The Snow Kimono

by Mark Henshaw

  Oh, it’s horrible, Sachiko cried. Horrible.

  She turned away from the mirror again, hid her face in her hands.

  It’s horrible, horrible, she kept saying.

  Ume dabbed the towel on her back once more. When she had finished, she looked at the scar again. Sachiko’s skin was flushed from rubbing. The scar appeared oddly fainter now, less scorpion-like, more benign, more, Ume thought, like the character 毛, which meant fur.

  It’s nothing, Ume said. Nothing. I should not have said anything. You can barely see it, Sachiko. She patted her shoulder. If I had not said it looked like a scorpion, you would not have thought so yourself. It could be anything. Anything, she said.

  But I saw it move, Sachiko said.

  It’s just a scar, Ume said. It doesn’t mean anything. There, the bleeding’s stopped.

  Sachiko looked over her shoulder once again. All trace of blood had been sponged from her back. Now she could barely see the scar. She turned her back from left to right. It was only when lit from one particular angle that she could see it clearly. And when she did, Ume was right—it could have been anything, a meaningless piece of calligraphy; a small, delicate flourish etched into her skin; some other, less sinister image. Or, what it was—a small, barely perceptible scar, of no consequence to anyone, least of all to her.

  When Ume and Mizuki had finished, when they had powdered her face, tied her hair up, helped her into the snow kimono, Sachiko barely recognised herself in the mirror. She had been transformed. It seemed to her now that there were two of her, each inhabiting a different world—the one from which she watched, and the one she was watching.

  In the end, Mr Ikeda, Katsuo, did not join them. He had sent a message. He was yet delayed.

  Sachiko sat opposite her father at the low table. From time to time, two young women knelt into the silence between them to place a steaming new dish of food onto the table, and remove the tepid, barely touched remains of the one that preceded.

  Her father did not speak. He made no comment. Not on the beauty of the kimono she was wearing. Not on the fact that it had been made by her grandmother, which he must have known. Not on her hair. Her face. Even when she had entered the room, and he was already there, he did not speak. He had stood, bowed, but he had done so as though to a stranger.

  Now her father sat pushing pieces of food around his plate. The sound of a shamisen came from somewhere in the garden.

  Are you all right, Father? she said, when she could stand the silence no longer. You’re not eating.

  He seemed to weigh up how rude it would be not to reply to a direct question from his own daughter.

  Yes, Sachiko, he said, picking up his cup. I am just not hungry. It has been a long day and I have much to think about.

  Sachiko.

  Her father rarely used her name. He only used it when he was calling her. Or talking about her. But almost never in her presence. It had always been Daughter this, Daughter that.

  She heard footsteps approaching along the corridor, and then Ume was standing in the doorway.

  Mr Ikeda is ready for you, Mr Yamaguchi.

  Ready?

  Sachiko looked at her father. What did ready mean? But she did not have time to ask. Her father was already on his feet, wiping his mouth roughly with the back of his hand. Again, he did not say goodbye. Sachiko watched him leave.

  The two young women detached themselves from the wall and came to collect his plate.

  How long has Mr Ikeda been home? Sachiko asked them.

  They glanced at her, each other.

  I am sorry, Miss Sachiko, one of them said. We do not know.

  Chapter 26

  SACHIKO takes a breath.

  Has Ume returned? she asks him.

  Not yet, he tells her.

  It is dark now, still snowing. Katsuo is kneeling beside her. Sachiko marshals what little strength she has left; then, despite the cold which has begun to invade her, she continues to tell him of that first night.

  They are just two intermittent voices talking in the darkness. In the cold, cold night.

  After my father left me, she tells him between breaths, I went to lie on my bed. You did not come down for the meal after all. I wondered why. So much had been made of my coming here. Being presented to you. Ume had already told me about the snow kimono, the one you wanted me to wear…which I am wearing now.

  How strange life is.

  Katsuo waits.

  She told me you had saved it for me…How it rippled in the light when Ume laid it out!

  Sachiko pushes herself up on her elbows. Katsuo cradles her head in his lap. Her forehead is burning.

  Oh, Katsuo, Katsuo…I’m so sorry. I cannot bear the pain. When will they come for us?

  Soon, he says. I am here with you. Just keep talking to me. It will help to take away the pain.

  He looks about. At the now moonlit sky. The attendant trees. Their ghostly blue shadows. How quiet they all are. The snow silent all around them. Then he looks down at Sachiko. At her swollen belly. Her snow kimono. Which has begun to bleed.

  Now that he has seen this, his heart has ceased to beat.

  Oh, my beloved Sachiko, he says to her. Talk to me. Talk to me. Please, he begs her. Do not go to sleep.

