The Snow Kimono (17 page)

He said these last words with pure rage. I, for my part, did what
I
had been trained
to do. I stepped away, I removed myself, the better to understand what was happening.
Calmly, with reason. I said to myself, just imagine that you are in the courtroom,
that this
isn’t
personal. If you don’t, you won’t be able to marshal your thoughts
in the midst of this onslaught. This chaos. For the moment, observe, don’t react.

O-ba-
san
!

I saw the handle move, but the door did not open.

Master? I heard the old woman say. Is everything all right?

You don’t know, he kept
saying. You just don’t know.

But it wasn’t clear to me if he was talking about me, or himself.

I went to the door. The old woman was waiting outside. She looked at me quizzically,
then tried to see past me into Katsuo’s room. But the door was already closing.

I walked down the long corridor with her following behind me. Then I was outside
in the street again, listening to the silence which now surrounded me.

Part IV

MARIKO

Chapter 16

TWO years after Mariko disappeared, Katsuo published a novel—his third—a semi-autobiographical
work called
The Chameleon
.

Omura and Jovert were out smoking on Omura’s balcony once again. Almost a month had
passed since Jovert had seen him. The Paris skyline shimmered in the early autumn
air.

Katsuo had already enjoyed successes before.
Spring Promise
,
The Dead of Winter
.
But nothing, not even his own ambition, could have prepared him for the reception
of
The Chameleon.
I remember the days immediately after it was published. I would
see people reading it on the train, at the bus stop, in cafés. The park. It was amazing.
As for Katsuo, well, overnight, Katsuo found himself lionised. Courted by everybody
who was anybody in Osaka. He was feted wherever he went.

The Chameleon
turned out to be everything he had said it was going to be. But then,
barely had this outpouring of adulation reached its peak when he too disappeared.
His grief over Mariko’s
loss had finally taken its toll. It was as if, in the midst
of the grand party organised to celebrate his success, with all of Osaka’s high society
in attendance, someone—a young, exquisitely beautiful woman, no doubt, a glass of
champagne raised to her lips—had paused to ask: Where’s the guest of honour? Where’s
Katsuo? Only to find that no one could remember when they had last seen him.

And when I say disappeared, I mean exactly that. He vanished. Not for a day, not
for a week, or a month. He was gone for years. And no one, not me or anyone else,
knew where he was, or heard from him. The letters I used to so look forward to had
dried up long ago.

Then, just as he was beginning to fade from people’s memories, and just as suddenly,
he reappeared.

A colleague came up to me one day on the courthouse steps. Have you heard, Tadashi?
he said.

Heard what?

Katsuo Ikeda. He’s back.

Naturally, I tried to contact him. I sent him messages. Phoned. But I got no reply.
Then one day—I remember it exactly—I ran into him quite by accident in a side street
in Osaka’s textile district. I had gone there to pick up a suit I had ordered. I
was about to enter the shop when there he was, coming towards me, deep in thought.

Katsuo? I said.

He looked up, surprised.

Tadashi.

I did not know what to say. That he had disappeared in the way he had, without telling
anyone. That he had been away for so long, without contacting me. That he was back,
and had been for some time. These questions all jostled for attention. He, for his
part, appeared agitated, anxious to get away, as though the friendship that had been
part of our lives for so long had ceased to exist, or indeed, had never existed in
the first place. We exchanged a few awkward words. I was on the point of asking him
where he had been, when he interrupted me.

I’m sorry, he said. I’m late. He looked at his watch. And then, as if by way of afterthought:
Forgive me, he said. And he turned and walked quickly away.

Not, forgive me, Tadashi. Merely, forgive me.

I stood there, stunned. People had to step around me in the street. It wasn’t until
I got home that I realised I had forgotten to pick up my new suit.

Soon afterwards, all sorts of rumours began to circulate. About someone, a beautiful
young woman from some obscure mountain village, who had come to live with him. Or,
that he had gone mad, that he could be heard wandering about his garden late at night
arguing with himself, that he rarely ventured out.

So, late one evening, it must have been a couple of months later, I decided to visit
him. In the back of my mind, I think my intention was to confront him, to find out
why he had been avoiding me.

I had heard that he had moved back into his old house high above the bay. It was
midsummer, warm. I took a taxi. I
remember getting out at the top of the hill and
looking down at the thin capillaries of light that outlined the harbour below. I
could just make out the sea beyond, its surface pale and flat and still.

I had not been to the house in years, but I could recall as if it were yesterday
the day Katsuo had rung to tell me that, at last, he had found the perfect place.
I can still hear him on the phone saying: You must see this house, Tadashi. You must
see it.

At that time, we were both in our mid-twenties. My legal practice was beginning to
flourish. Katsuo’s new novel,
The Dead of Winter
, had done well. And after years
of freedom, of philandering, he was finally on the verge of marrying Mariko. Mariko
had turned out to be as tempestuous as she was beautiful. We all thought she was
more than a match for Katsuo.

