Beauty and Sadness (13 page)

“You’re more than I deserve. It’s a love I never dreamed I’d find. Happiness like this is worth dying for.…” Even now Oki’s words had not faded from her memory. The dialogue in his novel echoed them and
seemed to have taken on a life apart from either Oki or herself. Perhaps the lovers of old were no more, but she had the nostalgic consolation, in the midst of her sadness, that their love was forever enshrined in a work of art.

Otoko’s mother had left behind a razor she had used for shaving her face. Little as she needed it, Otoko would occasionally take it out—perhaps once a year, as if impelled by some memory—and shave the nape of her neck and the hairline at her forehead. One day when she saw Keiko begin to spread on that depilatory cream she suddenly announced: “Keiko, I’ll shave you.” She took her mother’s razor out of the drawer of the dressing table.

As soon as she saw the razor Keiko exclaimed, “No, no, I’m afraid!” and fled from the room. Otoko pursued her all the more eagerly.

“It’s not dangerous! Please, let me!”

Once caught, Keiko reluctantly allowed herself to be brought back to the dressing table. But when Otoko soaped her arm and applied the razor, she noticed with surprise that Keiko’s fingers were trembling.

“Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. Just keep your arm steady.”

However, she found Keiko’s anxiety stimulating. It was a temptation. Her own body tensed, and strength seemed to flow into her shoulders.

“Maybe I’d better let the underarm go this time,” said Otoko. “But your face won’t be any trouble.”

“Wait, let me catch my breath,” Keiko begged.

Otoko shaved above her eyebrows and under her lip. While the hairline around her forehead was being shaved Keiko kept her eyes tight shut. Face tilted up, she rested her head on Otoko’s supporting hand. That long, slender throat caught Otoko’s attention. It was a curiously innocent-looking throat, delicate and shapely, glowing with youth. Otoko held her razor still.

Keiko opened her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

The thought had come to Otoko that if she thrust her razor into this lovely throat, Keiko would die. At this moment she could easily kill her with a single stroke against the loveliest part of her body.

Her own slender, girlish throat had surely not been so beautiful, but once when Oki’s arm was around it she had protested that he was strangling her. Then he had squeezed even harder.

The choking sensation came back to her as she looked at Keiko. She began to feel dizzy.

It was the only time Otoko shaved her. After that Keiko always refused, and Otoko did not insist. When she opened the drawer of the dressing table for a comb or whatever, she would see her mother’s razor. Sometimes it reminded her of that faint murderous impulse that had flitted through her mind. If she
had
killed Keiko, she herself would not have gone on living. Later that impulse seemed like a vaguely familiar wraith. Was that another time when she missed a chance to die?

Otoko realized that in that fleeting murderous impulse lurked her old love for Oki. At the time Keiko had not
yet met him. She had not put herself between them.

Now that Otoko had heard about the night at Enoshima, that old love flared up ominously within her. Yet in those flames she could see a single white lotus blossom. Their love was a dreamlike flower that not even Keiko could stain.

The white lotus still there before her inner eye, Otoko shifted her gaze to the lights of the Kiyamachi tea houses reflected in the stream below. For some time she looked down at them. Then she looked at the dark range of the Eastern Hills, beyond Gion. The softly rounded hills were peaceful, but the darkness within them seemed to be flowing secretly toward her. The headlights of automobiles coming and going along the opposite bank, the couples on the promenades, the lamps and people on the balconies lining this side of the river—all these Otoko saw without really seeing them, as the night scene of the Eastern Hills spread out in her mind.

I’ll go ahead with my
Ascension of an Infant
, Otoko told herself. If I don’t paint it right away, I may never be able to. It’s already on the verge of turning into something different … losing all the love and sadness. Was this rush of feeling because she saw the lotus in the flames? It began to seem as if Keiko were the lotus. Why did the white lotus bloom in fire? Why did it not wither away?

“Keiko,” she said suddenly, “are you in a good humor again?”

“If you are.” Keiko’s tone seemed coquettish. “Tell me, which of your sadnesses have been deepest?” Otoko asked.

“I’m not sure,” she answered casually, “I’ve had so many I can’t say. I’ll try to remember all of them, and let you know. But my sadnesses are brief.”

