by Taeko Kono
Yuko still caught colds easily, and would occasionally run a fever for two or three days during her period. But she refused to let it bother her. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she would say to Kajii. “I just have to accept it. It’s all part of the recovery process.”
Her health had greatly improved over the first year of treatment, but Yuko spent the next winter in a state of unbearable impatience. Her chest X-rays showed her three lesions very much reduced: now there were just two branches, their shadows on the negative no bigger than pine needles.
“I don’t think they’ll ever disappear entirely,” her doctor had said the previous summer. “They’re like scars left from a burn. But you’re definitely over the disease itself. Once the weather cools down you’ll feel completely well.”
He had raised Yuko’s hopes. But autumn had passed into winter, and she still hadn’t regained her health. The very smoothness of her initial recovery now worked against her, increasing her anxiety. She started to get irritated by the erratic ups and downs of her physical state, which she’d been able to accept before.
“I still don’t feel well,” she grumbled to the doctor, as if blaming him. “Why’s it taking so long?”
“Be patient,” he replied, calmly. “You’ll feel stronger soon. Even a little cold takes a while to get over, doesn’t it? How can you expect instant health after coughing up blood? You’re still taking a nap in the afternoon? Good. As long as you keep that up.”
Yuko was hardly in a position to forget her nap. All day her whole body longed for the hours between one and three o’clock. She tried not to rest at other times during the day, because her doctor had told her that taking it too easy would delay her recovery. But she only really felt well in the morning, the first few hours after getting out of bed. As the day wore on, her sense of well-being would recede; her body grew heavy and her shoulders stiff. Sometimes the ache would extend up her neck all the way to her head, leaving her exhausted by noon. Some days she would marvel at how well she was bearing up; but then by late afternoon her cheeks would start to burn, and the thermometer would show her running a temperature.
When Kajii asked how she was feeling, she would have to report that there was no change. But she could no longer make light of it as she had done before, and she finally started to give full vent to her frustration. Sometimes she would sigh: “Perhaps I should have gone ahead and had that operation after all!”
“Don’t be absurd!” Kajii replied, frowning.
In deciding against surgery, Yuko had followed medical advice, but there had, in fact, been considerable differences of opinion among the professionals treating her. The surgeon had argued that the only cure was to cut away the infected area. Her own doctor, however, had disagreed, pointing out that Yuko was over thirty, past the age when this operation yielded the best results. Besides, he said, though shallow, the lesions were widespread, which would involve excising a large area. His advice was to treat the lung with drugs. The loss of an organ through surgery, he added, takes a toll on the rest of the body until the day you die.
This last argument had been the one to finally sway Yuko. But there was no denying that other, personal, considerations also figured in her decision. She knew, though she made no mention of this to her doctors, that surgery would leave her with a large scar across her back, something Kajii, in particular, was opposed to. When the surgeon tried to explain to them the operation’s advantages, he had replied, dubiously: “Well, if you really think she has no choice.” But as soon as her doctor made his counterargument, he agreed with him: “I’m sure you’re right. If three or four staff members were laid off at my office, the others would be crushed by the extra work. It’s much better to keep everyone there, even if they’re a little inefficient. The body must work the same way.”
But when Yuko’s body failed to recover beyond a certain point, even with all the medication, she couldn’t help having second thoughts about having refused surgery. If only she’d had the operation, those shadowy pine-needle shapes on her lung wouldn’t be bothering her now — she wouldn’t be suffering these interminable aftereffects.
Kajii, however, disagreed: “If you’d had surgery, they might have had to operate several times, and you’d still be bedridden,” he said. “You worry too much. That’s the problem. Even people in the best of health have days when they run a temperature. They just don’t realize it because they’re not fussing over themselves all day.”
One evening, after dinner, she reached for the metal medicine box to take her para-amino acid, and Kajii stopped her. “Can’t you take that later?”
“Well, all right,” she replied, and pressed the lid down. She rose, and put the tin away in a cupboard. Ever since bringing it home from the hospital, where it had been placed at her bedside, she had left it out on the kitchen table. For more than a year now, she realized, she’d been subjecting Kajii to the sight of it — and to the ritual of her reaching for it and taking out a sachet of the powder to swallow down. She had been so preoccupied with her illness, she reflected; this is why people get so fed up with long-term patients. And yet it was only recently that he had started openly to show his resentment… As the thoughts pressed in upon her mind, she felt herself redden.
Yuko had never been able to be satisfied by ordinary sex, and even now that she had fallen ill, she would demand that Kajii use violent methods of arousal.
“This’ll only make you weaker,” he would warn, when she demanded he use greater force. She refused to listen. Kajii would protest again, but despite his words, he would be doing as she asked.
For a time, this element of anxiety had heightened the thrill and increased their pleasure. But now she knew that the need to be careful, coupled with her arbitrary point-blank refusals caused by the mood swings special to tb, had started to irritate him. Whenever she suffered a relapse after what they did, he seemed to feel renewed disgust for her utter lack of shame and for the way she didn’t hesitate to then hypocritically fuss. Just the sight of her appeared to put him in a bad mood.
