Masks

by Fumiko Enchi

  “I never…” Mieko began as if to deny it, then seemed to change her mind. “I never want to hear you speak that way again, Yasuko. Yes, if you must know, it would make me terribly sad for you to grow old and never know another man but Akio. And as long as Mr. Ibuki and Dr. Mikamé are both so fond of you, I thought if you could fall in love with one of them, you would be happier that way. I didn’t want to see a woman like you stay tied to me with nothing but your memories of Akio.”

  “Is that all? Honestly, Mother?” Yasuko’s gaze was intense, her eyes burning as she looked up at Mieko.

  “Of course it is. But I only thought it. It makes me very unhappy to hear you say such a shameless thing aloud.”

  “No, Mother, I don’t believe that is all. I can tell because I love you. Deep inside, you have some other plan that I’m not meant to understand. And in order to thwart that plan of yours, I was going to marry Toyoki…but now I can’t do it, after all.”

  “You liked Mr. Ibuki better all along anyway. I’ve always known that.”

  “Not I, Mother. It’s you who like him—somehow, time and again, your feelings seem to take hold of me. This is not just some crazy excuse; so many times I’ve found myself doing things that don’t make a bit of sense—and every time, without fail, I feel you there in the background, manipulating me like a puppet.”

  “You’re not treating his wife fairly, Yasuko, are you? I’m sure of it; I’m more sensitive to these things than you. This isn’t just some harmless flirtation that she’s better off not knowing about, is it?”

  “You’re right. It’s not. I know.” Yasuko tried to lift her head, but Mieko gently held her back. Her features, never sharply defined, had taken on even greater obscurity in the dim lamplight, as if veiled in a thin mist.

  “Men don’t understand, do they?” said Yasuko. “He seems to think that as long as she doesn’t find out, it’s as if nothing has ever happened between us, but I don’t see it that way at all. When a man and a woman have a physical relationship, it never ends there, does it? Even if there are no children, I think both people are forever changed.”

  “And they are. You’re right, Yasuko: what’s done is done, and can never be undone. But it took me years to realize that simple truth, so it’s hardly any wonder that Mr. Ibuki hasn’t found it out yet. You know, Yasuko, to hear you say what you just did makes me think that you are a woman who could pick up and begin again where I leave off. And in that sense you are my real daughter; the woman in me that I tried, but failed, to pass on to Harumé has found new life in you.”

  “Mother.” Yasuko took Mieko’s hand and swung it to and fro like a spoiled child. “Tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about that essay you wrote, the one called ‘An Account of the Shrine in the Fields’? I doubt that even Akio knew you had written it. And wouldn’t it have been only natural for you to show it to him after he’d begun studying spirit possession himself?”

  “Oh, Yasuko…I’m sorry I ever wrote that. It was out of line for me; I should have stuck to my poetry. And here I thought I had burned every copy so that no trace would survive…what sinful things words are, coming to life again just when I’d forgotten them and unmasking me like that. I wrote that essay in the fall of 1937. It was meant for a particular person to read—someone who’d been conscripted and sent to China. I had it printed up and sent it to him, but it was returned the following year. Stamped on the envelope were the words ‘Addressee Deceased from Disease Contracted at Front.’ ”

  “I knew it.” Yasuko let out a long breath. “In that essay you wrote that Genji’s romance with the Rokujō lady was much more than a passing affair, and something in the way you wrote it made me certain: you must have loved someone else, someone young, not Akio’s father. And that person died, didn’t he? At the front.”

  “Yes.”

  Mieko said the one word, and nothing more. Yasuko, who had been eagerly awaiting her next utterance, looked in disappointment at the shapely head pressed deep into the pillow.

  After a silence, not moving or opening her eyes, Mieko spoke in a muffled voice that was part moan.

  “Yasuko, that man was Akio’s and Harumé’s father. Those children never had one drop of Toganō blood.”

  “What! Is that true?” Yasuko sat up so suddenly that the quilt fell back in a triangle, revealing Mieko’s slim figure lying gracefully draped in a sleeping-gown of patterned silk crepe, her legs bent slightly at the knee. “Did Akio know that?”

  Mieko raised her head slightly from the pillow and gave a single nod.

