“Lock up in front and go right to bed. I’ve already bolted the half door at the gate.”
Having sent the maid to bed, O-Nobu sat again in front of the brazier without even changing her kimono. She stirred the ashes mechanically, adding charcoal to the dying embers. Then she put the kettle on, as if boiling water was a household procedure that must not be neglected. But as she sat alone in the dead of night with her ears peeled for the rattling of the kettle, a feeling of aloneness attacking out of nowhere built up inside her even more overwhelmingly than when she had arrived home. Because this was loneliness incomparably more intense than what she was accustomed to feeling as she waited unbearably for Tsuda’s return late at night, she found herself gazing in her heart’s eye with a fond longing at the figure of her husband lying in bed at the clinic.
I must tell you it’s all because you aren’t here.
Thus she spoke to the picture she had conjured in her mind.
She resolved that the first thing she must do on the morrow, no matter what, was visit him at the clinic. But in the very next instant her chest was no longer pressed against her husband’s. Something was wedged between them. And the closer she tried to snuggle, the more sharply the unwanted something jabbed into her breast. Her husband was unperturbed, as if he hadn’t noticed. Very well then! she felt like saying, half annoyed, turning her back on him.
Having reached an impasse, she shifted her reverie unceremoniously to Madam Yoshikawa. It was just as she had thought at the theater, even clearer now: if she hadn’t encountered the lady this evening, she might well have escaped this so very disagreeable feeling about her beloved husband.
She was left with a desire to bare her heart to someone, somewhere. She took up her brush, thinking to continue the letter home she had begun the night before, but in the end she was unable to set down her thoughts on paper and could only compose her usual assurance that she and Tsuda were getting along famously so her parents were not to worry. Tonight, however, these words alone were in no way adequate. Exhausted by her effort to put her thoughts in order, she finally threw down her brush. Leaving her kimono in a heap on the floor, she went to bed. The spectacle she had observed at the theater for all those hours exploded across her agitated mind in fragments of vivid colors, stimulating even as it irritated her, and hours passed before she was able to fall asleep.
[ 58 ]
LYING IN bed, she heard the clock strike one. She heard two. Then she was awakened by morning light. She didn’t know what time it was, but the sun seeping through a crack in the wooden shutters informed her that she had slept later than usual.
She looked at the clothes scattered near her pillow in the sunlight. They lay on the tatami where she had let them fall the night before, kimono and underwear and long kimono slip in a heap, top and bottom, inside and out, a careless tangle of runaway colors. From beneath the pile, one folded end of her long, narrow obi, an iris pattern in gold thread, extended to within reach of her hand.
O-Nobu gazed at the tangle with a certain dismay. As the work of someone who had always considered neatness to be one of the female virtues, there was something disgraceful about it. As far as she could recall, she had never once since marrying Tsuda allowed him to see this kind of mess; remembering that her husband was not sleeping in the room with her, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Her carelessness today went beyond clothing. If Tsuda hadn’t gone to the clinic and were at home as usual, she would never have allowed herself to sleep this late, no matter what time they had gone to bed the night before, nor had she leapt out of bed the minute she opened her eyes—how could she avoid rebuking herself as a lazy creature?
Even so, it wasn’t easy to get up. O-Toki, possibly to make up for her own remissness the night before, had risen before her and could be heard moving around in the kitchen; that seemed ample justification for remaining in bed, wrapped in bed clothes that were warm against her skin.
As she lay there, the feeling of transgression she had awakened with gradually dwindled. Even a woman, she began to feel, could hardly be blamed for an infraction as minor as this once or twice a year. An easiness spread through her body from head to toe, and in her relaxed mood she savored with gratitude the freedom to experience a rare sense of unburdened tranquility for the first time since her marriage. When she realized—there was no denying it—that her husband’s absence was making this possible, she even felt blessed to find herself alone for the time being. And she was surprised to perceive that going to bed at night and rising in the morning with her husband day after day, a constraint she had overlooked until now, scarcely pausing to register it, had been for her an unexpectedly heavy burden. But this spontaneous awakening was of short duration. By the time she left her bed, having observed with her newly liberated eye her agitation of the previous evening with a measure of ridicule, she was already being governed by a different mood.
Late as it was, O-Nobu discharged her duties as a housewife with the same meticulous care as always. Since her husband’s absence saved her considerable bother, she folded her kimono herself without troubling the maid. When things were put away, she dressed hastily and left the house at once, proceeding straight to the newly installed telephone booth a few blocks down the street.
