“Uncle—” she began, looking at him with her small eyes wide open as though in dismay.
“It’s a disaster. She never intended to say anything. Which is why we wanted you there. Truthfully speaking.”
“But what was I supposed to do?”
“Tsugi insisted that we invite you. She considers you much cleverer than herself. She was convinced you’d have all sorts of things to say afterward even if she didn’t have a clue.”
“I wish you’d said something so I could have been prepared.”
“She wouldn’t let us. She wouldn’t let us say a word.”
“But why?”
O-Nobu glanced at her aunt.
“Because she was embarrassed,” her aunt replied before her uncle could interrupt her.
“It wasn’t only that. Mostly she was afraid she wouldn’t get a useful evaluation if O-Nobu went in prepared. She wanted to hear your unbiased first impression.”
O-Nobu finally understood why her uncle had been pressing her.
[ 66 ]
TSUGIKO OCCUPIED a unique position in O-Nobu’s world. She wasn’t nearly as concerned with O-Nobu’s best interests as her aunt was. And when it came to a mutual affinity, her connection was vastly more distant than her uncle’s. Nevertheless, the power of shared bloodline, an attraction based on different personalities, and, beyond that, the closeness in their ages made Tsugiko someone who was easily approached.
When O-Nobu encountered any of the issues that move the hearts of all young women in common, in the natural course of things it was to Tsugiko rather than her uncle or her aunt to whom she was inclined to turn. In such cases her natural aptitude for dealing with such matters invariably proved superior to Tsugiko’s. In terms of experience, she was of course Tsugiko’s senior. At least, as she was well aware, Tsugiko looked up to her as such a person.
This appreciative younger cousin made a habit of accepting solemnly at face value everything O-Nobu said. In O-Nobu’s view, her pliable cousin had been trained to feel this way by her extravagant display of her own superiority during the long years when they had shared a room under the same roof.
“A woman must see through a man at a single glance.”
With a remark like this, she had once surprised her naive cousin. She had spoken as someone equipped with an acuteness of vision more than adequate to accomplish this. Just as Tsugiko’s surprise had transformed into appreciation and was on its way to becoming worshipful, an event designed accidentally enough to affirm O-Nobu’s confidence, the spontaneous love between herself and Tsuda, had blazed before her eyes like the flame of a mystery. Subsequently O-Nobu’s declaration was enshrined in Tsugiko’s mind as everlasting truth itself. O-Nobu, more than adequately content with herself as she considered the world around her, couldn’t help feeling particularly satisfied where her cousin was concerned.
Quickly enough, Tsuda was conveyed to Tsugiko as O-Nobu saw him. Supplementing with indirect knowledge provided entirely by O-Nobu that part of the picture outside her own ken because she had no opportunity for daily contact, she had effortlessly constructed a complete and total ideal called Tsuda.
In the little more than half a year that had passed since her marriage, O-Nobu’s thoughts about Tsuda had changed. But Tsugiko’s vision remained intact. She believed in O-Nobu implicitly. O-Nobu was not the sort of woman who retracted things she has declared after all this time. Manifestly she was among that small number of fortunates who had succeeded in wresting happiness from the heavens by virtue of her own clarity.
Having to sit with her disillusionment while bearing in mind the relationship with her cousin that had survived from the past was not so painful as unpleasant. It was disturbing to feel surrounded by indirect demands that she own up to the failings she had managed to gloss over until now. She couldn’t help feeling it was others, not herself, who were behaving perversely.
As long as I’m suffering on account of my mistakes, that should be enough.
She was always ready with this sort of defense, which she kept stored away in her heart. But this was not the sort of thing she could hurl in the faces of her uncle, her aunt, or Tsugiko, who were ignorant of her process. If she must appeal, her only choice was to cry out to the heavens, the void above her that would provoke the three of them innocently enough to retaliation with insinuations of their own.
