Masks (9 page)

Patches of snow a few days old lingered here and there in the shadows of buildings and around tree roots in hollows in the ground. The sight of the snow, frozen hard now in odd shapes, reawakened in his senses the soft chill of the new-fallen flakes.

On the night when this snow had come, in a heavy, swirling storm, he had left the banquet for Junryo Kawabé with Mieko and Yasuko and had gone with them to their old-fashioned house. Sitting with them in one of the inner rooms, he had been treated to a bewitching display of coquetry. He had not been mistaken, he thought, in seeing Mieko as the oversized figure of a beauty and Yasuko as the attendant, drawn on a smaller scale, at her side.

That night Mieko had clearly been aware of the growing romance between him and Yasuko, and it had appeared to him that she was giving them her blessing. She had looked beautiful, easily ten years younger than she was, wearing a formal kimono made of mother-of-pearl silk in a striking pattern of scattered folding fans (copied, she said, from a No costume). Yasuko, wearing a bulky mohair pullover from which her slender neck protruded in rather ungainly fashion, had darted around Mieko with the smooth alacrity of a squirrel in a tree, and such ballerina-like grace and delicacy in her smallest movement that he had felt a wave of jealousy.

Mieko spoke little, only holding to her lips the glass of whiskey Yasuko brought to her and smiling with evident happiness.

Although she had asked Ibuki, through Yasuko, for his opinion of her essay, she now prevented him from bringing the subject up by announcing firmly that she wanted “no talk of ghosts now.”

What surprised Ibuki most was Mieko’s capacity for liquor. After a sip or two of white wine Yasuko’s face shone as if a light had been turned on it, but not even a glass of straight whiskey could alter the pallor of Mieko’s skin. The only effect was a greater luster in the corners of her eyes, like drops of some pure ointment, and an increased richness of feeling in her gaze as she swung her eyes from Yasuko to Ibuki and back again.

Yasuko, as if to spurn the magnanimity of Mieko’s approval, paid no attention to Ibuki all evening and stayed close to Mieko’s side. Ibuki’s watchful eyes, familiar now with Yasuko’s body, persuaded him that there was indeed more to her relationship with Mieko than the dutiful ties between mother- and daughter-in-law. He fretted with the acute discomfort of someone who is forced to swallow a medicine.

It was past eleven when he stood up.

“We can’t have you walking home in all this snow,” said Mieko, proposing to call a taxi, but Ibuki declined the offer and headed down the long, dimly lighted old corridor toward the front door. Slightly drunk, he was conscious of a growing desire to embrace Yasuko, but she clung as closely as ever to Mieko and made no move in his direction.

Mieko was warmed by the liquor, and the provocative, vaguely medicinal odor that emanated from her clothing struck him full in the face like a cloud of smoke. He felt like a man being escorted by two prostitutes down the hall of a brothel in some long-ago time. Yasuko did not come with him out the front door. Instead it was Yū, her back bent
and her hair disheveled in reminder of some recent illness, who preceded him down the walk to unlock the small wicket gate.

A large bell attached to the gate rang with an old-fashioned clanging as it opened, and then a clump of snow on the bamboo leaves beside him slid suddenly to the ground.

“Are you wet?” Yasuko’s voice called from the doorway.

Turning, he saw her standing before the door with an arm around the shoulders of a young woman larger than her. The other woman wore a lavender kimono in a splashed pattern, and her face floated up pure white in the light of a lantern hanging suspended from the eaves. It was the face he had seen in the garden on the night of the firefly party, but now, in the reflected light of the snow, it was still more hauntingly beautiful.

“Good night, sir, and do be careful,” said Yū, closing the gate as if to hide the scene behind.

“Good-bye.” Yasuko’s voice echoed emptily and aimlessly.

Setting off toward the main road down a path of frozen snow, Ibuki was in a licentious frame of mind, the desires left unsatisfied by Yasuko now gathering around Harumé, whose arms and shoulders had seemed so round and firm. He longed to seize her roughly. Ibuki recognized the viscid flow of emotion between Yasuko and Mieko as, he felt, unclean, yet he was aware also of his own paradoxical desire to enter that unclean moistness.

“Ibuki! Where are you headed?”

