The Waiting Years Read online

  Most of this conversation took place between Zenkō and Kin. Tomo’s eyes were fixed on Suga’s dancing but she took in enough of their talk to convince her more surely than in any other case so far of the depth of the mother’s affection for her daughter. The daughter of such a mother was unlikely to have been seriously spoiled by the world, and promised to respond readily to Tomo’s instruction if she took her back with her to Fukushima.

  Even in her dancing, although Tomo was no good judge, the movements of eyes and limbs had a vaguely subdued quality that robbed it of brilliance despite its skill. This, again, did not displease Tomo. Almost without realizing it, she had conceived an antipathy to any suggestion of a clearcut, strong personality in the woman who was to intrude on her household. A girl with strikingly young, fresh features but a spirit that was subdued and timid – for Tomo, it was almost the ideal type for the ‘second woman’ in the house.

  ‘Don’t you think she looks promising?’ asked Zenkō as soon as they emerged from the narrow side street on their way home. ‘She’s not made to be a geisha,’ he went on. ‘Girls with that introspective air aren’t popular.’

  ‘Are you really sure?’ asked Kin doubtfully. ‘And her so pretty …’

  ‘Looks alone aren’t enough,’ he said. ‘But remember – that’s the kind of woman that in ten years’ time will firm up wonderfully. That’s the one thing you should be concerned with.’

  ‘Yes, you may be right.’ A shiver ran over Tomo’s skin as though it had been touched by the naked blade of a sword. The same tremor had passed over her from time to time as she had watched Suga dance.

  As she gazed at the innocent body of this girl who, for all the provocative movements – the inclinations of the head and the elusive movements of the body – with which she suggested the amorous affairs of men and women on the stage, was in fact still half a child, Tomo found herself wondering in what way this immature girl would be broken in, how she would be transformed, once they took her to their home and delivered her into the practiced hands of Shirakawa; unconsciously she closed her eyes and held her breath, only to see a vision of her husband and Suga with limbs intertwined that brought the blood rushing to her head and made her open her eyes wide again as though to dispel a nightmare. Pity welled up at the sorry fate of the girl fluttering before her like a great butterfly, and with it a jealousy that flowed about her body in a rapid, scorching stream.

  Her mind that under the pressure of the search had felt nothing so long as no suitable woman had presented herself was suddenly assailed with a yearning like the hunger that comes with the ending of a fast. The pain of having publicly to hand over her husband to another gnawed at her within. To Tomo, a husband who would quite happily cause his wife such suffering was a monster of callousness. Yet since to serve her husband was the creed around which her life revolved, to rebel against his outrages would have been to destroy herself as well; besides, there was the love that was still stronger than that creed. Tormented by the one-sided love that gave and gave with no reward, she had no idea, even so, of leaving him. It was true that Shirakawa’s money and property, their daughter Etsuko, and their son Michimasa now living with relatives in the country were bonds that held her, but still stronger was the longing, whatever the sacrifice, to have her husband understand through and through the innermost desires and emotions of her heart. The longing was something that no one other than Shirakawa could fulfill.

  At the idea of another woman, this young girl Suga, coming between herself and her husband, it seemed to Tomo that the husband with whom even in the past she had never been able to effect real contact was moving still farther away.

  The night after she received his reply conveying approval of the photograph of Suga that she had sent, Tomo dreamed that she killed her husband and woke in fright at the sound of her own cry.

  Even after she awoke, the force that had gone into her hands to strangle him was still vividly apparent in her clenched fists; she sat up in bed appalled at herself and stayed for a while hugging her body with her arms.

  Etsuko’s face as she lay on her side sleeping soundly in the bed next to Tomo’s stood out in pale profile in the light from the low wick of the bedside lamp. Tomo felt a pang of love for the innocence of the sleeping face that formed so striking a contrast with its comparatively grownup expression when she was awake. So alert was Tomo to the danger of spoiling her that Etsuko tended to find her affection elsewhere, attaching herself more to maids and other friendly adults than to her mother; little did she imagine how Tomo now, wakening in the small hours from a dream of horror, lay bathed in sweat, gazing with tearful eyes at her daughter as though she were a solitary spring in a scorching desert.

