“Oh well, we really can’t expect him to be thrilled at the idea of leaving his student lodgings for digs like this. He must be as put off as we are by the thought of us all living here at such close quarters. But then what do I care?—if he decides not to move in after all, I’ll just go ahead and buy that overcoat for myself.”
Sōsuke’s response, brimming with masculine assertiveness, did not succeed in setting his wife’s doubts to rest. Oyone remained silent. After a while, her slender chin still nestled in her collar, she turned her gaze toward her husband.
“Do you think Koroku hates me?” she asked.
When they had first come back to Tokyo, Sōsuke had often been questioned by his wife along these lines; each time the subject came up he went to great lengths to reassure her. Lately she had not said a word about it, however, as though all such suspicions were totally forgotten, and so he himself had ceased to worry on this score.
“Now don’t go getting all worked up again,” he said. “Why should it matter what Koroku thinks as long as you have me around.”
“Is that what it says in the Analects?” At moments like this Oyone could be quite wry.
“Yes, that’s what it says,” Sōsuke answered. On this note the conversation came to an end.
The next morning Sōsuke awoke to a chilling sound on the tinplated eaves.
“It’s time to get up,” said Oyone, appearing at his bedside, her sleeves still tied back from working in the kitchen. Listening to the constant drip-drip outside he wanted to stay just a little while longer under the covers. But at the sight of her animated figure, which so contrasted with her pallor, he leapt to his feet with a brisk word of greeting.
The landscape was obscured by the heavy downpour. Like a lion shaking its mane, the mōsō bamboo near the top of the embankment swayed occasionally, scattering raindrops all over. All that Sōsuke had to fortify himself with for the drenching he was about to get from this dreary sky were hot miso soup and warm rice.
“These shoes are going to leak again. But without a second pair, what can I do?” He stepped helplessly into the only pair he owned, punctured soles and all, and rolled up the cuffs of his pants a good inch.
That afternoon Sōsuke came home to find a metal basin full of soaking rags that Oyone had left out next to the mirror stand in the six-mat room. Directly over it on the ceiling was a single dark splotch from which water was dripping intermittently. “It’s not just my shoes—now the house is getting soaked too!” he said with a hollow laugh.
In the evening Oyone placed some hot coals in the kotatsu[27] in order to dry out her husband’s tweed socks and striped woolen pants. The next day it rained with equal force and the couple repeated their routine. The day after that brought no relief. On the morning of the third day, Sōsuke furrowed his brow and clucked his tongue.
“It seems to have made up its mind to rain forever. My shoes are so sopping, I can’t bear to put them on.”
“And the six-mat room is a disaster from this nonstop leaking,” said Oyone.
They talked about the roof and decided that as soon as the weather improved they would approach the landlord about having it patched. As for the shoes, however, there was nothing to be done. They chafed and squeaked as Sōsuke forced his feet into them, then off he went.
Mercifully, around eleven that morning, the sun burst out and it turned into an unseasonably mild day, with sparrows chirping in the hedges. When Sōsuke came home, Oyone, her face astonishingly radiant, asked him out of the blue, “Dear, would it be all right to sell the screen?”
The Hōitsu screen stood once again in a corner of the parlor, where it had first been placed upon delivery from the Saekis. Given the room’s location and size, however, it had proved to be a decorative nuisance. Set up by the south wall, it half blocked the way in from the vestibule; alongside the east wall it shut out the light; in the only other remaining spot, it interfered with the view of the alcove.
“Here I’ve finally managed to get myself one keepsake from my father,” Sōsuke had grumbled more than once, “and it turns out to clutter up the house.”
Whenever the subject came up, Oyone stared at the perfectly round silver moon and its discolored rim, and at the ripe susuki plumes, whose color was all but indistinguishable from that of the silk it was painted on. She made it plain with her body language that she had no idea why anyone would make a fuss over such an object, yet she did not express her opinion aloud, out of deference to her husband, except on one occasion when she asked him, “I wonder, though—is this is actually a good painting?”
