The Sound of the Mountain (21 page)

The electric razor, it might have been said, did the honors in place of the awkward greetings that would otherwise have been exchanged between Kikuko, absent without leave, and the family of Shuichi, by whom she had been driven to an abortion.

Fusako too smiled happily, getting the children into their new dresses and praising the good taste of the embroidery at the necklines. Having mastered the instruction booklet, Shingo gave the razor a trial.

The inquiring eyes of the whole family were upon him.

He moved his chin over the razor, the instruction booklet in his other hand. ‘It says here that it does well too with the downy hair at the nape of a lady’s neck.’ His eyes met Kikuko’s.

The hairline at her forehead was very beautiful. It seemed to him that he had not really seen it before. It drew a delicately graceful curve.

The division between the fine skin and the even, rich hair was sharp and clean.

For some reason the cheeks of the otherwise wan face were slightly flushed. Her eyes were shining happily.

‘Father has a nice new toy,’ said Yasuko.

‘It’s not a toy,’ said Shingo. ‘It’s a finely tooled product of modern civilization. A precision instrument. It has a number, and it’s initialed by technicians for the trial and the adjustment and the final inspection.’

In fine spirits, Shingo tried shaving with and against the grain.

‘You won’t cut yourself or give yourself a rash, I’m told,’ said Kikuko, ‘and you don’t need soap and water.’

‘An old man is always getting his razor caught in wrinkles. It will do nicely for you too.’ He offered the razor to Yasuko.

But Yasuko pulled back as if in fright. ‘If you think I have whiskers, you’re quite mistaken,’ she said.

He looked at the blades, and put on his glasses and looked again. ‘They don’t move. I wonder how it cuts. The motor revolves, but the blades don’t move.’

‘Let me see.’ Shuichi reached for the razor, but passed it on immediately to Yasuko.

‘It’s true. The blades don’t seem to move. Maybe it’s like a vacuum cleaner. You know how a vacuum cleaner sucks in dirt.’

‘Can you tell where the whiskers go?’ asked Shingo. Kikuko looked down and smiled.

‘Suppose we give a vacuum cleaner in return for the electric razor. Or a washing machine – that would do too. It would be a help to Kikuko.’

Shingo agreed with his old wife.

‘We don’t have a single finely tooled product of modern civilization in this house. Every year you say you’ll buy a refrigerator, and it’s time for one again this year. And toasters. There are toasters that turn off automatically and send the bread flying when it’s done.’

‘An old wife’s views on domestic electrification?’

‘You are very fond of Kikuko, and a lot of good it does her.’

Shingo unplugged the electric razor. There were two brushes in the case. One was like a small toothbrush, the other like a small bottle brush. He gave them a try. Cleaning the hole behind the blades with the bottle brush, he looked down and saw that very short white hairs were falling on his knee. He could see only white hairs.

He slapped them from his knee.

Shingo at once bought a vacuum cleaner.

It struck him as amusing that, before breakfast, his electric razor and Kikuko’s vacuum cleaner should be buzzing along together.

Perhaps he was hearing the sound of renewal in the house.

Satoko trailed after Kikuko, fascinated with the cleaner.

It may have been because of the electric razor that Shingo had a dream of chin-whiskers.

He was not a participant but a spectator. In a dream, however, the division between the two is not clear. It took place in America, where Shingo had never been. Shingo suspected that he had dreamed of America because the combs Kikuko had brought back were American.

In his dream, there were states in which the English were most numerous, and states in which the Spanish prevailed. Accordingly, each state had its own characteristic whiskers. He could not clearly remember, after he awoke, how the color and shape of the beards had differed, but in his dream he had clearly recognized differences in color, which is to say in racial origins, from state to state. In one state, the name of which he could not remember, there appeared a man who had gathered in his one person the special characteristics of all the states and origins. It was not that all the various whiskers were mixed in together on his chin. It was rather that the French variety would be set off from an Indian beard, each in its proper place. Varied tufts of whiskers, each for a different state and racial origin, hung in sprays from his chin.

