The Snow Kimono

by Mark Henshaw

Spring Promise, I said. It’s perfect. The irony heartbreaking. So exquisite, so complete.

  It is, isn’t it, Tadashi? he said. It is the perfect title. I know it sounds conceited, but I needed to hear it. From you. You know how much I trust your judgement. I knew you would see how perfect it was.

  He poured himself another drink, lit another cigarette.

  Oh, I’m sorry, he said.

  He headed for the balcony.

  It’s okay, Katsuo, I said. I’ve finished. The air has almost cleared in here, in any case.

  He inhaled on his cigarette, looked at its burning end, then threw it over the balcony anyway.

  So, he said. Now that you’ve had some time to think about it, what do you think, overall?

  You mean in the five minutes since I put it down?

  He shrugged.

  I told him again how impressed I was.

  And you found it credible?

  Very, I said.

  He threw his head back. He was exultant.

  So, Katsuo, congratulations, I said. Now you’ve heard it from me.

  I knew it, he said. I knew it. I kept saying to myself, if Tadashi approves, I will have achieved what I set out to do.

  He sat down, smiling. I think this was the only time I ever saw uncalculated pleasure on his face. Of course, I did not know then what I know now—that the future changes everything.

  Chapter 10

  TODO, I said.

  It was our third evening in Shirahama. We had gone to a small restaurant away from the town centre. When we arrived most of its tables were taken. Not by tourists, but by locals.

  You know, Inspector, Omura said, interrupting himself. Isn’t that strange. I’ve forgotten to tell you something, just as I had forgotten it that evening.

  You see, when Katsuo came down into the foyer that evening, I was already there waiting for him. I remember him stepping off the stairs and coming over to me. He was adjusting his tie, his cuffs.

  What’s the matter? he said.

  I brought some papers with me, I told him. From Osaka. One of them is missing. I think someone has been through my things.

  One of your papers? Why would anyone want to take one of your papers? Are you sure you didn’t leave it behind?

  It’s possible, I suppose, I said. But I could have sworn I brought it with me. It was part of a sequence of documents I’ve been working on.

  Did you tell Yamada?

  I did. He asked me what they looked like. They were papers.

  What kind of papers?

  They were deeds to a property.

  Katsuo shrugged.

  Are we going? he said. Or would you prefer to stay?

  Half an hour later we were pushing on the door of the small restaurant in Shirahama’s back streets.

  The owner came over to Katsuo when we entered.

  Ah, Mr Ikeda. Back so soon?

  Katsuo grasped his hand, smiled.

  Once we had ordered and the waiter had departed, I returned to the subject I had raised the day I arrived, determined to have an answer once and for all.

  Professor Todo? I said.

  Like I said, Tadashi, Todo was a fool.

  And if it’s true, this rumour going around that he committed suicide?

  Wouldn’t you?

  Wouldn’t I what?

  Commit suicide. If you were T-T-To-d-do, he said, imitating Professor Todo’s tortured stutter.

  Don’t you care?

  About what?

  T-T-To-d-do, I said pointedly.

  No, Tadashi. I don’t. And don’t look at me like that.

  Like what?

  Like you’re judging me.

  He waited.

  I see nothing’s changed, has it, Tadashi, he said. You think you are such a man of principle. Good, honourable Tadashi, who can do no wrong.

  He uttered the words with such bitterness, such venom, that I felt as though I had been slapped.

  What happened to us being brothers? he said.

  I don’t know, Katsuo, I said. Perhaps you could tell me.

  How memory waylays us. His comment about being brothers, and what I had been thinking about in that rundown back-street restaurant, resurrected for me, from the undifferentiated mass of otherwise similar memories, the precise moment the scandal had begun to unfold.

  Katsuo and I were sitting on one of the stone benches in the old courtyard of the university. Katsuo had returned from Osaka only that morning.

  You know, Tadashi, he was saying, Etsuko is probably the most intelligent person I have ever met.

  Etsuko was his girlfriend at the time, although I was yet to meet her.

  What, more intelligent than you? I said.

  Well, at least as intelligent.

  And I’m sure she’s beautiful too.

  Katsuo seemed to consider what I said for a moment. It was unlike him to have missed my irony.

  I’ve never really thought about it, he said. But yes, I suppose you could say she is beautiful. In her own way.

  And what way is that? I said.

  In her way, Tadashi. Not that you would know anything about that.

  Again, his comment, and the coldness with which he delivered it, stung me. I had thought that my reserve with women was something known only to me.

