Meanwhile, a ring so splendid it appeared to be beyond Tsuda’s means had begun to sparkle on O-Nobu’s finger. The first to notice was O-Hide. Her curiosity as a fellow member of the female sisterhood made her acutely conscious. She praised O-Nobu’s ring. In the process, she sought to determine the time and place of its purchase. Ignorant of the agreement between Tsuda and his father that had been guaranteed by Hori, O-Nobu, in spite of her normal wariness, was completely naive where the ring was concerned. Her desire to demonstrate to O-Hide the degree to which she was loved by Tsuda overcame entirely her normal discretion. She related the story of the purchase exactly as it had happened.
O-Hide, who had been critical all along of what she considered O-Nobu’s extravagance, passed the details on to Kyoto. Moreover, she represented in her letter that it was O-Nobu who had provoked her husband into spending money that might otherwise have been returned even though she knew about his promise regarding summer and year-end bonuses. O-Hide had decided arbitrarily that the vanity toward his wife that had in truth prevented Tsuda from revealing the family circumstances to O-Nobu was instead O-Nobu’s own vanity. And she had conveyed her misunderstanding to Kyoto as if it were the truth. Even now she was unable to put aside her misapprehension. As a consequence, her resentment about the ring was directed not at her elder brother but at her sister-in-law.
“I’m wondering what in the world Sister intends to do about all this.”
“This has nothing to do with O-Nobu. I haven’t told her a thing.”
“Really! How fortunate for her that she’s not involved.”
O-Hide’s smile was ironic. Tsuda vividly recalled O-Nobu asking, the evening before she had gone to the theater, if she might pawn her obi as she held the thick, shining cloth up to the light.
[ 96 ]
“WHAT IN the world do you intend to do?”
This might have been intended as an attack on her improvident brother, but it was also an expression of O-Hide’s own perplexity. She had her husband to consider. And lurking in the background was a mother-inlaw in whose presence she tended to be even more deferential.
“It’s true that Hori spoke up because you asked him to, but I don’t think he intended to assume responsibility beyond a certain point. Not that he’s about to turn his back on you after all this and deny any responsibility. But it isn’t as if he signed a personal guarantee either, and so when Father treats this as though it were a legal matter, he makes it terribly awkward for me at home.”
On the surface of things, Tsuda had no choice but to acknowledge his sister’s position. In his heart, however, he was unable to sympathize with her, and his indifference reverberated in O-Hide. She saw standing before her an unrepentantly selfish elder brother. An elder brother who thought of little but his own convenience. If he did have other thoughts, they were exclusively about his new wife. And on this new wife he fawned. More properly, he was her pawn. To satisfy her he had been obliged to become even more arbitrary than before with regard to the outside world.
Tsuda would have said about this view of himself that it was destitute of sympathy and extremely unbecoming for a younger sister. An unsparingly frank expression of what she was feeling might have been, “You made your own bed, Brother, so you must lie in it; but what do you intend to do for me?”
Tsuda had nothing to propose. Nor was he inclined to do anything. Instead he broached the difficulty of divining his father’s thoughts.
“It’s Father’s intentions I’m wondering about. Do you suppose he’s thinking, ‘All I have to do is announce there’s no more money coming and Yoshio will find a way to manage’?”
“If only we knew!”
O-Hide cast a meaningful look at Tsuda before she subjoined, “That’s what’s making it so awkward for me with Hori.”
Something in the nature of a faint intimation flickered in Tsuda’s brain. Like lightning seen in early autumn, it was distant, but it was also vivid. It had to do with his father’s character. Distant because until now he had been unaware of it and yet, having once become aware it seemed, judging from the old man’s usual comportment, difficult to gainsay, and, in that sense, to Tsuda as his father’s son, it cut deeply into his consciousness with the sharpness of a blade. His first impulse had been to cry out inside himself, “Impossible!” but in the next instant he had been obliged to amend the thought to “For all I know—”
As reflected in the mirror of unfounded surmise, his father’s psychology might be parsed in the following order, one step generating the next in a progression meant to produce the desired result. Monthly remittances are tactfully intermitted. Tsuda is distressed. In view of foregoing circumstances, he informs Hori. His hand forced by his sense of responsibility to Kyoto, Hori is enabled for the first time to discharge his obligation to Tsuda’s father by helping Tsuda in his time of need. This leaves him no choice but to repay the monthly remittances. Tsuda’s father need only thank him for his generosity and hold out his hand.
Considered this way in stages, it appeared that a certain care had been taken. There was logic involved. And of course a degree of skill had to be acknowledged. And nothing in the least straightforward. Though not exactly despicable, there was about it a faint odor of vulpine cunning. An immoderate attachment to a small sum of money stood out particularly. In other words, in every way it smacked of his father.