Sōsuke had taken this opportunity to explain to Oyone for the first time who Hōitsu was, but succeeded only in repeating random bits and pieces of what he hazily recalled his father telling him long ago. He was far from sure of his answers concerning the painting’s true worth, the details of Hōitsu’s career, and the like.
Still, this explanation was enough to make Oyone act with uncommon decisiveness. Making the connection between what she now knew about Hōitsu and what had been said in the course of their other conversations over the past week, she smiled quietly to herself. After the rain had stopped and the sun’s rays had burst forth on the sitting-room shoji, she draped over her everyday kimono an oddly colored woven cloth, neither scarf nor shawl, and went out. After walking a couple of hundred yards she turned in the direction of the streetcar tracks and followed the road straight until she came to a rather large used-furniture store that was flanked by a bakery and a grocer’s. Oyone was familiar with the store from having once bought a dining table with foldable legs there; this was also where Sōsuke had acquired the cast-iron kettle now sitting on the brazier.
Hands tucked in her sleeves, Oyone stood in front of the store and looked inside. There were plenty of the popular new iron kettles lined up in a row. The next things to catch her eye, thanks to their abundance, predictable at this season, were the small braziers. But there did not appear to be a single object that could properly be called an antique. Straight ahead of her hung a solitary tortoise shell of dubious provenance, below which, like a tail, dangled a long sacerdotal whisk[28] of yellowish horsehair. She also noted a couple of rosewood tea cabinets, but the wood looked so green it seemed likely to warp. Not that Oyone could tell for sure, but once she had satisfied herself that there were no hanging scrolls or paintings to be seen in the store, she went inside.
She had of course made her way to this place with the firm intention of realizing at least some gain from the screen her husband had received from the Saekis; having acquired considerable experience in transactions of this sort ever since their Hiroshima days, she was quite capable of initiating a sales pitch with the proprietor unhampered by all the effort and stress it would have cost the average housewife. The proprietor, a fiftyish man with a dark complexion and hollow cheeks, sat reading a newspaper through outsize tortoiseshell glasses and warming his hands over a bronze brazier, its exterior covered with knobs.
“Yes, I suppose I could come and have a look at it.” The man was quick to answer, but Oyone was inwardly disappointed by his less than enthusiastic response. Still, as she herself had not set out on this venture with any high hopes, she felt obliged to take him up on his tepid offer, even if she felt as though she were asking him a favor.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll be over later—the shop boy’s not around just now, you see.”
Their business concluded for now with these brusque words, Oyone went straight home, thinking to herself that it was far from certain the proprietor would show up. Having finished her simple, solitary lunch, she had just had Kiyo clear the table when a loud voice suddenly boomed out a “Hello!” and in came the furniture dealer from the front entrance. Oyone ushered him into the parlor and showed him the screen. He stroked the frame and the backing.
“Well, if you want to dispose of it . . .” Then, after a moment’s consideration and with a great show of reluctance, he named a price: “I’ll take it off your hands for six yen.�
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This struck Oyone as quite reasonable. But it occurred to her that it would be presumptuous of her to close the deal without at least a few words with Sōsuke; then too, the object has a certain history to it, she thought, becoming still more cautious. Telling the dealer that she would discuss it with her husband as soon as he came home, she showed him to the door. On his way out he said, “Well, madam, since you’ve gone to so much trouble, I suppose I could be a bit generous here and offer you one more yen.”
Although trembling inside, Oyone was emboldened to reply, “But you know, sir, it is a Hōitsu!”
Unimpressed, the man said dismissively, “There’s not much of a market for Hōitsu these days.” After eyeing Oyone at length, he added, “Well, then, be sure to talk it over carefully,” and walked away.
That evening, after describing this scene in detail, Oyone became the ingenue again as she asked, “But then, we couldn’t really sell it, could we?”
