The Sound of the Mountain (13 page)

‘Possibly so. I’ll give it some thought myself.’

He considered her forward, but he had to agree with her.

Shingo had had no intention of asking anything of the woman named Ikeda, and he had had nothing to say to her. He had just let her talk on.

To the woman the visit must have seemed pointless. Without going so far as to seem a suppliant, Shingo should have discussed the matter candidly with her. She had done well to say as much as she had. It had been as if she were apologizing for Kinu, and doing yet something more.

Shingo felt that he should be grateful to both Eiko and Ikeda.

The visit had aroused neither doubts nor suspicions.

But, perhaps because his self-respect was on trial, he answered irritably when, going into a business dinner, a geisha whispered something in his ear.

‘What? I’m deaf, damn it. I can’t hear you.’

He clutched at her shoulder. He took his hand away immediately, but the geisha frowned with pain and rubbed at the shoulder.

‘Come out here for a minute,’ she said, reading the irritation on his face. She pressed her shoulder to his and led him to the veranda.

He was back in Kamakura at about eleven. Shuichi was not yet home.

In her room, next to the breakfast room, Fusako raised herself on an elbow and looked up at him. She was nursing her younger child.

‘Is Satoko asleep?’

‘She just now went to sleep. Mother, she said, which is bigger, a thousand yen or a million yen? Which is bigger? We laughed and laughed. Ask Grandfather when he comes home, I said. She went to sleep while she was waiting for you.’

‘If she was asking about a thousand yen before the war and a million yen since, it was a good question,’ laughed Shingo. ‘May I have a glass of water, please, Kikuko?’

‘Water? A glass of water?’ Kikuko got up, but she spoke as if it were an odd request.

‘From the well. I don’t want all those chemicals.’

‘Yes.’

‘Satoko wasn’t born before the war,’ said Fusako, still in bed. ‘I wasn’t married yet.’

‘It would be better if you hadn’t married at all, before the war or after,’ said Yasuko. They heard water being drawn at the well. ‘The pump doesn’t sound cold anymore. In the winter when Kikuko goes out early to get water for your tea, that squeaking makes me shiver even when I’m warm in bed.’

‘I’m thinking of having them live away from us,’ he said in a low voice.

‘Away from us?’

‘Don’t you think that would be better?’

‘Maybe. If Fusako is going to stay on.’

‘I’ll leave, Mother, if it’s a question of living away from you.’ Fusako got out of bed. ‘I’ll move out. Isn’t that the thing to do?’

‘It has nothing to do with you,’ Shingo half snarled at her.

‘It does have something to do with me. A great deal, in fact. When Aihara said that you made me what I am by not liking me, I almost choked. I’ve never been so hurt in my life.’

‘Control yourself, control yourself. Here you are in your thirties.’

‘I can’t control myself because I have no place to control myself in.’

Fusako brought together her night kimono over her rich breasts.

Shingo got up wearily. ‘Let’s go to bed, Granny.’

Kikuko brought his glass of water. In her other hand she had a large leaf.

‘What is it?’ he asked, drinking the water down in one breath.

‘A loquat leaf. There’s a new moon, and there was a white blur by the well. I wondered what it might be. A new loquat leaf, already this big.’

‘Very school-girlish of you,’ said Fusako sardonically.

Shingo woke to a sound as of a man’s groaning.

He was not sure whether it was a dog or a man. At first it sounded like the moaning of a dog. It would be Teru, in her death agonies. Had she been poisoned?

His heart was racing.

He held his hand to his chest. It was as though he had had a seizure.

But when he was fully awake, he knew that it was not a dog but a man. He was being throttled; his voice was thick. Shingo was in a cold sweat. Someone was being attacked.

‘Kiko-o-oh. Kiko-o-oh,’ the voice seemed to say. ‘Tell me, tell me.’ There was pain in it, the words caught in the throat and refused to take shape.

‘Kiko-o-oh. Kiko-o-oh.’

About to be killed, would he be asking his assailant’s reasons or demands?

Shingo heard someone fall against the gate. He hunched his shoulders, preparing to get up.

‘Kikuko-o-oh. Kikuko-o-oh.’

It was Shuichi calling Kikuko. His speech was muddled, and the second syllable was lost. He was dead drunk.

