‘You remember the girl on your left this afternoon?’
‘Yes, Yukiko. The Inamura girl.’
‘Kurimoto invited me today so that I could inspect her.’
‘No!’ She gazed at him with wide, unblinking eyes. ‘It was a miai, was it? I never suspected.’
‘Not a miai, really.’
‘So that was it. On the way home from a miai.’ A tear drew a line from her eye down to the pillow. Her shoulders were quivering. ‘It was wrong. Wrong. Why didn’t you tell me?’
She pressed her face to the pillow.
Kikuji had not expected so violent a response.
‘If it’s wrong it’s wrong, whether I’m on the way home from a miai or not.’ He was being quite honest. ‘I don’t see the relationship between the two.’
But the figure of the Inamura girl at the tea hearth came before him. He could see the pink kerchief and the thousand cranes.
The figure of the weeping woman had become ugly.
‘Oh, it was wrong. How could I have done it? The things I’m guilty of.’ Her full shoulders were shaking.
If Kikuji had regretted the encounter, he would have had the usual sense of defilement. Quite aside from the question of the miai, she was his father’s woman.
But he had until then felt neither regret nor revulsion.
He did not understand how it had happened, it had happened so naturally. Perhaps she was apologizing for having seduced him, and yet she had probably not meant to seduce him, nor did Kikuji feel that he had been seduced. There had been no suggestion of resistance, on his part or the woman’s. There had been no qualms, he might have said.
They had gone to an inn on the hill opposite the Engakuji, and they had had dinner, because she was still talking of Kikuji’s father. Kikuji did not have to listen. Indeed it was in a sense strange that he listened so quietly; but Mrs Ota, evidently with no thought for the strangeness, seemed to plead her yearning for the past. Listening, Kikuji felt expansively benevolent. A soft affection enveloped him.
It came to him that his father had been happy.
Here, perhaps, was the source of the mistake. The moment for sending her away had passed, and, in the sweet slackening of his heart, Kikuji gave himself up.
But deep in his heart there remained a dark shadow. Venomously, he spoke of Chikako and the Inamura girl.
The venom was only too effective. With regret came defilement and revulsion, and a violent wave of self-loathing swept over him, pressing him to say something even crueller.
‘Let’s forget about it. It was nothing,’ she said. ‘It was nothing at all.’
‘You were remembering my father?’
‘What!’ She looked up in surprise. She had been weeping, and her eyelids were red. The eyes were muddied, and in the wide pupils Kikuji still saw the lassitude of woman. ‘If you say so, I have no answer. But I’m a very unhappy person.’
‘You needn’t lie to me.’ Kikuji roughly pulled her kimono open. ‘If there were even a birthmark, you’d never forget. The impression …’ He was taken aback at his own words.
‘You aren’t to stare at me. I’m not young any more.’
Kikuji came at her as if to bite.
The earlier wave returned, the wave of woman.
He fell asleep in security.
Half awake and half asleep, he heard birds chirping. It was as if he were awakening for the first time to the call of birds.
A morning mist wet the trees at the veranda. Kikuji felt that the recesses of his mind had been washed clean. He thought of nothing.
Mrs Ota was sleeping with her back to him. He wondered when she had turned away. Raising himself to an elbow, he looked into her face in the semi-darkness.
5
Some two weeks later, the Ota girl called on Kikuji.
He had the maid show her into the parlor. In an effort to quiet the beating of his heart, he opened the tea cupboard and took out sweets. Had the girl come alone, or was her mother waiting outside, unable to come in?
The girl stood up as he opened the door. Her head was bowed, and Kikuji saw that the out-thrust lower lip was firmly closed.
‘I’ve kept you waiting.’ Kikuji opened the glass doors to the garden. As he passed behind the girl, he caught a faint scent from the white peony in the vase. Her full shoulders were thrown slightly forward.
‘Please sit down.’ Kikuji took a seat himself. He was strangely composed, seeing the image of the mother in the daughter.
‘I really should have telephoned first.’ Her head was still bowed.
‘Not at all. But I’m surprised that you were able to find the place.’
She nodded.
Then Kikuji remembered: during the air raids, she had seen his father as far as the gate. He had heard the story from Mrs Ota at the Engakuji.
On the point of mentioning it, he stopped himself. He looked at the girl.
Mrs Ota’s warmth came over him like warm water. She had gently surrendered everything, he remembered, and he had felt secure.
Because of that security, he now felt his wariness fade. The girl did not return his gaze.
‘I …’ She broke off and looked up. ‘I have a request to make. About my mother.’
Kikuji caught his breath.
‘I want you to forgive her.’
‘To forgive her?’ Kikuji sensed that the mother had told the daughter of him. ‘I’m the one to be forgiven if anyone is.’
‘I’d like you to forgive her for your father too.’
‘And isn’t he the one to be forgiven? But my mother is no longer alive in any case, and who would do the forgiving?’
‘It is Mother’s fault that your father died so soon. And your mother. I told Mother so.’
‘You are imagining things. You musn’t be unkind to her.’
‘Mother should have died first.’ She spoke as if she found the shame intolerable.