She made three calls. The first, not surprisingly, was to Tsuda. As he was confined to his bed and unable to come to the phone, she was obliged to learn news of him indirectly. She had expected to hear that there were no complications, and her expectation was confirmed. “He’s doing well—there’s nothing to worry about.” Hearing this assurance from a voice that sounded like the nurse’s and wanting to determine how urgently Tsuda was awaiting her, she requested the voice to ask the patient whether it would be all right if she didn’t visit today. Tsuda sent the nurse back to the phone to ask “Why?” At the other end of the line, unable to hear his voice or see his face, O-Nobu, at a loss to make a judgment, inclined her head. In a case like this, Tsuda wasn’t a man to request that she come by all means. But he was a man to turn sour if she didn’t come. Not that he could be counted on to express satisfaction or happiness if she did. Nor was there any guarantee, having deflected her kindness, that he wouldn’t pout, as if to say “that was your duty as a woman.” Having considered all this on the spot, she let slip on the phone an attitude toward her husband that she had apparently picked up, or thought she had, from Madam Yoshikawa the previous evening.
“Please tell him I won’t be coming in today because I have to go to the Okamotos.”
Hanging up, she called Okamoto to ask if she might stop in. Finally, summoning Tsuda’s younger sister to the phone, she reported his condition in just a very few words and returned to the house.
[ 59 ]
SITTING DOWN to a tray that was both breakfast and lunch with O-Toki helping her to rice was another first experience since her marriage. This change occasioned by Tsuda’s absence made her feel anew like a queen; at the same time the freedom from daily routine in which she greedily indulged had the opposite effect of binding her hands more tightly than usual. With a heart that was agitated for a body so relaxed, O-Nobu turned to O-Toki.
“Doesn’t it feel odd with Mr. Tsuda away?”
“It does—it feels lonely.”
O-Nobu had more to say.
“This is the first time I’ve slept so late.”
“But since you’re always so early it can’t hurt to have breakfast and lunch together once in a while.”
“‘Just look at her the minute Mr. Tsuda is away’—is that how it seems?”
“To who?”
“To you, silly.”
“’Course not.”
O-Toki’s intentionally loud voice offended O-Nobu’s sensibility more grievously than her clumsy conversation. She stopped talking.
Thirty minutes later, stepping into the dress-up clogs that O-Toki had set out for her on the concrete just inside the entrance, O-Nobu turned back to the maid, who had accompanied her to the front door.
/> “Please stay alert. Falling asleep the way you did last night is dangerous.”
“Will you be late again this evening?”
O-Nobu hadn’t considered for a minute when she would be coming home.
“Not as late as last night.”
She felt an urge to enjoy herself at the Okamotos as late as she liked on this rare occasion of her husband’s absence.
“I’ll be home as early as I can.”
Leaving the maid with this assurance on her way out to the street, O-Nobu turned at once toward her appointment. As the Okamotos’ residence lay in roughly the same direction as the Fujiis’, the same streetcar along the river would take her at least partway. Alighting at the first or second stop before the end of the line, she crossed the small wooden bridge over the river and proceeded on foot down the street on the opposite bank. It was the same street along which, two or three evenings ago, Tsuda and Kobayashi, leaving the bar, had discussed, mutually entangled in feelings that came from differences in their status and personalities, relocation to Korea, O-Kin’s marriage, and other matters. O-Nobu, who had heard nothing about this from Tsuda, walked innocently along in the opposite direction to the one they had taken, without picturing them, and started up the long, narrow hill that had to be climbed to reach her uncle’s house. Just then, Tsugiko happened to be coming down.
“Thanks for last night.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have a lesson—”
Having graduated from girls’ upper school the previous year, this cousin occupied herself during her leisurely days studying a variety of things—piano, tea ceremony, flower arranging, watercolor, cooking. Knowing her predilection for trying her hand at everything that occurred to her, O-Nobu, hearing the word “lesson,” felt like laughing out loud.
“Which lesson—ballet?”
The girls were sufficiently intimate to engage in this variety of inside humor. From O-Nobu’s point of view, her remark might have been construed as conveying a measure of irony directed at Tsugiko’s status, which allowed leisure time far greater than her own, but her cousin appeared to detect in it no hint of mockery.
“Of course not.”
Tsugiko had only this to say and laughed good-humoredly. Sensitive as she was, O-Nobu was obliged to acknowledge the laugh as innocence itself. Nonetheless, in the end, her cousin wouldn’t disclose what the lesson was.
“You’ll just tease me.”
“Something new?”
“There’s no telling what I’ll take up next—after all, I’m such a glutton.”
No one in the Okamoto family hid the fact that, where lessons were concerned, Tsugiko had been labeled “Miss Glutton.” First applied by her younger sister, the pejorative had been adopted by the entire family; recently Tsugiko had taken to using it herself unhesitatingly.
“Wait for me—I’ll be back soon.”
Turning around to watch Tsugiko’s receding back as she descended the hill with her light step, O-Nobu was sensible of the blend of respect and derision she invariably felt about her cousin.
[ 60 ]
THIS TIME it was her uncle whom O-Nobu encountered as she approached the Okamotos’ manorly house. With no kimono jacket, his plain obi cinched low over his hips and his hands folded over the single knot at his back, he was engaged in an animated conversation at the entrance to the house with a gardener who was plying a hoe next to him, but as soon as he caught sight of O-Nobu he called out to her.
“There you are! I’m just mucking about in the garden.”
A long piece of akebia vine lay coiled on the ground next to the gardener.
