The Sound of the Mountain (7 page)

Kikuko signed for the telegram and passed it on to Yasuko, who waited for Shingo to come home from the office.

‘Was something warning me in that dream?’ She was remarkably calm as she watched Shingo read the telegram.

‘Back to the country, is it?’

So she won’t kill herself – that was the first thought that came to him.

‘But why didn’t she come here?’

‘She probably thought Aihara would find out and be after her.’

‘Has anything come from Aihara?’

‘No.’

‘I suppose it’s finished, then, with Fusako taking the children, and not a word from him.’

‘But she came home the other time, and maybe she told him she was coming home again for a while. It wouldn’t be easy for him to show his face.’

‘It’s all over, whatever you say.’

‘I’m surprised that she should have had the nerve to go back to the country.’

‘Couldn’t she just as well have come here?’

‘Couldn’t she just as well – that’s not a very warm way to put it. We have to feel sorry for her, when she can’t come back to her own home. We’re parents and child, and this is what we’ve come to. I’ve been very unhappy.’

Frowning, Shingo raised his chin to untie his necktie.

‘Where’s my kimono?’

Kikuko brought a kimono, and went off silently with his suit.

Yasuko sat with bowed head while he was changing.

‘It’s not at all impossible that Kikuko will run out on us,’ she muttered, looking at the door Kikuko had closed behind her.

‘Do parents have to be responsible forever for their children’s marriages?’

‘You don’t understand women. It’s different when women are sad.’

‘And do you think a woman can understand everything about every other woman?’

‘Shuichi is away again tonight. Why can’t the two of you come home together? You come home by yourself and here is Kikuko to take care of your clothes. Is that right?’

Shingo did not answer.

‘Won’t we want to talk to him about Fusako?’

‘Shall we send him off to the country? We’ll probably have to send him for her.’

‘She might not want him to come for her. He’s always made a fool of her.’

‘There’s no point in talking about that now. We’ll send him on Saturday.’

‘We look good before the rest of the family, I must say. And here we stay away as if we never meant to have another thing to do with them. It’s strange that she should pick them to run off to, when they’ve meant so little to her.’

‘Who is taking care of her?’

‘Maybe she means to stay in the old house. She can’t stay on forever with my aunt.’

Yasuko’s aunt would be in her eighties. Yasuko had had very little to do with her or with her son, the present head of the family. Shingo could not even remember how many brothers and sisters there were.

It was unsettling to think that Fusako had fled to the house seen ruined in his dream.

On Saturday morning, Shingo and Shuichi left the house together. There was still some time before Shuichi’s train.

Shuichi came into Shingo’s office. ‘I’ll leave this with you,’ he said, handing his umbrella to Eiko.

She cocked her head inquiringly. ‘You’re off on a business trip?’

‘Yes.’

Putting down his bag, Shuichi took a seat by Shingo’s desk.

Eiko’s eye followed him. ‘Take care of yourself. It will probably be cold.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Shuichi spoke to Shingo, though he was looking at Eiko. ‘I was supposed to go dancing with the young lady this evening.’

‘Oh?’

‘Get the old man to take you.’

Eiko flushed.

Shingo did not feel inclined to comment.

Eiko picked up the bag as if she were going to see Shuichi off.

‘Please. That’s not for a lady to do.’ He snatched the bag and disappeared through the door.

Eiko made an unobtrusive little motion toward the door, and returned disconsolately to her desk. Shingo could not tell whether the gesture had been from confusion or calculation; but it had had in it a touch of the feminine that pleased him.

‘What a shame, when he promised you.’

‘I don’t put much stock in his promises these days.’

‘Shall I be a substitute?’

‘If you like.’

‘Are there complications?’

‘What?’ She looked up, startled.

‘Does Shuichi’s woman come to the dance hall?’

‘No!’

Shingo had learned from Eiko that the woman’s husky voice was erotic. He had not asked for further details.

It was not perhaps remarkable that his secretary should be acquainted with the woman when his own family was not; but he found that fact hard to accept.

