Thousand Cranes (11 page)

Taking a train from Tokyo Central, she would be there ahead of him. He wondered, however, if they might not be on the same train. He looked for her in the crowd.

She had indeed reached his house ahead of him.

She was in the garden, said the maid. Kikuji went around the house and saw her sitting on a rock in the shade of the white oleander.

Since Chikako’s visit some days before, the maid had been careful to sprinkle the shrubbery before Kikuji came home. She
used an old faucet in the garden. The rock seemed damp at Fumiko’s sleeve.

When a red oleander floods into bloom, the red against the thick green leaves is like the blaze of the summer sky; but when the blossoms are white, the effect is richly cool. The white clusters swayed gently, and enveloped Fumiko. She was wearing a white cotton dress trimmed at the pockets and the turned-down collar with narrow bands of deep blue.

The light of the western sun fell on Kikuji from over the oleander.

‘It’s good to see you.’ There was nostalgia in his voice as he came up to her.

She had been about to speak. ‘Over the telephone, a few minutes ago …’ She seemed to shrink away from him as she stood up. Perhaps she had felt that unless she stopped him he would take her hand. ‘You said that, and I’ve come to deny it.’

‘That you’re married? I was very surprised.’

‘Surprised that I was or that I wasn’t?’ She looked at the ground.

‘Well, both. When I heard that you were married, and again when I heard that you weren’t.’

‘Both times?’

‘Shouldn’t I have been?’ Kikuji walked on over the stepping stones. ‘Suppose we go in from here. You could just as well have waited inside, you know.’ He sat on the veranda. ‘I’d come back from a trip and I was lying here, and in marched Kurimoto. It was at night.’

The maid called Kikuji into the house, probably to confirm the dinner instructions he had telephoned from the office. While he was inside he changed to a white linen kimono.

Fumiko seemed to have repowdered her face. She waited for him to sit down again.

‘What exactly did Miss Kurimoto say?’

‘Just that you were married.’

‘Did you believe it?’

‘Well, it was the sort of lie I could hardly believe anyone would tell.’

‘You didn’t even doubt it?’ The near-black eyes were moist. ‘Could I get married now, possibly? Do you think I could? Mother and I suffered together, and with the suffering still here …’ It was as if the mother were still alive. ‘Mother and I both presume a great deal on people, but we expect them to understand us. Is that impossible? Are we seeing our reflections in our own hearts?’ Her voice wavered on the edge of tears.

Kikuji was silent for a time. ‘Not long ago I said the same thing. I asked if you thought I could possibly marry. The day of the storm, was it?’

‘The day of the thunder?’

‘And now you say it to me.’

‘But it’s different.’

‘You said several times that I would be getting married.’

‘But your case is so different.’ She gazed at him with tear-filled eyes. ‘You’re different from me.’

‘How?’

‘Your position, your place.’

‘My position?’

‘Your position is different. Shouldn’t I say position? I’ll say the degree of darkness, then.’

‘In a word, the guilt? But mine is deeper.’

‘No.’ She shook her head violently, and a tear spilled over, drawing a strange line from the corner of her left eye to her ear. ‘The guilt was Mother’s and she died – if we have to talk about guilt. But I don’t think it was guilt. Only sorrow.’

Kikuji sat with bowed head.

‘If it was guilt,’ she continued, ‘it may never go away. But sorrow will.’

‘When you talk about darkness, aren’t you making your mother’s death darker than you need to?’

‘I should have said the degree of sorrow.’

‘The degree of sorrow.’

‘Is the degree of love,’ he wanted to add; but he stopped himself.

‘And there is the question of you and Yukiko. That makes you different from me.’ She spoke as if she meant to bring the conversation back to reality. ‘Miss Kurimoto thought Mother was trying to interfere, and she thought I stood in the way too. And so she said I was married. I can’t think of any other explanation.’

‘But she said that the Inamura girl was married too.’

For a moment her face seemed to collapse. Again she shook her head violently. ‘A lie, a lie. That’s a lie too. When?’

‘When did she get married? Very recently, I suppose.’

‘It’s sure to be a lie.’

‘When I heard that the two of you were married, I thought it might be true about you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘But the other may really be true.’

