It is time for my practice, and I must close. Please write.
Sincerely,
FRIEDL HENING
In the envelope was a card from Mrs. Stolz saying that the ring had arrived.
37
YUKIKO was in Tokyo until the end of March. She could have stayed on until her wedding day, but she wanted a leisurely farewell to Sachiko and the Ashiya family. She slipped away toward the end of the month, bringing word from Kunishima that the wedding had been set for April 29, the Emperor’s birthday; that it would be in the Imperial Hotel; and that Viscount Mimaki, too old to make the trip, would probably be represented by his heir and the latter’s wife. Though the Mimakis wanted to avoid ostentation, the reception at least was to be in keeping with their high position. Besides friends and relatives from Tokyo, there would be many guests from the Osaka-Kobe region. It was but natural, then, that all the Makiokas from Osaka, and Tatsuo’s family from Nagoya, and even his sister, Mrs. Sugano, from Ogaki, should also be present. The reception would be a most elaborate one for the times. Mimaki, in Osaka for a visit, invited Sachiko and Yukiko to go with him for a look at his house. It was a fairly new one-storey house some blocks north of the electric line, just the right size for a married couple with one maid. What particularly pleased them was the large garden. After discussing the furniture and decorations, Mimaki described his plans for the honeymoon: they would spend the wedding night in the Imperial Hotel and leave the next morning for Kyoto; they would stay in Kyoto only long enough to pay their respects to his father; and, going on to Nara, they would spend two or three days enjoying spring in Yamato.1 But if Yukiko thought she already knew Yamato well enough, they could choose a place near Tokyo. Sachiko knew Yukiko’s answer without asking: Yukiko had had enough of the east-country; Mimaki should take her to Nara. Near though they were, they knew little of the Yamato ruins and monuments. Yukiko had never seen the wall paintings at the Hōryūji Temple, for instance. Sachiko remembered those bedbugs, and would have recommended a Japanese inn if Mimaki had not made the suggestion first. Mimaki also told them that Kunishima had found him a job in the East Asia Aircraft Corporation, which had a factory near Osaka; that his diploma in aeronautics had been his chief recommendation; that he was a little worried because he had done no work in aeronautics since his graduation; and that he was even more uneasy at having been offered a rather high salary, again thanks to Kunishima. To see his way through these difficult times, however, he meant to hang on. He would go to work as soon as he returned from the honeymoon, and he would study traditional architecture in his spare time and one day re-establish himself as an architect.
When he asked about Koi-san Sachiko started up in alarm. She managed to answer with a show of indifference that Koi-san was not in at the moment, but that she was well. Whether or not he knew the truth, he asked no more. He stayed but half a day. Taeko had come in from Arima with O-haru, and was in a Kobe maternity hospital. Afraid of attracting attention, Sachiko had not gone to the hospital, and had not once telephoned to ask how her sister was. Late one evening a day or so after Taeko entered the hospital, O-haru suddenly appeared. The child was in an abnormal head-up position, she reported. The chief obstetrician said that the position had definitely been normal when Taeko left for Arima. Possibly the automobile trip over the mountains had done the damage. Had he known sooner he might have corrected it, but now, with the birth so near, the child had settled into the pelvic basin and there was nothing to be done. He added, however, that they were not to worry. He would guarantee a safe delivery. There appeared to be little cause for alarm, said O-haru, who returned to the hospital after telling her news. Sachiko had no word through early April, when the child should have been born—first births are often late. Time passed; the cherry blossoms were beginning to fall. With Yukiko to be married in another fortnight or so, they regretted the passing of each busy spring day. They considered the possibility of a special celebration by which to remember these last days, but celebrations were harder and harder to arrange. Caught by the austerity edicts, they were unable to have new wedding kimonos dyed, and finally had to have the Kozuchiya hunt up old ones. That month rice rationing began. Kikugoro was not making his usual spring visit to Osaka, and they had to be satisfied with an even quieter cherry viewing than the year before. But it was an annual rite, and summoning up their determination and taking care to dress as unobtrusively as possibly, they made a one-day trip to Kyoto on Sunday the thirteenth. After a look at the weeping cherries in the Heian Shrine, they rushed out to the western suburbs and went through the form of seeing the cherries there. This year they did without their party at the Gourd Restaurant. Taeko again was missing. The four of them spread a sad little lunch by Ozawa Pond and had a rather solemn drink of cold sake from the lacquer cups, and when the excursion was over they hardly knew what they had seen.
