Taking his hand from hers, Katsuo went over to the monkey cage. Tomoko stood over him. Possibly because of the wind, the monkey smell was strong. The monkey gazed at them with wrinkled forehead. As it moved from one branch to another, a hand carefully pressed to its hips, Tomoko could see at the side of the oldish little face a dirty ear with red veins showing through. She had never looked so carefully at an animal before.
Beside the cage was a pond. The fountain in the middle was turned off. There were beds of portulaca around the brick rim, on which a child about Katsuo's age was teetering precariously.
His parents were nowhere in sight.
I hope he falls in. I hope he falls in and drowns.
Tomoko watched the uncertain legs. The child did not fall.
When he had been once round, he noticed Tomoko's gaze and laughed proudly. Tomoko did not laugh. It was as if the child were making fun of her.
She took Katsuo by the hand and hurried down from the roof.
At dinner, Tomoko spoke after rather too long a silence:
'Aren't you quiet, though! And you don't seem the least bit sad.'
Startled, Masaru looked to see whether anyone had heard.
'You don't see? I'm only trying to cheer you up.'
'There's no need to do that.'
'So you say. But what about the effect on Katsuo?'
'I don't deserve to be a mother, anyway.'
And so the dinner was ruined.
Masaru tended more and more to retreat before his wife's sorrow. A man has work to do. He can distract himself with.his work. Meanwhile Tomoko nursed the sorrow. Masaru had to face this monotonous sorrow when he came home, and so he began coming home later at night.
Tomoko phoned a maid who had worked for her long before and gave away all of Kiyoo's and Keiko's clothes and toys. The maid had children of about the same ages.
One morning Tomoko awoke a little later than usual.
Masaru, who had been drinking again the night before, lay 23
curled up on his side of the double bed There was still a dank smell of liquor. -The springs squeaked as he turned over in his sleep. Now that Katsuo was alone, she let him sleep in their second-floor bedroom, though she knew of course that it would be better not to. Through the white mosquito net over their own bed and the net over Katsuo's she looked at the child's sleeping face. He always wore a sort of pout when he slept.
Tomoko reached out of the mosquito net for the curtain cord The roughness of the stiff cord in its hempen cover was pleasant against her sweaty hand The curtain parted a little.
The light struck the sandalwood-tree from below, so that the shadows piled on each other, and the wide clusters of leaves were even softer than usual. Sparrows were chirping noisily.
Every morning they would wake up and start chattering to one another, and apparently they would then form a line and run up and down the gutter. The confused patter of little feet would go from one end of the gutter to the other and back again.
Tomoko smiled as she listened.
It was a blessed morning. She had to feel that it was, for no reason at all. She lay quietly with her head still on the pillow.
A feeling of happiness diffused itself through her whole body.
Suddenly she gasped. She knew why she was so happy. Last night for the first time she had not dreamed of the children.
Every night she had dreamed of them, and last night she had not. She had had instead some pleasant, foolish little dream.
She had forgotten so soon, then - her heartlessness struck her as fearful. She wept tears of apology to the children's spirits.
Masaru opened his eyes and looked at her. But he saw a sort of peace in the weeping, and not the usual anguish.
"You thought of them again?'
'Yes.' It seemed too much trouble to tell the truth.
But now that she had told a lie, she was annoyed that her husband did not weep with her. If she had seen tears in his eyes, she might have been able to believe her lie.
The forty-ninth-day services were over. Masaru bought a lot in the Tama Cemetery. These were the first deaths in his branch 24
of the family, and the first graves. Yasue was charged with watching over the children on the Far Shore too: by agreement with the main family, her ashes were to be buried in the same Jot. Tomoko's fears came to seem groundless as the sadness only grew deeper. She went with Masaru and Katsuo to see the new cemetery lot Already it was early autumn.
It was a beautiful day. The heat was leaving the high, clear sky. Memory sometimes makes hours run side by side for us, or pile one on another. It played this strange trick on Tomoko twice in the course of the day. Perhaps, with the sky and the sunlight almost too clear, the edges of her subconscious too were somehow made half transparent.
Two months before the drownings, there had been that car accident. Masaru had not been hurt, of course, but after the drownings Tomoko never rode with him in the car when she took Katsuo out. Today Masaru too had to go by train.
They changed at M. for the little branch line to the cemetery.
Masaru got off the train first with Katsuo. Held back in the crowd, Tomoko was able to get off only a second or two before the door closed. She heard a shrill whistle as the door slid shut behind her, and, almost screaming, she turned and tried to force it open again. She thought she had left Kiyoo and Keiko inside.
