At the time, it must have been first nature to a military man like Ineko’s father to carve that “Army Lieutenant Colonel” alongside his name in the bark of the camphor tree, even when he was lost to himself. As a commissioned officer who had graduated from the Military Academy and then from the Army Staff School, then climbed to the rank of colonel, Kizaki couldn’t simply shed his rank on the day of the defeat. His attachment to that title had only been strengthened by the sense of inferiority he felt as a disabled officer with a fake leg and an assignment in the army that made it unclear whether or not he had really returned to active duty.
Now, more than a decade after the defeat, and in the wake of his death, it did indeed inspire a certain “loneliness” in his daughter and his wife to think of Kizaki carving his rank into that great tree. It was “lonely,” too, to imagine the bitter taste Kizaki must have gotten in his mouth, years later, whenever he cast his thoughts back to all that he had done.
Ineko and her mother had both tried, all this time, to avoid bringing up either story: how Kizaki had vanished into the mountains after the defeat, or how he and his horse had tumbled from the cliff into the sea and died. Ineko and her mother of course had been thinking of these things when their conversation turned to the topic of loneliness, yet even now a substantial gap, a sizeable body of missing information, separated Ineko’s use of the word “lonely” from her mother’s. Still, they understood each other. Ineko’s words had caught her mother off guard, and Ineko felt that her mother’s had come from nowhere, but neither — feeling the other’s words seep into her own individual loneliness — had been inclined to press. They could perhaps have spoken at greater length about how appropriate their loneliness was, in the context of the world around them, but they refrained even from this. Echoing her mother, Ineko settled into an acknowledgment that they lived with a suitable amount of loneliness, and that it was better that way.
“You know, Ineko,” her mother said, her tone more formal than before. “I don’t see any link between your blindness to the ping-pong ball and your father’s inability to remember his wandering in the mountains. I don’t think there’s anything there, really — nothing hereditary. I just happened to think of your father, that’s all. That’s why I mentioned him.”
“Oh?” Ineko seemed distracted, as if her mind were elsewhere and she hadn’t really heard her mother’s somewhat defensive comment.
Ineko’s mother, meanwhile, had remembered something altogether different — something so peculiar it made her blush. She had heard it from the widow of a commissioned officer who had died in the war. A friend had invited the woman to a beauty parlor where men did all the work — there was even a male manicurist. It was amazing, she said, how much it helped her forget her stress. Ineko’s mother had no idea why she had thought of that now.
Ineko herself was calling up an image of the young woman who had stumbled across her father in the mountains and saved him, kept him alive. Ineko no longer believed in her, that girl her mother had described as a sprite in the service of a god. Something in her mother’s tone had suggested that she, too, had her doubts. But when she was younger, Ineko had been sure she existed. That young woman was constantly before her, vividly present. She inhabited Ineko. And Ineko herself was that young woman. Ineko felt that way from the time she was a child until yesterday. And still, having that image of the young woman in her mind’s eye felt quite natural, even now that she had stopped believing.
Earlier, when Ineko had suggested in a loud and aggressive tone that she and her mother go search for the girl in Kyūshū, she had not intended any sarcasm toward her parents, or meant to ridicule them. She had spoken in earnest. True, she had come to believe the young woman was an illusion, perhaps a fiction her father had invented, but that didn’t change the fact that that young woman had lived inside Ineko throughout her girlhood, and when the notion of setting out to find that young woman first occurred to Ineko, and when she proposed it to her mother, the young woman had in fact become somewhat more real. Oddly, underlying that strengthened sense of her reality was at the same time an increased anxiety about the possibility that she was a fiction. Her mother’s evident unwillingness to accompany her up into the mountains of Kyūshū to hunt for the young woman and the camphor tree left Ineko feeling dissatisfied, it was true, but also relieved.
It had been quite a while since they last talked about Ineko’s father’s disappearance into the mountains following Japan’s surrender, about “that day,” so her mother had recounted the story as if she had never told it before; but for Ineko it was already a vivid memory — in fact, her first memory. In her innocence, Ineko had never thought to question the notion of a heavenly being, a maiden or a sprite who served a god, but there was no way to know exactly when the young woman had become Ineko, had come to inhabit her. Most likely it was soon after she first heard the story.
Little Ineko and the young woman hadn’t been the same age, of course. Even as a small child, Ineko was aware of that. And so in her mind the young woman was simultaneously a little girl and a young woman. She wore the same clothes most women did at the time, a dark blue top with splashes of white paired with women’s work pants, but the white splashes were special — each formed a cross. Those white crosses were clearer in Ineko’s mind than any of the young woman’s other attributes. Her face was Ineko’s own, of course, but she was somewhat too mysterious and idealized to be described as identical, and from one day to the next her features could be more or less well defined, and sometimes underwent subtle changes.