  On the day that Suga and her mother came to the Kusumi’s to meet them for the first time, Etsuko, who had been told by her mother and Kin that they would be taking Suga back to Fukushima with them, seemed captivated in her childish way with Suga’s beauty.

  ‘Isn’t she pretty?’ she said. ‘She’s the girl in the photo, isn’t she? What’s she going to do at home?’

  ‘She’s going to help your father,’ said Tomo, momentarily averting her eyes.

  ‘You mean, like Seki?’

  ‘Yes … Yes, I suppose so.’

  Etsuko fell silent, sensing that she would be scolded if she inquired further. Yoshi also, who had been sternly bidden to silence by Tomo, said nothing to her about Suga.

  However complex her emotions, Tomo was obliged to keep them hidden while interviewing Suga’s mother. The mother, who unlike Suga was small with a snub nose and round face, clearly felt intense guilt towards Suga at letting her go for the sake of money, and talked in great detail to Tomo as to one who was her only source of hope, telling her how Suga was not strong physically and even confiding that she was ‘not really a woman’ yet.

  ‘But now I feel much better,’ she said to Kin, ‘seeing what a kind, decent mistress she’ll have. The lady says that even if the master turns against Suga in the future, she’ll be sure to look after her interests.’

  As she watched Suga’s mother telling Kin all this in her own presence and with such näive confidence in her, Tomo resolved in her own mind that she would never let harm come to Suga. She must be responsible for everything, even the future security of the woman who was presumably to deprive her of her husband’s love. Occasionally she would smile a lonely smile at the irony of her lot. At such times she could slip free of the bonds in which she was entangled and, however briefly, survey herself and her husband, Suga and Etsuko, with the same dispassionate gaze.

  One morning two or three days after the Bon Festival, Tomo’s party with the addition of Suga left the Kusumi’s in four rickshaws.

  Suga in her purple splash-patterned kimono of thin silk with its sash of heavy Hakata silk rode the first part of the way in the same rickshaw as Etsuko, who was reluctant to be separated from her.

  ‘The young lady’s taken a fancy to her, too,’ said Kin as she and her daughter went back to the living room after seeing off the rickshaw with its burden that was so like two colorful blossoms, one large and one small. ‘That’s something to be thankful for.’

  She took off the apron she had been wearing and glanced at her daughter as she folded it up. Toshi walked over to the bow window, her bad leg dragging as she went.

  ‘That Mr. Shirakawa is a wicked man, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘I felt so sorry for all three of them – the mistress and the young lady, and Suga – that I cried …’

  She dabbed at the corner of her eyes with her fingers as she tucked the stitching stand between her knees.

  Green Grapes

  At one time it had been the inn where visiting feudal lords always stayed. Even today the Kamisuya, where two guests sat facing each other across a go board by the balcony of a second-story room whose green bamboo blinds were rolled up to let in a cool breeze, was the best inn in Utsunomiya and the destination of all prominent visitors. In the better of the two seats sat Yukitomo Shirakawa, Ch
ief Secretary at the prefectural office of the neighboring prefecture of Fukushima. His companion was a minor official called Ōno who had come in attendance on him. Shirakawa was the right-hand man of Michiaki Kawashima, one of the driving forces behind the government of the day and a man so feared in his own prefecture that mere mention of the ‘demon governor,’ it was said, was enough to silence a crying child. He was a leader too in the governor’s drive to wipe out the civil rights movement that had begun to rear its head so frequently of late.

  Shirakawa was thin, so thin that the summer kimono of linen with the narrow band of light blue showing below his long, slender neck billowed out with an effect of coolness. His nose was aquiline in an oval face and his eyes, despite the mild expression with which he habitually veiled them, would from time to time dart a fierce light that suggested more than a trace of monomania. Yet at first glance he was merely a middle-aged gentleman of a neat and unassuming appearance that seemed to belie his position as chief henchman of the ‘demon governor.’

