Masks (12 page)

The letter was unsigned. Again and again she looked at it, as at the text of a sutra learned nearly by heart. She did not read it, but merely gazing at its pages seemed to quiet the violent agitation within her.

After a time she turned startled eyes toward the unopened window.

A woman’s pale face appeared. The space between her eyebrows was creased in a frown, the eyes wide with alarm. As if hearing the inaudible cry of an unearthly, astonishing voice, Mieko groped her way to the window and slid open the shutter. The light in the outbuilding had vanished; there was only the smoke still pouring from the chimney, vanishing hastily skyward as if in flight from the secret deed in progress beneath the roof.

Ibuki sank into a bottomless softness, feeling himself melting into a similar softness. Captivated by such delicious drowsiness, he dozed in a pleasant half-sleep. Then several times over came the brief and piercing cry of a bird, the brevity of the sound severing his sweet dream like a pair of sharp scissors.

He remembered suddenly that it was winter, his senses awakening to the harsh early-morning cold that always roused him at home. Drawing his eyebrows together in a deep frown, he turned questioning eyes on the face of the sleeping woman whose head lay cradled on his arm. The weightless, short-cut hair brushing warm as the pinion feathers of a bird against his skin proved that it was Yasuko, yet he stared long and closely at the even-featured sleeping face—the closed eyelids thin and relaxed as large petals, the nose slender and intelligent, round-tipped, standing out in fair-skinned relief—unable to believe that the woman he held was actually she.

Carefully he pulled his arm away; but her head merely
rolled a bit, and from her coral lips that bore no trace of lipstick came only the quiet, warm breathing of sleep.

He tucked the cream-colored blanket gently around her slim shoulders and stepped barefoot down upon the thick mat of a dark red Persian rug. Drawing back the bedchamber curtain, he found the walls of the old room to be covered ceiling to floor with bookcases. The layers of closely packed books overlapped darkly in the faint light, as if to press down on the lives of the living.

On a small table were wine and curaçao and cheese, which Yasuko had brought from the main house last night, exactly as they had been left.

Gazing with unconscious pleasure at Yasuko’s sleeping figure, tranquil as a reclining statue of Buddha, Ibuki traced in his memory the strangely entangled events of the night before.

When he opened the door as directed, Yasuko was standing there alone; she locked the door after him, then led him inside.

“Have these rooms always been here? I never noticed before,” he said, looking at an oil painting of an old-fashioned beauty with hair swept into a chignon, a russet shawl about her shoulders, that hung on the wall.

“That’s Mother.” Yasuko bent down to adjust the flame in the heater.

“Mieko Toganō? This? It’s certainly different from the way she is now.”

“I should think so,” said Yasuko. “It was done the year she graduated from college. It’s by Minoru Shimojō,” she added, naming a famous painter and joining him in looking up at the portrait. Ibuki was chagrined by the ease with which his pent-up anger dissolved at her artless smile.

In the painting, where complicated effects of light and shadow gave an impression of heaviness and inertness, the
oval face with its bright eyes and firmly shut mouth was portrayed with utmost vividness. There was not a trace of the filmy beauty that veiled Mieko now like fold upon fold of thin silk.

“I feel as if in this painting I’ve seen what she’s really like for the first time.”

“I know. That’s why she doesn’t particularly like showing it to people. The strength that Shimojō captured so vividly here is the part of herself she keeps most deeply hidden now….”

“Yes, of course—now that you mention it, this painting could well give away her secrets. I see why they call Shimojō a master.”

“From what I’ve heard, in her student days she was good at tennis, and terribly bright.”

“Tennis? Knowing her now, I find that hard to believe.” Ibuki put an arm lightly around Yasuko beside him. “Come on, tonight let’s not talk about Mieko. I came here to see you.”

They walked toward the painting and sat down next to each other on the old-fashioned brocade sofa beneath it. The touch of her softness brought all his pent-up longing to the surface, and taking her small face in both his hands, he kissed her a long moment. Yasuko accepted him with a smile, but her tongue twisted and turned like a ballerina, swift and strong, thrusting him back, putting him to flight, sporting freely with him inside her small mouth. Roused by her challenging, tantalizing play, he embraced her with such strength that even in the space of a kiss she cried out.

She was evidently fresh from a bath. The scent of cologne her body gave off rekindled in Ibuki the sensual ecstasy of the night in Atami when he first slept with her, but out of a greedy wish to increase the pleasure of the coming banquet, he held himself back.

