Masks (7 page)

The essay continued.

He tried to remember, as his eyes returned to the page
before him, how Mieko had reacted that day to the sight of the Ryō no onna mask, but he could not; his memory was blank. As evidence that Genji had truly loved the Rokujō lady, the author of the essay went on to point out various resemblances she bore to the Akashi lady, who spent the remainder of her life happily in Kyoto as Genji’s favored companion.

After the departure of the Rokujō lady and her priestess daughter for Ise, Genji is dogged by ill fortune: the death of his emperor father increases the violence of factions hostile to him; Fujitsubo becomes a nun; his affair with Oborozukiyo
^*8
comes to light. Finally, he is stripped of rank and sent into exile at Suma, there to enter upon the most dismal period of his life. All this might well be taken as an extension of the curse of the Rokujō lady, but she, of course, has scarcely meant to bring disaster on the man she loves, and so their correspondence continues without a pause, even after she has gone to Ise.

The unconscious nature of her spirit-possessing powers can be told from a particularly vicious attack on Aoi—one in which she thrashes the sick woman cruelly and pulls her hair—and during which she herself has not the least thought of inflicting such injury. The hatred she feels toward her rival, the curses she calls down upon her, are intensely real, but always they remain secret, kept sealed within her own heart. And so, she believes, her strongest imprecations can never be translated into deeds, until one day her inner obsession takes bold and unequivocal shape, descending on and abusing the object of her enmity with such ferocity that she is overcome by her own power.

As Genji settles into a secluded and monastic life at Suma, his numerous ladies send him letters to cheer him in his solitude. Longest and most ardent of them all, written
in an exquisite hand on sheet upon sheet of finest Michinoku paper, are those from the Rokujō lady. Pity for “one fallen lowest under heaven” arouses her lyrical powers to their fullest. Genji, his fortunes at a nadir, is for his part deeply moved by the beauty of her writing, and often his thoughts stray quietly to distant Ise. Here the Rokujō lady’s egoistic love ceases to express itself in attacks of spirit possession and instead melts into a lyrical beauty. Yet her soul alternates uncertainly between lyricism and spirit possession, making no philosophical distinction between the self alone and in relation to others, and is unable to achieve the solace of a religious indifference.

One knows Genji has all but forgotten his displeasure with the Rokujō lady when (after moving from Suma to Akashi) he first meets the Akashi lady and senses, in her faint whispers and refined air, a strong resemblance to his former love. Far from losing interest, he begins the tender sort of dalliance that has been missing briefly from his life, and later, after she has borne him a daughter, he summons her to Kyoto and makes of her there a cherished companion, second in his affections only to Murasaki.

Deeply ashamed of her provincial upbringing and of being the daughter of a mere provincial governor, far lowlier in station than Genji’s other ladies, the Akashi lady leads a self-effacing life in Kyoto, yet she has a pride of spirit far keener than the others. On koto and biwa she is as accomplished as the finest master, and despite her mean opinion of her parentage, she does not forget that among her forebears were imperial princes and ministers. Her modesty is, in short, an inferiority complex that grows in reaction to her very egotism. She is of an altogether different mold from another of Genji’s paramours, the lady of the orange blossoms (a pitiful type, who is convinced from the start of her inadequacy and unworthiness to receive Genji’s love, and whose low self-esteem brings on quite another denouement).

When Genji arranges for his wife Murasaki to take charge of the little Akashi princess, to see that she is trained properly to become empress, the Akashi lady gives her consent willingly, despite many tears, aware that she is guaranteeing her child the brightest possible future. Her natural mother’s love is tempered by farsighted concern for the girl’s welfare. Moreover, she is level-headed and practical enough to view her own situation with dispassion. Unlike the Rokujō lady, the Akashi lady is endowed with a sufficiently keen intellect and enough common sense to avoid squandering her mental energy in spirit possession, turning instead to literary creation as the ideal means of exercising her powers. We find her in the chapter entitled “The First Warbler” writing “something like a novel”—a sign of the literary gifts which she shares with the Rokujō lady.