Kikuji saw that she was speaking of his own relations with her mother. How deeply they must have wounded and shamed her!
‘I want you to forgive her,’ the girl said once more, an urgent plea in her voice.
‘It’s not a question of forgiving or not forgiving.’ Kikuji spoke with precision. ‘I am grateful to your mother.’
‘She is bad. She is no good, and you must have nothing more to do with her. You are not to worry yourself about her.’ The words poured out, and her voice was trembling. ‘Please.’
Kikuji understood what she meant by forgive. She included a request that he see no more of Mrs Ota.
‘Don’t telephone her.’ The girl flushed as she spoke. She raised her head and looked at him, as if in an effort to master the shyness. There were tears in the wide, near-black eyes, and there was no trace of malice. The eyes were submitting a desperate petition.
‘I understand,’ said Kikuji. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Please, I beg you.’ As the shyness deepened, the flush spread to her long, white throat. She was in European dress, and a necklace set off the beauty of the throat. ‘She made an appointment over the telephone and then didn’t keep it. I stopped her. When she tried to go out, I hung on her and wouldn’t let her.’ The voice now carried a note of relief.
Kikuji had telephoned Mrs Ota the third day after their meeting. She had seemed overjoyed, and yet she had not come to the appointed tea room.
Besides the one telephone call, Kikuji had had no communication with her.
‘Afterwards I felt sorry for her, but at the time it was so wretched – I was so desperate to keep her from going. She told me to refuse for her, then, and I got as far as the telephone and couldn’t say anything. Mother was staring at the telephone, and tears were streaming over her face. She felt you there in the telephone, I know she did. That is the sort of person she is.’
The two were silent for a time. Then Kikuji spoke. ‘Why did you leave your mother to wait for me after Kurimoto’s party?’
‘Because I wanted you to know that she was not as bad as you might have t
hought.’
‘She is too much the reverse of bad.’
The girl looked down. Below the well-shaped nose he could see the small mouth and the lower lip, thrust out as if in a pout. The softly rounded face reminded him of her mother.
‘I knew that Mrs Ota had a daughter, and I used to wish I could talk to the girl about my father.’
She nodded. ‘I used to wish very much the same thing.’
Kikuji thought how good it would be to talk freely of his father and take no account of Mrs Ota.
But it was because he could no longer ‘take no account’ that he was able to forgive her, and at the same time to feel that he was forgiving what she and his father had been. Must he find that fact strange?
Perhaps suspecting that she had stayed too long, the girl hastily stood up.
Kikuji saw her to the gate.
‘I hope we will have a chance sometime to talk about my father. And about your mother, and all the beauty there is in her.’ Kikuji feared that he had chosen a somewhat exaggerated way to express himself. Still, he meant what he had said.
‘But you will be getting married soon.’
‘I will?’
‘Yes. Mother said so. It was a miai with Inamura Yukiko, she said.’
‘It was not.’
A hill fell away from outside the gate. Halfway down the slope the street curved, and, looking back, one saw only the trees in Kikuji’s garden.
The image of the girl with the thousand-crane kerchief came to him. Fumiko stopped and said good-by.
Kikuji started back toward the house.
The Grove in the Evening Sun
Chikako telephoned Kikuji’s office.
‘Are you going straight home?’
He would be going home, but he frowned. ‘Well …’
‘You go straight home. For your father’s sake. This is the day he had his tea ceremony every year. I could hardly sit still, thinking about it.’
Kikuji said nothing.
‘The tea cottage … Hello? … I was cleaning the tea cottage, and all of a sudden I wanted to do some cooking.’
‘Where are you calling from?’
‘Your house. I’m at your house. I’m sorry – I should have said so.’
Kikuji was startled.
‘I just couldn’t sit still. I thought I’d feel better if you would let me clean the cottage. I should have telephoned first, I know, but you would have been sure to refuse me.’
Kikuji had not used the tea cottage since his father’s death.
In the months before she died, his mother had gone out to sit in the cottage from time to time. She did not put embers in the hearth, however, but carried hot water with her. Kikuji would wait uneasily for her to come back. It troubled him to imagine what she might be thinking, alone in the stillness.
He had sometimes wanted to look in on her, but to the end he had kept his distance.
Chikako rather than his mother had taken care of the cottage while his father was alive. His mother had but rarely gone into it.
It had been closed since his mother’s death. A maid who had been with the family from his father’s time would air it several times a year.
‘How long has it been since you last cleaned the place? I cannot get rid of the mildew, no matter how hard I rub.’ Her voice was brassy. ‘And while I was about the housecleaning, I wanted to do some cooking. The idea just came to me. I don’t have everything I need, but I hope you’ll come right home.’
‘You don’t think you’re being a little forward?’
‘You’ll be lonely by yourself. Suppose you bring a few friends from the office.’
‘Very unlikely. Not one of them is interested in tea.’
‘All the better. They won’t expect too much, and the preparations have been very inadequate. We can all relax.’
‘Not the slightest chance.’ Kikuji flung the words into the telephone.
