Segaki (9 page)

Muchaku saw that there were dozens of snails scattered about on the leaves and rocks, as though a shower had brought them out, though there had been no shower. Yasumaro stared at them thoughtfully.

“I suppose you thought my being in the field odd,” he said.

Muchaku did not answer.

Once more Yasumaro looked amused, but it was not
exactly amusement, it was almost compassion, and it made Muchaku uncomfortable.

“Cold blooded perhaps?”

“It is none of my affair.”

Yasumaro was still watching the snail. It had almost joined its brothers, all of whose antennae were now turned towards the shrubs. “I collect them,” he said. “It is now, I’m afraid.” He paused, as though, which was unusual for him, seeking approval. “Well?”

“I do not think some things matter to you as much as to others. You never did have many emotions.”

“Ha,” said Yasumaro, and gave him a hard look. “It is certainly true that I do not have the ordinary ones, but there are others, and one feels them just as much. Tell me, can you imagine a man without a landscape?”

“No.”

“A landscape without a man?”

“Yes.”

“Then we have no quarrel, you and I,” said Yasumaro, as though everything were settled, and beamed at him. Muchaku could make no sense of what had been said, but thought perhaps his brother was poking fun at him. He should have been angry, but somehow when his brother poked fun at you it always made you feel sunnier instead.

“We must remember evil is a merely human matter. In these cruel times we tend to forget that.” Yasumaro looked a little apologetic. “It is so easy to be emotional, so easy to experience things. That frees us from the obligation to understand them.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. You must have led a comfortable life off there in Noto. And yet you came here.”

“What did the soldier want?”

Yasumaro was coming up to the veranda. He stopped, one foot on the steps, and looked at Muchaku. He seemed to wait for some sort of answer he clearly didn’t get. He grunted. “Nothing. He really was the girl’s brother. He was worried about her.” Again he took his brother’s arm. “I told her to heat bath water, and you must change. This is a secular house. I don’t like those rags around me. In clothes like that you couldn’t even taste your food. Don’t look so solemn. It is really quite comfortable here. I had the girl lay you out one of my robes.”

The bath-house was in the garden, at the end of the wing. Muchaku did not feel at his ease. It was not that the house was not still peaceful, but there was something tensely transient in the air. He clambered into his tub, and the extremely hot water soothed him. Later the maid came out and sloshed him down. He winced, at which she looked at him critically and burst into a flood of giggles. But she would not speak to him.

He went back naked to his room and got into the clothes that Yasumaro had had laid out for him. And Yasumaro was as usual right. Once in them, and he did feel differently, and only slightly at a loss, as we always do when guests for the first time in a large and unfamiliar house.

He had not worn the ordinary clothes of a gentleman for twenty years. The silk was grateful against his skin, though as was fitting to his age, the pattern was elegantly subdued. The folds of the cloth fell with an unfamiliar grace between his legs, and forced him to stand slightly differently than was his wont. He felt unexpectedly younger.

He did not quite know what to do. He slid back the door panel and wandered through the house. Only this wing of it was occupied. The rest, and it had once been large, was apparently blocked off. Open galleries ran through abandoned and yet very beautiful courts, each with a sand garden, and though the rooms were neglected, the sand was correctly raked, to simulate waves, and the rocks were of priceless shapes and placed in tense patterns that were new to him. No doubt Yasumaro had designed them himself.

Unexpectedly he found himself in the kitchen.

The girl, he still did not know her name, nor did he ever learn it, was standing with a bandanna around her head, humming to herself, her fingers expertly popping cut vegetables into a steaming cauldron with a pair of long bamboo tweezers. Of the soldiers there was no sign. He stood motionless, for the sight was lovely to watch. She was entirely engaged in what she was doing, watching the bubbling surface of the water for the exact. moment to fish out a bean sprout or to pop another in. It was more usual to steam such things. But again, he did not dare to ask why she did anything.

With a satisfied sound, she lifted the lid from a smaller earthern pot and tenderly held out lettuce in the tongs, steaming it for a well considered instant before
transferring
it into lacquer bowls. Then she saw him.

