“. . . Yes. Yes, go on.”
“Well, but then the owner of the fair, he died, and the performers disbanded, and I was set free. Set free, but with nowhere to go really. I ended up on the street, I’m ashamed to say. A common beggar. Until I realized something while I was begging one day. At the fair, the others, they’d all performed, one way or another. They all did something, while I . . . You see, they kept me in a wagon, and they’d bring me out so folks could get a good look—most people of course had never seen anything like me—but I always just stood there uselessly and let them watch . . . It occurred to me, though, while I was begging that day, that maybe I could make use of my . . . of what I am. I could do something. Perform somehow. And I hit upon the idea. The basics of it. It’s no surprise, I guess. Because puppetry was always with me. In my mind, I mean. I’d be there on the street, but a drama would be going on in my head, I’d be playing a show for myself. And so my act, that’s when it began to . . .” Oike stopped. “I’m too ashamed to say any more, sir. That act of mine, it’s not worth discussing. I’m sorry to have gone on for so long.”
Kurobe said nothing. He was grateful for the darkness: for the last few moments he had been weeping silently as they walked. He had been moved to hear of how the father had spared his son; moved further when he learned of the various degradations Oike had endured, the story made all the more poignant by Oike’s matter-of-fact telling of it, not a hint of self-pity in his voice. But the tears had come only when Oike began describing the act he had created. Kurobe remembered what he’d seen on the street, and this—being forced to make a mockery of what you love in order to survive—seemed the worst degradation of all.
Oike became a regular visitor. Kurobe and his new friend would talk late into the evening, and as time went on, Kurobe’s daughter-in-law was ordered more and more frequently to prepare the guest room so Oike could stay the night. Kurobe was perhaps even guilty of half-deliberately keeping Oike late as an excuse to have him remain until morning. Certainly he was pleased with the result: for that night, at least, Oike had been spared sleeping on the street; but even more importantly, he had been prevented from performing his act.
Kurobe relished the chance to explain the nuances of his art to such an attentive pupil. His elder son’s apprenticeship had been all distraction; his younger son’s all duty. But now he had a listener whose silent attention seemed to reflect back to him his own passion for puppetry. He eventually realized, however, that he could go no further in his lessons without the use of an actual puppet. The construction of the Kurobe puppets and the techniques used to animate them were a family secret. Nevertheless, one day, in the midst of an explanation, Kurobe rose abruptly and left the room. When he returned he held the artist Matahei in his arms.
Oike seemed to hold his breath. Kurobe began to demonstrate some simple movements for his friend—parted lips; an extended hand; a pair of raised eyebrows—then turned the puppet around, exposing the opening in its back. “Go ahead, reach inside,” Kurobe said, smiling. He expected Oike to be pleased; but the little man instantly recoiled. “No!” he cried sharply. “No, sir, I mustn’t . . .” And shaking his head vigorously, he let out a strange laugh.
Kurobe was eventually able to coax Oike into stretching a tentative hand through the opening. He felt and finally held the stick; his fingers, though, were too short to reach the levers unassisted, so Kurobe placed his own hand over Oike’s, and together they moved through first the basic controls and then the more advanced combinations; and Oike’s face seemed to undergo its own subtle changes as the wooden face beside him changed from one expression to the next . . .
Ordinarily, Kurobe consulted with his younger son before making any important decisions concerning the theater. But one afternoon he called in Sojiro and curtly announced that Oike was to be taken on as an assistant. He thought afterward that he had perhaps been too short with his son, as if to swiftly stamp out an objection which had in fact never been raised. Sojiro merely bowed, said, “I understand, Father,” and set about making preparations for Oike’s arrival.
Oike was given a room in the Kurobe home and put to work as an assistant to the puppet-maker’s apprentice. He was tolerated there without complaint, in keeping with Master Kurobe’s wishes, although he was forbidden to handle the puppets themselves. Instead he was given simple tasks, and gradually allowed to observe the basic skills of puppet maintenance and repair. Kurobe knew there were murmurs, of course. At times he would make a surprise appearance in the workshop. “How is my little man doing, then?” he would say, laughing sheepishly. Or, “I hope my little man isn’t causing trouble!”
When Oike’s work was done Kurobe often invited him out to the pavilion. The two would sit there for hours while his daughter-in-law served tea and cake, talking about art or, at times, simply looking out together at the garden, imperfectly carpeted now with red and gold leaves.
As fall turned to winter, a change came over Kurobe. He did not exactly neglect his puppetry; he in any case knew his repertoire so thoroughly that he could have performed each part flawlessly without ever rehearsing again. But whereas in the past his free time had been spent with his puppets, now he found he preferred to spend that time with Oike, as if in a rush to impart to the little man all of his knowledge in the short time he had left.
