Kobayashi had gradually worked himself up. Finally, looking as though he were unbearably moved, he spilled tears on the tablecloth.
[ 36 ]
UNFORTUNATELY, TSUDA was not sufficiently drunk to be caught up in this display. Observing from outside the realm of empathy, he was inclined to be critical of what he saw. He wondered, was it sake or his uncle that was making Kobayashi cry? Was it Dostoevsky or Japan’s working class? Whichever should be the case, he well understood that it had scant relation to himself. He was disgusted. And he was uneasy. He gazed at the stains left by tears that had rained from the eyes of his overwrought friend as if they were merely an annoyance.
The man who had been identified as a detective took out again his thin notebook and began scribbling something in pencil. Appearing to notice everything, in the manner of a cat, while immovably composed in a similarly feline way, his behavior made Tsuda uncomfortable. As for Kobayashi, his ebriety had carried him well beyond concern: the detective appeared to be the last thing on his mind. Abruptly he thrust one suited arm in front of Tsuda’s nose.
“If my clothes are soiled, you deride me for being dirty. If I happen to be wearing something bright and clean, you deride me for being bright and clean. So what can I do? What must I do to earn your respect? I implore you to let me know. I may not be much, but I want your respect.”
Smiling stiffly, Tsuda pushed the arm away. Oddly, there was no resistance; as though its original strength had drained away, the arm returned submissively to its former position. But Kobayashi’s mouth was not so docile. Having withdrawn his hand, he opened his mouth at once.
“I can read your mind. I sympathize fervently with the working class. I’m poor as a church mouse myself, but here I am in a brand-new suit—you perceive a contradiction that makes you want to laugh at me.”
“It seems natural enough to have a suit made no matter how poor you are—you can’t very well walk the streets naked. The suit is fine; no one thinks anything about it.”
“Not true. You think I’m just being a dandy. Dressing myself up. You think that’s disgraceful.”
“Maybe you’re right—I should apologize.”
Having concluded he could bear no more, Tsuda finally sought relief in surrender and tried a glib accommodation. Whereupon Kobayashi’s attitude also softened naturally.
“It’s my fault, too. I was wrong. I do enjoy dressing up, I’ll give you that. I’ll concede that as far as it goes, but there’s a reason I had this suit made that you know nothing about.”
It was impossible Tsuda should have known anything about a special reason. Nor did he wish to know. Having come this far, however, he couldn’t avoid asking. Kobayashi, who had spread his arms wide open and was examining his own outfit, responded somewhat forlornly.
“The truth is, I’ll be going into exile in this suit. I’m running away to Korea.”
Tsuda regarded his companion with surprise on his face for the first time. When he had taken the opportunity to point out something that had been bothering him, that Kobayashi’s necktie was twisted to one side, and had bid him straighten it, he resumed listening to his story.
Having worked for a long time at Uncle Fujii’s magazine as an editor and proofreader, writing articles of his own when he could find the time, and making the rounds to places that seemed likely to pay for them, Kobayashi, who had always appeared to be a busy man, had finally found himself unable to endure being in Tokyo any longer and had resolved to cross the water to Korea, where arrangements for his employment at a certain newspaper were nearly concluded.
“When things get this painful, it makes no sense to keep hanging on in Tokyo. I can’t stand living in a place where there’s no future for me.”
Kobayashi spoke as if a future had been prepared and would be awaiting his arrival in Korea, and in the next breath he contradicted his seeming certainty.
“The long and short of it is I may be someone who was always destined to spend my life wandering aimlessly. I can’t settle down. The cruel part is, I want to settle down and the world won’t let me. So what choice do I have but to become a fugitive?”
“You’re not the only one who can’t settle down. I’m not in the least settled down myself.”
“Stop indulging yourself. If you can’t settle down it’s because you’re extravagant. I’m in pain because I’ll have to scramble for a slice of bread until my dying day.”
“But feeling unsettled is a defining predicament of modern man in general. You’re not the only one in pain.”