Masaru led her off by the arm. She looked at him defiantly, as if he were a detective arresting her. Coming to herself an instant later, she tried to explain what had happened - she must explain somehow. But the explanation only made Masaru uncomfortable. He thought she was acting.
Young Katsuo was delighted at the old-fashioned locomotive that took them to the cemetery. It had a high funnel, and it was wonderfully tall, as though on stilts. The wooden sill on which the engineer leaned his elbow might have been made of coal.
The locomotive groaned and sighed and gnashed its teeth, and finally started off through the unexciting suburban market gardens.
Tomoko, who had never been to the Tama Cemetery before, 25
was astonished at its brightness. So wide a space, then, was given to the dead? The green lawns, the wide tree-lined avenues, the blue sky above, clear far into the distance. The city of the dead was cleaner and better ordered than the city of the living.
She and her husband had had no cause to learn of cemeteries, but it did not seem unfortunate that they had now become qualified visitors. While neither of them especially thought about the matter, it seemed that the period of mourning, an unrelieved parade of the dark and the sinister, had brought them a sort of security, something stable, easy, pleasant even.; They had become conditioned to death, and, as when people are conditioned to depravity, they had come to feel that life held nothing they need fear.
The lot was on the far side of the cemetery. Perspiring freely as they walked in from the gate, they looked curiously at Admiral T's grave, and laughed at a large, tasteless tombstone decorated with mirrors.
Tomoko listened to the subdued humming of the autumn cicadas, and smelled the incense and the cool, shady grass.
'What a nice place. They'll have room to play, and they won't be bored. I can't help thinking it will be good for them. Strange, isn't it?'
Katsuo was thirsty. There was a high brown tower at the crossroads. The circular steps at the base were stained from the leaking fountain in the centre. Several children, tired of chasing dragonflies, were noisily drinking water and squirting water at each other. Now and then a spray of water traced a thin rain-bow through the air.
Katsuo was a child of action. He wanted a drink, and there was no help for it. Taking advantage of the fact that his mother was not holding his hand, he ran towards the steps. Where was he going? she called sharply, For a drink of water, he answered over his shoulder. She ran after him and took both his arms firmly from behind. 'That hurt,' he protested. He was frightened. Some terrible creature had pounced upon him from behind.
Tomoko knelt in the coarse gravel and turned him towards 26
her. He looked at his father, gazing in astonishment from beside a hedge some distance off.
'You are not to drink that water. We have some here.'
She began to unscrew the lid of the thermos flask on her knee.
They reached their bit of property. It was in a newly opened section of the cemetery behind rows of tombstones. Frail young box-trees were planted here and there, after a definite pattern, one could see if one looked carefully. The ashes had not yet been moved from the family temple, and there was no grave marker. There was only a roped-off bit of level land.
'And all three of them will be here together,' said Masaru.
The remark did little to Tomoko. How, she wondered, could facts be so completely improbable? For one child to drown in the ocean - that could happen, and no doubt anyone would accept it as a fact. But for three people to drown; that was ridiculous. And yet ten thousand was different again. There was something ridiculous about the excessive, and yet there was nothing ridiculous about a great natural catastrophe, or war. One death was somehow grave and solemn, as were a million deaths. The slightly excessive was different.
Three of them. What nonsense! Three of them,' she said.
It was too large a number for one family, too small a number for society. And there were none of the social implications of death in battle or death at one's post. Selfish in her womanly way, she turned over and over again the riddle of this number.
Masaru. the social being, had in the course of time come to note that it was convenient to see the matter as society saw it; they were in fact lucky that there were no social implications.
Back at the station, Tomoko fell victim again to that doubling up of time. They had to wait twenty minutes for the train.; Katsuo wanted one of the toy badgers on sale in front of the station. The badgers, dangling from sticks, were of cotton wad*
ding scorched a badger colour, to which were added eyes, ears, and tails.;
'You can still buy these badgers!' exclaimed Tomoko.
'And children seem to like them as much as ever,'
27
'I had one when I was a child.'
Tomoko bought a badger from the old woman at the stall and gave it to Katsuo. And a moment later she caught herself looking around at the other stalls. She would have to buy something for Kiyoo and Keiko, who had been left at home,
'What is it?' asked Masaru.
'I wonder what's the matter with me. I was thinking I had to buy something for the others.' Tomoko raised her plump white arms and rubbed roughly with clenched fists at her eyes and temples. Her nostrils trembled as though she were about to weep.