Her uncle, who had pulled his tray closer and begun to gulp the tea her aunt had freshly brewed for him, couldn’t possibly have had any idea of this tangle of feelings swirling in O-Nobu’s heart. Looking out at the single-level garden just completed, his face clear and calm, he exchanged a few comments with his wife about the placement of trees and rocks he was contemplating.
“Next year I’m thinking of planting a maple alongside that pine. From here that’s the only place that looks unbalanced, as if something is missing.”
O-Nobu glanced vacantly in the direction her uncle was pointing. Along the wall that ran from the house next door, earth had been spaded into a high mound to permit the planting of a small, dense grove of Mencius bamboo, and where the roots clustered there was indeed, as her uncle had pointed out, a feeling of sparseness. O-Nobu had been waiting for an opportunity to change the subject, and now she took agile advantage.
“You’re right—if you don’t fill that it will be obvious that you went out of your way to plant a grove there.”
The conversation, as she expected, flowed into a different channel. But when it returned to its original path there was an even steeper slope than before that had to be climbed.
[ 67 ]
AS UNCLE Okamoto reentered the tatami room from the garden, having been summoned by the gardener who had been hoeing at the entrance a while ago, O-Nobu’s conversation with her aunt, which had begun with Yuriko and Hajime, not yet back from school, was just veering back to Tsugiko.
“Miss Glutton should be home by now; I wonder what’s keeping her?”
O-Nobu’s aunt purposely used the nickname Yuriko had assigned her sister. O-Nobu conjured an image of her greedily ambitious cousin. Self-indulgent to a fault in the little universe she was permitted, one step outside and she came instantly to a standstill, the very model of circumspection; in the cage that was home, bounded by the supervision of her mother and father, she chirped away carelessly like a happy little bird, but once the door was open and she was thrust outside, she had no idea how to sing or whither to fly.
“What lesson did she have today?”
“Take a guess,” said Aunt Okamoto, who proceeded at once to satisfy the curiosity O-Nobu had brought with her from the hillside. When she heard that the subject, “foreign language,” was one of those Tsugiko had recently begun with her usual enthusiasm, O-Nobu was surprised all over again by the quantity of her cousin’s interests. She even found herself wondering whatever in the world she intended by striving for such a variety of accomplishments.
“But foreign language is a bit different; it has a special significance.”
Her aunt explained, defending Tsugiko as she proceeded, that the special significance she had in mind related indirectly to the possible marriage currently being considered, obliging O-Nobu out of deference to nod as though in agreement while looking as intently interested as possible. Anticipating and acquiring before the marriage the skills likely to please her husband, or those that would be professionally convenient for him if she possessed them, was a laudable demonstration of kindness toward a woman’s future spouse. Or it might be considered worthwhile simply as a means of winning his affection. In Tsugiko’s case, however, there remained any number of skills to be acquired that would be important to her as a human being and a wife. As O-Nobu pictured them in her mind, such accomplishments unfortunately were not likely to make a better woman. They would, however, sharpen her wits. They would almost certainly chafe. But they would whet her cleverness. She herself had begun these lessons with her aunt. And with her uncle’s help, they had ripened to maturity in her. In this sense her two teache
rs had raised her, and it appeared that they observed the results of their mentoring with satisfaction.
How can those same eyes be satisfied by what they see in Tsugiko?
Her aunt and uncle had never betrayed signs of discontent with anything having to do with Tsugiko, an attitude O-Nobu failed to understand. Pressed for an explanation, she would have had to say that they beheld their niece and their daughter through different eyes. The thought chagrined her; from time to time it seized her like a convulsion. But in each case, before it had a chance to blaze up, it was extinguished by her uncle’s liberality in all things and by the kindness of her aunt, whose treatment of her had never once lacked fairness. Hiding the flush inside her with an invisible sleeve pressed against her face, O-Nobu observed her uncle and aunt with what would have to be called perplexity, their attitudes and intentions an eternal riddle.
“Tsugiko-san is so fortunate—not to be a worry-wart like me.”
