Thousand Cranes (3 page)

‘Nothing in particular. Nothing at all.’

‘You must be careful with her. So meek and gentle – she always manages to make it look as if she could do no one the least harm. But you can never tell what she’s thinking.’

‘I suppose she comes to your parties often?’ Kikuji asked with a touch of sarcasm. ‘When did she begin?’

To escape Chikako’s poison, he started into the garden.

Chikako followed him. ‘And did you like her? A nice girl, didn’t you think?’

‘A very nice girl. And she would have seemed even nicer if I’d met her without the rest of you hovering around, you and Mrs Ota and Father’s ghost.’

‘Why should that bother you? Mrs Ota has nothing to do with the Inamura girl.’

‘It just seemed the wrong thing to do to the girl.’

‘Why? If it bothered you to have Mrs Ota here, I apologize, but you must remember that I didn’t invite her. And you’re to think of the Inamura girl separately.’

‘I’m afraid I have to go.’ He stopped. If he went on walking with Chikako, there was no telling when she would leave him.

By himself again, he noted that the azaleas up the side of the mountain were in bud. He heaved a deep sigh.

He was disgusted with himself for having let Chikako’s note lure him out; but the impression of the girl with the thousand-crane kerchief was fresh and clean.

It was perhaps because of her that the meeting with two of his father’s women had upset him no more than it had.

The two women were still here to talk of his father, and his mother was dead. He felt a surge of something like anger. The ugly birthmark came to him again.

An evening breeze was rustling the new leaves. Kikuji walked slowly, hat in hand.

From a distance he saw Mrs Ota standing in the shadow of the main gate.

He looked for a way of avoiding her. If he climbed to the right or left, he could probably leave the temple by another exit.

Nevertheless, he walked toward the gate. A suggestion of grimness came over his face.

Mrs Ota saw him, and came toward him. Her cheeks were flushed.

‘I waited for you. I wanted to see you again. I must seem brazen, but I had to say something more. If we had said good-by there, I would have had no way of knowing when I might see you again.’

‘What happened to your daughter?’

‘Fumiko went on ahead. She was with a friend.’

‘She knew, then, that you would be waiting for me?’

‘Yes.’ She looked into his eyes.

‘I doubt if she approves. I felt very sorry for her back there. It was clear that she did not want to see me.’ The words may have been blunt, and again they may have been circumspect; but her answer was quite straightforward.

‘It was a trial for Fumiko to see you.’

‘Because my father caused her a great deal of pain.’

Kikuji meant to suggest that Mrs Ota had caused him a great deal of pain.

‘Not at all. Your father was very good to her. Sometime I must tell you about it. At first she would not be friendly, no matter
how kind he was to her; but then, toward the end of the war, when the air raids were bad, she changed. I have no idea why. In her own way, she did her very best for him. Her very best, I say, but she was only a girl. Her best was going out to buy chicken and fish and the like for him. She was very determined, and she didn’t mind taking risks. She went out into the country for rice, even during the raids. Your father was astonished, the change was so sudden. I found it very touching myself, so touching that it almost hurt. And at the same time I felt that I was being scolded.’

Kikuji wondered if he and his mother might also have had favors from the Ota girl. The remarkable gifts his father brought home from time to time – were they among her purchases?

‘I don’t know why Fumiko changed so. Maybe it was because we didn’t know from one day to the next whether we would still be alive. I suppose she was feeling sorry for me, and she went to work for your father too.’

In the confusion of defeat, the girl must have known how desperately her mother clung to Kikuji’s father. In the violent reality of those days, she must have left behind the past that was her own father, and seen only the present reality of her mother.

‘Did you notice the ring Fumiko was wearing?’

‘No.’

‘Your father gave it to her. Even when he was with me, your father would go home if there was an air-raid warning. Fumiko would see him home, and no one could talk her out of it. There was no telling what would happen if he went alone, she would say. One night she didn’t come back. I hoped she had stayed at your house, but I was afraid the two of them had been killed. Then in the morning she came home and said that she had seen him as far as your gate and spent the rest of the night in an air-raid shelter. He thanked her the next time he came, and gave her that ring. I’m sure she was embarrassed to have you see it.’

