The Snow Kimono

by Mark Henshaw

  Katsuo had already enjoyed successes before. Spring Promise, The Dead of Winter. But nothing, not even his own ambition, could have prepared him for the reception of The Chameleon. I remember the days immediately after it was published. I would see people reading it on the train, at the bus stop, in cafés. The park. It was amazing. As for Katsuo, well, overnight, Katsuo found himself lionised. Courted by everybody who was anybody in Osaka. He was feted wherever he went.

  The Chameleon turned out to be everything he had said it was going to be. But then, barely had this outpouring of adulation reached its peak when he too disappeared. His grief over Mariko’s loss had finally taken its toll. It was as if, in the midst of the grand party organised to celebrate his success, with all of Osaka’s high society in attendance, someone—a young, exquisitely beautiful woman, no doubt, a glass of champagne raised to her lips—had paused to ask: Where’s the guest of honour? Where’s Katsuo? Only to find that no one could remember when they had last seen him.

  And when I say disappeared, I mean exactly that. He vanished. Not for a day, not for a week, or a month. He was gone for years. And no one, not me or anyone else, knew where he was, or heard from him. The letters I used to so look forward to had dried up long ago.

  Then, just as he was beginning to fade from people’s memories, and just as suddenly, he reappeared.

  A colleague came up to me one day on the courthouse steps. Have you heard, Tadashi? he said.

  Heard what?

  Katsuo Ikeda. He’s back.

  Naturally, I tried to contact him. I sent him messages. Phoned. But I got no reply. Then one day—I remember it exactly—I ran into him quite by accident in a side street in Osaka’s textile district. I had gone there to pick up a suit I had ordered. I was about to enter the shop when there he was, coming towards me, deep in thought.

  Katsuo? I said.

  He looked up, surprised.

  Tadashi.

  I did not know what to say. That he had disappeared in the way he had, without telling anyone. That he had been away for so long, without contacting me. That he was back, and had been for some time. These questions all jostled for attention. He, for his part, appeared agitated, anxious to get away, as though the friendship that had been part of our lives for so long had ceased to exist, or indeed, had never existed in the first place. We exchanged a few awkward words. I was on the point of asking him where he had been, when he interrupted me.

  I’m sorry, he said. I’m late. He looked at his watch. And then, as if by way of afterthought: Forgive me, he said. And he turned and walked quickly away.

  Not, forgive me, Tadashi. Merely, forgive me.

  I stood there, stunned. People had to step around me in the street. It wasn’t until I got home that I realised I had forgotten to pick up my new suit.

  Soon afterwards, all sorts of rumours began to circulate. About someone, a beautiful young woman from some obscure mountain village, who had come to live with him. Or, that he had gone mad, that he could be heard wandering about his garden late at night arguing with himself, that he rarely ventured out.

  So, late one evening, it must have been a couple of months later, I decided to visit him. In the back of my mind, I think my intention was to confront him, to find out why he had been avoiding me.

  I had heard that he had moved back into his old house high above the bay. It was midsummer, warm. I took a taxi. I remember getting out at the top of the hill and looking down at the thin capillaries of light that outlined the harbour below. I could just make out the sea beyond, its surface pale and flat and still.

  I had not been to the house in years, but I could recall as if it were yesterday the day Katsuo had rung to tell me that, at last, he had found the perfect place. I can still hear him on the phone saying: You must see this house, Tadashi. You must see it.

  At that time, we were both in our mid-twenties. My legal practice was beginning to flourish. Katsuo’s new novel, The Dead of Winter, had done well. And after years of freedom, of philandering, he was finally on the verge of marrying Mariko. Mariko had turned out to be as tempestuous as she was beautiful. We all thought she was more than a match for Katsuo.

  I remember that some days after Katsuo had called me about the house, the three of us—Katsuo, Mariko and I—went to inspect it late one afternoon. It was a wonderful old place, a former consulate, a mansion really, set high into the mountainside overlooking the bay. When we got there, the estate agent opened the door for us. We walked from one radiant, weightless room to another. Katsuo had been ecstatic. Unstoppable. He could not believe his luck. Here, finally, was the perfect place, the place he had imagined owning for so long. We walked out onto the vast terrace. It seemed to reach seamlessly out to the still grey sea beyond, as if the house were just floating there.

  I remember Mariko going to stand with her hands resting on the stone balustrade behind her. In the failing evening light, with the darkening sea at her back, she looked more ravishing than I had ever seen her before. Katsuo was standing beside her, his hand on her right shoulder, his fingers resting on her flawed but flawless skin.

  Katsuo ended up buying the house. A few months later, at a glittering ceremony on the same balcony, with the sea again at their backs, he and Mariko were married.

