Death in Midsummer & Other Stories (8 page)

'My name is Hamako,' said Asaka, rather belatedly introducing her daughter. 'How do you do.' She put her hand to the child's head and urged her to bow. Hamako declined to do so, however. Instead she knelt on the stool and concentrated on the straw. She was too small to reach it sitting down.

It pleased Kawase that the child was not one for ceremony.

Her features were good, resembling those of her mother, and her profile, as she sucked at the straw and brushed away hair with her outspread hand, was very pretty. She was quiet, leaving conversation to her elders.

55

'People are always asking how I could have produced such a quiet child.' But immediately Aska returned to more adult topics.

The shop was filled with a peculiarly American odour, half the hygienic smell of medicines, half the sweet, clinging odour of bodies. The customers were almost all women, middle-aged or older, with proud eyes and heavily painted hps, attacking large sweets and open sandwiches. Despite the noise and bustle of the store, there was something very lonely about the individual women and their appetites. Sad, lonely, like a performance by so many consuming machines.

'I want a ride on the cable car,' said Hamako, who had half emptied her glass.

That's what she wants every day. And we can perfectly well afford a taxi.'

'Oh, the richest tourists ride on the cable car. You won't be lowering yourself.'

'Is that sarcasm? But I'm not surprised. You were something of a needier in the old days.'

It was Asaka's first mention of 'the old days'.

'Well, I'll take you for a ride on the cable car if your mother won't.' Kawase slipped a quarter under the saucer and picked up the bill. He shook his head. He did not have a headache, but now that he was on the way home, all the weariness of travel seemed to collect in one place. He thought that a cable-car ride might clear it away.

Preparatory to helping Hamako down, Asaka squirmed back into her mink coat. Kawase helped her.

'I'm always forgetting. The gentleman is supposed to help.

I'm not used to such kindness.'

'You'll have to learn to be more arrogant.'

To be more dignified.'

Asaka sat up on the stool and arched her back. The young swelling of her suit coat was such as to arouse the envy of the women around the counter. Kawase remembered how in the old days he would stand behind her as she arched her back just so, and help tie her obi. Compared to the stiff, clean austerity of the obi, the softness of the mink coat seemed to evade the grasp.

56

A strange simile came into Kawase's mind: it was as if the great, vermilion-lacquered, black-riveted gate of some noble lady's mansion were suddenly to change into a slick revolving door.

3 They avoided talk of the old days, like a pair weaving in and out among puddles after a rainstorm, so deftly that neither of than found the process awkward. For talk of the present, they had only San Francisco. They were two travellers who had no other life.

The more he looked at her the more he could see behind her Western elegance the influence of that educator, her patron.

The Asaka of old was something of an expert on the Japanese dance, and she would naturally fall into dance poses, her delicate fingers in a formal pattern, when she brought her hand to her mouth to laugh or was frightened or heard something she would rather not have heard. Now everything was changed. Yet she had not really acquired Western elegance in place of the old Japanese elegance. Her movements were remarkably angular.

Kawase could imagine how unceasing had been her patron's labours in correcting all those little mannerisms. It was as if he had sent her off to America with his fingerprints on every part of her body. Only the too-white powder remained as a relic of the old days. Perhaps that was her one gesture of defiance, alone in a foreign country. As a matter of fact, however, it had once been much whiter.

As Asaka stood waiting for the cable car, the child's hand in hers, Kawase looked afresh at the mink coat and wondered where she would be keeping her little packet of paper handkerchiefs. In the old days she had always had a supply in her obi.

The paper made itself felt in many delicate ways when they spent the night together. Kawase was in the habit of dancing with his hand on the bow of the obi, and he would come on the warm swelling of the paper, and deliberately rustle it as they danced. A smile, intimate and wary of being seen, would come to her lips. Sometimes, seated languidly with her legs curled 57

beneath her, she would start to untie her obi, and there Would be a soft gesture as she first took out the paper and laid it on the
tatami
matting. A certain heaviness in the motion told of the dampness of late night in the rainy season. On such a night, Kawase would slip his hand into the bow of the obi, and it would be as warm and moist as the inside of a tight closet. Hie could scarcely imagine that when, later, the obi was untied it would give forth that clean, cool, silken sound. And then, as the first morning light came through the frosted-glass window of the inn, the paper on the floor would light up, and he would watch daybreak from the white square. Asaka never forgot to take out the paper when she undid her obi, but sometimes she would forget to put it back when they dressed the following morning. And sometimes when they were quarrelling, the paper would be there, a clear, white sign on the matting. As these memories passed through his mind, Kawase concluded that nowhere on the mink-coated figure was there room for that swelling packet. A little white window had been painted over.

