I myself was hardly able to think straight, and when he heard my voice come on the line I think Masayuki was thrown. After two or three halting exchanges, Yoko came down the stairs, supported by Taro. “Masayuki!” she shouted, grabbing the receiver and starting up the same strangled weeping as before. “You said let it be over. If it’s over, fine, you said.” Crying in bursts, she sank to the floor, where soon all we heard was that wordless, gasping, keening sound. There was nothing for it but to pick up the receiver and tell Masayuki in a few words how events had unfolded. My failure to search the attic was so hard to defend; I made excuses, but in the end all I could do was apologize. I could sense Taro behind me listening as I babbled into the receiver, explaining how after going back to Tokyo I had become increasingly concerned, and how I decided this morning as soon as the trains were running again to come back to Karuizawa to double-check—only to find that Taro had arrived just before me. The two of us were in the process of taking Yoko to Karuizawa Hospital. As I spoke, I saw that Yoko no longer had the strength to sit up. Still wrapped in Taro’s coat, she lay on the floor like a rag doll. “Tell him to hurry,” she said, her eyes rolling back till the whites showed.
“Yoko says you should hurry,” I repeated into the phone.
The voice in my ear trembled with disbelief and joy. “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“I’m on my way,” he said, unable to hide his emotion. “Tell her I’m on my way.”
AT KARUIZAWA HOSPITAL, where Yoko was taken to the emergency room, she was diagnosed with nothing more than a bad cold. However high the fever, a cold was still a cold. And it was December 28, the end of the year, just the time when they were most understaffed. The hospital was unwilling to admit her, but we prevailed on the doctor and head nurse to let her stay until she had gained enough strength for the trip back to Tokyo. Taro’s money might have had some effect, but it also helped that there were few other inpatients. When the arrangements were made, I took Taro’s rented car back to the Shigemitsu villa, driving nervously along snowy roads, and picked up the things she would need: nightgown, slippers, teacup, chopsticks, toothbrush, mug, towel, and so on. By the time Masayuki arrived from Tokyo, the evening was well advanced. Taro was holed up in the dark waiting room on the first floor, and I was alone in the sickroom with her. Masayuki knocked on the door but made no move to enter, probably thinking that Taro might be inside. When I went to the door and opened it, he stood there looking haggard. Remorse flooded through me. The words of apology I’d said in a daze over the telephone I now repeated in all earnest. Whether he heard me or not, I don’t know. He took in the fact that I was the sole visitor in the room, but he was focused only on the bed. Yoko was asleep, having been given a sedative. He stole over to her side, careful not to wake her.
“She has a cold,” I said in a low voice to Masayuki’s back. “Her fever is high, but it’s just a cold.” Then I closed the door and went outside.
The Prince Hotel was full, even its suite, for the New Year holidays. Since it was too much trouble to look around for other hotels, Taro and I slept at the Oiwake cottage from that night on, lighting kerosene stoves for warmth. Luckily, we had wrapped the pipes in Nichrome several years ago, so there was running water in the house even in midwinter. I called my son in Miyota as soon as we arrived. This was the time of year when I was usually preparing to head there for the holidays, but I knew I was needed in the hospital, not only to take care of Yoko but to coordinate Taro’s and Masayuki’s visits. I told him that my plans had changed and I would be home later, after the first week of the new year. I didn’t mention that I was in Oiwake, a stone’s throw away.
I had not stayed in the cottage with Taro since the summer before old Mrs. Utagawa died. It felt strange. I decided to sleep in the maid’s room behind Takero’s study, the way I used to, and was lugging futon and quilts from the closet in the front room when Taro came out of the study looking annoyed. He practically ordered me to sleep in the front room, before quickly disappearing into the study again.
I had arranged my futon and was lying down with the musty, cold quilt drawn up to my nose, staring up at the yellow light dangling from the ceiling, when a wave of emotion spurred me into action. I threw my coat around my shoulders and marched to Taro’s study, knocked on the door, and barged in.
He was sitting in the dark, looking out the window.
“It’s all your fault!” I cried out.
I had meant to apologize when I knocked on the door, but completely different words came out. He looked at me, startled.
“It’s all your fault for being so reckless and obsessed!”
He seemed annoyed, but said nothing.
“Masayuki is only human. He reached the point where he couldn’t take it anymore, that’s all.”
“I’ve always, always, been patient. I hardly ever get to see her.” His voice was low, as if he were holding himself in check.
“Well, you should be patient!” To cap this, I shouted, “After all, you’re not the one she married!” And added, “Anyway, stop blaming me.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but I went out, slamming the door behind me, so what he might have said I’ll never know. I’d wanted to apologize for not having searched the attic properly, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Even afterward—even after Yoko died—I’ve never been able to do so … to this very day. I was afraid I might fail to apologize as sincerely as I desperately wanted to.
Taro has never brought the matter up.
I gather that when Yoko arrived in Karuizawa, she went straight to the Saegusa villa and up to its eastern attic room, where, after crying her eyes out and staring at the ceiling all night, she was so exhausted that, as the sun came up, she took a sleeping pill and consequently never noticed that Masayuki and I had come. She did the same thing the next night, and got snowed in, and caught a cold. All this time, she kept the electric heater on, which made the air in the room so dry that she might have been better off without it.
