The Snow Kimono (38 page)

Can we meet at the inn? he says.

He takes the bus, as Katsuo would have done. The same bus. To imagine what it would
have been like to be him, travelling up the mountain, this hideous thing already
in his mind.

He sits at the front, talks to the driver.

Did he know Hideo Yamaguchi?

Yes, he did. Tragic, he says. Why would such a good man kill himself?

He wheels the bus up around another hairpin bend.

After a while: You know, I began to think it had something to do with me.

With you?

Yes, with me. Three deaths. In less than a year, the driver says. I know, people
tell me it’s just coincidence. But three of them, in one year? And all of them passengers
on my bus at one time or another.

Three? Omura says.

The driver nods.

It wasn’t just Hideo, you know. His daughter died as well. About eight months after
he did. She died in childbirth, trapped in the snow.

He glances quickly over his shoulder to the road above.

And before that…Well, before that, I lost my only son.

The engine changes register. The bus slows. The driver’s powerful arms pull at the
wheel. The bus climbs up around another bend.

The two of them, Mrs Yamaguchi and Omura, are talking on the bridge. They are only
centimetres from where Katsuo had stood, although they do not know this. She has
begun telling him about her family, her husband, her past. My sister was very stubborn,
you see, she is saying. She hated village life. How small it was. How narrow. It’s
killing me, she used to say. From our verandah she would look down at our village
and say to me: There’s a world out there, Tomoko. Just waiting for me.

Then, just after she turned fifteen, my sister came home from school one afternoon
and announced: I’m leaving. I’m going to Osaka. My mother forbade her to go. But
my sister simply dropped her school bag where she was, turned, and walked out the
door. Just like that. I remember waiting up with my mother long into the night. Waiting
for her to return.

Don’t worry, my mother said. She’ll be back. She needs
her things. Then, when she
didn’t return, and it was after midnight, my mother went into her room. Opened her
cupboards. And they were almost empty. She had already packed. She must have hidden
her bag somewhere, or given it to someone for her to pick up on the way.

And she stayed away. For good. We rarely heard from her.

Then, one day, perhaps seven or eight years later, completely unannounced, this young
woman arrived on our doorstep saying she was pregnant, that she needed a place to
stay. And it was her, my sister.

A long time later my mother told me that she hadn’t recognised her, not until she
spoke.

Mariko, my mother said. Is it really you?

She did not tell us where she had been. What she had done. She kept to her room.
Looking forward to the birth. Which came about a month later.

Not long after the child was born, however, Mariko began to change. She…

But Tadashi Omura has stopped listening. What was this sudden upheaval in his chest?
Had Mrs Yamaguchi said Mariko?

There, she said it again. Mariko.

…withdrew into herself. She barely looked at the child. She kept saying what a mistake
she’d made. That she should have waited.

She
had
said Mariko!

Could it be? Was this
Katsuo’s
Mariko?

That she had given up everything. She realised now that she
was too young to have
a child. A child whom she felt nothing for, whom she did not love.

Then Omura came back to her, Mrs Yamaguchi. Concentrated. Attended to what she was
saying.

Early one morning, she was saying, I got up to go to the bathroom. I could hear Sachiko
crying. She must have been about six or seven months old. I went into Mariko’s room,
but Mariko was not there. She had disappeared again. There was only Sachiko in her
crib at the end of the bed. And a note.

She did not understand what was happening to her, she said. She no longer knew who
she was. She felt crushed. She felt as though she was living in a fog. Life had once
been so dazzling, she said. So full of promise.

And then her plea: Why, she said, do I not love this child whom I so longed for?
For whom I surrendered everything. I can bear the pain no longer. Please, forgive
me.

I could hear Sachiko crying.

Omura told Jovert that, in that instant, the dam had burst. He had felt his thoughts
cascading back through his life, bouncing from one memory to the next, had felt himself
being swept along on this torrent, all the time desperately trying to grasp hold
of something that would anchor him, hold him fast. Some memory, some incident, that
would fix in his mind what he already knew was true. How old was Sachiko? What had
Katsuo said? Sixteen? Seventeen? When had Katsuo bought the house? When had he commenced
his legal practice? When
exactly
had Mariko left?

He could see the three of them standing on the terrace that first day, looking down
over the city to the harbour below as clearly as if it were yesterday. Mariko, holding
a glass of wine. Radiant. Full of laughter. Katsuo, his hand on her shoulder, his
fingers under the strap of her dress. Where her scar was.

