The Waiting Years Page 5

  ‘Do you think it didn’t hurt, then?’

  ‘I’m sure it did. I put a new bandage on for him this morning, and the wound was this big.’ Wrinkling her clearly marked eyebrows she shortened the string between her fingers to about two inches in order to show Etsuko. Etsuko merely thought that such a big wound must have hurt a lot, and was glad that her father had not been killed. But Suga, it seemed, was not content with this.

  ‘They say that a real man doesn’t show it when something hurts or worries him. The master kept it all to himself without a murmur. I think he’s wonderful.’

  Working at her sewing in her own room, Tomo listened with chagrin to the note of innocent admiration in the words that the normally untalkative Suga used with such emphasis. In Suga’s dreamy gaze and the gentle curves of her body there remained none of the unnatural stiffness that they had had when she first arrived; in the easy girlishness that pervaded them now, she was little different from Etsuko herself. It had taken Shirakawa a good month to relax her to the point where she was as open and vulnerable as this. But he had nearly reached his goal. Already vaguely disposed to cling to a man who petted and spoiled her like a father, Suga had now discovered a new and more heroic Shirakawa and was yielding to the pleasure of the discovery as mist gives way to sunlight. The first flower of love had begun to grow within her. Just as the fresh green orb of the tightly folded peony bud is seen one morning to be tinged with a flush of scarlet, so Suga too had begun to change her hue, and the change disturbed Tomo deeply. Nevertheless, there was no physical relationship so far. Something emanating from a woman who had known Shirakawa physically always affected Tomo with a sense of uneasiness. In Suga’s case no such emanation had made itself felt so far.

  Wondering just when and how Suga would give herself to Shirakawa, Tomo found herself even less able to sleep since Shirakawa had come to her room. Sometimes she could bear it no longer and getting up would push back the shutters, taking care not to disturb the sleeping Etsuko. Moonlight drifted across the grass in the garden wet with autumn dew, and the round window of the new wing flickered vaguely with the light of a lamp whose wick was turned low. In her mind’s eye she could see how the light now shone on the yellow silk bedding, picking out the round shoulders of Suga’s night kimono of purple striped silk as she lay peacefully sleeping; suddenly it seemed to Tomo that she herself was a great snake rearing its hooded head out of the light to stare at him and Suga, and hardly aware of what she did she clasped her arms tightly across her breast, shut her eyes tightly, and moved her lips as though crying out with her last breath, ‘Help me! Oh help me!’ Many times she dreamed that she was on a ship tossed in a violent storm, rolling about inside its hull, unable to breathe.

  One morning, Suga stayed in bed in her room, saying she had a headache. When Etsuko came back from school and went into the anteroom of the new wing carrying colored paper for making origami, Suga exclaimed ‘Miss Etsuko!’ looking up from her pillow with eyes that were pleased at the familiar face but whose lids were swollen and puffy.

  ‘Suga – what’s happened to your eyelids?’

  Etsuko spoke with no special significance but Suga blushed and pressed a hand to her eyes as though dazzled by the light. She felt as if Etsuko had peered in on the unforeseen events of the previous night. She harbored no resentment towards Shirakawa; in fact, lately she had begun to sense in him an indulgence, an inexhaustible dependability, for which she had hungered ever since leaving her father and mother. But her astonishment and shame remained; Suga had no feeling of any physical or mental flowering, only a kind of inner wilting with a sorrowful sense of something damaged, something destroyed. She hated even her parents, who had surely meant this when they told her never to go against her master’s wishes. Something indefinable in her appearance began to betray the painful awareness that her body had been sold for money.

  As Suga looked up with eyes full of melancholy, Etsuko’s pale, oval face, so like Shirakawa’s, seemed so fresh and fair that it might almost have soared away into the sky at any moment; she felt a vague enmity, too, but it was too ill-defined for Suga herself to distinguish it as such. At Etsuko’s insistence she made all kinds of figures for her by folding the varicolored papers, all the while remembering with sadness, as though from a distant past, the innocent girl who only yesterday had been content to engage with Etsuko in artless pastimes such as these.

