The Izu Dancer and Other Stories: The Counterfeiter, Obasute, The Full Moon (2 page)

"Come on over," she called to me.

"Come on over," the younger woman echoed, and the two of them turned back toward their inn.

The man stayed on in my room till evening.

I was playing chess with a traveling salesman that night when I heard the drum in the garden. I started to go out to the veranda.

"How about another?" asked the salesman. "Let's have another game." But I laughed evasively and after a time he gave up and left the room.

Soon the younger women and the man came in.

"Do you have somewhere else to go tonight?" I asked.

"We couldn't find any customers if we tried."

They stayed on till past midnight, playing away at checkers.

I felt clear-headed and alive when they had gone. I would not be able to sleep, I knew. From the hall I called in to the salesman.

"Fine, fine." He hurried out ready for battle.

"It's an all-night match tonight. We'll play all night." I felt invincible.

We were to leave Yugano at eight the next morning. I poked my school cap into my book sack, put on a hunting cap I had bought in a shop not far from the public bath, and went up to the inn by the highway. I walked confidently upstairs—the shutters on the second floor were open-but I stopped short in the hall. They were still in bed.

The dancing girl lay almost at my feet, beside the youngest of the women. She flushed deeply and pressed her hands to her face with a quick flutter. Traces of make-up were left from the evening before, rouge on her lips and dots of rouge at the corners of her eyes. A thoroughly appealing little figure. I felt a bright surge of happiness as I looked down at her. Abruptly, still hiding her face, she rolled over, slipped out of bed, and bowed low before me in the hall. I stood dumbly wondering what to do.

The man and the older of the young women were sleeping together. They must be married—I had not thought of it before.

"You will have to forgive us," the older woman said, sitting up in bed. "We mean to leave today, but it seems there is to be a party tonight, and we thought we'd see what could be done with it. If you really must go, perhaps you can meet us in Shimoda. We always stay at the Koshuya Inn-you should have no trouble finding it."

I felt deserted.

"Or maybe you could wait till tomorrow," the man suggested. "She says we have to stay today. . . . But it's good to have someone to talk to on the road. Let's go together tomorrow."

"A splendid idea," the woman agreed. "It seems a shame, now that we've gotten to know you . . . and tomorrow we start out no matter what happens. Day after tomorrow it will be forty-nine days since the baby died. We've meant all along to have a service in Shimoda to show that we at least remember, and we've been hurrying to get there in time. It would really be very kind of you. ... I can't help thinking there's a reason for it all, our getting to be friends this way."

I agreed to wait another day, and went back down to my inn. I sat in the dirty little office talking to the manager while I waited for them to dress. Presently the man came by and we walked out to a pleasant bridge not far from town. He leaned against the railing and talked about himself. He had for a long time belonged to a theater company in Tokyo. Even now he sometimes acted in plays on Oshima, while at parties on the road he could do imitations of actors if called upon to. The strange, leglike bulge in one of the bundles was a stage sword, he explained, and the wicker trunk held both household goods and costumes.

"I made a mistake and ruined myself. My brother has taken over for the family in Kofu and I'm really not much use there."

"I thought you came from the inn at Nagaoka."

"I'm afraid not. That's my wife, the older of the two women. She's a year younger than you. She lost her second baby on the road this summer-it only lived a week-and she isn't really well yet. The old woman is her mother, and the girl is my sister."

"You said you had a sister thirteen?"

"That's the one. I've tried to think of ways of keeping her out of this business, but there were all sorts of reasons why it couldn't be helped."

He said his own name was Eikichi, his wife was Chiyoko, the dancer, his sister, was Kaoru. The other girl, Yuriko, was a sort of maid. She was sixteen, and the only one among them who was really from Oshima. Eikichi became very sentimental. He gazed down at the river, and for a time I thought he was about to weep.

IV

ON the way back, just off the road, we saw the little dancer petting a dog. She had washed away her makeup.

"Come on over to the inn," I called as we passed.

"I couldn't very well by myself."

"Bring your brother."

"Thank you. I'll be right over."

A short time later Eikichi appeared.

"Where are the others?"

"They couldn't get away from mother."

But the three of them came clattering across the bridge and up the stairs while we were playing checkers. After elaborate bows they waited hesitantly in the hall.

Chiyoko came in first. "Please, please," she called gaily to the others. "You needn't stand on formality in
my
room."

An hour or so later they all went down for a bath. I must come along, they insisted; but the idea of a bath with three young women was somewhat overwhelming, and I said I would go in later. In a moment the little dancer came back upstairs.

"Chiyoko says she'll wash your back for you if you come down now."

Instead she stayed with me, and the two of us played checkers. She was surprisingly good at it. I am better than most and had little trouble with Eikichi and the others, but she came very near beating me. It was a relief not to have to play a deliberately bad game. A model of propriety at first, sitting bolt upright and stretching out her hand to make a play, she soon forgot herself and was leaning intently over the board. Her hair, so rich it seemed unreal, almost brushed against my chest. Suddenly she flushed crimson.

