Quicksand (23 page)

It was around nine o'clock when I sent him off, and I went back to bed for a time, but I was so strangely excited that I couldn't sleep. Besides, my husband telephoned me as soon as he arrived in Osaka, and he kept calling about every half hour, as I paced up and down the bedroom, trying to soothe my nerves, with all kinds of thoughts racing through my mind. Suddenly it occurred to me that while we were struggling day after day in this contest of wills, Watanuki was likely to be up to something— and Mitsuko too: what had she been thinking since I left her the other day? Had she been waiting for me yesterday from morning till night? Anyhow, since my threats about killing myself weren't having the desired effect, why not bring matters to a head, and yet without causing too great a scandal, by going off with her to some nearby place like Nara or Kyoto? Then we could have Ume come rushing frantically to my husband, to tell him: “My mistress and your wife ran off together! Please go after them, or there'll be an awful to-do when her family finds out!” And we'd have her bring him to us just as we were about to commit suicide. . . . Today was our one chance to act—that was what I thought, but because I couldn't go out, I phoned Mitsuko and asked her to hurry over to my house.

“I'll tell you all about it after you're here, so please come right away!”

Then I warned our maid: “You mustn't mention this to the master.” And I settled down to wait for Mitsuko. About twenty minutes later she arrived.

As long as my husband kept telephoning me I felt reassured that he was in Osaka, but still, just in case he came home unexpectedly, I had Mitsuko's parasol and sandals taken around to the garden side, and as a further precaution I met with her in the parlor downstairs, so that she could make a hasty departure by the back way. Mitsuko looked pale and anxious. During the time that we were apart, she seemed to have become exhausted. As she listened to my story, tears filled her eyes.

“So you had to put up with all that too, did you, Sister?”

It seems that from the night before, and throughout the day yesterday, she had been bullied unmercifully by Watanuki.

“You and Sister have been plotting against me,” he accused her, “so I decided to outsmart you by going to Mr. Kakiuchi's office in Imabashi and telling him all about his wife. That's why he came to Kasayamachi to investigate. Once he took her home like that, there's no use waiting for her to come back anymore!”

AFTER THAT
, Watanuki had said he was sure Mitsuko knew he had exchanged written vows with Sister. “But by now that's only a scrap of paper—I left my copy with her husband, just to prove what I told him. And here's the receipt,” he added, taking it from his pocket to show her.

“There, it's all down in writing: ‘He will take responsibility for his wife . . .'” and so on. One by one Watanuki read the provisions to her, but he held the receipt so that his hand concealed the one my husband wanted.

“Now that I have this in writing from Mr. Kakiuchi, we needn't be concerned about Sister any longer, so I'd like you to sign a pledge with me too.”

At that, Mitsuko said, he produced what looked like another draft agreement from his pocket. When she read it, she saw that it was full of brazenly self-serving conditions: Mitsuko and Watanuki were to be forever united in body and spirit; she would follow Watanuki in death; if she violated their pledge she would be subject to retribution; and on and on.

“If these terms are acceptable, please sign your name here and affix your seal.”

But Mitsuko refused.

“I won't do anything of the kind!” she told him. “I've never heard of demanding pledges the way you do. You just want to blackmail people.”

“There's nothing to worry about, as long as you don't intend to change your mind.” He tried to thrust a pen into her hand.

“It's not as if I'm borrowing money! Do you think you can tie down a person's feelings with a contract? This looks like another of your nasty schemes.”

“And you won't sign it because you
may
change your mind, is that it?”

“Whether I sign or not, one can't foresee the future,” she retorted.

“Well, you'll regret it if you don't! I've got all the proof I'd need to blackmail you.” As he spoke, he took a photograph out of his wallet and showed it to her. Surprisingly enough, it was a picture of the document my husband had retrieved.

“I thought Mr. Kakiuchi might not be willing to return it,” Watanuki said, “so I had the photo made before I went to Imabashi the other day—I'm not the sort of man to be taken in. If I show it to a reporter, along with my receipt, he'll want to buy them both. I don't know what I may be driven to. . . . You'd better listen to me, or you'll be in serious trouble!” he warned her.

“You see!” said Mitsuko. “That's how contemptible you are! But I don't care—go ahead and sell your story to the newspapers, or anywhere you like, and stop bothering me!”

With that, they parted angrily.

And so, Mitsuko told me, she had stayed away from Kasayamachi today in order to avoid looking weak. She was just wondering what to do next, when she got my phone call and responded eagerly.

As long as Watanuki didn't think his relations with her were hopeless, he was unlikely to take any steps that might harm himself too. But now that things had come to a crisis, it was vital to get my husband on our side. We decided to carry out my plan.

“If you'd like to go somewhere nearby, how about our villa at Hamadera?” Mitsuko asked.

