With the toothpick still between his teeth and his hands thrust into his robe, he was musing at the threshold of his room when the young man who had been sweeping leaves in the garden with a bamboo broom approached and greeted him politely.
“Morning. That was a tiring journey.”
“You’re the fellow who rode with me in the carriage?”
“By your leave—”
“It really is quiet, just as you said. And this place is endless.”
“Not really. As you can see, there’s hardly any flat land, so they kept digging out and building and building some more on levels. The halls, though, I’m afraid they’re like you say, endless.”
“I got lost on my way back from the bath last night — I was in a panic.”
“That’ll happen.”
While this exchange was in progress, a man and woman were coming down from the hill just beyond the garden. To ease the relatively steep pitch of the hillside, the trail descended through brilliant maples and withered trees in switchbacks, so that even after the couple was in sight it took a while for them to emerge at the entrance to the garden. The young hostler, who knew a generous tipper when he saw one, didn’t stand around waiting. Leaving Tsuda behind without a backward glance, he dashed to the bottom of the hill and greeted the other guests as if he had been waiting to welcome them when they appeared.
Tsuda had a good look at their faces for the first time. He nearly failed to recognize the woman, who had let down the large knot of hair piled atop her head the last time he had seen her and reset it in a normal hairdo, but this was unquestionably the female who had opened the door to his bath in her seductive state of semidress the night before. Her male companion he knew only by his voice; under cover of the distance separating them, he examined his face for the first time. He wore a mustache, closely cropped in the style of the day, and there was an aura about him that somehow confirmed what the bath attendant had said, that he was a merchant. Something in his countenance put Tsuda instantly in mind of O-Hide’s husband, Hori Shōtarō, slightly abbreviated “Hori the Shō-san,” and further shortened “Hori-shō,” a nickname Hori himself often used that seemed to accord perfectly with his brother-in-law’s manner. He imagined that this fellow, too, must have a nickname so redolent of the merchant class it would overpower his high-faluting mustache. Tsuda’s speculation based on a single glance didn’t stop there. Advancing a step further into cynicism, he wondered whether this was truly a married couple. With that question in mind, he sensed something incongruous about the domesticity of their morning as they described it, a walk following a bath after rising early. Tsuda was still standing as before, working on his teeth with his toothpick. Though he was observing them at a distance, the conversation, which included the hostler, was distinctly audible.
“Is there anything the matter with the lady in the annex today?” the woman inquired. The hostler replied.
“No, Ma’am, not that I know of. Is there anything—”
“Nothing special. But we always see her at morning bath, and she wasn’t there today.”
“Is that so? It could be she’s still asleep?”
“Maybe. But we always take morning bath at the same time.”
“I see.”
“And this morning we had a date to walk into the hills together.”
“Shall I go and remind her?”
“It doesn’t matter now — we’ve already been on our walk. I just thought I’d ask you if maybe she wasn’t feeling well.”
“I think she’s probably still asleep. On the other hand—”
“Never mind about the other hand. You don’t have to be so serious, I was just asking.”
The couple moved away.
With his mouth full of tooth powder, Tsuda ventured into the hall to search for the bath he had used the night before.
[179]
BUT THIS morning he was spared the necessity of a search. When he had made his way downstairs to the bath without a misstep despite some confusing twists and turns, he was overtaken anew by a sense of how ridiculously he’d been acting since the night before.
Through the glass transom installed beneath the eaves, the strong sunlight of an autumn morning was pouring into the room. Glancing up through the glass above his head, Tsuda could just make out what might have been a rock or an embankment and realized that the tub he was soaking in was below ground. The difference in height between the bath and the cliff outside was considerable. From what he could see, he judged it to be some ten or twelve feet, which meant, inasmuch as he had heard there was an older bath below him, that the inn had been built on multiple levels.
Silverleafs were growing on top of the cliff. Unfortunately the morning sun wasn’t shining there, and the hard sheen of the flowers as they swayed occasionally in the wind made them appear icy cold. Camellias were also visible from the tub as they dropped from the bush and scattered. But the scenery was fragmented. Outside the two feet of view permitted by the glass, Tsuda could see nothing above or below. The vista unknown to him was bound to be ordinary. And yet for some reason it piqued his curiosity. A bird had suddenly begun to warble, a bulbul judging by its melodic song, and hearing it just outside at the cliff but unable to see it, Tsuda felt somehow dissatisfied.
But this dissatisfaction was a mere afterthought. The truth was, from the moment he had come downstairs to the bath, he had been playing over in his mind the incident from the previous night and was as a consequence submerged in a far deeper sense of dissatisfaction. Finding the sunlit bathing room deserted, he had stood in the desolate hallway of the bathing area and just to be sure, as if he were within his rights to do exactly as he pleased, had opened each of the doors to the small tubs lined up on both sides. Possibly he had been prompted to try this by the pair of slippers that had been left in front of one of the doors. But when he came finally to the tightly closed door with the slippers in front of it, he hesitated. He wasn’t unaware of what he was about. He was moreover disinclined to be rude. At a loss for what to do, he strained to hear from outside the door, and the silence inside empowered his hand to turn the handle and push it boldly open. Encountering a private tub as empty as all the others, he experienced relief and disappointment at the same time.
Naked now and soaking in the tub, he had been left in the aftermath of his experiment with an incessant sense of anticipation. With a mirthless smile, he tried comparing himself before and after the change he had undergone since the previous evening. Last night, until the woman with the upswept hair had walked in on him, he had been, if anything, innocent. This morning, before anyone had appeared, he felt a kind of tension that came from lying in wait.
Perhaps the unidentified slippers had incited him to this transgression. But if the slippers had churned him, it was because on arising he had overheard talk of Kiyoko in the banter between the woman from Yokohama and the hostler. She was still in bed. Or at least she hadn’t taken her bath yet. If she were intending to bathe, she would have to be bathing now or on her way here, one or the other.
Tsuda’s keen hearing detected abruptly the sound of someone coming down the stairs. He stopped splashing water on himself. Whereupon the footsteps stopped. Perhaps he was imagining things; it seemed to him that when they resumed a second later they were moving in the opposite direction, back up the stairs. He thought he could imagine why. He wondered if the problem mightn’t be that he had left his slippers outside the door as he had seen others do. Why hadn’t he worn them inside? he asked himself regretfully.