'Go ahead and buy something. Buy something for them.'
Masaru's tone was tense and almost pleading. 'We can put it on the altar.'
'No. They have to be alive.' Tomoko pressed her handkerchief to her nose. She was living, the others were dead. That was the great evil. How cruel it was to have to be alive.
She looked around her again: at the red flags hanging from the bars and restaurants in front of the station, at the gleaming white sections of granite piled high before the tombstone shops, at the yellowing paper-panelled doors on the second floors, at the roof tiles, at the blue sky, now darkening towards evening clear as porcelain. It was all so clear, so well defined. In the very cruelty of life was a deep peace, as of falling into a faint Autumn wore on, and the life of the family became day by day more tranquil. Not of course that grief was quite discarded.
As Masaru saw his wife growing calmer, however, the joys of home and affection for Katsuo began to bring him back early from work; and even if, after Katsuo was in bed, the talk turned to what they both wanted not to talk of, they were able to find a sort of consolation in it.
The process by which so fearful an event could melt back into everyday life brought on a new sort of fear, mixed with shame, as if they had committed a crime that was finally to go undetected. The knowledge, always with them, that three people were missing from the family seemed at times to give a strange sense of fulfilment.
28
No one went mad, no one committed suicide. No one was even ill. The terrible event had passed and left scarcely a shadow. Tomoko came to feel bored. It was as if she were waiting for something.
They had long forbidden themselves plays and concerts, but Tomoko presently found excuses: such pleasures were in fact meant to comfort the grieving. A famous violinist from America was on a concert tour, and they had tickets. Katsuo was forced to stay at home, partly at least because Tomoko wanted to drive to the concert with her husband.
She was a long time getting ready. It took long to redo hair that had for months been left unattended. Her face in the mirror, when she was ready, was enough to bring back memories of long-forgotten pleasures. How to describe the pleasure of quite losing oneself in a mirror? She had forgotten what a delight a mirror could be - no doubt grief, with its stubborn insistence on the self, drew one away from such ecstasies.
She tried on kimono after kimono, finally choosing a lavish purple one and a brocade obi. Masaru, waiting behind the wheel of the car, was astonished at his beautiful wife.
People turned to look at her all up and down the lobby.
Masaru was immensely pleased. It seemed to Tomoko herself, however, that no matter how beautiful people thought her, something would be lacking. There had been a time when she would have gone home quite satisfied after having attracted so much attention. This gnawing dissatisfaction, she told herself, must be the product of liveliness and gaiety that only emphasized how far from healed her grief was. But as a matter of fact it was only a recurrence of the vague dissatisfaction she had felt at not being treated as became a woman of sorrows.
The music had its effect on her, and she walked through the lobby with a sad expression on her face. She spoke to a friend.
The expression seemed quite to suit the words of consolation the friend murmured. The friend introduced the young man with her. The young man knew nothing of Tomoko's sorrows and said nothing by way of consolation. His talk was of the most ordinary, including one or two lightly critical remarks about the music..
29
What a rude young man, thought Tomoko, looking at the shining head as it moved off through the crowd. He said nothing. And he must have seen how sad I was.
The young man was tall and stood out in the crowd. As he turned to one side, Tomoko saw the eyebrows and the laughing eyes, and a lock of hair straying down over the forehead. Only the top of the woman's head was visible.
Tomoko felt a stab of jealousy. Had she hoped to have from (he young man something besides consolation, then - had she wanted other, rather special words? Her whole moral being quaked at the thought. She had to tell herself that this new suspicion was quite at odds with reason. She who had never once been dissatisfied with her husband.
'Are you thirsty?' asked Masaru, who had been speaking to a friend. 'There's an orangeade stand over there.'
People were sucking the orange liquid from tilted bottles.
Tomoko looked over with the puzzled squint one so often sees on the nearsighted. She was not in the least thirsty. She remembered the day she had kept Katsuo from the fountain and had made him drink boiled water instead. Katsuo was not the only one in danger. There must be all sorts of little germs milling about in the orangeade.
She went slightly insane in her pursuit of pleasure. There was something vengeful in this feeling that she must have pleasure.
Not of course that she was tempted to be unfaithful to her husband. Wherever she went, she was with him or wanted to be. Her conscience dwelt rather on the dead. Back from some amusement, she would look at the sleeping face of Katsuo, who had been put to bed early by the maid, and as she thought of the two dead children she would be quite overcome with remorse.
