Masks (14 page)

“For the record, I had no conscious part in it at all. It was all Yasuko’s doing.”

“Yasuko? What do you mean? I can hardly believe you would go to bed with a woman who’s practically an idiot.”

“Believe me, you were lucky. Sometimes it’s better to be the one not chosen.” Calmly, in a voice that betrayed no
emotion, Ibuki related his memories of holding the Masugami woman in a dreamlike embrace.

“That’s weirder than spirit possession; it’s utterly fantastic. Are you sure no one slipped you a bit of opium?”

“I half wonder. But what do you make of it all? What possible motive could Yasuko have for getting me to sleep with Harumé and father her child? She might have been amusing herself at my expense, I suppose, but even assuming she wasn’t in love with me, it’s a bit much for a practical joke.”

“Yes, but then you never can be sure where you stand with Yasuko. Only a week ago she sounded willing to marry me.”

“She did? What do you mean?” Ibuki’s gaze became sharp and probing.

The week before, when Mikamé had told Yasuko of his plan to join an ethnology study team and to leave that fall on a tour of central Asia, possibly going as far as Tibet, she had implied her willingness to go along as his wife.

“She meant it all right,” Ibuki said shortly. “She told me once she was looking for a graceful way to leave the Toganō family. I hope you won’t think I’m only saying this out of jealousy, Mikamé, but here’s a friendly piece of advice: when you marry Yasuko, you had better do it someplace far away from Mieko Toganō. Otherwise, you’ll find that just when you think you’ve got hold of Yasuko, she’s slipped between your fingers and that all along she’s been nothing but a medium for Mieko. Look at me. I fell headlong into the trap they set, and I ended up playing exactly the role they gave me: not the hero, but the fool.”

“But didn’t you also have a dream, like the one in that story,
Peony Lantern
? That must be what love is: playing the part of the fool unintentionally. What I can’t understand is why Yasuko should have wanted to trick you into
sleeping with that beautiful halfwit…what was behind it all?” The more Mikamé wondered, his eyes wide in puzzlement, the more shadowed Ibuki’s face became, the cheekbones more sharply prominent.

“I think I have an idea.”

“Tell me. I’m curious.”

“I’d rather not talk about it. It’s too depressing. But Yasuko
is
a medium, there’s no doubt of that. I’m convinced that Mieko Toganō is her motivating force. It’s all there in ‘An Account of the Shrine in the Fields.’ ”

“That essay?” Mikamé cocked his head skeptically as he filled his briar pipe. “Frankly I still have doubts about whether she even wrote it. Assuming she did, her attachment to the Rokujō lady has an obsessive quality about it. But what’s that got to do with Yasuko?”

“I think Mieko used the Rokujō lady as a device to talk about herself. I think she wrote that essay to satisfy a particular need and then regretted having done so almost immediately—regretted having exposed herself even in so indirect a way.” He paused. “Lately I’ve taken the time to sift through her poetry, and believe me, except for the narrative pieces, it’s all humbug. Even the poem about her husband’s death, which is filled with a kind of passionate yearning like something by Izumi Shikibu.
^*
I suppose some people find it moving, but I couldn’t work up a single tear. I could tell it was fake even before I knew about that incident with the maid a long time ago. And the poem she wrote after Akio died is the same. She’s managed to build up a respectable literary reputation over the years, but if you ask me, she’s been taking everyone in with counterfeits the whole time. Her real self shows in that essay she wrote,
and nowhere else. Even that is probably the tip of the iceberg. There is far more to Mieko Toganō than people suspect.”

Ibuki then quoted a sentence from the essay which he said applied to its author as well: “ ‘Her spirit alternated constantly between spells of lyricism and spirit possession, making no philosophical distinction between the self alone and in relation to others, and unable to achieve the solace of a religious indifference.’

“You know,” he added, “the news of Harumé’s pregnancy came to me only indirectly, through Sadako; I have yet to hear about it from either Mieko or Yasuko. But if it happens that Mieko does
not
arrange for an abortion, that will shed light on something that is just now becoming plain to me. It will also underline what a damned fool I’ve been, but then it’s as you say—love affairs are always more foolish than the lovers know. In fact, by giving me a glimpse of the inner workings of Mieko’s mind, my own foolishness has not been a complete waste. Yasuko once told me that the secrets inside her mother-in-law had all the fragrance of a garden in the night. I have some idea now of what she may have meant by that. It hardly surprises me that Yasuko should be more in love with Mieko than she is with you or me.”

“Secrets aren’t for me, they’re too womanish…too much like children’s toys. Your feminine streak gives you a secretive side of your own, but that sort of thing isn’t in my line.”

“Which could be exactly why Yasuko is drawn to you.” Ibuki smiled faintly as he studied Mikamé’s mouth, which was clamped tightly around the stem of his pipe. “Do you still want to marry Yasuko, knowing that I’ve taken her to bed?”

“If you have no objection.” Mikamé was nonchalant. “I
have no qualms about that sort of thing. A man may try as hard as he likes, but he’ll never know what schemes a woman may be slowly and quietly carrying out behind his back. Children—think what endless trouble men have gone to over the ages to persuade themselves that the children their women bore belonged to them! Making adultery a crime, inventing chastity belts…but in the end they were unable to penetrate even one of women’s secrets. Even the sadistic misogyny of Buddha and Christ was nothing but an attempt to gain the better of a vastly superior opponent. It’s my belief that one should never intrude beyond a certain point into a woman’s affairs. So if I do marry Yasuko, I won’t be jealous of Akio or you. Not much, anyway—and after all, jealousy is a great aphrodisiac!” He laughed so boisterously that Ibuki jumped.

“Tell me,” he went on, “what do you think are Yasuko’s real feelings? The more I listen to you, the more I find myself drawn to her by the things she hides. Do you think she’ll ever break away from Mieko?”

“I’m sure she wants to. But I doubt that she can. My own opinion is that she ought to go with you on that trip to central Asia.”

With that the two friends fell abruptly into a solemn silence, eye to eye. Neither could make out any reflection in the eyes of the other. And there was a bleak weariness in the dull realization that they would see nothing, however long they might wait.

After that, as if Sadako’s letter had furnished a convenient excuse, Yasuko would no longer consent to meet Ibuki in the Western-style room in the outbuilding. “Your wife hires investigators; she frightens me,” she would say, fending him off.

Ibuki was equally annoyed by his wife’s enterprise. Yet
he soon found that the information she was receiving supported his claim that he had broken with Yasuko, and also supplied him with useful knowledge of the Toganō household.

He learned that Harumé, now swollen with child, had taken up residence with Yū in a certain temple on the fringes of Kyoto where an elder brother of Mieko’s was head priest.

He recalled that one day during the spring rainy season when the study group had met in his office, Yasuko had mentioned that her mother-in-law had gone to Kyoto.

“Off to see the Shrine in the Fields again?” Mikamé had asked, his voice loud as always.

“No,” Yasuko had replied with a gentle shake of her head. “She had business there with relatives.”

Toward the end of June Ibuki left for Kyoto to deliver his biennial lecture series at the university there.

“Won’t Yasuko be going?” asked Sadako with surprising equanimity. She was delighted with the unexpectedly positive effects of her investigation; that the sheer aggressiveness of her action should have undermined her husband’s pride was to her no cause for shame. She knew—and was satisfied in the knowledge—that while he was gone, Yasuko would have to stay home to look after Mieko, who was suffering a recurrence of intercostal neuralgia brought on by the seasonal damp.

Between lectures Ibuki would leave his hotel on Gojō Avenue and wander the familiar Kyoto streets, his eyes refreshed by the green foliage, sleek with rain, that grew in lush profusion at roadsides and atop the old mud walls, while his spirit, weary as though emerging from wild excesses of debauchery, was pleasantly soothed by the milky light that filtered down as if through frosted glass.

One day, when a mottled layer of ashen clouds was deepening in the sky and the air shone with a fine, soft drizzle, he got off the bus at Arashiyama and proceeded on foot.

Beside a narrow bamboo-lined path he spotted a stone marker engraved “Site of the Shrine in the Fields” and halted, hands in the pockets of his Burberry raincoat. The sight of the desolate torii gate and shrine—exactly as described in the essay—aroused in him no strong desire to gain a closer view. He wandered on, slowly and aimlessly, until he came to a stop beside the wall of a temple that was backed up against a big old pond. The tiled-roof mud wall, built up in narrow layers, led to a black gate from which hung a wooden sign that read “Jikōji Temple—Rear Entrance.”

