“Wow, that’s forty thousand yen between the two of us! Hey, tomorrow when we go to Osaka, let’s have Matsuzaka beef at the grill in the hotel. We could order some expensive wine too . . .”
“No.” Yōko snatched the envelope from Tetsuyuki’s hand. “We’re going to put this in savings. We need to pay back your father’s debts as soon as possible, don’t we?”
Tetsuyuki could not say anything in response. With pursed lips he gazed at the passing scenery outside the window. After some time an idea occurred to him.
“Maybe we should consult with someone versed in legal matters. I got absolutely nothing from my father as inheritance. Am I really obligated to pay back money I never borrowed? Just because I’m his child, I shouldn’t have to cover his losses. I inherited no property, just debt. Could there be a dumber idea?”
He had decided that after winter break, he would try asking a professor in the Law Department. As soon as they arrived at Suminodō, Yōko went into a phone booth. In the meantime, Tetsuyuki purchased the grocery items she had scribbled on a note: two cuts of steak, salad oil, butter, potatoes, cabbage, onions, mayonnaise, carrots, coffee beans and a stand for drip filters. Though his shopping took a rather long time, Yōko had still not come out of the phone booth.
Just as he was approaching the booth with a large bag of groceries she came out and stood still, a blank expression on her face.
“They said Mrs. Sawamura died last night.”
“Died?”
“The wake will be held tonight.” She took the registered-mail envelope out of her purse and inspected the postmark: it was stamped December 30. “They said she suddenly began to be in pain last evening and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but passed away around ten o’clock.”
For a long time, the two of them stood still on the street in front of the station, a place brimming with sunlight but swept by chilly winds. As if by tacit agreement, they both started walking, passing through the shopping arcade and crossing the railroad tracks.
“She was well along in years . . .” Tetsuyuki felt a certain disappointment that Sawamura Chiyono did not die in the tea hut she had erected in the middle of that spacious garden. He had perceived from her manner of speaking that she wanted to die there, and had a premonition that her wish would probably be fulfilled. “I think that tea is a ritual for gazing on life and death.” Tetsuyuki was strangely able to recall clearly phrases from her unsolicited life story. “While in the tearoom, both host and guest are dead. When they leave the tearoom, they are alive . . . I take naps in the tea hut. That way, I come to understand more fully. When I’m asleep, that’s death. When I’m awake, that’s life. But both are my same self. Life and death, life and death, life and death . . .”
Upon entering the apartment and locking the door, Tetsuyuki and Yōko embraced and locked their lips in a seemingly endless kiss.
“How is Kin?” Yōko asked in hoarse voice.
“Still alive.”
“For a while at least, huh?”
“I’ll pull the nail out of him on April twelfth.” Though he was not conscious of it, that was a year and a day after Tetsuyuki had, in this room where darkness had slipped in, unwittingly driven a nail through Kin’s back. It was also the day he had embraced Yōko’s naked body for the first time in the spring light.
“Why April twelfth?”
Tetsuyuki did not respond to Yōko’s question. He himself did not understand why he had chosen that day. Instead, he said, “We ought to go to the wake tonight.”
Yōko wordlessly slipped off her coat and began preparing dinner in the kitchen. Tetsuyuki lit the heater, then glanced at Kin’s motionless body. In that instant, an unforeseen notion took on the form of words, casting a strange illumination in his mind.
“Over the two days of April eleventh and twelfth last year, I drove a nail into two living creatures.” He turned around and looked intently at Yōko’s back, and she seemed small, helpless, yet at the same time presented a vivid image. He felt a deep love that transcended lust and mere attraction, but in which there was also a glint of anxiety.
He quietly approached her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and rubbed his cheek against hers.
“Let’s go to the wake. If we leave here before six, we’ll be right on time. And after we’ve left Mrs. Sawamura’s house, let’s stay in the ‘You’ve Come Again’ Hotel. I can pull the nail out of Kin, but I can’t pull it out of you.” Yōko turned to face him, a redness in her eyes. She tapped his neck lightly with the handle of the knife. Apparently she had taken his words in an obscene sense.
