by Fumiko Enchi
Ibuki then quoted a sentence from the essay which he said applied to its author as well: “ ‘Her spirit alternated constantly between spells of lyricism and spirit possession, making no philosophical distinction between the self alone and in relation to others, and unable to achieve the solace of a religious indifference.’
“You know,” he added, “the news of Harumé’s pregnancy came to me only indirectly, through Sadako; I have yet to hear about it from either Mieko or Yasuko. But if it happens that Mieko does not arrange for an abortion, that will shed light on something that is just now becoming plain to me. It will also underline what a damned fool I’ve been, but then it’s as you say—love affairs are always more foolish than the lovers know. In fact, by giving me a glimpse of the inner workings of Mieko’s mind, my own foolishness has not been a complete waste. Yasuko once told me that the secrets inside her mother-in-law had all the fragrance of a garden in the night. I have some idea now of what she may have meant by that. It hardly surprises me that Yasuko should be more in love with Mieko than she is with you or me.”
“Secrets aren’t for me, they’re too womanish…too much like children’s toys. Your feminine streak gives you a secretive side of your own, but that sort of thing isn’t in my line.”
“Which could be exactly why Yasuko is drawn to you.” Ibuki smiled faintly as he studied Mikamé’s mouth, which was clamped tightly around the stem of his pipe. “Do you still want to marry Yasuko, knowing that I’ve taken her to bed?”
“If you have no objection.” Mikamé was nonchalant. “I have no qualms about that sort of thing. A man may try as hard as he likes, but he’ll never know what schemes a woman may be slowly and quietly carrying out behind his back. Children—think what endless trouble men have gone to over the ages to persuade themselves that the children their women bore belonged to them! Making adultery a crime, inventing chastity belts…but in the end they were unable to penetrate even one of women’s secrets. Even the sadistic misogyny of Buddha and Christ was nothing but an attempt to gain the better of a vastly superior opponent. It’s my belief that one should never intrude beyond a certain point into a woman’s affairs. So if I do marry Yasuko, I won’t be jealous of Akio or you. Not much, anyway—and after all, jealousy is a great aphrodisiac!” He laughed so boisterously that Ibuki jumped.
“Tell me,” he went on, “what do you think are Yasuko’s real feelings? The more I listen to you, the more I find myself drawn to her by the things she hides. Do you think she’ll ever break away from Mieko?”
“I’m sure she wants to. But I doubt that she can. My own opinion is that she ought to go with you on that trip to central Asia.”
With that the two friends fell abruptly into a solemn silence, eye to eye. Neither could make out any reflection in the eyes of the other. And there was a bleak weariness in the dull realization that they would see nothing, however long they might wait.
—
After that, as if Sadako’s letter had furnished a convenient excuse, Yasuko would no longer consent to meet Ibuki in the Western-style room in the outbuilding. “Your wife hires investigators; she frightens me,” she would say, fending him off.
Ibuki was equally annoyed by his wife’s enterprise. Yet he soon found that the information she was receiving supported his claim that he had broken with Yasuko, and also supplied him with useful knowledge of the Toganō household.
He learned that Harumé, now swollen with child, had taken up residence with Yū in a certain temple on the fringes of Kyoto where an elder brother of Mieko’s was head priest.
He recalled that one day during the spring rainy season when the study group had met in his office, Yasuko had mentioned that her mother-in-law had gone to Kyoto.
“Off to see the Shrine in the Fields again?” Mikamé had asked, his voice loud as always.
“No,” Yasuko had replied with a gentle shake of her head. “She had business there with relatives.”
Toward the end of June Ibuki left for Kyoto to deliver his biennial lecture series at the university there.
“Won’t Yasuko be going?” asked Sadako with surprising equanimity. She was delighted with the unexpectedly positive effects of her investigation; that the sheer aggressiveness of her action should have undermined her husband’s pride was to her no cause for shame. She knew—and was satisfied in the knowledge—that while he was gone, Yasuko would have to stay home to look after Mieko, who was suffering a recurrence of intercostal neuralgia brought on by the seasonal damp.
—
Between lectures Ibuki would leave his hotel on Gojō Avenue and wander the familiar Kyoto streets, his eyes refreshed by the green foliage, sleek with rain, that grew in lush profusion at roadsides and atop the old mud walls, while his spirit, weary as though emerging from wild excesses of debauchery, was pleasantly soothed by the milky light that filtered down as if through frosted glass.
One day, when a mottled layer of ashen clouds was deepening in the sky and the air shone with a fine, soft drizzle, he got off the bus at Arashiyama and proceeded on foot.
Beside a narrow bamboo-lined path he spotted a stone marker engraved “Site of the Shrine in the Fields” and halted, hands in the pockets of his Burberry raincoat. The sight of the desolate torii gate and shrine—exactly as described in the essay—aroused in him no strong desire to gain a closer view. He wandered on, slowly and aimlessly, until he came to a stop beside the wall of a temple that was backed up against a big old pond. The tiled-roof mud wall, built up in narrow layers, led to a black gate from which hung a wooden sign that read “Jikōji Temple—Rear Entrance.”