Yasuko brought wine and curaçao, serving him and taking some herself, too. The orange-colored curaçao was sweet and syrupy, not to his liking, but he remembered that it had filled him with a sense of fierce power, as if his body were being invaded steadily by a strength not his own.

“You’ve got to leave Mieko,” he said. “Once, when you told me that, I thought you were being silly, but not anymore….And whatever you do, don’t marry Mikamé….He’s my enemy, and so is she, and so is anyone who tries to take you away from me….I don’t know what I’d do to keep from losing you.”

Holding her close to him, caressing her arms and wrists, he had appealed to her in such words; yet through it all there had been a consciousness of being transported into another realm, as if he were dreaming wide-eyed in the midst of a fearfully brilliant light. He had drunk whiskey at home before coming, and although he had had since then only a sip or two of ladies’ liqueur, the world of color and light opening up before his eyes was dumbfounding, a world that for mere drunkenness seemed far too bright and shining.

Strangely spellbound, he complied unresistingly as Yasuko’s graceful arms twined nimbly around him, slipping off his suitcoat and loosening his necktie, while in her face close by his the dimple in her cheek came and went, now deepening and now softening. She was like the Yasuko always clinging to Mieko. The sensation was strangely agreeable, as if she were waiting on him, as if he had taken Mieko’s place.

He was not paralyzed, nor had his physical longing abated, yet suddenly the desire to pull her roughly to him was gone. Giving himself over to her, he fell into the bed in the shadow of the curtain, his body enmeshed with hers.

That the one with him then had been Yasuko there could be no doubt. But later, after closing his eyes in comfortable exhaustion, having been drawn again and again into dream after blinding dream, he started suddenly at the coldness of the hair on his arm in the dark. He pushed back the curtain by his pillow, and the fading light of the moon flowed in, illuminating in soft gray beams a woman’s face of snowy whiteness, the heavy brows and thick downswept lashes alone black, as if drawn with a brush: Harumé.

Ibuki cried out and pulled his arm hastily away, catching her chill, heavy hair in his hand. Roused from slumber, Harumé opened her eyes and looked up into the face of a man staring down at her with a deep frown. Her heavily rouged, camellia-bright lips were ripe with sensuality, and her face was the face of Masugami—the mask of the young madwoman which he had seen at the home of Yorikata Yakushiji. Despite the clear apprehension in her look, she showed no sign of fear. When Ibuki suddenly released her body, her eyes roamed his face in blank amazement, a smile of physical satiety curving her mouth.

It was all wrong. Not knowing whether he might be drunk or dreaming, but sensing with the faint vestiges of consciousness that rational thought lay for the time beyond his powers, Ibuki had been transported yet again to the world of blinding light.

Might it be that the drinks had been laced with some sort of philter? Only now was he returning to full consciousness. He was reminded of the mental state he had experienced once during an appendectomy after an injection of lumbar anesthetic, which had caused him to remain hazily conscious throughout the surgery. He looked down at himself and discovered that he was wearing, over
his bare skin, a dressing robe and splashed-pattern night kimono that must have belonged to Akio.

“Are you up? It’s still early, isn’t it?” Yasuko’s voice was drowsily nasal.

Turning, he saw her lying face up in bed, groping for her wristwatch on the bedside table. He grasped the white fingers searching blindly on the tabletop and shook her hand hard.

“Wake up. I have something to ask you.”

“What is it?” she said gently, allowing him to embrace her and pull her into a sitting position. The look on her sleep-benumbed face, tender as that of a contented babe at its mother’s breast, he found unutterably dear. He swept her pliant body into his arms, but she quickly slipped from his grasp and stood up.

“Oh, I’m so tired…I don’t want to get up,” she said, and shook herself roughly like a branch covered with blossoms. “Are you going already?” She picked up her watch and looked at it. “It’s only five. The trains won’t be running yet.”

“Were you here all night? Didn’t someone else come?”

“Someone else?” She tilted her head wonderingly. “What makes you ask that?”

“Because—it’s awfully odd—I think that woman Harumé was here, in this bed.”

“What!” She laughed, sweeping back her short hair. “Why, that’s impossible. Harumé sleeps in her own room. What on earth would she come in here for? You were dreaming.” She rounded her lips into a pout. “What is it, Tsuneo—are you in love with Harumé?”

