The Izu Dancer and Other Stories: The Counterfeiter, Obasute, The Full Moon

by Inoue Yasushi

  "You will have to forgive us," the older woman said, sitting up in bed. "We mean to leave today, but it seems there is to be a party tonight, and we thought we'd see what could be done with it. If you really must go, perhaps you can meet us in Shimoda. We always stay at the Koshuya Inn-you should have no trouble finding it."

  I felt deserted.

  "Or maybe you could wait till tomorrow," the man suggested. "She says we have to stay today. . . . But it's good to have someone to talk to on the road. Let's go together tomorrow."

  "A splendid idea," the woman agreed. "It seems a shame, now that we've gotten to know you . . . and tomorrow we start out no matter what happens. Day after tomorrow it will be forty-nine days since the baby died. We've meant all along to have a service in Shimoda to show that we at least remember, and we've been hurrying to get there in time. It would really be very kind of you. ... I can't help thinking there's a reason for it all, our getting to be friends this way."

  I agreed to wait another day, and went back down to my inn. I sat in the dirty little office talking to the manager while I waited for them to dress. Presently the man came by and we walked out to a pleasant bridge not far from town. He leaned against the railing and talked about himself. He had for a long time belonged to a theater company in Tokyo. Even now he sometimes acted in plays on Oshima, while at parties on the road he could do imitations of actors if called upon to. The strange, leglike bulge in one of the bundles was a stage sword, he explained, and the wicker trunk held both household goods and costumes.

  "I made a mistake and ruined myself. My brother has taken over for the family in Kofu and I'm really not much use there."

  "I thought you came from the inn at Nagaoka."

  "I'm afraid not. That's my wife, the older of the two women. She's a year younger than you. She lost her second baby on the road this summer-it only lived a week-and she isn't really well yet. The old woman is her mother, and the girl is my sister."

  "You said you had a sister thirteen?"

  "That's the one. I've tried to think of ways of keeping her out of this business, but there were all sorts of reasons why it couldn't be helped."

  He said his own name was Eikichi, his wife was Chiyoko, the dancer, his sister, was Kaoru. The other girl, Yuriko, was a sort of maid. She was sixteen, and the only one among them who was really from Oshima. Eikichi became very sentimental. He gazed down at the river, and for a time I thought he was about to weep.

  IV

  ON the way back, just off the road, we saw the little dancer petting a dog. She had washed away her makeup.

  "Come on over to the inn," I called as we passed.

  "I couldn't very well by myself."

  "Bring your brother."

  "Thank you. I'll be right over."

  A short time later Eikichi appeared.

  "Where are the others?"

  "They couldn't get away from mother."

  But the three of them came clattering across the bridge and up the stairs while we were playing checkers. After elaborate bows they waited hesitantly in the hall.

  Chiyoko came in first. "Please, please," she called gaily to the others. "You needn't stand on formality in my room."

  An hour or so later they all went down for a bath. I must come along, they insisted; but the idea of a bath with three young women was somewhat overwhelming, and I said I would go in later. In a moment the little dancer came back upstairs.

  "Chiyoko says she'll wash your back for you if you come down now."

  Instead she stayed with me, and the two of us played checkers. She was surprisingly good at it. I am better than most and had little trouble with Eikichi and the others, but she came very near beating me. It was a relief not to have to play a deliberately bad game. A model of propriety at first, sitting bolt upright and stretching out her hand to make a play, she soon forgot herself and was leaning intently over the board. Her hair, so rich it seemed unreal, almost brushed against my chest. Suddenly she flushed crimson.

  "Excuse me. I'll be scolded for this," she exclaimed, and ran out with the game half finished. The older woman was standing beside the public bath across the river. Chiyoko and Yuriko clattered out of the bath downstairs at almost the same moment and retreated across the bridge without bothering to say good-by.

  Eikichi spent the day at my inn again, though the manager's wife, a solicitous sort of woman, had pointed out that it was a waste of good food to invite such people in for meals.