A day later Bell had kittens. Already eleven or twelve years old, Bell had had trouble the year before, and the veterinary had given her injections to induce labor pains. This year again she had been trying all night to have her kittens. Making a nest in a downstairs closet, Sachiko called the veterinary. When, with great difficulty, a head appeared, Yukiko and Sachiko took turns tugging at it. They said nothing, but they were doing their best for Bell to bring good luck to Taeko. From time to time Etsuko, pretending to be on her way to the bathroom, would peer in at them. Go away, they would say; it was no place for a child. By about four in the morning they had succeeded in delivering three kittens. They washed their bloody hands with alcohol and changed from their smelly kimonos, and just as they were ready for bed the telephone rang. Sachiko rushed for it in alarm. The call was from O-haru. What had happened? Was it all over? Not yet, said O-haru. It seemed to be an extremely difficult birth, and Taeko had been in labor for something like twenty hours already. The chief obstetrician had said that the pains were too light and was giving injections, but, perhaps because he was out of German medicine and had to use Japanese instead, the results were unsatisfactory. Koi-san only writhed and groaned. She had eaten nothing since the evening before, and she was vomiting a strange substance, dark and bilious. She knew they could not save her, she would say. This time she was going to die. Though the doctor was reassuring, the nurse was worried about Taeko’s heart. Even to the layman it was obvious that a crisis was approaching, and O-haru had determined to telephone in spite of Sachiko’s injunctions. The situation was not entirely clear to Sachiko. She concluded nonetheless that Koi-san needed German medicine, and she was sure there would be a way to find it. Every hospital had a supply hidden away for very special patients. If she were to plead with the chief obstetrician … Yukiko was beside her, urging her to go to the hospital. This was no time to worry about gossip. Teinosuke, who had gotten up, agreed with Yukiko. Since they had assured Miyoshi that they would be responsible for Taeko and the child, they had to do something. He bundled Sachiko off to the hospital and set about notifying Miyoshi.
The head obstetrician was said to be well trained and thoroughly conscientious. It was Sachiko who had recommended him to her sister, but Sachiko did not know him personally. She took along certain medicines, prontosil and betaxin and coramine and the like, that were by then becoming rare. Miyoshi was already at the hospital. It was good of her to come, said Taeko, her eyes filling with tears. The two sisters had not seen each other in six months, not since the autumn before. She hardly thought she would pull through this time—Taeko was weeping quite openly, and she seemed to be in great pain. From time to time she vomitted an indescribable substance, horribly thick and muddy. Miyoshi had been told by the nurse that poisons from the child were coming out through the mother’s mouth. To Sachiko it did look very much like a child’s first stool or like the offal one finds in a crab shell.
Sachiko immediately went to see the chief obstetrician. Presenting Teinosuke’s card and bringing out her medicine, she assaulted him in a carefully shrill voice. She had finally gathered this medicine, but she had been unable to find the p
articular German medicine they needed. She wanted him to search through the whole of Kobe for it, whatever the price. Somewhere, someone … The good-natured doctor soon surrendered. They had one injection left, literally one injection, he said, bringing the medicine out with great reluctance. Strong labor pangs set in not five minutes after the injection, and Sachiko had a demonstration of the relative merits of German and Japanese medicine. Taeko was taken to the delivery room. Sachiko, Miyoshi, and O-haru, on a bench outside, heard her moan once or twice. The doctor ran to the surgery room with the child in his hands. From time to time during the next half hour they heard a determined slapping, but that first cry failed to come.
