“There you are! I’m just mucking about in the garden.”
A long piece of akebia vine lay coiled on the ground next to the gardener.
“We’re thinking of training this above the gate at the garden entrance — wouldn’t it go well there?”
O-Nobu surveyed at a glance the thatch-roofed gate in the middle of a solid fence of plaited bamboo, the hatchet-hewn pillars supporting it, and the log crossbeams.
“Umm — you uprooted it from where it was growing on the little trellis?”
“Right, and I replaced it with a blinder-gate with embellished trim.”
Her uncle had been using his newly acquired leisure to remodel the house according to his own design, and his architecture and landscape vocabulary had expanded in no time. As the word “blinder-gate” conveyed no image to her, O-Nobu’s only choice was responding with a vague nod.
“This is good exercise after a meal — good for your appetite.”
“Are you joking? I haven’t had lunch yet.”
Pulling O-Nobu out of the garden and into the house with him, her uncle called loudly to her aunt: “Sumi! Sumi! I’m starving out here. Some lunch right away, please.”
“Didn’t I say you should have eaten a while ago with the rest of us?”
“You may be surprised to learn that the world isn’t organized around the convenience of the kitchen. Has it ever occurred to you that there is a time for everything?”
Her aunt’s unruffled attitude — that her husband had only himself to blame — and her uncle’s response were the same as always. O-Nobu, feeling as though she had breathed the air of home for the first time in a long while, couldn’t help comparing the aging couple before her with herself and Tsuda, married for less than a year, just embarking as it were on their new life. Assuming they traveled the long matrimonial road together, could they also expect to end up this way, or, no matter how long they stayed together, might it be, given how different they were temperamentally from her aunt and uncle, that their relationship would remain different? For someone as young as O-Nobu, this was a riddle not solvable by wisdom and imagination. She was not satisfied with Tsuda as he was today. Nor could she imagine a future version of herself in which her abundance as a woman had withered away very much like her aunt’s. If that were the fate that awaited her unavoidably, it would be a sad blow to her desire to maintain forever the luster of the present. Surviving in the world as a woman having lost everything womanly about her appeared to O-Nobu in her youth as a truly terrifying existence.
Unaware of the meditation on a distant future churning in this young wife’s breast, O-Nobu’s uncle sat cross-legged on the tatami facing the lunch tray that had been placed in front of him and regarded her.
“Are you there? You seem lost in your thoughts.”
O-Nobu replied at once.
“Why don’t I serve you for a change — it’s been a long while.”
There was no rice tub, and, as O-Nobu stood, her aunt stopped her.
“I know you’d like to serve him, but today is a bread day so there’s nothing to serve.”
The maid came in with nicely browned toast on a plate.
“It’s unbearable what’s happened to this uncle of yours. Born in Japan and not allowed to have rice — how pathetic is that?”
His doctor had forbidden her diabetic uncle to consume more than a designated quantity of starch.
“Look at me — all I eat is tofu.”
Laid out on his plate was a portion of white, uncooked tofu that no single person could possibly have consumed. Observing her rotundly obese uncle contorting his features into a face he intended to look pitiful, O-Nobu, far from feeling substantially sorry for him, was inclined to laugh aloud.
“A little fasting would be good for you. Getting through a day as fat as you are would be an agony for anyone.”
Her uncle turned to look at her aunt.
“She’s always been good at insults, but since she married it seems she’s mastered the art.”
[61]
O-NOBU HAD been under her uncle’s care since she was a little girl, and she knew better than others the idiosyncrasies that emerged and receded in him from a variety of angles.
Oversensitive to a degree incongruent with his corpulent body, there were times when he would seclude himself in his room for half a day without speaking, while at other times the mere sight of another person would trigger what appeared to be an uncontrollable garrulousness. It wasn’t so much that he needed an outlet for his robust energy; he was either attempting out of consideration for others to put them at their ease as best he could or, as was more frequently the case, anxious to avoid the awkward silence generated by his own boredom in the presence of a guest, with the result that his conversation, when it wasn’t about practical matters, tended to center around subjects from his daily life of personal interest to him. His gift for talk, which he employed in social situations to great effect and which, it appeared, had contributed in no small way to his success, was frequently enhanced by a scintillating sense of humor. O-Nobu, who had grown up at her uncle’s side, had somewhere along the way inherited this gift. Trading digs with him when he was in the right mood had become second nature to her, requiring no effort. However, since her marriage to Tsuda she had reformed. As a consequence, two months passed, then three, and the wisecracking she had at first suppressed out of respect no longer came easily to her. In the end, she found herself relating to her husband in this regard as a different person than the self she had experienced when she was at the Okamotos. This left her unsatisfied. At the same time, she couldn’t help feeling that she was deceiving her husband. In her uncle’s unchanged behavior, observed on occasional visits, there was something that led her to recall a former freedom. As he sat cross-legged on the tatami in front of his raw tofu, she observed his waggish face nostalgically, as though it were a memento from the past.
“But it was you who taught me how to be insulting. I certainly haven’t learned anything of the kind from Tsuda.”
“Mebbe not, I reckon.”
Intentionally rolling the words on his tongue in old Tokyo dialect, Okamoto glanced at his wife, who loathed this verbal affectation and would have forbidden its use in her house if she hadn’t known that any criticism from her would only incite him to persist. She said nothing, pretending not to have noticed. Like someone whose expectations have been disappointed, her uncle turned to O-Nobu.
“Is Yoshio-san so severe?”
O-Nobu merely grinned, saying nothing.
“I see by your smile that pleases you.”
“What does?”
“You needn’t play dumb with the likes of me. I ask you in earnest, is Yoshio-san so serious?”
“I really couldn’t say. But why do you ask so seriously?”
“I have thoughts of me own about this — depending on your answer.”
“Goodness gracious! Then I’ll tell you. Just as you suspect, he is rather severe. What about it?”
“You swear?”
“What a fuss you’re making.”
“I’ll get right to my point. Assuming what you say is true, that he’s a severe person, if it is, he’ll never be right for someone as good at insults as you. Now Auntie here, she ought be a perfect fit.” As he spoke he nodded at his wife with his chin as she sat beside him in silence.
O-Nobu felt brushed by a sense of loneliness like a wind out of the distance. Observing herself, abruptly gripped by sadness, she was surprised.