Thirst for Love (3 page)

The initial is the same, but since I’ve changed him to a woman, nobody will know. The name S comes up too much, but I don’t have to worry about that. After all, there’s no proof. To me this is a false diary, though no human being can be so honest as to become completely false.

She attempted to analyze what she really had in mind when she first set down these hypocrisies; then she rewrote them in her mind.

Even though I might rewrite them, there is no reason to believe the result says what I really think.

Rationalizing in this way, she recast the diary passage:

Etsuko went by the creed, nevertheless, that one should never take anything too seriously. One who walks barefoot will end up cutting his feet. To walk one needs shoes, just as to live one needs a ready-made objective. Etsuko turned the pages heedlessly and talked to herself.

Just the same, I am happy. I am happy. Nobody can deny it. In the first place, there is no
evidence.

She thumbed ahead in the diary. The white pages went on and on. And so, finally, a year of this happy diary came to an end . . .

Meals in the Sugimoto household followed a peculiar routine. There were four groups: Kensuke and his wife on the second floor, Asako and her children on the first floor, Yakichi and Etsuko in another part of the first floor, and Miyo and Saburo in the servant’s quarters. Miyo cooked rice for everyone, but the other dishes were prepared by the group that ate them. Out of Yakichi’s willfulness sprang the custom by which the two sons’ families were allotted a fixed sum monthly for household expenses and expected to manage within it. Only he, he felt, did not have to conform to so straitened a regimen. His invitation to Etsuko—who had nowhere to turn with her husband dead—was based on nothing but the wish to utilize her services as cook. It was a simple impulse, nothing more.

Yakichi took the best of the fruits and vegetables harvested. Only he had the right to pick the nuts from the Shiba chestnut tree, the most delicious of them all. The other families were forbidden to do so. Only Etsuko shared them with him.

When he arrived at the decision to bestow on Etsuko these perquisites, perhaps a certain ulterior motive was already moving within Yakichi. The best Shiba chestnuts, the best grapes, the best Fuyu persimmons, the best strawberries, the best peaches—the right to share these seemed to Yakichi a privilege for which no compensation was too great.

Thanks to these marks of special favor received by Etsuko so soon after her arrival, she became the object of the jealousy and resentment of the other two families. That jealousy and resentment soon excited a further, vicious surmise, an exceedingly plausible calumny that seemed somehow to reach Yakichi and direct his conduct. Yet the more satisfactory succeeding events were in corroborating the suspicions aroused by the first hypothesis, the more difficult it became for the one who arrived at it to believe what he saw.

Could this woman whose husband was dead less than a year willingly enter into a physical relationship with her father-in-law? She was still very young, still supremely eligible for marriage; could she have voluntarily set out to bury the last half of her life? How could she benefit by giving herself to this old man, who was over the hill of his sixtieth year? To be sure, she was a woman with no close relatives, but was this something one did nowadays because “one must eat”?

All kinds of conjectures built around Etsuko a wall that excited new curiosity. Inside this wall she came and went, bored, weary, yet with abandon, like a lone running bird.

Kensuke and his wife Chieko were in their second-floor apartment, eating. Chieko had married Kensuke out of sympathy for his cynicism, and since her sympathy had built-in escape hatches, she could now behold her husband’s extraordinary shiftlessness and not suffer any disillusionment with married life. This literary youth gone to seed and his literary maid had married by the credo that goes: “Nothing in this world is so stupid as marriage.” Yet even now the two could sit, side by side in their bow window, reading aloud the prose poems of Baudelaire.

“Poor Father,” said Kensuke, “when you get to his age, your troubles never seem to stop coming. I went by Etsuko’s room a while ago and noticed that her light was burning, though I was sure she had gone out. I went in—rather quietly, I suppose—and lo and behold, Father was there absorbed in reading Etsuko’s diary. He was so caught up he didn’t know I was standing right behind him. Then I said, ‘Father,’ and he jumped, he was so surprised. He recovered his composure and frowned at me, with the frightful glare that I was always afraid to look at when I was a child. Then he said: ‘If you tell Etsuko I’ve been reading her diary, I’ll throw you and your wife out of this house. Do I make myself clear?’”

“I wonder what made him so concerned about Etsuko that he has taken to reading her diary,” said Chieko.

“Maybe he’s noticed that for some reason or other she’s been restless lately, though I don’t think he realizes that she has fallen in love with Saburo. That’s the way I see it, anyway. Yet she’s a shrewd woman, and I don’t think she’ll expose her heart to a diary.”

“I just can’t believe what you say about Saburo, but I have great respect for your powers of observation and won’t argue with you. Frankly, it’s Etsuko I can’t figure out. If she could say what she wants to say and do what she wants to do, we could help her.”

“There are some things that don’t work out as you plan them. And Father has lost all his pride since Etsuko came,” said Kensuke.

“His pride’s been gone since the land reform.”

“I guess you’re right. As the son of a tenant farmer, the moment when he told himself, ‘I own land,’ was a great one. He strutted like a private promoted to corporal. All that people who didn’t own land had to do to get it was work thirty or so years for a steamship company and then become head of the firm. That was his odd formula for success. He took delight in tricking the process with talk about working hard and living austerely.