  Once he had truly taken possession of her, Shirakawa’s infatuation for Suga began to assume the proportions of an obsession. There was little he did not know concerning the other sex, whether geishas or ordinary women, but the fatherly affection that he felt for this unspoiled girl so far removed in age from himself rejuvenated him as though he had married again, and bathed his days in a glow of contentment. On a holiday, he went with Suga to the hot springs at Iizaka, taking with him his immediate subordinates and the proprietress of a restaurant he frequented. Here, Suga found herself addressed as ‘the mistress’ and free to express herself to Shirakawa without constraint, so that each time she returned from a visit to the hot springs her beauty, like a great peony unfolding its many petals, seemed to grow a little more full-blown and voluptuous until finally she was no longer recognizable as the maid of earlier days, remarkable for the charming timidity.

  As his infatuation for Suga developed, Shirakawa no longer even set foot in Tomo’s room, nor finally could Tomo herself bear any more the uncertainty of putting out her husband’s quilts and waiting unheeded and alone.

  It was generally held that Shirakawa had dissipated too much of his strength in pleasure to have any children other than Michimasa and Etsuko, yet even the remote possibility that Suga might have a child made Tomo shudder. Between husband and wife there yawned a gulf deeper than anything foreseen in the imaginings and silent surrenders so often repeated before she had brought Suga home with her. She must resign herself to the fact that henceforth the gulf would become deeper and wider each day, each night that passed. Only now did she realize with a sense of guilt the true reason why, in the inn at Utsunomiya on her return from Tokyo, she had been unable to talk frankly to her husband about the money he had entrusted to her. By nature incapable of being less than honest with others whoever they might be, she had never concealed anything from her husband where money matters were concerned. She had always despised as something shameful the traditional wife’s savings made without her husband’s knowledge, and the idea that she herself had now descended to the same level saddened her and at the same time gave her a new sense of resilience, as though her body had been reinforced throughout with fine wire.

  Objectively speaking, there were any number of prominent and distinguished men in society today who had cast off their wives of many years like worn-out slippers and sent them back to their homes in the country, taking as their recognized spouses attractive women risen from the ranks of apprentice geishas or geishas. Since Tomo’s straightforwardness and robust decency had earned her the confidence of Governor Kawashima and his wife it seemed unlikely that even Shirakawa would do anything so outrageous, yet such was his infatuation for Suga these days that there was no knowing what scheme he might be hatching to drive her out. Before the Meiji Restoration, the family code had drawn a dividing line between wife and concubine that was not easily crossed, but now that the lesser retainers of remote country clans had come overnight to reign in the halls of power, the idea of the geisha house as a kind of antechamber to those halls had taken hold among men who aspired to high office, and the position of the wife, which inevitably depended on her husband’s skill in public affairs, had become as vulnerable as a fragile, clinging vine.

  Sometimes when her husband had seemed indecently blatant in his displays of affection for Suga, too careless of what others thought, Tomo even considered taking Etsuko and the money and going back to her home in far-off Kyushu. Yet each time her resolve was weakened by the thought of the future awaiting her daughter, now growing into such a beautiful young woman. Etsuko, fortunately, was on
good terms with Suga and was loved by her father. If only Tomo herself could bear it, Etsuko would certainly be happier growing up in comfort as the daughter of a man of rank than in poverty in a remote country district of Kyushu.

  This was the conclusion to which Tomo’s better judgment always led her despite all her wilder impulses. It would be better for Shirakawa, too. However able he might be in his work it would only need the loss of his strictly upright, uncalculatingly honest wife for him sooner or later to make some fatal blunder in his official capacity also. Tomo, who knew that his difficult disposition had made him many enemies, had come almost without realizing it to see his nature at a step removed. In this she had already ceased to be the wife who obeyed her husband with implicit faith in his judgment, and was gradually acquiring the ability to view him dispassionately, as another human being. Innocent of learning, she had never been taught how to understand a person intellectually and was constitutionally incapable of letting her actions follow the natural dictates of her instincts. Only this had made it possible for her to live in unswerving allegiance to the feudal code of feminine morality and to take as her ideal the chaste wife who grudged no sacrifice for her husband and family. But now an unmistakable mistrust in the code that had been her unquestioned creed was making itself felt within.

  Every day, every night, she came face to face in the same house with the woman who might dislodge her from her position as wife, talking to her as though it were the most normal thing in the world. How could she believe that such a life was decent and correct? How could she respect or love the husband who in his conceit and self-indulgence saw nothing more in the self-sacrifice and burning passion of over a dozen years than the loyalty of a faithful servant? Such a husband was no object for her love, such a life no more than an ugly mockery. She stood on in desperation in this sterile wasteland, firmly clasping Etsuko’s tiny body to her, while she was mercilessly robbed of the husband she was to have served and the household whose mainstay she was to have been. She knew that to fall would mean never to rise again. The three-layered kimono with its family crests, the smooth servility of others, no longer helped her to live. She might have preferred, if she could, to shut her eyes to the present and return to the self that had trusted in Shirakawa’s love, undismayed in the face of countless betrayals; but a force that flowed unceasingly like a raging stream carried her on despite everything, allowing her only to gaze back with many a deep sigh to the land left far upstream.

  To her household Tomo presented a more energetic front than ever; constantly she was on her guard never to show so much as a hair out of place. Far from fading into the background because of Shirakawa’s infatuation for Suga, she seemed to counter Suga’s growing beauty with such a sense of authority in her back and shoulders as she sat motionless in her room that even the maids and menservants who knew her so well would sometimes note it with a sense of surprise. Something forbidding emanated from her as she sat there without speaking, something that spurned all lies and deception and inspired more fear than did Shirakawa himself.

  A letter in an untrained hand came for Tomo from her mother in the country. Though Tomo had told her nothing, a relative who had been staying at the home of someone who worked in the prefectural office and was connected with Shirakawa had spread the seeds of rumor on his return to Kyushu. Anguished at the thought of how Tomo must feel in the same house with a young concubine, her mother had laboriously spelled out the letter in her clumsy hand.

  None of the other husbands in their family, she said, had got on in the world as Shirakawa had done, and Tomo should be grateful for her good fortune. It often happened that a man of ability took a concubine; at such times the wife should keep an even closer watch on herself so as not to lose her husband’s love. His behavior was perhaps indiscreet in a man who had two young children, but she must not let jealousy upset her judgment to the point of bringing harm on herself, much less on her children. For all its illegibility and its uneven characters traced in an ink that now ran dry in mid-stroke, now blotted the paper, the letter betrayed the painstaking care of a mother attempting to convey to her child the emotion in her heart. Tomo, as she read, seemed almost to hear her old mother talking to her, coaxing her as when she was a child, and the tears flowed freely – self-indulgent tears of a kind long forgotten, tears that by their very unfamiliarity brought home to her afresh the grimness of her present life. If feeling were set aside, her mother’s injunctions were one and all no more than the tattered remnants of an outdated code that Tomo had already seen through and been forced to cast aside. The only part of her mother’s letter that had any new message for Tomo’s heart was contained in the last four or five lines:

  For this fleeting world is a hell of evil, full of suffering, where man’s shallow knowledge avails him nought and unawares he heaps sin on sin. Trust only, therefore, in the vow of the Lord Amida, morning and night forget not to invoke His name, and leave all else to Him … I should like to see you and talk to you more about the faith before I die. I hope sometime, if Yukitomo will give his permission, that you will come home.

