The Waiting Years, page 9
‘This kimono looks as though it came from the pawnshop. Look – the red silk inside the sleeve has faded,’ said Yumi, turning back Suga’s long sleeve as she stood before her.
‘It’s been worn by somebody, hasn’t it? I’m sure the bride who wore it before couldn’t have been very happy, seeing that it got sent to the pawnshop.’
‘No more this bride,’ put in Suga, sighing as she slipped the heavy robe off her shoulders. She should not say such things on such an auspicious day, she felt, but a surge of resentment welled up in her against Michimasa and the contemptuous way he addressed her, as though she were some domestic animal.
‘No indeed,’ took up Yumi promptly. ‘Marrying a man like him, and as his second wife too … Secondhand kimonos are the least you can expect. I’d refuse him if it were me! I wouldn’t care how much money he had, or whether he was the only son or not – the very idea of marrying that half-witted misfit makes me shudder.’ She shook her body and grimaced as though she had found some unpleasant insect on her.
‘I wonder why he was born that way, when the master and mistress are born brighter than average? The master once said it must be because he was born when the mistress was only fifteen, so he’s not quite all there. He certainly couldn’t be more different from the young lady he’s marrying, could he?’
‘Seki said the son’s had to pay for all the women the father’s deceived.’
‘Don’t!’
Suga’s thick eyebrows contracted and her face darkened. For Yumi, the words passed her lips lightly without further thought, but for Suga they were less easily forgotten, persisting like evil spirits, with overtones of curses and unforgotten grudges. To hear Yumi talking of such portentous matters in such an utterly carefree manner made Suga feel a kind of self-disgust: she reminded herself of a ditch that would not allow things to flow through smoothly but became clogged with filth.
For a few days following the wedding ceremony Tomo watched in distress as Miya went about silent and uncommunicative, with the pale, withered look of a flower touched by the wind. Even Yukitomo, knowing women as he did, seemed to be disturbed at the idea of the harm both spiritual and physical that Michimasa’s unbridled speech and action might be inflicting on Miya in the privacy of the marriage chamber, and instead of turning aside with an open look of displeasure as he normally did when he saw his son he took pains to placate him by giving him the Swiss-style gold watch with a platinum chain that he had long coveted and by ordering Western-style food from distant restaurants in order to gratify Michimasa’s taste for the unusual. He knew well that with Michimasa it would be less effective to lecture him on how to cherish his new wife than to please him with food or gifts, which always improved his temper visibly and, if hardly making him delightful company, at least stopped him from distressing his wife with nonsensical remarks.
As expected, Michimasa cheered up in his own vacant way, and as he did so Miya began once more to laugh out loud, narrowing her eyes in mirth till they threatened to disappear completely in her soft cheeks.
Although in photographs Miya did not have the well-defined outlines that would have made her a beauty of Suga’s or Yumi’s type, the soft flesh was delicately molded on the slender frame, and the skin on her face, arms, and legs had an even blush of pale pink like cherry blossom. When a smile appeared in her narrow eyes and at the corners of her slightly loose, passive mouth she acquired an indescribable charm and even an equivocal, perishable type of beauty. Perhaps because of her slender build her movements were light and graceful, and her lilting speech with its slight plebeian twang brought a rare touch of gaiety to the bureaucratic solemnity of the Shirakawa residence.