  ‘They’re late, surely?’ said Ōno as he swept toward him the black stones that he had been using in the game just finished. Shirakawa took a puff at the tobacco in his silver pipe, then without haste drew out the gold watch tucked beneath his sash and said, half to himself:

  ‘It’s getting on to five – I imagine they’ll be here soon. The steward’s gone to the outskirts of the town to meet them, so they can hardly miss the way.’

  He affected composure, but the eagerness with which he was waiting was betrayed by the fact that he did not suggest another game. Ōno moved the go board out of the way and glanced at the tatami where it had stood to make sure there was no dust; he knew how fastidious Shirakawa was about such things.

  Shirakawa, who had arrived in this town the day before on the pretext of a need to visit the prefectural office of Tochigi prefecture, had in reality come to await the wife and daughter whom he had sent to Tokyo more than three months previously. Ōno had already heard from the Shirakawas’ steward, who had accompanied them, that it was something more than a desire to meet his daughter and his wife of such long standing that had brought him all the way to Utsunomiya.

  ‘They say she’s a terrific beauty,’ the steward had declared with a sensational air. ‘Either way, the master’s a queer one, sending his wife all the way to Tokyo to choose her for him.’ He looked scandalized.

  Ōno had already heard occasional reports of Shirakawa’s ways – how the governor had remarked that if Shirakawa was going to carry on as he did it would be better for his family if he kept a concubine or two at home; how he was going to become the patron of some geisha or other in Fukushima – but being, like the steward, a conventional man himself, the idea of a wife going to Tokyo and using her own judgment in finding a concubine to bring home astonished him. He wondered, in the first place, how a respectable woman like Shirakawa’s wife had ever set about finding a woman suitable as a concubine in a place as big as Tokyo. Could it be that a woman married to a man of great worldly ambition herself developed talents beyond the imagination of men such as himself?

  Suddenly there were sounds of rickshaws drawing up before the entrance downstairs, followed by a confused murmur of men’s and women’s voices greeting newly arrived guests and the sound of footsteps hurrying along corridors.

  ‘Here they are, I think,’ said Ōno, who got hastily to his feet and made for the staircase at a trot.

  It was one hour or so later that Shirakawa’s wife Tomo led forward a fresh, unspoiled-looking young girl with her hair drawn back in a bun and said:

  ‘This is Suga, who has come back with me to enter the family service.’

  Earlier, Tomo and Etsuko had greeted Shirakawa briefly while Suga waited downstairs, then Tomo had sent Suga to have a bath with Etsuko. When she came back, she had seated her in front of the mirror-stand and combed out her sidelocks and bun for her. Suga’s hair after the bath gleamed like black lacquer; it was heavy and hard to comb, but Tomo found herself marveling anew at the dazzling fairness of the face without makeup that was framed by the glossy black locks. Since she had used her own judgment in selecting the girl and had given the mother a considerable sum of money in exchange, she must now convince her husband with his acute eye for feminine beauty that she had found a great bargain that should not have been missed, and she worked to make the beautiful Suga seem still more beautiful, watching with strangely mixed feelings as Etsuko romped innocently about them, peering at Suga in the mirror as though at a large doll and exclaiming:

  ‘I like hair ornaments, they’re pretty.’

  ‘I’m very inexperienced, sir, but I hope I shall give satisfaction.’

  The shoulders in the purple silk kimono with the girlish shoulder-tucks seemed to shrink together as Suga, kneeling and bowing low to the floor, stumbled through the greeting in precisely the form that her mother in Tokyo had taught her. A young girl of fifteen sacrificed for the sake of her family’s fortunes, her only instructions were that she would be going into service for life with the Shirakawa family in Fukushima. She was to wait on the master as his maid, but as to the nature of the service she had been told nothing. The one thing she dreaded above all was a reprimand, being resolved all her days to observe her mother’s solemn injunction that she look after her master well and never disobey his wishes whatever might happen. Luckily, she had struck up a friendship with the nine-year-old daughter Etsuko during their two or three days together in Tokyo, and the mistress too, she was relieved to find, was in no way an unkind person despite the formality typical of people from the provinces. That left only the most important person of all, the master, who was certain to be an awesome figure since he was far older, it seemed, than his wife and, as chief secretary or some such important-sounding position in the prefecture, sometimes stood in for the governor himself. Whatever would she do if he were to scold her in a loud voice? In Tokyo, there would at least have been a home she could run back to, but the thought of such a thing happening in Fukushima untold scores of miles away made her unutterably wretched …

  ‘ “Suga,” eh? A good name. Tell me, how old are you?’

