Thirst for Love

  Once when he had gone into the union offices, one of the executives who had been telling a funny story interrupted his tale and said nothing more. It was the man who had come to the Sugimoto home the day the minister was supposed to arrive. If that had provided a good story, this evening’s events would be much worse. It seemed perilously sure they would provide fuel for even more vicious surmises.

  Etsuko was looking down at her hands, which were resting in her lap. On one nail she saw a drop of flame-colored blood, already dry. Almost unconsciously she lifted it to her lips.

  The hospital director slid open the door and walked halfway in. He spoke to them as if proud of his acquaintance with the Sugimoto family and said, nonchalantly: “Not a thing to worry about; she’s conscious again.”

  Yakichi found that report not worth comment and asked brusquely: “And what caused it?”

  The doctor came into the room and closed the door. Then he pulled up his trouser legs by the crease and sat down clumsily beside them. He smirked unprofessionally as he said: “She’s pregnant.”

  4

  A VISION of the long-forgotten Ryosuke returned to haunt Etsuko’s days, as he had disturbed her tortured rest the night following the festival. This vision, however, was not surrounded by a sentimental halo, as was that which appeared to her immediately after his death; it was a naked, vicious, evil visitation.

  In this vision her life with him became transformed into endless lessons in a disreputable school set up in a secret room. Ryosuke didn’t love Etsuko; he taught her. He didn’t teach her; he trained her. He taught her tricks, the way peddlers train deformed girls.

  Those detestable, perverted, cruel hours of instruction . . . those countless forced memorizations, those whips, those beatings . . . they all taught Etsuko the lesson: “If you can deny yourself jealousy, you can stop loving.”

  With all her power Etsuko strove to make this lesson her own—to no avail.

  To stop loving—it was cruel tutelage, yet to conform with it Etsuko would have endured any privation. But the lesson of that tutelage and the prescription for it were made useless by the lack of some essential ingredient.

  She had come to Maidemmura seeking that ingredient and, to her relief, found it—alas, a clever imitation of a useless prescription. It was false, and the thing feared, the thing worried about, happened again.

  As the doctor smirked and said, “She’s pregnant,” an excruciating pain struck Etsuko’s breast. She felt the blood drain from her face; a terrible dryness in her mouth brought her close to retching. It would not do to have anyone notice! She watched the expressions of Yakichi, Kensuke, and Chieko, all alive with not simply unfeigned, but absolutely dumbfounded, expressions of surprise.

  So that’s it. This time we’re surprised! I must act surprised, by all means.

  “Oh, how awful. I can’t believe it,” said Chieko.

  “Shocking, isn’t it?” said Yakichi, trying to lighten the tone of the discussion, “but with girls the way they are nowadays . . .” He was trying to convey to the doctor that this affair was not of his doing. (The first thing that had occurred to him was how much it would cost to hush up the doctor and the nurse.)

  “Are you surprised, Etsuko?” said Chieko.

  “Yes,” said Etsuko, smiling stiffly.

  “Nothing surprises you, cool as you are,” said Chieko.

  She was right. Etsuko wasn’t surprised. She was jealous.

  Kensuke and Chieko found this affair fascinating. They had no moral bias—that was their strong point, in which they took pride. Thanks to this self-styled strong point, however, they fell into the position of bystanders, devoid of all sense of justice. Everyone likes to watch a fire; but those who watch it from a terrace are no better than those who watch from the street.

  Is there such a thing as a morality without bias? Their dream of a modern, ideal world helped them somehow to bear life in the country, and the only tool they had to build that dream, to make it real, was advice, the kind counsel on which they held the patent. Advising made this fine pair feel occupied—spiritually, at least. Spiritual busyness—in truth it was the world of the sick.

