The Waiting Years Page 4

  ‘Ōno – let’s finish the game we started. We’ll be up early tomorrow morning, so Tomo had better go to bed early downstairs.’

  Tomo got up to go, with a sidelong view as she did so of Ōno’s short frame straining over the go board that he was carrying out to the center of the room. She was thirty, and the fact that her husband, whose eyes tonight had an intensity that gave him a new appeal, should make no move towards her tormented her spiritually and physically all the more after a separation of three months. Whether the torment that seethed within her was love or hatred she could not tell, but a calm determination not to leave the crucible of doubt gave her features the tranquillity of a Nō mask in her unhurried progress along the corridor.

  To Suga’s eyes, reared as she was in Tokyo, the streets of Fukushima were half deserted; even the shelves of the shops on the main streets looked half empty and uninviting. Shirakawa’s official residence was at a place called Yanagi Koji some six hundred yards from the prefectural office. It was a former samurai’s residence with a long, roofed gateway, and its verandas, high like those of a temple, skirted large rooms each ten or twelve tatami mats in size. In the back garden, beyond the ever-open sliding doors of the back rooms, an orchard of persimmon, apple, and pear trees and grapevines grew in a profusion of green next to a field of vegetables.

  The first shock awaiting Tomo on her return to their residence was a new wing to the house, three rooms emitting a fragrance of new cedarwood and entirely surrounded by a veranda, that stood in a sunny location facing south just in front of the vines in the orchard. The rooms were connected to the main building of the house by a covered passageway.

  ‘The carpenters came not long after you’d gone,’ said Seki the housemaid, with an overwrought expression. That Seki’s relationship with Shirakawa had been something more than that between servant and master Tomo had once learned indirectly from Seki herself.

  Going into the new wing, Tomo was astonished to find a new mulberry-wood mirror-stand with a bright crimson cover of crepe over the glass and a chest-of-drawers standing ostentatiously in the six-tatami dressing room.

  ‘New quilts, too,’ said Seki with a look of acute discomfort, opening the closet to show Tomo. Inside, two new sets of well-padded bedding in heavy yellow checkered silk, one in the upper compartment and one in the lower, lay on wrapping cloths of silk dyed in a pattern of fresh twining greenery, cozily trailing the sleeves of their patterned-silk, padded covers.

  ‘Whose room is this?’ asked Etsuko, who had followed them in, tilting to one side as she spoke the fair-skinned, oval face that was so like Shirakawa’s.

  ‘Your father had it built for reading his official papers in. Now go away dear,’ said Tomo sharply as though repelling her. Above all, she must not let this thing that threatened to engulf her whole existence become a threat to her daughter as well. To Etsuko, however, this desperate determination merely made her mother seem forbidding. She liked much better to be with someone pretty like Suga, who seemed to give off a pleasant fragrance when you went near her; and she ran off willingly along the corridor.

  ‘Should I put the master’s bed out in here from tonight?’ asked Seki, her eyes seeming to bore into Tomo as she spoke.

  ‘Yes, you’d better.’

  ‘And Miss Suga in the anteroom?’

  ‘We’ll leave Suga to get out her own bed.’

  Though Tomo’s outward manner was dignified and pleasant, she shifted her gaze to the garden, overcome by an unbearable sense of shame at the idea that the same fierce fire burned in Seki’s breast as in her own.

  She could see Suga and Etsuko standing face to face beneath the serrated leaves of the grapevine in the orchard. Suga, in a cotton kimono with a pattern in white on dark blue, had her hand, probably at Etsuko’s insistence, stretched above her head, clutching lightly at a bunch of green grapes that hung above her. The sunlight falling through the vine flecked the fair skin of her face with green.

  ‘Can you eat them as green as this?’

  ‘They’re very good. They’re a kind of green grape they grow in Western countries.’

  Etsuko’s voice came cool and clear. Suga pulled off the bunch and placed one of the grapes like a great green gem in her mouth.

  ‘I told you so – it’s sweet, isn’t it? The agricultural testing station next door gave the vine to us.’

