The Laws of Evening: Stories (9 page)

There were ten
jizo
. One was much older than the others, a mere lump of rock; moss grew thick as bark over its features and spread its roots in the porous stone. Moss after the rainy season was silky to the touch; to Sono it was like stroking the fur of a small animal. Another
jizo,
better preserved, consisted of two Buddhas standing side by side. These unfortunate twins had been put to death centuries ago; born of opposite sexes, they were assumed to have had sexual contact within the womb. It occurred to Sono, recalling the distaste with which she had once hustled her own twins away, how narrowly the girls would have escaped such a fate in olden times. Yet another
jizo
—illegitimate, according to its stone inscription—had been born dead with an umbilical cord wrapped around its neck.

Birth. Fraught with danger, this transition from one world to the next. Amazing that it succeeded at all. So much could go wrong: women dying in childbirth, fetuses shifting into wrong alignment inside the womb, accidents of cell division—or of social error—growing unchecked for months, only to be destroyed after a pointless waste of hope and energy. And sometimes, for no comprehensible reason, newborns just did not survive; the qualities that had sustained them in the womb proved to be inadequate for the outside world.

Sono thought of those little lives, doomed in their infancy. If she were younger, the very thought of those poor peasant mothers and their babies crying out for each other, understanding nothing, would have twisted her insides with terrible pain. Now, it merely moved her with a vague tender sorrow that was almost pleasurable. Aaa, life…so sad, Sono thought, fanning herself with a round paper
uchiwa
as crows cawed their lonely way home over the dark treetops. She felt quite removed from it all. Having little left to lose, little left to desire, had lifted her onto a halcyon mountaintop from which she saw all the sufferings of mankind blending beautifully, like tiny trees, into the landscape below.

And now a new dimension, heavy with infinities of time and space, hung just above reach in the failing light, straining against the glowing membrane of the evening sky. Sono wanted to cup this sky in her palm and gauge the temperature of what lay beyond: cool, surely, like a clear mountain lake. If she could prick the sky with a pin…

Did babies in the womb also have premonitions of an outside world? Vibrations, growing stronger as the time approached; then that final period of limbo when familiar walls shrank in places and opened up in others, subtly disturbing the ordered space; amniotic fluid gently shifting in preparation for something incomprehensible. Did babies feel it too—vague anticipations, to be confirmed beyond measure in the shock of birth: chilled air, sounds scraping across a virgin eardrum, hot skin on skin?

Autumn came. The sky fluctuated, in the course of a day, between a high dome of cobalt blue and a flat mottled white. “Autumn skies, women’s minds,” the old saying went. A smell of burning leaves wafted through every alley, as pungent as incense.

Akimi, Sono’s niece, phoned from Aomori Prefecture. “Auntie! The three of us are all flying in next Thursday to help,” she said. The equinox was approaching. The family graves needed weeding, altar tablets needed consecrating. “Auntie, you sound like your mind’s someplace else lately,” she said. “Is that senior citizens’ center wearing you out?”

Before they arrived, Sono thought she would walk over to the temple grounds and buy each of them amulets. Amulets made lovely gifts: little silk pouches adorned with tinkling bells, with folded squares of prayer paper inside. And practical as well—people were constantly having to replace them, since their protective capabilities expired after a year. There was no harm in having up-to-date protection, Sono supposed, whether you believed in that sort of thing or not.

She went early the next day. Nan-ben-ji, the largest of the nine temples, opened its little office at eight; the first of the tour buses would not arrive till eight-thirty. The morning air was suffused with a soft lemon yellow, and high up on either side of the flagstone path sunlight streamed through dripping branches—it had rained the night before—bringing down with it the scent of wet pine. The crows were silent, anticipating the tourists; every so often, one cawed.

Somewhere in the distance, a school bell tolled
kinn konn kann konn
.

Sono bought the amulets and then, in no hurry, shuffled down the cold wooden veranda—in slippers, provided at the front gate—to the main prayer room. This room housed the famous life-size Nan-ben-ji Buddha of the Amida sect. Sitting on the floor cushion, she had to look up to see it, and the burnished bronze face, glowing within the shadows of the alcove, looked down to hers.

In the past few months, Sono had grown accustomed to the
jizo
’s smiles: smug, contented smiles of children, eyes closed as if just fed and drifting off to sleep. The more tragic a baby’s story, it was said, the happier a smile the stone carver would try to give it. Now, as she gazed up at this bronze face in all its mature, sorrowful powers, Sono saw what a limited nirvana there had been in the
jizo
’s smiles—smiles created for the minds of children, for whom bliss was merely a more comfortable version of their own physical world.

