Thousand Cranes (9 page)

‘You must be lonely. Suppose you take up tea again.’

‘But …’

‘It will give you something to think about.’

‘But I’m afraid I can’t afford such luxuries.’

‘Come, now.’ Chikako dismissed the remark with a sweep of her hands, which had been folded on her knees. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m here to air the cottage. The rains seem to be over.’ She glanced at Kikuji. ‘Fumiko is here too. Shall we?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I thought I might be allowed to use the Shino piece you have in memory of Fumiko’s mother.’

Fumiko looked up.

‘And we can all exchange memories.’

‘But I’ll only weep if I go into the cottage.’

‘Let’s weep. We’ll all have a good cry. I won’t have my way with the cottage once Kikuji is married. It’s full of memories, of course, but then …’ Chikako laughed shortly, and was sober again. ‘Once we’ve arranged everything with Mrs Inamura’s Yukiko, you know.’

Fumiko nodded. Her face was expressionless.

There were signs of fatigue, however, on the round face that so resembled her mother’s.

‘You’ll only embarrass the Inamuras, talking of plans that aren’t definite,’ said Kikuji.

‘I’m speaking of a
possible
engagement. But you’re right. It’s the good things that attract the villains. You must pretend you’ve heard nothing, Fumiko.’

‘Of course.’ Fumiko nodded again.

Chikako summoned the maid and went out to clean the cottage.

‘Be careful,’ she called back from the garden. ‘The leaves are still wet here in the shade.’

3

‘It was raining so hard here that you must have heard it over the telephone.’

‘Can you hear rain over the telephone? But I wasn’t listening. Could you hear the rain in my garden?’

Fumiko looked out toward the shrubbery, from beyond which they could hear Chikako’s broom.

Kikuji too looked out. ‘I didn’t think so at the time, but afterward I began to wonder. It was a real cloudburst.’

‘I was terrified at the thunder.’

‘So you said over the telephone.’

‘I’m like my mother in all sorts of trivial ways. When I was little, Mother used to cover my head with her kimono sleeves whenever it thundered. And when she went out in the summertime, she would look up at the sky and ask if anyone thought it would thunder. Even now, sometimes, I want to cover my head.’ Shyness seemed to creep in from her shoulders toward her breast. ‘I brought the Shino bowl.’ She stood up.

She laid the bowl, still wrapped in a kerchief, at Kikuji’s knee.

Kikuji hesitated, however, and Fumiko herself untied it.

‘I suppose your mother used the Raku for an everyday cup? It was Ryōnyū?’

‘Yes. But Mother didn’t think ordinary tea looked right in either red or black Raku. She used this bowl instead.’

‘You can’t see the color against black Raku.’

Kikuji made no motion toward taking up the Shino before him.

‘I doubt if it’s a very good piece.’

‘I’m sure it’s very good indeed.’ But he still did not reach for it.

It was as Fumiko had described it. The white glaze carried a faint suggestion of red. As one looked at it, the red seemed to float up from deep within the white.

The rim was faintly brown. In one place the brown was deeper.

It was there that one drank?

The rim might have been stained by tea, and it might have been stained by lips.

Kikuji looked at the faint brown, and felt that there was a touch of red in it.

Where her mother’s lipstick had sunk in?

There was a red-black in the crackle too.

The color of faded lipstick, the color of a wilted red rose, the color of old, dry blood – Kikuji began to feel queasy.

A nauseating sense of uncleanness and an overpowering fascination came simultaneously.

In black enamel touched with green and an occasional spot of russet, thick leaves of grass encircled the waist of the bowl. Clean and healthy, the leaves were enough to dispel his morbid fancies.

The proportions of the bowl were strong and dignified.

‘It’s a fine piece.’ Kikuji at length took it in his hand.

‘I don’t really know, but Mother liked it.’

‘There’s something very appealing about tea bowls for women.’

The woman in Fumiko’s mother came to him again, warm and naked.

Why had Fumiko brought this bowl, stained with her mother’s lipstick?

Was she naive, was she tactless and unfeeling? Kikuji could not decide.

But something unresisting about her seemed to come over to him.

He turned the cup round and round on his knee. He avoided touching the rim, however.

‘Put it away. There will be trouble if old Kurimoto sees it.’

