Later Father and I boarded a motorboat at Lake Biwa. I jumped into the water. The little fish that live in the weeds brushed against my legs, and the shadow of my legs, distinctly reflected on the bottom of the lake, moved with me. The picture bore no relation to what Mother and I had been discussing, but it flashed into my mind, only to vanish.
I slid off the bed and threw my arms around Mother’s knees. “Mother, please forgive me.” I was at last able to say it.
Those days, as I remember them now, were the last in which the dying embers of our happiness still glowed. Once Naoji returned from the South Pacific, our real hell began.
CHAPTER THREE / MOONFLOWERS
A sensation of helplessness, as if it were utterly impossible to go on living. Painful waves beat relentlessly on my heart, as after a thunderstorm the white clouds frantically scud across the sky. A terrible emotion—shall I call it an apprehension—wrings my heart only to release it, makes my pulse falter, and chokes my breath. At times everything grows misty and dark before my eyes, and I feel that the strength of my whole body is oozing away through my finger tips.
Of late a gloomy rain has been falling almost incessantly. Whatever I do depresses me. Today I took a wicker chair out onto the porch, intending to work again on the sweater which I began to knit this spring. The wool is of a somewhat faded rose, and I am eking it out with cobalt-blue yarn to make a sweater. The pale rose wool originally came from a scarf that Mother knitted for me twenty years ago, when I was still in elementary school. The end of the scarf was formed into a kind of skullcap, and when I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror, a little imp stared back at me. The scarf was very different in color from the scarves my school friends wore, and that fact alone sufficed to make me loathe it with an unreasoning fury. I felt so ashamed to be seen in it that I had refused to wear it again, and for years it had lain hidden away in a drawer somewhere. This spring it came to light, and I unraveled it. I decided to make it into a sweater for myself, in the pious intention of resuscitating a dead possession. But somehow the faded color failed to interest me, and I had put the yarn aside again. Today, having nothing else to do, I took it out on the spur of the moment and idly began to knit. It was only while I was knitting that I realized the pale rose of the wool and the grey of the overcast sky were blending into one, making a harmony of colors so soft and mild that no words could describe it. I had never suspected that the important thing was to consider the match a costume makes with the color of the sky. What a beautiful, wonderful thing color harmony is, I thought to myself, rather surprised. It is amazing how when one unites the grey of the sky with the pale rose of the wool, both colors at once come alive. The wool I held in my hands became vibrant with warmth, and the cold rainy sky was soft as velvet. I remembered a Monet painting of a cathedral in the mist, and I felt as if, thanks to the wool, I had for the first time understood what good taste is. Good taste. Mother had chosen the pale rose wool because she knew just how lovely it would look against the snowy winter sky, but in my foolishness I had disliked it. I had had my own way, for Mother never attempted to force anything on me. During all this time Mother had not said a word of explanation but had waited these twenty years until I was able to appreciate the beauty of the color myself. I thought what a wonderful Mother I had. At the same moment clouds of dread and apprehension suddenly welled up within my breast as I wondered whether Naoji and I between us had not tortured and weakened Mother to the point of killing her. The more I reflected the more certain it seemed that the future had in store for us only horrible, evil things. The thought filled me with such nameless fears that I felt almost incapable of going on living. The strength left my fingers, and I dropped my knitting needles on my lap. A great sigh shook me. With my eyes still shut, I lifted my head. Before I knew what I was doing, I had cried, “Mother!”
“Yes?” Mother, leaning over a desk in a corner of the room, reading a book, answered with a note of doubt in her voice.
I was confused. In an unnecessarily loud voice I declared, “The roses have bloomed at last. Did you know it, Mother? I just noticed it now. They’ve bloomed at last.”
The roses in front of the porch had been brought back long ago by Uncle Wada from France—or was it England? at any rate some distant country—and had now been transplanted here from our house in Nishikata Street. I had been fully aware this morning that one of them had bloomed, but to cover my embarrassment I pretended with exaggerated enthusiasm just to have discovered the fact. The flowers, of a dark purple, had a sombre pride and strength.
“Yes, I knew,” Mother said gently, adding, “Such things seem very important to you.”
“Perhaps. Are you sorry for me?”
“No. I only meant to say that it was typical of you. It’s just like you to paste pictures by Renoir on the kitchen match boxes or to make handkerchiefs for dolls. To hear you talk about the roses in the garden, one would think you were discussing live people.”
“That’s because I haven’t any children.”
I was quite taken aback by my own remark. I nervously fingered the knitting on my lap. It was as if I clearly could hear a man’s voice, a scratchy bass, like a voice on the telephone, saying, “What do you expect—she’s twenty-nine!” My cheeks burned with shame.
Mother made no comment but went back to her book. For some days now she has been wearing a gauze mask over her mouth, and that may have been the cause of her exceptional taciturnity of late. She wore the mask in obedience to Naoji’s instructions.
Naoji had returned a week or so before from the South Pacific, his face sallow. One summer evening, without a word of warning, he had burst into th
e garden, slamming the wooden gate behind him. “What a horror! What atrocious taste for a house! You should put out a sign ‘China Mansions: Chow Mein’!”
These were Naoji’s words of greeting on first seeing me.
Mother had taken to bed two or three days before with a pain in her tongue. I could not detect anything abnormal about the tip of her tongue, but she said that the slightest movement hurt her unbearably. At meal times she could only get down a thin soup. I suggested that the doctor examine her, but Mother shook her head and said with a forced smile, “He would only laugh at me.” I painted her tongue with Lugol, but it had no apparent effect. Mother’s illness unnerved me.
Just at this juncture, Naoji came.
He sat for a moment by Mother’s pillow and inclined his head in a word of greeting. That was all—he immediately sprang to his feet and rushed off to inspect the house. I followed behind him.
“How do you find Mother? Changed?”
“She’s changed all right. She’s grown thin. It’d be best for her if she died soon. People like Mama are not meant to go on living in such a world as this. She was too pathetic even for me to look at her.”
“How about me?”
“You’ve coarsened. Your face looks as if you’ve got two or three men. Is there any sake? Tonight I’m going to get drunk.”
I went to the village inn and begged the proprietress to let me have a little sake, in honor of my brother’s return, but I was told that they were unfortunately just out of stock. When I repeated this information to Naoji, his face darkened into an expression the like of which I never before had seen, and which made him a stranger. “Damn it! You don’t know how to deal with her.” He got me to tell him where the inn was and rushed out. That was that. I waited for hours for his return, but in vain. I had made baked apples, one of Naoji’s favorite dishes, and an omelette, and had even put brighter electric lights in the dining-room to add some cheer. While I was waiting, Osaki, the girl from the inn, put her head in at the kitchen door and whispered urgently, “Excuse me. Is it all right? He’s drinking gin.” Her pop-eyes bulged even more than usual.
“Gin? You mean methyl alcohol?”
“No, it’s not methyl, but just the same….”
“It won’t make him sick if he drinks it, will it?”
“No, but still….”