The cable car came and the three got on. With a nostalgic clang of its bell and a noise like a chest of drawers - such, too, the old streetcars of Tokyo had been - the cable car began to push its way industriously up Powell Street.

The rear half of the car was an ordinary closed trolley, but the front half had an open roof with benches, pillars, and standing-room on both sides of the motorman, who was grandly manipulating two long iron handles.

The old-fashioned car delighted Hamako. The three sat on one of the benches and watched windows slide down the hill before them. 'Isn't it fun,' said Hamako time after time. 'Isn't it fun.'

'Isn't it,' said Asaka, half to Kawase. It was as if the remark were to conceal the pleasure she felt herself. He sensed in the exchange her comradely way of making it appear that they were no ordinary, respectable mother and child.

At the top of the hill they got off the car and, since they had no business there, took another car down. The steep descent was even more interesting. Five or six middle-aged women, apparently tourists, shrieked and squealed as if they were in an 58

amusement park, and looked round at the cool faces of native San Franciscans, seeking the reaction to their coquettishness.

They were large women with faint moustaches, in coats of red and green.

Back at the square from which they had started, Asaka politely took her leave. She had an appointment for lunch, she said, but would like to have dinner with Kawase if he was free.

Kawase took Hamako's hand and walked with them to his hotel, which was very near the square.

They stopped before a show window full of picnic things.

The picnic set, all in Scotch plaid, was quite blinding, but the contrast with the artificial grass was very pleasant. The arrangement was done with careful casualness. It could have been left scattered by picnickers who had gone down to the river to wash their hands, and whose bright laughter came back up from the river.

'You'd never find a set like this in Japan,' said Asaka, her nose almost against the glass. It occurred to Kawase that she had probably gone through childhood with no knowledge of picnics. Sometimes she showed an intense longing for childish things. Once he had been unable to pry her from a window full of festival dolls. Either her patron, so intent on educating her in the Western way, had not noticed this side of her nature, or he was ignoring it. Kawase felt confident in his own perceptiveness.

Lost in the display, Asaka seemed to forget his presence.

Suddenly she pointed at a thermos flask covered with Scotch plaid.

'Hamako. You're a big girl now, and you aren't afraid of that any more, are you?'

'No.'

'But you still remember the days when you were?'

'No.'

'There she is, answering just like a grown-up.' Asaka smiled as if, for the first time, to seek Kawase's assent. Kawase had been looking at the bright sunlight on the pavement, and the smiling face turned towards him seemed to mix with the brilliant white after-image like some weird, luminous mask 59

floating in the air. He had only been half listening to the exchange, but he felt a painful knot in his chest. A moment later he saw that he must pretend not to understand a conversation that an outsider would not understand.

'What are you talking about?' he asked, trying to make the matter seem trivial.

'Nothing, really. But from the time she was about a year and a half old she was terrified of thermos flasks. If there's tea inside, it makes a funny bubbling noise round the cork, and she was terrified of that noise. When she wouldn't obey, I'd bring a thermos flask and threaten her with it. Not that I have to any more.'

'Children pick strange things to be afraid of.'

Asaka went on quite as if she were describing the child's unusual talents. 'But who ever heard of a child that was afraid of thermos flasks? Her grandmother had a good laugh over it.

She said that Hamako would probably have a stroke if she grew up and the president of some thermos-flask company proposed to her.'

4 Asaka came by herself that evening. She had hired a Negro
baby sitter
at
the
hotel, and
Hamako had
taken
remarkably
well to the girl.

They had raw oysters and a crab saute at a French restaurant called the Old Poodle Dog and finished in a blaze of cherries jubilee.

Kawase had recovered
from
the jolt the thermos flask had given him. He told himself that he was a victim of silly illusions and blamed his altogether too lively imagination.

The sadness of his wife's letter came back to him, and for no reason at all he felt that his own wife and child were far sadder than Asaka and her child. It was a foolish, baseless notion, and yet he could not put it from his mind.

Borrowing the strength of alcohol, he tried to flee from the present by turning to the forbidden subject of the old days.

'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.