“No, why should he?”
“Well, you seem to consult Mr. Hinoki about everything.”
“I wouldn’t tell him about something like that.” Yuichi thought regretfully of his few remaining secrets and went on: “Mr. Hinoki doesn’t know anything about that.”
“I wouldn’t think so. In the old days that old man was an incorrigible woman-chaser. But the strange thing was the women did nothing but run away from him.”
Sunset was over. The wind began to spring up faintly. Even though the sun was down, there was still a clear glow off the water. The sheen of the water still reached all the way to the mountains, betraying the presence of the sea. The shadows were deep on the surface of the sea close to the shores of the islands. The olive-green shadows on the water contrasted with the sea that still gorgeously reflected the light. The two got up and went to supper.
The hotel was far from a settlement, and when the evening meal was over there was nothing to do. They played some records, and leafed through some bound volumes of picture magazines. They carefully read the travel folders of the airlines and hotels. Thus Mrs. Kaburagi lowered herself, becoming like a nurse to a child who wants to stay awake doing nothing forever.
Mrs. Kaburagi perceived that what she had once imagined to be pride of conquest had turned out to be nothing more than childish caprice. If this discovery was not distasteful to her, neither was it disappointing. For she recognized that the joy Yuichi alone seemed to be taking in this deepening night, his placid contentment, the peculiar pleasure he took in not doing anything, was based entirely on the awareness that she was there beside him, in all her solicitude.
After a time Yuichi yawned. Then he said reluctantly: “Shall we go to bed soon?”
“I’m sleepy; I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
But Mrs. Kaburagi, who should have been sleepy, started babbling when they got to the room. It was a babbling that was beyond her control. Even when they had rested their heads on the pillows of their separate beds, and turned off the lamp that was on the little table between them, she kept up her cheerful, feverish monologue. Her topics were innocent, innocuous, enervating. Yuichi’s answers came from the darkness at long intervals. Finally, he was silent. Wholesome sleep took the place of words. Mrs. Kaburagi, too, ceased talking. For more than thirty minutes she listened to the youth’s regular breathing. Her eyes were wide awake; she couldn’t sleep. She lit the lamp. She picked up the book on the night table. She was startled, then, by the rustle of bedclothes as of someone turning in sleep, and glanced toward the neighboring bed.
In truth, until this time Mrs. Kaburagi had been waiting. She was tired of waiting, disillusioned with waiting, and then—even though she had seen clearly since that strange peeping that waiting was impossible—she still waited. Yuichi, however, who had discovered the one person in the world he could relax with, the one woman who was willing to talk to him, with supreme trust stretched out his happily tired body and slept. He turned. Though he was sleeping naked, he was too warm, and pushed the blanket from his chest. The circle of light at his head made his face, cut with deep shadows under the eyes, and his loosely covered, rising and falling chest shine like a bust carved on an ancient coin.
Mrs. Kaburagi altered her dream. To be more exact, she shifted from the subject of the dream to the object of the dream. This subtle shift of vision, this shift from one chair to another in her dream, this small unconscious change in attitude, led her to give up waiting. She moved across to the other bed, like a snake writhing across a stream. Her hands and arms trembled as they supported her bending body. Her lips were directly opposite the face of the sleeping youth. She closed her eyes. Her lips could see well enough.
Endymion’s sleep was profound. The young man did not know who was cutting off the light across his sleeping face, or what a feverish, sleepless night was pressing close. He did not feel the stray hairs brushing his cheek. He only opened his lips slightly, exposing the glistening rows of teeth.
Mrs. Kaburagi opened her eyes. Their lips had not yet touched. It was now that she opened her eyes to her resolution of valiant self-abnegation: If bur lips so much as touched, in that moment something would leave with a flutter of wings, never to return. If I wish to maintain between this youth and me something like music that never ends, I must not move a finger. Night and day I must hold my breath, careful never to disturb so much as a particle of dust between us. . . . She regained her control and returned to her bed. She pressed her cheek against her warm pillow and looked fixedly at that form, like a bas-relief in its circle of golden light. She turned off the lamp. The vision persisted. She turned her face toward the wall; it was near dawn*when she finally slept.