Indeed the pursuit of pleasure became a sure way to stir up a pang of conscience.
Tomoko remarked suddenly that she wanted to take up sewing. This was not the first time Masaru had found it hard to follow the twists and jumps in a woman's thinking, 30
Tomoko began her sewing. Her pursuit of pleasure became less strenuous. She quietly looked about her, meaning to become the complete family woman. She felt that she was
'looking life square in the face'.
There were clear traces of neglect in her reappraised surroundings. She felt as if she had come back from a long trip.
She would spend a whole day washing and a whole day putting things in order. The middle-aged maid had all her work snatched away from her.
Tomoko came on a pair of Kiyoo's shoes, and a little pair of light-blue felt slippers that had belonged to Keiko. Such relics would plunge her into meditation, and make her weep pleasant tears; but they all seemed tainted with bad luck. She telephoned a friend who was immersed in charities, and, feeling most elev-ated, gave everything to an orphanage, even clothes that might fit Katsuo.
As she sat at her sewing machine, Katsuo accumulated a wardrobe. She thought of making herself some fashionable new hats, but she had no time for that. At the machine, she forgot her sorrows. The hum and the mechanical movements cut off that other erratic melody, her emotional ups and downs.
Why had she not tried this mechanical cutting-off of the emotions earlier? But then of course it came at a time when her heart no longer put up the resistance it would once have. One day she pricked her finger, and a drop of blood oozed out. She was frightened. Pain was associated with death.
But the fear was followed by a different emotion: if such a trivial accident should indeed bring death, that would be an answer to a prayer. She spent more and more time at the machine. It was the safest of machines, however. It did not even touch her.
Even now, she was dissatisfied, waiting for something.
Masaru would turn away from this vague seeking, and they would go for a whole day without speaking to each other.
Winter approached. The tomb was ready, and the ashes were buried.
In the loneliness of winter, one thinks longingly of summer.
Memories of summer threw an even sharper shadow across their lives. And yet the memories had come to seem like something out of a storybook. There was no avoiding the fact that, around the winter fire, everything took on an air of fiction.
In midwinter, there were signs that Tomoko was pregnant.
For the first time, forgetfulness came as a natural right. Never before had they been quite so careful - it seemed strange that the child might be born safely, and only natural that they should lose it.
Everything was going well. A line was drawn between than and old memories. Borrowing strength from the child she was carrying, Tomoko for the first time had the courage to admit the pain was gone. She had only to recognize that fact.
Tomoko tried to understand. It is difficult to understand while an incident is before one's eyes, however. Understanding comes later. One analyses the emotions, and deduces, and explains to oneself. On looking back, Tomoko could not but feel dissatisfied with her inadequate emotions. There could be no doubt that the dissatisfaction would stay longer, a drag on her heart, than the sorrow itself. But there could be no going back for another try.
She refused to admit any incorrectness in her responses. She was a mother. And at the same time she could not leave off doubting.
While true forgetfulness had not yet come, something covered Tomoko's sorrow as a thin coating of ice covers a lake.
Occasionally it would break, but overnight it would form again.
Forgetfulness began to show its real strength when they were not watching it. It filtered in. It found the tiniest opening, and filtered in. It attacked the organism like an invisible germ, it worked slowly but steadily. Tomoko was going through unconscious motions as when one resists a dream. She was most uneasy, resisting forgetfulness.
She told herself that forgetfulness came through the strength of the child inside her. But it was only helped by the child. The outlines of the incident were slowly giving way, dimming, blurring, weathering, disintegrating,
32
There had appeared in the summer sky a fearsome marble image, white and stark. It had dissolved into a cloud - the arms had dropped off, the head was gone, the long sword in the hand had fallen. The expression on the stone face had been enough to raise the hair, but slowly it had blurred and softened.
One day she switched off a radio drama about a mother who had lost a child. She was a little astonished at the promptness with which she thus disposed of the burden of memory. A mother awaiting her fourth child, she felt, had a moral obligation to resist the almost dissolute pleasure of losing herself in grief. Tomoko had changed in these last few months.
For the sake of the child, she must hold off dark waves of emotion. She must keep her inward balance. She was far more pleased with the dictates of mental hygiene than she could be with insidious forgetfulness. Above all, she felt free. With all the injunctions, she felt free. Forgetfulness was of course demonstrating its power. Tomoko was astonished at how easily managed her heart was.
