The Gate

  “Has something happened to Nee-san?” he said. All traces of inebriation had left his face.

  Sōsuke repeated to Koroku the instructions he had given Kiyo and asked him to hurry. Koroku headed straight back to the vestibule, never having had a chance to remove his cloak.

  “Even if I hurry, it’ll take time to find a doctor,” he said. “Why don’t I borrow the Sakais’ telephone and call for one right away?”

  “Yes, please do,” said Sōsuke.

  While waiting for Koroku to return from his errand, he had Kiyo constantly replenish the water in the basin as he alternated between applying pressure to the affected area and massage. He could not bear to sit idly by and watch Oyone suffer; these ministrations brought him at least some small relief.

  Still, there was nothing more trying for Sōsuke than to wait for the doctor to arrive as the minutes ticked away. Even as he rubbed Oyone’s shoulder he strained to hear the faintest sounds that might echo from down the street.

  By the time the doctor finally arrived, Sōsuke felt for a brief moment as though the long night had come to an end. For his part, the doctor observed the normal professional decorum and showed no sign of alarm. He performed his examination with aplomb, his briefcase still tucked under his arm as though this were a short, routine visit to a patient of long standing. The thoroughly unruffled look on the doctor’s face was duly noted by Sōsuke, and his racing pulse at last slowed down.

  The doctor recommended three immediate if temporary treatments: applying mustard plasters to the affected area; warming the patient’s feet with hot compresses; and cooling her forehead with an ice bag. He himself then prepared a mustard plaster, spreading it over Oyone’s shoulder and around to the base of her neck. Kiyo and Koroku took charge of the hot compresses, while Sōsuke applied the ice bag wrapped in a hand towel to her forehead.

  These ministrations continued for about an hour. Saying that he would stay and observe their effects on the patient, the doctor remained seated at her bedside. He and Sōsuke exchanged some small talk from time to time, but for the most part they silently regarded the state of their patient. Outside, night wore on amidst the customary stillness.

  “My, but it’s getting cold,” said the doctor. Feeling sorry for the man, Sōsuke urged that he convey instructions for Oyone’s further care and then linger no longer. For, compared to how she had been earlier, Oyone seemed almost in high spirits.

  “I think you are out of the woods now,” the doctor said to her. “I’m going to prescribe a single dose of some medicine for you that I want you to take tonight, please. I think you’ll be able to sleep then.”

  When the doctor left, Koroku followed him out in order to fetch the medicine.

  During Koroku’s absence, Oyone gazed up at Sōsuke’s face near her pillow and asked the time. In contrast to earlier that evening, the blood had now left her cheeks; the side of her face where the lamplight fell looked especially pale. Sōsuke thought her pallor might be exaggerated by her black hair, which was thoroughly disheveled, and he carefully brushed the locks away from her cheeks.

  “You seem a little better,” he said.

  “Yes, I’m really quite comfortable now,” she replied, displaying one of her characteristic smiles. Even when in distress, Oyone generally did not neglect to smile for Sōsuke. From the sitting room, to which Kiyo had withdrawn and simply flopped down, came the sound of snoring. Oyone asked Sōsuke to send her to bed.

  By the time Koroku returned with the medicine and Oyone ingested it as prescribed, it was close to midnight. Within twenty minutes the patient was sound asleep.

  “What a relief,” said Sōsuke, looking at Oyone’s face.

  After studying his sister-in-law’s appearance for a while, Koroku responded, “She’ll be all right.” Together they eased the ice bag away from her forehead.

  Shortly after, Koroku went to his room. Sōsuke spread out his futon next to Oyone and slept his usual sleep. Five or six hours later, leaving behind sharp needles of frost, the winter night gave way to a cloudless dawn. Over the next hour, splashing light across the land, the sun rose boldly, unchallenged, into a blue sky. Oyone remained fast asleep.

  Sōsuke finished breakfast and as the time for him to leave for the office approached, Oyone still showed no sign of waking from her slumber. Bending down over her pillow, he listened to her deep breathing and wondered whether he should go to work or take the day off.

