Thousand Cranes Read online

  But Chikako’s voice clawed at his ear and scraped at his nerves. ‘Well, she will know I’m here. I can’t run away now.’ He stood up.

  He went in through the door by the alcove, and took his place at the upper end of the room.

  Chikako followed close after him. ‘This is Mr Mitani. Old Mr Mitani’s son.’ Her tone was most formal.

  Kikuji made his bow, and as he raised his head he had a clear view of the daughter. Somewhat flustered, he had at first not distinguished one lady from another in the bright flood of kimonos. He saw now that Mrs Ota was directly opposite him.

  ‘Kikuji.’ It was Mrs Ota. Her voice, audible throughout the room, was frankly affectionate. ‘I haven’t written in so long. And it’s been so very long since I last saw you.’ She tugged at the daughter’s sleeve, urging her to be quick with her greetings. The daughter flushed and looked at the floor.

  To Kikuji this was indeed odd. He could not detect the faintest suggestion of hostility in Mrs Ota’s manner. She seemed wholly warm, tender, overcome with pleasure at an unexpected meeting. One could only conclude that she was wholly unaware of her place in the assembly.

  The daughter sat stiffly, with bowed head.

  At length noticing, Mrs Ota, too, flushed. She still looked at Kikuji, however, as if she wanted to rush to his side, or as if there were things she must say to him. ‘You are studying tea, then, are you?’

  ‘I know nothing at all about it.’

  ‘Really? But you have it in your blood.’ Her emotions seemed too much for her. Her eyes were moist.

  Kikuji had not seen her since his father’s funeral.

  She had hardly changed in four years.

  The white neck, rather long, was as it had been, and the full shoulders that strangely matched the slender neck – it was a figure young for her years. The mouth and nose were small in proportion to the eyes. The little nose, if one bothered to notice, was cleanly modeled and most engaging. When she spoke, her lower lip was thrust forward a little, as if in a pout.

  The daughter had inherited the long neck and the full shoulders. Her mouth was larger, however, and tightly closed. There was something almost funny about the mother’s tiny lips beside the daughter’s.

  Sadness clouded the girl’s eyes, darker than her mother’s.

  Chikako poked at the embers in the hearth. ‘Miss Inamura, suppose you make tea for Mr Mitani. I don’t believe you’ve had your turn yet.’

  The girl of the thousand cranes stood up.

  Kikuji had noticed her beside Mrs Ota.

  He had avoided looking at her, however, once he had seen Mrs Ota and the daughter.

  Chikako was of course showing the girl off for his inspection.

  When she had taken her place at the hearth, she turned to Chikako.

  ‘And which bowl shall I use?’

  ‘Let me see. The Oribe3 should do,’ Chikako answered. ‘It belonged to Mr Mitani’s father. He was very fond of it, and he gave it to me.’

  Kikuji remembered the tea bowl Chikako had placed before the girl. It had indeed belonged to his father, and his father had received it from Mrs Ota.

  And what of Mrs Ota, seeing at the ceremony today a bowl that had been treasured by her dead husband and passed from Kikuji’s father to Chikako?

  Kikuji was astounded at Chikako’s tactlessness.

  But one could not avoid concluding that Mrs Ota, too, showed a certain want of tact.

  Here, making tea for him, clean against the rankling histories of the middle-aged women, the Inamura girl seemed beautiful to him.

  3

  Unaware that she was on display, she went through the ceremony without hesitation, and she herself set the tea before Kikuji.

  After drinking, Kikuji looked at the bowl. It was black Oribe, splashed with white on one side, and there decorated, also in black, with crook-shaped bracken shoots.

  ‘You must remember it,’ said Chikako from across the room.

  Kikuji gave an evasive answer and put the bowl down.