Recently Sōsuke had become very preoccupied with material wants. And yet he was so used to living on a modest scale that it was now second nature for him to make do on what was in fact an inadequate budget; it simply never occurred to him to seek, through some clever maneuver, the means to provide even a small degree of extra comfort in his life. Listening to Oyone’s account of the day’s events, his main reaction was one of astonishment at her keen resourcefulness. At the same time he doubted that any of this was really necessary. When he prodded Oyone on this point, she said that if they ended up with a little under ten yen from the sale, not only could he order a new pair of shoes, there would be enough left over for her to buy a bolt of meisen[29] silk for a kimono. That may be true, thought Sōsuke, but when he weighed in his mind the Hōitsu screen handed down from his father against a pair of new shoes and a bolt of ordinary silk, the disparity seemed extreme to the point of absurdity.
“If you want to sell the screen,” he said, “well, go ahead and sell it. I mean, it’s only taking up space here. Still, I’ll get along without the new shoes. It’s only a problem when we have the kind of deluge we had a few days ago. The weather’s fine now.”
“But when it does rain again you’ll have the same problem.”
Sōsuke could hardly give Oyone a lifetime guarantee of good weather; for her part, Oyone could not bring herself to tell him they must sell the screen before it rained again. They looked at each other and laughed.
Oyone finally asked him, “Do you think the price is too low?”
“Yes, it most likely is.” When confronted with this question, the furniture dealer’s offer did strike him as too low. If they were to sell the screen, he wanted to get as much money for it as possible. He vaguely recalled having read something in the paper to the effect that for certain old paintings and calligraphy scrolls, the market had recently soared. If only he had an heirloom like that, he thought, but then faced up to the reality that no such thing had dropped into the microcosm he inhabited.
“They always say, ‘It all depends on the buyer,’ but it also depends on the seller. As great a work as it may be, it won’t matter, since the fact that it’s mine means it won’t sell for much. Even so, seven or eight yen—that’s really too cheap.”
There was a defeatist ring to Sōsuke’s words. Even while he was at pains to defend not only the Hōitsu screen but also the furniture dealer, he gave the impression that his involvement alone rendered the situation hopeless.
Looking somewhat depressed herself, Oyone dropped the subject.
The next day Sōsuke told all of his colleagues at the office about the screen and its prospective sale. More or less unanimously they said the offer he’d been made was ridiculously low. Not one of them offered to broker a more lucrative deal, however, nor did anyone acquaint him with certain steps he should take, channels he should explore, in order not to end up a sucker. Finally, then, he was left with no choice but to sell to the furniture dealer on the side street. That is, the only real alternative was not to sell the screen at all but to set it up again in the parlor and live with the nuisance. He opted for this alternative, and there stood the screen once more when the furniture dealer turned up and asked them to sell it to him, this time for fifteen yen. The couple smiled at each other. Having decided between themselves to hold out awhile longer, they declined to sell. Oyone had begun to take pleasure in rejecting the dealer’s offers. The dealer visited them again. They declined another offer. On his fourth visit he brought along a man they had never met; after a whispered conversation with the man, the dealer at length came up with an offer of thirty-five yen. The couple proceeded to huddle off to one side for a discussion of their own, then made up their minds finally to dispose of the screen.
7
THE CRYPTOMERIA around Emmyōji had turned reddish black, as though scorched. On clear days a jagged white line of mountains appeared along the distant rim of the wind-scoured sky. The waning year pursued the couple, each passing day driving them further into the cold. The cry of the nattō peddler[30] as he made his regular morning rounds was redolent of the frost that gripped the roof tiles. Listening to the cry as he lay in bed, Sōsuke realized that winter had come again. Oyone began her annual vigil, worrying over what might go wrong between year’s end and the coming of spring. “Let’s hope the pipes don’t freeze like last year,” she would mutter in the kitchen. Evenings, the couple kept close company with the kotatsu. They recalled wistfully the mild winters of Hiroshima and Fukuoka.
