The Snow Kimono (36 page)

Chapter 39

IT starts as a normal day. Tadashi Omura steps out of his apartment and pulls the
door closed. He takes the lift downstairs. Then he sets out on the ten-minute walk
to his office. The air is clear. The sun is shining.

He has no presentiment that truth is circling overhead. That it will be waiting for
him when he arrives at his office.

Then he is sitting at his desk. He takes the document he has been working on out
of his briefcase and opens it. Sees the isolated pools of red. His many emendations.
There is still so much to do.

His left hand rests on the page. The fingers of his right hand reach expertly up
for his glasses, snug in his coat top pocket. His detailed revisions are suddenly
as sharp as barbed wire. His handwriting meticulous, dense, inescapable.

The document is a family will. It is the territory he hates most. The will is complex,
an old Osaka family. They are
well known, wealthy. Once, they were happy.

For reasons he will not disclose, the father, a former friend, wants his only son
excised. His word—excised.

Omura remembers him, the boy, as a young child. Shy, smiling, well-mannered.

But now things must be watertight.

Where did this new bitterness come from? What transgressions did it conceal? He
could not ask. The father unbending.

Watertight. No loopholes. No gaps. To ensure the carnage continues.

Later—three soft knocks. He is still at his desk. His ashtray has begun to fill.
He waits, glances at his open diary. The low reverberation of a departing freighter
rolls across the city. Eleven thirty.

Mrs Akimoto, his secretary, knocks again. He imagines her leaning in towards the
door, her small clenched fist still raised.

Come in, he says.

Mrs Akimoto is older, old-fashioned. She has been with him for years. From before
she was married. She bows, as she always does.

Forgive me, Mr Omura, but there is someone here to see you.

He looks at his diary again. Perhaps he has missed something.

It’s a lady, Mrs Akimoto says. She does not have an appointment. I suggested she make one, but she said she would wait. All day, if necessary. Until
you come out.

Tadashi hears what his secretary has said.

She says it’s important.

Did she tell you what it’s about?

No, she wouldn’t say.

Did she give you her name?

She said her name was Yamaguchi.

Yamaguchi?

Yes, Mrs Yamaguchi.

He frowns.

The name Yamaguchi doesn’t mean anything to me, he says. Do we have anything on file?

No, Mrs Akimoto says. I looked.

He turns back to the document on his desk.

Thank you, Mrs Akimoto. Ask Mrs Yamaguchi to give me ten minutes. I will see her
then. Please bring some tea with you when you come.

Mrs Yamaguchi is perhaps fifty. Perhaps older. Her face resolute. Her mouth a mere
uneven crease in her face. But her eyes are steady. He can hear her saying: I will
wait here until he comes out.

She sits in the chair opposite him.

I need your help, she says.

She has an accent. Now he knows she is not from Osaka.
Or Tokyo. She comes from one
of the northern provinces. He has heard this accent before. The rural mud has stuck.
And yet her clothing is beautifully made. The cloth expensive.

The bridge of his nose hurts. He takes his glasses off. Retrieves a soft cloth from
his drawer. He polishes the thick round lenses.

Help in what way? he says, holding his glasses up to the light.

A little over a year ago, she says, my husband died. One evening, the police came
knocking on my door. They told me my husband’s body had been found at the base of
the walking bridge at Akiyama. Amongst the rocks. His skull had been fractured. His
neck was broken. They told me he had committed suicide. They told me…They told me
Hideo had jumped.

I’m sorry, Mrs Yamaguchi, he says. He is about to go on.

That was a year ago, she says. I now know that my husband did not jump. He was killed.

Killed?

Yes, killed. Murdered.

The moment has arrived. Does he feel the fluttering of wings about his head?

Mr Ishiguro said to come and see you, she says.

Here it is.

Mr Ishiguro said to come and see you
. The wings are beating now.
Mr Ishiguro said…

He said it wasn’t anything to do with him.

Mr Ishiguro? he says.

Yes?

Which Mr Ishiguro?

But he already knows.

Mr Ishiguro, the cloth maker. She touches the sleeve of her kimono. His factory is
on the outskirts of the city.

And what else did Mr Ishiguro say?

She looks perplexed.

That you would know what to do, she says.

He sees the determination in her eyes. She is not going to go away.

And why do you think your husband was murdered? he asks.

Because I found his diary, she says. I have it here.

Chapter 40

I WILL pay you what you paid me, Hideo says.

Three months after he had surrendered Sachiko, Hideo returned. To get his daughter
back.

How?

They were sitting in the long room. Hideo did not answer.

It’s too late, Hideo, Katsuo said.

Why?

I cannot explain.

It did not take long for Hideo to produce his ultimatum.

