Thirst for Love (2 page)

* * * *

Yakichi Sugimoto had bought this property, of about ten acres, in 1934, five years before he retired from the Kansai Merchant Ships Corporation.

He was originally from the Tokyo area, the son of a tenant farmer, and had worked his way through college. After graduation he was hired by Kansai Ships and assigned to their Osaka home office, in Dojima. He married a girl from Tokyo, and although he lived in Osaka he had his three sons educated in Tokyo. In 1934 he became general manager; in 1938, president. The next year he retired.

When he and his wife happened to visit the grave of an old friend in the Hattori Garden of Souls, a new government cemetery, he was taken with the rolling beauty of the surrounding area. When he inquired about the place, he heard for the first time the name Maidemmura. He selected a sloping site covered with chestnuts and bamboo and graced with orchards, and in 1935 built a simple villa there. At the same time he turned over the cultivation of the fruit trees to a gardener.

This was not at all, however, what his wife and sons had been thinking of as a likely base for leisurely villa life; in fact, it became nothing more than the spot to which Yakichi could drive with his family from Osaka and spend the weekend enjoying the sun and indulging a penchant for farming. Yakichi’s languid dilettante of an eldest son, Kensuke, opposed his energetic father’s whim with all the force he could muster; but although he loathed it all from the very depths of his heart, he finally found himself—reluctantly, as usual—being coerced into joining his brothers as a farmer.

Among the Osaka men of affairs at this time there were many who loved the soil, and out of the inborn miserliness and sunny pessimism that went with their Kyoto–Osaka area vitality, they looked askance at the villas in the sought-after shore and hot springs areas, and built cottages in the mountains, where land and socializing cost little.

After Yakichi Sugimoto retired, Maidemmura became the hub of his life. The name may well be derived from
mai
, meaning rice, and
den
, meaning field, with the
mura
, of course, meaning village. The area was evidently under the sea in prehistoric times, and as a result the soil was extremely rich. On this ten acres of land Yakichi was able to grow various fruits and vegetables. The tenant farmer and his family, along with three gardeners, were of much help to this tiller of the soil, and after a few years the Sugimoto peaches became greatly prized in the urban markets.

During the war Yakichi lived a life disdainful of the hostilities. It was, however, a unique form of disdain. The city folk, as he saw it, had to buy the bad rations and high-priced black-market rice because they lacked foresight. He, however, had foresight and was able to live a life of composed self-sufficiency. He traced everything back to the doctrine of foresight. Even his retirement at the mandatory age seemed somehow planned. The malaise and boredom other retired executives suffered, so much like the malaise and boredom of imprisonment, he seemed somehow to have missed.

He mocked the military with the half-jesting jibes of a man who holds no grudge. Those jibes hit their highest point when his wife died after coming down with pneumonia, for which she had received a drug newly developed by the medical corps. Yakichi had secured the drug from a friend in the Osaka army headquarters. The drug had no beneficial effect, said Yakichi, save the death of her.

He weeded; he tilled. The peasant blood revived in him; his love of the soil became a fever. Now that neither his wife nor society was watching him, he even went so far as to blow his nose between his fingers. From the very depths of his aging physique, beaten down by suspenders and vests graced with gold chains, emerged intimations of the sturdy frame of a farmer. Beneath his once overly groomed features, the farmer’s face came to light. If his subordinates could see him now they would know that the furious brows and glaring eyes that had once terrorized them were features usually associated with old farmers.

It was as if Yakichi were owning land for the first time. Before this he had been able to own building sites. This farm, in fact, had seemed to him only another such piece of property. But now it had come to be
land
. The instinct which held that the concept of ownership has no meaning unless the object owned is land came to live again in him. It seemed as if for the first time the achievements of his life were firm and palpable to hand and heart. It now seemed that the disdain in which he as a rising young man held his father and his grandfather was entirely attributable to their failure to possess so much as one acre of land. Out of a love that was more like a thirst for revenge, Yakichi erected a ridiculously expensive monument to his ancestors at the family temple. He did not dream that Ryosuke would be the first one buried there. For that purpose he might as well have taken a plot at the Hattori Garden of Souls.

On their infrequent visits to the Osaka area, his sons were puzzled by the changes taking place in their father. The image of him held by Kensuke, the eldest; Ryosuke, the second son; and Yusuke, the youngest, was more or less the image produced by their dead mother’s careful nurture. She, brought up in the abominable ways of the Tokyo middle class, permitted her husband to act only as an upper-class executive should. Until she died her husband could not blow his nose with his hand, pick his nose in company, slurp his soup, or hawk and spit into the charcoal fire in the
hibachi
—bad habits that society, in all its magnanimity, tolerates in great men.

The transformation of Yakichi was in his sons’ eyes somehow pitiable, foolish, makeshift. It was as if the high spirit of his days as general manager of Kansai Merchant Ships had returned, though now with the businesslike flexibility gone, leaving only the self-made man at his worst. His voice was like that of a farmer running after garden thieves.