The Akashi lady, spared the psychic ordeals of the Rokujō lady by her intellectual pragmatism, basks happily in Genji’s continuing affection, cherished for what he calls her “infinitely deep sensitivity.” She incurs his displeasure only on those rare occasions when, despite herself, her irrepressible selfhood comes out in unbecoming ways.

On one of Genji’s visits soon after the Akashi lady and her daughter have arrived in Kyoto, the girl approaches just as Genji is leaving and wraps herself around him affectionately, so that he lingers a bit. When he asks her why her mother does not also come out to say good-bye, the servant women report that she is prostrate with misery at his departure. Genji is displeased, concluding that she is putting on airs, and here her behavior does seem to resemble the overwrought emotionalism of the Rokujō lady. Another time, on the morning after a typhoon, Genji is surprised to find the Akashi lady in perfect control of herself after the violence of the night, as unruffled as if there had been no storm. He resents her failure to turn to him for comfort as well as her display of independence and inner
strength—qualities again reminiscent of the Rokujō lady.

One other character strongly resembles the Rokujō lady: her daughter, the empress Akikonomu, who has her mother’s nobility and charm but not her headstrong ways.

In keeping with his promise to the Rokujō lady, Genji refrains from making any claims of his own on Akikonomu, content to watch over her with a platonic affection that continues even after she has become consort of the Reizei emperor, his own illicit son by Fujitsubo. Later, after the death of Murasaki, we find that Akikonomu is the sole person to whom Genji can reveal the depth of his despair—a sign that even late in life he was deeply affected by her dignified charm.

The empress Akikonomu was an aristocrat marked by her mother’s sensitive temperament, but not by her dangerous proclivity to possess the spirits of others; the Akashi lady was a realist of shrewd common sense who sagely reined in her strong ego to compensate for her humble origins. That these two women, each expressing a different facet of the Rokujō lady, should both find favor with Genji and form lasting relationships with him, never forgotten or cast aside, indicates the particular regard which he had for women of strong character—foremost among them the Rokujō lady.

The following poem and its preface are from the collected poetry of Murasaki Shikibu, author of
The Tale of Genji
: “On seeing a painting wherein the vengeful ghost of the first wife, having seized the second, is exorcised by prayers”:

Suffering from the rancor of the dead—

Or might it be the devil in one’s own heart?

Murasaki Shikibu’s modernism is evident here in the skeptical view she takes of the medium’s powers (although exorcism was in her day an established practice), and in her perception that what is taken for seizure by a malign spirit
might in fact be the working of the victim’s own conscience. One cannot help wondering why she chose to write so vividly in her novel about a phenomenon in which she herself seemed to have little faith: in doing so, however, she was able to combine women’s extreme ego suppression and ancient female shamanism, showing both in opposition to men.

In our own day, shamanism seems to have withered and died. Yet does it not, on second thought, offer a partial explanation of the power women still have over men? Perhaps it is true, as Buddhism teaches us, that this power constitutes woman’s greatest burden and delusion—and ultimately her greatest sin. But the sin is inseparable from a woman’s being. It is a stream of blood flowing on and on, unbroken, from generation to generation.

Just as there is an archetype of woman as the object of man’s eternal love, so there must be an archetype of her as the object of his eternal fear, representing, perhaps, the shadow of his own evil actions. The Rokujō lady is an embodiment of this archetype.

There the essay ended.

Ibuki was intrigued by Mieko Toganō’s theory. From his readings in the
History of Japanese Shamanesses
and elsewhere, he was familiar with the idea that the ancient Yamato tribe might have brought Ural-Altaic forms of shamanism to Japan. And in Japanese folklore, the prominence of the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami suggested that the gods had spoken through shamanesses in prehistoric times. Supporting evidence could be found in the
Kojiki
episode concerning Emperor Chūai, in which a deity enters the empress Jinjū Kōgō and through her decrees the invasion of Korea.

