The red Raku bowl was almost against her hair, so long that it fell to the floor matting.
She left the room with both hands pressed to her face.
Moments passed, and she did not come back. ‘I believe I’ll be leaving, then,’ said Kikuji.
She came to the door with a bundle.
‘I’m afraid it will be heavy, but try not to mind too much.’
‘Oh?’
‘The Shino.’
He was astonished at her quickness: she had emptied the jar, dried it, found a box for it, and wrapped it in a kerchief.
‘I’m to take it already? But it had flowers in it.’
‘Please do take it.’
‘If I may, then,’ said Kikuji. The quickness, he sensed, had come from an excess of grief.
‘But I won’t come to see how you use it.’
‘Why not?’
Fumiko did not answer.
‘Well, take care of yourself.’ He started out.
‘Thank you. It was good of you to come. And – don’t worry about Mother. Hurry and get married.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
He turned back toward her, but she did not look up.
3
Kikuji tried putting white roses and pale carnations in the Shino jar.
He was haunted by the thought that he was falling in love with Mrs Ota, now that she was dead.
And he felt that the love was made known through the daughter, Fumiko.
On Sunday, he telephoned her.
‘You’re at home by yourself?’
‘Yes. It’s a little lonely, of course.’
‘You shouldn’t be alone.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I can almost hear the quiet.’
Fumiko laughed softly.
‘Suppose we have a friend look in on you.’
‘But I keep thinking that whoever comes will find out about Mother.’
Kikuji could think of no answer. ‘It must be inconvenient. You have no one to watch the house when you want to go out.’
‘Oh, I can always lock it.’
‘Suppose you come and see me, then.’
‘Thank you. One of these days.’
‘Have you been well?’
‘I’ve lost weight.’
‘And are you able to sleep?’
‘Hardly at all.’
‘That will never do.’
‘I’m thinking of closing the house soon and taking a room in a friend’s house.’
‘Soon – when will that be?’
‘As soon as I can sell the house.’
‘The house?’
‘Yes.’
‘You mean to sell it?’
‘Don’t you think I should?’
‘I wonder. As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of selling my own.’
Fumiko did not answer.
‘Hello? There’s no use talking about these things over the telephone. It’s Sunday and I’m at home. Can you come over?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have flowers in the Shino, but if you come I can try putting it to the use it was meant for.’
‘A tea ceremony?’
‘Not a real ceremony. But it’s a great waste not to use Shino for tea. You can’t bring out the real beauty of a tea piece unless you set it off against its own kind.’
‘But I look even worse than when you were here. I can’t see you.’
‘There will be no other guests.’
‘Even so.’
‘You won’t reconsider?’
‘Good-by.’
‘Take care of yourself. Excuse me – there seems to be someone at the door. I’ll call again.’
It was Kurimoto Chikako.
A grim look came over Kikuji’s face. Had she heard?
‘It’s been so gloomy. Rain, rain. The first good day in such a long time, and I’m taking advantage of it.’ She was already looking at the Shino. ‘From now into the summer, I’ll have more time from lessons, and I thought I’d like to come and sit in your cottage for a while.’
She brought out her offerings, sweets and a folding fan. ‘I suppose the cottage will be all mildewed again.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Mrs Ota’s Shino? May I look at it?’ She spoke casually, and turned to examine the Shino.
As she bent toward it, the heavy-boned shoulders fell back. She seemed to exude venom.
‘Did you buy it?’
‘It was a present.’
‘Quite a present. A keepsake?’ She raised her head and turned back to him. ‘Really, shouldn’t you have paid for a piece like this? I’m a bit shocked that you took it from the girl.’
‘I’ll give the question some thought.’
‘Do. You have all sorts of tea pieces that belonged to Mr Ota, but your father paid for every one of them. Even after he was taking care of Mrs Ota.’
‘That’s not a matter I want to discuss with you.’
‘I see, I see,’ said Chikako airily, and stood up. He heard her talking to the maid, and she emerged in an apron.
‘So Mrs Ota committed suicide.’ The show of unconcern was no doubt designed to catch him off guard.
‘She did not.’
‘Oh? But I knew immediately. There was always something weird about that woman.’ She looked at him. ‘Your father used to say that he would never understand her. To another woman, of course, the problem was a little different, but there was something childish about her, no matter how old she got. Well, she wasn’t my sort. Sticky and clinging, somehow.’
‘May we ask you to stop slandering the dead?’
‘Oh, please do. But isn’t this particular dead person still trying to ruin your marriage? Your father suffered a great deal at the hands of that woman.’
It was Chikako who had suffered, thought Kikuji.
Chikako was his father’s plaything for a very short time. She had no cause to indict Mrs Ota. Still, one could imagine how she had hated the woman who was with his father to the end.
‘You’re too young to understand such people. For your sake, it was good of her to die. That’s the truth.’
Kikuji turned aside.