Kikuji was most uncomfortable. And it was odd that the woman seemed to expect sympathy as a matter of course.

His mood was not clearly one of dislike or distrust, however. There was a warmth in her that put him off guard.

When the girl had desperately been doing everything she could for his father, had she been watching her mother, and yet unable to watch?

Kikuji sensed that Mrs Ota was talking of her own love as she talked of the girl.

She seemed to be pleading something with all the passion she had, and in its final implications the plea did not seem to make a distinction between Kikuji’s father and Kikuji himself. There was a deep, affectionate nostalgia in it, as if she meant to be talking to Kikuji’s father.

The hostility which Kikuji, with his mother, had felt for Mrs Ota had lost some of its strength, though it had not entirely disappeared. He even feared that unless he was careful he might find in himself the father loved by Mrs Ota. He was tempted to imagine that he had known this woman’s body long ago.

His father had soon left Chikako, Kikuji knew, but he had stayed with Mrs Ota until his death. Still it seemed probable that Chikako had treated Mrs Ota with derision. Kikuji saw signs of much the same cruelty in himself, and he found something seductive in the thought that he could do her injury with a light heart.

‘Do you often go to Kurimoto’s affairs?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t you have enough of her in the old days?’

‘I had a letter from her after your father died. I missed your father a great deal. I was feeling very lonely.’ She spoke with bowed head.

‘And does your daughter go too?’

‘Fumiko? Fumiko just keeps me company.’

They had crossed the tracks and passed the North Kamakura Station, and were climbing the hill opposite the Engakuji.

4

Mrs Ota was at least forty-five, some twenty years older than Kikuji, but she had made him forget her age when they made love. He felt that he had had a woman younger than he in his arms.

Sharing a happiness that came from the woman’s experience, Kikuji felt none of the embarrassed reticence of inexperience.

He felt as if he had for the first time known woman, and as if for the first time he had known himself as a man. It was an extraordinary awakening. He had not guessed that a woman could be so wholly pliant and receptive, the receptive one who followed after and at the same time lured him on, the receptive one who engulfed him in her own warm scent.

Kikuji, the bachelor, usually felt soiled after such encounters; but now, when the sense of defilement should have been keenest, he was conscious only of warm repose.

He usually wanted to make his departure roughly; but today it was as though for the first time someone was warmly near him and he was drifting willingly along. He had not until then seen how the wave of woman followed after. Giving his body to the wave, he even felt a satisfaction as of drowsing off in triumph, the conqueror whose feet were being washed by a slave.

And there was a feeling of the maternal about her.

‘Kurimoto has a big birthmark. Did you know it?’ He bobbed his head as he spoke. Without forethought, he had introduced the unpleasant. Possibly because the fibres of his consciousness had slackened, however, he did not feel that he was wronging Chikako. He put out his hand. ‘Here, on the breast, like this.’

Something had risen inside him to make him say it. Something itchy that wanted to rise against Kikuji himself and injure the woman. Or perhaps it only hid a sweet shyness in wanting to see her body, to see where the mark should be.

‘How repulsive!’ She quickly brought her kimono together. But there seemed to be something she could not quite accept. ‘I hadn’t known,’ she said quietly. ‘You can’t see it under the kimono, can you?’

‘It’s not impossible.’

‘No! How could you possibly?’

‘You could see it if it were here, I should imagine.’

‘Stop. Are you looking to see if I have a mark too?’

‘No. But I wonder how you’d feel at a time like this if you did have a mark.’

‘Here?’ Mrs Ota looked at her own breast. ‘But why do you have to speak of it? Does it make any difference?’ In spite of the protest, her manner was unresisting. The poison disseminated by Kikuji seemed to have had no effect. It flowed back to Kikuji himself.

‘But it does make a difference. I only saw it once, when I was eight or nine years old, and I can see it even now.’

‘Why?’

‘You were under the curse of that birthmark yourself. Didn’t Kurimoto come at you as if she were fighting for Mother and me?’

Mrs Ota nodded, and pulled away. Kikuji put strength into his embrace.

