“Yes.” As Keiko combed the long strands, Otoko watched from her bed.
“You’re taking down your hair tonight?”
“I think it’s getting an odor. I should have washed it.” Keiko sniffed at a handful of her back hair. “Otoko, how old were you when your father died?”
“Eleven, of course! How many times are you going to ask me?”
Keiko said nothing. She closed the paper-screened doors to the veranda, and the doors between the bedroom and the studio, and lay down beside Otoko. The two beds were together.
For several nights they had gone to bed without closing the outside shutters. The paper screens facing the garden glowed faintly in the moonlight.
Otoko’s mother had died of lung cancer, without revealing to her that Otoko had a younger half-sister by a different mother. Otoko had never been told.
Her father had been in the export-import trade in silk and wool. A great many people attended his funeral, bowing and offering incense in the usual fashion, but Otoko’s mother noticed among the mourners a rather strange young woman who seemed to be of mixed blood. When she bowed to the bereaved family, her eyes looked swollen from weeping. Otoko’s mother felt a sharp pang. She nodded to summon her husband’s private secretary, and whispered to him to inquire at the reception desk about the Eurasian-looking young woman. Later the secretary was able to learn that her grandmother was a Canadian who had married a Japanese man, and she herself had gone to a school for Americans and was working as an interpreter. He said she lived in a small house in Azabu.
“I suppose she has no children.”
“They say there’s a little girl.”
“Did you see her?”
“No, I heard it from people in the neighborhood.”
She felt sure that the little girl was her husband’s child. There were ways to verify it, but she thought the young woman herself might come to see her. She never came. Over half a year later Otoko’s mother was told by the secretary that she had married, taking the child along to her new home. He also intimated that the Eurasian woman had been her husband’s mistress. As time passed, her jealous indignation cooled. She began to wish she could adopt the little girl. Her own husband’s child must be growing up unaware of her real father. She felt as if she had lost something precious—and not merely because Otoko was her only child. Yet she could not tell an eleven-year-old girl about her father’s illegitimate daughter. By now her sister would have been married for some years, in the normal course of events, and perhaps also have children of her own. But for Otoko it was as if she did not exist.…
“Otoko, Otoko!” Keiko was sitting up in bed, shaking her. “Did you have a nightmare? You seemed to be in pain.” As Otoko gasped for breath, Keiko leaned over her and stroked her chest.
“Were you watching me?”
“Yes, for a while.”
“How mean of you! I was having a dream.”
“What kind of dream?”
“About a green person.” Otoko’s voice was still agitated.
“Somebody dressed in green?”
“Not the clothing. It was green all over, including the arms and legs.”
“The green-eyed monster?”
“Don’t make fun of me! It wasn’t fierce-looking, just a green figure floating lightly round and round my bed.”
“A woman?”
Otoko did not reply.
“It’s a good dream. I’m sure it is!” Keiko put her hand over Otoko’s eyes and pressed them shut; then she took up one of Otoko’s fingers in her other hand, and bit it.
“Ouch!” Otoko opened her eyes wide.
Keiko interpreted the dream for her. “You said you’d paint me, remember. So I’ve taken on the green of the tea plantation.”
“Do you think so? You’re dancing all around me even when you’re asleep? That frightens me!”
Keiko let her head drop on Otoko’s breast, and tittered a little hysterically. “But it’s your dream.…”
The following day they climbed up to the temple on Mt. Kurama, arriving toward evening. Worshipers were gathered in the temple compound. The late dusk of a long May day had already settled on the surrounding peaks and tall forests.
Over the Eastern Hills beyond Kyoto the full moon had risen. Watch fires were burning on the left and right before the main hall of the temple. The priests had come out and begun to chant the sutras, repeating the sacred words in chorus after the scarlet-robed head priest. A harmonium accompanied them.
All the worshipers offered lighted candles. Directly in front of the main hall was a huge silver sake bowl filled with water, reflecting the full moon. Water from the bowl was poured into the cupped hands of each of the worshipers; one by one they came forward, bowed, and drank it. Otoko and Keiko did the same.
“When we get home you may find green footprints in your room!” said Keiko. She seemed exhilarated by the atmosphere of the mountain ceremony.
A RAINY SKY
When Oki was tired of writing, or when a novel was going badly, he would lie down on the couch in the open corridor beside his study. In the afternoon he would often fall asleep there for an hour or two. Only in the past few years had he got into the habit of taking such naps. He used to go out for a walk instead, but after so many years in Kamakura he had become all too familiar with the nearby temples, and even with the hills. Then too, being an early riser, he always took a short walk in the morning. Once awake, he could not bear to loll about in bed; also, he preferred to be out of the way while the maid tidied up the house. Before dinner he took a fairly long walk.
The corridor beside his study was a wide one, with a writing table and chair in the corner. He wrote either there or at a low table on the matted floor of the study. The couch in the corridor was very comfortable. When he stretched out on it his difficulties vanished from his mind. It was uncanny. While he was writing a novel he tended to sleep poorly at night and to dream about his work, but on the couch in the corridor he quickly fell into a deep sleep that blotted out everything. When he was young he never had a nap. Often the whole afternoon would be taken up by callers. He wrote at night, usually from midnight till dawn. Now that he worked during the day he had begun taking naps, but not at any fixed time. Whenever he felt blocked in his writing he lay down on the couch. Sometimes it was in the morning, sometimes almost evening. Only rarely did he feel, as he used to when he worked at night, that fatigue stimulated his imagination.
