Beauty and Sadness (12 page)

“But that was your idea.”

“Mine?… You think I’d leave you?”

Otoko said nothing.

“Never in my life!” Keiko burst out, and again grasped Otoko’s little finger and bit it.

“Ouch!” Otoko shrank back. “That hurt, you know!”

“I meant it to.”

Dinner arrived. As the waitress arranged the dishes Keiko turned primly away and sat gazing at a cluster of lights on Mt. Hiei. Otoko made conversation with the waitress, keeping one hand over the other. She was afraid the teeth marks were visible.

When they were alone again Keiko looked down at her soup bowl, took a morsel of eel with her chopsticks, and said: “But you really ought to desert me.”

“You
are
stubborn, aren’t you?”

“I’m the kind of girl that’s deserted by her lover. Do you think I’m stubborn?”

Otoko asked herself if women were more stubborn toward each other than toward men, and felt the needle prick of the same old guilty thought. Her finger was still stinging too, as if pierced by a needle. Had she herself taught Keiko to inflict pain?

One day, not long after they began living together, Keiko had come running in from the kitchen, saying the oil in the frying pan had spattered.

“Did you get burned?”

“It stings!” Keiko thrust her hand out to Otoko. The tip of one finger was red. Otoko took the hand.

“It doesn’t look bad,” she said, and quickly stuck the finger in her mouth. Startled by the touch of her tongue on it, she took it out again. This time Keiko put the finger in her own mouth.

“Does it help to lick it?”

“Keiko, what about your frying pan?”

“I forgot!” She ran back to the kitchen.

Later—when had it been?—Otoko somehow began toying with her at night, pressing her lips on Keiko’s eyelids, or nibbling at her sensitive ears until she squirmed and moaned. That led Otoko on.

All the while Otoko remembered that long, long ago Oki had toyed with her the same way. Perhaps because
she was so young, he had been in no hurry to kiss her on the mouth. As she felt his lips again and again on her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks, she was lulled into utter submission. Keiko was two or three years older, and of the same sex, but she responded even more quickly. Otoko soon found her irresistible. However, the thought that she was repeating Oki’s old caresses made her feel a choking sense of guilt. But it also made her quiver with vitality.

“Don’t do that. Please!” Yet as Keiko spoke she nestled her bare breast against Otoko’s. “Isn’t your body the same as mine?”

Otoko drew back.

Keiko clung to her more closely. “Isn’t it? Just the same as mine!” She waited a moment. “It really is, you know.”

Otoko suspected that she was not a virgin. Keiko’s sudden verbal thrusts were still unfamiliar to her.

“We’re not the same,” Otoko murmured, as Keiko’s hand came groping for her breast. The hand moved without hesitation, but there seemed to be shyness in its touch. “Don’t do that!” Otoko clutched Keiko’s hand.

“You’re not being fair!” Now there was strength in Keiko’s fingers.

Years ago, at fifteen, when she felt Oki’s hand on her breasts Otoko had said: “Don’t do that. Please!” Exactly those words had appeared in his novel. She would probably have remembered them anyway, but because they were in the book they seemed to have taken on a life of their own.

And yet Keiko had said the same thing. Was it because she had read
A Girl of Sixteen?
Was this what any girl would say?

The novel also had a description of Otoko’s breasts, along with something Oki had said about the bliss of touching them.

Because Otoko had never nursed a baby, her nipples still retained their rich color. Even after twenty years that color had not faded. But since her early thirties her breasts had begun to shrink.

Probably Keiko had noticed their slackness in the bath, and made sure of it when she touched them. Otoko wondered if she would mention it, but she never did. Nor was anything said when Otoko’s breasts responded to Keiko’s caresses by steadily becoming fuller. Keiko’s silence was odd, since she must have considered it a victory.

Sometimes Otoko felt that the swelling of her breasts was morbid and evil, sometimes she felt terribly ashamed; above all, she was astonished by the way her body, at almost forty, was changing. That was very different from what she had felt at fifteen, when the shape of her breasts changed under Oki’s caresses, and again at sixteen, when she was pregnant.

After her parting from Oki no one had touched her breasts for over two decades. Meanwhile her youth, and her chance to marry, had passed. It was the hand of another woman—Keiko—that had touched them once again.