  Within a year, however, the marriage had begun to falter. Mariko had wanted a child. Desperately. Katsuo did not. He was too young; he wasn’t ready; he had his career to think about; he could not see himself as a father. Not now, not ever. There were any number of excuses.

  He and I spent long nights down by the harbour, going from one disreputable place to another, endlessly discussing this growing knot of unhappiness at the centre of his existence.

  Sometimes, when it began to get late, I would point to my watch. Katsuo would nod, and we would get up to go, only to find ourselves sitting in some even more squalid place five minutes later, amongst the dock workers, the fishmongers, their tattooed women. And Katsuo would start again.

  He loved Mariko, he said. More than that, he was obsessed with her. He knew that he could not live without her. That was his problem. He both loved and felt trapped by her. Particularly now that she wanted a child.

  I would sit there wondering what Mariko was doing, alone in that beautiful house high up on the mountainside, the house he had bought for her. What did she make of his spectacular absences? How unhappy was she? And how ironic was her unhappiness. She seemed as much addicted to him as he was to her. I remembered how dazzling, how perfect they had seemed as a couple when they first met.

  At some inevitable point during one of these endless nights, we would reach the same threshold, and I would bring the late hour to his attention once again. He would wave his hand dismissively in my face. I’m not ready to go, Tadashi, he would say. Just like I’m not ready to have a child. You go, my good and proper, my principled friend. You go. You have a child. And he would look me in the eye, and laugh his cruel laugh, as if this proposition were inconceivable, even to him. A child is the last thing I want, he would say. I have my work to do. Doesn’t Mariko understand that? And yet, if you could be with her, he would say. If you could see how beautiful she is…

  Their arguments escalated. These two people, so favoured by the gods, began to tear eac
h other apart. Without, it seemed, knowing why. We could all see it. We understood what lay at the heart of their unhappiness. But Katsuo and Mariko? They did not. Why, we asked ourselves, could they both not wait?

  To avoid her wrath, he had an iron gate built into the garden wall. At night, after Mariko had fallen asleep, Katsuo would slip secretly out of the house, and through this gate. He would descend into the dissolute city in search of two or three of his more sordid friends, people who occupied the shadowy peripheries of his life, people whom I barely knew. He’d track them down to wherever they were lurking: the sleazy, lowlife bars, the choked gutters of the harbour slums; he would hunt them down in the wild and dangerous places he’d become addicted to, the places in which he could lose himself, and whatever else he had to lose. In the end, he did not care.

  And then, suddenly, Mariko was gone. Where once this beautiful, radiant creature had been, there was nothing. While we waited for her to return, a return that never came, it was as if the world itself had stopped.

  Six months later, in one of the bars we had so often gone to, when the years of heartache that followed had only just begun, Katsuo told me of their final confrontation.

  What if I just went ahead, Katsuo? Mariko had said. Allowed myself to fall pregnant?

  They were sitting opposite each other in the long room that overlooked the balcony. The temporary truce that had existed for some weeks between them was about to end.

  I would not do that, Mariko, Katsuo had said with a menacing calm.

  Why not? You couldn’t really do anything about it.

  You think so. I could always go and see old Eguchi, he said. Then you might wake up one morning and find that you were pregnant no longer.

  She stared evenly at him across the low table.

  You would do that, wouldn’t you?

  I would.

  But why, Katsuo? It’s just a child.

  It’s not just a child, Mariko, he said bitterly. It’s a life. Mine.

  And what if it’s already too late?

  Now it was his turn to look at her. At her beautiful face, at her eyes, which he could not live without.

  Then, Mariko, please remember what I said.

  He put his book down onto the table. Stood up.

  I’m going up to the library, he said. And then I am going out.

  She sat watching his retreating form.

  Goodnight, Katsuo, she said.

  Goodnight, Mariko.

  When he returned home, in the early hours of the morning, washed out, full of remorse, he went up to their bedroom to rouse Mariko as he always did. To take her in his arms. Tell her how much he loved her. Tell her that he had changed his mind. If she so desperately wanted a child, he would not stand in her way. But their bed was empty, and she had gone.

  So, late that night, I found myself walking down the hill beside the stone wall surrounding Katsuo’s garden. I was thinking about the house, about Mariko, about Katsuo’s unbending will, and the breakdown of their marriage. It seemed so long ago. So much had happened in between.

  Then I was standing by the iron gate, looking down into the garden, seeing it as though for the first time. The lanterns, the elaborate terraces planted with bamboo, the ferns, trees of all sorts. I could hear the sound of falling water. Here and there, the serpentine flagstone paths reflected the light as they wound their way up the mountainside. At the heart of the garden, barely visible, shrouded now by masses of faintly transparent leaves, was the house itself.

