by Fumiko Enchi
“But I can’t possibly tell him yes or no when I’ve only heard about it this moment.” Yasuko stretched out her arms, fingers clasped, turning pink palms toward Mikamé while she glanced nervously at Mieko. The exchange of silent words between the two women was discernible even to Mikamé.
—
“Those two definitely have some sort of unspoken agreement between them, that much I’m sure of, but as to whether Yasuko has any intention of marrying me or not, I’m totally in the dark.”
Listening to Mikamé’s account, Ibuki had felt a maddening itch creep like vermin over his skin. He spoke up intently now. “Yasuko’s not going to get married again. You and she wouldn’t make a bad couple, but I just don’t think she’s got marriage in mind. You must have seen it for yourself at Atami—she and Mieko are so intimate that I’m sure nothing in this world could pry them apart. On the surface Mieko may have sounded agreeable, but if you ask me, she has no intention of handing Yasuko over to you or anybody.”
“I know.” Mikamé took Ibuki’s words at face value, nodding. Such credulity struck Ibuki as naïve, but the thought that Yasuko might be put within Mikamé’s reach by that very naïveté filled him with nervous fear, like one whose foothold in sand was slipping gradually from beneath him.
After dark, when Mikamé finally left, Ibuki rode with him as far as Shinjuku. He explained to Sadako that he wanted to stop by his favorite bookstore to see if certain volumes he had ordered were in, but he already knew they were not; his real purpose in going was to telephone the Toganō house and have a conversation he did not want his wife to overhear.
Yasuko’s young breath sounded softly in the receiver, and then he heard her innocent voice. Bluntly, not waiting for her to finish, he said, “So you went to Atami! I heard it from Mikamé.” He made his voice accusatory and demanding, but she answered with apparent unconcern.
“Yes, he invited Mother and me. Really, I did mean to go to Ito, but as it turned out, I just couldn’t.”
“Four days I waited. For nothing.”
“Did you see Mikamé there?”
“No, when I got home today, he was waiting to see me—all excited about having proposed to you.”
“Yes, he did. He brought it up in front of Mother and me.” She sounded not in the least abashed. It was Ibuki who fell silent, at a loss for words. The unnatural suppression of his emotion, like an overflow of water choked by a narrow bottleneck, made him suddenly reckless.
“I want to see you tonight. May I come over now?”
“Now?”
“Yes. It’s only eight o’clock. If you’ll meet me somewhere, so much the better.”
“I can’t go out now,” she said firmly, and was silent for a moment. “Very well. Please come to the house. I’ll be expecting you.”
“I’ll be there, but I don’t want her around tonight. I want to be alone with you.”
“All right,” she said simply.
Following along the wall by the gate, she told him, he would find a small entrance just around the corner. She would unlock it. He was to come there after nine o’clock. Inside was a room that had been Akio’s study, where no one ever went. It was, she explained, the room where she used to work in private on Akio’s treatise on spirit possession.
—
Mieko had seated Harumé on the tatami in front of the vanity stand after giving her a bath and shampoo, and was now combing out her sleek raven hair. The task was not easy, for Harumé’s hair, which had never had a permanent wave, was thick and heavy enough when wet to break the teeth of a comb. The pallor of her skin, normally dull and lifeless, glowed faintly from her bath, and there was a moist seductiveness in the too-vivid blackness of her brows and lashes. Finishing the combing, Mieko laid her hands on Harumé’s shoulders and turned her gently to one side. Then she seated herself knee to knee in front of her daughter and gazed closely at the face flushed a delicate pink.
In Harumé’s features, never taxed with the strain of intellectual labor, there lingered still the pliant softness of a baby’s skin. Apart from a certain air of unease, the look of one who dwelt in perpetual mental twilight, her face bore no flaws to mask with cosmetics.
“Harumé,” said Mieko gently, “hold still now.”
Taking the other’s round, small chin in one hand, she tilted the face up a fraction of an inch. Then, with the glossy tip of a tube of lipstick from the vanity drawer, she painted the slack lips a rich red. The bright color, generously applied, gave Harumé’s features a bold animation, as if flooding them with light.