  ‘The pattern has the feel of the mountains in it,’ said Chikako. ‘One of the best bowls I know for early spring – your father often used it. We’re just a little out of season, but then I thought that for Kikuji …’

  ‘But what difference does it make that my father owned it for a little while? It’s four hundred years old, after all – its history goes back to Momoyama and Rikyū4 himself. Tea masters have looked after it and passed it down through the centuries. My father is of very little importance.’ So Kikuji tried to forget the associations the bowl called up.

  It had passed from Ota to his wife, from the wife to Kikuji’s father, from Kikuji’s father to Chikako; and the two men, Ota and Kikuji’s father, were dead, and here were the two women. There was something almost weird about the bowl’s career.

  Here, again, Ota’s widow and daughter, and Chikako, and the Inamura girl, and other young girls too, were holding the old tea bowl in their hands, and bringing it to their lips.

  ‘Might I have tea from the Oribe myself?’ asked Mrs Ota suddenly. ‘You gave me a different one last time.’

  Kikuji was startled afresh. Was the woman foolish, or shameless?

  He was overcome with pity for the daughter, still sitting with bowed head.

  For Mrs Ota, the Inamura girl once more went through the ceremony. Everyone was watching her. She probably did not know the history of the black Oribe. She went through the practiced motions.

  It was a straightforward performance, quite without personal quirks. Her bearing, from shoulders to knees, suggested breeding and refinement.

  The shadow of young leaves fell on the paper-paneled door. One noted a soft reflection from the shoulders and the long sleeves of the gay kimono. The hair seemed luminous.

  The light was really too bright for a tea cottage, but it made the girl’s youth glow. The tea napkin, as became a young girl, was red, and it impressed one less with its softness than with its freshness, as if the girl’s hand were bringing a red flower into bloom.

  And one saw a thousand cranes, small and white, start up in flight around her.

  Mrs Ota took the black Oribe in the palm of her hand. ‘The green tea against the black, like traces of green in early spring.’ But not even she mentioned that the bowl had belonged to her husband.

  Afterward there was a perfunctory inspection of the tea utensils. The girls knew little about them, and were for the most part satisfied with Chikako’s explanation.

  The water jar and the tea measure had belonged to Kikuji’s father. Neither he nor Chikako mentioned the fact.

  As Kikuji sat watching the girls leave, Mrs Ota came toward him.

  ‘I’m afraid I was very rude. I may have annoyed you, but when I saw you it seemed that the old days came before everything.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘But see what a gentleman you’ve become.’ She looked as if she might weep. ‘Oh, yes. Your mother. I meant to go to the funeral, and then somehow couldn’t.’

  Kikuji looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Your father and then your mother. You must be very lonely.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps I am.’

  ‘You’re not leaving yet?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact …’

  ‘There are so many things we must talk about, sometime.’

  ‘Kikuji.’ Chikako called from the next room.

  Mrs Ota stood up regretfully. Her daughter had gone out and was waiting in the garden.

  The two of them left after nodding their farewell to Kikuji. There was a look of appeal in the girl’s eyes.

  Chikako, with a maid and two or three favorite pupils, was cleaning the other room.

  ‘And what did Mrs Ota have to say?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. Nothing at all.’

  ‘You must be careful with her. So meek and gentle – she always manages to make it look as if she could do no one the least harm. But you can never tell what she’s thinking.’

  ‘I suppose she comes to you
r parties often?’ Kikuji asked with a touch of sarcasm. ‘When did she begin?’

  To escape Chikako’s poison, he started into the garden.

  Chikako followed him. ‘And did you like her? A nice girl, didn’t you think?’

  ‘A very nice girl. And she would have seemed even nicer if I’d met her without the rest of you hovering around, you and Mrs Ota and Father’s ghost.’

  ‘Why should that bother you? Mrs Ota has nothing to do with the Inamura girl.’

  ‘It just seemed the wrong thing to do to the girl.’

  ‘Why? If it bothered you to have Mrs Ota here, I apologize, but you must remember that I didn’t invite her. And you’re to think of the Inamura girl separately.’

  ‘I’m afraid I have to go.’ He stopped. If he went on walking with Chikako, there was no telling when she would leave him.