  —

  Yasuko had no memory of returning to her own bed, but awoke there all at once, roused from a dream of pushing her way endlessly through fold upon fold of white curtains.

  Snow is falling,

  snow is falling;

  the lane is gone,

  the bridge is gone,

  buried in white…

  alas, alas,

  the road to my sweetheart’s house,

  vanished from sight.

  The words of a children’s song, partly in northern dialect, were being sung tunelessly over and over in a low voice, while someone’s feet kept time on the veranda floorboards. “It’s Harumé,” she thought.

  “Harumé? Are you up already?”

  No answer. A pause; then the snow song started over again. The realization that Harumé was urging her to get up made Yasuko feel for her a quick rush of pitying affection, as for an orphan. She left the warmth of bed, flinching at the sudden sharp cold, and checked Mieko’s sitting room next door before she dressed rapidly and stepped out the door.

  The storm doors along the narrow hallway were already open. Outside, a thin mantle of snow lay upon the garden and the roof of the main house.

  “Ah, so it did snow,” murmured Yasuko to herself. “That’s why she’s been singing the Kanazawa song.” She gazed at Harumé, who was standing near the narrow railing of the veranda across from the stone washbasin in the garden, her arms hanging loosely at her sides.

  Over a red-striped nightdress like Yasuko’s, Harumé wore a padded jacket of pale lavender crepe—probably a keepsake from the grandmother who had raised her, thought Yasuko. She was reminded of the gloomy munificence of the great temple compound that she had once visited with Mieko. Someone like Harumé, she thought, destined forever to be a little girl, might well be happier if she were left quietly alone in those shadowy and antiquated surroundings.

  As Yasuko drew near, Harumé seemed to sense her presence, turning slowly to face her. What would Mikamé say if he could see her now? Against the pallor of her face, lusterless and empty as a blank white wall, her big dark eyes and heavy eyebrows stood out exactly like those of an ukiyo-e style beauty drawn in india ink on fine white Chinese paper. There was something vaguely disturbing about her face, a sort of incoherence, as though the pitiable slumber of her mind had disconnected each vivid feature from the other.

  Invest that face with wit and masculinity, and it would be, thought Yasuko, the face of Akio, so clearly had the bond of twinship been stamped in their looks. It had been Harumé’s fate at birth—no, while still inside the womb—to suffer brain damage from the pressure of her brother’s feet. The truth had gone undetected while the handsome twins, alike as they could be, were still newborn, but the older they grew, the more obvious it had become.

  Harumé’s departure to live with her maternal grandparents had been due less to any superstitious fear of twins than to a dread that raising the pair together might somehow lead to misery for Akio.

  “Come to think of it, there is a child in my earliest memories who must have been Harumé. I can even remember being picked up and held with her. But I never knew until now that we were twins.” So Akio had reminisced to Yasuko. According to Yū, the elderly housemaid who had been with Mieko since before she was married, Akio had seemed to harbor an inborn hatred for Harumé from the start, pulling her hair, hitting her over the head,
and otherwise tormenting her the moment Mieko or Yū looked away. It was his behavior that had given them an excuse for sending the girl away so young.

  Damaged by her brother even before she was born, Harumé had by a cruel fate outlived him, though her mind was malformed and incapable of growth. Yasuko stared at Harumé now with a new and heavier sadness, contemplating again the secret of the twins’ birth, which their mother had disclosed to her in the night.

  “Harumé, aren’t you cold?” she said, laying a hand on the other’s rounded cotton-clad shoulder. Slowly Harumé looked up at her with eyes slightly out of focus.

  “No.”

  At close range it could be seen that the eyelids in Harumé’s fair-skinned face were puffy, the lashes gummed together so thickly that one eye appeared upturned and smaller than the other, only the dark pupil showing, in an expression so wistful that Yasuko was reminded of a small shaggy dog.

  “Didn’t you wash your face yet, dear?” Although she was younger than Harumé, Yasuko spoke unconsciously as if to a child.

  “No. Yū’s not up.”

  “Yū is in bed with a cold, so she won’t be up till this afternoon.” Pitying Harumé her inability to comprehend, Yasuko led her by the hand to the sink and ran a bowl of hot water, then saw to it that she washed her face and brushed her teeth.

