Beauty and Sadness (3 page)

It was twenty past nine when a call from the lobby announced Miss Ueno.

“Tell her I’ll be down in a moment,” Oki answered. Or should I have had her come up here? he said to himself.

Otoko was nowhere to be seen in the spacious lobby. A young girl approached and inquired politely if he was Mr. Oki. She said Miss Ueno had asked her to call for him.

“Oh?” He tried to be casual. “That’s very kind of you.”

Having expected only Otoko, he felt that she had eluded him. The vivid memories of her that had filled his day seemed to dissipate.

Oki was silent for a time after getting into the car the girl had waiting for them. Then he asked: “Are you Miss Ueno’s pupil?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re living with her?”

“Yes. There’s a maid too.”

“I suppose you’re from Kyoto.”

“No, Tokyo. But I fell in love with Miss Ueno’s work and came chasing after her, so she took me in.” Oki looked at the girl. The moment she spoke to him at the hotel he had been aware of her beauty and now he noticed how lovely she was in profile. She had a longish slender neck, and charmingly shaped ears. Altogether, she was disturbingly beautiful. But she spoke quietly, in a rather reserved manner. He wondered if she knew what was between him and Otoko, something that had happened before she was born. Suddenly he asked: “Do you always wear a kimono?”

“No, I’m not so proper,” she said, a little more easily. “At home I usually wear slacks. Miss Ueno said I should dress for the holiday, because New Year’s Day would come while we were out.” Apparently she was also to listen to the bells with them. He realized that Otoko was avoiding being alone with him.

The car went up through Maruyama Park toward the Chionin Temple. Awaiting them in a private room at an elegant old tea house were two young apprentice geisha, besides Otoko herself. Again he was caught by surprise. Otoko was sitting alone at the
kotatsu
, her knees under its
coverlet; the two geisha sat across from each other at an open brazier. The girl who had brought him knelt at the doorway and bowed.

Otoko drew herself away from the
kotatsu
to greet him. “It’s been such a long time,” she said. “I thought you might like to be near the Chionin bell, but I’m afraid they can’t offer anything elaborate here, they’re really closed for the holidays.”

All Oki could do was thank her for going to so much trouble. But to have two geisha, besides her pupil! He could not even hint at the past they had shared, or let the way he looked at her betray it. His telephone call yesterday must have left her so upset and worried that she had decided to invite the geisha. Did her reluctance to be alone with him indicate the state of her feelings toward him? He had thought so the moment he was face to face with her. But at that first glance he felt he was still living within her. Probably the others did not notice. Or perhaps they did, since the girl was with her every day, and the geisha, though very young, were women of the pleasure quarter. Of course none of them showed the least sign of it.

Otoko remained at one side, between the geisha, and had Oki sit at the
kotatsu.
Then she had her pupil take the seat opposite him. She seemed to be avoiding him again.

“Miss Sakami, have you introduced yourself to Mr. Oki?” she asked lightly, and went on, as if formally presenting her: “This is Sakami Keiko, who’s staying with me. She may not look it, but she’s a bit crazy.”

“Oh, Miss Ueno!”

“She does abstract paintings in a style all her own. They’re so passionate they often seem a little mad. But I’m quite taken with them; I envy her. You can see her tremble as she paints.”

A waitress brought sake and tidbits. The two geisha poured for them.

“I had no idea I’d be listening to the bells in this sort of company,” said Oki.

“I thought it might be pleasanter with young people. It’s lonely, when the bell tolls and you’re another year older.” Otoko kept her eyes down. “I often wonder why I’ve gone on living so long.”

Oki remembered that two months after the death of her baby Otoko took an overdose of sleeping medicine. Had she also remembered? He had rushed to her side as soon as he learned of it. Her mother’s efforts to get Otoko to leave him had brought on the suicide attempt, but she sent for him nevertheless. Oki stayed at their house to help take care of her. Hour after hour he massaged her thighs, swollen and hard from massive injections. Her mother went in and out of the kitchen bringing hot steamed towels. Otoko lay nude under a light kimono. Still only sixteen, she had very slender thighs, and the injections made them swell up grotesquely. Sometimes when he pressed hard his hands slipped down to her inner thighs. While her mother was out of the room he wiped away the ugly discharge oozing between them. His own tears of pity and bitter shame fell on them, and he swore to himself that he would save her, that he would never part from her, come what might.
Otoko’s lips had turned purple. He heard her mother sobbing in the kitchen, and found her crouched before the stove.

