What happened between you and Mother has shown me that there is such a thing as love no one blesses, love that must not be blessed. Only the two of you, no one else, could ever know how much in love you were. Not Aunt Midori, not me, not any of our relatives. None of our neighbours, not the people across the street, not even your best friends knew — and they couldn’t. Now that Mother has died, only you know. And when you die, Uncle, not one person on this planet will even suspect that this love of yours existed. Until now, I always believed love was as bright as the sun, dazzlingly so, and that it should be eternally blessed by God and all the people around you. I knew love was like a clear stream that sparkled beautifully in the sun, and when the wind blew any number of soft ripples skittered across its surface, and its banks were gently held by the plants and trees and flowers, and it kept singing its pure music, always, as it grew wider and wider — that’s what love was to me. How could I have imagined a love that stretched out secretly, like an underground channel deep under the earth, flowing from who knew where to who knew where without ever feeling the sun’s rays?
For thirteen years Mother deceived me. She was still deceiving me when she died. I never dreamt we could have any secrets from each other, no matter what happened. She used to say so herself, that we were mother and daughter, after all. The only thing she never talked about was the reason she and Father had to break up; she said I wouldn’t understand until it was time for me to get married myself. That made me want to grow up as quickly as I could. Not because I wanted to know what happened between Mother and Father, but because I thought having to keep that knowledge bottled up inside her must hurt Mother a lot. And it did, in fact, seem to be very painful. It never even occurred to me, though, that Mother might be keeping an altogether different secret from me!
When I was a girl, Mother used to tell me this story about a wolf who was enchanted by the devil and tricked a little rabbit. The wolf was turned into a stone for what he did. Mother tricked me, and she tricked Aunt Midori, and she tricked everyone else… it’s just incomprehensible. The devil who enchanted her must have been one terrible devil. Come to think of it, Mother used the word wicked in her diary. The two of you were going to be wicked, she said, and if you were going to do it anyway you might as well be thoroughly evil. Why didn’t she write that she had been possessed by the devil? My poor mother, so much unluckier than the wolf who tricked the rabbit! And to think someone as gentle as Mother, and as gentle as you, Uncle Jōsuke, whom I love so much, could have decided to be wicked — to be evil, in fact! How heartbreaking to love someone, but only be able to hold on to that love if you give yourself up to evil! When I was a girl, someone once bought me a round glass paperweight with a fake red petal inside it during the festival for Shōten at the temple in Nishimiya. I took it in my hand and started walking, but before long I began to cry. I’m sure at the time no one understood why I had suddenly burst into tears. I had been overcome by sadness, all at once, because I imagined how that petal must feel, frozen in the cold glass, motionless, even when spring came, and then when autumn came, poor petal, crucified in the glass. I feel the same sadness now. Your poor love, sad as that petal!
*
Uncle, Uncle Jōsuke.
You must be very angry with me for secretly reading Mother’s diary. But the day before she died, I had a premonition, I guess you could say — a feeling that came over me all at once, just like that, that she wasn’t going to recover. Her death was getting closer. I felt it in her somewhere, something bad. You know as well as I do, Uncle, that for the past six months there seemed to be nothing wrong with her except for a slight, persistent fever — she still had her appetite, and in fact her cheeks glowed more than before, and she put on weight. But recently when I saw her from behind, when I looked at the line from her shoulders down to her arms, especially, she seemed so forlorn that I felt a kind of foreboding. The day before Mother died, Aunt Midori came by for a visit, and when I went to Mother’s room to tell her and slid her door open I was so surprised that I almost gasped. She was kneeling on the floor facing the other way, wearing a haori of greyish-blue Yūki silk with a large thistle woven across the back. She had told me once that I could have it because it was too gaudy for her at her age, and then she had wrapped it in paper and put it away in the chest of drawers, and for years she had almost never taken it out. I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out—
“What are you doing?”
Mother turned to face me, looking puzzled.
“I mean…” I started, but then I couldn’t continue. A second later I couldn’t even see why I had been so taken aback in the first place, and the whole thing seemed funny. Mother loved kimono, and she used to take out old, flashy pieces and try them on all the time — in fact, when she got sick it became almost part of her daily routine to take some kimono she hadn’t worn in years out of the chest and put it on, and she had been choosing bolder and bolder designs, maybe to cheer herself up. When I thought about it later, though, I realized that it really had been a shock to see her in that Yūki haori. Because she was so beautiful it was like being woken up all at once from a deep sleep — I’m not exaggerating. And at the same time, I had never in my life seen her looking as lonely as she did at that moment. Aunt Midori was behind me, and when she stepped into the room she commented right away on how lovely Mother looked, and then sat for a time without speaking, lost in admiration.
The beautiful but lonely feeling that came over me when I saw Mother in that haori, sitting with her back to me, stayed there inside me all day, like a cold weight that had settled in my heart.
In the evening, the wind that had been blowing since morning died down, so Sadayo and I raked up the leaves that had fallen in the garden and burned them. While I was at it, I thought I would bring out a bundle of straw I had bought a few days earlier for way too much and burn it to make ash for Mother’s hibachi. As I was doing that, Mother, who had been sitting inside, watching me through the glass doors, came out onto the verandah with a package wrapped in clean brown paper.
“Burn this too, please!” she said.
When I asked what it was, she snapped in an unusually sharp tone that it was nothing, just burn it. I guess she felt bad, though, because she said softly, “It’s a diary. My diary.” She told me once more that she wanted it burnt, and then she spun on her heel and walked off down the hall, her gait oddly unstable, as if she were being carried along by the wind.
It took about half an hour to make the ash. By the time the last straw had flared and gone up in a line of purplish smoke, I had made my decision. I took Mother’s diary and quietly went upstairs to my room, and then hid it at the back of a shelf. That night, the wind blew up again. When I looked out of my window, the garden was bathed in the light of an almost ferociously white moon, and it had a sort of barren air, like some rocky coast up north, and the roar of the wind sounded like waves pounding the shore. Mother and Sadayo had gone to bed ages ago, so I was the only one up. I stacked five or six heavy encyclopedia volumes by the door so it wouldn’t open right away if someone tried it, and I pulled the curtain all the way shut — even the moonlight pouring into my room scared me! — and then finally I adjusted the shade on my lamp and placed a single college notebook down on my desk. That notebook was what had emerged from the brown wrapping paper. That notebook was Mother’s diary.