Thousand Cranes (8 page)

On the gourd was a fading lacquer seal-signature, and on its ancient-looking box the mark of the first owner, Sōtan,
¹
which, if authentic, would make it three hundred years old.

Kikuji knew nothing about tea flowers, nor was the maid likely
to be well informed. For morning tea, however, it seemed to him that the morning glory was most appropriate.

He gazed at it for a time. In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.

Was it more fitting than all those Occidental flowers in the three-hundred-year-old Shino?

But there was something unsettling in the idea of a cut morning glory.

‘You expect it to wither right in front of your eyes,’ he said to the maid at breakfast.

He remembered that he had meant to put peonies in the Shino.

It had already been past the peony season when Fumiko gave him the jar, but he could have found them if he had hunted.

‘I’d even forgotten that we had the gourd. You were clever to think of it.’

The maid only nodded.

‘You saw my father put morning glories in it?’

‘No. But morning glories and gourds are both vines, and I thought …’

‘Both vines!’ Kikuji snorted. The poetry had quite vanished.

His head grew heavy as he read the newspaper, and he lay down in the breakfast room.

‘Don’t bother to make the bed.’

The maid, who had been doing the laundry, came in drying her hands. She would clean his room, she said.

When he went back to bed, there was no morning glory in the alcove.

Nor was there a gourd hanging from the pillar.

‘Well.’ Perhaps she had not wanted him to see the fading flower.

He had snorted at the association of the two vines, and yet his father’s way of living seemed to survive in the maid.

The Shino jar stood naked in the middle of the alcove. Fumiko, if she were to see it, would no doubt think this treatment unkind.

Upon receiving it, he had put white roses and pale carnations in it, because she had done the same before her mother’s ashes. The roses and carnations were flowers that Kikuji himself had sent for the seventh-day memorial services.

He had stopped and bought flowers at the shop from which, the day before, he had sent flowers to Fumiko.

His heart would rise even at the touch of the jar, and he had put no more flowers in it.

Sometimes he would be drawn to a middle-aged woman in the street. Catching himself, he would frown and mutter: ‘I’m behaving like a criminal.’

He would look again and see that the woman did not resemble Mrs Ota after all.

There was only that swelling at the hips.

The longing at such moments would almost make him tremble; and yet intoxication and fear would meet, as at the moment of awakening from a crime.

‘And what has turned me into a criminal?’ The question should have shaken him loose from whatever it was; but instead of an answer there came only intenser longing.

He felt that he could not be saved unless he fled those moments when the touch of the dead woman’s skin came to him warm and naked.

Sometimes too he wondered if moral doubts had not sharpened his senses to the point of morbidness.

He put the Shino in its box and went to bed.

As he looked out over the garden, he heard thunder.

It was distant but strong, and at each clap it was nearer.

Lightning came through the trees in the garden.

But when the rain began, the thunder seemed to withdraw.

It was a violent rain. White spray rose from the earth of the garden.

Kikuji got up and telephoned Fumiko.

‘Miss Ota has moved.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ He was startled. ‘Excuse me, but might I …’ She must have sold the house. ‘I wonder if you could tell me where she is living.’

‘Just a moment, please.’ It seemed to be a maid.

She came back immediately and gave him the address, which she was evidently reading from a notebook. ‘In care of Mr Tozaki.’ There was a telephone.

Fumiko’s voice was bright. ‘Hello. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.’

‘Fumiko? This is Mitani. I called your house.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice fell, and it was like her mother’s.

‘When did you move?’

‘I …’

‘And you didn’t tell me.’

‘I’ve been staying with a friend for several days now. I sold the house.’

‘Oh?’

‘I didn’t know whether I should tell you or not. At first I thought I shouldn’t, but lately I’ve begun to feel guilty.’

‘You ought to.’

‘Really? You’re kind enough to think so?’

As they talked on, Kikuji felt fresh and new, washed clean. There could be this feeling from a telephone conversation, then?

‘The Shino you gave me. When I look at it I want to see you.’