“Are they?”

“Yes.”

Otoko looked hard at her. Speaking as calmly as possible, she said: “There’s one thing I want to ask of you tonight. Please don’t go to Kamakura again.”

“Do you mean to see Mr. Oki? Or his son?”

Her question stabbed Otoko. “Either one, of course!”

“I only went to get revenge for you!”

“Are you still talking like that? What a frightening girl you are!” Otoko’s expression changed, and she shut her eyes as if to hold back unforeseen tears.

“You’re such a coward.…” Keiko rose and went behind Otoko. She pressed down her shoulders with both hands, and then played with her ears. As Otoko sat there vacantly, she could hear the murmur of the flowing stream.

W
e have a visitor, dear!” Fumiko called to Oki from the kitchen where she was preparing breakfast. “A great big Mrs. Mouse is honoring us, hiding under the stove.” Sometimes his wife taunted him by using exaggeratedly polite language.

“Is that so?”

“She even seems to have her little offspring along.”

“Oh?”

“Really, you ought to come see.… The baby mouse just peeped out, and he has the sweetest face.”

“Hmm.”

“He looked at me with beautiful sparkling black eyes.”

Oki said nothing. The pungent aroma of
miso
soup drifted into the dining room, where he was reading the morning newspaper.

“Now the rain’s leaking in! Right into the kitchen. Can you hear it, dear?”

It was raining when he woke up, but now it had become a heavy downpour. The wind that swayed the pines and bamboos on the hill had veered around to the east and was driving the rain in from that side.

“How could I, with all the rain and wind?”

“Won’t you come and look?”

“Mmm.”

“Those poor little raindrops—hurled against the roof tiles, and squeezed through cracks, like teardrops weeping in on us …”

“You’ll have me crying too.”

“Let’s set the wire trap tonight. I think it’s up on the closet shelf. Will you get it down for me later, please?”

“Are you sure you want to catch Mrs. Mouse and her sweet little offspring in a trap?” said Oki mildly, without looking up from his newspaper.

“And what about the leak?”

“How bad is it? Isn’t that just the way the wind is blowing? Tomorrow I’ll get up on the roof and see.”

“That’s dangerous for an old man. I can have Taichiro climb up.”

“Who’s an old man?”

“You retire at fifty-five in most businesses, don’t you?”

“I’m glad to hear that. Maybe I should retire too.”

“Do, whenever you please.”

“I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.”

“The day you die.”

“Indeed!”

“I’m sorry,” Fumiko apologized, and then added in
her usual tone: “I only meant you can go on writing a long, long time.”

“That’s not a very pleasant outlook, especially with a nagging wife. It’s like being prodded by the devil’s pitchfork.”

“Really! When did I ever nag you?”

“You can be a nuisance, you know.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, jealousy, for example.”

“All women are jealous, but you taught me long ago that it’s a bitter, dangerous medicine … a double-edged sword.”

“To wound your partner and yourself.”

“No matter what, I’m too old for double suicide or divorce.”

“Old couples getting divorced are bad enough, but there’s nothing sadder than when they commit suicide together. It must make an old person feel agitated to see such articles in the papers. Even more so than the way young people feel about the suicide of young lovers.”

“That’s because you were agitated about double suicide once yourself, a long time ago.… Anyway, you didn’t let your young girl friend know you wanted to die with her. Maybe you should have. She killed herself, but she never dreamed you were willing to die too. Don’t you feel sorry for her?”

“She didn’t kill herself.”

“She meant to. It’s the same thing.”

Fumiko was talking about Otoko again. Meanwhile he could hear oil sizzling in a skillet, probably for pork with
cabbage. The aroma of fermented bean paste was becoming stronger.

“Your
miso
soup must be getting overdone,” Oki remarked.

“All right, all right. I know I can’t please you with that precious soup—you’ve complained about it often enough, ordering different kinds of
miso
from all over the country.… To pickle your wife in it, I suppose.”

“Do you know how to write the name for that soup in Chinese?”

“Can’t you just write it phonetically?”

“You repeat the character for ‘honorable’ three times.”

“Oh?”

