The Waiting Years Read online

  She stroked the kitten’s small white belly, ruffled the fur on its back, felt its tiny claws scratching at her hand, and suddenly hugged it so tightly to her that it raised a plaintive wail.

  ‘I’m the same as you, aren’t I?’ she sighed.

  She knew that however a kitten might struggle it was no match for a human being. And intuitively she sensed the cruel, merciless soul that lay beneath Shirakawa’s exterior polish and refinement.

  Something had happened while they had still been in Fukushima.

  Among the young subordinates of Shirakawa who frequented the house there was a shortish man called Kazabaya who, whenever he passed Suga in the corridor, would brush seemingly unawares against her shoulder or arm, or stare unblinkingly into her face. One day at a saké party at which Kazabaya was sitting at the foot of the table, some turn in the conversation led him to ask Suga to show him her ring of inlaid gold.

  Thinking nothing of it, Suga took off and showed him the ring, which he promptly pocketed and refused to return despite all her entreaties. Afraid to talk too loudly in front of others she let the matter drop, beside herself with fear at the thought of what would happen if Shirakawa should find out after Kazabaya had gone.

  She would never have mentioned the matter directly to Shirakawa, of course, yet before the night was out he had realized from the unusual shrinking of her immature body that something was wrong. Clasping her fingers that were stiff with cold one by one in the dark, he said casually, ‘Your ring’s gone,’ and her smooth white skin suddenly turned to gooseflesh and she began to tremble like a frightened mole.

  ‘Did you give it to somebody?’ Gently, like a father, he stroked the skin on her back and arms, and she curled herself up against him and began to sob. Then in fits and starts, hiccuping between her sobs like a scolded child, she blurted out the story of how Kazabaya had taken the ring from her.

  ‘Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to cry about … The young fellows often play that sort of joke. Even so, you’d better take care – that kind of thing can lead to the most dreadful trouble.’

  He put an arm around her as he spoke, while with the other hand he used the sleeve of his kimono to wipe away her tears and separated strand by strand the wet hairs that clung to her cheek.

  Assuming that the affair had ended that evening, Suga was horrified a few days later to hear that on a visit to Higashiyama Spa with his colleagues from the prefectural office Kazabaya had been beaten up in a drunken quarrel and had broken his hipbone. Among those who had gone with him were several police officers who were at Shirakawa’s beck and call. Ever after, when Suga saw Kazabaya come limping to Shirakawa to listen humbly to his behests, she felt a surging sense of pain. Nowadays, Kazabaya averted his eyes from her as though afraid to catch sight of even a lock of her hair.

  The master was a man to be feared, she realized, a man who might do anything once his anger was aroused. From this time on, the image of Kazabaya limping along lurked somewhere in the back of her mind even when she and Shirakawa were at their most relaxed and intimate.

  ‘I’ve sown too many wild oats to be a father again,’ Shirakawa would say sometimes, ‘but even if I hadn’t, I’m sure with a body like yours you couldn’t have a child.’

  The words branded themselves indelibly on her mind. She had no particular desire for a child by Shirakawa, yet to be dismissed as a woman who could not bear children shrouded her heart with the forlorn sensation of being on a journey through the dusk with no place to rest at the end of the road.

  She was, after all, a servant, with no prospects in life. Her one consolation was that by doing this she could ensure that her mother and brother lived a little more comfortably. Even if she left, she would never again become the unspoiled girl she had once been, and with a wife already in the same household the addition of one more woman like herself made little difference. From the time when she came to feel that this might well happen, Suga began to feel almost a kind of identification with Yumi in her hairstyle, her boyish face, her swarthy complexion and her tall, clean-limbed look.

  Shirakawa must have done something to Yumi, somewhere, for Suga found her one day standing by the heavy doors of the white-walled storehouse, her narrow shoulders shaking with sobs.

  ‘What’s the matter? Yumi, tell me what’s the matter,’ she said, resting a hand on Yumi’s shoulder and peering round into her face. Yumi promptly hid her face in the sleeve of her kimono and wept. At each heave of her shoulders Suga felt a vague sensation in her own body that told her quite clearly, with no need to ask, the cause of Yumi’s misery.

  ‘There, Yumi … I know, I know. It was the same with me, after all …’

  The tears came flooding into Suga’s eyes as she spoke and her voice was thick with emotion. Yumi peered up at her as though hearing her voice for the first time, saw Suga’s large, tear-filled eyes, and buried her head against Suga’s breast in a violent fit of weeping as though what she saw had provoked a fresh wave of unhappiness. Weeping with her, Suga stroked Yumi’s narrow shoulders; the body was strong and flexible like young bamboo, with a thin layer of firm flesh over a slight bone structure. The amber, somewhat coarse-textured skin too had a touch of masculinity that was agreeable to Suga.

  ‘My mother and father will be cross … that this should happen to me … I’m so ashamed.’ She wept afresh between each phrase. Yet there was a certain resilience in Yumi’s lamentations that had been lacking in Suga’s own sorrow. Suga found it attractive. Suddenly, her heart was filled not with jealousy but with a wish to be close to Yumi, to put her arms around her so that they could share their common woe.

  ‘Yumi, let’s try to help each other. I’m not worth much, but won’t you let me be your sister?’

  ‘Will you really? Suga … I, I …’ Heedless of her elaborate hairstyle, she buried her head in Suga’s lap.

  That evening Yumi came to Suga’s room, where she talked to her of her upbringing and her family. They were poor; the only working member left was her elder sister’s husband at the ward office, but at one time her father had been a bodyguard of a minor feudal lord and her mother had been in service at the lord’s residence. At the urging of Mrs. Sonoda, Yumi had come to the Shirakawa household in the belief that she was going to learn polite manners, but the way things had turned out made her suspect that those responsible had secretly intended it from the time they first helped her to get the position. Shirakawa said that he would take responsibility for her as his adopted daughter in the same way as Suga, but she doubted whether her stubborn father would agree. It would be unbearably embarrassing for her if her father came complaining that his daughter had been ruined. The very idea, she told Suga with an expression of intense emotion, made her want to go away somewhere and hide herself.

  Excitement and the tears that stained her cheeks had given Yumi’s face, with its tightly knit eyebrows like those of a handsome boy, a still more simple beauty. The fact that her sorrow was untouched by bitterness at the wrong she had been done softened Suga’s own heart and gave her a sense of kinship with the girl.

  The bazaar that day had gone even better than expected, it seemed. At dusk, Tomo and Etsuko came home ahead of Shirakawa, who had come to the bazaar as a guest; they carried with them a bundle of cakes and cosmetic bags that he had bought as presents for those who had stayed at home.

  Shedding her constricting Western dress and donning a kimono of heavy yellow silk with a loose jacket in Yūzen dyed silk, Etsuko came to Suga’s room and told her everything she wanted to know about how she had served tea to Her Majesty the Empress.

  ‘Yes … I think you could say she’s pretty. You know – she’s rather like our Yumi.’ Having let this slip, Etsuko shrank into herself and glanced behind her. If her mother had been there, she would certainly have been severely scolded for such a disrespectful comparison. So strict was Tomo’s training that Etsuko always seemed more lively and childlike when she was with Suga or the maids. Suga herself felt a natural sympathy with the in
nocent way in which Etsuko would cling to her. Having had a mother who did up her hair for her, bought her pretty hair ornaments, and generally spoiled her, there were times when she felt something akin to pity for this child who though still small could never fully be herself with either parent and was always on her guard in a way that was unnatural in a child.

  ‘Do you like Yumi, Etsuko?’

  ‘Oh yes, very much!’

  ‘More than me, I think?’

  ‘Oh, no! You’re more … but no, I like you both.’ She shook her head as if perplexed. Suga looked put out but was captivated at the same time by the openness and straightforwardness of the girl’s nature; it was only when she was joking thus with Etsuko that she felt a clearing of the spirit as though she herself were a child once more.

