“Who’s there?”
Footsteps halted at the half door, and O-Nobu requested identi fication.
Tsuda was more impatient than ever.
“Open up! It’s me!”
“Goodness!” O-Nobu cried out. “I didn’t know — forgive me.”
Rattling open the latch, O-Nobu appeared paler than usual as she ushered her husband inside. From the front entrance Tsuda proceeded straight to the sitting room.
As always, it was perfectly tidied. The iron kettle was clanking as it was meant to be. In front of the brazier a thick muslin cushion had been positioned as always on the tatami floor as though awaiting his arrival. Opposite, at O-Nobu’s customary place, a woman’s ink-stone and brush lay next to her cushion. The lid of the box, a mosaic of plum blossoms inlaid with mother-of-pearl, had been set to one side, and the small ink-stone inset in flecked, pear-yellow lacquer ware was glistening. Evidence that the writer had left her seat abruptly, a blot of sumi ink from the tip of the narrow writing brush had seeped into the rice paper, smudging the seven or eight lines of a letter in progress.
O-Nobu, who had followed her husband inside after closing the doors for the night, plumped herself down on her cushion dressed as she was, in an everyday kimono jacket thrown over her nightgown.
“I’m so sorry.”
Tsuda looked up at the pendulum clock. It had just struck eleven. Though he was normally home earlier, this was not the first time since his marriage that he had returned at this hour.
“But why did you lock me out? Did you suppose I wouldn’t be coming home tonight?”
“Of course not. I was waiting, thinking any minute now, any minute now; finally I began to feel so lonely I started a letter to my parents.”
Like Tsuda’s mother and father, O-Nobu’s mother and father also lived in Kyoto. From a distance, Tsuda regarded the letter just begun. But he still wasn’t feeling persuaded.
“But why lock the gate if you were waiting? Afraid to leave it open?”
“No — and I didn’t lock it.”
“You can’t deny it was locked.”
“Toki must have forgotten to unlock it this morning. That must be it — she’s impossible.”
In her habitual way, O-Nobu arched her eyebrows. As the half door was never used during the day, it wasn’t unreasonable to explain how it came to be locked as an oversight that morning.
“What’s Toki doing?”
“I sent her to bed a while ago.”
Deciding it would be going too far to wake the maid to pursue his investigation of the responsible party, Tsuda put aside the matter of the half door and went to bed.
[39]
THE NEXT morning, before he had even washed, Tsuda was surprised by a spectacle he hadn’t anticipated when he went to bed. It was close to nine when he awoke. As always, he went past the front entrance and into the sitting room on his way to the kitchen. And there was O-Nobu, dressed resplendently and sitting in her usual place as if that were nothing out of the ordinary. Tsuda was startled. O-Nobu smiled, appearing gratified to observe her husband reacting as if water had been thrown in his sleepy face.
“You just woke up?”
Blinking rapidly, Tsuda gazed wonderingly at O-Nobu’s high chignon secured at the base with a red ribbon, the brightly embroidered pattern of her kimono over-collar, and, in the center of it all, the whiteness of her heavily made up face, as if he were beholding something unfamiliar and exotic.
“What are you doing? The sun is scarcely up.”
O-Nobu was unruffled.
“I’m not doing anything — but you are; you’re going in to the clinic today.”
Tsuda’s hakama and kimono jacket had been picked up from where he had let them fall to the floor on his way to bed and, neatly folded, laid out on lacquered wrapping paper.
“You’re intending to go along?”
“Of course I am — will I be a bother?”
“I wouldn’t say a bother—”
Tsuda looked carefully again at his wife’s outfit.
“I’m just wondering why you had to get so dressed up.”
Tsuda recalled the scene he had witnessed recently in the murky waiting room. The group of patients sitting there and his gorgeously attired young wife were fundamentally irreconcilable.
“But today is Sunday.”
“Maybe so, but we’re not exactly going to the theater or cherry-blossom viewing.”
“But I was hoping—”
As Tsuda saw it, Sunday meant only that patients would be crowding into the clinic from the moment it opened.
“It feels as if waltzing into the clinic as a couple with you in that get-up would be a little—”
“Excessive?”
Amused by O-Nobu’s choice of a formal Chinese compound, Tsuda laughed aloud. O-Nobu’s eyebrows briefly arched, and then she was wheedling.
“It will take forever to change my kimono now. And since I went to the trouble of wearing it, won’t you please put up with it just this once?”
Tsuda accepted defeat. Washing up, he heard O-Nobu’s voice instructing the maid to hail two rickshaws and felt unsettled, as if he were the one being rushed.
The meager breakfast he was allowed took less than five minutes. Standing without even using a toothpick, he started to go upstairs.
“I have to put together some things to take with me.”
As he spoke, O-Nobu opened the closet behind her.
“I put everything in here, look and see.”
Dressed up as she was in her finery, Tsuda felt obliged to spare his wife some effort and dragged from the closet with his own hands a satchel on the heavy side and a smallish bundle wrapped in a knotted silk cloth. The bundle contained only the quilted jacket he had just tried on and an unbacked sash for use with his sleeping robe. The satchel disclosed a jumble of articles — a toothbrush and tooth powder, his customary lavender stationery, matching envelopes, fountain pen, a small scissors, and tweezers. Tsuda removed the Western tome that was the heaviest and bulkiest object.
“I’ll leave this.”
“Really? It’s been on your desk forever and there’s a bookmark in it so I thought you’d surely want to read it.”
Tsuda said nothing, lowering ponderously to the tatami matting the German book on economics that remained unfinished after two months.
“This monster is too heavy to read lying in bed.”
Tsuda knew this was a legitimate reason for leaving the volume at home, but it felt bad nonetheless.
“I have no idea which books you need and which you don’t, so please choose the ones you want to take—”
From the second floor Tsuda brought down a few slender novels and stuffed them into the satchel.
[40]
AS THE weather was fine, they had the hoods lowered and set out with the satchel in one rickshaw and the bundle in the other. They had turned the corner of their side street and traveled several blocks along the trolley tracks when O-Nobu’s rickshaw man abruptly hailed Tsuda’s. Both rickshaws stopped.
“I left something at home.”
Looking back, Tsuda gazed in silence at his wife’s face. It wasn’t only her husband who could be brought to a standstill by the power of the words that issued from the lips of this meticulously groomed young woman. The rickshaw man, still gripping the wooden traces in both hands, directed at O-Nobu a similarly curious gaze. Even passers-by couldn’t help glancing with interest at the couple.