Mandarins (10 page)

In the autumn of the following year, Nobuko accompanied her husband on a business trip that brought her for the first time since her marriage to T
ō
ky
ō
. With much to accomplish in a short time, he had no opportunity to go out with her, except for a visit to her mother just after their arrival. Thus, it was alone that she rode the streetcar to the terminal stop, drearily typical of the newly developed urban
areas, and from there took a rickshaw the rest of the way, swaying back and forth.

Not far from the house, the residential area gave way to spring onion patches. The neighboring buildings were clusters of newly constructed rental dwellings, indistinguishable, one from the other: the door under the eaves, the photinia hedge, and the clothes hanging on the laundry pole. Nobuko was rather disappointed at how commonplace it seemed.

When she called out to announce herself, it was to her surprise that Shunkichi himself appeared. “Aha!” he exclaimed cheerily, welcoming the rare visitor. He looked much the same, though she saw that he had let his once closely cropped hair grow.

“It's been a long time.”

“Well then, come in, come in. Unfortunately, I happen to be alone.”

“Where is Teruko? Is she out?”

“She went on an errand—along with the maid.”

Nobuko felt strangely uncomfortable as she stepped into the hallway and quietly took off her somewhat flamboyantly lined coat.

He invited her to sit in the eight-mat room that served as both library and drawing room. Everywhere there were heaps of books. The afternoon light that seeped through the sliding paper doors fell conspicuously on a small rosewood desk, about which lay an unmanageable mass of newspapers, magazines, and manuscript paper. The only evidence of a wifely presence was a new
koto
leaning against the wall of the alcove. Nobuko gazed long and curiously at what she saw before her.

“We knew from your letter that you were coming but not that it would be today.” Shunkichi lit a cigarette, a look of fond reminiscence in his eyes. “How is your life
Ō
saka?”

“And how are you, Shun-san? Are you happy?”

As she offered this brief reply, Nobuko was conscious of happy
moments from the past returning. The awkward memories of the last two years, with virtually no correspondence between them, now caused her surprisingly little anguish.

Warming their hands at the brazier, they found an inexhaustible variety of matters to discuss: Shunkichi's novel, news of mutual friends, similarities and contrasts between T
ō
ky
ō
and
Ō
saka . . . Yet, as though by tacit agreement, nothing was said of how each lived from day to day. For Nobuko, this only reinforced her keen sensation that she was indeed talking to him, her cousin of old.

Sometimes there was silence between them. Nobuko would simply smile, looking down into the ashes of the brazier. In those moments, she felt a vague sense of expectation. This was each time dispelled as Shunkichi, whether deliberately or coincidentally, plunged into a new topic of conversation. Little by little she found herself looking irresistibly into his face. For his part, however, he puffed nonchalantly on a cigarette, revealing in his expression nothing the least bit odd.

Teruko returned. She seemed on the verge of rushing to clasp her hands, so happy she was to see her. Nobuko too was smiling, though already there were tears in her eyes. For a while they forgot Shunkichi as they plied each other with questions about their lives since the previous year. Teruko was particularly energetic, her cheeks flushed as she spoke, not neglecting to tell her sister all about the chickens that she continued to raise.

Shunkichi looked contentedly at the two as they talked, a cigarette in his mouth and all the while a smile on his face. When the maid returned, he took from her several postcards she had brought and, immediately turning to his desk, began to busy himself with his pen. Teruko appeared surprised to realize that the maid had been out:

“So no one was home when you arrived?” she asked.

“No, only Shun-san,” her sister replied in a tone that seemed to emphasize that there was nothing in this to trouble her.

With his back still turned, Shunkichi remarked to his wife: “You should thank your master, for it was he who served the tea!” The two women exchanged mischievous glances and giggled, but Teruko intentionally did not reply.

They now gathered around the dining table for supper. Teruko explained that the eggs they saw before them had all come from her own hens, which she kept in the garden.

“Human beings,” said Shunkichi, offering wine to Nobuko as he launched into a discourse of a socialistic hue, “sustain their lives through plunder. The eggs we see here are but one minor example.”

“How strange of
you
to say so!” Teruko replied with a childlike titter, for it was clearly Shunkichi among the three who had the greatest fondness for eggs. As for Nobuko, the ambience there at the table could only remind her of a lonely sitting room in a distant pinewood at dusk.

The conversation topics were still unexhausted, well after the last of the dessert fruit had been consumed. Shunkichi, now mellow with the wine, sat cross-legged under the electric light of the long autumn evening, delineating with gusto a school of sophistry quite his own. The animated discussion once again brought Nobuko back to more youthful days. Her eyes gleamed as she exclaimed: “I think I might just write a novel myself!”

Shunkichi replied with Gourmont's aphorism: “The Muses are women, and you must be a man to possess them properly.”
²
Nobuko and Teruko joined forces in refusing to accept the authority of such a pronouncement.

“If so,” said Teruko in all seriousness, “must one be a woman to compose music? After all, Apollo is male!”

The hour was already late, and in the end it was agreed that Nobuko would spend the night. Before going to bed, Shunkichi opened one
of the shutters on the veranda and, dressed only in his nightclothes, stepped down into the small garden. He called out, as if to no one in particular:

“Come. There's a fine moon out.”

Nobuko alone followed him. Taking off her split-toed socks and slipping into the clogs that lay on the stepping-stone, she felt the cold dew on her feet.

The moon was shining over the top of a thin and withered cypress in a corner of the garden. Shunkichi stood under it and looked up at the faint light of the night sky.

“My, how high the grass is!” said Nobuko, walking gingerly toward him, as though repelled by the overgrown garden. Shunkichi continued to gaze at the sky.

“Hmm, Thirteenth Night,”
³
he murmured simply.