  In Chieko’s breast rang a boundless respect for the learning her husband carried so gracefully. After all, he didn’t talk about it, but he could read Greek! That was, in Japan at least, a rare feat. He also knew Latin grammar to the extent of having memorized the paradigms of 217 verbs. He could recite the long names of all the characters in a great number of Russian novels. Not only that, but he could talk for hours on things such as how the Japanese noh play is one of the world’s greatest “cultural legacies” (he loved that phrase) and how its “refined elegance is truly comparable with the great traditions of the West.” Like an author who thinks himself a genius because his books don’t sell, he felt that his not being asked to lecture anywhere was evidence that the world was not ready for his message.

  This erudite couple was convinced that if they so much as extended a hand, humanity would be somehow transformed. A conviction maintained because it was never put into practice. As filled with conceit as the thinking of the retired soldier. It may well have been something Kensuke had inherited from the man he most despised, Yakichi Sugimoto.

  Their advice had neither bias nor self-interest, so when someone who should have followed it did not and ran into difficulty, they declared he had brought it on himself with his biases. They felt they could lay blame on anyone, and as a result they fell into the trap of having to excuse everyone too. As they saw it, nothing in this world was of real importance.

  They felt that they could effortlessly change their lives by extending a hand ever so slightly, but it was too much trouble to do that right now. The difference between them and Etsuko was that their effortless love was expended on their own shiftlessness.

  Thus, as Kensuke and Chieko walked home under a threatening sky late on the night of the festival, they were excited by their anticipation of the details of Miyo’s pregnancy. Miyo was staying the night at the hospital and would not return until the next morning.

  “There’s no doubt whose child it is. It’s Saburo’s,” said Kensuke.

  “Certainly,” said Chieko.

  A rarely experienced sense of desolation gripped Kensuke at the thought that his wife did not suspect him in the slightest. It was a point on which he felt a jot of jealousy toward the dead philanderer Ryosuke.

  “What if it was me?”

  “Don’t say such things! I can’t stand indecent jokes.”

  Chieko put both hands to her ears, as would a child, swayed her hips wildly from side to side, and pouted. Earnest woman that she was, she detested vulgar humor.

  “It’s Saburo. It has to be.”

  Kensuke thought so too. Yakichi, after all, had lost all normal capacities. One had only to look at Etsuko to see that clearly.

  “I wonder how this is going to work out. Etsuko doesn’t look as if she’s taking it very well.” They watched the backs of Yakichi and Etsuko, walking together five or six paces ahead of them, and lowered their voices. Etsuko carried her shoulders as if she were angry. She was in the grip of some powerful emotion; that was clear. “The way she looks, she’s still in love with Saburo.”

  “It must be hard on Etsuko. Why is it that she always has such bad luck?”

  “Sometimes jiltings run in series—like miscarriages. Her nervous system has gotten in the habit of it, I suppose, and when she falls in love it has to end in miscarriage.”

  “But Etsuko is smart, and I think she’ll get her feelings under control sooner or later.”

  “Let’s have a heart-to-heart talk with her.”

  People who wear only ready-made clothes are apt to doubt the very existence of tailors; and this pair, enthralled though they were by ready-made tragedies, had no way of knowing that there were people who had their tragedies made to order. Etsuko was, as ever, written in an alphabet they couldn’t read.

  * * * *

  The rain started in the m
orning of October eleventh. They had to close the storm shutters because of the wind and rain. To make matters worse, they had no electric power in the daytime. The downstairs rooms, dark as a root cellar, echoed depressingly with the crying of Natsuo and the pertinaciously chorusing voice of his sister. Nobuko had stayed home from school—out of sorts because she hadn’t been taken to the festival.

  These annoyances drove Yakichi and Etsuko to pay a rare visit to Kensuke’s quarters. The second floor was not equipped with storm shutters, for the windows were fitted strongly with glass. No rain blew in, but in one place a leak had developed. A bucket lined with cloths stood under it.

  This was an epoch-making visit. Yakichi, who preferred to keep to himself, and had built for himself a restricted area within his own home, had never visited Kensuke’s or Asako’s rooms. As a result, on seeing his father enter, Kensuke spared no effort to show Yakichi how honored he was and ran about helping Chieko prepare tea. Yakichi was appropriately impressed.

  “Don’t go to any trouble. We’re just seeking refuge.”