  12

  THAT MORNING at the office Sōsuke commenced the day’s tasks in his usual fashion, but his natural concern for the ailing Oyone, exacerbated by vivid recollections of scenes from the previous night by her sickbed that kept flashing before his mind’s eye, prevented any satisfactory performance. He made one bungling effort after another. Then, having waited until noon, he resolved to leave the office.

  On the streetcar he conjured up for himself certain encouraging developments: Oyone waking up at some point, feeling much better and no longer in danger of another attack. There being very few fellow passengers at this hour, in contrast to his regular commute, he was scarcely distracted by external stimuli, and could therefore shift his gaze inward, onto images that were spontaneously projected inside his mind. Meanwhile, the streetcar had reached the last stop.

  When he came to the front gate not a sound was to be heard from inside the house, which seemed deserted. He slid open the latticework door, removed his shoes, and stepped across the threshold; still no one emerged to greet him. Instead of following the veranda around to the sitting room as he usually did, he went through the vestibule and directly entered the parlor, where Oyone would be resting. And there she was, still fast asleep. All was the same as it had been that morning—the red lacquer tray by her pillow with the empty medicine packet, the glass, and even the water that had been left in it. She lay facing the alcove, just as she had when he left, with her left cheek visible and the mustard plaster showing at the collar line. Even Oyone’s slumber was unchanged from what he had observed in the morning, so deep that only her breathing evinced some connection with this world. Indeed, not a single detail of his wife’s appearance had been altered from what had registered in his brain on his departure. Without removing his overcoat, Sōsuke bent down and listened awhile to the rhythm of her breathing. It did not seem as though she could be easily awakened. He counted on his fingers the hours she had now slept since taking the medicine the night before. For the first time his face betrayed anxiety. Sōsuke had worried when Oyone was unable to sleep the previous evening, but as he studied her now he wondered if this being lost to the world for so long was not still more alarming.

  He placed his hand on Oyone’s coverlet and shook her gently. Her hair billowed out over the pillow, but the rhythm of her slumberous breathing remained unchanged. Leaving his wife be, Sōsuke passed into the sitting room and from there into the kitchen. In the sink teacups and lacquer bowls were soaking in a basin, still unwashed. He peeked into Kiyo’s room and found her stretched out on the floor, a small tray of food beside her, her head inclined toward the rice tub. He then slid open the door to the six-mat room and stuck his head in. Koroku was asleep, with the covers pulled up over his head.

  Sōsuke changed his own clothes and, by himself, folded the articles he had shed and put them away in the closet. He then proceeded to light the charcoal brazier and put the kettle on. Leaning on the brazier, he pondered for a few minutes, then stood up and set about waking Koroku first, Kiyo next. In both cases they leaped to their feet with a start. When Sōsuke asked his brother how Oyone had fared so far today, Koroku said, actually, he’d felt so sleepy that he nodded off after eating lunch around eleven thirty; but up until then, Oyone had been sleeping peacefully.

  “I want you to go to the doctor’s,” Sōsuke said. “Tell him that ever since taking that medicine last night she hasn’t opened her eyes once, and ask him if this is normal.”

  With a murmur of acknowledgment, Koroku bolted from the house. Sōsuke returned to the parlor and gazed int
ently at Oyone’s face. Arms folded, he agonized over whether to risk the possible ill effects of not rousing her immediately or to incur whatever harm might come from waking her abruptly out of this deep sleep. He could not decide.

  Presently Koroku returned and reported that when he’d explained things to the doctor, who had been about to leave on his daily rounds, he said he would come by as soon as he’d seen a couple of other patients. But in the meantime, Sōsuke rejoined, was it all right simply to leave her in her present state? Koroku said only that the doctor had told him nothing beyond what he’d just reported. This put Sōsuke right back where he had been before, seated rigidly at Oyone’s bedside. Both the doctor and Koroku, he felt, were lacking in concern. Recalling Koroku’s flushed face upon his return to the house the previous night, while he was in the midst of caring for his ailing wife, Sōsuke’s annoyance redoubled. He had not been aware of Koroku’s drinking until Oyone first brought it to his attention; yet when observing his brother closely after that, he had come to the conclusion that Koroku indeed lacked a certain moral fiber and that the situation warranted a serious talk in due time. Even so, Sōsuke shrank from the prospect of exposing Oyone to sour looks on the faces of those around her, and had not yet broached the topic.