But why that attic room? Was it because it was where long ago Masayuki had come to say he was sorry for making her fall down and hurt herself? Did she feel that if she stayed in that room he might appear unexpectedly, the way he did then, like a little messenger sent down from the night sky? Or was it because she somehow wanted to go back to those early years when she was so often neglected and had to nurse her own loneliness—to those years when not even Taro had entered her life? In any case, as her fever soared, she slipped into a delirium. What she had wanted to tell Taro on the third night by calling New York, I don’t know. She may not have known herself—probably it came to her through the haze of fever that she didn’t want to end up dying if she could help it.
AND SO SHE went into the hospital with what at first was just a bad cold. It was as if the three of them had been granted a final, blissful reprieve. On the first night, Masayuki telephoned Natsue and arranged that no one from Seijo should visit. The story he gave her was that Yoko had gone to an antique store in Komoro on business, decided on the spur of the moment to spend the night in Karuizawa, and then got snowed in, catching a cold and running a fever. Since I fortunately happened to be visiting my family in Miyota, I was on hand to help out, and so nobody from Seijo needed to come. She would be back in Tokyo in a few days, but until then he would be grateful if Natsue could look after Miki, who was due back from her skiing trip the next day. The people in Seijo may have had some dim suspicion that something had happened between the couple, but no one dared ask. Natsue pretended to take everything he said at face value. “If Fumiko is there, that’s a big relief,” she said, and as far as Miki was concerned, “Of course I’ll look after her. You two take some time together for once and don’t worry about a thing.” She sounded good-natured. Had she known that Taro was there too, making a happy trio, she might not have been so accommodating.
Yoko had a private room on the northwest corner, with a view of Mount Asama. Masayuki and Taro came and went by turns. I wo
rked out in advance the times they could come to see her, to prevent them running into each other. When it was Taro’s turn, he and I would show up together. No one would ever have taken us for a married couple, but at least he was accompanied by a woman, which helped camouflage the strangeness of having two men pay constant sick calls alternately on the same woman. The time of year meant that the university was on vacation and the office was closed, so Masayuki had nothing better to do than come to see her. Some of the nurses looked star-struck at the alternating appearances of these two dashing men. I personally found it a bit ludicrous that two busy grown-ups should spend all their time taking turns coming to see her in the hospital, getting nothing else done—even granting it was New Year’s vacation. I never thought that this would be the end.
THE AGITATION OF the three days and nights Yoko had spent scarcely eating or drinking, only crying wildly, took a long while to fade from her system. For the first couple of days she had a blank look, but from the third day on she started to come around. Her temperature went down almost to normal, and despite a nasty cough she gradually began regaining her physical and mental equilibrium. She took to calling Miki every night, being a responsible mother and asking, “Are you eating properly? Are you lonely?” But once the receiver was put down she herself looked childlike, so young and innocent that she might have been a double of herself sleeping at Okura Hospital after the “elopement” more than twenty-five years earlier. When a woman is seriously ill, she often retreats into a much younger self, a simpler and purer self. Yoko was the same. When she was asleep, there was even something almost unearthly about the way she looked.
With her temperature still hovering above normal, it was important that she not get excited, so both men tried to avoid getting her talking. Taro took his cue from Masayuki and sometimes sat at her bedside reading novels aloud. One day, she interrupted.
“You know, Masayuki is a better reader than you,” she said. “There’s something funny about your Japanese. You make too many mistakes.”
Lying with her frizzy hair spread out on the pillow, her eyes on the wall opposite, she said this quite matter-of-factly. Taro laid the book he’d been reading in his lap and, despite this harsh verdict on his reading ability, just grinned.
“What’s so funny?” she wanted to know, a little smile playing on her own lips.
“Nothing.”
“But you’re laughing.”
Taro was reluctant to explain, but she kept pressing him, so he gave in. He’d known for a long time that Masayuki read to her at night to help her get to sleep, and he had always wanted to do the same thing. Now, here of all places, he’d been given his chance.
Yoko giggled, then burst out laughing too.
They both seemed to have put away the memory of lying entwined in the attic, crying together. To look at them you would never have guessed a scene like that had taken place.
YOKO’S COLDS ALWAYS took a long while to go away, so nobody was worried that as time went by she failed to get better. Her persistent cough didn’t alarm any of us either. It was only after a week, when her fever shot up again and we were told that she’d developed pneumonia, that we grew concerned. But even then no one expected her to die. She was still so young. When the antibiotic had no effect and her temperature hovered up around the danger level for two days running, on the evening of the third day the doctor suggested that it would be a good idea to summon her close family. Given her youth there was probably nothing to worry about, but you never could tell with a second bout of pneumonia. It was better to be prepared, just in case. That was when the gravity of the situation hit us for the first time. From then on she deteriorated at a horrifying rate; she had little reserve strength, and her immunity was down. Before they could find an antibiotic that would work, she slipped past the point of no return.