‘Were we to stand for it, having her interfere with your marriage plans? She died because she couldn’t keep down the devil in her even when she knew she was doing wrong. That’s the truth too. And then being the woman she was, she thought she would die and go meet your father.’
Kikuji felt cold.
Chikako stepped down into the garden. ‘I’m going out to the cottage and quiet my nerves.’
He sat for a time looking at the flowers.
The white and the pale pink seemed to melt into a mist with the Shino.
The figure of Fumiko, weeping alone in her house, came to him.
Her Mother’s Lipstick
Back in his bedroom after brushing his teeth, Kikuji saw that the maid had hung a gourd in the alcove. It contained a single morning glory.
‘I’ll be getting up today,’ he said, though he got into bed again. Throwing his head back, he looked up at the flower.
‘There was a morning glory in bloom,’ said the maid from the next room. ‘You’ll be at home again today, then, sir?’
‘One more day. But I’ll be getting up.’ Kikuji had been away from work for several days with a headache and cold. ‘Where was the morning glory?’
‘It had climbed the ginger at the far side of the garden.’
It was a plain indigo morning glory, probably wild, and most ordinary. The vine was thin, and the leaves and blossom were small.
But the green and the deep blue were cool, falling over a red-lacquered gourd dark with age.
The maid, who had been with the family from his father’s time, was imaginative in her way.
On the gourd was a fading lacquer seal-signature, and on its ancient-looking box the mark of the first owner, Sōtan,1 which, if authentic, would make it three hundred years old.
Kikuji knew nothing about tea flowers, nor w
as the maid likely to be well informed. For morning tea, however, it seemed to him that the morning glory was most appropriate.
He gazed at it for a time. In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.
Was it more fitting than all those Occidental flowers in the three-hundred-year-old Shino?
But there was something unsettling in the idea of a cut morning glory.
‘You expect it to wither right in front of your eyes,’ he said to the maid at breakfast.
He remembered that he had meant to put peonies in the Shino.
It had already been past the peony season when Fumiko gave him the jar, but he could have found them if he had hunted.
‘I’d even forgotten that we had the gourd. You were clever to think of it.’
The maid only nodded.
‘You saw my father put morning glories in it?’
‘No. But morning glories and gourds are both vines, and I thought …’
‘Both vines!’ Kikuji snorted. The poetry had quite vanished.
His head grew heavy as he read the newspaper, and he lay down in the breakfast room.
‘Don’t bother to make the bed.’
The maid, who had been doing the laundry, came in drying her hands. She would clean his room, she said.
When he went back to bed, there was no morning glory in the alcove.
Nor was there a gourd hanging from the pillar.
‘Well.’ Perhaps she had not wanted him to see the fading flower.
He had snorted at the association of the two vines, and yet his father’s way of living seemed to survive in the maid.
The Shino jar stood naked in the middle of the alcove. Fumiko, if she were to see it, would no doubt think this treatment unkind.
Upon receiving it, he had put white roses and pale carnations in it, because she had done the same before her mother’s ashes. The roses and carnations were flowers that Kikuji himself had sent for the seventh-day memorial services.
He had stopped and bought flowers at the shop from which, the day before, he had sent flowers to Fumiko.
His heart would rise even at the touch of the jar, and he had put no more flowers in it.
Sometimes he would be drawn to a middle-aged woman in the street. Catching himself, he would frown and mutter: ‘I’m behaving like a criminal.’
He would look again and see that the woman did not resemble Mrs Ota after all.
There was only that swelling at the hips.
The longing at such moments would almost make him tremble; and yet intoxication and fear would meet, as at the moment of awakening from a crime.
‘And what has turned me into a criminal?’ The question should have shaken him loose from whatever it was; but instead of an answer there came only intenser longing.
He felt that he could not be saved unless he fled those moments when the touch of the dead woman’s skin came to him warm and naked.
Sometimes too he wondered if moral doubts had not sharpened his senses to the point of morbidness.
He put the Shino in its box and went to bed.
As he looked out over the garden, he heard thunder.
It was distant but strong, and at each clap it was nearer.
Lightning came through the trees in the garden.
But when the rain began, the thunder seemed to withdraw.
It was a violent rain. White spray rose from the earth of the garden.
Kikuji got up and telephoned Fumiko.
‘Miss Ota has moved.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ He was startled. ‘Excuse me, but might I …’ She must have sold the house. ‘I wonder if you could tell me where she is living.’
‘Just a moment, please.’ It seemed to be a maid.
She came back immediately and gave him the address, which she was evidently reading from a notebook. ‘In care of Mr Tozaki.’ There was a telephone.
Fumiko’s voice was bright. ‘Hello. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.’
‘Fumiko? This is Mitani. I called your house.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice fell, and it was like her mother’s.
‘When did you move?’
‘I …’
‘And you didn’t tell me.’
‘I’ve been staying with a friend for several days now. I sold the house.’
‘Oh?’
‘I didn’t know whether I should tell you or not. At first I thought I shouldn’t, but lately I’ve begun to feel guilty.’