Meanwhile, the cold cloudy weather didn’t change: she could rarely leave the apartment even for a stroll. On these days, Yuko’s physical condition would be even worse, and it didn’t help that their apartment was in a huge modern complex: she was beside herself with boredom. She longed desperately for spring. If only the weather would improve, she thought, she could recover, physically and emotionally. Before the month of January was out, however, she’d lost all patience.
“Why don’t you go skiing for a few days?” she suggested to Kajii. He had always enjoyed the sport. “You weren’t able to go last year, or the year before.” She managed to get him to go skiing twice.
That had not impressed their cleaning woman. “Leaving you all on your own, in your condition . . . That’s not very nice . . . ,” she had grumbled.
“But it was my idea,” Yuko replied, rattled. The woman worked hard, and she meant well, but she was a busybody. When the idea of a rest cure came up, the woman had commented: “Well, aren’t you the lucky one!” And then, disingenuously, made an astonishing quip: “But — leave a man on his own . . . You never know what he’ll get up to!”
Yuko grew weary, waiting for spring, and found herself thinking more and more of the warm Soto Boshu coast, where they had once stayed together in Kajii’s company’s vacation home. She had vivid memories of warmth flowing up her legs as soon as she set foot on the beach, the soft seaside air, and the summery glow of the sunshine, in contrast to the weather in Tokyo, which at the same season had a distinct chill. And the people of the region had been so simple and kind, she remembered. One day she and Kajii had been waiting at a bus stop, when a young farm girl in pantaloons and smock passed by, pulling a wheelbarrow full of vegetables. They asked her about the bus route, and she replied in slow, unhurried tones: “Wait here. It’ll come.” After going on a few yards, she tipped down her wheelbarrow and ca
me back to say something else, which they didn’t understand, and she had to repeat: “The ticket costs ten yen.”
Soon spring was nearly upon them, and still Kajii rejected the rest cure idea. By now, however, Yuko no longer cared what season it was: she wanted to go. She was determined to get to the seaside, whatever Kajii’s objections — nothing would stop her. She didn’t care if it did throw off their budget. Perhaps she never should have conceived this plan, but now that she had, it seemed to her that his refusal to let her go was actually undermining her full recovery. If only he’d let her go, she kept insisting, she would be completely healed.
Kajii finally gave his consent, begrudgingly, persuaded by Yuko’s doctor, who encouraged them to give it a try. “A couple of months won’t do any harm,” the doctor said. “I’ll give her a supply of medicine. We’ll worry about a relapse if and when it happens. I’ll soon get her on the mend.”
“You don’t need that long a visit,” Kajii told Yuko. “I’m not having you fall into one of your depressions. I’m still not persuaded it’s a good idea, you know. I’m only letting you go because you’ve worn me out. One month will be quite enough.”
And now, here she was, looking out the train window at the Boso sea twinkling in the warm spring sunlight. The sea looked choppy today. White-crested waves were pummeling the heads of the low shoals jutting out from the shore, which was dotted here and there with houses. Even inside the train she could hear the crash of the waves breaking against the rocks and then sweeping back down the beach.
Perhaps the sight of the deserted coast prompted Kajii to insist again on her staying only one month.
“I haven’t forgotten,” she said to him, nodding. She wouldn’t ask to stay longer, she meant to reassure him, no matter how much she might want to. She turned and looked out the window at the distant horizon, at the bobbing waves glinting in the sun, at the little green islands off the coast, and the wet sand on the shore turning dark and light as the waves pulled back and forth. And she thought to herself: I’m here. I’ve made it to the Boso coast! That alone sent the strength surging through her.
Yuko’s room, located for her by the manager of Kajii’s company’s vacation home, was on the second floor of a gift shop, the last but one in the short row of such stores in the village. The smallest room in a set of three (all with reddened worn tatami mats, and separated by a small corridor), it was probably used to accommodate guests in the summer season. At the back of the house, it looked out over the sea. The man thought she would like this better than an inn, where the meals would be the same day after day, or a pension, where she would have to put up with the noise of locals gathering to drink. Yuko wouldn’t have minded cooking for herself if he’d been able to find a suitable place, a small cottage, for example. But here she would have her meals prepared for her. The mother and daughter were at home all day running the shop, while the father of the family worked as a clerk at an inn.
As soon as Yuko arrived, she felt freed from everything that had been weighing her down — her listlessness, the heaviness in her shoulders, her depression, and all the bad feeling between her and Kajii. She could definitely feel herself getting stronger. It had been so long since freshness and vigor had flooded every part of her body — this was exactly how she’d felt before falling ill. Several times a day, with a mixture of nostalgia and pleasure, she savored her emotional and physical well-being.
Here, though she continued to take her nap every day, Yuko spent the mornings and late afternoons outdoors. Sometimes she would go to look at the large fish farm just along the shore, or, slightly farther away, to a flower nursery, where she’d buy marguerites or wallflowers in a bunch of three for ten yen. But most of her time she spent down on the beach. Sitting on the decks of deserted beach huts, on the last swing in a buckled row (apparently the work of the typhoon two years before), or on a rock ledge overlooking the sea — she never tired of watching the rollers. They broke in any number of ways; and then there were the small black periwinkles playing in the rock pools; and masses of torn seaweed thrown up with the waves that rushed between the low rocks, only to be swept away again. As the sun went down, the sea became a clear indigo blue. Yuko would stay and gaze at the sunset, until suddenly the breeze came up, and she would realize it was time to go in.