The American government designated the beard a national monument; and so he could not of his own free will cut or dress it.

That was the whole of the dream. Looking at the wondrous assortment of colors in the beard, Shingo half felt that it was his own. Somehow he felt the man’s pride and confusion as his own.

The dream had had scarcely any plot. He had just seen a bearded man.

The beard was of course a long one. Perhaps it was because he shaved his own face clean every morning that he had dreamed of that unfettered beard. He liked the idea of its becoming a national monument.

A naïve, uncomplicated dream, and he looked forward to telling it in the morning. He woke to the sound of rain, however, and, shortly going back to sleep, woke again, this time from an unpleasant dream.

His hands were against drooping, vaguely pointed breasts. They remained soft, refusing to rise. The woman was refusing to respond. All very stupid.

Even though he was touching her breasts, he did not know who the woman was. It was not so much that he did not know as that he did not seek to find out. She had no face and no body; just two breasts floating in space. Asking for the first time who she was, he saw that she had become the younger sister of a friend of Shuichi’s; but the recognition brought neither excitement nor feelings of guilt. The impression that it was the sister was a fleeting one. She remained a dim figure. Her breasts were those of a woman who had not had children, but Shingo did not think she was a virgin. He was startled to find traces of her purity on his finger. He felt disconcerted, but not especially guilty.

‘We can say that she was an athlete,’ he muttered. Startled at the remark, he awoke.

‘All very stupid’ – he recognized Mori Ogai’s
^*
dying words. It seemed he had once read them in a newspaper.

But it had probably been an evasion on his part, waking from an unpleasant dream, to think first of Mori Ogai’s dying words and then to tie them to the dream.

The Shingo of the dream had felt neither delight nor affection, nor even wantonness. All very stupid indeed. And a dreary way to wake up.

He had not sought to assault the girl. Perhaps he had been about to. Had he assaulted her, trembling with love or terror, the dream would have had more life after he waked.

He thought of wanton dreams he had had in recent years. They had generally been of women he would have to call coarse and vulgar. So it had been tonight. Was it that even in a dream he feared adultery?

He remembered the friend’s sister as having full breasts. Before Shuichi married there had been some not-very-serious talk of arranging a marriage with her, and the two had kept company.

A bolt flashed across his mind.

Had not the girl in the dream been an incarnation of Kikuko, a substitute for her? Had not moral considerations after all had their way even in his dream, had he not borrowed the figure of the girl as a substitute for Kikuko? And, to coat over the unpleasantness, to obscure the guilt, had he not made her a less attractive girl than she was?

And might it not be that, if his desires were given free rein, if he could remake his life as he wished, he would want to love the virgin Kikuko, before she was married to Shuichi?

Suppressed and twisted, the subconscious wish had taken an unlovable form in his dream. Even in the dream, had he sought to hide it, to deceive himself?

That he had transferred it to the girl who had been talked of for Shuichi, that he had given her an elusive, uncertain form – was it not because he feared in the extreme having the woman be Kikuko?

And the fact that, upon awakening, he had difficulty remembering it, that his companion in the dream, and the plot as well, was blurred, and the fact that there had been no pleasure in the hand against the breast – might these be because, at the moment of awakening, a certain cunning went adroitly to work at erasing the dream?

‘A dream. And the national monument was a dream too. Don’t put faith in what dreams decide for you.’ He wiped his face with the palm of his hand.

The dream had had a chilling effect, but when he woke Shingo was bathed in a disagreeable sweat.

The rain which after the dream of whiskers had been only enough to tell him that it was rain was now driven by a wind, and beating against the house. The dampness seemed to come up through the floor mats. It had the sound of a rain, however, that would have its brief rampage and go.

He remembered an ink wash by Watanabe Kazan
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that he had seen at a friend’s house a few days before.

It had been of a single crow at the tip of a leafless tree, and had born the legend: ‘A stubborn crow in the dawn: the rains of June. Kazan.’