She lost the habit of remembering, and it no longer seemed strange that the tears failed to come at memorial services or visits to the cemetery. She believed that she had become mag-nanimous, that she could forgive anything. When for instance spring came and she took Katsuo walking in a near-by park, she was no longer able to feel, even if she tried, the spite that would have swept over her immediately after the tragedy had she come upon children playing in the sand. Because she had forgiven them, all these children were living in peace. So it seemed to her.
While forgetfulness came to Masaru sooner than to his wife, that was no sign of coldness on his part. It was rather Masaru who had wallowed in sentimental grief. A man even in his fickleness is generally more sentimental than a woman. Unable to stretch out the emotion, and conscious of the fact that grief was not particularly stubborn in following him about, Masaru suddenly felt alone, and he allowed himself a trifling infidelity.
He quickly tired of it. Tomoko became pregnant. He hurried back to her like a child hurrying to its mother.
The tragedy left them as a castaway leaves a sinking ship.
T-DOHI 33
Soon they were able to view it as it must have seemed to people Who noticed it in a corner of the newspapers that day. Tomoko and Masaru even wondered if they had had a part in it. Had they not been but the spectators who happened to be nearest?
All who had actually participated in the incident had died, and would participate for ever. For us to have a part in a historical incident, our very existence must somehow be at stake. And what had Masaru and his wife had at stake? In the first place, had they had time to put anything at stake?
The incident shone far away, a lighthouse on a distant headland. It flashed on and off, like the revolving light on Cape Tsiimeki, south of A. Beach. Rather than an injury it became a moral lesson, and it changed from a concrete fact to a meta-phor. It was no longer the property of the Ikuta family, it was public. As the lighthouse shines on beach wastes, and on waves baring their white fangs at lonely rocks all through the night, and on the groves around it, so the incident shone on the complex everyday life around them. People should read the lesson.
An old, simple lesson that parents may be expected to have engraved on their minds: You have to watch children constantly when you take them to the beach. People drown where you would never think it possible.
Not that Masaru and his wife had sacrificed two children and a sister to teach a lesson. The loss of the three had served no other purpose, however, and many a heroic death produces as little.
Tomoko's fourth child was a girl, born late in the summer.
Their happiness was unbounded. Masaru's parents came from Kanazawa to see the new grandchild, and while they were in Tokyo Masaru took them to the cemetery.
They named the child Momoko. Mother and child did well -
Tomoko knew how to take care of a baby. And Katsuo was delighted to have a sister again.
It was the following summer - two years after the drowning, a year after Momoko's birth. Tomoko startled Masaru by saying she wanted to go to A. Beach.
34
'Didn't you say you would never go there again?'
'But I want to.'
'Aren't you strange? I don't want to at all, myself.'
'Oh? Let's forget about it, then.'
She was silent for two or three days. Then she said: 'I would like to go.'
'Go by yourself.'
T couldn't.'
'Why?'
•I'd be afraid.'
'Why do you want to go to a place you're afraid of?'
'I want all of us to go. We would have been all right if you'd been along. I want you to go too.'
'You can't tell what might happen if you stay too long. And I can't take much time off.'
'One night will be enough.'
'But it's such an out-of-the-way place.'
He asked her again what had made her want to go. She only answered that she did not know. Then he remembered one of the rules in the detective stories he was so fond of: the mur-derer always wants to go back to the scene of the crime, whatever the risks. Tomoko was taken by a strange impulse to revisit the place where the children died.
Tomoko asked a third time - with no particular urgency, in the same monotonous way as before - and Masaru determined to take two days off, avoiding the week-end crowds. The Eirakuso was the only inn at A. Beach. They reserved rooms as far as possible from that unhappy room. Tomoko as always refused to drive with her husband when the children were along.
The four of them, husband and wife and Katsuo and Momoko, took a taxi from Ito.
It was the height of the summer. Behind the houses along the way were sunflowers, shaggy as lions' manes. The taxi scattered dust on the open, honest faces, but the sunflowers seemed quite undisturbed.
As the sea came in sight to the left, Katsuo gave a squeal of delight. He was five now, and it was two years since he had last been to the coast.
35
They talked little in the taxi. It was shaking too violently to be the best place for conversation. Momoko now and then said something they understood. Katsuo taught her the word 'sea', and she pointed out of the other window at the bald red mountain and said: 'Sea.' To Masaru it was as if Katsuo were teach-ing the baby an unlucky word.
They arrived at the Eirakuso, and the same manager came out. Masaru tipped him. He remembered only too clearly how his hand had trembled with that other thousand-yen note.
