“I don’t let that concern me. All I want is to be happily married to Ineko.”
“Happily married? Well, I’m sorry she’s like that.”
“You and I, we feel differently about what it is to be . . . like that.”
“You’re the one who feels how frightening it is, though, how hateful — more so even than I do, as her mother. Wouldn’t you agree? How she must shake, how she must wail and writhe when you hold her, and she stops seeing you. Forgive me for saying this, but that’s not what it’s like when that special joy comes over a woman. Ineko loses her mind, doesn’t she?”
“I find her more adorable than ever, then. More loveable.”
“You’re an odd one,” Ineko’s mother said, as casually as she could manage. “She’s gotten into your heart so much you’re getting weird yourself. I can’t let this go on.”
“There’s no need to put her in a madhouse.”
“Ineko will die if it goes on the way it has. Her life will end, Mr. Kuno.”
“She’ll grow weak and die, you mean? Or do you think she’d kill herself?”
“Both. You can’t deny either possibility. Perhaps it’s because I’m her mother, I don’t know, but I sense something, somehow, in her heart or maybe her body, something we can’t afford to ignore. It’s made me scared. I simply can’t ignore it.”
“Ah,” Kuno said glumly.
After that, silence reigned for a time on both sides of the sliding doors. The flimsy panels, covered in cheap paper that was now worn and yellowing, without a picture or even a pattern to liven them up, their frames shoddily lacquered, were like a heavy wall between the rooms, and yet at the same time it was almost as if they weren’t there at all.
“Mr. Kuno, why don’t you lie down,” Ineko’s mother said then.
“Ah. My heart feels more settled when I sit, like it might make its way to Ineko. Priests sit like this, after all. When they want to focus their hearts, fill them with prayer.”
“You’re putting your hands together, aren’t you?”
“What? You can see me?”
“I can tell.”
“Oh?”
“You’re not an ascetic. Your heart will move more freely if you lie down and relax.”
“All right, I will.” Kuno didn’t protest. “And you, Mother?”
“I’m about ready to lie down, too. I’d probably distract you if I stayed up,” Ineko’s mother said. “We can talk a little more as we lie here.”
“All night long, if you like.”
“The whole night?”
“We’ll end up talking until morning, I’m sure.”
“I don’t think I could take that,” Ineko’s mother said, a plaintive note in her voice. With that, she began getting ready for bed: undoing her obi, folding her haori and kimono. She tried to do all this as silently as she could, but she knew Kuno could hear her in the next room. The thought made her movements a little more awkward than they had been until then.
She hesitated for a moment, wondering whether she should remove the cloth she wore wrapped around her waist beneath her under-kimono, or leave it on and put the yukata the inn had provided on over it. At home, she would have taken it off. She was used to sleeping without it, and hardly ever stayed at an inn.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, so softly she was less speaking to herself than thinking aloud. “There’s no reason to feel I shouldn’t tonight. And at my age . . . .”
So what if there was a young man on the other side of those sliding doors — he was her daughter’s lover. Kuno’s mind was filled with thoughts of Ineko, she was like hot water brimming inside him; he didn’t even regard Ineko’s mother as a woman. There must be something wrong with her, though, thought Ineko’s mother, that she was even thinking about how he saw her.
There was no reason whatsoever for her to be thinking of Kuno as she debated whether or not to remove her slip. If she was worried that it might get cold here on the shore, even in this warm town where the dandelions started blooming in midwinter, she could simply have gone to sleep with it on. The yukata from the inn had been washed and starched, but it was starting to look a bit old. She didn’t like the thought of wearing the fabric directly against her stomach or thighs. This aversion, which had come over her without any warning, led her to look down at the pure white piece of silk she had wrapped around her, from her waist down to her knees. White slips like this tended to get slightly soiled at the edge, but she took great care to prevent this, and changed hers constantly; frugal as she was in her day-to-day life, this was one of the few luxuries she countenanced. Every so often, it occurred to her that the white of this silk was unlikely to catch a man’s fancy; that it was a color best suited to a widow like her.
Ineko’s mother loosened the cord around the slip slightly to make herself more comfortable, but that was all. The presence of a young man in the next room and the well-worn look of the inn’s yukata were what led her to question whether or not she ought to wear the slip, but when she lowered her eyes to the curves of her thighs under the white silk, she found herself thinking of her departed husband Kizaki. An image of him flicked up in her heart.
“The woman of forty will do everything for you. The woman of twenty nothing.”
She heard these words quite clearly, spoken in Kizaki’s voice. She had forgotten the title of the translation in which they appeared, but she remembered Kizaki calling to her when he encountered them, and then reading them aloud.
“That’s Balzac. Balzac,” he said. “You know his works better than I do, I’m sure, but I bet you don’t know that quote. Let me read it again. A woman of forty will do everything for you. A woman of twenty nothing. How do you like that?”
“What do you mean? How do I like it?” Ineko’s mother hadn’t been able to share her husband’s enthusiasm, and the phrase her husband had seemed so taken with struck her at first as a rather unremarkable aphorism.