Kobayashi betrayed no sign of feeling in the least consoled by Tsuda’s words.
[ 37 ]
THE WAITRESS, who had been observing them, approached abruptly and began to clear the table pointedly. As if on that signal, the man in the Inverness glided out of his seat. Engrossed in their conversation, Tsuda and Kobayashi had stopped drinking a while ago and could hardly carry on as though oblivious. Tsuda took the opportunity to stand at once. Before leaving his seat, Kobayashi helped himself to a gold-tipped Manilla from the box that had been left on the table between them and lit it. It was as if he had decided he deserved a modest bonus on the side, Tsuda thought, piqued by the irony as he retrieved the cigarette box and put it in his sleeve.
Though the hour wasn’t that late, the crowd on this autumn night had dwindled surprisingly. The distinctive rumbling of a streetcar that would have been inaudible by day reached them from a distance. They walked along together, each in the grip of his own mood, their paired shadows wavering down the river bank.
“When will you be leaving?”
“It depends, maybe while you’re in the hospital.”
“That soon?”
“Not necessarily. I won’t know for certain until Sensei has another meeting with the head writer on the paper.”
“When you’re leaving, or if you’re going at all?”
“Something like that—”
Kobayashi’s reply was vague. As Tsuda moved quickly ahead without bothering to probe, he amplified.
“The truth is, I don’t really want to go.”
“Is Uncle saying you absolutely must?”
“Not at all—it’s not like that.”
“Then why not call it off?”
Tsuda’s words, with the force of logic that would have been plain as day to anyone hearing the remark, had the effect of cruelly squelching what appeared to be his companion’s expectation of sympathy. A few steps further, Kobayashi turned to Tsuda abruptly.
“Tsuda-kun!* I’m horribly lonely!”
Tsuda made no reply.
They walked together in silence. The trickle of water in the very center of the shallow riverbed vanished darkly beneath the indistinct stanchions of a bridge with a faint gurgling audible between the rumbling of a trolley.
“I guess I’ll go after all. I just think I better go.”
“Then do.”
“Right—I’ll go. Going to Korea or Taiwan is a much better deal than staying in a place like this and being made a fool of by everyone around.”
Kobayashi’s voice had tightened to shrillness. Tsuda sensed the importance of keeping his own voice calm.
“It’s foolish to be so pessimistic. As long as you’re young and in good health, why shouldn’t you succeed splendidly wherever you go? Let’s throw you a farewell party—to cheer you up.”
This time Kobayashi said nothing. Even so, Tsuda tried to remain sympathetic.
“How is O-Kin going to feel if you’re away when she gets married?”
Kobayashi appeared startled, as if he had just realized he had forgotten all about his younger sister.
“I feel sorry for her, but what can I do? It was her misfortune to end up with a hoodlum like me for a brother; she’ll have to resign herself.”
“Auntie and Uncle will look after things even if you’re away.”
“I guess that’s how it will have to be. Otherwise she can break off this engagement and stay on at Sensei’s house working like a ma
id. The way I figure it, she’d be a maid either way—I feel even sorrier about Sensei. If I do go, I’ll have to borrow travel money from him.”
“They won’t pay for the trip?”
“It doesn’t seem so.”
“You’ll have to squeeze it out of them.”
“Right—”
When Kobayashi spoke again, breaking another minute of silence, he might have been talking to himself.
“I borrow travel money from Sensei, I bum an overcoat from you, I leave my only sister in the lurch—I’m hopeless.”
These were the last lines Kobayashi uttered that night. Shortly after, they went their separate ways. Tsuda hurried homeward without looking back.
* A suffix less formal than san, kun is roughly equivalent to second-person familiar, as in tu or du. It is used only by men, friends, or a superior to a subordinate.
[ 38 ]
HIS FRONT gate was closed as usual. He reached for the half door in the gate; tonight it wouldn’t open. Thinking it must be stuck, he tried again several times and finally yanked at it forcefully and only then, hearing on the inside the leaden rasp of the latch resisting, resigned himself.
