“There you go again,” Kuno said sternly. “I never said anything about going off onto some side street. I wasn’t talking about that sort of slapdash ‘perspective’ at all.”
Ineko’s mother nodded. “I understand that. I’m grateful for what you’ve said. But people are creatures of inventive self-justification, of self-affirmation. I don’t believe animals do that sort of thing. They don’t have language, after all. Or maybe they do, maybe animals are pure bundles of self-affirmation, but it’s beautiful for them, because it’s instinctual, and because they lack the words for justifying themselves.”
“You’re not making any effort to understand what I said. Would understanding me somehow violate your conscience? I’m not trying to offer you an excuse, a way out. I’m not trying to help you out by thinking through destiny inside out.”
“I know that. Didn’t I just say I took comfort in your perspective?”
Kuno walked two or three steps, not exactly watching Ineko’s mother, but keeping silent in a way that suggested he was conscious of her.
“I haven’t heard Ineko’s bell in a while,” he said. “Have you?”
“Oh? I guess not.” The mother looked back at the hill where the Ikuta Clinic stood.
Kuno turned back, too. “She must have stopped ringing it.”
“You think so?”
“Maybe she was tired.”
“Or the nurse made her stop. I’m sure the townspeople would be annoyed if they kept ringing the bell for ages when it’s only three o’clock.”
The trees on the low hill, surrounding the clinic and Jōkōji, were dense evergreens, mostly broadleaves, with the deep green, almost black hue typical of warmer regions. The richness of their coloring made it seem as if they could have been growing there untended for a millennium, as if the hill were perhaps an ancient imperial burial mound. The grave-like mood came from the stillness of the place, of course; it wasn’t at all dark. The sky above the trees looked wintry in some subtle way, shaded by the shortness of the days. A flock of six or seven birds rose up at an angle from behind the trees, from left to right, and began flying toward town. The mother found it odd to see them approaching in silence, but she didn’t mention it to Kuno.
It was after three now, in winter, and dusk was approaching. How did the mad behave at sundown? Did they become wilder? The mother didn’t know, but the thought worried her. She had only just left her daughter at the clinic.
“You know, Mother,” Kuno said, “I’ve said the same thing to Ineko, too, of course, once before. And with more passion than I said it just now. I said that her riding gave her father joy, that it made him happy, that it was the source of his life.”
“What did Ineko say?”
“And she helped him, a defeated solider, hang on to his life. I’m sure you can see where this is going, though. She was very upset that I had described her father as defeated.”
“Yes, she would be. That’s the kind of person she is.”
“She was very sharp with me. You didn’t see my father fall from the cliff and die, Mr. Kuno, she said. I told her the image had been imprinted on my heart, burned there, ever since she’d told me the story, because that was the core of a tragedy in the life of the woman I loved. Maybe I could actually see it more clearly, I said, because she had been too panicked to look, whereas I was able to call on deep reserves of sympathy to imagine the scene. She didn’t accept that, though. She thought it was nonsense.”
The flock of birds flew overhead on its way to the shore, so low that Kuno and Ineko’s mother could hear the beating of their wings. Neither looked up, however.
“I’ve never known what to believe,” the mother said. “When you hear her tell the story, it seems so strange that she could have seen it all so clearly. I almost think it must have been a hallucination that came out of her terror. I can’t say how many times I’ve asked her about it. Maybe you saw it in a dream? You had a nightmare, and then convinced yourself that that was reality? Because the truth is she fainted, you know, the moment Kizaki fell over the cliff.”
Ineko had lost consciousness while she was still riding her horse. She was such a practiced rider that even then she didn’t tumble off. She kept a firm grip on the reins. The two horses had been galloping full speed, side by side, but when it happened Ineko’s slowed — not because she had reined it in, but because the horse itself sensed that it should. If Ineko hadn’t fainted, she might well have thrown herself off the cliff after her father.
Ineko hadn’t witnessed the moment when her father’s horse, galloping on the side of the road nearer the ocean, slipped.
By the time she screamed and closed her eyes, her father and his horse were already plummeting from that high cliff into the ocean. Her father was clinging with both arms to his horse’s neck. The horse writhed, pumping its feet in the air. The cliff’s wall was sheer but rough, studded with boulders, and midway down a giant shelf of rock jutted out into the air. Ineko couldn’t hear the crash of the bodies hitting the rock, of course, but she felt it — the pain blasting into her body as man and horse were separated. The horse dropped first, stomach turned to the sky, his neck curling like a bow toward his belly. The man, her father, was falling lengthwise and twisted so that his head faced down, and just then his prosthetic leg parted from his torso. Ineko felt it happening. Most likely it had been detached when his body hit the rock shelf. Either way, when she looked back on her feelings at that terrible moment — it wasn’t that she couldn’t explain it, that wasn’t the point — the leg filled her with horror. Her father’s left leg was sticking straight out. Inside his riding breeches, it had already parted from the human — it was death.
A splash rose high from the azure ocean. The human sank. The horse flailed in the water for a moment, struggling to swim, then stopped moving. Ineko fainted.