  All about me I could hear the odd amplified sounds of summer. Frogs calling to each other. The endless thrumming of crickets. The slow tock, tock, tock of a water clock. From far below, I could hear the muted stirrings of a harbour city coming to life.

  I reached through the grill, pressing myself against the wall as I tried to locate the latch pull I knew was concealed inside. The stone felt cool through my shirt. As I stretched my arm out, a tiny movement caught my eye. A small, vividly green lizard was clinging to an ivy leaf just centimetres above my head, its bulbous eye staring down into mine. I was so close I could see its fat padded toes, its thick-rimmed lips, in its side, the fluttering of its tiny heart.

  The gate opened silently. A few metres in front of me there was a large ornamental pond. Plate-sized water-lilies hovered in clusters about its perimeter. From some, flowers cupped like white hands stood on stalks. Sour-faced fish floated through the limbs of trees.

  I crossed the stepping stones. I saw my shadow flicker from tree to tree. A breeze stirred, setting the leaves above me shimmering.

  It was only then that I saw her. At the far end of the house, a young woman, sitting motionless with her back against a pillar. She was wearing a ceremonial kimono, its white dazzling against the surrounding darkness. Her hair had been intricately pinned. Muted light spilled from the lantern above her.

  She was so still she could have been arranged there. I heard Katsuo’s voice calling from inside the house.

  Sachiko…Sachiko?

  His tone sounded vaguely urgent.

  I slipped back into the shadows. I saw his silhouette appear against the lighted doorway. He said something to the young woman, to Sachiko. Without replying, she slipped down from the wall, knelt to gather up something from the ground, a book, a small box. Light fell across her face. As she rose, she reached one hand up to Katsuo’s face and kissed him. Then she disappeared into the house.

  Katsuo remained in the doorway looking out into the garden for a few moments, listening. Waiting. Then, he too turned and disappeared inside.

  I made my way back to the gate, silently released the catch. I looked up to where the lizard had been, but it was no longer there. Below me, I could see the brooding stillness of the harbour. The sound of a foghorn, long and mournful, seemingly without beginning or end, floated up to me. As it faded away, I started on the long, steep descent into the city beneath me, my head full of questions. Who was Sachiko; where had she come from; why was she dressed the way she was; how long had she been there; and, most of all, why was Katsuo keeping her hidden away from us, and the rest of the world?

  You know, Inspector, I wish I had never gone there that night. Sometimes I say to myself: Tadashi, if only you had never gone there. If only you had never gone.

  Chapter 17

  A MEMORY comes back to him.

  Tell Mariko the story about your father, Katsuo says.

  What story?

  And so Omura tells Jovert of this memory.

  We, he says—Katsuo, Mariko and I—were standing out on the terrace of Katsuo’s new house. Katsuo had just had it refurbished. He had arranged a huge party, to celebrate the fact that the work on the house was finally done.

  While the other guests congregated outside, or sat in what he now called ‘the long room’—the sitting room that looked out onto the terrace—Katsuo showed me his special creation, his ‘study’ as he called it, the secret room he had had constructed at one end of the house, a room with a one-way mirror which looked through to an elaborate bathroom. I knew immediately where this had come from, and what it would be used for. I had seen such a room many times before.

 
You know, he had said to me once, Utamaro, Shigenobu, Eisen, all the great artists did their best work from life. From careful observation. You should come down with me one night to The Peony. I could get you in. You could observe one of your favourite tableaux come to life. And see what you’re missing out on.

  I have often wondered, Omura told Jovert, what it must have been like to be him, to be inside his skin, just for a few hours, a day, to experience the world that inhabited him. How extraordinary it must have been.

  You know the one, Katsuo said. The story about your father and the jigsaw puzzles.

  Which jigsaw story? I said, even though I knew.

  The one about your father…The one where he goes out and buys one of those western-style jigsaw puzzles.

  I don’t think so, I said.

  Oh, come, come, Tadashi, my dear friend. Please. Mariko wants to hear it.

  But I remained silent. I knew better than to trust Katsuo when he was drunk.

  Katsuo started to tell Mariko the story himself. I had only told it to him once but was unsurprised to hear Katsuo using almost exactly the same words I had used. It was as if I was speaking. I thought again of how he used to observe us. How powerful his memory was. He even acted out the part of my father with uncanny accuracy.

  And Tadashi, tell Mariko what you told your father when he saw that the half-completed image was the same as the image on the box in which the puzzle had come. What did you say to him? What words of pathetic encouragement did you give him? No? Okay, let me see. He pretended to think for a moment. Katsuo knew exactly what he was going to say. He raised himself momentarily on his toes. I had never realised that I did this until I saw him do it that day. I saw how foolish I must seem.