“But the husband was so fond of his wife he never could forget her. He begged her to always come back and sleep with him nightly and she did. Her name is name of all foxes in Japan—kitsune. Some say this comes from double meaning in Japanese, another way same characters can be read, kitē neru, come and sleep.”
“Kitē neru,” she repeated, looking down at his hand covering hers.
He put an arm around her and she turned toward him. They embraced, her face against his cheek. His skin smelled like the soap in the bath, the faintest tinge of sulphur. He pulled back her hair, kissed her neck, then whispered in her ear. “Kitē neru. Kitsune. Come and sleep.”
15
When Barbara awoke the room was filled with light. She turned toward Seiji: he wasn't there. His futon was still beside hers but his clothes and suitcase were gone. Surely he wouldn't just leave. She got up and dressed quickly. A pot of tea was on the kotatsu, one cup beside it, no note anywhere. She opened the door to the garden. A lizard was sunning itself on a stone, a stripe of iridescent blue. The water pipe's loud tock made her jump.
“Ohayo gozaimasu.” Seiji stepped inside the room.
“Where were you?
“I was arranging with the innkeeper.” He bowed slightly. “I hope you have rested well.”
“Very well—it was wonderful.”
“Yes,” he said in a low voice, his eyes not quite meeting hers. “I regret that I must depart.”
“Right now?”
“Hamada sensei needs me to return to Mashiko to help with some oversea exhibit. This is day we agreed to return.”
“What about our translating?”
“I have written one paper for you in your book.” He nodded toward the black bag which stood beside the kotatsu. “Please have safe return journey.”
She looked down at the kotatsu and the bag. He had packed up all of Michi's papers. “I may not return to Tokyo.”
“Not return?” He looked shocked; she felt a sting of pleasure.
“Some friends have invited me to Kyoto for a week or two,” she said though she and Junko had not confirmed their plans. “I may decide to join them.”
“Ah.” He bowed. “Please have fine holiday.”
“Oh I will.” She forced a smile. “And I hope you have a fine time with Hamada sensei.”
For a moment they stood looking at each other; she felt a wavering between them, almost like movement, then they bowed goodbye.
She listened to his feet go down the hall. There were voices, then the sound of his truck rattling down the hill. She picked up her pocketbook and the black bag and went out through the garden. There was no point in giving Kawabata and company the exquisite discomfort of witnessing the gaijin's departure. She half-ran, half-walked down the hill, the black bag banging against her thigh. It occurred to her that she hadn't looked carefully around the room; he could have forgotten the foxes. She stopped and felt in the side pocket of the bag; they were there, carefully wrapped. She looked up in the direction of the inn, no longer visible behind the trees, almost as if it had been a mirage.
In her room, she lay on the bed, thinking of Seiji, his face close to hers, the delicate lashes beneath the fold of eyelid. They'd slept wrapped together, his leg over hers; she'd never felt so close to anyone.
Yet he'd left without a word about what had passed between them. Longing swept through her.
Get up, she told herself, move. She took her suitcase from the closet and started packing. There must be an early train. She couldn't stay here moping.
The front desk clerk told her the next bus left for the train station in an hour.
She walked down the hill. It was a clear day and the enormous snow-capped cone of Mt. Fuji towered above the lower mountains on the other side of the lake. It seemed startlingly close, the contours visible beneath the snow.
Barbara stood gazing at the reflection of Fuji-san on the water: the famous inverted view. It was shiny, too pretty, a postcard of Hakone. Wish you were here, she could write to Seiji.
On the bus going down the mountain she sat with Michi's bag on the seat beside her to discourage companionship and closed her eyes as if she were sleeping.
He had turned out the lamp and rolled toward her. “Seiji,” she whispered. He traced her eyebrows, nose, and lips, then touched her breast lightly, a gesture that was a question. She pulled him to her. After, they lay holding each other without speaking. “Balabala,” he murmured into her hair, “Balabala-san,” making them both laugh. “Your name is too hard,” he said.
“Give me a Japanese one, then.”
“Ah—Kirēkitsu. Kirekitsu-san. This will mean beautiful fox.” She'd gone to sleep with his breath against her face.
Then, this morning, waking to find him gone. Perhaps there was some cultural subtlety she didn't understand. Maybe he didn't want the innkeeper to know. Though Mr. Kawabata hardly seemed prudish.
She would see Seiji again; he would call.
On the train, she had a car almost to herself. After the conductor came through, she opened the black bag. Seiji had rolled all of Michi's papers into one sheaf and tied them together with paper string. In her notebook he had written out, in laborious childlike script, Chie's 1933 entry.
“In raising my daughter,” it began, “I have come to long for my mother Ko. I wish that she could be here to advise me about Michi-chan.” Barbara skimmed the next couple of paragraphs, about the trials of raising a well-bred daughter. “This New Year's I have taken out my private box to look at possessions Ko brought with her from Izumo to Hiroshima in her dowry chest. Roku removed them from Ko's room on the day of her disappearance, and years later, gave them to my safekeeping.