From the time her pneumonia set in, Masayuki and Taro scarcely left the hospital. She was moved to a room near the nurses’ station and Masayuki, the husband, stayed mainly in her room, while poor Taro sat on a bench in a far corner of the waiting room with his legs outstretched. I saw to all Yoko’s needs, wiping beads of sweat off her forehead, giving her sips of juice, letting the nurse know when her IV had run dry. With her high fever she mostly slept, but occasionally she would open her hollow eyes wide and look at the chair next to the bed as if to make sure someone was there. And she would reach out a hand to comfort the person sitting by her, whether it was Masayuki or Taro.
“I’m going to get well, I know it,” she would reassure them huskily.
But the night the doctor advised Masayuki to summon the rest of the family “just in case,” Yoko cried out, despite her fever, in a voice that seemed wrung from deep inside her, “It’s so sad!”
Knowing that her family had been sent for, she seemed to realize there was perhaps no hope. Her breath came in shallow gasps as she focused her eyes on the ceiling in fear. I thought she went to sleep, but apparently I was wrong; she was just waiting for the nurse to leave the room before she said anything. Masayuki got up and bent over the bed so that his face was in her line of vision.
“So sad,” she repeated, and held out her near hand to him, the one without an IV needle in it. “You poor thing, poor, poor thing.” She squeezed his hand as hard as she could and then closed her eyes. Soon her cheeks were wet, but she hadn’t the strength to cry much. She looked up at him and said, “Miki still has her life ahead of her, but for you, my sweet silly man, it’s over … over … when I die. You wouldn’t marry again if I begged you to … Damn heaven and earth! I’ve been so stupid. Insane. And there’s no going back, is there? It’s all so sad …”
Masayuki bent down and pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. He stayed like that, as still as stone.
To give them some privacy, I stepped out and took the elevator down to the waiting room. Since it was after hours for the outpatients, the fluorescent lights were mostly turned off. Taro was sitting in the darkest part of the waiting room, hidden away on a bench far from both the elevator and the entrance. Two other pairs of people who seemed to be locals—an old woman with someone I guessed was her middle-aged daughter, and a young couple—had chosen the brightest places in the room to sit. Taro’s appearance marked him as an outsider, and sitting alone in the darkness he looked sinister, like an escaped prisoner. I went over and stood in front of him, saying simply, “She’s no better,” then turned and went to sit on a bench near the elevator. I decided to distance myself from him, in case Masayuki came down in search of me.
About half an hour went by before Masayuki came down in the elevator, wearing his coat. When he saw my face under the fluorescent light, he told me that Yoko was asking for me and Taro. After delivering the message he went outside.
The room was ominously silent when I opened the door. Yoko lay facing the ceiling, motionless. After a moment I realized she was taking rapid, shallow breaths. Even though barely half an hour had passed since I’d left her, signs of her approaching death were cruelly apparent.
“Fumiko.” She turned her head toward me, then paused for a moment to steady her breathing. “Taro and I were going to look after you in your old age … so I never did anything to thank you.”
She was preparing to die, but I wouldn’t have it and cut her off a bit tartly. “I’ll look after myself in my old age, thank you. And if it comes to that,” I added, “I’ve got Ami.”
“Yes … dear Ami.”
Yoko didn’t seem to mind the way I’d spoken. Seeing her look up at the ceiling again with those sunken eyes and nod quietly in agreement, I felt contrite. More gently I said, “And you’re young, so you’ll get well.”
“Perhaps,” she answered. “Anyway, thank you. We owe everything to you,” she said seriously. She turned her eyes back toward me, her gaze as pure as a ray of light.
For a while no one spoke.
“Taro …”
He was already there at her bedside, and when she called his name he leaned over the bed.
“Taro, you mustn’t kill yourself.” She reached up to touch his face, reaching out weakly with the arm that was free of IV equipment, so he bent down lower. She stroked his cheek with her fingertips and repeated, “You mustn’t. If you do, I’ll never forgive you as long as I—for all eternity, do you hear me?” Her voice was infinitely gentle.
“But why …?” he murmured.
For the first time I realized what he had been thinking about in the waiting room below. Sick as she was, Yoko had known.
“Why?” he said again.
“Because if we both die first, how would poor Masayuki feel?… It would be as if we’d left him behind, alone.”
Yoko shifted her gaze to me, where I stood behind Taro, and let her arm drop listlessly before addressing me in something like her usual tone, half demand and half plea.
“Fumiko, this is my last request. Watch over him and keep him from ever doing that.” Then she looked back at Taro, deep purple shadows around her fever-moist eyes. “Swear it now, in front of Fumiko.” Her lips were dry.
“Why should I?”
“Come on, now. Be a good boy.”
She said this with great tenderness, as though comforting a child, and tried again to reach out to him. He pressed her hand gently and laid it on the bed.
“What if Masayuki dies?” he asked.
“He can’t. He’s got Miki to take care of.”
Taro looked straight down at her hollow eyes and inhaled deeply, breathing them in. He let his breath out slowly. “But if he does?”
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