Thirst for Love Read online

  I felt relieved then. Yes, without the slightest jealousy or anything like it. In fact I felt a faint joy at being divested of responsibility. I tried not to watch what Saburo was doing. That was easy enough. My bent back, my silence, my application to the task—all without seeing him—aped Saburo’s silence, Saburo’s bent posture, Saburo’s application to the task.

  . . . yet there wasn’t a thing.

  Eleven o’clock came. Everyone withdrew to their rooms.

  What did she feel, then, when at one in the morning Yakichi, smoking his pipe, came into her room while she was mending and asked how she had been sleeping lately? This old man with ears turned toward Etsuko’s bedroom every night—ears alive all night to the turnings and wakings of Etsuko in the room down the hall. Are not old men’s ears like pure shells, incessantly washed and filled with wisdom? The ears, which in shape seem more like the property of an animal than any other part of the human body, are in an old man the very incarnation of intelligence. Was it for these reasons that Etsuko saw something other than ugliness in Yakichi’s solicitude on her behalf? Was it as if she were guarded and loved by wisdom?

  And yet giving it such a lovely name is perhaps going too far. Yakichi stood behind Etsuko, looking at her calendar on a doorpost.

  “What’s this? You bad girl. It’s still at last week’s date,” he said.

  Etsuko turned slightly: “Is it? I beg your pardon.”

  “Beg pardon? You don’t have to say that.”

  His voice was filled with good humor; as he spoke Etsuko could hear behind her the sound of pages being torn from her calendar. Then all sound stopped. She suddenly felt her shoulder being grasped, while a cold hand dry as bamboo slipped into her bodice. Her body recoiled slightly, but she said nothing. It was not because she could not cry out; she simply didn’t.

  How can one explain the sense of resignation Etsuko felt at this moment? Was it simply lust? Sloth? Was it the way a thirst-crazed man swallows rusty water that Etsuko accepted this? No. Etsuko was not thirsty in the slightest. Her nature had suddenly become one that asked for nothing. It seemed as if she had come to Maidemmura to find again a basis for that fearful self-sufficiency she had contracted in the Hospital for Infectious Diseases. She drank perhaps like a drowning man helplessly swallowing sea water, in accordance with some law of nature. Not to ask for anything means that one has lost one’s freedom to choose or reject. Once having decided that, one has no choice but to drink anything—even sea water . . .

  Afterward, however, Etsuko exhibited none of the gagging expressions of a drowning person. Until the moment of her death, it seemed, no one would know she was drowning. She did not call out—this woman bound and gagged by her own hand . . .

  April eighteenth was the day for the “mountain journey,” as they called cherry-blossom viewing in this area. It was the custom for everyone to take the day off and gather in family groups to wander about the foothills looking at blossoms.

  Everyone in the Sugimoto household except Yakichi and Etsuko had been eating more than they wished of jami—bamboo-shoot scraps. The former tenant farmer, Okura, would take the bamboo shoots they had harvested out of the shed, load them into the bicycle trailer, and take them to market, where they were graded and sold at three different prices. The bamboo shoots left over were swept up into a great pile and then cooked by the potful to make up the bill of fare for the Sugimotos other than Yakichi and Etsuko in April and May.

  The day of the mountain journey, however, was a grand occasion. A whole feast had been crammed into nested boxes. Clutching decorated mats, the family started out en masse to enjoy their picnic. Asako’s older child, a girl, was in raptures; there was no school.

  Etsuko recalled: We passed a lovely spring day, quite like those one sees boldly pictured in schoolbooks. Everyone became a person boldly painted in a picture—or played that part.

  There in the atmosphere charged with the intimate smell of manure—in the intimacy of country people, somehow the smell of manure is always present . . . And all those insects flying! And the air filled with the droning flight of bees and beetles! And the shining wind replete with sunlight! And the bellies of swallows turning in the wind!

