The Sound of the Mountain (2 page)

It was as if a demon had passed, making the mountain sound out.

The steep slope, wrapped in the damp shades of night, was like a dark wall. So small a mound of a mountain, that it was all in Shingo’s garden; it was like an egg cut in half.

There were other mountains behind it and around it, but the sound did seem to have come from that particular mountain to the rear of Shingo’s house.

Stars were shining through the trees at its crest.

As he closed the shutter, a strange memory came to him.

Some ten days before, he had been awaiting a guest at a newly built restaurant. A single geisha was with him. The guest was late, and so were the other geisha.

‘Why don’t you take off your tie?’ she said. ‘You must be warm.’

Shingo nodded, and let her take it off for him.

She was not a geisha with whom he was particularly familiar, but when she had folded the tie and put it into the pocket of his coat, which lay beside the alcove, the conversation moved on to personal matters.

Some two months before, she said, she had been on the point of committing suicide with the carpenter who had built the restaurant. But as they had prepared to take poison, doubts had overtaken her. Were the portions in fact lethal?

‘He said there was plenty. The doses were all measured out, his and mine, he said, and that proved it.’

But she could not believe him. Her doubts only grew.

‘I asked him who did the measuring. Someone might have measured out just enough to make us sick and teach us a lesson. I asked him who the druggist or doctor was that gave it to him, but he wouldn’t say. Isn’t that strange? There we were, going to die together. Why wouldn’t he answer me? After all, who was to know afterwards?’

‘A good yarn,’ Shingo had wanted to say.

And so she had insisted, she went on, that they try again after
she
had found someone to do the measuring.

‘I have it here with me.’

Shingo thought the story an odd one. All that had really stayed with him was the fact that the man was a carpenter and had built the restaurant.

The geisha had taken two packets from her purse and opened them for him.

He had only glanced at them. He had had no way of knowing whether or not they were poison.

As he closed the shutter, he thought of the geisha.

He went back to bed. He did not wake his wife to tell her of the fear that had come over him on hearing the sound of the mountain.

Shuichi and Shingo worked for the same firm. The son served as a sort of prompter for the father.

There were other prompters too, Yasuko and Kikuko, Shuichi’s wife. The three of them worked together, a team supplementing Shingo’s powers of memory. The girl in the office was yet another prompter.

Coming into Shingo’s office, Shuichi took a book from the small stand in one corner and began leafing through it.

‘Well, well,’ he said. He went over to the girl’s desk and pointed to an open page.

‘What is it?’ asked Shingo, smiling. Shuichi brought the book to him.

‘One is not to understand that the sense of chastity has here been lost,’ said the passage in question. ‘We have but a device for loving longer. A man unable to bear the pain of loving a woman, a woman unable to bear the pain of loving a man – they should go happily out in search of other partners, and so find a way to make their hearts more steadfast.’

‘Where is “here”?’

‘Paris. It’s a novelist’s account of his trip to Europe.’

Shingo’s mind was no longer as alive as it had once been to aphorism and paradox. This seemed to him, however, neither of the two. It seemed, more simply, penetrating insight.

Shuichi had probably not been moved by the passage. He had found a way, on the spur of the moment, for signaling to the girl that he wanted her to go out with him after work.

As he got off the train in Kamakura, Shingo found himself wishing that he had come home with Shuichi, or perhaps later.

The bus was crowded with commuters. He decided to walk.

The fishmonger nodded a greeting as Shingo stood outside the shop. He went in. The water in the tub of prawns was a cloudy white. He prodded a lobster. It should have been alive, but it did not move. He decided on whelks, of which there was a good supply.

When asked how many he wanted, however, he was perplexed.

‘Well, make it three. Three of the biggest ones.’

‘Shall I dress them for you, sir?’

The fishmonger and his son dug out the meat with butcher knives. Shingo disliked the sound of scraping against the shell.

As the man washed and cut the meat, two girls stopped in front of the shop.

‘What will you have?’ he asked, going on with the dicing.