The inn was quiet. It was a bad year. Masaru began remembering things and became irritable. He scolded his wife in front of the children.
'Why the devil did we come here? We only remember things we don't want to. Things we had finally forgotten. There are any number of decent places we could have gone to on our first trip with Momoko. And I'm too busy to be taking foolish trips.'
'But you agreed to, didn't you?'
'You kept at me.'
The grass was baking in the afternoon sun. Everything was exactly as two years before. A blue-green-and-red swimming suit was drying on the white swing. Two or three quoits lay around the peg, half-hidden in the grass. The lawn was shady where Yasue's body had lain. The sun, leaking through the trees to the bare grass, stemmed suddenly to dapple the undulations of Yasue's green bathing suit - it was the way the flecks of light moved with the wind. Masaru did not know that the body had lain there. Only Tomoko had the illusion. Just as for Masaru the incident itself had not happened while he did not know of it, so that patch of grass would be for ever only a quiet, shady corner. For him, and still more for the other guests, thought Tomoko.
His wife was silent, and Masaru tired of scolding her. Katsuo went down into the garden and rolled a quoit across the grass.
He squatted down and watched intently to see where it would go. It bounced awkwardly through the shadows, took a sudden jump, and fell. Katsuo watched, motionless. He thought it should get up again.
36
The cicadas were humming. Masaru, now silent, felt the sweat coming out around his collar. He remembered his duty as a father. 'Let's go down to the beach, Katsuo.'
Tomoko carried Momoko. The four of them went through the gate in the hedge and out under the pine-trees. The waves came in swiftly and spread shining over the beach.
It was low tide, and they could make their way round the rock to the beach. Taking Katsuo by the hand, Masaru walked across the hot sands in pattens borrowed from the inn.
There was not a single beach umbrella. They could see no more than twenty people the whole length of the bathing beach, which began from just beyond the rock.
They stood silently at the edge of the water.
There were grand clusters of clouds again today, piled one upon another. It seemed strange that a mass so heavy with light could be borne in the air. Above the packed clouds at the horizon, light clouds trailed away as though left behind in the blue by a broom. The clouds below seemed to be enduring something, holding out against something. Excesses of light and shade cloaked in form, a dark, inchoate passion shaped by a will radiant and architectural, as in music.
From beneath the clouds, the sea came towards them, far wider and more changeless than the land. The land never seems to take the sea, even its inlets. Particularly along a wide bow of coast, the sea sweeps in from everywhere.
The waves came up, broke, fell back. Their thunder was like the intense quiet of the summer sun, hardly a noise at all.
Rather an ear-splitting silence. A lyrical transformation of the waves, not waves, but rather ripples one might call the light, derisive laughter of the waves at themselves - ripples came up to their feet, and retreated again.
Masaru glanced sideways at his wife.
She was gazing out to sea. Her hair blew in the sea breeze, and she seemed undismayed at the sun. Her eyes were moist and almost regal. Her mouth was closed tight. In her arms she held one-year-old Mokomo, who wore a little straw hat.
Masaru had seen that face before. Since the tragedy, Tomoko's face had often worn that expression, as if she had 37
forgotten herself, and as if she were waiting for something. ,
'What are you waiting for?' he wanted to ask lightly.
But the words did not come. He thought he knew without asking.
He clutched tighter at Katsuo's hand.
Translated and abridged by Edward G. Seidensticker Three Million Yen
We're to meet her at nine?' asked Kenzo.
'At nine, she said, in the toy department on the ground floor,'
replied Kiyoko. 'But it's too noisy to talk there, and I told her about the coffee shop on the third floor instead.'
That was a good idea.'
The young husband and wife looked up at the neon pagoda atop the New World Building, which they were approaching from the rear.
It was a cloudy, muggy night, of a sort common in the early-summer rainy season. Neon lights painted the low sky in rich colours: The delicate pagoda, flashing on and off in the softer of neon tones, was very beautiful indeed. It was particularly beautiful when, after all the flashing neon tubes had gone out together, they suddenly flashed on again, so soon that the after-image had scarcely disappeared. To be seen from all over Asakusa, the pagoda had replaced Gourd Pond, now filled in, as the main landmark of the Asakusa night.
To Kenzo and Kiyoko the pagoda seemed to encompass in all its purity some grand, inaccessible dream of life. Leaning against the rail of the parking lot, they looked absently up at it for a time.