“We’re just like Mr. and Mrs. Honda across the way,” Oyone laughed. The Hondas were a retired couple who lived in the same tract and likewise rented from Sakai. With the assistance of one young housemaid, they lived such a quiet life that from morning till night not so much as a squeal or a scrape could be heard from their house. From time to time Oyone, alone sewing in the sitting room, could hear a voice calling out “Grandpa!,” which was how old Mrs. Honda referred to her husband. When on occasion she bumped into Mrs. Honda at her gate or elsewhere outside her house, they would exchange formal greetings appropriate to the season, and Mrs. Honda would invite Oyone over for a chat. Oyone, however, had never paid a single visit, nor had Mrs. Honda ever called on her. What she knew about the old couple was, then, very sketchy. That the Hondas had one son who had an excellent post in the administration of the residency-general[31] of Korea or some such office, and who sent them enough money each month for them to live comfortably—this much she had gleaned from someone who delivered goods for one of the local shops.
“Is old Mr. Honda still fiddling around with his potted plants?” Sōsuke asked.
“It’s too cold for that now. He’s probably stopped. There are a lot of pots stacked up under their veranda.”
The conversation then shifted from the house across the lane to their landlord’s domicile. The polar opposite of the Hondas, this household struck the couple as lively in the extreme. At this season the grounds were desolate and no longer swarmed with the boisterous play of children, but the sound of the piano persisted night after night. Even the raucous laughter of scullery maids and whoever else was in the kitchen reverberated down to the couple’s sitting room.
“What does this fellow do for a living?” Sōsuke asked. For some time now he had been pestering Oyone with such questions.
“I don’t suppose he does anything but amuse himself,” she said, repeating what had become her stock answer to questions along these lines. “What with his land holdings and rental properties . . .”
Sōsuke’s inquisitiveness on the subject of Sakai went no further than this. In the past, after he had withdrawn from the university, whenever Sōsuke ran into someone who wore about him the boastful air of occupying an enviable position in the world, he had to stifle the impulse to say: Just you wait and see. With time this impulse turned into a more generalized sense of hatred. In the last year or two, however, he had become totally indifferent to the distinction between himself and others. The view he had come to adopt was this: Just as he had been born to lead the life tha
t he was living, so others had come into the world bearing their own destinies; inasmuch as he and these others belonged to different subspecies to begin with, there was no connection, aside from coexisting as members of the human race, between himself and others, therefore no grounds for contending interests. Consequently, although he might occasionally ask, in idle conversation, “What does so-and-so do for a living?,” he could hardly be bothered even to listen carefully to the reply.
For the most part Oyone shared this indifference toward others. But tonight she uncharacteristically responded to Sōsuke’s question at length, and proceeded to mention that Mr. Sakai was a man of about forty and clean-shaven; that the daughter who was always practicing the piano was the eldest, eleven or twelve years old; and that when other children came over to play they were not allowed to use the swing.
“Why is it that the other children can’t use the swing?” asked Sōsuke.
“Well, it seems that Mr. Sakai is stingy and doesn’t want the swing to wear out so soon.”
Sōsuke burst out laughing. The image of a skinflint evoked by such rumors was totally at odds with the landlord who, at the first mention of a leak, had in fact immediately sent a roofer over and who, apprised that their hedge had rotted out, had dispatched his own gardener to address the problem.
That night neither Honda’s pots nor Sakai’s swing turned up in Sōsuke’s dreams. Having gone to bed around half past ten, he snored like a man exhausted by the myriad phenomena of the universe. Oyone, who had lately had trouble sleeping because of a lingering headache, opened her eyes from time to time and looked about the dimly lit room. A small lamp was sitting in the alcove. They were accustomed to keeping it burning throughout the night, and placed it there at bedtime after turning the wick down.
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