  The dancer was practicing the samisen when I went up to the inn by the highway that evening. She put it down when she saw me, but at the older woman's order, took it up again.

  Eikichi seemed to be reciting something on the second floor of the restaurant across the street, where we could see a party in progress.

  "What in the world is that?"

  "That? He's reading a Noh play."

  "An odd sort of thing to be doing."

  "He has as many wares as a dime store. You can never guess what he'll do next."

  The girl shyly asked me to read her a piece from a storyteller's collection. I took up the book happily, a certain hope in my mind. Her head was almost at my shoulder as I started to read, and she looked up at me with a serious, intent expression, her eyes bright and unblinking. Her large eyes, almost black, were easily her best feature. The lines of the heavy lids were indescribably graceful. And her laugh was like a flower's laugh. A flower's laugh—the expression does not seem strained when I think of her.

  I had read only a few minutes when the maid from the restaurant across the street came for her. "I'll be right back," she said as she smoothed out her clothes. "Don't go away. I want to hear the rest."

  She knelt in the hall to take her leave formally.

  We could see the girl as though in the next room. She knelt beside the drum, her back toward us. The slow rhythm filled me with a clean excitement.

  "A party always picks up speed when the drum begins," the woman said.

  Chiyoko and Yuriko went over to the restaurant a little later, and in an hour or so the four of them came back.

  "This is all they gave us." The dancer casually dropped fifty sen from her clenched fist into the older woman's hand. I read more of the story, and they talked of the baby that had died.

  I was not held to them by curiosity, and I felt no condescension toward them. Indeed I was no longer conscious that they belonged to that low order, traveling performers. They seemed to know it and to be moved by it. Before long they decided that I must visit them on Oshima.

  "We can put him in the old man's house." They planned everything out. "That should be big enough, and if we move the old man out it will be quiet enough for him to study as long as he can stay."

  "We have two little houses, and the one on the mountain we can give to you."

  It was decided, too, that I should help with a play they would give on Oshima for the New Year.

  I came to see that the life of the traveling performer was not the forbidding one I had imagined. Rather it was easy-going, relaxed, carrying with it the scent of meadows and mountains. Then too this troupe was held together by close family affection. Only Yuriko, the hired girl—perhaps she was at a shy age—seemed uncomfortable before me.

  It was after midnight when I left their inn. The girls saw me to the door, and the little dancer turned my sandals so that I could step into them without twisting. She leaned out and gazed up at the clear sky. "Ah, the moon is up. And tomorrow we'll be in Shimoda. I love Shimoda. We'll say prayers for the baby, and mother will buy me the comb she promised, and there are all sorts of things we can do after that. Will you take me to a movie?"

  Something about Shimoda seems to have made it a home along the road for performers who wander the region of the Izu and Sagami hot springs.

  V

  THE baggage was distributed as on the day we came over Amagi Pass. The puppy, cool as a seasoned traveler, lay with its forepaws on the older woman's arms. From Yagano we entered the mountains again. We looked out over
the sea at the morning sun, warming our mountain valley. At the mouth of the river a beach opened wide and white.

  "That's Oshima."

  "So big! You really will come, won't you?" the dancer said.

  For some reason—was it the clearness of the autumn sky that made it seem so?—the sea where the sun rose over it was veiled in a springlike mist. It was some ten miles to Shimoda. For a time the mountains hid the sea. Chiyoko hummed a song, softly, lazily.

  The road forked. One way was a little steep, but it was more than a mile shorter than the other. Would I have the short, steep way, or the long, easy way? I took the short way.

  The road wound up through a forest, so steep now that climbing it was like climbing hand-over-hand up a wall. Dead leaves laid it over with a slippery coating. As my breathing became more painful I felt a perverse recklessness, and I pushed on faster and faster, pressing my knee down with my fist at each step. The others fell behind, until presently I could only hear their voices through the trees; but the dancer, skirts tucked high, came after me with tiny little steps. She stayed always a couple of yards behind, neither trying to come nearer nor letting herself fall farther back. Sometimes I would speak to her, and she would stop and answer with a startled little smile. And when she spoke I would pause, hoping that she would come up even with me, but always she waited until I had started out again, and followed the same two yards behind. The road grew steeper and more twisted. I pushed myself on faster, and on she came, two yards behind, climbing earnestly and intently. The mountains were quiet. I could no longer hear the voice of the others.