  ‘Well, so it is! I’ve never had a green grape like this that was so sweet.’

  Smiling at each other happily the two girls plucked the grapes and conveyed them to their coral lips. Seen like this Suga, so big and grown-up when she was on her best behavior indoors, was still no more than an innocent playmate for Etsuko. Yet even as Tomo’s eyes watched the girl’s innocent, childlike features, smiling as though with a sense of release, and the relaxed movements of the limbs, the image of the yellow silk bedding in the closet just behind her bore down oppressively on her mind and refused to go away.

  It was wicked. They were giving a girl still of an age to be playing with dolls to a man a full two dozen years her senior, an elderly roué who had already tasted all the world’s pleasures. The girl’s parents were a party to the whole proceedings. Even if they had not given her to be his mistress, they could never have got enough money to keep the family going without handing over her fresh young body in exchange. Her physical beauty was so dazzling that her unspoiled charms would have been destined to be ravished, sooner or later, if not here then somewhere else; even so, much as the throat rebels at the idea of swallowing in cold blood the flesh of a bird killed before one’s eyes, Tomo felt a vague sense of guilt, shared with her husband, for having gone to buy Suga. Why must she contribute to this cruelty that was little better than slave-trading?

  As she watched Suga, with the cool skin that harbored an inner light like newly fallen snow and the dewy eyes that were always wide open yet had a misleadingly troubled look, Tomo would experience two unbidden and conflicting emotions: boundless pity as for a charming animal that was about to be led to the slaughter, and fixed hatred at the thought that eventually this innocent girl might turn into a devil that would devour her husband and sweep unchecked through the whole house.

  The day following their return to Fukushima a man from Marui’s, the family drapers, began to appear in the living room almost every day, bringing with him great bundles of cloth. He usually came after Shirakawa was back from the prefectural office, so that the master could glance through the cloths of many colors spread about the spacious room and make the choice himself. He bought clothes for Tomo and Etsuko as well, but the real purpose of course was to buy a complete outfit for Suga.

  As though buying a trousseau for a bride, he bought every kind of garment she was likely to need, from formal black kimonos with the family crest and a colored pattern around the bottom of the skirt only, to sashes of figured satin, fine gauze-like silks, linen, striped crepe, and even the long red undergarments.

  Finding herself, a newcomer, providing no service but treated instead as a guest, Suga was less pleased than perplexed that clothes should be made for her in this way. But at such times the gleam in Shirakawa’s eyes that was like a light moving on dark waters would grow stronger. ‘Suga,’ he would say, a pink flush suffusing his thin cheeks as it did when he was angry, his eyes gleaming with an unnaturally bright light, ‘put this purple over your shoulder and stand there with the spotted sash against it to see how they match.’

  She would slip the half-finished kimono over her shoulders timidly, half uncomfortably yet with the practiced air of a tradesman’s daughter who was used to wearing dancing costume, then she would hold the spotted sash round it at the front and stand there, as vivid and attractive as a woman in one of Kobayashi Kiyochika’s brightly colored portraits. The maids and the man from Marui’s who sat watching would give an involuntary exclamation of admiration. Most delighted of them all, Etsuko would go over to stand by Suga and exclaim, ‘Oh, it’s so pretty!’ Fair-skinned and slender as a young crane, Etsuko looked mor
e refined than ever when she stood by the unopened peony that was Suga. It was yet another source of satisfaction to Shirakawa.

  ‘A pattern of vetch on a white ground will be best for Etsuko,’ he would say, turning round to Tomo, ‘with a satin sash to go with it.’

  Shirakawa’s unaccustomed animation and Suga’s complete lack of bashfulness towards him despite her timidity told Tomo that so far he had made no physical advances towards her. In order to possess himself of a girl more than twenty years his junior even Shirakawa, it seemed, was obliged to employ a technique completely different from when he made advances to geishas or maids. To clothe a girl from a poor family in the most luxurious garments possible was in itself almost certainly a means of winning Suga’s heart. Watching him from the corner of her eye, Tomo remembered the husband who had once so carefully selected hair ornaments, neckbands and the like and sent them home to the young wife whom he had left behind in the country.

