Light and dark

[180]

RETURNING TO his room, he sat down to his breakfast and engaged the maid who was serving him in conversation.

“Are those guests from Yokohama staying on top of the cliff I can see from the new bath?”

“Yes, did you have a look?”

“No, I just thought they might be.”

“You guessed right. Why not drop in? They’re both charming, Mr. and Missus.”

“They’ve been here a while?”

“Just ten days.”

“And they’re the ones who sing?”

“You seem to know everything. Have you heard them?”

“Not yet. Katsu-san told me.”

The maid provided answers unhesitatingly to whatever Tsuda asked, but she understood boundaries. When he touched the quick of the matter she deflected his question.

“What’s the story with that woman?”

“She’s his wife.”

“His real wife?”

“I imagine so.” The maid laughed. “I don’t guess she’s an imitation wife; why do you ask?”

“Isn’t she a bit saucy for a housewife?”

Instead of replying, the maid abruptly offered Kiyoko as a comparison.

“The lady staying in the back is more refined.”

The layout of the rooms was such that Kiyoko was behind him. The man and woman from Yokohama were staying in what amounted to the front.

“So I’m midway between the two,” Tsuda said, finally realizing.

Even so, since his room was slightly recessed it wasn’t on the way for either of them.

“Is that lady friends with the couple?”

“They’re on good terms.”

“From before?”

“I wonder — I wouldn’t know that. But most likely they became acquainted after they came here. They’re back and forth all day long; they don’t have much to do. Just yesterday they went to the park together.”

Tsuda reeled the conversation in.

“I wonder why that lady is here alone.”

“She needs to recover a bit.”

“What about her husband?”

“They came together, but he left right away.”

“He abandoned her? That wasn’t very nice. He hasn’t been back since?”

“There was something about coming back right away — I don’t know what happened.”

“She must be bored — the wife.”

“Why don’t you drop in on her for a chat?”

“Would that be all right? Ask her when you get a chance.”

“I could do that.” The maid grinned, not taking him seriously. Tsuda inquired again.

“What does she do with herself?”

“Well, she takes her baths, she walks, she listens to them singing — sometimes she does some flower arranging, and at night she often practices her calligraphy.”

“I see — does she read?”

“I suppose she does,” the maid responded carelessly and broke out laughing at the bothersome detail of Tsuda’s questions. Tsuda realized he was being obvious and hastily changed the subject as though a little flustered.

“Someone forgot their slippers outside one of the private baths this morning. At first I thought it must be occupied and didn’t want to barge in, but when I tried opening the door there was no one inside.”

“Goodness! It must have been that sensei again.”

The sensei was a calligrapher. Tsuda remembered having seen his seal here and there on framed and mounted scrolls.

“He must be pretty old.”

“He’s an old man. With a white beard down to here.”

The maid placed a hand on her chest to indicate the length of the calligrapher’s beard.

“You don’t say. Does he practice?”

“He’s working on something huge, a little bit every day; he says it’s going to be inscribed on his tombstone.”

Tsuda was surprised and impressed to hear from the maid that the calligrapher had traveled all this way expressly to work on his own epitaph.

“Can it really take so much effort to create something like that? An amateur would think it could be done in half a day.”

This observation elicited no response from the maid. And it was only a fraction of what Tsuda was thinking but didn’t say. He was comparing this aging sensei’s mission and his own. Alongside the sensei he installed the couple from Yokohama with nothing to do but rehearse old songs. He added Kiyoko to the same line-up, Kiyoko who apparently practiced flower arrangement and calligraphy for no particular reason. Finally, when he heard the maid describe the sole remaining guest as a man who neither spoke nor moved but only sat the livelong day gazing at the mountains, Tsuda said what he was thinking.

“There are all kinds of people, that’s for sure. Just five or six of us are already such an assortment, it must be a madhouse here in the summer and at New Year’s.”

“When we’re full we have 130 or 140 people.”

Having missed Tsuda’s point, the maid reported the number of guests likely to show up at the busiest seasons of the year.