Thick clouds drifting in the sky jostled with one another. Kōji gazed down between his legs at the shapes of the flowers and plants inside the bright, still greenhouse—undisturbed by the wind outside. He fancied that he had never seen such self-sufficient flowers, quietly breathing in the night air, and unaware of human scrutiny. Furthermore, with their primary colors, this colony of statue-still flowers and leaves, crowded into the uninhabited interior of the greenhouse, created almost a sense of danger.
Cheerfully maintaining his balance in the face of the rain-laden wind—like a sailor perched on top of a ship’s mast—Kōji hammered in one nail after another with a well-practiced hand, before shifting his body slightly and quickly driving a nail into the next sheet. The sound of the hammer rang clear as it pierced the warm wind. Just as he thought it would strike his face, the light rain receded and was now falling onto the top of the mimosa tree. He could feel the solemn, turbulent sky pressing down overhead. The wind gave Kōji’s mind a colossal freedom of emotion, as if in an instant it would carry away into the boundless distance all his words. Mimicking a professional carpenter, he placed several nails between his lips. The indescribably sweet taste of the steel. He felt frighteningly free.
He saw Yūko—who was wearing slacks—come down into the garden from the edge of the veranda of the main building. When he recognized this ill-tempered mistress, his sense of freedom withered in a moment. It was well past her and Ippei’s usual bedtime. She had what looked like a Coca-Cola bottle in each hand. It seemed she had come out to reward them for their hard work. As before, she decided not to speak to Kōji, but as she called out to Teijirō, her loud voice was broken and carried by the wind so that Kōji was able to hear only snatches.
“You’ve worked hard. Why don’t you take a short break? Is there anything I can do to help?”
As she spoke, the scarf, which she had thrown on carelessly, was whipped away from her hair by a sudden gust of wind and blown high in the air, coming to rest on a corner of the glass roof in front of Kōji. As the scarf came away from her head, Yūko looked to Kōji like a beautiful animal, with her flame-like, tangled mass of hair. Holding the bottles in her hands, she had been unable to save her scarf from the wind. Placing the bottles by the entrance to the greenhouse, she raised her hands in the air. One half of her face appeared pale in the light of the greenhouse, and her unsmiling countenance lifted and for the first time turned toward Kōji—as if in prayer.
Kōji reached out and took hold of the scarf. A design of ivy had been hand-painted in gold on the extremely fine black georgette. At once, he spat the nails out and wrapped them in the material to hold the scarf down, and then shouted, “I’m going to throw it. There’s a weight inside, so keep out of the way.”
Yūko observed Kōji’s movements closely and gave an affirmative nod. With a feeling of mild admiration, she watched as Kōji’s youthful form adopted a throwing position against the agitated gray night sky, sitting astride the greenhouse roof with the wind tugging at his clothes. The scarf balled into a small black mass and dropped to the concrete floor in front of the greenhouse.
She drew near and, cautiously reaching out—as if it were an unfamiliar object—touched her hand against the scarf. Then she shook out the nails, stroked her hair, and, this time just to make sure, tied the scarf ends securely under her pale chin. Then she stood up and waved at Kōji on the roof. She smiled at him for the first time since the previous evening. Without applying too much or too little pressure, Kōji used his jeans-clad thighs to brace himself against the sloping glass and his body appeared all the more as if bound to the roof. Yūko’s actions seemed to him a selfish sign of reconciliation.
In the end, the typhoon veered away from West Izu.
Kōji had a patient debate with Teijirō about whether they ought to completely remove the protective sheets they had gone to great lengths to fix in place. Ultimately, they decided to leave half of them in place so that the sunlight would not be impeded. There was no way of knowing when the typhoon might come again.
One afternoon, several days later, Kōji was delivering some flowers to Taisenji temple. Yūko had asked him to take them that morning. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted to meet with the priest, who, whenever Kōji came, would always persuade him to stay awhile and serve him tea. Then he would invite him to sit on a cushion at the edge of the veranda overlooking the back garden, where, as always, the honeybees droned. The priest, Kakujin, didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in probing into Kōji’s affairs, and yet, in looking at Kōji’s face he appeared to have detected something from his irritation-fueled put-on cheerfulness and from his red eyes—the unmistakable consequence of too little sleep.
Of course, Kōji didn’t say anything either. He had not come to talk.
The night of the high winds, when he returned to his own room after that moment of reconciliation with Yūko, Kōji had sensed something was different. Without any prior notification, he discovered that the twelve-mat room next to his had been turned into Yūko and Ippei’s bedroom.
As a result of his intense fatigue, Kōji had slept soundly that night. But the following night he couldn’t get to sleep. I’ll get used to it before long, he thought. After all, he had even become accustomed to that dirty bathhouse and the three-minute-interval buzzer.
In any event, it would likely take him a long time to grow used to it, and when he finally did, it was clear that something had definitely come to an end. Kōji was reluctant to suggest to Yūko that his room be moved downstairs, next to Teijirō’s room or someplace like that. The reason was that Yūko hadn’t notified him at all of her own room change (and clearly she was doing as Ippei desired!); added to which, Kōji’s self-respect implored him to protect his small six-mat castle.
Incidentally, this slight rearrangement in the pattern of living in the Kusakado household had, by the following day, suddenly become general knowledge throughout the village. The young maid who lived out of the house had made sure everybody knew about it.
The villagers delighted in the fact that this strange family had at length come to this pass. There was pleasure in guessing how their immoral behavior would turn out. Several mothers with disabled children expected that before long a child more conspicuously ugly and deformed than any in the village would be born to the Kusakado household.
A child that would play tag with its own shadow, weaving in and out of the dozens of oil drums lined up at the harbor, the sides of which were brightly colored in the sunset, who, teased by the young, fit fishermen, with his tongue dripping saliva, would try to help load the cargo onto the ship. Doubtless, such a child would grow up to be like those mothers’ own sons…
The rumors were reported that day to the priest’s wife, as a consequence of which the priest, too, soon got to hear of them. The priest had just returned from holding a Buddhist service for the dead. When he heard about them, he fell silent, took hold of the sleeves of his black vestment, and spread his arms out wide. He recalled a line from “Yun Men Stretching Out His Arms” in the Hekiganroku.
The priest’s affection for Kōji positively overflowed from his affable, small, narrow eyes. It seemed clear to Kōji that he was weighing in his own mind what he was able to impart. Dimpling his ruddy cheeks, and in an extremely circumspect manner, the priest hesitantly began to talk. This was an indication that he was trying to step outside his own small-framed portrait.
“If there is anything I can do, then I will do my best to help. I would even take counsel with you. You seem to have much that is weighing heavily on your mind. If you are worried about something, it is better to get it off your chest. The soul, you see, is a shy and retiring thing. It lurks in dark places and dislikes sunlight. And so, if you do not keep the skylight open at all times, the soul will rot. It easily decays, like a fresh sea urchin.”