‘Oh? I have another, a little cylindrical tea bowl. I thought of letting you have that too, but Mother used it as an everyday teacup. It has her lipstick on it.’

‘Oh?’

‘Or so Mother used to say.’

‘The lipstick was just left there?’

‘Not “just left there.” The Shino was reddish to begin with, but Mother used to say that she couldn’t rub lipstick from the rim, no matter how hard she tried. I sometimes look at it now that she is dead, and there does seem to be a sort of flush in one place.’

Was this only idle talk?

Kikuji could hardly bear to listen. ‘We’re having a real storm. How is it there?’

‘Terrible. I was terrified at the thunder.’

‘But it should be pleasant afterward. I’ve been away from work for several days, and I’m at home now. If you have nothing else to do, why not come over?’

‘Thank you. I’d been meaning to stop by, but only after I found work. I’m thinking of going to work.’ Before he could answer, she continued. ‘I’m so glad you called. I
will
see you. I shouldn’t see you again, of course.’

Kikuji got out of bed when the shower was over.

He was surprised at the outcome of the telephone conversation.

And it was strange that his guilt in the Ota affair seemed to disappear when he heard the daughter’s voice. Did it make him feel that the mother was still living?

He shook his shaving brush among the leaves at the veranda, wetting it with rain water.

The doorbell rang shortly after lunch. It would be Fumiko – but it was Kurimoto Chikako.

‘Oh, you.’

‘Hasn’t it gotten warm. I’ve been neglecting you, and I thought I should look in.’

‘I haven’t been entirely well.’

‘Your color isn’t good.’ She scowled at him.

It had been foolish, he thought, to associate the sound of wooden clogs with Fumiko. Fumiko would be wearing European dress.

‘Have you had new teeth made?’ he asked. ‘You look younger.’

‘I had spare time during the rainy season. They were a little too white at first, but they turn yellow in a hurry. They’ll be all right.’

He led her into the sitting room, which also served as his bedroom. She looked at the alcove.

‘I’ve always found empty alcoves pleasant,’ said Kikuji. ‘No hangings to weigh you down.’

‘Very pleasant, with all this rain. But maybe a few flowers at least.’ She turned back to him. ‘What did you do with Mrs Ota’s Shino?’

Kikuji did not answer.

‘Shouldn’t you send it back?’

‘That I think is up to me.’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘It’s hardly your place to be giving orders.’

‘That’s not quite true either.’ She laughed and showed her white teeth. ‘I came today to tell you what I think.’ In a quick gesture, she thrust both hands before her, then spread them as if to brush something away. ‘If you don’t get rid of that witch.’

‘You sound very threatening.’

‘But I’m the go-between, and I’m to have my say.’

‘If you’re talking about the Inamura girl, I’m sorry to have to refuse your proposal.’

‘Now, now. That’s very small of you, refusing a girl you like just because you don’t like the go-between. The go-between is a bridge. Go ahead, step on the bridge. Your father was quite happy to.’

Kikuji did not hide his displeasure.

When Chikako put herself into an argument, she threw her shoulders back. ‘I’m telling you the truth. I’m different from Mrs Ota. As things went with your father, I was a very light case. I see no reason to hide the truth – I was unfortunately not his favorite
game. Just when it started, it was over.’ She looked down. ‘But I have no regrets. He was good enough to use me afterward, when it was convenient for him. Like most men, he found it easier to use a woman he had had an affair with. And so, thanks to him, I developed a good, healthy strain of common sense.’

‘I see.’

‘You should make use of my healthy common sense.’

Kikuji was almost tempted to feel safe with her. There was something in what she said.

She took a fan from her obi.

‘When a person is too much of a man or too much of a woman, the common sense generally isn’t there.’

‘Oh? Common sense goes with neuters, then?’

‘Don’t be sarcastic. But neuters, as you call them, have no trouble understanding men and women too. Have you thought how remarkable it is that Mrs Ota was able to die and leave an only daughter? It seems just possible that she had something to fall back on. If she died, mightn’t Kikuji look after the daughter?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I thought and thought, and all of a sudden I came up against a suspicion: she died to interfere with your marriage. She didn’t just die. There was more to it.’