“There,” said Mieko with satisfaction. She pressed a fine tissue to Harumé’s lips, then picked up a small mirror and held it up to her. The face reflected in the mirror seemed slightly smaller and more somberly hued than the real one.
Harumé, who had submitted docilely to all of Mieko’s ministrations until that moment, all at once swept to her feet. The suddenness of her action sent the towel over her shoulders fluttering to the floor. Her dressing gown, thin cotton lined with lavender silk crepe, was untidily open at the neck, exposing the curve of her breasts.
Mieko stood up too, as if pulled irresistibly by Harumé. As she adjusted the front of the gown over Harumé’s moist white skin, she laid an arm across her shoulders and smoothed the stray wisps of hair over her ear, whispering closely, filling the other’s body with her own warm breath, “Harumé, you won’t be alone tonight. I’ll be with you. You must carry out my plan for me—I’m relying on you. And you will, won’t you?”
Harumé shook her head slowly, seemingly annoyed by the tickling in her ear, and then became quiet, eyes staring, her face solemn. Mieko took one last appraising look and scattered drops of eau de cologne on Harumé’s hair and shoulders.
Footsteps in the hallway crept softly toward them. Mieko, somehow knowing it would be Yasuko, took Harumé by the hand and led her quietly toward the door. The footsteps stopped outside the doorway, and it was indeed Yasuko’s voice that called softly, “Mother.”
“Is it time?”
“Yes. Go ahead.”
Yasuko, concealed in shadow, slid the door partway open but made no move to enter, and Mieko, not wondering at this, took Harumé by the shoulder and pushed her gently out into the hall.
On seeing Yasuko’s white arm drop lightly across Harumé’s shoulders, Mieko slid the door shut and, with one hand covering her eyes, fled back into her bedchamber. She dropped to her knees on the bedclothes, face tightly pressed against the pillow, and from her lips came anguished moans like prayers or lamentations.
After a time she slowly raised her head, got up, and crossed over away from the hallway, past the latticed doors beside the alcove, to the west side of the room. Lifting the bolt on the window shutter, she opened it a crack. In the garden the late moon sent dark pine shadows across the frozen ground. Beyond, in the window of the outbuilding that had served as Akio’s study, a lamp faintly glowed pink, while from the rooftop chimney, clouds of white smoke rose dimly in the light of the moon.
Unmindful of the cold creeping into her body, Mieko stood with a sleeve pressed to her mouth, gazing long toward the outbuilding as if to discover what was happening now beneath that roof. Her expression was calm and unflickering as always, but beneath the chill weight of her sagging breasts her heart raced in a mad elvish dance, while from hips to thighs a powerful tension enveloped her, anchoring her to the floor.
On sliding the door closed, she drew a long breath and relaxed, as if relieved of a great burden; then, seating herself once again on the bed, she drew from under the pillow an old envelope wrapped in pale blue silk and opened it, after gazing for a moment at the writing on the front. Inside was a rather bulky letter written in fountain pen on thin sheets of writing paper. The handwriting, bold and cursive, was that of a man.
Tomorrow at last I leave mainland Japan.
Tonight the moon is exceptionally bright, and the deck is light. The two poems you wrote when I went to Sapporo—was it the summer before last?—co
me back to me now:
The Tsuruga Straits at night, in their depths the moon;
Are you engulfed, I wonder, in sorrow green as the sea?
Grass for your pillow, on a far journey you leave;
Despairing, I awake before dawn from my dream.
At the time I belittled them, calling them outdated lyricism of the New Poetry school, but tonight I walked the deck reciting them aloud. I saw your face again as you stood quietly among the people from Clear Stream who saw me off at the station, and my heart stirred. I truly have only gratitude for you. You forgave all my selfishness and capriciousness.
