Beauty and Sadness (2 page)

Oki had thought he would telephone her the next day, if not that night, or drop in at her house. But in the morning, after being awakened by his neighbors’ children,
he began to feel hesitant, and decided to send her a special-delivery letter. As he sat at the writing desk staring perplexedly at a blank sheet of hotel stationery he decided that he need not see her, that it would be enough to hear the bells alone and then go back.

Oki had been aroused early by the children, but once the two foreign families went out he fell asleep again. It was almost eleven when he awakened.

Slowly tying his necktie, he suddenly recalled Otoko saying: “I’ll tie it for you. Let me.…” She was fifteen, and those had been her first words after he had taken her virginity. Oki himself had not spoken. There was nothing he could say. He had been holding her tenderly close, stroking her hair, but he could not bring himself to speak. Then she had slipped out of his arms and begun to dress. He got up, put on his shirt, and started to tie his tie. She was looking up into his face, her eyes moist and shining, but not tearful. He avoided those eyes. Even when he had kissed her, earlier, Otoko had kept her eyes wide open until he pressed them shut with his lips.

There was a sweet, girlish ring in her voice as she asked to tie his tie. Oki felt a wave of relief. What she said was completely unexpected. Perhaps she was trying to escape from herself, rather than to indicate forgiveness, but she handled his necktie gently, though she seemed to be having trouble with it.

“Do you know how?” Oki asked.

“I think so. I used to watch my father.”

Her father had died when Otoko was eleven.

Oki dropped into a chair and held Otoko facing him
on his lap, lifting his chin to make it easier for her. She crouched slightly toward him, several times undoing the tie and beginning over again. Then she slipped off his lap, trailing her fingers along his right shoulder, and gazed at the necktie. “There you are, Sonny-boy. Will that do?” Oki got up and went to the mirror. The knot was perfect. He rubbed the palm of his hand roughly across his face, with its faint oily film of sweat. He could hardly look at himself after having violated such a young girl. In the mirror he saw her face approaching. Startled by its fresh, poignant beauty, Oki turned round to her. She touched his shoulder, nestled her face against his chest, and said: “I love you.”

It had also seemed strange that a fifteen-year-old girl should call a man twice her age “Sonny-boy.”

That was twenty-four years ago. Now he was fifty-four. Otoko must be thirty-nine.

After his bath Oki had switched on the radio and learned that Kyoto had had a light freeze. The forecast said that the mild winter would probably continue over the holidays.

Oki breakfasted on toast and coffee in his room, and arranged to hire a car. Unable to make up his mind to call on Otoko, he decided to have the driver take him out to Mt. Arashi. From the car window he saw that the familiar, softly rounded low hills to the north and west, though some of them were in feeble sunlight, had the chilly drabness of a Kyoto winter. It looked as if the day were already ending. Oki got out of the car just before the
Togetsu Bridge, but instead of crossing it walked up the road along the river toward Kameyama Park.

At the end of the year even Mt. Arashi, so alive with tourists from spring till fall, had become a deserted landscape. The ancient mountain lay there before him, utterly still. The deep pool of the river at its base was a limpid green. In the distance echoed the sound of logs being loaded onto trucks from rafts along the bank. The mountainside descending to the river was the famous view, he supposed, but now it was in shadow except for a band of sunlight over the shoulder of Mt. Arashi that sloped toward the upper reaches of the river.

Oki had intended to have a quiet lunch by himself near Mt. Arashi. He had visited two restaurants there before. One of them was not far from the bridge, but its gate was closed. It seemed unlikely that people would come all the way out to this lonely mountain at the end of the year. Oki walked on along the river at a leisurely pace, wondering if the little rustic restaurant upstream would also be closed. He could always go back to the city for lunch. When he climbed the worn stone steps up to the restaurant, a girl turned him away, saying everyone had gone to Kyoto. How many years ago had it been, in the season for bamboo shoots, that he ate those young shoots in bonito broth here? He went back down to the road, and noticed an old woman sweeping leaves from a flight of low stone steps that led up to another restaurant next door. He asked if it was open, and she told him she thought so. Oki paused beside her for a moment, remarking
how quiet it was. “Yes, you can hear people talking all the way across the river,” she said.

