“I don’t imagine he’ll be wearing it again—” O-Nobu hesitated, well aware it was in her husband’s temperament to be unexpectedly testy about this sort of thing. A scolding for carelessness on account of an outgrown overcoat would be mortifying.
“I’m sure it’s fine. He definitely said he’d give it to me. I wouldn’t lie about it.”
A refusal to hand the coat over would be making a liar of Kobayashi.
“I may have been blind drunk, but I knew what was going on. You won’t find me forgetting about something that’s coming to me.”
O-Nobu made up her mind.
“If you’ll just wait a minute. I’ll have the maid phone the hospital.”
“I didn’t realize you were so cautious,” Kobayashi said and laughed. But O-Nobu discovered in his face no sign of the displeasure she had secretly feared. Even so, she couldn’t help adding a word of justification as a precaution against giving offense.
“Just to be sure. I’d hate to receive a scolding afterward.”
O-Toki hurried off, and until she returned from the public telephone with Tsuda’s reply, they remained seated. Awaiting her return face to face, they chatted. When the conversation took an unexpected turn, glinting in the light of her surprise, O-Nobu’s heart began to pound.
[82]
“TSUDA-KUN SEEMS to have settled down lately. It’s all your influence, Mrs. T.”
The remark came out of the blue the minute O-Toki was out the door. In view of who the speaker was, O-Nobu felt her reply should be limited to something vague.
“You think so? It seems to me I have no influence at all.”
“How can you say that? He seems like a new person.”
O-Nobu’s impulse was to mock him for this hyperbole. But she was unable to descend from the plateau of her hauteur and fell pointedly silent instead. Kobayashi wasn’t the sort of person to register such a signal. He rambled on, unconcerned with order or sequence, gathering himself from time to time to bear down with rude directness.
“At the end of the day, no man is any match for his wife’s power. For a bachelor like me it’s beyond imagining, but there must be something there, I guess, that makes that so.”
Unable to repress herself longer, O-Nobu laughed.
“There are lots of mysterious things that someone in your shoes would never notice — between a man and his wife.”
“How about giving me an example?”
“What good would it do a single man to know anything about it?”
“For future reference.”
A clever light gleamed in O-Nobu’s small eyes.
“The best thing would be for you to find a wife for yourself.”
Kobayashi made a show of scratching his head.
“I might want to but I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“If there are no takers how can there be anyone to find?”
“Good gracious, Japan has an excess of women. There are brides galore standing around on every corner, any kind you want.”
Having spoken, O-Nobu wondered if she had gone too far. But her companion was indifferent. His nerves, accustomed to stronger, more vitriolic language on a daily basis, had been numbed.
“No matter how many extra women there are, I’m poised to flee; no one would become a fugitive with me.”
The notion of fleeing evoked abruptly in O-Nobu’s mind the lyric journey of a man and woman heading away from the world toward double suicide at the end of a play. Picturing momentarily the Kabuki figures bewitchingly symbolizing a fervid love, O-Nobu looked across at Kobayashi, as utterly unrelated to such an image as he could be, sitting before her in hopes of acquiring someone else’s worn overcoat, and smiled.
“If you’re going to flee, why not go all the way and take someone along?”
“Who?”
“That goes without saying. A man must take his wife.”
“Is that so—”
As though he had been struck, Kobayashi stiffened. O-Nobu, who had not expected this reaction, was a little surprised. If anything she felt unexpectedly amused. Kobayashi, on the other hand, was serious. After a momentary pause, he spoke again, oddly, as though to himself.
“If there had been a good-hearted woman to accompany me all the way to Korea, even I might have ended up a regular human being instead of a twisted one. Truth is, it’s not only a wife I don’t have. I have nothing. No parents and no friends. In other words I have no world. You might even say, broadly speaking, that I’m not even human.”
O-Nobu had the feeling she was meeting a person like this for the first time in her life. She had never heard anyone say such things, and she had difficulty comprehending even their surface meaning. When it came to how she ought to handle her companion, she had no idea of a direction to take. Meanwhile Kobayashi was becoming more emotional.
“Mrs. T! All I have is one kid sister. And to me, who has nothing else, my sister is extremely precious. I couldn’t even say how many times more precious than she would be to an ordinary person. Even so I have to leave my sister here. She tends to want to tag along wherever I go. But I can’t possibly take her with me. Because it’s safer for us to be in separate places than together. There’s less danger of being murdered!”
O-Nobu felt unnerved. She had wanted O-Toki home again as soon as possible, but she hadn’t returned. Her only choice was to see if changing the subject might bring her some relief from this oppressiveness. She succeeded easily enough. And tumbled once again into an impossible situation.
[83]
THE EXTRAORDINARY trajectory of the conversation that followed was launched by O-Nobu.
“But I wonder if what you say is true?”
Predictably, Kobayashi surfaced from the melancholy in which he appeared to have been submerged until now. And he rejoined, as O-Nobu had hoped, with a question of his own.
“Whether what is? What I said just now?”
“No, not that—”
O-Nobu cleverly lured her companion down a byway.
“What you were saying before — that Tsuda has changed a lot recently.”
Kobayashi was obliged to return to where he had begun.
“I did say that. Because there’s no mistaking it.”
“He has changed so much?”
“Yes he has.”
O-Nobu examined Kobayashi’s face with dissatisfaction on her own. Kobayashi, looking very much as though he had some kind of evidence in hand, stared back. All the while they held each other’s eyes, the shadow of a faint smile played at the corners of his mouth. But in the end the shadow faded before it had the opportunity to bloom into a genuine smile. The steadiness of O-Nobu’s gaze made it clear that she was not about to be toyed with or mocked by the likes of Kobayashi.
“Mrs. T! You must have noticed something?”
It was Kobayashi’s turn to prompt. Unquestionably O-Nobu had noticed. But the change she had perceived in her husband was tending in precisely the opposite direction from the changes Kobayashi had in mind or at least was speaking of. It felt as if, in some unfocused way, it had been coming to light gradually since she and Tsuda had been together, a subtle transition that moved slowly through stages of color and texture that were difficult to distinguish. This was a change the essence of which would be incomprehensible to an observer peering in from the outside, no matter how sensitive he might be. And it was O-Nobu’s secret. An infinitesimal change in a person she loved as he readied himself to detach from her, or perhaps a change in feeling as he began at last to acknowledge the sad truth that he was already detached. And how should someone like Kobayashi know of this?
“I haven’t noticed anything. Is there something so different about the way he is?”