Death in Midsummer and Other Stories

  With a husband's intuition, he sensed the truth. But in any case the first problem is to go and see for myself.

  He looked out of the window as they came near the heart of the city. The sun of the midsummer morning was even more blinding because of the white-shirted crowds. The trees along the road cast deep shadows directly downwards, and at the entrance to a hotel the gaudy red-and-white awning was taut, as if the sunlight were a heavy metal. The newly dug earth where the street was being repaired was already dry and dusty.

  The world around him was quite as it had always been.

  Nothing had happened, and if he tried he could believe that nothing had happened even to him. A childish annoyance came over him, in an unknown place, an incident with which he had had nothing to do had cut him off from the world.

  Among all these passengers none was so unfortunate as he.

  The thought seemed to put him on a level above or a level below the ordinary Masaru, he did not know which. He was someone special. Someone apart.

  No doubt a man with a large birthmark on his back sometimes feels the urge to call out: 'Listen, everyone. You don't know it, but I have a big, purple birthmark on my back.'

  And Masaru wanted to shout at the other passengers: 'Listen, everybody. You don't know it, but I have just lost my sister and two of my three children.'

  His courage left him. If only the children were safe. ... He began trying to think of other ways to interpret the telegram.

  Possibly Tomoko, distraught over Yasue's death, had assumed that the children were dead when they had only lost their way.

  Might not a second telegram be waiting at the house even now?

  Masaru was quite taken up with his own feelings, as if the incident itself were less important than his reaction to it He regretted that he had not called the Eirakusd immediately.

  The plaza in front of lto station was brilliant in the mid'.

  17

  Her husband, Masaru Ikuta, was thirty-five. A graduate of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, he had gone to work for an American company before the war. His English was good, and he knew his business - he was abler than his silent manner suggested. Now the manager of the Japanese office of an American automobile company, he had the use of a company automobile, half as advertising, and he made 150,000

  yen a month. He also had ways of appropriating certain secret funds for himself, and Tomoko and Yasue, with a maid to take care of the children, lived in comfort and security. There was no pressing need to cut the family down by three.

  Tomoko sent a telegram because she did not want to talk to Masaru over the telephone. As was the custom in the suburbs, the post office telephoned the message when it arrived, and the call came just as Masaru was about to leave for work. Thinking it a routine business call, he calmly picked up the telephone.

  'We have a rush telegram from A. Beach,' said the woman in the post office. Masaru began to feel uneasy. 'I'll read it to you.

  Are you ready? "YASUE DEAD, KIYOO AND KEIKO MISSING, TOMOKO." *

  'Would you read it again, please?'

  It sounded the same the second time: 'YASUE DEAD.: KIYOO AND KEIKO MISSING, TOMOKO.' Masaru was angry.: It was as though, for no reason he could think of, he had suddenly received notice of his dismissal.

  He immediately telephoned the office and said he would not be in. He thought he might drive to A. Beach. But the road was long and dangerous, and he had no confidence that he could drive it, upset as he was. As a matter of fact he had recently had an accident. He decided to take a train to ltd, and a taxi from there.

  The process by which the unforeseen event works its way into a man's consciousness is a strange and subtle one. Masaru, who set out without even knowing the nature of the incident, was careful to take a good supply of money with him. Incidents required money.

  He took a taxi to Tokyo station. He felt nothing he could really call emotion. He felt rather what a detective might feel 16

  on his way to the scene of a crime. Plunged less in speculation than in deduction, he quivered with curiosity to know more about the incident that involved him so deeply.

  She could have telephoned. She was afraid to talk to me.

  With a husband's intuition, he sensed the truth. But in any case the first problem is to go and see for myself.

  He looked out of the window as they came near the heart of the city. The sun of the midsummer morning was even more blinding because of the white-shirted crowds. The trees along the road cast deep shadows directly downwards, and at the entrance to a hotel the gaudy red-and-white awning was taut, as if the sunlight were a heavy metal. The newly dug earth where the street was being repaired was already dry and dusty.

  The world around him was quite as it had always been.

  Nothing had happened, and if he tried he could believe that nothing had happened even to him. A childish annoyance came over him. In an unknown place, an incident with which he had had nothing to do had cut him off from the world.

  Among all these passengers none was so unfortunate as he.

  The thought seemed to put him on a level above or a level below the ordinary Masaru, he did not know which. He was someone special. Someone apart

  No doubt a man with a large birthmark on his back sometimes feels the urge to call out: 'Listen, everyone. You don't know it, but I have a big, purple birthmark on my back.'

  And Masaru wanted to shout at the other passengers: 'Listen, everybody. You don't know it, but I have just lost my sister and two of my three children.'

  His courage left him. If only the children were safe. ... He began trying to think of other ways to interpret the telegram.

  Possibly Tomoko, distraught over Yasue's death, had assumed that the children were dead when they had only lost their way.

  Might not a second telegram be waiting at the house even now?

  Masaru was quite taken up with his own feelings, as if the incident itself were less important than his reaction to it. He regretted that he had not called the Eirakuso immediately.

