The Sound of the Mountain (8 page)

Six or seven birds jumped from plume to plume. The plumes waved violently.

There were three buntings, quieter than the sparrows. They did not have the nervous energy of the sparrows, and they were less given to jumping.

The glow of their wings and the fresh color of their breasts made them seem like birds new this year. The sparrows seemed coated with dust.

Shingo of course preferred the buntings. Their call was unlike that of the sparrows, and there was a similar difference in their motions.

He gazed on for a time, wondering whether the sparrows and buntings would quarrel.

But sparrows called to and flew with sparrows, and buntings flocked together.

When occasionally they mingled, there was no sign of a quarrel.

At his morning ablutions, Shingo looked on with admiration.

It was probably because of the sparrows on the temple gate that the scene had come back to him.

When he had seen the callers out, he turned and said to Eiko: ‘Show me where Shuichi’s woman lives.’

He had been thinking the possibility over as he talked to the callers. Eiko was taken by surprise.

With a gesture as of resistance, she frowned briefly; then she seemed to wilt. Yet she answered coolly, her voice restrained and distant. ‘And what will you do if I take you there?’

‘Nothing that will embarrass you.’

‘Do you mean to see her?’

Shingo had not gone so far as to think of seeing her today.

‘Can’t you wait and have Shuichi take you?’ Still she spoke calmly.

Shingo felt a certain contempt in her voice.

She remained silent even after they were in the cab.

He was unhappy with himself for having imposed upon her, and he felt that he was shaming both himself and his son.

He had imagined himself settling matters while Shuichi was away; but he suspected that he would stop at imagining.

‘I think that if you are to talk to someone it should be the other lady.’

‘The one you say is so pleasant?’

‘Yes. Shall I have her come to the office?’

‘I wonder.’

‘He has much too much to drink at their house, and he gets violent and orders the other lady to sing. She has a very good voice. And then Kinu
^*
starts crying. If it makes so much difference to her, then I imagine she listens to what the other lady says.’

It was a somewhat confused way of expressing herself. Kinu must be Shuichi’s woman.

Shingo had not known that Shuichi had taken to drink.

They got out by the University and turned up a narrow lane.

‘If Shuichi hears about this, I’ll have to leave the office,’ said Eiko softly. ‘I’ll have to ask to be let go.’

A chill passed over Shingo.

Eiko had stopped. ‘You turn by the stone fence there, and it’s the fourth house. You’ll see the name Ikeda on the gate. They’ll see me. I can’t go any farther.’

‘Let’s give it up, then, if it embarrasses you so.’

‘Why, when you’ve come this far? You have to go ahead. It means peace in your family.’

He felt a certain malice in this defiance.

Eiko had called it a stone fence, but it was actually concrete. He turned past a large maple. There was nothing remarkable about the house, small and old, that carried the name Ikeda. The entrance faced north and was dark. The glass doors upstairs were closed. The house was silent.

There was nothing further to catch his eye.

Disconsolately, he walked on.

What sort of life did his son live behind that door? He was not ready to put in an unannounced appearance.

He turned up another street.

Eiko was not where he had left her. Nor was she to be seen on the main street from which they had turned up the lane.

Back at home, he avoided Kikuko’s eye. ‘Shuichi came by the office for a few minutes and then left,’ he said. ‘I’m glad he has good weather.’

Exhausted, he went to bed early.

‘How many days did he take off?’ Yasuko was in the breakfast room.

‘I didn’t ask,’ he answered from bed. ‘But all he has to do is bring Fusako back. I imagine it will be two or three days.’

‘I helped Kikuko change the wadding in the quilts today.’

Fusako would be coming home with two children. Shingo thought how difficult things would be now for Kikuko.

Shuichi should take a separate house, he said to himself. He thought of the house in Hongo.

And he thought of the defiant Eiko. He was with her every day, and he had not until today witnessed such an outburst.

He had never seen Kikuko give vent to her emotions. Yasuko had said that she controlled her jealousy out of consideration for Shingo himself.