  On the morning of the mountain journey those in the house were busy with preparations. When Etsuko finished packing the sushi lunches, she looked through the lattice window at Asako’s daughter, who was playing on the flagstone floor of the entranceway. She was dressed, in accordance with her mother’s terrible taste, in a bright yellow sweater the color of mustard flowers. What was she doing—this squatting girl of eight, eyes fixed on the ground? There on the flagstones was an iron teakettle, steam rising from it. Nobuko was staring intently at something moving between the edge of the stone floor and the dirt in which it was laid.

  It was a swarm of ants, floating about in the hot water that had been poured into their nest. Countless ants writhing in the boiling water that welled from the aperture of the nest. And that eight-year-old child, her bobbed head thrust deep between her knees, was watching them silently and intently. She held both hands against her face, oblivious to the hair that slanted down over her cheeks.

  As she watched this, Etsuko felt refreshed. Until the mother noticed that the kettle was gone and called to her daughter through the kitchen door, Etsuko watched Nobuko’s small back with its taut yellow sweater as if it were her own at some earlier time. From this time on she felt something slightly like a mother’s love toward this child ugly with her mother’s features.

  Just before they left, there was a little flurry as to who would stay at home. In the end, however, Miyo bowed to Etsuko’s sensible suggestion that she remain. Etsuko was amazed that her rather offhand expression of opinion on the subject was followed. There was, however, nothing very complicated about it. Yakichi simply did what she wished.

  As the family fell into single file on the path that led from their property to the village nearby, Etsuko was again rudely shaken by awareness that the family seemed to be unconsciously guided by an annoyingly sharp sense of social stratification. It was an acute, animal instinct, like that by which one worker ant knows simply by feel or smell another worker ant from a different nest, or the queen ant knows a worker ant, or, in turn, the worker knows the queen. They couldn’t have found out . . . There was as yet no evidence by which they might . . . In the line the household group formed, however, all unwittingly, Yakichi came first, then Etsuko, then Kensuke, Chieko, Asako, Nobuko (her younger brother Natsuo, age five, had been left with Miyo) in order down to Saburo, carrying on his shoulder a great arabesque-pattern furoshiki filled with provisions.

  They crossed an outlying section in the back of their property; it was the area now largely fallen into disuse in which Yakichi had cultivated grapes before the war. It was a patch about one fourth of an acre in size, of which about a third was taken up by small peach trees in full bloom. The rest of it was occupied by three toppling greenhouses, their glass almost all destroyed by typhoons, oil drums filled with stagnant rainwater, grapevines returned to the wild . . . sunbeams falling on dry straw.

  “This is terrible, isn’t it,” said Yakichi, pushing one of the posts holding up a greenhouse with his thick rattan stick. “The next time we get some money we’ll fix it up.”

  “You’re always saying that, Father,” said Kensuke, “but these greenhouses will probably be like this forever.”

  “We never get any money; is that what you mean?”

  “Not at all,” said Kensuke, his voice picking up tone. “When you get any money, Father, it’s always too much or too little to use for repairs.”

  “Now, is that so? You mean it’s either too much or too little to give you as part of your allowance.”

  As they talked, they arrived at the top of a hill covered by pines in which four or five mountain cherries were mingled. There were no cherry trees of the famous blossoming varieties hereabout, so they had no choice but to spread their decorated mats under the mountain cherries, unsuitable fo
r any proper blossom viewing. Already farm families had taken up the area under each of the trees. They bowed cordially as the line of the Sugimoto family arrived. They did not, however, offer their places, as they were once wont to do.

  Kensuke and Chieko began whispering to each other about the other families. In accordance with Yakichi’s instructions, everyone spread their mats on a portion of the slope from which they could see the blossoms in something like a panorama. A farmer of their acquaintance—a man in his fifties wearing a pink necktie under a government-issue, checkered jacket—came over carrying a bottle and saké cup and offered them some holiday raw saké. Kensuke accepted a cup and blithely drained it.