  Shirakawa’s promise to take Suga to the theater had not been empty, and almost every night the faces of the Shirakawa family – Shirakawa himself with Tomo, Etsuko, Suga and two or three maids – were to be seen in the best seats at Fukushima’s one and only theater, the Chitose-za.

  In her newly made summer kimono of spotted crimson with tucks at the shoulders, Suga cut such a striking figure in the theater that even the actors in the green room commented on her to each other: ‘They say that’s the new wife who’s recently come to live with the chief secretary of the prefecture. The kind of face you might see in the picture on a young girl’s battledore, isn’t it?’

  To the active members of the Liberal Party who so often had their secret gatherings raided and their leading figures arrested and who hated Shirakawa as their principal foe, the very sight of Suga was like a red rag to a bull. ‘He’s the kind of man who deserves to be called a blight on the state – depriving the people of their rights while he lets tarts like that live in the lap of luxury.’ Neither Suga nor Etsuko, of course, had any idea that they were being watched with eyes darting hatred. Even Tomo always accepted more or less without question what she had been told by her husband and the wife of the governor: that those who defied the officials governing the nation in accordance with the Emperor’s command, and who tried to stir up the people with talk of liberty and civil rights, were rogues who deserved punishment in the same way as arsonists and robbers. Toward the Emperor and the authorities she showed the same vaguely submissive attitude as to the feminine ethic that had taught her to yield to her husband’s wishes in every respect, however unreasonable they might seem. Born in a country district of Kyushu near the end of the feudal period and barely able to read and write, she had no shield to defend herself other than the existing moral code.

  The play at the theater was different every evening. One evening as they entered the box where the family always sat, Etsuko began to cry and complain that she was scared. The play was Yotsuya Kaidan, which was a great favorite among horror-loving patrons and often appeared on summer programs.

  ‘It’s all right, Miss. We’ll shut our eyes together when the ghost appears,’ said Suga, who despite her usual timidity seemed relatively hard to scare and was watching the proceedings eagerly as she sat close by Etsuko’s side. At bottom, Tomo thought, she’s no weak woman.

  The prologue gave way to the scene in the grounds of the temple of Kannon at Asakusa, then to the scene in which the heroine’s father is killed, and by the time they had reached the scene in which Iemon’s servant combs Oiwa’s hair for her and it starts to fall out, Tomo’s attention was entirely caught by the play and her eyes were riveted on the stage without so much as a sidelong glance at the others sitting by her.

  On the stage, seated before a faded yellowish-green mosquito net, Oiwa was nursing her baby, her face wasted in childbirth yet beautiful still. Bitterly she lamented her fate – her damaged health and the husband who had suddenly turned against her following the birth of the baby; in vain she longed while still alive to see her younger sister and give her the comb that her mother had left them. The husband, Iemon, who had been lured away by the girl next door, wished to get rid of Oiwa. Telling her that it would help her recover from the effects of childbirth, the girl’s family had given her a poison intended to ruin her looks and thereby ensure that Iemon did not have regrets at leaving her, and the unsuspecting Oiwa, not realizing the deception, had taken the medicine repeatedly with every sign of gratitude.

  Tomo watched the scene with a choking sense of pain; time and again she shut her eyes tightly in an effort to overcome the emotions that welled up irresistibly within her. Oiwa’s fate, her uncomplicated trust in others, and her utter betrayal were all too familiar. Almost overinsistently, it seemed to Tomo, the play dwelt on the inevitable process whereby the love of a man and woman reached a peak of intensity only to cool off steadily into a kind of frozen hell. It was all too easy and too convincing to draw a parallel between Oume, who stole Iemon away, and Suga; between the cold but attractive Iemon and Shirakawa; between Oiwa, whose resentment at her cruel betrayal finally transformed her into a monstrous spirit of revenge, and herself. She watched as though spellbound those grotesque scenes in which the ghost of Oiwa took its powerful and protracted revenge. Etsuko, who at first had cried in terror and put her small hands half-jokingly over her face, had finally gone to sleep with her head pressed into Suga’s lap, and was still limp and heavy as Tomo lifted her into the rickshaw that came to take them home.