My naps must be a sign of age, Oki thought. But the couch was magical.
Whenever he rested on it he fell asleep and awakened refreshed. Not infrequently he could find a new pathway through the difficulties that had brought his writing to a standstill. A magic couch.
Now they were in the rainy season—the season he disliked most. Their house was some distance from the ocean and separated from it by hills, but extremely damp. The sky hung low. Oki felt a dull blurring and heaviness over his right temple, as if mold were growing on the folds of his brain. There were days when he slept twice, morning and afternoon, on the magic couch.
One afternoon the maid announced that someone from Kyoto called Sakami had come to see him. Oki had just awakened but was still lying on the couch. “Shall I say you’re resting?” she asked.
“No. It’s a young lady?”
“Yes, sir. She was here once before.”
“Show her into the parlor, please.”
He let his head sink back again and closed his eyes. The nap had lightened his rainy season dullness but the thought of Keiko was even more refreshing. He rose and washed and went out to the parlor. As soon as she saw him, Keiko got up from her chair. She was blushing slightly.
“I’m sorry to drop in on you like this.”
“It’s good of you to come. I was out for a walk the other time and just missed you. You should have stayed a little longer.”
“Taichiro saw me to the station.”
“So I hear. I believe he showed you around Kamakura.”
“Yes.”
“Since you’re from Tokyo, that must have been nothing new. And of course it doesn’t compare with Kyoto or Nara.”
Keiko looked straight into his eyes. “There was a beautiful sunset over the ocean.”
Oki was surprised to learn that his son had gone all the way to the shore with her. “I haven’t seen you since New Year’s Day,” he remarked. “Half a year has gone by already.”
“Mr. Oki, is that a long time? Does half a year seem long to you?”
He wondered what she was getting at. “I suppose it depends on how you think of it,” he said. Keiko was unsmiling, as if disdainful of his reply. “If you couldn’t meet a lover for half a year, wouldn’t it seem like a long time?”
Keiko remained silent, with the same disdainful expression. Her greenish eyes seemed to challenge him. Oki became a little annoyed. “After half a year of pregnancy you can feel the baby move in your womb,” he went on, trying to embarrass her. She did not respond. “Anyway, we’ve come from winter to summer, though it’s still this miserable rainy season.… Even philosophers don’t seem to have any satisfactory explanation of time. People say time will solve everything, but I have my doubts about that, too. What do you think, Miss Sakami? Is death the end of it all?”
“I’m not such a pessimist.”
“I wouldn’t call it pessimism,” said Oki, to be contradictory. “Of course the same half year for me and for a young woman like you would be very different. Or suppose someone had cancer with only half a year to live. Then again, some people have their lives cut off suddenly in a traffic accident, or in war. Some are murdered.”
“But you are an artist, Mr. Oki, aren’t you?”
“I’m afraid I’ll leave behind only things I’m ashamed of.”
“You needn’t be ashamed of any of your works.”
“I wish that were true. But maybe everything I’ve done will disappear. I’d like that.”
“How can you say such a thing? You must realize your novel about my teacher is going to last.”
“That novel again!” Oki frowned. “Even you bring it up, knowing her as you do.”
“It’s because I do know her. I can’t help it.”
“Well, perhaps not.”
Her expression livened. “Mr. Oki, did you ever fall in love again?”
“Yes, I suppose so. But not the way it was with Otoko.”
“Why haven’t you written about it?”
“Well …” He hesitated. “She made it clear she didn’t want me to put her in a book.”
“Really?”
“Maybe it indicates a kind of weakness on my part, as a writer. But I don’t imagine I could have poured out that much emotion a second time.”
“I wouldn’t care what you wrote about me.”
“Oh?” This was only his third meeting with her—indeed, you could hardly call them “meetings.” How could he possibly write about her, except to borrow her beauty for one of his characters? She did say she went down to the shore with his son. Had anything happened then?
“So I’ve found a good model,” said Oki, laughing to hide his suspicions. But as he looked at her, the strange, seductive charm of her eyes stilled his laughter. Her eyes were so moist that she almost seemed to be in tears.
“Miss Ueno has promised to do a portrait of me,” Keiko said.
“Has she?”
“And I brought another picture to show you.”
“I can’t say I know much about abstract paintings, but I’d like to see it. Let’s look at it in the next room, where it’s not so cramped. My son has the two you brought last time hanging in his study.”
“He isn’t home today?”
“No, this is one of his days at the university. My wife went to the theater.”
“I’m glad you’re alone,” Keiko murmured, and went to the entryway to get her painting. She brought it in to the Japanese-style sitting room. The picture was in a simple frame of unpainted wood. Its dominant tone was green, but she had boldly dashed on a variety of colors to suit her whim. The whole surface was seething and undulating.