No matter how they might disagree about other things, with regard to a lack of regard for their father’s way of doing things, Tsuda was uncharacteristically aligned with his sister. O-Hide, normally sympathetic to their father in every sense, was obliged in this particular case to join Tsuda in knitting her brows in disapproval. Their father’s immorality—that was a separate issue. Tsuda was not pleased at the thought of receiving aid from O-Hide. O-Hide did not feel kindly disposed to her brother and his wife. She was also made to feel painfully burdened by her duty to her husband and mother-in-law. But she was tormented, first of all, as was Tsuda, by what to do about the actual problem facing them. Even so, they lacked the courage to sound the depths of their feelings aloud to each other. Their conversation advanced without reference to their father’s thinking except for a tacit acknowledgment that they had construed it correctly in their imaginations.
[ 97 ]
UNABLE TO advance by unbraiding the tangle of logic and their mutual feelings, they moved in circles, approaching but never quite touching the issue at hand and concealing their irritation at the other’s avoidance. But they were siblings; they shared a dogged, viscous quality like asphalt overheated in the sun. While secretly deploring the other’s incapacity for frankness, neither was sufficiently tactless to level an accusation. Tsuda, however, as the elder brother and the man, was more adept than O-Hide at bringing the conversation to bear.
“So you’re saying you have no sympathy for your big brother.”
“Of course I’m not.”
“Or at least that you have no sympathy for O-Nobu. Which comes down to basically the same thing.”
“But I haven’t said a word about Sister.”
“Anyway, it turns out I’m the real offender in this affair. I’m perfectly aware that’s the conclusion without having to ask you a thing. Fine! I’ll accept my punishment. I’ll get through this month without any money from Father!”
“You can manage that?”
Tsuda’s reply was elicited by the skeptical chill in O-Hide’s voice.
“If I can’t I’ll die trying!”
O-Hide relaxed a little her tightly pursed mouth and revealed a glimpse of her white teeth. The figure of O-Nobu fingering her shiny obi beneath the electric light rose in Tsuda’s mind.
Maybe I should explain our financial situation to O-Nobu once and for all, the whole story.
For Tsuda there was no simpler approach to a resolution. Under the circumstances, however, there was no confession likely to prove so difficult. He had an intimate understanding of O-Nobu’s vanity. It was equal to his own, the vanity that required him to sa
tisfy hers to the extent possible. To rend her trust in him in a place so important to a woman would be like striking a crushing blow to himself. The source of his considerable pain, as he imagined it, was not so much feeling sorry for O-Nobu as having to compromise his dignity in front of his wife. Even in a case like this, so trivial a matter it would invite the laughter of others, he was unable to act. The truth was, his family had more than sufficient money to maintain appearances in front of O-Nobu. This was a fact there was no denying, and it took precedence.
He was, moreover, a man who never lost his temper. A man who had inherited from his mother and father a temperamental inability to forget himself, he took a dim view of emotional outbursts. Having just blurted “Or die trying,” he continued to observe O-Hide closely. He wasn’t embarrassed by the absence in his gut of any feeling nearly so resolute as his exclamation. Far from it, he began dispassionately to work the scales of a balance. Against the pain of confessing to O-Nobu he weighed the unpleasantness of accepting aid from O-Hide. Between the two, he was feeling inclined to choose the latter.
O-Hide, who possessed the means to accommodate him easily, was left unsatisfied by the absence of any heartfelt regret coming from her brother. And she loathed the fact that O-Nobu was installed smugly behind him like the statue of a Buddhist goddess. It also infuriated her that her father was initiating conversations with her husband that suggested in a roundabout way that he viewed him as the responsible party. Roiled by this and by that, even after Tsuda’s desire had become transparent, she refrained from vouchsafing any sign that she was favorably disposed toward him.
As for Tsuda’s attitude toward O-Hide, who had been chosen by virtue of her beauty to marry into a family of considerable affluence, it contained an abundant measure of self-esteem. Since her marriage, he had detected something close to the odor of a parvenu issuing from this younger sister. At least so he thought. At some point he had begun to view her from inside the formidable armor of the elder brother. It was therefore unthinkable that he should hasten to bow down to her.
So there they were, neither venturing to broach the subject of money. And both waiting for the other to speak up. In the midst of this indecisive, foundering, very private conversation, the maid, O-Toki, burst into the room and broke at once the impasse they were in the process of constructing between themselves.
[ 98 ]
IT WAS a fact that Tsuda had received a phone call shortly before she arrived. Halfway up the stairs, the apprentice from the pharmacy had called out, sounding annoyed at having to go the trouble, “Tsuda-san, telephone!” Interrupting his dialogue with O-Hide, he had responded “Where from?” “Home, I guess,” the student had replied on his way back down the stairs. This brusque exchange after his immoderate absorption in a difficult conversation focused Tsuda selfishly on himself. Off to the theater and not a sign of her since, not yesterday or today, he hadn’t appreciated O-Nobu’s behavior, and now he liked it even less.
She’s fishing with a phone call.
This was his first thought. A call yesterday and again today and, for all he knew, again tomorrow, and only then, when she had done a fine job reeling him in, would she put in an unexpected appearance; such was likely to be her game. Judging by her usual behavior toward him, his expectation was hardly unreasonable. He could even imagine her smiling face when she surprised him with a supple entrance when he was unprepared. He knew well the strange power of that smile to steal into his heart. Brandishing that sharp weapon for just an instant, she never failed to vanquish him. To feel his mood being flipped over like a leaf in the wind despite his struggle to sustain it was like, as he might have put it, watching his own helpless fall into the arms of her magic.
