Thirst for Love (10 page)

“The smell is awful,” said Etsuko again, as if she were, however clearly, talking to herself.

Miyo looked over from her stance in the chair and said: “Yes, it’s awful—really.”

Etsuko was angry. As her anger grew, she reflected on the dull rustic stolidity that characterized both Saburo and Miyo. To the extent that Saburo’s comforted her Miyo’s made her angry. There was only one reason: Miyo and Saburo were much more like each other than she and Saburo. That was what made her angry.

Etsuko tried sitting down in the chair Yakichi would cordially offer to the minister this evening. As she did so her face took on the magnanimity tinged with compassion appropriate to a busy man surveying the living room of a friend forgotten by the world. The minister would be taking, it seemed, several minutes of his day, of which each minute and each second were practically objects at auction, and would be ceremonially carrying them and proffering them to his host as the only gifts of this visit.

“Things are fine as they are. It’s not necessary to prepare,” Yakichi had said to Etsuko, with a happy look on his sour face. This great officer’s visit could even bring about an unexpected renaissance in Yakichi: “How about it? Why don’t you come out again and stand for office? The time when new postwar men who didn’t know a thing ran rampant is gone; the time is coming back in government and business for their great forerunners, rich with experience.”

Yakichi would hear this, and his ridicule, wearing the mask of self-deprecation, would quickly take wing and shine as only it could shine.

“I’m through. This silly old man here is not good for a thing. Maybe I can imitate a farmer; but ‘Old men shouldn’t take cold showers,’ as they say. All I’m good for, really, is fiddling with
bonsai
, or something like that. But I don’t have any regrets. I’m satisfied as I am. I don’t know whether I should say this to your face, but in this time, I believe, nothing is more perilous than standing in the forefront of the age. No one knows when it’s going to turn upside down, does one? It’s a rigged world. Peace is rigged. By the same token, war is rigged and the prosperity is rigged. And in this rigged world a lot of people live and die.

“Of course, all men live and die. It’s a matter of course. But in this rigged world, you don’t find anything to lay down your life for. Don’t you see? In a
rigged life
it has become stupid to
risk
one’s
life
. Yet a fellow like me can’t work without laying his life on the line. No, I’m not the only one. In fact, as I see it, nobody can do his work right without risking his life. But all there are around today are sad characters who carry on even though they don’t have jobs they would lay down their lives for. That’s how it seems, anyway. That’s how bad it is. And that’s why I’m an old man, with not much more to go.

“But don’t get upset. Just take it as so much whistling in the dark. I’m an old fogy—just so much dregs. Only fit to be ground up for soup. To press these dregs again into second-rate
saké
would be a sad story indeed.”

The blandishments Yakichi would waft before the senses of the minister might have been packaged under the name “Rest and Seclusion,” so seductively would they draw him away from fame and fortune. What would they profit Yakichi? They would give social value to his seclusion, foster overestimation of the sharpness of the talons this world-sick old hawk held concealed.

It was Yakichi’s favorite quotation from the Chinese classic the
Li Sao
, written in his own calligraphy and hung in a frame on the wall of the reception room. To a parvenu, developing a hobby like this is a considerable achievement. Since only one personal eccentricity was enough to mature his taste for hobbies, this tenant-farmer penchant for calligraphy had evidently put a brake on Yakichi’s ambitions. People who are well born, however, seldom steep themselves thus in elegance.

Until well into the afternoon the household was very busy. Yakichi said over and over that an extravagant reception was not necessary. All understood, however, that if they took him at his word he would be very upset. Only Kensuke quietly skulked on the second floor, avoiding the work. Etsuko and Chieko deftly arranged the Autumnal Equinox rice cakes in matching lacquered boxes. They made whatever preparations they could in the event their guests stayed for the evening meal, going so far as to include portions for a secretary and a chauffeur. Mrs. Okura was called to strangle the chicken. When she started for the chicken coop in her house dress, Asako’s children both ran along, curious as to what was happening.

