He had gone down to look. The dots were red aoki berries. Numbers of them lay on the ground. Kiga picked one up. Toying with it, he told Eguchi of the secret house. He went to the house, he said, when the despair of old age was too much for him.
"It seems like a very long time since I lost hope in every last woman. There's a house where they put women to sleep so they don't wake up."
Was it as if a girl sound asleep, saying nothing, hearing nothing, said everything to and heard everything from an old man who, for a woman, was no longer a man? But this was Eguchi s first experience of such a woman. The girl had no doubt had this experience of old men numbers of times before. Giving everything over to him, aware of nothing, in a sleep as of suspended animation, she breathed gently, her innocent face on a side. Certain old men would perhaps caress every part of her body, others would be racked with sobs. The girl would not know, in either case. Even at this thought Eguchi was able to do nothing. In taking his hand from her neck, he was as cautious as if he were handling a breakable object. But the impulse to arouse her by violence still had not left him.
As he withdrew his hand, her head turned gently and her shoulder with it, so that the girl was lying face up. He pulled back, wondering if she might open her eyes. Her nose and lips shone with youth in the light from the ceiling. She brought her left hand to her mouth. She seemed about to take the index finger between her teeth, and he wondered if it might be a way she had when she slept. But only she brought it softly to her lips, and no further. The lips parted slightly to show her teeth. She had been breathing through her nose, and now she breathed through her mouth. Her breath seemed to come a little faster.
He wondered if she would be in pain, and decided she was not. Because the lips were parted, a faint smile seemed to float on the cheeks. The sound of the waves breaking against the high cliff came nearer. The sound of the waves receding waves suggested large rocks at the base of the cliff. Water caught behind them seemed to follow after. The scent of the girl's breath was stronger from her mouth than it had been from her nose. It was not, however, the smell of milk. He asked himself again why the smell of milk had come to him. It was a smell, perhaps, to make him feel woman in the girl.
Old Eguchi even now had a grandchild that smelled of milk. He could see it here, before him. Each of his three daughters were married and had children. And he had not forgotten how it had been when they smelled of milk, and how he had held the daughters themselves as nursing babies. Has the milky smell of these blood relatives come back as if to reprove him? No, it should to be the smell of Eguchi's own heart, going out to the girl. Eguchi too turned face up, and, lying so that he nowhere touched the girl, closed his eyes. He would do well to take the sleeping medicine at his pillow. It would not be as strong as the drug the girl had been given. He would be awake earlier than she. Otherwise, the secret of the fascination of the place would be gone. He opened the package. In it were two white pills.
If he took one, he fall in a slumber. Two, and he would fall into a deep of death. That would be just as well, he thought, looking at the pills. And the milk brought an unpleasant memory and a lunatic memory to him.
"Milk. It smells of milk. It smells like a baby."
Starting to fold the coat he had taken off, the woman glare at him, her face tense.
"Your baby. You took it in your arms when you left home, didn't you? Didn't you? I hate it. I hate it."
Her hands trembling violently, the woman stood up and threw the coat to the floor.
"I hate it. Coming here just after you've had a baby in your arms."
Her voice was harsh, but the look in her eyes was worse. She was a geisha with whom he had for some time been familiar. She had known all along that he had a wife and children, but the smell of the nursing child brought violent revulsion and jealousy. Eguchi and the geisha were not again on good terms.
The smell the geisha so disliked had been from his youngest child. Eguchi had had a lover before was married. Her parents became suspicions, and his occasional meetings with her were turbulent. Once when he withdrew his face he saw that her breast was lightly stained with blood. He was startled, but, as if nothing had happened, he brought his face back and gently licked it away. The girl, in a trance, did not know what had happened. The delirium had passed. Even when he told her she did not seem to be in pain.
So far away beyond the years, why had the two memories come back to him? It did not seem likely that because he had had in him the two memories he had smelled milk in the girl beside him. They were far beyond the years, but he did not think, somehow, that one distinguished near memories from distant memories as they were new or old.
He might have a fresher and more immediate memories from his boyhood sixty years ago than from the yesterday. Was this tendency not clearer the older one aged? Could not a person's young days make him what he was, lead him through life? It was a triviality, but the girl, whose breast had been wet with blood had taught him that a man's lips could draw blood from almost any part of the woman's body. And although afterwards Eguchi had avoided going to that extreme, the memory, the gift from a woman bringing strength to a man's whole life, was still with him, a full sixty-seven years old.
A still more trivial thing.
"Before I go to sleep I close my eyes and count the men I wouldn't mind been kissed by. I count them up to my fingers. It's very pleasant. But it makes me sad when I can't think of even ten."
These remarks had been made to the young Eguchi by the wife of a business executive, a middle-aged woman, a woman of society, and, report had it, an intelligent woman. She was waltzing with him at that time. Taking this sudden confession to mean that he was among those she would not mind being kisses by, Eguchi held her hands less tightly.
"I only count them…" she said nonchalantly "You are young, and I suppose you don't find it sad to get to sleep. And if you do you always have your wife. But give it a try once I find it very good medicine."
Her voice was if anything dry, and Eguchi did not answer. She had said that she only counted them. But one could suspect that she called up their faces and bodies in her mind. To conjure up ten would take a considerable amount of time and imagining. At the thought, the perfume as of a love potion from this woman somewhat past her prime came more strongly to Eguchi. She was free to draw in her mind as she wished the figure of Eguchi among the men she would not mind being kissed by. The mater was no concern of his, and he could neither resist nor complain. And yet it was sullying, the fact that without his knowing it he was being enjoyed in the mind of a middle-aged woman. But he had not forgotten her words. He was not without a suspicion afterwards that the woman have been playing with him, or that she had invented the story to make fun of him. But later still, only the words remained. The woman was long dead. Old Eguchi no longer had these doubts. And, clever woman, she had died after having imagined herself kissing how many hundreds of men?
As old approached, Eguchi would, on nights when he had difficulty sleeping, sometimes remember the woman's words, and count up numbers of women in his fingers. But he did not stop at anything so simple as picturing those he would not mind kissing. He would travel back over memories of women with whom he had had affairs. And old love had come back tonight because the sleeping beauty had given him the illusion that he smelled milk.
Perhaps the blood on the breast of that girl from long ago had made him sense in the girl tonight an odor that did not exist. Perhaps it was a melancholy comfort for an old man to be sunk in memories of women who would not come back from the far past, even while he fondled a beauty who would not awaken. Eguchi was filled with a warm repose that had loneliness in it. He had but touched her lightly to see whether her breast was wet, and the twisted thought had not come to him of leaving her to be startled when she awoke after him, at having had blood drawn from her breast. Her breasts seemed to be beautifully rounded. A strange thought came to him: why, among all animals, in the long course of the world, had the breasts of the human female alone become beautiful?