Ibuki turned around to see Mikamé behind the wheel of his Hillman, leaning his head out the car window. His boyish face was full-fleshed and ruddy in color, but his eyes gleamed with the uneasy light of an animal stalking its
prey—a sinister look no doubt attributable to his daily contact with the mentally unsound.

“You said you had class today, so I stopped by your office to see if you were there.”

“Then we almost missed each other, because I was about to head over to your place. Okay if I get in?”

“Be my guest.”

“I’ll sit in back.” Ibuki bent his tall frame and crawled inside the automobile, then leaned back in weary comfort.

“Where to?”

“Wherever you say. Just so I get home before tomorrow.”

“Well then, where shall it be…Ginza?” Handling the steering wheel with a practiced air, Mikamé added, “I’ve drawn up a sort of protocol on Mieko Toganō.”

“You’re turning into quite the detective. I don’t envy you—as if Heian ghosts weren’t enough, now you’ve got Mieko to worry about, too?” Ibuki grinned as if the matter had nothing to do with him, did not even interest him.

Mikamé stopped the car before the revolving doors of a large hotel near Shimbashi Station.

“What’s this? It’s too early for dinner.”

“Never mind. Just follow me.” Leaning an elbow on the front desk, Mikamé spoke briefly and familiarly to the clerk, then took a key and headed toward the elevator.

“Are you renting a room here? How extravagant of you.”

“Not really. The rates are reasonable, so I use this place now and then to do some work.”

“What sort of work, pray tell?” said Ibuki mockingly, solemn-faced.

Mikamé twirled the large key-chain. “Writing. If I rented an actual apartment, the hospital would never leave off calling. This is my hideout.”

They stepped off the elevator on the seventh floor and found a hotel maid waiting for them.

Mikamé led the way, striding briskly down a dim, unadorned central corridor that suggested a hospital with its rows of identical gray doors. At the end of the corridor was a red light marked “Exit.” They rounded the corner, and the maid unlocked the second door they came to.

Beyond the door was a neat, compact room furnished with a chair that was the same orange as the carpeting and a single bed next to the wall. As he joked with the maid, Mikamé took off his overcoat and dropped his big briefcase heavily on the bed.

“This is full of writing paper.”

Ibuki grunted in acknowledgment and turned toward the window, the thought crossing his mind that to move immediately toward the window upon entering a strange room is probably a universal human reflex. It might not be a bad idea to bring Yasuko to a place like this, he mused.

He looked down on a narrow, pockmarked alleyway lined on either side with boxlike office buildings devoid of any softness or curvature, so tightly pressed together that the street seemed like the bottom of a deep canyon.

Sand and white and slate blue and gray, the façades of the buildings were each marked, like human faces, with the signs of their years.

It seemed to be quitting time. Human figures moved busily to and fro in the windows of all the buildings.

To the right was a building shaped in a cube like a child’s toy block, its high clock tower rising against a bank of gray clouds, the round glass dial glittering like polished brass in the light of the setting sun.

“Look down there,” said Mikamé, tapping Ibuki on the shoulder with the hand in which he held a cigarette. Ibuki looked, and saw at the bottom of the street canyon a crowd of men and women wearing coats, streaming forth
one after another like objects struck from a mold and walking off silently at the same unvarying speed.

“Quitting time.”

“Yes, the liberation of the office worker. They don’t look all that happy about it, do they?”

“From up here they all look so small and proper.”

“The effect of distance.”

“It’s hard to imagine much crime taking place.”

“I’ll tell you what’s fun about staying here—watching this little back street from morning till night. I did it once. When you get up around six, the pavement is clean and deserted. The first ones out are the vagrants. See over on that corner, the construction site? They come and rummage for food scraps by the bunkhouse, and then they fix themselves a meal; some of them bring their dogs. After that come the cleaning women, and then the young men and women who work in the offices. By nine o’clock almost everyone in that building across the way has clocked in. They go back and forth all morning long, shuffling papers and looking busy, and then at noon the action shifts to the rooftops. Everyone goes up there to exercise, or just to stand and talk—men with men, mostly, and women with women. And here you have quitting time.”

“It must be deserted at night.”

“No pedestrians, just cars, and not many of them. The only building on the street with lights in the windows is this hotel.”