One cold afternoon Kurobe was in the garden going over a scene from an upcoming performance with Mogi, the theater’s narrator, when the name of the drama, and even the thread of the conversation, left him completely. He had the most annoying sense that the memory was circling just out of reach. If he had admitted his lapse, if he had apologized and laughed it off, the incident might have been forgotten. What aging man did not, after all, experience such moments? But he stiffened, and blinked, and remained perfectly silent as his humiliation deepened and the memory danced around him. Mogi said nothing, but Kurobe felt sure afterward that he knew, or suspected. He had no doubt that Mogi could be trusted with his secret—they had been friends for more than thirty years. He also realized, though, that it was only a matter of time now before the others—his fellow puppeteers, the puppet-makers, musicians, stage crew, and most critically, his sons—learned what was happening to him.
He needed to name a successor without further delay; but each time he reminded himself, he felt himself blanketed by a pleasant torpor which seemed to assure him that any danger was distant and small and hardly worthy of consideration.
Then spring came and, out walking with Oike beneath the cherry blossoms—petals fell like snowflakes, swirling at their feet, drifting across their path, and lodging, Kurobe could see, in Oike’s sparse hair—his affliction once more took hold. It lifted him up and it set him back down again; and he was like a man who awakes and for a confusing instant cannot say where or when . . .
Pink: pink swirled around him. Pink branches above. Cherry blossoms: sign of spring. Spring, then . . . And beside him? Oike. It was Oike. He recognized him instantly, but with an absurd dream-sense of joy and nostalgia, as if he had just been reunited with a long-lost comrade.
Oike looked up and said only, “Sir?”
And then, as if he understood everything, he reached up, took Kurobe’s hand, and led him through the pink snowfall.
After that Oike was constantly with the old master. The pair became a common sight on benches beside the river, on the streets surrounding the theater, even backstage before a performance. They spent many companionable hours together in the garden, although Kurobe now avoided the carp pool (he couldn’t stand the sight of the Emperor’s fish cutting its crazed lines through the water). Oike no longer assisted the puppet-maker. This pretense was ended; instead his days were devoted to remaining at the puppeteer’s side.
One evening, after giving Oike an informal lecture on the forbidden puppet play Love Suicides at Sonezaki, banned now for more than a hundred years because of the real-life suicides it had inspired, Kurobe walked his friend
to his door, said good night, and then, inexplicably, found himself confused as to where to go. He knew perfectly well that he was in his own home. Yet he had the most curious certainty that the rooms and doorways, the stairs and halls of his house—everything outside the range of his candle—had begun surreptitiously rearranging themselves.
He felt the way he had as a boy, watching his father rehearse while sets—castle walls; the gates of a shrine; a peasant cottage—glided on wooden tracks across the stage, and he would wait for them to slide into position, forming a scene he could recognize; now too it seemed as if the elements of his world had slid apart and were realigning; now too it seemed he was on the verge of recognizing something fundamental; he waited for it to be revealed to him, and when the sliding ceased and he found himself in a space both familiar and unknown—there was no way to know whether he should go left or right—the dwarflike creature before him studying his face, also familiar like a character from a half-remembered children’s tale, gently took the candle from him—a guide, Kurobe understood, to the corridors of the reconfigured world . . .
***
Kurobe soon recovered; but it nevertheless became a nightly custom for Oike, candle in hand, to walk the old man to his door. One night, as he was returning afterward to his own room, someone fell into step behind him. Oike turned to find Kurobe’s elder son in the darkness just beyond the candlelight, grinning down at him.
“’Evening,” Genzo said.
“Good evening, sir.”
“It stopped raining, finally. Feels like it’s cooled off some out there. I thought I might take a walk. Care to join me?”
Together they trudged through the mud. Genzo strode purposefully ahead, stepping over puddles while Oike followed, skirting them as best he could. They passed darkened houses, crossed a bridge, and came to an area of wet cobbled streets. Pink lanterns bobbed gaily in the breeze, marking the borders of the pleasure quarter.
“What do you say to a drink?” Genzo asked.
Oike wasn’t used to drinking, at least not in the quantities Kurobe’s son consumed. Genzo nevertheless cheerfully demanded that Oike match him cup for cup. An hour hadn’t gone by before the little man needed to be hauled over Genzo’s shoulder like a sack of rice. Twice Oike was sick on the way home, once right down the back of Genzo’s kimono. Genzo, though, only laughed. The following night, Genzo again waited until his father had retired, fell quietly into step behind Oike, and invited him out for a walk. Oike tried to decline, claiming to have been under the weather all day; but Genzo insisted. So off they went; and this time it took three more cups of sake before Genzo’s new drinking companion needed to be slung over a shoulder and carried home.
It wasn’t long before Oike—who had given up on trying to refuse and now accompanied Kurobe’s son with a look of resignation—became capable of putting away as much as a man twice his size, and the night came when Oike left the tavern on his own small pair of feet. Genzo found this turn of events, which he hadn’t anticipated, very amusing. He kept bending over and, patting (or rather clumsily slapping) Oike on the head and shoulders, loudly congratulating him. He suggested they celebrate Oike’s achievement; and, weaving perhaps even more than Oike himself, led the little man to a nearby geisha house.
