The Nicholas Linnear Novels (83 page)

Now she broke away from his orbit, walking more quickly, ignoring the glances of those she passed, the lust of the men, the envy of the women; she had become inured to that. It was time to pick up Yōki; Sato would soon be home from the wars.

Akiko watched Yōki out of the corner of her eye as they sped through the center of Tokyo and out again. She is a magnificent creature, Akiko thought. I have chosen well. She had found Yōki some weeks ago and when she was certain of her choice had struck up a conversation with her. That had led to an odd—at least Akiko saw it as that—kind of friendship. Its borders were the night when, as far as Yōki was concerned, they both emerged like nocturnal birds.

Akiko had once asked Yōki what occupied her during the day. “Oh, on and off, I’m a saleslady,” she had said. “You know, door to door. Perfumes and cosmetics. Otherwise I watch television. Not only dramas but programs where I learn calligraphy, flower arranging—even the tea ceremony.”

In a culture where 93 percent of the population watched TV at least once a day that was, perhaps, not surprising. Yet it nevertheless chilled Akiko that her country was teaching its population by proxy. She had learned the tea ceremony from her mother, and she remembered watching the older woman’s face, listening to the tone of her voice, seeing the patterns on her kimono moving just so here and not at all there, resolving to memorize every detail no matter how tiny for those, her mother had once told her, were all that would be noticed.

Could the emissions of an electronic cathode ray tube provide such teaching? She was sure it could not, and she found herself disgusted when she thought of the number of women being taught in such an impersonal manner.

But outwardly she showed none of this disdain. Yōki was important to her—at least for the next several hours.

The limo pulling up onto the gravel verge of the two-story house pushed her thoughts back to the present. Seiichi Sato lived just north of Ueno Park in Uguisudani in Taitō-Ku. A block and a half to the southwest was wide Kototoi-dōri, the avenue that curled like a serpent around two sides of the park. Beyond, the high tops of the carefully pruned cypress stood stark and utterly black against the faintly pink and yellow glow from the Ginza and Shinjuku nightspots. The trees were the natural markers of the Tokugawa Shōgun graveyard across the myriad railroad tracks in the northern end of Ueno.

Sato’s house was large by Tokyo standards, built on the
ken
principle, the standard six-foot unit of construction. It was made of bamboo and cypress; the three-layered roof was of terra cotta tile. The far end of the house contained a great notch to accommodate a more-than-one-hundred-year-old cryptomeria whose boughs overgrew the sheltering eight-foot fence, swaying over the road itself.

The driver came around and opened the rear door for them, and Akiko took her charge inside.

Seiichi Sato sipped hot sakē from a tiny porcelain cup and contemplated the Void. He did this, sometimes, in moments of intense stress, to clear his mind. But mainly he used this form of mental exercise when he was impatient. In a land where patience was not merely a virtue but a way of life, Sato had had to teach himself this attitude as if he were some form of alien in his own culture. Yet he had worked diligently, even obsessively at it, and he knew that his patience had won him all that he held dear today.

He was in the six
-tatami
room—space being defined in Japanese houses by the number of reed mats the wood floor could contain—with only a small table, a cotton futon and a drawered
naga-hibachi
of burl paulownia wood dating from the early part of the nineteenth century. A recess in the right top of the long brazier allowed for the heating of sakē as well as food.

Sato wore only a white cotton kimono. Its bold crimson square reproduced the crest of the Danjuro line of
kabuki
actors. He looked calm and assured, his cool eyes staring at a spot not within the realm of the physical world.

A soft knock on the
fusuma
made him blink but otherwise he did not move. Now he unlocked his thoughts and allowed the keen sense of anticipation to enfold him like a cloak on a chill winter’s eve.

He reached out and moved the paper door an inch to the right. Just the pronounced curve of the front half of Akiko’s eye gazed at him from beneath a half-lowered lid. The sable darkness dusted along the delicate flesh was like the painting of dusk across a changing sky. The coal black iris was like the heart of some deeply buried treasure. Despite himself, Sato felt the quickness of his pulse, the heat of his own breath firing in his throat.