Yakichi’s bronze bust graced a drawing room that must have been twenty mats in size. His portrait in oil, by one of the shining lights of the Kansai art world, hung there. This bust, this portrait were of the same tradition as the pictures of successive presidents one sees lined up in the voluminous handouts printed for the fiftieth anniversaries of Imperial Japanese So-and-so Corporations. What his sons saw as pitiable was the gratuitous obduracy, the ostentatious pride of the bust enduring unchanged within this old peasant. The remarks he made about the military had behind them the grimy arrogance of the country demagogue. The innocent villagers took his words as evidence of his patriotism, and accorded him even greater respect.

It was ironic that the eldest son, Kensuke, who considered Yakichi impossible, should have been the first to move in with the father. He knew that although his chronic asthma permitted him to live in idleness and escape the draft, it did not exempt him from voluntary service—a duty he took the initiative of choosing by having his father secure him a post with the Maidemmura post office. He moved in with his wife in tow, and it seemed certain that some kind of friction would develop, but Kensuke slid out from under his proud father’s absolute power with ease. In this feat his talent for cynicism served him well.

As the war got worse all three of the gardeners were called up, but one of them, a youth from Hiroshima prefecture, managed to have his younger brother, just out of grade school, take his place. That boy, named Saburo, was being brought up in the Tenri sect; for the big festivals in April and October he would leave to meet his mother and, dressed in a white happy coat with the word
Tenri
on the back, would go to worship at the Mother Temple.

* * * *

Etsuko placed her shopping bag on the doorstep as if she were listening to determine what sound it made; then she peered into the dark room. The child’s laughter went on and on. Now that Etsuko could hear more clearly she realized the child was not laughing, but crying, rocking himself in the darkness of the deserted room. Asako seemed to have put him down while she cooked. She was the wife of Yusuke, who had not yet returned from Siberia. She had come here with her two children in the spring of 1948, exactly a year before Yakichi asked the widowed Etsuko to join them.

Etsuko started toward her six-mat room, but as she approached it she was surprised to see a light gleaming from above the partition. She did not recall that she had left a light burning.

She opened the sliding door. Yakichi was sitting at the desk engrossed in reading something. He seemed flustered when he looked up and saw his daughter-in-law. Etsuko realized that the red, leather-backed book he had been reading was her diary.

“I’m home,” she said, in a clear, cheerful voice. Her look and her reaction to what she had come upon were quite different from what one might have expected. Her voice, her movements were lithe as a maiden’s. This husbandless woman was a human being to be reckoned with.

“Welcome home; you’re late, aren’t you,” said Yakichi, who might with more honesty have said: “You’re early.”

“I’m starved—while I was waiting I borrowed your book.” The book he held up was a novel he had substituted for the diary; it was a translated work Kensuke had lent Etsuko. “It was too tough for me; I didn’t understand a word.”

Yakichi was wearing the old knickerbockers he wore in the fields, a military-style shirt, and an old vest from one of his business suits. His dress was what it had been for a long time, but the almost servile humility with which he comported himself was a tremendous alteration from what he had been during the war, before Etsuko knew him. There was also the decline in his physique, the loss of power in his glance. The once proudly closed lips seemed to have lost the power of coming together; when he spoke, flecks of spittle appeared at the corners of his mouth.

“They were all out of pomelos. I looked all over for them, too, but couldn’t find any.”

“That’s too bad.”

Etsuko sank to her knees on the
tatami
and slipped her hand inside her sash. She felt the warmth of her abdomen after the walk; her sash caged the heat like a hothouse. She sensed the perspiration running on her breast. It was a dark, cold sweat, heavy as sweat shed in sleep. It swirled around her, cold though it was, seeming to scent the air.

Her whole body felt constricted by something vaguely discomforting. Then she suddenly slumped to the
tatami
. Someone who did not know her well might have misinterpreted the attitude her body assumed at times like this. Yakichi had many times mistaken it for seductiveness. It was motivated, however, simply by something that overpowered her when she was extremely tired. At such times, Yakichi had found, it was not wise to make advances.

She kicked off her
tabi
. They were flecked with mud; the soles were soiled a dark gray. Yakichi fumbled for something to say.

Finally he came out with: “They’re dirty, aren’t they?”

“Yes, the road was very poor.”

“It was a hard rain. Did it come down in Osaka too?”

“Yes, while I was shopping in the Hankyu.” Etsuko recalled the sound of the rain assaulting her ears. All the world seemed to have changed to rain under that sky tight with storm.

She said nothing more. This room was all she had. She began to change her kimono, heedless of Yakichi’s eyes. The electric power was weak, and the bulb was dim. Between the silent Yakichi and the wordlessly moving Etsuko, the only sound was the shriek of silken sash being unwound, like the scream of a living thing.

Yakichi found it impossible to remain silent for long. He was conscious of Etsuko’s unspoken reproach. He said that he would like to eat and made his way to his eight-mat room across the hall.

Etsuko started tying her everyday Nagoya sash and wandered over to the desk. Holding the sash behind her back with one hand, she riffled the pages of the diary with the other. A small, bitter smile passed over her lips.

Father doesn’t know this is my false diary. Nobody knows that it is a false diary. Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.

She opened to yesterday’s page. She looked down at the page filled with characters and read: