The Sound of the Mountain (24 page)

‘A great many children were left behind by men who died in the war, and a great many mothers were left to suffer. Think of it as if he had gone off into the islands and left behind a half-breed. Women bring up children that men have forgotten long ago.’

‘The matter has to do with Shuichi’s child.’

‘I can’t see that it makes any difference as long as I don’t mean to bother you. I won’t come crying to you, I swear I won’t. And Shuichi and I have separated.’

‘The child will live for a long time. The bond with its father will last after you think you’ve cut it.’

‘The child is not Shuichi’s.’

‘You must know that Shuichi’s wife did not have
her
child.’

‘She can have as many as she wants, and if she has none the regrets are hers. Do you think a pampered wife can understand how I feel?’

‘And you do not know how Kikuko feels.’

In spite of himself, Shingo spoke the name.

‘Did Shuichi send you around?’ She set upon him like an inquisitor. ‘He told me I was not to have the child, and beat me and stamped on me and kicked me and dragged me downstairs to try to get me to a doctor. It was a fine show, and I think we have acquitted ourselves of our duty to his wife.’

Shingo smiled bitterly.

‘It really was quite a display, wasn’t it?’ she said to the Ikeda woman, who nodded.

‘Kinu is already collecting scraps that she thinks might do as diapers.’

‘I went to the doctor afterwards because I thought the kicking might have injured the child. I told Shuichi it was not his. It most definitely is not yours, I said. And with that we separated. He hasn’t been here since.’

‘Another man’s, then?’

‘Take it so, and that will be that.’

Kinu looked up. She had been weeping for some time, and there were new tears on her face.

Even now, at the end of his resources, Shingo thought the woman beautiful. On close examination her features were not perfect; but the first impression was of beauty all the same.

Despite the apparent softness, she was not a woman to let Shingo come near.

His head bowed, Shingo left Kinu’s house.

Kinu had accepted the check he had offered her.

‘If you’re leaving Shuichi it might be better to take it.’ Mrs Ikeda had been very direct, and Kinu had nodded.

‘So you’re buying me off. That’s the sort of thing I’ve come to. Shall I give you a receipt?’

As he got into a cab, Shingo wondered whether it might not be better to effect a reconciliation between Shuichi and the woman. An abortion might still be possible. Or should the separation be considered final?

Kinu had been antagonized by Shuichi and now by Shingo’s visit. Her longing for a child seemed unshakable.

It would be dangerous to push Shuichi toward the woman again; and yet as matters stood the child would be born.

Kinu had said that it belonged to another man. Not even Shuichi could be sure. If Kinu made the assertion out of pride and Shuichi was prepared to believe her, then the world might be described as in order. There need be no further complications. Yet the child would be a fact. Shingo would die, and he would have a grandson on whom he had never laid eyes.

‘And so?’ he muttered.

In some haste, they had submitted the divorce notice after Aihara’s attempt at suicide. In effect, Shingo had taken in his daughter and two grandchildren. If Shuichi and his woman were to part, another child would remain, out in the world somewhere. Were they not but a clouding-over of the moment, these two solutions that were no solutions?

He had contributed to no one’s happiness.

On a different level, he did not like to think of the ineptness with which he had faced Kinu.

He had intended to take a train home from Tokyo Central Station, but, coming upon the friend’s card, he took a cab instead to the Tsukiji geisha district.

He hoped to ask advice of the friend. The latter was getting drunk with two geisha, however, and there was no opportunity.

Shingo thought of a young geisha who had once sat on his lap. It had been after a party, and they had been in an automobile. He called her again tonight. When she arrived the friend made a number of not very interesting remarks: that Shingo was not to be underestimated, that he had a good eye, and the like. It was rather an achievement for Shingo, who could not remember the girl’s face, to have remembered her name. She proved to be winsome and elegant.

Shingo went into a small room with her, but did nothing out of the ordinary.

Soon he found her face pressed gently against his chest. He thought she was being coquettish, but she seemed in fact to have gone to sleep.

He looked inquiringly down at her. She was too near for him to see her face.

He smiled. There was warm comfort in having a young girl peacefully asleep in one’s arms. She was still in her teens, four or five years younger than Kikuko.

Perhaps there was in his feelings a touch of pity at the plight of the prostitute. In any case, he felt himself bathed in a soft repose, the repose of sleeping with a young girl.

Happiness, he thought, might be just such a matter of the fleeting instant.

He considered vaguely the fact that in sex too there were riches and poverty, good luck and bad. Slipping away, he caught the last train home.

Yasuko and Kikuko were waiting up in the breakfast room. It was past one.

‘Shuichi?’ asked Shingo, avoiding Kikuko’s eyes.

‘He’s already in bed.’

‘Oh? And Fusako?’

‘She’s in bed too.’ Kikuko was putting away his suit for him. ‘The good weather managed to hold out, but it seems to have clouded over again.’

‘Oh? I hadn’t noticed.’

As she stood up, she lost her hold on the suit. She straightened the trousers again.

Shingo noticed that her hair was shorter. She seemed to have been to the beauty parlor.

With Yasuko breathing heavily beside him, he slept fitfully. Soon he had a dream.

He was a young army officer in uniform. He had a sword at his hip, and three pistols. The sword seemed to be the family heirloom that Shuichi had taken off to the war.

Shingo was walking a mountain path. He had a woodcutter with him.

‘The roads are dangerous at night. I seldom go out,’ said the woodcutter. ‘You would do well to walk on the right.’

Shingo felt uneasy as he moved to the right. He turned on a flashlight. Diamonds glittered around the edge, making it brighter than most flashlights. A dark form loomed up in the darkness – two or three cedars, one against another. But he looked more carefully and saw instead a great cluster of mosquitoes in the shape of a tree trunk. What to do, he wondered. Cut his way through. He took out his sword and hacked away at the mosquitoes.

Looking back, he saw that the woodcutter was in headlong flight. Here and there flames were shooting from Shingo’s uniform. The strange thing was that there were two Shingos. Another Shingo was watching the Shingo along whose uniform the flames were creeping. The flames licked the sleeves and the shoulder seam and the hem of the tunic, and disappeared again. It was less that they blazed up than that they came and went like wisps from a charcoal fire, giving forth tiny noises.

Shingo was finally at home. It seemed to be his childhood home, in Shinshu. Yasuko’s beautiful sister was there. Though exhausted, Shingo felt no itching from the mosquitoes.

The woodcutter who had fled in such haste also made his way to Shingo’s old home. He fell unconscious as he stepped through the door.

From his body they took a great bucketful of mosquitoes.

Shingo did not know by what process this was accomplished, but he could see the piling up of mosquitoes in the bucket as he awakened.

‘A mosquito in the net?’ He listened carefully, but his head was heavy.

It was raining.

As autumn came on and the full weariness of summer overtook him, Shingo would sometimes go to sleep on his way home from work.

During rush hours there were trains on the Yokosuka Line every fifteen minutes. The second-class car was not crowded.

In his mind, as he dozed off lightly, was a row of acacia trees in bloom. Not long before, he had passed under the trees that now came to him, and he had marveled, as he looked up, that even in Tokyo rows of acacias came into bloom. It had been on the street leading from the foot of Kudan Hill toward the Palace moat. It had been a damp, drizzly day in mid-August. A single acacia in the row had scattered its flowers on the sidewalk. Why should that be, he had asked, looking back from the cab. The picture was still in his mind. The flowers had been delicate ones, pale yellow tinged with green. Even had there not been the single tree shedding its flowers, the fact of the row of flowering trees would no doubt have left its impression. He had been on his way from a hospital, where he had visited a friend dying of liver cancer.

Although they had been college classmates, the man was not one whom Shingo saw regularly. He was in an advanced state of emaciation and had with him only a nurse.

Shingo did not know whether or not his wife was still living.

‘Do you ever see Miyamoto?’ asked the friend. ‘Even if you don’t have a chance to see him, would you mind telephoning and asking about it?’