He was soon asleep. Awakened by Yasuko’s snoring, he took her nose between his fingers.

‘Do you suppose Fusako will have that kerchief again?’ said Yasuko, as if she had been awake all the time.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

They had nothing more to say to each other.

A stray bitch dropped puppies under the floor of Shingo’s house.

‘Dropped puppies’ is a somewhat brusque way of putting the matter; but for Shingo and his family it was just so: suddenly, there was a litter under the veranda.

‘We didn’t see Teru yesterday, Mother,’ Kikuko had remarked in the kitchen a week or so before, ‘and she isn’t here today either. Do you suppose she’s having puppies?’

‘She hasn’t been around, now that you mention it,’ said Yasuko, with no great show of interest.

Shingo was in the
kotatsu
^*
making tea. He had since autumn been in the habit of having the most expensive of teas in the morning, and he made it for himself.

Kikuko had mentioned Teru while she was getting breakfast. Nothing more had been said.

‘Have a cup,’ said Shingo, pouring tea, as Kikuko brought him his breakfast.

‘Thank you very much.’ This had not happened before. Kikuko’s manner was most ceremonious.

There were chrysanthemums on her obi and cloak. ‘And the season for chrysanthemums is past. With all the stir over Fusako, we forgot about your birthday.’

‘The pattern on the obi is “The Four Princes”. You can wear it the year round.’

‘“The Four Princes”?’

‘Orchid and bamboo and plum and chrysanthemum,’ said Kikuko briskly. ‘You must have seen it somewhere. It’s always being used in paintings and on kimonos.’

‘A greedy sort of pattern.’

‘It was delicious,’ said Kikuko, putting down the tea bowl.

‘Who was it that gave us the
gyokuro
?
^*
In return for a funeral offering, I think. That was when we started drinking it again. We used to drink it all the time, and never
bancha
.’

Shuichi had already left for the office.

As he put on his shoes in the doorway, Shingo was still trying to remember the name of the friend because of whom they had had the
gyokuro.
He could have asked Kikuko, but did not. The friend had taken a young girl to a hot-spring resort and died there suddenly.

‘It’s true that we don’t see Teru,’ said Shingo.

‘Not yesterday, and not today either,’ said Kikuko.

Sometimes Teru, hearing Shingo prepare for his departure, would come around to the doorway and follow him out the gate.

He had recently seen Kikuko in the doorway feeling Teru’s belly.

‘All puffy and bloated,’ said Kikuko, frowning. But she went on feeling for the puppies all the same.

‘How many are there?’

Teru looked up quizzically at Kikuko, showing the whites of her eyes. Then she rolled over, belly up.

It was not so swollen as to be repulsive. Toward the tail, where the skin seemed thinner, it was a faint pink. There was dirt around the nipples.

‘Ten of them?’ said Kikuko. Shingo counted with his eyes. The pair farthest forward was small, as if withered.

Teru had a master and a license, but it appeared that the master did not often feed her. She had become a stray. She made the rounds of the kitchens in the neighborhood. She had been spending more time at Shingo’s since Kikuko had taken to giving her leftovers morning and evening, with something special added for Teru herself. Frequently, at night, they heard her barking in the garden. It seemed that she had attached herself to them, but not even Kikuko had come to think her their own.

Teru always went home to have puppies.

Her absence yesterday and today, Kikuko had intended to say, meant that she had again gone home to have puppies.

It seemed sad that she should go home for that purpose.

But this time the puppies had been born under the floor of Shingo’s house. It was ten days or so before anyone noticed.

‘Teru has had her puppies here, Father,’ said Kikuko when Shingo and Shuichi came home from the office.

‘Oh? Where?’

‘Under the maid’s room.’

‘Oh?’

Since they had no maid, the maid’s room, small and narrow, was used as a storeroom.

‘Teru is always going in under the maid’s room. So I looked, and there do seem to be puppies.’

‘How many?’

‘It’s too dark to tell. They’re back in under.’