That was how Ineko’s father had died, as Ineko told the story. There was ample room to question, as the mother did, whether Ineko had actually seen these things, but Ineko believed she had. Ineko had no idea why the horse had floated when it hit the water, while the human disappeared from view. She couldn’t even be sure her father had sunk for good. He might have gone under only to bob up again — she wouldn’t have seen him, she was unconscious by then.
“It’s only to be expected that a young woman would faint after such a terrible shock, but if fainting kept her alive, then perhaps you could say it was fate, too, stepping in to help. That moment of unconsciousness,” Kuno said. “Divine protection, as they say.”
“Divine protection?” Ineko’s mother repeated. “That sounds like something people used to say all the time, but don’t anymore. In any event, you’re talking about God, I assume? You don’t strike me, Mr. Kuno, as someone likely believe in God.”
“Call it fate, then.”
“You believe in fate?”
“Sometimes events compel you to see them in those terms, whether or not you believe. I don’t deny that it’s trite and banal to marvel at fate after a brush with something awful when you don’t generally give it a second thought, but still, I can’t help wondering whether Ineko would even be alive today if she hadn’t lost consciousness.”
“Her father’s fate was much worse, going over that cliff.” Once again, the mother’s gaze clouded. “If Ineko hadn’t actually fainted, if she had just gone into an indiscriminate frenzy, becoming so distraught that she plunged off the cliff with her horse — even then her death would have seemed like a side effect, or maybe an aftereffect, of her father’s fate.”
“How can you say that?” Kuno snapped, so vehemently Ineko’s mother was taken aback. “I wasn’t talking about her father. I’m not talking about anyone who isn’t here, who isn’t part of this life we’re living. I never met Ineko’s father, never talked to him. You know that. When it occurred to me that Ineko’s riding as a girl was a comfort to her father, that it might have helped him survive th
e defeat, and when I said as much to Ineko and you, I was thinking of the two of you, of course — of the living. I didn’t say it for her father, who’s dead anyway.”
“Yes, I know that. Didn’t I thank you earlier, Mr. Kuno, for showing us a different way to look at things? It’s a matter of perspective, I said. You remember.”
“I’m not happy with that. As I said before, I wasn’t trying to do you a favor by finding some way to turn the meaning of her father’s death, his fate, inside out — to open a patch of light in the mass of clouds that hangs over those he left behind,” Mr. Kuno continued. “I’m sure you’d agree, wouldn’t you, that when someone dies, the family and friends usually try to hide their regret and self-recrimination, their pangs of conscience, behind a mask of grief and loss that only they, the living, can wear? The living have no power over death, be it from sickness or accident. Murder is the exception, of course. But even then, it seems to me there must be something in the victim’s fate that calls it on, something more than just the broken destiny of the killer, since murder isn’t in our nature, or in our instincts. I may be young, but I’ve seen a fair number of people die, people I was close to, and as a result of that, I suppose, I’ve come to think there’s something insolent in mourning the dead, tying death to oneself in that way. However lovingly you tend to someone, if he’s going to die, he dies. If that’s his fate, if the god of death has put its hand on him, then nothing he can do, nothing anyone who loves him can do, no matter how deep their love may be, will save him. Perhaps its true that ‘destiny’ and ‘the god of death’ and so on are just words primitive people used to name their fears and their sense of wonderment, but once a word is created, all sorts of things and stories emerge to give it form. The god of death assumes various guises and figures in any number of stories — and people didn’t think of those as visions or dreams. In their eyes, the god of death was real. You know, every once in a while, I wonder how the ancients, people who lived before the word fate was born, before the characters we use to write it existed, how they felt about these things — man’s destiny, death. I have studied these things very little, so it’s just me thinking, musing. Not that possessing that sort of knowledge or doing that research would actually enable anyone living in a later age to fathom the hearts of the ancients.” Kuno paused. “It’s shallow and pointless, Mother, I know. All I’m trying to say is that I don’t think you and Ineko will go on living in the shadow of Kizaki’s death forever, and that I hope one day you’ll make your way out into the sun, into the light of life. You were your husband’s wife and Ineko was her father’s daughter, it’s true, but when he went over that cliff, that was his fate and his alone. I genuinely believe that.”
“But Ineko was there with him, Mr. Kuno. She witnessed it, as his daughter. Surely you’ll agree there’s no way she can escape from that.”
“Yes,” Kuno said clearly, “but her father fell and died — and she fainted and lived.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“It happens all the time with fatal accidents. Two soldiers are crouching together when one gets hit by a bullet and dies. Someone is killed in a car crash, and the person in the next seat goes home without a scratch. Those are just some easy examples. You can say the same thing about sickness, too — say you have a husband and wife who have been married for forty years, and he’s diagnosed with cancer. She can’t get cancer with him, even if she wants to.”
A smile drifted across the mother’s face. “Well, this isn’t like that, is it? If Ineko had kept an eye on the ground, watching where her father’s horse was going, he wouldn’t have fallen off the cliff — her inattention killed him. That’s how she sees it, and that’s why she has been suffering all this time. The notion that she would have flung herself into the ocean after him if she hadn’t fainted seems a bit fantastic — just the kind of idea that might occur to a girl in the frenzy of such a moment.”
