At times the whistle of the Hankyu train sent its note reverberating over the dark ricefields, like a flock of scrawny night birds flying swiftly with raucous cries. The beating wings of the train whistle set the night air trembling. It was the time of the year when, if one looked up suddenly, one might see a dim, blue-green flash of lightning flicker silently across a corner of the night sky and disappear.
In the evening, after supper, no one came to visit the rooms occupied by Yakichi and Etsuko. There had been a time when Kensuke came by to kill time chattering, or Asako dropped in with the children, or everybody came in to enjoy themselves. By degrees, however, Yakichi’s distaste for playing host became clear, and the others began to keep their distance. Yakichi could not stand competing with anyone for Etsuko’s time.
In those hours, they were not pressed to do anything. Sometimes they played go, which Yakichi taught her. This was the only opportunity Yakichi had ever had to display his skill as mentor to a young woman. Tonight again they sat at the go board.
Lost in the joy of lifting the weight of each go stone in her fingers, constantly groping with her hand in the bowl of stones, Etsuko never took her eyes from the board, to which they clung as if possessed. Her attitude seemed to display extraordinary absorption, but in fact she was drawn by nothing more than the meaningless ordering of the regularly intersecting black lines. Yakichi, too, was struck by Etsuko’s absorption. Was it in the game or something else? He observed this lone young woman, free of embarrassment, oblivious in the joy of frivolous abstraction, her white teeth faintly visible in her partly opened mouth.
At times her go stones struck the board with a high-pitched sound. It was as if they were lashing something, an attacking dog, perhaps. At such times Yakichi would furtively observe his daughter-in-law’s face and place his stones gently, as if remonstrating with her.
“What terrific power! Just like the duel between Musashi Miyamoto and Kojiro Sasaki at Ganryushima.”
From behind Etsuko came the heavy sounds of steps in the hallway. It wasn’t the lightness of a woman’s step. It wasn’t the gloom-ridden burden of a middle-aged man. It was a feverish, youthful weight that bounced from the soles of the feet and made the boards in the hall, dark in the night, squeak with a noise like a groan, like a shout.
Etsuko’s hand paused in the act of setting down a stone. Her fingers seemed to be barely supported by the stone. Yet it was essential that those fingers, trembling in spite of themselves, grip the stone firmly. She feigned that she was carefully considering her next play. It was not, however, a difficult play, and it was important that her father-in-law not be made suspicious by undue hesitation.
The door slid open. Saburo remained kneeling outside and poked his head into the opening. Etsuko heard him say: “Good night, sir.”
Yakichi grunted and bent forward to place a stone. Etsuko stared at his stiff, knobby, ugly old fingers. She said nothing to Saburo. She did not look toward the door. It closed. The footsteps retreated in the direction opposite Miyo’s bedroom. There, facing west, was Saburo’s three-mat room.
2
DOGS MAKE country nights unbearable with their howling. The old setter Maggie, tied in the shed in back, lifted her ears at the sound of a pack of wild dogs passing through the orchard and the grove nearby. Then she lifted her voice in a long, stupid howl, as if complaining of her solitary confinement. The wild dogs paused in their rustling passage through the bamboo grass and answered her. Etsuko, a light sleeper, awoke.
She had gone to bed only an hour ago. A long period of sleep was a duty she still owed the ensuing day. She searched her mind for a hope that would justify tomorrow. Any tiny, ordinary hope would suffice. Without that who can live till morning? Some mending that is still to be done, tickets for tomorrow’s trip, the small quantity of saké left in the bottle to provide tomorrow’s liquid sustenance—all these one must offer to the next day before one can face the dawn.
What did Etsuko have to offer? Oh yes, two pairs of socks, one blue, one brown. Her gift of these to Saburo was all that tomorrow meant to Etsuko. She was not religious, yet like devoutly religious women, Etsuko found in the emptiness of her hopes the purest of meanings. She clung to these frail cords—one blue, one brown. By them she dangled from this impossible, murky, pitch-black, bloated balloon of a tomorrow; and where it would take her she did not think about. Not thinking about things was the basis of Etsuko’s contentment. It was her reason for being.
