Neither accepting nor declining the invitation, O-Nobu glanced at her aunt with a smile. Her aunt glared at her uncle as if to say, “Not a care in the world — it’s appalling.”
Perhaps he didn’t notice, or perhaps he noticed but didn’t care, but Okamoto repeated the invitation in a more serious tone than before.
“Please stay if you’d like — no need for formality with us.”
“Listen to Mr. Hospitality. Do you realize they have only one maid and she’s waiting for this child to come home? She can’t just stay out!”
“No, I suppose you’re right. Not with one maid all alone in the house.”
Okamoto abandoned his idea readily; it seemed clear he had asked merely for the sake of asking and had been unconcerned with the outcome from the beginning.
“I haven’t stayed over one night since I married Tsuda.”
“Is that so? You’re a paragon of virtue.”
“I certainly hope not — Yoshio hasn’t stayed out either, not once.”
“That’s how it ought to be. Side by side as a couple, never faltering.”
“No greater joy, no sweeter bliss.”
Repeating in a small voice one of the lines from the play, Tsugiko, as though dismayed at her own forwardness, turned bright red. On purpose, Okamoto nearly shouted.
“What’s that?”
Embarrassed, Tsugiko walked briskly toward the gate, pretending she hadn’t heard. The others followed her outside.
As he was stepping into his rickshaw, O-Nobu’s uncle spoke to her.
“If you can’t stay with us that’s fine, but do drop over sometime in the next few days. There’s something I’d like to ask you.”
“I have something to ask you as well, and I want to thank you for today. Tomorrow maybe, would that be convenient?”
“Oh-yes-please!”
As if this English were a signal, the four rickshaws sped on their way.
[57]
THE OKAMOTO residence was a considerable distance but in the same general direction as Tsuda’s house, which meant that O-Nobu, whose “rubber wheel” had followed theirs, was able to accompany them all the way to her side street. As they parted at her usual corner, O-Nobu called from under her hood to the others as they passed, but before she had ascertained whether her voice had reached them, her rickshaw had turned off the main street. Moving down the hushed side street, O-Nobu was struck suddenly by a kind of loneliness. Like a person who has been circling until now within a group and, misstepping without realizing it, has fallen as from a tree outside the domain of the community all alone, O-Nobu entered her house with a sense, however pallid, of abandonment.
The maid did not emerge in response to the rattling of the lattice door. In the sitting room the lamps were shining brightly, but that was all — even the iron kettle was not rattling cheerily as usual. O-Nobu surveyed the room, unchanged since morning, with eyes that had changed. Chilliness was beginning to wrap around her forlorn mood. The moment passed, and as simple loneliness began to transform into anxiety, O-Nobu, exhausted by the pleasure of her social outing, was on the verge of collapsing in front of the brazier when she turned abruptly toward the kitchen and called the maid’s name, “Toki, Toki!” At the same time she opened the door to the maid’s room to one side of the kitchen.
O-Toki was slumped over the sewing she had strewn across the two-tatami-mat floor. Lifting her head, she responded with a “Yes, Missus—” and abruptly stood up. Rising, she struck her disheveled head against the shade of the lamp, which she had purposely lowered to sew by, and became even more flustered as the bulb threw a wobbling wash of light against the rear wall. O-Nobu didn’t smile. Nor did she feel like scolding. It didn’t even occur to her to wonder how she might have reacted in a similar situation. At this moment, even the presence in the room of the maid befuddled with sleep was reassuring.
“Lock up in front and go right to bed. I’ve already bolted the half door at the gate.”
Having sent the maid to bed, O-Nobu sat again in front of the brazier without even changing her kimono. She stirred the ashes mechanically, adding charcoal to the dying embers. Then she put the kettle on, as if boiling water was a household procedure that must not be neglected. But as she sat alone in the dead of night with her ears peeled for the rattling of the kettle, a feeling of aloneness attacking out of nowhere built up inside her even more overwhelmingly than when she had arrived home. Because this was loneliness incomparably more intense than what she was accustomed to feeling as she waited unbearably for Tsuda’s return late at night, she found herself gazing in her heart’s eye with a fond longing at the figure of her husband lying in bed at the clinic.
I must tell you it’s all because you aren’t here.
Thus she spoke to the picture she had conjured in her mind.
She resolved that the first thing she must do on the morrow, no matter what, was visit him at the clinic. But in the very next instant her chest was no longer pressed against her husband’s. Something was wedged between them. And the closer she tried to snuggle, the more sharply the unwanted something jabbed into her breast. Her husband was unperturbed, as if he hadn’t noticed. Very well then! she felt like saying, half annoyed, turning her back on him.
Having reached an impasse, she shifted her reverie unceremoniously to Madam Yoshikawa. It was just as she had thought at the theater, even clearer now: if she hadn’t encountered the lady this evening, she might well have escaped this so very disagreeable feeling about her beloved husband.
She was left with a desire to bare her heart to someone, somewhere. She took up her brush, thinking to continue the letter home she had begun the night before, but in the end she was unable to set down her thoughts on paper and could only compose her usual assurance that she and Tsuda were getting along famously so her parents were not to worry. Tonight, however, these words alone were in no way adequate. Exhausted by her effort to put her thoughts in order, she finally threw down her brush. Leaving her kimono in a heap on the floor, she went to bed. The spectacle she had observed at the theater for all those hours exploded across her agitated mind in fragments of vivid colors, stimulating even as it irritated her, and hours passed before she was able to fall asleep.
[58]
LYING IN bed, she heard the clock strike one. She heard two. Then she was awakened by morning light. She didn’t know what time it was, but the sun seeping through a crack in the wooden shutters informed her that she had slept later than usual.
She looked at the clothes scattered near her pillow in the sunlight. They lay on the tatami where she had let them fall the night before, kimono and underwear and long kimono slip in a heap, top and bottom, inside and out, a careless tangle of runaway colors. From beneath the pile, one folded end of her long, narrow obi, an iris pattern in gold thread, extended to within reach of her hand.
O-Nobu gazed at the tangle with a certain dismay. As the work of someone who had always considered neatness to be one of the female virtues, there was something disgraceful about it. As far as she could recall, she had never once since marrying Tsuda allowed him to see this kind of mess; remembering that her husband was not sleeping in the room with her, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Her carelessness today went beyond clothing. If Tsuda hadn’t gone to the clinic and were at home as usual, she would never have allowed herself to sleep this late, no matter what time they had gone to bed the night before, nor had she leapt out of bed the minute she opened her eyes — how could she avoid rebuking herself as a lazy creature?