‘A pity. What shall we do? Do you suppose – someone who shared the hobby with your father? But we couldn’t, at this hour. Shall I call the Inamura girl?’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Why shouldn’t I call her? The Inamuras are very interested in you, and this will be your chance to see the girl again, and have a good look at her and talk to her. I’ll just call her up. If she comes it will be a sign that as far as she’s concerned everything is settled.’
‘I don’t like anything about the idea.’ Kikuji’s chest tightened painfully. ‘And I won’t be coming home anyway.’
‘This isn’t the sort of question you settle over the telephone. We’ll talk about it later. Well, that’s how things are. Come right home, now.’
‘How things are – what are you talking about?’
‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m just being bold.’ The venomous persistence came at him over the wire.
He thought of the birthmark that covered half her breast. The sound of her broom became the sound of a broom sweeping the contents from his skull, and her cloth polishing the veranda a cloth rubbing at his skull.
Revulsion came first. But it was a remarkable story, this marching into a house with the master out, and taking over the kitchen.
She would have been easier to forgive if she had limited herself to cleaning the cottage and arranging flowers in memory of his father.
Into his revulsion flashed the image of the Inamura girl, a vein of light.
Chikako had drifted away after his father’s death. Did she mean to use the Inamura girl as bait to draw him near again? Was he again to become entangled with her?
As always, she had made herself interesting, however – one smiled ruefully at her, and one’s defenses fell. Yet her obstinacy seemed to carry a threat.
Kikuji feared that the threat came from his own weakness. Weak and quivering, he could not really be angry at the importunate woman.
Had she sensed the weakness, and was she hastening to take advantage of it?
Kikuji went to the Ginza, and into a dirty little bar.
Chikako was right: he should go home. But the weakness was an oppressive burden to have to take with him.
Chikako could hardly know that Kikuji had spent the night in that Kamakura inn. Or had she seen Mrs Ota afterward?
It seemed to him that there was more than Chikako’s usual brazenness in this persistence.
Yet perhaps, in the way most natural for her, she was pushing the Inamura girl’s suit.
He fidgeted for a time in the bar, then started home.
As the train approached Tokyo Central Station, he looked down upon a tree-lined avenue.
It ran east and west, almost at right angles to the railroad. The western sun poured into it, and the street glittered like a sheet of metal. The trees, with the sun behind them, were darkened almost to black. The shadows were cool, the branches wide, the leaves thick. Solid Occidental buildings lined the street.
There were strangely few people. The street was quiet and empty all the way to the Palace moat. The dazzlingly bright streetcars too were quiet.
Looking down from the crowded train, he felt that the avenue alone floated in this strange time of evening, that it had been dropped here from some foreign country.
He had the illusion that the Inamura girl was walking in the shade of the trees, the pink kerchief and its thousand white cranes under her arm. He could see the cranes and the kerchief vividly.
He sensed something fresh and clean.
His chest rose – the girl might even now be arriving at his door.
But what had Chikako had in mind, telling him to bring friends, and, when he refused, suggesting that she call the Inamura girl? Had she meant from the start to call the girl? Kikuji did not know.
Chikako came hurrying to the door. ‘You’re alone?’
Kikuji nodded.
‘It’s better that way. She’s here.’ Chikako took his hat and briefcase. ‘You made a stop on your way home, I see.’ Kikuji wondered if his breath smelled of liquor. ‘Where was it? I called the office aga
in and was told you had left, and I knew how much time it would take you to get home.’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised at anything you do, I suppose.’
She made no apology for having come uninvited and taken over the house.
She evidently meant to go with him to his room and help him change to the kimono the maid had laid out.
‘Don’t bother. I can manage by myself.’ In shirt sleeves, Kikuji withdrew to his room.
But Chikako was still waiting when he came out.
‘Aren’t bachelors remarkable.’
‘Very.’
‘But it’s not a good way to live. Let’s make a change.’
‘I learned my lesson from watching my father.’
She glanced up at him.
She had borrowed an apron from the maid, and her sleeves were pushed up. The apron had belonged to Kikuji’s mother.
The flesh of her arms was disproportionately white and full, and the muscle at the inside of the elbow was like cord. Very strange, thought Kikuji. The flesh seemed hard and heavy.
‘I suppose the cottage would be best.’ Her manner became more businesslike. ‘I have her in the main house now.’
‘Is there a light out there? I don’t remember having seen one.’
‘We might eat by candlelight. That would be even more interesting.’
‘Not for me.’
Chikako seemed to remember something. ‘When I spoke to Miss Inamura over the telephone, she asked if I meant that her mother was to come too. I said it would be still better if we could have the two of them. But there were reasons why the mother couldn’t come, and we made it just the girl.’
‘“We made it,” you say, but you did it all by yourself. Don’t you suppose she thought it just a little rude, being summoned out with no warning?’
‘No doubt. But here she is. She’s here, and doesn’t that cancel out my rudeness?’
‘Why should it?’
‘Oh, it does. She’s here, and that means that as far as she’s concerned matters are going beautifully. I can be forgiven if I seem a little odd along the way. When everything is settled, the two of you can have a good laugh over what an odd person Kurimoto is. Talks that are going to be settled are going to be settled, whatever you do in the process. That’s been my experience.’
Thousand Cranes Page 3