  The plaza in front of ltd station was brilliant in the mid*

  17

  summer sun. Beside the taxi stand was a little office, no bigger than a police box. The sunlight inside it was merciless, and the edges of the dispatch sheets on the walls were brown and curled.

  'How much to A. Beach?'

  Two thousand yen.' The man wore a driver's cap, and had a towel around his neck. 'If you're in no hurry, you can save money going by bus. It leaves in five minutes,' he added, either out of kindness or because the trip seemed too much of an effort.

  'I'm in a hurry. Someone in my family has just died there.'

  'Oh? You're related to the people who drowned at A. Beach?

  That's too bad. Two children and a woman all at once, they say.'

  Masaru felt dizzy under the blazing sun. He did not say another word to the driver until the taxi reached A. Beach.

  There was no particularly distinguished scenery along the way. At first the taxi climbed up one dusty mountain and down the next, and the sea was rarely in sight. When they passed another car along a narrow stretch of road, branches slapped at the half-open window like startled birds, and dropped dirt and sand rudely on MasaruTbarefully pressed trousers.

  Masaru could not decide how to face his wife. He was not sure that there was such a thing as a 'natural approach' when none of the emotions he had ready seemed to fit. Perhaps the unnatural was in fact natural.

  The taxi pulled through the darkened old gate of the Eirakuso. As it came up the driveway, the manager ran out with a clattering of wooden sandals. Masaru automatically reached for his wallet.

  Tm Ikuta.'

  'A terrible thing,' said the manager, bowing deeply. After paying the driver, Masaru thanked the manager and gave him a thousand-yen note.

  Tomoko and Katsuo were in a room adjoining the room where Yasue's coffin lay. The body was packed in dry ice ordered from It5, and would be cremated now that Masaru had arrived.,


  18

  Masaru stepped ahead of the manager and opened the door.

  Tomoko, who had lain down for a nap, jumped up at the sound.

  She had not been asleep.

  Her hair was tangled and she had on a wrinkled cotton kimono. Like a convicted criminal, she pulled the kimono together and knelt meekly before him. Her motions were aston-i ishingly quick, as though she had planned them in advance. She stole a glance at her husband and collapsed in tears.

  He did not want the manager to see him lay a comforting hand on her shoulder. That would be worse than having the most intimate bedroom secrets spied on. Masaru took off his coat and looked for a place to hang it.

  Tomoko noticed. Taking a blue hanger from the lintel, she hung up the sweaty coat for him. Masaru sat down beside Katsuo, who had been awakened by his mother's weeping and lay looking up at them. The child, on his knees, was as unresisting as a doll. How can children be so small? he wondered. It was almost as if he were holding a toy.

  Tomoko knelt weeping in a corner of the room.

  'It was all my fault,' she said. Those were the words Masaru most wanted to hear.

  Behind them, the manager too was in tears. 'I know it's no business of mine, sir, but please don't blame Mrs Ikuta. It happened while she was taking a nap, and through no fault of hers.'

  Masaru felt as if he had heard or read of all this somewhere.

  'I understand, I understand.'

  Obeying the rules, he stood up with the child in his arms, and, going over to his wife, laid his hand gently on her shoulder. The gesture came easily.

  Tomoko wept even more bitterly.

  The two bodies were found the next day. The constabulary, diving all up and down the beach, finally found them under the headland. Sea creatures had nibbled at them, and there were two or three creatures up each little nostril.

  Such incidents of course go far beyond the dictates of custom, and yet at no time are people more bound to follow 19

  custom. Tomoko and Masaru forgot none of the responses and the return gifts custom demanded.

  A death is always a problem in administration. They were frantically busy administering. One might say that Masaru in particular, as head of the family, had almost no time for sorrow. As for Katsuo, it seemed to him that one festival day succeeded another, with the adults all playing parts.

  In any case, they steered their way through the whole complex affair. The funeral offerings came to a considerable sum. Funeral offerings are always larger when the head of the family, who can still provide, is a survivor than when it is his funeral.

  Both Masaru and Tomoko were somehow braced for what had to be done. Tomoko did not understand how this almost insane grief and this careful attention to detail could exist side by side. And it was surprising too that she could eat so heavily without even noticing the taste.

  What she dreaded most was having to see Masaru's parents.

  They arrived from Kanazawa in time for the funeral. 'It was all my fault,' she forced herself to say again, and by way of compensation she turned to her own parents.

  'But who should they feel sorriest for? Haven't I just lost two children? There they all are, accusing me. They put the whole blame on me, and I have to apologize to them. They all look at me as if I were the absent-minded maid who dropped the baby in the river. But wasn't it Yasue? Yasue is lucky she's dead.

  Why can't they see who's been hurt? I'm a mother who has just lost two children.'

  "You're being unfair. Who is accusing you? Wasn't his mother in tears when she said she felt sorrier for you than anyone?'

  'She was just saying so.'

  Tomoko was thoroughly dissatisfied. She felt like one de-moted and condemned to obscurity, one whose real merit went unnoticed. It seemed to her that such intense sorrows should bring special privileges with them, extraordinary privileges.

  Some of the dissatisfaction was with herself, apologizing thus abjectly to her mother-in-law. It was to her mother that she 20

  went running when her irritation, like an itching rash all over her body, got the better of her.