“No, how could I be? I’ve never said two words to her. But in the night you changed into her, I’m sure of it. I can remember jumping up in amazement.”

“Stop it! You sound like that poem from the
Tales of
Ise
: ‘Did you come, I wonder, or was it I who went? I scarcely know—was it dream or reality, did I sleep or wake?’ Come on, get hold of yourself!” She patted him on the shoulder, gazing into his face.

“It’s so strange. I have a feeling that I’m acting like a damned idiot—but let it go. In the hands of someone like you, a man is destined to become a fool.” He drew her to him again.

For some time thereafter, Ibuki continued to see Yasuko, slipping at night through the back entrance to the Toganō estate and into the Western-style room in the outbuilding, but the face like the Nō mask Masugami—belonging, so it seemed, to Harumé—appeared again only once in his midnight dreams.

He tried to lure Yasuko out, but except in her own house she would not set foot in any room where they might be alone. And so, although guiltily conscious of the proximity of Mieko Toganō’s gaze, he found himself coming again and again to the back entrance of the Toganō estate.

It was a source of great resentment to him that Mikamé had formal approval to take Yasuko on drives, to escort her to concerts and otherwise entertain her, while he, short of time as well as money, was left behind to fidget jealously.

Having reassured himself that Mieko was not opposed to his suit, Mikamé now appeared eager to gain the affections of Yasuko. She went wherever he invited her and even drank alone with him occasionally, but she resisted
his advances with the pliancy of a willow, not allowing him so much as to hold her hand.

Around cherry blossom time he invited her to drive with him to a certain mountain village to investigate reports of a female fortune-teller living there, one said to commune with spirits. He planned to stop at Murayama Reservoir on the way back for a look at the cherry blossoms and then to stay the night at a nearby inn, but again, while Yasuko took copious notes on the old crone’s stereotyped trance and utterances and wandered later with obvious pleasure beneath the fully opened white blossoms by the reservoir, even jotting down an occasional poem in her notebook, she refused, despite all his urging, to go to the inn.

He felt some guilt over not having invited Ibuki along on the outing, as he would normally have done. He had been prevented by a suspicion that Yasuko might be in love with Ibuki—a suspicion that had deepened over the last few months.

After seeing Yasuko home, he drove happily back to his apartment, where he was surprised to find Ibuki’s wife, Sadako, standing in the hallway outside the door to his rooms.

“Sadako, is that you?” he exclaimed, going up to her. “When did you get here? You should have waited inside.” He opened the door and stepped in, one hand on her shoulder. The unusual pallor of her face as she sat down alerted him to the fact that this was no ordinary social call.

“What’s up?” He was purposely offhand. “Did you and Ibuki have some sort of quarrel?” He took off his jacket and hung it up, then lowered himself into an armchair facing her. Still she said nothing. “What is it, for heaven’s sake?”

“I don’t know how to begin. It’s Tsuneo, my husband—I simply can’t understand him anymore. I decided you would be the best person to come to for advice; after all, it concerns you, too.”

“Me?” Yasuko’s face flashed immediately into his mind, but he forced himself to remain casual. “What do you mean?”

“It’s got to do with Yasuko Toganō. You’ve asked her to marry you, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but nothing’s settled yet. I’m just now back from a drive with her.”

“Oh?” She stared at him in seeming surprise. “Then she hasn’t said yes yet.”

“Well, no.”

“I’m not surprised. Dr. Mikamé, you would do yourself a great favor by forgetting all about that woman. The more you have to do with her, the more trouble you’re going to make for yourself. She’s writing some sort of treatise on spirit possession, I know, but believe me, there’s more to it than that. That woman is a witch herself. For the last month or so, I’ve been paying a private investigator to tell me exactly what goes on in that house, and—”

“A private investigator?” repeated Mikamé, astonished. He was well aware that there were such people, but no one in his acquaintance had ever found it necessary to turn to one for assistance.

“You needn’t sound so surprised. I have a brother in the police force who introduced me to a reputable agency. Tsuneo was acting so strangely, I had to do something.” She glossed over it with no loss of her customary poise. Mikamé was stunned by the hard and smoothly enameled surface she possessed, which enabled her to turn aside all suggestion of impurity or ambiguity.

