The Wild Geese (5 page)

By the time the dishes had been carried into the room, it seemed as though all three of them had dropped in to dine after a family excursion. Suezo, who was usually a tyrant in his own home and who was alternately obeyed and resisted by his wife, felt a placid and delicate delight that he had never felt before when he saw Otama take up a saké bottle and fill his cup, her face blushing and revealing a modest smile. While Suezo knew intuitively
and unconsciously a happiness whose shadow floated like a vision in Otama's presence, he lacked the fine reasoning that would have made him reflect why his home life was devoid of such happiness, nor could he calculate how much was required to maintain such an unusual feeling—in fact, whether or not the requirement might be satisfied by him and his wife.

“Please!” shouted a voice against the beating of a pair of wooden clappers just outside the fence. “Your favorite actors!”

Upstairs the music stopped, and a maid said something from the railing.

“Thank you,” said the man outside. And he called out the names of two Kabuki players.

The actor-imitator began to perform at once.

“We're lucky,” said the maid, entering the room with another container of saké. “A real mimic's come tonight!”

“What's that?” asked Suezo. “Are there false mimics along with the true ones?”

“Oh, yes. Lately, a university student's been going around.”

“You mean he can actually play an instrument too?” asked Suezo.

“Of course, just like a professional. Even his costume's real. But we know him! We can tell who he is by his voice.”

“Then there's only one deceiver,” said Suezo.

“Yes, only one who dares!” said the maid, laughing.

“Do you know him personally?” Suezo asked.

“Why, yes! He often comes here to eat.”

“He must have quite a skill then,” said the old man.

“And just think—he's only a student.”

“But probably a bad one,” said Suezo with an ironic smile as he thought of the students who came to his house. Some of them, he knew, disguised themselves as tradesmen and teased the prostitutes in the small houses. How they enjoyed using the jargon of these women! But it surprised him that a student did tour the neighborhood in earnest as a mimic.

“Who are your favorite actors, Otama-san?” Suezo said, turning to her suddenly.

“I don't have any favorites,” she said. She had been quietly listening to the conversation.

“Oh!” interrupted her father, “she's never been inside a theater!” And he added: “We live right next to one, and all the girls on our block go to see the plays. But not my Otama. Never. I hear the other girls rush out of their houses the minute they catch the first note!”

The old man, in spite of his intentions, was apt to revert to the praise of his daughter.

T
HEY
REACHED
an agreement. Otama would live in the house Suezo had bought on Muenzaka.

But the transfer, which Suezo had thought a simple matter, raised some difficulties.

“I want my father as close as possible,” Otama had said. “I want to visit him often. I must look after him.”

Her original intention had been to send her father, already over sixty, the greater part of her allowance and to provide him with a young maid who would make him comfortable. If her plan worked, he would no longer have to remain in their dismal home, its wall shared with that of a rickshaw garage. “Why can't you put my father in a house near my own?” she had asked.

So it turned out that Suezo, who had thought that all he need do was to receive his mistress in the house he had purchased for her, now had, in addition, just as he had been forced to invite the father with the daughter at their first interview, to undertake the problem of the old man's living quarters.

She had told Suezo: “It's my own concern. I don't want to trouble you.”

But since she had mentioned the problem, he could not avoid it. He wanted to show her how generous he was.

Finally Suezo had said: “Look. When you come to live at Muenzaka, I'll rent a house for your father at Ike-nohata.”

It had been forced on him. When Suezo saw how Otama would have to save and pinch on her allowance after she had said that she would manage the arrangement herself, he couldn't allow her to do so.

Thus Suezo had to pay more than he had calculated. But he paid without bitterness, much to the bewilderment of the old go-between.

By the middle of July, Otama and her father had settled in their new homes. Suezo was so bewitched by the modesty of the girl's manner and her maidenly way of speaking that he visited her almost every night. He had been capable of complete ruthlessness in this dealings, and still was, but now he tried every trick of tenderness to gain Otama's affection. This, I believe, is what historians have often called the touch of weakness in a man of iron will.

On these visits Suezo made it a point to appear almost every evening, though he never stayed the entire night. With the help of the go-between, Otama had hired a maid. Ume was only thirteen, and she did the kitchen work, which, Otama could not help feeling, was little more than having a child play a pleasant game. The result was that Otama did not have enough to do during the day and was left without anyone to talk to.

She would find herself wishing for her master to come earlier in the evening and would smile at the change taking place in herself. Before, the situation had been different. She had also been alone while her father was out selling his candies, but during his absence she had taken in piece-work. She had not even had the friendship of the girls in the neighborhood, yet she had never regretted the loss, had never even been bored. She would think only of the sum she would receive upon completing the task. There would be her father's surprise, his smile of pleasure because of her diligence. Yes, she had worked hard in those days. But now it was different, and she was beginning to feel the pains of ennui.

Yet her weariness was not unbearable, relieved as it was by Suezo's evening calls. Her father's position in the new house was a more difficult one than her own. Overnight he had been given luxuries he had never had before. At odd times during the day he would say to himself: “Am I bewitched? Yes! Bewitched by a fox!”

But the change was not enough to satisfy him, and he began to miss those earlier days when he and Otama would spend their evenings together, the oil lamp lit, their small talk about the ways of the world begun, the silence without disturbance from others infiltrating their room.