  If they weren’t careful, Harumé might go all day without washing. Generally someone would notice and see that she was tidied up, but there were times when she would resent being touched and attack her would-be helper like a wild animal. Such episodes came only during her monthly period. Once Yasuko had been the victim, receiving a bite on her little finger so savage that it had drawn blood. Ever since that time Harumé had seemed more comfortable around Yasuko, more eager, even, to draw close to her.

  This morning the sight of new-fallen snow, familiar to Harumé from her childhood, seemed to have put her in a good humor, for she followed Yasuko’s instructions cheerfully, plying her toothbrush and dabbing at her face willingly with a facecloth. Yasuko turned the freshly scrubbed face back toward her and carefully brushed the dried matter from each individual eyelash, wondering as she did so at the uncanny resemblance between this meekly upturned countenance and that of Akio. Of course, that was a man’s face, this a woman’s, yet there had been a similar clarity in the pallor of Akio’s skin. Sometimes, as she wiped Harumé’s face, her hand would brush directly against her cheeks or lips, and Yasuko would find herself slipping into the sweet fantasy that it was really Akio who stood there, teasing her playfully in the guise of a woman. The moment when she had felt faint at the sight of the Nō mask on the Yakushiji stage, she had seen it plainly: the two faces of Harumé and Akio coming together as one before her eyes.

  After helping Harumé change into her clothes, Yasuko walked back with her to Mieko’s sitting room. Along the way Harumé sang the snow song again in her childish voice and stepped in time.

  Mieko’s room had just been cleaned, and a middle-aged housekeeper was still polishing the table and alcove with a dry rag. Mieko stood out on a corner of the veranda, her arms crossed and her hands fitted snugly into the sleeves of her unlined kimono. When she saw Yasuko coming, she smiled; her face was like a Nō mask struck suddenly by a beam of light. “The first snow!” she called out, in a voice filled with such unhesitating self-assurance that the confidences of the night before seemed as a dream.

  “Good morning,” said Harumé. When she was in a good humor, as she was now, she would mimic Yasuko exactly.

  “You were singing the snow song, weren’t you?” Mieko nodded lightly at her daughter and then turned to Yasuko, who, as always, was chilled by the coolness in Mieko’s eyes when they regarded Harumé. “When I was a little girl, my nurse from the country used to sing that song to me. Harumé must have learned it from her grandmother.” She looked back at Harumé. “Do you remember your grandmother in Kanazawa?”

  “Grandma,” prompted Yasuko, like an interpreter. “The one who always took such good care of you.”

  Harumé stared back at Yasuko in puzzlement, tilting her head one way and another before saying weakly, “I don’t know…”

  Harumé had at long last learned to write her name in block letters, but she was incapable of turning off the gas and had no fear of fire, and so could not be trusted alone in the house. It seemed to Yasuko that the twins’ separation had benefited Mieko no less than Akio. Harumé as she was now, with a child’s mind and woman’s body, was as unsettling a sight as a face without a nose or a hand without fingers. Surely Mieko was pained by it more than anyone; why did she not arrange to have Harumé placed in an institution? One time Yasuko had mentioned that a nearby facility might be willing to take Harumé in, but Mieko had dismissed the idea at once, on vague financial grounds. Yet even with Harumé at home, caring for her in an inconspicuous manner absorbed all of Yū’s energies and was shockingly expensive. Yasuko had concurred gladly with the decision to take Harumé back in, hoping that this new arrangement might lessen Mieko’s grief at her son’s death; but now that they were living together, it appeared that the opposite had happened and that especially for Mieko Harumé’s presence was a source of nothing but anguish. Month after month, Mieko insisted on laundering the soiled undergarments herself when Harumé had her period, and she would not allow even Yū to help. Harumé, lacking totally in feminine discretion, was continually leaving a trail of crimson drops in the bathroom or on the veranda or arriving at the dinner table accompanied by a pungent odor. Whenever Harumé’s time of the month drew near, Yū would become increasingly edgy and would seldom take her eyes from her charge.

  “If the mistress would only put Miss Harumé in a sanitarium, I’d go along and look after her there. That would be so much better for the mistress, and for you too, ma’am. Sell just one of her rings, and she’d have money enough.” So Yū would frequently grumble to Yasuko. Yū had been in the family for a matter of decades now, and doubtless she could have told more than anyone else about Mieko’s relations with the late Mr. Toganō, and about the birth of the twins. Yet never once had she indulged in the kind of boastful whispers that such old women are sometimes given to—an indication not only of the strength of her devotion to Mieko but also of a naturally tight-lipped disposition. Yasuko, in the wake of what she had learned the night before, realized that Yū was the one person who might satisfy her curiosity about the lover for whom “An Account of the Shrine in the Fields” had been written.

  “Mother, today at two o’clock there is a meeting of the poetry circle at the U.S. Hall,” said Yasuko crisply. “And this evening at the Imperial Hotel is the banquet in honor of Dr. Kawabé and that new stone engraved with his poem. You’ll be attending both, won’t you?” She looked at Mieko inquiringly.

  “Cold, isn’t it…the snow…” Mieko spoke absently, seemingly unequal to the effort of going outdoors. Yasuko, who was skilled by now at handling her mother-in-law’s reclusive tendencies, took this noncommittal remark for assent and proceeded on to the next item. She had found that given Mieko’s languid ways, this was the only approach that enabled her to carry out her duties as secretary.

  “Then you’ll go. What about clothes?”

  “I suppose streetwear won’t do if I’m to go straight to the banquet.”

  “I don’t see why you couldn’t come home and change first. If you like, you could leave the meeting early. I’ll fill in for you after that and dash over to the banquet as soon as I’m free.”

  “That hardly seems necessary…” Mieko hesitated and then said casually, “Mr. Ibuki will be at the banquet tonight, too, won’t he?”

  Yasuko looked away as if suddenly the light had hurt her eyes. “Yes, I suppose he will.” A stabbing pain reached through the pit of her stomach.

  “Well then, I think I will come home and change before going out again,” said Mieko in her serene way.

  —

  It was Ibuki’s last lecture of the year at S. University. Yasuko was absent as usual, but now it s
eemed better that she stayed away. Ibuki had already finished off the semester’s text, and he planned that day merely to fill in the hour with desultory discussion, but a few students who knew of his research in spirit possession urged him to make some general remarks on the subject. Inui, the French major, had apparently said something to them, for they also showed interest in the recent séance in Professor Saeki’s office and wanted to hear more about it.

  Ibuki passed lightly over the séance, however, and spoke, instead, about the occasional use of spirit possession in Heian times as a private, political tool. In The Tale of Genji, when Genji’s wife Aoi lies suffering from a malign spirit, her attendants and relatives insist repeatedly to Genji that the living ghost of the Rokujō lady has seized her, but Genji, we are told, refuses steadfastly to believe it until confronted by the evidence himself. This clearly was a case of genuine possession, not one trumped up for some ulterior purpose. An instance of the latter is the tale called Midnight Awakening: a certain empress observes that her son-in-law, a minister of state, remains ardently attached to his former lover, and she retaliates by spreading rumors that the wife, her daughter, has been attacked in her sickbed by the mistress’s living ghost. The mistress, as it happens, is desperately eager to be rid of the man and she is not jealous in the least. But the empress promotes the idea anyway as a device to force her son-in-law into line.

  “The episode takes up no more than a couple of lines in the whole work,” said Ibuki, “but I suspect that similar cases of human manipulation involving mediumistic acts—cases, in other words, in which spirit possession took place to serve some strategic purpose—must have been quite common. In Heian days the attendant who acted as medium was known as a spirit-dwelling woman. We have no way of knowing whether this was always the same woman or whether the spirits would be transferred to different women at different times. I tend to believe that probably a relatively small, fixed number of women acted as mediums. That way it would have been quite possible to bribe one of them to say whatever one liked, making her into a false medium or, if you will, a demagogue. Shamanesses do tend to go from being strictly mediums into being prostitutes as well. The state of inspiration itself is intensely physical, heightening a person’s sensuality to the furthest degree (unlike intellectual labor, which diminishes sexuality), so that the body of a medium in a trance comes to seem the very incarnation of sex.