  Will you look at old T-T-T-Todo, the st-star-star-stuttering old fool, he said. I don’t think I’ve met anyone so blind to everything that goes on in the world.

  Professor Todo was one of Katsuo’s teachers. He had just emerged from the archway at the far end of the courtyard. I knew him. He occasionally came over to talk to us. Or, more accurately, to talk to Katsuo. He was old. He should have been pensioned off years before. But he was harmless. Whenever he came over, he always seemed nervous. He would refer to Katsuo as Master Katsuo. How are you today, Master Katsuo? And you, Mr Omura? he would say with a nervous smile.

  He likes you, Katsuo. He treats you like a son, you said so yourself.

  Todo is a fool.

  I thought you said it was Todo who encouraged you.

  Oh yes, I remember. You ma-ma-must r-read, K-K-Katsuo. You m-must analyse, always analyse. Above all, you ma-ma-must work. You have t-t-t-talent, Katsuo. But t-talent is nothing. For every writer who creates s-s-something lasting, there are a thou-thousand young m-men of t-talent who do nothing, whose only accomplishment is d-d-daydreaming.

  You know, he came to me a week ago, Katsuo said. But how can you respect a man who can’t even pronounce his own n-n-name? To discuss Shiga’s poetry.

  Katsuo laughed. We were still watching Todo crossing the courtyard. He seemed as preoccupied as ever, gesturing to himself as he walked.

  Shiga! Another fraud, he said.

  Shiga was a previously unknown nineteenth-century poet whose works had been unearthed by a Tokyo academic the
year before. The literary journals were full of him. Already the canon of seventeenth-century poetry was being reassessed in the light of his work. Katsuo had been scathing.

  You know what I think of Shiga, he said. Anyway, Todo came to me. To me, can you believe it? To discuss his own ‘observations’ about Shiga’s work. The old fool wants to write an article himself. He thinks he can see some connections between Shiga’s poetry and the great Utamaro.

  It’s possible, I said. I have noticed echoes there myself.

  You’ve read Shiga?

  Yes. Like everybody else, I read the poems when they came out.

  And, don’t tell me, you think there are connections between Shiga and Utamaro.

  Yes. I do, in fact.

  Don’t be ridiculous, Tadashi. It’s not possible.

  Why? I said.

  Katsuo just looked at me.

  I shrugged. Sometimes, most times, there was no point in arguing with Katsuo.

  So, what did you do? I said.

  What do you think I did? I encouraged him.

  What for, Katsuo? Todo is an old man.

  He’s a fool, Tadashi. He kept on saying he wanted to write one last significant piece before he died. As if he’s written anything significant before in his life. He’s an ignorant buffoon. He needs to be taught a lesson.

  And you’re going to teach him?

  Yes, I am. T-Todo is in for a big fall, he said bitterly.

  Todo had disappeared by now. I, too, went to get up and leave, but Katsuo held me back.

  I offered to help him, you know, to write his article, Katsuo said. I quoted Shiga’s poetry at length. I made the occasional mistake, of course. Deliberately. Which, amazingly, the old fool corrected. I pointed out some flaws in his argument. Suggested some alternatives. I was able to convince Todo that what I said was superior, and that it was he who had led me to these insights. Insights that even Shiga, fine poet that he was, had failed to grasp. And yes, indeed, there were parallels after all between Shiga’s poetry and the works of Utamaro. So many, in fact, that I felt ashamed that I had not seen them myself.

  Ah, Tadashi, you have no idea how conceited old Todo is. When he left, he could scarcely get the words of fawning gratitude out, so indebted to me was he for my help.

  I protested. I told him that what I had said was merely in response to what he had already been thinking, that really I had said nothing at all. His Shiga article, he told me, would be the one thing that guaranteed his rightful place amongst his intellectual peers. Katsuo snorted. His rightful place amongst his intellectual peers! At least he was right about that.

  A month or two went by. I didn’t hear any more from Katsuo after this conversation. But then he came to see me in my room.

  Read this, he said.

  He handed me a magazine. A literary magazine. It was open at Professor Todo’s article.

  The article was long, and quite dense. There were many footnotes. It took me some time to read as Katsuo paced up and down. Todo’s arguments seemed, I have to confess, very lucid. And his style was surprisingly elegant, not what I had expected at all.

  This is quite good, I said. I’m impressed.

  Katsuo raised his eyebrows, laughed. He took the journal from me and flipped through a couple of pages.

  Now read this.

  It was the last article in the magazine. It was a lengthy and devastating analysis which proved that the whole Shiga discovery was a hoax. The poems were made up of a range of misquotations and distortions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century so-called rustic school poets.

