Kobayashi’s eyes were glazed. There was nothing O-Nobu could say.
“Goodness!”
“It’s a fact. Can you tell me you’re not actually thinking the same thing?”
“I’ve never heard such silliness.”
“I know you have to say that.”
“It seems you’re feeling terribly persecuted.”
“Maybe so. But no matter how I’m feeling, a fact is a fact. But never mind. I’m a born good-for-nothing, so I can’t really complain about being disrespected. I have no right to resent anyone. Still, Mrs. T! Do you have any idea how it feels to have been treated with contempt by everyone with no letup?”
His eyes never leaving her face, Kobayashi waited for her reply. O-Nobu had nothing to say. How could she be concerned about the feelings of someone for whom she could find no sympathy? Besides, she had problems of her own to consider; she was simply unable to spread the wings of her imagination for his sake. Perceiving this in her demeanor, Kobayashi exclaimed, “Mrs. T! My reason for living is to be abhorred by others. I say and do things to make people abhor me. Otherwise I couldn’t endure the pain. I couldn’t go on living. I can’t make people recognize my existence. I’m worthless. No matter how people disdain me, I can’t strike a decent blow back at them. Since I have no options, I think to myself, at least I can try to be hated. I take that on myself.”
The psychological state that had been unfurled for O-Nobu belonged to a person from a different planet. To be loved by everyone, to see to it that she was loved by everyone, particularly where her husband was concerned — this desire was in the fiber of her being. Moreover, she had always believed implicitly that the same desire was alive and undeniable in everyone, close to a natural law.
“You seem surprised. I suppose you’ve never met such a person. But you should know that people come in many flavors.”
Kobayashi looked somewhat less dyspeptic, as though relieved.
“I can see you’ve been sick of me for a while now. You’re thinking, ‘If only he’d leave, if only he’d leave.’ But for some reason the maid hasn’t come back, so you’re stuck with keeping me company. I see that clearly. You’ve been thinking I’m a hateful sort, but you have no idea why I’ve become so hateful, what turned me into this. So I offered you a little explanation. Even I wasn’t born hateful, at least I don’t imagine so—”
Once again, Kobayashi laughed aloud.
[86]
IN THE presence of this unaccountable man, O-Nobu felt her mind whirl in confusion. First of all, she failed to comprehend him. Second, she felt no sympathy. Finally, she had doubts about his seriousness. Defiance, dread, contempt, suspicion, ridicule, disgust, curiosity — the tangle of sentiments intersecting in her breast rejected any attempt at organization. As a consequence they served only to unseat her. Finally, she framed a question.
“So you’re saying you came over here just to make me dislike you?”
“No, that wasn’t my purpose. My purpose was to pick up the overcoat.”
“So you came to get the coat, and as long as you were here you thought you might as well make me dislike you?”
“Not at all. It may surprise you to know that I consider myself a perfectly ingenuous person, a natural man. Compared with you, Mrs. T, I believe I’m guileless.”
“That’s beside the point, why won’t you answer directly?”
“But I have. I’ve told you I am without artifice, a natural man. And that’s what makes you dislike me.”
“And that’s your purpose?”
“But it isn’t a purpose — it may be a fundamental desire.”
“What’s the difference between a purpose and a desire?”
“Could they be the same?”
Hatred flashed in O-Nobu’s small eyes.. The glance that stabbed at Kobayashi read, “Don’t toy with me because I’m a woman.”
“Don’t get angry,” Kobayashi said. “I was just trying to explain that I’m not striking back at you for any trivial reasons of my own. I went out of my way to say what I did because I want you to understand that I have no choice, that Providence commands me to be a wretch and make people dislike me. I want you to recognize the fact that I have no evil objective. I want you to realize that I have no purpose and never have. Providence may have a purpose. And that purpose may be manipulating me. Being manipulated may even be what I desire.”
O-Nobu’s own thinking was insufficiently rigorous to uncover the lapses in Kobayashi’s anfractuous logic. Nor was her mind sufficiently trained to determine whether it should be unconditionally accepted or rejected. But she was more than quick-witted enough to grasp the essentials of the argument he had confronted her with, and she promptly demonstrated her swiftness.
“So on the one hand you admit to being nasty so that people will dislike you, and on the other hand you say that you’re not in any way responsible.”
“Exactly. That’s the gist of it.”
“That’s so cowardly.”
“It’s not cowardly. Where there’s no responsibility, there’s no cowardice.”
“Of course there is. In the first place, I don’t recall ever having done anything bad to you. If I have I’d like to hear about it.”
“Mrs. T! I’m a person the world treats like a vagabond.”
“What does that have to do with me and Tsuda?”
Kobayashi laughed, as if he had been waiting for the question.
“From where you both stand, probably nothing. But as I see it, more than plenty.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
This time, Kobayashi declined to reply. With an expression that seemed to say “You’ll understand if you think about it carefully,” he began smoking a cigarette in silence. O-Nobu felt even more distressed. She wanted to say she’d had enough and to ask him to leave. Kobayashi, as if he had read her mind and dismissed her feelings as insignificant, was unperturbed, an attitude that further infuriated her. Just then O-Toki returned, a moment she had been impatiently awaiting, and as a result her turmoil had to be dissipated before she had an opportunity to express it cogently.
[87]
SITTING ON the engawa, O-Toki slid open the shoji screen from the outside.
“I’m back. Sorry it took so long — I had to take the trolley all the way to the hospital.”
O-Nobu looked at O-Toki a little angrily.
“You didn’t phone?”
“Oh yes I did—”
“You couldn’t get through?”
As questions followed answers, O-Nobu gradually grasped the reason for O-Toki’s trip to the hospital. At first her call had not gone through, and even when it finally did she had been unable to communicate her purpose. She had asked for the nurse, thinking to request her to convey the message, but even this attempt had failed. The student apprentice or the pharmacist or whoever it was who had taken the call had said this and that, but nothing that made any sense. To begin with, the voice was indistinct, and even what she could hear clearly made no sense. When it began to seem that the man on the other end of the line had not taken her question to Tsuda, she had given up and left the telephone box. But she was loathe to return to the house with her errand unaccomplished and had hurried straight to the streetcar.
“I thought about coming home first and asking, but that would just take more time, and since I knew you had a visitor waiting—”
O-Toki’s explanation was reasonable. O-Nobu ought to have thanked her. But when she considered the suffering at Kobayashi’s hands her thoughtful maid had caused her, she felt all the more resentful.