“This child’s a bit of a different person since she got married. She’s become timid. I wonder if that’s also her husband’s effect — it’s odd.”
“It’s because you keep hounding her to say something; it sounds more like a scolding than a request — who could handle that?”
Her aunt’s attitude was less admonitory toward her uncle than protective of her. But O-Nobu’s heart was now too full of her own feelings to rejoice at this.
“But isn’t this a matter for Tsugiko to decide? All she has to do is make up her mind and it’s done, she doesn’t need me to get involved.”
O-Nobu couldn’t help recalling the moment when she had chosen her own husband. Discovering Tsuda, she loved him at once. Loving him, she confessed her desire to become his wife to her guarantors at once. Receiving permission, she married him at once. And from start to finish, she was ever her own protagonist. The responsible party. She couldn’t recall ever being inclined to disregard her own intentions and rely on others.
“What in the world does Tsugiko-san say?”
“She says nothing. That girl is more timid than you.”
“If the principal party is acting that way, what can we do?”
“Exactly right! Timid as she is, there’s nothing we can do.”
“She’s not timid. She’s docile.”
“Since she isn’t saying anything, it hardly matters which. Or maybe she can’t say anything because she has nothing to say.”
O-Nobu profoundly doubted that two people whose connection was as tenuous as this could ever become a genuine couple. Not when even my own marriage is turning out this way, she reasoned. Unable to perceive her cousin’s situation as closely resembling her own, she saw only the logic in front of her nose. It seemed less ridiculous than frightening. How superficial her cousin was, she even thought.
“Uncle—” she began, looking at him with her small eyes wide open as though in dismay.
“It’s a disaster. She never intended to say anything. Which is why we wanted you there. Truthfully speaking.”
“But what was I supposed to do?”
“Tsugi insisted that we invite you. She considers you much cleverer than herself. She was convinced you’d have all sorts of things to say afterward even if she didn’t have a clue.”
“I wish you’d said something so I could have been prepared.”
“She wouldn’t let us. She wouldn’t let us say a word.”
“But why?”
O-Nobu glanced at her aunt.
“Because she was embarrassed,” her aunt replied before her uncle could interrupt her.
“It wasn’t only that. Mostly she was afraid she wouldn’t get a useful evaluation if O-Nobu went in prepared. She wanted to hear your unbiased first impression.”
O-Nobu finally understood why her uncle had been pressing her.
[66]
TSUGIKO OCCUPIED a unique position in O-Nobu’s world. She wasn’t nearly as concerned with O-Nobu’s best interests as her aunt was. And when it came to a mutual affinity, her connection was vastly more distant than her uncle’s. Nevertheless, the power of shared bloodline, an attraction based on different personalities, and, beyond that, the closeness in their ages made Tsugiko someone who was easily approached.
When O-Nobu encountered any of the issues that move the hearts of all young women in common, in the natural course of things it was to Tsugiko rather than her uncle or her aunt to whom she was inclined to turn. In such cases her natural aptitude for dealing with such matters invariably proved superior to Tsugiko’s. In terms of experience, she was of course Tsugiko’s senior. At least, as she was well aware, Tsugiko looked up to her as such a person.
This appreciative younger cousin made a habit of accepting solemnly at face value everything O-Nobu said. In O-Nobu’s view, her pliable cousin had been trained to feel this way by her extravagant display of her own superiority during the long years when they had shared a room under the same roof.
“A woman must see through a man at a single glance.”
With a remark like this, she had once surprised her naive cousin. She had spoken as someone equipped with an acuteness of vision more than adequate to accomplish this. Just as Tsugiko’s surprise had transformed into appreciation and was on its way to becoming worshipful, an event designed accidentally enough to affirm O-Nobu’s confidence, the spontaneous love between herself and Tsuda, had blazed before her eyes like the flame of a mystery. Subsequently O-Nobu’s declaration was enshrined in Tsugiko’s mind as everlasting truth itself. O-Nobu, more than adequately content with herself as she considered the world around her, couldn’t help feeling particularly satisfied where her cousin was concerned.
Quickly enough, Tsuda was conveyed to Tsugiko as O-Nobu saw him. Supplementing with indirect knowledge provided entirely by O-Nobu that part of the picture outside her own ken because she had no opportunity for daily contact, she had effortlessly constructed a complete and total ideal called Tsuda.
In the little more than half a year that had passed since her marriage, O-Nobu’s thoughts about Tsuda had changed. But Tsugiko’s vision remained intact. She believed in O-Nobu implicitly. O-Nobu was not the sort of woman who retracted things she has declared after all this time. Manifestly she was among that small number of fortunates who had succeeded in wresting happiness from the heavens by virtue of her own clarity.
Having to sit with her disillusionment while bearing in mind the relationship with her cousin that had survived from the past was not so painful as unpleasant. It was disturbing to feel surrounded by indirect demands that she own up to the failings she had managed to gloss over until now. She couldn’t help feeling it was others, not herself, who were behaving perversely.
As long as I’m suffering on account of my mistakes, that should be enough.
She was always ready with this sort of defense, which she kept stored away in her heart. But this was not the sort of thing she could hurl in the faces of her uncle, her aunt, or Tsugiko, who were ignorant of her process. If she must appeal, her only choice was to cry out to the heavens, the void above her that would provoke the three of them innocently enough to retaliation with insinuations of their own.
Her uncle, who had pulled his tray closer and begun to gulp the tea her aunt had freshly brewed for him, couldn’t possibly have had any idea of this tangle of feelings swirling in O-Nobu’s heart. Looking out at the single-level garden just completed, his face clear and calm, he exchanged a few comments with his wife about the placement of trees and rocks he was contemplating.
“Next year I’m thinking of planting a maple alongside that pine. From here that’s the only place that looks unbalanced, as if something is missing.”
O-Nobu glanced vacantly in the direction her uncle was pointing. Along the wall that ran from the house next door, earth had been spaded into a high mound to permit the planting of a small, dense grove of Mencius bamboo, and where the roots clustered there was indeed, as her uncle had pointed out, a feeling of sparseness. O-Nobu had been waiting for an opportunity to change the subject, and now she took agile advantage.
“You’re right — if you don’t fill that it will be obvious that you went out of your way to plant a grove there.”
The conversation, as she expected, flowed into a different channel. But when it returned to its original path there was an even steeper slope than before that had to be climbed.
[67]
AS UNCLE Okamoto reentered the tatami room from the garden, having been summoned by the gardener who had been hoeing at the entrance a while ago, O-Nobu’s conversation with her aunt, which had begun with Yuriko and Hajime, not yet back from school, was just veering back to Tsugiko.