Light and dark

[123]

HORI’S HOUSE lay in the same general direction as the clinic; alighting from the same streetcar two stops sooner and turning immediately to the right brought O-Nobu to the front gate five blocks or so down the street.

Unlike the Okamoto house or the Fujiis’, this residence was far from the suburbs and had no room in front for anything that could be called a garden. Needless to say, there was no driveway for rickshaws or carriages. Built virtually on the street, the two-story house was set back from the gate a mere fifteen feet. Since even this area had been cobbled with stones, the ground was nowhere visible.

In the process of urban renewal, the street had been long since cleared and was relatively wider than others. Even so, there was not a single shop in evidence. Instead, it was lined with lawyers’ and doctors’ offices, inns, and other such establishments and was consequently quiet at all hours in spite of the lively neighborhood that surrounded it.

Willow trees had been planted in regular rows on both sides of the street. Accordingly, in seasons when the weather was fine, even the drab urban wind created a certain charm as it stirred the luxuriant green branches. The largest willow, standing just at the corner of Hori’s wall, draped its long branches diagonally over the gate so charmingly that it might have appeared to an onlooker to have been transplanted there specifically to complement the house.

A second striking feature was the large, antique rainwater vessel made of iron in front of the main entrance. This sizable relic, which brought to mind the pawnshops in the old part of the city, also fit perfectly with the layout of the front entrance just beside it. In this relatively wide portal there were no doors, plain or decorative in the inlaid Chinese style, only a fine lattice.

Once this was seen to be an elegant townhouse, a glance at its exterior would have sufficed to make clear that its owners, at least in previous generations, had been prosperous merchants, though the present occupant would have to be styled an eccentric. Hori himself had never had any idea what sort of house he was living in. He lacked the disposition to trouble himself about such things and was utterly unconcerned with what others might have to say about his métier. Certainly he was a bon vivant but with a personality, unlike that of an uneducated man who was merely rich, such that a house like this, suitable for a flamboyant actor, might have been an inappropriate abode — this was a man with a very small ego. To put it less generously, Hori was a man who had lost his sense of self. There was about him an easygoing carelessness: he lived according to the customs and conventions of the world around him yet made no effort to amend the idiosyncrasies that were the family legacy. This allowed him to be satisfied to live in a house constructed, according to his father and mother, by ancestors in the manner of a sturdy warehouse that was at the same time imbued with a stylishness appropriate to a traditional showman. Assuming there was virtue in this, he would have to be commended for an attitude entirely innocent of self-congratulation. To be sure, he had no reason to gloat. His residence, as reflected in his eyes, was too antiquated to allow for gloating.

Every time O-Nobu visited Hori, she was sensible of a dissonance between the house and herself. Often she felt this distance even after going inside. In her view, only Hori’s mother inhabited the house in perfect accord. Yet Hori’s mother was the woman in the house O-Nobu disliked most. Perhaps it was less dislike than a difficulty in relating. Or a difference in generations, or, more harshly, that the old woman was a living anachronism, or perhaps, if that failed to capture it precisely, personal incompatibility or the difference in backgrounds, there were any number of ways to describe the problem, but it reduced in the end to the same awkwardness.

Hori himself was another problem. In O-Nobu’s eyes, the master of the house appeared at once to fit in and not to fit in here. But to take this a step further, it was hardly more than saying that he appeared to fit in and not to fit in anywhere, so there was scarcely a point in making an issue of it. The same ambiguity was precisely reflected in O-Nobu’s feelings of affection and dislike for Hori. In truth, it was as if she both liked and disliked him.

When it came to the last member of the household, O-Hide, the essence of what O-Nobu felt could be simply represented. In her view, O-Hide’s upbringing had prepared her to fit in to the structure of this family least well of all. To translate her conclusion into psychological terms, adding a touch of pretension, there was no way in the world that O-Hide could ever assimilate into the ethos of this family. O-Hide and Hori’s mother — whenever O-Nobu tried aligning these two in her mind, she found herself confronting a contradiction. But it wasn’t easy to determine whether the result was tragic or comic.

When she considered the household and the individuals in it together in this way, one thing struck O-Nobu as odd.

Hori’s mother, more comfortable here than anyone, was the most trouble, and O-Hide, the least at home, seemed likely to cause her in another sense the most distress.

As she slid open the lattice at the entrance a bell jangled, activating the thoughts that were always at the back of her mind.