Mandarins (2 page)

We were sitting in a two-room cottage of six tatami mats each. The windows, shaded by marsh-reed blinds, looked out on a yard where nothing grew—or rather nothing other than the seashore's ubiquitous sedge, here in only scattered clumps on the sand, their spikes already drooping. Those spikes had not yet fully emerged when we first arrived, and the ones we saw then were for the most part bright green. Now they were all a vulpine brown, with drops of rain on their tips.

“Well now, I think I shall get a bit of work done.”

M was sprawled out on the mats, wiping his spectacles with the sleeve of the heavily starched
yukata
that belonged to the inn. The
work to which he referred concerned the monthly contribution that each of us was obliged to write for our literary magazine.

He moved into the next room, while I used one of the floor cushions for a pillow and read
Nans
ō
-Satomi-Hakkenden
. The day before I had reached the part where Shino, Genpachi, and Kobungo are going off to rescue S
ō
suke.

As I read this passage, I remembered the royalties I had received two days earlier for a manuscript: forty
sen
per page . . . In July, M and I had completed our university studies in English literature. Now we faced the task of finding a means to support ourselves. Gradually putting aside the eight dogs, I found myself considering the idea of becoming a teacher. But then it seemed I had fallen asleep and had the following brief dream:

It was, it appeared, quite late in the night. In any case, I was lying down alone in the sitting room, having closed the shutters. Someone had suddenly knocked, calling out to me: “Hello, hello?” I was aware that beyond the shutters there was a pond, but I had no idea who might be calling to me.

“Hello, hello? Please. I have something to ask of you,” I heard the voice saying. Hearing this, I thought to myself:
Aha, it's K.
He was a class behind us, a hopeless student in the philosophy department. Without getting up, I replied in a strong voice:

“It's no use putting on that plaintive tone for me. I suppose it's about money again.”

“No, no, it's not about that. I merely wish to present to you a woman of my acquaintance.”

Somehow it did not seem to be K's voice after all. It was rather that of someone genuinely concerned about me. My heart pounding, I jumped up to open the shutters. There was indeed an immense pond below the veranda, but I found neither K nor anyone else there.

For some time I gazed at the moonlit pond. The flow of seaweed told me that the tide was coming in, and now there were wavelets sparkling silver immediately before my eyes. As they edged closer to my feet, a crucian carp slowly came into view, leisurely moving its tail and fins in the transparent water.

Ah, so it was the fish that was calling me
, I thought to myself with a sense of relief . . .

When I awoke, the pale light of the sun was seeping through the reed blinds at the front of the cottage. I took a basin and went down to the well in back to wash my face. Yet even when I returned, the dream lingered curiously in my mind. A half-formed thought occurred to me:
Then the crucian carp I saw in my dream is, in fact, my subliminal self!

An hour later we put on our swimming caps, wrapped towels around our heads, slipped on clogs on loan from the inn, and went off to swim in the ocean, some sixty meters away. Stepping off the veranda and walking through the garden, we descended the gentle slope and immediately found ourselves on the beach.

“Do you think we can swim?”

“It seems a bit chilly today.”

Even as we chattered of such things, we were at pains to avoid
walking through the sedge. (We had already learned to our astonishment of the terrible itch in the calves that comes from carelessly walking through those rain-soaked weeds.) The coolness in the air did indeed preclude a dip. And yet we felt a wistful attachment to this beach in Kazusa—or rather to the waning summer.

During our first days here, there were boys and girls merrily riding the waves, and even until yesterday there had been seven or eight. Today, however, there was no one to be seen, and the red flags marking the swimming area were not flying. Now there were only the waves crashing endlessly against the vast seashore. Empty too were the reed enclosures that served as the changing area. There was only a brown dog chasing a swarm of gnats, and no sooner had we seen it than it had run off in the opposite direction.

I had taken off my clogs but was in no mood to swim. M, on the other hand, had already left his
yukata
and spectacles in the changing area, wrapped his towel over his swimming cap, tying the loose ends under his chin, and plunged into the shallows with a loud splash.

“You're going to swim after all?”

“Well, isn't that why we're here?”

M was bent forward in the water, which came up to his knees. His smiling face, tanned with the sun, was turned toward me.

“Come on in!”

“No, thank you!”

“What? I dare say you would if Enzen the Charmer were here!”

“Nonsense!”

The Charmer was a middle-school boy of fifteen or sixteen whom we had seen during our stay here and casually greeted. He was not a particularly beautiful lad; it was rather that he was possessed of a youthful freshness that made one think of a sapling tree. On an afternoon some ten days before, we had just come up from the water and
thrown ourselves down on the hot sand when he arrived, likewise wet from the waves, briskly pulling behind him a plank. When he saw us lying there at his feet, he broadly smiled at us with a set of dazzling teeth.

When he was gone, M gave me a wry grin and remarked:

“Now there's one with the smile of a charmer!”
¹
And so, between us, he had acquired the name.

“So you're determined not to come in?”

“Quite.”

“
Quel
é
goiste!
”

M got himself wetter and wetter and was now gliding out to sea. Paying no further heed to him, I walked to a low dune a slight distance from the changing place. Sitting on my clogs, I tried to light a Shikishima. The wind was stronger than I thought, and the flame did not easily reach the tip.