Sadako’s suspicions regarding Yasuko and her husband
dated back to one cold January night when Ibuki had stayed out until early morning. When he finally came home, he returned with a suitable excuse, having had the forethought to telephone home to say that he would be late (an old friend had come from out of town, he said, and had invited him to his hotel in Shinjuku). But that evening after classes, when he was home lounging in a comfortable padded kimono left casually open at the neck, Sadako had noticed little Ruriko giggling and pointing at her father’s bare chest. “Daddy! Red, red!”

Glancing over, she had seen a bright streak of lipstick by his topmost rib, like a camellia petal impressed on the skin.

“What in the world is that, Tsuneo?” She frowned, squinting.

“Eh?” Ibuki looked down and saw only a flicker of red. It never crossed his mind that the mark might be lipstick. He was untroubled, secure in his knowledge that Yasuko had worn no makeup the night before.

“Here, take a look. Ruriko thinks it’s funny.” She brought over a plastic pink-handled mirror from her dressing table and thrust it at him fiercely.

He stared at the vivid mark reflected in the oval mirror. “What do you suppose that is?” Yasuko’s pale coral lips, untouched by lipstick, floated again in his mind’s eye.

“Would you really like to know? Some woman’s lipstick rubbed off on you. Not on your tie or your shirt, either—right on your bare skin!” She laughed in dry amusement.

Ibuki had pleaded ignorance, insisting repeatedly that he remembered nothing and finally offering the admittedly clumsy excuse that it must have been the work of a drunken geisha at the inn where he and his friend had stayed and that his own drinking must have blurred his memory.

That had been more or less that. But ever since, Sadako had kept a watchful eye on her husband’s comings and goings. Knowing that he could not afford geishas and that in any case he had no taste for such diversions, she had considered various possibilities until her suspicion finally settled on Yasuko Toganō.

“Between Ruriko and the housework I have so little time that I myself couldn’t hope to keep track of where he goes and what he does. But I’m the type that has to get to the bottom of whatever’s bothering me. The way things were, I couldn’t concentrate on anything, so I took the little savings I had and hired somebody to find out what was going on in that house. And just as I thought, it turned out that he was over there all hours of the day and night.”

“All hours—what do you mean, that he’s sleeping with Yasuko?” Mikamé felt the strength slowly drain from his body.

“Of course. And all the time she keeps you dangling too, doesn’t she? Tsuneo is terrified of losing her to you, which makes him that much more infatuated. The two of you are a pair of puppets, and she pulls the strings. That woman is a witch: she does exactly what she wants with men.”

Sadako made this declaration with apparent relish, her eyes on Mikamé. He was forced to smile at her analogy, picturing Ibuki and himself as two marionettes, one thin and one fat, both hopping up and down on strings. He wondered fleetingly if the reason he felt no serious anger toward Ibuki might be that his own attempt to win Yasuko was basically a game.

“That was ingenious, Sadako, to think of hiring a private investigator. But what reason could Yasuko have for wanting to manipulate Ibuki and me that way?”

“Every reason. To start with, you spoil her with all the
presents she could want, and Tsuneo helps her with that research of hers.”

“I see.” Mikamé’s failure to explode seemed to grate on Sadako’s nerves. She glared at him rigidly. But the aggressive nature evidenced in her unhesitating decision to hire a detective was nothing at all like the brooding sort of wrath that could force a woman’s spirit to leave her body and wreak vengeance on a rival. Mikamé nodded, reassured, even as he felt her cold gaze on him.

“And what about Ibuki? Has his attitude toward you changed since all this began?”

“Not really. He’s somewhat cooler, and he tries to hide his extra income now; but he doesn’t seem to want a divorce as far as I can tell. He hasn’t got the nerve to ask for one anyway. I know exactly what he has in mind: he wants to play around with someone like Yasuko and still keep his home life intact.”

“That’s understandable. No man would part willingly with a valuable wife like you. What about Mieko Toganō? Does she know all this?”

“She must. Whenever he goes over there, Yasuko is waiting for him in a separate building where Akio’s study used to be. Mieko would have to be awfully muddleheaded not to know they were seeing each other all the time right under her nose like that.”

The tone of Sadako’s conversation had gradually fallen. Remaining ladylike under such circumstances would, of course, be difficult, Mikamé reflected, but sudden crises like this did, in fact, seem to bring out the least attractive side of a woman. He found himself coming to the absurd conclusion that Ibuki was entirely justified in preferring Yasuko over his wife.