This heroic ordeal was crowned with success. The next day Mrs. Kaburagi awoke with a clear head. In the eyes with which she looked at Yuichi’s face deep in the sleep of morning, there was a new, resolute power. Her emotions had been refined. She picked up her pure white, wrinkled pillow and playfully threw it at Yuichi’s face.
“Wake up! It’s a lovely day. You can’t sleep all day.”
This late-summer day was much pleasanter than the day before, filled with promise of being a day to remember always. After breakfast, they packed lunches and drinks, hired a car, and set out to do some sightseeing around the farthest reaches of the Shima Peninsula. They would return to the hotel by boat from the beach where they had bathed the day before. From the village of Ugata near the hotel, they went through wilds of burnished earth, from which scrubby pines, hemp palms, and tiger lilies sprang here and there, and finally reached the port of akin. The view from Cape Daio, over which a giant pine towered, held them breathless. As they stood buffeted by the wind, they saw the white clothing of the pearl divers at their task, looking like whitecaps breaking upon the sea. They saw on a cape to the north the Anori lighthouse standing like a tall stick of chalk, and the smoke from the pearl divers* fires rising on the beaches of Cape Oi.
The old lady who was their guide was smoking a handmade cigarette of chopped tobacco rolled in a camellia leaf. Her fingers, yellow with age and nicotine, trembled as she pointed to the end of misty Cape Kuni in the distance. There long, long ago the Empress Jito had gone with many court ladies on a boating excursion and held court for seven days.
Hearing this ancient, useless lore of travel was wearisome. They returned to the hotel no more than an hour before the time Yuichi was to depart. Mrs. Kaburagi, who did not have good connections to Kyoto this evening, stayed behind, planning to leave the next morning. About the time the evening calm began, Yuichi left. Mrs. Kaburagi saw him off at the trolley stop just below the hotel. The trolley came. The two shook, hands, after which Mrs. Kaburagi drew back abruptly, made her way to the railing outside the station, and waved good-bye. She waved for a long time, cheerfully, showing no emotion whatever, while the scarlet evening sun shone on her cheek.
Yuichi was alone among a earful of peddlers and fishermen. His heart was filled with gratitude toward this mistress of noble, disinterested friendship. Gratitude welled up in him; it made him feel envious of Kaburagi, who had taken this perfect woman as his wife.
Chapter 31 PROBLEMS SPIRITUAL AND FINANCIAL
WHEN HE GOT BACK to Tokyo, Yuichi ran directly into trouble. During the short time he had been away, his mother’s kidney trouble had taken a turn for the worse.
Unaware what to strive for, what means to use in resisting, the widow Minami, half blaming herself, had no recourse save to become, gravely ill. With marvelous facility, she became dizzy and often for a very short time lost consciousness. Thin urine welled from her constantly; the symptoms were certainly those of kidney atrophy.
When he arrived home at seven in the morning and opened the front door, Yuichi knew from the expression on Kiyo’s face that his mother was critically ill. The moment he entered, the heavy odor of illness struck his nostrils. The joyful memories of the trip were suddenly frozen in his heart.
Yasuko, exhausted from nursing her mother-in-law late
into the night, was not yet awake. Kiyo went to prepare his bath. Yuichi made his way upstairs to the bedroom he shared with Yasuko.
The high windows had been open throughout the night to let in the cool air, and the rays of the rising sun now streamed in and lit the skirt of the mosquito netting. Yuichi's bed was laid out. The linen pads had been carefully arranged. On the pallet next to his Yasuko was sleeping with Keiko.
Yuichi lifted the netting and slipped in. Softly he lay down on the padding of his own bed. The baby opened her eyes. On her mother’s outstretched arm she lay, soberly and with wide eyes observing her father. The scent of milk came to him faintly.
The infant suddenly smiled. It was as if drops of smile dripped from the comers of her mouth. Yuichi poked her cheek lightly with his. finger. Keiko, her eyes unwavering, continued smiling.
Yasuko started to turn over, rather painfully, then stopped and opened her eyes. She saw the face of her husband, unexpectedly close to her own. Yasuko did not smile at all.
