“You’re so long-winded, Uncle.”
“You’ll never best him with talk, so you might as well just give it up. If you say something he gets pushier.”
“I know — he’s trying to brew some male-female discord.”
Uncle Okamoto observed O-Nobu and her aunt with a grin as they exchanged their critiques, waiting for a break in their dialogue to pronounce sentence.
“It appears you’ve finally surrendered. And I accept your surrender, I don’t pursue the defeated — because one of a man’s virtues is pity for the weak. Even a man like me.”
Assuming the well-satisfied look of the victor, he rose, slid open the shoji, and stepped outside; decisive footsteps in the direction of the study gradually receded. When he returned a minute later he was holding four or five slender volumes.
“O-Nobu. I’ve brought you something amusing. Give these to Yoshio-san the next time you visit the hospital.”
“What are they?”
O-Nobu took the books at once and looked at the covers. Inexperienced with foreign languages, she had difficulty deciphering the English titles. She read them haltingly, one word at a time: “Book of Jokes. English Wit and Humor…”
“Gracious!”
“They’re all funny. Puns and riddles and suchlike. And they’re the right size for reading in bed; they won’t give him a stiff neck.”
“Made to order for you, Uncle—”
“Maybe so, but it’s harmless, nothing to make Yoshio-san angry no matter what a stick-in-the-mud he is.”
“Of course he won’t be angry.”
“Anyway, this is in the interest of couple harmony. Take it to him and give it a try.”
O-Nobu thanked her uncle, and when she put the books in her lap, he held out to her the slip of paper in his other hand.
“This is reparation for making you cry before. I promised, so please take it along.”
O-Nobu knew what the paper was before she had received it from her uncle’s hand. He waved it pointedly in front of her face.
“When you’re experiencing discord with your mate, this is absolutely the best medicine. In most cases one dose of this and you’ll recover at once — it’s a miraculous cure.”
Looking up at her uncle, O-Nobu protested weakly.
“We’re not suffering discord. We’re truly in harmony.”
“So much the better. If you take this when you’re united, it will make your hearts even healthier. Your bodies, too, more robust. With this wonder drug you can’t lose either way.”
O-Nobu took the check from her uncle’s hand, and, as she peered at it, tears filled her eyes.
[77]
O-NOBU DECLINED the rickshaw her uncle offered to call for her. But she was unable to reject his offer to see her to the trolley stop. Presently they descended together down the long hill to the river’s edge.
“This sort of exercise is the best thing for my condition — I guess I can damn well walk if I please.”
The remark suggested that he had forgotten, fat as he was and easily winded, the almost ludicrous degree to which he would suffer when he had to climb back up the hill.
Along the way they discussed their late evening the night before. In passing, O-Nobu mentioned finding O-Toki slumped over the table fast asleep. Since the maid had been in the Okamoto house before moving in with the new couple, O-Nobu’s uncle couldn’t escape a feeling of responsibility as her guarantor.
“Your aunt knows her well; she’s a good, honest woman. Otherwise we wouldn’t have assured you she could stay alone in the house. Even so, falling asleep is irresponsible. Of course, she’s young and probably sleepy most of the time.”
Listening to her uncle express his sympathy, O-Nobu, who well knew that if it had been her, no matter how young she was, she would never have been able to fall asleep in a similar situation, merely smiled. In her view, her principal reason for going home this early was a desire to avoid repeating the consequences of her late return the night before.
She boarded the trolley hurriedly as it pulled up. From inside she turned to her uncle and said “Sayonara.”
“Sayonara,” her uncle replied, “our best to Yoshio-san.”
No sooner had they exchanged parting words than O-Nobu was isolated inside the noise and motion of the trolley.
She let her mind wander. The faces and figures of the participants from the night before took their places, one on the heels of another, and rotated past her mind’s eye with the speed of the trolley she was riding. Even so, she was sensible of something connecting the images in the dizzying display. Possibly that certain something underlay and was generating the whirling images. She was compelled to derive its meaning somehow. But her efforts were in vain. She perceived a series of things, a cluster like dumplings, but she had alighted from the trolley without having resolved the nature of the logic holding them together.
The rattling of the lattice door being opened brought O-Toki running from the direction of the kitchen, and, as O-Nobu expected, she bid her mistress “welcome home” and pressed her head politely to the tatami. O-Nobu felt that she was responsible for this dramatically changed behavior.
“Tonight at least I’m home early.”
It appeared the maid didn’t think so. Seeing the self-satisfied look on O-Nobu’s face, she agreed unconvincingly, “Yes—” prompting O-Nobu to a small conciliation.
“I intended to be even earlier, but the day just flies away.”
Bidding O-Toki fold the kimono she had thrown off, she inquired whether anything unusual had come up during her absence.
“Not really,” O-Toki replied.
Just to be sure, O-Nobu reframed the question.
“I suppose no one stopped by?”
O-Toki’s reply was taut, as if she had abruptly recalled something.
“There was someone, yes. A gentleman named Kobayashi-san.”
This was not the first time O-Nobu had heard the name mentioned as one of Tsuda’s friends. She could remember having spoken to him two or three times. But she wasn’t fond of him. And she understood that her husband had little respect for him.
“What was he doing here?” she almost blurted, rudely enough, and then, restraining herself, inquired of O-Toki in a more appropriate tone, “Was there something he needed perhaps?”
“Yes Missus, he came to get that overcoat—”
O-Nobu, who had heard nothing from her husband, made no sense of this.
“Overcoat? What overcoat?”
In her meticulous way, O-Nobu posed O-Toki a variety of questions in an attempt to comprehend what Kobayashi had intended. But she got nowhere. Repeated questions and answers only led them deeper into a labyrinth. When they finally realized it was Kobayashi who was the odd one, not the two of them, they laughed aloud together. An English word Tsuda used often, “nonsense,” surfaced in O-Nobu’s memory. “Kobayashi and ‘nonsense’”—the combination struck O-Nobu as hilarious. Releasing herself without reserve to the comedy that rose in her like a spasm, O-Nobu forgot for the time being the nagging task she had brought home with her from the trolley.
[78]
THAT EVENING O-Nobu wrote a letter to her parents in Kyoto. Having begun and left off the day before yesterday and again yesterday, she had resolved that it must be completed today no matter what, a resolution by no means exclusively in consideration of her parents.