‘Herring.’

‘How many?’

‘One.’

‘One?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just one?’

The herring were not the smallest possible, but they were little larger than minnows. The girl did not seem to be especially put off by this show of disapproval, however.

The man took up the herring in a bit of paper and handed it to her.

‘But we didn’t need any fish,’ said the second girl, hanging over the other and prodding her elbow.

‘I wonder if they’ll still be here on Saturday,’ said the other. She was looking at the lobsters. ‘My boyfriend sort of likes them.’

The second girl did not answer.

Startled, Shingo ventured a glance.

Prostitutes of the new sort, they had bare backs, cloth shoes, and good figures.

The fishmonger collected the diced meat at the center of his board and, dividing it in three parts, began to put it back into the shells.

‘We’re getting more and more of their kind. Even here in Kamakura.’

His asperity struck Shingo as most odd. ‘But I thought they were behaving rather well,’ he said, protesting against he hardly knew what.

Casually, the man was putting the meat back into the shells, so mixed together, thought Shingo, that it was unlikely to be reassembled in the particular shells from which it had come. He was aware of very small niceties.

Today was Thursday. Two more days until Saturday – but then, he told himself, there were plenty of lobsters to be had these days. He wondered how the uncouth maiden would prepare lobster for her American friend. A lobster made a simple, uncouth dish, however, fried or boiled or roasted.

Shingo had felt well disposed toward the girls, and yet afterwards he was taken with vague feelings of despondency.

There were four in his family, but he had bought only three whelks. He had not acted precisely out of consideration for Kikuko, although he had of course known that Shuichi would not be home for dinner. He had simply deleted Shuichi.

At a grocery farther on he bought gingko nuts.

It was unusual for Shingo to buy food on his way home, but neither Yasuko nor Kikuko showed surprise.

Perhaps they wished to hide their thoughts about the fact that Shuichi, who should have been with him, was not.

Handing his purchases to Kikuko, he followed her into the kitchen.

‘Some water please, with a little sugar in it.’ He went to the faucet himself.

In the sink were prawns and lobsters. He was struck by the coincidence. He had seen both at the fishmonger’s, but had not thought of buying both.

‘A good color,’ he said. The prawns had a fresh luster.

Kikuko cracked a gingko nut with the back of a knife.

‘It was a nice thought, but I’m afraid they’re no good.’

‘Oh? I did think they were a little out of season.’

‘I’ll call the grocery and tell them.’

‘Don’t bother. But all these shellfish – my contribution doesn’t add much.’

‘We might open a seaside restaurant.’ Kikuko showed the tip of her tongue, in mild derision. ‘Let’s see, now. We can boil these, shell and all. So maybe we should roast the lobsters and fry the prawns. I’ll go buy some mushrooms. While I’m at it would you mind going out to get eggplant from the garden?’

‘I’d be delighted.’

‘Little ones. And bring in some sage, too. I wonder if the prawns might be enough by themselves.’

Kikuko brought only two whelks to the table.

‘But there should be another,’ said Shingo, a little puzzled.

‘Oh, dear. But the two of you have such bad teeth, Grandpa – I thought you might want to share one nicely between you.’

‘I don’t see any grandchildren around.’

Yasuko looked down and snickered.

‘I’m sorry.’ Kikuko got up lightly and went to the kitchen for the third.

‘We should do as Kikuko says,’ said Yasuko. ‘Share one nicely between us.’

Shingo thought Kikuko’s words beautifully apt. It was as though his own problem, whether to buy three or four, had thus been brushed away. Her tact and skill were not to be underestimated.

She might have been expected to say that she would leave one for Shuichi, or that she and Yasuko would share one. Perhaps she had considered these possibilities.

‘But were there only three in the store?’ asked Yasuko, not alive to such subtleties. ‘You only brought three, and there are four of us.’

‘We didn’t need another. Shuichi didn’t come home.’

Yasuko smiled what should have been a wry smile, but, perhaps because of her age, it ended up as something less than that.

