The Waiting Years
Fumiko Enchi
* * *
THE WAITING YEARS
TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE BY
John Bester
Contents
I First Bloom
Green Grapes
The Handmaid
II The Moon of the Twenty-sixth Night
Purple Ribbon
Unripe Damsons
III The Stepsisters
The Waiting Years
About the Author
Fumiko Enchi was the pen-name of Fumi Ueda, one of the most prominent Japanese women writers in the Showa period of Japan. Her first play, A Turbulent Night in Late Spring, performed at the Tsukiji Little Theatre, was a success and a short story published in 1952, Days of Hunger, was acclaimed by the critics and won the coveted Women Writers Prize.
On the publication in 1957 of The Waiting Years – a novel she took eight years to write – she won Japan’s highest literary award, the Noma Prize. Enchi was made a Person of Cultural Merit in 1979, and was awarded the Order of Culture by the Japanese government in 1985. She was elected to the Japan Art Academy shortly before her death in 1986.
ALSO BY FUMIKO ENCHI
Days of Hunger
Masks
I
* * *
First Bloom
It was an afternoon in early summer.
At the Kusumi’s house that backed onto the Sumida River at Hanakawado in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, the mother, Kin, placed a white clematis from the garden in the alcove of one of the two adjoining rooms upstairs that she had been cleaning assiduously since early morning, and patting her hip with an air of weary finality came climbing down the dark wooden staircase.
In the small room next to the entrance hall, her daughter Toshi sat beneath the wooden-barred window threading a needle for her sewing, holding the eye up against the bright light reflected from the waters of the river. She spoke as her mother came into the room carrying the thick, oiled paper on which the flowers had rested while she arranged them.
‘The clock next door just struck three. They’re late, aren’t they, Mother?’
‘Good gracious, is it that time already? But then, they’re coming all the way from Utsunomiya by rickshaw; they said afternoon but I expect it will be more like early evening.’
Kin seated herself by the rectangular charcoal brazier and lit the tobacco in the tiny bowl of a longish, bamboo-stemmed pipe.
‘You’ve been hard at it since this morning, Mother. I expect you’re tired,’ said Toshi with a pleasant smile. She ran her sewing needle in and out of her double bun, which was coming slightly undone, then stuck it into the red pin cushion on the stitching stand. Next, she gently transferred her sewing – some material that looked like heavy silk crepe – from her lap to a piece of wrapping paper and went over to her mother, dragging her bad leg as she went. She too felt she deserved a rest.
‘I wonder how it can get so dusty when I clean the place every day,’ said Kin, smoothing out her kimono sleeves that had been tied up for housework and fastidiously dusting off the black satin collar of her kimono with her hand. She did not mention it to her daughter, but she was secretly proud of having removed every speck of dust from the room, of having mounted a pair of steps even, so as to wipe the last traces of dust from the openwork panel over the lintel between the rooms and from the groove above the lintel itself.
‘I wonder what Mrs. Shirakawa’s coming up to Tokyo for,’ said Toshi, who was apparently less interested in the cleaning than her mother and was rubbing her eyes, which were tired from sewing, with her fingertips.
‘What, exactly, are you hinting at?’ Kin frowned suspiciously at her daughter. The mother was still youthful in outlook and the daughter had been prevented by sickness from marrying until it was too late, so that by now they were used to talking to each other more as sisters than as parent and child. Occasionally, even, Toshi seemed more elderly in her ideas than her mother.
‘She said in her letter, didn’t she, she was coming to Tokyo to do some sightseeing?’
‘Even so, I wonder.’ Toshi tilted her head portentously to one side. ‘I wonder whether a young married woman like her really has time to come up to Tokyo just to do the sights. Mr. Shirakawa’s a chief secretary or something at the prefectural office, isn’t he? Only just below the governor himself …’
‘That’s right. They say he’s a very influential man,’ said Kin, tapping her pipe on the edge of the brazier. ‘Yes, he’s certainly got on in the world. I never thought he’d do as well as that when he was working at the Tokyo City Hall and they lived next door to us. Not that he didn’t have all his wits about him even then.’