But what year was that?

I’m sorry, Mrs Yamaguchi, he said. Did you say Mariko? That your sister’s name was
Mariko?

Yes, she said.

And did she have a scar high up on her right shoulder? He reached up subconsciously
to his own shoulder.

Yes, she said. She did. It was like a tiny map of Japan.

And then he thought the impossible thought: Sachiko was Katsuo’s daughter.

Mariko had gone, Mrs Yamaguchi was saying. She had abandoned Sachiko. So we brought
her up as our own.

He stood there, on the bridge, beside Mrs Yamaguchi, looking down into the darkening
river. To the now corpse-less riverbank. Mrs Yamaguchi had been right, he saw now.
There were no rocks below.

Chapter 43

IT was the saddest call he ever made.

Two days after his meeting with Mrs Yamaguchi at the inn, and, coincidentally, almost
exactly two years after he had run into Katsuo that day in Osaka’s garment district,
Omura decided to pay him a visit unannounced. He had spoken to Ishiguro on the phone
earlier that day.

I’m sorry, Tadashi. It’s not my affair, Ishiguro had said. You need to speak to Katsuo.

He went in the evening. The taxi dropped him at the bottom of the hill. He had expected
to have to buzz the house from the gates. But the gates were open. There were weeds
growing up through its metal track, and around the base of the buttressed walls.
Two rows of thistles—their ghostly, broken-headed spheres still glowing against the
setting sun—lined each side of the driveway. Their heads were nodding in the evening
breeze, as if to say: At last, you’re here. Go on up, we’ve been waiting for you.

He walked up the hill through the untrimmed hedgerows. When he emerged onto the gravel
forecourt, the house lay in darkness. Katsuo’s once magnificent car sat abandoned
some distance from the house, as if it had given up on finding a better place to
die. All four tyres were flat. Its once gleaming bodywork was pockmarked with dust.

The house looked closed up, deserted. He cursed himself for not having asked the
cab to wait. It was a long walk back to town.

He climbed the stairs to the first-floor landing. Pushed the button. There were dead
leaves crowded into the corners of the portico. Others, still looking for a place
to shelter, scurried from one unwelcoming group to another. Cobwebs hung from the
light fittings. The house mat was leaning against the wall.

He pushed the button again.

They had been there, he and Mariko. On that first day.
They
had been the anointed
ones. They had moved from one light-filled room to another, as if no one in the world
existed but them.

Now the house felt abandoned.

But then he heard the sound of a key scraping in a lock. The door began to open.
An old man appeared in the half-light. He was dressed in a dishevelled bathrobe.
He had a soiled scarf tied around his head. The sound of a baby crying came from
somewhere deep within the house.

My name is Tadashi Omura, he said. I am an old friend of Katsuo Ikeda, the owner
of the house. I am wondering if he is in?

The old man did not answer him. Omura thought he might be deaf. He went to repeat
his question.

It’s me, Tadashi, the old man said.

He barely recognised his voice. The old man looked up at him so that Omura could
see his face.

Katsuo?

Yes, he said.

Katsuo leaned inside the door and turned the light on. He reached up, removed his
scarf.

See, he said. It’s me.

The face Omura saw now was even more shocking than the old man’s. The light from
above cast deep shadows into Katsuo’s eyes. His cheeks were hollow. His neck was
as deeply ravined as the trunk of an ancient fig. He had not shaved in a long time.

Katsuo? he repeated.

Yes, Tadashi, he said again. Won’t you come in.

They sat opposite each other in the long room. As they had always done. Outside,
it was beginning to get dark. Only the first metre or so of the balcony was visible.
It could have stretched on forever for all he knew.

He told Katsuo about Mrs Yamaguchi coming to see him. About the diary. What it contained.
He told him that she thought her husband’s death wasn’t suicide. That he had been
killed.

Didn’t Ishiguro call you? Omura asked.

Ah, old Ishiguro, Katsuo said. What would Ishiguro know?

Katsuo took a cigarette
out of the packet on the table in front of him. He lit it. Inhaled. He blew the smoke
out into the air above his head. Omura recognised the ploy. He could see it in the
way Katsuo leaned forward, flicking the ash of his cigarette into the small bowl
in front of him. Katsuo was waiting, wondering just how much he really knew. What
had Katsuo once said to him, of his writing? It’s simple, Tadashi, he had told him
in the particularly condescending way he saved for such occasions. All you have to
do is ask: What if? What if? What if? And then: How come? He decided not to waste
time.