Thirst for Love (12 page)

In Saburo’s room, Etsuko saw nothing but the essentials of an even plainer way of life.

Are they, I wonder, being as circumspect in avoiding my search as I am being diligent in seeking them out? Or am I in my careful scrutiny missing what I seek because it is inserted, as in the Poe story I borrowed from Kensuke, in some letter rack out in plain sight?

As Etsuko left the room she met Yakichi coming toward her down the hall. Since the hall ended with Miyo’s room Yakichi had no business coming down it unless he was going there.

“You, here?” Yakichi said.

“Yes.”

Etsuko’s reply was not apologetic. As they went back to Yakichi’s room the old man’s body bumped clumsily against her. Not at all because the hallway was too narrow. His body struck hers for no reason, as would the body of a sulky child pulled along by his mother.

When they had settled down in the room, Yakichi said: “Why were you there in his room?”

“I went to look at his diary.”

Yakichi’s mouth moved indistinctly. He said nothing more.

* * * *

The tenth of October was Autumn Festival day in the several neighboring villages. Saburo had dressed and left with the members of the Young Men’s League before sundown. The festival was so crowded that it was perilous to take small children on foot. The best way to restrain the supplications of Nobuko and Natsuo to go along, therefore, seemed to be to ask them to stay with their mother to mind the house. After supper, Yakichi, Etsuko, Kensuke and Chieko, along with Miyo, went off to the local shrine and the village festival.

The great drums had been booming near and far since sundown. Something in the wind, like screams, like songs, sounded with them. These noises that flowed piercingly over the ricefields in the dark night, noises like the songs of birds and animals crying together in the night, did not disturb the stillness; in fact, they deepened it. Country nights, even in areas not far from great cities, are deep like that, broken only here and there with the cries of insects.

For a time after they had finished getting ready to go to the festival, Kensuke and Chieko had opened the windows and listened to the sound of the drums coming from all directions. “That must be the one at the Hachiman shrine by the station. That must be the one at the village shrine we’re going to. That, I think, is the drum at the village hall over there, the drum they let little children—their noses daubed with white powder—take turns beating on. Its sound is the most youthful; at times it stops altogether . . .”

They were so lost in the joy of this guessing game, so puerile in the differing opinions that brought them to the verge of quarreling, that they sounded as though they were taking part in a play. It was hard to believe their conversation was carried out by a husband of thirty-eight and a wife of thirty-seven.

“No, that’s from the direction of Okamachi—from the Hachiman shrine by the station.”

“My, you’re stubborn. Here you’ve been living in this neighborhood for six years, and you still don’t know where the station is from here.”

“All right, would you be so kind as to bring me a map and a compass?”

“Why, madam, we don’t have things like that here.”

“Yes, I’m the madam, and you’re the plain old man of the house.”

“Of course. And it isn’t everybody that can become the wife of a plain old man of the house. Why, all the ordinary wives of the world are Mrs. Department Heads, Mrs. Fishmongers, Mrs. Trumpeters. You were born lucky. As wife to a plain old man of the house, you are the paragon of wifely success. As a female, you can take over the life of a male. Surely, there is no greater success for a female, is there?”

“You don’t have it quite straight. I meant you were a plain, ordinary man of the house.”

“Ordinary? Wonderful! The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can’t have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I’ll show you a man who is not yet a man. The earliest days of the
haiku
, before Basho, before Shiki, were filled with the vigor of an age in which the spirit of the ordinary had not died.”

“Yes, and your
haiku
show the ordinary at its highest point of development.”

Through the tone of this, through this shallow dialogue, ran everlastingly the same theme—the theme of Chieko’s boundless respect for her husband’s “learning.” Among the Tokyo intellectuals of a decade ago, couples like this were not at all uncommon. In their respectful pursuit of the forms of the grand tradition even into this time, however, they were like a woman wearing last year’s hairdo among country folk, as if it were still the mode.

Kensuke lit a cigarette and leaned against the window frame. The smoke he exhaled streamed on the night air like white hair floating on water, entangling itself in the branches of the persimmon tree nearby. After a short silence he said: “Father isn’t ready yet, is he?”