‘It’s a lie. No one gets married in this heat. In a summer kimono, sweat pouring off – can you imagine it?’

‘There’s no such thing as a summer wedding?’

‘Only now and then. People put weddings off to fall, or …’ For some reason, tears came to her eyes again, and fell to her knee. She gazed at the wet spot. ‘But why should Miss Kurimoto tell such lies?’

‘She cleverly took me in, did she?’ Kikuji deliberated for a time.

But what had brought the tears?

It was certain that at least the report about Fumiko was a lie.

Had Chikako said that Fumiko was married to drive her off, the Inamura girl in fact being married? He weighed the possibility.

There was something in it he could not accept, however. He, too, began to feel that she had lied.

‘Well, as long as we don’t know whether it’s a lie or the truth, we don’t know the extent of Kurimoto’s prankishness.’

‘Prankishness?’

‘Suppose we call it that.’

‘But if I hadn’t telephoned today I’d have been left married. A fine prank.’

The maid called Kikuji again.

He came back with a letter in his hand.

‘Your letter, and no stamp.’ He lightly turned it over.

‘No, no. You’re not to look at it.’ She brought herself toward him, still kneeling, and tried to take it from his hand. ‘Give it back to me.’

Kikuji whipped his hands behind him.

Her left hand fell on his knee, and her right hand reached for the letter. With left hand and right hand thus making contradictory motions, she lost her balance. The left hand was behind her to keep her from falling against Kikuji, the right was clutching at the letter, now behind Kikuji’s back. Twisting to the right, she was about to fall. The side of her face would be against his chest – but she turned supplely away. The touch of her left hand on his knee was unbelievably light. He could not see how she had supported the upper part of her body, twisted as it was and about to fall.

He had stiffened abruptly as she threw herself upon him; and now he wanted to cry out at the astonishing suppleness. He was intensely conscious of the woman. He was conscious of Fumiko’s mother, Mrs Ota.

At what instant had she recovered and pulled away? Where had the force spent itself? It was a suppleness that could not be. It was like the deepest instinct of woman. Just as he was expecting her to come down heavily upon him, she was near him, a warm odor. That was all.

The odor was strong. It came richly, the odor of a woman who
had been at work through the summer day. He felt the odor of Fumiko, and of her mother. The smell of Mrs Ota’s embrace.

‘Give it back to me.’ Kikuji did not resist. ‘I’m going to tear it up.’

She turned away and tore her letter to small bits. The neck and the bare arms were damp with perspiration.

She had suddenly paled as she fell toward him and recovered herself. Then, kneeling again, she had flushed; and in that time, it seemed, the perspiration had come out.

3

Dinner, from a near-by caterer, was uninteresting, exactly what one would have expected.

Kikuji’s teacup was the cylindrical Shino bowl. The maid brought it to him as usual.

He noticed, and Fumiko’s eyes too were on it. ‘You have been using that bowl?’

‘I have.’

‘You shouldn’t.’ He sensed that she was not as uncomfortable as he. ‘I was sorry afterward that I’d given it to you. I mentioned it in my letter.’

‘What did you say?’

‘What … Well, I apologized for having given you a bad piece of Shino.’

‘It’s not a bad piece at all.’

‘It can’t be good Shino. Mother used it as an ordinary teacup.’

‘I don’t really know, but I’d imagine that it’s very good Shino.’ He took the bowl in his hand and gazed at it.

‘There is much better Shino. The bowl reminds you of another, and the other is better.’

‘There don’t seem to be any small Shino pieces in my father’s collection.’

‘Even if you don’t have them here, you see them. Other bowls come into your mind when you’re drinking from this, and you think how much better they are. It makes me very sad, and Mother too.’

Kikuji breathed deeply. ‘But I’m moving farther and farther from tea. I have no occasion to see tea bowls.’

‘You don’t know when you might see one. You must have seen much finer pieces.’

‘You’re saying that a person can give only the very finest?’

‘Yes.’ Fumiko looked straight at him, affirmation in her eyes. ‘That is what I think. I asked you in my letter to break it and throw away the pieces.’