After their meal, Tetsuyuki changed into his pajamas at Yōko’s urging, and slipped under the futon she had spread out for him. Over the past week, he had averaged only four hours of sleep each day. She sat down next to his pillow. He slipped his hand under her skirt.
“Again?” She stopped his hand. “If you do that, you won’t get any sleep.” Though reproving him, when he promised not to make any indecent movements with his fingers, she relaxed her legs with a half-doubting expression on her face.
“I wonder who’ll come into possession of that enormous mansion.”
As he thought about how to respond to Yōko, Tetsuyuki fell asleep.
He slept until nearly five thirty, and it was just before nine o’clock when they arrived at Kawaramachi in Kyoto. In the vicinity of the Shūgakuin Imperial Villa—in front of a bamboo thicket that hardly suggested a residential area—paper lanterns bearing a family crest had been set out, indicating that a wake was being held. Several cars were parked on the road beside the river. As they got out of the cab and approached the gate, both realized at the same time that they had forgotten their juzu prayer beads. Tetsuyuki had arranged that on the following day a fellow student would lend him notes from several classes to prepare for the upcoming graduation exam, and Yōko had planned to act as tour guide of Kobe for an aunt and uncle who had taken advantage of the New Year’s vacation to visit the Kansai area. Thus neither would be able to participate in tomorrow’s funeral ceremony, but at Osaka Station they had purchased an envelope for condolence money and had inserted 10,000 under both their names. They were in a hurry and had completely forgotten to purchase juzu.
Yōko whispered, “What shall we do? We can’t go into such a formal gathering without prayer beads.”
“It can’t be helped. We can’t turn back now. We’ll just have to tell them that we were out when we heard of Mrs. Sawamura’s passing, and that coming here directly, we were in such a hurry that we forgot them.”
As they opened the front door, a monk was just leaving. The familiar middle-aged maid saw him off, then returned and thanked them with a polite bow for having come from such a distance. As they walked down the long corridor, she continued.
“All of her relatives live far away and have not yet arrived. The only ones here now are her friends and Mr. and Mrs. Kumai.”
In the large Japanese-style room in which Mrs. Sawamura’s remains had been placed, only five friends were sitting in silence, an all-too-melancholy sight for the wake of the owner of an enormous mansion.
Some time after Tetsuyuki and Yōko had offered incense, one of those friends in attendance addressed Mr. Kumai—the only relation present—saying they were elderly and did not have the stamina to remain at the wake through the night, and asked to be excused. Bowing deeply, Mr. Kumai thanked them for their participation. The five friends then stood in front of the coffin, pressing their hands together reverently. One of them, an elderly woman, placed her hand on the small hinged door on the lid of the coffin to view the face of the deceased, but Mr. Kumai stopped her, explaining in a calm but overpowering voice:
“I’m truly sorry, but before her demise the departed expressed her wish that her face not be viewed by anyone.” After the five friends left, only Mr. and Mrs. Kumai, Tetsuyuki, and Yōko remained in the room.
“We’re sorry for imposing on you the last time we came.”
Mr. Kumai responded imp
assively to Yōko’s apology. “I think I should also inform Mr. and Mrs. Lang of my aunt’s passing. Though it was none of my business, their son rather angered me. He did come to pick up his parents, but was very curt with us, and it was difficult to tell whether his greeting to my aunt was intended as an expression of gratitude or a complaint that she had been meddlesome. He did not have a proper spirit about him.”
“I received New Year’s gift money from Mrs. Sawamura. It came this morning, and when I tried calling to thank her, I was surprised to hear that she had passed away last night . . .”
Mr. Kumai responded to Yōko. “She had had a cold for about twenty days, and had been coughing constantly. I told her she ought to see a doctor, but she laughed it off, saying that she had no fever and felt fine. Yesterday evening, the sound of something breaking came from her room. When the maid went to check, she was crouching down on the floor in agony. The maid said that her lips were pale. She appeared to be conscious right up to the time she was loaded into the ambulance, because she said something to the maid.”