‘Yes.’ She put it back in the box and wrapped it up.

She had evidently meant to give it to him, but she had lost her chance to say so. Perhaps she had concluded that he did not like it.

She took the package out to the hall again.

Shoulders thrust forward, Chikako came from the garden. ‘Would you mind taking out Mrs Ota’s water jar?’

‘Couldn’t you use one of ours, with Fumiko here and all?’

‘I don’t understand. Can’t you see that I want to use it because she
is
here? We’ll have this keepsake with us while we exchange memories of her mother.’

‘But you hated Mrs Ota so.’

‘Not at all. We just weren’t meant for each other. And how can you hate a dead person? We weren’t meant for each other,
and I couldn’t understand her. And then in some ways I understood her too well.’

‘You’ve always been fond of understanding people too well.’

‘They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily.’

Fumiko appeared at the veranda, and sat down just inside the room.

Hunching her left shoulder, Chikako turned to face the girl.

‘Fumiko, suppose we use your mother’s Shino.’

‘Please do.’

Kikuji took the Shino jar from a drawer.

Chikako slipped her fan into her obi, tucked the box under her arm, and went back to the cottage.

‘It was something of a shock to hear that you’d moved.’ Kikuji too went toward the veranda. ‘You sold the house all by yourself?’

‘Yes. But it was very simple. I knew the people who bought it. They were living in Oiso while they looked for something permanent, and they offered to trade houses. Theirs was very small, just right for me, they said. But I could never live by myself, no matter how small the house, and if I’m to work it will be easier to live in a rented room. I decided to have a friend take me in.’

‘Have you found work?’

‘No. When I’m being honest with myself, I have to admit that there’s nothing I’m qualified to do.’ Fumiko smiled. ‘I’d been meaning to come by, once I found work. I hated the thought of talking to you while I was still drifting, no house, no work, nothing.’

At such times you
should
talk to me, Kikuji wanted to say. He thought of Fumiko by herself. It was not a lonely figure he saw.

‘I’m thinking of selling this house too, but I put it off and put it off. But wanting to sell, I’ve left the eaves untended, and you can see how long it’s been since I had the mats refaced.’

‘You’ll be married here, I suppose,’ she said unaffectedly. ‘You can have them done then.’

Kikuji looked at her. ‘Kurimoto’s story? Do you think I could marry now?’

‘Because of Mother? Mother has made you suffer enough. You should think of her as something finished long ago.’

4

Cleaning the cottage took the practiced Chikako very little time.

‘How do you like the company I’ve put the Shino in?’ she asked. Kikuji did not know.

Fumiko too was silent. They both looked at the Shino.

Before Mrs Ota’s ashes it had been a flower vase, and now it was back at its old work, a water jar in a tea ceremony.

A jar that had been Mrs Ota’s was now being used by Chikako. After Mrs Ota’s death, it had passed to her daughter, and from Fumiko it had come to Kikuji.

It had had a strange career. But perhaps the strangeness was natural to tea vessels.

In the three or four hundred years before it became the property of Mrs Ota, it had passed through the hands of people with what strange careers?

‘Beside the iron kettle, the Shino looks even more like a beautiful woman,’ Kikuji said to Fumiko. ‘But it’s strong enough to hold its own against the iron.’

The luster glowed quietly from the white depths.

Kikuji had said over the telephone that when he looked at this Shino he wanted to see Fumiko. In the white skin of her mother, had he sensed the depths of woman?

It was a warm day. Kikuji slid open the doors of the cottage.

The maples were green in the window behind Fumiko. The shadow of the maple leaves, layer upon layer, fell on Fumiko’s hair.

Her head and her long throat were in the light of the window, and her arms, below the short sleeves of a dress she was apparently wearing for the first time, were white with a touch of green. Although she was not plump, there was a round fullness in the shoulders, and a roundness too in the arms.

Chikako was gazing at the jar. ‘You can’t bring a water jar to life unless you use it for tea. It’s a great waste, cramming foreign flowers in it.’

‘Mother used it for flowers too,’ said Fumiko.

‘It’s like a dream, sitting here with this souvenir of your mother. I’m sure she is as happy to see it here as we are.’ Was she being sarcastic?

Fumiko, however, seemed not to notice. ‘I gather that Mr Mitani means to use it as a flower vase, and I’ve given up tea myself.’

‘Oh, you musn’t say that.’ Chikako looked around the cottage. ‘I do feel most at peace when I’m allowed to sit here. I go to all sorts of tea cottages, of course.’ She looked at Kikuji. ‘Next year will be the fifth anniversary of your father’s death. We must have a tea ceremony.’

‘I suppose so. It would be fun to invite all sorts of connoisseurs and use imitation pieces from beginning to end.’

‘Oh, come. There isn’t an imitation piece in your father’s whole collection.’

‘Oh? But don’t you think that would be fun?’ he asked Fumiko. ‘This cottage always smells of some mouldy poison, and a really false ceremony might drive the poison away. Have it in memory of Father, and make it my farewell to tea. Of course I severed relations with tea long ago.’

‘What you’re saying is that a meddlesome old woman comes to air the place?’ Chikako was stirring tea with a bamboo whisk.

‘Perhaps I am.’

‘You musn’t. But then I suppose it’s all right to sever old
relations when you’ve struck up new.’ She brought him tea like a waitress filling an order.

‘Listen to his jokes, Fumiko. You must wonder whether this souvenir of your mother hasn’t come to the wrong place. I almost feel that I can see your mother’s face in it.’

Kikuji drank and put the bowl down, and glanced at the Shino.

Perhaps Fumiko could see Chikako’s figure reflected in the black lacquer lid.

But Fumiko only sat there absently.

Kikuji did not know whether she was resisting Chikako or ignoring her.

It seemed odd that she could be here in the cottage with Chikako and show no resentment.

She had remained impassive when Chikako spoke of Kikuji’s marriage.

From long hostility toward Fumiko and her mother, Chikako made every remark an insult.

Was Fumiko’s sorrow so deep that the insults flowed over the surface?

Had her mother’s death driven her beyond them?

Or had she inherited her mother’s nature, was there in her, too, a strange childishness that left her unable to resist, whether the challenge came from herself or another?

Kikuji did not seem disposed to guard her from Chikako’s venom.

He noted the fact, and thought himself odd.

And Chikako, now serving herself, struck him as an odd figure too.

She took a watch from her obi. ‘These little watches are no good when you’re far-sighted. Suppose you give me your father’s pocket watch.’

‘He had no pocket watch.’

‘Oh, but he did. He often had one with him. When he went to Fumiko’s house too, I’m sure.’ Chikako goggled at her own watch.

Fumiko looked down.

‘Ten past two, is it? The hands are running together in one big blur.’ Her manner became brisk and businesslike. ‘Miss Inamura has been kind enough to organize a tea group, and they practice at three. I thought I’d just stop by for your answer before I went.’

‘Tell her very clearly that I’ll have to refuse.’

‘I see. I’m to tell her very clearly.’ Chikako met the crisis with a laugh. ‘I must have the group practice in this cottage sometime.’

‘Maybe we could have Miss Inamura buy the house. I’ll be selling it anyway.’

Chikako ignored him, and turned instead to Fumiko. ‘Fumiko, suppose we go at least part of the way together.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll be just a minute putting things away.’

‘Let me help you.’

‘You’ll help me, will you?’ But Chikako hurried into the pantry without waiting for her.

There was a sound of water.

‘You still have time,’ said Kikuji in a low voice. ‘Don’t go off with her.’

Fumiko shook her head. ‘I’m afraid.’

‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

‘I’m afraid.’

‘Suppose you go out, then, and come back when you’ve gotten rid of her.’

But Fumiko again shook her head. She smoothed the back of her summer dress, wrinkled from kneeling.

Kikuji, still kneeling, was about to put out his hand.

He thought she was going to fall. She flushed crimson.

She had reddened sightly at the mention of the pocket watch, and now all the shame seemed to blaze forth.

She took the Shino water jar into the pantry.

‘So you brought your mother’s Shino, did you?’ came Chikako’s husky voice.

Double Star

Kurimoto Chikako came by to tell Kikuji that Fumiko and the Inamura girl were both married.

With daylight-saving time, the sky was still bright at eight-thirty. Kikuji lay on the veranda after dinner, watching the caged fireflies the maid had bought. Their white light took on a yellow tinge as evening became night. He did not get up to turn on the light, however.