Again Miyo pulled the apron over her face. What she had said made sense—if one ignored that ingratiating white lie: “Women can’t wear men’s socks.”
Etsuko understood one thing now, and as a result she said resignedly: “It’s all right. Don’t cry. If Chieko and the rest see you, I don’t know what they’ll think. There’s no reason to make such a fuss about a pair or two of socks. Now, calm down. Dry your tears.”
She deliberately avoided looking at Saburo, put her arm around Miyo’s shoulder and led her outside. She studied the shoulder she was embracing, the slightly dirty neck, and the unkempt coiffure.
A woman like this! Of all things! A woman like this!
Through the row of pasania trees the fresh autumn sky gleamed; from it came the screams of shrikes, in voice for the first time this year. Miyo heard them and walked into a puddle, remnant of the recent rains, splashing muddy water on Etsuko’s dress. “Aaaa . . .” Etsuko said, and let go of the girl.
Miyo suddenly dropped to the ground like a dog and carefully wiped Etsuko’s skirt, using the same serge apron with which she had just dried her tears.
This wordless display of devotion was, in the eyes of Etsuko, standing there wordlessly permitting it, not so much a touching country-girl wile, as something charged with courteous, sullen hostility.
One day after that Saburo, wearing the socks, bowed to Etsuko as if nothing had happened and innocently smiled.
* * * *
Etsuko now had a reason for living.
From that day until the unpleasant incident of the October tenth Autumn Festival she had something to live for.
Etsuko had never asked for salvation. As a result, it was strange that a reason for living should have been born to her.
It is easy enough for people to see life as valueless. In fact, people with any degree of sensitivity have difficulty forgetting it. Etsuko’s instinct in these matters was strikingly like that of the hunter. If in the distant wood she should chance to see the white tail of a hare, her cunning would come into play, all the blood of her body would grow turbulent, her sinews would surge, her nervous system would grow taut and concentrate itself like an arrow in flight. In the leisurely days when she lacked this reason for living she was like quite a different hunter, passing indolent days and nights asking no more than a sleep by the fire.
To some people living is extremely simple; to others, it is extremely difficult. Against this unjust imbalance, more striking than the injustice of racial discrimination, Etsuko felt not the slightest rancor.
It’s best to take life lightly, she thought. After all, people to whom living is easy don’t have to give any excuse for living beyond that. Those who find it hard, though, very quickly use something more than just living as an excuse. Saying life is hard is nothing to brag about. The power we have to find all the difficulties in life helps to make life easy for the majority of men. If we didn’t have that power, life would be something without simplicity or difficulty—a slippery, empty sphere without a foothold.
This power is one that prevents life from looking like that, a power that people who never come to see life thus do not know. Yet it is not anything out of the ordinary as powers go; in fact it is nothing more than an everyday necessity. He who tampers with the scales of life and makes it seem unduly heavy will receive his punishment in hell. Even if life’s weight is not tampered with, it is like a coat, its weight barely noticed; only the sick man feels the weight of that overcoat and grows stiff in the shoulders. I have to wear heavier clothing than others, she thought, because it happens that my soul was born and still lives in the snow country. The problems of life are to me nothing but the suit of armor that protects me.
Her reason for living made tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and whatever the future might bring seem not at all heavy. They were still heavy, to be sure, but some subtle shift in her center of gravity sent Etsuko blithely and buoyantly into the future. Was it hope? Never.
All day she monitored what Saburo and Miyo were doing. It would gain her nothing but pain to discover them kissing under some tree, or to discover in the middle of the night some thread connecting their widely separated rooms. Since, however, uncertainty would bring her even greater pain, Etsuko was determined to stoop to any action that would enable her to search out proof of their love.
Judged merely by its end result, her passion was shockingly authentic evidence of the limitlessness of the human passion for self-torture. A passion lavishly expended in the destruction of her hopes alone, it was a scale model of human existence—perhaps streamlined, perhaps vaulted. Passions do have a form, and through their forms become biological cultures in which human lives can be fully displayed.