Shingo thought he understood Kazan’s feelings, and the intent of the picture. The crow, high in a naked tree, bearing up under strong wind and rain, was awaiting the dawn. The storm was shown in faint ink. He did not remember the tree very well, but he thought it had been broken off, leaving only a thick trunk. He remembered the crow vividly. Perhaps from sleep, perhaps from the wind – most likely both – its feathers were somewhat ruffled. It had a heavy bill. The upper bill, blackly stained where the ink had run, was thicker and heavier than the lower. The eyes were sleepy, as if it had not yet fully awakened. Yet they were strong, and somehow angry. It was a large figure for the size of the picture.

Shingo knew of Kazan only that he had been impoverished and that he had committed suicide, but he could see that this ‘Crow in the Stormy Dawn’ gave expression to Kazan’s feelings at a certain point in his life.

No doubt the friend had put the painting up to match the season.

Shingo ventured an opinion: ‘A very strong-minded bird. Not at all likeable.’

‘Oh? I used to look at it during the war. Damned crow, I used to think. Damned crow it is. But it has a quietness about it. If Kazan had to kill himself for no better reasons than he had, then you and I probably ought to kill ourselves time after time. It’s a question of the age you live in.’

‘We waited for the dawn, too.’

The crow would be hanging in the friend’s parlor this rainy night, thought Shingo.

He wondered where his own kite and crow would be.

Unable to sleep after waking from the second dream, Shingo lay waiting for the dawn. He did not wait with the stubborn resistance of the Kazan crow, however.

Whether the woman in the dream had been Kikuko or the friend’s sister, he thought it altogether too dreary that no flicker of lust had come over him.

The dream had been uglier than any waking adultery. The ugliness of old age, might it be?

Women had left his life during the war, and had been absent since. He was not very old, but that was how it was with him. What had been killed by the war had not come to life again. It seemed too that his way of thinking was as the war had left it, pushed into a narrow kind of common sense.

He wanted to inquire among his friends whether many old men his age felt as he did. But perhaps he would but be laughed at and called weak and feckless.

What was wrong with loving Kikuko in a dream? What was there to fear, to be ashamed of, in a dream? And indeed what would be wrong with secretly loving her in his waking hours? He tried this new way of thinking.

But a
haiku
by Buson came into his mind: ‘I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.’ The gloom only grew denser.

Shuichi’s marital relations had ripened since he had taken a mistress. Since Kikuko had had her abortion, they had softened, warmed. On the night of that wild storm, Kikuko had been much more coquettish toward Shuichi than usual: on the night he had come home drunk, she had forgiven him more gently than usual.

Was she sad, or silly?

And was she aware of these facts herself? Perhaps, not alive to them, she was but giving herself in all innocence to the wonders of creation, riding the wave of life.

She had protested by not having the baby and by going back to her family, and so given expression to an unbearable loneliness; and then, returning a few days later, she had drawn closer to Shuichi, as if apologizing for some misdeed, or treating a wound.

Shingo could, if he chose, think that this too was ‘all very stupid’. But probably it was to the good.

He was even able to think that he might as well wait for the Kinu affair to settle itself.

Shuichi was his son; but were they so ideal a couple, were they so fated for each other, that Kikuko must put up with such treatment? Once he began doubting, the doubts were endless.

Not wanting to arouse Yasuko, he could not turn on the light to look at his watch; but dawn seemed to be breaking, and it would soon be time for the temple bell.

He remembered the bell at the Shinjuku Garden.

It had signaled closing time, but he had said to Kikuko: ‘It sounds like a church bell.’

He had felt as if he were making his way through some wooded park on his way to a Western church, and as if the cluster of people at the gate were also going to church.

He got up without having had enough sleep.

He left early with Shuichi. He did not want to have to face Kikuko.

Suddenly he asked: ‘Did you kill anyone during the war?’

‘I wonder. If anyone got in the way of a bullet from my machine gun, he probably died. But you might say I wasn’t shooting the machine gun.’