‘I was a little worried when he left his umbrella. It’s nice that he has good weather for his trip.’
She stood for a time with her hand at the open window. Her skirt was askew, higher on one side than the other. Her stance suggested confusion.
She went back to her desk, head bowed.
A boy brought in three or four letters. Eiko put them on Shingo’s desk.
‘Another funeral,’ muttered Shingo. ‘Too many of them. Toriyama this time? At two this afternoon. I wonder what’s happened to that wife of his.’
Used to the way he talked to himself, Eiko only looked at him.
‘I can’t go dancing tonight. There’s a funeral.’ His mouth slightly open, he was staring absently before him. ‘He was persecuted. She really tormented him when she was going through the change of life. She wouldn’t feed him. She really wouldn’t feed him. He would manage to have breakfast at home somehow, but she would get nothing at all ready for him. There would be food for the children, and he would have some of it when she wasn’t watching. He was so afraid of her that he couldn’t go home at night. Every night he would wander around or go to a movie or a variety show or something, and stay away until they were all safe in bed. The children all sided with her and helped persecute him.’
‘I wonder why.’
‘That’s the way it was. The change is a terrible thing.’
Eiko seemed to think that she was being made fun of. ‘Might it have been his fault?’
‘He was important in the government, and then he joined a private firm. They’ve rented a temple for the funeral, so I suppose he did fairly well. He had only good habits when he was in the government.’
‘I suppose he took care of his family?’
‘Naturally.’
‘It’s not easy to understand.’
‘No, I don’t suppose it is. But there are plenty of fine gentlemen in their fifties and sixties who spend their nights wandering around because they’re afraid of their wives.’
Shingo tried to remember Toriyama’s face, but it refused to come to him. They had not met in ten years.
He wondered whether Toriyama had died at home.
4
Shingo thought he might meet university classmates at the funeral. He stood by the temple gate after he had offered incense, but he saw no one he knew.
There was no one his age at the funeral. Perhaps he had come too late.
He looked inside. The line by the door of the main hall was beginning to break up and move away.
The family seemed to be inside.
The widow survived, as Shingo had supposed she would. The thin woman directly in front of the coffin would be she.
She evidently dyed her hair, but had not dyed it in some time. It was white at the roots.
He thought, as he bowed to her, that she had not been able to dye it because Toriyama’s long illness had kept her busy. But then as he turned to light incense before the coffin he felt like muttering to himself that a person could never be sure.
As he had come up the stairs and paid his respects to the family, he had quite forgotten how the dead man had been persecuted; and then as he turned to pay his respects to the dead man, he remembered again. He was astonished at himself.
Making his way out, he turned so as not to have to look at the widow.
He had been startled not by the widow but by his own strange forgetfulness. He felt somehow repelled as he made his way back down the flagstone walk.
And as he walked away, he felt as if forgetfulness and loss lay pressing against the nape of his neck.
There were no longer many people who knew about Toriyama and his wife. Even though a few might survive, the relationship had been lost. It had been left to the wife, to remember as she pleased. There were no third parties to look back upon it intently.
At a gathering of six or seven classmates, including Shingo, there had been no one to give it serious thought when Toriyama’s name came up. They only laughed. The man who mentioned it coated his remarks with derision and exaggeration.
Two of the men at the gathering had died before Toriyama.
It was now possible for Shingo to think that not even Toriyama and his wife had known why the wife had persecuted him, or why he had come to be persecuted.
Toriyama was being taken to the grave, not knowing. For the wife, left behind, it was all in the past. Without Toriyama, it had gone into the past. Probably she too would go to the grave unknowing.
The man who, at the gathering of classmates, had mentioned Toriyama, had as family heirlooms four or five old No masks. Toriyama had come calling, he said, and had stayed on and on when the masks were brought out. Since they could hardly have been of such great interest to someone seeing them for the first time, the man went on, he had probably been killing time until his wife would be safely in bed.
But it seemed to Shingo today that a man in his fifties, the head of a household, walking the streets each night, would be sunk in thoughts so deep they could not be shared.
The photograph at the funeral had evidently been taken on New Year’s Day or some other holiday before Toriyama left the government. He was in formal dress, his face round and tranquil. The photographer had touched away the shadows.
The quiet face in the picture was too young for the widow by the coffin. One was made to think that she was the persecuted one, old before her time.
She was a short woman, and Shingo looked down at her hair and the white at its roots. One shoulder drooped a little, giving an impression of weariness and emaciation.
The sons and daughters and people who seemed to be their spouses were ranged beside the widow, but Shingo did not really look at them.
‘And how are things with you?’ he meant to ask if he met an old acquaintance. He waited at the temple gate.
He thought he would reply, if asked the same question, ‘I’ve managed somehow to come through; but there’s been trouble in my son’s family and my daughter’s.’ And it seemed to him that he meant to tell of his problems.
To make such revelations would be of no help to either of them, nor would there be any thought of intercession. They would but walk to the street-car stop and say good-bye.