‘To break it? To break this?’ Kikuji sought to divert the attack that bore down upon him. ‘It’s from the old Shino kiln, and it must be three or four hundred years old. At first it was probably an ordinary table piece, but a long time has gone by since it became a tea bowl. People watched over it and passed it on – some of them may even have taken it on long trips with them. I can’t break it just because you tell me to.’

On the rim of the bowl, she had said, there was a stain from her mother’s lipstick. Her mother had apparently told her that once the lipstick was there it would not go away, however hard she rubbed, and indeed since Kikuji had had the bowl he had washed without success at that especially dark spot on the rim. It was a light brown, far from the color of lipstick; and yet there was a faint touch of red in it, not impossible to take for old, faded lipstick, It may have been the red of the Shino itself; or, since the forward side of the bowl had become fixed with use, a stain may have been left from the lips of owners before Mrs Ota. Mrs Ota, however, had probably used it most. It had been her everyday teacup.

Had Mrs Ota herself first thought of so using it? Or had Kikuji’s father? Kikuji wondered.

There had also been his suspicion that Mrs Ota, with his father,
had used the two cylindrical Raku bowls, the red and the black, as everyday ‘man-wife’ teacups.

His father had had her make the Shino water jar a flower vase, then – he had had her put roses and carnations in it? And he had had her use the little Shino bowl as a teacup? Had he at such times thought her beautiful?

Now that the two of them were dead, the water jar and the bowl had come to Kikuji. And Fumiko had come too.

‘I’m not just being childish. I really do wish you would break it. You liked the water jar I gave you, and I remembered the other Shino and thought it would go with the jar. But afterward I was ashamed.’

‘I shouldn’t be using it as a teacup. It’s much too good.’

‘But there are so many better pieces. You’ll drink from this and think of them. I’ll be very unhappy.’

‘But do you really believe that you can’t give away anything except the finest pieces?’

‘It depends on the person and the circumstances.’

The words had rich overtones.

Was Fumiko kind enough to think that for a souvenir of her mother, a souvenir of Fumiko herself – perhaps something more intimate than a souvenir – only the finest would do?

The desire, the plea, that only the finest be left to recall her mother came across to Kikuji. It came as the finest of emotions, and the water jar was its witness.

The very face of the Shino, glowing warmly cool, made him think of Mrs Ota. Possibly because the piece was so fine, the memory was without the darkness and ugliness of guilt.

As he looked at the masterpiece it was, he felt all the more strongly the masterpiece Mrs Ota had been. In a masterpiece there is nothing unclean.

He looked at the jar and he wanted to see Fumiko, he had said over the telephone that stormy day. He had been able to sa it
only because the telephone stood between. Fumiko had answered that she had another Shino piece, and brought him the bowl.

It was probably true that the bowl was weaker than the jar.

‘I seem to remember that my father had a portable tea chest. He used to take it with him when he went traveling,’ mused Kikuji. ‘The bowl he kept in it must be much worse than this.’

‘What sort of bowl is it?’

‘I’ve never seen it myself.’

‘Show it to me. It’s sure to be better. And if it is, may I break the Shino?’

‘A dangerous gamble.’

After dinner, as she dexterously picked seeds from the watermelon, Fumiko again pressed him to show her the bowl.

He sent the maid to open the tea cottage, and went out through the garden. He meant to bring the tea chest back with him, but Fumiko went along.

‘I have no idea where it might be,’ he called back. ‘Kurimoto knows far better than I.’

Fumiko was in the shadow of the blossom-heavy oleander. He could see, below the lowest of the white branches, stockinged feet in garden clogs.

The tea chest was in a cupboard at the side of the pantry.

Kikuji brought it into the main room and laid it before her. She knelt deferentially, as though waiting for him to untie the wrapping; but after a time she reached for it.

‘If I may see it, then.’

‘It’s a bit dusty.’ He took the chest by the wrapping and dusted it over the garden. ‘The pantry is alive with bugs, and there was a dead cicada in the cupboard.’

‘But this room is clean.’

‘Kurimoto cleaned it when she came to tell me that you and the Inamura girl were married. It was night, and she must have shut a cicada in the cupboard.’

Taking out what appeared to be a tea bowl, Fumiko bent low to undo the sack. Her fingers trembled slightly.

The round shoulders were thrown forward, and to Kikuji, looking at her in profile, the long throat seemed even longer.