Presently he rose resolutely, slid open the fusuma, and called down to his wife from the head of the stairs.
“O-Nobu. Do you have any Japanese paper and an envelope?”
“Japanese?”
To O-Nobu the adjective sounded oddly comic.
“Do you mind ladies’?”
Tsuda unscrolled across his desk the rice paper imprinted with a stylish flower pattern.
“I wonder if he’ll like this.”
“As long as the letter is clearly written so he can understand, I don’t think the paper matters.”
“You’re wrong about that. You might not think so, but he can very particular.”
Tsuda peered intently at the narrow page, his face serious. The hint of a smile appeared at the corners of O-Nobu’s mouth.
“Shall I send Toki out for something better?”
Tsuda grunted distractedly. It wasn’t as if plain rice paper and an unpatterned envelope would ensure the success of his request.
“She’ll be only a minute.”
O-Nobu went directly downstairs. A minute later Tsuda heard the maid’s footsteps leaving the house. Until the required articles reached him, he waited idly, smoking a cigarette at his desk.
There was therefore nothing to distract him from thoughts of his father. Born and raised in Tokyo, he had never missed an opportunity to denigrate the Kyoto area until one day he had moved there, intending to settle permanently. When Tsuda had ventured to express mild disapproval, knowing that his mother was not fond of the region, his father had asked, pointing to the house he had built on land he had purchased, “What will you do with all this?” Even younger than he was now, he had failed to grasp what his father meant. Handling the property wouldn’t be a problem, he had thought. From time to time his father would turn to him and say, “This isn’t for anyone else, it’s all for you,” or again, “You might not realize its value to you now, but once I’m dead and gone you’ll know to be grateful.” Tsuda replayed in his mind these words and the old man’s attitude when he had spoken them. Inflated with confidence that he had single-handedly provided for his son’s future happiness, his father had seemed unapproachable, an awe-inspiring oracle. Tsuda wanted to say, turning to the father in his imagination, Instead of feeling overwhelmed with gratitude when you die, I’d much prefer feeling grateful regularly each month a little at a time.
It was some ten minutes later that he began to indite, in formal epistolary Japanese on rice paper unlikely to offend his father, the phrases and flourishes that seemed most likely to coax some money out of him. When, feeling awkward and unnatural, he had finally completed the letter, he reread what he had written and was appalled by his own artless calligraphy. Never mind the text, the characters it was written in seemed to him to preclude any possibility of success. And what if he should succeed; the money couldn’t possibly arrive in time for when he needed it. When he had sent the maid to the post office, he burrowed under the covers and said to himself,
I’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow.
[16]
THE FOLLOWING afternoon Tsuda stood before Yoshikawa, summoned by him.
“I hear you came to the house yesterday.”
“I stopped in briefly and said hello to Mrs. Yoshikawa.”
“So you’re sick again?”
“A little—”
“That’s no good — every five minutes.”
“This isn’t new — I’m still recovering from last time.”
His face registering mild surprise, Yoshikawa spat out his after-lunch toothpick. From his vest pocket he removed his cigar case. Tsuda struck one of the matches on top of the ashtray. In his eagerness to appear alert, he moved too quickly and the match went out before it could be of use. Flustered, he struck a second and lifted it with care to the tip of Yoshikawa’s nose.
“At any rate, if you’re sick, you’re sick. You’d better take some time off to pull yourself together.”
Tsuda thanked his boss and started from the room. Yoshikawa spoke to him through the smoke.
“I assume you’ve let Sasaki know.”
“I spoke to Sasaki-san and to some others and arranged for them to cover me.”
Tsuda reported to Sasaki.
“If you’re going to be taking off anyway there’s no reason to put it off. Do what you have to, recover as soon as you can, and get back to work.”
Yoshikawa’s words were a limpid reflection of his temperament.
“Start tomorrow if you can arrange it.”
“As you say—”
Now Tsuda felt he had no choice but to check in to the clinic the very next day. He was halfway out the door when once again he was detained by a voice at his back.
“By the way, how’s your father doing? Full of piss and vinegar as always?”
The rich fragrance of cigar smoke abruptly assailed Tsuda’s nose as he turned back.
“He’s well — thank you for inquiring.”
“I suppose he’s writing his poetry, taking it good and easy — what a life! I ran into Okamoto on the town last night and he was talking about your father. He was envious as hell. He’s come into some leisure time himself recently, but he’s no match for your old man—”
It had never occurred to Tsuda for a minute that his father was an object of envy among this crowd. Should someone offer to exchange their circumstances for his father’s, he had felt certain they would smile stiffly and beg to be left just as they were for at least another ten years. This was of course merely an assumption he had extrapolated from his own personality. At the same time, it was based on what he understood of Yoshikawa’s temperament and that of his cronies.
“My father is behind the times so he has no choice but to live the way he does.”
Little by little Tsuda had returned to the center of the room and was now standing where he had first entered.
“You’ve got it backward — he can live that kind of life because he’s ahead of the times.”
Tsuda felt tongue-tied. His lack of fluency in comparison to his boss felt like a burden. At an awkward loss for words, he gazed at the slowly dissipating cloud of cigar smoke.
“Be careful not to cause your father any worry. I know all about everything that’s going on with you, and if you take a wrong turn, I promise you I’ll make sure your old man knows about it, you take my meaning?”
These words, as though spoken to a child, might have been in jest or an admonishment; when Tsuda had listened to them, he finally fled the room.
[17]
ON HIS way home that day, Tsuda alighted from the streetcar before his stop and made his way a few blocks along the busy thoroughfare before turning into a side street. Midway down the narrow, winding street past the awning on a pawnshop and a go parlor and modest houses that might have been home to a neighborhood fire chief or a master carpenter, he pushed open a door inset with frosted glass and stepped inside. As the bell fastened to the upper part of the door jangled, four or five pairs of eyes glimmered at him from the cramped room just down the hall from the entrance. The room was not merely cramped; it was truly dark. To Tsuda, having stepped abruptly inside from the bright street, it felt like nothing so much as a cave. Huddling in one corner of the chilly couch, he returned the gaze of the glittering eyes, which just now had turned toward him in the darkness. Most of the men had seated themselves near the large ceramic brazier that had been installed in the center of the room. Two with folded arms, two more with one hand each on the edge of the brazier, another, apart, his face lowered to the newspaper scattered about as if to lick the print, and the last, in a corner of the room opposite the couch where he had seated himself, his body slightly atilt, in Western trousers, one leg over the other.