It was Tomo who first fell in love with Miya’s ingratiating femininity. The familiar way in which, as they were setting off home after the meeting arranged by the go-between, Miya had said, ‘Mother, your jacket –’ and gone round to turn down her collar for her had had a warmth that inspired Tomo with the hope that such a daughter-in-law might help lower the barrier of stiffness with which she was always obliged to surround herself so carefully at home. The sense of magical promise was almost like the first moments of love between man and woman, and Tomo had prayed eagerly that the match might be realized. Her daughter Etsuko, who had married last year, had been reared as a jewel without a flaw, yet Tomo sensed in her something of the cold, hard quality of crystal; and Suga’s gloomily reticent expression, the eyes that were forever sullen and suspicious like a beautiful cat’s, grew more disturbing as she got older. Yumi, the most outgoing of them all, was merely free from reserve, as clearcut and superficially gay as the branches and blossom of the peach tree, and was quite remote from that romantic, sensuous mood for which Tomo longed. As the two concubines formed an increasingly impenetrable barrier between herself and Yukitomo, physical relations between them had ceased altogether, and though the faith in the saving powers of Amida that her mother back home in the country had sought to bequeath to her was, little by little, beginning to put forth buds in her daily life, she was only just forty and healthy still in mind and body, so that fight it though she might the desire for the warm contact of a human body welled up in her irresistibly.
Since her code of morals would have considered it a sin to take a lover so long as she had a husband in Yukitomo, her sexual desire may unconsciously have been deflected to the same sex, so that she looked at Miya not with a woman’s eyes but with the eyes of a desiring man, seeking all unawares the enveloping softness, free of all sharp angles, that only a woman could offer. Miya had happened to fit in with the image of a feminine woman that Tomo was seeking.
One further reason why Tomo had hoped to get Miya as a second wife for Michimasa was her concern for her grandchild Takao. Takao had lost his mother shortly after birth; Tomo had been obliged to rear him herself, and her search for some object to love had been concentrated on the child. His innocent baby face, smiling despite its ignorance of a mother, had inspired her with a boundless compassion and a sense of life endlessly renewed.
Tomo, burdened with a constant sense of guilt at her inability to love her own son Michimasa, would sometimes gaze at her grandchild’s limbs as he romped about so full of life and marvel that she could feel so much affection for Michimasa’s child. In Yukitomo’s eyes, too, Takao could do no wrong, though when Michimasa and Etsuko were in their infancy Yukitomo had been disturbed by the children and had often sent them with his wife to some distant part of the house so that he would not be irritated by the sound of their crying. Yukitomo would take him from Maki and holding him with both hands lift him up high in the air. ‘Fly, Takao, fly, high up in the sky!’ he would chant, and roar with laughter. Since Yukitomo showed such affection for him, both Suga and Yumi also made much of the ‘little master,’ and Takao was passed from the arms of one member of the household to another, a constant focus of attention. So long as Takao was with them, Yukitomo would speak to Tomo with his old lack of reserve and even Tomo could talk without any sense of barrier. This child, offspring of their own unworthy son Michimasa, was a silent witness to the blood ties that existed between the two of them, now husband and wife in name alone. This idea too had been instilled in Tomo’s lonely soul by her own mother who had died in Kumamoto the previous year, shortly before Takao’s birth, and Tomo cherished it accordingly. So fond of Takao was Yukitomo that it was already decided that whatever other children Michimasa might have Takao would remain legitimate heir to the Shirakawa estate, one part of which had already been made over into his name. Thus Takao’s position in the family was in no danger so long as his grandparents were alive; but they might die unexpectedly, and Tomo instinctively feared for Takao’s sake to introduce a woman of strong character as Michimasa’s second wife. On this score, too, Miya passed the test.
Before a month had passed Miya was on cheerful, friendly terms with everybody in the house. She made no conscious effort, yet seemed to distil so sweet, so flowerlike a fragrance that not only Yukitomo and Tomo but even Suga and Yumi, who might have been expected to feel jealousy towards another young woman, would watch her with frank, unguarded smiles. She would peer into Takao’s face as he lay in Maki’s arms and exclaim, ‘How sweet! Let me hold him for a while!’ and taking him in her slender arms kiss him unaffectedly on the cheek, laughing till her eyes became the merest creases in her face. Yukitomo and Tomo were delighted by her apparent complete unawareness of the predecessor who had borne Takao.
On fine days Miya would gaze out from the second floor over the sea off Shinagawa and rejoice like a child: it was so cheerful here in this house on the hill, she said, after her own home which was shut in on every side by other dwellings.
