood a white-jacketed man administering treatment. Sōsuke was conducted to the farthermost chair where, as prompted, he stepped up onto a kind of footstool in order to seat himself. The intern carefully covered him from the waist down with a striped apron.
Reclining comfortably in the chair, he found the pain from the offending tooth to be not all that serious. On the contrary, he felt a delightful sensation of ease settle over his shoulders, down his back, and around his waist. He simply lay back and gazed at the gas pipe that hung from the ceiling. Then it occurred to him that given such an office, with its various appurtenances, he might be charged a good deal more on his way out than he had bargained for.
At which point there appeared a very fat man, with hair rather too thin for his youthful-looking face, who proceeded to greet him with such elaborate formality that Sōsuke, sitting in the chair as he was, hastened to nod his head slightly in response. After making a few general inquiries about his condition, the fat man examined the inside of his mouth and gently wiggled the problem tooth.
“Once it starts to wobble like this,” he said, “I’m afraid there’s no way to reset it firmly in the gums. We have some necrosis here, you see.”
This diagnosis descended on Sōsuke like the autumn sun’s weak rays. “So I’ve finally reached that age, have I?” is what he wanted to say but, mildly embarrassed, he responded, by way of confirming the diagnosis: “Then it can’t be fixed?”
Smiling, the fat man replied, “Indeed, I fear I have no choice other than to respectfully submit that it is incurable. In the worst case we will have to resign ourselves to extracting the tooth, but at present I don’t think that is necessary, and so I shall simply relieve the pain. With necrosis, you see—but then perhaps you do not comprehend the term ‘necrosis’—it means that the inside of the tooth is pretty much rotten.”
Murmuring abjectly, Sōsuke prepared himself to submit to whatever treatment the fat man might mete out. The man proceeded to drill a hole in the tooth’s root with a whirring machine; next, he passed a long, wirelike device through the hole; finally, after sniffing at the wire’s tip, he drew out a thin strand of some substance. “I’ve removed this much of the nerve,” he said, showing it to Sōsuke. After packing the hole with a medicinal preparation, he told Sōsuke to return the following day.
When he climbed down from the chair and straightened himself up, his field of vision shifted from the ceiling overhead to the garden outside the windows, where a large potted pine, at least five feet tall, came into focus. A sandal-shod gardener was meticulously covering the pine’s roots with matted straw. Yes, this was the season, he thought, when the dew at night began to stiffen into frost—a sign for people who could afford it to busy themselves with preparations of this nature.
On the way out he stopped at the pharmacy counter and received a specially pre
pared powder, with instructions to dilute it in warm water to a strength of 1:100 and gargle at least ten times a day. He was pleasantly surprised at the modest fee charged for treatment. Calculating that at this rate the four or five additional visits the dentist had advised would pose no hardship, he was about to put on his shoes when he noticed for the first time that the soles had holes in them.
When Sōsuke reached home he learned he had just missed his aunt.
“Oh, is that so?” Noncommittal response notwithstanding, he changed out of his office clothes with a show of annoyance, then sat down at his customary place in front of the brazier. Oyone gathered up an armful of shirt, trousers, and socks and carried them off to the six-mat room. His mind wandering, Sōsuke began to smoke; then, at the sound of clothes being brushed in the six-mat room, he asked, “Oyone, did my aunt have anything in particular to say?”
His toothache, in the natural course of things, had subsided, and the chilly, autumnal mood that had assailed him abated somewhat. In due time he had Oyone fish out the gargling medicine from his pocket and bring it to him diluted in warm water. He stepped out onto the veranda and began rinsing his mouth vigorously.
“The days have really grown short, haven’t they?” he said, calling back inside to his wife.
Presently the sun set. From the early-evening hours this neighborhood, where even in the daytime the noise of rickshaw traffic was not very noticeable, fell quite still. As was their habit the couple drew near the lamplight. In the whole wide world this spot where they sat together felt like the only source of brightness. In the light that shone from the lamp Sōsuke was conscious only of Oyone, Oyone only of Sōsuke. They forgot the dark world of human affairs, which lay beyond the lamp’s power to illuminate. It was through spending each evening this way that as time passed they had found their own life together.
Tranquillity having resumed, the couple leisurely discussed the reply that Mrs. Saeki had given to Sōsuke’s proposal, all the while shaking a container of dried-kelp snacks—a souvenir from Kobe, courtesy of Yasunosuke, she had said—and picking out the ones seasoned with pepper.
“But can’t they be expected to take care of Koroku’s monthly tuition and pocket money?” asked Sōsuke.
“She said they can’t manage that. She told me any way you look at it those two expenses add up to ten yen a month, and for them to come up with that amount every month would be a crushing burden at this stage.”
“But for us to put up twenty yen a month through the end of the year—isn’t that simply out of the question?”
“Yes, of course. And so she did say that Yasu told her they would somehow kick in a contribution for just the next couple of months, but in the meantime would we please come up with some other arrangement.”
“Is it that they really can’t manage this much?”
“I can’t answer that. All I can tell you is what your aunt told me.”
“But then, I suppose when they make their killing on those bonito boats they won’t have to think twice about such a piddling sum.”
“Oh, absolutely not,” Oyone chimed in with a little chuckle.
Sōsuke’s mouth moved at the corners as if he were about to say something else, but the conversation simply died out.
After a while he spoke up again. “In any case we’ve simply got to take Koroku in. Everything else depends on that. He’s been attending classes lately, hasn’t he?”
“I think so.” Scarcely listening to Oyone’s reply, Sōsuke, in a departure from his usual habits, retreated to his place of study. An hour or so later, when Oyone softly slid open the panel and peeked into the parlor, she found him at his desk reading.