But the proposal of a link between the Rokujō lady and ancient shamanistic spiritism was new to Ibuki. He sensed
the amateurish dogmatism and boldness in the leaps in Mieko’s thinking.

Despite having published this essay more than twenty years before, Mieko had never mentioned it at meetings of the discussion group. With the study of spirit possession that Akio had begun and Yasuko had taken over, one might have expected Mieko to have shown the essay to one or both of them, but Ibuki surmised from Yasuko’s failure to mention it that she knew no more about it than he had known.

In any case, Mieko seemed a trifle overdefensive of the Rokujō lady, rather like a loyal sister.

He thought again of how on the train Yasuko had likened the mysteries within her mother-in-law to a garden of nocturnal perfumes; perhaps Mieko’s reticence about her accomplishments was further evidence of her secretiveness. Perhaps she had even used the Rokujō lady as a pretext to write about her own psychic powers.

Evidently Mieko had sought to encourage a romance between him and Yasuko. This puzzled Ibuki, who was unable to discern any sign of partisanship in Mieko’s attitude toward him and was uncertain what it all might mean.

“Aren’t you coming to bed yet?” Sadako pushed open the study door and called in peevishly, and automatically he slid the article under a book. He knew very well the reason for her ill humor: since the trip to Kyoto he had felt no desire for his wife, even though he and Yasuko had met only that one time. The relations between husband and wife were awkward and strained.

“I’ll be along in a minute.”

“That’s the third time you’ve said that. The first time was an hour ago.”

“Sorry. I’ve been reading about spirit possession. It’s fascinating—I couldn’t put it down.”

“Something from Dr. Mikamé?”

“He’s letting me borrow it. Step in here for a minute, will you? I have a question for you. You know the saying ‘Hell hath no fury…’ Is it true that women are such creatures of revenge? What about you, Sadako? Suppose you were consumed with resentment toward someone. Do you think it’s possible you might turn into a possessive spirit?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” A derisive smile passed briefly over her dry, thin cheek. “I’m hardly the type. Besides, I know too well that wishing something would happen is no guarantee that it will.” During the war Sadako had prayed faithfully, but in vain, for her brother’s safe return. “Never mind that. Today we got another notice about the property tax. Keep on ignoring them the way you do, and next thing you know the bailiff will be banging on our door. I’d be worrying more about that than about some hypothetical ghost if I were you.”

His wife’s classical features appeared suddenly comical to Ibuki—a reflex response to the amusing fact that he feared the coming of the bailiff even more than she did.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m serious, you know. Getting arrested for tax evasion would be a lot worse than seeing a ghost.”

“You’re right. And I’ll bet I know what would scare you most of all—a husband out of work. Am I correct?” Ibuki stood up and put an arm around his wife’s shoulders with apparent naturalness. The cords of her neck were hard and rigid. Noting with slight distaste how they stretched tightly from her stiff jawbone down toward her carotid artery, he remembered with a shock that she was a year or two younger than Yasuko. A swift chill passed through him like a stream of cold water.

Yasuko was startled awake by the sound of her own voice. Her back and chest were wet with perspiration, and one arm had fallen asleep across her chest. After forcing movement into her fingers, she switched on the bedside lamp.

Claret-colored light filtered through the lampshade, and in it, sitting up in bed in her red-striped nightdress, she seemed as thin and frail as a girl.

“Yasuko.” From beyond the heavy sliding doors, whose silver trim was black with tarnish, a voice called out. The adjoining room was Mieko’s bedroom. “You had a nightmare, didn’t you? I heard you. I was lying here half-asleep, and I thought I called your name and went to comfort you—but the next thing I knew, I was here, still in bed.” Her voice was drowsily abstracted.