  After a moment in which the universe itself seems to hold its breath, she begins to speak again. Her words weave themselves around the many already woven into his memory. In the moonlight he can see her lips moving, he can see her fitful, cooling breath, but he no longer knows whether she is speaking to him or not.

  Chapter 27

  SHE is a bird above the garden.

  Ume has shown her the viewing platform. There are things up here that cannot be seen from anywhere else. Twisted tree trunks reach up through the penumbral light. Boulders, stone seats, small waterfalls, bridges. Pathways across the water. Small swarms of tiny white camellia buds move about the garden like fireflies. She watches them disappear. Moments later, further up the slope, another group appears. Then another, lit by invisible beams of light. Here and there, she can see the reflected surfaces of the flagstone paths. Elsewhere, half-hidden statues watch from the shadows.

  The sound of a car engine drifts up to her. From its rise and fall she knows that it is making its way slowly up the mountain road, the same one she and her father drove up earlier that day. She recalls what Mr Ishiguro had said.

  A car will come to pick you up at nine, Hideo.

  She glimpses headlights through the trees. They disappear, reappear, disappear. She waits. Then she sees them sweep around the last tight curve leading up to the driveway. She hears the engine change pitch, and change pitch again. She sees the probing headlights dip as the car comes to a stop. She watches the twin beams dim, dim, dim, as the wrought-iron gates open. The car is now a glow advancing between the deeply creviced hedgerows. Then its low dark form appears in the lights either side of the driveway. A door to the house closes beneath her. The headlights disappear beneath the unseen terrace.

  She stands, her hands on the platform railing, listening. The garden fidg
ets below her. Then, in quick succession, the sound of two car doors closing. A moment later, a third. Headlights sweep across the tree tops at the far end of the house. A patch of driveway lights up, begins to move. The outline of the great car follows in its wake. Two small red lights gather in the road behind.

  As it moves away from her, she can see that the car’s interior lights are on. Its two almond-shaped rear windows are illuminated dimly. In them, like the pupils of two eyes looking back up at her, she can see the silhouettes of two heads. The car floats down the driveway. Out through the gates. Then it turns onto the road, towards the beckoning city.

  Chapter 28

  IN her room, Sachiko stands looking out into the garden. She holds her breath, listens. There is no breeze. No movement. No leaf stirs. The surface of the pond is mirror-still. The lunar edges of the water-lilies lie flat and snug against their reflections.

  She goes to the door. Opens it quietly. Looks out into the corridor. She tiptoes barefooted into the half-darkened sitting room. The vast uncurtained windows look out onto the terrace. Its shadowed surface is waiting.

  She pulls the sliding glass doors aside and half-runs to the balustrade. How cold the stone is on her feet. The sea unmoving. The glittering city lies suspended below her. At its furthest ends, denser webs of light shimmer in the cool air.

  The moon, huge and red, begins to rise above the horizon. Part-hoisted, it seems to pause. A ribbon of light unfurls across the sea’s dark mass. It zigzags up to her across the flat tiled rooves of the houses below.

  Sachiko imagines herself scaling the balustrade, skipping down across these rooftop stepping stones to the waiting sea. She sees herself dashing, barefooted, across this glowing ribbon of light, plunging into the safe embrace of the moon. But she is already too late. She has missed her chance. The moon has begun to move again. With one last heft, it pushes itself free of the horizon. It hovers there unsteadily for a moment, like a weightlifter lifting a weight, then rises effortlessly into the sky.

  She hears her father’s voice. He is calling her again.

  Sachiko, Sachiko…

  She goes to the sliding door, tries to open it. But it is locked. She pulls on the handle.

  Who would lock me out? she thinks.

  Her father is standing inside the half-lit room, pacing back and forth. She realises that he isn’t calling her after all. He is merely calling her name: Sachiko, Sachiko, he is saying again and again.

  Sachiko…

  How was it that a name could contain so much sorrow, so much pain?

  Father? she calls out.

  But he does not answer. He seems deaf to her. She pounds on the glass with her fists, runs closer to where he is standing. She pounds again. She waves her arms. Still he does not see her. Instead, he keeps pacing.

  Father!

  She looks for a side door. But there isn’t one. A solid sheet of glass now extends seamlessly from one side of the terrace to the other. Keeping her out. She runs back to where the handle was. It too has disappeared.

  Father! she calls again, more urgently.

  The moon is now high overhead. She is a tiny figure poised on the teetering horizon, imploring the moon to return, to come back, to save her.

  She awakes in the darkness of her room to voices. At first she thinks they are part of her dream. But they come again. A man, two, and a woman. She hears the woman laugh, her laughter like a ball bouncing down a staircase. She cannot place where they are. Something crashes to the ground. Shatters. She hears a man’s voice, entreating his companions to be quiet.