Ineko’s father had been to the West and for a military man he was fairly cultured, but the longer he spent in the militaristic atmosphere pervading the country in the years before the war and then during the war itself, the narrower his thinking had become. Sent reeling by the defeat, he gave himself up to the trends of the age, in part to distract himself from his grief at the defeat, though deep in his heart he rebelled against these new ways; and so, when he read works of literature or religion, he would get sucked in so easily it was almost silly. He had developed a habit of being so struck with admiration by famous passages and aphorisms and so on that he would call his wife over and read them to her.
It was only natural that Ineko’s mother took this particular aphorism to be another instance of that habit.
“Doesn’t it depend on the woman, how fully she devotes herself to the man she’s with, and how well she takes care of him? I don’t see that it has anything to do with age, whether she’s forty or twenty,” Ineko’s mother had said. “I’m sure there must be women out there who do everything for their men when they are twenty, and then when they get to be forty refuse to do anything at all.”
“When you put it in that commonsensical way, you weaken the impact of Balzac’s phrase.” Ineko’s father had grown testy. “It’s an unpleasant word game, taking something someone says and flipping it around like that.”
“Men make women, and women are made by men. That’s another one.”
“What?” Ineko’s father had seemed taken aback.
Amused, Ineko’s mother had made another verbal leap. “You ought to make a women as you would like her to be made. I’m sure that would make the woman happy. A man who doesn’t have it in him to make a woman into what he wants her to be isn’t really a man.”
Ineko’s father looked at Ineko’s mother, his eyes registering his puzzlement. He seemed startled that his wife had said something so out of character.
This was as far as the
conversation had gone, but for some reason those Balzac lines that her husband had read aloud lingered in Ineko’s mother’s memory. She wasn’t sure what to make of that quotation, since she hadn’t questioned her husband about how Balzac had used them, what nuance he might have invested them with — if those words had been rooted in his own personal experiences, or had described a fictional character — and she herself had never read the book in which her husband had found them. She had the sense, though, that when her husband had encountered the aphorism, it had occurred to him that one day his own wife would be forty. Perhaps as a result, the words had touched him in some special way, or inspired in him an expectation, a hope. But by the time she thought of this, already four or five days had passed.
Back then, Kizaki would sink his teeth into Ineko’s mother’s breasts, or grab her hair and roughly shake her head, telling her, “I can’t enjoy life’s greatest delicacy! The best part!”
As he grew wilder, his voice would start to sound like a wail and Ineko’s mother felt she might faint. She couldn’t even cry.
“Please, calm down, be quiet — that would be so much better,” she would have liked to say, but white with terror she didn’t have the presence of mind to offer such wisdom. Before she could even try and comfort her husband, to soothe his nerves, he’d grow so rough it was really beyond the pale. You could say that as a soldier, the role he had played in the war had been no fault of his own, but it didn’t matter; he flailed like this because “life’s greatest delicacy” had been stolen from him less as heaven’s punishment for the role he played in the war than as a castigation on a human scale.
For Ineko’s mother, that phrase, “A woman of forty will do everything for you,” was a revelation. And she succeeded in molding herself to it. All this meant was that she became a motherly prostitute, or acquired a prostitute-like motherliness — nothing many “women of twenty” wouldn’t already have known about. But as far as Ineko’s mother was concerned, it was a new experience.
It was because the words had been useful to Ineko’s mother in that way that, looking down at the curve of her knees, she heard Kizaki’s voice speaking them there in that cheap inn in Ikuta. Kizaki had died before she became a woman of forty. And now she was older than that. Her husband’s life had ended before she had ever had an opportunity to do “everything” for him, and now before too long her own life would end as well. Sometimes Ineko’s mother wondered what was included in that “everything” — just how much a woman could do for a man. Everything seemed to her limitless. Sometimes she felt she had been unable to do anything at all for her husband, and that pained her. Needless to say, this was more a sentimental game than anything else; deep in her heart, she felt had given as much as could be expected to her husband, and whatever her failings, they had been excused. There were times when she despised herself for a deviousness she regarded as typically feminine, or hated herself because her jealousy had played a part in his death, but she was well aware that as long as a woman lives she will find ways to justify all her actions, and to forgive herself for any sort of mistake. Occasionally, looking back, she would ask herself if this awareness might have made her a somewhat cold mother to Ineko.
“Time to sleep, Mr. Kuno,” Ineko’s mother called out, and quietly crept under the covers. “It really is time to lie down. Oh, they’ve given us hot water bottles.”
“Have they? I don’t need one.”
“You don’t? It’s very nice to feel the warmth just beyond your feet. It’s winter, after all, even in a town like this.”
“Ah.”
“You don’t use hot water bottles or electric blankets in Tokyo, either, I guess?”
“No. Why do you ask?” Mr. Kuno seemed irked that Ineko’s mother was talking about hot water bottles and so on.
Ineko’s mother noticed, saying: “Ineko’s feet are always cold, aren’t they?”
Kuno couldn’t suppress a little gasp at this. Perhaps because she was on the other side of the sliding doors, he seemed to detect a slightly flirtatious note in Ineko’s mother’s voice.