That young woman met her unfortunate end, in Ineko’s mind, when Ineko’s father died. Ineko felt she herself had killed her father, because they had been riding together, side by side, when he fell from the cliff. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t persuade herself that she was blameless. It was inevitable that the young woman would vanish from within her. That young woman had given Ineko’s father his life; Ineko had killed him. It would be an exaggeration to say that the starkness of that opposition had led Ineko to deny the woman’s existence, but it made it very painful to call her image to mind. In any event, Ineko was too distraught after her father’s death to give her any thought.
Before long, though, the young woman was resurrected in Ineko’s heart, and she began to find peace in her reappearance — more so, even, than in any hopes of her dead father’s return. The young woman was just an illusion, after all, a comforting dream. She had never inspired in Ineko any terrible pangs of guilt. It was easy to say that the young woman had rescued her father, and that Ineko herself had killed him, but was any of this really true? Perhaps the young woman hadn’t saved her father. Perhaps Ineko hadn’t killed him. Either way, since her father’s death the notion that that young woman had saved him was attended by a certain lonely nostalgia distinct from whatever it was she had felt before he died.
“It’s entirely different,” Ineko’s mother said, pressing the point home. “His wandering in the mountains and your getting dizzy during the ping-pong game.”
“It never occurred to me to compare them,” Ineko replied. “You’re the one who brought all that up, as if one thing reminded you of the other.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Ineko’s mother mumbled. “At any rate, the ball was only gone for a moment, right?”
“And only the ball was gone. I could still see everything else.”
“It only seemed that way to you. You couldn’t see anything else, either — your eyes were on the ball, and it all happened so suddenly . . . isn’t it kind of hard to say whether or not you could see anything else?”
“Not at all. I couldn’t see the ball, but I returned it.”
“But that’s . . .”
“It’s not like that other time, Mother.”
“What other time?”
“When I fainted while I was riding, and I couldn’t see anything at all. Just for a moment, of course.” Ineko was talking about her father�
��s accident.
“That . . .” Ineko’s mother said, avoiding the topic. “You can’t compare that to your ping-pong game, you really can’t.”
“No. But I remember it.”
“You remembered a lot,” Ineko’s mother said, as if it were a joke. “Anyway, how are you feeling? There’s more color in your face now than before, when you first got back.”
“Is there? I haven’t been feeling bad. Not since I got home.”
“You certainly were pale.”
“I was scared, that’s all.”
Ineko kept insisting she had stopped seeing the ping-pong ball, and her tone left no doubt that she believed this is what had happened. But her mother couldn’t accept that. Ineko had just been so focused on the ball that it was the only thing that seemed to have vanished. There was nothing strange in that. Ineko’s refusal to listen when her mother suggested this conveyed a sense of the terror she had felt during the few moments when she couldn’t see the ball. You couldn’t make light of something like that; but then what could you make of it? Maybe Ineko felt that the terror that had come over her then couldn’t be shared. Suspecting that this might be the case, Ineko’s mother gazed at Ineko — less at her face than at her form. Her daughter’s shoulders and knees seemed less tense than before.
“Lie down for a bit, take it easy,” Ineko’s mother said. “I’ll get dinner ready.”
“I can’t eat,” Ineko said. “I can’t eat.” By the time she’d said that, she was covering her mouth, fighting a sudden urge to vomit. Her throat tightened; her eyes grew red and moist.
The mother hurriedly rubbed Ineko’s back. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. It’s okay.” She was breathing the way people do at such times. “I don’t know what came over me, just at the mention of dinner.”
“You’re exhausted. You should get some rest.”
“It’s okay.” Ineko’s mother was still massaging Ineko’s back; now Ineko took her mother’s hand in hers and brought it around to her chest. “I feel calmer looking at the camellias. I can see them just fine, all those flowers, and they don’t seem to be swaying, or moving around.”
“Yes?” Ineko’s mother said, taken aback at those last words, but she decided not to ask what Ineko meant.
She saw the flowers blooming just as they were, neither swaying nor moving. That was only natural, so why would she bother to say it? Did the flowers’ stillness comfort Ineko, help her feel at peace in the state she was in now?
Ineko’s mother, too, turned and gazed out at the camellias. The flowers were absolutely still. They weren’t swaying, no breeze was blowing. And of course flowers don’t move around — they never leave the place where they bloom. From the time a flower blossoms to the time it drops, it remains in the same position on the same branch. Thinking this made them seem even more motionless than before. The vivid red flowers seemed detached from their surroundings, brilliant spots hovering in midair, perhaps because the green of the leaves was so deep, even heavy; but as one stared at the flowers’ neatly delineated redness, one began to feel a sense of pity for them, emerging from the impression of loveliness they first conveyed. Ineko’s mother couldn’t remember ever having pitied a flower before. Perhaps she did when she was little, but if she had she couldn’t remember. Ineko, though, had sometimes felt sorry for flowers when she was little, they had noticed that, and evidently her heart still moved in that way. Still, Ineko’s mother had trouble understanding the fear that had prompted Ineko’s unthinking comment, since fear was surely what it was, that the flowers didn’t look as if they were swaying, or moving. The four or five camellias in the garden were already beginning to take on the colors of a late-autumn dusk.