Taeko was taken back to her room, and the three of them sat tensely around the bed. They could still hear the slapping, and they could imagine the doctor at work. After a time the nurse came in. It was a great pity—the child had been alive, and had died at the moment of birth. They had done everything possible to revive it—they had even given an injection of the German medicine Sachiko had brought—and all to no avail. The doctor would tell them the details. He wanted to dress the child in the clothes the mother had made, said the nurse, taking a dress Taeko had brought from Arima. Almost immediately the doctor came in with the dead child. He had no excuses to offer. It had been entirely his fault. Since the position of the child was abnormal, he had pulled at the feet and—how could it have happened?—his hand had slipped, and the child was strangled. He had promised them a safe delivery, and now to have blundered. He had no excuses, he said again, wiping the sweat from his forehead. Sachiko could not feel angry at a doctor who confessed his responsibility and went on with apologies he could as well have avoided. He talked on, and showed them the child. A girl, he said. And what a pretty girl. He had delivered many children, but he could say with no exaggeration that he had never seen a sweeter, prettier little girl. It made him sad to think what a beauty she would have become. The hair was brushed to a gloss, and the child had on the dress the nurse had taken, and almost anyone would have cried out in sorrow at the rich, black hair, the fair skin, the cheeks with a rosy flush still on them. The three took it up by turns, and suddenly Taeko was weeping bitterly, and the others with her, Sachiko and Miyoshi and O-haru. Just like a doll, said Sachiko. But as she looked at the clear, waxen skin, almost weirdly beautiful, she wondered if the child did not bear the curses of Okubata and Itakura.
Taeko left the hospital a week later. Teinosuke said that he had no objections provided she stayed out of sight for a time, and she immediately went to live with Miyoshi in second-floor rooms they had rented in Kobe. She came quietly on the evening of the twenty-fifth to take her leave of the Ashiya family and of Yukiko, and to gather her things. The room that had once been hers was gay with Yukiko’s trousseau. The alcove was jammed with presents from Osaka relatives and acquaintances. No one would have dreamed that Taeko would be the first of the two sisters to have her own home. After rummaging through the belongings she had left with Sachiko, she packed what she would need, talked to the family for a half hour or so, and was off to Kobe.
O-haru returned to Ashiya when Taeko left the hospital. It appeared that her family had found her a prospective husband. She would like two or three days off, she said, after Miss Yukiko was married.
Thus the future was settled. At the thought of how still the house would be, Sachiko felt like a mother who had just seen her daughter married. She went about sunk in thought, and Yukiko, once it had been decided that she and Teinosuke and Sachiko would take the night train to Tokyo on the twenty-sixth, had even more regrets than her sister at the passing of each day. Her stomach had for some time been upset, and even after repeated doses of wakamatsu and arsilin, she was troubled with diarrhea on the twenty-sixth. The wig they had ordered in Osaka arrived on schedule that morning. Yukiko put it in the alcove after trying it on, and Etsuko, back from school, promptly tried it on too. “See what a small head Yukiko has,” she said, going down to entertain the maids in the kitchen. The wedding kimonos arrived the same day. Yukiko looked at them and sighed—if only they were not for her wedding. Sachiko remembered how glum she had been when she was married herself. Her sisters had asked for an explanation, and she had retorted with a verse:
“On clothes I’ve wasted
Another good day.
Weddings, I find,
Are not always gay.”
Yukiko’s diarrhea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo.
1 The present Nara Prefecture. Yamato was the center of Japanese culture until the late eighth century.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Contents
Copyright
Also available by John Grisham
The Principal Characters
BOOK I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
BOOK II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
BOOK III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Cha
pter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
The Makioka Sisters Page 61