No trace of a shadow passed over Kikuko’s face, nor did she ask what might have happened to Shuichi.

She was the youngest of eight children.

The other seven were also married, and all had numerous progeny. Shingo sometimes thought of the fecundity she had inherited from her parents.

She would complain that he had not yet learned the names of her brothers and sisters. He was even further from remembering the names of her nieces and nephews. She had been born at a time when her mother no longer wanted children or thought herself capable of having them. Indeed, her mother had felt rather ashamed, at her age, and had considered abortion. It had been a difficult birth. Forceps had been applied to Kikuko’s head.

Kikuko had told Shingo of having heard these facts from her mother.

It was difficult for him to understand a mother who would speak of such things to her daughter, or a girl who would reveal them to her father-in-law.

Kikuko had held back her hair to show a faint scar on her forehead.

The scar, whenever he chanced to glimpse it afterwards, somehow drew him to her.

Still, Kikuko had been reared as the pet of the family, it seemed. She was not spoiled, precisely, but she seemed to expect affection. And there was something a little weak about her.

When she had first come as a bride, Shingo had noted the slight but beautiful way she had of moving her shoulders. In it, for him, there was a bright, fresh coquetry.

Something about the delicate figure made him think of Yasuko’s sister.

Shingo had as a boy been strongly attracted to the sister. After her death Yasuko had gone to take care of the children. Yasuko had quite immersed herself in the work, as if wishing to supplant her sister. It was true that she had been fond of the brother-in-law, a handsome man, but she had also been in love with her sister, so beautiful a woman as to make it difficult to believe that the two could have had the same mother. To Yasuko her sister and brother-in-law had been like inhabitants of a dream world.

She worked hard for her brother-in-law and the children, but the man behaved as if he were quite indifferent to her feelings. He lost himself in pleasure, and for Yasuko self-immolation became a career.

And so Shingo had married her.

Now more than thirty years had passed, and Shingo did not think the marriage a mistake. A long marriage was not necessarily governed by its origins.

Yet the image of the sister remained with both of them. Neither spoke of her, and neither had forgotten her.

There was nothing especially unhealthy about the fact that, after Kikuko came into the house, Shingo’s memories were pierced by moments of brightness, like flashes of lightning.

Married to her less than two years, Shuichi had already found another woman, a source of some surprise for Shingo.

Unlike Shingo himself, reared in the provinces, Shuichi showed no evidence of deprivation in matters of love and desire. Shingo could not have said when his son had had his first woman.

Shingo was certain that whoever now held Shuichi’s attention was a business woman, perhaps a prostitute of sorts.

He suspected that affairs with women in the office meant no more than dancing after work, and might be only for purposes of distracting his father’s attention.

She would not in any case be a sheltered girl like the one before him. Somehow Shingo had sensed as much from Kikuko herself. Since the beginning of the affair there had been a ripening in the relations between Kikuko and Shuichi. There had been a change in Kikuko’s body.

Waking in the night – it was the night they had had the shellfish – Shingo heard Kikuko’s voice as he had not heard it before.

He suspected that she knew nothing of Shuichi’s mistress.

‘And so Father has made the apologies, with a shellfish,’ he muttered to himself.

How was it that, although she knew nothing of the other woman, she should feel emanations come drifting toward her?

Shingo drowsed off, and suddenly it was dawn. He went for the paper. The moon was still high. After glancing over the news he fell asleep once more.

Shuichi pushed his way aboard the train and surrendered his seat to Shingo when the latter followed after.

He then handed over the evening paper and took Shingo’s bifocals from his pocket. Shingo had a pair of his own, but he was much given to forgetting them. Shuichi was entrusted with a spare set.

Shuichi leaned over the paper. ‘Tanizaki said today that a classmate of hers was looking for work. We do need a maid, you know. So I said we’d take her.’

‘Don’t you think it might be a little dangerous, having a friend of Tanizaki’s around?’

‘Dangerous?’

‘She might hear things from Tanizaki and pass them on to Kikuko.’