During those few moments while Yasuko was awakening, Yuichi’s memory moved swiftly. He remembered the sleeping face that he had so often gazed upon so intently, the sleeping face that he had dreamed of—immaculate possession that he would not harm for the world. He remembered her face filled with surprise, joy, and trust that time in the hospital room during the night. Yuichi could expect nothing from his wife when she opened her eyes. He had merely returned from his trip during which she had remained behind in despair. But his heart, accustomed to being forgiven, yearned; and his innocence, accustomed to being trusted, dreamed. In this instant his emotions were like those of a beggar who asks for nothing, yet who has no other skill save that of begging.
Heavy with sleep, Yasuko’s eyelids opened. Yuichi saw a Yasuko he had never seen before. She was a different woman.
She spoke in a sleepy, unvarying, yet not at all ambiguous tone. “When did you get back? Have you had breakfast? Mother is very sick. Did Kiyo tell you?” she asked, as if reading off a checklist. Then she said: “I’ll fix your breakfast quickly; won’t you wait on the veranda?”
Yasuko arranged her hair and dressed hurriedly. She came downstairs with the baby in her arms. She did not entrust the child to her husband while she prepared breakfast, but laid her down in the room next to the veranda where he was reading the newspaper.
The morning had not yet warmed up. Yuichi blamed his uneasiness on the night journey, so hot' that he had slept almost not at all. He clicked his tongue as he thought: I now understand clearly what they call the unimpeded pace of misfortune. It has a fixed speed like that of a clock . . . But one always feels like this when he hasn’t had enough sleep! It’s all the doing of Mrs. Kaburagi!
The change in Yasuko as she opened her eyes in the extremity of fatigue and discovered the face of her husband before her was a surprise mostly to Yasuko herself.
She had formed the habit of closing her eyes and sketching in her mind down to the last detail the picture of her suffering and then opening her eyes and seeing it before her. That picture was beautiful, magnificent. This morning, however, this was not what she saw. There was only the face of a youth, outlined by the rays of the morning sun, shining through a comer of the mosquito netting, giving the impression of an inanimate figure of clay.
Yasuko opened a can of coffee and poured hot water into the white china coffee pot. In her hands there was an unfeeling quickness; her fingers did not tremble in the slightest.
After a while, Yasuko placed Yuichi’s breakfast before him on a wide silver-plated tray.
It was a delicious breakfast to Yuichi. The morning shadows were still abundant in the garden. The whitewashed railing of the veranda shone with dazzling late-summer dew. The young couple silently ate breakfast together. Keiko quietly slept. The sick mother had not yet awakened.
“The doctor said Mother should be taken to the hospital sometime today. We’ve been waiting for you to come home to make arrangements to have her admitted.”
“All right.”
Yuichi looked attentively at the garden. He blinked as he observed the morning sun lighting the treetops of the pasanias. The mother’s grave illness drew the young couple together. Yuichi had the illusion that now Yasuko’s heart was once again firmly his, and he took advantage of the moment to employ the charms any husband would use.
“It’s good to have breakfast, just the two of us, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Yasuko smiled. There was an impenetrable indifference in her smile. Yuichi was dismayed. His face turned red with embarrassment. Then he poured out these words— a transparent, insincere, overdramatized outpouring, perhaps, but at the same time, perhaps also a heartfelt, sincere confession couched in words that he had never before uttered to a woman. “While I was away,” he said, “all I thought of was you. It’s become clear to me what with all our troubles of the last few days that you mean more to me than anyone.”
Yasuko remained calm. She smiled a light, noncommittal smile. It was as if Yuichi’s words were those of an unknown country. She looked at his lips as if they were being moved by someone talking on the other side of a thick pane of glass. His words did not come through.
However, Yasuko had already resolved that she would settle down, bring up Keiko, and never leave Yuichi’s house until she was ugly and stricken in years. This virtue, born from hopelessness, had a power no sin could influence.