‘Your inventions can be monstrous sometimes.’ But even as he spoke, he had to gasp at the force of the invention.

It came like a flash of lightning.

‘You told Mrs Ota about the Inamura girl, didn’t you?’

Kikuji remembered, but feigned ignorance. ‘It was you, wasn’t it, who told her that everything was arranged?’

‘I did. I told her not to interfere. It was the night she died.’

Kikuji was silent.

‘How did you know I telephoned? Did she come weeping to you?’

She had trapped him.

‘Of course she did. I can guess from the way she screamed at me over the telephone.’

‘Then it’s very much as if you killed her, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose that conclusion makes things easier for you. Well, I’m used to being the villain. When your father needed a villain, he found me quite ideal. It’s not exactly that I’m returning an old favor, but I’m here to play the villain today.’

Kikuji knew that she was giving vent to the old, deep jealousy.

‘But we won’t worry about what goes on backstage.’ She looked down her nose. ‘I don’t care in the least if you sit there glowering at the nasty old woman who comes meddling. Before long I’ll have gotten rid of the witch and made a good marriage for you.’

‘I must ask you to stop talking about this good marriage you’re making for me.’

‘Certainly. I don’t want to talk about Mrs Ota any more than you do.’ Her voice softened. ‘I don’t mean that she was bad. She was only hoping that when she died the daughter would naturally go to you.’

‘The nonsense begins again.’

‘But isn’t it the truth? Do you really think that while she was alive she didn’t once think of marrying the daughter off to you? That’s very absent-minded of you. Waking and sleeping, brooding over your father, almost bewitched, I used to think – if you want to call her emotions pure I suppose they were. She was half out of her mind, and she managed to involve the daughter too, and finally she gave her life. Pure she may have been, but to the rest of us it all sounds like some terrible curse, some witch’s net she was laying for us.’

Kikuji’s eyes met hers.

Her small eyes rolled up at him.

Unable to shake them off, Kikuji looked away.

He withdrew into himself and let her talk on. His position had
been weak from the start, and that strange remark had shaken him.

Had the dead woman really thought of marrying her daughter to him? Kikuji did not want to linger over the possibility. It was unreal, a product of that venomous jealousy. Of ugly suspicions, clinging to her breast like the ugly birthmark.

He was deeply uneasy.

Had he not hoped for the same thing?

One’s heart could indeed move from mother to daughter; but if, still drunk in the embrace of the mother, he had not sensed that he was being passed on to the daughter, had he not in fact been the captive of withcraft?

And had his whole nature not changed after he met Mrs Ota?

He felt numb.

The maid came in. ‘Miss Ota said she would stop by again if you were busy.’

‘She left, then?’ Kikuji stood up.

2

‘It was good of you to telephone this morning.’ Fumiko looked up at him, showing the full curve of her long, white throat.

There was a yellowish shadow in the hollow from throat to breast.

Whether it was a play of light or a sign of weariness, it somehow gave him rest.

‘Kurimoto is here.’

He was able to speak calmly. He had come out feeling tense and constrained, but at the sight of Fumiko the tension strangely left him.

She nodded. ‘I saw Miss Kurimoto’s umbrella.’

‘Oh. That one?’

There was a long-handled gray umbrella by the door.

‘Suppose you wait in the cottage. Old Kurimoto will be leaving soon.’

He wondered why, knowing that Fumiko was coming, he had not sent Chikako away.

‘It doesn’t make any difference as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Come on in, then.’

Shown into the drawing room, Fumiko greeted Chikako as if she did not suspect the hostility. She thanked Chikako for her condolences.

Chikako hunched her left shoulder and threw her head back, as when she watched a pupil at tea.

‘Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I’m watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people.’

‘Mother wasn’t as gentle as all that.’

‘It must have troubled her to die and leave an only daughter behind.’

Fumiko looked at the floor.

The mouth with its pouting lower lip was drawn tight.