  By himself again, he noted that the azaleas up the side of the mountain were in bud. He heaved a deep sigh.

  He was disgusted with himself for having let Chikako’s note lure him out; but the impression of the girl with the thousand-crane kerchief was fresh and clean.

  It was perhaps because of her that the meeting with two of his father’s women had upset him no more than it had.

  The two women were still here to talk of his father, and his mother was dead. He felt a surge of something like anger. The ugly birthmark came to him again.

  An evening breeze was rustling the new leaves. Kikuji walked slowly, hat in hand.

  From a distance he saw Mrs Ota standing in the shadow of the main gate.

  He looked for a way of avoiding her. If he climbed to the right or left, he could probably leave the temple by another exit.

  Nevertheless, he walked toward the gate. A suggestion of grimness came over his face.

  Mrs Ota saw him, and came toward him. Her cheeks were flushed.

  ‘I waited for you. I wanted to see you again. I must seem brazen, but I had to say something more. If we had said good-by there, I would have had no way of knowing when I might see you again.’

  ‘What happened to your daughter?’

  ‘Fumiko went on ahead. She was with a friend.’

  ‘She knew, then, that you would be waiting for me?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked into his eyes.

  ‘I doubt if she approves. I felt very sorry for her back there. It was clear that she did not want to see me.’ The words may have been blunt, and again they may have been circumspect; but her answer was quite straightforward.

  ‘It was a trial for Fumiko to see you.’

  ‘Because my father caused her a great deal of pain.’

  Kikuji meant to suggest that Mrs Ota had caused him a great deal of pain.

  ‘Not at all. Your father was very good to her. Sometime I must tell you about it. At first she would not be friendly, no matter how kind he was to her; but then, toward the end of the war, when the air raids were bad, she changed. I have no idea why. In her own way, she did her very best for him. Her very best, I say, but she was only a girl. Her best was going out to buy chicken and fish and the like for him. She was very determined, and she didn’t mind taking risks. She went out into the country for rice, even during the raids. Your father was astonished, the change was so sudden. I found it very touching myself, so touching that it almost hurt. And at the same time I felt that I was being scolded.’

  Kikuji wondered if he and his mother might also have had favors from the Ota girl. The remarkable gifts his father brought home from time to time – were they among her purchases?

  ‘I don’t know why Fumiko changed so. Maybe it was because we didn’t know from one day to the next whether we would still be alive. I suppose she was feeling sorry for me, and she went to work for your father too.’

  In the confusion of defeat, the girl must have known how desperately her mother clung to Kikuji’s father. In the violent reality of those days, she must have left behind the past that was her own father, and seen only the present reality of her mother.

  ‘Did you notice the ring Fumiko was wearing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your father gave it to her. Even when he was with me, your father would go home if there was an air-raid warning. Fumiko would see him home, and no one could talk her out of it. There was no telling what would happen if he went alone, she would say. One night she didn’t come back. I hoped she had stayed at your house, but I was afraid the two of them had been killed. Then in the morning she came home and said that she had seen him as far as your gate and spent the rest of the night in an air-raid shelter. He thanked her the next time he came, and gave her that ring. I’m sure she was embarrassed to have you see it.’

  Kikuji was most uncomfortable. And it was odd that the woman seemed to expect sympathy as a matter of course.

  His mood was not clearly one of dislike or distrust, however. There was a warmth in her that put him off guard.

  When the girl had desperately been doing everything she could for his father, had she been watching her mother, and yet unable to watch?

  Kikuji sensed that Mrs Ota was talking of her own love as she talked of the girl.

  She seemed to be pleading something with all the passion she had, and in its final implications the plea did not seem to make a distinction between Kikuji’s father and Kikuji himself. There was a deep, affectionate nostalgia in it, as if she meant to be talking to Kikuji’s father.

