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'Was it during the rainy season, I wonder - once at a hotel you had stomach cramps and we had to call a doctor. You had us all in a cold sweat.'

'I thought I was going to die. And that brassy doctor only made things worse. I didn't like him at all.'

The bill was high too.'

'I remember the kimono I had on that night. It was a summer kimono, naturally, heavy silk with horizontal stripes sewn so that stripes met at the seams in different colours. First a stripe of blurry sepia, maybe three inches wide, then a stripe of grey the same width, and on top of that white. Do you remember?'

'Very well.' In fact, the memory had dimmed.

The obi was a good one too - two sprays of white bamboo on a vermilion background. But I never wore it again. I was always afraid of stomach cramps.'

It was a strange combination: a woman in a black cocktail suit, a jewelled pin on her breast, bringing a lipstick-smeared wineglass to her mouth time after time and talking of an old kimono.

Only a little more and Kawase would have said it: That business about the thermos flask this morning - it made me wonder if you were getting even with me after all these years. As a matter of fact, my own boy ...' But he caught himself and closed his mouth just in time.

They had parted five years before in most unpleasant circumstances. The quarrel began when one of Asaka's colleagues, Kikuchiyo, passed on a secret to Kawase. She asked if Kawase knew that Asaka had been very friendly with a big export trader for some months, that he was going to redeem her from her obligations as a geisha, and that the two had already gone off together to Hakone a number of times. To Kawase this was startling news. Although it was broad daylight, he summoned Asaka to their usual rendezvous, a snack bar over a Ginza shoe-shop.

His indignation did not entirely make sense. One could ask, in the first place, if it was not out of proportion to his affection for her. All his relations with women contained a tacit understanding that he would not marry. He lost no opportunity to 61

comment cynically on those who longed for normal married life, and he always demanded that the woman join in the laughter. It followed that she would hold herself back in self-defence, and so the two would come to look upon their relationship as frank and sprightly. They wished and strove to think it so. Half for reasons of expediency and half for reasons of taste, Kawase was determined to have just such an affair with Asaka.

In the end the effort touched their vanity and brought a dim light of despair, and an emptiness came into their quips and jokes. They fell into the illusion that they were beyond being wounded.

Then Kikuchiyo brought her report. Whether true or not, it was inevitable. Kikuchiyo was merely the one who happened to be on hand when the moment arrived.

Quite aware that his indignation might be comical, Kawase was taken with another impulse, to have a try at seeing where the indignation would lead him. In fact it was for a time like the first touch of ardour he had known. He was rather pleased.

But Asaka's response was wholly unacceptable. After his own wilful fashion, he had thought that, as she had responded to his jokes with jokes of her own, so she would respond to this first show of ardour with ardour of her own. Hating to be the only comical one, he had hoped that the woman too would give herself up to the comedy and answer with appropriate excitement.

Stubbornly silent, she sat with almost excessive propriety by the window of the snack bar, almost empty in the mid-afternoon lull. The silence seemed to Kawase evidence of obtuseness. She had not seen that his excitement amounted to a first avowal of love.

He had expected to see unconcealed pleasure come into her eyes at his persistent accusations. All his troublesome pride seemed to hang on it. If he could but see the pleasure, he would forgive her everything.

It was not long before Kawase had said all he had to say and they both fell silent, avoiding each other's eyes. It was a cloudy autumn afternoon. The streets below were crowded. The dust-, 62

covered neon tubes of the cabaret across the way could be studied in great detail.

Asaka looked stubbornly out of the window. Without the slightest change of expression, she began to weep. She scarcely moved her lips as she said: 'I think I'm going to have a baby.

Your baby.'

That single remark made Kawase, who had not thought of leaving her, decide to do just that. What a cheap trick! All memory of the brisk, clean affair seemed to vanish, fallen into the dirty world of bargaining and haggling. He did not even feel like saying what most men would have said, that there was no way of knowing whose child it was. He said it all the same, very clearly, with an eye on what was to come later. If she wanted a bout of mud-slinging, he would give her what she asked for.

For the first time Kawase found himself disliking those dance-like gestures, the thick, white, professional make-up. They had Seemed like the essence of the elegant and the stylish, but now they were only symbols of vulgarity and lack of sensitivity.

He was glad that her insincerity had made up his mind for him.

'As a matter of fact, my own boy ...' Although Asaka perhaps did not guess the content of the remarks he was on the verge of making, she may have sensed that he was in danger of saying something better left unsaid. She stopped him in the Western manner, with a light, somewhat intoxicated wink.

It was nicely timed. The fact that he was stopped not by himself but by her brought a strange, sweet, melting emotion.

'And did you enjoy the cherries jubilee?' asked the waiter.

Kawase had intended to leave a 15-per-cent tip, but he left a 20-per-cent tip instead.

5. During the twelve-hour jet flight back to Japan, Kawase went time after time to the lounge for a smoke and thought of the bright morning light in his hotel, where Asaka had stayed the night.

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With a shortage of help to look after the hundreds of rooms, the rule that a guest could not have a woman in his room, current in all good hotels, had become an empty form. Outside the elevator the hotel corridor was empty late at night. There was not even a danger of being overheard, walking along the thick carpeting under rows of old-fashioned brackets. Somewhat befuddled, Asaka and Kawase bet five dollars on whether or not they could get in a dozen kisses between the elevator and the room, a considerable distance away. Kawase won.

In the morning they awoke from a brief sleep, drew back the curtains, and looked far down at San Francisco Bay, shimmer*

ing between buildings in the morning sunlight.

The day before, having breakfast alone, Kawase had scattered crumbs to the pigeons on the ledge. They flew up again this morning when he opened the window. There were no crumbs today, however, for the two of them could scarcely call for room service. Disappointed, the pigeons withdrew to a hollow below the ledge, craned their necks inquiringly for a time, and flew away. Their necks were an intricate combination of blue, brown, and green.

