The Sound of the Mountain (6 page)

‘That’s not kind of you.’

Shingo had thought, the time before, that Eiko had been a little off balance, a little giddy perhaps; and that had been too sanguine a view. The point was rather that he had been stiff and clumsy himself.

‘Well, let’s go again. This time I’ll lean forward and hang on to you.’

She looked down and laughed. ‘I’d be delighted. But not tonight. Not in these clothes.’

‘No, not tonight.’

She was wearing a white blouse and had a white ribbon in her hair.

It was not unusual for her to wear a white blouse. Possibly the white ribbon, a fairly broad one, made it look whiter. Her hair was knotted tightly at the back. She was, one might say, dressed for a storm.

The hairline was fresh and clean, tracing a curve behind her ears. The hair stood out cleanly against the fair skin it normally covered.

She had on a thin wool skirt of navy blue. It was somewhat worn.

When she was so dressed, the smallness of her breasts did not matter.

‘Has Shuichi asked you out again?’

‘No.’

‘What a pity. The young man keeps his distance because you go dancing with his father.’

‘I’ll have to ask
him
to go out.’

‘And so I needn’t worry?’

‘If you insist on making fun of me, I’ll have to refuse to go dancing with you.’

‘I’m not making fun of you. But I haven’t been able to look you in the eye since you began noticing him.’

She reacted with silence.

‘I suppose you know Shuichi’s woman.’

This time she registered confusion.

‘A dancer?’

There was no reply.

‘Is she older?’

‘Older? She’s older than his wife.’

‘And good-looking?’

‘Yes, very good-looking.’ She stumbled over the words, but continued: ‘She has a husky voice. No, not so much husky as broken, you might say. In two parts. He finds it very erotic.’

‘Well!’

She seemed about to go on. He did not want to listen.

He felt ashamed for himself, and he felt a revulsion, as if the true nature of Shuichi’s woman and of Eiko herself were about to emerge.

He was taken aback by this initial observation, about the eroticism in the woman’s voice. There had been bad taste on Shuichi’s part, of course, but what about Eiko herself?

Noting the displeasure on his face, Eiko fell silent.

That night too Shuichi went home with Shingo. When they had closed the shutters the four of them went out to see a movie version of the Kabuki play
Kanjincho
.

As Shuichi took off his undershirt, changing to go to the movie, Shingo saw red marks high on his chest and shoulder. Had Kikuko left them there during the storm?

The principal actors in the film, Koshiro and Uzaemon and Kikugoro, were all dead.

Shingo’s feelings were different from those of Kikuko and Shuichi.

‘I wonder how many times we saw Koshiro do Benkei,’ said Yasuko.

‘I forget.’

‘Yes, you always forget.’

The town was bright in the moonlight. Shingo looked up at the sky.

The moon was in a blaze. Or so, just then, it seemed to Shingo.

The clouds around the moon made him think of the flames behind Acala in a painting, or a painting of a fox-spirit. They were coiling, twisted clouds.

But the clouds, and the moon too, were cold and faintly white. Shingo felt autumn come over him.

The moon, high in the east, was almost full. It lay in a blaze of clouds, it was dimmed by them.

There were no other clouds near the blaze in which the moon lay. In a single night after the storm the sky had turned a deep black.

The shops were shuttered. The town too had taken on a melancholy aspect in the course of the night. People were on their way home from the movie through silent, deserted streets.

‘I couldn’t sleep last night. I’m going to bed early.’ Shingo felt a lonely chill pass over him, and a yearning for human warmth.

And it was as if a crucial moment had come, as if a decision were forcing itself upon him.

‘The gingko is sending out shoots again,’ said Kikuko.

‘You’ve only just noticed?’ said Shingo. ‘I’ve been watching it for some time now.’

‘But you always sit facing it, Father.’

Kikuko, who sat so that Shingo saw her in profile, was looking at the gingko behind her.

The places of the four as they took their meals had in the course of time become fixed.

Shingo sat facing east. On his left was Yasuko, facing south, and on his right Shuichi, who faced north. Kikuko, facing west, sat opposite Shingo.

Since the garden was to the south and east, it might be said that the old people occupied the better places. And the women’s places were the convenient ones for serving.

At times other than meals, they had come to occupy the same fixed places.

So it was that Kikuko always had the gingko behind her.

Yet Shingo was troubled: that she had not noticed unseasonal buds on the great tree suggested a certain emptiness.

‘But you ought to notice when you open the shutters or go out to clean the veranda,’ he said.

‘I suppose that’s true.’

‘Of course it is. And you’re facing it when you come in the gate. You have to look at it whether you want to or not. Do you have so much on your mind that you come in looking at the ground?’

‘This will never do.’ Kikuko gave her shoulders that slight, beautiful shrug. ‘I’ll be very careful from now on to notice everything you do and imitate it.’

For Shingo, there was a touch of sadness in the remark. ‘This won’t do either.’

In all his life no woman had so loved him as to want him to notice everything she did.

Kikuko continued to gaze in the direction of the gingko. ‘And some of the trees up the mountain are putting out new leaves.’

‘So they are. I wonder if they lost their leaves in the typhoon.’

The mountain in Shingo’s garden was cut off by the shrine precincts, a level stretch just above. The gingko lay at the boundary, but from Shingo’s breakfast room it looked as if it were yet higher.

It had been stripped bare on the night of the storm.

The gingko and the cherry were the trees left bare by the wind.

Since they were the larger of the trees around the house, they were perhaps good targets for the storm. Or was it that their leaves were especially vulnerable?

The cherry had had a few drooping leaves even after the storm, but it had shed them since, and now stood quite naked.

The leaves of the bamboo up the mountain had withered, perhaps because, with the ocean so near, the wind had brought in salt spray. Stalks of bamboo had broken off and blown into the garden.

The great gingko was again sending out buds.

Shingo faced it as he turned up the lane from the main street, and every day on his way home he looked at it. He also saw it from the breakfast room.

‘The gingko has a sort of strength that the cherry doesn’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking the ones that live long are different from the others. It must take a great deal of strength for an old tree like that to put out leaves in the fall.’

‘But there’s something sad about them.’

‘I’ve been wondering whether they’d be as big as the leaves that came out in the spring, but they refuse to grow.’

Besides being small, the leaves were scattered, too few to hide the branches. They seemed thin, and they were a pale yellowish color, insufficiently green.

It was as if the autumn sun fell on a gingko that was, after all, naked.

The trees in the shrine precincts were mostly evergreen. They seemed to be strong against wind and rain, and were quite undamaged. Above the luxuriant evergreens was the pale green of new leaves. Kikuko had just discovered them.

Yasuko had come in through the back gate. He heard running water. She said something, but, over the sound of water, he could not make out what.

‘What did you say?’ he shouted.

Kikuko helped him. ‘She says that the bush clover is blooming very nicely.’

‘Oh?’

Kikuko passed on another message. ‘And she says that the pampas grass is putting out plumes.’

‘Oh?’

Yasuko had something more to say.

‘Oh, be quiet. I can’t hear you.’

‘I’ll be happy to interpret.’ On the edge of laughter, Kikuko looked down.

‘Interpret? It’s just an old woman talking to herself.’

‘She says she dreamed last night that the house in Shinano was going to pieces.’

“Oh?”

‘And what is your answer?’

‘I said “Oh,” and that’s all I have to say.’

The sound of water stopped. Yasuko called Kikuko.

‘Put these in water, please, Kikuko. They were so beautiful that I had to break some off. But you take care of them, please.’

‘Let me show them to Father first.’

She came in with an armful of bush clover and pampas grass.

Yasuko had evidently washed her hands and then moistened a Shigaraki vase, which she brought in.

‘The amaranth next door is a beautiful color too,’ she said as she sat down.

