Quicksand (27 page)

“What do you suppose we can do about it?” Mitsuko asked.

At first we decided there was no need to be upset. If Watanuki had sold them the material, surely he wouldn't have gone out of his way to incriminate himself; the gossip about my affair with Mitsuko was nothing new either, so it might all blow over without much effect. Mitsuko's family found out about it in another two or three days, but we had my husband assure them that the reports were false.

“It's the same old slander,” he told them, “and this time it's gone too far. You could sue the paper for publishing that forged signature.”

For the moment we felt relieved. But those articles went on day after day, getting sharper and more revealing and bringing to light even facts unfavorable to Watanuki, along with stories about the Kasayamachi inn, our excursions to Nara, the time Mitsuko put stuffing under her kimono to meet my husband—the reporter seemed to know things Watanuki himself wouldn't have known. At this rate, everything about the Hamadera episode would be coming out, from the suicide hoax to the way my husband was drawn into the whirlpool. Another funny thing was that although Mitsuko and I both locked away our letters, one of the letters I sent her—a terribly violent letter, full of embarrassing expressions—had somehow been stolen and a photo of it boldly published in the paper. Only Ume could have taken it, so we had to conclude that she was in league with Watanuki. In fact, she came to see me two or three times after being fired by Mitsuko's family and loitered around suspiciously, with no particular business. Did she want more money, after everything I'd done for her? I wondered. Finally I just ignored her, thinking it wasn't necessary to trouble myself any further, but she came again a few days before that first newspaper article, said something waspish about Mitsuko, and left. I never saw her again.

“What an ungrateful woman!” Mitsuko exclaimed. “She was never just a servant, all the time she was at my house. I treated her like my own sister. . . .”

“Probably you spoiled her.”

“That's what you call biting the hand that feeds you. How could she possibly complain, after all
you
did for her, Sister!”

“She must have been bribed by Watanuki.”

Well, it's only a guess, but once the newspaper began to investigate on the basis of Watanuki's information and started ferreting out one secret after another, perhaps they were lucky enough to get hold of Ume. Or else that awful Watanuki had worked with her from the beginning and maybe even sold the reporter his own secrets, out of desperation. No matter what, by this time we didn't have a moment to waste. If we kept hesitating, sooner or later Mitsuko would be confined to her house, so she wanted us to go ahead with the plan we had agreed upon. Still, days went by, one after another, as we discussed exactly how to carry it out. In the meantime the story of Hamadera began to appear.

As for what happened later, all the newspapers carried full reports of
that
scandal, so I'm sure you've read more than enough about it. I won't try to go into everything that took place in those last days—talking on and on like this has me too excited to be coherent anyway—only there's a certain detail the newspapers missed, and that's the fact that the one who insisted we kill ourselves, and who made the final arrangements, was Mitsuko.

I think it was the day we learned about the letter Ume had stolen that Mitsuko brought over all my old letters, everything she had.

“It's too dangerous to leave these at my house,” she declared.

“Shall I burn them?” I asked.

“No, no!” Mitsuko said quickly. “We can't tell how soon we may have to die, and I want to leave this whole record behind in place of a suicide note. Please, Sister, save all these along with the letters in your cabinet.”

She told us to put our own things in order, and a few days later, around one o'clock on the afternoon of October 28, she came to us and said: “It's getting to be very difficult at home. I feel as if once I go back I'll never be let out again.” She couldn't bear the thought of running away and then being pursued and caught, she said; better to die in our familiar bedroom.

Then we hung my portrait of Kannon on the wall over our beds, and together the three of us burned incense.

“If I'm watched over by my Kannon bodhisattva, I'll die happy,” I said.

“After we're dead, I suppose they'll call this the ‘Mitsuko Kannon,'” my husband put in. “Everybody will respect it, and we can rest in peace.”

Let's nestle close, we agreed, one on either side of Mitsuko like the two bodhisattvas attending the Buddha—so close and intimate that we'd have no more jealous quarrels in our next lives. We joined the beds together and arranged three pillows side by side, with Mitsuko in the middle, and drank down that fatal medicine. . . .

. . . What? Yes, it's true, somehow I wondered whether I might be the only one left alive. As soon as I woke up the next morning I wanted to follow them to the other world. But the thought came to me that my survival might not have been an accident; maybe I'd been deceived by them even in death. Wasn't leaving that packet of letters in my charge another clue? Perhaps they were afraid I might still come between them even after their love suicide! Ah. . . . (The widow Kakiuchi suddenly burst into tears.) If I hadn't had those suspicions, I couldn't have let myself go on living—and yet there's no use holding a grievance against the dead. Even now, rather than feeling bitter or resentful, whenever I think of Mitsuko I feel that old longing, that love. . . . Oh, please, forgive me all these tears. . . .