‘That’s just what I mean, Mother,’ said Toshi, as though urging her mother on. ‘It’s all too casual, somehow, for her to leave a husband who’s as busy as that and come up for a month or two of sightseeing, bringing her daughter and a maid and all. It isn’t as though her own family lived here.’
‘You’re right – she comes from Kumamoto, the same as Mr. Shirakawa himself. Even so, though …’ Kin looked hard into her daughter’s face as though the problem was beyond the grasp of her own imagination. ‘Surely they couldn’t be thinking of a divorce? There was no hint of such a thing in Mr. Shirakawa’s letter.’
‘I don’t suppose there was,’ said Toshi. Her elbow rested on the covered end of the brazier, with her chin propped on her hand, and her eyes had a dreamy look as though gazing into the future. Even though Toshi was her own daughter, there were times when Kin was disturbed by the odd way that the crippled girl’s presentiments had of coming true. For a while she gazed at Toshi’s face with the air of one awaiting the utterance of a medium, but before long Toshi took her elbow off the brazier.
‘There’s no telling,’ she said.
It was an hour or so later that Tomo Shirakawa, accompanied by her nine-year-old daughter Etsuko and a maid, alighted from her rickshaw before the Kusumi’s house.
First they went to the hot bath that was waiting and removed the grime of their journey, then Tomo came back down to the sitting room to give them their presents: dried persimmons and Aizu lacquer ware, which she said were local products of Fukushima, as well as lengths of cloth in suitable patterns for both Kin and Toshi.
Sitting there in her striped kimono, with the dignified loose jacket of black silk crepe decorated with the family crests, her sloping shoulders on which the clothes sat so well held slightly back, Tomo had the typical air of an important official’s wife, an air acquired during the four or five years that Kin had not seen her. The breadth of her forehead and the generous spacing of her eyes and mouth about the well-shaped, somewhat fleshy nose saved her face from any suggestion of oversensitivity, but the eyes, narrow beneath the full, drooping eyelids, had an almost frustrated look, as though the lids were being used to screen off a whole variety of emotions that might have found expression there. It was this same heaviness of gaze, together with a certain formality of speech and manner, that had always made Kin, for one, sense a certain remoteness in Tomo, despite the cordiality that had developed during the two years or so that the Shirakawas had lived next door to them in Tokyo. There was no snobbishness, no unpleasantness, nothing one might censor; Kin, a typical Tokyo woman, would have expressed it by saying that Tomo ‘kept herself to herself.’ Yet now that her husband’s position was more important than in his younger days, this same unbending quality in Tomo gave her an undeniable air of distinction.
Etsuko, whose hair was still too short to be done up properly and was fastened in a child’s flat bun, was fascinated by the unfamiliar view of the river and could not keep her gaze off the barred window.
‘She’s getting to be a really beautiful girl,’ said Kin quite sincerely, so fair w
as Etsuko’s complexion and so fine her features with the well-shaped, aquiline nose.
‘She’s like her father,’ added Toshi. It was true: the face with its graceful cheekline and the delicate set of the neck were more like Shirakawa himself than his wife. Etsuko seemed to fear the disapproval of her mother, who had only to utter the one word ‘Etsuko!’ in a low voice for the girl to seem suddenly to shrink into herself and come to sit by her side.
‘How nice that you could just up and come to Tokyo like this,’ said Kin as she bustled about making tea and serving it to them. ‘I hear your husband’s an important figure these days, almost the same as the governor. It must be very wearing for you.’
‘Oh no, I know nothing about his official work nowadays …’ She replied unaffectedly, with no trace of bragging or self-importance such as might confirm the talk Kin had heard of Mr. Shirakawa’s living like a feudal lord in the prefecture where he worked.