“That child worries much more than you do. It’s just that when she’s here at home she can’t find anything to worry about no matter how she tries, and that’s why she seems so carefree.”
“But I think I was more of a worrier even in the days when you and Uncle were looking after me.”
“But there’s a difference—”
Her aunt interrupted herself, and O-Nobu was uncertain how she intended to finish. She might have been referring to different personalities, different social standing, different circumstances, but before she had a chance to pursue this, something stopped her. Her pulse had skipped a beat, as though she had been jolted by something she had been unaware of until now.
Could they have dragged me to the miai yesterday because I’m plainer than Tsugiko and could serve as a foil to her good looks?
The suspicion flickered in O-Nobu’s brain like a spark from a flint stone, and in that instant she reached frantically for her will power and drew it about her. Finally she regained command of herself. Her face revealed nothing.
“Tsugiko-san has an advantage—everyone likes her.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. But there’s no accounting for taste. Even a foolish girl like her.”
Uncle Okamoto stepped up to the engawa just as her aunt was speaking. “What about Tsugiko?” he asked in a loud voice, entering the room again.
[ 68 ]
AS HE settled himself on the tatami, a feeling O-Nobu had managed to suppress until now came surging back. Just then, for a brief instant, her uncle’s infinitely good-natured face, infinitely robust, infinitely optimistic in its plump rotundity, touched a nerve.
“You’re a very bad person, Uncle!”
O-Nobu couldn’t help striking like a snake. The words themselves were blunted by frequent use between them, but today O-Nobu’s voice was different, and there was something out of the ordinary about her expression as well. But her uncle had been oblivious of the tide rising and ebbing in her breast for some time, and, uncharacteristically for someone normally attentive and sensitive, he was in the dark.
“I’m that bad?”
Feigning ignorance in his usual manner, he packed unperturbedly the small bowl of his long-stem pipe with loose tobacco.
“You must have heard something from your aunt while I was outside.”
O-Nobu fell silent again. Her aunt responded at once.
“She appears to know all about your villainy by now without hearing anything from me.”
“Undoubtedly. She’s so intuitive. And maybe she’s right. After all, she can tell with a single glance at a man how much money he has in his wallet, and whether he carries it in his knickers or in a belly-band atop his navel—she’s that kind of lass so you can’t be too careful.”
Her uncle’s joke did not produce the effect he had anticipated. O-Nobu cast her eyes down, and her eyelids quivered. Unnoticed, tears had accumulated at the ends of her eyelashes. Her uncle’s taunting had seemed out of character, and now abruptly it ceased. An odd oppressiveness enveloped all three of them.
“What’s the matter, O-Nobu?”
To fill the emptiness of silence, her uncle struck his pipe against the hollowed bamboo on his smoking tray. Her aunt also felt impelled to lighten the moment somehow.
“Who cries about such a thing! It’s so childish—and it’s the same old joke.”
Her aunt’s scolding sounded like more than an obliging gesture in her uncle’s direction. From where she stood, understanding as well as she did the relationship between her husband and her niece, the comment was fair. O-Nobu knew this. But the more reasonable her aunt’s reproval seemed, the more she felt like crying. Her lips trembled. She was unable to hold back a flow of tears. And now the dam that until now had stopped her mouth crumbled. Bursting into tears, she spoke.
“Why must you go out of your way to humiliate me!”
Her uncle appeared bemused.
“Humiliate? I’m praising you. You remember, before you married Yoshio-san, you had some perceptions about him. And we all appreciated what you had to say, so I thought—”
“I don’t want to hear this; I’m already fed up. I shouldn’t have gone to the theater.”
Briefly, they were silent.
“This has turned into a mess somehow. Is it your uncle’s fault for teasing you?”
“No—it’s all my fault. Everything.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic. I’m asking because I don’t understand what happened.”
“And I’ve told you that it’s all my fault.”
“But you don’t say why.”
“There’s no reason.”
“You’re just sad for no reason?”