Only now does it occur to me that scarcely ever did I make you happy; it seems all I did was abuse you. And always, with a mother’s generosity, you forgave me. Perhaps your very leniency brought out the tyrant in me. Knowing full well you were not in a position to declare our love openly, yet provoked by the underhandedness of it all, I deliberately acted in front of you as if I were in love with someone younger, like S. It even gave me a sadistic pleasure, of which I was quite aware, to imagine how much I had hurt you. Surely you knew that it was only your refusal to leave your husband that made me so unkind—and still, with never a word of protest, as gracious as a goddess, you forgave me everything. Your forgiveness, together with your appearance of submissiveness to your husband, made it all the harder for me to guess your innermost feelings. That it was your despair, the rage which you had every right to feel toward T. that first brought us together, I cannot deny, but I should like to think that the love which later grew between us had nothing to do with your feelings of resentment or revenge.
To satisfy myself that it was so, I begged you to show your passion, to confess all to T. and come running to me with the two children. But you stubbornly refused. You said that you lacked the courage to take action in real life, and therein, you said, lay the explanation for your literary gifts as well as for the darkness of your fate as a woman (that was after you had conceived Harumé and Akio, when you first told me that I was their father).
To put it another way—you contain a curious ambiguity that enables you to get along without distinguishing between the truth and falseness of your actions in the real world. Because of that trait you seemed at once incomprehensible and unclean to me (I admit to the unreasonable fastidiousness of the Japanese male, to whom the blood of menstruation is of all blood the dirtiest). Even so, I was profoundly drawn by the intense emotion engendered in your mysterious body and soul.
To have fathered two children—the boy, especially—with you fills me at this moment, as I leave Japan for the war, with a great and living joy far outweighing the unpleasantness of any veil of lies. That Akio will grow up a Toganō means nothing to me. The guilt I suffered so long for having conspired in woman’s wrongdoing seems now as ephemeral as a chip of ice in the sun. What are patriarchal notions of blood and family to a man who has given his child you for a mother? I see clearly now that T., who insulted you and made you despair, was the unlucky one. However long he may continue after this to live with you, I know you will never forgive him.
You appear infinitely generous, but you are a woman of infinite passion, in hate as well as love. Therefore, I have at times feared you and even tried to get away from you. I made love to S. in desperate hopes of leaving you, but that attempt served only to prove that you held me captive and I could never escape. I think you suffered a great deal because of her, but please believe that now, as I leave this country, it is you whose image is fixed indelibly in my heart. Since I am a noncombatant, I am sure I will be back safely, but it will give me courage to think that when I return, you will be waiting for me.
I am not in the least sorry to have loved you. Though our love may be illicit—though I am certainly defrauding your husband—I want to tell you once again that I feel no lingering sense of guilt, no ugly scar on my heart; and that I sense heaven’s blessing in this tangible fruition of our love.
For Akio, and for Harumé, who will grow up separately, may your love be constant shelter and nourishment. Please don’t worry about me.
—
The letter was unsigned. Again and again she looked at it, as at the text of a sutra learned nearly by heart. She did not read it, but merely gazing at its pages seemed to quiet the violent agitation within her.
After a time she turned startled eyes toward the unopened window.
A woman’s pale face appeared. The space between her eyebrows was creased in a frown, the eyes wide with alarm. As if hearing the inaudible cry of an unearthly, astonishing voice, Mieko groped her way to the window and slid open the shutter. The light in the outbuilding had vanished; there was only the smoke still pouring from the chimney, vanishing hastily skyward as if in flight from the secret deed in progress beneath the roof.
—
Ibuki sank into a bottomless softness, feeling himself melting into a similar softness. Captivated by such delicious drowsiness, he dozed in a pleasant half-sleep. Then several times over came the brief and piercing cry of a bird, the brevity of the sound severing his sweet dream like a pair of sharp scissors.
He remembered suddenly that it was winter, his senses awakening to the harsh early-morning cold that always roused him at home. Drawing his eyebrows together in a deep frown, he turned questioning eyes on the face of the sleeping woman whose head lay cradled on his arm. The weightless, short-cut hair brushing warm as the pinion feathers of a bird against his skin proved that it was Yasuko, yet he stared long and closely at the even-featured sleeping face—the closed eyelids thin and relaxed as large petals, the nose slender and intelligent, round-tipped, standing out in fair-skinned relief—unable to believe that the woman he held was actually she.
