Light and dark

[179]

BUT THIS morning he was spared the necessity of a search. When he had made his way downstairs to the bath without a misstep despite some confusing twists and turns, he was overtaken anew by a sense of how ridiculously he’d been acting since the night before.

Through the glass transom installed beneath the eaves, the strong sunlight of an autumn morning was pouring into the room. Glancing up through the glass above his head, Tsuda could just make out what might have been a rock or an embankment and realized that the tub he was soaking in was below ground. The difference in height between the bath and the cliff outside was considerable. From what he could see, he judged it to be some ten or twelve feet, which meant, inasmuch as he had heard there was an older bath below him, that the inn had been built on multiple levels.

Silverleafs were growing on top of the cliff. Unfortunately the morning sun wasn’t shining there, and the hard sheen of the flowers as they swayed occasionally in the wind made them appear icy cold. Camellias were also visible from the tub as they dropped from the bush and scattered. But the scenery was fragmented. Outside the two feet of view permitted by the glass, Tsuda could see nothing above or below. The vista unknown to him was bound to be ordinary. And yet for some reason it piqued his curiosity. A bird had suddenly begun to warble, a bulbul judging by its melodic song, and hearing it just outside at the cliff but unable to see it, Tsuda felt somehow dissatisfied.

But this dissatisfaction was a mere afterthought. The truth was, from the moment he had come downstairs to the bath, he had been playing over in his mind the incident from the previous night and was as a consequence submerged in a far deeper sense of dissatisfaction. Finding the sunlit bathing room deserted, he had stood in the desolate hallway of the bathing area and just to be sure, as if he were within his rights to do exactly as he pleased, had opened each of the doors to the small tubs lined up on both sides. Possibly he had been prompted to try this by the pair of slippers that had been left in front of one of the doors. But when he came finally to the tightly closed door with the slippers in front of it, he hesitated. He wasn’t unaware of what he was about. He was moreover disinclined to be rude. At a loss for what to do, he strained to hear from outside the door, and the silence inside empowered his hand to turn the handle and push it boldly open. Encountering a private tub as empty as all the others, he experienced relief and disappointment at the same time.

Naked now and soaking in the tub, he had been left in the aftermath of his experiment with an incessant sense of anticipation. With a mirthless smile, he tried comparing himself before and after the change he had undergone since the previous evening. Last night, until the woman with the upswept hair had walked in on him, he had been, if anything, innocent. This morning, before anyone had appeared, he felt a kind of tension that came from lying in wait.

Perhaps the unidentified slippers had incited him to this transgression. But if the slippers had churned him, it was because on arising he had overheard talk of Kiyoko in the banter between the woman from Yokohama and the hostler. She was still in bed. Or at least she hadn’t taken her bath yet. If she were intending to bathe, she would have to be bathing now or on her way here, one or the other.

Tsuda’s keen hearing detected abruptly the sound of someone coming down the stairs. He stopped splashing water on himself. Whereupon the footsteps stopped. Perhaps he was imagining things; it seemed to him that when they resumed a second later they were moving in the opposite direction, back up the stairs. He thought he could imagine why. He wondered if the problem mightn’t be that he had left his slippers outside the door as he had seen others do. Why hadn’t he worn them inside? he asked himself regretfully.

A minute later he was surprised to hear footsteps again, this time outside the building. Both sets of footsteps were immediately connected in his imagination. It came to him easily that the person who had avoided the bath had subsequently gone outside on purpose. Just then he heard a woman’s voice. But this issued from an entirely different direction. From what he could see outside looking up from below, the cliff leveled off at the top, and it appeared that an annex facing the baths had been built on this patch of level ground. At any rate, the voice was coming from that direction. It belonged unmistakably to the woman who had been discussing Kiyoko with the hostler a while ago on her way back from a walk.

The glass transom beneath the eaves that had been ajar last evening to let steam escape was tightly closed this morning, and as a result the woman’s words reached Tsuda indistinctly. But judging from the way she was lifting her voice, one thing was certain: she was standing on the top of the cliff calling out to someone below. In the order of things, some sort of acknowledgment was to be expected from the base of the cliff. Strangely enough, there was no response; the alternating remarks of a normal conversation did not occur. The only talking came from the top of the cliff.

But this time the footsteps did not stop as they had before. Tsuda heard the sound of garden clogs treading irregular stone steps as a woman, unmistakably a woman, ascended the path. About the time she should have been nearing the top, a portion of her skirt appeared in the upper part of the glass transom. It was gone at once. The momentary impression Tsuda retained was the fluttering of a beautiful pattern. In that pattern as it moved out of sight he had the impression he recognized colors he had seen from the bottom of the stairs the night before.