I remember that some days after Katsuo had called me about the house, the three of
us—Katsuo, Mariko and I—went to inspect it late one afternoon. It was a wonderful
old place, a former consulate, a mansion really, set high into the mountainside
overlooking the bay. When we got there, the estate agent opened the door for us.
We walked from one radiant, weightless room to another. Katsuo had been ecstatic.
Unstoppable. He could not believe his luck. Here, finally, was the perfect place,
the place he had imagined owning for so long. We walked out onto the vast terrace.
It seemed to reach seamlessly out to the still grey sea beyond, as if the house were
just floating there.

I remember Mariko going to stand with her hands resting on the stone balustrade behind
her. In the failing evening light,
with the darkening sea at her back, she looked
more ravishing than I had ever seen her before. Katsuo was standing beside her, his
hand on her right shoulder, his fingers resting on her flawed but flawless skin.

Katsuo ended up buying the house. A few months later, at a glittering ceremony on
the same balcony, with the sea again at their backs, he and Mariko were married.

Within a year, however, the marriage had begun to falter. Mariko had wanted a child.
Desperately. Katsuo did not. He was too young; he wasn’t ready; he had his career
to think about; he could not see himself as a father. Not now, not ever. There were
any number of excuses.

He and I spent long nights down by the harbour, going from one disreputable place
to another, endlessly discussing this growing knot of unhappiness at the centre of
his existence.

Sometimes, when it began to get late, I would point to my watch. Katsuo would nod,
and we would get up to go, only to find ourselves sitting in some even more squalid
place five minutes later, amongst the dock workers, the fishmongers, their tattooed
women. And Katsuo would start again.

He loved Mariko, he said. More than that, he was obsessed with her. He knew that
he could not live without her. That was his problem. He both loved and felt trapped
by her. Particularly now that she wanted a child.

I would sit there wondering what Mariko was doing, alone in that beautiful house
high up on the mountainside, the house he had bought for her. What did she make of
his
spectacular absences? How unhappy was she? And how ironic was her unhappiness.
She seemed as much addicted to him as he was to her. I remembered how dazzling, how
perfect they had seemed as a couple when they first met.

At some inevitable point during one of these endless nights, we would reach the same
threshold, and I would bring the late hour to his attention once again. He would
wave his hand dismissively in my face. I’m not
ready
to go, Tadashi, he would say.
Just like I’m not ready to have a child. You go, my good and proper, my
principled
friend. You go. You have a child. And he would look me in the eye, and laugh his
cruel laugh, as if this proposition were inconceivable, even to him. A child is the
last
thing I want, he would say. I have my work to do. Doesn’t Mariko understand
that? And yet, if you could be with her, he would say. If you could
see
how beautiful
she is…

Their arguments escalated. These two people, so favoured by the gods, began to tear
each other apart. Without, it seemed, knowing why. We could all see it. We understood
what lay at the heart of their unhappiness. But Katsuo and Mariko? They did not.
Why, we asked ourselves, could they both not wait?

To avoid her wrath, he had an iron gate built into the garden wall. At night, after
Mariko had fallen asleep, Katsuo would slip secretly out of the house, and through
this gate. He would descend into the dissolute city in search of two or three
of
his more sordid friends, people who occupied the shadowy peripheries of his life,
people whom I barely knew. He’d track them down to wherever they were lurking: the
sleazy, lowlife bars, the choked gutters of the harbour slums; he would hunt them
down in the wild and dangerous places he’d become addicted to, the places in which
he could lose himself, and whatever else he had to lose. In the end, he did not care.

And then, suddenly, Mariko was gone. Where once this beautiful, radiant creature
had been, there was nothing. While we waited for her to return, a return that never
came, it was as if the world itself had stopped.

Six months later, in one of the bars we had so often gone to, when the years of heartache
that followed had only just begun, Katsuo told me of their final confrontation.

What if I just went ahead, Katsuo? Mariko had said. Allowed myself to fall pregnant?

They were sitting opposite each other in the long room that overlooked the balcony.
The temporary truce that had existed for some weeks between them was about to end.

I would not do that, Mariko, Katsuo had said with a menacing calm.

Why not? You couldn’t really do anything about it.

You think so. I could always go and see old Eguchi, he said. Then you might wake
up one morning and find that you were pregnant no longer.

She stared evenly at him across the low table.

You would do that, wouldn’t you?

I would.

But why, Katsuo? It’s just a child.

It’s
not
just a child, Mariko, he said bitterly. It’s a life. Mine.

And what if it’s already too late?

Now it was his turn to look at her. At her beautiful face, at her eyes, which he
could not live without.

Then, Mariko, please remember what I said.

He put his book down onto the table. Stood up.

I’m going up to the library, he said. And then I am going out.

She sat watching his retreating form.

Goodnight, Katsuo, she said.

Goodnight, Mariko.

When he returned home, in the early hours of the morning, washed out, full of remorse,
he went up to their bedroom to rouse Mariko as he always did. To take her in his
arms. Tell her how much he loved her. Tell her that he had changed his mind. If she
so desperately wanted a child, he would not stand in her way. But their bed was empty,
and she had gone.