Miya was reputed to be good at singing ballads in the tokiwazu style, so one evening they had her sing the ballad of the unhappy lovers Osono and Rokusa on their way to die together. Yumi, who was trained in the same tokiwazu style, accompanied her on the samisen. Gradually, as she gently related the dialogue of the doomed couple in a voice that was strong and steady yet full of feminine charm, her eyebrows began to contract and her white throat to strain in strangled sobs, till despite themselves the listeners were half persuaded that Miya herself had become Osono, and were overcome by a kind of sensuous sorrow. Coming to the end of the scene, Miya was combing back the loose strands of hair and wiping her damp forehead with a handkerchief when Michimasa, who had drunk too much saké, vomited copiously on the tatami and was carried out into the anteroom.
Frowning, Miya made reluctantly to get up, but when Yukitomo told her to leave it to the maids she looked pleased and came happily to sit by her father-in-law’s side.
‘Let me help you to some saké. My awful singing has made the young master sick,’ she said, holding the china bottle poised on her upturned palm in a seductive manner that came as a vague shock to Tomo sitting next to her, so much did it remind her of a young and newly qualified geisha.
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Your singing almost made me feel like the hero of a love suicide myself. Everybody’s sitting very quiet, aren’t they? Here, now, have a drink. Somehow I think you’re a good drinker.’
He gave her his own saké cup and filled it to the brim for her. Ever since she came as a bride she had refrained from indulging her taste for saké, but now at Yukitomo’s instigation she drank several cupfuls in succession, so that her eyes grew faintly pink at the corners and her face acquired so much the air of a full-blown flower that Suga could not help drawing Yumi’s attention to it with a meaningful glance.
Observing Miya without appearing to do so, Yukitomo gradually realized that whether she was at home or out it was the times when Michimasa was not there that showed her cheerful youthfulness at its most radiant and allowed her to be herself, as gay and carefree as a butterfly. When her husband Michimasa was with her, and Tomo and the others thoughtfully went away in order to leave the young couple to themselves, she would look disconsolate and, finding some excuse to leave him before long, would go and join Suga and the others in attendance upon Yukitomo.
On one occasion Yukitomo deliberately sent Michimasa to replace him at a garden party given by a cement firm, and in his absence took Suga and Yumi, and Miya with them, to see the irises in the famous garden at Horikiri, leaving Tomo to take care of the house.
The spacious lake of the iris garden was crossed by numerous bridges of narrow planks arranged to form zigzags across the water, and the entire surface was covered with the dark green leaves of the irises whose gay purple, white, and dappled blooms swayed in the breezes of early summer. Swallows skimmed the surface of the water with flashes of their white underbellies. The beauty of the three young women, in their varying hairstyles and with their kimonos of many cloths and colors, was so startling that it drew glances from the other visitors they passed on their way.
‘It’s like looking at an old color print,’ said one old woman gazing at them enthralled, ‘to see three such fine women standing together among the irises.’
Of the three it was Miya who frolicked most gaily of all; when the planks of the bridge creaked beneath her clogs it was she who cried ‘Oh! It’s going to break!’ in exaggerated alarm and clung fearfully to Suga and Yumi. When they went up the bank again, Yukitomo helped Miya up, almost lifting her light body in his arms and recalling as he did so how once among the apprentice geishas of Shimbashi there had been a girl with just such a lithe body as this.
‘The young mistress doesn’t seem a bit lonely even when she’s away from the young master, does she?’ said Suga casually that evening in Yukitomo’s bedroom. ‘She looks younger, in fact – almost like a young girl.’
In the ten years that she had served him as mistress Suga had learned the art of probing in the most innocent way possible into the secret recesses of Yukitomo’s mind. Perhaps he did not sense the subtle inquiry concealed in Suga’s words, for he made no reply but sat with an ambiguous smile playing about the corners of his mouth.
‘What are you smiling at? Stop it!’
