He went from the front door to Shuichi’s room. ‘Tanizaki told you?’ He did not sit down.
‘Ah, yes. That she did. Important news having to do with our household.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought it all that newsworthy. But when you take her dancing next time, buy her a decent summer dress.’
‘You were ashamed of her, were you?’
‘The blouse and skirt didn’t seem to match very well.’
‘Oh, she has clothes enough. It’s your fault for not warning her. Just make your dates in advance, and she’ll come dressed for the occasion.’ He turned away.
Skirting the room where Fusako and the two children were sleeping, Shingo looked up at the clock.
‘Five,’ he muttered, as if to confirm an important fact.
A Blaze of Clouds
1
Although the newspaper had predicted that the two-hundred-tenth day would pass uneventfully that year, there was a typhoon the night before.
Shingo could not remember how many days earlier he had seen the article, and so it could not perhaps have been called a weather forecast. There were of course forecasts and warnings as the day approached.
‘I suppose you’ll be coming home early tonight?’ said Shingo to Shuichi. It was more a suggestion than a query.
Having helped Shingo with his preparations for departing, the girl Eiko hurried to go home herself. Through the transparent white raincoat, her breasts seemed even smaller.
He had taken greater notice of them since, on the night he had gone dancing with her, he had noticed how meager they were.
Eiko came running down the stairs after them and stood with them in the entrance. Because of the downpour, she had apparently not taken time to repowder her face.
‘And where is it you live?’ But Shingo did not finish the question. He must have asked it twenty times already, and he did not remember the answer.
At Kamakura Station passengers stood under the eaves trying to judge the violence of the wind and rain.
As Shingo and Shuichi passed the house with sunflowers at the gate, the theme song from Quatorze Juillet came through the wind and rain.
‘She doesn’t seem very worried,’ said Shuichi.
They knew that it would be Kikuko playing the Lys Gauty record.
When it was over she started it again.
Midway through they heard shutters being closed.
And they heard Kikuko singing to the record as she closed them.
Through the storm and the music, she did not hear the two come in from the gate.
‘My shoes are flooded.’ Shuichi took off his stockings in the doorway.
Shingo went in, wet stockings and all.
‘So you’re back.’ Kikuko came toward them, her face glowing with pleasure.
Shuichi handed her his stockings.
‘Father’s must be wet too,’ said Kikuko. Starting the record again, she went off with their wet clothes.
‘They can hear you all over town, Kikuko,’ said Shuichi as he wound an obi around his waist. ‘You might try to seem a little more worried.’
‘But I was playing it because I was worried. I couldn’t sit still, thinking about the two of you.’
But her frolicsome manner suggested that she found the storm exhilarating.
She was still humming to herself as she went off for Shingo’s tea.
Shuichi, fond of the Parisian chanson, had bought the collection for her.
He knew French. Kikuko did not, but, with lessons in pronunciation, she had become fairly proficient at imitating the record. Not, of course, that she could give, as could Gauty, a sense of having struggled and somehow lived on. All the same, her delicate, hesitant delivery was most pleasing.
Kikuko’s wedding present from her seminary classmates had been a collection of nursery songs from the world over. In the early months of her marriage she had been very fond of it. When she was alone, she would quietly join in the singing; it gave Shingo a sense of warm repose.
A most womanly kind of observance, thought Shingo. And he felt that, listening to the nursery songs, she was sunk in memories of her girlhood.
‘Shall I ask you to play them at my funeral?’ Shingo had once said to her. ‘Then I won’t need any prayers.’ He had not been serious, but then suddenly he was on the edge of tears.
But Kikuko was still childless, and it seemed, since he had not heard it recently, that she had tired of the collection.
As the chanson was nearing its end, it suddenly faded away.
‘The electricity has gone off,’ said Yasuko from the breakfast room.
‘It won’t go back on tonight,’ said Kikuko, switching off the phonograph. ‘Let’s have dinner early, Mother.’
At dinner, the thin candles went out three or four times as the wind blew through cracks in the shutters.
The ocean seemed to be shouting above the wind. It was as if the sea were doing more than the wind to heighten the terror.
2
The scent of the candle that he had just blown out was still in Shingo’s nostrils.
Each time the house would shake, Yasuko would reach for the matchbox on the bed and rattle it, as if to reassure herself and to let Shingo know.
And she would reach for his hand, and gently touch it.
‘Will we be all right?’
‘Of course. And if something does blow over the fence, we can’t very well go out and look.’
‘Will it be all right at Fusako’s?’
‘At Fusako’s?’ He had not thought of Fusako. ‘I imagine so. On a night like this they ought to go off to sleep early like a good married couple, whatever they do on other nights.’
‘How could they sleep?’ Turning away his remark, she fell silent.
They heard Shuichi’s voice and Kikuko’s. There was a soft coaxing quality in Kikuko’s.
‘She has two small children,’ said Yasuko after a time. ‘Things are not as easy as they are with us.’
‘And he has a crippled mother. How is her arthritis?’
‘There’s that too. If they were to run away Aihara would have to carry the old lady on his back.’
