The light slap of his slippers stopped at the door to Kiyoko’s room.
“This is it.”
Peering up at Tsuda askance, the maid burst out laughing.
“I told you.”
“You have some nose, all right. Keener than a hunting dog’s.”
The maid was laughing heartily, but no response to her hilarity issued from inside the room. It was impossible to tell whether anyone was there; the interior was quiet as before.
“Your visitor is here, Ma’am.”
Calling in to Kiyoko, the maid slid the well-seated shoji all the way back.
“May I come in?”
Stepping into the room as he spoke, Tsuda halted in surprise. He had been prepared to come face to face with Kiyoko, but the room appeared to be empty.
[183]
THERE WERE actually two adjoining rooms. Tsuda had entered an antechamber with no alcove for hanging a scroll or exhibiting flowers. Thick, cross-hatched pillows in front of a rectangular mirror edged in black on a black wooden stand and the small brazier of paulownia wood alongside it evoked, on a small scale, the atmosphere of a sitting room in a normal Japanese house. There was a black lacquer kimono rack in a corner. The bright colors of the striped garments tossed over it and their silkiness, as if they would be smooth to the touch, evoked the fairer sex.
The heavy paper door to the adjoining room had been left open. Tsuda saw an arrangement of fresh-cut chrysanthemums in the alcove there. Two cushions had been placed face to face in front of it. Tea-brown silk with a round whiteness in the center, a single peony perhaps, the elegant cushions seemed excessively formal as a preparation for receiving a casual visitor. Even before he had seated himself, Tsuda had intuited something.
Everything is too proper. This must represent the distance that separates the destinies of the two people about to face each other.
Recognizing this all of a sudden, Tsuda was on the verge of regretting having come.
But what produced this distance? On reflection it seemed inevitable it should be there. Tsuda had merely forgotten. But how could he have forgotten? Perhaps forgetting was also inevitable.
It was just then, as he was standing in the anteroom lost in thought, gazing at the cushions inside without moving to them or taking a seat, that Kiyoko stepped into view from the far corner of the engawa. What she had been doing there until now Tsuda couldn’t imagine. Nor could he understand why she would have chosen to step outside. Perhaps, waiting for him after straightening the room, she had been gazing at the terraced layers of autumn foliage on the mountain, leaning against a corner of the railing. In any event, her manner seemed odd. To be precise, her behavior at that moment would have been more appropriate to running into an unexpected guest than welcoming someone she had invited.
And yet, curiously enough, this was less offensive to him than the cushions stiffly awaiting them to take their seats or the oblong brazier that had been positioned between the cushions to create what appeared to be an intentional obstruction. Doubtless that was because this attitude was not so distant as to be incompatible with the Kiyoko he had been painting in his imagination.
The Kiyoko whom Tsuda knew was by no means a restless, fussy woman. On the contrary, she was inveterately unperturbed. It might even have been said that a distinguishing feature of her temperament, and of the actions that derived from her temperament, was a certain languor. He had always counted on that quality of hers. He had placed inordinate faith in it, and as a result his faith had been betrayed. Such at least was his interpretation. Even so, notwithstanding his interpretation, the faith he had established at the time, though he wasn’t conscious of it, had remained intact inside him. Her marriage to Seki may have occurred as swiftly as the darting of a swallow, but that was an inconsistency and nothing more. Since his turmoil began only when he strove to connect these two realities without contradiction, he preferred to consider them separately: just as a was a fact, so then must b also be true.
Why did that languorous woman leap into an airplane? Why did she fly loop-the-loops?
It was precisely here that serious doubt lingered. Facts, however, were in the end facts, no matter how they might be doubted, and would not disappear by themselves.
On this head, Kiyoko the rebel was more fortunate than faithful O-Nobu. If, when Tsuda had entered the room, it had been O-Nobu instead of Kiyoko who had thrown him off his pace with an oddly timed entrance from the far end of the engawa, what would his response have been?
She’s up to something again.
Certainly this is what he would have thought. But coming from Kiyoko, this same behavior had an entirely different effect.
She’s as languid as ever.
Having persuaded himself, Tsuda had no choice but to assess her behavior as languid even though she had knocked his legs from under him with a move of dizzying speed.
It wasn’t simply that she had thrown his timing off. She had appeared from the far end of the engawa carrying in both hands the large basket of fruit he had presented her in Madam Yoshikawa’s name. Whatever her intention, it seemed clear the nuisance the gift may have created for her until now couldn’t be taken as a measure of her indifference to Tsuda. Even so, this behavior had to be accounted odd, the more so if she had kept the basket with her on the balcony until now, even more so assuming she had put it down once and picked it up again. At the very least, it was awkward. And juvenile somehow. Nonetheless Tsuda, who knew her normal behavior as if by heart, couldn’t help discerning in this something unmistakably like her.
It’s funny. It’s funny in a way that’s just like you. And you’re not the slightest bit aware of what’s comical about it.
As he watched Kiyoko appear to struggle with the basket as though it were heavy for her, this is what Tsuda would have liked to say.
[184]
AT THAT point Kiyoko held the basket out to the maid. Not knowing what she was to do with it, the maid extended her hand mechanically and took it, saying nothing. While this simple interaction occurred between them, Tsuda had to stand where he was. But instead of the awkwardness that such a moment would normally have created, he felt at ease, untroubled in any way. He interpreted what he saw as merely a continuation of the languid behavior that was consonant with the Kiyoko he knew. Accordingly the confusion he was feeling about what he remembered of the night before doubled in intensity. Why had this imperturbable woman paled? Why had she gone rigid? No matter how he thought about it, there was no reconciling the extremity of her surprise then and her composure now. He felt like a person who has awakened for the first time in his life to the difference between night and day.
Without waiting to be asked, he sat down on the cushion that had been provided. He then turned his gaze on Kiyoko who, still on her feet, was instructing the maid to arrange the fruit on a plate.
“Thank you for the lovely gift.”
These were her first words to him. The subject shifted perforce from the bearer of the gift to the kindness of the person who had provided it. Having resolved to lie from the moment he used Madam Yoshikawa’s name, Tsuda was no longer even conscious that he was misrepresenting.
“I almost gave the tangerines to an old fellow I met along the way.”
“For heaven’s sake, why?”
It mattered little to Tsuda how he replied.
“The basket was a nuisance, heavy as a piece of luggage.”