  The hostility which Kikuji, with his mother, had felt for Mrs Ota had lost some of its strength, though it had not entirely disappeared. He even feared that unless he was careful he might find in himself the father loved by Mrs Ota. He was tempted to imagine that he had known this woman’s body long ago.

  His father had soon left Chikako, Kikuji knew, but he had stayed with Mrs Ota until his death. Still it seemed probable that Chikako had treated Mrs Ota with derision. Kikuji saw signs of much the same cruelty in himself, and he found something seductive in the thought that he could do her injury with a light heart.

  ‘Do you often go to Kurimoto’s affairs?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t you have enough of her in the old days?’

  ‘I had a letter from her after your father died. I missed your father a great deal. I was feeling very lonely.’ She spoke with bowed head.

  ‘And does your daughter go too?’

  ‘Fumiko? Fumiko just keeps me company.’

  They had crossed the tracks and passed the North Kamakura Station, and were climbing the hill opposite the Engakuji.

  4

  Mrs Ota was at least forty-five, some twenty years older than Kikuji, but she had made him forget her age when they made love. He felt that he had had a woman younger than he in his arms.

  Sharing a happiness that came from the woman’s experience, Kikuji felt none of the embarrassed reticence of inexperience.

  He felt as if he had for the first time known woman, and as if for the first time he had known himself as a man. It was an extraordinary awakening. He had not guessed that a woman could be so wholly pliant and receptive, the receptive one who followed after and at the same time lured him on, the receptive one who engulfed him in her own warm scent.

  Kikuji, the bachelor, usually felt soiled after such encounters; but now, when the sense of defilement should have been keenest, he was conscious only of warm repose.

  He usually wanted to make his departure roughly; but today it was as though for the first time someone was warmly near him and he was drifting willingly along. He had not until then seen how the wave of woman followed after. Giving his body to the wave, he even felt a satisfaction as of drowsing off in triumph, the conqueror whose feet were being washed by a slave.

  And there was a feeling of the maternal about her.

  ‘Kurimoto has a big birthmark. Did you know it?’ He bobbed his head as he spoke. Without forethought, he had introduced the unpleasant. Possibly because the fibres of his consciousness had slackened, however, he did not feel that he was wronging Chikako. He put out his hand. ‘Here, on the breast, like this.’<
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  Something had risen inside him to make him say it. Something itchy that wanted to rise against Kikuji himself and injure the woman. Or perhaps it only hid a sweet shyness in wanting to see her body, to see where the mark should be.

  ‘How repulsive!’ She quickly brought her kimono together. But there seemed to be something she could not quite accept. ‘I hadn’t known,’ she said quietly. ‘You can’t see it under the kimono, can you?’

  ‘It’s not impossible.’

  ‘No! How could you possibly?’

  ‘You could see it if it were here, I should imagine.’

  ‘Stop. Are you looking to see if I have a mark too?’

  ‘No. But I wonder how you’d feel at a time like this if you did have a mark.’

  ‘Here?’ Mrs Ota looked at her own breast. ‘But why do you have to speak of it? Does it make any difference?’ In spite of the protest, her manner was unresisting. The poison disseminated by Kikuji seemed to have had no effect. It flowed back to Kikuji himself.

  ‘But it does make a difference. I only saw it once, when I was eight or nine years old, and I can see it even now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You were under the curse of that birthmark yourself. Didn’t Kurimoto come at you as if she were fighting for Mother and me?’

  Mrs Ota nodded, and pulled away. Kikuji put strength into his embrace.

  ‘She was always conscious of that birthmark. It made her more and more spiteful.’

  ‘What a frightening idea.’

  ‘And maybe too she was out for revenge against my father.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘She thought he was belittling her because of the birthmark. She may even have persuaded herself that he left her because of it.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about the repulsive thing.’ But she seemed to be drawing no clear picture of the birthmark in her mind. ‘I don’t suppose Miss Kurimoto worries about it any more. The pain must have gone long ago.’

  ‘Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’

  ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.’ She spoke as if still half in a dream.

  Then Kikuji said what he had meant at all costs not to say.