“I doubt they have hot water bottles at the clinic,” Kuno said, returning to the topic on his own this time.
“Oh, I think they might. I bet they do. There are elderly people there, too, after all.”
“That’s true, there are . . . that strange old man . . .”
They stopped talking for a while.
Then Ineko’s mother spoke again. “When it’s this quiet, don’t you feel as though you can still hear the sound of the bell, way off in the distance, in the sky above the ocean?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Do you remember, Mr. Kuno, how the temples were forced to turn in their bells during the war?”
“I heard about that. I have the feeling I may even have seen a big hanging bell being rolled along somewhere, though I could be imagining it.”
“Yes. After the war, I remember seeing that too — a whole bunch of bells that had been left somewhere, thrown away. I assume they made the temples turn them in because they’re made of iron, but then they couldn’t use it.”
“None of it — from the bamboo spears to the bells.”
“Eighty percent of the bells in the entire country, I think it was, or maybe ninety. It’s amazing when you think of it, because evidently there were about fifty thousand bells to start. I saw that total somewhere once, in something I read.”
“Do you think Jōkōji got its bell back after the war?”
“Maybe they didn’t have to turn it in,” Ineko’s mother said. “I have the feeling they didn’t collect the older bells, from before the Edo period. There’s a phrase, tōne no sasu kane — a bell with a distant ring. It’s a nice way to describe the sound of an old bell, don’t you think?”
“A distant ring. Yes, that’s nice, and you could say that about this conversation, too.”
“Don’t be ridiculous — not this random chatter. And I don’t have such a nice voice.” Ineko’s mother laughed. “It’s a more elegant phrase than that.”
“I wish our sounds carried far enough to reach Ineko, at the clinic. I’d like to stay up through this quiet night, until morning, talking that way with Ineko. A distant talk.”
“Oh?” Ineko’s mother murmured. “Perhaps I should be quiet, then.”
“No, not at all. Whatever you may be saying, I can still have my distant talk with Ineko.”
“It would be nice if you could.”
“Mother, did you see the white dandelion blooming on the bank of Ikuta River?”
“A white dandelion? Is there such a thing?”
“I saw one blooming there, just one. You didn’t see it?”
“No. I bet it’s just another thing you saw — an illusion, like the white rat.”
“That’s not true. I saw the white rat and the white dandelion both, there’s no doubt about that, right there on the river bank. I’ll show you tomorrow morning, on our way to the clinic. I can’t promise I’ll be able to show you the rat, since rats move about, but I’m sure you’ll see the dandelion. A dandelion isn’t going to walk away.”
“All right. I suppose the blossom is probably closed now.”
“Huh,” Kuno murmured, as if to himself. “Yes, I guess dandelions close their eyes when they go to sleep, too. Maybe that’s why they bloom so long.”
“There are all sorts of different flowers. Do you know the lines, Enlightenment in the voice of the bamboo; radiance of heart in the peach blossom? Ineko may not be enlightened by the dandelions here, or by the sound of bamboo leaves rustling in the wind, but it would be nice if she could find a certain radiance of the heart, as the phrase has it. And soon.”
“Mother,” Kuno said sharply. “Ineko’s heart isn’t dark. It isn’t like that.”
“Isn’t it? I guess I’m wrong, then. Though I don’t think achieving ‘radiance of heart’ is qu
ite about that — it’s not about bringing light to a heart cast in darkness. Of course, you can take those lines in all kinds of ways, too: the darkness of the heart, brightening the heart. If you’re talking about a radiance of the heart in terms of the way or the dharma, that’s quite a difficult thing to accomplish. I just mean making the heart bright. But it’s not about making a dark heart bright. I don’t think that Ineko has a dark heart, or a dark personality. And yet . . .”
“And yet?” Kuno repeated.
Ineko’s mother seemed to have gotten up from her futon quietly; Kuno saw above the screen that her room grew less light, then went dark. The mother had turned off the light hanging from the ceiling, and then switched off the one by her pillow as well. There was no lamp by Kuno’s own pillow. He looked up at the naked bulb overhead. It was probably a forty-watt bulb, but the glass looked sooty, and it emitted only a feeble light.
“Shall I turn out the light over here, too?” Kuno asked. “You think you can sleep?”
“Yes . . . and no. But you should go to sleep, Mr. Kuno.”
“It’s the same for me. Yes, and no.”
“Oh dear. It’s still early, though.”
“Yes.”
“I’m grateful for all your efforts today. Don’t you feel it was a very, very long day?”
“Yes, I’m sure it must have been for you. You must be exhausted. You didn’t get any sleep last night, and then you carried right on into today,” Kuno said. “I can’t really tell how I feel myself — whether this was a long day, or a short one.”
“It’s a very odd place we’ve found to sleep tonight, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps. But neither of us is really concerned about whether or not we actually get any rest tonight as we are about Ineko, and whether or not she can sleep. Isn’t that so?”
“Ineko’s gone to sleep, I’m sure. The people at the clinic will have given her a sedative or a sleeping pill.”
“What?” Kuno seemed taken aback by this. “You think they would do that?”
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