At first Oike seemed uncomfortable there, but after a few more drinks he was even cajoled into performing an unsteady impromptu rendition of his street act. This went over tremendously well with not only the geishas but the other customers as well. Everyone laughed and cheered. Oike had known only the streets of the pleasure quarter; but as the weeks passed, Genzo began inviting him into all of the bright festive worlds that had until then remained hidden behind high walls and closed doors. Genzo was a well-known and—when he hadn’t overextended himself—well-paying customer; with him as escort, Oike was guaranteed admission to establishments which would otherwise certainly have turned him away. Genzo, for his part, found that his new friend’s presence won him entry once again into places from which he had himself been barred for one sake-inspired misbehavior or other. He brought with him, after all, an irresistible novelty; and once Oike was drunk enough (and these days he never failed to become fabulously, gloriously drunk) he would, without any prompting, leap up on the nearest table to dance, show magic tricks, or perform bawdy parodies of puppet theater.
Occasionally, Genzo allowed himself to wonder why he was spending so much time with Oike.
When he first discovered him on the street, Genzo had recognized something in the little man’s act. It appeared there for an instant amid all the grotesquerie: an anomaly of some sort—a movement? an expression? he couldn’t say—that had brought to mind his father’s puppetry. Art peeking out, as if by accident, from the moronic clowning; and by the time he began watching Oike in earnest, by the time he tried to examine what he was seeing, it was already gone. He’d felt a desire—an obligation almost—to share with his father what he’d witnessed. But there was no way to explain it really, even to himself; so he’d offered to take his father to see the act. True, maybe he was a little drunk at the time, but did that make his offer any less genuine? Drink or no drink, it had taken courage, after everything that had passed between them. A hand reached out to his father. Reached out, and slapped away: You know perfectly well that’s not the sort of place where I choose to spend my time. And then to be compared to a dog . . . After finishing his bottle of sake he’d stumbled out onto the street, bent on finding the deformed creature: if his father wouldn’t go with him to see his discovery, he’d bring the damned thing home. A prank; a small revenge. And the next day had gone marvelously: his father’s initial outrage at the sight of Oike had been a moment to savor; but best of all had been Genzo’s vindication, which occurred the moment the little man, quite on his own and without any encouragement, stood up and enacted the scene from Shogen’s House: there it was, plainly written on his father’s stunned (and even strangely stricken) face: proof that he had recognized the same talent Genzo had spoken of all along.
The matter should have ended there. But then Oike was invited back. And not only once but again and again. Genzo hadn’t foreseen this. Oike was an entertaining enough character, and his knowledge of puppet theater really was extraordinary; but for him to be taken on as assistant and installed in their home . . . ! Before long the creature never left his father’s side. And the way his father doted on him . . . The prank had taken on a life of its own. And it was all Genzo’s own doing. He arrived at a sort of plan to make things right, although its contours remained unclear to him even as he carried it out. He was trying, he understood eventually, to drown his father’s new confidant in sake, to keep him drunk at night and hungover by day, until his father became so disgusted he would send the filthy little thing packing, back to the streets where he belonged. Genzo had wanted to destroy the unsettling friendship between the two, but equally he’d wanted his father to know that Genzo was the instrument of that destruction.
Yet somewhere along the way the plan had revised itself. He’d come to look forward to his time with Oike; he was no longer sure what he wanted. Did his father know about their nights together? If he did he gave no sign. Had Oike kept it a secret? Or had he already confessed everything: the sake, the geisha houses, the drunken tabletop parodies of puppet theater? If it was a secret, it wouldn’t be a difficult one to keep from his father these days. He sometimes hardly seemed aware of what was happening around him. He could be in the room with you and not see you there at all. It was true he’d always had a distracted quality, like any man absorbed in his work. But behind it there had been a focus, a sense that his mind was elsewhere, perhaps, but fully engaged; now there was a vagueness to his distraction that worried Genzo.
And then one evening during a performance of Chushingura, in the middle of Kanpei’s suicide scene, something happened to his father. Not an error, exactly. A hesitation; a missed beat. An instant when father and sons were no longer moving together in
unison.
A voice within Genzo had always foretold dissolution. Even as a boy, he could sense the ruin waiting in every bright shape that bloomed around him. When his mother died, Genzo’s father accused him of failing to properly mourn, seeing his wild revels as evidence that he wasn’t grieving, or worse—that he was celebrating his own mother’s death. One more thing that could not be forgiven. It wasn’t true, of course; but he had experienced . . . Not joy, certainly, but—well, a balm of sorts, a consolation: yes, everything really was meant to end in collapse, as he’d always suspected. After the cremation, they took turns, the three of them—his father, then Genzo, then Sojiro—removing her bones. Striving: this is what it came to, when all was said and done. Bones picked from ashes with a pair of chopsticks. As if her death were an argument won, his view of the world confirmed and his father’s disproven once and for all. And so he waited for a similar consolation now at seeing the great Master Kurobe finally falter, a consolation he felt sure he should be feeling . . .
The Involuntary Sojourner Page 15