  "Where do you live in Tokyo?"

  " In a dormitory. I don't really live in Tokyo."

  "I've been in Tokyo. I went there once to dance, when the cherries were in bloom. I was very little, though, and I don't remember anything about it.'"

  "Are your parents living?" she would take up again, or, "Have you ever been to Kofu?" She talked of the movies in Shimoda, of the dead baby.

  We came to the summit. Laying her drum on a bench among the dead autumn weeds, she wiped her face with a handkerchief. After that she turned her attention to her feet, then changed her mind and bend down instead to dust off the skirt of my kimono. I drew back surprised, and she fell to one knee. When she had brushed me off front and back, bent low before me, she stood up to lower her skirts—they were still tucked up for walking. I was breathing heavily. She invited me to sit down.

  A flock of small birds flew up beside the bench. The dead leaves rustled as they landed, so quiet was the air. I tapped the drum a couple of times with my finger, and the birds started up in alarm.

  "I'm thirsty."

  "Shall I see if I can find you some water?" But a few minutes later she came back empty-handed through the yellowing trees.

  "What do you do with yourself on Oshima?"

  She mentioned two or three girls' names that meant nothing to me, and rambled on with a string of reminiscences. She was talking not of Oshima but of Kofu, apparently, of a grammar school she had been in for the first and second grades. She talked artlessly on as the memories of her friends came back to her.

  The two younger women and Eikichi came up about ten minutes later, and the older woman ten minutes later still. On the way down I purposely stayed behind talking to Eikichi, but after two hundred yards or so the little dancer came running back up. "There's a spring below. They're waiting for you to drink first."

  I ran down with her. The water bubbled clear and clean from shady rocks. The women were standing around it. "Have a drink. We waited for you. We didn't think you would want to drink after we had stirred it up."

  I drank from my cupped hands. The women were slow to leave. They wet their handkerchiefs and washed the perspiration from their faces.

  At the foot of the slope we came out on the Shimoda highway. Down the highway, sending up columns of smoke here and there, were the fires of the charcoal-makers. We stopped to rest on a pile of wood. The dancing girl began to curry the puppy's shaggy coat with a pinkish comb.

  "You'll break the teeth," the older woman warned.

  " That's all right. I'm getting a new one in Shimoda."

  It was the comb she wore in her hair, and even back in Yugano I had planned to ask for it when we got to Shimoda. I was a little upset to find her combing the dog with it.

  "But all he would have to do would be to get a gold tooth. Then you'd never notice," the dancer's voice came to me suddenly. I looked back.

  They were obviously talking about my crooked teeth. Chiyoko must have brought the matter up, and the little dancer suggested a gold tooth for me. I felt no resentment at being talked about and no particular need to hear more. The conversation was subdued for a time.

  "He's nice, isn't he," the girl's voice came again.

  "He seems to be very nice."

  "He really is nice. I like having someone so nice."

  She had an open way of speaking, a youthful, honest way of saying exactly what came to her, that made it possible for me to think of myself as, frankly, "nice." I looked up anew at the mountains, so bright that they made my eyes ache a little. I had come at nineteen to think of myself as a misanthrope, a lonely misfit, and it was my depression at the thought that had driven me to this Izu trip. And now I was able to look upon myself as "a nice person" in the everyday sense of the expression. I find no way to describe what this meant to me. The mountains grew brighter—we were getting near Shimoda and the sea.

  Now and then, on the outskirts of a village, we would see a sign: "Vagrant performers keep out."

  The Koshuya was a cheap inn at the northern edge of Shimoda. I went up behind the rest to an attic-like room on the second floor. There was no ceiling, and the roof sloped down so sharply that at the window overlooking the street one could not sit comfortably upright.