Inclining his head to one side at this unexpected development, he stood a moment where he was. Not once since becoming a new householder had he spent a night away from home, and even on the rare occasion when he returned late at night he had never until now encountered this.
Today he had been wanting to come home since dusk. He had dined perfunctorily at his uncle’s house because he had been given no choice. The small quantity of sake he had reluctantly consumed had been a concession to Kobayashi. Since evening had fallen he had spent the time away from home with O-Nobu on his mind. As he returned through the chilly night, it was very much as if he had been guided by his longing for the warm lamplight of his house. It wasn’t simply that his body had halted as a horse halts before a wall; his anticipation had been abruptly extinguished in front of his gate. Whether this stanching was O-Nobu’s fault or simply accidental was a matter of no small concern to him.
Lifting his hand, he rapped twice smartly on the locked door. The sound that rang into the darkness of the deepening night in the street was less a command to “Open up!” than a demand to know “Why is this locked?”
“Coming!” a reply immediately sounded from within. It reached his ear as swiftly as an echo, and it was O-Nobu’s voice, not the maid’s. Going suddenly still, he listened in silence outside the gate. He heard the sound of the switch at the entrance, an outdoor light used only when needed. The lattice at the gate immediately rattled open; clearly the front door hadn’t yet been closed.
“Who’s there?”
Footsteps halted at the half door, and O-Nobu requested identi fication.
Tsuda was more impatient than ever.
“Open up! It’s me!”
“Goodness!” O-Nobu cried out. “I didn’t know—forgive me.”
Rattling open the latch, O-Nobu appeared paler than usual as she ushered her husband inside. From the front entrance Tsuda proceeded straight to the sitting room.
As always, it was perfectly tidied. The iron kettle was clanking as it was meant to be. In front of the brazier a thick muslin cushion had been positioned as always on the tatami floor as though awaiting his arrival. Opposite, at O-Nobu’s customary place, a woman’s ink-stone and brush lay next to her cushion. The lid of the box, a mosaic of plum blossoms inlaid with mother-of-pearl, had been set to one side, and the small ink-stone inset in flecked, pear-yellow lacquer ware was glistening. Evidence that the writer had left her seat abruptly, a blot of sumi ink from the tip of the narrow writing brush had seeped into the rice paper, smudging the seven or eight lines of a letter in progress.
O-Nobu, who had followed her husband inside after closing the doors for the night, plumped herself down on her cushion dressed as she was, in an everyday kimono jacket thrown over her nightgown.
“I’m so sorry.”
Tsuda looked up at the pendulum clock. It had just struck eleven. Though he was normally home earlier, this was not the first time since his marriage that he had returned at this hour.
“But why did you lock me out? Did you suppose I wouldn’t be coming home tonight?”
“Of course not. I was waiting, thinking any minute now, any minute now; finally I began to feel so lonely I started a letter to my parents.”
Like Tsuda’s mother and father, O-Nobu’s mother and father also lived in Kyoto. From a distance, Tsuda regarded the letter just begun. But he still wasn’t feeling persuaded.
“But why lock the gate if you were waiting? Afraid to leave it open?”
“No—and I didn’t lock it.”
“You can’t deny it was locked.”
“Toki must have forgotten to unlock it this morning. That must be it—she’s impossible.”
In her habitual way, O-Nobu arched her eyebrows. As the half door was never used during the day, it wasn’t unreasonable to explain how it came to be locked as an oversight that morning.
“What’s Toki doing?”
“I sent her to bed a while ago.”
Deciding it would be going too far to wake the maid to pursue his investigation of the responsible party, Tsuda put aside the matter of the half door and went to bed.
[ 39 ]
THE NEXT morning, before he had even washed, Tsuda was surprised by a spectacle he hadn’t anticipated when he went to bed. It was close to nine when he awoke. As always, he went past the front entrance and into the sitting room on his way to the kitchen. And there was O-Nobu, dressed resplendently and sitting in her usual place as if that were nothing out of the ordinary. Tsuda was startled. O-Nobu smiled, appearing gratified to observe her husband reacting as if water had been thrown in his sleepy face.
