Thousand Cranes (6 page)

‘This is the first time you’ve been in the cottage?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What are you looking at?’

‘Nothing. Not at anything.’

‘The painting there is a Sōtatsu.’

She nodded, and her head remained bowed in the act.

‘And you’ve never been in the main house?’

‘Never.’

‘Can that be true, I wonder.’

‘I was there once. Your father’s funeral.’ Her voice trailed off.

‘The water is boiling. Suppose we have tea. You’ll feel better afterwards, and as a matter of fact I’d like a bowl myself.’

‘Is it all right?’ She started to get up, and reeled slightly.

Kikuji took tea bowls and other utensils from the boxes in the corner. He remembered that the Inamura girl had used them the evening before, but he took them out all the same.

Mrs Ota’s hand was trembling. The lid clinked against the kettle.

She bent over to take up the bamboo tea-measure, and a tear wet the shoulder of the kettle.

‘Your father was good enough to buy this kettle from me.’

‘Really? I hadn’t known.’

Kikuji found nothing displeasing in the fact that the kettle had belonged to the woman’s husband. And he did not think her words strange, so simply had she said them.

‘I can’t bring it to you.’ She had finished making tea. ‘Come for it.’

Kikuji went to the hearth, and drank the tea there.

The woman fell across his lap as if in a faint.

He put his arm around her shoulder. The shoulder quivered, and her breathing grew fainter. In his arms, she was soft as a small child.

3

He shook her roughly.

As if to strangle her, he grasped her with both hands between throat and collarbone. The collarbone stood out sharply.

‘Can’t you see the difference between my father and me?’

‘You mustn’t say that.’

Her eyes were closed, and her voice was soft.

She was not yet ready to return from the other world.

Kikuji had spoken less to her than to his own disquieted heart.

He had been led easily into the other world. He could only think of it as another world, in which there was no distinction between his father and himself. So strong was the sense of the other world that afterward this disquietude came over him.

He could ask himself if she was human. If she was pre-human, or again if she was the last woman in the human race.

He could imagine her in this other world, making no distinction between her dead husband and Kikuji’s father and Kikuji.

‘You think of my father, don’t you, and my father and I become one person?’

‘Forgive me. The things I’ve done. The things I’ve been guilty of.’ A tear spilled over from the corner of her eye. ‘I want to die. It would be so pleasant to die now. You were about to strangle me. Why didn’t you?’

‘You aren’t to joke about it. But I do feel a little like strangling someone.’

‘Oh? Thank you.’ She arched her long throat. ‘It’s thin. You should have no trouble.’

‘Could you die and leave your daughter behind?’

‘It makes no difference. I’ll wear out and die soon in any case. Take care of Fumiko.’

‘If she is like you.’

Suddenly she opened her eyes.

Kikuji was astonished at his own words. They had been quite involuntary.

How had they sounded to the woman?

‘See? See how my heart is beating? It won’t be long now.’ She took Kikuji’s hand and held it to her breast.

Perhaps her heart had started in surprise at Kikuji’s words.

‘How old are you?’

Kikuji did not answer.

‘Still in your twenties? It’s wrong. I’m very unhappy. I don’t understand myself.’

Pressing one hand to the floor, she half pushed herself up. Her legs were curled beneath her.

Kikuji sat up.

‘I didn’t come here to spoil things for you and Yukiko. But it’s done.’

‘I haven’t decided to marry her. But the truth is that you’ve washed my whole past for me – or so it seemed when you said that.’

‘Really?’

‘Kurimoto was my father’s woman too, and she’s the go-between. All the poison from the old days is concentrated in that woman. My father was lucky to have you for the last.’

‘You must hurry and marry Yukiko.’

‘That’s a question for me to decide.’

She stared vacantly at him. The blood left her cheeks, and she pressed a hand to her forehead.

‘The room is spinning around.’

She had to go home, she said. Kikuji called a cab and got in with her.

She leaned back in one corner, her eyes closed, a thoroughly helpless figure. The last embers seemed in danger of going out.

Kikuji did not see her into the house. As she left the cab, her cold fingers simply left his.