  Now, why? thought Etsuko, rather disconnectedly, as she watched Kensuke. I wouldn’t have any. . . . Her thoughts were worth little: Now, there’s Kensuke accepting the saké cup—he with the cutting remarks still in his mouth. It would be all right if he really liked raw saké. But anyone can tell he has never cared for it. He’s doing it simply because he enjoys drinking saké given him by this man who is unaware that he has been ripped up the back. That small joy in rottenness. Joy in spite. Joy in the little laugh up one’s sleeve. . . . There are some people who are born for no other purpose. God seems to enjoy doing silly things like that.

  Then Chieko took the cup—only because her husband had.

  Etsuko refused. This gave all of them another reason to talk about her as a woman who did not conform.

  A certain order seemed to be forming within the family circle on this day, an occurrence Etsuko found no reason to resent. She was satisfied in the relationship between the two expressionless solidities made up of Yakichi’s expressionless good humor and, at his side, her own expressionless self. Next she was satisfied with Saburo—bored, with no one to talk to, not even a boy as silent as himself. She was satisfied with the dull motherliness of Asako, and even the hostility of Kensuke and his wife, hidden under the mantle of tolerance. It was an order created by Etsuko and no one else.

  Nobuko bent over Etsuko, holding a small wildflower. “What is it, Aunt Etsuko?” she asked. Etsuko didn’t know and asked Saburo.

  Saburo glanced at the flower and returned it to Etsuko. “It’s a murasuzume,” he said.

  What surprised Etsuko was not the strange name of the flower, but the blinding speed of his hand as he returned it.

  Chieko, quick of hearing, caught the exchange and said: “This fellow acts as though he knows nothing, and he knows everything. Sing us a Tenri song. You’ll be amazed how much he knows.”

  Saburo looked down, his face red.

  “Please, sing. Don’t be embarrassed. Sing,” said Chieko, handing him a hardboiled egg. “See, I’ll give you this. Sing for us.”

  Saburo glanced at the egg between Chieko’s fingers, on one of which a ring with a cheap stone glittered. In his black puppy’s eye a tiny sharp gleam moved. He said: “Forget the egg. I’ll sing.” Then he smiled a little smile, seemingly of apology.

  Chieko said: “‘If the whole world in one line’—and something else.”

  “‘Lay before your eyes,’ it goes,” he said, his face serious. Then he turned his eyes toward the nearby village spread out before them and recited, as if repeating an imperial mandate. The village was in a small valley. In the war an army air force unit was billeted there. From its secluded recess officers commuted to Hotarugaike Air Base. Cherries grew along the creek over there. And an elementary school had a tiny yard with cherry trees in it, too. Two or three children were visible there, playing on an exercise bar built over sand. They looked like balls of lint blown in the wind.

  Saburo recited this text from Tenri litany:

  I look upon the whole world stretched out in one line,

  And not a soul among them there knows what’s going on.

  Of course, there is nobody to teach them.

  Nobody knows anything, which is as it should be.

  But God is appearing now before all eyes,

  And teaching everybody there every single thing.

  “That was banned during the war,” Yakichi commented learnedly. “Those lines ‘I look upon the whole world stretched out in one line/ And not a soul among them there knows what’s going on’ sounded as though they included His Majesty. Logically, anyway. So the Intelligence Office banned it, I understand.”

  Nothing happened on that day—the day of that mountain journey—either.

  A week after that Saburo was given three days off, as he was every year, so that he could go to Tenri to march in the great April Twenty-sixth Festival. He would meet his mother at the National Church, stay over there, and worship at the Mother Temple.

  Etsuko had not yet been in Tenri. There was a magnificent temple there, built by the gifts of the faithful from all over the country and erected with their “Hinoki faith” contributions, as they referred to their donated labor. In the very center of the temple was a “manna table.” She had heard stories of that table—on which on the last day manna would fall—and how, in the winter, through the roof, open like a skylight, snowflakes would come and dance in the wind.

  “Hinoki faith”—there was in the term the smell of new wood and the sound of clear devotion and joyful labor. It told of old men who could no longer work and, just to be part of it, would scoop dirt into their handkerchiefs and help in construction.