‘Can’t she walk?’
‘She can move around, I believe. But in this storm? Gives you the blues, doesn’t it.’
‘Gives you the blues?’ The word ‘blues’ from the sixty-three-year-old Yasuko struck Shingo as comical.
‘It said in the paper that a woman changes her hairstyle any number of times in the course of her life. I liked that.’
‘What was it in?’
It was, according to Yasuko, in the opening words of the eulogy of a painter in the old style, a specialist in portraits of women, to a recently deceased woman painter, also of old-style beauties.
But in the eulogy proper it came out that with the woman artist the case had been the opposite. For a good fifty years, from her twenties to her death at seventy-five, she had worn her hair straight back and held in place by a comb.
Yasuko apparently found it admirable that a woman could make her way through life with her hair pulled straight back; but the thought that through her life a woman wore her hair in many ways also seemed to appeal to her.
Yasuko was in the habit of saving the newspapers she read every day and looking again through several days’ accumulation. One could not be sure how old an article she would suddenly come up with. And since she always listened carefully to the nine-o’clock news commentary as well, she would launch forth on the most improbable topics.
‘And so you mean that Fusako will do her hair all sorts of ways?’
‘She’s a woman, after all. But there won’t be as many changes with her as there were with us who did it the old way. And it would be more fun if she were as good-looking as Kikuko.’
‘You weren’t kind to her when she came home. She was desperate.’
‘Don’t you suppose I was under your influence? You only care about Kikuko.’
‘That’s not true. An invention of you
rs.’
‘It is true. You never liked Fusako – Shuichi was always your favorite. That’s the way you are. Even now that he has another woman you can’t say anything to him. And you really show too much affection for Kikuko. It amounts to cruelty. She can’t give a sign of her jealousy because she’s afraid of what it might do to you. It really gives me the blues. I hope the typhoon blows us all away.’
Shingo was startled. ‘A typhoon,’ he said, thinking of the rising fury of his wife’s observations.
‘Yes, it is a typhoon. And Fusako, trying to have her parents get a divorce for her, at her age, in this day and age. It’s cowardly.’
‘Not really. But has there been talk of a separation?’
‘More important is what I can see right ahead of me, your scowling face when she comes back and you have to take care of her and those two children.’
‘You’ve been outspoken enough yourself.’
‘That is because we have Kikuko, whom Father is so fond of. But Kikuko aside, I have to admit I don’t like it. Sometimes Kikuko says or does something that takes a load off my mind, but when Fusako says something the load only gets heavier. It wasn’t so bad before she got married. I know perfectly well that it’s my own daughter and grandchildren I’m talking about, and I can still feel that way? Frightening, that’s what it is. It’s your influence.’
‘You’re more of a coward than Fusako.’
‘I was joking. You couldn’t see me stick out my tongue.’
‘The old woman is good with her tongue. Remarkably.’
‘But I do feel sorry for her. Don’t you?’
‘We can take her in if you want.’ Then, as if he remembered something: ‘The kerchief she brought with her.’
‘The kerchief?’
‘The kerchief. I’ve seen it before, but can’t remember where. Is it ours?’
‘The big cotton one? She took her mirror in it when she got married. It was a very big mirror.’
‘So that was it.’
‘I didn’t like that bundle. She could perfectly well have put her things in the suitcase she took on her honeymoon.’
‘A suitcase would have been heavy, and she had those two children. And I don’t suppose she cared very much at that point how she looked.’
‘But we have Kikuko to think of. That kerchief – I brought something wrapped in it when we were married.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s even older. It was my sister’s. When she died they sent it home with a dwarf tree tied up in it. A fine maple.’
‘Oh?’ said Shingo again, softly. His head was full of the red glow of that remarkable maple.
Back in the country, his father-in-law’s chief extravagance had been dwarf trees. He gave particular attention, it seemed, to maples. Yasuko’s elder sister was his assistant.
In bed with the storm roaring about him, Shingo could see her among the shelves of dwarf trees.
Probably her father had given her one when she married. Perhaps she had asked for it. And when she died her husband’s family had sent it back, because it was so important to her father, and because they had no one to look after it. Or possibly her father had gone for it.
The maple that now filled Shingo’s head had been on the family altar.
Had her sister died in autumn then? Autumn came early to Shinano.
But would they have sent it back immediately upon her death? That it should have been red and on the altar made everything seem a little too neatly arranged. Was not a nostalgic syndrome working upon his imagination? He had no confidence.
Shingo could not remember the anniversary of his sister-in-law’s death. Yet he did not ask Yasuko.
That was because Yasuko had once said: ‘Father never let me help him with his trees. I suppose it had something to do with my nature, but he felt much closer to my sister. I couldn’t stand up to her myself. I wasn’t just jealous, I was ashamed. She did everything so much better than I did.’
That was the sort of remark she could make when the talk touched upon Shingo’s preference for Shuichi, and she would add: ‘I suppose I was rather like Fusako myself.’
Shingo was surprised to learn that the kerchief was a memento of Yasuko’s sister. He fell silent, now that the sister had come into the conversation.