  “Please don’t bother yourselves.”

  As they spoke, Yakichi and Etsuko seemed to fall into the pose of children playing office, acting the parts of the boss and his wife visiting the home of a subordinate.

  “I couldn’t tell what Etsuko was thinking the way she was sitting, hidden just a little behind Father,” Chieko said later.

  The rain encompassed everything in a tight, dense wall. The wind had abated somewhat, but the sound of the downpour was still overpowering. Etsuko turned to watch the rain water coursing like India ink down the jet-black trunk of a persimmon tree. She felt here as if she were shut up in the sound of merciless, monotonous, oppressive music . . .

  The sound of the rain is like the voices of tens of thousands of monks reading sutras. Yakichi is chattering, Kensuke is chattering, Chieko is chattering—how useless words are! What petty craft, what futility! What diddling, bustling, everlasting-stretching-with-all-one’s-might-for-some-thing, meaningless activity!

  No one’s words can compete with this mercilessly powerful rain. The only thing that can compete with the sound of this rain, that can smash this deathlike wall of sound, is the shout of a man who refuses to stoop to this chatter, the shout of a simple spirit that knows no words. Etsuko recalled the mass of rose-color naked figures running before her in the light of the flaming poles, and the sound of their shouting, like the cries of slippery young animals.

  Only that shout! That’s all that’s needed!

  Etsuko suddenly came back to the moment. Yakichi’s voice had elevated in pitch. Her opinion was being demanded.

  “What will we do about Miyo? If her partner in this thing is Saburo, he is the one who must decide. We’ll have to go by what he thinks right. If he insists on dodging his responsibility, we won’t keep the irresponsible cur in the house. We’ll fire him and keep only Miyo. Then we’ll arrange an abortion for her child, and that will be that.

  “If, though, Saburo honestly owns up to his guilt, he can marry Miyo. They’ll be man and wife, and all will be as it should be.

  “Those are our two alternatives. What do you think about them? My ideas are pretty radical, but that’s because I’m trying to go by the spirit of the new constitution.”

  Etsuko did not reply. She uttered a faint, perhaps inaudible “Well . . .” and focused her exquisite black eyes on a random spot somewhere in the sky. The noise of the rain somehow justified her silence. Kensuke looked at her and fancied she had a streak of madness in her.

  “You don’t seem to be able to figure out how we should proceed, do you, Etsuko?” said Kensuke, helpfully.

  Yakichi, however, did not waver. He had no intention of being patient. He was proposing these alternatives in the presence of Kensuke and his wife because he felt a burning need to test Etsuko. His question was contrived to force her either to defend Saburo by recommending the marriage or, in order that she might allay the suspicions of the others, to revile Saburo—however much it went against her grain—and join in the plan to get rid of him. If Yakichi’s old friends had seen him stoop to such mild measures as this, they would have doubted their eyes.

  Yakichi’s jealousy was inexpressibly degrading. If, in the prime of his life, he had seen his wife captivated by another man, he probably would have wiped those strange ideas out of her head with a single swipe of the rough back of his hand. Fortunately, his dead wife was never thus afflicted. She was a woman resolutely pursuing the charming irrelevance of educating him in the ways of high society. Now Yakichi was old. His was an aging process that worked from the inside out—an aging process like that which might attack a stuffed eagle, its insides hollowed by white ants. With Etsuko’s stealthy attachment for Saburo developing under his eyes, Yakichi took no decisive step.

  Etsuko looked at the jealousy flashing in this old man’s eyes in all its powerlessness and degradation and thought of the potency of her own jealousy, of the thing that filled her with its inexhaustible store, of the “ability to suffer” of which she was constantly aware and was tempted to boast of to any who would hear.

  Etsuko answered to the point, joyfully and to the point. “I intend to speak to Saburo and ask him for the truth. I think this is a better course than your talking to him directly, Father.”

  One common danger allied Etsuko and Yakichi. It was not the mutual benefit that makes allies of the ordinary nations of this world; it was jealousy.