“You are late.” His voice was breathy as he began their ritual. “I thought you would not come.”

Akiko heard the thickness in his voice and smiled to herself. “I always come,” she whispered. “I cannot do otherwise.”

“You are free to walk away.” Sato’s heart constricted as he said those words.

“I give my love to you freely and I am bound by it. I will never leave you.”

The script had been developed over a period of months to provide them both with a degree of excitement and intrigue within the carefully prescribed boundaries of societal courtship. Of course, there were aspects about their courtship—minor ones, to be sure—that had Sato’s mother been alive she would have disapproved of in the most vociferous language.

Sato bowed his head and, opening the
fusuma
farther, moved back on his knees and shins to allow her entrance. As Akiko entered, the dual
kanji
ideograms for
sōbi
hovered in the center of Sato’s being like a feudal
daimyō
’s banner, for she did indeed possess sublime beauty. And, despite their ritualistic dialog, he knew it was he who was bound to her for all time, body and spirit.

For a time they knelt facing one another, Sato’s large, capable hands held palms up, Akiko’s smaller ones resting lightly in his. Locked, their eyes stared within and through. Sato, contemplating the
karma
that had brought them together, felt the essence of her stirring, a lacquered kite rising above rooftops and rustling crowns of cypress and pine. A strong gust took it suddenly and it shot straight for his heart, lodging there like a broken wing.

“What are you thinking?”

The question startled him. Was it just because of the abrupt sound from out of the silence of the beating of their hearts, he asked himself. From deep within him came a secret fear that somehow, in some unfathomable way, her mind had pierced his flesh, peering into his inviolable thoughts. And in that split instant, a brief shudder contracted the muscles ridged along his gently arched back and he blinked, his eyes searching hers as if she were a stranger.

Then her lips bowed into a smile and her white, even teeth showed. “You are so solemn this night.” She laughed, and he saw the play of light along the side of her throat, the small shadow lying in the hollow like a teardrop.

He said nothing, and after studying his granitelike countenance for a moment she made a move to rise. “I will—” But his fingers curled around her wrist stopped her and, perched like a bird, her lips opened. “Sato-san.”

Slowly he brought her back down to her knees, then drew himself upward. The fabric of his kimono winked and rippled as his shoulders squared and Akiko was abruptly aware of his strength and, even more, his power.

“This night is special,” he said thickly. “There will only be one like it in all our lives.” He paused for a moment as if collecting his thoughts. “So our lives will be truly bound by the laws of the Amida Buddha.” His eyes raked her face. “Does this mean nothing to you?”

“I have thought of little else all day.”

“Then stay.” At that moment his fingers let go their grip and her arm, freed, drifted down to her lap. Her perfect, lacquered nails overlapped as her fingers interlaced, a streak of light lying along the gleaming surface of each beyond which he could not see. “On this most special of nights, send my gift away.”

Her face, as composed as a porcelain mask, disclosed nothing of her inner feelings. Sato could scarcely discern the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed. Her
wa
was as unruffled as the still skin of a mountain lake, reflecting rather than revealing.

He was disconcerted. “Surely you must know it is you who I desire.”

Akiko turned her head as if he had struck her a physical blow. “Then you hate the gift I bear; you have hated all the gifts that I have brought you since—”

“No!” Trembling, Sato silently railed against the trap he had entered.

“I have dishonored you with my desire to please you.” Akiko wrung her hands like an aggrieved little girl.

Sato leaned forward. “I have loved each and every gift; I have treasured the thought behind them.” He had regained control of his voice if not his emotions. “There is only honor in what you have brought me, knowing—” His eyes slid away from her, staring fixedly at the
tatami
between them. “Knowing that you have never…been with a man, understanding my desires”—he took a deep breath—“and wanting to bring me happiness in this sphere.”

Her head lowered. “It is my duty. I—”

But his hand shot out again, covering hers. “But tonight we are so close to being joined. Seeing you and—”

“What you ask—” Her head snapped up. “And then what of our wedding night? Will we make a mockery of tradition? Will we degrade the path that is ours? Do you want that?”