They had stood silently for some time when Shunkichi gave her a quiet look.

“Would you like to go look at the henhouse?”

Nobuko nodded silently. They walked slowly side by side toward the opposite corner of the garden until they reached the straw-mat enclosure. The smell of chickens was in the air. All lay in the faint moonlight or in shadows. Shunkichi looked inside.

“Asleep,” he said softly to her, though as speaking to himself alone.

Hens robbed of their eggs
. . . , thought Nobuko involuntarily.

When the two returned to the house, they found Teruko standing in front of her husband's desk, gazing vaguely at the electric light. Into the lampshade had crawled a green leafhopper.

The next morning Shunkichi put on his best suit and after breakfast made his way hurriedly to the threshold to go out, explaining that
he had to visit the grave of a friend to mark the first anniversary of his death.

“All right? Please wait for me. I'll be back about noon.”

He said this to Nobuko as he threw on his overcoat. She smiled but said nothing, holding out his trilby in her delicate hand.

Teruko saw him off and invited her elder sister to sit across from her at the long brazier as she dutifully busied herself with serving tea. She appeared to have still many a jolly topic to discuss: the housewife next door, the journalists who had come for an interview, the foreign opera troupe Shunkichi had taken her to see . . .

Nobuko's spirits sank as she listened, and she suddenly realized that she was giving only perfunctory replies to what her sister was saying. At last her state of mind was apparent to Teruko as well. She stared worriedly into her sister's face.

“What is wrong?” she asked. Nobuko herself did not know.

The wall clock struck ten. Nobuko listlessly looked up.

“It seems Shun-san won't be returning any time soon.”

“No, not yet.” Her sister's terse response struck her as somehow typifying that of a still contented bride. Again despite herself, she felt downcast.

“You
are
happy, aren't you, Teruko?” She intended to sound lighthearted as she made the remark, burying her chin in her kimono collar, but spontaneously and inevitably a note of genuine envy had crept in.

Seemingly guileless, Teruko merrily laughed with a playful scowl: “You just wait, dear sister. I'll get even for that!” She then added fawningly: “You say that knowing full well how happy
you
are!”

Nobuko heard the words as though she had been struck by a whip. She raised her eyelids ever so slightly.

“Do you really think so?” she asked in return, and was immediately sorry for her words. For an instant Teruko bore a strange look, and, as
their eyes met, Nobuko saw that in her sister's face was an irrepressible expression of regret.

“Well, I am happy if you think I am,” she said with a forced smile. The two fell silent, listening to the iron kettle as it simmered beneath the ticking wall clock.

Presently Teruko inquired quietly and ever so timidly: “But is he not kind to you?” Her voice clearly resonated with a sense of compassion, but Nobuko would have none of it. She lowered her eyes to the newspaper spread out across her lap and deliberately offered no reply. As in
Ō
saka, the news was all about the price of rice.
⁴

In the still sitting room could soon be heard the faint sound of weeping. Nobuko looked up from her newspaper and across the brazier to her sister, now holding a sleeve to her face.

“You needn't cry,” she said. But it was no simple task to comfort her, and still her tears flowed. As she gazed wordlessly for some time at the shaking shoulders, Nobuko experienced a cruel sense of joy. Mindful that the maid should not hear the commotion, she looked into Teruko's face and continued in a low voice.

“If I've been wrong, I apologize. If you are happy, Teru-san, then I shall feel gratified. Truly . . . If Shun-san loves you . . .”

As she spoke, her own voice, moved by her very words, gradually took on a mawkish tone. Now Teruko abruptly lowered her sleeve and raised her tear-stained face. In her eyes was kindled a new and strange emotion, not of sadness or anger but rather of irrepressible jealousy.

“Then why, even last night, did you . . .?” Before she could finish the sentence, she had buried her face in her sleeve and was convulsed with weeping . . .

Several hours later, Nobuko was jolting hurriedly toward the streetcar station in a canopied rickshaw. Her only view of the outside
provided by a celluloid window in the front, she watched a slow but steady procession of drab suburban houses, together with thickets of brush and trees, their colors turning with the season. Only the cold autumn sky remained motionless, as fleecy clouds drifted by.

Nobuko's mind was tranquil—the tranquillity of bleak resignation. When Teruko's tearful paroxysms had subsided, peace between the two, though occasioned by renewed weeping, was easily restored. Yet Nobuko could not separate herself from grim reality. She had not waited for the return of her cousin, and as she stepped into the rickshaw, her heart congealed in spite: her sister was now forever a stranger.

She abruptly looked up and through the celluloid window saw Shunkichi coming along the squalid road, walking stick under his arm. Her heart began to palpitate: should she stop the rickshaw or go on? She tried to calm herself beneath the canopy, even as she vainly wavered. Within moments of meeting, she saw him, bathed in the soft sunlight, cautiously guiding his shoes around the many puddles in his path.

Shun-san!
she thought for an instant of calling out. Indeed his familiar figure was just beside her carriage. But again she hesitated, and now, quite unawares, he had passed her by. The faintly overcast sky, the sparse rows of houses, the yellow tops of the tall trees . . . and then, as before, only the thin traffic of pedestrians along the streets of the dismal
banlieue
. . .

Autumn
. . . , came the thought. Beneath the canopy she sat, chilled and pensive, overwhelmed by desolation.

I put on a heavy overcoat, donned my Astrakhan hat, and set off for the Ichigaya Prison, where my cousin had spent the last four or five days. My role was simply that of a family representative, offering cheer and comfort, but clearly mixed with my motives was curiosity.

It would soon be February. There were still post–New Year's sales banners along the street, but in all of the neighborhoods I passed, the pallor of the season had settled on trade and commerce as well. As I walked up a slope, I too felt an aching weariness.