“It’s Etsuko who isn’t ready. Father may be helping her tie her sash. I know it’s hard to believe, but he even ties the string of her petticoat for her. Whenever she dresses, they close the door of her room tight and talk in low tones, so you can’t tell how long . . .”

“Father’s really living it up in his last years, isn’t he?”

Their conversation naturally swung around to the subject of Saburo. Etsuko’s calm comportment of recent days, they finally decided, must be evidence that she had given him up. Rumor sometimes follows a more precise logic than fact, and fact more than rumor is apt to have a lie in it somewhere.

The way to the village shrine led through the woods behind the house. Not far from the pine grove by which they had gone cherry-blossom viewing this spring, they came to a fork in the path. They took the fork that led away from the pine grove. For a while there was only swampland covered with rushes and water chestnuts. They descended a steep hill with a cluster of houses at the bottom. On the mountain across the valley lay the village shrine.

Miyo was in front, carrying a paper lantern. Kensuke walked behind, illuminating the path with a flashlight. At the fork in the path they were joined by Tanaka, a rugged, honest farmer, also on his way to the festival. He carried a flute, on which he practiced as they walked. His playing was surprisingly skillful, but his cheerful tunes somehow struck them as sad, rendering their procession led by its paper lantern as silent as a funeral. To liven things up Kensuke started clapping his hands to each tune; everyone joined him. The sound of their clapping came back in hollow echoes from the surface of the swamp.

“It’s odd, isn’t it,” said Yakichi; “the sound of the drum seems farther away here.”

“It’s the terrain that does that,” said Kensuke, from the rear.

At that moment Miyo stumbled and almost fell, an occurrence which prompted Kensuke to take her paper lantern and her place at the head of the line. There was no need to have this witless girl conduct them.

Etsuko stood beside the path where she had stepped aside to make way for Kensuke and watched the lantern change hands. In the lantern light Miyo’s skin seemed rather green. There was no light in her eyes. In fact, she even seemed to be having trouble breathing.

This was the way Etsuko’s eyes had now learned to observe things—in that instant when the paper lantern was passed from hand to hand and lighted the upper half of Miyo’s body—in appraisals that brief.

But that glimpse was soon forgotten, as the great festival lanterns hanging from the eaves of houses brought exclamations of admiration from the little column toiling up the slope.

Most of the villagers had gone to the festival, leaving only the great lanterns to guard their homes, bright and silent. The Sugimoto group crossed the stone bridge over the creek that flowed through the town. The geese that swam in the creek in the daytime cried out from their coops as the noisy strangers passed. “Just like babies crying at night,” said Yakichi. Everyone laughed. They were thinking of Natsuo and his negligent mother.

Etsuko looked at Miyo in her arrow-feather kimono, careful that no gleam of ill will escaped from her eyes. She wasn’t concerned about what the family might see. It was Miyo she was concerned about. Just the surmise—surmise, nothing more—that Miyo, this dull-witted country maiden, so much as suspected her jealousy, would be more than Etsuko’s self-respect could stand. Whether it was Miyo’s complexion or her kimono, Etsuko could not tell, but somehow this evening the girl was more than a little beautiful.

It’s a strange world,
Etsuko thought.
When I was a child, it was unthinkable for a maid to go around in anything but a striped kimono. When the likes of servants can go about in stylish fabrics, tradition can’t stand, society’s order is being spat upon. If my mother had anything to do with her, she’d fire her before the day was over.

No matter how one looks at it, from below or above, status is a fine substitute for jealousy. What better evidence for this could there be than that Etsuko never harbored a bit of that old-time social consciousness in her attitude toward Saburo?

