Death in Midsummer & Other Stories (5 page)

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.

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'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.

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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.

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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.