Nobody noticed, Etsuko felt, how she watched the other two everywhere they went. She was perfectly calm, and worked harder than usual.
Etsuko inspected the rooms of Miyo and Saburo while they were out, much as Yakichi had once done with her room. No evidence, however, came to light. This pair was not the diary-writing kind. They didn’t know how to write love notes; nor were they even aware of that gentle conspiracy of love in which the present moment seems to stand forth already endowed with the beauty of reminiscence. With these two there was neither evidence nor commemoration. When they met, surely, there was only a mingling of glances . . . of hands . . . of lips . . . of breasts. And after that, perhaps this here and that there . . . Ah! How easy! How simple, beautiful, abstract an action!
Words unneeded, meaning unnecessary; an attitude like that of an athlete throwing a javelin; a stance necessary and adequate to the simple tasks for which it was assumed. That action . . . that behavior that seemed to have been assumed entirely to conform with that simple, abstract, beautiful line—and of that behavior not one shred of evidence remained. It was an action like that of a swallow flying for a moment above the surface of the plain.
Etsuko’s dreams veered at times, and at one moment her existence seemed to be carried away into the darkness of outer space in one great swing of a beautiful cradle, turbulently tossed on a gleaming column of water.
In Miyo’s room, Etsuko found a cheap mirror in a celluloid frame, a red comb, cheap cold cream, Mentholatum, just one half-decent kimono of cheap, Chichibu meisen, arrow-feather fabric, some badly wrinkled sashes, a brand-new petticoat, a shapeless bag of a dress for summer wear and the slip that went with it (in the summer Miyo blithely went shopping in the village wearing only these two garments), an old women’s magazine with pages thumbed till they looked like dirty artificial flowers, a maudlin letter from a friend in the country, and, on closer inspection, clinging to all, strands of reddish hair.
In Saburo’s room, Etsuko saw nothing but the essentials of an even plainer way of life.
Are they, I wonder, being as circumspect in avoiding my search as I am being diligent in seeking them out? Or am I in my careful scrutiny missing what I seek because it is inserted, as in the Poe story I borrowed from Kensuke, in some letter rack out in plain sight?
As Etsuko left the room she met Yakichi coming toward her down the hall. Since the hall ended with Miyo’s room Yakichi had no business coming down it unless he was going there.
“You, here?” Yakichi said.
“Yes.”
Etsuko’s reply was not apologetic. As they went back to Yakichi’s room the old man’s body bumped clumsily against her. Not at all because the hallway was too narrow. His body struck hers for no reason, as would the body of a sulky child pulled along by his mother.
When they had settled down in the room, Yakichi said: “Why were you there in his room?”
“I went to look at his diary.”
Yakichi’s mouth moved indistinctly. He said nothing more.
* * * *
The tenth of October was Autumn Festival day in the several neighboring villages. Saburo had dressed and left with the members of the Young Men’s League before sundown. The festival was so crowded that it was perilous to take small children on foot. The best way to restra
in the supplications of Nobuko and Natsuo to go along, therefore, seemed to be to ask them to stay with their mother to mind the house. After supper, Yakichi, Etsuko, Kensuke and Chieko, along with Miyo, went off to the local shrine and the village festival.
The great drums had been booming near and far since sundown. Something in the wind, like screams, like songs, sounded with them. These noises that flowed piercingly over the ricefields in the dark night, noises like the songs of birds and animals crying together in the night, did not disturb the stillness; in fact, they deepened it. Country nights, even in areas not far from great cities, are deep like that, broken only here and there with the cries of insects.
For a time after they had finished getting ready to go to the festival, Kensuke and Chieko had opened the windows and listened to the sound of the drums coming from all directions. “That must be the one at the Hachiman shrine by the station. That must be the one at the village shrine we’re going to. That, I think, is the drum at the village hall over there, the drum they let little children—their noses daubed with white powder—take turns beating on. Its sound is the most youthful; at times it stops altogether . . .”