“Now, don’t be naughty! Haven’t I always told you that you shouldn’t watch chickens being strangled?” their mother called from the house. Asako couldn’t cook or sew, yet she thought herself liberally endowed with the faculty of bringing up children in the
petit-bourgeois
tradition. She had flown into a passion, for instance, when Nobuko came in with a cheap comic book borrowed from the Okuras’ daughter. She took it away and substituted for it a picture book for learning English. Nobuko smeared the Queen’s face with blue pastel paints to get back at her mother.

As she took from the cupboard the Shunkei lacquered trays and wiped them one by one, Etsuko quivered in expectation of the screams of the chicken being strangled. She would cloud a spot with her breath, then wipe. The amber lacquer would cloud over and then clear and reflect her face. Amid these uneasy repetitions, Etsuko sketched in her mind the scene at the shed in which the chicken was being killed.

The shed gave off the kitchen door. Dangling a chicken, the bandy-legged Mrs. Okura entered. The interior was half lighted by the rays of the afternoon sun. As a result, the darker areas seemed even darker. Dull, dim outlines reflected from wrought-iron surfaces suggested the presence of mattocks and spades propped in back. Two or three weathered storm shutters leaned against the wall. There was a straw basket for carrying earth. There was a sprayer for fogging magnesium sulfate over the persimmon trees. The wife sat down in a small lopsided chair and scissored the wings of the struggling bird tightly between her thick, gnarled knees. Then, for the first time, she noticed the two children standing in the door of the shed watching her every movement, her every exertion.

“Naughty! Young lady, you’re going to catch it from your mother. Now go right away from there. This isn’t something children should be watching.”

The chicken squawked; the chickens in the henhouse heard and squawked too.

Nobuko and little Natsuo, holding his sister’s hand, with only their eyes gleaming in the shadow thrown by the light at their backs, stood and watched barely breathing as Mrs. Okura bent over the struggling chicken, writhing its whole body in the effort to free its wings. She perfunctorily reached forth both her hands toward the neck . . .

After a time Etsuko heard the chicken’s screech—tentative, yet committed; full of frustration, bewilderment, and terror.

It was just four o’clock. Yakichi had managed to hide his exasperation that his guest had not yet arrived; he had even managed to act as if he were not quite worn out with waiting. As the shadows darkened under the
kaede
trees in the garden, however, he began to assume an undisguised expression of uneasiness. He went into a wild fit of smoking and then suddenly headed out to work in the pear orchard.

Etsuko attempted to help him by going out to where the highway ended at the cemetery gate to watch for a limousine destined for the Sugimoto home. She leaned against the girders of the bridge and looked far out on the distant gentle curve of the road. As she looked from this point beyond which the highway was unpaved and in fact unfinished, and watched the road twist as far as the eye could see—among rich ricefields almost ready for harvesting, cornfields with their straight rows, forests grounded in tiny swamps, the Hankyu electric line, village streets, creeks—Etsuko felt herself grow dizzy. To imagine that a limousine was going to negotiate this road to Etsuko’s feet went beyond dreaming; it seemed to verge on the miraculous. According to the children, two or three cars had stopped here about noon. Now, however, there was no sign of them.

Of course, today is the Equinox! But what have we been doing? All the bean-jam rice cakes we’ve been making since morning, and packing them away in nested boxes in the cupboard so the children wouldn’t find them and ruin them! We were so busy that not one of us thought of it. I did pray once in front of the ancestral tablets. But otherwise we only burned incense, as we do every day. All day we spent our time grieving about the arrival of living guests, and all of us forgot completely about the dead.

She watched a family troop noisily out of the gate of the Hattori Garden of Souls—an ordinary middle-aged couple and four children, one of them a girl in student dress. The children had trouble staying with the group; they constantly lagged, then ran ahead. Etsuko noticed they were playing a game, catching grasshoppers in the grass circle enclosed by the drive in which cars turned around. The winner was the one who caught the most grasshoppers without stepping on the grass. The lawn slowly darkened. The graves that lay far beyond the entrance and the thick stands of bushes and trees gradually filled with darkness, like cotton soaking up water. Only the cemetery area on the farthest slope was bright with the setting sun; the gravestones and the evergreen shrubs there shone red. The slope seemed like a face lighted by quiet rays.

