*
Come to think of it, I will close with one bit of unusual news. Today, for the first time in years, I went and cleaned your study in the annexe myself, rather than leave it to the maid. I was impressed by how settled it is — a very nice study indeed. The sofa is singularly comfortable, and the Ninsei pot on the bookshelf does much to enhance the atmosphere, like a blaze of flowers in the otherwise muted room. I wrote this letter in your study. The Gauguin does not quite suit the space, and if possible I would like to take it with me and hang it in the house in Yase; I took the liberty of removing it from the wall, hanging the snowy landscape by Vlaminck in its place. I also rotated the clothes in the drawer, setting out three winter suits, each paired with one of my particular favourites among your neckties. Whether or not you will be pleased, I cannot say.
SAIKO’S LETTER (POSTHUMOUS)
By the time you read this, my darling, I will no longer be among the living. I don’t know what it’s like to die, but I know all my joy, my pain, my suffering will be gone. All my feelings for you, this surge of emotion that keeps coming and coming whenever I think of Shōko, will have vanished from the face of the earth, just like that. There will be nothing left of me — not my body, not my heart.
And yet, hours or maybe days after I’ve died and entered that state, you will read this letter. And it will communicate to you all these feelings I hold within me now, while I live. It will tell you, just as if I myself were talking to you, things about me, my thoughts and feelings, that you never knew before. You’ll listen to my voice as it comes through this letter as if I were still living, and you will be stunned, saddened, angry. You won’t cry. But you will look at me with that terribly sad face of yours, which no one but me knows — I know Midori has never seen it — and tell me how silly I am. I can see your face clearly even now, and hear your voice.
All of which is to say that even after I die, my life will still be waiting here hidden in this letter until it is time for you to read it, and the second you cut the seal and lower your eyes to read its first words, my life will flare up again and burn with all its former vigour, and then for fifteen or twenty minutes, until you read the very last word, my life will flow as it did when I was alive into every limb, every little corner of your body, and fill your heart with various emotions. A posthumous letter is an astonishing thing, don’t you think? I brim right now with the desire to give you something true in the fifteen or twenty minutes of life this letter holds — yes, at least that much. It scares me to be saying this to you at this late date, but it seems to me that while I was alive I never once let you see me as I truly am. Now, writing this, I am the real me. Or rather, this me, the one writing, is the only one that is real. Yes, this is real…
My eyes still remember how beautiful the foliage was on Mount Tennō, in Yamazaki, washed by the fine autumn rain. What made it so beautiful? We stood under the eaves of the closed old gate of that famous tea house at Myōkian, just across from the station, waiting for the rain to end, gazing up at the mountain, which jutted up just behind the station, so huge and so close, and it was so beautiful it took our breath away. It was a sort of trick of the season, perhaps, that moment in November, and of the time of day, shortly before dusk. An effect of the particular atmosphere that day in late autumn, after an afternoon of intermittent drizzle — an array of colours so rich it was as if the whole mountain were dreaming them, colours so beautiful they made us afraid at the thought that we were going to climb up there, up the side of the mountain. Thirteen years have passed since then, yet the touching beauty of those leaves, on all the different trees, rises up before me as if I were there at this moment.
That was the first occasion you and I were ever able to spend time alone together. You had been dragging me to various spots on the outskirts of Kyoto since morning, and I couldn’t have been more exhausted, mentally and spiritually. I’m sure you must have been worn out too. As we climbed the steep, narrow path up the mountain, you said all kinds of outrageous things. Love is a form of attachment. I’m attached to my tea bowls, and there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? So how can it be wrong for me to be attached to you? And: We’re the only ones, just you and me, who have seen this magnificent foliage, here on Mount Tennō. And we saw it with each other, together. There’s no going back now. You sounded like a spoilt child, trying to wheedle your way into getting what you wanted.
All day long my heart had been straining, trying not to give in to you, and then suddenly it was as if you had pushed it down, and I relented — all on account of the silly, desperate things you said. The confused pity your reckless, overbearing statements evoked in me crystallized itself within my body — like flowers blooming everywhere inside me — as the joy of a woman in love.
It amazes me how easy, how simple it was to forgive my own infidelity when I had never succeeded in forgiving my husband, Kadota, for exactly the same failing.
*
Let us be wicked, you said. Wicked. You used that word for the first time when we stayed at the Atami Hotel. Do you remember? It was windy out, and the storm shutters on the window facing the ocean kept shaking and rattling all night. When you pushed it open around midnight to try and fix it, there was a fishing boat far out at sea that had caught fire and was burning high, bright red, like a cresset. People might be dying out there, we could see that, and yet the horror of it didn’t touch us — we saw only how beautiful it was. The second you closed the shutter, though, I became uneasy. You opened it again almost right away, but by then the boat must have burnt up, because there wasn’t a speck of light anywhere — just the dim, settled, bleary vastness of the ocean.
Until that night, I had still been struggling, deep in my heart, to break away from you. But after that night, after we saw the burning boat, an odd fatalism took hold of me. When you suggested we be wicked together, when you asked me to join with you and deceive Midori for the rest of our lives, I replied without a moment’s hesitation that if we were going to be wicked anyway, we might as well be evil. We would trick Midori, yes, but not only her — everyone, the entire world. That night, for the first time since we began having our trysts, I was able to sleep peacefully.
I felt as if I had glimpsed, in that boat blazing on the water, unbeknownst to anyone, the fate of our hopeless love. Even as I write this, that scene, those flames bright enough to overcome the darkness, rise up before me. What I saw on the ocean that night was without doubt a figure, the perfect figure, of the distress, the fleeting, this-worldly writhing that is a woman’s life.
*
There’s no point losing ourselves in such reminiscences, though. These last thirteen years, which began in the moments I have been describing, gave us our share of pain and anguish, but I feel even so that I have been the happiest person in the world. Cradled as I always was by your great love, your caring, I may even have been too happy.
I looked over my diary earlier today. I couldn’t help being struck by how often the words “death” and “sin” and “love” appeared there, and it made me feel — as if I didn’t know well enough already — how difficult the long years we navigated together have been; and yet, when I held that notebook in my palm and felt its heaviness, it had a happy weight. I may have been tormented by an omnipresent awareness of sin, a constant refrain of SIN SIN SIN, and I lived every day of my life staring down a vision of death, telling myself that I would die if Midori ever found out, I would make my amends to her, when she finally learnt, by dying, but all this merely stands as a measure of how irreplaceable my happiness was.