Below, the cable car was already clanging its way up the street. Asaka was in a black slip, her rich shoulders bare. It was flesh with which he had long been familiar, and yet, here abroad, it seemed to give off a strong, simple scent as of the meadows, quite the opposite of the artificial scent it had in kimono and powder. That the earthiness in her skin, like the effect of the sun sinking into the skins of her ancestors over the ages, should give such pleasure to a person whose skin was the same colour was one of those strange reversals possible only in a foreign country.

It was a fine, free morning, and all the bonds and restraints that had tied Kawase's heart from the morning before were miraculously swept away.

Bringing the neck of his pyjamas together against the morning chill, he said brightly: 'And what will you do this time if you have a baby?'

Asaka was seated like a foreign prostitute at the mirror, dazzling in the sunlight. She was looking at her reflection. The 64

gentle slope of the shoulders seemed to send out its own radiance.

'If I have a baby it will be Sonoda's,' she answered, briskly mentioning the name of her patron.

But as he approached Japan, that memory faded and the image of his wife and child in their loneliness grew stronger.

Kawase did not himself know why he seemed so intent upon painting them in sad, sentimental colours. Was there some force that drove him to look upon them so? His wife had written faithfully once a week in his absence, and her letters indicated that all was well.

The jet flew low over the sea. The lights were turned out to show the lights of Tokyo, and soft music played. The plane would apparently go directly into Haneda Airport from the bay off Yokohama. Clusters of lights came slowly up at them. All the strained sadness of the city - the more people crowded into it the more sadness - seemed to be in those clusters of lights.

In the heady disquiet of returning home from a long trip abroad, Kawase listened to the deep breathing of the engines and gave himself up to the precise and yet somehow frustrating flow of time and space as rows of lights at the runways emerged from the disorder.

The confusion of customs, the irritation of waiting for his luggage - performing the last duties required of the traveller at the end of the road, he climbed the red-carpeted stairs and immediately saw his wife, child in arms, among the welcomers.

She had on a lawn-green sweater and she had gained weight in his absence. The outline of her face was somehow blurred, making her if anything more attractive.

'See? There's papa,' she said to the child, who hung impass-ively on her neck, worn out by the crowd and the excitement.

At length, as if he could think of no alternative, he wrinkled his nose and smiled.

There was nothing lonely or unhappy about them. The signs were that they had been quite content in Kawase's absence. He was disappointed that his wife should be so bright and cheerful.

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Several of his subordinates went with them to his house for a home-coming party. Kawase had no chance to talk to his wife.

The child was nodding at his knee.

'Maybe he should go to bed,' said one of the men from the office.

Amid the appurtenances of Japan - straw mats, sliding paper doors, alcove, round window,, countless little dishes and decanters on the table - Kawase had become the classical Japanese gentleman once more. He had to assert his authority.

'If you show him a thermos flask, he'll be wide awake again.'

'A thermos flask?'

'Kimiko,' Kawase called to his wife, 'bring a thermos flask.'

She was slow to answer. No doubt she agreed that it was time the boy was in bed. It was after eleven. Her evasiveness greatly irritated Kawase. It came to seem that he had returned to Japan solely for the pleasure of accosting the child with a thermos flask. It was as if only that feeling of pleasure or fear, he scarcely knew which, could clear away the disquiet deep inside him since the jet flight.

Five minutes later he called to his wife again. Intoxication did not spread pleasantly as it should, but seemed to form a cold lump at the back of his head.

'What about the thermos flask?'

'Yes.'

'But see how sleepy he is,' said Komiya, the same young man.

'I think we can do without the thermos flask.'

Emboldened by sake, Komiya was being somewhat forward.

Kawase glanced at him. He was a very intelligent young man, one of the best in Kawase's section, and he had a distinctive face, thick eyebrows that came faintly together over the bridge of the nose. Catching the man's eye, Kawase felt something stab at the icy lump in his head: He knows. He knows the boy's afraid of thermos flasks.

Instead of asking why, Kawase shoved the child at Komiya, who caught it as if it were a football and looked at Kawase in frank amazement.

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'You put him to bed, then,'said Kawase.

Sensing that it was a dangerous moment, the others became even noisier. Kawase's wife slipped in, took the child from Komiya, and went off to put it to bed, almost asleep despite the clamour. The smoothness of the operation did not please Kawase.

It was one o'clock by the time the guests left.

Kawase helped his wife clear the table. Though exhausted, he felt more awake than ever and not in the least intoxicated. His displeasure seemed to have made itself known to his wife. They exchanged as few words as possible while they were engaged in this small cooperative task.

'Thank you very much. Why don't you go to bed? You must be tired.' Splashing at the dish-washer, she did not look round.

Kawase did not answer. The dishes of left-overs by the sink were starkly white in the fluorescent light.

After a time he said: 'What about the thermos flask? I knew he was sleepy, but you could have brought it on my first night home.'

'It's broken.' Over the sound of the water his wife answered in a bright, unnaturally high voice.

It was odd that Kawase did not find the news surprising.

'Who broke it? Shigeru?'

She shook her head. The stiff, heaped-up waves of hair, reset for his home-coming, shook softly.

'Who did break it, then?'

She had been washing dishes, but suddenly her arms were motionless, and he sensed that she had them braced against the stainless steel of the sink as if pushing at it. The lawn-green sweater was shaking.

'But what is there to cry about? I just asked you who broke it.' 'I broke it,' she said in little gasps.

Kawase did not have the courage to lay his hand on her shoulder. He was afraid of thermos flasks.

Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker The Priest of Shiga Temple