  That night, Tomo felt a chill run over her body when Suga brought the message for her to come to Yukitomo’s bedroom. For all his good temper after the Rokumeikan bazaar when he had told her to go home ahead of him with the shopping they had done, he had been tense and ill-tempered on his return later that night. She was used to his moodiness, and she knew from long experience that at no time was he so out of sorts and difficult as when a clear, cold gaze was contradicted by a pulsing blue vein at his temple and when the joints of his fingers seemed stiff, his thumb crooked. And at such times it was his habit, rather than seeking to disperse his tension in Suga’s company, to summon Tomo and question her in detail about the management of the family finances or the supervision of their assets. Tomo had no objection to his making an opportunity for them to talk together alone without the concubines, for at least once or twice every month there were decisions they had to make jointly, but she hated that at times when something had displeased him it should be she who received the full force of his resentment. Going into her husband’s bedroom, where two sets of quilts were set out side by side, she felt like an accountant about to have his books inspected by his superior. The thought that today when he was particularly irascible she must necessarily bring up the matter of Yumi made her still more reluctant to enter the room where he was waiting.

  Two or three days previously, Tomo had received a letter from Yumi’s father tastefully written in the Chihagi style of calligraphy. Respectful inquiries after their health soon gave way to a suggestion that the unforeseen change in her circumstances that had been thrust on Yumi was somehow half Tomo’s own responsibility. Why had Shirakawa needed to violate Yumi when he had a wife and a mistress already? Though he was head of the household, to deprive a young woman of her virginity without her father’s consent was going too far. Her virginity, either way, could never be recovered, so what steps did he propose to take? He would call on Shirakawa in the near future to hear his intentions in the matter. The phraseology was obsequious but the bullying tone was unmistakable.

  Tomo also knew through Sonoda, however, that Yumi’s father had been dimly aware and privately hoping that this would happen when he put her in service. That the father should send such a pompous letter when he almost certainly had an eye to the remittances that would make life easier if Yumi became a concubine like Suga was doubtless no more than a sign of the importance of pride to an old man of samurai stock, yet Tomo herself felt more sympathy with the unsophisticated straightforwardness of Suga’s mother and with her frank appeal that carried no pretense of equality. The greed she sensed behind the lines of well-formed characters and the well-turned phrases was to her far the more base, and she stayed a while with the letter in her hand, a grim little smile playing about her mouth.

  When she entered the bedroom, Shirakawa was in his nightwear, one elbow resting on the small mahogany writing table beside the lamp as he made corrections in red ink on some official documents.

  ‘Why don’t you change?’ he said, directing an ill-tempered look at her. Quietly, she went out into the anteroom again. The sound of rustling fabric reached him with an odd clarity. She must be undoing her sash of stiff silk; he put down his writing brush and listened to the indications of slow, heavy motion that were melancholy and monotonous yet powerful as the waves on a wintry sea in their silent suggestion of the body and the voice so familiar to his sight and hearing after nearly twenty years of marriage. They summoned up forgotten scenes that came and went as she moved, scenes of the mountain streams of his home in Kyushu and the deep snows that buried the northeastern districts of Honshu where his work had taken him. Like a shadow that he could never leave behind, Tomo would gradually age in this house, growing more and more like a family ghost till finally she died. Vaguely he sensed the deep-seated, icy will so far removed from love or self-sacrifice that made her follow so submissively the vagaries of his will. It aroused in him some strong emotion akin to hatred. To him she was, quite unlike Suga or Yumi, something formidable, an enemy entrenched in a fortress that no assault could reduce. Yet today he was sick at heart and would gladly have put aside the stiffness in which he normally encased himself and talked to her easily and familiarly, as they had when they were young.

  Why should that be? Today, he had seen a ghost in broad daylight.