Exhausted, Shingo sank back on the pillow. His heart was still racing. He rubbed his chest and breathed deeply and regularly.

‘Kikuko-o-oh, Kikuko-o-oh.’

Shuichi seemed not to be knocking on the gate but falling against it.

Shingo thought he would go out after he had rested a moment.

But then he decided that that might not be the best thing to do. Shuichi seemed to be calling out in heart-broken love and in sorrow. It was the voice of one for whom there is nothing else. The groaning was like a child calling out for its mother in a moment of pain and sorrow, or of mortal fear. And it seemed to come from depths of guilt. Shuichi was calling out to Kikuko, seeking to endear himself to her, with a heart that lay cruelly naked. Perhaps, his drunkenness his excuse, he called out in a voice that begged for affection, thinking he would not be heard. And it was as if he were doing reverence to her.

‘Kikuko-o-oh, Kikuko-o-oh.’

The sadness came across to Shingo.

Had he ever himself, even once, called out to his wife in a voice filled with such hopeless love? Perhaps, unconsciously, it had in it the hopelessness of a certain moment on a foreign battlefield.

He listened on, wishing that Kikuko would awaken. At the same time he felt a little embarrassed to have his daughter-in-law hear that misery-ridden voice. He thought he would rouse Yasuko if Kikuko did not get up soon; but it would be better for Kikuko to go.

He pushed the hot-water bottle to the foot of the bed. Was it because he still had a hot-water bottle, even now in spring, that his heart raced so?

Kikuko was in charge of the bottle. He would occasionally ask her for one. The water stayed warm longer when she heated it, and the lid was secure.

Perhaps because Yasuko was stubborn, perhaps because she was healthy, she disliked hot-water bottles even at her age. She had warm feet. As late as his fifties, Shingo had still taken warmth from his wife, but now they slept apart.

She never moved to touch his hot-water bottle.

‘Kikuko-o-oh, Kikuko-o-oh.’ Again the voice came from the gate.

Shingo turned on the light by his pillow. It was almost two-thirty.

The last train on the Yokosuka line got to Kamakura before one. Shuichi had evidently held out in one of the taverns by the station.

Shingo thought, from the tone of the voice, that the end was in sight for Shuichi and the woman in Tokyo.

Kikuko went out through the kitchen.

Much relieved, Shingo turned off the light.

‘Forgive him,’ he muttered, addressing the words to Kikuko.

She seemed to be holding Shuichi up.

‘Please. You’re hurting me.’ It was Kikuko. ‘You’re pulling my hair with your left hand.’

‘Am I?’

The two of them fell down in the kitchen.

‘Steady, now. On my knees. Your legs swell when you’re drunk.’

‘My legs swell? You’re a liar.’

Kikuko seemed to be taking off his socks, his legs on her knees.

She had forgiven him. Perhaps he need not have worried. Perhaps, as his wife, she took pleasure in sometimes being able to forgive. And perhaps she had listened well to the voice.

His legs on her knees, she pulled off the socks of a husband drunk and back from visiting another woman. Shingo felt the gentleness in her.

When she had put Shuichi to bed, she went out to lock the back gate and the kitchen door.

Shuichi’s snoring was so loud that even Shingo could hear it.

Here was Shuichi, put to bed by his wife and promptly asleep; and what would be the position of the woman Kinu who, until just now, had been made his companion in ugly drunkenness? Had Shingo not heard that he drank and resorted to violence and made her weep?

And Kikuko: she had sometimes been pale and drawn because of Kinu, but the flesh at her hips had grown richer.

The snoring soon stopped, but Shingo could not get back to sleep.

He wondered if Yasuko’s snoring had been handed on to their son.

Probably not. Probably he snored tonight because he had had so much to drink.

Yasuko did not seem to snore these days. She seemed to sleep even better in cold weather.

Shingo disliked mornings after he had slept badly because his memory was worse than usual, and he was overtaken by fits of sentimentality.

It might have been sentimentality that had made him hear Shuichi’s voice as he had. Possibly it had been a voice thick from drink, nothing more. Had Shuichi hidden his discomfiture behind his drunkenness?

It also seemed to Shingo that the love and the sadness he had sensed in that fuddled voice had only been what he hoped for in his son.