For a while the talk flowed freely, chiefly of life in Tokyo: how certain areas were getting busy; how hairstyles had changed in the few years Tomo had been away; of the play they were doing now at the Shintomi Theater; till finally Tomo said, ‘And we’re to enjoy ourselves this time without hurrying back … Though, to tell the truth, there is a little business mixed up with it too …’ As she spoke, she turned to reset a red comb for Etsuko, who was by her side. So casual was the phrasing that Kin paid no attention, but to Toshi it meant that, as she herself had inferred, Tomo had some important business in Tokyo. Unruffled and gracious though Tomo’s manner was, there seemed to be some unnatural burden weighing her down from within.
The next day Toshi, who was normally a stay-at-home, showed their gratitude for the presents they had received by asking Etsuko to go with her to visit the great temple of Kannon at Asakusa, and Yoshi the maid and Etsuko both set off happily in her company.
‘On your way home, buy her a picture book or something at the arcade in front of the temple,’ Kin told her daughter as she went to the gate to see them off. Going indoors, she went straight upstairs where she found Tomo sitting in the anteroom, putting clothes into a wicker hamper that they had brought with them and taking out fresh ones. The sky with its scattered white clouds, reflected in the waters of the river below, filled the two rooms where Tomo sat with a spacious white light.
‘Well – at work so soon?’ exclaimed Kin, kneeling on the wooden floor of the veranda just outside the room.
‘Now Etsuko’s getting older she insists on taking this and that with her,’ said Tomo, speaking slowly as she put away kimonos one by one in the hamper. ‘It’s made traveling anywhere quite a bother.’ She paused. ‘Mrs. Kusumi … I wonder if you’re busy just at the moment?’
She had just leaned forward in order to put a yellow silk, lined kimono of Etsuko’s deep down inside the hamper, and her face was not visible. It was precisely for the sake of a chat that Kin had come upstairs, but suddenly Tomo’s words made her feel somehow awkward at having come up at all.
‘No … Why, is there something I can do for you?’
‘If you’re busy, of course, it doesn’t have to be now, but since Etsuko was out I thought … Either way, why don’t you come in here for a while?’
Speaking in the same leisurely tone as ever, she brought a cushion and placed it on the tatami mats near the veranda.
‘You see – to tell the truth, there’s something I’d very much like you to do for me while I’m here.’
‘Now I wonder what that could be? If it’s anything in my power I’ll gladly do it, of course …’
Kin made a show of speaking heartily yet wondered desperately what Tomo was about to confide in her as she sat there so correctly with hands clasped in her lap and eyes downcast. The faintest of lines, like a very slight smile, extended from the edge of her gently curving cheek down to the corner of her mouth.
‘It’s a rather peculiar business, I’m afraid,’ she said, raising her hand to touch her sidelock. Hating even a single strand to be out of place, she had a habit of running a hand over her hair from time to time even though, in keeping with the whole of her personal appearance, it was always immaculately groomed.
At this point it dawned on Kin that, somewhere, a woman must be involved. When Shirakawa had been in Tokyo, women had always been coming to the house; it had worried Tomo, Kin knew, and now that he had reached his present position the likelihood of such an affair was all the greater. She deliberately maintained her inquiring expression nevertheless, since to probe into such a private matter as though she had already guessed its nature would have conflicted with her innate, townswoman’s sense of etiquette.
‘What is it? Don’t hesitate to tell me,’ she said.
‘Well, since I shall have to ask your help at any rate …’ Again the smile, elusive as the smile on a No mask, played about the corners of Tomo’s mouth.
‘The fact is, you see, I’d like to find a maid to take back with me. Aged somewhere between fifteen and, say, seventeen or eighteen. From a respectable family, if possible … but she must be good-looking.’
As she spoke the last words, the smile around her lips showed itself clearly, and the eyes beneath their heavy lids took on an intense light that went oddly with the smile.
‘Of course, I quite understand.’
Kin dropped her gaze, uncomfortable at the insincere ring of her own voice. She had already heard enough to justify the foreboding that Toshi had felt the other day.