Sato felt her nails digging into his calloused flesh and knew she was right. He grasped at the fluttering of his intense desire for her, choking it off. His head nodded on his thick neck and he whispered through dry lips, “It is your gift that I desire.”

Akiko stood by the
naga-hibachi,
feeling its heat suffuse her. She paid only the most minimal attention to the work her hands were doing, cooking the
soba,
the buckwheat noodles, preparing the soy-based sauce in small porcelain cups, pouring the rest into a tiny matching pitcher, setting out the green horseradish and chopped cucumber on a saucerlike plate.

The
soba,
when done, was lifted in tiny portions into rectangular stacking trays of black lacquer. Normally, she would be waited upon as would be Sato. But this was part of her gift to him, and at this time of the night servants were enjoined from this side of the house.

Akiko served the food and more hot sakē. She observed that Sato and Yōki were talking in low, intimate tones. She had prepared the girl well. Yōki knew what to expect and what was expected of her.

Akiko rose and walked silently to the edge of the
fusuma.
She paused with a delicate hand on the light wooden frame. The sound of them washed over her before she slid the paper door shut behind her.

But she did not leave the house. Instead, she moved to the left, entering a smaller, two
-tatami
room. Carefully closing the
fusuma
, she slid across the reed mats on her knees until she reached the
shōji
common with the room within which Sato and Yōki reclined.

The screen was actually composed of many long and narrow vertical panels, decorative and pleasing to the eye. Some time ago, just after she had been introduced into the household, Akiko had secretly altered the nature of one of these panels so that it became removable by a subtle manipulation of its thin wooden border.

Through this rift she now gazed upon Sato and Yōki. They had finished their
soba
; the sakē was almost gone. They were very close together. Kneeling at her spyhole, Akiko settled herself for what was to come.

Sato’s back was to her. She saw the movement of his arm and then the soft slide of Yōki’s kimono—for Akiko knew better than to present the girl to Sato in her Western-style clothes—back and down, exposing one soft white shoulder.

Akiko held her breath as the rich play of the girl’s muscles was revealed. Sato’s eyes were drawn to Yōki’s breasts; the brown and gray kimono lay like wings on the
tatami
on either side of her, her thighs still partially wrapped. Then Sato’s head bent down and forward and with a soft cry Yōki’s head went back, her fingers caressing his ears as his tongue streaked hotly across her nipples.

Akiko crossed her arms over her own breasts, feeling the hot stiffness there like points of fire. Her mouth was dry and she longed for sakē to slake her thirst.

She had almost given in to Sato tonight. That had shocked her like a lightning bolt out of the blue. It had been relatively easy to keep him at arm’s length all these long weeks; she had been disgusted by the lust clouding his eyes. But this night had been different.

Yōki was now completely naked. Sato’s open mouth licked and sucked at her flesh with such intensity that Akiko could feel her own flesh heating, tingling just as if it were she he was making love to.

Why? What had been different? Akiko searched her mind, analyzing as Sun Hsiung had taught her to do so long ago: quarter your memory, then divide it into eighths, sixteenths, and so on. “Eventually,” he had told her, “you will find the detail you have been seeking for your senses are the most sensitive of receptors. They record everything; it is only your conscious mind which filters out what it believes to be all the important data. The lesson you must learn—and it is a most difficult one—is that your conscious mind often makes the wrong choice.”

Now, as her eyes drank in the erotic movements unfolding just beyond the aperture in the
shoji
, Akiko began the quartering search of her memory, for she was well attuned to her own emotions as she was to others’.

Tonight, just like all nights, she had sprung the right trap to ensnare Sato so that she could slip away from his advances. She had been filled with elation at the frustration she was causing him. But that feeling had been short-lived. Why?

Rock music’s primal pulse so full of anger, aggression, and lust, sizzled in her blood like alcohol; a room blue with smoke, making figures as indistinct as priests inside a temple wreathed in incense lit for the dead. She stalked a tiger there, lithe, full of a terrifying atavistic power. It magnetized her; spooked her.