“We’re thinking of training this above the gate at the garden entrance—wouldn’t it go well there?”
O-Nobu surveyed at a glance the thatch-roofed gate in the middle of a solid fence of plaited bamboo, the hatchet-hewn pillars supporting it, and the log crossbeams.
“Umm—you uprooted it from where it was growing on the little trellis?”
“Right, and I replaced it with a blinder-gate with embellished trim.”
Her uncle had been using his newly acquired leisure to remodel the house according to his own design, and his architecture and landscape vocabulary had expanded in no time. As the word “blinder-gate” conveyed no image to her, O-Nobu’s only choice was responding with a vague nod.
“This is good exercise after a meal—good for your appetite.”
“Are you joking? I haven’t had lunch yet.”
Pulling O-Nobu out of the garden and into the house with him, her uncle called loudly to her aunt: “Sumi! Sumi! I’m starving out here. Some lunch right away, please.”
“Didn’t I say you should have eaten a while ago with the rest of us?”
“You may be surprised to learn that the world isn’t organized around the convenience of the kitchen. Has it ever occurred to you that there is a time for everything?”
Her aunt’s unruffled attitude—that her husband had only himself to blame—and her uncle’s response were the same as always. O-Nobu, feeling as though she had breathed the air of home for the first time in a long while, couldn’t help comparing the aging couple before her with herself and Tsuda, married for less than a year, just embarking as it were on their new life. Assuming they traveled the long matrimonial road together, could they also expect to end up this way, or, no matter how long they stayed together, might it be, given how different they were temperamentally from her aunt and uncle, that their relationship would remain different? For someone as young as O-Nobu, this was a riddle not solvable by wisdom and imagination. She was not satisfied with Tsuda as he was today. Nor could she imagine a future version of herself in which her abundance as a woman had withered away very much like her aunt’s. If that were the fate that awaited her unavoidably, it would be a sad blow to her desire to maintain forever the luster of the present. Surviving in the world as a woman having lost everything womanly about her appeared to O-Nobu in her youth as a truly terrifying existence.
Unaware of the meditation on a distant future churning in this young wife’s breast, O-Nobu’s uncle sat cross-legged on the tatami facing the lunch tray that had been placed in front of him and regarded her.
“Are you there? You seem lost in your thoughts.”
O-Nobu replied at once.
“Why don’t I serve you for a change—it’s been a long while.”
There was no rice tub, and, as O-Nobu stood, her aunt stopped her.
“I know you’d like to serve him, but today is a bread day so there’s nothing to serve.”
The maid came in with nicely browned toast on a plate.
“It’s unbearable what’s happened to this uncle of yours. Born in Japan and not allowed to have rice—how pathetic is that?”
His doctor had forbidden her diabetic uncle to consume more than a designated quantity of starch.
“Look at me—all I eat is tofu.”
Laid out on his plate was a portion of white, uncooked tofu that no single person could possibly have consumed. Observing her rotundly obese uncle contorting his features into a face he intended to look pitiful, O-Nobu, far from feeling substantially sorry for him, was inclined to laugh aloud.
“A little fasting would be good for you. Getting through a day as fat as you are would be an agony for anyone.”
Her uncle turned to look at her aunt.
“She’s always been good at insults, but since she married it seems she’s mastered the art.”
[ 61 ]
O-NOBU HAD been under her uncle’s care since she was a little girl, and she knew better than others the idiosyncrasies that emerged and receded in him from a variety of angles.
Oversensitive to a degree incongruent with his corpulent body, there were times when he would seclude himself in his room for half a day without speaking, while at other times the mere sight of another person would trigger what appeared to be an uncontrollable garrulousness. It wasn’t so much that he needed an outlet for his robust energy; he wa
s either attempting out of consideration for others to put them at their ease as best he could or, as was more frequently the case, anxious to avoid the awkward silence generated by his own boredom in the presence of a guest, with the result that his conversation, when it wasn’t about practical matters, tended to center around subjects from his daily life of personal interest to him. His gift for talk, which he employed in social situations to great effect and which, it appeared, had contributed in no small way to his success, was frequently enhanced by a scintillating sense of humor. O-Nobu, who had grown up at her uncle’s side, had somewhere along the way inherited this gift. Trading digs with him when he was in the right mood had become second nature to her, requiring no effort. However, since her marriage to Tsuda she had reformed. As a consequence, two months passed, then three, and the wisecracking she had at first suppressed out of respect no longer came easily to her. In the end, she found herself relating to her husband in this regard as a different person than the self she had experienced when she was at the Okamotos. This left her unsatisfied. At the same time, she couldn’t help feeling that she was deceiving her husband. In her uncle’s unchanged behavior, observed on occasional visits, there was something that led her to recall a former freedom. As he sat cross-legged on the tatami in front of his raw tofu, she observed his waggish face nostalgically, as though it were a memento from the past.
“But it was you who taught me how to be insulting. I certainly haven’t learned anything of the kind from Tsuda.”