“There is a sheet of paper rolled and tied with an antique black silk ribbon. On it is a receipt, ‘How to make the plum wine.“ It is this direction I have followed, in making wine from plum trees in our Hiroshima garden.”
Michi had said she used her mother's recipe, but it had been passed down from Ko. She and Seiji were drinking Ko's wine. She thought of Ko and Hiroshi on their honeymoon nights, sparks in the air around them, and she closed her eyes. “Passion is a good thing when it can be found, do you agree?” The door had been open to the garden, letting in the cool air, the scents of earth. Seiji stroked her palm with his fingertips. “Kitē neru. Come and sleep.”
He'd written out this translation while she slept nearby; from time to time he would have glanced at her. When she looked back down at the page and continued reading, she heard the words in Seiji's voice: “Most precious thing from Ko's dowry is ukiyoe print. Always as I look at the picture my heart is struck to see a small child reaching after woman figure who is leaving her home. The woman's head behind paper door reveals the profile of a fox. Fox woman leaving her child forever! Michi-chan, when you are reading this one day, please look at the print. In it is a portrait of your grandmother Ko, who comes from western Japan on the shore of Lake Shinji.”
When Michi had seen the scroll in her apartment, she must have been thinking of this fox woman, and her own story.
“Some day this emblem of your grandmother Ko will belong to you, Michi-chan. Maybe in it you can understand me.”
That print hadn't been on Michi's wall, she would have remembered it. Maybe it was in the tansu. It could be rolled up inside one of the papers.
She looked again at Chie's description of the fox woman: she could feel the longing of the little girl as she reached for her mother's hem. She remembered a moment she hadn't thought of for years, she and her mother walking across the living room in opposite directions and Barbara—she must have been nine or ten—blurting out, “Why can't you be more motherly?” Her mother had stopped midstride. “I can't imagine what on earth you mean,” she'd said, with a laugh.
She leaned back against the seat. The rocking motion of the train lulled her. She closed her eyes again. Come and sleep, he had said, Kitē neru. A print of Kite neru would be full of yearning, too: morning light, dead cigarettes in an ashtray, an
d a futon, its covers thrown back, in the lovers' empty room.
16
When Barbara returned to Sango-kan, she was glad to find Mrs. Ueda there, with dinner prepared for her. She'd imagined a dark, deserted building. It was unsettling, however, that Mrs. Ueda had known exactly when she was returning—apparently Miss Fujizawa's secretary had called the hotel to inquire about her schedule. If she'd had a reservation with Seiji at the ryokan, it would be all over campus by now.
Mrs. Ueda had already set the table and put, beside Barbara's place, a letter bearing a Scots postmark. It was from her father, a few scrawled sentences and a photograph of him and Gina on a golf course. “I've wanted to golf here ever since I got my first chipping iron. How are you doing in the land of the geisha and the rising sun? Sure do miss you, Baby. Please write your old man.” The picture had been taken from a distance, he and Gina tiny figures on an emerald green fairway. She could just make out his silver hair and dark eyes; he looked as far away as he was.
Mrs. Ueda was studying the picture through her reading glasses. “A distinguished looking man. And your mother is quite youthful.”
“She's my stepmother. My parents are divorced.”
“Ah. And has your mother remarried?”
Barbara shook her head. “She's too bitter.”
“It was his decision, then.”
“Yes, though she was really just as unhappy. I think she wishes she'd been the one to break things off.”
“I am sorry for her. After my husband returned from the war he took up with a pan-pan girl, a prostitute. I was bitter too, for quite some time.”
“Did you get divorced?”
“No,” she said with an abrupt laugh. “He drank himself to death with sake.”
“I'm very sorry,” Barbara said. “How about Michi-san? Did she have a happy marriage?”
Mrs. Ueda sighed and shook her head. “Poor Nakamoto's life was a hard one. Her husband was killed during the war.”
“But—before that?”
“They had only a brief time together. It was happy enough, I suppose.”
“Was it an arranged marriage?”
“I believe so, yes.”
Barbara helped Mrs. Ueda bring dinner to the table, and they sat down to eat.
“I'm afraid the pork is altogether too dry,” Mrs. Ueda said.
“No, it's delicious. And so kind of you to have it waiting for me.”
“I'm afraid I haven't the knack for domesticity like Nakamoto.”
“I wondered if you have a certain print of hers, by Yoshitoshi— the fox woman leaving her child.”
“I do not have such a one by any artist. I would recall the subject.” Mrs. Ueda filled her mouth with pork, and chewing, studied Barbara. “How have you heard of this print?”
“Michi-san and I had several conversations about foxes—she told me her mother claimed to understand their language. I happen to have a fox woman scroll with me that my mother got here years ago, and I'm interested in all those stories.” She took a deep breath; she was babbling. “I know that Michi-san had this print at one time.”
“Perhaps it was lost in wartime. So many things were lost in war.”
When she went back upstairs, Barbara took the black bag to the three-mat room. She pulled open the bottom drawer of the tansu and began unwrapping Chie's bottles in order. There was nothing unusual inside the first few papers: no fox woman print, just the sheets of calligraphy she'd come to expect.
The writing on the 1939 paper was strange, more like random brush strokes than calligraphy. The same was true of the sheets wrapped around the next few bottles.
There were no wines for the years 1943 or '44. The 1945 bottle had several thicknesses of paper around it. Maybe the print was here. She peeled off layer after layer of blank rice paper. There must be something important inside.
The final layer was soft white cloth; the bottle beneath it felt lumpy and strange. She laid it on the tatami to undo the cord and cloth. For a moment she stared, her mind moving slowly. The bottle was empty, its sides fused together. The glass looked squeezed, as though by a huge hand, and the neck was twisted back against itself. She stood, dizzy, and walked into the kitchen. She turned on the water and held her hands beneath it, then put her hands to her face. The bottle had been melted in the bombing. Maybe it was from Michi's house.
The newsreel image of the rising mushroom-shaped cloud came to her mind. Michi was down below it some where. Kneeling, screaming, her hands over her ears. Seiji was there too, just a young boy.
She went into the large tatami room. Everything had gone flat, as if she were walking around inside a picture. She picked up one of Seiji's bowls from the tokonoma, set it back down.
In the small room by the tansu the misshapen bottle lay on its cloth like a deformed fetus. She covered it quickly, returned it to the chest, and closed the drawer. She took a bottle of opened wine from the top drawer and drank from it, gulping it down. She should have waited until Seiji was with her before opening that bottle. 1945. She should have known.
Around her was a litter of papers and bottles. All the drawers of the chest sagged open. The air seemed heavy, pressing her down.
It was just growing dark. She pushed up the window as far as it would go. Nearby a bird was singing, a liquid glide up and down. Some love bird, I think, Seiji had said. The odor of woodsmoke began to drift up through the open door. Sato-san was making a fire for the bath.
She wrapped the rest of the 1930s bottles, the early 1940s. The sounds she made with the paper seemed magnified by the quiet, complete except for the sound of that bird, more distant now.
The fox print could be with one of Michi-san's own journal entries. She took out the 1949 bottle; it had to be Michi's, since her mother had died soon after the war. The 1949 bottle was also enclosed in several thicknesses of paper. She removed them carefully, four pages, the outer one blank, the other three filled with calligraphy. No print.
The 1951 wine had only one sheet of writing inside the outer paper, but she was astonished to find a photograph stuck to the bottle. She peeled the picture off carefully and held it in the palm of her hand: Michi and Ume. Michi was bending down to direct Ume's somber face toward the camera. Ume looked to be three or four, wearing a flowered dress and a big bow in her hair. Her head wasn't small—if anything her face seemed rather large. She had a sharp chin like Michi's. Barbara looked at the background, the bridge in the far distance. It was the Golden Gate Bridge. San Francisco. She felt a jolt of excitement, seeing them there. Michi had probably been in California that year; most likely she had written about it. She'd have this paper translated next.
There was nothing but calligraphy around the next few bottles. Then, beneath the 1955 paper, she found a photograph of Michi, Ume, and Seiji, kneeling together at a table. They seemed to be in the middle of lunch or dinner; Michi and Seiji had paused for the photograph but Ume was bending forward slightly, noodles dangling from her chopsticks. Michi was looking at Ume with a worried little smile—not unlike the way she'd looked at Barbara sometimes. Seiji was slightly apart from them and facing straight ahead. He looked uncomfortable, the outsider in this threesome.
She discovered one other photograph, beneath the paper of the last bottle to be unwrapped, 1959. It was of Seiji alone. He stood unsmiling, regal in a black kimono, before a glass case of tea bowls, probably an exhibition of his work. It looked as if it were a triumphant occasion, but his expression was solemn.
She thought of last night, how little he'd said. Perhaps it was characteristic. Perhaps he became more reserved, when moved. The building was steeped in silence. A line from Lawrence Durrell came to her mind: “Does not everything depend upon our interpretation of the silence around us?”
She jumped up, hurried to the kitchen, and turned on the radio. With the Mamas and the Papas singing in the background, she opened the black bag and removed the roll of papers she'd taken to Hakone. She began wrapping the Hakone papers around their bottles and putti
ng them away. The 1961 paper seemed to be missing.
She felt inside the black bag and the side compartment— empty. Maybe she'd accidentally put the paper inside another one. She pulled open the bottom drawer of the tansu and took out the 1930s bottles again, unwrapping each one and looking at the dates on the back of the papers. She undid the 1960 bottle: only the one page. She felt beneath the tansu, then moved the tansu and searched behind it. She looked around the room. The paper was not here.
She hadn't taken out the papers on the train, just the notebook. The 1961 paper must still be at Hakone.
Barbara ran downstairs and picked up the phone. Speaking softly, so Mrs. Ueda wouldn't hear, she managed to get through to the long distance operator and then to the Akai Hana ryokan. Mr. Kawabata answered the phone.
Plum Wine: A Novel (Library of American Fiction) Page 14