Yasuko had forsaken the world of absolutes; she had left it completely. When she had been in that world, her love yielded to no evidence. Yuichi’s coldness, his abrupt rejections, his late homecomings, his overnight absences, his secrets, the fact that he never loved a woman—in the face of such evidence the affair of the anonymous letter was a trivial matter. Yet Yasuko had remained unmoved, because she lived in another world.
Yasuko did not step off her world on her own initiative. She was dragged off it. Yuichi, who as a husband was perhaps too kind, had deliberately enlisted the aid of Mrs. Kaburagi and wrenched his wife out of the quiet of love’s realm, out of the unrestricted, limpid realm in which she lived, where impossibilities could not exist, and dragged her into the disorderly world of reciprocal love. Yasuko was now hemmed in by the evidence of that world. There were with her there things she had known all along, things familiar to her, with which she was hemmed in by the dull, dumb wall of impossibility. She had only one method of dealing with it all. That lay in not feeling anything—in not seeing, in not hearing anything.
While Yuichi was away on that trip, Yasuko had donned the arts and artifices of this new world in which she was forced to live. She had to go so far as to treat herself resolutely as a woman without love—even of herself. She had turned into a deaf mute, outwardly adjusted; she served her husband his breakfast wearing a stylish apron in a yellow checked pattern.
“Would you like some more coffee?” she said. She said it without effort.
A bell rang. I was the hand bell beside the pillow in Mrs. Minami’s sickroom.
“She must be awake,” Yasuko said. The two went to the sickroom. Yasuko opened the shutters.
“Have you come home at last?” the widow said, not lifting her head from the pillow. Yuichi saw death in her face. It was swollen with dropsy.
That year there were no typhoons of consequence between the 210th day and the 220th day. Of course there were several typhoons, but they all just missed Tokyo, causing no severe wind or water damage.
Yaichiro Kawada was extremely busy. Mornings he was at the bank. Afternoons he held conferences. His executives huddled with him in conferences over the question of how to invade the sales network of a competing firm. At the same time he was negotiating with an electrical supply company and other subcontractors. He was involved in negotiations with directors of a French auto company now visiting Japan, working toward agreements on technical cooperation, patent rights, and commissions. At night, as a rule, he entertained his banking associates at geisha houses. Also, based on intelligence reports his labor relations chie
f brought him periodically, he had come to understand that strikebreaking preparations on the part of the company had been quite unsuccessful and that the union was developing momentum toward a strike.
The tic in Kawada’s right cheek was getting worse. It was the only emotional weakness in his otherwise imperturbable exterior, and it threatened him. Hidden behind his proud, German, never downturned face; behind his fine nose; behind the clear line of the cleft of his upper lip; behind his rimless glasses, Kawada’s sensitive heart moaned and bled. At night, before he went to sleep, he would read a page from a collection of Holderlin’s early poetry. He would peer at it stealthily as if reading an erotic passage, intoning: “ ‘Ewig muss die liebste Liebe darben . . .' ” It was the last verse of the poem “To Nature.” “ Was wir lieben ist ein Schatten nur. . . / He is free,” groaned the wealthy bachelor in his bed. “Just because he’s young and beautiful, he thinks he has the right to spit on me.”
The twofold jealousy that makes the love of the aging homosexual unbearable came between Kawada and his bachelor’s sleep. Take the jealousy of a man whose woman is unfaithful and combine with it the jealousy that a woman past her prime feels toward a young, beautiful woman, and combine with that doubly intricate product the peculiar consciousness that the person one loves is of the same sex, and you have an exaggerated, absolutely unforgivable humiliation in love. If a prominent man experienced something as enormous as this at the hands of a woman, he would be able to endure it. But nothing could do more harm to the self-respect of someone like Kawada than to have the humiliations of love for a man thrown into his face.
Kawada recalled how one day when he was young he was seduced by a rich merchant in New York’s Hotel Waldorf-Astoria. Then he remembered the night of a party in Berlin, when he and a gentleman he knew got into the man’s Hispano Suiza and headed for his villa in the suburbs. The two men in swallow-tail coats embraced in the car oblivious to the headlights of the other cars. Their perfumed hardboiled shirt fronts rubbed against each other.
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