If you do not return Sachiko to me, he said, I will tell her that I sold her to you.
I will tell her that, from the age of twelve, every time I came down to Osaka, you
paid me for her.

Sold her? Katsuo said. We entered into an agreement, Hideo. Sachiko would come to
work for me, in exchange for which I would take care of her future. In the meantime,
as you say, I paid you. Handsomely. We had an agreement.

Hideo said nothing.

And tell me Hideo, which is worse? That you sold her? Or that I bought her?

That you bought her.

Why?

Because of what you bought her for.

You took my money. You knew then what our contract meant. Or did you lie to yourself
about that?

He waited for Hideo to reply.

Perhaps, he said.

Perhaps which?

Hideo hesitated.

Yes, I knew, he said.

You knew. And I waited. Sachiko is sixteen. You know I could have taken her much
earlier. In the eyes of the law, I have done nothing wrong.

Both men remained silent, each watching the other.

I made a mistake, Katsuo-san, Hideo said. I cannot live with what I have done. That
I sold her to you haunts me. I feel her loss every day. I have always felt it.

Katsuo knew of what Hideo spoke. The pain of losing someone. Had he not spent years
mourning Mariko’s loss after she had left? Years. And had he not known how much he
loved Mariko until she was gone? What had Hideo just said: I feel her loss every
day.

In those first desperate weeks, after Mariko disappeared, Katsuo had searched and
searched for her. Later, in his years of self-imposed exile, his longing had grown
more unbearable every day. How could he have made such a mistake? Not to have recognised
that he could not live without her. To have let her slip through his fingers.

Then, years later, not long after his return, he had been leafing through an old
magazine, passing time while he waited to be shaved, and there, when he turned a
page, was a photograph of her. It had been a shock to see her eyes again, eyes that
he had not seen for so long, looking up at him. There had been a clutching at his
heart, a momentary glimpse of hope reborn. And then the caption:
Consort of wealthy
industrialist found dead
. He had read and re-read it.

She had changed her name. Why had he never thought of that? It had been so cruel
to have discovered her death this way. So unexpected. So without warning. Mariko,
the woman whose laughter he could still hear, whose face he could still see, who
had walked his balcony by his side, had died alone, in a cheap room in a cheap hotel,
of an overdose, the former consort of a man convicted of fraud. A man who refused
to speak to him.

He had gone there, to that room, to that empty space, to be with her.

But it had been beyond him to envisage her sitting alone on the still-made bed, pausing
that brief moment before she took the irrevocable step. His brain refused to imagine
her lovely hands reaching for the bottle of pills, refused to see
her pale eyes dulled
with tears. And she still wondering—how had life come to this?

The room had been empty. No unearned forgiveness was waiting for him there. No shrine.
She was gone.

He had kept the photo. Looked at it from time to time. So the wound would not heal.
Life could have been so different.

Had she come looking for him?

In the years that followed, he isolated himself, became a prisoner to his own grief.
He gave up hope of ever finding someone else. He no longer cared.

Then his friend Ishiguro started talking about a girl he had seen, the daughter of
one of his clients, who lived in a mountain village hundreds of kilometres away.

She reminds me of Mariko, he said. Or what Mariko must have been like when she was
young.

But Katsuo had dismissed him.

A year later, Ishiguro called.

I saw her again, he said.

Who?

The girl. The one that reminds me of Mariko. I tell you, Katsuo, she
is
beautiful.
Her name is Sachiko. When you finish what you’re working on, you should come with
me. To see her.

Eventually, when
The Woman on the Beach
was done, he agreed to go. He was still not
sure, however, that he wanted to be reminded of Mariko.

But Ishiguro had been right. The girl
was
beautiful. And
there
was
something Mariko-like
about her. It was as if she were Mariko’s echo.

Afterwards, back in Osaka, the thought of her lingered. He kept seeing Sachiko emerging
onto her parent’s lit verandah wearing kimonos made from Ishiguro’s exquisite cloths.
She was tall. Slender. Pale-skinned. He was struck by her poise, her reserve. Her
extraordinary face. By the end of the evening, after he had continued waiting unrewarded
for her to reappear, she had begun to inhabit him.

Sachiko.

It had been easy for Ishiguro to ask after her on her father’s next visit; what his
plans for his daughter were, her education, her future. Easy for him to mention a
wealthy benefactor who was looking for a young girl to tend to his house, to become
his secretary, his assistant—his current housekeeper being old—in exchange for furthering
her education. A benefactor who was prepared to enter into a contract with him, but
who was also prepared to wait.

Hideo had been flattered when Ishiguro introduced him to Sachiko’s prospective employer.
Ishiguro had not told him who this might be, and he would never have guessed. Katsuo
Ikeda? The writer? Who was already famous. And Ume, who was indeed already old, who
would oversee Sachiko’s training, nodding to him, as if he were important.