They were so lost in the joy of this guessing game, so puerile in the differing opinions that brought them to the verge of quarreling, that they sounded as though they were taking part in a play. It was hard to believe their conversation was carried out by a husband of thirty-eight and a wife of thirty-seven.
“No, that’s from the direction of Okamachi—from the Hachiman shrine by the station.”
“My, you’re stubborn. Here you’ve been living in this neighborhood for six years, and you still don’t know where the station is from here.”
“All right, would you be so kind as to bring me a map and a compass?”
“Why, madam, we don’t have things like that here.”
“Yes, I’m the madam, and you’re the plain old man of the house.”
“Of course. And it isn’t everybody that can become the wife of a plain old man of the house. Why, all the ordinary wives of the world are Mrs. Department Heads, Mrs. Fishmongers, Mrs. Trumpeters. You were born lucky. As wife to a plain old man of the house, you are the paragon of wifely success. As a female, you can take over the life of a male. Surely, there is no greater success for a female, is there?”
“You don’t have it quite straight. I meant you were a plain, ordinary man of the house.”
“Ordinary? Wonderful! The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can’t have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I’ll show you a man who is not yet a man. The earliest days of the haiku, before Basho, before Shiki, were filled with the vigor of an age in which the spirit of the ordinary had not died.”
“Yes, and your haiku show the ordinary at its highest point of development.”
Through the tone of this, through this shallow dialogue, ran everlastingly the same theme—the theme of Chieko’s boundless respect for her husband’s “learning.” Among the Tokyo intellectuals of a decade ago, couples like this were not at all uncommon. In their respectful pursuit of the forms of the grand tradition even into this time, however, they were like a woman wearing last year’s hairdo among country folk, as if it were still the mode.
Kensuke lit a cigarette and leaned against the window frame. The smoke he exhaled streamed on the night air like white hair floating on water, entangling itself in the branches of the persimmon tree nearby. After a short silence he said: “Father isn’t ready yet, is he?”
“It’s Etsuko who isn’t ready. Father may be helping her tie her sash. I know it’s hard to believe, but he even ties the string of her petticoat for her. Whenever she dresses, they close the door of her room tight and talk in low tones, so you can’t tell how long . . .”
“Father’s really living it up in his last years, isn’t he?”
Their conversation naturally swung around to the subject of Saburo. Etsuko’s calm comportment of recent days, they finally decided, must be evidence that she had given him up. Rumor sometimes follows a more precise logic than fact, and fact more than rumor is apt to have a lie in it somewhere.
The way to the village shrine led through the woods behind the house. Not far from the pine grove by which they had gone cherry-blossom viewing this spring, they came to a fork in the path. They took the fork that led away from the pine grove. For a while there was only swampland covered with rushes and water chestnuts. They descended a steep hill with a cluster of houses at the bottom. On the mountain across the valley lay the village shrine.
Miyo was in front, carrying a paper lantern. Kensuke walked behind, illuminating the path with a flashlight. At the fork in the path they were joined by Tanaka, a rugged, honest farmer, also on his way to the festival. He carried a flute, on which he practiced as they walked. His playing was surprisingly skillful, but his cheerful tunes somehow struck them as sad, rendering their procession led by its paper lantern as silent as a funeral. To liven things up Kensuke started clapping his hands to each tune; everyone joined him. The sound of their clapping came back in hollow echoes from the surface of the swamp.
“It’s odd, isn’t it,” said Yakichi; “the sound of the drum seems farther away here.”
“It’s the terrain that does that,” said Kensuke, from the rear.
At that moment Miyo stumbled and almost fell, an occurrence which prompted Kensuke to take her paper lantern and her place at the head of the line. There was no need to have this witless girl conduct them.