“What did she say?”
Mr. Kumai shook his head at Tetsuyuki’s question. “It was difficult to make out, and the maid couldn’t understand it. From then until the time she expired, she never regained consciousness. The doctor’s diagnosis was heart failure.”
Tetsuyuki glanced at Yōko, and was met with a doubtful look. Mr. Kumai had just said to the elderly woman who was about to look at Sawamura Chiyono’s face that, before breathing her last, she had said that she wanted no one to see her face after her death. Apologizing for not being able to attend the funeral ceremony, Tetsuyuki explained the reason.
“You’ve gone to the trouble of coming to the wake, so please do not feel obligated,” Mr. Kumai said with a bow. Mrs. Kumai—beautiful, but with a mien that somehow suggested daggers—kept looking intently at Yōko, or training her eyes on Tetsuyuki’s threadbare jacket or the black tie he had just purchased in Kawaramachi.
From outside the room, the maid announced relatives. “They have just arrived from Kanazawa.” Mr. and Mrs. Kumai stood up and hurriedly exited. As the sound of footsteps receded, Tetsuyuki approached the coffin.
“Tetsuyuki!” Yōko’s voice was lowered as she tried to stop him, but he opened the small hinged doors on the coffin and pulled the white cloth back. He broke out in gooseflesh and almost let out an involuntary cry. What he saw was not the fair-skinned, refined, calm and self-possessed Sawamura Chiyono he had known in life, but rather a hideous dead face with blackened skin, whose features were grotesquely distorted in agony. The right eye was shut tight, but the left eye was wide open. The proof that it was not indeed someone else was a small brown mole next to her lip and the peculiarly well-shaped ridge of her nose that was all that remained of the beauty of her younger years.
“Tetsuyuki!” Yōko again called out in a small voice. Footsteps could be heard approaching through the long corridor. Tetsuyuki quickly replaced the white cloth, closed the hinged doors, and returned to his seat. His fingertips were trembling and his heart was pounding wildly. Mr. and Mrs. Kumai entered accompanied by three male relatives. Availing themselves of that opportunity, Tetsuyuki and Yōko took their leave of the Sawamura residence.
“That was kind of a creepy wake. It seems a bit strange that it should be such a lonely affair, with so few people . . .” Yōko commented inside the cab, giving Tetsuyuki’s wrist a firm squeeze. “I was really nervous not knowing from where in that huge mansion someone might enter that room.”
“Yeah, but you thought it was odd too, didn’t you, Yōko? What Mr. Kumai said to that old lady. And it didn’t hang together with what he said later.”
“Mmm. And then, my heart was really pounding while you were looking inside the coffin . . .”
“My hair was standing on end.”
The neon sign for the hotel came into view and they had the cab stop. They both fell silent as they walked along the dark street. The chilly wind typical of winter in Kyoto made their faces grow taut. The square electric sign proclaiming VACANCIES was making a creaking noise as it shook in the wind. The owner of the hotel remembered Tetsuyuki and Yōko. With a smile and mannerism more suited to an eager street vendor than to the owner of a love hotel, he said, “Welcome! I’m glad you came again.”
“We’ll be staying here tonight.”
“Guests to stay the night! Usher them to their room!” The owner called commandingly in a loud voice as if addressed to a steward, but like the time before, showed them to their room himself.
“It’s pretty cold out tonight, isn’t it?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“You two are already engaged to be married, aren’t you?”
“How did you know?”
“When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you pick up on things like that. There are all kinds of couples that come here: some I can tell are both married with families, or that this young woman doesn’t realize she’s come here with a gangster . . . there are those kinds of couples.” The owner explained as he filled the bath for them, then added, “There is no breakfast service for guests who stay the night. We don’t have the staff for that, so we can only offer coffee, toast, and a fried egg. Will that be all right?”