“You just woke up?”
Blinking rapidly, Tsuda gazed wonderingly at O-Nobu’s high chignon secured at the base with a red ribbon, the brightly embroidered pattern of her kimono over-collar, and, in the center of it all, the whiteness of her heavily made up face, as if he were beholding something unfamiliar and exotic.
“What are you doing? The sun is scarcely up.”
O-Nobu was unruffled.
“I’m not doing anything—but you are; you’re going in to the clinic today.”
Tsuda’s hakama and kimono jacket had been picked up from where he had let them fall to the floor on his way to bed and, neatly folded, laid out on lacquered wrapping paper.
“You’re intending to go along?”
“Of course I am—will I be a bother?”
“I wouldn’t say a bother—”
Tsuda looked carefully again at his wife’s outfit.
“I’m just wondering why you had to get so dressed up.”
Tsuda recalled the scene he had witnessed recently in the murky waiting room. The group of patients sitting there and his gorgeously attired young wife were fundamentally irreconcilable.
“But today is Sunday.”
“Maybe so, but we’re not exactly going to the theater or cherry-blossom viewing.”
“But I was hoping—”
As Tsuda saw it, Sunday meant only that patients would be crowding into the clinic from the moment it opened.
“It feels as if waltzing into the clinic as a couple with you in that get-up would be a little—”
“Excessive?”
Amused by O-Nobu’s choice of a formal Chinese compound, Tsuda laughed aloud. O-Nobu’s eyebrows briefly arched, and then she was wheedling.
“It will take forever to change my kimono now. And since I went to the trouble of wearing it, won’t you please put up with it just this once?”
Tsuda accepted defeat. Washing up, he heard O-Nobu’s voice instructing the maid to hail two rickshaws and felt unsettled, as if he were the one being rushed.
The meager breakfast he was allowed took less than five minutes. Standing without even using a toothpick, he started to go upstairs.
“I have to put together some
things to take with me.”
As he spoke, O-Nobu opened the closet behind her.
“I put everything in here, look and see.”
Dressed up as she was in her finery, Tsuda felt obliged to spare his wife some effort and dragged from the closet with his own hands a satchel on the heavy side and a smallish bundle wrapped in a knotted silk cloth. The bundle contained only the quilted jacket he had just tried on and an unbacked sash for use with his sleeping robe. The satchel disclosed a jumble of articles—a toothbrush and tooth powder, his customary lavender stationery, matching envelopes, fountain pen, a small scissors, and tweezers. Tsuda removed the Western tome that was the heaviest and bulkiest object.
“I’ll leave this.”
“Really? It’s been on your desk forever and there’s a bookmark in it so I thought you’d surely want to read it.”
Tsuda said nothing, lowering ponderously to the tatami matting the German book on economics that remained unfinished after two months.
“This monster is too heavy to read lying in bed.”
Tsuda knew this was a legitimate reason for leaving the volume at home, but it felt bad nonetheless.
“I have no idea which books you need and which you don’t, so please choose the ones you want to take—”
From the second floor Tsuda brought down a few slender novels and stuffed them into the satchel.
[ 40 ]
AS THE weather was fine, they had the hoods lowered and set out with the satchel in one rickshaw and the bundle in the other. They had turned the corner of their side street and traveled several blocks along the trolley tracks when O-Nobu’s rickshaw man abruptly hailed Tsuda’s. Both rickshaws stopped.
“I left something at home.”
Looking back, Tsuda gazed in silence at his wife’s face. It wasn’t only her husband who could be brought to a standstill by the power of the words that issued from the lips of this meticulously groomed young woman. The rickshaw man, still gripping the wooden traces in both hands, directed at O-Nobu a similarly curious gaze. Even passers-by couldn’t help glancing with interest at the couple.