“Oh you should not be here,” she said. “Please go.”

“I enjoyed watching. You must admire vegetables very much.”

She broke into a worried smile. “Oh, when you have all the right ingredients…” she said, and glanced to the
doorway. “Please go. He would not like your being here.”

He did as she told him, and found Yasumaro waiting in the studio garden. They were to eat in the studio it appeared.

“Now you are as you once were,” said Yasumaro. “Don’t you recognize the gown? It is one of your old ones. I kept them all.”

“Not quite I am afraid.”

“People of the same generation always share the same youth,” said Yasumaro. “Have you never noticed? They can always call it back again. Let’s be twenty for an hour or two. The girl would be grateful. She cooks young food.”

Indeed she did. One could see, tasting it, that whatever else she might be, instinctively she had exquisite
sensibilities
. It was simply done and simply served, but that kind of simplicity can neither be bought nor learned. It can only be inherited. For recipes, too, are the better for three generations, as well as cooks.

And then, too, like true luxury, there was very little of it, but that exact, enough to whet the senses, but not enough to dull them, some thinly sliced raw fish in a marinade, as opaque as window paper, smoked eel, laid over chopped spring onions, chicken in an oyster sauce, and those slippery field mushrooms with the phallic shape and the nutmeg taste, splattered with the thinnest rain of earth brown soy sauce.

All of it had that bitter, light, but evasively aromatic brittleness Japanese food does have. Throughout the meal Yasumaro watched Muchaku not watching the maid, and seemed thoughtful.

Afterwards they had tea on the veranda, to be exact, on the bamboo moon watching veranda, for the moon was already up.

For some reason Yasumaro did not seem to wish to use his tea house. Nor did he follow the formal tea ceremony. But he did make superb tea, with the best and plainest of utensils, and the bamboo whip with which he frothed up the cup was in itself the abstraction of the mushrooms they had had for dinner.

The pits and depressions in the garden looked endlessly deep, as they always do in moonlight, the evening was moist, the air acrid, no doubt from the burning wood, and in the darkness there was the sudden feeble dart of a late firefly, and quiet movements in the garden, the snails perhaps, apart from the stirring of the trees. The tea, unexpectedly, was heavy and pungent.

“I suppose you are wondering about her,” said
Yasumaro
. “It is very simple. She worked at that inn you
undoubtedly
passed. I used to visit her every Thursday. You see she is not exactly of her type, she is better than the provincial geisha, and very young. She wants to please. There has been much fighting. Her family is gone, and there was no one left to go to the inn. So she came here. It has worked out well. That was two months ago. She likes it here, I think. She is a good girl. She has been trained to please, and therefore she pleases.”

The dog’s head and shoulders emerged from the
darkness
of the garden, as it scrambled to the porch.
Yasumaro
frowned. Perhaps he did not like dogs. But he said nothing. The dog curled into a neat ball and went to sleep. From behind them came the sound of a flute, wayward and charming.

“She does not sing well, and of course never mastered the koto. But she plays the peasant flute. At the inn they would not allow that.” He was abruptly wistful. “She has never said so, but I think she would like to be fond of me, if she weren’t so well trained. And of course she is grateful. That is a rare quality, too.”

The flute explored the night air, and found barriers. The melody occupied a narrower and narrower compass. It should have been peaceful there, and yet it wasn’t. Muchaku shivered. The sound was too like the wail of those ghost foxes.

Yasumaro looked about to say something, and then changed his mind. It had something to do with the soldier, of that Muchaku was sure, and he remembered that other soldier. He did not want to do that. He became agitated.

Yasumaro was looking at the dog, which had raised its head and then lowered it. “Your dog is gentle,” he said. “The 10th Regent, Takatori, who was murdered a month ago, liked fighting dogs better. He kept four or five thousand of them, and had them carried through the streets in litters. No doubt that is why we are fighting like dogs now.”