  She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?

  Tomoko wondered why she did not collapse. It seemed strange that she did not collapse, standing there in mourning for more than an hour in the midsummer heat. Sometimes she felt a little faint, and what saved her each time was a fresh start of horror at death. 'I'm a stronger person than I thought,' she said, turning a tearful face to her mother.

  Talking with his parents of Yasue, Masaru shed tears for the sister who had thus died an old maid, and Tomoko felt a touch of resentment towards him too.

  'Who is more important to him, Yasue or the children?' she wanted to ask.

  There was no doubt that she was tense and ready. She could not sleep on the night of the wake, even though she knew she should. And yet she had not even a suggestion of a headache.

  Her mind was clear and taut.

  Callers would worry over her, and sometimes she answered them roughly: 'You needn't think about me. It makes no difference whether I am alive or dead.'

  Thoughts of suicide and insanity left her. Katsuo would be for a time the best reason why she should go on living. But sometimes she thought that it was only a failure of courage, or perhaps passion gone limp, whatever it was that made her think, as she looked at Katsuo being read to by the mourning women, how good it was that she had not killed herself. On such nights she would lie in her husband's arms and, turning eyes as wide as a rabbit's on the circle of light from the bed lamp, repeat over and over again, like one pleading a case: 'I was wrong. It was my fault I should have known from the start that it was a mistake to leave the three children with Yasue.'

  The voice was as hollow as a voice testing a mountain echo.

  Masaru knew what this obsessive sense of responsibility 21

  meant. She was waiting for some sort of punishment. She was greedy for it, one might say.

  After the fourteenth-day services, life returned to normal.

  People urged them to go off somewhere for a rest, but mountain and seashore both terrified Tomoko. She was convinced that misfortunes never came alone.

  One evening late in summer, Tomoko went into the city with Katsuo. She was to meet her husband for dinner when he finished work.

  There was nothing Katsuo could not have. Both his mother and his father were almost uncomfortably gentle. They handled him as they would a glass doll, and it was a great undertaking even to see him across a street. His mother would glare at the cars and lorries stopped for a light, and dash across with his hand clutched in hers.

  The last of the swimming suits in the store windows assailed her. She had to turn her eyes from a green bathing suit like Yasue's. Afterwards she wondered whether the mannequin had had a head. It seemed that it had not - and again that it had, and a face exactly like Yasue's dead face, the eyes closed in the wet, tangled hair. All the mannequins became drowned corpses.

  If only summer would end. The very word 'summer' carried with it festering thoughts of death. And in the evening sun she felt a festering warmth.

  Since it was still a little early, she took Katsuo into a department store. It was only a half-hour or so before closing time.

  Katsuo wanted to look at toys, and they went up to the third floor. They hurried past the beach playthings. Mothers were frantically going through a heap of marked-down bathing suits for children. One woman held a pair of dark-blue trunks high to the window, and the afternoon sun reflected from the buckle.

  Enthusiastically looking for a shroud, thought Tomoko.

  When he had bought his blocks, Katsuo wanted to go up to the roof. The roof playground was cool. A fairly strong breeze from the harbour flapped at the awnings.

  Tomoko looked through the wire netting at Kachidoki Bridge beyond the city, and at the Tsukishima docks
and the cargo ships anchored in the bay.

  22

  Taking his hand from hers, Katsuo went over to the monkey cage. Tomoko stood over him. Possibly because of the wind, the monkey smell was strong. The monkey gazed at them with wrinkled forehead. As it moved from one branch to another, a hand carefully pressed to its hips, Tomoko could see at the side of the oldish little face a dirty ear with red veins showing through. She had never looked so carefully at an animal before.

  Beside the cage was a pond. The fountain in the middle was turned off. There were beds of portulaca around the brick rim, on which a child about Katsuo's age was teetering precariously.

  His parents were nowhere in sight.

  I hope he falls in. I hope he falls in and drowns.

  Tomoko watched the uncertain legs. The child did not fall.

  When he had been once round, he noticed Tomoko's gaze and laughed proudly. Tomoko did not laugh. It was as if the child were making fun of her.

  She took Katsuo by the hand and hurried down from the roof.

  At dinner, Tomoko spoke after rather too long a silence:

  'Aren't you quiet, though! And you don't seem the least bit sad.'

  Startled, Masaru looked to see whether anyone had heard.

  'You don't see? I'm only trying to cheer you up.'

  'There's no need to do that.'

  'So you say. But what about the effect on Katsuo?'

  'I don't deserve to be a mother, anyway.'

  And so the dinner was ruined.

  Masaru tended more and more to retreat before his wife's sorrow. A man has work to do. He can distract himself with.his work. Meanwhile Tomoko nursed the sorrow. Masaru had to face this monotonous sorrow when he came home, and so he began coming home later at night.

  Tomoko phoned a maid who had worked for her long before and gave away all of Kiyoo's and Keiko's clothes and toys. The maid had children of about the same ages.

  One morning Tomoko awoke a little later than usual.

  Masaru, who had been drinking again the night before, lay 23