‘I can’t just leave it,’ he said aloud. He picked up the pieces again, and put them in the sleeve of his night kimono.
It would be sad to leave them there. And besides, Kurimoto Chikako might come calling.
He thought of burying the bowl beside the stone basin, because Fumiko had broken it there in such obvious desperation. Instead, he wrapped the pieces in paper, put them in a drawer, and went back to bed.
What had she so dreaded having him compare the Shino with?
And why had the possibility so worried her? Kikuji could think of no reason.
Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her.
She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.
Always before, she had been Mrs Ota’s daughter. Now, he had forgotten – the idea had quite left him that the mother’s body was in a subtle way transferred to the daughter, to lure him into strange fantasies.
He had at length made his way outside the dark, ugly curtain.
Had the breach in her cleanness rescued him?
There had been no resistance from Fumiko, only from the cleanness itself.
That fact, one might think, told how deep he had sunk into the meshes of the curse, how complete the paralysis was; but Kikuji felt the reverse, that he had escaped the curse and the paralysis. It was as if an addict had been freed of his addiction by taking the ultimate dose of a drug.
Kikuji called Fumiko from his office. She worked for a wool wholesaler in Kanda.
She was not at work. Kikuji had left home sleepless. Had Fumiko fallen into a deep sleep at perhaps dawn? Or, in her shame, had she shut herself up for the day?
In the afternoon she still was not at work, and he asked where she lived.
Her new address would have been on the letter yesterday; but Fumiko had torn it up envelope and all and put the pieces in her pocket. At dinner they had talked of her work, and he remembered the name of the firm. He had not asked where she lived. It had been as if her dwelling were Kikuji himself.
On his way home, he looked for the rooming house. It was behind Ueno Park.
Fumiko was not there.
A girl twelve or thirteen, just back from school to judge from her student uniform, came to the door and went inside again.
‘Miss Ota is out. She said she was going away with a friend.’
‘Away? She went on a trip? What time was it? And where did she say she was going?’
The girl went inside again, and this time she did not come to the door. ‘I really don’t know. Mother is out.’ She seemed afraid of Kikuji. She had thin eyebrows.
Kikuji looked back as he went out the gate, but he could not tell which was Fumiko’s room. It was a fairly decent two-storey house with a little garden.
She had said that death was at her feet. Kikuji’s own feet were suddenly cold.
He wiped his face with his handkerchief. The blood seemed to leave as he wiped, and he wiped more violently. The handkerchief was wet and dark. He felt a cold sweat at his back.
‘She has no reason to die,’ he muttered.
There was no reason for Fumiko to die, Fumiko who had brought him to life.
But had the simple directness of the evening before been the directness of death?
Was she, like her mother, guilt-ridden, afraid of the directness?
‘And only Kurimoto is left.’ As if spitting out all the accumulated venom on the woman he took for his enemy, Kikuji hurried into the shade of the park.
1 Short split-toed socks.
2 A mat is about one yard by two.
3 A Seto ware dating from the sixteenth century.
4 Sen Rikyū (1521–91), an early tea master.
1 An early Edo Period painter the dates of whose birth and death are uncertain.
2 Minamoto Muneyuki, died 939.
3 Ki no Tsurayuki, died 945.
4 In the southern outskirts of Tokyo.
1 A ware from the Oribe kilns (see page 11).
2 Raku, a Kyoto ware, was first produced in the sixteenth century. Ryōnyū (1756–1834) was the ninth master of the Raku kiln.
1 Sen Sōtan (1578–1658), a tea master, was the grandson of Sen Rikyū (page 12).
1 A Kyūshū ware of Korean origin.
Thousand Cranes Page 10