  The cool breeze of a summer evening blew in through the flap of the rickshaw. Tomo’s eyes seemed to bore into Etsuko’s face with its small, regular, doll-like features as the girl slept innocently with her tiny bun of hair pressed against Tomo’s lap. Etsuko’s older brother Michimasa, who was living at the home of Tomo’s parents in the country, also came vividly to her mind. She must not become like Oiwa. Even though a madness many times the strength of Oiwa’s sought to possess her, she would hug Etsuko to her all the more fiercely as though the act were a prayer. For if she were to became mad, what would happen to the children?

  Although for Seki’s sake she had seemed to accept the inevitable with such good grace, Tomo still put out her husband’s bed every night in her own room in case it should be needed. She got out the quilts herself after the maids had retired for the night, and put them away again early in the morning. Every night the bed lay unclaimed, well-ordered and chill beside Tomo’s.

  One night Shirakawa, coming home unusually late, did not go to the new wing but came into Tomo’s room.

  ‘Send the women to bed … and bring some saké.’ His eyes were bloodshot and a blue vein pulsed at his temple. It was unusual for Shirakawa, who disliked saké, to order it at this hour.

  ‘Tomo,’ he said, rolling up his sleeve for her to see. The upper half of his left arm was bound with a white bandage through which blood was seeping. Tomo went rigid, the bottle of warmed saké she had just brought still poised in her hand.

  ‘Why! Where did you…?’

  ‘We raided a secret meeting of the Liberal Party. We arrested about ten of them, but the rest set on us as we were coming home.’ He laughed. ‘Lucky it was the left arm.’ His voice was high-pitched with tension and when he smiled his cheeks were stiff and tense. The opponents had been in earnest. He was lucky to have got home alive. The hand in which Tomo held the saké bottle trembled with the realization that it was to her he had come and not to Suga.

  ‘It was lucky you weren’t …’ She faltered then stopped, staring at Shirakawa with startled eyes. His gaze flashed with a fierce light, he drained his saké cup at a gulp, then, sweeping her towards him with his arm, he crushed her against his chest. Her hair fell loose. With her face still pressed to his chest she lost her balance, clutched momentarily at the air in vain and collapsed heavily against him. The saké from the bottle in her hand spilt over his chest and a smell of fermented liquor enveloped them as he tilted up her face and pressed his lips savagely to hers.

  Shirakawa went back to the new
wing at dawn. He had said not a word to Tomo about Suga, yet as she went back to bed alone it occurred to Tomo that he must have feared letting the young and still untouched Suga know the full force of his blood-smeared animality. And the knowledge that she had betrayed a certain passion with the husband who had rushed to her when he was wounded only heightened the hatred she felt for him, heightened it to the point where she could have clawed to shreds the face that seemed to sneer its perception of her foolishness.

  The newspapers the next day reported that Chief Secretary Shirakawa had been returning from a raid on a secret meeting of the Liberal Party when he had been fired at by a number of its adherents; though slightly wounded himself, he had fired at one of his assailants with a pistol and killed him. Shirakawa had not told Tomo that he had fired his pistol, but the clearer it became that his coming to her after so many months had been but a way of giving vent to the murderous mental and physical excitement aroused by having killed a man, the more wretched Tomo felt.

  The prefectural office and the whole town talked of nothing else for some time after, and Tomo could not fail to note that Suga’s eyes when she spoke of it to Etsuko showed not so much fear as a childlike admiration.

  ‘I really think the master was wonderful,’ she said out on the veranda as their pretty hands moved together deftly weaving a cat’s cradle of red cord.

  ‘Why, Suga?’

  ‘Well look at the danger he’d been through the other evening, and he didn’t say a word. The next morning I saw him washing his face in a funny way, using only one hand to dip his towel in the water. I asked him what he’d done, but he just smiled and said the muscle in his arm was stiff. He didn’t say anything at all about his injury.’