“I was so scared, Mother.” Yasuko crept over to the doors separating the two rooms and slid one partway open. Beyond it was a large Japanese-style room with an antique six-panel screen set facing the side doors to keep out the draft. A silver water pitcher and a lacquered clothes tray shone dimly by Mieko’s pillow in the yellow light from a lamp made of exquisitely tinted Italian glass.

Mieko was sitting up in bed, her back to the deeply colored light. The sight of Yasuko coming toward her, her shoulders hunched with cold, seemed to awaken Mieko’s awareness of the shrill north wind outdoors and to deepen her sense of chill. “Goodness, Yasuko, haven’t you got a robe on? Come, get in here with me.” She made the invitation naturally, with one arm casually folding back her blue satin feather quilt.

Whether from cold or from lingering fear of her recent nightmare, Yasuko trembled like a frightened kitten as she snuggled under the counterpane and sank into the soft mattress. Breathing heavily, she looked up at Mieko and said: “Mother, I saw Akio’s face just now—his face after they dug him up from the snow.” She lay encircled in Mieko’s arms, her chest heaving so that it brushed with each sharp intake of breath against the round swelling of Mieko’s breasts.

“Ah, that face. That wasn’t really his face anymore, I know…yet there are times when it comes and haunts me, too. If that’s what your dream was about, then I want to hear it. Tell me—what was the face like?” Gently, as if it were a little child that she held in her arms, Mieko patted and brushed back the cold sweat-soaked strands of hair along Yasuko’s brow. At the same time her legs began a smooth, rotary motion like that of paddle blades, softly stroking and enfolding Yasuko’s curled-up legs. Slowly, as the sweet smell of Mieko’s body drifted warmly about her,
fragrant as summer flowers, the look on Yasuko’s face became as tender and childlike as that of a contented babe at its mother’s breast.

“This time was by far the worst. Do you remember, right after the accident, how I went up with the search party? They gave each of us a long steel rod to poke down in the snow and hunt for buried objects with. It was frightening—I kept thinking, ‘What if Akio is down there and I stab him with this by mistake?’—but every time I thrust down, when I pulled up the rod again, there in the snow would be a tiny deep hole of a blue that was so pure, so clear, so beautiful, it took my breath away. My arms have never forgotten that feeling of thrusting down…but tonight in my dream I
did
stab Akio with that rod: I stabbed his dead face straight in the eye.”

“Yasuko, no!”

“Why, Mother? Why should I have dreamed such a horrible thing?” Yasuko buried her face in the comforting circle of Mieko’s arms and shuddered.

“Akio’s face—was it the way it was then, one cheek gouged out, the bones showing?”

Whether it had happened when he was crushed and swept along in the avalanche, or whether it was a result of the unnatural position in which his body had lain for five long months beneath the snow, no one knew; but while one side of Akio’s face had been preserved intact like a wood carving, the flesh on the other side had been entirely torn away. Beneath the left cheekbone his upper jaw had been fully exposed, revealing a line of white teeth.

Her face still buried in Mieko’s relaxed, gossamer-soft arms, Yasuko nodded. Mieko stroked and patted her quivering shoulders.

“You couldn’t help it. Don’t you remember, Yasuko, you and I saw it together: that tiny mark on Akio’s forehead,
like a stab wound? The man from the Self-Defense Forces said that someone’s rod must have touched him there during the search. From that time on, you were destined to have a dream like this one tonight.”

“Was I, Mother?” Yasuko lifted her head and looked up searchingly at Mieko.

In the colorful light that shone through the muted yellow, red, and indigo of the lamp’s stained glass, Mieko’s face blurred into an ever more indistinct white. It seemed a face untouched by either sorrow or regret. The sight of that indestructible face had the effect of setting off in Yasuko a release of her deepest self-destructive urges. A violence shook her, as of ocean waves crashing against a huge, immovable rock.

