Light and dark

[15]

TAKING FROM his desk drawer the Western-style stationery he normally used, lavender paper and matching envelope, he had written several lines absently with his fountain pen when a thought occurred abruptly. His father didn’t normally expect, nor was he likely to be pleased to receive, a letter from his son scrawled with a fountain pen in colloquial Japanese. Conjuring his father’s face halfway across the country, he put down his pen with an uncomfortable smile. Once again he was struck by the feeling that sending a letter would accomplish nothing. On a scrap of thick, scratchy parchment similar to charcoal paper, he sketched carelessly his father’s long, narrow face complete with goatee and considered what to do.

Presently he rose resolutely, slid open the fusuma, and called down to his wife from the head of the stairs.

“O-Nobu. Do you have any Japanese paper and an envelope?”

“Japanese?”

To O-Nobu the adjective sounded oddly comic.

“Do you mind ladies’?”

Tsuda unscrolled across his desk the rice paper imprinted with a stylish flower pattern.

“I wonder if he’ll like this.”

“As long as the letter is clearly written so he can understand, I don’t think the paper matters.”

“You’re wrong about that. You might not think so, but he can very particular.”

Tsuda peered intently at the narrow page, his face serious. The hint of a smile appeared at the corners of O-Nobu’s mouth.

“Shall I send Toki out for something better?”

Tsuda grunted distractedly. It wasn’t as if plain rice paper and an unpatterned envelope would ensure the success of his request.

“She’ll be only a minute.”

O-Nobu went directly downstairs. A minute later Tsuda heard the maid’s footsteps leaving the house. Until the required articles reached him, he waited idly, smoking a cigarette at his desk.

There was therefore nothing to distract him from thoughts of his father. Born and raised in Tokyo, he had never missed an opportunity to denigrate the Kyoto area until one day he had moved there, intending to settle permanently. When Tsuda had ventured to express mild disapproval, knowing that his mother was not fond of the region, his father had asked, pointing to the house he had built on land he had purchased, “What will you do with all this?” Even younger than he was now, he had failed to grasp what his father meant. Handling the property wouldn’t be a problem, he had thought. From time to time his father would turn to him and say, “This isn’t for anyone else, it’s all for you,” or again, “You might not realize its value to you now, but once I’m dead and gone you’ll know to be grateful.” Tsuda replayed in his mind these words and the old man’s attitude when he had spoken them. Inflated with confidence that he had single-handedly provided for his son’s future happiness, his father had seemed unapproachable, an awe-inspiring oracle. Tsuda wanted to say, turning to the father in his imagination, Instead of feeling overwhelmed with gratitude when you die, I’d much prefer feeling grateful regularly each month a little at a time.

It was some ten minutes later that he began to indite, in formal epistolary Japanese on rice paper unlikely to offend his father, the phrases and flourishes that seemed most likely to coax some money out of him. When, feeling awkward and unnatural, he had finally completed the letter, he reread what he had written and was appalled by his own artless calligraphy. Never mind the text, the characters it was written in seemed to him to preclude any possibility of success. And what if he should succeed; the money couldn’t possibly arrive in time for when he needed it. When he had sent the maid to the post office, he burrowed under the covers and said to himself,

I’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow.