by Kyoko Mori
But I have no other way, Hideki thought. I have to live in peace with Hanae. Everybody knew that his first wife had committed suicide. He could not add to that disgrace by having his second wife run away. It had taken much courage, he reminded himself as he watched the flames and the smoke, to go on at the company after Shizuko’s death instead of resigning as some people had expected him to do. This time, if Hanae were to leave him, there would be no choice. People would no longer give him the benefit of the doubt. They would no longer assume that he had been unlucky in his first marriage, that he had married an unstable woman who would have killed herself no matter who her husband was. If Hanae were to leave, he would be expected to step down from his supervisory position. A man who had had two wives and could not control either of them was not fit to supervise other men. But that wasn’t the only important thing, Hideki told himself: Hanae did love him. She had loved him, she once said, since the first day she came to work as a secretary at his office. That was more than fifteen years ago. Hanae had been just twenty-two, a mere girl, who then continued to love him for nine, ten years before he was widowed and could marry her. There was much to be said, Hideki thought, for such love and loyalty.
As he pulled open the last box and put his hand inside, his fingers touched something hard. He pulled it out and squinted in the glow of the fire. It was a large notebook; its sturdy blue cardboard cover seemed familiar. Stepping back a few paces from the fire, he continued to stare at the notebook. It was Shizuko’s sketchbook. He remembered it from the days before their marriage when he was hospitalized with tuberculosis and she used to sit by his bed making watercolor sketches while they talked. His face felt hot from the fire. He was beginning to sweat. He got up, emptied the rest of the box into the fire, stepped back, and crouched again. With the unopened sketchbook still in his hand, he found himself thinking of Shizuko’s face—in death, her face was almost peaceful, as though she had completely forgotten him. She did not even leave a note for him—just one for Yuki, which she would not show him. Nothing for him. Silence. Sweating still, Hideki looked up at the balmy early-spring sky.
Three years ago on a warm spring evening like this, Yuki’s grandmother had called him and asked him to let her visit them, to attend the third anniversary of Shizuko’s death. Hideki had given in because the old woman’s voice sounded broken down and pathetic, and he couldn’t bear to listen to her any longer. “Fine, I’ll send her,” he had said, and hung up. That was the only time he had gone against Hanae’s wishes. He had given his consent over the phone; when his wife found out and got angry, it was too late. He had also tried to save some pottery that she was going to throw out. It was a tea set, he remembered. But he had never told Yuki that he had saved it for her, afraid she would blame him then for not having saved anything else. In the end, the pottery seemed to have been thrown out anyway. He never confronted Hanae about it. Hideki gripped the sketchbook and looked at the fire, considering. He thought of the address Yuki had written down on a piece of paper by the telephone. He could almost see her small, cramped-up handwriting. All right, he thought. I will save the sketchbook and send it. Hanae would never find out if he sent it from his office in Osaka.
When the fire died down, Hideki stood up, pulled the empty boxes a little farther away, and walked back to the house. He held Shizuko’s sketchbook in his hand, keeping it away from his body. Hanae would be in the bedroom getting ready for sleep. Before he went to her, he stopped in his study and deposited the sketchbook in the bottom desk drawer and locked it up. He had no desire to look through it.
In the bedroom, Hanae was sitting in front of her three-way mirror in her short white nightgown and applying cold cream to her face. Her hair was pulled back and tucked under a white towel. There was another towel draped over her shoulders. With her fingers, she made careful circular movements around her eyes, nose, cheeks. When she took her hand away, her face looked peaceful and blank.
“I left the fire to die down by itself. It should be all right,” Hideki said. He sat down on their large, pink-covered futon.
Hanae continued to look into the mirror while she spoke. “It was very good of you. I’m sorry you had to do a chore after your long day at the office. But you know how I don’t like to handle fire.”
“I left the boxes in the yard,” Hideki said. “They wouldn’t have burned very well. The ground was damp.”
“That’s all right. I can use the boxes again. There are plenty of other things I want to throw out.”
Hideki stretched out his legs and lay back, facing the ceiling, his arms folded underneath his head.
“I’ll be done with this in a minute,” Hanae said. “Then I’ll bring you some whiskey and give you a massage.”
Hideki got up, changed into his pajamas, and lay down again.
He lay flat on his stomach while Hanae straddled his buttocks and her strong, thin hands kneaded his back, over and below his shoulder blades, up and down his sides over his ribs. Her legs braced his waist. With his arms stretched down his sides, his fingertips lightly touched her bare feet. When she was done, he began to drift into sleep. He turned over and felt her lift the covers and crawl in next to him, adjust her head underneath his armpit so her hard little skull was snuggled against the cup of his shoulder.
* * *
It must have been two or three in the morning when he woke up staring into the dark closet. Behind him, the white glare of the night lamp flashed on and he heard Hanae’s voice.
“What are you doing?” she said.
He let go of the doorknob. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I wanted to get up and go to the bathroom.”
“You’ve got the wrong door.” Hanae waited till he found the door of the bedroom and snapped off the light.
In the hallway, Hideki thought, I must have been too tired to know where I was going. He was sweating profusely. His pajamas felt damp. There was a sour taste in his mouth.
After he washed out his mouth at the sink, he washed his face several times and rubbed it with a towel till his cheeks were red. Now he was too awake to go back to sleep. He turned off the bathroom light and stood in the dark. Something was weighing on his mind, but he couldn’t tell what it was. It reminded him vaguely of when he was a young boy, waking up in the middle of the night keenly afraid of having to die someday, wondering what death was like. Surely I cannot be afraid of that now, he told himself. He had gotten over that fear a long time ago, in his twenties, when he became sure that there was nothing beyond this life. The whole time he was in the hospital with tuberculosis, he did not once worry about dying.
His eyes having adjusted to the dark, he walked slowly down the hallway toward his study without turning on the light. He would get some whiskey and read until he was sleepy again. Once in the study, he leaned over his desk to reach out and turn on the desk lamp. The light flashed into his face. He flinched and shut his eyes against its sudden brightness. His vision burned with jagged white lines. He slumped into his chair, breathing hard. His hands shook a little as he took out the desk key, opened the drawer, and pulled out the sketchbook. After a moment’s hesitation, he opened it.
The first few pictures were familiar. They were watercolors of the view from the hospital window, of himself lying in bed, of the tulips somebody must have sent him, of a cluttered tray of hospital food that he had refused to eat. A third of the way through the book, watercolors gave way to pencil sketches. They were mostly of Yuki in various stages of her infancy and early childhood—at the harbor, in the park, or at home with her toys on the floor. Hideki tried to imagine the two of them, Yuki absorbed in some toy, Shizuko making a quick sketch of her before she grew restless and began to move again. Day after day, Shizuko had watched her daughter and never tired of sketching her. Hideki quickly glanced through the pages. Toward the end, there was another watercolor. He recognized the small cottage in the mountains where they had spent a few days one summer. That must have been the last vacation he had spent with her. In the sket
ch, Yuki was standing at the door in a white blouse and pink shorts. She must have been about seven. Hideki tried to remember something about that vacation. There was a small farm nearby where they raised milk cows and sheep, the only farm of that kind in the whole Kobe district. Surely I must have taken them to the farm, he thought. He turned the page and saw a sketch of cows, with Yuki standing gingerly a few yards away from them.
He glanced through the next few watercolors, more cows, sheep, flowers, and came to the second-to-last page. It was a portrait of Yuki, with her long hair in two braids, red ribbons tied around each. She was smiling, holding a bunch of daisies to her face. Hideki didn’t know when that was done. During the vacation it must have been. He could not remember when he had last seen Yuki smile.
Hurriedly, he turned to the last page and saw a pencil sketch of himself sleeping in a chair inside the cottage. The chair was a chaise longue made of green canvas. He could almost feel its taut stretch against his back. Leaning over the picture, he found thin petals pressed onto the page. They were the color of ink smudges, four petals connected into one flower. At least ten flowers were scattered over the sketch. Hideki remembered what they were—hydrangea blossoms. These small individual flowers clustered into huge balls that looked like balloons on the foggy mountain paths.
As he looked at the dried petals, he remembered that vacation. On the second day, he and Shizuko had argued about something and he had walked off away from the cottage. In the end, after several hours, he returned with large clusters of hydrangea flowers that he had picked while wandering about the mountain paths all by himself, at first sullen and then sorry, very sorry. He had stuck the flowers almost into Shizuko’s face, said something about their being blue rather than pink because it was or wasn’t humid, and then sat on the chaise longue hoping that she would now go on as though nothing had happened. And she did. She took the flowers from him, put them in a large pitcher of water, and asked him whether they should go out to supper at a resort hotel nearby. She never referred to their quarrel. Smiling, she turned to Yuki, who looked frightened, and told her to look at the flowers, how the hydrangea changed colors depending on the level of moisture in the soil. That was how she was at her best—gentle, quiet, always considerate about saving his feelings. In all their time together, she had never raised her voice at him or walked away to slam doors and to sulk. When he knew she had forgiven him, he fell asleep in the chair, tired from walking about all day. She must have sketched him then and pressed these flowers into the last page of her sketchbook.
He wanted to remember her as she was that afternoon. He closed and opened his eyes many times, trying. But it was no use. In the harsh light of the desk lamp, he was staring at the brittle flowers, the memory escaping him and leaving him nothing but faded ink smudges. He closed the sketchbook and locked it up again in his desk drawer. Then he remained seated for a long time, his elbows against the edge of the desk, holding his head in his hands like a burden.
14
AFTER THE RAIN
(August 1975)
The morning after the rainstorm, Masa was out in her garden at five thirty. The two-week drought had gotten her in the habit of rising early to water her plants. Walking through the garden—first the vegetable plots and then the flower beds—she noticed that the wind had knocked down two of her tomato plants. Otherwise, there was little damage.
Masa was in the south corner of the garden, where her white statice and baby’s breath had been. Last week, the white flowers had grown into round clusters bigger than her best watermelons. Walking amidst them, she had imagined herself among clouds, the vigorous clouds that towered in the southern sky in mid-summer. But she had harvested the flowers the previous afternoon when the radio warned of the oncoming storm. Now there were only rows and rows of green leaves flat against the muddy ground, looking like wilted lettuce. The flowers were hanging upside down in the shed. In a few weeks, her daughter-in-law, Etsuko, would come from Himeji to pick them up in her car. Etsuko made wreaths and basket decorations out of dried flowers and sold them to a woman who ran a gift shop. Masa grew the flowers for her because Etsuko and Saburo lived on a crowded city street where the eaves of one house practically touched the eaves of the next. Masa had tried to help Etsuko weave the wreaths one year, but her fingers were too stiff for that kind of work now; her eyes, too, even though she saw perfectly well, tired easily from looking at the small, star-shaped flowers of the statice.
It was a wonder that the flowers came back every year. Stuck to the ground, the muddy leaves did not seem to have any life in them. Still, early next spring, every statice and baby’s breath would send up long spikes that gradually became thick with blossoms.
Masa remembered a time when she found comfort in the return of various flowers each spring. During the winter months, she used to remind herself of the perennials she had tended over the years, the flowering trees that were older than most of her children. She looked forward eagerly to the first flowers—plums in February, violets in March, cherry blossoms in early April. All that had changed. The spring after Shizuko’s death, the lavenders Shizuko had helped her to plant bloomed profusely. The yellow roses Shizuko had built an arch for bloomed for the first time that June. Masa knew then that there was no comfort in the flowers coming back every spring. Until that year, she had planted very few annuals because she hated to see them bloom all summer and die in the fall. The only annuals she and her husband planted every year had been the morning glories that Takeo tended, but every fall, he collected their seeds to plant next spring, so it was more as though the same flowers were coming back after a short rest. Since Shizuko’s death, though, Masa planted more annuals—pansies and petunias, sweet peas, impatiens, zinnias. Some years, the white petunias bloomed into late October, till one morning, the frost snapped them into small, wilted piles.
Masa walked slowly toward the house, stopping now and then to snip off dead leaves or fading flowers, pull out the weeds growing between the plants. There were few weeds. The drought had killed those that had sprung up after Yuki’s visit. Yuki had spent hours of her two-week visit weeding the flower beds and vegetable plots. Masa wondered if Yuki had spent so much time outside because she wanted to avoid talking to her.
But Yuki must have been anxious to see us, Masa told herself. She had visited in the last weeks of June, as soon as her college was out for the summer. She said she wanted to stay longer but couldn’t because she had to work. Besides, she needed to use the studio at her college for photography and she had to go to the library to read.
“Why do you have to read books or even go to college to study art?” Masa had asked her. “I thought you would be able to learn just from doing it on your own. Isn’t that how all the great artists learned? They didn’t go to college.”
Yuki shook her head. “That was a different time, and a lot of them were apprenticed to other artists even then. They didn’t just teach themselves everything. It’s hard to explain.”
“I was thinking you could live with us here all year round and still be an artist. This is a nice quiet place to live. Why not?”
“I don’t know. How would I support myself here?”
“You wouldn’t have to worry about that. Grandpa’s pension is enough for all three of us if we live modestly. If you want to work, you can always give lessons.”
“But I don’t want to spend a long time looking at kids’ drawings.”
“You can coach the track team at the village school. Even people around here read about you in the papers last year when you won those competitions.”
“I don’t want to coach track teams.”
“What will you do after you graduate, anyway? Will you become a teacher somewhere else then?”
“Grandma, I don’t know.” Yuki sighed. “I just started college. I don’t know what I’ll do afterward.”
“What is the use of going to college if you don’t know what you’re going there for?”
“Maybe I’m going because I d
on’t know. I just want to study art now. I have no idea about four years from now or even next year. I don’t want to think that far ahead.”
Masa was going to point out that this was too haphazard a way to live when Yuki abruptly stood up and put on her straw hat.
“I’m going to the garden. I didn’t weed your petunia patch yet,” she said. “Let me know if there’s something else I can do.”
Yuki was never rude or irritable on this visit. Even when they disagreed, her face was always full of patience. But something was wrong. Masa felt a strain when they talked, and she was sure that Yuki felt it also. So much of it, she thought, was Yuki’s father’s fault. If he had allowed Yuki to visit regularly, things would have been different. As it was, Masa felt that Yuki had suddenly become somebody else—a tall and thin girl, a young woman almost, whose face was full of patience. When Yuki was a child, it was Masa herself whose face had had that look. Now, it had somehow become the other way around, with no gradual change to explain it, nothing in between.