“Hello there!”

I had not seen M return, but there he was in the shallows. He was calling to me, but unfortunately my ears could not catch his words for the incessant roar of the waves.

“What is it?”

He came and sat beside me, his
yukata
draped over his shoulders.

“Oh, I was stung by a jellyfish.”

For the last several days, the jellyfish had seemed to be multiplying. In fact, the morning before last I had found myself covered with their pinprick marks, running from my left shoulder to my upper arm.

“Where?”

“On my neck. I was thinking,
Oh, they've got me!
—and then saw them all around.”

“That's why I didn't go in.”

“Fine talk coming from you! But now we're finally done with swimming.”

The sun had bathed the shore, as far as the eye could see, in a white haze, obscuring all but the seaweed brought in on the tide. Only the shadow of a cloud would sometimes pass swiftly by. With cigarettes dangling from our lips, we paused to gaze in silence at the incoming waves.

“Have you been offered that teaching position?” asked M suddenly.

“Not yet. What about you?”

“I? I, well . . .”

As he started to speak, we were startled by laughter and the thud, thud, thud of footsteps. They belonged to two girls of similar age, in swimming suits and caps. They passed us with an indifference bordering on insolence, running straight toward the water. The suit of the one was scarlet, that of the other a tigerlike blend of black and yellow. Our eyes followed these happy, fleeting figures, as the two of us simultaneously found ourselves smiling, as though on cue.

“So they haven't left yet . . .”

For all his air of irony, there was something in his voice that betrayed a touch of emotion.

“Well then, are you going to back for another dip after all?”

“I don't know. I might if she were by herself. But she's with Singesi . . .”

As with the Charmer, we had given the girl in the black-and-yellow suit a name—for her
sinnliches Gesicht
.
²

Neither of us found the girl easy to like. And neither did we find the other one . . . No, M felt a certain interest . . . And he had no qualms about making such self-seeking suggestions as: “You take Singesi; I'll take her friend.”

“Go ahead. Take a swim for her sake!”

“Yes, such a display of self-sacrifice! But she's perfectly aware that she's being watched.”

“But why not?”

“Well, it does rankle a bit . . .”

Hand in hand, they were already in the water. Wave after wave sent foam and spray swirling toward their feet, but each time they invariably jumped, as though anxious not to get wet. It was a blithe and brilliant picture, a strange contrast to the desolate beach in the lingering heat of summer, a beauty indeed belonging less to the realm of humans than to that of butterflies. We listened to the sound of their wind-borne laughter and watched them as they waded away from shore.

“You have to admire them for their pluck!”

“The water's not yet over their heads.”

“No, they're already . . . No, no, they're still standing.”

They had long since released their hands and were moving separately out to sea. The girl in the scarlet suit had been swimming briskly onward when she suddenly stopped in the water, which came up to her breasts, and beckoned to the other, crying out in a piercing voice. Even encased in her enormous cap and at this distance, her vibrantly smiling face could still be seen.

“Jellyfish?”

“Perhaps.”

Yet they went on, one behind the other, paddling ever farther into the offing. When the two dots that were their swimming caps became all that we could still see of them, we got up at last from the sand. We hardly spoke, for now we were getting hungry, and ambled back to the inn.

. . . Even the twilight was as cool as in autumn. When we had finished supper, we went again to the beach, this time in the company of our friend H, who was home for a holiday visit, and N-san, the young proprietor of the inn. We had not intended to go out for a walk together, but as it happened H and N-san each had errands to run, H to visit his uncle in a nearby village, N-san to go there himself to order a chicken coop from the local basket-maker.

The way to the village led across the shore, around the base of a high dune, and then continued on, the swimming area directly behind us. The dune naturally blocked any view of the ocean, and even the roar of the waves was muffled. There were nonetheless sparse patches of weeds, their black spikes poking out of the sand, and a sea breeze was still ceaselessly blowing.

“The plants here are not very much like sand sedge. Do you know what they call them, N-san?”

I plucked a clump that lay at my feet and handed it to him. He was dressed for the season in casual jacket and shorts.

“It isn't knotweed. I wonder what it is. H-san should know. He's a native, not like me.”

We had heard that N-san had come from T
ō
ky
ō
to be adopted into his wife's family and that sometime around the summer of the previous year she had abandoned home and hearth to run off with a lover.

“H-san also knows much more about fish than I do.”

“Oh? Is H really so learned a scholar then? I would have thought he knew nothing other than
kend
ō
.”

H, who was using a piece of an old bow as a walking stick, responded to the provocation with no more than a smirk.

“What about you, M-san?”

“I, I only swim.”

N-san lit a cigarette, a Golden Bat, and told us the story of a stockbroker in T
ō
ky
ō
, who the previous summer, while swimming, had been stung by a scorpion fish. He adamantly insisted, however, that it was preposterous to think that anything of the sort could have stung him and that instead it must have been a sea serpent.

“Are there really sea serpents?”

H was the only one to respond. He was tall and wore a swimming cap.

“Sea serpents? In the ocean here there certainly
are
sea serpents.”