The face above her was neither young nor old, male nor female. It had shed all such characteristics. It had shed all emotion. When she was a child, this had unnerved her: what help could you possibly receive, praying to a smile so disengaged and remote? Now, examining this face, Sono sensed how much of life it held: behind these features had once stirred great joys and griefs. The Nan-ben-ji Buddha smiled down at her now with that same nostalgic sorrow with which she herself had regarded the
jizo,
with that same sense of immense distance.

Sono remembered a time when she had cried with her whole body: dry, ragged sobs heaving up along her spine until she thought they would tear the flesh of her heart. She thought with sorrow of how that heart had changed; something flower-like, each petal exposed to the world, had become a smooth hard husk.

But then, looking up again, Sono recognized that strangely luminous sky of summer twilight, its endless dimensions glowing whitely through the Buddha’s muted features. And she was thankful to whoever had left this signpost to testify that he, too, had known this limbo for which there are no words; that through the ages others had known it; and that by her own humble path, she had come to the right place.

R
ITSUKO
N
AKAJIMA
was thirty years old, and she had never been on a date. In addition, she had never held a job. The latter might have been acceptable; even in these modern times, many middle-class women in the Kin-nanji district did not work outside the home. But such women were usually married.

“Anything new with that Nakajima girl, the middle one?” some housewife might say while shelling peas with her children on the veranda, or gossiping with neighbors in one of the narrow alleyways leading to the open-air market. There never was. Ritsuko was spotted strolling in the dusk or running the occasional errand at the market; in the mornings, children on their way to school saw her feeding the caged canary on the upstairs balcony. Like some retired person, neighbors said. Like Buddha in a lotus garden.

Wasn’t she depressed? Wasn’t she desperate? They waylaid her in the alleys: the young housewives applying subtle pressure; the old women probing bluntly, secure in the respect due their age. Ritsuko met their questions (Do you want children someday? What do you do in your free time?) with an indecisive “saaa,” a cocked head, and an expression suggesting that such a puzzle had never even crossed her mind before. Comments and advice alike were absorbed with a “haaa” of humble illumination.

“There’s no give-and-take,” declared old Mrs. Wakame. She was a formidable busybody who ambushed passersby from the comfort of her front stoop, where she lingered on the pretext of watering her dozens of tiny potted flowers. “Talking to that girl is like—” old Mrs. Wakame said, then shook her head and quoted an old saying about a sumo wrestler charging through squares of cotton hung from doorways.

But Ritsuko was not stupid. She was too retiring, even for a girl, but her schoolwork had always been good. Her business degree from Ninjo College would have guaranteed her a job if only this recession, now in its ninth year, had not hit the country just as her class was graduating. Managers had begun to be laid off despite decades of service; quotas for college recruits were slashed below half. Ritsuko, like many in her class, was rejected repeatedly at interviews the summer before March graduation.

Like her classmates, she had waited for the next interviewing season. Up to that point, she did not attract undue attention. But the following summer, when neighbors made polite inquiries of Mrs. Nakajima as to why her daughter was not interviewing—or at least making do with part-time work—they were told that Ritsuko would marry directly from home, bypassing the typical three or four years of premarriage employment. Nine years went by, however, and nothing happened.

Perhaps there was an inheritance? There
was
the house, which was all paid off according to the Tatsumi woman, whose husband worked at Mitsui Bank. But split among three daughters, it wasn’t much. Moreover, Mr. Nakajima drew but a modest salary at some little export company in Shiga Prefecture. How much savings could they possibly have after private college tuition for three daughters, not to mention wedding expenses for the eldest? Old Mrs. Wakame had noticed Mrs. Nakajima buying bargain mackerel caught off American shores, as well as low-grade rice from Indonesia and Thailand.

There was little to be gleaned from the other two daughters. The Nakajima sisters, apparently, were not close; Aiko and Chie showed little insight into Ritsuko’s mind and even less interest. They at any rate were leading normal lives. Aiko, the eldest, had recently married a confectioner’s son and was now living in Gion. Twenty-five-year-old Chie, unmarried and therefore still living at home, had been dating her current boyfriend for five months. She had landed a bank teller job after two years of interviewing; each day she rode the Number 72 bus to and from work, looking like a stewardess in Shinwa Bank’s official navy jumper.