‘She was always conscious of that birthmark. It made her more and more spiteful.’

‘What a frightening idea.’

‘And maybe too she was out for revenge against my father.’

‘For what?’

‘She thought he was belittling her because of the birthmark. She may even have persuaded herself that he left her because of it.’

‘Let’s not talk about the repulsive thing.’ But she seemed to be drawing no clear picture of the birthmark in her mind. ‘I don’t
suppose Miss Kurimoto worries about it any more. The pain must have gone long ago.’

‘Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’

‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.’ She spoke as if still half in a dream.

Then Kikuji said what he had meant at all costs not to say.

‘You remember the girl on your left this afternoon?’

‘Yes, Yukiko. The Inamura girl.’

‘Kurimoto invited me today so that I could inspect her.’

‘No!’ She gazed at him with wide, unblinking eyes. ‘It was a
miai
, was it? I never suspected.’

‘Not a
miai
, really.’

‘So that was it. On the way home from a
miai
.’ A tear drew a line from her eye down to the pillow. Her shoulders were quivering. ‘It was wrong. Wrong. Why didn’t you tell me?’

She pressed her face to the pillow.

Kikuji had not expected so violent a response.

‘If it’s wrong it’s wrong, whether I’m on the way home from a
miai
or not.’ He was being quite honest. ‘I don’t see the relationship between the two.’

But the figure of the Inamura girl at the tea hearth came before him. He could see the pink kerchief and the thousand cranes.

The figure of the weeping woman had become ugly.

‘Oh, it was wrong. How could I have done it? The things I’m guilty of.’ Her full shoulders were shaking.

If Kikuji had regretted the encounter, he would have had the usual sense of defilement. Quite aside from the question of the
miai,
she was his father’s woman.

But he had until then felt neither regret nor revulsion.

He did not understand how it had happened, it had happened so naturally. Perhaps she was apologizing for having seduced him, and yet she had probably not meant to seduce him, nor
did Kikuji feel that he had been seduced. There had been no suggestion of resistance, on his part or the woman’s. There had been no qualms, he might have said.

They had gone to an inn on the hill opposite the Engakuji, and they had had dinner, because she was still talking of Kikuji’s father. Kikuji did not have to listen. Indeed it was in a sense strange that he listened so quietly; but Mrs Ota, evidently with no thought for the strangeness, seemed to plead her yearning for the past. Listening, Kikuji felt expansively benevolent. A soft affection enveloped him.

It came to him that his father had been happy.

Here, perhaps, was the source of the mistake. The moment for sending her away had passed, and, in the sweet slackening of his heart, Kikuji gave himself up.

But deep in his heart there remained a dark shadow. Venomously, he spoke of Chikako and the Inamura girl.

The venom was only too effective. With regret came defilement and revulsion, and a violent wave of self-loathing swept over him, pressing him to say something even crueller.

‘Let’s forget about it. It was nothing,’ she said. ‘It was nothing at all.’

‘You were remembering my father?’

‘What!’ She looked up in surprise. She had been weeping, and her eyelids were red. The eyes were muddied, and in the wide pupils Kikuji still saw the lassitude of woman. ‘If you say so, I have no answer. But I’m a very unhappy person.’

‘You needn’t lie to me.’ Kikuji roughly pulled her kimono open. ‘If there were even a birthmark, you’d never forget. The impression …’ He was taken aback at his own words.

‘You aren’t to stare at me. I’m not young any more.’

Kikuji came at her as if to bite.

The earlier wave returned, the wave of woman.

He fell asleep in security.

Half awake and half asleep, he heard birds chirping. It was as if he were awakening for the first time to the call of birds.

A morning mist wet the trees at the veranda. Kikuji felt that the recesses of his mind had been washed clean. He thought of nothing.

Mrs Ota was sleeping with her back to him. He wondered when she had turned away. Raising himself to an elbow, he looked into her face in the semi-darkness.

5

Some two weeks later, the Ota girl called on Kikuji.

He had the maid show her into the parlor. In an effort to quiet the beating of his heart, he opened the tea cupboard and took out sweets. Had the girl come alone, or was her mother waiting outside, unable to come in?