He wore a faint grimace, giving his face the same look of chilly loneliness that was in Noriyuki’s memorial photograph. The contrast with his usual geniality, something he had inherited from both sides of the family, strengthened the impression of coldness.
I could picture Yoko retreating a step, her eyes wide open. How can you say that, Masayuki? How can you say something like that? If you say things like that, it’s all over.
“I should have apologized right then.” He closed his mouth, then opened it again. “But I didn’t. I said, ‘If it’s over, then fine.’ I said it without thinking.”
“And then?”
“That was that. She ran upstairs to her bedroom.”
I had heard before that the couple had separate bedrooms, his on the first floor and hers on the second. Yoko still had trouble sleeping, and Masayuki still read to her at bedtime, but she also had trouble staying asleep. When she woke up in the night she would read for a while before taking a sedative toward dawn and going back to sleep. And so she had the second-floor bedroom to herself.
He should have gone after her and apologized, but he didn’t. For some reason, at the time he thought if it was over, then fine, let it be over. That might be the best thing for her, he’d even thought. Masayuki said all this in a detached tone.
“And the next day I went to work.”
I heard him out in silence. I personally didn’t think he had said anything wrong. “If it’s over, then fine.” If he said that, it was perfectly understandable. And yet deep down I understood the shock Yoko felt.
In any case, with Harue’s poison still circulating inside him, the spell Yoko had cast on him for ten years seemed to wear off, and he saw himself as he appeared in other people’s eyes. All the things he had willingly gone along with for her sake then revisited him in a new light, mocking his lenience. A change in perspective turns everything upside down. Where Taro’s Windrush project on Long Island had seemed to offer him the chance of a lifetime as an architect, perhaps he, the odd man out, had only been given a toy with which to occupy himself. Perhaps there had been an element of pity for his firm, which was short of clients. And the gratitude he had felt toward Taro for buying the land in Karuizawa was just one more sign of what a fool he’d been. Others might have seen it as an unsubtle reminder of his, Masayuki’s, own impotence. Inevitably his thoughts began to run along those lines. Once he started applying an ordinary yardstick to his predicament, nothing made sense anymore, so it was no wonder his mind began a downward spiral.
The next morning Yoko did not get up, but this wasn’t unusual for her after a sleepless night. Masayuki made breakfast for their daughter, who went off to school suspecting nothing. He came to his senses in the middle of a faculty meeting at the university. Suddenly he felt queasy, his fingers and toes turned to ice, and he broke out in a cold sweat. “Are you okay, Shigemitsu?” his colleagues said, and he took the chance to excuse himself and go home. By then Yoko was gone. He felt sure she was on her way to Narita Airport. He couldn’t quite bring himself to contact me and ask me to call New York in his stead, so he sat at home thinking she might call from the airport, and waited by the telephone until nightfall. Fortunately that had been Miki’s last day of school before winter vacation, and after coming home she had gone off on a short skiing trip with her cousins and friends, still unaware that anything was amiss between her parents.
WE ARRIVED AT the Oiwake cottage just past noon. Being so small it took less than a minute to search. I went outside, rustling dry leaves as I walked, and checked the shed, which was of course empty. The bunk bed where Taro had slept long ago was surrounded by crisscrossing spiderwebs, making me feel all the more convinced that Yoko had gone to New York. Beside me, Masayuki seemed to feel the same way, staring tight-lipped at this empty place.
Just then we heard the faint sound of the telephone ringing in the cottage. It was uncanny; we had arrived only minutes before. It was as if someone were watching us from a distance. Masayuki was pulled back into the moment; he frowned and cocked his head uneasily toward the sound. I raced back to the cottage, kicking up fallen leaves as I ran, and picked up the receiver to hear a familiar voice.
“Fumiko, is that you?”
It was Taro. He must have expected we would go there and at some point had started calling every five minutes.
“Yes, it’s me.” Careful to keep my irritation under control in front of Masayuki, I said, “Did you hear from Yoko?”
Impatiently he asked, “She’s not there?”
