The Sound of the Mountain (9 page)

‘I don’t know about the
gyokuro
, but I envy him the way he died. I’ve heard about such things. But Mizuta of all people.’

Shingo snorted.

‘Don’t you envy him?’

‘You’re bald and fat, and there’s hope for you.’

‘But I don’t have all that much blood pressure. I’ve been told that Mizuta was so afraid of a stroke that he refused to spend a night alone.’

Mizuta had died in a hot-spring hotel. At the funeral his old friends whispered of what Suzumoto called his pleasant death. It seemed a little strange afterwards to have concluded that, by virtue of the fact that he had had a young woman with him, it had been such a death. They were curious to know whether the woman might be at the funeral. There were those who said that she would carry unpleasant memories through her life, and those who said that, if she loved him, she would be grateful for what had happened.

To Shingo, the fact that because they were university classmates these men in their sixties should toss out student jargon seemed another of the ugly marks of old age. They still addressed one another by the nicknames and affectionate diminutives of their student days. They had known all about one another when they were young, and the knowledge brought intimacy and nostalgia; but the moss-grown shell of the ego resented it. The death of Mizuta, who had made a joke of Toriyama’s death, had now become a joke.

Suzumoto had insisted, at the funeral, upon speaking of the pleasant death; but the thought of it brought a wave of revulsion over Shingo.

‘It’s not very good form for an old man,’ he said.

‘No. We don’t even dream of women anymore.’ Suzumoto’s tone too was dispassionate.

‘Have you ever climbed Fuji?’

‘Fuji?’ Suzumoto seemed puzzled. ‘Why Fuji? No, I haven’t. Why do you ask?’

‘Neither have I. I am an aged man, and I have not yet climbed Mount Fuji.’

‘What? Is that some sort of dirty joke?’

Shingo let out a guffaw.

At work over an abacus near the door, Eiko snickered.

‘When you think about it, there must be a surprising number of people who go to their graves without climbing Fuji or seeing the three great sights. What percentage of Japanese do you suppose climb Fuji?’

‘Not one percent, I’d say.’ Suzumoto returned to the earlier subject. ‘I doubt if one person in tens of thousands, in hundreds of thousands, has the good luck of Mizuta.’

‘He won a lottery? But it must not be pleasant for his family.’

‘Yes, the family. As a matter of fact his wife came,’ said Suzumoto, with an air as of entering upon his real business, ‘and asked me about this.’ He put a clothwrapped parcel on the table. ‘Masks. No masks. She asked me to buy them. I thought I’d ask you to look them over.’

‘I know nothing about masks. They’re like the three great sights. I know they’re in Japan, but I’ve never been to see them.’

There were two boxes. Suzumoto took the masks from their pouches.

‘This one is the
jido
mask, I’m told, and this the
kasshiki.
They’re both children.’

‘This one is a child?’ Shingo took up the
kasshiki
mask by the paper cord that passed from ear to ear.

‘It has hair painted on it. See? In the shape of a gingko leaf. That’s the mark of a boy who hasn’t come of age. And there are dimples.’

‘Oh?’ Shingo held the mask at arm’s length. ‘Tanizaki. My glasses, there, please.’

‘No, you have it right as it is. They say you’re supposed to hold a No mask a little above eye level with your arms stretched out. It’s actually better for old men like us. And turn it down a little to cloud it.’

‘It looks like someone I know. Very realistic.’

Turning a No mask slightly downward is known as ‘clouding’, explained Suzumoto, because the mask takes on a melancholy aspect; and turning it up is known as ‘shining’ because the expression becomes bright and happy. Turning it to the left or the right, he added, is known as ‘using’ or ‘cutting’ or something of the sort.

‘It looks like someone I know,’ said Shingo again. ‘It’s hard to think of it as a child. More like a young man.’

‘Children were precocious in those days. And a real child’s face would be wrong for the No. But look at it carefully. It’s a boy. I’m told that the
jido
is a sprite of some sort. Probably a symbol of eternal youth.’

Shingo turned the
jido
mask this way and that as Suzumoto directed. The hair was in childish bangs.