“They should have
forced
her to work, for her own good.” “Life’s just passing her by.” “That father should bring home company underlings for dinner. Isn’t that how the Fujiwaras met?” Ecstatic approval followed each comment, fanning a glow of well-being that lingered as the housewives went their separate ways. Their ruminations moved in endless circles, like a merry-go-round from which they could disembark at any moment if a better topic came along.

It was out of genuine kindness—as well as curiosity, the kind that drives children to poke sleeping animals—that old Mrs. Wakame phoned Ritsuko’s mother. She felt justified in using the telephone, because this time, unlike other outdoor occasions when Mrs. Nakajima had managed to slip away, she had a legitimate favor to bestow. This sense of the upper hand made old Mrs. Wakame’s voice expansive. A young man, she told Mrs. Nakajima, a former student of her retired husband, was interested in marriage. Should she act as matchmaker and set up a meeting?

There was a brief silence.

“That is very kind,” Mrs. Nakajima said with dignity. “We accept.”

Mrs. Nakajima herself had married through a matchmaker, but that was decades ago; nowadays, love marriages were prevalent. As a result, Ritsuko had received only one other matchmaking offer, five years ago, involving an elementary-school principal with forty-three years to Ritsuko’s twenty-five. Trusting in future offers, Mrs. Nakajima had declined without even setting up a meeting. “A middle-aged man! How could I do that to a young girl?” she had said. “It would just crush her spirit.”

“What spirit?” said her youngest daughter, Chie. That scornful remark had hurt Mrs. Nakajima deeply, for of her three daughters Ritsuko resembled her mother the most.

Today, Mrs. Nakajima and Ritsuko sat at the kitchen table in the awkward aftermath of old Mrs. Wakame’s phone call. It was about four o’clock, and Mr. Nakajima and Chie were still at work. Granny was home—she sat upstairs all day, coming down only for meals—but by unspoken assent, they made no move to go to her with the news.

A breeze wafted in through the open window, bringing with it the aggressive smell of fresh grass. Since the last rain, weeds had invaded the neighborhood, appearing overnight, in startling hues of neon, through cracks in the asphalt, from under ceramic roof tiles, even within the stone lanterns in the garden. The garden itself, cut off from the western sun by a high bamboo fence, now lay in deepening shadow.

Also drifting in on the breeze, from the direction of Asahi Middle School, came the synchronized shouts—“Fight! Fight! Fight!”—of the baseball team running laps. It was April again, the start of another new school year.

Instinctively Mrs. Nakajima considered closing the window, turning on the little radio that was permanently set, at cozy low volume, to the easy-listening station. For the shouts were a disturbing reminder that for the past nine years, while Ritsuko’s life ground to a halt, mindless toddlers had been transforming into young adults whose voices now rose with strength and promise. Aaa, each new spring came so quickly!…As if the rest of the world followed a different clock.

But the phone call changed things. Suddenly the air in the kitchen, which still smelled faintly of this morning’s prayer incense, altered—attuning itself to that elusive forward momentum of the outside world. For the first time, Mrs. Nakajima dared to hope her daughter’s destiny could be saved, like a pan snatched from a stove in the nick of time.

With a sharp, anxious sigh, Mrs. Nakajima pushed herself up from the low table. Ritsuko, idly prying off the label from a jar of salted plums, glanced up in mild puzzlement.

“That jar’s so low already,” Mrs. Nakajima said by way of explanation.

“I can buy another jar,” Ritsuko offered. “I’ll take my bicycle.” She ran errands for everyone in the family, which was only fair since she wasn’t working. That had been Mrs. Nakajima’s job for many years. She had not minded it for herself, but it smote her to see the same affable subservience in her daughter.

According to the résumé, Kanzo Funaba was twenty-eight years old—Ritsuko’s junior by two years. He had a business degree from Noraku University, where old Mr. Wakame had taught (hardly an elite school but a good one), and he held a position as assistant manager at a merchandising company called Sabin Kogyo. Two photographs were enclosed with the résumé, casual outdoor shots: Kanzo in a wet suit, sitting on the beach and gazing pensively out over the waters of Kobe Bay; Kanzo in a Nike T-shirt, triumphantly holding aloft a small mackerel on a line.

“His hobbies,” Mr. Nakajima read over the gentle clacking of chopsticks at the dinner table, “are scuba diving, sailing, dirt biking, and deep-sea fishing.”