That much Shingo wanted to do.
‘Now that Toriyama is dead, nothing is left of his torment.’
‘Are Toriyama and his wife to be called successes if their children’s families are happy?’
‘How much responsibility must a parent take these days for his children’s marriages?’
Such mutterings came to Shingo one after another as the sort of things he would like to say were he to meet an old friend.
Sparrows were chirping away on the roof of the temple gate.
They cut arcs along the eaves, and then cut the same arcs again.
5
Two callers were awaiting him when he got back to his office. He had whiskey brought from the cabinet behind him and poured it into black tea. It was a small help to his memory.
As he received the callers, he remembered the sparrows he had seen in the garden the morning before.
At the foot of the mountain, they were pecking at plumes of pampas grass. Were they after the seeds, or after insects? Then he saw that in what he had taken to be a flock of sparrows there were also buntings. He looked more carefully.
Six or seven birds jumped from plume to plume. The plumes waved violently.
There were three buntings, quieter than the sparrows. They did not have the nervous energy of the sparrows, and they were less given to jumping.
The glow of their wings and the fresh color of their breasts made them seem like birds new this year. The sparrows seemed coated with dust.
Shingo of course preferred the buntings. Their call was unlike that of the sparrows, and there was a similar difference in their motions.
He gazed on for a time, wondering whether the sparrows and buntings would quarrel.
But sparrows called to and flew with sparrows, and buntings flocked to
gether.
When occasionally they mingled, there was no sign of a quarrel.
At his morning ablutions, Shingo looked on with admiration.
It was probably because of the sparrows on the temple gate that the scene had come back to him.
When he had seen the callers out, he turned and said to Eiko: ‘Show me where Shuichi’s woman lives.’
He had been thinking the possibility over as he talked to the callers. Eiko was taken by surprise.
With a gesture as of resistance, she frowned briefly; then she seemed to wilt. Yet she answered coolly, her voice restrained and distant. ‘And what will you do if I take you there?’
‘Nothing that will embarrass you.’
‘Do you mean to see her?’
Shingo had not gone so far as to think of seeing her today.
‘Can’t you wait and have Shuichi take you?’ Still she spoke calmly.
Shingo felt a certain contempt in her voice.
She remained silent even after they were in the cab.
He was unhappy with himself for having imposed upon her, and he felt that he was shaming both himself and his son.
He had imagined himself settling matters while Shuichi was away; but he suspected that he would stop at imagining.
‘I think that if you are to talk to someone it should be the other lady.’
‘The one you say is so pleasant?’
‘Yes. Shall I have her come to the office?’
‘I wonder.’
‘He has much too much to drink at their house, and he gets violent and orders the other lady to sing. She has a very good voice. And then Kinu* starts crying. If it makes so much difference to her, then I imagine she listens to what the other lady says.’
It was a somewhat confused way of expressing herself. Kinu must be Shuichi’s woman.
Shingo had not known that Shuichi had taken to drink.
They got out by the University and turned up a narrow lane.
‘If Shuichi hears about this, I’ll have to leave the office,’ said Eiko softly. ‘I’ll have to ask to be let go.’
A chill passed over Shingo.
Eiko had stopped. ‘You turn by the stone fence there, and it’s the fourth house. You’ll see the name Ikeda on the gate. They’ll see me. I can’t go any farther.’
‘Let’s give it up, then, if it embarrasses you so.’
‘Why, when you’ve come this far? You have to go ahead. It means peace in your family.’
He felt a certain malice in this defiance.
Eiko had called it a stone fence, but it was actually concrete. He turned past a large maple. There was nothing remarkable about the house, small and old, that carried the name Ikeda. The entrance faced north and was dark. The glass doors upstairs were closed. The house was silent.
There was nothing further to catch his eye.
Disconsolately, he walked on.
What sort of life did his son live behind that door? He was not ready to put in an unannounced appearance.
He turned up another street.
Eiko was not where he had left her. Nor was she to be seen on the main street from which they had turned up the lane.
Back at home, he avoided Kikuko’s eye. ‘Shuichi came by the office for a few minutes and then left,’ he said. ‘I’m glad he has good weather.’
Exhausted, he went to bed early.
‘How many days did he take off?’ Yasuko was in the breakfast room.
‘I didn’t ask,’ he answered from bed. ‘But all he has to do is bring Fusako back. I imagine it will be two or three days.’
‘I helped Kikuko change the wadding in the quilts today.’
Fusako would be coming home with two children. Shingo thought how difficult things would be now for Kikuko.
Shuichi should take a separate house, he said to himself. He thought of the house in Hongo.
And he thought of the defiant Eiko. He was with her every day, and he had not until today witnessed such an outburst.
He had never seen Kikuko give vent to her emotions. Yasuko had said that she controlled her jealousy out of consideration for Shingo himself.
He was soon asleep. Awakened by Yasuko’s snoring, he took her nose between his fingers.
‘Do you suppose Fusako will have that kerchief again?’ said Yasuko, as if she had been awake all the time.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’
They had nothing more to say to each other.
