Beauty and Sadness (4 page)

Someone in Otoko’s position “had to make New Year’s calls,” as Keiko said, but she could at least have stolen ten or fifteen minutes to come to the station. She was keeping aloof from him again. But although he had been unable to say anything about it last night in the presence of the others, their past together seemed to create a current of feeling between them. It was true of this supper too.

As the train began to move Oki had tapped the window,
lifted it slightly so that she could hear, and thanked Keiko again and invited her to visit him when she came to Tokyo. “You can easily find us, just ask at the North Kamakura Station. And send me a painting or two of yours, won’t you? An abstract, the kind Miss Ueno calls a little mad.”

“How embarrassing! Having Miss Ueno say a thing like that.…” For a moment there was an odd sparkle in her eyes.

“But doesn’t she envy your ability?”

The train had stopped in the station only briefly, and his conversation with Keiko had been brief too.

Oki himself had never written an “abstract” novel, though some of his novels had an element of fantasy. Insofar as language diverged from everyday reality it might be thought of as abstract or symbolic, but he had always tried to suppress such tendencies in his writing. He had liked French symbolist poetry, as well as haiku and medieval Japanese poetry, but ever since he began writing he seemed to have been learning to use abstract, symbolic language to cultivate a concrete, realistic mode of expression. However, he had thought that by deepening this kind of expression he would eventually arrive at a symbolic quality.

But what, for example, was the relation between the Otoko in his novel and the real Otoko? It was hard to say.

Of all his novels, the one that had had the longest life, and was still widely read, was the one that told the story of his love affair with her. The publication of that novel had caused her further injury, eventually turning the
eyes of the curious on her. Yet why had she now, decades later, gained the affection of so many readers?

Perhaps one should say that the Otoko in his novel, rather than the girl who was the model for the character, had gained the affection of his readers. It was not Otoko’s own story, it was something he had written. He had added imaginative and fictional touches of his own, and a certain idealization. Leaving that aside, who could say which was the real Otoko—the one he had described, or the one she might have created in telling her own story?

Still, the girl in his novel was Otoko. The novel could not have existed without their love affair. And it was because of her that it continued to be so widely read. If he had never met her he would never have known such a love. To find a love like that, at thirty, might be taken as good luck or bad, he could not say which, but there was no doubt that it had given him a fortunate debut as an author.

Oki had called his novel
A Girl of Sixteen.
It was an ordinary, straightforward title, but in those days people thought it shocking that a teen-age schoolgirl should take a lover, have a premature baby, suffer a lapse of sanity. To Oki, her lover, it had not seemed shocking. And of course he had not written about it in that spirit, nor had he regarded her as strange. Like the title, the author’s attitude was straightforward, and Otoko was depicted as a pure, ardent young girl. He had tried to bring to life his impression of her face, her figure, the way she moved. In short, he had poured all his fresh, youthful love into the book. Probably that was why it had
been so successful. It was the tragic love story of a very young girl and a man himself still young but with a wife and child: only the beauty of it had been heightened, to the point that it was unmarred by any moral questioning.

In the days when he was secretly meeting Otoko, she once startled him by saying: “You’re the kind who’s always worrying about what other people think, aren’t you? You ought to be bolder.”

“I thought I was shameless enough. How about right now?”

“No, I’m not talking about us.” She paused. “It’s everything—you ought to be more yourself.”

Oki reflected on himself, at a loss to reply. Long afterward her words stuck in his mind. He felt it was because she loved him that this child could see through his character and his life. He had gone on to indulge himself often enough, but whenever he began to worry about other people’s opinions he remembered her words. He remembered her as she said them.

He had stopped caressing her for a moment. Otoko, perhaps thinking it was because of what she had said, nestled her face in the crook of his arm. Then she began to bite, harder and harder. Oki kept his arm still, bearing the pain. He could feel her tears on his skin.

“You’re hurting me,” he said, grasping her by the hair and drawing her away. Blood was oozing from the teeth marks in his arm. Otoko licked the wound.