Etsuko stood beside the path where she had stepped aside to make way for Kensuke and watched the lantern change hands. In the lantern light Miyo’s skin seemed rather green. There was no light in her eyes. In fact, she even seemed to be having trouble breathing.
This was the way Etsuko’s eyes had now learned to observe things—in that instant when the paper lantern was passed from hand to hand and lighted the upper half of Miyo’s body—in appraisals that brief.
But that glimpse was soon forgotten, as the great festival lanterns hanging from the eaves of houses brought exclamations of admiration from the little column toiling up the slope.
Most of the villagers had gone to the festival, leaving only the great lanterns to guard their homes, bright and silent. The Sugimoto group crossed the stone bridge over the creek that flowed through the town. The geese that swam in the creek in the daytime cried out from their coops as the noisy strangers passed. “Just like babies crying at night,” said Yakichi. Everyone laughed. They were thinking of Natsuo and his negligent mother.
Etsuko looked at Miyo in her arrow-feather kimono, careful that no gleam of ill will escaped from her eyes. She wasn’t concerned about what the family might see. It was Miyo she was concerned about. Just the surmise—surmise, nothing more—that Miyo, this dull-witted country maiden, so much as suspected her jealousy, would be more than Etsuko’s self-respect could stand. Whether it was Miyo’s complexion or her kimono, Etsuko could not tell, but somehow this evening the girl was more than a little beautiful.
It’s a strange world, Etsuko thought. When I was a child, it was unthinkable for a maid to go around in anything but a striped kimono. When the likes of servants can go about in stylish fabrics, tradition can’t stand, society’s order is being spat upon. If my mother had anything to do with her, she’d fire her before the day was over.
No matter how one looks at it, from below or above, status is a fine substitute for jealousy. What better evidence for this could there be than that Etsuko never harbored a bit of that old-time social consciousness in her attitude toward Saburo?
Etsuko wore a scattered-chrysanthemum silk kimono, of a kind rare outside the city, under a shiny black haori, tailored slightly short. The scent of her treasured Houbigant wafted faintly about her—a cologne that had no place at a country festival, obviously put on for Saburo alone. The unsuspecting Yakichi himself had sprayed it on her neck. On downy hair the color of her skin, infinitesimall
y small droplets of cologne rested, shining like pearls, incomparably lovely. Her skin had always been smooth; there was, in fact, a definite contradiction between the opulent area here entrusted to Yakichi, and the horny and soil-encrusted flesh of his hand. Yet his dirty hand would gradually eliminate all boundaries and merge with her fragrant bosom. In the process of fashioning this artificial contradiction, Yakichi seemed to find himself drawn for the first time into the restful sense that he really possessed her.
As they turned into a lane by the rice distribution center, they were suddenly greeted by the stench of an acetylene lamp, in the light of which they saw at last the evening bustle of hucksters. One was selling candy. Another was selling toy pinwheels—the handles of them impaled in a bale of straw. Another was selling flowery paper umbrellas. Near him others were selling—though it was not the season—firecrackers, children’s card games, and balloons.
In the festival season these merchants would go to the Osaka candy stalls and buy leftover goods at reduced prices. Then they would loiter around the Hankyu Umeda station and ask passers-by what station stop was celebrating a festival today. If they went first to the Hachiman shrine by the Okamachi station and saw competitors already installed there, they would proceed to this second-choice festival. Their dreams of great markups almost gone, they would arrive in small groups from across the fields, their gait testifying to their resignation. Many of the peddlers here this evening were old men and women.
The children were gathered in a knot about some little toy cars that ran around in a circle. The Sugimoto family passed the peddlers one by one, debating whether to buy Natsuo a fifty-yen auto.
“It’s too high, too high. Have Etsuko buy him one the next time she goes to Osaka; it will be much cheaper,” said Yakichi. “Besides, all they sell in places like this are things you buy today and find broken tomorrow.”
His denunciation was handed down in a loud voice, and the old man selling toys glared at him fiercely. Yakichi glared back.