Etsuko’s entire body was still swathed in the groping of Yakichi’s dry, gnarled fingers. Even an hour or two of sleep had not wiped it off. A woman who has been caressed by a skeleton can never forget that caress. It was a new skin added to her skin—transparent, damp, thinner than the chrysalis a butterfly is about to shed. It was as if she had been painted with an invisible pigment, which if she so much as moved a muscle would fly into luminous shreds in the darkness.
She looked around her with eyes accustomed to the dark. Yakichi, oddly enough, was not snoring. The nape of his neck gleamed faintly like a plucked fowl. The sound of the clock above the shelf chopping time and the chirping of the crickets under the floor placed this night within earthly boundaries, without which it would not have been of this earth—this night that hovered over Etsuko and filled her with fear that she was turning as rigid as a fly dropped in gelatin.
She lifted her head slowly. The mother-of-pearl on the door of the heirloom cabinet glistened blue.
She closed her eyes tightly. The memory of it came back. It had taken place six months earlier, when shortly after she came here she started taking walks alone and was immediately dubbed eccentric by the villagers. Etsuko ignored them and walked on. It was then that they noticed that she walked as if pregnant, from which they deduced that she was a woman with a past.
From a corner of the Sugimoto property, one could look across the creek at the expanse of the Hattori Garden of Souls. Very few people visited the graves there except during the equinoctial holidays. In the afternoons, on the broad slopes of the cemetery, the countless tombstones threw tiny shadows on the ground. From here the cemetery, wavy with undulations and surrounded by hilly woodland, seemed cheerful and pure. At times one could see the sun reflecting off single granules in the white quartz of one or another of the tombs.
Etsuko was particularly fond of the breadth of the sky above the cemetery and the stillness of the broad path that ran through it. This white, bracing tranquillity, mixed with the scent of shrubbery and tender tree shoots, made her feel as at no other time that her spirit was unclothed.
It was the time for gathering herbs. Etsuko walked along the creek collecting horsetail and starwort in her sleeve. In one place the creek water had run over the bank. There was parsley there. The creek flowed under a bridge and then cut past the concrete drive that came from Osaka where it terminated at the cemetery gate. Etsuko circled the round, grassy plot at the entrance and headed for her favorite path. She marveled that this respite had been vouchsafed her. It was like a reprieve.
She passed by some children playing catch. After a time she came to a green plot that as yet bore no monuments. It lay inside the wall that ran along the creek. As she started to sit down, she noticed a boy lying on his back evidently absorbed in the book he held over his face. It was Saburo. He felt her shadow as it hovered over him and sat up.
“Mrs. Sugimoto,” he said. At that moment all the star-wort and horsetail fell from her sleeve onto his face.
The changes of expression that then rapidly passed over Saburo’s face gave Etsuko a cool and distinct sense of joy, of the kind that comes to one who encounters a simple and neatly soluble equation. When the herbs first struck his face, he thought she was teasing him and exaggerated his efforts to escape. Then he looked at Etsuko’s expression and realized it had been an accident. His face swiftly sobered and turned apologetic. He stood up. Then he sank down on his knees and helped Etsuko retrieve the spilled starwort.
Then I asked him: “What have you been up to?”<
br />
“I’ve been reading a book, madam.”
He blushed and showed her the samurai adventure story. His “madam” made her think of military usage, though this boy only eighteen had not been a soldier. He had been brought up hearing the dialect of Hiroshima and was now testing his use of standard speech.
Saburo volunteered that he had gone to get the bread ration and was relaxing on the way back when Etsuko discovered him. His plea was more ingratiating than defensive. “I won’t tell,” said Etsuko.
She recalled that she had asked about the damage done to Hiroshima by the atomic bomb. He said that his immediate family lived outside the city proper but that one whole family of his relatives had died in the bombing. There was nothing more for Etsuko and Saburo to say. He did not wish to be so forward as to ask her any questions.