  As she read the passage, a vivid memory came of her mother reciting the invocation to Amida each morning, bowing deeply before their family shrine in Tomo’s long-forgotten home in the country. Clinging to her mother’s knees the infant Tomo had gazed up into her face, watching the lips that moved not as when they spoke normally but with a mechanical mouthing as they repeated incessantly the Namu Amida Butsu. Tomo too had chanted ‘Namu Amida Butsu’ in imitation of her, but many years had lapsed since the words had passed her lips. All talk of the Buddha and of Amida had come to seem like a pack of lies to deceive children. The injunction in her mother’s letter to leave everything to the Buddha only irritated her: what was she supposed to leave to him, and how? If there were some noble being, some god or Buddha, who could see all that went on in the human world, why did he not make life more decent for one who tried as hard as she to live truthfully? But despite these thoughts Tomo resolved that as soon as the opportunity arose she would at least arrange to go home as her mother wished. Whatever happened, she must hear directly from her mother those last wishes that could not be conveyed by letter alone.

  The following spring, Governor Kawashima was appointed to a new post as Superintendent-General of the Metropolitan Police, and Yukitomo Shirakawa and his family followed him to Tokyo where they were installed with due ceremony in an official Police Department residence in the Soto-Kanda district of the capital. Tomo, who had had a copy of the family entry in the official register made in connection with Etsuko’s change of school, was holding the flimsy piece of paper in her hand when she glanced down casually at it and a small cry escaped her. Directly after Etsuko’s name was listed the name of Suga, as the adopted daughter of Yukitomo Shirakawa and of his wife Tomo.

  The Handmaid

  It was a typically bright, faintly chilly afternoon in the chrysanthemum season.

  Kin Kusumi was trotting through the gateway of what was now the Imperial Palace carrying a basket of crackers that she had bought as a present on a visit to the temple of Kannon. She was on her way to the residence of Superintendent Shirakawa within the grounds, and since she had other business there today besides the usual polite inquiries after the family’s health she was much preoccupied with the chances of success for her mission.

  Newly built the previous year, Shirakawa’s official residence was rumored to be second in size only to the Superintendent-General’s own. A shapely pine tree grew in the center of the drive where the carriages swung round before the entrance, and beyond it was visible a spacious entrance hall with two rickshaws displaying family crests in gold drawn up before it. It seemed that someone was just going out. If it should be Mrs. Shirakawa, thought Kin, it would suit her purposes very well.

  In theory long acquaintance had put their relationship on an easy footing yet still Kin found herself somehow constrained in Tomo’s presence, her body growing tense as though she were under some pressu
re. The fact that today she had come from Suga’s mother bearing a private message to the girl whom three years previously she had helped to place in the Shirakawa household made the thought of Tomo sitting there in her room still more disturbing.

  The attractive girl in the elaborate hairstyle who emerged from within when Kin announced her presence at the side entrance – a maid, it seemed, though she was unknown to Kin – kneeled and bowed in the most formal manner, which flurried Kin so much that she had her summon Seki the housekeeper with whom she was more familiar.

  ‘The mistress and the young lady are just going to a charity bazaar, and a foreign dressmaker is here getting them ready,’ Seki said. ‘Why don’t you come in and watch?’

  Her taste for the unusual aroused, Kin accepted the invitation and hurried in Seki’s wake down a long corridor with a highly polished floor.

  ‘That’s a very pretty, graceful young maid you’ve got. When did she …?’

  ‘The month before last,’ said Seki, turning round and giving Kin a meaningful look. ‘The story before she came was that she was the very image of the Kabuki actor Eizaburo.’

  Kin nodded two or three times noncommittally, reflecting to herself that Suga’s mother might be justified in worrying about the rumor that she had got wind of almost before anyone else.

  ‘How old is she? And where does she come from?’ The tone was casual, but Kin was aware that her voice as she pressed for more details sounded too strained for someone of her age, and that her neck was flushing hot below her ears.

  ‘Sixteen, apparently. She’s two years younger than Suga, but her height makes her look more or less the same, you know. It seems her father was in the service of the lord of the Toda clan. She has quite an opinion of herself, if you ask me.’