A Dream of Islands
1
A stray bitch dropped puppies under the floor of Shingo’s house.
‘Dropped puppies’ is a somewhat brusque way of putting the matter; but for Shingo and his family it was just so: suddenly, there was a litter under the veranda.
‘We didn’t see Teru yesterday, Mother,’ Kikuko had remarked in the kitchen a week or so before, ‘and she isn’t here today either. Do you suppose she’s having puppies?’
‘She hasn’t been around, now that you mention it,’ said Yasuko, with no great show of interest.
Shingo was in the kotatsu* making tea. He had since autumn been in the habit of having the most expensive of teas in the morning, and he made it for himself.
Kikuko had mentioned Teru while she was getting breakfast. Nothing more had been said.
‘Have a cup,’ said Shingo, pouring tea, as Kikuko brought him his breakfast.
‘Thank you very much.’ This had not happened before. Kikuko’s manner was most ceremonious.
There were chrysanthemums on her obi and cloak. ‘And the season for chrysanthemums is past. With all the stir over Fusako, we forgot about your birthday.’
‘The pattern on the obi is “The Four Princes”. You can wear it the year round.’
‘“The Four Princes”?’
‘Orchid and bamboo and plum and chrysanthemum,’ said Kikuko briskly. ‘You must have seen it somewhere. It’s always being used in paintings and on kimonos.’
‘A greedy sort of pattern.’
‘It was delicious,’ said Kikuko, putting down the tea bowl.
‘Who was it that gave us the gyokuro?* In return for a funeral offering, I think. That was when we started drinking it again. We used to drink it all the time, and never bancha.’
Shuichi had already left for the office.
As he put on his shoes in the doorway, Shingo was still trying to remember the name of the friend because of whom they had had the gyokuro. He could have asked Kikuko, but did not. The friend had taken a young girl to a hot-spring resort and died there suddenly.
‘It’s true that we don’t see Teru,’ said Shingo.
‘Not yesterday, and not today either,’ said Kikuko.
Sometimes Teru, hearing Shingo prepare for his departure, would come around to the doorway and follow him out the gate.
He had recently seen Kikuko in the doorway feeling Teru’s belly.
‘All puffy and bloated,’ said Kikuko, frowning. But she went on feeling for the puppies all the same.
‘How many are there?’
Teru looked up quizzically at Kikuko, showing the whites of her eyes. Then she rolled over, belly up.
It was not so swollen as to be repulsive. Toward the tail, where the skin seemed thinner, it was a faint pink. There was dirt around the nipples.
‘Ten of them?’ said Kikuko. Shingo counted with his eyes. The pair farthest forward was small, as if withered.
Teru had a master and a license, but it appeared that the master did not often feed her. She had become a stray. She made the rounds of the kitchens in the neighborhood. She had been spending more time at Shingo’s since Kikuko had taken to giving her leftovers morning and evening, with something special added for Teru herself. Frequently, at night, they heard her barking in the garden. It seemed that she had attached herself to them, but not even Kikuko had come to think her their own.
Teru always went home to have puppies.
Her absence yesterday and today, Kikuko had intended to say, meant that she had again gone ho
me to have puppies.
It seemed sad that she should go home for that purpose.
But this time the puppies had been born under the floor of Shingo’s house. It was ten days or so before anyone noticed.
‘Teru has had her puppies here, Father,’ said Kikuko when Shingo and Shuichi came home from the office.
‘Oh? Where?’
‘Under the maid’s room.’
‘Oh?’
Since they had no maid, the maid’s room, small and narrow, was used as a storeroom.
‘Teru is always going in under the maid’s room. So I looked, and there do seem to be puppies.’
‘How many?’
‘It’s too dark to tell. They’re back in under.’
‘So she had them here.’
‘Mother said that Teru was behaving very strangely, going around and around the tool-shed and pawing at the ground. She was looking for a place to have puppies. I imagine if we had put out straw she would have had them in the shed.’
‘They’ll be one fine problem when they grow up,’ said Shuichi.
Shingo was pleased that Teru had had her puppies here; but the unpleasant thought also came to him of the day when, unable otherwise to dispose of mongrel puppies, they would have to abandon them.
‘I’m told that Teru had puppies here,’ said Yasuko.
‘So I’m told.’
‘I’m told that she had them under the maid’s room. The only room in the house with no one in it. Teru thought things out nicely.’
Still in the kotatsu, Yasuko frowned slightly as she looked up at Shingo.
Shingo too got into the kotatsu. When he had had his cup of tea, he said to Shuichi: ‘What happened to the maid Tanizaki was to get for us?’ He poured a second cup.
‘That’s an ashtray, Father.’
He had poured his second cup into the ashtray.
2
‘I am an aged man, and I have not yet climbed Mount Fuji.’ Shingo was in his office.
They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.
Last night he had dreamed of Matsushima Bay and its islands. That was perhaps why the words had come to him.
The Sound of the Mountain Page 6