When I first saw Saburo, I thought he must be at least twenty. I can’t recall how old he looked when I saw him as he lay on the grass of the Hattori Garden of Souls. He was young. His cotton shirt, which was full of patches, was open, and his sleeves were rolled up. Perhaps he was hiding his badly frayed cuffs. His arms were splendid, arms that city men don’t acquire until much later. They were tanned, those well-developed arms; all the golden fuzz on them made them look as if their maturity embarrassed them.
Etsuko could only look at him reprovingly. It wasn’t an expression that suited her, but she had no other. She wondered if he knew why. Of course he didn’t. He was conscious only of the presence of another nuisance of a woman come to live with his nuisance of an employer.
His voice! That slightly nasal, smoky, subdued, yet childish voice! Those words that seemed to be torn one by one from his uncommunicative tongue! How round those words, like plain wild fruit!
Nevertheless, when Etsuko saw him the next day she was able to look at him without being moved in the slightest. No reproof—just a smile.
That’s right. Nothing happened.
Then one day when she had been there a month, Yakichi asked Etsuko to mend the old suits he wore for farming. He hurried her to complete the job, and it took her well into the night. At one o’clock in the morning, Yakichi, who should have been asleep, came into Etsuko’s room. He praised her diligence, slipped his arms into the jacket that had been repaired, and silently smoked his pipe for a while.
“Do you sleep well now?”
“Yes. It’s different from Tokyo—so quiet.”
“You’re not telling me the truth,” said Yakichi.
“Actually I’m not sleeping very well at all,” said Etsuko. “It’s just too quiet, quieter than I like it.”
“That’s too bad. I shouldn’t have brought you away.” Yakichi’s reply had in it a touch of front-office sarcasm.
Even when Etsuko accepted Yakichi’s invitation to come to Maidemmura, she anticipated the occurrence of nights like this. In fact she rather welcomed them. Earlier she had wished to die with her husband—the death of an Indian widow. It was an occult thing, that sacrificial death she dreamed of, a suicide proffered not so much in mourning for her husband’s death as in envy of that death. What she desired was not any common, ordinary death, but a slow death, over a protracted period of time. Was it not that in the depth of her jealousy she sought something that would enable her never to fear jealousy again? Behind this sordid craving, as wretched as a craving for carrion, did there not lurk a fervent desire to have everything for herself—a purposeless greed?
Her husband’s death . . . It was a day toward the end of autumn. She could still see clearly the hearse pulled up to the back door of the Hospital for Infectious Diseases. The workmen had lifted the casket. There was the damp smell of incense and mildew and corpses in the basement mortuary, as well as the ghastly presence of the artificial white lotuses thick with gray dust, and the damp tatami for overnight mourners, and the couch used as the bier, its leather cover peeling. From this mortuary with its portable shrine—a waiting room in which the tablets of the dead keep changing—the workmen carried the coffin up the sloping concrete ramp. One of the workmen was wearing army shoes, and the hobnails in them struck the concrete with a sound like gnashing teeth. The door opened . . .
Etsuko had never known a sunburst of such profusion, of such emotion, as that which she met in that moment. That flooding sunshine of early November, that transparent geyser filling and overflowing all.
The back door of the hospital opened onto a flat basin of the city once completely devastated by fire bombings. On the other side ran the embankment of the Chuo line, overgrown with withered vegetation. Half the neighborhood was made up of new houses and houses under construction; the rest was still ruins of fire, given over to weeds, rubbish, and assorted debris. The November sunshine spread over everything. The handlebars of bicycles running along the broad avenue that traversed the area shone in it. Even from the rubbish piles in the ruins, bright shards, perhaps from beer bottles, dazzled the eye. The sunlight struck the casket and then Etsuko with the force of a cataract.
The hearse started its engine. Etsuko got in behind the casket in the curtained interior.