“She’s dying!”

“You’ve done all you could,” he told her.

“And so have you,” she said, gripping his hand.

He stayed by Otoko’s side for three days without sleeping, until she finally opened her eyes. She writhed and moaned in pain, pawing frantically at herself. Then her glaring eyes seemed to fix on him. “No, no! Go away!”

Two doctors had done their utmost for her, but Oki felt that his own devoted nursing had helped to save her life.

Probably Otoko’s mother had not told her everything he had done. But to him it was unforgettable. More vivid than the memory of her body lying in his embrace was that of her naked thighs as he massaged her back to life. He could see them even as she sat there with him waiting to hear the temple bell.

No sooner had anyone filled her sake cup than Otoko drained it. Evidently she knew how to hold her liquor. One of the geisha said it took an hour to give the bell all one hundred and eight strokes. Both geisha were in ordinary kimonos, not turned out for a party. They were not wearing dangling butterfly obi, and instead of fancy flowered hairpins they had only pretty combs in their hair. Both of them seemed to be friends of Otoko, but Oki could not understand why they had come dressed so casually. As he drank, listening to the frivolous chatter of
their soft Kyoto voices, his heart lightened. Otoko had been quite astute. She had avoided being alone with him, but she might very well have wanted to calm her own emotions for this unexpected reunion. Even to sit here together created a current of feeling that flowed back and forth between them.

The great bell of the Chionin tolled.

A hush fell over the room. The worn old bell sounded almost cracked, but its reverberations hung on and on. After an interval, it tolled again. It seemed to be very near.

“We’re too close,” said Otoko. “I was told this would be a good place to hear the Chionin bell, but I think it might have sounded better from a little farther away, somewhere by the river, maybe.”

Oki slid back the paper screen from a window and saw that the bell tower was just below the small garden of the tea house. “It’s right over there,” he said. “You can see them striking it.”

“We really are too close,” Otoko repeated.

“No, this is fine,” Oki said. “I’m glad to be so near for once, after hearing it over the radio every New Year’s Eve.” Yet there was indeed something lacking. Dark shadowy figures had gathered in front of the bell tower. He closed the screen and went back to the
kotatsu.
As the bell tolled on he stopped straining to listen to it, and then he heard a sound that only a magnificent old bell could produce, a sound that seemed to roar forth with all the latent power of a distant world.

After leaving the tea house they walked up to the Gion
Shrine for the traditional New Year ceremony. Many were already on their way back from it, swinging the fire-tipped cords they had lighted at the shrine. According to long custom, that fire would light the stove for cooking holiday dishes.

O
ki was standing on a low hill, his gaze held by the purple sunset. He had been at his desk since half past one that afternoon, and had left the house to take a walk after finishing an installment of a serial for a newspaper. He lived in the hilly northern outskirts of Kamakura, and his house was across the valley. The glow spread high in the western sky. The richness of the purple made him wonder if there might be a thin bank of clouds. A purple sunset was most unusual. There were subtle gradations of color from dark to light, as if blended by trailing a wide brush across wet rice paper. The softness of the purple implied the coming of spring. At one place the haze was pink. That seemed to be where the sun was setting.

He recalled that on his way back from Kyoto on New Year’s Day the rails glinted crimson far into the distance in the rays of the setting sun. On one side was the sea.
As the rails curved into the shadow of the hills their crimson disappeared. The train entered a gorge, and suddenly it was evening. But the warm crimson of the rails had reminded him again of the past he had shared with Otoko. Although she had avoided being alone with him, that very fact made him feel that he was still alive within her. As they walked back from the Gion Shrine some drunken men in the crowds had accosted them and tried to touch the high-piled coiffures of the two young geisha. One seldom saw that kind of behavior in Kyoto. Oki walked beside the geisha to shield them, Otoko and her pupil following along a few steps behind.

