Beauty and Sadness (7 page)

“You can’t tell on such short acquaintance.”

“I certainly can.”

“How can you?”

“I’d have no trouble seducing Mr. Oki
or
his son.”

“You frighten me!” exclaimed Otoko, blanching.
“Keiko, that kind of conceitedness is dangerous.”

“Not in the least,” said Keiko, quite unperturbed.

“It
is
,” Otoko insisted. “And aren’t you being terribly predatory? No matter how young and beautiful you are.”

“I suppose most women are what you call predatory.”

“Indeed. And is that why you took your favorite pictures to Mr. Oki?”

“No. I don’t need pictures to seduce him.”

Otoko seemed appalled.

“It’s just that I’m your pupil, so I wanted him to see my best work.”

“I’m grateful. But you say you only exchanged a few words with him at the station. Was that any reason to give away your pictures?”

“I promised. Besides, I wondered how he would react to them, and I needed a pretext for going to meet his family.”

“It’s a good thing he was out!”

“I imagine he saw the pictures later, but he probably didn’t understand them.”

“You’re being unfair to him.”

“Even in his novels he never wrote anything better than
A Girl of Sixteen.
”

“That’s not true. You’re fond of it because he idealized me in it. A youthful novel like that appeals to young people. I can see why you wouldn’t care for his later works.”

“Anyway, if he died today it’s the only novel he’d be remembered for.”

“Stop talking like that!” Otoko’s voice was stern. She
drew her wrist out of Keiko’s grasp and edged away.

“Are you still so attached to him?” Keiko’s voice was also harsh. “Even though I said I’d get revenge for you?”

“It’s not attachment.”

“Is it … love?”

“Perhaps.”

Abruptly Otoko got up and went inside. Keiko stayed out on the moonlit veranda, sitting with her face buried in her hands.

“Otoko, I’m living for someone else too!” Her voice trembled. “But when it’s a man like Mr. Oki …”

“Forgive me. It all happened when I was so young.”

“I’m going to get revenge.”

“That wouldn’t destroy my love.”

Keiko was weeping on the veranda, still with her face in her hands. “Paint me, Otoko … before I turn into the kind of woman you said. Please! Let me pose in the nude for you.”

“All right. I’d love doing a portrait of you.”

“I’m glad!”

Otoko had stored away a number of sketches of her dead baby. Years had passed, but she still intended to use them for a painting to be called
The Ascension of an Infant.
She had searched through albums of Western art for pictures of cherubs and of the Christ child, but their plump good health seemed inappropriate to her sorrow. There were several famous old Japanese paintings of Saint Kobo as a boy that touched her with their typically graceful expression of restrained emotion. Yet the saint was neither an infant nor was he ascending to heaven.
Not that Otoko wanted to show the ascension as such, only to suggest that kind of spiritual feeling. But would she ever finish it?

Now that Keiko had asked to be painted, Otoko thought of her old sketches for
The Ascension of an Infant.
Perhaps she could portray Keiko in the manner of the paintings of the boy saint. It would be a purely classical
Portrait of a Holy Virgin.
Though works of religious art, some of the saint’s portraits had an indescribably seductive charm.

“Keiko, I do want to paint you,” said Otoko, “and I’ve just thought of a design. It’ll be in the Buddhist tradition, so I can’t have any sort of improper pose.”

“Buddhist?” Keiko shifted uneasily. “I’m not sure I care for the idea.”

“Well, let me try. Buddhist paintings are often very beautiful—and I could call it
A Girl Abstractionist.
”

“You’re teasing me.”

“I’m serious. I’ll do it as soon as I’ve finished the tea plantation.” Otoko looked back at the studio wall. Over their pictures of the tea plantation hung her portrait of her mother.

Otoko let her eyes rest on the portrait.

Her mother looked young and beautiful in it, even younger than herself. Perhaps that reflected Otoko’s own age of thirty-one or -two at the time she painted it. Or perhaps it had just turned out that way.

When Keiko first saw it she had said: “Lovely. This looks like a self-portrait.” Does it really? Otoko had wondered.