Kenzo was in an undershirt, cheap trousers, and wooden clogs. His skin was fair but the lines of the shoulders and chest were powerful, and bushes of black hair showed between the mounds of muscle at the armpits. Kiyoko, in a sleeveless dress, always had her own armpits carefully shaved. Kenzo was very fussy. Because they hurt when the hair began to grow again, she had become almost obsessive about keeping them shaved, and there was a faint flush on the white skin.
She had a round little face, the pretty features as though 39
woven of cloth. It reminded one of some earnest, unsmiling little animal. It was a face which a person trusted immediately, but not one on which to read thoughts. On her arm she had a large pink plastic handbag and Kenzo's pale blue sports shirt.
Kenzo liked to be empty-handed.
From her modest coiffure and make-up one sensed the fru-gality of their life. Her eyes were clear and had no time for other men.
They crossed the dark road in front of the parking lot and went into the New World. The big market on the ground floor was filled with myriad-coloured mountains of splendid, gleaming, cheap wares, and salesgirls peeped from crevices in the mountains. Cool fluorescent lighting poured over the scene.
Behind a grove of antimony models of the Tokyo Tower was a row of mirrors painted with Tokyo scenes, and in them, as the two passed, were rippling, waving images of the mountain of ties and summer shirts opposite.
'I couldn't stand living in a place with so many mirrors,' said Kiyoko. 'I'd be embarrassed.'
'Nothing to be embarrassed about.' Though his manner was gruff, Kenzo was not one to ignore what his wife said, and his answers were generally perceptive. The two had come to the toy department.
'She knows how you love the toy department. That's why she said to meet her here.'
Kenzo laughed. He was fond of the trains and automobiles and space missiles, and he always embarrassed Kiyoko, getting an explanation for each one and trying each one out, but never buying. She took his arm and steered him some distance from the counter.
'It's easy to see that you want a boy. Look at the toys you pick.'
'I don't care whether it's a boy or a girl. I just wish it would come soon.'
'Another two years, that's all.'
'Everything according to plan.'
They had divided the savings account they were so assiduously building up into several parts, labelled Plan X and Plan Y
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and Plan Z and the like. Children must come strictly according to plan. However much they might want a child now, it would have to wait until sufficient money for Plan X had accumulated.
Seeing the inadvisability, for numerous reasons, of hire-purchase, they waited until the money for Plan A or Plan B or Plan C had accumulated, and then paid cash for an electric washing machine or refrigerator or a television set. Plan A and Han B had already been carried out. Plan D required little money, but since it had as its object a low-priority wardrobe, it was always being pushed back. Neither of them was much interested in clothes. What they had they could hang in the cloak-room, and all they really needed was enough to keep them warm in the winter.
They were very cautious when making a large purchase.
They collected catalogues and looked at various possibilities and asked the advice of people who had already made the purchase, and, when the time for buying finally came, went off to a wholesaler in Okachimachi.
A child was still more serious. First there had to be a secure livelihood and enough money, more than enough money, to see that the child had surroundings of which a parent need not be ashamed, if not, perhaps, enough to see it all the way to adulthood. Kenzo had already made thorough inquiries with friends who had children, and knew what expenditures for powdered milk could be considered reasonable.
With their own plans so nicely formed, the two had nothing but contempt for the thoughtless, floundering ways of the poor.
Children were to be produced according to plan in surroundings ideal for rearing them, and the best days were waiting after a child had arrived. Yet they were sensible enough not to pursue their dreams too far. They kept their eyes on the light immediately before them.
There was nothing that enraged Kenzo more than the view of the young that life in contemporary Japan was without hope.
He was not a person given to deep thinking, but he had an almost religious faith that if a man respected nature and was obedient to it, and if he but made an effort for himself, the way would somehow open. The first thing was reverence for nature, 41
founded on connubial affection. The greatest antidote for despair was the faith of a man and woman in each other.
Fortunately, he was in love with Kiyoko. To face the future hopefully, therefore, he had only to follow the conditions laid down by nature. Now and then some other woman made a motion in his direction, but he sensed something unnatural in pleasure for the sake of pleasure. It was better to listen to Kiyoko complaining about the dreadful price these days of veg-etables and fish.
The two had made a round of the market and were back at the toy department.
Kenzo's eyes were riveted to the toy before him, a station for flying saucers. On the sheet-metal base the complicated mechanism was painted as if viewed through a window, and a revolving light flashed on and off inside the control tower. The flying saucer, of deep blue plastic, worked on the old principle of the flying top. The station was apparently suspended in space, for the background of the metal base was covered with stars and clouds, among the former the familiar rings of Saturn.
