Thousand Cranes (12 page)

There was something engaging about the pouting lower lip, which pushed forward in proportion as the mouth was drawn earnestly shut, and about the plain swell of the ear lobes.

She looked up at him. ‘It’s Karatsu.’
¹

Kikuji came nearer.

‘It’s a very good bowl.’ She laid it on the floor matting.

It was a small, cylindrical Karatsu bowl, which, like the Shino, could be used for everyday.

‘It’s strong. Dignified – much better than the Shino.’

‘But can you compare Shino and Karatsu?’

‘You can tell if you see them together.’

Held by the power of the Karatsu, Kikuji took it on his knee and gazed at it.

‘Shall I bring the Shino, then?’

‘I’ll get it.’ Fumiko stood up.

They put the Shino and the Karatsu side by side. Their eyes met, and fell to the bowls.

‘A man’s and a woman’s.’ Kikuji spoke in some confusion. ‘When you see them side by side.’

Fumiko nodded, as if unable to speak.

To Kikuji too the words had an odd ring.

The Karatsu was undecorated, greenish with a touch of saffron and a touch too of carmine. It swelled powerfully toward the base.

‘A favorite your father took with him on trips. It’s very much like your father.’

Fumiko seemed not to sense the danger in the remark.

Kikuji could not bring himself to say that the Shino bowl was like her mother. But the two bowls before them were like the souls of his father and her mother.

The tea bowls, three or four hundred years old, were sound and healthy, and they called up no morbid thoughts. Life seemed to stretch taut over them, however, in a way that was almost sensual.

Seeing his father and Fumiko’s mother in the bowls, Kikuji felt that they had raised two beautiful ghosts and placed them side by side.

The tea bowls were here, present, and the present reality of Kikuji and Fumiko, facing across the bowls, seemed immaculate too.

Kikuji had said to her, on the day after the seventh-day services for her mother, that there was something terrible in his being with her, facing her. Had the guilt and the fear been wiped away by the touch of the bowls?

‘Beautiful,’ said Kikuji, as if to himself. ‘It wasn’t Father’s nature to play with tea bowls, and yet he did, and maybe they deadened his sense of guilt.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘But when you see the bowl, you forget the defects of the old owner. Father’s life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.’

‘Death, waiting at your feet. I’m frightened. I’ve tried so many things. I’ve tried thinking that with death itself at my feet I can’t be forever held by Mother’s death.’

‘When you’re held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren’t in this world yourself.’

The maid came with a kettle and other tea utensils.

She had evidently concluded that, so long in the cottage, they needed water for tea.

Kikuji suggested to Fumiko that they use the Shino and the Karatsu here as if they themselves were on a trip.

Fumiko nodded simply. ‘May I use the Shino one last time before I break it?’ She took the tea whisk from the box, and went to wash it.

The long summer day was still bright.

‘As if on a trip,’ said Fumiko, twirling the small whisk in the small bowl.

‘Off on a trip – and are we at an inn?’

‘It doesn’t have to be an inn. A river bank, or a mountain top. Maybe cold water would have been better, to make us think of the mountains.’ As she lifted the tea whisk, her near-black eyes rose and for an instant were on Kikuji. Then she looked down at the Karatsu, which she turned in the palm of one hand.

The eyes moved forward with the bowl, to a spot before Kikuji’s knee.

He felt that she might come flowing over to him.

When she started to make tea in her mother’s Shino, the whisk rustled against the bowl. She stopped.

‘It’s very hard.’

‘It must be hard in such a small bowl,’ said Kikuji. But the trouble was that Fumiko’s hands were trembling.

Once she had stopped, there was no making the whisk move again.

Fumiko sat with bowed head, her eyes on her taut wrist.

‘Mother won’t let me.’

‘What!’ Kikuji started up and took her by the shoulders, as if to pull her from the meshes of a curse.

There was no resistance.

4

Unable to sleep, Kikuji waited for light through the cracks in the shutters, and went out to the cottage.

The broken Shino lay on the stepping stone before the stone basin.

He put together four large pieces to form a bowl. A piece large enough to admit his forefinger was missing from the rim.

Wondering if it might be somewhere on the ground, he started looking among the stones. Immediately he stopped.

He raised his eyes. A large star was shining through the trees to the east.

It was some years since he had last seen the morning star. He stood looking at it, and the sky began to cloud over.

The star was even larger, shining through the haze. The light was as if blurred by water.

It seemed dreary in contrast to the fresh glimmer of the star, to be hunting a broken bowl and trying to put it together.

He threw the pieces down again.

