Quicksand (18 page)

Watanuki probably couldn't imagine that his secret was such common knowledge that he'd been nicknamed for it; he must have thought it was known only to a few women in the pleasure quarter and that he had been discreet enough to keep it hidden. In fact, it seemed most unlikely that they could conveniently deceive her parents and proceed with the marriage. Watanuki's own “parents” were his mother and an uncle who had become his guardian, he had told her, and so Mitsuko only needed to call on them, explain the situation, and say: “One of these days my family may bring you a formal marriage proposal, and I hope you'll find it acceptable.” His mother would be overjoyed, and his uncle would never do anything to expose him and spoil his one chance for marriage. But Mitsuko felt that before her parents made a proposal, they would undoubtedly look into his background and somehow or other learn the truth. So rather than cause an unnecessary storm of protest, wouldn't it be better just to go on meeting clandestinely for the time being?

Watanuki declared that he had no overriding reason to insist on getting married, and he himself realized that it was asking a lot, for someone in his condition; still, Mitsuko could hardly be expected to remain unmarried forever, and he couldn't help worrying that he was bound to lose her. Moreover, everything he had said to justify himself was the opposite of what he really felt. If he could, he wanted to take a wife and live like a normal man—not just to deceive others but to deceive
himself
, convince himself that he wasn't different in the slightest from other men. Not only that, he was vain enough to want to astonish them all by having a rare beauty like Mitsuko as his wife. So he was eager to marry her, even spiteful about it.

“You keep making excuses, but I imagine you'd accept any good marriage offer!”

Mitsuko retorted that she would never marry somebody else, even if her parents demanded it, and there were no immediate prospects anyway. Before long she would be twenty-four, free to make her own decision about getting married. Their chance would come, if he'd only be patient a little longer. . . . Otherwise they'd have no way out but suicide, she said, and at last she got him to agree to wait.

Mitsuko told me she didn't really understand her own feelings around that time, but in the beginning she was just trying to calm him down, hoping to break off with him somehow. Whenever she met him she felt remorseful afterward and thought to herself: What a ridiculous state of affairs! Envied for my looks by other women and yet in the clutches of a man like that. I've got to put a stop to it once and for all! But strangely enough, after two or three days she would be the one to go chasing after him again. Yet if you asked whether she was so much in love, it seems that she despised the very sight of him and thought of him as contemptible, a man without a shred of character. They were getting together regularly, but they were far from friendly; they always quarreled, and the quarrels would begin with the same old stupid accusations, delivered in a voice dripping with suspicion:

“How long do you intend to keep me waiting?” he might say, or “You must have given away my secret!”

Mitsuko herself had no wish to reveal anything so distasteful, so humiliating for both of them, and she didn't need to be admonished by Watanuki. Still, it was impossible for her to keep it from Ume, and that set off a furious quarrel with him.

“How could you tell a thing like that to your maid!”

Mitsuko was not in the least intimidated.

“You're a liar and a hypocrite!” she shot back. “What you say and do are entirely different! There's no real love between us.”

At last, cornered and white with fury, he shouted: “I'll kill you!”

“Go ahead and kill me, if you want to. I've been ready to die for a long time.” Mitsuko stood motionless, her eyes shut tight.

Watanuki checked his anger.

“Forgive me; I was wrong.”

“I'm not as shameless as you are,” she told him. “If the truth ever came out, I'd suffer far more than you! Please don't accuse me like that again.”

She had him at her mercy. Watanuki could no longer confront her, but that only made him wilier. Behind her back he was all the more suspicious.

Anyway, around that time talk of marriage into the M family began. . . . That was when Mitsuko was going to the Women's Arts Academy, just to get out of the house and have a chance to meet Watanuki, and she told me it was she herself who started the rumor of a lesbian affair with me, by sending anonymous postcards. She did it because he'd been insanely jealous ever since he got wind of the marriage proposal. He swore he wouldn't put up with it and threatened to expose their relationship to the newspapers. Not only that, but the city councilman's family had entered the competition, and they were doing their best to find some defect that would spoil her chance of marriage. Of course she had no desire to marry Mr. M, so she didn't mind losing out, but what she
did
fear was that their investigation might turn up Watanuki's secret and bring that whole story to light. In short, she had purposely spread her own rumor in order to cover up the true situation.

Well, you could say she deceived me just in order to deceive other people. For her part, Mitsuko preferred to be thought of as a lesbian rather than the victim of a dubious “playboy” or a “pansy.” She felt she could escape without being pointed out scornfully and becoming everyone's laughingstock. That was how it all started, from a notion that came to her when she heard I was painting a picture modeled on her and saw how I reacted when I passed her in the street. But I took it so seriously, I was so passionate, that before she knew it she was falling in love. I suppose I wasn't totally naïve myself, but my own feelings were incomparably purer than Watanuki's, and she found herself drawn to me—then too, she said, there was an enormous difference between being the plaything of a near pariah and being worshiped by someone of her own sex, even portrayed as a divine Kannon. So from the time she came to know me she recovered her self-esteem, her natural feeling of superiority, and once again the world seemed bright to her. She told Watanuki she was taking advantage of those rumors to throw people off the scent, and she could use her friendship with me as another excuse to leave her house.

