Light and dark

[114]

AIDED BY his fatigue from the restless night before, Tsuda’s sleep that night was unexpectedly sound. Awakening with clear sunlight in his eyes, he peered through the window glass at the bright day and heard the familiar swish-swash of scrubbing from the laundry next door, a sound that somehow invoked an autumn mood.

“If you be going, go in this! Oh yes! Oh my…”

The laundry men were singing a popular song, adding at the end of every verse a made-up refrain, “O yes! Oh my! No flies on me!” The song helped Tsuda imagine their busy hands as they bent to their work.

Abruptly, the launderers emerged from an odd opening onto the roof with arms full of white cloth. Approaching the clothes pole, they spread the cloth as if it were a single piece beneath the autumn sky. This activity, repeated daily since his arrival here, was monotonous. But it was also industrious. If there was significance in that, it escaped Tsuda.

But he had more pressing matters to consider. An image of Madam Yoshikawa rose to his mind. When he tried imagining his future, the picture was all too vague. When he attempted to render it more sharply, the matron always came into focus. Today there seemed to be more than ordinary significance in this focal point representing his future.

First of all, there was the remnant of his recent visit that continued to trouble him. On that occasion it was she who had abruptly shined a light in his mind on an issue that had been closed between them and sealed. He had struggled, resolved not to hear what more she might have to say. Simultaneously he had willed her to continue. Inasmuch as it was she who had broken the seal, it occurred to him that he had a right to unpack the contents.

Second, he was concerned about Kyoto. The relative weight of the two matters aside, it was the latter that pressed upon him more urgently. Clearly he was well advised to meet with her as soon as possible. Lumbered with a body that would be unable to move for four or five days, he had gone so far, before O-Nobu had left the previous day, to urge her to visit the matron in his stead. O-Nobu had declined to go, leaving him without a plan, but he still felt strongly that a visit from her was the appropriate move to make.

It struck Tsuda as passing strange that O-Nobu was so opposed to paying the lady a visit. A woman who normally would have stepped into a delicate situation like this eagerly without a word of encouragement! Such was his thought at the time. He had even tried to persuade her that the errand was a pretext for coming into Madam’s presence that he had prepared expressly for her. But she had not relented, and Tsuda hadn’t felt inclined to apply further pressure at the time. His reluctance was partly a function of the mutual openness they had managed to achieve as a couple, but it was also a reflection of her reason for declining. If she were to go, she had insisted, she would certainly fail. She declined to offer an explanation, saying only that Tsuda himself was certain to succeed. When he objected that timeliness rather than success was the issue, pointing out that a meeting would be impossible until he had left the hospital, which might be too late, her response had surprised him. Madam Yoshikawa would certainly be coming to the clinic for a visit, she declared. She insisted that the matter might be handled most naturally and simply by making use of that opportunity.

Gazing at the laundry drying on the roof next door, Tsuda gathered in this manner, as though hauling in a net, fragments of the previous day’s conversation and examined them one after the other. He began to feel that Madam Yoshikawa might indeed pay him a sick call. It also seemed she was unlikely to come. He was unsure why O-Nobu had insisted so emphatically that she would appear. He pictured the large group that was said to have sat down to dinner in the restaurant in the theater. He tried assembling in a novelistic manner the conversation that might have transpired between O-Nobu and Madam Yoshikawa. But he was unable to isolate anything in particular that would have led to her prediction, and he had to admit that he was baffled. He acknowledged in O-Nobu a certain degree of the intuition that the heavens unfortunately had chosen to deny him. This gift put him always a little in awe of her, and he lacked the courage it would have taken to dismiss it carelessly. At the same time, he was altogether incapable of relying on it, and he considered whether he might not contrive by himself to draw the lady to the clinic. A phone call occurred to him at once. He tried hard to think if there mightn’t be a way to call that would induce her naturally, without seeming presumptuous or deliberate, to pay a visit. He might as well have been struggling to build something out of foam. No matter how he labored to work something out, it seemed to evaporate before he had managed to complete it. When he realized he was scheming to actualize a fundamentally unreasonable fantasy and was accordingly doomed to failure, he smiled with a certain bitterness and returned to gazing through the window glass.

A wind had risen. The single willow tree in front of the laundry was swaying in unison with the drying sheets. The three power lines that nearly grazed the tree trembled as though in concert with the rest.