“Are you working on something? It’s really time for you to go to bed,” she urged him.
Turning toward her, he assented and rose from his desk.
As he was changing into his sleeping robe and wrapping the wide crepe sash around his waist, he said, “Tonight I was reading the Analects[24] for the first time in ages.”
“Did the Analects have something to offer?” Oyone asked in response.
“No, not a thing,” he replied. Then, as he laid his black head of hair on the pillow, he said, “Oh, you were right. This trouble with my tooth does come with age. It seems that once they start to wobble like this there’s no way to fix them.”
6
IT WAS now settled that, whatever else, Koroku would be moving into his brother’s house as soon as he was ready.
“I hadn’t thought much about what a bother it would be to find another place to put these things,” Oyone observed plaintively to Sōsuke, gazing with a look of mild regret at the mulberry-wood mirror stand in the six-mat room. And in fact, once deprived of this space, she would have no place to attend to her appearance. At a loss for suggestions, Sōsuke rose to his feet and cast a glance at one of the oblique panels of the mirror, which stood across the room next to the windowsill. From this angle he could see a reflection of Oyone in profile, from her cheek down to her neckline. Distressed at the sight of her poor color, he shifted his gaze from the reflection in the mirror to the actual person. Her hair was disheveled, the back of her collar faintly soiled.
“Are you feeling all right?” he said to her. “You look very pale.”
“It must be the cold,” she replied, and then quickly opened the door to a closet on the west wall. At the bottom of the closet there was an old, badly scarred chest of drawers and, on top of that, a Chinese-style trunk and a couple of wicker containers.
“There’s absolutely no place to put these,” she said.
“Then you should just leave them there.”
On the level of small details like this, Koroku’s impending entrance into their household posed no little trouble to them both. Therefore they did not go out of their way to urge haste on Koroku, who, after agreeing to move in with them, as yet showed no signs of doing so. They tacitly shared the view that each day’s postponement was an extra day’s reprieve from living at what were bound to be very close quarters. Perhaps out of the same apprehension, Koroku for his part seemed determined to stay at his lodging house as long as possible and kept putting off the move day after day. Unlike his brother and sister-in-law, however, he was not by nature one to sit quietly, merely waiting for the time to pass.
Meanwhile a thin coating of frost settled on the ground, reducing the basho plant behind the house to shreds. In the mornings a bulbul[25] called out shrilly from the landlord’s garden atop the embankment. In the evenings, mingling with the toots of the tofu-seller’s horn, the drum of the wooden fish-block[26] resounded from Emmyōji, the local temple. The days grew ever shorter. Oyone’s complexion did not regain its customary color and luster but remained as Sōsuke had first noticed it in the mirror. On several occasions he came home from the office to find her asleep in the six-mat room. When he asked her what was wrong, she replied only that she was feeling out of sorts. When he suggested that she see a doctor, she would not hear of it. There was no need, she said.
Still, Sōsuke worried. Even at the office he grew preoccupied with Oyone’s condition, to the extent that it was, he realized, interfering with his work. Then, one day, as he sat on the streetcar on his way home from work, he suddenly slapped his knee. Arriving at the house, he gleefully opened the door and in high spirits asked Oyone how her day had gone. As she proceeded with the usual routine of scooping up his clothes and socks and carrying them away, he followed her as far as the six-mat room and chortled, “Oyone, couldn’t it be that you’re pregnant?”
She did not reply, and, her head bent down, sedulously brushed the dust from her husband’s suit. Later, when the sound of brushing had ceased and his wife still did not emerge, he returned to find her seated by the mirror stand, looking quite alone and cold in the dim room. She stood up and acknowledged his presence in a voice that retained a trace of tears.
That night the couple sat facing each other with hands cupped over a cast-iron kettle that had been placed on the brazier.
/> “So, what do you think of the goings-on in this world of ours!” Sōsuke’s tone was uncharacteristically effusive, and it summoned up in Oyone’s mind’s eye a bright image of the two of them together before their marriage.
“Shouldn’t we do something to liven things up?” he went on. “Things have been so dreary around here lately.” Whereupon they launched into a discussion about whether to go out the next Sunday, and if so, where. Then the conversation shifted to what they might wear for the New Year. Sōsuke told Oyone, in a droll fashion that made her laugh at several points, about a colleague named Takagi who, pressed by his wife for a new kimono and such, refused out of hand, saying that he didn’t work all day in order to satisfy her vanity. When she protested that she’d have nothing to wear in cold weather, he told her that if she felt chilly she would just have to throw some bedding around herself or put a blanket over her head—in short, simply make do for the time being. Watching her husband tell this story Oyone felt their past life reappearing before her eyes.
“Takagi’s wife can make do with her bedding,” he said, “but as for me, I’d really like to have a new overcoat. When I was at the dentist’s the other day, I watched the gardener wrapping straw around the roots of a bonsai pine, and that was my reaction.”
“That you wanted an overcoat?”
Sōsuke nodded.
Oyone looked directly at her husband as she said, her voice full of sympathy, “Well, then, have one made. We can pay on installment.”
“Oh, let’s just forget it.” Sōsuke now sounded apologetic. “By the way,” he then asked, “when do you suppose Koroku wants to move in?
“I think he loathes the idea of moving here,” Oyone replied. She had been conscious early on of Koroku’s dislike for her. But, she told herself, this is my husband’s younger brother, and ever since had gone out of her way to make herself agreeable in his eyes so as to win him over little by little. Perhaps it worked; recently she had come to believe that he felt toward her a degree of closeness that was at least average for a brother-in-law. In the present situation, however, she succumbed to irrational worries, imagining that she was the sole cause of Koroku’s delay.
The Gate Page 8