“That’s not it, Mother! I killed Akio again myself. I lost the power to keep him, and him alone, alive inside me. That’s the reason. That’s what made me dream I stabbed him in the eye with that rod…How horrible…”

“Please, Yasuko, don’t upset yourself so.” It was Mieko whose voice was now agitated and flustered. “Nighttime, Yasuko, especially the middle of the night, plays tricks on a person’s mind. You mustn’t say irrational things based on some wild notion you’ve just had. Surely you know that.”

Mieko spoke almost imploringly, holding tight to Yasuko’s squirming body and patting her shoulders. The gesture had the awkward uncertainty of a young mother dealing with an obstreperous child. As if moved by her mother-in-law’s apparent distress, Yasuko held herself perfectly still, then, as Mieko’s pleasing fragrance began to sink once again into Yasuko’s body, easing the tiredness in her joints, she pushed Mieko away and wriggled free of her embrace.

“It’s no use, Mother. You pretend not to understand, but I know very well that you do; you know all about it.
You know as well as I do that my body doesn’t belong only to Akio anymore—or to you either—”

“My dear, what are you talking about?” Mieko gasped. “I haven’t any idea what you mean.” She had, of course, long since noticed the peculiar smell that clung to Yasuko’s body, an odor with the sharp pungency of a fish just taken from the sea. She knew that it had been there ever since Yasuko’s return from Kyoto on the train with Ibuki, but there was nothing in her look to betray that she knew.

Nearly a month had passed since that train ride. The freezing dew that moistened the rooftops each morning had turned imperceptibly to whitest frost, and tonight the chill in the air gave a foretaste of snow.

Two days before had been the fourth anniversary of Akio’s death, and again this year Mieko had invited family and friends to the house for an informal memorial service. In the past, Ibuki had always come; but he was prevented this time by a faculty meeting, and so Mikamé had come alone and stayed late, chatting genially with the others.

He took this opportunity to mention his discovery of “An Account of the Shrine in the Fields.”

“Mrs. Toganō, why don’t you consider having that essay published again? I’m only an amateur, so it’s not too surprising I’d never heard of it, but even Ibuki seemed unaware you’d written any such thing.”

“Goodness, no,” she said, rejecting the idea with her usual composure. “That was only a sort of folly of my youth. It’s hardly something worth showing to people after all these years.” When Mikamé told of having given the essay to Ibuki to read, she seemed embarrassed, quietly lowering her gaze.

Whatever her private thoughts may have been, the following day she sent Yasuko to call on Ibuki with a note thanking him for troubling to read the essay.

It was nightfall when Yasuko returned.

“What did he say?” asked Mieko.

“That he will be over to see you himself one of these days, to tell you what he thinks,” replied Yasuko, and disappeared into her room without another word. Mieko had overlooked the brighter color of Yasuko’s eyes then, their radiant glow, but now she was quite sure something had again passed between Ibuki and Yasuko earlier that day.

“I have to go away from here, Mother. The longer I stay, the more I feel like a puppet in your control, the more I begin to hate myself—” Her defiant words were cut short by Mieko’s cry of dismay.

“Yasuko, stop—think what you’re saying! If you went away now, what would I do? Without you, I’d be the one like a puppet—a puppet left deserted and helpless. Please, be a good girl. Don’t go on saying such dreadful things and making me so upset.”

“No, Mother. Until now I’ve always gone along with your wishes, without thinking twice or minding in the least. Even what’s happening to me now seems less a matter of my own free choice than of your command. Shall I go ahead and say it? You want me to have an affair with Tsuneo Ibuki, don’t you?”

“I never…” Mieko began as if to deny it, then seemed to change her mind. “I never want to hear you speak that way again, Yasuko. Yes, if you must know, it would make me terribly sad for you to grow old and never know another man but Akio. And as long as Mr. Ibuki and Dr. Mikamé are both so fond of you, I thought if you could fall in love with one of them, you would be happier that way. I didn’t want to see a woman like you stay tied to me with nothing but your memories of Akio.”

“Is that all? Honestly, Mother?” Yasuko’s gaze was intense, her eyes burning as she looked up at Mieko.