‘Suppose we go to sleep,’ said Yasuko. ‘They’ll think we old ones have trouble sleeping too. Kikuko laughed away through the storm, and she put on one record after another. I am sorry for her.’
‘There was a contradiction even in those few words.’
‘There always is.’
‘That was for me to say. I go to bed early for a change, and see what happens to me.’
The dwarf maple was still with Shingo.
And in another part of his mind he asked whether, even now that he had been married to Yasuko for more than thirty years, his boyhood yearning for her sister was still with him, an old wound.
He went to sleep an hour or so after Yasuko. A violent crash awoke him.
‘What is it?’
He heard Kikuko groping her way along the veranda.
‘Are you awake? They say a sheet of tin from the shrine blew over onto our roof.’
3
The tin roof of the mikoshi* shed had quite blown away.
The caretaker came early in the morning to collect seven or eight sheets from Shingo’s roof and garden.
The Yokosuka line was running. Shingo left for work.
‘How was it? Could you sleep?’ Shingo asked Eiko as she brought tea.
‘Not a wink.’ Eiko described the wake of the storm as she had seen it from the train window.
‘I don’t suppose we can go dancing today,’ said Shingo after he had had a cigarette or two.
Eiko looked up smiling.
‘The morning after the other time, my hips were stiff. It’s my age.’
She smiled mischievously, from her eyes down toward her nose. ‘Don’t you suppose it’s because of the way you arch your back?’
‘Arch my back? Do I? Do I bend from the hips?’
‘You arch your back and keep your distance. As if it might be against the law to touch me.’
‘That can’t be true.’
‘Oh, but it is.’
‘Was I trying to make myself look good? I wasn’t aware of it.’
‘No?’
‘You young people hang on to each other so when you dance. It’s all in very bad taste.’
‘That’s not kind of you.’
Shingo had thought, the time before, that Eiko had been a little off balance, a little giddy perhaps; and that had been too sanguine a view. The point was rather that he had been stiff and clumsy himself.
‘Well, let’s go again. This time I’ll lean forward and hang on to you.’
She looked down and laughed. ‘I’d be delighted. But not tonight. Not in these clothes.’
‘No, not tonight.’
She was wearing a white blouse and had a white ribbon in her hair.
It was not unusual for her to wear a white blouse. Possibly the white ribbon, a fairly broad one, made it look whiter. Her hair was knotted tightly at the back. She was, one might say, dressed for a storm.
The hairline was fresh and clean, tracing a curve behind her ears. The hair stood out cleanly against the fair skin it normally covered.
She had on a thin wool skirt of navy blue. It was somewhat worn.
When she was so dressed, the smallness of her breasts did not matter.
‘Has Shuichi asked you out again?’
‘No.’
‘What a pity. The young man keeps his distance because you go dancing with his father.’
‘I’ll have to ask him to go out.’
‘And so I needn’t worry?’
‘If you insist on making fun of me, I’ll have to refuse to go dancing with you.’
‘I’m not making fun of you. But I haven’t been able to look you in the eye since you began noticing him.’
She reacted with sile
nce.
‘I suppose you know Shuichi’s woman.’
This time she registered confusion.
‘A dancer?’
There was no reply.
‘Is she older?’
‘Older? She’s older than his wife.’
‘And good-looking?’
‘Yes, very good-looking.’ She stumbled over the words, but continued: ‘She has a husky voice. No, not so much husky as broken, you might say. In two parts. He finds it very erotic.’
‘Well!’
She seemed about to go on. He did not want to listen.
He felt ashamed for himself, and he felt a revulsion, as if the true nature of Shuichi’s woman and of Eiko herself were about to emerge.
He was taken aback by this initial observation, about the eroticism in the woman’s voice. There had been bad taste on Shuichi’s part, of course, but what about Eiko herself?
Noting the displeasure on his face, Eiko fell silent.
That night too Shuichi went home with Shingo. When they had closed the shutters the four of them went out to see a movie version of the Kabuki play Kanjincho.
As Shuichi took off his undershirt, changing to go to the movie, Shingo saw red marks high on his chest and shoulder. Had Kikuko left them there during the storm?
The principal actors in the film, Koshiro and Uzaemon and Kikugoro, were all dead.
Shingo’s feelings were different from those of Kikuko and Shuichi.
‘I wonder how many times we saw Koshiro do Benkei,’ said Yasuko.
‘I forget.’
‘Yes, you always forget.’
The town was bright in the moonlight. Shingo looked up at the sky.
The moon was in a blaze. Or so, just then, it seemed to Shingo.
The clouds around the moon made him think of the flames behind Acala in a painting, or a painting of a fox-spirit. They were coiling, twisted clouds.
But the clouds, and the moon too, were cold and faintly white. Shingo felt autumn come over him.
The moon, high in the east, was almost full. It lay in a blaze of clouds, it was dimmed by them.
There were no other clouds near the blaze in which the moon lay. In a single night after the storm the sky had turned a deep black.
The Sound of the Mountain Page 4