  I thought that, at last, you had come home, she says. I pictured you raising a finger to your lips.

  The house returns to stillness. But now Sachiko is awake. She will not go back to sleep.

  She reaches for the lamp, turns it on. She is lying on her still-made bed. She is no longer wearing the snow kimono. Instead, she is wearing a loose night wrap. She imagines Ume finding her in her room, asleep. Still dressed. She pictures Ume undoing her kimono, rolling her gently to one side, then scooping up the armfuls of snow. She sees her laying the night wrap out.

  But surely she would have woken.

  The snow kimono hangs against the wall like a sentinel. She lies there on the bed, thinking about the voices she has heard. It is after midnight. The events of the day jostle in her head. They settle for a moment. Then, like a flock of birds at dusk, they take to the air, whirling round and round in the sky above her.

  She sits up, rises, pulls her night wrap tightly around her. She goes to the door, slides it open. The cool floor of the corridor on her bare feet reminds her again of her dream. She makes her way down the darkened hallway. She stops outside her father’s room. Listens. No sound comes from within.

  Halfway down the corridor, a skewed lozenge of light floats on the floor. Vague aquatic shadows are circulating there. In the darkness, she waits for her eyes to adjust. She can see a fissure of light at the corridor’s far end. She can just make out the panelled shadows of the door above it.

  Then she hears their voices. A muffled exchange. A man’s voice, then a woman’s.

  She stays standing in the corridor like this, listening. Barely breathing. A faint shadow passes fleetingly through the bar of light beneath the door. She starts to walk towards it.

  She stands in the pool of light on the corridor floor, looking up through the window. Tier after tier of half-illuminated tree limbs are etched against the night sky. The tops of the trees are swaying. The whole garden seems to be moving. And yet there is no sound. No frogs calling, no crickets. Even the water clock has stopped. It is as though she is tethered to the ocean floor and is gazing up through the thick and vitreous water, at a forest of strange and exotic sea plants undulating silently above her. The voices come again.

  I thought it was you, she tells Katsuo. I thought that you had come home. Then I am outside the door, waiting, listening, my toes lit by the light coming from under the door. I can feel my heart beating.

  What if you open the door? I think. How will I explain my presence here? What will I say? I am a guest in your house, someone whom you have not yet met. Or seen. Could I lie? Could I say that I had become disoriented, that I was looking for my father’s room?

  I hear another noise. Like a mattress settling, or a floorboard creaking. I hear a voice, a woman’s voice, something low, guttural, repeated. As if she is in pain.

  I feel the heat rising to my face.

  How shameful it would be to be discovered here, I think again. Outside your door, listening.

  Then I hear your laugh. Except that it isn’t your laugh. It is someone else’s. Someone I know well.

  It is my father’s.

  Suddenly the world is all turmoil. All the roosting birds have taken flight. The dark-limbed trees have erupted into the sky. Now all the birds are wheeling about, screaming. I am the crouched heart at the centre of this swirling mass. I raise my hands to protect myself. To block the noise out. But a thousand wings beat at my face.

  My father, I think. What is he doing here?

  As if to answer my question, I hear the woman’s laugh.

 
And then I understand the history of my father’s visits. I see how pathetic, how old, how out of place he is. I see Mr Ishiguro’s fixed smiling face. I see my father led astray. I see his tormented homecomings. The days that follow. His silences. His inward-falling.

  I recall his absences on the nights that follow his return. His descent into town. To get drunk. To seek oblivion. I see his penitent returns. His pitiful remorse. How he cannot look at me.

  Does my mother know?

  I see her face, resigned, bitter, defeated. And I know she knows.

  Now that I understand, I know that there is no going back. I can never forgive my father.

  I have left my childhood behind. It has been wrenched from me. I am on my own.

  Ume has told me something she should not have. She begs me not to tell you. You kept the snow kimono for me. Petals are falling from the sky. The bath has tiny red boats floating in it. Ume stirs them in with a wooden paddle. When I open my eyes, someone is staring back at me. She has a white face. Red lips. It is raining again. The rain beats down like stones. I think the roof is caving in. Who amongst them did they want to punish? Ichiro has not come home. My beloved son is lost. You still have not returned. Whose words are these?

  I start to piece things together. Although not in the way things turned out. I had no idea, then, that I was coming here to be with you. But I had already guessed that I had not journeyed down to Osaka with my father merely to accompany him, or to work for Mr Ishiguro.

  This is not now. In the snow. Not anymore. This is memory.

  Sachiko is sitting on the ledge in the garden, swinging her bare, hypnotic feet; she is standing on the terrace, looking down into the rain-cleansed city; she is walking with him in the quiet streets above the house. She never tires of answering his questions. And he never tires of asking them.