“Hurt me too,” she said. Oki gazed at her arm—truly the arm of a young girl—and ran his hand up it from the
fingertips to the shoulder. He kissed her shoulder. She squirmed with pleasure.

It was not because she had said “You ought to be more yourself” that Oki wrote
A Girl of Sixteen
, but as he was writing it he remembered those words. Two years after he parted from her the novel was published. Otoko was living in Kyoto. Her mother must have left Tokyo because of his failure to respond to her appeal; probably she could no longer endure the sorrow that she shared with her daughter. What had they thought of his novel, of his winning success with a work that touched their lives so deeply? To be sure, no one brought up the question of the model for the heroine of the young author’s novel. Only after Oki was in his fifties, and people were beginning to investigate his career, had it become known that the character was based on Otoko. That was after her mother had died, and by then Otoko had made a name for herself as a painter, and photographs of her with the caption “the heroine of
A Girl of Sixteen
” had begun to appear in magazines. He imagined that the photographs were used without her consent. Naturally she gave no interviews on the subject. Even when the novel first appeared Oki heard nothing from her or her mother about it.

The trouble had occurred in his own household. That was to be expected. Before their marriage Fumiko was a typist at a news agency, and so Oki had had his young bride type up all his writings. It was something of a lovers’ game, the sweet togetherness of newlyweds, but
there was more to it than that. When his work first appeared in a magazine he was astonished at the difference in effect between a pen-written manuscript and the tiny characters in print. However, as he became more experienced he began to anticipate the effect of his words on the printed page. Not that he wrote with that in mind, he never gave it a thought, but the gap between manuscript and published work disappeared. He had learned how to write for print. Even passages that seemed tedious or loose in manuscript would turn out to be tightly written. Perhaps that meant that he had learned his craft. He often told beginning novelists: “Get something in print, in a little magazine or anywhere. It’s very different from manuscript—you’ll be surprised how much you learn.”

The present-day form of publication was printing in type. But he had had the opposite kind of surprise too. For example, he had always read
The Tale of Genji
in the small type of modern editions, but when he came across it in a handsome old block-printed edition it made an entirely different impression on him. What had it been like when they read it in those beautiful flowing manuscripts of the age of the Heian Court? A thousand years ago
The Tale of Genji
was a modern novel. It could never be read that way again, no matter how far
Genji
studies progressed. Still, the old edition gave a more intense pleasure than a modern one. Doubtless the same would be true of Heian poetry. As for later literature, Oki had tried reading Saikaku in facsimiles of the seventeenth-century block-print editions, not out of antiquarianism
but because he wanted to come as close as he could to the original work. But to read contemporary novels in manuscript facsimile was sheer dilettantism; they were meant to be read in type print, not in a boring handwriting.

By the time he married Fumiko there was no longer any serious gap between his manuscripts and the printed versions, but since his wife was a typist he had her type them up for him. Typewritten manuscripts in Japanese were far closer to printing than handwritten ones. Then too, he knew that almost all Western manuscripts were either produced on the typewriter or typed up in clean copies. But the typescripts of Oki’s novels, partly because he was not used to them, seemed colder and flatter than either the pen manuscripts or the final printed versions. Yet for that reason he could recognize their defects, and found it easier to make corrections and revisions. And so it had become customary for Fumiko to type up all his manuscripts.

Hence the problem of what to do with the manuscript of
A Girl of Sixteen.
To have Fumiko type it would be to cause her pain and humiliation. It would be cruel. When he met Otoko his wife was twenty-two and had just given birth to their son. Of course she suspected her husband’s love affair. She would go out at night, carrying the baby on her back, and wander along the railroad tracks. Once, after she was gone for several hours, he discovered her in the garden leaning on the old plum tree, unwilling to return to the house. He had been out looking for her, and heard her sobbing as he came in the gate.

“What on earth are you doing? You’ll make the baby catch cold.”

It was mid-March, and still quite chilly. The baby did catch cold. It was hospitalized with a touch of pneumonia. Fumiko stayed at the hospital to look after it.