“If Ineko had jumped that day, I would never have met her. She would never have come into my life.” Kuno was silent for a moment. “And what about you, Mother? If they had both died that day. The life you have lived from then until this day.”
“Let’s not talk about Kizaki’s death anymore, Mr. Kuno.”
“I just think you and Ineko are too hung up on his death, after all this time. It’s fine to miss him, to feel sad, but nursing the sort of regret you do, punishing yourselves for what happened — it’s disrespectful to the gods of destiny. It’s like you’ve slammed the gate on your lives, shut yourself up in the dark. That’s why I said those things. I just went on too long.”
“No. You’re welcome to go on and on about it as much as you like. After all, though his death certainly pained me, it left a much deeper wound in Ineko’s heart.” The mother looked at Kuno, not quite directly and not quite with upturned eyes, but in a manner that was somehow both simultaneously. “I’ve been wanting to ask you for some time now, Mr. Kuno — do you think Ineko’s somagnosia is related to her witnessing her father’s death? Could that be what caused it? Have you ever noticed anything along those lines, or had some reason to wonder? When she told you how he died, for instance, or on some other occasion?”
“It’s hard to say.” Kuno cocked his head, thinking. His face took on a look of just barely concealed distress. “No, I don’t think it’s that. Of course, psychology isn’t my field.”
“To tell the truth, I don’t believe there’s any causal relationship between Ineko’s father’s death and this sickness, either, and I’d prefer to think there isn’t. I only asked because you mentioned it. His death, I mean.”
“That’s not true — you’re the one who brought it up. And I only talked like that to try and release you from the dark weight of that story. I didn’t say anything about the death itself.”
“I know,” the mother said simply. “Please, let’s stop talking about it.”
“I agree. You know, I might have said something along those lines, about her somagnosia having something to do with her father’s accident. But I don’t really think it does. I just wondered whether, somewhere in all that, there might be a cure for her disease. It’s odd, isn’t it? Even though I don’t believe the first misfortune triggered the second. Even though I don’t think the two are related.”
“Somehow people tend to feel that all misfortunes are connected.”
“Do they? I don’t see it that way,” Kuno said. “But if you do, Mother, if you genuinely do, then wasn’t putting Ineko in the madhouse a mistake? Doesn’t it just add another block to the pile of misfortune, thread another bead on the rosary?”
“I wonder. I consider Ineko very fortunate to have been loved by a man like you, and I think she’s lucky we were able to find a place like the Ikuta Clinic.”
“Nice as the clinic may be, I’d discharge her tomorrow if I could,” Kuno said forcefully. “Mother, please, go back with me tomorrow morning. We can stay in Ikuta tonight.”
“You have trouble letting go, don’t you, Mr. Kuno. More than me, though I’m a woman, and her mother,” Ineko’s mother said. “All right, though, I’m willing to spend the night in town and go up in the morning to see how she’s doing. But you agreed at the beginning that we should put her in the clinic, so this business about taking her out . . . no.”
“I never wanted to put her in an asylum. You know that. I asked you for her hand.”
“To let you marry my mad daughter? My somagnosic Ineko?”
“Sometimes she can’t see people’s bodies. So what? Does something like that even count as a mental illness?” Kuno asked. Then, blushing, and lowering his voice as if it embarrassed him to go on: “Doesn’t that happen with women occasionally, that they stop seeing the person they’re with at the most intense moment of their loving? I’m too much of a neophyte, I lack both the experience and the knowledge to say such a thing. You’ve lived your whole life as a woman, though.”
“My husband
was a soldier, Mr. Kuno, blunt and unpolished,” the mother replied. “I may never have known the sort of womanly happiness to which you refer.”
“I don’t think that’s relevant, being a solider or not. Besides, what about other women? Don’t you hear about these things from them?”
“The women I associate with tend to be quite proper, I’m afraid. I’ve never had the sort of friends who would openly discuss such secretive . . . well, secrets,” the mother said. “And in any event — I don’t mean to suggest you’re giving yourself too much credit, though I know that’s how this will sound — you weren’t the first to experience Ineko’s somagnosia. If you’d been the only one, we wouldn’t have had to commit her. Married couples can accommodate all kinds of peculiar things. Sooner or later, it seems, something unusual will crop up between even the most ordinary of men and women. And that’s all right, whatever it may be, as long as they themselves don’t mind. If it becomes intolerable, there’s always the option of divorce. I suppose if you’re going to have a secret, though, it’s best if it’s unique, not like the secrets other couples share. At any rate, Ineko’s troubles went beyond that, as you know.”
Kuno was silent. He was reflecting on his own responsibility for Ineko’s disease.
“We’ll do as you suggest — stay in Ikuta tonight, then go back to the clinic tomorrow,” the mother said. “I’m sure we’ll be able to get a room someplace.”
Dandelions Page 4