“Mr. Oki, this is realistic for me. It’s a tea field at Uji.”
He crouched to peer at it. “It’s a tea field that looks like surging waves—a tea field swelling with youth. At first I wondered if it symbolized a heart bursting into flames.”
“That makes me so happy! To have you see it that way …” Keiko knelt behind him, her chin almost on his shoulder, as he studied the picture. Her sweet breath warmed his hair. “I’m so happy,” she repeated. “Happy you could see my heart in it! Though it’s not much as a picture of a tea field.”
“It’s really youthful.”
“Of course I went out to the tea field to sketch, but it was only for the first hour or so that I saw it as rows of tea bushes.”
“Oh?”
“The plantation was very quiet. Then all those rounded, rolling waves of fresh green began to stir, and finally it came out like this. It’s not abstract.”
“But I should think a tea field would seem rather subdued, even when the new growth is sprouting.”
“I never have learned how to be subdued! Not in art, nor in my emotions.”
“Not even in your emotions?” As he turned toward her his shoulder touched the softness of her breast. His eyes stopped before one of her ears. “If you keep on at that rate, you may find yourself cutting off one of those pretty ears.”
“I’m not a genius like Van Gogh! Someone will have to bite it off for me.”
Startled, Oki twisted sharply around to her, and Keiko caught hold of him to steady herself.
“I detest subdued emotions,” she said, not shifting her position. With the least pressure she would have collapsed helplessly into his arms, ready to be kissed.
But he did not move. She remained motionless too.
“Mr. Oki,” she whispered, her gaze fixed on him.
“Your ears are lovely,” he said, “but there’s a kind of eerie beauty to your profile.”
“I’m glad you think so!” Her slender neck flushed slightly. “I’ll never forget that, as long as I live. But how long will beauty last? A woman feels sad to think of that.”
He had no reply.
“It’s embarrassing to be stared at, but any woman would be delighted to seem beautiful to a man like you.”
Oki was astonished at the warmth of her response. She might have been uttering words of love. “I’m delighted too,” he said gravely. “Though you must be beautiful in many ways I’ve never seen.”
“Do you think so? I don’t know, I’m not a model, just someone who’s trying to paint.”
“A painter has a right to use a model. Sometimes I envy that.”
“If I’m any good to you …”
“That’s very kind.”
“I said I wouldn’t care what you wrote about me. I’m sorry I can’t equal the girl of your imagination, that’s all.”
“Should I be realistic?”
“Whatever you please.”
“An artist’s model and a writer’s model are entirely different, you know.”
“Of course.” Keiko blinked her rich eyelashes. “But my tea-field sketch isn’t just a scene from nature. It’s turned out to be about myself.”
“All pictures are like that, aren’t they? Even abstractions. But a model has to be another live human being. Novels need human beings too, no matter how much you write about landscapes.”
“Mr. Oki, I’m a human being!”
“A beautiful one,” he said, helping her up. “But even a nude artist’s model only has to pose. That’s not quite enough for a novelist.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
Oki found the girl’s boldness inhibiting. “I suppose I could borrow your looks for a character in a novel.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun.” She seemed deliberately coquettish.
“Women are odd,” he said, to extricate himself. �
�Two or three of them have told me they’re sure I modeled one of my characters on them. And they were complete strangers, women I’d had nothing to do with. What kind of delusion could that be?”
“Lots of women are unhappy, so they console themselves with delusions.”
“Isn’t there something wrong with them?”
“It’s easy for a woman to go wrong. You can make a woman go wrong, can’t you?”
Her question left him at a loss. “Do you just coldly wait for it to happen?”
He tried to change the drift of the conversation. “Anyway, being a novelist’s model is different. It’s an unrewarded sacrifice.”
“I love to sacrifice myself! Maybe that’s my reason for living.” Again she had astonished him.
“In your case it’s willful, as if you’re demanding the other person’s sacrifice.”
“That’s not true. Sacrifice comes from love. It’s from yearning.”
“Are you sacrificing yourself to Otoko?”
She did not answer.
“That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Maybe I was, but Otoko is a woman, after all. There’s nothing pure about one woman devoting her life to another.”
“That’s something I wouldn’t know.”
“Both of them may be destroyed.”
“Destroyed?”
“Yes.” After a moment she went on: “I hate to have the slightest doubt. I don’t care if it only lasts five or ten days, I want someone who can make me forget myself completely.”
“That’s asking a lot, even of marriage, isn’t it?”
“I’ve had marriage offers, but that kind of devotion doesn’t count. I don’t want to be concerned about myself. As I said, I detest subdued emotions.”
“You seem to feel you ought to commit suicide a few days after you fall in love with someone.”
“I’m not afraid of suicide. The worst thing is being sick of life. I’d be happy if you strangled me—after you used me as a model, that is.”
Oki tried to dispel the feeling that Keiko had come to seduce him; perhaps she was not such a designing woman. In any event, she might be quite an interesting model for a character. Yet it did not seem unlikely that a love affair followed by a separation would drive her, as it had Otoko, into a psychiatric ward.
Beauty and Sadness Page 6