Otoko resembled her mother. Was it out of longing for her dead mother that so much of the resemblance was captured in this portrait? At first she had made a great many sketches based on a photograph, but none of these had moved her. Then she decided to ignore the photograph—and there was her mother sitting before her. Rather than a phantom, it was her living image. Over and over she made new sketches, swiftly, her heart overflowing with emotion. But frequently she paused, eyes clouded with tears. She realized that the portrait of her mother was becoming more like a self-portrait.

The final result was the picture now hanging on the wall over the studies of the tea plantation. Otoko had burned all the earlier versions. The remaining one looked most like a self-portrait, but Otoko thought it would do. Whenever she looked at it, there was a hint of sadness in her eyes. The picture breathed with her. How long had it taken her to fix the image into this portrait?

Until now Otoko had painted no other portraits, and only a few small figure paintings of any kind. Yet tonight, pressed by Keiko, she suddenly felt like doing a portrait. Otoko had never thought of her
Ascension of an Infant
in that way. But that long-cherished wish must explain why she was reminded of the portraits of the boy saint, and wanted to paint Keiko in classical Buddhist style. Her mother, her lost baby, and Keiko—were they not her three loves? Different as they were, she should paint all three of them.

“Otoko,” Keiko called. “You’re looking at your mother’s picture, and wondering how you can paint me,
aren’t you? You think you can’t possibly have that kind of love for me.” She came in and sat close beside her.

“Silly! I’m dissatisfied now when I look at it—I’ve improved a little since then, you know. Anyway, I’m still fond of the picture. For all its faults, it’s one I devoted myself to heart and soul.”

“You needn’t go to such pains over
my
picture. Just dash it off.”

“No, no,” said Otoko, her thoughts elsewhere. Looking at the portrait had brought a flood of memories of her mother. Then Keiko had called to her, and Otoko was reminded once again of the old portraits of the boy saint. Some of the figures looked like pretty little girls or beautiful young maidens, in the elegant, refined manner of Buddhist art but also with a certain voluptuousness. They could be taken as symbols of the homosexual love at medieval monasteries where women were forbidden, of the yearning for handsome boys who could be mistaken for beautiful young girls. Perhaps that was why the saint’s portraits had come to mind as soon as she thought of painting Keiko. The hair style was not unlike the bobbed hair and bangs worn by little girls today. However, one no longer saw such resplendent brocade kimonos except in the No theater; they would seem much too old-fashioned for a modern young woman. Otoko recalled Kishida Ryusei’s portraits of his daughter Reiko. They were oils or water colors minutely drawn in a meticulous classical style influenced by Dürer: some of them were like religious paintings. But Otoko had seen an extremely rare one, in light colors on Chinese paper,
that showed Reiko in a red underskirt naked above the waist. She was sitting in a formal pose. It was hardly one of Ryusei’s masterpieces, and Otoko wondered why he had portrayed his own daughter that way, in a painting in classical Japanese style. He had done similar things in Western style.

Why not paint a nude of Keiko, then? She could still follow the design of the boy saint’s portrait, and there were even Buddhist figures that gave the hint of a woman’s breasts. But what of the hair style? She had seen a superb portrait by Kobayashi Kokei, of exquisite purity, but that too had the wrong sort of coiffure. Pondering various solutions, Otoko felt all the more keenly that it was beyond her powers.

“Keiko, shall we go to bed?” she asked.

“So early? With such a lovely moon?” Keiko turned to look at the clock. “It’s only five minutes of ten.”

“I’m a little tired. Can’t we talk lying down?”

“All right.”

While Otoko was at the dressing table Keiko prepared their beds. She was very quick at it. After Otoko got up, Keiko went to the mirror to remove her makeup. Leaning over, curving her slender neck, she stared at the face in the mirror.

“Otoko, I’m not the right person for a Buddhist painting.”

“That depends on the artist.”

Keiko took out her hairpins and shook her head.

“Are you undoing your hair?”

“Yes.” As Keiko combed the long strands, Otoko watched from her bed.

“You’re taking down your hair tonight?”

“I think it’s getting an odor. I should have washed it.” Keiko sniffed at a handful of her back hair. “Otoko, how old were you when your father died?”

“Eleven, of course! How many times are you going to ask me?”

Keiko said nothing. She closed the paper-screened doors to the veranda, and the doors between the bedroom and the studio, and lay down beside Otoko. The two beds were together.