O-Nobu burst into tears again. Her aunt scowled
“What are you thinking? Are you a baby throwing a tantrum? When you lived with us you never cried so hard no matter how badly he teased you. You’re married for five minutes and your husband dotes on you a little and look what happens. Young people are unbearable.”
O-Nobu bit her lip and fell silent. Her uncle, convinced as he was that she was the cause of all the trouble, looked sorry for her.
“There’s no point in scolding her that way. It’s my fault for teasing her too much. Right, O-Nobu? I’m sure I’m right. Look here, to make up for upsetting you, your uncle will get you something nice.”
With her seizure behind her and her uncle treating her like a child, O-Nobu wondered what she could do to bring a peaceful transformation to this awkward moment.
[ 69 ]
JUST THEN an unsuspecting Tsugiko, back from her language lesson, appeared in the doorway.
“I’m home.”
The others, lacking the impetus for a reconciliation, seized on her sudden return eagerly, responding to her greeting all at once.
“Welcome back.”
“You’re late—we’ve been waiting for a while.”
“Waiting impatiently. Everybody’s wondering why you’re so late.”
Hoping to recover lost ground from his earlier misstep, Uncle Okamoto, always restless, was even more animated than usual.
“At any rate, it seems there’s something your cousin here wants to discuss with you.”
Converting with this unnecessary remark his real objective into its exact opposite and casting its inverted shadow on O-Nobu, he appeared, if anything, altogether pleased with himself.
However, when the maid appeared, dropping to her hands and knees just outside the room to announce that the bath was ready, he rose as though suddenly remembering something.
“I haven’t time for a bath yet, there’s still work to do in the garden—feel free to go ahead if you like.”
Intending to spend the rest of the autumn day with his feet on the ground in the company of his favorite gardener, he descended to the garden again. On his way out he turned back to the others.
“O-Nobu, have a bath and stay for dinner.”
Two or three steps more into the garden and he was back again. O-Nobu observed with admiration this incessant mental activity so character
istic of her uncle.
“Since O-Nobu is here should we invite Fujii to dinner as well?”
Though they were in different professions, Fujii and her uncle had graduated from the same school and were old acquaintances; recently, the result of the connection to Tsuda, Fujii had had more to do with her uncle than ever before. While O-Nobu interpreted the invitation as issuing from her uncle’s good will toward her, it didn’t please her particularly. If the Fujii household and Tsuda were separate entities, the distance separating her from the Fujiis was even greater.
“I wonder if he’ll come.” The expression on her uncle’s face reflected accurately what O-Nobu was thinking.
“Recently everybody says I’m cloistered, relishing my retirement, but I’m no match for him when it comes to dropping out of the world; he’s been doing it forever. What do you think, O-Nobu, if we ask old man Fujii over for a bowl of rice will he come?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I don’t think it’s likely he’d come—”
O-Nobu’s aunt sounded tentative.
“You might be right—he probably doesn’t accept last-minute invitations. Bad idea? But let’s give him a call anyway, just to see.”
O-Nobu laughed.
“You say ‘Let’s give him a call’ as if there were a telephone in that house.”
“Shall we send somebody over then?”
Not wanting to go to the trouble of writing a letter, or because he thought it a waste of time, O-Nobu’s uncle moved briskly toward the entrance to the garden without another word.
“I think I’ll just excuse myself and have a bath,” said O-Nobu’s aunt, rising.
Everyone knew about her uncle’s fastidiousness where bathing was concerned, but only her aunt was able at a time like this to act decisively on his invitation to precede him into the tub, and O-Nobu envied her unapologetic boldness. She was also repelled. Unfeminine and unpleasant, her attitude was at the same time manly and admirable. How wonderful if only that were possible, O-Nobu felt, and, at the same time, intertwined with that feeling was as always another, that she hoped never to behave in such a way no matter how old she became. As she gazed vacantly at her aunt’s receding back, Tsugiko, the only other person remaining, issued an invitation.