"Excuse me. I'll be scolded for this," she exclaimed, and ran out with the game half finished. The older woman was standing beside the public bath across the river. Chiyoko and Yuriko clattered out of the bath downstairs at almost the same moment and retreated across the bridge without bothering to say good-by.

Eikichi spent the day at my inn again, though the manager's wife, a solicitous sort of woman, had pointed out that it was a waste of good food to invite such people in for meals.

The dancer was practicing the samisen when I went up to the inn by the highway that evening. She put it down when she saw me, but at the older woman's order, took it up again.

Eikichi seemed to be reciting something on the second floor of the restaurant across the street, where we could see a party in progress.

"What in the world is that?"

"That? He's reading a
Noh
play."

"An odd sort of thing to be doing."

"He has as many wares as a dime store. You can never guess what he'll do next."

The girl shyly asked me to read her a piece from a storyteller's collection. I took up the book happily, a certain hope in my mind. Her head was almost at my shoulder as I started to read, and she looked up at me with a serious, intent expression, her eyes bright and unblinking. Her large eyes, almost black, were easily her best feature. The lines of the heavy lids were indescribably graceful. And her laugh was like a flower's laugh. A flower's laugh—the expression does not seem strained when I think of her.

I had read only a few minutes when the maid from the restaurant across the street came for her. "I'll be right back," she said as she smoothed out her clothes. "Don't go away. I want to hear the rest."

She knelt in the hall to take her leave formally.

We could see the girl as though in the next room. She knelt beside the drum, her back toward us. The slow rhythm filled me with a clean excitement.

"A party always picks up speed when the drum begins," the woman said.

Chiyoko and Yuriko went over to the restaurant a little later, and in an hour or so the four of them came back.

"This is all they gave us." The dancer casually dropped fifty sen from her clenched fist into the older woman's hand. I read more of the story, and they talked of the baby that had died.

I was not held to them by curiosity, and I felt no condescension toward them. Indeed I was no longer conscious that they belonged to that low order, traveling performers. They seemed to know it and to be moved by it. Before long they decided that I must visit them on Oshima.

"We can put him in the old man's house." They planned everything out. "That should be big enough, and if we move the old man out it will be quiet enough for him to study as long as he can stay."

"We have two little houses, and the one on the mountain we can give to you."

It was decided, too, that I should help with a play they would give on Oshima for the New Year.

I came to see that the life of the traveling performer was not the forbidding one I had imagined. Rather it was easy-going, relaxed, carrying with it the scent of meadows and mountains. Then too this troupe was held together by close family affection. Only Yuriko, the hired girl—perhaps she was at a shy age—seemed uncomfortable before me.

It was after midnight when I left their inn. The girls saw me to the door, and the little dancer turned my sandals so that I could step into them without twisting. She leaned out and gazed up at the clear sky. "Ah, the moon is up. And tomorrow we'll be in Shimoda. I love Shimoda. We'll say prayers for the baby, and mother will buy me the comb she promised, and there are all sorts of things we can do after that. Will you take me to a movie?"

Something about Shimoda seems to have made it a home along the road for performers who wander the region of the Izu and Sagami hot springs.

V

THE baggage was distributed as on the day we came over Amagi Pass. The puppy, cool as a seasoned traveler, lay with its forepaws on the older woman's arms. From Yagano we entered the mountains again. We looked out over the sea at the morning sun, warming our mountain valley. At the mouth of the river a beach opened wide and white.

"That's Oshima."

"So big! You really will come, won't you?" the dancer said.

For some reason—was it the clearness of the autumn sky that made it seem so?—the sea where the sun rose over it was veiled in a springlike mist. It was some ten miles to Shimoda. For a time the mountains hid the sea. Chiyoko hummed a song, softly, lazily.

The road forked. One way was a little steep, but it was more than a mile shorter than the other. Would I have the short, steep way, or the long, easy way? I took the short way.

The road wound up through a forest, so steep now that climbing it was like climbing hand-over-hand up a wall. Dead leaves laid it over with a slippery coating. As my breathing became more painful I felt a perverse recklessness, and I pushed on faster and faster, pressing my knee down with my fist at each step. The others fell behind, until presently I could only hear their voices through the trees; but the dancer, skirts tucked high, came after me with tiny little steps. She stayed always a couple of yards behind, neither trying to come nearer nor letting herself fall farther back. Sometimes I would speak to her, and she would stop and answer with a startled little smile. And when she spoke I would pause, hoping that she would come up even with me, but always she waited until I had started out again, and followed the same two yards behind. The road grew steeper and more twisted. I pushed myself on faster, and on she came, two yards behind, climbing earnestly and intently. The mountains were quiet. I could no longer hear the voice of the others.

"Where do you live in Tokyo?"

" In a dormitory. I don't really live in Tokyo."

"I've been in Tokyo. I went there once to dance, when the cherries were in bloom. I was very little, though, and I don't remember anything about it.'"

"Are your parents living?" she would take up again, or, "Have you ever been to Kofu?" She talked of the movies in Shimoda, of the dead baby.