“But Mieko Toganō is a very absentminded woman. She trusts everything to Yasuko. It’s quite possible she hasn’t stumbled on their secret yet.”

“I wonder. The man who found out all this for me said the same thing, that Yasuko is the one in charge. He said that she’s brilliant, but that Mieko Toganō is the sort of woman who’s either very bright or very stupid, one can’t be sure which. That could be a sign of her greatness, he said, and by the same token, it could make her that much easier for Yasuko to handle. Mieko lost a baby once when she was just married because of a terrible trick her husband’s mistress played on her, but she never uttered a word of protest, so she must be either a very strong person or a very weak one—that’s what the other women at
Clear Stream
all seem to think.”

Mikamé realized suddenly, as he watched Sadako’s thin lips moving busily, that Dr. Morioka must not have been alone in his knowledge of that incident.

“I think you can assume that Mieko Toganō is unaware of what’s going on. I find it hard to believe that she does know and approves. You probably don’t realize it, but between those women there is a bond so strong that they are almost like lovers—it makes me tend to think that Yasuko would want to keep her affair with your husband a secret from Mieko, too.”

“It’s all so absurd. That house is a witches’ den. Serves you right for wrapping yourselves up in a weird subject like spirit possession—you and Tsuneo are both under a witch’s spell!” She laughed wryly. “If you’ve asked Yasuko to marry you, then you can’t just be neutral about all this, can you? Or do you mean to say that if she accepted your proposal now, you’d still go through with the marriage?”

“Well, no, I suppose I couldn’t.” At her accusing tone Mikamé meekly raised a hand to the back of his head, but it appeared nonetheless that the wound inflicted by her revelation was not all that deep. “Yasuko’s flirtatiousness appeals to me, but I wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize my friendship with Ibuki either. I’m not overly
possessive, anyway. A wife who had her little adventures now and then might not be so bad.”

“Ugh.” Sadako wore a look of abhorrence. “That’s how a woman like her makes fools out of men like Tsuneo and you. You’re like cats and dogs. Before you know it, she’s going to have a baby, and no one will even know who the father is. It makes me sick to be part of such a mess.” Suddenly she leaned forward with the intense expression of a woman seeking to probe the mind of another person. “Dr. Mikamé, did you know that the twin sister of Yasuko’s dead husband, Akio, is right now living in the Toganō house?”

“What? I never knew Akio had a twin. Well, well. Is that something else your detective found out for you?”

“Yes. I don’t think even Tsuneo knows. He’s never said a word about it. Of course, she didn’t always live there; she was brought up by relatives somewhere else, and came back here to live only after Akio died. She’s rather slow-witted, it seems, and so they keep her hidden away indoors most of the time.”

“Really. Neither Mieko nor Yasuko ever told me about anyone like that.” He suddenly remembered the beautiful woman he had seen in the arbor at the firefly party that summer night. “Is she a handsome woman?”

“So they say. They say that she has classical features, that she’s even prettier than Yasuko. But that’s not all. It appears that the beautiful young woman is about to have a baby!”

“Oh?” He folded his arms with a strangely somber look.

“They think she must have been raped, considering her mental deficiencies.” Again she turned her dark gaze on him. He broke into rapid speech, as if unable to bear the shadows in her eyes.

“That often happens. It was probably some young fellow who let himself in and out the back way. It’s the worst sort of crime, but I’ve known it to happen among my own patients. Such women generally have normal sexuality, you see, in spite of their childish intelligence. But apart from Harumé, how terrible for Mieko. I’d no idea she had a daughter like that. To have a mentally retarded daughter give birth to an illegitimate baby would surely be heartbreaking for any mother. I wonder why she hasn’t arranged yet for an abortion. She’ll have to do it soon.”

A wave of pity for Mieko Toganō seemed to come over Mikamé as he spoke. His assumption about her feelings was perfectly natural, but in fact, according to the housekeepers and others who frequented the Toganō household (their gossip was relayed to Sadako by her private investigator), Mieko, far from suffering the torments imagined by Mikamé, showed no outward reaction whatever.

The first to become aware of Harumé’s changed condition were Mieko and Yū. Always sensitive to her monthly cycle, each of them took separate note when she failed to menstruate for two consecutive months and when she showed an increasing and unaccountable desire to be petted and held. Telling no one of their observations, each of the two women maintained a private and somber watch.