The evening before, Fumiko had flung the Shino against the basin before he could stop her.

He had cried out.

But he had not looked for the pieces in the shadows among the stones. He had rather put his arm around Fumiko, supporting her. As she fell forward in the act of throwing the Shino, she seemed herself about to collapse against the basin.

‘There is much better Shino,’ she murmured.

Was she still sad at the thought of having Kikuji compare it with better Shino?

He lay sleepless, and an echo of her words came to him, more poignantly clean in remembrance.

Waiting for daylight, he went out to look for the pieces.

Then, seeing the star, he threw them down again.

And looking up, he cried out.

There was no star. In the brief moment when his eyes were on the discarded pieces, the morning star had disappeared in the clouds.

He gazed at the eastern sky for a time, as if to retrieve something stolen.

The clouds would not be heavy; but he could not tell where the star was. The clouds broke near the horizon. The faint red deepened where they touched the roofs of houses.

‘I can’t just leave it,’ he said aloud. He picked up the pieces again, and put them in the sleeve of his night kimono.

It would be sad to leave them there. And besides, Kurimoto Chikako might come calling.

He thought of burying the bowl beside the stone basin, because Fumiko had broken it there in such obvious desperation. Instead, he wrapped the pieces in paper, put them in a drawer, and went back to bed.

What had she so dreaded having him compare the Shino with?

And why had the possibility so worried her? Kikuji could think of no reason.

Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her.

She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.

Always before, she had been Mrs Ota’s daughter. Now, he had forgotten – the idea had quite left him that the mother’s body was in a subtle way transferred to the daughter, to lure him into strange fantasies.

He had at length made his way outside the dark, ugly curtain.

Had the breach in her cleanness rescued him?

There had been no resistance from Fumiko, only from the cleanness itself.

That fact, one might think, told how deep he had sunk into the meshes of the curse, how complete the paralysis was; but Kikuji felt the reverse, that he had escaped the curse and the paralysis. It was as if an addict had been freed of his addiction by taking the ultimate dose of a drug.

Kikuji called Fumiko from his office. She worked for a wool wholesaler in Kanda.

She was not at work. Kikuji had left home sleepless. Had Fumiko fallen into a deep sleep at perhaps dawn? Or, in her shame, had she shut herself up for the day?

In the afternoon she still was not at work, and he asked where she lived.

Her new address would have been on the letter yesterday; but Fumiko had torn it up envelope and all and put the pieces in her pocket. At dinner they had talked of her work, and he remembered the name of the firm. He had not asked where she lived. It had been as if her dwelling were Kikuji himself.

On his way home, he looked for the rooming house. It was behind Ueno Park.

Fumiko was not there.

A girl twelve or thirteen, just back from school to judge from her student uniform, came to the door and went inside again.

‘Miss Ota is out. She said she was going away with a friend.’

‘Away? She went on a trip? What time was it? And where did she say she was going?’

The girl went inside again, and this time she did not come to the door. ‘I really don’t know. Mother is out.’ She seemed afraid of Kikuji. She had thin eyebrows.

Kikuji looked back as he went out the gate, but he could not tell which was Fumiko’s room. It was a fairly decent two-storey house with a little garden.

She had said that death was at her feet. Kikuji’s own feet were suddenly cold.

He wiped his face with his handkerchief. The blood seemed to leave as he wiped, and he wiped more violently. The handkerchief was wet and dark. He felt a cold sweat at his back.

‘She has no reason to die,’ he muttered.

There was no reason for Fumiko to die, Fumiko who had brought him to life.

But had the simple directness of the evening before been the directness of death?

Was she, like her mother, guilt-ridden, afraid of the directness?

‘And only Kurimoto is left.’ As if spitting out all the accumulated venom on the woman he took for his enemy, Kikuji hurried into the shade of the park.

¹
Short split-toed socks.

²
A mat is about one yard by two.

³
A Seto ware dating from the sixteenth century.

⁴
Sen Rikyū (1521–91), an early tea master.

¹
An early Edo Period painter the dates of whose birth and death are uncertain.

²
Minamoto Muneyuki, died 939.

³
Ki no Tsurayuki, died 945.

⁴
In the southern outskirts of Tokyo.

¹
A ware from the Oribe kilns (see
page 11
).

²
Raku, a Kyoto ware, was first produced in the sixteenth century. Ryōnyū (1756–1834) was the ninth master of the Raku kiln.

¹
Sen Sōtan (1578–1658), a tea master, was the grandson of Sen Rikyū (
page 12
).

¹
A Kyūshū ware of Korean origin.