“That’s because it was always so important in the cuisine, and so tricky to get just right.”

“Maybe your honorable
miso
is feeling cross this morning because your precious soup wasn’t treated respectfully enough.”

She was taunting him again. Oki came from the western part of Japan, and had never really mastered Tokyo polite speech; Fumiko, however, had been brought up in Tokyo, so he often asked her help with it. Yet he did not always accept what she told him. A tenacious argument would turn into an endless squabble, and he would declare that Tokyo speech was only a vulgar dialect with a shallow tradition. In Kyoto or Osaka, he would insist, even ordinary gossip was usually very polite, quite unlike Tokyo gossip. All sorts of things—mountains and rivers, houses, streets, heavenly bodies, even fish and vegetables—were referred
to with polite expressions.

“In that case, you’d better ask Taichiro,” she would say, dropping the argument. “After all, he’s a scholar.”

“What would he know about it? He may know something about literature, but he’s never studied polite language. Look at the sloppy way he and his friends talk! Even in his articles he can’t write proper Japanese.”

Actually, Oki disliked either consulting his son or being instructed by him. He preferred to ask his wife. But although Fumiko was a Tokyoite, his questions often left her confused.

Again this morning he found himself complaining about the decay of language.

“In the past, scholars knew their Chinese and could write a correct, well-turned prose.”

“People don’t talk like that. Funny new words get born every day, like those baby mice, and it doesn’t matter to them what they nibble at. Words change so fast it makes your head spin.”

“So they have only a short life, and even if they survive they’re dated—like the novels we write. It’s rare for one to last five years.”

“Well, maybe it’s enough if a new word lasts overnight.” Fumiko brought in the breakfast tray. “I’ve done well to survive too, all these years since you were thinking of dying with that girl.”

“Because there’s no retirement age in the housewife business. Too bad.”

“But there’s divorce. I’ve wanted to know myself what it feels like to be divorced, at least once in my life.”

“It’s not too late.”

“I don’t want to anymore. You know the old saying about trying to seize opportunity by the forelock, after it’s fallen out.”

“Yours hasn’t—you aren’t even gray yet.”

“But yours has!”

“That’s my sacrifice to avoid divorce. So that you won’t be jealous.”

“You
will
make me angry!”

Bantering as usual, they went on with breakfast. If anything, Fumiko seemed in a good humor. She had thought of Otoko, but this morning she was evidently not in a mood to dig up the past.

The rain had slackened, though as yet there were no rifts in the clouds.

“Is Taichiro still asleep?” Oki asked her. “Get him up!”

Fumiko nodded. “All right, but I doubt if I can. He’ll tell me to let him sleep because he’s on vacation.”

“Isn’t he going to Kyoto today?”

“He can leave for the airport after dinner.… Why is he going anyway, when it’s so hot?”

“Maybe you should ask him. He’s taken it into his head to visit Sanetaka’s grave again, behind the Nisonin Temple. It seems he’s going to write a thesis on the
Sanetaka Chronicle.
… Do you know who Sanetaka was?”

“A court noble?”

“Of course he was a noble! He rose to be chamberlain under Yoshimasa, and he was a friend of the poet Sogi and his circle. Sanetaka was one of the aristocrats who
kept literature and art alive during the wars of the sixteenth century. He seems to have had an interesting personality, and he left an enormous diary. Taichiro wants to use it to study the culture of that period.”

“Oh? And where is the temple?”

“At the foot of Mt. Ogura.”

“But where is that? Didn’t you take me there once?”

“A long time ago. It was the place with all the poetic associations.”

“That was in Saga, wasn’t it? Now I remember.”

“Taichiro is dredging up so many incidental details that he says I should put them into a novel. He calls them worthless anecdotes. I suppose he thinks he’s quite a scholar, telling me I can liven up a novel with his worthless anecdotes and blown-up legends.”

Fumiko smiled discreetly.

“Go wake your young scholar!” Oki got up from the table. “Who ever heard of a son sleeping while his father is already at work?”

He went into his study and sat at the desk, head propped in his hands, reflecting on their exchange about a retirement age for novelists. It did not seem at all funny. He heard someone gargling in the lavatory. Taichiro came in wiping his face with a towel.