‘About what?’

‘You remember. What we talked about at the class reunion. At New Year’s.’

Shingo remembered. It had been about potassium cyanide. The friend apparently knew that he had cancer.

At a gathering of men in their sixties, talk of senile disabilities and mortal ailments tended to loom large in the conversation. Knowing that Miyamoto’s factory made use of potassium cyanide, someone had said that, should he perhaps fall victim to an inoperable cancer, he would hope to be given a dose of the poison. To prolong the hideous ailment would only bring meaningless suffering. And, when a person knew he was doomed to die, he would at least wish to choose his own time.

Shingo had trouble finding an answer. ‘But we were in our cups, after all,’ he said.

‘I won’t use it. I won’t use it. I just want to have the freedom of choice we were talking about. I think I’ll be able to stand the pain if only I know I have a way of being rid of it. You understand, don’t you? It’s all I have – call it my last liberty, my only way of resisting. But I promise you that I won’t use it.’

A certain fire came into the man’s eyes as he spoke. The nurse, who was knitting a white woolen sweater, said nothing.

Unable to make the request of Miyamoto, Shingo had dropped the matter; but he did not like to think that a man who would soon die might still be depending on him.

At a certain remove from the hospital, the acacia trees, Shingo found, somehow brought relief. And now, as he dozed off on the train, the same row of trees appeared before him. The sick man had not left his mind.

He went to sleep, and when he opened his eyes the train had stopped.

It was not in a station.

The roar as a Tokyo-bound train passed had been more startling with Shingo’s train stopped. Probably it had awakened him.

Shingo’s train would move forward a little and stop, move forward a little and stop.

A group of children were running down a narrow road toward the train.

Several passengers were leaning out the windows and looking ahead.

Outside the left window was the concrete wall of a factory, a dirty, stagnant ditch between it and the train. The stench flooded in through the window.

To the right was the road along which the children were running. A dog stood motionless by the road, its nose in the green grass.

At the point where the road met the tracks there were two or three little huts, the cracks nailed over with old boards. From a window that was no more than a square hole a girl who seemed to be feeble-minded was beckoning to the train. Her motions were weak and languid.

‘The train that left just before us seems to have had an accident in Tsurumi Station,’ said the conductor. ‘It is stopped there. We must apologize for keeping you waiting.’

The foreigner opposite Shingo shook the Japanese boy sleeping beside him and asked in English what the conductor had said.

Holding the large arm of the foreigner in his hands, the boy had been sleeping with his head on the other’s shoulder. In the same position after opening his eyes, he looked up coquettishly. His eyes were somewhat inflamed, and ringed with dark circles. His hair was dyed red, but had grown out black at the roots, to make it a dirty brown. Only the tips were that strange reddish color. Shingo suspected that the boy was a male prostitute who specialized in foreigners.

The boy turned the hand on the foreigner’s knee palm up, and pressed it gently with his own, for all the world like a satisfied woman.

The foreigner’s arms, below the short sleeves, made one think of a shaggy red bear. Though the boy was not particularly small, he looked like a child beside the giant foreigner. The latter’s arms were heavy, his neck thick. Perhaps because he found it too much trouble to turn his head, he appeared quite unaware of the boy clinging to him. He had a fierce countenance, and his florid robustness made the muddy quality of the boy’s weary face stand out more.

The ages of foreigners are not easy to guess. The large bald head, the wrinkles at the throat, and the blotches on the bare arms, however, made Shingo suspect that the man’s age was not too far from his own. That such a man should come to a foreign country and appropriate a boy for himself – Shingo suddenly felt as if he were faced with a monster. The boy had on a maroon shirt, open at the throat to reveal a bony chest.

He would soon be dead, thought Shingo, averting his eyes.

The foul ditch was lined with green weeds. Still the train did not move.

Shingo found mosquito nets heavy and oppressive. He was no longer using one.

Yasuko complained of the deprivation every night and would make a great ceremony of swatting mosquitoes.