The next day as he was about to board the train, still telling himself that Otoko could not be expected to come to the station, her pupil Sakami Keiko appeared.

“Happy New Year! Miss Ueno says she wanted to see you off, but she’s had to make New Year’s calls all morning, and this afternoon people are coming to see her. So I’m here in her place.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Oki replied. Her beauty attracted attention among the few holiday travelers. “This is the second time I’ve troubled you.”

“Not at all.”

Keiko was wearing the same kimono as last night: a bluish figured satin with a design of plovers fluttering among scattered snowflakes. The plovers gave it color, but it was rather somber holiday finery for such a young girl.

“That’s a handsome kimono. Did Miss Ueno paint the design?”

“No.” She blushed faintly. “I did it myself, though it’s not what I’d hoped.” Actually the somber kimono brought out Keiko’s disturbing beauty all the more strikingly. And there was a youthfulness in the decorative color harmonies and varied shapes of the plovers. Even the scattered snowflakes seemed to be dancing.

Saying it was from Otoko, she gave him several boxes of Kyoto delicacies to eat on the train.

During the few minutes the train waited in the station Keiko came over and stood at his window. As he saw her there framed in the window it occurred to him that, in her whole life, this might be the time when she was at her most beautiful. He had not known Otoko in the full flower of her youthful beauty. She was sixteen when they parted.

Oki opened his supper early, around four-thirty. It was an assortment of New Year’s foods, including some small, perfectly formed rice balls. They seemed to express a woman’s emotions. No doubt Otoko herself had made them for the man who had long ago destroyed her girlhood. Chewing the little bite-sized rice balls, he could feel her forgiveness in his very tongue and teeth. No, it was not forgiveness, it was love. Surely it was a love that still lived deep within her. All he knew of her years in Kyoto was that she had made her way alone, as a painter. Perhaps there had been other loves, other affairs. Yet he knew that what she felt for him was a young girl’s desperate love. He himself had gone on to other women. But he had never loved again with such pain.

Delicious rice, he thought, wondering if it was grown
around Kyoto. He ate one little rice ball after another. They were seasoned exactly right, neither too salty nor too bland.

About two months after her suicide attempt Otoko had been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, behind barred windows. He learned of it from her mother, but was not allowed to see her.

“You could look at her from the corridor,” Otoko’s mother had said, “but I wish you wouldn’t. I’d hate to have you see the poor child now myself. And she’d be upset if she saw you.”

“Do you think she’d recognize me?”

“Of course she would! Isn’t it all because of you?”

Oki had no reply.

“But they say she hasn’t gone crazy. The doctor tells me not to worry, she’ll only be there a little while.” Her mother gestured as if cradling a baby in her arms. “She often goes like this, wanting her baby. She’s really pitiful.”

Otoko left the hospital after some three months. Her mother came to talk to him.

“I know you have a wife and child, and Otoko must have known that too from the very beginning. So maybe you’ll think
I’m
crazy, at my age, asking it of you.…” She was trembling, with tears in her downcast eyes. “Won’t you please marry her?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Oki said unhappily. There had been stormy scenes at home as well. His wife was then in her early twenties.

“You can just ignore me, as if I’m a little deranged too.
I’ll never ask again. But I’m not saying right away. She can wait a few years, even five or six—she’s the kind of girl who’ll go on waiting whether I want her to or not. And she’s only sixteen.”

It occurred to him that Otoko’s passionate temperament came from her mother.

Within a year Otoko’s mother sold their house in Tokyo and took her daughter to live in Kyoto. Otoko transferred to a girls’ high school there, dropping one grade behind. As soon as she was graduated from high school she entered an art school.

It was over twenty years later that they listened to the Chionin bell together, that she sent him a supper to eat on the train back to Tokyo. All her holiday foods seemed to be in the old Kyoto tradition, Oki thought, as he took the morsels up one by one in his chopsticks. Even breakfast at the hotel that morning had included a bowl of the traditional New Year’s soup, for form’s sake, but the true flavor of the holiday was in this supper. At home in Kamakura it would all be quite Westernized, the way it looked in the color photographs in women’s magazines.