‘So she had them here.’

‘Mother said that Teru was behaving very strangely, going around and around the tool-shed and pawing at the ground. She was looking for a place to have puppies. I imagine if we had put out straw she would have had them in the shed.’

‘They’ll be one fine problem when they grow up,’ said Shuichi.

Shingo was pleased that Teru had had her puppies here; but the unpleasant thought also came to him of the day when, unable otherwise to dispose of mongrel puppies, they would have to abandon them.

‘I’m told that Teru had puppies here,’ said Yasuko.

‘So I’m told.’

‘I’m told that she had them under the maid’s room. The only room in the house with no one in it. Teru thought things out nicely.’

Still in the
kotatsu,
Yasuko frowned slightly as she looked up at Shingo.

Shingo too got into the
kotatsu.
When he had had his cup of tea, he said to Shuichi: ‘What happened to the maid Tanizaki was to get for us?’ He poured a second cup.

‘That’s an ashtray, Father.’

He had poured his second cup into the ashtray.

‘I am an aged man, and I have not yet climbed Mount Fuji.’ Shingo was in his office.

They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.

Last night he had dreamed of Matsushima Bay and its islands. That was perhaps why the words had come to him.

This morning it had seemed odd to him that he should have dreamed of Matsushima, since he had never been there.

And it occurred to him that at his age he had been to only one of the ‘three great sights of Japan’. He had seen neither Matsushima nor the strand at Amanohashidate. Once, on his return from a business trip to Kyushu, he had had a look at the Miyajima Shrine. It had been winter, not the proper season.

In the morning, he could remember only fragments of the dream; but the color of the pines on the islands and of the water remained clear and fresh, and he was certain that the dream had been of Matsushima.

On a grassy meadow in the shade of the pines, he had a woman in his arms. They were hiding, in fear. They seemed to have left their companions. The woman was very young, a mere girl. He did not know how old he himself was. He must have been young, however, to judge from the vigor with which they ran among the pines. He did not seem to feel a difference in their ages as he held her in his arms. He embraced her as a young man would. Yet he did not think of himself as rejuvenated, nor did it seem to be a dream of long ago. It was as if, at sixty-two, he were still in his twenties. In that fact lay the strangeness.

The motorboat in which they had come went off across the sea. A woman stood in the boat, waving and waving her handkerchief. The white handkerchief against the sea was vivid in his mind even after he woke. The two were left alone on the island, but there was none of the apprehension that they should have felt. He just told himself that they could see the boat out at sea, and that their hiding place would not be discovered.

Watching the white of the handkerchief, he woke.

He did not know, after he woke, who the woman had been. He could remember neither face nor figure. Nor did any tactile impression remain. Only the colors of the landscape were clear. He knew neither why he was sure that it had been Matsushima nor why he should have dreamed of Matsushima.

He had not been to Matsushima, nor had he crossed by boat to an uninhabited island.

He thought of asking someone in the house whether to see colors in a dream was a sign of nervous exhaustion, but in the end remained silent. He did not find it pleasing to think that he had dreamed of embracing a woman. It seemed altogether reasonable that, at his present age, he should have been his young self.

The contradiction was somehow a comfort to him.

He felt that the strangeness would vanish were he to know who the woman was. As he sat smoking, there was a tap on the door.

‘Good morning.’

Suzumoto came in. ‘I thought you wouldn’t be here yet.’

Suzumoto hung up his hat. Tanizaki came up in some haste to take his coat, but he sat down without removing it. His bald head seemed comical to Shingo. The discoloration of age was to be seen above his ears. The aged skin was muddy.

‘What brings you here so early?’ Restraining a laugh, Shingo looked at his own hands. A faint discoloration would appear from the back of his hand down over the wrist, and then go away again.

‘Mizuta. He had such a pleasant death.’

‘Ah, yes, Mizuta.’ Shingo remembered. ‘They sent
gyokuro
after the funeral, and I got into the habit of drinking it again. Very good it was, too.’