‘It’s all right – it’s not you, it’s Miya.’
‘The young mistress? What about her?’
‘Doesn’t her face when she laughs remind you of something?’
‘Not that I’ve noticed.’
‘The women in those erotic prints. Remember? I showed them to you once, didn’t I?’
‘Well! Of all the –’ Suga reddened.
‘That kind of woman may be all right as a wife for a semiidiot like Michimasa, but …’ He left the rest to her imagination and putting an arm around the shoulders that were cool and white as newly fallen snow drew her to him. She snuggled up to him docilely, convinced by his unspoken comment, it seemed, of the scorn in which he held Miya.
Tomo’s fears had not after all been unfounded.
Perhaps because of the unusual fierceness of the summer, Miya, who had been troubled with pleurisy as a girl and was excessively susceptible to the heat, became a semiinvalid, losing weight visibly and spending half the time in bed upstairs. Then, one morning around the time when the first cool breezes were beginning to blow, an alarming noise came from upstairs where the young couple lived. Miya came rushing down the stairs, almost falling over herself in her haste, and nearly collided with Tomo in the corridor.
‘Mother …’ she gasped, and suddenly burst out weeping in a loud voice. Upstairs, Michimasa could be heard stamping on the floor and yelling imprecations, but no one made to go up to him. Startled though she was, Tomo had been expecting that this day would come sooner or later. Putting her arms about the shivering, uncontrollably sobbing Miya she led her into a room at the back of the house and tried, almost apologetically, to calm her down while seeking to elicit the details of her quarrel with Michimasa.
At first Miya could get out nothing between her sobs but ‘Oh what a fool I was … I can’t stand it … I can’t stay with him any longer,’ but as the storm of emotion passed she began, albeit incoherently, to complain of Michimasa’s heartless behavior. As Tomo had suspected, she had found him somehow unsympathetic from the start, but her illness this summer had shown her still more clearly the callousness of his nature. Far from worrying himself over her physical debility he sought to have physical relations with her almost every night. She had given in, since to object only made him more insistent, but in the last few days she had been menstruating. At such times she normally refused him, but this time nothing would make him take no for an answer. The previous night she had finally refused him absolutely, but in the morning he had been terrifyingly out of temper, had told her among other things that a wife who disobeyed her husband’s commands was punishable by law, and had thrown at her everything he could lay his hands on. If she stayed married to such a man, she would surely end up by getting killed, she said, so she was going back to her parents’ home that very day. Even allowing for a certain hysterical exaggeration, a man like Michimasa was quite capable of the things she described, and Tomo listened with complete sympathy; yet even so she did her utmost to persuade Miya not to leave the house into which she had married, insisting that they would speak to Michimasa and see that he never committed such outrages again.
The Miya that Tomo had pictured to herself was a gentle woman ruled by her affections, but today she was a different person altogether. Her face was blank, hard, and drained of all color, and the almond eyes that normally smiled so tenderly were narrowed at the outer corners and expressionless. Tomo tried to arouse in her a kind of fellow-feeling by talking of her own feelings as a woman in the face of the indignities she must constantly suffer from Yukitomo, but Miya seemed deaf and indifferent to such difficult, depressing talk and only dwelt more and more insistently on her own unhappy married life, as though it were all Tomo’s own responsibility. Sensing that the more she talked the more Miya saw her as a country woman wrapped up in the past, Tomo was overcome by a profound disappointment. As it was gradually borne in on her that despite appearances Miya was not the essentially warm-hearted woman who brought a little grace to other people’s lives that she had imagined, she felt an increasing irritation at her own lack of insight.
Leaving the room after urging Miya once more to give the matter further thought, Tomo had an uneasy foreboding that the affair would make Yukitomo angry with Michimasa and Miya, so that once again he would vent his spleen on herself. It was Yukitomo’s habit whenever Michimasa created some unpleasantness to attack Tomo as though Michimasa were her child and not his own as well.