  But then, he asked himself, why not come out with it now, when Oyone is fast asleep? Even if our tempers ran away with us, it wouldn’t upset her now . . . And yet one look at his wife’s utterly insensible face was enough to dislodge this train of thought and renew his anxiety. He felt impelled to wake her up this instant. Still, he hesitated. At that moment he was delivered from this agitation by the arrival of the doctor.

  Briefcase tucked primly under his arm, as on the previous visit, the doctor nodded and puffed leisurely on his cigarette as he heard Sōsuke out. “Well then, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll examine the patient,” he said, turning toward Oyone. As though conducting a routine checkup, he spent some time taking her pulse, his gaze fixed firmly on his watch. He then placed a black stethoscope over her heart, studiously edging it this way and that over her skin. Finally, he produced a reflector with a small round hole in the middle and asked Sōsuke to light a candle. Not having a candle, he had Kiyo light an oil lamp. The doctor raised one of Oyone’s closed lids and directed the ray of light from the reflector past the lashes into the recesses of her eye.

  The examination over, the doctor turned to Sōsuke. “Hmm, it seems that the medicine worked a bit too well . . .” Seeing the look in Sōsuke’s eyes, he hastened to explain. “But there is certainly no cause for alarm. In cases like this, any serious reaction would affect the heart or the brain, and on the basis of my examination I find nothing unusual in either department.” At this, Sōsuke at last felt reassured. As the doctor was preparing to leave, he explained that this medicine was fairly new. In theory it had fewer adverse side effects than other soporifics, but its effect varied greatly according to the constitution of the individual patient.

  Detaining him for a moment longer, Sōsuke asked, “There’s no harm, then, in just letting her sleep on like this?”

  So long as none of them had any pressing obligations, he replied, there was no need to wake her.

  After the doctor’s departure Sōsuke suddenly felt very hungry. The iron kettle he had put on in the sitting room was whistling away. He summoned Kiyo and told her to serve dinner. Flustered, she responded that she had not even begun preparations. Indeed, it was still some time before the dinner hour. Sōsuke sat comfortably by the brazier, legs crossed, and made do for the time being by downing four bowls of rice gruel in rapid succession, munching on pickled radishes in between. About thirty minutes later, Oyone’s eyes opened of their own accord.

  13

  HAVING decided to have his hair cut for the New Year, Sōsuke stepped into a barbershop for the first time in a long while. With the holiday fast approaching, the shop was quite crowded, and scissors snipped in unison at several different chairs, offering a fittingly busy accompaniment to a spectacle he had just witnessed among the crowds in the streets, everyone seemingly in a rush to leap out of this frigid season into spring.

  As he sat by the heating stove smoking a cigarette and waiting his turn, Sōsuke felt himself ineluctably swept forward by a force beyond his control and, along with the faceless tide of humanity, being propelled toward the New Year. Although in fact he had no fresh expectations for the year that lay ahead, he was unwittingly goaded by the surrounding populace into a certain excitement.

  With time the symptoms accompanying Oyone’s attack thoroughly abated. Her recovery had by now reached the point where Sōsuke was able to resume his normal routine and not worry much about being out of the house. While the couple’s customary New Year’s celebrations were quiet and low-key, the preparations for this season still made it the busiest time of year for Oyone. Sōsuke had been resigned to this New Year’s being even more subdued than usual. Just seeing Oyone before him, however, looking as if she had been given new life, filled him with relief. He felt as though a tragic drama had receded into the background. And yet there drifted across his mind, like a dark mist, a vague premonition that this drama would someday assume another form and engulf his family.

  Watching the people all around him intent on making the short winter days even busier with their frantic activity, as if driven by the ebbing year to fill every moment, Sōsuke felt all the more weighed down by this nameless dread of things to come. It even popped into his head that, were it possible, he would choose to linger amid the shadows of the nearly spent year. His turn at a chair having come at last, he caught sight of his reflection in the cold mirror, whereupon he asked himself: Who is this person staring out at me? He was draped in a white sheet from the neck down, and he could not make out the color or pattern of his suit. It was then that he noticed, in the background of the reflection, a wicker cage that housed the barber’s pet bird. The tiny bird hopped lightly about on its perch.