That summer only a caretaker couple were living there, and if Mitsuko said she wanted to go to swim in the ocean, and take Ume along with her, she could arrange to stay four or five days without worrying her family in the least. Meanwhile I could slip out of my house to meet them at the Namba station; by the time the three of us reached Hamadera, my husband would discover that I was gone. No doubt his first move would be to telephone Mitsuko's house. As soon as he knew where she was, he would call Hamadera, and we'd have Ume answer the phone:

“Your wife and my mistress have taken some kind of drugs—they're both unconscious! They've left notes behind, so they must have meant to commit suicide! I was just going to call our house and then call you. Please come right away!”

He'd be sure to get there as fast as he could.

Ume's little speech was an important part of the plot, but being in a realistic coma was more important, even for a hoax like this. We had to take just enough medicine so a doctor would say our lives were in no danger and we'd be all right after two or three days of rest. We didn't know the proper dose for that, but Mitsuko was in the habit of taking Bayer sleeping pills, which were perfectly harmless.

“They say even a boxful of these tablets couldn't kill you,” she explained, “so if we take less than that, we'll be on the safe side. Though I wouldn't care if I
did
have an overdose, since we'd be together, Sister!”

“I wouldn't care either!” I said.

And so, once my husband had hastened to our bedside, we would have Ume ready with a story for him:

“They're still groggy, as you see, but the doctor says they're out of danger, and now and then they open their eyes; they're mostly conscious by now. Maybe I ought to report this to my mistress's family, but I know she'll scold me if I do, and I suppose Mrs. Kakiuchi will too, so I haven't called them. Please keep it to yourself. Anyway, your wife can't go home tonight—I hope you'll let her stay for a while, as if she's here on a visit, till she's all well again.”

After that we could spend a few more days in bed, sometimes acting delirious, talking in our sleep, or waking up and crying, and Ume would advise him to leave us alone if he wanted us to recover fully. He would have to agree.

“When shall we do it, then?” Mitsuko asked.

“It ought to be today. We won't have a better chance, now that I'm in prison like this.”

“I want to hurry too, or Watanuki will be after me again.”

More phone calls had come from my husband while we were making our plans, and we began to be afraid we might not have time to escape or, if we did, he would discover it before we reached Hamadera. We would need up to three hours from the time we left before he found us, or the plan wouldn't work. At first I thought of calling his office and telling him I wanted to sleep till evening. “Don't wake me,” I'd say, and then lock the bedroom door from inside, crawl out the window, and jump down. But we have a two-story Western house, with a smooth wall that doesn't offer a foothold, and the beach in front would be crowded with bathers too; I couldn't do anything like that before all those people. So we talked it over and decided it was better for me to be on my good behavior two or three more days, and then, after my husband and our maid had relaxed their vigilance, I'd make my escape by pretending to go for a swim.

All I had to do was wait a few days until he began to trust me again; then, as he was about to leave for the office, I'd declare: “If I stay cooped up in this house, I might as well be an invalid; let me go have a swim at least. I'll put on a bathing suit and just go to the beach in front of our house.” And I'd actually walk out the door in my bathing suit. Ume would be waiting for me at the beach and would have brought something of Mitsuko's for me to put on, preferably a one-piece dress I could slip over my bathing suit, and a low-brimmed hat or parasol to hide my face. The beach would be swarming with people, so no one would notice me, but since I hardly ever wore Western-style dresses in those days, I was even less likely to be recognized, no matter who saw me. We were to meet between ten
A.M
. and noon—a time when my husband was sure to be in Osaka. Ume was to come three days from now, unless it rained, but if anything went wrong she would come again the following day, on the fourth day, or the fifth, and so on.

That was what we planned. Then we had another good idea: Mitsuko would go ahead to Hamadera on the evening of the second day, and when my husband called her family they would tell him she had gone to the villa yesterday. When he called Mitsuko, she'd come to the telephone herself and say: “Sister doesn't know I'm here, so I don't expect her.” He'd think I hadn't gone very far and might even have drowned myself. Before anything else, he'd want to begin a search for me.

A little later, when the time was right, we'd have Ume call him: “Mrs. Kakiuchi just got here—before I knew it, something awful happened!”

We estimated it would be an hour and a half to two hours before the maid went to look for me. After that she would phone my husband in Osaka; he would make his own phone calls and wouldn't get back to Koroen for another hour or so; then he'd spend one or two more hours asking bathers if they'd seen me and searching all along the shore; finally, after that phone call from Ume, it would take him an hour and twenty or thirty minutes to come from Koroen to Hamadera—in all, we would have five or six hours, which was plenty of time for us to carry out our preparations. Only, I felt sorry for Ume, who would have to go with Mitsuko to Hamadera the day before and then come all the way to Koroen by ten o'clock in the morning and wait an hour or two on the beach in the worst of the heat. If by some chance I had to let her wait in vain, she'd need to come back a second or a third day. But Mitsuko assured me I could count on her.

“She likes to do that kind of thing.”

We made all the necessary arrangements, down to the last detail, reminded each other to be careful, and Mitsuko left for home. That was around one
P
.
M
. My husband came back at almost the same time, just missing her. It was really lucky I wasn't trying to escape today, I thought.