Light and dark

[60]

THIS TIME it was her uncle whom O-Nobu encountered as she approached the Okamotos’ manorly house. With no kimono jacket, his plain obi cinched low over his hips and his hands folded over the single knot at his back, he was engaged in an animated conversation at the entrance to the house with a gardener who was plying a hoe next to him, but as soon as he caught sight of O-Nobu he called out to her.

“There you are! I’m just mucking about in the garden.”

A long piece of akebia vine lay coiled on the ground next to the gardener.

“We’re thinking of training this above the gate at the garden entrance — wouldn’t it go well there?”

O-Nobu surveyed at a glance the thatch-roofed gate in the middle of a solid fence of plaited bamboo, the hatchet-hewn pillars supporting it, and the log crossbeams.

“Umm — you uprooted it from where it was growing on the little trellis?”

“Right, and I replaced it with a blinder-gate with embellished trim.”

Her uncle had been using his newly acquired leisure to remodel the house according to his own design, and his architecture and landscape vocabulary had expanded in no time. As the word “blinder-gate” conveyed no image to her, O-Nobu’s only choice was responding with a vague nod.

“This is good exercise after a meal — good for your appetite.”

“Are you joking? I haven’t had lunch yet.”

Pulling O-Nobu out of the garden and into the house with him, her uncle called loudly to her aunt: “Sumi! Sumi! I’m starving out here. Some lunch right away, please.”

“Didn’t I say you should have eaten a while ago with the rest of us?”

“You may be surprised to learn that the world isn’t organized around the convenience of the kitchen. Has it ever occurred to you that there is a time for everything?”

Her aunt’s unruffled attitude — that her husband had only himself to blame — and her uncle’s response were the same as always. O-Nobu, feeling as though she had breathed the air of home for the first time in a long while, couldn’t help comparing the aging couple before her with herself and Tsuda, married for less than a year, just embarking as it were on their new life. Assuming they traveled the long matrimonial road together, could they also expect to end up this way, or, no matter how long they stayed together, might it be, given how different they were temperamentally from her aunt and uncle, that their relationship would remain different? For someone as young as O-Nobu, this was a riddle not solvable by wisdom and imagination. She was not satisfied with Tsuda as he was today. Nor could she imagine a future version of herself in which her abundance as a woman had withered away very much like her aunt’s. If that were the fate that awaited her unavoidably, it would be a sad blow to her desire to maintain forever the luster of the present. Surviving in the world as a woman having lost everything womanly about her appeared to O-Nobu in her youth as a truly terrifying existence.

Unaware of the meditation on a distant future churning in this young wife’s breast, O-Nobu’s uncle sat cross-legged on the tatami facing the lunch tray that had been placed in front of him and regarded her.

“Are you there? You seem lost in your thoughts.”

O-Nobu replied at once.

“Why don’t I serve you for a change — it’s been a long while.”

There was no rice tub, and, as O-Nobu stood, her aunt stopped her.

“I know you’d like to serve him, but today is a bread day so there’s nothing to serve.”

The maid came in with nicely browned toast on a plate.

“It’s unbearable what’s happened to this uncle of yours. Born in Japan and not allowed to have rice — how pathetic is that?”

His doctor had forbidden her diabetic uncle to consume more than a designated quantity of starch.

“Look at me — all I eat is tofu.”

Laid out on his plate was a portion of white, uncooked tofu that no single person could possibly have consumed. Observing her rotundly obese uncle contorting his features into a face he intended to look pitiful, O-Nobu, far from feeling substantially sorry for him, was inclined to laugh aloud.

“A little fasting would be good for you. Getting through a day as fat as you are would be an agony for anyone.”

Her uncle turned to look at her aunt.

“She’s always been good at insults, but since she married it seems she’s mastered the art.”