  The crux of the article, however, was what followed. Further investigations by its author, over a period of some months, involving a forensic process of backtracking and hole-plugging, had revealed that Etsuko Kaida, the leading Tokyo academic who had made the initial discovery, did not, in fact, exist.

  What—and this was the article’s closing argument, delivered with a chilling nonchalance—had convinced the author that the Shiga poems were fake was the certain knowledge that they had been written by the author of the present article himself. He had constructed the poems. And he was, in addition, the mystery Tokyo academic who claimed to have discovered the poems in the first place. Etsuko Kaida was, in fact, Katsuo Ikeda.

  I just rearranged the letters of my name, Katsuo said.

  I was staring at him.

  Oh, come on, Tadashi. Etsuko! Who is, let me remind you, just as smart as I am.

  I can see that, Katsuo, I said. The name. I’m not stupid, you know. What I can’t see is why you could possibly want to do that to Professor Todo. What has he ever done to you?

  Who really cares? he said. It wasn’t about him. I did it to amuse myself.

  But he’s an old man, I said. He’s harmless.

  Katsuo didn’t answer. I handed the magazine back to him. He rolled it up and began tapping it on the top of my desk.

  I’m going for a walk, I said. When you’ve finished, please have the courtesy to pull my door closed when you leave.

  Within hours, news of the scandal was circulating in every corridor of the university. How a student had duped one of the university’s most senior professors. Todo was publicly humiliated. He had been made a complete laughing stock. The university felt it had been disgraced. While the governors decided what to do about him, Katsuo took matters into his own hands. He disappeared.

  This would not have meant much to me if it had not been for Todo. He came to see me the night before the disciplinary tribunal was to meet to decide Katsuo’s fate.

  When I went to answer my door, Professor Todo was standing outside.

  Mr Omura, he said.

  Professor Todo.

  May I come in?

  He sat for a long time holding his hat, looking at the floor.

  You know, Mr Omura, he said at last, I was not surprised. Katsuo is the most talented student I ever had, he said. But it is a talent that is poisoned. He does not yet know how to harness it. I tried to help him. Do you understand what I am saying?

  I nodded.

  But I might as well not have been there. Todo was still looking at the floor. It was as though I was invisible, and he was talking to himself.

  He thinks I am stupid, blind.

  Todo seemed to have shrunk even further into himself. I could see his left hand shaking.

  Katsuo’s like a spider, he said. He paralyses people. Then he sucks them dry. It’s almost as if he can’t help himself. I think I recognised this the moment I first saw him.

  He nodded to himself, as though confirming something he had just thought.

  I treated him like a son, he said.

  He got up, took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, replaced his hat.

  I have spoken to the tribunal, he said. I’ve told them I take full responsibility for what happened. I’ve recommended that they take no action against Katsuo.

  He went to the door.

  Would you do something for me, Mr Omura? When you next see him, tell Katsuo that I understan
d.

  He bowed and left.

  It was only later that I recalled something—the entire time he was in my room, he had not stuttered once!

  A few days after this, I heard that Todo had resigned. Then he too disappeared. Rumours started to circulate that he had gone back to his village, that he had committed suicide there.

  A week later, there was another knock on my door. This time it was Katsuo.

  Where have you been? I said.

  Away, he said. He waved his hand in some indeterminate direction. Tell me, he said, is it true? I’ve just heard they want to expel me. Their best student! Can you believe that? Can’t they see it was just a joke?

  A joke, I said. What about Professor Todo?

  Well, yes. Todo, he said. But Todo’s life was over. He’s old. Old, Tadashi. What more did he have to contribute?

  He brushed his hand through his hair.

  He came to see me, you know.

  Who?

  Professor Todo.

  What for?

  I think he wanted to know why.

  And what did you tell him?

  I didn’t tell him anything. He warned me to stay away from you. He said you sucked people dry, suffocated them. He said that he had treated you like a son. He said, Tell Katsuo I understand.

  Katsuo was staring into space.

  Todo was a fool. A stupid, ignorant fool, he said.

  Katsuo was about to say something else, but instead, he turned and left. It was not until I went to Shirahama that I saw him again.

  Part III

  NATSUMI

  Chapter 11

  AT the beginning of summer, Natsumi took her two children to Shirahama once again to escape the oppressiveness of the capital. Her husband, a successful businessman, was happy to indulge his still-young wife, to pack her off with his best businessman’s smile to the seaside for a month or two, so that she could escape her boredom, or her disillusionment, or whatever else it was she called the emptiness of their marriage.