“Do you bring women here?” asked Ibuki, sitting again in the chair.

“Sometimes. But when you use just one hotel, there’s a practical limit to that sort of thing. It has to be someone totally respectable, if you know what I mean.” He slapped his thigh and, looking sideways at Ibuki, said, “Now there’s the perfect type—someone like Yasuko.”

Ibuki gave him a wry smile. He was glad Mikamé had shown him this geometric neighborhood with its neat files of silent office workers whose lives were measured so precisely by the clock; in his obsession with Mieko and Yasuko Toganō he had lately grown fearful of losing his sense of time completely.

He took a sip of the coffee the maid had brought in. “So tell me—what have you found out about Mieko Toganō?”

“All right. This is from her doctor, who happens to be a friend of my father’s.”

Mikamé never could tell a story without improving on it, thought Ibuki, resigning himself to considerable embroidery and exaggeration in what was to come.

Mikamé’s account began back in the time when the Toganō family were wealthy landowners, proprietors of thousands of hectares of farmland in what was now Niigata Prefecture. The estate had been so vast that the head of the family, asked by a fellow member of the House of Peers what the total area was, admitted that he did not know. In any case, it was indeed an enormous tract, so large that one could walk mile after mile in any direction and never set foot on another man’s property. In the Tokugawa era the Toganōs had, of course, enjoyed the privilege of bearing surnames and carrying swords; their sons and daughters had married only the children or kin of feudal lords, upper-class samurai, or priests of influential shrines or temples. They were believed to have descended from a powerful clan in line to become feudal lords, but who had chosen substance over honor by preferring to keep the title to their own lands. The Toganōs’ relations with the many hundreds of tenant farmers on their land had been maintained strictly according to the feudal code. Domestic servants were recruited from tenant families, and by custom,
every Toganō male of a certain age was entitled to choose a good-looking tenant girl to serve him as maid and mistress. This method of dealing with women endured for centuries across many generations of Toganō men, who lived six months of the year buried under snow, shut off from the outside world; and the custom did not vanish at the mere uprooting of a man from his native place, for it reached even as far as Mieko’s husband, Masatsugu. When he married Mieko and brought her to the house in Meguro, Masatsugu had already installed there a young housemaid from the country by the name of Aguri.

Mieko, a beautiful young woman of little worldly experience, who had lived in Tokyo with relatives while attending Ochanomizu Girls’ School, was unquestionably everything Masatsugu wanted in a wife, but there had seemed to him no inconsistency between his marriage to Mieko, on the one hand, and his love for Aguri, on the other.

Twice Aguri conceived a child, once before Mieko arrived and again shortly after, but each time Masatsugu saved appearances by arranging for an abortion. However desperately Aguri might have wanted to bear the children, she had no choice but to obey when given an order from her lover and master.

To such a house, where a woman of such desperate wounds lived, Mieko came as a bride of nineteen.

Uninhibited by the restrictions that living with his parents would have imposed, Masatsugu made love to his new wife openly, as if her bashfulness had given him particular delight. There were occasions, she later realized, when Aguri would have seen them together, but at the time she never suspected what steely eyes were turned on her.

In less than a year, Mieko became pregnant. Full of joy, Masatsugu and Mieko informed his parents, but their happiness
ended abruptly when in the third month she suffered a miscarriage. The apparent cause of the mishap was a fall down a flight of stairs; her strength was slow to return, and she lingered in the hospital a long while.

The doctor who had twice attended Aguri was Mikamé’s father’s friend, and it was he who attended Mieko after her accident as well. According to a nurse who spoke with Mieko’s maid in the hospital, just as Mieko started down the stairs, the hem of her kimono caught on a protruding nail. She tripped and lay dangling helplessly on the staircase. More than the loss of her child, more than the long hospital stay, it seemed that the most terrible part of the ordeal for Mieko had been her memory of Aguri, poised as if waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

While Mieko was in the hospital, a number of visitors brought word to her and her family about Masatsugu’s secret involvement with Aguri. At first, Mieko’s mother sought indignantly to reclaim her daughter, but Masatsugu’s family would not permit it; in the end Aguri was sent home to the country, Masatsugu apologized to Mieko and her mother, and Mieko again took her place in the Toganō family.