  When Sōsuke emerged onto the street, his head fragrantly anointed and his ears ringing with the barber’s hearty farewell, he felt utterly refreshed. Feeling the cold air against his skin, he had to admit that, as Oyone had claimed, a haircut can go a long way toward improving one’s mood.

  A question having come up about their water bill, Sōsuke stopped off at the Sakais’ on his way home. Ushered inside by a maid, he assumed he would be conducted to the usual place, but the maid swiftly led him through the parlor toward the sitting room. The sliding door was partly open, leaving a two-foot gap through which resounded several voices raised in laughter. The Sakai household was as usual in high spirits.

  The master of the house was seated facing him on the far side of a long, low brazier of highly polished wood. His wife sat slightly off to one side, toward the shoji that opened onto the veranda, her gaze likewise fixed on him. Behind Sakai stood a tall, slender pendulum clock encased in a black frame. To the right of the clock was a plain wall; to the left, a recessed cupboard, in which hung an assortment of decorative objects such as rubbings, illustrated haiku, and painted fans with the ribs removed.

  Along with Mr. and Mrs. Sakai, two of the daughters, wearing matching patterned jackets with tight sleeves and round collars, sat shoulder to shoulder. The older one looked to be about twelve years old, the younger about ten. The two pairs of eyes opened wide at the sight of Sōsuke emerging from the other side of the door, with traces of the just now subsiding merriment evident at the corners of those eyes and mouths. Sōsuke then discovered, in addition to the parents and daughters, the odd figure of a man crouched down deferentially near the threshold.

  Sōsuke deduced within the first few minutes of sitting down that the outburst of laughter he had heard earlier must have erupted in the course of the family’s conversation with this strange man. His reddish hair looked as gritty as sand; his face was sunburned to a hue likely to last a lifetime. He wore a white cotton shirt fastened with ceramic buttons; dangling from a cord visible around the collar of his coarse, homespun padded jacket,
there was an old-fashioned traveler’s purse. His appearance proclaimed him an inhabitant of some remote, mountainous locale from which he could only infrequently descend to Tokyo. In an added touch, despite the cold weather his attire managed to leave his kneecaps exposed. Every so often he would extract a towel from the back of his faded blue sash and wipe his nose with it.

  “This man has come to Tokyo all the way from the province of Kai[45] with bolts of cloth strapped on his back,” said Sakai by way of an introduction, whereupon the man turned to Sōsuke.

  “Yes, sir. Please, won’t you buy something?”

  Thus prompted, Sōsuke noticed that fabric samples had been spread out all over the room: meisen, crepe de chine, white pongee, and the like. He marveled at the incongruity between, on the one hand, the man’s ludicrous attire and style of speech, and on the other, the exquisite goods he had come bearing on his back. Mrs. Sakai related for his benefit how this peddler’s village was nothing but a mass of volcanic rock where no rice or even millet would grow, so that the people had no choice but to plant mulberry bushes and raise silkworms. Even so the place was dirt-poor, it seemed: Only a single family possessed a pendulum clock, and no more than two or three children went to school beyond the elementary grades.

  “I gather that our visitor here is the only person in the village who can write,” she concluded with a laugh.

  “You’re dead right about that,” the peddler chimed in, as if his confirmation had been sought. “Whether it’s reading or writing, arithmetic or penmanship—there’s nobody up there but me who can handle these things. You wouldn’t believe that place!”

  Spreading out one fabric sample after another for the Sakais’ inspection, the man said repeatedly, “Please, won’t you buy this?” When they told him the price was much too high, he’d better cut it way down, and so forth, he would respond with “Why, that ain’t hardly nothing” . . . “On my knees I’m begging you, take it for this much” . . . “Now go on, just feel the weight of it,” and other such backwoods phrases, each of them greeted by his audience with loud laughter. The master and mistress of the house, apparently at leisure today, kept egging the man on.