“During the war he had tremendous power. He talked about Tojo as if he were some clever old friend who had made money in stocks. I was just a post office worker, and I used to listen to it humbly. Since he wasn’t an absentee landowner, he didn’t lose much of his land here in the postwar reform, but when they let a yokel like the tenant farmer Okura become a landowner at a ridiculously low price, it was an awful blow. It was then that he started to say: ‘If I had known things would come to this, I wouldn’t have worked so hard for sixty years!’ To see these swarms of people getting land they hadn’t worked for was to him like losing his reason for being. Though you mightn’t think so, he really has a lot of the sentimentalist left in him, and he actually seemed to enjoy the idea of being one of the martyrs of that time. If, when he was most depressed, they had charged him with being a war criminal and had escorted him off to Sugamo, he might even have been rejuvenated.”

“Etchan is lucky,” said Chieko. “She doesn’t know how tyrannical Father was. One moment, though, she’s happy, and the next moment she’s depressed, but—let the matter of Saburo be what it might—I just can’t fathom how a woman can, before the period of mourning for her husband is over, become her father-in-law’s mistress.”

“Just the same,” her husband answered, “she’s a simple, fragile woman. She’s like the willow tree, and never resists the wind, but just blindly clings to her notion of constancy, so much so that she’s incapable of noticing when the one she is constant to changes. Blown about in the dusty wind, she didn’t notice that the man she clung to because he was her husband had become a different man.”

Kensuke was a skeptic who prided himself on an ability to see through mankind as if it were transparent.

Night came, and the three families went on with their separate lives. Asako was involved with her children. She put them to bed early, climbed in with them, and slept.

Kensuke and his wife did not come downstairs. Outside their windows they could see the far slope on which the distant lights of the government housing units were strewn like sand. All there was between here and there was a dark sea of rice fields, along the edge of which the lights looked as if they belonged to a town strung along an island shore. In that town, it seemed, a majestic activity went on endlessly. In that town, one might imagine, a quiet religious conclave was going on, in which motionless men sat immersed in ecstasy and awe. In that rapt silence, one might dream, a calm, endlessly slow murder was being perpetrated in the lamplight—if Etsuko had looked at the lights of the government housing units in this way she would not have been tempted to treat them with scorn.

At times the whistle of the Hankyu train sent its note reverberating over the dark ricefields, like a flock of scrawny night birds flying swiftly with raucous cries. The beating wings of the train whistle set the night air trembling. It was the time of the year when, if one looked up suddenly, one might see a dim, blue-green flash of lightning flicker silently across a corner of the night sky and disappear.

In the evening, after supper, no one came to visit the rooms occupied by Yakichi and Etsuko. There had been a time when Kensuke came by to kill time chattering, or Asako dropped in with the children, or everybody came in to enjoy themselves. By degrees, however, Yakichi’s distaste for playing host became clear, and the others began to keep their distance. Yakichi could not stand competing with anyone for Etsuko’s time.

In those hours, they were not pressed to do anything. Sometimes they played
go
, which Yakichi taught her. This was the only opportunity Yakichi had ever had to display his skill as mentor to a young woman. Tonight again they sat at the
go
board.

Lost in the joy of lifting the weight of each
go
stone in her fingers, constantly groping with her hand in the bowl of stones, Etsuko never took her eyes from the board, to which they clung as if possessed. Her attitude seemed to display extraordinary absorption, but in fact she was drawn by nothing more than the meaningless ordering of the regularly intersecting black lines. Yakichi, too, was struck by Etsuko’s absorption. Was it in the game or something else? He observed this lone young woman, free of embarrassment, oblivious in the joy of frivolous abstraction, her white teeth faintly visible in her partly opened mouth.

At times her
go
stones struck the board with a high-pitched sound. It was as if they were lashing something, an attacking dog, perhaps. At such times Yakichi would furtively observe his daughter-in-law’s face and place his stones gently, as if remonstrating with her.

“What terrific power! Just like the duel between Musashi Miyamoto and Kojiro Sasaki at Ganryushima.”

From behind Etsuko came the heavy sounds of steps in the hallway. It wasn’t the lightness of a woman’s step. It wasn’t the gloom-ridden burden of a middle-aged man. It was a feverish, youthful weight that bounced from the soles of the feet and made the boards in the hall, dark in the night, squeak with a noise like a groan, like a shout.

Etsuko’s hand paused in the act of setting down a stone. Her fingers seemed to be barely supported by the stone. Yet it was essential that those fingers, trembling in spite of themselves, grip the stone firmly. She feigned that she was carefully considering her next play. It was not, however, a difficult play, and it was important that her father-in-law not be made suspicious by undue hesitation.

The door slid open. Saburo remained kneeling outside and poked his head into the opening. Etsuko heard him say: “Good night, sir.”

Yakichi grunted and bent forward to place a stone. Etsuko stared at his stiff, knobby, ugly old fingers. She said nothing to Saburo. She did not look toward the door. It closed. The footsteps retreated in the direction opposite Miyo’s bedroom. There, facing west, was Saburo’s three-mat room.

2

D
OGS MAKE
country nights unbearable with their howling. The old setter Maggie, tied in the shed in back, lifted her ears at the sound of a pack of wild dogs passing through the orchard and the grove nearby. Then she lifted her voice in a long, stupid howl, as if complaining of her solitary confinement. The wild dogs paused in their rustling passage through the bamboo grass and answered her. Etsuko, a light sleeper, awoke.

She had gone to bed only an hour ago. A long period of sleep was a duty she still owed the ensuing day. She searched her mind for a hope that would justify tomorrow. Any tiny, ordinary hope would suffice. Without that who can live till morning? Some mending that is still to be done, tickets for tomorrow’s trip, the small quantity of
saké
left in the bottle to provide tomorrow’s liquid sustenance—all these one must offer to the next day before one can face the dawn.