Still, Otoko had had many opportunities for love and
marriage since coming to Kyoto with her mother. But she had avoided them. As soon as she realized that a man was in love with her, memories of Oki were revived. Rather than mere recollections, they were her reality. When she parted from Oki she thought she would never marry. Distraught by sorrow, she could hardly plan ahead to the next day, much less to the distant future. But the thought of never marrying had crept into her mind, and in time it became an inflexible resolution.

Of course Otoko’s mother hoped for her to marry. She had moved to Kyoto to keep her away from Oki, and to calm her, not with the intention of settling down permanently. Even in Kyoto her anxiety over her daughter remained. The first time she brought up a marriage proposal was when Otoko was nineteen. It was at the Nembutsu Temple in Adashino, deep in the Saga plain, on the night of the Ceremony of the Thousand Lights.

Otoko noticed tears in her mother’s eyes as she looked at the thousand lights burning before the countless little weathered gravestones, memorials to the unmourned dead, that stood in rows across the gravel bed symbolizing the children’s Limbo. A sense of mortality hung in the air. The feeble candle flames flickering there in the dusk made the gravestones seem all the more melancholy.

It was dark as they walked back together along a country road.

“My, but it’s lonely,” her mother said. “Don’t you feel lonely, Otoko?” This time the word “lonely” seemed to
have a different meaning. She began talking about a marriage proposal for Otoko that had come by way of a friend in Tokyo.

“I feel guilty toward you because I can’t marry,” said Otoko.

“There’s no such thing as a woman who can’t marry!”

“But there is.”

“If you don’t, we’ll both be among the unmourned dead.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“They’re the ones who have no relatives left to mourn them.”

“I know, but I can’t imagine what
that
would mean.” She paused. “You’re dead, after all.”

“It’s not just when you’re dead. A woman without husband or children must be like that even while she’s still alive. Suppose I didn’t have you. You’re still young, but …” Her mother hesitated. “You often paint pictures of your baby, don’t you? How long do you expect to go on doing that?”

Otoko did not reply.

Her mother told her all she knew about the proposed marriage partner, a bank clerk. “If you’d like to meet him, let’s make a visit to Tokyo.”

“What do you suppose I see before me as I listen to you?” Otoko asked.

“You’re seeing something?”

“Iron bars. I see the iron bars on the windows of that psychiatric ward.”

Her mother was silenced.

Otoko received several more proposals while her mother was alive.

“It’s no good thinking about Mr. Oki,” her mother said, urging her to marry. It was more an appeal than a warning. “There’s nothing you can do. Waiting for Mr. Oki is like waiting for the past—time and the river won’t flow backward.”

“I’m not waiting for anyone,” Otoko replied.

“You just keep thinking of him? You can’t forget him?”

“It’s not that.”

“Are you sure?… You were only a child when he seduced you—an innocent child, if ever there was one—so maybe that’s why it’s left a scar. I used to hate him for being cruel to such a child!”

Otoko remembered her mother’s words. She wondered if it was because of her youth and innocence that she had had such a love. Perhaps that explained her blind, insatiable passion. When a spasm gripped her and she bit his shoulder she would not even realize that blood was flowing.

Long after separating from Oki, she was shocked to read in
A Girl of Sixteen
that on his way to meet her he would be trying to decide how to make love to her, and that he usually did exactly as he had planned. She found it appalling that a man’s heart would “throb with joy as he walked along thinking about it.” To a spontaneous young girl like Otoko it had been inconceivable that a
man would plan in advance his lovemaking techniques, their sequence, and the like. She accepted whatever he did, gave whatever he asked. Her youth made her all the more unquestioning. Oki had described her as an extraordinary girl, a woman among women. Thanks to her, he wrote, he had experienced all the ways of making love.

When she read that, Otoko burned with humiliation. But she could not suppress her lively memories of his lovemaking; her body tensed and began to quiver. Finally the tension was released, and delight and satisfaction spread through her whole body. Her past love had come back to life.

It was not only the vision of the iron bars of a hospital window that Otoko saw on her way home along the dark road from the Ceremony of the Thousand Lights. She also saw herself lying in Oki’s embrace.