‘Why not keep them company?’ said Suzumoto.

Shingo put the mask on the table. ‘You buy them. You were the one she asked.’

‘She actually had five. I bought two women’s masks, and forced one on Unno. I thought you might take the others.’

‘So I get the leftovers? You took good care of yourself, buying the women’s masks first.’

‘You’d rather have the women’s?’

‘What does it matter, now that they’re gone?’

‘I can bring them if you want. I’ll save money if you take them. It’s just that I felt sorry for her because of the way Mizuta died, and couldn’t refuse. But she said that these are better made than the women’s masks. And don’t you like the idea of eternal youth?’

‘Mizuta is dead, and Toriyama – he looked at them for such a long time at Mizuta’s – Toriyama is dead too. Your masks don’t make a person feel very comfortable.’

‘But the
jido
mask is a symbol of eternal youth. Don’t you like the idea?’

‘Did you go to Toriyama’s funeral?’

‘I don’t remember why, but I couldn’t.’ Suzumoto stood up. ‘Well, I’ll leave them with you. Take a good look at them. If you don’t like them, find someone who does.’

‘Whether I like them or not is beside the point. They are nothing to me. I don’t doubt that they’re good masks, and doesn’t it mean that if I cut them off from the No, I’ll be killing them when I die?’

‘You needn’t worry.’

‘Are they expensive?’ Shingo asked, as if chasing after him.

‘Yes. I was afraid I might forget, and had her write it down. There on the cord. It seems to be about what they’re worth, but I’m sure you can bargain.’

Shingo put on his glasses and started to untwist the cord; and the moment he could see them clearly the hair and lips of the
jido
mask struck him as so beautiful that he wanted to cry out in surprise.

When Suzumoto had left, Eiko came to his desk.

‘Isn’t it beautiful.’

Eiko nodded silently.

‘Put it on for a minute.’

‘But that would be all wrong. Here I am in foreign clothes.’ When Shingo handed her the mask, however, she put it on and tied the cord.

‘Move your head, very gently.’

Standing before him. Eiko moved her head this way and that.

‘Good. Very good.’ The words came of their own accord. Even with so little movement, the mask quite came to life. Eiko had on a russet dress, and her hair sent waves cascading at the sides of the mask, but she had taken on a charm that held him captive.

‘Is that enough?’

‘Yes.’ Shingo immediately sent Eiko out to buy a reference work on No masks.

The masks carried the names of the makers. The reference book reported that they did not fall into the category of ‘old masks’, from the Muromachi Period, but they were the work of masters of the next age. Even a novice like Shingo sensed, as he took them in his hands, that they were not forgeries.

‘Give you the creeps,’ said Yasuko, putting on his bifocals.

Kikuko laughed softly. ‘Can you see with Father’s glasses?’

‘Bifocals are very promiscuous,’ Shingo answered for his wife. ‘Almost anyone’s will work for almost anyone.’

She was using the glasses he had taken from his pocket.

‘In most houses the husband wears them sooner, but in this one the old woman is a year older.’ In high spirits, Shingo had sat down in the
kotatsu
without taking off his coat. ‘The chief trouble is that you can’t see when you’re eating. You can’t see the food set before you. If it’s in fine pieces, there are times when you can’t even make out what it is. You first start wearing them, and take up a bowl of rice like this, and the kernels all blur into one another, and you can’t separate them. It’s very inconvenient at first.’ Shingo was gazing at the masks.

But then it came to him that Kikuko, a kimono in front of her, was waiting for him to change. And it came to him that this evening again Shuichi was away from home.

He continued to look at the
kotatsu
as he stood up to change. In part he was avoiding Kikuko’s face.

He felt a heaviness in his chest. Probably it was because Shuichi had not come home that Kikuko had come to look at the masks. She set about putting away his clothes as if nothing of importance had happened.

‘Like heads from the chopping block. They really give you the creeps,’ said Yasuko.

Shingo came back to the
kotatsu.
‘Which do you like best?’

‘This.’ Yasuko answered without hesitation, taking up the
kasshiki
mask.