Ineko’s mother often remembered that day, back when Ineko was in her second year of high school. It was the first time Ineko had ever shared with her mother the terror of being unable to see something. Over time, the doubts she had harbored about Ineko’s explanation had faded, until she came to accept that it had indeed happened precisely as Ineko said — that she had seen everything else, but not the ball. Presumably there were times during any ping-pong match when the ball moved faster than the eye could follow, but that wasn’t relevant in this case: the ball she didn’t see should have been visible.
“Did Ineko ever tell you about the time she stopped seeing a ping-pong ball during a game?” Ineko’s mother asked Kuno.
“Ping pong?” Kuno looked confused. “No, she never said anything about ping-pong.”
“Ah.” The mother fell silent. She stared at a sliding door that led out into the hall. The rectangles of paper didn’t look all that old, but the paper seemed thin and of inferior quality. They hadn’t been stretched tight enough, either. These paper-paneled doors were exactly what you would expect to find in a run-down country town.
“What about ping-pong?” Kuno asked. “Does Ineko play?”
“She used to, way back when.”
“When was that?”
“Until her second year of high school.”
“That’s not so long ago,” Kuno said. He almost smiled, but didn’t. “She’s never mentioned ping-pong.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Why wouldn’t she? Though in fact, she seems to have an aversion to talking about the past. She almost never does. That’s struck me before, and I’ve wondered about it. Sharing memories is one of the great joys of being in love, don’t you think?”
“You two are hardly old enough to be sharing memories.”
“That’s not true. Everyone has memories, lots of them — from when they were babies, or from their childhood, things that were enjoyable or sad, funny things, blunders. Everyone has an endless supply. And however trivial it may be, however minor, when Ineko tells me a story like that I listen in a way no one else ever will. The story enters me as love. If she tells me about some silly incident from when she was little, it’s like a lullaby. It doesn’t have to be anything big, any sort of confession — when you’re in love, you get used to sharing even the most ordinary memories, and in the most casual way. Don’t you think that’s true?”
“I guess,” Ineko’s mother murmured, so quietly it wasn’t even a reply.
“I’m fascinated to learn even the tiniest, most inconsequential things about Ineko before I knew her.” Kuno looked at Ineko’s mother. “And now here we are, Mother, you and I, unexpectedly spending the night together at this inn.”
“It certainly is unexpected, isn’t it?”
“We won’t be able to sleep tonight — not after leaving Ineko in that awful clinic. If we can’t sleep anyway, I wouldn’t mind staying up all night hearing new stories about Ineko.”
“That’s kind of you.”
Suddenly, Ineko’s mother got up, opened the sliding door, and stepped into the hall.
“What is it?” Kuno called.
“Oh, nothing. When I went into the hall earlier I opened the curtain to look at the ocean. I thought I might have forgotten to close it, that’s all.”
The curtain was closed. Ineko’s mother pulled it back a bit and stood facing the water.
“You see something?” Kuno asked, still sitting in the room.
“Nothing. The stars. Come see for yourself.”
Kuno got up and walked over. “Lots of stars. The ocean is so calm,” he said dully.
“Nothing in this view would tell us where we are,” Ineko’s mother said. “There seems to be nothing out there but the dark night.”
“And yet we’ll probably never forget this night, or this inn.”
Returning to his spot on the floor, Kuno tried again. “Mother, tell me a story about Ineko, please. Anything you like.”
“When you ask like that . . . nothing comes to mind.”
“You could start with her birth.”
“Her birth?” Ineko’s mother said
, as if she doubted her ears. “You mean her actual birth, when I gave birth to her? Isn’t it a bit odd for you to ask about that, Mr. Kuno? You’re crazy, really.”
“Perhaps, but that’s what I’d like. To start from her birth.”
“I’d prefer not to. I didn’t see it, you know — what happened when I was giving birth. It’s not the kind of thing you can talk about just because someone wants you to.”
“Ah.”
“Is Ineko so reluctant to talk about herself?” Ineko’s mother asked. “To you, too?”
“So it seems.”
“Really? Reluctant enough that you feel she isn’t entirely comfortable with you?”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I just want her to tell me more.”
“I’m happy to hear that, but then maybe you’re also being a bit greedy. People don’t usually share every little thing about themselves, do they, even with a lover? That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re hiding things.”
“Of course I can’t know absolutely everything about Ineko, but if I could, that’s how much I’d like to know. Everything.”
“You know all about her, Mr. Kuno,” Ineko’s mother said forcefully. “That’s how it seems to me. There’s no question. You know as much about Ineko as any person could ever know about another, don’t you think? You know her in a way no two men, or women, could ever know one another — the way a man and a woman do when they’re in love.”
“I’m aware of that. I was talking about deeper things, though — or maybe sometimes they could be incredibly slight things. The pleasure of listening to her go on about all the silly little things she remembers.”
“And now she’s sick. You saw more of her sickness than anyone.”
“Let’s not talk about that,” Kuno said. “Not until tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Can’t you forget that until tomorrow?”
Dandelions Page 10