‘You ought to.’
‘Really? You’re kind enough to think so?’
As they talked on, Kikuji felt fresh and new, washed clean. There could be this feeling from a telephone conversation, then?
‘The Shino you gave me. When I look at it I want to see you.’
‘Oh? I have another, a little cylindrical tea bowl. I thought of letting you have that too, but Mother used it as an everyday teacup. It has her lipstick on it.’
‘Oh?’
‘Or so Mother used to say.’
‘The lipstick was just left there?’
‘Not “just left there.” The Shino was reddish to begin with, but Mother used to say that she couldn’t rub lipstick from the rim, no matter how hard she tried. I sometimes look at it now that she is dead, and there does seem to be a sort of flush in one place.’
Was this only idle talk?
Kikuji could hardly bear to listen. ‘We’re having a real storm. How is it there?’
‘Terrible. I was terrified at the thunder.’
‘But it should be pleasant afterward. I’ve been away from work for several days, and I’m at home now. If you have nothing else to do, why not come over?’
‘Thank you. I’d been meaning to stop by, but only after I found work. I’m thinking of going to work.’ Before he could answer, she continued. ‘I’m so glad you called. I will see you. I shouldn’t see you again, of course.’
Kikuji got out of bed when the shower was over.
He was surprised at the outcome of the telephone conversation.
And it was strange that his guilt in the Ota affair seemed to disappear when he heard the daughter’s voice. Did it make him feel that the mother was still living?
He shook his shaving brush among the leaves at the veranda, wetting it with rain water.
The doorbell rang shortly after lunch. It would be Fumiko – but it was Kurimoto Chikako.
‘Oh, you.’
‘Hasn’t it gotten warm. I’ve been neglecting you, and I thought I should look in.’
‘I haven’t been entirely well.’
‘Your color isn’t good.’ She scowled at him.
It had been foolish, he thought, to associate the sound of wooden clogs with Fumiko. Fumiko would be wearing European dress.
‘Have you had new teeth made?’ he asked. ‘You look younger.’
‘I had spare time during the rainy season. They were a little too white at first, but they turn yellow in a hurry. They’ll be all right.’
He led her into the sitting room, which also served as his bedroom. She looked at the alcove.
‘I’ve always found empty alcoves pleasant,’ said Kikuji. ‘No hangings to weigh you down.’
‘Very pleasant, with all this rain. But maybe a few flowers at least.’ She turned back to him. ‘What did you do with Mrs Ota’s Shino?’
Kikuji did not answer.
‘Shouldn’t you send it back?’
‘That I think is up to me.’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘It’s hardly your place to be giving orders.’
‘That’s not quite true either.’ She laughed and showed her white teeth. ‘I came today to tell you what I think.’ In a quick gesture, she thrust both hands before her, then spread them as if to brush something away. ‘If you don’t get rid of that witch.’
‘You sound very threatening.’
‘But I’m the go-between, and I’m to have my say.’
‘If you’re tal
king about the Inamura girl, I’m sorry to have to refuse your proposal.’
‘Now, now. That’s very small of you, refusing a girl you like just because you don’t like the go-between. The go-between is a bridge. Go ahead, step on the bridge. Your father was quite happy to.’
Kikuji did not hide his displeasure.
When Chikako put herself into an argument, she threw her shoulders back. ‘I’m telling you the truth. I’m different from Mrs Ota. As things went with your father, I was a very light case. I see no reason to hide the truth – I was unfortunately not his favorite game. Just when it started, it was over.’ She looked down. ‘But I have no regrets. He was good enough to use me afterward, when it was convenient for him. Like most men, he found it easier to use a woman he had had an affair with. And so, thanks to him, I developed a good, healthy strain of common sense.’
‘I see.’
‘You should make use of my healthy common sense.’
Kikuji was almost tempted to feel safe with her. There was something in what she said.
She took a fan from her obi.
‘When a person is too much of a man or too much of a woman, the common sense generally isn’t there.’
‘Oh? Common sense goes with neuters, then?’
‘Don’t be sarcastic. But neuters, as you call them, have no trouble understanding men and women too. Have you thought how remarkable it is that Mrs Ota was able to die and leave an only daughter? It seems just possible that she had something to fall back on. If she died, mightn’t Kikuji look after the daughter?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I thought and thought, and all of a sudden I came up against a suspicion: she died to interfere with your marriage. She didn’t just die. There was more to it.’
‘Your inventions can be monstrous sometimes.’ But even as he spoke, he had to gasp at the force of the invention.
It came like a flash of lightning.
‘You told Mrs Ota about the Inamura girl, didn’t you?’
Kikuji remembered, but feigned ignorance. ‘It was you, wasn’t it, who told her that everything was arranged?’
‘I did. I told her not to interfere. It was the night she died.’
Kikuji was silent.
‘How did you know I telephoned? Did she come weeping to you?’
She had trapped him.
Thousand Cranes Page 6