Thirst for Love, Page 2

  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:

  September 21 (Wednesday)

  Nothing happened today, all day. The heat wasn’t too bad. The garden was full of the noise of insects. In the morning I went to the village distribution center to get our ration of miso. The child of the people who run the distribution center has pneumonia but was brought around by penicillin and seems to be mending. It was none of my business, but I was relieved.

  When one lives in the country, one has to have a simple soul. Somehow, I have sought this and matured. I’m not bored. Not a bit bored. I’m never bored. I now understand the gentle feeling of breathing easily that comes to a farmer when he doesn’t have to be out in the fields. I am wrapped in Father’s generous love. I feel as if I am fifteen or sixteen again.

  In this world the simple soul, the artless spirit—this alone—is enough. Nothing else is necessary, I believe. In this world only people who can work and stir themselves are necessary. In the swamp of city life, the flood of connivances to which the heart is subject destroys it.

  There are calluses on my hands. Father praises me for them. They are the hands of a true person. I don’t get angry anymore; I don’t get depressed. That terrible memory, the memory of my husband’s death, doesn’t bother me so much anymore. Mellowed by the soft burgeoning sun of autumn, my heart has developed magnanimity; I give thanks to everything I see.

  I think of S. She is in the same situation as I. She has become the companion of my heart. She, too, lost her husband. When I think of her misfortune, I am consoled. She is a widow of truly beautiful, clean, simple soul, and
so she will certainly have opportunities to remarry. I would like to have a long talk with her before that happens, but since Tokyo is a long way from here the opportunity is certainly to be denied me. It would be nice if she sent me at least one letter, but . . .

  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:

  September 21 (Wednesday)

  Another painful day has ended. How I ever got through this day is a mystery to me. In the morning, I went to the distribution center to get our ration of miso. The child of the people who run the distribution center had pneumonia but was brought around by penicillin and seems to be mending. That’s too bad! If the child of that woman who goes around talking about me behind my back should die, I would get some consolation, anyway.

  When one lives in the country, one has to have a simple soul. Just the same, the Sugimotos, with their rotten, stuck-up effeteness, make country life increasingly more painful. I love the simple soul. I even go so far as to think that there is nothing so beautiful in this world as the simple spirit in the simple body. When, however, I stand before the deep chasm that lies between my soul and that soul, I do not know what to do. Is it possible to transfer the obverse of a coin to the reverse? Simply take a coin with an unbroken surface and make a hole in it. That is suicide.

  Every once in while I come close, driven by a decision to lay my life on the line. My partner flees—to some infinitely distant place. And thus, again, I am alone, surrounded by boredom. Those calluses on my fingers—they are ridiculous.

  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.