‘There is amaranth by the house with the sunflowers,’ said Shingo, remembering that those remarkable sunflowers had been knocked down in the storm.

Blossoms had lain in the street, broken off with six inches or so of stem. They had been there for several days, like severed human heads.

First the petals withered, and then the stems dried and turned dirty and gray.

Shingo had to step over them on his way to and from work. He did not like to look at them.

The bases of the stems stood leafless by the gate.

Beside them, five or six stalks of amaranth were taking on color.

‘But there aren’t any around here like the ones next door,’ said Yasuko.

It was her family house that Yasuko had dreamed of.

It had been unoccupied for several years now, since her parents’ death.

Apparently meaning Yasuko to succeed to the family name,
^*
her father had sent his older daughter out in marriage. It should have been the opposite for a father who favored his older daughter, but, with so many men asking for the hand of her beautiful sister, he had probably felt sorry for Yasuko.

Perhaps, therefore, he gave up hope for Yasuko when, after her sister’s death, she went to work in the house into which the sister had married, and seemed intent upon taking her place. Perhaps he felt a certain guilt because parents and family had made her feel so inclined.

Yasuko’s marriage to Shingo seemed to please him.

He decided to live out his years with no family heir.

Shingo was now older than the father had been when he gave Yasuko in marriage.

Yasuko’s mother had died first, and the fields had all been sold when the father died, leaving only the house and a modest amount of forest land. There were no heirlooms of any importance.

The remaining property was in Yasuko’s name, but the management had been turned over to a country relative. The forests had probably been cut down to pay taxes. It had been many years since Yasuko had last had either income or expenses related to the country place.

There was a prospective buyer when, during the war, the countryside was crowded with refugees, but Yasuko felt nostalgic about the house, and Shingo did not press her.

It was in that house that they had been married. In return for giving his only surviving daughter in marriage, the father had asked that the ceremony be held in his house.

A chestnut fell as they were exchanging marriage cups. It struck a large stone in the garden, and, because of the angle, rebounded a very long way and fell into a brook. The rebound was so extraordinary that Shingo was on the point of calling out in surprise. He looked around the room.

No one else seemed to have noticed.

The next day Shingo went down to hunt for it. He found several chestnuts at the edge of the water. He could not be sure he had the one that had fallen during the ceremony; but he picked one up, thinking to tell Yasuko of it.

But then he decided that he was being childish. And would Yasuko, and others to whom he might speak of it, believe him?

He threw it into a clump of grass by the water.

It was less fear that Yasuko would not believe him than shyness before her brother-in-law that kept him from speaking.

Had the brother-in-law not been present, Shingo might have spoken of it at the ceremony the day before. In the presence of her brother-in-law, he felt a constraint very like shame.

He had certain feelings of guilt for having continued to be drawn to the sister even after she was married, and the sister’s death and Yasuko’s marriage had disturbed her brother-in-law.

For Yasuko, the feelings of shame must have been even stronger. One might say that, pretending not to know her real feelings, her sister’s widower had used her as a convenient substitute for a maid.

It was natural that, as a relative, he should be invited to Yasuko’s wedding. Very uncomfortable all the same. Shingo found it difficult to look at him.

The brother-in-law was a handsome man who quite outshone the bride. It seemed to Shingo that there was a peculiar radiance in his part of the room.

To Yasuko, her sister and brother-in-law were inhabitants of a dream world. In marrying her, Shingo had tacitly descended to her own lower rank.

He felt as if her brother-in-law were coldly looking down on the wedding from an elevation.

And the blank left by his failure to speak of so small a thing as the falling chestnut probably stayed on in their marriage.

When Fusako was born, Shingo secretly hoped that she might be a beauty like her aunt. He could not speak of this hope to his wife. But Fusako proved to be even homelier than Yasuko.

As Shingo would have put it, the blood of the older sister had failed to flow through the younger. He was disappointed in Yasuko.

Three or four days after Yasuko dreamed of the house in the country, a telegram came from a relative saying that Fusako had arrived with her two children.