It was particularly hard to accept when he had Eiko here before him.

One knew that she was a person of no consequence, and yet on such occasions she seemed to hang heavily before him, like the curtain of life itself. He could not guess what was passing through her mind.

‘Did you meet her when he took you dancing?’ he asked lightly.

‘Yes.’

‘Many times?’

‘No.’

‘Did he introduce you?’

‘It wasn’t an introduction, really.’

‘I don’t understand. He took you to meet her – he wanted to make her jealous?’

‘I’m no one to be jealous of.’ Eiko shrugged her shoulders very slightly.

Shingo could see that she was drawn to Shuichi, and that she was jealous.

‘Then be someone to be jealous of.’

‘Really!’ She looked down and laughed. ‘There were two of them too.’

‘What? She had a man with her?’

‘Not a man. A woman.’

‘I was worried.’

‘Worried?’ She looked at him. ‘The woman she lives with.’

‘They have a room together?’

‘A house. It’s small, but very nice.’

‘You mean you’ve been to the house?’

‘Yes.’ Eiko half swallowed the word.

Once more Shingo was surprised. ‘Where is it?’ he asked, somewhat abruptly.

‘I shouldn’t tell you,’ she said softly, a shadow crossing her face.

Shingo fell silent.

‘In Hongo, near the University.’

‘Oh?’

She continued as if the pressure had been relieved, ‘It’s up a dark narrow lane, but the house itself is nice. And the other lady is beautiful. I’m very fond of her.’

‘You mean the one that’s not Shuichi’s?’

‘Yes. She’s a very pleasant person.’

‘Oh? And what do they do? Are they both single?’

‘Yes – I don’t know, really.’

‘Two women living together.’

Eiko nodded. ‘I’ve never known a pleasanter person. I’d like to see her every day.’ There was a certain coyness in her manner. She spoke as if the pleasantness of the woman made it possible for her to be forgiven something in herself.

All very strange, thought Shingo.

It did occur to him that, in praising the other woman, she might be indirectly reprimanding Shuichi’s woman; but he had trouble guessing her real intentions.

Eiko looked out of the window. ‘It’s clearing.’

‘Suppose you open it a little.’

‘I was a little worried when he left his umbrella. It’s nice that he has good weather for his trip.’

She stood for a time with her hand at the open window. Her skirt was askew, higher on one side than the other. Her stance suggested confusion.

She went back to her desk, head bowed.

A boy brought in three or four letters. Eiko put them on Shingo’s desk.

‘Another funeral,’ muttered Shingo. ‘Too many of them. Toriyama this time? At two this afternoon. I wonder what’s happened to that wife of his.’

Used to the way he talked to himself, Eiko only looked at him.

‘I can’t go dancing tonight. There’s a funeral.’ His mouth slightly open, he was staring absently before him. ‘He was persecuted. She really tormented him when she was going through the change of life. She wouldn’t feed him. She really wouldn’t feed him. He would manage to have breakfast at home somehow, but she would get nothing at all ready for him. There would be food for the children, and he would have some of it when she wasn’t watching. He was so afraid of her that he couldn’t go home at night. Every night he would wander around or go to a movie or a variety show or something, and stay away until they were all safe in bed. The children all sided with her and helped persecute him.’

‘I wonder why.’

‘That’s the way it was. The change is a terrible thing.’

Eiko seemed to think that she was being made fun of. ‘Might it have been his fault?’

‘He was important in the government, and then he joined a private firm. They’ve rented a temple for the funeral, so I suppose he did fairly well. He had only good habits when he was in the government.’

‘I suppose he took care of his family?’

‘Naturally.’

‘It’s not easy to understand.’

‘No, I don’t suppose it is. But there are plenty of fine gentlemen in their fifties and sixties who spend their nights wandering around because they’re afraid of their wives.’

Shingo tried to remember Toriyama’s face, but it refused to come to him. They had not met in ten years.

He wondered whether Toriyama had died at home.