“No, she’s not.”
On the heels of this, he said, “I think she might be in Karuizawa.”
I said nothing. We intended to have a look there too, but as both of the earlier adventures had taken place in Oiwake, the likelihood of finding her anywhere else seemed slim.
“What about it?” Taro asked. “Did you try there?”
“Not yet, but we will.”
“I have a hunch that’s where you’ll find her,” he said gravely. “It occurred to me when I hung up before.”
Why didn’t he tell me a little more of what was in his mind? Why didn’t he explain that by “Karuizawa” he meant the Saegusa house, not the other one? When I heard the word “Karuizawa,” I had the fleeting thought that, given the freezing temperature, there really was some possibility that she might have gone there. Several years back, the Saegusa sisters had complained about the trials of getting old, the cold settling in their bones even before the end of summer, and had had kerosene heaters installed in each of their bedrooms. The Shigemitsu household did the same. Yoko’s bedroom there was fully heated.
“Anyway,” I said, “we’ll go look. If we find her I’ll call you, but if we don’t, I won’t.” Aware of Masayuki’s eyes on me from behind, I hung up without waiting for an answer.
“Go where, Karuizawa?”
“Yes.”
He asked no more questions.
We stood there wordlessly in the deserted cottage for another moment, as if making sure that it was perfectly still. The chill that had settled in the small, old building as fall turned to winter seeped up through the floorboards, enveloping me. Amid the quiet and the cold, I got the distinct impression that Masayuki did not have much hope of finding her in Karuizawa. The flicker of hope that Taro’s intensity had aroused in me quickly faded.
Outside, the dark gray winter sky hung lower and lower.
The two Western-style buildings stood together in lonely disuse, the very picture of winter, or of dying itself. Masayuki got out of the car with an absent look and plodded mechanically toward the Shigemitsu house to one side. I started off in the same direction but then decided there was little point in both of us searching the same building. “I’ll look over here then,” I called out to his back, and turned toward the Saegusa house.
I wanted Taro to be happy. Yet the thought that now at last he would be happy may have unnerved me. And my fear of his happiness may have convinced me that what I dreaded could only be true—that Yoko had in fact flown off to New York.
There’s no point in trying to defend myself, but from the moment I set foot in the Saegusa house, my mind was made up that she was not there. It was nearly ten years since I had last seen her in the attic rooms. In the meantime, the attic had been turned into storage space, long unused as bedrooms. Besides, I was in my mid-fifties and my legs were not what they had been. After taking a quick look around the rambling house, beginning with the first floor, I finally started up the attic stairs but stopped halfway, checking only that all three doors along the corridor were shut before retracing my steps. If that was all, I wouldn’t have blamed myself so much afterward. The moment I turned to leave, however, I felt something strange—at least, it seemed to me that I did. Perhaps it’s a memory colored by what came later, yet the three closed doors seemed to be trying to tell me something. Or rather, in a way I still can’t explain, I felt as if I heard the voice of a little girl, talking excitedly to herself. My surroundings were hushed, but for
a moment I was hearing things. I remember that when I went down the stairs, I moved cautiously, not making a sound, trying to shake off the illusion. I remember that on the silent ride home with Masayuki, I fought off the urge to go back and check one more time.
THAT NIGHT, WHEN I got back to my apartment in Gotokuji, the red light on my answering machine was flashing. The first message was a request from Taro to call him as soon as I got home without worrying about the time difference. After that there were a dozen calls without any message.
I washed my face and hands thoroughly, changed my clothes, and took my time making a cup of hot green tea before I telephoned Taro.
“She’s not there yet?” I asked.
“No,” he answered shortly before asking, “Did you go on over to Karuizawa?”
“Of course we did.”
“I called and called.”
“Yes, I know.”
“No, I mean I called Karuizawa.”
“The Saegusa house?”
“Yes, over and over for about two hours.”
Probably at five-minute intervals, as before, I thought. “They usually unplug the telephone before leaving, in case of lightning.”