“Yes, that’s fine.”
“What time shall I bring it by?”
“At ten.”
“Breakfast at ten! Check!” Raising his voice like a cashier, the owner exited the room. Tetsuyuki and Yōko looked at each other and smiled.
“Looking at that guy energizes me.”
It occurred to Tetsuyuki that both times they had come to this hotel were days when they attended on matters of life and death: the previous time was after Mr. and Mrs. Lang’s attempted suicide, and today it was after Sawamura Chiyono’s wake. Tetsuyuki stood there in his shabby old coat, musing idly. Yōko unbuttoned his coat, buried her face in his chest, and sighed deeply.
“What did Mrs. Sawamura’s face look like?”
After some hesitation, he lied. “She looked beautiful, as if she were alive . . .”
“Then why did it frighten you so much?”
“Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? I had no idea when Mr. Kumai would come back, and he had told both of us in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to show us the face.”
“I wonder why.”
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter, does it?”
They bathed together, cavorting with each other in the tiled tub. With his palm, Tetsuyuki traced the contour from her waist over her buttocks, his favorite part of her body. Then he said in as cheerful and unaffected tone as possible, “What’s this? A yawn? I’m not going to let you get any sleep tonight.”
“No, I’m going to bed.”
They dried each other with the towel and lay down naked on the bed until they cooled down from the bath.
“. . . it hurts,” Yōko whispered in his ear.
“Where?”
“. . . my nipples.”
The overture was coming from her, but it was not a call for ecstasy. Tetsuyuki perceived it as rather like a child’s presuming upon an adult’s indulgence. He turned off the light and began whispering sweet nothings, using every phrase he knew to declare his love for her. At some point they coupled, and at some point they finished, ending in such gentle rapture and peace that Tetsuyuki was soon able to begin again.
Several hours later Tetsuyuki awoke, startled by a dream in which he emerged from water only to have someone force his head back into it. He turned on the small lamp by the bed and checked the clock: five a.m. Taking care not to wake her, he brushed Yōko’s hair away from her face and looked at her sleeping profile. She was sleeping on her side, her naked body facing him. He breasts appeared very constricted, squeezed between her arms, and he carefully moved her top arm to her side. It took rather a long time before one of her nipples—the one that had been crumpled under her arm—returned to its original shape, and its amusing movement brought a smile to his lips. Yōko
also appeared to be having a dream; her lips were making short movements, like those of an infant sucking its mother’s breast, even making a slight sound. Tetsuyuki carefully covered her breasts with the quilt and traced the parting of her lips with his index finger. The sucking sound increased, then suddenly stopped.
Tetsuyuki began to comprehend what sort of thing love between a man and woman is, why it is both resilient and at the same time fragile. He vowed that he would never again mention her having once shifted affections to another man, but even as he pledged to himself, he realized how doubtful his resolution was. Even so, he was confident that they would make a very fine married couple. He felt both regret and horror at the thought that her body, lustrous and supple, would someday inevitably disappear from this world, but for that very reason he was drawn to serious reflection about what happiness was, and he felt a renewed drive to turn himself and those he loved toward this happiness.
He was unable to get Sawamura Chiyono’s hideous dead face out of his mind. She had such a calm and collected attitude toward life and death, speaking of such matters with a sort of lofty, religious enlightenment. So why did she have such a horrifying visage in death that those paying their condolences were forbidden to look at her? What was it that she said to her maid as she was dying? Did she actually believe her own stated view on life and death? Wasn’t it really not a matter of enlightenment, but rather of her own final pride, her last pretense of self-importance? Tetsuyuki compared her face in death with that of his father. His father’s was beautiful, peaceful even.
While alive, his father was always being deceived, but had never deceived anyone. He had been betrayed and had lost a great deal, but had never robbed anyone of anything. He had done no wrong, and one could even say that it was because of his honesty that his business failed. And yet didn’t he win at the game of life?
Inhabitation Page 21