“A pretty dream that was,” said the old man to himself. “It'll never come back.”

At other times he said to himself: “When will she come? I expect her. But when?”

A number of days had passed since their separation, and he had not received even a short visit from her.

For the first few days the old man was delighted with the house, the maid from the country, the conveniences. The girl cooked his meals and did the heavy task of carrying in the water from the well. He tried to keep busy too and helped the girl put the rooms in order. Sometimes
he swept. Occasionally he sent her out to shop for him. And in the evening when he heard her working in the kitchen, he sprinkled the ground around the parasol pine. Later, his figure framed in the low window, his arms on the sill, a pipe in his mouth, he watched the movements of the noisy crows over Ueno Hill and looked at the shrine on the wooded island in the pond, the lotus flowers in the water blurred by degrees in the thickening haze of evening.

He said to himself that he was grateful for his good fortune, that he was satisfied with his circumstances, yet at the same time he could not help thinking: “I raised her without anyone's help. I kept her from the moment she was born. We didn't even need words. We could understand each other without talk. A daughter who was always kind, always waiting for me when I came home.”

He would sit at the window for hours, his eyes on the pond or the people walking along the street.

At times he wanted to shout: “Otama! Look at that! Did you see that carp jump?”

When a stranger was passing, he wanted to call his daughter to the window, wanted to tell her: “A foreigner! What a hat she's got on! A whole bird on top of it!”

How he wished he could say that to Otama, to cry: “Did you ever see such a sight?”

And it pained him that he could not.

With each passing day he became increasingly irritable. He began to find fault with the maid when she brought him his meals. He had not had a servant for many years, and since he was a tender-hearted man, he
refrained from scolding her. But he was uneasy in her presence, for no matter what she did, it went against him. To do justice to the girl—just up to Tokyo from the country—it was unfortunate for her to be compared with Otama, who bore herself so well and did everything gently and quietly.

Finally, on the fourth day after moving to his new house, he was shocked to find that the maid had her thumb in his soup as she brought it to him at breakfast.

“No more serving me! Go away!” He found the courage to say that much.

After the meal he took his usual position at the window. He didn't think it would rain, and with the weather so cool, he thought he would go out for a walk. As he went around the pond he kept speculating: “She may come while I'm out.”

And he turned several times to look at his house.

Eventually he came to a small bridge leading towards Muenzaka. Should he go to his daughter's house? But he couldn't bring himself to take that direction. It seemed as though he felt hindered by a barrier suddenly rising between him and his daughter, an awareness of their altered positions, something. A mother might never have such a feeling towards an only child. Wondering why a father should, he continued around the pond instead of crossing the bridge. Suddenly he discovered he was standing in front of Suezo's place. The go-between had previously pointed to it from his own house. From close up, it seemed better looking, surrounded by its high mud wall with bamboo strips nailed diagonally at the top of
the barrier. The neighboring house, which he had been told belonged to the scholar Fukuchi, had more extensive grounds, but the residence itself was old-fashioned and not as gaudy and pretentious as Suezo's.

For a while the old man stood in front of Suezo's house, his eyes on the service gate of white woodwork, yet his mind definite that he did not want to enter it.

The old man was not thinking of anything in particular, but for some time he seemed dazed, attacked by a rush of feeling, a kind of loneliness coming over him and mixed with the sudden awareness of life's brevity, its change. If you force me to define these emotions more specifically, they were those of a parent who has debased himself by selling his daughter as a mistress.

A week passed, and still Otama had not come. He was annoyed at himself for wanting to see her so badly, and he wondered: “Has she forgotten me? She's comfortable now. Why not?”

These suspicions were so faint that he alone could have brought them about and played with them in his own mind. Suspicions they were, and yet not such as to make him hate her. But superficially at least, with the irony that one often uses in conversation, he murmured: “I'd be happier if I could.”

Then his reasoning took another direction: “I leave the house so that I don't have to think too much. Let her come when I'm not there! She'll be sorry she missed me. But what if she doesn't care if I'm out? Well, at least her visit was a waste of time. That should annoy her. It would serve her right too!” And on his walks he repeated these
conclusions a number of times.

He would go to the park, rest on a bench in the shade, and then get up and walk again. If he happened to see a covered rickshaw, he would say to himself: “Ah! she's visited me! Oh, she'll be upset all right not to find me in. That'll teach her!” And if, as he half wished, it did punish her, he knew that he was also putting himself to a test.

In the evening he began to go to the theater to listen to the storyteller and the recitations of dramatic ballads. Inside, he imagined his daughter on one of her futile visits to his house, but the thought would suddenly occur to him that she was also in the hall, and he would look around at the young women with the same hair style as Otama's. Once he was certain he had seen her. The woman had entered during the intermission, her companion in
yukata
and with a panama hat, quite a new fashion in those days. The old man watched her take a seat in the gallery, put her hands on the railing, and look down into the pit below. But as he looked more closely, he said to himself: “No, her face is too round. Besides, she's smaller than Otama.” In addition, her escort was accompanied not only by that woman but by others who sat behind him.

They were all geisha girls and apprentices.

And he heard a student near him whisper: “That's Fukuchi!”

As Otama's father left the hall after the performance, he saw the man followed by his troop of geishas and novices and led by a woman holding a long-handled lantern with the name of the theater written in red characters.