She could still only take the briefest of baths in the evenings, and often at dusk she would watch children playing baseball on the beach in the distance beyond the covered veranda. They carried their games until late, well after dark; it was a wonder they could see the ball. On and on they played. She would leave the room for a minute, and come back to find the beach deserted. It was strange how she never caught sight of the children actually leaving the beach.
Yuko did not mind having to dine alone. Sometimes as she sat eating, her landlady would come in with some fresh raw sea urchin, delivered a few moments before. “Would you like some?” she might ask, and set them down, cracked open and still bristling with spines. The woman would stay, chatting on interminably, but this too Yuko did not mind.
She had hardly touched the embroidery, books, and radio which she had brought along with her. After eight o’clock at night, she was too tired to do anything. She had worried a little that the sound of the waves might keep her from falling asleep, but it did nothing of the sort. Every morning she woke up at 5:30, refreshed and ready to face the day, just as she had as a young girl.
It was so wonderful to be there. Paradise, Yuko thought. Before she arrived, she had expected to be able to get some perspective on the days she and Kajii had spent squabbling. But once here, maybe because her nerves had relaxed so completely, she found she couldn’t bother trying to locate the source of their tension. Occasionally, something came back to mind, but only a vague and blurry memory, which refused to come into focus and soon faded away. Even matters of love and sex seemed to belong to a distant, previous existence.
Yuko began to daydream about settling down in a place like this, alone. Perhaps she could run a small gift shop. She wouldn’t need to stock much: a few picture postcards, kokeshi dolls, candy, net bags of natural seashells, wakame seaweed wrapped in paper and marked by hand with “50 yen” or “100 yen,” sazae shellfish, dried clams. . . . One day, when she returned from a walk, a customer in front of the shop had mistaken her for a clerk. “Hey, give me one of those, will you?” he said, pointing to a packet of wakame. “Certainly,” she replied, handing it to him and receiving a hundred-yen coin in return.
Schools were already closed for spring vacation. It wouldn’t be long before people started arriving on holiday trips. For the moment, though, even on Sundays, gift shop customers were few and far between. The saleswomen didn’t bother standing out in front to hail people. Their only sales ploy was to drop an extra sazae from the big box into the customer’s basket. “This one’s free.” If that was all there was to it, even she could manage. If she could only move to this beautiful, warm seaside town, if she could have her fill of all this peace, all this freedom and good health — then, surely, Yuko thought, she could live without any other consolation.
And then Kajii’s younger brother, who was a school teacher, came with his wife and little boy to visit the place and see how she was doing.
Yuko was returning from a walk around midday when she heard a shout over the road’s grassy bank from the beach below, and she saw a child down there, waving. It was her nephew, Takeshi.
“Well, how nice!” Yuko said, leaning over the bank. “Didn’t anyone come with you?” The boy didn’t reply but immediately started to clamber up the embankment, scrambling as fast as he could through the shoulder-high grass, his little legs pumping up against his chest, and finally emerging up on the road.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked accusingly, pulling on her hand. “We’ve been waiting.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Who’s ‘we’?”
“Oh, both of them.” Takeshi started to walk, still
holding her hand.
“Did you come on the semi-express?”
“The ‘Boso No. 1!’ ” he replied. Then he faced straight ahead, pulling the visor of his brand-new school cap to the left and right. “I’m a first-grader now!” he announced.
Yuko, who had been about to comment on his uniform, realized she was being asked for congratulations, and duly complied. “I bet you can’t wait to start school!” she added. Then she slowed down a little, and leaned over for a look. It was adorable. The hooks under his little chin; the white collar of his shirt, just visible within his jacket’s black collar; the two neat rows of gold buttons on his chest; the square cuffs, with a line of three small buttons accentuating the manliness of his chubby little wrists. Everything was there, in miniature. He was like a little doll. Yuko was enchanted.
“Did we surprise you?” Takeshi asked, pulling her along to make her hurry.
Yuko’s brother-in-law and his wife were waiting in her room, sitting at the low table, empty teacups in front of them.
“You look so well!” they both exclaimed when she appeared with Takeshi. “You even look as if you’ve put on weight!”
“It’s because I made Kajii give me this time all to myself,” Yuko answered. She looked over at Takeshi, who had gone to stand next to his mother. “Well what a nice surprise!” she said, with a touch of formality. “And doesn’t your school uniform suit you!”
Koji looked at his son, proudly.
“All right, Takeshi,” Fumiko said. “Let’s get you changed. You’ve had your chance to show off in front of Auntie.” She pulled her traveling bag toward her. Then she exclaimed: “Oh! You are a dirty boy! You’ve got it dirty already!” Dragging him by one elbow over to the window, she began brushing off the dirt from his climb up the bank.
“When are we going to have our lunch?” the boy asked, undaunted.