At two the next morning, there was a telephone call from Fumiko.

‘Hello. Mr Mitani? My mother has just …’ The voice broke for an instant, then continued firmly. ‘Has just died.’

‘What! What happened?’

‘Mother is dead. She had a heart attack. She has been taking a great deal of sleeping medicine lately.’

Kikuji did not answer.

‘I’m afraid I – must ask a favor, Mr Mitani.’

‘Yes?’

‘If there is a doctor you know well, and if it seems possible, could you bring him here?’

‘A doctor? You need a doctor? I’ll have to hurry.’

Kikuji was astonished that no doctor had yet been called. Then, suddenly, he knew.

Mrs Ota had killed herself. The girl was asking him to help hide the fact.

‘I understand.’

‘Please.’

She had thought carefully before calling him, he knew, and she had therefore been able to state the essentials of her business with something like formal precision.

Kikuji sat by the telephone with his eyes closed.

He saw the evening sun as he had seen it after the night with Mrs Ota: the evening sun through the train windows, behind the grove of the Hommonji Temple.
⁴

The red sun seemed about to flow down over the branches.

The grove stood dark against it.

The sun flowing over the branches sank into his tired eyes, and he closed them.

The white cranes from the Inamura girl’s kerchief flew across the evening sun, which was still in his eyes.

Figured Shino
¹

On the day after the seventh-day memorial services, Kikuji made his visit.

It would be evening if, following his usual schedule, he stopped by on his way home from the office. He had therefore meant to leave work a little early, but the day was over before he was able to collect himself for the task.

Fumiko came to the door.

‘Oh!’

She knelt in the raised entranceway and looked up at him. Her hands were pressed to the floor, as though to steady her shoulders.

‘Thank you for the flowers yesterday.’

‘Not at all.’

‘I thought I wouldn’t see you.’

‘Oh? But people do sometimes send flowers ahead, and go themselves later.’

‘Even so, I didn’t expect you.’

‘I sent them from a florist’s very near here.’

Fumiko nodded simply. ‘There was no name, but I knew immediately.’

Kikuji remembered how he had stood among the flowers and thought of Mrs Ota.

He remembered that the smell of the flowers had softened the guilt.

And now, softly, Fumiko was receiving him.

She had on a plain cotton dress. Except for a touch of lipstick on her dry lips, she wore no cosmetics.

‘I thought it would be best to stay away yesterday,’ he said.

Fumiko turned slightly to one side, inviting him in.

Perhaps because she was determined not to weep, she limited herself to the most ordinary greetings; but it seemed that she would weep anyway unless she moved or remained silent.

‘I can’t tell you how happy I was to have the flowers. But you should have come.’ She stood up and followed him in.

‘I didn’t want to upset your relatives,’ he answered – lightly, he hoped.

‘That sort of thing doesn’t worry me any more.’ The words were firm and clear.

In the sitting room, there was a photograph before the urn.

There were only the flowers Kikuji had sent the day before.

He thought this strange. Had Fumiko left only his and taken away all the others? Or had it been a lonely memorial service? He suspected that it had.

‘A water jar, I see.’

He was looking at the vase in which she had arranged his flowers. It was a water jar for the tea ceremony.

‘Yes. I thought it would be right.’

‘A fine Shino piece.’ For a ceremonial jar, it was rather small.

He had sent white roses and pale carnations, and they went well with the cylindrical jar.

‘Mother sometimes used it for flowers. That’s why it wasn’t sold.’

Kikuji knelt to light incense before the urn. He folded his hands and closed his eyes.

He was apologizing. But love flowed into the apology, to coddle and mollify the guilt.

Had Mrs Ota died unable to escape the pursuing guilt? Or, pursued by love, had she found herself unable to control it? Was it love or guilt that had killed her? For a week Kikuji had debated the problem.

Now, as he knelt with closed eyes before the ashes, her image failed to come to him; but the warmth of her touch enfolded him, making him drunk with its smell. A strange fact, but, because of the woman, a fact that seemed in no way unnatural. And although her touch was upon him, the sensation was less tactile than auditory, musical.