Carefully he pulled his arm away; but her head merely rolled a bit, and from her coral lips that bore no trace of lipstick came only the quiet, warm breathing of sleep.
He tucked the cream-colored blanket gently around her slim shoulders and stepped barefoot down upon the thick mat of a dark red Persian rug. Drawing back the bedchamber curtain, he found the walls of the old room to be covered ceiling to floor with bookcases. The layers of closely packed books overlapped darkly in the faint light, as if to press down on the lives of the living.
On a small table were wine and curaçao and cheese, which Yasuko had brought from the main house last night, exactly as they had been left.
Gazing with unconscious pleasure at Yasuko’s sleeping figure, tranquil as a reclining statue of Buddha, Ibuki traced in his memory the strangely entangled events of the night before.
When he opened the door as directed, Yasuko was standing there alone; she locked the door after him, then led him inside.
“Have these rooms always been here? I never noticed before,” he said, looking at an oil painting of an old-fashioned beauty with hair swept into a chignon, a russet shawl about her shoulders, that hung on the wall.
“That’s Mother.” Yasuko bent down to adjust the flame in the heater.
“Mieko Toganō? This? It’s certainly different from the way she is now.”
“I should think so,” said Yasuko. “It was done the year she graduated from college. It’s by Minoru Shimojō,” she added, naming a famous painter and joining him in looking up at the portrait. Ibuki was chagrined by the ease with which his pent-up anger dissolved at her artless smile.
In the painting, where complicated effects of light and shadow gave an impression of heaviness and inertness, the oval face with its bright eyes and firmly shut mouth was portrayed with utmost vividness. There was not a trace of the filmy beauty that veiled Mieko now like fold upon fold of thin silk.
“I feel as if in this painting I’ve seen what she’s really like for the first time.”
“I know. That’s why she doesn’t particularly like showing it to people. The strength that Shimojō captured so vividly here is the part of herself she keeps most deeply hidden now….”
“Yes, of course—now that you mention it, this painting could well give away her secr
ets. I see why they call Shimojō a master.”
“From what I’ve heard, in her student days she was good at tennis, and terribly bright.”
“Tennis? Knowing her now, I find that hard to believe.” Ibuki put an arm lightly around Yasuko beside him. “Come on, tonight let’s not talk about Mieko. I came here to see you.”
They walked toward the painting and sat down next to each other on the old-fashioned brocade sofa beneath it. The touch of her softness brought all his pent-up longing to the surface, and taking her small face in both his hands, he kissed her a long moment. Yasuko accepted him with a smile, but her tongue twisted and turned like a ballerina, swift and strong, thrusting him back, putting him to flight, sporting freely with him inside her small mouth. Roused by her challenging, tantalizing play, he embraced her with such strength that even in the space of a kiss she cried out.
She was evidently fresh from a bath. The scent of cologne her body gave off rekindled in Ibuki the sensual ecstasy of the night in Atami when he first slept with her, but out of a greedy wish to increase the pleasure of the coming banquet, he held himself back.
Yasuko brought wine and curaçao, serving him and taking some herself, too. The orange-colored curaçao was sweet and syrupy, not to his liking, but he remembered that it had filled him with a sense of fierce power, as if his body were being invaded steadily by a strength not his own.
“You’ve got to leave Mieko,” he said. “Once, when you told me that, I thought you were being silly, but not anymore….And whatever you do, don’t marry Mikamé….He’s my enemy, and so is she, and so is anyone who tries to take you away from me….I don’t know what I’d do to keep from losing you.”
Holding her close to him, caressing her arms and wrists, he had appealed to her in such words; yet through it all there had been a consciousness of being transported into another realm, as if he were dreaming wide-eyed in the midst of a fearfully brilliant light. He had drunk whiskey at home before coming, and although he had had since then only a sip or two of ladies’ liqueur, the world of color and light opening up before his eyes was dumbfounding, a world that for mere drunkenness seemed far too bright and shining.