Etsuko wore a scattered-chrysanthemum silk kimono, of a kind rare outside the city, under a shiny black
haori
, tailored slightly short. The scent of her treasured Houbigant wafted faintly about her—a cologne that had no place at a country festival, obviously put on for Saburo alone. The unsuspecting Yakichi himself had sprayed it on her neck. On downy hair the color of her skin, infinitesimally small droplets of cologne rested, shining like pearls, incomparably lovely. Her skin had always been smooth; there was, in fact, a definite contradiction between the opulent area here entrusted to Yakichi, and the horny and soil-encrusted flesh of his hand. Yet his dirty hand would gradually eliminate all boundaries and merge with her fragrant bosom. In the process of fashioning this artificial contradiction, Yakichi seemed to find himself drawn for the first time into the restful sense that he really possessed her.

As they turned into a lane by the rice distribution center, they were suddenly greeted by the stench of an acetylene lamp, in the light of which they saw at last the evening bustle of hucksters. One was selling candy. Another was selling toy pinwheels—the handles of them impaled in a bale of straw. Another was selling flowery paper umbrellas. Near him others were selling—though it was not the season—firecrackers, children’s card games, and balloons.

In the festival season these merchants would go to the Osaka candy stalls and buy leftover goods at reduced prices. Then they would loiter around the Hankyu Umeda station and ask passers-by what station stop was celebrating a festival today. If they went first to the Hachiman shrine by the Okamachi station and saw competitors already installed there, they would proceed to this second-choice festival. Their dreams of great markups almost gone, they would arrive in small groups from across the fields, their gait testifying to their resignation. Many of the peddlers here this evening were old men and women.

The children were gathered in a knot about some little toy cars that ran around in a circle. The Sugimoto family passed the peddlers one by one, debating whether to buy Natsuo a fifty-yen auto.

“It’s too high, too high. Have Etsuko buy him one the next time she goes to Osaka; it will be much cheaper,” said Yakichi. “Besides, all they sell in places like this are things you buy today and find broken tomorrow.”

His denunciation was handed down in a loud voice, and the old man selling toys glared at him fiercely. Yakichi glared back.

Yakichi won. The old man turned away and resumed his patter with the children around him. Childishly drunk with victory, Yakichi passed through a
torii
and started up the stone steps.

To be sure, Maidemmura’s prices were higher than those of Osaka. They only bought in Maidemmura what was absolutely necessary. Take the night soil for instance. “Osaka honey has a good price,” the saying went, and in winter it sold for two thousand yen a cartload. Farmers went to Osaka and purchased it, and Yakichi bought it with a sour face. In the materials that went into it alone, he said, Osaka’s night soil was better than what was produced here.

As they started up the stairs a sound like thundering surf descended upon them. The sky above the stairway filled with dancing sparks; the sound of splitting bamboo mixed with shouts of wonder beat upon their eardrums. The limbs of an old cypress tree stood out naked in the cruel light of blazing bonfires.

“If we start up from here, I don’t think we’ll ever get to the shrine,” said Kensuke.

With that their column swung away from the stairway, which they had climbed halfway, and took the path that wound its way to the back of the main shrine. It was Miyo and not Yakichi who was out of breath when they reached their objective. With her big hands she uneasily rubbed her colorless cheeks.

The front of the shrine sanctuary was like the bridge of a battleship directing its bow into a roaring swirl of fire and tumult. The women, who dared not enter the swirl, stood above and looked down on the pandemonium in the courtyard, from which the stone staircase and wall barely protected them. They were silent with good reason, for over their heads, and over the stairs, and over their hands that gripped the stone barrier, the shadows cast by the fire and the shadows of the men that stood between them and the fire swung madly about.

At times the bonfires would pick up force tremendously; the flames would seem to be infusing themselves with energy. The faces of the women spectators—joined by this time by the Sugimoto family—would be etched in stark reflections; the cord that ran to the bell-pull hanging from the eaves of the shrine would shine as red as if struck by the setting sun. Then the shadows would leap as if dancing, licking up that moment’s brightness, leaving the group on the top of the stairs black, silent, and peevish.

“Surely they’ve gone mad, and Saburo right along with them,” said Kensuke as if to himself, staring down at the writhing mass below them. He glanced toward Etsuko, beside him, and noticed that the side of her
haori
was ripped, a fact she seemed unaware of. She seemed to him strangely appealing this evening.