Taro paused before asking the question he already knew the answer to. “She wasn’t there?”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“You looked in every room?”
I hesitated slightly before saying quietly, “I did.”
He didn’t press me anymore.
That night there was a light snowfall, and by the time I was about to turn out the lights I could see snow piled on the balcony railing.
In the morning, the snow had stopped and there was only a gray, overcast sky. The snow on the railing had gone. But when I switched on the television, the news reported heavy snow in Nagano that had started at dawn and was disrupting train schedules. I was standing in the kitchen making coffee, thinking about the snow, when the phone rang.
It was Masayuki.
“No word from New York yet?”
“No, not yet.”
“I checked by telephone to see if her name was on the passenger list of any nonstop flight, but it’s not on any flight that’s landed so far.”
“I see.”
“I suppose she could have spent the night in Narita, or made a stopover somewhere …”
“True.”
Not knowing what else to say, I was silent, and so was he. After the uncomfortable silence stretched on, I finally broke it.
“I’ll call you as soon as I hear something.”
“Yes, please do.”
No sooner had I hung up and gone back to the kitchen than the phone rang again. I put down the kettle, rushed back to the living room, and picked up the receiver. This time it was Taro.
“I see they’ve had a snowstorm.”
He must have been watching the NHK broadcast in New York. He seemed to be implying that Yoko was in Karuizawa. My own irritation and anxiety made me not reply.
“No word yet?”
“As soon as I hear anything, I’ll call you.” I think I said this fairly snappishly. Two grown men calling me in turns—what in heaven’s name did they expect me to do?
Taro asked hesitantly, “Are you sure you checked every room in Karuizawa?”
He must have sensed something from my response the evening before.
Why did I have to run around searching for Yoko? Indignation welled up in me, and at the same time I was furious that my failure to check out the attic should come back to haunt me this way. I yelled into the telephone, “If you’re that worried, why don’t you just go look for her yourself!”
I heard a sharp intake of breath.
“All right.”
That was all. The line went dead.
I sank down on the sofa and covered my face with my hands. I don’t know how long I remained still. Even though the heat was on, I could feel the air in the room becoming steadily colder. When I raised my face, the dull Tokyo sky was dancing with snowflakes again.
FROM MIDDAY THAT day until the next morning, the Asama super-express train stopped running. It was around noon when I left Ueno station in bright winter sunshine. As the train emerged from each successive tunnel, the scenery turned whiter. In Karuizawa station a taxi driver opened his window to ask where I wanted to go, and only when I told him the house number and he was sure the place was accessible did he open the door. The car crawled through the snowy landscape, a landscape transformed since two days before. The sky that had then hung low and gray was now sparkling and clear. At intervals the breeze shook snow loose from branches, flinging it into the air, where it shone like crystal in the bright sunlight.
The roofs of the two villas were covered with snow.
As the taxi drew closer, I saw that the back door to the Saegusa house was standing wide open. The door was old, and no longer opened and shut smoothly; unless you locked it, the door’s weight always swung it open. I looked from the taxi window at that gaping door without any surprise. It was pure coincidence that I arrived just after Taro, who drove directly from Narita by rental car, yet somehow I had known all along that it would turn out this way. The unchained gate, the curving tire tracks in the snow, the silver car reflecting the winter sunlight, the wide-open back door—nothing I saw surprised me.
SNOWY ROAD IN OLD KARUIZAWA
Midway up the first flight of stairs I could already hear a shrill voice. As I climbed higher, the sound grew louder and louder. By the time I reached the open door to the room at the eastern end of the attic, it was almost ear-splitting. When I stepped inside, things were scattered about on the floor: an old electric heater, a blanket, plastic bottles, a boxed lunch, instant noodles. At the same time, a murky, freakish atmosphere hit me with full force. It felt as if I were being dragged feet first into a hole that gave a glimpse of the darkness below.