Etsuko looked scornfully at the middle-aged parents, walking along talking and smiling, oblivious to the children. In her romantic way of looking at things, husbands were always unfaithful, wives always suffered; middle-aged couples all ended up not speaking to each other for one of two reasons: either they were sick of one another or hated each other. This gentleman in stylish striped sport coat and slacks, however, and his wife in her lavender suit carrying a shopping bag out of which a thermos bottle protruded seemed to be utter strangers to the romantic tale. They seemed to belong to that class that turns the romances of our world into topics for afterdinner conversation and forgets about them.

When they got as far as the bridge, the couple called their children. As they did so, they looked uneasily up and down the road otherwise devoid of humanity. Finally, the gentleman approached Etsuko and asked politely: “I wonder if you can tell me where we turn off this road to get to the Okamachi station of the Hankyu line.”

As Etsuko told them about the shortcut through the ricefields and the government housing, the parents gaped in amazement at her precise Tokyo Yamate speech. The four children soon crowded about and looked up at Etsuko. A boy, about seven, quietly extended his closed fist before her. Then he relaxed his fingers just a little and said: “Look!”

In the cage made by his little fingers the bent light-green body of a grasshopper was visible. In the shadow of the fingers the insect slowly extended and retracted its legs.

The oldest girl smartly slapped the boy’s hand from below. He released the grasshopper, which flew clear, hopped twice on the ground, and plunged into the bushes on the side of the road and disappeared.

A brother-sister quarrel ensued, quelled by laughing parents. All nodded respectfully to Etsuko; then they took up their leisurely procession again, and stepped onto the grassy path between the ricefields.

Etsuko suddenly wondered whether the automobile so long awaited by the Sugimoto family had come up. She turned and looked up the highway, but again, as far as she could see, no car was visible. Shadows were accumulating gradually on the road surface; it was twilight.

It was bedtime, and the guests had not arrived. The household was beaten down by a heavy, oppressive mood; yet, taking their lead from the silent, irritable Yakichi, they had no choice save to act as if the visit would still take place.

Since Etsuko had come, nothing had brought the family together in anticipation comparable to this. Yakichi didn’t say a word about the Equinox—he seemed to have forgotten it. He waited. Then he went on waiting. He was torn alternately by hope and disappointment. His demeanor was like that of Etsuko waiting for her husband to come home—hopeless and abandoned.

“He’s still coming; it will work out”—it is horrible to say these words. After you say them it seems to you that, really, no one is coming.

Even Etsuko, who knew how Yakichi felt, could not believe that the hopes he had been filled with all day were simply hopes for worldly advancement. We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise. In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.

Yakichi was sorry that he had shown the telegram to the union executive. Thanks to this he had given those people the opportunity to pin on him the label of a man cast aside. The executive insisted that he wanted to take just one quick look at the minister’s face, and he hung around the Sugimoto home until about eight p.m., diligently helping wherever he could. Thus he saw everything: Yakichi’s concern, Kensuke’s half-teasing verbal digs, the whole family’s preparations for a concerted welcome, the approaching night, the misgivings, the first definite signs of waning hope.

As for Etsuko, the events of this day taught her the lesson that it never pays to anticipate anything. At the same time she experienced, in response to Yakichi’s painful efforts not to be wounded by this betrayal of his hopes, a strange stirring of affection that she had not known before in the time she had been in Maidemmura. The telegram might well have been dashed off by one of Yakichi’s many cronies in the Osaka area as a practical joke dreamed up at some drunken party.

Etsuko treated Yakichi with unobtrusive gentleness, quietly intimate, mindful of his sensitivity to anything like sympathy.

After ten, Yakichi, his spirits crushed, for the first time thought about Ryosuke with a humiliating feeling of fear. A sense of sin that he had never once in his life entertained now lightly touched a corner of his heart. This sense grew heavier; it imparted a bittersweet taste to his tongue; it seemed to him a feeling that could grow upon one, cajoling the heart as one pondered it. The evidence for it was Etsuko, who this evening seemed more beautiful than ever.