  After that the four talked agreeably until noon. When they returned to their rooms, Yakichi sent Etsuko back to Kensuke’s quarters with a whole pint of their fine Shiba chestnuts.

  While preparing lunch, Etsuko burned one of her fingers slightly and broke a small dish.

  When the food was soft, Yakichi had nothing but fine things to say about it. When it was hard he found it tasteless. He judged Etsuko’s cooking not by how it tasted, but by how soft it was.

  On rainy days, when the veranda was closed off, Etsuko cooked in the kitchen. The rice Miyo had cooked the day before had not been transferred to a tub but had been kept in the pot in order to retain the warm taste. Only the rice remained as evidence that she had been there. The charcoal embers showed no sign of life. Etsuko went to Chieko for hot coals with which to start a fire; while she was transferring them to the clay stove, she burned her middle finger.

  The pain annoyed Etsuko. What if she screamed? Under no circumstances would it be Saburo who would hear her scream and come running. It would be Yakichi who would bustle in, his ugly, brown, wrinkled legs showing out of his open robe, and would say: “What’s wrong?” It would never be Saburo.

  She felt like laughing—a loud, mad laugh. Again, though, there would be Yakichi. His eyes would narrow. He wouldn’t laugh with her; he would simply strive to figure out the reason for her laughter. He was not of an age to join voices and laugh unreservedly with a woman. Yet he was her only echo, her only reverberation; and she was a woman none would call old.

  A puddle of rainwater covered part of the twenty square yards or so of the kitchen’s earthen floor, reflecting the gray light coming lazily through the glass door. Etsuko stood barefoot in her damp, sticky geta, held her burned finger against the tip of her tongue and absentmindedly looked toward the door. Her head was full of the sound of rain.

  Assuredly, daily life is a ridiculous thing. Her hands began to move as if they were no longer tied. She put the pot on the fire. She poured water. She poured sugar. She cut sweet potatoes into round slices and put them in it. The menu for today’s lunch would be candied sweet potato, ground beef she had purchased at Okamachi with sautéed hatsutaké mushrooms, and grated yam—all put together by her absentminded energies. All the while she wandered about, dreaming like a scullery maid.

  But the pain hasn’t started yet. Why not? I’m not yet really suffering. Pain should turn my heart to ice, make my hands shake, tie up my legs. Who is this me, here preparing a meal? Why am I doing this?

  Cool judgment, accurate judgment, judgme
nt seasoned with sentiment—these things I can still use and shall continue to use far into the future. But Miyo’s pregnancy should have made my misery complete! Something must be missing. It must be that something more terrible must be added to that completeness.

  First I must follow through with the plan I have contrived so carefully. It will be painful to see Saburo; it certainly won’t be fun. But married! To me? (I must be out of my mind.) To Miyo! To that country wench, that rotten tomato, that stupid girl smelling of urine!

  Thus my suffering will be complete. My suffering will be a perfect thing, a finished thing. Then maybe I will get some relief. A brief, a false ease will be mine. That I shall cling to. That chimera I shall trust . . .

  Etsuko heard the chirping of a chickadee by the window frame. She pressed her forehead to the glass and watched the little bird adjusting the feathers of its wet wings. A thin white patch that looked like an eyelid kept winking down across the bird’s tiny, flashing black eye. At its throat a fine break in the feathers kept moving; from there the peevish chirping came.

  She saw something very bright in the distance. The rain had now slowed to a drizzle. The center of the chestnut grove at the edge of the garden was growing bright, opening like a gold niche in a dark temple.

  In the afternoon the rain cleared away.

  Etsuko went out into the garden with Yakichi to repair the roses that had lost their supports in the storm. Some roses were floating face-down in the muddy, grass-strewn rainwater. Mutilated petals drifted beside them.

  Etsuko rescued one flower and tied it to a righted support with a piece of string. Fortunately the stem had not broken. Her fingers felt the weight of the petals of which Yakichi was so proud. As she touched each flower Etsuko looked deep into the marvelous, scarlet petals from which the fresh, clinging sensation came.