Yoko lay on her back, her hair bedraggled, shrieking something. It wasn’t this that shocked me. On top of her lay Taro, still in his heavy overcoat; neither was this such a surprise. What did startle me—what shocked me to the core—was that overlapping with Yoko’s screams I heard Taro crying in despair. It was so long since I had heard him cry like that … As I listened, it came back to me: the last time was after the “elopement,” when he came to stay with me at Evergreen Apartments No. 2. He had cried that same way, utterly inconsolable, like a little child. The memory came back vividly, unconnected to the scene in front of me. Sadness filled the very air, a vast, all-encompassing sadness that enveloped me and made me feel that now, perhaps for the very first time, I truly understood these two.
Was the impossibly heavy burden of sadness they each bore something innate and inescapable? Or was it something they had acquired long ago by picking up on old Mrs. Utagawa’s forebodings about their future, back when they were children too small to comprehend what the future might hold? A sadness that, once absorbed, had only grown over time, harbored deep in their hearts? Now I understood. On its own, the love they shared was hopeless and could only be illicit, and somewhere inside Taro knew it too … How long did he stay there like that? It might have been five minutes, or ten. However short or long it was, he couldn’t drag Yoko up from her sorrow but was being dragged down with her, unable to do anything but dissolve in tears. Normally almost too capable, now he was foundering, pulled down by her despair at being deserted by Masayuki … I watched in utter helplessness as he went on sobbing.
Yoko had gone quiet and was staring at me with wide, bloodshot eyes. From beneath Taro’s weight, she raised her head and said, “Fumiko …” She hadn’t the presence of mind to see anything strange in my sudden appearance. “Masayuki said he wanted it to be over. Fine, he said, let it be over.”
Then, overcome, she began wailing again. The sound grated on my nerves, as if her lungs had gone into spasm. With her eyes, nose, and lips swollen from so much weeping, her face looked awful: blotchy red, except for an area around her eyes, which was muddy and dark, an indication of high fever. I noticed the
peculiar smell of a room whose occupant is feverish. Taro, whether or not he was aware of my presence, continued crying shamelessly.
“It’s not true, though,” I said.
Yoko, apparently unable to take in the meaning of this, raised her head again. Her bloodshot eyes stared up at me, wide open but unfocused. I continued, “The day before yesterday, Masayuki and I came here together to look for you. He looked next door and I looked in this house, but unfortunately I was too lazy to come all the way up here. That’s what happened.”
“Masayuki came?”
“Yes.”
“To look for me?”
I nodded. Yoko seemed only slowly to take in what I’d said. Her raspy, convulsive sobs came at greater intervals, and eventually quieted down. The lessening of sound in the room only made Taro’s crying stand out more. I kept my eyes on the long figure in the heavy overcoat lying facedown on top of her and simply added, “Taro knows it.”
Yoko stared at his dark, shiny head, so close to her own. He was still weeping, though feebly now. After looking at him awhile longer, she raised her free hand and began gently stroking the black hair in front of her. “We need to call Masayuki right away,” she whispered in his ear. It was the same tender voice she’d used with him before, her private voice. She went on stroking his hair, then repeated, “We need to call Masayuki right away,” and tried to shift him off her, but he was too heavy, and she was too weak. Giving up, she let her head drop back on the bed and said again, looking vacantly up at the ceiling, “We need to call him.” At this point Taro finally pulled himself together, as though regaining, for both of them, the will to live. Propping himself up, he swept back her matted hair and wiped the sweat off her forehead with a finger. “Let’s get you to a hospital,” he said huskily. A moment later he was on his feet beside the bed.
Downstairs the telephone began to ring. “That must be him,” said Yoko, turning her head toward the sound. But I thought it was unplugged. Confused, I ran down to the second floor and picked up the receiver. Just as Yoko had said, it was Masayuki. I learned afterward that toward dawn, her mind in a haze, she had gone downstairs and plugged in the telephone to call Taro, without knowing what exactly she wanted to say. He was by then flying over the Pacific. The phone had been working ever since. That Masayuki, driven to distraction with worry, should have called the Saegusa villa just then was another coincidence that in retrospect seemed almost eerie.
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