Light and dark

[82]

“TSUDA-KUN SEEMS to have settled down lately. It’s all your influence, Mrs. T.”

The remark came out of the blue the minute O-Toki was out the door. In view of who the speaker was, O-Nobu felt her reply should be limited to something vague.

“You think so? It seems to me I have no influence at all.”

“How can you say that? He seems like a new person.”

O-Nobu’s impulse was to mock him for this hyperbole. But she was unable to descend from the plateau of her hauteur and fell pointedly silent instead. Kobayashi wasn’t the sort of person to register such a signal. He rambled on, unconcerned with order or sequence, gathering himself from time to time to bear down with rude directness.

“At the end of the day, no man is any match for his wife’s power. For a bachelor like me it’s beyond imagining, but there must be something there, I guess, that makes that so.”

Unable to repress herself longer, O-Nobu laughed.

“There are lots of mysterious things that someone in your shoes would never notice — between a man and his wife.”

“How about giving me an example?”

“What good would it do a single man to know anything about it?”

“For future reference.”

A clever light gleamed in O-Nobu’s small eyes.

“The best thing would be for you to find a wife for yourself.”

Kobayashi made a show of scratching his head.

“I might want to but I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“If there are no takers how can there be anyone to find?”

“Good gracious, Japan has an excess of women. There are brides galore standing around on every corner, any kind you want.”

Having spoken, O-Nobu wondered if she had gone too far. But her companion was indifferent. His nerves, accustomed to stronger, more vitriolic language on a daily basis, had been numbed.

“No matter how many extra women there are, I’m poised to flee; no one would become a fugitive with me.”

The notion of fleeing evoked abruptly in O-Nobu’s mind the lyric journey of a man and woman heading away from the world toward double suicide at the end of a play. Picturing momentarily the Kabuki figures bewitchingly symbolizing a fervid love, O-Nobu looked across at Kobayashi, as utterly unrelated to such an image as he could be, sitting before her in hopes of acquiring someone else’s worn overcoat, and smiled.

“If you’re going to flee, why not go all the way and take someone along?”

“Who?”

“That goes without saying. A man must take his wife.”

“Is that so—”

As though he had been struck, Kobayashi stiffened. O-Nobu, who had not expected this reaction, was a little surprised. If anything she felt unexpectedly amused. Kobayashi, on the other hand, was serious. After a momentary pause, he spoke again, oddly, as though to himself.

“If there had been a good-hearted woman to accompany me all the way to Korea, even I might have ended up a regular human being instead of a twisted one. Truth is, it’s not only a wife I don’t have. I have nothing. No parents and no friends. In other words I have no world. You might even say, broadly speaking, that I’m not even human.”

O-Nobu had the feeling she was meeting a person like this for the first time in her life. She had never heard anyone say such things, and she had difficulty comprehending even their surface meaning. When it came to how she ought to handle her companion, she had no idea of a direction to take. Meanwhile Kobayashi was becoming more emotional.

“Mrs. T! All I have is one kid sister. And to me, who has nothing else, my sister is extremely precious. I couldn’t even say how many times more precious than she would be to an ordinary person. Even so I have to leave my sister here. She tends to want to tag along wherever I go. But I can’t possibly take her with me. Because it’s safer for us to be in separate places than together. There’s less danger of being murdered!”

O-Nobu felt unnerved. She had wanted O-Toki home again as soon as possible, but she hadn’t returned. Her only choice was to see if changing the subject might bring her some relief from this oppressiveness. She succeeded easily enough. And tumbled once again into an impossible situation.