The bright stars of the summer night were splendid. The painted metal surface was indescribably cool, and it was as if all the discomfort of the muggy night would go if a person but gave himself up to that sky.
Before Kiyoko could stop him, Kenzo had resolutely snapped a spring at one corner of the station.
The saucer went spinning towards the ceiling.
The salesgirl reached out and gave a little cry.
The saucer described a gentle arc towards the pastry counter across the aisle and settled square on the million-yen biscuits.
'We're in!' Kenzo ran over to it.
'What do you mean, we're in?' Embarrassed, Kiyoko turned quickly away from the salesgirl and started after him.
'Look. Look where it landed. This means good luck. Not a doubt about it.'
The oblong biscuits were in the shape of decidedly large banknotes, and the baked-in design, again like a banknote, carried the words 'One Million Yen'. On the printed label of the 42
cellophane wrapper, the figure of a bald shopkeeper took the place of Prince Shotoku, who decorates most banknotes. There were three large biscuits in each package.
Over the objections of Kiyoko, who thought fifty yen for these biscuits ridiculous, Kenzo bought a package to make doubly sure of the good luck. He immediately broke the wrapping, gave a biscuit to Kiyoko, and took one himself. The third went into her handbag.
As his strong teeth bit into the biscuit, a sweet, slightly bitter taste flowed into his mouth. Kiyoko took a little mouselike bite from her own biscuit, almost too large for her grasp.
Kenzo brought the flying saucer back to the toy counter.: The salesgirl, out of sorts, looked away as she reached to take it.
Kiyoko had high, arched breasts, and, though she was small, her figure was good. When she walked with Kenzo she seemed to be hiding in his shadow. At street crossings he would take her arm firmly, look to the right and the left, and help her across, pleased at the feel of the rich flesh.
Kenzo liked the pliant strength in a woman who, although she could perfectly well do things for herself, always deferred to her husband. Kiyoko had never read a newspaper, but she had an astonishingly accurate knowledge of her surroundings.
When she took a comb in her hand or turned over the leaf of a calendar or folded a summer kimono, it was not as if she were engaged in housework, but rather as if, fresh and alert, she were keeping company with the 'things' known as comb and calendar and kimono. She soaked in her world of things as she might soak in a bath
'There's an indoor amusement park on the fourth floor. We can kill time there,' said Kenzo. Kiyoko followed silently into a waiting lift, but when they reached the fourth floor she tugged at his belt.
'It's a waste of money. Everything seems so cheap, but it's all arranged so that you spend more money than you intend to.'
'That's no way to talk. This is our good night, and if you tell yourself it's like a first-run movie it doesn't seem so expensive.'
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'What's the sense in a first-run movie? If you wait a little while you can see it for half as much.'
Her earnestness was most engaging. A brown smudge from the biscuit clung to her puckered lips.
'Wipe your mouth,' said Kenzo. 'You're making a mess of yourself.'
Kiyoko looked into a mirror on a near-by pillar and removed the smear with the nail of her little finger. She still had two-thirds of a biscuit in her hand.
They were at the entrance to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'. Jagged rocks reached to the ceiling, and the porthole of a submarine on the sea floor served as the ticket window: forty yen for adults, twenty yen for children.
'But forty yen is too high,' said Kiyoko, turning away from the mirror. 'You aren't any less hungry after you look at all those cardboard fish, and for forty yen you can get a hundred grams of the best kind of real fish.'
'Yesterday they wanted forty for a cut of black snapper. Oh, well. When you're chewing on a million yen you don't talk like a beggar.'
The brief debate finished, Kenzo bought the tickets.
'You've let that biscuit go to your head.'
'But it isn't bad at all. Just right when you're hungry.'
'You just ate.'
At a landing like a railway platform five or six little boxcars, each large enough for two people, stood at intervals along a track. Three or four other couples were waiting, but the two climbed unabashedly into a car. It was in fact a little tight for two, and Kenzo had to put his arm around his wife's shoulders.
The operator was whistling somewhat disdainfully. Kenzo's powerful arm, on which the sweat had dried, was solid against Kiyoko's naked shoulders and back. Naked skin clung to naked skin like the layers of some intricately folded insect's wing. The car began to shake.
'I'm afraid,' said Kiyoko, with the expression of one not in the least afraid.
The cars, each some distance from the rest, plunged into a