Watanuki was not the sort to accept that at face value, although he put on an appearance of agreeing with her. “Yes, that's a good idea,” he said. But he must have felt a stab of jealousy and begun watching for a chance to drive us apart. Now it occurred to her that there was even something fishy about the incident at Kasayamachi. All that business about gambling in another room and a police raid might have been fabricated; from the beginning he could have schemed with the employees at the inn to frighten Mitsuko and then to hide all their clothes while the two were fleeing. . . . The fact was, that afternoon, before coming to my house, Mitsuko had gone shopping at Mitsukoshi and happened to run into him. She told him she was going straight to Kasayamachi after visiting me, and he should wait for her there. Watanuki could see she was wearing one of our matching kimonos. This was his chance: if he could get that kimono away from her, she'd have to telephone me, and that would surely lead to a rift between us. While he was waiting for her at the inn, he could have bribed the employees and told them exactly what to do—Watanuki was fully capable of a scheme like that and had time to carry it out. It was much too farfetched to think that people wearing their stolen kimonos were taken down to the police station, let alone that the police never bothered to call either Mitsuko's or Watanuki's home. But Mitsuko hadn't suspected any such plot at the time and was far too upset to know what to do.

“There's only one way out,” Watanuki had declared. “You've got to call Mrs. Kakiuchi and have her bring you that matching kimono.”

Watanuki's account had been quite different. But Mitsuko told me she was so flustered that at first she couldn't remember which kimono she had lost. Even after he advised her to call me, she had said: “I can't ask Sister to do that.”

But he kept pressing her.

“Shall we run away together, then? Or will you make that call?”

Mitsuko was desperate. She would rather die than go away with him. Utterly at a loss, she ran to the telephone. Even then she could have tried to keep him out of my sight, especially in a place like that, but she was too confused to ask him to leave ahead of her or to have me come to a nearby café.

That was what Watanuki had aimed for when he told her to hurry and make up her mind. Once I had arrived, she said she couldn't bear to see me.

“Just go and hide,” he said. “I'll smooth this over for you.”

He did everything he could to play the role of Mitsuko's lover and to lead me on with all his explanations and his insidious questions.

“That's exactly what he did,” Mitsuko said. “To tell the truth, he didn't know too much about you until then, Sister.”

“
OH, SO HE WAS
trying to lead me on, was he?” I asked. “I thought he was mocking me when he said your feeling for me was absolutely sincere.”

“Yes, and that was also to make you angry, Sister. I was listening from behind the sliding door, thinking what a liar he was but that nothing he said was going to convince you. . . .”

Mitsuko was furious with him, once she knew she'd been tricked, but he pursued her all the more relentlessly now that there was no one to hinder him. If she accused him of deception, he replied that she was the real liar. “You were deceiving
me
with all your lies, weren't you?” He never stopped holding a grudge against us. “I'm sure you haven't broken off with her over a thing like that,” he would say. “You're still meeting her somewhere, probably.”

He had already seen to it that we were no longer friends, and yet either he couldn't give up his jealous doubts or else he was only pretending, just being disagreeable.

“Why don't you act like a man,” Mitsuko would retort, “instead of going on and on about something that's over and done with?”

“No, no, it isn't over. . . . I suppose you've told her my secret.”

Actually, that was what he was most afraid of. If it ever happened, he warned her, he'd have his revenge on us.

“Don't be ridiculous! How could I have told Sister, when I was hiding the very fact that I knew you? But you've seen her; you must have realized it from her attitude.”

“No, there was something suspicious in the way she looked at me,” he said.

Watanuki was so used to deceiving others that he distrusted everyone—but this time it wasn't just nastiness; he had reason to be suspicious. Since he knew about my relations with Mitsuko, he thought I must know about his relations with her, and I had never shown any jealousy over it simply because I felt safe, because I'd been told he wasn't a real man. Otherwise wouldn't I have exposed them? That was why he had me called to the Kasayamachi inn: so I would see that he often went to such places with Mitsuko and could hardly be a man of doubtful sexuality.

If he had approached her straightforwardly and begged her to break off with me, even Mitsuko would have felt obliged to agree. But once she'd been tricked like that and then accused of betraying him, she had a perverse desire to turn the tables. The thought of how she had let him come between us made her feel all the more attached to me. She wanted to do anything she could to be reconciled, at least to see me again, if only for the last time. But if she went to my house, I'd probably refuse to see her, and anyway, what sort of excuse could she offer? Whatever she might say, my feelings were unlikely to change.

Racking her brains for a solution, she finally remembered that book. . . . Of course the book was of no use to Mitsuko, and she
had
lent it to Mrs. Nakagawa. Once she got her idea, she spent days planning what to do—how to make the phone calls in the name of the SK Hospital, and so on. Naturally she didn't consult anyone; she developed the whole scheme herself. But she decided she needed a man's voice to make those calls, so she took Ume into her confidence and had her enlist their laundryman.