  ‘Fifteen, sir.’

  She replied for all she was worth, then sat with tense features as though she might burst into tears at any moment. With the straight lines of her unnaturally thick eyebrows contracted very slightly and the sharply defined lids of her large eyes wide open as though in surprise, her face in the yellowish light of the lamp was sharply etched like an actor’s on the stage. Shirakawa was reminded of the extraordinary facial beauty of a well-known courtesan called Imamurasaki, seen long ago one night in cherry-blossom time, parading with her retinue through Yoshiwara.

  ‘You must find it lonely here in the country after a busy place like Tokyo?’

  ‘Oh no, sir.’

  ‘Do you like Kabuki?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she replied and went rigid with doubt lest this had not been the right thing to say.

  ‘Just like Tomo,’ he said laughing. ‘We have a theater here in Fukushima, you know. I believe an Osaka actor called Tokizō is playing there at the moment, so I’ll take you as soon as we get back.’

  Although the master was in a good mood, each mild phrase he uttered fell on Suga’s ears with hidden menace.

  It was not until he had dismissed her with a ‘You’d better get a good night’s sleep’ and she had gone from the room with Etsuko still following that the stiffness left her body and she relaxed.

  ‘I’m afraid she seems to have a rather retiring nature,’ said Tomo hesitantly with a glance at her husband’s face as they watched Suga leaving the room. Beneath the drooping lids, Shirakawa’s eyes had a gleam like light on dark restless waters. It was the expression he always wore when he felt attracted by a desirable woman. Time and again the overwhelmingly joyful experiences of Tomo’s younger years had turned sour as she was forced to watch with a helpless horror, as though her very flesh and blood were being devoured by maggots, while her husband’s eyes ligh
ted on another woman in just this way.

  ‘Why? She looks gentle, surely that’s a good thing? I’m sure a girl like that will make a perfectly good companion for Etsuko.’

  His tone was impersonal, but his gaze had followed intently the innocent, childlike movement of Suga’s hips as, clutching at her long sleeves, she rose abruptly to her feet and left the room. The movement, like a boy’s in its innocence of female sexuality, was precisely that of the Tomo whom his mother had invited to their house in the country at the age of fourteen. The discovery excited Shirakawa all the more in that Suga’s face, shoulders and breasts had a rounded, ample, feminine air. He had asked Tomo particularly to find a girl as unspoilt and unsophisticated as possible, the kind of girl who would do equally well as her own maid, but now he was almost ashamed that she had respected his wishes so carefully, searching so diligently to find this flower in the bud whose petals were even more tightly folded than he had dared to hope.

  ‘You say her parents have a bamboo-wrapper shop?’

  ‘Yes, in Kokuchō. They used to have quite a good business, but apparently they had a dishonest employee, and the business went downhill. I met the mother; she seemed an extremely pleasant, straightforward person.’

  At this point it occurred to Tomo that she should talk to Shirakawa about the enormous sum of money with which he had entrusted her to pay for the search. She had used five hundred yen to pay Suga’s family and buy her new clothes; before finding Suga she had also spent money engaging apprentice geishas and in interviewing via intermediaries several girls of non-professional or semi-professional standing; but even after this more than one half of the money her husband had given her still remained in her keeping. She had intended to return it to Shirakawa immediately she arrived at the inn. Once more now she tried to turn to the subject yet for some reason the words seemed suddenly to stick in her throat and nothing came to her lips. She flushed in a kind of panic, but Shirakawa, who seemed to notice nothing, clapped his hands to summon Ōno.