What she thought about on the way to the crematorium was neither jealousy nor death. All she pondered was the glare that had just struck her. In her lap her hands toyed with a bouquet of autumn flowers. There were chrysanthemums. There was bush clover. There were Chinese balloon flowers. There were cosmos, wilted from the overnight stay. The front of her mourning dress was sprinkled with yellow pollen.
What did she think in that light-bathed time? Of liberation from jealousy? From the myriad sleepless nights? From her husband’s sudden fever? From the Hospital for Infectious Diseases? From his horrible, delirious ravings in the dead of night? From the awful odors? From death?
Was Etsuko even jealous that this abundant sunshine was a thing of this earth? And was that because jealousy had become the only emotion she could maintain for any length of time?
A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him—the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage. Etsuko, however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation.
She could not help feeling that the sunlight that bathed her there by the back door of the hospital was a shocking waste committed by heaven, now gratuitously inundating the earth. She came to the conclusion later that she was much more comfortable in the half-light of the hearse. Each time the car bumped, something rattled in her husband’s coffin. Perhaps it was her husband’s pipe, placed with him because he treasured it, knocking against the wooden side. It should have been wrapped in something. Etsuko placed her hand against the white cloth that covered the outside of the casket at the spot the noise was coming from. The pipe, or whatever it was, went silent—as if holding its breath.
She pulled back a corner of the curtain. After a time she saw another hearse ahead of hers slow down and swing from the center of the boulevard into a tasteless mall surrounded by benches and a preposterously large building that looked like a kiln. It was the crematorium.
Etsuko remembered thinking: I have not come to cremate my husband, but to cremate my jealousy.
But when her husband’s remains were burned, would her jealousy be consumed too? Her jealousy was in a sense a contagion caught from her husband. It had attacked her body, her nerves, her bones. If she wished to burn her jealousy, she must walk with her husband’s coffin into the innermost depths of that blast furnace of a building. There was no other way.
For three days before he took sick, her husband had not come home. He went to work. He was not one to be so carried away by a love affair that he took a day off f
rom the office. He simply could not bear to come home, where Etsuko was waiting. She went to the neighborhood public phone five times a day but hesitated about calling. Yet when she did call he always came to the phone. He was never brutal to her then. His soft, sweet, purring excuses, however, and his deliberate lapses into lisping Osaka speech reminded Etsuko of the way he would twist out his cigarettes in the ashtray and intensify her pain. She preferred abuse. Although at first glance he was a big man to whose lips abuse might spring readily, Ryosuke could repeat to her in gentle tones promises he had long decided not to fulfill. Etsuko could not combat it. She would have been much better off if she had not called him in the first place.
“It’s hard to talk here, but last night I met an old friend. First he asked me to go play mah-jongg. He’s high up in the Commerce Ministry and I couldn’t be rude to him. What? Yes, tonight I’m coming home. Right after work, I’m coming home. . . . But I’ve got mountains of work. . . . Should you get dinner? Do it or don’t do it, I don’t care—whatever you like. . . . If I’ve eaten, I’ll eat again when I get home. Look, I’m hanging up. Mr. Kawaji here is getting jealous. . . . Yes, I see. I understand. All right, goodbye.” Dandy that he was, Ryosuke put on an air of bourgeois contentment among his colleagues.
Etsuko waited. Then she waited some more. He didn’t come home. Was it because on the rare evenings that he did spend at home Etsuko never nagged him or called him to account? All she did was look at her husband with sadness in her eyes. Those bitch’s eyes, those dumb, sad eyes, made Ryosuke angry. It was the something for which the woman waited, her hands held out like a beggar’s. Something for which the woman with eyes more and more like a beggar’s waited. For Ryosuke, it sniffed out all the desolate fears of their ugly skeleton of a marital relationship and flensed it of the detail of life.
He turned his solid—more precisely his “stolid”—back and feigned sleep. One night in summer he felt his wife’s lips touch his body as he slept, and he slapped her for it. “Don’t you have any shame?” he said in a sleepy voice, slapping her. Without emotion, as if he were striking a mosquito that had landed on him.
Thirst for Love Page 3