For several nights they had gone to bed without closing the outside shutters. The paper screens facing the garden glowed faintly in the moonlight.

Otoko’s mother had died of lung cancer, without revealing to her that Otoko had a younger half-sister by a different mother. Otoko had never been told.

Her father had been in the export-import trade in silk and wool. A great many people attended his funeral, bowing and offering incense in the usual fashion, but Otoko’s mother noticed among the mourners a rather strange young woman who seemed to be of mixed blood. When she bowed to the bereaved family, her eyes looked swollen from weeping. Otoko’s mother felt a sharp pang. She nodded to summon her husband’s private secretary, and whispered to him to inquire at the reception desk
about the Eurasian-looking young woman. Later the secretary was able to learn that her grandmother was a Canadian who had married a Japanese man, and she herself had gone to a school for Americans and was working as an interpreter. He said she lived in a small house in Azabu.

“I suppose she has no children.”

“They say there’s a little girl.”

“Did you see her?”

“No, I heard it from people in the neighborhood.”

She felt sure that the little girl was her husband’s child. There were ways to verify it, but she thought the young woman herself might come to see her. She never came. Over half a year later Otoko’s mother was told by the secretary that she had married, taking the child along to her new home. He also intimated that the Eurasian woman had been her husband’s mistress. As time passed, her jealous indignation cooled. She began to wish she could adopt the little girl. Her own husband’s child must be growing up unaware of her real father. She felt as if she had lost something precious—and not merely because Otoko was her only child. Yet she could not tell an eleven-year-old girl about her father’s illegitimate daughter. By now her sister would have been married for some years, in the normal course of events, and perhaps also have children of her own. But for Otoko it was as if she did not exist.…

“Otoko, Otoko!” Keiko was sitting up in bed, shaking
her. “Did you have a nightmare? You seemed to be in pain.” As Otoko gasped for breath, Keiko leaned over her and stroked her chest.

“Were you watching me?”

“Yes, for a while.”

“How mean of you! I was having a dream.”

“What kind of dream?”

“About a green person.” Otoko’s voice was still agitated.

“Somebody dressed in green?”

“Not the clothing. It was green all over, including the arms and legs.”

“The green-eyed monster?”

“Don’t make fun of me! It wasn’t fierce-looking, just a green figure floating lightly round and round my bed.”

“A woman?”

Otoko did not reply.

“It’s a good dream. I’m sure it is!” Keiko put her hand over Otoko’s eyes and pressed them shut; then she took up one of Otoko’s fingers in her other hand, and bit it.

“Ouch!” Otoko opened her eyes wide.

Keiko interpreted the dream for her. “You said you’d paint me, remember. So I’ve taken on the green of the tea plantation.”

“Do you think so? You’re dancing all around me even when you’re asleep? That frightens me!”

Keiko let her head drop on Otoko’s breast, and tittered a little hysterically. “But it’s
your
dream.…”

The following day they climbed up to the temple on Mt. Kurama, arriving toward evening. Worshipers were
gathered in the temple compound. The late dusk of a long May day had already settled on the surrounding peaks and tall forests.

Over the Eastern Hills beyond Kyoto the full moon had risen. Watch fires were burning on the left and right before the main hall of the temple. The priests had come out and begun to chant the sutras, repeating the sacred words in chorus after the scarlet-robed head priest. A harmonium accompanied them.

All the worshipers offered lighted candles. Directly in front of the main hall was a huge silver sake bowl filled with water, reflecting the full moon. Water from the bowl was poured into the cupped hands of each of the worshipers; one by one they came forward, bowed, and drank it. Otoko and Keiko did the same.

“When we get home you may find green footprints in your room!” said Keiko. She seemed exhilarated by the atmosphere of the mountain ceremony.

W
hen Oki was tired of writing, or when a novel was going badly, he would lie down on the couch in the open corridor beside his study. In the afternoon he would often fall asleep there for an hour or two. Only in the past few years had he got into the habit of taking such naps. He used to go out for a walk instead, but after so many years in Kamakura he had become all too familiar with the nearby temples, and even with the hills. Then too, being an early riser, he always took a short walk in the morning. Once awake, he could not bear to loll about in bed; also, he preferred to be out of the way while the maid tidied up the house. Before dinner he took a fairly long walk.