I let out a cry and burst into tears.
“You are very foolish.” Mother’s voice as she spoke these words was shaking with anger.
I lifted my head. “Yes, I am. I’ve been taken advantage of because I’m a fool. You’re getting rid of me because I’m a fool. It’s best I go, isn’t it? Poverty—what’s that? Money—what’s that? I don’t understand such things. I had always believed in love, in my mother’s love, in that at least.”
Again I spoke in that stupid, unforgivable way.
Mother turned her head away abruptly. She was weeping. I wanted to beg her pardon and to cling to her, but my hands were dirty from my work in the fields, and this involuntary embarrassment kept me distant. “Everything will be all right if I’m not here. I’ll go. I have somewhere I can go.”
With these words I ran off to the bathroom where I washed my face and hands, still sobbing. I went to my room, changed my clothes, only once again to be overcome with weeping. I wanted to weep more, more, until I had drained every tear from my body. I ran to the foreign-style room on the second floor, threw myself on the bed, and covering my head in the blankets, wept my very flesh away. Then my mind began to wander aimlessly. Gradually out of my grief, the desire for a certain person crystallized in me, and I yearned u
nbearably to see his face, to hear his voice. I had that very particular sensation one experiences when the doctor prescribes cauterization of the soles of one’s feet, and one must bear the pain without flinching.
Toward evening Mother came softly into the room and switched on the light. She approached the bed and called my name in a very gentle voice.
I got up and sat on the bed, sweeping both hands over my hair. I looked at her face and smiled.
Mother also smiled faintly and then sank into the sofa under the window. “I have just disobeyed your uncle for the first time in my life. I wrote a letter in answer to his, requesting him to leave my children’s affairs to me. Kazuko, we’ll sell our clothes. We’ll sell our clothes one after another and use the money just as we please, for whatever useless things we feel like. Let’s live extravagantly. I don’t want to let you work in the fields any more. Let’s buy our vegetables even if they are expensive. It’s unreasonable to expect you to spend every day working like a farmer.”
To tell the truth, the strain of daily work in the fields had begun to take its toll. I am sure that the reason why I wept and stormed as if I had gone off my head was that the combination of physical exhaustion and my unhappiness had made me hate and resent everything.
I sat on the bed in silence, my eyes averted.
“Kazuko.”
“Yes.”
“What did you mean by saying that you had somewhere to go?”
I could tell that I had turned red to the nape of my neck.
“Mr. Hosoda?”
I did not answer.
Mother gave a great sigh. “May I bring up something that happened a long time ago?”
“Please do,” I whispered.
“When you left your husband and returned to the house in Nishikata Street, I did not intend to say a word of reproach, but there was one thing that made me say that you had betrayed me. Do you remember? You burst into tears and I realized that I had been wrong to say such a terrible thing.”
But my memory was that I had felt grateful to Mother at the time for talking to me in such a way, and my tears had been of happiness.
“When I said that you had betrayed me it was not because you left your husband’s house. It was because I had learned from him that you and that painter Hosoda were lovers. That news came as a terrible shock. Mr. Hosoda had already been a married man for years and had children. I knew it could never come to anything, no matter how much you loved him.”
“Lovers—what a thing to say. It was nothing but groundless suspicion on my husband’s part.”
“Perhaps. I don’t suppose you can still be thinking of Mr. Hosoda. Where was it then that you meant when you said you had somewhere to go?”
“Not to Mr. Hosoda’s.”
“Really? Then where?”
“Mother, recently I have discovered the one way in which human beings differ completely from other animals. Man has, I know, language, knowledge, principles, and social order, but don’t all the other animals have them too, granted the difference of degree? Perhaps the animals even have religions. Man boasts of being the lord of all creation, but it would seem as if essentially he does not differ in the least from other animals. But, Mother, there was one way I thought of. Perhaps you won’t understand. It’s a faculty absolutely unique to man—having secrets. Can you see what I mean?”
Mother blushed faintly and gave a charming smile. “If your secrets only bear good fruit, it will be all I could ask. Every morning I pray to your father’s spirit to make you happy.”
Suddenly there flashed across my mind an image of driving with Father through Nasuno and getting out on the way, and how the autumn fields looked. The autumn flowers—asters, pinks, gentians, valerians—were all in bloom. The wild grapes were still green.