  "Your shoulder isn't stiff?" The older woman was fussing over the girl. "Your hands aren't sore?"

  The girl went through the graceful motions of beating a drum. "They're not sore. I won't have any trouble. They're not sore at all."

  "Good. I was worried."

  I lifted the drum. "Heavy!"

  "It's heavier than you'd think," she laughed. "It's heavier than that pack of yours."

  They exchanged greetings with the other guests. The hotel was full of peddlers and wandering performers— Shimoda seemed to be a migrants' nest. The dancer handed out pennies to the inn children, who darted in and out. When I started to leave she ran to arrange my sandals for me in the doorway.

  "You will take me to a movie, won't you?" she whispered, almost to herself.

  Eikichi and I, guided part way by a rather disreputable-looking man from the Koshuya, went on to an inn said to belong to an ex-mayor. We had a bath together and lunch, fish new from the sea.

  I handed him a little money as he left. "Buy some flowers for the services tomorrow," I said. I had explained that I would have to go back to Tokyo on the morning boat. I was, as a matter of fact, out of money, but told them I had to be back in school.

  "Well, we'll see you this winter in any case," the older women said. "We'll all come down to the boat to meet you. You must let us know when you're coming. You're to stay with us—we couldn't think of letting you go to a hotel. We're expecting you, remember, and we'll all be down at the boat."

  When the others had left the room I asked Chiyoko and Yuriko to go to a movie with me. Chiyoko, pale and tired, lay with her hands pressed to her abdomen. "I couldn't, thank you. I'm simply not up to so much walking."

  Yuriko stared stiffly at the floor.

  The little dancer was downstairs playing with the inn children. When she saw me come down she ran off and began wheedling the older woman for permission to go to the movies. She came back looking distant and crestfallen.

  "I don't see anything wrong. Why can't she go with him by herself?" Eikichi argued. I found it hard to understand myself, but the woman was unbending. The dancer sat out in the hall petting a dog when I left the inn. I could not bri
ng myself to speak to her, so chilling was this new formality, and she seemed not to have the strength to look up.

  I went to the movies alone. A woman read the dialogue by a small flashlight. I left almost immediately and went back to my inn. For a long time I sat looking out, my elbows on the window sill. The town was dark. I thought I could hear a drum in the distance. For no very good reason I found myself weeping.

  VI

  EIKICHI called up from the street while I was eating breakfast at seven the next morning. He had on a formal kimono, in my honor it seemed. The women were not with him. I was suddenly lonesome.

  "They all wanted to see you off," he explained when he came up to my room, "but we were out so late last night that they couldn't get themselves out of bed. They said to apologize and tell you they'd be waiting for you this winter."

  An autumn wind blew cold through the town. On the way to the ship he bought me fruit and tobacco and a bottle of a cologne called "Kaoru." "Because her name's Kaoru," he smiled. "Oranges are bad on a ship, but persimmons you can eat. They help seasickness."

  "Why don't I give you this?" I put my hunting cap on his head, pulled my school cap out of my pack, and tried to smooth away a few of the wrinkles. We both laughed.

  As we came to the pier I saw with a quick jump of the heart that the little dancer was sitting at the water's edge. She did not move as we came up, only nodded a silent greeting. On her face were the traces of make-up I found so engaging, and the rather angry red at the corners of her eyes seemed to give her a fresh young dignity.

  "Are the others coming?" Eikichi asked.

  She shook her head.

  "They're still in bed?"

  She nodded.

  Eikichi went to buy ship and lighter tickets. I tried to make conversation, but she only stared silently at the point where the canal ran into the harbor. Now and then she would nod a quick little nod, always before I had finished speaking.

  The lighter pitched violently. The dancer stared fixedly ahead, her lips pressed tight together. As I started up the rope ladder to the ship I looked back. I wanted to say good-by, but I only nodded again. The lighter pulled off. Eikichi waved the hunting cap, and as the town retreated into the distance the girl began to wave something white.