The restaurant, buried in a hillside grove, had a thick, damp-looking old thatched roof and a dark entryway. One would hardly take it for a restaurant. In front, a stand of bamboo pressed in on it. The trunks of four or five splendid red pines towered beyond the thatched roof. Oki was shown into a private room, but there seemed to be no one else around. Just outside the glass sliding doors were red
aoki
berries. He saw a single azalea flower blooming out of season.
Aoki
shrubs and bamboos and the red pines blocked his view, but through the leaves he could glimpse a deep, clear jade-green pool in the river. All of Mt. Arashi was as still as that pool of water.

Oki sat at the
kotatsu
, both elbows propped on the low quilt-covered table over a warm charcoal brazier. He could hear a bird singing. The sound of logs being loaded on trucks echoed through the valley. From somewhere off in the Western Hills came the plaintive, lingering whistle of a train entering or leaving a tunnel. He was reminded of the thin cry of a newborn baby.… At sixteen, in the seventh month of carrying his child, Otoko had given birth. The baby was a girl.

Nothing could be done to save it, and Otoko never saw the baby. When it died, the doctor advised against letting her know too soon.

“Mr. Oki, I want you to tell her,” Otoko’s mother had said. “I’m apt to burst out crying, the poor thing having
to go through all this, when she’s still such a child.”

For the time being Otoko’s mother had suppressed her anger and resentment toward him. Her daughter was all she had, and once her daughter was pregnant, even by a man with a wife and child of his own, she no longer dared revile him. Her spirit failed, though it had seemed even stronger than Otoko’s. She had to rely on Oki to see that the child was born in secret, and to arrange for its care afterward. Then too, Otoko, nervous and high-strung in pregnancy, had threatened to kill herself if her mother criticized him.

When he came back to her bedside, Otoko looked at him with the gentle eyes, drained of feeling, of a newly delivered mother. But soon tears welled up in the corners of her eyes. She must have guessed, Oki thought. The tears flowed uncontrollably. As one of the streams went toward her ear, he hastily dabbed at it. She grasped his hand, and for the first time broke into audible sobs. She wept and sobbed as if a dam had burst.

“It’s dead, isn’t it? The baby’s dead, it’s dead!”

She was writhing in anguish, and Oki held her tight, pinning her body down. He could feel one of her small, youthful breasts—small, but swollen with milk—against his arm.

Her mother came in and called to Otoko. Perhaps she had been just outside.

Oki kept his arms around her.

“I can’t breathe,” she said. “Let me go.”

“Will you lie still? You won’t move?”

“I’ll lie still.”

He released her, and her shoulders sagged. New tears began to seep through her closed eyelids.

“Mother, are you going to cremate it?”

There was no answer.

“Such a tiny baby?”

Again her mother did not answer.

“Didn’t you say I had jet-black hair when I was born?”

“Yes, jet black.”

“Was my baby’s hair like that? Mother, could you save some for me?”

“I don’t know, Otoko.” Her mother hesitated, and then blurted out: “You can have another one!” She turned away frowning, as if she wanted to swallow her own words.

Had not Otoko’s mother, and even Oki himself, secretly hoped the child would never see the light of day? Otoko had given birth in a dingy little clinic on the outskirts of Tokyo. Oki felt a sharp pang at the thought that the baby’s life might have been saved if it had been cared for in a good hospital. He had taken her to the clinic alone. Her mother could not endure it. The doctor was a middle-aged man with the reddened face of an alcoholic. The young nurse looked accusingly at Oki. Otoko was wearing a kimono—still of a childish cut—with a matching cloak of cheap, dark-blue silk.

The image of a premature baby with jet-black hair appeared before Oki, there at Mt. Arashi over twenty years later. It flickered in the wintry groves of trees, and in the depths of the green pool. He clapped his hands to
summon the waitress. Clearly no guests had been expected, and it would take a long time to prepare his meal. A waitress brought tea and stayed chatting on and on, as if to keep him entertained.