Because of that voice, Shingo himself had forgiven Shuichi. And he thought that Kikuko had forgiven him. The selfishness of blood ties bore itself in on Shingo.

He thought himself good to his daughter-in-law, and yet he seemed in some respects to side with his son.

It was an ugly picture. Shuichi had drunk too much at the house of the woman in Tokyo, and come home to fall against the gate.

If Shingo himself had gone to open the gate, he probably would have glared at Shuichi, and Shuichi would have sobered up. It was better that Kikuko had gone. Shuichi had thus been able to come in hanging on her shoulder.

Kikuko the injured party was Kikuko the absolver.

How many times would Kikuko, now in her early twenties, have to forgive Shuichi before she had lived with him to the ages of Shingo and Yasuko? Would there be no limit to her forgiving?

A marriage was like a dangerous marsh, sucking in endlessly the misdeeds of the partners. Kinu’s love for Shuichi, Shingo’s love for Kikuko – would they disappear without trace in the swamp that was Shuichi’s and Kikuko’s marriage?

It seemed to Shingo quite proper that in postwar domestic law the basic unit had been changed from parent and child to husband and wife.

‘In other words, the husband–wife marsh,’ he muttered to himself. ‘They’ll have to have their own house.’

It was because of his age that he had this way of muttering what came into his mind.

The expression ‘husband–wife marsh’ meant only that a husband and wife alone, putting up with each other’s misdeeds, deepened the marsh with the years.

That was probably because the wife awoke to herself in confrontation with the husband’s misdeeds.

Shingo rubbed at an itching eyebrow.

Spring was near.

He did not dislike awakening in the night as he had during the winter.

He had awakened from a dream before Shuichi’s voice had awakened him. At the time he remembered it well, but when he was awakened the second time he had almost forgotten it.

Perhaps it was the pounding of his heart that had erased it.

He remembered only the fact that a girl fourteen or fifteen years old had an abortion, and the words: ‘And she has become a holy child forever.’

He had been reading a novel. Those were the concluding words.

He had read the novel as words, and seen the plot as a movie or play. He had not appeared in it himself. He had been completely the onlooker.

A girl who had an abortion at fourteen or fifteen and was at the same time a holy child was something of an oddity; but there had been a long story. Shingo’s dream had read a masterpiece about pure love between a boy and a girl. His feelings were still with him when he woke at the end of the reading.

Had it been that the girl did not know she was pregnant and did not think of it as an abortion, and went on longing for the boy from whom she had been separated? But such a twist in the dream would be unnatural and unclean.

A forgotten dream could not be put together again. And his feelings upon reading the novel were a dream.

The girl must have had a name, and he must have seen her face, but only her size, or more properly her smallness, remained vaguely in his mind. She seemed to have been in Japanese dress.

He asked himself whether it had been a vision of Yasuko’s beautiful sister, but decided that it could not have been.

The source of the dream was no more than an article in last night’s paper.

‘Girl Has Twins. Misguided Awakening of Spring in Aomori.’ Under the large headline was this article: ‘According to a survey by the Aomori Prefectural Public Health Service of legal abortions under the Eugenics Law, five girls fifteen years old, three girls fourteen, and one girl thirteen have undergone abortions. There have been four hundred cases of abortion among girls of high-school age, sixteen to eighteen, and of these twenty per cent have been high-school students. There has been one middle-school pregnancy in Hirosaki and one in Aomori, and there have been four in South Tsugaru District and one in North Tsugaru District. Though the girls have gone to specialists, a lack of sexual knowledge has produced the horrifying results of death in 0.2 per cent of the cases and serious illness in 2.5 per cent. The thought that others, in secret, go to their deaths at the hands of unlicensed doctors makes one tremble for “young mothers”.

Four actual cases were listed. A second-year middle-school student, fourteen years old, in North Tsugaru District, had, in February of the year before, suddenly felt the coming on of birth pangs, and borne twins. Mother and children were healthy, and the girl was back in school, now a third-year student. Her parents had not known of her pregnancy.

A high-school student in Aomori, having promised herself to a classmate, became pregnant the summer before. The parents of the two, on the grounds that they were still in school, decided upon an abortion. But the boy said: ‘We weren’t playing. We’re going to get married soon.’