Light and dark

[59]

SITTING DOWN to a tray that was both breakfast and lunch with O-Toki helping her to rice was another first experience since her marriage. This change occasioned by Tsuda’s absence made her feel anew like a queen; at the same time the freedom from daily routine in which she greedily indulged had the opposite effect of binding her hands more tightly than usual. With a heart that was agitated for a body so relaxed, O-Nobu turned to O-Toki.

“Doesn’t it feel odd with Mr. Tsuda away?”

“It does — it feels lonely.”

O-Nobu had more to say.

“This is the first time I’ve slept so late.”

“But since you’re always so early it can’t hurt to have breakfast and lunch together once in a while.”

“‘Just look at her the minute Mr. Tsuda is away’—is that how it seems?”

“To who?”

“To you, silly.”

“’Course not.”

O-Toki’s intentionally loud voice offended O-Nobu’s sensibility more grievously than her clumsy conversation. She stopped talking.

Thirty minutes later, stepping into the dress-up clogs that O-Toki had set out for her on the concrete just inside the entrance, O-Nobu turned back to the maid, who had accompanied her to the front door.

“Please stay alert. Falling asleep the way you did last night is dangerous.”

“Will you be late again this evening?”

O-Nobu hadn’t considered for a minute when she would be coming home.

“Not as late as last night.”

She felt an urge to enjoy herself at the Okamotos as late as she liked on this rare occasion of her husband’s absence.

“I’ll be home as early as I can.”

Leaving the maid with this assurance on her way out to the street, O-Nobu turned at once toward her appointment. As the Okamotos’ residence lay in roughly the same direction as the Fujiis’, the same streetcar along the river would take her at least partway. Alighting at the first or second stop before the end of the line, she crossed the small wooden bridge over the river and proceeded on foot down the street on the opposite bank. It was the same street along which, two or three evenings ago, Tsuda and Kobayashi, leaving the bar, had discussed, mutually entangled in feelings that came from differences in their status and personalities, relocation to Korea, O-Kin’s marriage, and other matters. O-Nobu, who had heard nothing about this from Tsuda, walked innocently along in the opposite direction to the one they had taken, without picturing them, and started up the long, narrow hill that had to be climbed to reach her uncle’s house. Just then, Tsugiko happened to be coming down.

“Thanks for last night.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have a lesson—”

Having graduated from girls’ upper school the previous year, this cousin occupied herself during her leisurely days studying a variety of things — piano, tea ceremony, flower arranging, watercolor, cooking. Knowing her predilection for trying her hand at everything that occurred to her, O-Nobu, hearing the word “lesson,” felt like laughing out loud.

“Which lesson—ballet?”

The girls were sufficiently intimate to engage in this variety of inside humor. From O-Nobu’s point of view, her remark might have been construed as conveying a measure of irony directed at Tsugiko’s status, which allowed leisure time far greater than her own, but her cousin appeared to detect in it no hint of mockery.

“Of course not.”

Tsugiko had only this to say and laughed good-humoredly. Sensitive as she was, O-Nobu was obliged to acknowledge the laugh as innocence itself. Nonetheless, in the end, her cousin wouldn’t disclose what the lesson was.

“You’ll just tease me.”

“Something new?”

“There’s no telling what I’ll take up next — after all, I’m such a glutton.”

No one in the Okamoto family hid the fact that, where lessons were concerned, Tsugiko had been labeled “Miss Glutton.” First applied by her younger sister, the pejorative had been adopted by the entire family; recently Tsugiko had taken to using it herself unhesitatingly.

“Wait for me — I’ll be back soon.”

Turning around to watch Tsugiko’s receding back as she descended the hill with her light step, O-Nobu was sensible of the blend of respect and derision she invariably felt about her cousin.