  Well, enough of that . . . In those three short days of Saburo’s absence, the feeling that developed with his absence—whatever the feeling—was to me entirely new. As a gardener who, after long care and toil, holds in his hand a marvelous peach, hefts the weight of it, and feels the joy of it, so I felt the weight of his absence in my hand and reveled in it. It would not be true to say that those three days were lonely. To me his absence was a plump, fresh weight. That was joy! Everywhere in the house I perceived his absence—in the yard, in the workroom, in the kitchen, in his bedroom.

  Out of the bay window of his room, his quilts were hung to air. They were thin, rough, cotton quilts with dark blue stripes. Etsuko was on her way into the back field to pick some Chinese cabbage for the evening meal. Saburo’s room faced the southwest and received the sun in the afternoon. The sun lit up every corner of it, all the way to the torn partition far from the window.

  Etsuko had not come here to peer into his room. She had been drawn by the delicate fragrance floating in the western sun, the smell released by a young animal sprawled asleep in the sunlight. She stood a moment by the quilts, for just a moment by this frayed fabric with the smell and luster of leather. She pressed her finger against it out of curiosity, as if stroking something alive. A warm elasticity in the cotton, swelled in the sun, answered her touch. Etsuko departed and slowly descended the stone steps that ran under the oaks toward the back fields.

  And so Etsuko finally fell again into the slumber that had long eluded her.

  3

  T HE SWALLOW’S NEST was empty—since yesterday, it seemed.

  The second-floor room of Kensuke and his wife had windows on the south and east. In the summer, they enjoyed watching, out their east window, the swallows that nested under the eaves of the first-floor entranceway.

  Etsuko was returning a book she had borrowed from Kensuke and, as she stood leaning against the rail at the window of his room, said: “The swallows are gone, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, but while you’re there, notice that we can see Osaka Castle today. It’s so smoggy in the summer you can’t see it.”

  Kensuke was sprawled out reading a book, which he laid aside. Then he threw open the southern window and pointed to the horizon in the southwest.

  When one looked at the castle from here one could not see any part of it anchored firmly to the ground. Everything floated. Everything was suspended. When the air cleared, one could fancy seeing something like the spirit of the castle detach itself from the material castle and stretch on tiptoe and look about from that height. In Etsuko’s eyes, the tower of Osaka Castle was like a spectral island constantly beguiling the gaze of
a castaway.

  No one lives there, I suppose, she thought. Perhaps, somewhere, there are men living in castle towers buried in dust.

  The conclusion that no one lived there relieved her. How unhappy—an imagination that couldn’t keep itself from making wild surmises as to whether someone was or was not living in some far-off old castle! It was this imagination that constantly shook the foundation of her happiness—which was to think about nothing at all.

  “What are you thinking about, Etsuko? Ryosuke? Or . . .” said Kensuke, sitting in the window bay. His voice—though it was not the same at all—was somehow like Ryosuke’s in its shading, and it shocked Etsuko into an honest reply.

  “I was wondering if anyone lives in the castle.”

  Her smoky, suppressed laugh awoke Kensuke’s cynicism. “You like people, after all, don’t you, Etsuko? People, people, people—you are really normal—with a normality I can’t even come close to. You just need to be a little honest with yourself. That’s my diagnosis. If so . . .”

  Chieko, who had gone down to the sink to wash the cups and plates from their late breakfast, came up the stairs carrying the dishes in a tray covered by a towel. A little package dangled perilously from her middle finger, and before she put the tray down she dropped the package in Kensuke’s lap where he sat in the window.

  “It came!”

  “Oh! The medicine I’ve been waiting for?”

  He opened the package and took out a little can marked “Himrod’s Powder.” It was an American asthma remedy that a friend of his in a trading firm in Osaka had managed to have sent over. It had seemed as if the desired medicine would never arrive, and only yesterday Kensuke had complained about his friend.

  Etsuko took the opportunity to leave, but Chieko stopped her, saying: “I come back, you go. It’s enough to make you wonder.”