Ignoring O-Hide’s advice, he hadn’t taken the call.
“I don’t need anything—ignore it.”
O-Hide didn’t know what to make of this. In the first place, it was entirely unlike her brother, with his aversion for carelessness. Second, this couldn’t be the brother who was invariably at O-Nobu’s beck. She concluded that Tsuda must be feigning indifference to his wife to conceal his normal pliability in deference to his sister. This was secretly not displeasing to her; even so, when she heard the apprentice loudly summoning her brother to the phone from below, she felt obliged to rise in his stead. She went to the trouble of going downstairs but to no avail: following the confusion created by the apprentice’s inattention, the line was dead.
Having gone through the motions of discharging her duty, O-Hide returned to her seat upstairs and took up again the thread of their conversation, by which time O-Toki, no longer able to endure the wait after her breathless haste, had abandoned the public phone booth and boarded a trolley. Not fifteen minutes later, Tsuda, surprised by her unexpected arrival, was no less surprised by her unexpected inquiry.
After she had left, he had trouble settling down. He felt confident he knew Kobayashi inside and out, but it had never occurred to him that he would barge into his home in his absence and attempt to draw O-Nobu into conversation when they were hardly on intimate terms—he couldn’t help being aghast at this, nor could he avoid thinking about it. This was not about whether to give him an overcoat. The problem here, entirely unrelated to the coat, was a personality that would permit Kobayashi to think nothing of wresting another man’s coat from the hands of his wife, whom he barely knew. Perhaps this was a second personality created as a survival response to his circumstances. But the real issue as it concerned him was the behavior this personality had manifested in O-Nobu’s direction. Craziness, apparently. Desperation. The cold eye he invariably trained on people who were content. He worried that among all the satisfied people Kobayashi knew, his old friend Tsuda and his new wife had been chosen to become paragons of satisfaction. Tsuda was well aware that he had prepared the foundation for this himself with his unrelenting contempt.
There’s no knowing what he might say.
A variety of fear rose abruptly in Tsuda’s chest. O-Hide, in contrast, burst out laughing. Her brother’s constant derogation of this fellow called Kobayashi meant nothing to her.
“Why does it matter what Kobayashi–san says? Nobody’s going to take a person like him seriously!”
O-Hide was familiar with one side of Kobayashi. But her knowledge was limited to things he had said in front of Uncle Fujii. And that was his placid side, as strikingly different from how he was when he was drinking as if he had been reborn.
“Not so! You’d be surprised.”
“Has he turned into such a bad person recently?”
O-Hide’s expression was incredulous.
“One match is all it takes to burn down a large house, if that’s what you want to do.”
“But if it doesn’t catch fire, it’s all over no matter how many match boxes you bring in! Sister isn’t the sort of woman a man like that can set on fire. Or at least…”
[ 99 ]
HEARING THIS, Tsuda was careful not to move his eyes. Turned away as he was, he waited for O-Hide to complete the thought. But having expressed just half of something that was likely to concern him, she quickly changed course.
“What makes you start worrying about such a foolish thing today? You have a special reason?”
Tsuda continued to look away. He wished to prevent his sister from reading his eyes. And he was affected by his own unnatural behavior. He felt somehow intimidated. At last he turned toward O-Hide.
“Who says I’m worried?”
“You’re just concerned?”
If things continued in this vein he would feel ridiculed. He went silent.
Just then the contractions that had assailed him a while ago commenced again around the wound. He endured several and was succumbing to worry that the spasms would begin recurring regularly. O-Hide, unaware of this, was unable to let the subject go. Having lost for a minute the thread of her inquiry, she thrust it at him again in a different form.
“Brother, I wonder what sort of person you think Sister is?”
&n
bsp; “Why question me now about something like that? It’s ridiculous.”
“Fine! Then I won’t ask.”
“But why? At least tell me why you ask?”
“It seemed important.”
“Important how? Just tell me that.”
“I felt it was important for your sake.”
Tsuda looked disturbed. O-Hide continued at once.
“Because you’re so concerned, Brother, with what Kobayashi-san may have said! There’s something odd about that.”
“It’s nothing you’d understand.”
“That’s why it’s odd, because I don’t understand. Tell me, then, what sort of thing might he bring up to Sister, and what could he say about it?”
“I haven’t said a word about bringing anything up!”
“But what are you afraid he might bring up?”
Tsuda didn’t reply. O-Hide peered into his face as if to bore a hole in it.
“I just can’t imagine it. No matter how bad a person he’s become, what could he possibly have to say? I can’t think of a thing.”
Still Tsuda declined to reply. O-Hide persisted in pressing him for a response.
“What if he did say something; all Sister would have to do is ignore him, isn’t that so?”
“I know that much without hearing it from you!”
“That’s why I’m asking. What in the world do you think of Sister? Do you trust her or not?”
Abruptly O-Hide bore down. Tsuda wasn’t sure why. But sensing the need to throw his antagonist off her stride, he burst into laughter, avoiding a direct answer.
“You should see yourself glowering. I feel as though I’m being cross-examined.”