Light and dark

[39]

THE NEXT morning, before he had even washed, Tsuda was surprised by a spectacle he hadn’t anticipated when he went to bed. It was close to nine when he awoke. As always, he went past the front entrance and into the sitting room on his way to the kitchen. And there was O-Nobu, dressed resplendently and sitting in her usual place as if that were nothing out of the ordinary. Tsuda was startled. O-Nobu smiled, appearing gratified to observe her husband reacting as if water had been thrown in his sleepy face.

“You just woke up?”

Blinking rapidly, Tsuda gazed wonderingly at O-Nobu’s high chignon secured at the base with a red ribbon, the brightly embroidered pattern of her kimono over-collar, and, in the center of it all, the whiteness of her heavily made up face, as if he were beholding something unfamiliar and exotic.

“What are you doing? The sun is scarcely up.”

O-Nobu was unruffled.

“I’m not doing anything — but you are; you’re going in to the clinic today.”

Tsuda’s hakama and kimono jacket had been picked up from where he had let them fall to the floor on his way to bed and, neatly folded, laid out on lacquered wrapping paper.

“You’re intending to go along?”

“Of course I am — will I be a bother?”

“I wouldn’t say a bother—”

Tsuda looked carefully again at his wife’s outfit.

“I’m just wondering why you had to get so dressed up.”

Tsuda recalled the scene he had witnessed recently in the murky waiting room. The group of patients sitting there and his gorgeously attired young wife were fundamentally irreconcilable.

“But today is Sunday.”

“Maybe so, but we’re not exactly going to the theater or cherry-blossom viewing.”

“But I was hoping—”

As Tsuda saw it, Sunday meant only that patients would be crowding into the clinic from the moment it opened.

“It feels as if waltzing into the clinic as a couple with you in that get-up would be a little—”

“Excessive?”

Amused by O-Nobu’s choice of a formal Chinese compound, Tsuda laughed aloud. O-Nobu’s eyebrows briefly arched, and then she was wheedling.

“It will take forever to change my kimono now. And since I went to the trouble of wearing it, won’t you please put up with it just this once?”

Tsuda accepted defeat. Washing up, he heard O-Nobu’s voice instructing the maid to hail two rickshaws and felt unsettled, as if he were the one being rushed.

The meager breakfast he was allowed took less than five minutes. Standing without even using a toothpick, he started to go upstairs.

“I have to put together some things to take with me.”

As he spoke, O-Nobu opened the closet behind her.

“I put everything in here, look and see.”

Dressed up as she was in her finery, Tsuda felt obliged to spare his wife some effort and dragged from the closet with his own hands a satchel on the heavy side and a smallish bundle wrapped in a knotted silk cloth. The bundle contained only the quilted jacket he had just tried on and an unbacked sash for use with his sleeping robe. The satchel disclosed a jumble of articles — a toothbrush and tooth powder, his customary lavender stationery, matching envelopes, fountain pen, a small scissors, and tweezers. Tsuda removed the Western tome that was the heaviest and bulkiest object.

“I’ll leave this.”

“Really? It’s been on your desk forever and there’s a bookmark in it so I thought you’d surely want to read it.”

Tsuda said nothing, lowering ponderously to the tatami matting the German book on economics that remained unfinished after two months.

“This monster is too heavy to read lying in bed.”

Tsuda knew this was a legitimate reason for leaving the volume at home, but it felt bad nonetheless.

“I have no idea which books you need and which you don’t, so please choose the ones you want to take—”

From the second floor Tsuda brought down a few slender novels and stuffed them into the satchel.