Light and dark

[178]

ON THE verge of shattering when a man entered the room and threw open the rain shutters early in the morning, his dream managed to sustain itself in the space between deep sleep and waking. When he finally rose from his bed as the sun was lifting in the sky and the light flooding the room was making sleep impossible, his eyes were heavy. Cleaning his teeth with a toothpick, he slid open the shoji. With the eyes of man who has at last awakened from a domain haunted by demons in which he had been trapped since the night before, he surveyed the scene outside.

The garden in front of his room appeared out of place in a mountain village. The landscaping, an irregularly shaped, artificial pond with young pines and azaleas and the like installed around it in predictable places, was more vulgar than merely commonplace. From the miniature mountain near his room, water piped from a real mountain spring emptied into the pond like a diminutive waterfall; there was even a fountain that gushered into the air like fireworks in five or six modestly sized plumes. Observing with a mirthless smile what was unmistakably the source of the noise that had troubled his sleep, Tsuda was led at once to thoughts of Kiyoko, who had distressed him infinitely more than the sound of the water. What if their connection turned out to be in essence the same lackluster affair as the fountain, just as meaningless? That would be intolerable.

With the toothpick still between his teeth and his hands thrust into his robe, he was musing at the threshold of his room when the young man who had been sweeping leaves in the garden with a bamboo broom approached and greeted him politely.

“Morning. That was a tiring journey.”

“You’re the fellow who rode with me in the carriage?”

“By your leave—”

“It really is quiet, just as you said. And this place is endless.”

“Not really. As you can see, there’s hardly any flat land, so they kept digging out and building and building some more on levels. The halls, though, I’m afraid they’re like you say, endless.”

“I got lost on my way back from the bath last night — I was in a panic.”

“That’ll happen.”

While this exchange was in progress, a man and woman were coming down from the hill just beyond the garden. To ease the relatively steep pitch of the hillside, the trail descended through brilliant maples and withered trees in switchbacks, so that even after the couple was in sight it took a while for them to emerge at the entrance to the garden. The young hostler, who knew a generous tipper when he saw one, didn’t stand around waiting. Leaving Tsuda behind without a backward glance, he dashed to the bottom of the hill and greeted the other guests as if he had been waiting to welcome them when they appeared.

Tsuda had a good look at their faces for the first time. He nearly failed to recognize the woman, who had let down the large knot of hair piled atop her head the last time he had seen her and reset it in a normal hairdo, but this was unquestionably the female who had opened the door to his bath in her seductive state of semidress the night before. Her male companion he knew only by his voice; under cover of the distance separating them, he examined his face for the first time. He wore a mustache, closely cropped in the style of the day, and there was an aura about him that somehow confirmed what the bath attendant had said, that he was a merchant. Something in his countenance put Tsuda instantly in mind of O-Hide’s husband, Hori Shōtarō, slightly abbreviated “Hori the Shō-san,” and further shortened “Hori-shō,” a nickname Hori himself often used that seemed to accord perfectly with his brother-in-law’s manner. He imagined that this fellow, too, must have a nickname so redolent of the merchant class it would overpower his high-faluting mustache. Tsuda’s speculation based on a single glance didn’t stop there. Advancing a step further into cynicism, he wondered whether this was truly a married couple. With that question in mind, he sensed something incongruous about the domesticity of their morning as they described it, a walk following a bath after rising early. Tsuda was still standing as before, working on his teeth with his toothpick. Though he was observing them at a distance, the conversation, which included the hostler, was distinctly audible.

“Is there anything the matter with the lady in the annex today?” the woman inquired. The hostler replied.

“No, Ma’am, not that I know of. Is there anything—”

“Nothing special. But we always see her at morning bath, and she wasn’t there today.”

“Is that so? It could be she’s still asleep?”

“Maybe. But we always take morning bath at the same time.”

“I see.”

“And this morning we had a date to walk into the hills together.”

“Shall I go and remind her?”

“It doesn’t matter now — we’ve already been on our walk. I just thought I’d ask you if maybe she wasn’t feeling well.”

“I think she’s probably still asleep. On the other hand—”

“Never mind about the other hand. You don’t have to be so serious, I was just asking.”

The couple moved away.

With his mouth full of tooth powder, Tsuda ventured into the hall to search for the bath he had used the night before.