“Of course it is. But I only thought it. It makes me very unhappy to hear you say such a shameless thing aloud.”

“No, Mother, I don’t believe that
is
all. I can tell because I love you. Deep inside, you have some other plan that I’m not meant to understand. And in order to thwart that plan of yours, I was going to marry Toyoki…but now I can’t do it, after all.”

“You liked Mr. Ibuki better all along anyway. I’ve always known that.”

“Not I, Mother. It’s you who like him—somehow, time and again, your feelings seem to take hold of me. This is not just some crazy excuse; so many times I’ve found myself doing things that don’t make a bit of sense—and every time, without fail, I feel you there in the background, manipulating me like a puppet.”

“You’re not treating his wife fairly, Yasuko, are you? I’m sure of it; I’m more sensitive to these things than you. This isn’t just some harmless flirtation that she’s better off not knowing about, is it?”

“You’re right. It’s not. I know.” Yasuko tried to lift her head, but Mieko gently held her back. Her features, never sharply defined, had taken on even greater obscurity in the dim lamplight, as if veiled in a thin mist.

“Men don’t understand, do they?” said Yasuko. “He seems to think that as long as she doesn’t find out, it’s as if nothing has ever happened between us, but I don’t see it that way at all. When a man and a woman have a physical relationship, it never ends there, does it? Even if there are no children, I think both people are forever changed.”

“And they are. You’re right, Yasuko: what’s done is done, and can never be undone. But it took me years to realize that simple truth, so it’s hardly any wonder that Mr. Ibuki hasn’t found it out yet. You know, Yasuko, to
hear you say what you just did makes me think that you are a woman who could pick up and begin again where I leave off. And in that sense you are my real daughter; the woman in me that I tried, but failed, to pass on to Harumé has found new life in you.”

“Mother.” Yasuko took Mieko’s hand and swung it to and fro like a spoiled child. “Tell me something.”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about that essay you wrote, the one called ‘An Account of the Shrine in the Fields’? I doubt that even Akio knew you had written it. And wouldn’t it have been only natural for you to show it to him after he’d begun studying spirit possession himself?”

“Oh, Yasuko…I’m sorry I ever wrote that. It was out of line for me; I should have stuck to my poetry. And here I thought I had burned every copy so that no trace would survive…what sinful things words are, coming to life again just when I’d forgotten them and unmasking me like that. I wrote that essay in the fall of 1937. It was meant for a particular person to read—someone who’d been conscripted and sent to China. I had it printed up and sent it to him, but it was returned the following year. Stamped on the envelope were the words ‘Addressee Deceased from Disease Contracted at Front.’ ”

“I knew it.” Yasuko let out a long breath. “In that essay you wrote that Genji’s romance with the Rokujō lady was much more than a passing affair, and something in the way you wrote it made me certain: you must have loved someone else, someone young, not Akio’s father. And that person died, didn’t he? At the front.”

“Yes.”

Mieko said the one word, and nothing more. Yasuko, who had been eagerly awaiting her next utterance, looked
in disappointment at the shapely head pressed deep into the pillow.

After a silence, not moving or opening her eyes, Mieko spoke in a muffled voice that was part moan.

“Yasuko, that man was Akio’s and Harumé’s father. Those children never had one drop of Toganō blood.”

“What! Is that true?” Yasuko sat up so suddenly that the quilt fell back in a triangle, revealing Mieko’s slim figure lying gracefully draped in a sleeping-gown of patterned silk crepe, her legs bent slightly at the knee. “Did Akio know that?”

Mieko raised her head slightly from the pillow and gave a single nod.

Yasuko had no memory of returning to her own bed, but awoke there all at once, roused from a dream of pushing her way endlessly through fold upon fold of white curtains.

The words of a children’s song, partly in northern dialect, were being sung tunelessly over and over in a low voice, while someone’s feet kept time on the veranda floorboards. “It’s Harumé,” she thought.