Muttering the temple name over to himself, he followed a stone pathway into the compound. Standing amid the fresh greenery inside were several tall chestnut trees, whose cream-colored corollas scattered a shower of powdery blossoms into the breeze, sprinkling Ibuki’s hair and shoulders with their petals. The spacious grounds were hushed and deserted. Over the high bell tower drooped sprays of golden flowers—broom, perhaps—with the unstudied grace of a discarded kimono.
He strolled idly about and was heading back the way he had come when all at once he heard the low voice of a woman, singing a children’s song:
Snow is falling,
snow is falling;
the lane is gone,
the bridge is gone,
buried in white…
alas, alas,
the way to my sweetheart’s house,
vanished from sight.
He had never heard Harumé speak, yet he knew with strange conviction that the low singsong was hers. His mind fell into turmoil, torn between a desire to see her and a desire to run away. Slowly, almost angrily, he moved toward a fence, in the direction of the voice. Across the low cedar wickerwork he quickly spotted Harumé’s figure in the pale white light as she sat reclining and singing absently to herself on a veranda where faded purple fulling cloth hung stretched to dry. He had feared that her stupidity would appear to him now as ugliness, but in her blank and fair-skinned face, the dark eyes brimming with melancholy shadows like those of a handsome cat, he was relieved to find a beauty so great that its lack of vivacity was all the more moving—a beauty that turned fear into pity. Her face and shoulders were thin and drawn, while the high roundness of her belly, thrusting up beneath her narrow sash, spoke plainly of the new life squirming inside her. Ibuki shivered, thinking of the moment when that bit of life had passed from him and lodged within her body. He felt a swift sense of peril, as if the ground beneath his feet were not to be trusted, but there was no attendant feeling of disgust. He stood there a long time, looking in reverence at the beautiful idiot whose flesh was as if steeped in uncleanness.
“Miss Harumé, it’s chilly today. You mustn’t catch cold.” A dry voice called out, and then Yū hurried out into the garden, her back slightly bent, and began to take down the finely patterned purple silk.
Fearful perhaps of the stern light in Yū’s eyes, Ibuki retreated through the black rear gate. But all the way b
ack on the bus, and again at the hotel, his mind was preoccupied with the endless pathos of Harumé’s beautiful, detached face and of her high round belly.
—
One fine fall day Toé Yakushiji arrived at Tokyo Station.
The regular meeting of the poetry circle was to be held at the Toganō home that day, and Toé, running late, was on her way there to see Mieko Toganō.
The Toganō parlor in Meguro was as tasteful, and the ladies as well dressed, as ever; but out in the garden the gardener was digging around tree roots, while indoors, scattered piles of old chests, boxed scroll paintings, and household utensils gave the house the unsettled look of moving day.
When she saw Toé, Mieko offered condolences on the death of her father that summer. Yasuko joined in. “Even though he was ill such a long time, it must have been a very great shock all the same.”
Toé then spoke fondly of the fall day one year before when Mieko and Yasuko had visited the family Nō stage in Kyoto. “Mrs. Toganō, my father always said that when he died, I was to give you one of the masks as a remembrance. Today I brought one with me.”
“Oh, my. But really—” Mieko demurred, but Yasuko interrupted with a glance up at her.
“Mother, she wants you to have it.” Then to Toé she said, “Thank you so very much.” The dimple flashed in her cheek. “The garden here is so big, and the house so hard to keep up, that we’ve decided to sell them and move to Kamakura. Right now things are so disorganized that the place isn’t fit to be seen, but everyone wanted to meet here for one last time, so here we are.”
“May I see the mask?” said Mieko.
“Of course. It’s not very old, but it’s one that Father was fond of. He often wore it in Sumida River and Mie Temple. He thought you would be able to appreciate the sadness in its look, having lost your only child. Please accept it for his sake.” Toé spoke smoothly, her large, double-lidded eyes open wide beneath her thin eyebrows.
“Thank you. I hope you won’t mind if the others look at it, too.” With a calm glance at Yasuko, as if to offset the directness of Toé’s gaze, Mieko drew the box toward her and untied the string.
Inside the box the carved image lay quietly with the yellowish hardness of a death mask. The long, conical slope of the eyelids, the melancholy, sunken cheeks, and the subdued red of the mouth with its blackened teeth—all conveyed the somber and grief-laden look of a woman long past the age of sensuality. This mask was smaller than the masks of younger women.
“I can’t help remembering that day when your brother tried on masks for us,” said Yasuko with a sigh. “Your father was in bed then in the back of the house, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Toé, turning her head down and pressing back tears with a slender finger.
“What does the name of the mask mean?” asked Yasuko, peering at it over Mieko’s shoulder. Mieko looked at Toé.