“It’ll be convenient for you if he dies,” she would say to him. “Then you’ll have no trouble leaving me.” Even so, Oki took advantage of his wife’s absence to go to meet Otoko. The baby was saved.

The next year, when Otoko had her premature baby, Fumiko learned about it by coming across a letter from Otoko’s mother. That so young a girl should have a baby was not in itself surprising, but Fumiko had never dreamed of such a thing. Railing at him, she flew into a passion and bit her tongue. When he saw blood trickling between her lips, Oki hastily forced her mouth open and stuck in his hand, until she began to choke and retch, and then go limp. His fingers were bleeding when he drew them out. At that Fumiko calmed down and set about bandaging his hand.

Before the novel was finished Fumiko had also found out that Otoko had broken off from him and gone to Kyoto. Having her type the manuscript would reopen the wounds of her jealousy and pain, but otherwise he would seem to be treating it as a secret. Oki was perplexed, but finally decided to give her the manuscript. For one thing, he wanted to make a full confession to her. She immediately read it through from beginning to end.

“I ought to have let you go,” she said, paling. “I wonder
why I didn’t. Everybody who reads it will sympathize with Otoko.”

“I didn’t want to write about you.”

“I know I can’t be compared with your ideal woman.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I was hideously jealous.”

“Otoko is gone. You and I will be living together for a long, long time. But a lot of the Otoko in that book is pure fiction. For instance, I have no idea what she was like while she was in the hospital.”

“That kind of fiction comes from love.”

“I couldn’t have written without it,” said Oki abruptly. “Will you type this one for me too? I hate to ask you.”

“I’ll type it. A typewriter is just a machine, after all. I’ll be part of the machine.”

Of course Fumiko could not simply function mechanically. She seemed to make frequent mistakes—he often heard her tear up a sheet of paper. Sometimes she paused, and he could hear her weeping quietly. Since the house was so small, and the typewriter was in a corner of the cramped dining room next to his shabby study, he was very well aware of his wife’s presence. It was hard to sit calmly at his desk.

Nevertheless, Fumiko said not a word about
A Girl of Sixteen.
She seemed to think a “machine” ought not to talk. The manuscript ran to some three hundred and fifty pages, and for all her experience would obviously take many days to complete. Soon she had become quite sallow and hollow-cheeked. She would sit staring nowhere,
clinging to her typewriter as if possessed, her brows knitted grimly. Then one day before dinner she threw up a yellowish substance and slumped over. Oki went to stroke her back.

Gasping, she asked for water. There were tears in her red-rimmed eyes.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have had you type it,” he said. “Though to try to keep this one book away from you …” Even if it had not destroyed their marriage, that wound too would have been slow to heal.

“I’m glad you did, anyway.” Fumiko tried to smile. “I’m really exhausted. It’s the first time I’ve typed anything this long all at once.”

“The longer it is, the longer you’re tortured. Maybe that’s the fate of a novelist’s wife.”

“Thanks to your novel I’ve come to understand Otoko very well. As much as I’ve suffered from it, I can see that meeting her was a good thing for you.”

“Didn’t I tell you she’s idealized?”

“I know. There aren’t any lovely girls exactly like that. But I wish you’d written more about me! I wouldn’t care if I’d come out a horrible, jealous shrew.”

Oki found it hard to reply. “You were never that.”

“You didn’t know what was in my heart.”

“I wasn’t willing to expose all our family secrets.”

“No, you were so wrapped up in that little Otoko you only wanted to write about her! I suppose you thought I would soil her beauty and dirty up your novel. But does a novel have to be so pretty?”

Even his reluctance to describe his wife’s jealous rage
had invited a new outburst of jealousy. Not that he had omitted it altogether. Indeed, to have written so concisely of it might have strengthened the effect. But Fumiko seemed to feel frustrated that he had not gone into detail. He was baffled by his wife’s psychology. How could she feel ignored? Since the novel was about his tragic love affair it was centered on Otoko. He had included without change a great many facts hitherto concealed from his wife. That was what had worried him most, but she seemed more hurt that he had written so little about her.