If he had not written about it, perhaps that vision of herself would not have remained alive for so many years.

Otoko had paled with jealous anger and despair when Keiko told her that at the critical moment in Oki’s embrace she had called her name—“and he couldn’t do another thing!” But beneath those emotions she felt that Oki had also remembered
her.
Had not a vision of her lying in his arms come sharply before him at that instant?

As time passed, the memory of their embrace was gradually becoming purified within Otoko, changing from physical to spiritual. She herself was not now pure; nor was Oki, in all likelihood. Yet their long-ago embrace, as she now saw it, seemed pure. That memory—
herself and not herself, unreal and yet real—was a sacred vision sublimated from the memory of their mutual embrace.

When she recalled what he had taught her, and imitated it in making love to Keiko, she feared that the sacred vision might be stained or even destroyed. But it remained inviolate.

Keiko was in the habit of using a depilatory cream to remove hair from her legs and arms, and began to smear it on in Otoko’s presence. At first she had done it in private. When Otoko would ask her about an odd smell coming from the bathroom, she would not reply. Otoko was unacquainted with depilatories, having never needed one.

Then she happened to see Keiko sitting with one knee drawn up, smoothing on the cream. Otoko frowned.

“Such a nasty smell! What is it?” When the hairs came out in the cream as it was being wiped off, Otoko covered her eyes. “Please don’t do that! It makes my flesh crawl.” She shivered and felt herself breaking out in goose pimples. “Do you have to do such a repulsive thing?”

“But doesn’t everyone?”

Otoko was silent.

“Wouldn’t it make your flesh crawl to touch a hairy skin?”

Still Otoko did not answer.

“I’m a woman, after all.”

So she was doing it for Otoko. Even for another woman, Keiko wanted to have a woman’s silky skin. Otoko felt oppressed both by her own sense of repugnance
at seeing the hair removed and by the feelings that Keiko’s frankness had aroused. The acrid smell lingered in her nostrils even after Keiko went to the bath to wash off the rest of the cream.

When Keiko came back she pulled up her skirt and stretched out a sleek milk-white leg. “Touch it and see. It’s all smooth now.” Otoko glanced down, but did not put out her hand. Keiko stroked her shin with her right hand, and looked at Otoko as if wondering what could be wrong. “Is something bothering you?” she asked. Otoko avoided her eyes.

“Keiko, from now on please don’t do it in front of me.”

“I never want to hide anything from you again. I have no more secrets from you.”

“Surely you needn’t show me something I find offensive.”

“You’ll get used to it. It’s just like trimming toenails.”

“You shouldn’t do your nails in front of people either. When you clip your nails you let them fly.… Cup your hand so the clippings won’t get away.”

Keiko meekly agreed.

After that, however, Keiko neither flaunted nor concealed her efforts to remove hair from her arms and legs. But Otoko never got used to it. Whether the depilatory cream had been improved or Keiko had substituted a different one, the smell was no longer quite so bad; still, the whole process made Otoko queasy. She could not bear to watch the shin and underarm hairs come out as the cream was wiped away. She would leave the room.
Yet beneath her repugnance a flame flickered and vanished, and flickered up again. That small, distant flame was barely visible to her mind’s eye, but so calm, so pure, that it was hard to believe it was a flicker of lust. It reminded her of Oki and herself all those years ago. Her queasiness at seeing Keiko remove hair had within it a feeling of contact between woman and woman, a direct pressure on her own skin; and her first reaction had been one of nausea. But when she thought of Oki the queasiness miraculously subsided.

In his embrace she had never had that feeling of queasiness; nor was she even aware of whether Oki himself was hairy. Did she lose her sense of reality? Now, with Keiko, she was even freer, she had developed a bold, middle-aged eroticism. It had amazed her to learn through Keiko that she had ripened as a woman during her long years alone. She feared that had her new lover been a man the vision she secretly guarded within her—the sacred vision of her love with Oki—would have vanished at his touch.

Otoko had failed in her early suicide attempt, but she always wished that she had died. Better still, she felt, to have died in childbirth—before she tried to kill herself, and before her own baby died. Yet as the months and years slipped by, these thoughts cleansed the wound she had received from Oki.