“It’s called Fukai, and the name can be written either of two ways: with the characters for ‘deep well’ or ‘deep woman.’ It’s used in roles depicting middle-aged women, especially mothers. The Kanze school takes the name to mean a woman of ‘exceedingly deep heart’—that is, someone mature not only in years, but also in experience and understanding. My father had his own interpretation, though. He liked to think of it as a metaphor comparing the heart of an older woman to the depths of a bottomless well—a well so deep that its water would seem totally without color. Of course, I don’t pretend to understand it myself.” Toé’s voice was energetic, a perfect complement to the clarity of her gaze and the flowing smoothness of her gestures. It was as if she had made a conscious resolution to ban from her person all trace of the veiled, evocative quality of the masks.
After Mieko had taken the mask Fukai in her hands and studied it, the sunken-cheeked, sorrow-stricken face traveled around the circle, from hand to hand. All of the young women, married and single, were gaily dressed and vivacious, but as each one held up the mask and gazed at it in turn, her features would be crossed by a look of lonely solemnity that seemed to mirror the shadows in the mask. As if to escape that solemnity, they were lavish with praise, exclaiming over the mask like foreigners. “What an exquisite, sad sort of beauty it has! Women today have lost this quiet gracefulness.”
When the students left, Mieko and Yasuko persuaded Toé to stay with them and to tell them details of her father’s death. She declined their invitation to have supper with them, however, and so they escorted her to the front door, walking together down a short hallway lighted by rays of the setting sun.
Suddenly the silence was broken by an infant’s crying, accompanied by the sound of an old woman crooning a lullaby. The atmosphere of chill and desolate refinement that normally hung over the large house was shattered by the baby’s wails.
“My! Is there a baby here?” asked Toé automatically, forgetting her natural reserve.
“Yes, it’s the child of a relative of ours. The mother died giving birth, and Yasuko felt so sorry for the poor thing that she offered to bring it up as her own.” Mieko spoke casually, with a sideways glance at Yasuko.
“It’s a lot of work, but he’s a dear creature, even if he does take up almost all my time now. Actually that’s one more reason we decided to move to Kamakura: it’s a healthier environment for the baby.”
Toé’s eyes fell sympathetically on the beautiful pair, both widows. With no man in the house to look after, she reflected, it was only natural for them to seek out such means of feeling needed.
Yasuko went with Toé as far as the gate. When she returned, Mieko was gone and Yū was pacing the hallway with Harumé’s child in her arms.
“How is the little one?” said Yasuko, peeping at its tiny face. Not yet three months old, the infant surveyed her guilelessly with its shiny black eyes. She drew back in momentary fear, seeming to see in its innocent look the stare of both Harumé and Akio.
“Yū, the baby does look like Harumé after all.”
“No, ma’am, this boy is the image of Master Akio.” Yū looked up, blinking sorrowfully. “If only I could tell you how miserable it makes me. I held Master Akio and Miss Harumé this very way when they were babies, and now both of them are gone. But this new life is here in their place; I have got that to be thankful for.” She wept easily these days. Great tears trickled down her cheeks. “Not that I ever wanted to hold this child in my arms. Heaven forgive me, but when Miss Harumé died of heart failure after it was over, I was glad. I couldn’t have borne it to see her with a little one, the way she was. I told the mistress so, too, but she didn’t pay any attention. She was determined to see this child brought into the world, in spite of anything I could say.”
“Yes. Once Mother has made up her mind, there’s no stopping her,” said Yasuko. “I love the baby, too. He looks so much like Akio I could almost believe he is mine.” Gently she lifted the white bundle out of Yū’s arms and cradled it in her own, laying a tender kiss on the soft cheek. Harumé’s death had filled her with a great wordless pity. Her constant prayer that this child of Harumé’s womb would turn out not like his mother but like Akio or Ibuki gave her expression the earnest intensity of a small girl.
“Mieko must feel a keener blend of anguish and joy at Harumé’s death than any of us,” she thought. Then the vast, mysterious depths within Mieko that had always so fascinated her seemed suddenly to become bottomless. A helpless bewilderment overcame Yasuko, and her gaze moved searchingly through space with the distraught air of someone left standing on a pier, seeking a final glimpse of a loved one’s face even as the ship disappeared from view.
Mieko was kneeling on the floor in the slowly deepening dusk. She had lifted the mask Fukai from its box again, and was studying it in solitude. The pale yellowish cast of the mournful thin-cheeked mask in her hands was reflected on her face, the two countenances appearing faintly in the lingering daylight like twin blossoms on a single branch. The mask seemed to know all the intensity of her grief at the loss of Akio and Harumé—as well as the bitter w
oman’s vengeance that she had planned so long, hiding it deep within her….
The crying of the baby filled her ears.
In that moment the mask dropped from her grasp as if struck down by an invisible hand. In a trance she reached out and covered the face on the mask with her hand, while her right arm, as if suddenly paralyzed, hung frozen, immobile, in space.
* A high-strung, sensual poet and diarist (c. 970–1030) known for her many romances.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FUMIKO ENCHI was born in Tokyo in 1905, the daughter of the great Meiji scholar Ueda Mannen. She is the author of many novels and stories, and has produced a ten-volume translation of The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. Masks was first published in Japan in 1958.