Shingo thought he might meet university classmates at the funeral. He stood by the temple gate after he had offered incense, but he saw no one he knew.

There was no one his age at the funeral. Perhaps he had come too late.

He looked inside. The line by the door of the main hall was beginning to break up and move away.

The family seemed to be inside.

The widow survived, as Shingo had supposed she would. The thin woman directly in front of the coffin would be she.

She evidently dyed her hair, but had not dyed it in some time. It was white at the roots.

He thought, as he bowed to her, that she had not been able to dye it because Toriyama’s long illness had kept her busy. But then as he turned to light incense before the coffin he felt like muttering to himself that a person could never be sure.

As he had come up the stairs and paid his respects to the family, he had quite forgotten how the dead man had been persecuted; and then as he turned to pay his respects to the dead man, he remembered again. He was astonished at himself.

Making his way out, he turned so as not to have to look at the widow.

He had been startled not by the widow but by his own strange forgetfulness. He felt somehow repelled as he made his way back down the flagstone walk.

And as he walked away, he felt as if forgetfulness and loss lay pressing against the nape of his neck.

There were no longer many people who knew about Toriyama and his wife. Even though a few might survive, the relationship had been lost. It had been left to the wife, to remember as she pleased. There were no third parties to look back upon it intently.

At a gathering of six or seven classmates, including Shingo, there had been no one to give it serious thought when Toriyama’s name came up. They only laughed. The man who mentioned it coated his remarks with derision and exaggeration.

Two of the men at the gathering had died before Toriyama.

It was now possible for Shingo to think that not even Toriyama and his wife had known why the wife had persecuted him, or why he had come to be persecuted.

Toriyama was being taken to the grave, not knowing. For the wife, left behind, it was all in the past. Without Toriyama, it had gone into the past. Probably she too would go to the grave unknowing.

The man who, at the gathering of classmates, had mentioned Toriyama, had as family heirlooms four or five old No masks. Toriyama had come calling, he said, and had stayed on and on when the masks were brought out. Since they could hardly have been of such great interest to someone seeing them for the first time, the man went on, he had probably been killing time until his wife would be safely in bed.

But it seemed to Shingo today that a man in his fifties, the head of a household, walking the streets each night, would be sunk in thoughts so deep they could not be shared.

The photograph at the funeral had evidently been taken on New Year’s Day or some other holiday before Toriyama left the government. He was in formal dress, his face round and tranquil. The photographer had touched away the shadows.

The quiet face in the picture was too young for the widow by the coffin. One was made to think that she was the persecuted one, old before her time.

She was a short woman, and Shingo looked down at her hair and the white at its roots. One shoulder drooped a little, giving an impression of weariness and emaciation.

The sons and daughters and people who seemed to be their spouses were ranged beside the widow, but Shingo did not really look at them.

‘And how are things with you?’ he meant to ask if he met an old acquaintance. He waited at the temple gate.

He thought he would reply, if asked the same question, ‘I’ve managed somehow to come through; but there’s been trouble in my son’s family and my daughter’s.’ And it seemed to him that he meant to tell of his problems.

To make such revelations would be of no help to either of them, nor would there be any thought of intercession. They would but walk to the street-car stop and say good-bye.

That much Shingo wanted to do.

‘Now that Toriyama is dead, nothing is left of his torment.’

‘Are Toriyama and his wife to be called successes if their children’s families are happy?’

‘How much responsibility must a parent take these days for his children’s marriages?’

Such mutterings came to Shingo one after another as the sort of things he would like to say were he to meet an old friend.

Sparrows were chirping away on the roof of the temple gate.

They cut arcs along the eaves, and then cut the same arcs again.

Two callers were awaiting him when he got back to his office. He had whiskey brought from the cabinet behind him and poured it into black tea. It was a small help to his memory.

As he received the callers, he remembered the sparrows he had seen in the garden the morning before.

At the foot of the mountain, they were pecking at plumes of pampas grass. Were they after the seeds, or after insects? Then he saw that in what he had taken to be a flock of sparrows there were also buntings. He looked more carefully.