The presence of women had always made Muchaku uneasy. He was afraid of them. And in his youth, when he had had to have them, he had been afraid of himself, afraid lest necessity and disgust overwhelm him. And yet he had once liked one or two. But then any necessity is disgusting, for it shows us how constrained a thing is self-control, just when we thought it was the one thing that made us untouchable. Nor did mention of the war reassure him. It was a quick draught in that garden. The
moon was still below the trees. Shining through them, it made gesticulating patterns.

Yasumaro turned everything into a work of art, just as he turned everything into piety. Neither one of them could help it. It was an ungovernable impulse. But Yasumaro was still somewhere a man, though he kept the man well hidden, whereas Muchaku had lost himself six years ago.

And Japanese art always leaves something out, so that we may put it in. Therefore it is never soothing. It is peaceful only if we look for peace, violent if we are afraid of violence. Japanese art never states the antithesis. It is always holding the mirror up to something that has no image. In order to show a field you must draw a wood. In order to
enjoy a valley, you must see only a mountain. It is a habit of mind, and the reason why it does not dally with abstraction, is that it has always taken abstraction for granted. It is reality, there, which must always be shown, because it is always in doubt. And because it is in doubt, it can never be shown, it can only be suggested, as something beyond what one is looking at. It strives to make us aware of reality by showing appearances for the contrivances they are. But this is not realism. Realism is only a distortion of reality.

For the Japanese live in a world in which everything is merely a way of looking at something else. Even a snail in that case is a lens. If the phenomenal is also
non-phenomenal
, then everything is factitious, which makes it easier to see through. One has only to polish the lens. Life, in that sense, is only something between a toy and an invented impersonal instrument that allows us to look at life. But shift the focus and one soon sees that that is
not life one is looking at at all. It is only something that moves, it is only movement.

The lens in this case showed only terrors, and he had in some manner to talk these away. He found himself mentioning all of them, except his having turned the soldier in, for that was a private moral horror too secret for him to name even to himself. After all, there are some secrets we have to keep even from ourselves, for otherwise they would destroy us.

Yasumaro had an explanation for everything, it was most comforting, for the cats, the flapping creatures in the glade, even the spontaneous combustion of the inn and the ricks in the fields. In times such as these even cannibalism was not impossible. There were strange things in the wood, not human, but they had once been human. For what we call human is only our best
behaviour
. Left to our own devices, we soon show what we are.

“For instance, the dog,” said Yasumaro, and petted it.

“Then there are no ghosts?”

“Oh yes, there are ghosts. We are all ghosts now, though it is the world that has died, not us. But since we all have to pay lip service to the present, it is not polite to say so.”

“And the ghost foxes?”

“Ah yes, the ghost foxes.” Yasumaro hesitated. “I am afraid the ghost foxes are real. I have never seen them myself. They must be very touching, and very beautiful.”

Muchaku shivered. “They are horrible and
frightening
.”

Yasumaro became bland. “But what on earth has that to do with beauty?” he asked. The flute had stopped
some time ago. There was now only the casual drip of water in the garden, and the moon was above the trees, so that it now tinctured the whole ocean of the air.

The time had come to retire.

Muchaku could not sleep. He had the feeling that
something
was happening somewhere that effected him. He lay under a quilt spread over the kotatsu sunk in the floor. The walls of the room were sparingly painted with the boles of old cypress trees lost in mist, but the walls had horizontal beams. The moonlight made them too distinct.

He could think of no one to go to but the dog, who must still be out in the garden somewhere. He rose, dressed, and slipped outside, into the merciless
non-commital
moonlight. It was so bright, that it made
everything
else darker, and behind it the high sky was black and starless.

There was a shrieking wind. It was odd that he had not been able to hear it indoors. It shook everything in the garden, so that the bedroom wing of the house seemed to hurtle smoothly through the night, as the moonlight flickered over it through the shifting tree-tops.

He peered around him, for since we see less well at night, we cannot impose order on our surroundings, and the world therefore assumes its own proportions. He did not dare go down into the garden, and the planks of the porch were icy underfoot. The dog was nowhere in sight.