She took a deep breath that might have been either a sign of assent or a sigh, then said:
‘I suppose that when a man reaches his position … that kind of thing becomes a necessity, doesn’t it?’
‘It does seem so. People come to expect it, you see.’
It was not true; with all her might, Tomo was checking the emotions that came welling up in her breast.
It was a year, perhaps, since her husband had first conceived the idea of taking a mistress into the house. The minor officials who danced attendance on Shirakawa had often bothered her with their innuendoes at saké parties and on other such occasions. ‘Mrs. Shirakawa,’ they would say, ‘with an establishment as big as this, you really ought to have more female help.’ Or, ‘The Chief Secretary has too much to do, you know. You should give him a little change now and then, he’ll sleep a lot more soundly.’
Her husband’s failure to reprimand his subordinates for their impertinence, despite his usual strong distaste for such familiarity, gave Tomo the impression that he was using them in order to make the suggestion himself.
Familiar by now with Shirakawa’s self-indulgence where women were concerned, Tomo could no longer feel for him the pure love she had experienced during the first few years of their marriage, yet his ability and his manly bearing still made him sufficiently attractive as a husband.
To take charge of a social life and household in keeping with her husband’s present position had not been easy for a woman born into a low-ranking samurai family of the former Hosokawa clan and married early with no chance, in the social turmoil just preceding the Meiji Restoration, to acquire either a proper education or the usual social accomplishments of the well-bred young woman. Yet an inborn hatred of compromise made her impose upon herself a strict rule of conduct that gave first importance in everything to husband and family, and she supervised the daily affairs of their household with a meticulous care that was beyond criticism. All the love and wisdom of which she was capable were devoted to the daily lives of her husband and the rest of the Shirakawa family.
She seemed consequently old for her years. Though not a beauty, she was good-looking enough and more attentive than most women to her appearance, so that there was nothing particularly elderly about her, yet the innate strictness of disposition that made her take her responsibilities so seriously deprived her utterly of the ripe sensuality common in women of early middle age, and Shirakawa was astonished at times to find that a wife who in theory was ten years his junior should seem more like an elder sister. He was fam
iliar of course with the fierce sensuality that burned with a low yet intense flame beneath the thick outer shell, and there were times when he himself felt a surge of warmth at the repressed passion he sensed within her, the passion that evoked so vividly the summer sun beating down mercilessly on the district of central Kyushu where she had been born and bred. One summer night, during the time when he was still working in Yamagata, a small snake had somehow got inside the mosquito net where he and his wife were sleeping. Wakening suddenly, he had felt something cold and wet at the front of his cotton night kimono. When he put his hand there, puzzled, the cold thing had started to slither away.
As he leapt to his feet with a cry, Tomo, startled, sat up sharply in bed. Drawing the lamp by the bed toward her and turning the light in his direction, she saw something like a slimy, shining black cord on her husband’s shoulder.
Shirakawa’s cry of ‘A snake!’ and the movement of her hand as it stretched out automatically and grasped the living cord came simultaneously.
Half falling over Shirakawa, she went out to the veranda and threw the snake through the open shutters into the garden. She was trembling, yet in the breast that thrust through the gaping front of her kimono and in her bared arm he had sensed a robust directness that was normally shut away out of sight.
‘Why did you throw it out? You should have let me kill it,’ he had complained, hating to give her the advantage. Even as he sensed the passionate nature within, he was beginning to find it difficult to see her as an object of desire. The strength that was a fraction greater than his own made him feel ill at ease in her presence.
‘To call the girl a concubine would be making too much of it,’ he had said to Tomo. ‘She’ll be a maid for you, too … It’s a good idea, surely, to have a young woman with a pleasant disposition about the house so that you can train her to look after things for you when you’re out calling. That’s why I don’t want to lower the tone of the household by bringing in a geisha or some other woman of that type. I trust you, and I leave everything to you, so use your good sense to find a young – as far as possible inexperienced – girl. Here, use this for your expenses.’