  Although he had accompanied Superintendent-General Kawashima to the ball that was held in the great drawing room of the Rokumeikan following the charity bazaar, he had no interest in Western music or dancing and had been sitting on a sofa in the antechamber quenching his thirst with white wine that a waiter had brought him.

  Someone had tapped him on the shoulder. Turning casually, he had seen a man in a frock coat standing there, a man with a handlebar mustache and piercing eyes about whose bitter mouth there played a smile that was half aggressive and half placating.

  ‘Hello, Shirakawa! I still have to thank you for all you did for me in Fukushima.’

  It was a young man called Hanashima, a follower of Unno Takachu, the political leader. At the period when Shirakawa, acting under orders from Governor Kawashima, had clamped down so fiercely on the civil rights movement in Fukushima, Unno had been bound fast and subjected to merciless interrogation, then tried in Tokyo and sent to jail where he was reported to have died of disease. Hanashima had apparently bragged that he could happily eat Shirakawa’s flesh and still hunger for revenge. Now, the broken-down, disheveled man of those days had given way to a figure of neat elegance with abundant hair parted in the very center and an aura of cologne that suggested a recent return from the West. Shirakawa was understandably taken aback.

  Hanashima threw out his chest and let out a peal of laughter, from sheer pleasure, it seemed, at having so startled the normally imperturbable Shirakawa.

  ‘Don’t look so surprised. I suppose you thought I was dead, didn’t you? But come – how silly of you! What would the people do if I died while cunning officials like you were still at large? Look – you see this nightless city with its glittering chandeliers? Do you know what it is? It’s the death throe of the clan government – the flaring-up of the candle before it flickers out! However much you struggle against it, the Constitution will be promulgated in another year or two. Then, like it or not, there’ll be a National Assembly. The members will be chosen by the people, so there’ll be no more of your officials appointed at the discretion of the government. Your reign will soon be over. Very soon you lackeys of bureaucracy will be done for. You’ll see the rising strength of the masses – you men who use your authority only to grab after personal profit.’

  Hanashima went off roaring with laughter, leaving Shirakawa almost speechless for a while. This state of deflation was totally unlike his usual self. The small groups of people about him did not matter: they might well have taken them for close friends, so hearty had Hanashima’s manner been. But what had happened to the Hanashima who as they took him under guard through the snow had cried out that he could not breathe because the ropes were too tight? In the ballroom, he could see the couples in their fine clothes, hands linked, like a stream of gay flowers as they glided to the strains of Western music over the parquet floor beneath the sparkling light of the gasoliers. Hanashima who had
left him just now was already dancing happily, his arms about a beauty in an evening dress of purple satin that revealed her naked shoulders. The effect was to make Shirakawa feel oddly forlorn and isolated.

  It was only four or five days previously that Superintendent-General Kawashima, a man not easily daunted, had said, his large heavy-lidded eyes creasing in a grim frown:

  ‘If we don’t get complete control within the next year or two, it’s all up with us. Personally, I don’t want to live to see that day come.’

  Could it be that the demon superintendent, the man who had devoted all his energies to suppressing the popular campaign for civil rights, had come to realize that the new age rolling towards them like the sea at full tide was something against which no resistance was possible? Shirakawa could not avoid a sense of disheartenment at the crack he saw appearing in the disposition of this obdurate man who had once so blithely seized people’s homes in what amounted to daylight robbery, and pulled them down in order to make way for a prefectural road – the man who had happily tolerated the poisoning by mineral wastes of a whole area along the banks of the Watarase river so that the copper mine at Ashio might prosper – all this done in the name of loyalty to the state.

  Today he had caught sight of Taisuke Itagaki, president of the Liberal Party, which probably meant that Hanashima had come in his party. At the thought of a national assembly being convened and of Unno and Hanashima winning seats in it, whence to carry on their championship of civil rights, Shirakawa, like it or not, could not avoid a sense that the days when he and other bureaucrats had reigned unchallenged were slipping into the past. Little by little, he felt himself menaced by an end similar to that which had overtaken any number of trusted followers of powerful figures in the not so distant past.