Light and dark

[96]

“WHAT IN the world do you intend to do?”

This might have been intended as an attack on her improvident brother, but it was also an expression of O-Hide’s own perplexity. She had her husband to consider. And lurking in the background was a mother-inlaw in whose presence she tended to be even more deferential.

“It’s true that Hori spoke up because you asked him to, but I don’t think he intended to assume responsibility beyond a certain point. Not that he’s about to turn his back on you after all this and deny any responsibility. But it isn’t as if he signed a personal guarantee either, and so when Father treats this as though it were a legal matter, he makes it terribly awkward for me at home.”

On the surface of things, Tsuda had no choice but to acknowledge his sister’s position. In his heart, however, he was unable to sympathize with her, and his indifference reverberated in O-Hide. She saw standing before her an unrepentantly selfish elder brother. An elder brother who thought of little but his own convenience. If he did have other thoughts, they were exclusively about his new wife. And on this new wife he fawned. More properly, he was her pawn. To satisfy her he had been obliged to become even more arbitrary than before with regard to the outside world.

Tsuda would have said about this view of himself that it was destitute of sympathy and extremely unbecoming for a younger sister. An unsparingly frank expression of what she was feeling might have been, “You made your own bed, Brother, so you must lie in it; but what do you intend to do for me?”

Tsuda had nothing to propose. Nor was he inclined to do anything. Instead he broached the difficulty of divining his father’s thoughts.

“It’s Father’s intentions I’m wondering about. Do you suppose he’s thinking, ‘All I have to do is announce there’s no more money coming and Yoshio will find a way to manage’?”

“If only we knew!”

O-Hide cast a meaningful look at Tsuda before she subjoined, “That’s what’s making it so awkward for me with Hori.”

Something in the nature of a faint intimation flickered in Tsuda’s brain. Like lightning seen in early autumn, it was distant, but it was also vivid. It had to do with his father’s character. Distant because until now he had been unaware of it and yet, having once become aware it seemed, judging from the old man’s usual comportment, difficult to gainsay, and, in that sense, to Tsuda as his father’s son, it cut deeply into his consciousness with the sharpness of a blade. His first impulse had been to cry out inside himself, “Impossible!” but in the next instant he had been obliged to amend the thought to “For all I know—”

As reflected in the mirror of unfounded surmise, his father’s psychology might be parsed in the following order, one step generating the next in a progression meant to produce the desired result. Monthly remittances are tactfully intermitted. Tsuda is distressed. In view of foregoing circumstances, he informs Hori. His hand forced by his sense of responsibility to Kyoto, Hori is enabled for the first time to discharge his obligation to Tsuda’s father by helping Tsuda in his time of need. This leaves him no choice but to repay the monthly remittances. Tsuda’s father need only thank him for his generosity and hold out his hand.

Considered this way in stages, it appeared that a certain care had been taken. There was logic involved. And of course a degree of skill had to be acknowledged. And nothing in the least straightforward. Though not exactly despicable, there was about it a faint odor of vulpine cunning. An immoderate attachment to a small sum of money stood out particularly. In other words, in every way it smacked of his father.

No matter how they might disagree about other things, with regard to a lack of regard for their father’s way of doing things, Tsuda was uncharacteristically aligned with his sister. O-Hide, normally sympathetic to their father in every sense, was obliged in this particular case to join Tsuda in knitting her brows in disapproval. Their father’s immorality — that was a separate issue. Tsuda was not pleased at the thought of receiving aid from O-Hide. O-Hide did not feel kindly disposed to her brother and his wife. She was also made to feel painfully burdened by her duty to her husband and mother-in-law. But she was tormented, first of all, as was Tsuda, by what to do about the actual problem facing them. Even so, they lacked the courage to sound the depths of their feelings aloud to each other. Their conversation advanced without reference to their father’s thinking except for a tacit acknowledgment that they had construed it correctly in their imaginations.