One of her stories was about a man bewitched by a badger. They had found him splashing along in the river at dawn, screaming for help. He was floundering in the shallows under the Togetsu Bridge, where you could easily climb up on the bank. It seems that after he was rescued and came to his senses, he told them he had been wandering around the mountain like a sleepwalker from about ten o’clock the night before—and the next thing he knew he was in the river.

Finally the kitchen had the first course ready: slices of fresh silver carp. Oki sipped a little sake with it.

As he left he looked up again at the heavy thatched roof. Its mossy, decaying charm appealed to him, but the mistress of the restaurant explained that, being under the trees, it never really got a chance to dry out. It was not very old, less than ten years ago they had put on new thatching. A half moon gleamed in the sky just beyond the roof. It was three-thirty. As Oki went down the river road he watched kingfishers skimming low over the water. He could see the colors of their wings.

Near Togetsu Bridge he got into the car again, intending to go to the Adashino graveyard. In the gathering winter twilight the forest of tombstones and Jizo figures would soothe his feelings. But when he saw how dusky it was in the bamboo grove at the entrance to the Gio Temple he had the driver turn back. He decided to stop
in at the Moss Temple and then go to the hotel. The temple garden was empty except for a couple who looked like honeymooners. Dry pine needles lay scattered over the moss, and reflections of trees in the pond shifted as he walked along. On the way back to the hotel, the Eastern Hills ahead glowed in the orange light of the setting sun.

After warming himself with a bath, he looked for Ueno Otoko’s number in the phone book. A young woman answered, no doubt her protégée, and immediately turned the telephone over to Otoko.

“Hello.”

“This is Oki.” He waited. “It’s Oki. Oki Toshio.”

“Yes. It’s been such a long time.” She spoke with the soft Kyoto drawl.

He was not sure how to begin, so he went on quickly to avoid embarrassing her, as if he were calling on impulse.

“I came to hear the New Year’s Eve bells in Kyoto.”

“The bells?”

“Won’t you listen to them with me?”

She made no reply, even when he repeated his question. Probably she was too surprised to know what to say.

“Did you come alone?” she asked, after a long pause.

“Yes. Yes, I’m alone.”

Again Otoko was silent.

“I’m going back New Year’s morning—I just wanted to hear the bells toll out the old year with you. I’m not so young anymore, you know. How many years is it since the last time we met? It’s been so long I suppose I
wouldn’t dare ask to see you without an occasion like this.”

There was no answer.

“May I call for you tomorrow?”

“No, don’t,” Otoko said a little hastily. “I’ll come for
you.
At eight o’clock … perhaps that’s early, so let’s say around nine, at your hotel. I’ll make a reservation somewhere.”

Oki had hoped for a leisurely dinner with her, but nine o’clock would be after dinner. Still, he was glad she had agreed. The Otoko of his old memories had come to life again.

He spent the next day alone in his hotel room, morning till evening. That it was the last day of the year made the time seem even longer. There was nothing to do. He had friends in Kyoto, but it was not a day when he cared to see them. Nor did he want anyone to know he was in the city. Although he knew a good many restaurants with tempting Kyoto specialties, he decided to have a simple, businesslike dinner at the hotel. So the last day of the old year was filled with memories of Otoko. As the same memories kept recurring to his mind they became increasingly vivid. Events of over twenty years ago were more alive to him than those of yesterday.

Too far from the window to see the street below, Oki sat looking out over the rooftops at the Western Hills. Compared with Tokyo, Kyoto was such a small, intimate city that even the Western Hills were close at hand. As he gazed, a translucent pale gold cloud above the hills turned a chilly ashen color, and it was evening.

What were memories? What was the past that he remembered so clearly? When Otoko moved to Kyoto with her mother, Oki was sure they had parted. Yet had they, really? He could not escape the pain of having spoiled her life, possibly of having robbed her of every chance for happiness. But what had she thought of him as she spent all those lonely years? The Otoko of his memories was the most passionate woman he had ever known. And did not the vividness even now of those memories mean that she was not separated from him? Although he had never lived here, the lights of Kyoto in the evening had a nostalgic appeal for him. Perhaps every Japanese would feel that way. Still, Otoko was here. Restless, he took a bath, changed into fresh clothing, and walked up and down the room, stopping occasionally to look at himself in the mirror as he waited for her.