‘Oh?’ Shingo was somewhat intimidated by Yasuko’s decisiveness. ‘They’re by different makers, but from the same period. About the time of Toyotomi Hideyoshi.’ He brought his face to the
jido
mask from directly above.

The
kasshiki
was masculine, the eyebrows those of a man; but the
jido
was neuter. There was a wide space between eyebrows and eyes, and the gently arched eyebrows were those of a girl.

As he brought his face toward it from above, the skin, smooth and lustrous as that of a girl, softened in his aging eyes, and the mask came to life, warm and smiling.

He caught his breath. Three or four inches before his eyes, a live girl was smiling at him, cleanly, beautifully.

The eyes and the mouth were truly alive. In the empty sockets were black pupils. The red lips were sensuously moist. Holding his breath, he came so close as almost to touch his nose to that of the mask, and the blackish pupils came floating up at him, and the flesh of the lower lip swelled. He was on the point of kissing it. Heaving a sigh, he pulled away.

He felt, from a distance, as if it had lied to him. He breathed heavily for a time.

Glumly, he put the
jido
mask back into its pouch of gold brocade on a red ground. He handed the pouch for the
kasshiki
mask to Yasuko.

‘Put it away.’

He felt as if he had looked behind the lower lip of the
jido
, to where the antique red faded away inside the mouth. The mouth was slightly open, but there were no teeth ranged behind the lower lip. It was like a flower in bud upon a bank of snow.

To bring one’s face so near as to touch it was probably, for a No mask, an inexcusable perversion. It was probably a way of viewing the mask not intended by the maker. Shingo felt the secret of the maker’s own love in the fact that the mask, most alive when viewed at a proper distance from the No stage, should all the same be most alive when, as now, viewed from no distance at all.

For Shingo had felt a pulsing as of heaven’s own perverse love. Yet he sought to laugh at it, telling himself that his ancient eyes had made the skin more alluring than that of a real woman.

He wondered whether this sequence of strange occurrences – he had embraced a girl in a dream, he had thought Eiko quite captivating in the mask, he had almost kissed the
jido
– meant that something was about to shake the foundations of his house.

He had not brought his face to that of a young girl since he had begun wearing bifocals. Would such a face, in his aged eyes, be faintly softer?

‘They belonged to Mizuta. You know, the one we got the
gyokuro
from. The one who died at a hot spring.’

‘Give you the creeps,’ said Yasuko again.

Shingo put whiskey in his tea. In the kitchen, Kikuko was dicing onions for a fish chowder.

On the morning of the twenty-ninth of December, as he was washing his face, Shingo saw Teru out sunning herself with all her puppies.

Even when the puppies had begun to come out from under the maid’s room, he had not known whether there were four or five of them. Kikuko would pounce upon a puppy and bring it into the house. In her arms the puppies were docile enough, but they would flee back under the house when they saw someone approaching. At no one time had they all been out together. Kikuko had said that there were four, and at another time that there were five.

He saw that there were five puppies out in the morning sunlight.

They were at the foot of the mountain, where he had seen the buntings mixed in among the sparrows. It was where earth was piled up from a cave they had dug as an air-raid shelter, and where, during the war, they had had a vegetable patch. It now seemed to be a place where animals sunned themselves.

The pampas grass at which the sparrows and buntings had been so busy had withered, but the powerful stalks, still upright, covered the side of the mound. The earth above was covered with soft weeds. Shingo was filled with admiration at Teru’s sagacity in having chosen it.

Teru had taken her puppies out to a good place before people were up, or while their attention was on getting breakfast, and she lay nursing them and letting them warm themselves in the morning sun. They were quietly enjoying a moment when there was no one to bother them. So he thought at first, and smiled at the scene that presented itself in the warm sunlight. It was late December, but in Kamakura the sun was as warm as in autumn.

But as he looked more closely he saw that the five were shoving and jostling one another in a competition for nipples. Their front paws pumped at Teru’s belly like pistons, and they were giving free rein to their young animal strength; and Teru, perhaps because they were now strong enough to climb the slope, seemed reluctant to let them nurse. She twisted and turned, and lay on her belly. It was red from the threshing paws.