Unable to sleep since her death, Kikuji had been taking sedatives with saké. He had been quick to awaken, however, and he had had many dreams.

They had not been nightmares. On awakening, he would be drowsy and sweetly drunk.

That a dead woman could make her embrace felt in one’s dreams seemed eerie to Kikuji. He was young, and unprepared for such an experience.

‘The things I’ve done!’ She had said it both when she spent the night with him in Kamakura and when she came into the tea cottage. The words had brought on the delicious trembling and the little sobs, and now, as he knelt before her ashes and asked what had made her die, he thought he might grant for the moment that it had been guilt. The admission only brought back her voice, speaking of her guilt.

Kikuji opened his eyes.

Behind him he heard a sob. Fumiko seemed to be fighting back tears – one sob had escaped, but only one.

Kikuji did not move. ‘When was the picture taken?’ he asked.

‘Five or six years ago. I had a snapshot enlarged.’

‘Oh? It was taken at a tea ceremony?’

‘How did you know?’

The photograph had been cut at the throat, showing only a little of the kimono and nothing of the shoulders.

‘How did you know it was a tea ceremony?’

‘It has that feeling. The eyes are lowered, and she seems to be busy at something. You can’t see the shoulders, of course, but you can feel a sort of concentration in her manner.’

‘I wondered if it would do. It was taken a little from the side. But it’s a picture Mother was fond of.’

‘It’s a very quiet picture. A very good picture.’

‘I can see now that it was a mistake, though. She doesn’t look at you when you offer incense.’

‘Oh? That’s true, I suppose.’

‘She’s looking away, and down.’

Kikuji thought of the woman making tea the day before she died.

As she measured out the tea, a tear fell on the shoulder of the kettle. He went for the tea bowl – she did not bring it to him. The tear on the kettle had dried by the time he had drunk the tea. She fell across his lap the moment he laid down the bowl.

‘Mother weighed more when the picture was taken.’ She hurried over the next words: ‘And it would have embarrassed me to have the picture too much like myself.’

Kikuji looked around at her.

Her eyes, now on the floor, had been fixed on his back.

He had to leave the urn and photograph, and face her.

How could he apologize?

He saw his escape in the Shino water jar. He knelt before it and looked at it appraisingly, as one looks at tea vessels.

A faint red floated up from the white glaze. Kikuji reached to touch the voluptuous and warmly cool surface.

‘Soft, like a dream. Even when you know as little as I do you can appreciate good Shino.’

Like a dream of a woman, he had thought, but he had suppressed the last words.

‘Do you like it? Let me give it to you in memory of Mother.’

‘Oh, no. Please.’ Kikuji looked up in consternation.

‘Do you like it? Mother will be happy too, I know she will. It’s not a bad piece, I should imagine.’

‘It’s a splendid piece.’

‘So Mother said. That’s why I put your flowers in it.’

Kikuji felt hot tears coming to his eyes. ‘I’ll take it, then, if I may.’

‘Mother will be happy.’

‘But it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be using it for tea. I’ll have to turn it into a flower vase.’

‘Please do. Mother used it for flowers too.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t mean tea flowers. It seems sad for a tea vessel to be leaving the tea ceremony.’

‘I’m thinking of giving up tea myself.’

Kikuji turned to face her, and stood up as he did so.

There were cushions near the doors to the breakfast room. He pushed one out toward the veranda and sat down.

She had been kneeling deferentially on the bare straw matting.

Only Kikuji moved. Fumiko was left in the middle of the room.

Her hands, gently folded at her knees, seemed about to tremble. She clutched them tightly together.

‘Mr Mitani, you must forgive Mother.’ Her head sank to her breast.

Kikuji started up, afraid that in the motion she would fall over. ‘What are you saying? It is I who must ask to be forgiven. I’ve been trying to think of the right words. But there’s no way to apologize, and I’m ashamed to be here with you.’

‘We are the ones who should be ashamed.’ The shame came over her face. ‘I wish I could just disappear.’

The flush spread from the unpowdered cheeks over the white throat; and all the wear and anguish came to the surface.