“Hehhhh!” Around the table, there was an exhaling of exaggerated awe.

“Expensive hobbies,” remarked Granny. She held out the photographs at arm’s length, gripping the rim of her eyeglasses with a free hand as if it were a telescope. She noted with a quickening of interest—nothing much, after all, ever happened upstairs—that this boy was better-looking than Ritsuko.

The entire discussion had an air of unreality. Over the years, it had been an unspoken rule to spare Ritsuko any reminder of her situation; tonight, however, the practical necessities of Mrs. Wakame’s offer unleashed in the family a heady tingle.

Chie, born in the year of the tiger, had just had an exhausting day at the bank. This was not the life she had envisioned for herself. Her feet ached. One of these days her ankles would swell up like some old matron’s. And tomorrow would be no better, nor the day after that. Oh, what was the point of struggling and coming home spent, only to see Big Sister smiling and doing nothing,
not a single thing,
and getting everyone’s sympathy besides? Granny actually gave her spending money out of her pension because “the poor girl has no income of her own.” And now a prospective husband was dropped into her lap, a better catch than Chie’s own boyfriend at the office. It was not to be borne.

“Let’s hope you can keep up with him,” she said to her big sister.

Ritsuko cocked her head in her usual evasive way but said nothing.

Mrs. Nakajima waved away Chie’s remark with an airy gesture that was at odds with the fierce, helpless glance she shot in her youngest daughter’s direction. “Men don’t care about that kind of thing, do they, Papa?” she said. Mr. Nakajima grunted, still staring at the résumé. Chie chewed stonily. Her red fingernail polish gleamed under the electric light.

“Well, well,” Granny said heartily, “that Wakame woman has once again outdone herself.”

There had been a time, several years ago, when Chie had insisted on knowing all the details of her mother’s courtship. “Saa,” Mrs. Nakajima had told her, “we dated for three months. He used to visit me once a week on his way home from work. I remember we took lovely walks in the dusk.”

“Did you flirt with each other?” Chie asked. It had caught her mother off guard. Neither of her other daughters had asked such a bald question.

“Of course not!” Mrs. Nakajima said. “It was nothing like that.” The impact of her words, now beyond retrieval, spread out in slow motion to fill the moment.

“He never even took you downtown?” Chie was referring to those chic tearooms where, since before the war, young men in love were known to take their dates.

“I don’t recall,” Mrs. Nakajima had said shortly. She met Chie’s level gaze and felt, for a brief instant, a stab of dislike. “We preferred eating pork buns or fried noodles at one of the local places.”

Tonight at the dinner table, Mr. Nakajima expounded on Kanzo Funaba’s workplace. He had heard good things about Sabin Kogyo. Despite this long recession plaguing the country, Sabin Kogyo had remained stable: its asset-liability ratio was excellent, and the yearly decline of its annual gross revenue was milder than those of most of its counterparts in the industry. The family fell silent before these indisputable statistics.

“It might really happen, ne!” Mrs. Nakajima whispered to her husband later that night, as they lay down to sleep on their separate futons.

“Nnn, it might!” he replied.

“Kobe’s not far,” Mrs. Nakajima said. “She can come visit us on the train.” They stared up into the dark, thinking.

Mrs. Nakajima had never had a boyfriend before her marriage. Mr. Nakajima had dated sporadically, his crowning achievement being a one-night sexual encounter with a barmaid at the establishment he and his co-workers frequented after work. They had no advice to pass on to Ritsuko. They did not fully comprehend how they themselves had become linked together; they merely hoped Ritsuko would grow into marriage as they had—in the same mysterious way she had learned to crawl, then later to walk.

Old Mrs. Wakame was feeling the first stirrings of doubt. Just this afternoon she had met Kanzo Funaba and his parents for the first time—something she should have done before approaching the Nakajimas, but at the time she had not been able to wait. A silent young man, she reported to the housewives standing about her front stoop. But not shy. Just silent….

What old Mrs. Wakame did not mention was how much this young man reminded her of her own teenage grandson, who had declared, when he was six, “Granny, I love you better than anybody else.” That moment still burned in her chest, but with pain now. For lately, whenever his parents brought him to visit, he sat before the television, distant and bored. Every so often, he would condescend to utter a strained little “hohhh” at her best offerings of gossip. Only when he talked to his own friends—Mrs. Wakame had overheard him using her hallway phone—did his voice take on the animated and confidential tones he had once used with her. This young man Kanzo Funaba exuded the same air as her grandson.