Muttering the temple name over to himself, he followed a stone pathway into the compound. Standing amid the fresh greenery inside were several tall chestnut trees, whose cream-colored corollas scattered a shower of powdery blossoms into the breeze, sprinkling Ibuki’s hair and shoulders with their petals. The spacious grounds were hushed and deserted. Over the high bell tower drooped sprays of golden flowers—broom, perhaps—with the unstudied grace of a discarded kimono.

He strolled idly about and was heading back the way he had come when all at once he heard the low voice of a woman, singing a children’s song:

He had never heard Harumé speak, yet he knew with strange conviction that the low singsong was hers. His mind fell into turmoil, torn between a desire to see her and a desire to run away. Slowly, almost angrily, he moved toward a fence, in the direction of the voice. Across the low cedar wickerwork he quickly spotted Harumé’s figure in the pale white light as she sat reclining and singing absently to herself on a veranda where faded purple fulling cloth hung stretched to dry. He had feared that her stupidity would appear to him now as ugliness, but in her blank and fair-skinned face, the dark eyes brimming with melancholy shadows like those of a handsome cat, he was relieved to find a beauty so great that its lack of vivacity was all the more moving—a beauty that turned fear into pity. Her face and shoulders were thin and drawn, while the high roundness of her belly, thrusting up beneath her narrow sash, spoke plainly of the new life squirming inside her. Ibuki shivered, thinking of the moment when that bit of life had passed from him and lodged within her body. He felt a swift sense of peril, as if the ground beneath his feet were not to be trusted, but there was no attendant feeling of disgust. He stood there a long time, looking in reverence at the beautiful idiot whose flesh was as if steeped in uncleanness.

“Miss Harumé, it’s chilly today. You mustn’t catch cold.” A dry voice called out, and then Yū hurried out into the garden, her back slightly bent, and began to take down the finely patterned purple silk.

Fearful perhaps of the stern light in Yū’s eyes, Ibuki retreated through the black rear gate. But all the way back on the bus, and again at the hotel, his mind was preoccupied with the endless pathos of Harumé’s beautiful, detached face and of her high round belly.

One fine fall day Toé Yakushiji arrived at Tokyo Station.

The regular meeting of the poetry circle was to be held at the Toganō home that day, and Toé, running late, was on her way there to see Mieko Toganō.

The Toganō parlor in Meguro was as tasteful, and the ladies as well dressed, as ever; but out in the garden the gardener was digging around tree roots, while indoors, scattered piles of old chests, boxed scroll paintings, and household utensils gave the house the unsettled look of moving day.

When she saw Toé, Mieko offered condolences on the death of her father that summer. Yasuko joined in. “Even though he was ill such a long time, it must have been a very great shock all the same.”

Toé then spoke fondly of the fall day one year before when Mieko and Yasuko had visited the family Nō stage in Kyoto. “Mrs. Toganō, my father always said that when he died, I was to give you one of the masks as a remembrance. Today I brought one with me.”

“Oh, my. But really—” Mieko demurred, but Yasuko interrupted with a glance up at her.

“Mother, she wants you to have it.” Then to Toé she said, “Thank you so very much.” The dimple flashed in her cheek. “The garden here is so big, and the house so hard to keep up, that we’ve decided to sell them and move to Kamakura. Right now things are so disorganized that the place isn’t fit to be seen, but everyone wanted to meet here for one last time, so here we are.”

“May I see the mask?” said Mieko.

“Of course. It’s not very old, but it’s one that Father was fond of. He often wore it in
Sumida River
and
Mie Temple.
He thought you would be able to appreciate the sadness in its look, having lost your only child. Please accept it for his sake.” Toé spoke smoothly, her large, double-lidded eyes open wide beneath her thin eyebrows.

“Thank you. I hope you won’t mind if the others look at it, too.” With a calm glance at Yasuko, as if to offset the directness of Toé’s gaze, Mieko drew the box toward her and untied the string.

Inside the box the carved image lay quietly with the yellowish hardness of a death mask. The long, conical slope of the eyelids, the melancholy, sunken cheeks, and the subdued red of the mouth with its blackened teeth—all conveyed the somber and grief-laden look of a woman long past the age of sensuality. This mask was smaller than the masks of younger women.