The Sound of the Mountain (3 page)

‘What would she have to pass on?’

‘Well, I suppose it will be good to have a maid with proper introductions.’ Shingo turned back to the paper.

‘Has Tanizaki been talking about me?’ asked Shuichi as they got off in Kamakura.

‘She hasn’t said a thing. I would have imagined that you had silenced her.’

‘Oh, fine. Suppose something actually were going on between me and your secretary. You’d be the joke of the office.’

‘Of course. But make sure, if you don’t mind, that Kikuko doesn’t find out.’

Shuichi did not seem inclined toward secretiveness. ‘So Tanizaki
has
been talking.’

‘She knows you have a girlfriend. And so I imagine she wants to go out with you herself.’

‘Maybe. Half of it might be jealousy.’

‘Splendid.’

‘I’m going to break it off. I’m trying to break it off.’

‘I don’t understand you. Well, let me hear all about it some time.’

‘After I’ve broken it off.’

‘Don’t let Kikuko know.’

‘She may already know.’

Shingo lapsed into disgruntled silence.

It continued through dinner. He got up abruptly from the table and went to his room.

Kikuko brought him watermelon.

‘You forgot the salt,’ said Yasuko, coming after her. The two sat down on the veranda. ‘Kikuko kept calling and calling. Didn’t you hear her?’

‘No. I did know that there was watermelon in the icebox.’

‘He didn’t hear you,’ said Yasuko. ‘And you called and called.’

‘It’s because he’s annoyed about something.’ Kikuko turned to her mother-in-law.

Shingo was silent for a moment. ‘There’s been something wrong with my ears these last few days, I think. The other night I opened the shutter to let in a little air, and I heard the mountain rumbling. And you were snoring away.’

Yasuko and Kikuko both looked toward the mountain.

‘Do mountains roar?’ asked Kikuko. ‘But you did say something once, Mother – remember? You said that just before your sister died Father heard the mountain roar.’

Shingo was startled. He could not forgive himself for not remembering. He had heard the sound of the mountain, and why had the memory not come to him?

Apparently Kikuko regretted having made the remark. Her beautiful shoulders were motionless.

Fusako, the daughter, came home with her two children.

‘Might another be on the way?’ asked Shingo casually, although he knew that with the older girl four and the younger barely past her first birthday the spacing would not call for another quite yet.

‘You asked the same question just the other day.’ She laid the younger child on its back and started to unswaddle it. ‘And what about Kikuko?’

Her question was also a casual one, but Kikuko’s face, as she looked down at the baby, was suddenly tense.

‘Leave it as it is for a while,’ said Shingo.

‘Her name is Kuniko, not “it”. Didn’t you name her yourself?’

Only Shingo, it seemed, was aware of the expression on Kikuko’s face. He did not let it worry him, however. He was much taken with the movements of the emancipated little legs.

‘Yes, leave her,’ said Yasuko. ‘She looks very happy. It must have been warm.’ She half tickled, half slapped the baby’s stomach and thighs. ‘Why don’t we send your mother and sister off, now, to freshen themselves up a bit?’

‘Shall I get towels?’ Kikuko started for the door.

‘We’ve brought our own,’ said Fusako. It appeared that she meant to stay for some time.

Fusako took towels and clothes from a kerchief. The older child, Satoko, stood behind her, clinging sullenly to her. Satoko had not said a word since their arrival. Her thick black hair caught the eye.

Shingo had seen the kerchief before, but all he remembered was that it had been in the house. He did not know when.

Fusako had walked from the station with Kuniko on her back, Satoko tugging on one hand, the kerchief in the other. It must have been a pleasing sight, thought Shingo.

Satoko was not an easy child to lead. She had a way of being particularly difficult when matters were already complicated enough for her mother.

Did it trouble Yasuko, Shingo wondered, that of the two young women it was Kikuko who kept herself in good trim?

Yasuko sat rubbing a reddish spot on the inside of the baby’s thigh. Fusako had gone to bathe. ‘I don’t know, she somehow seems more manageable than Satoko.’

‘She was born after things started going bad with her father,’ said Shingo. ‘It all happened after Satoko was born, and it had an effect on her.’

‘Would a four-year-old child understand?’

‘She would indeed. And it would influence her.’

‘I think she was born the way she is.’

After elaborate contortions the baby turned over on its stomach, crawled off, and, catching hold of the door, stood up.

‘Let’s go have a walk, just the two of us,’ said Kikuko, taking the child by the hands and walking it to the next room.

Yasuko promptly went over to the purse beside Fusako’s belongings and opened it.

‘And what the devil do you think you’re doing?’ Shingo kept his voice low, but he was almost quivering with annoyance. ‘Stop it. Stop it, I tell you.’

‘And why should I?’ Yasuko was calm.

‘I told you to stop. What do you think you’re up to?’ His hands were trembling.

‘I don’t intend to steal anything.’

‘It’s worse than stealing.’

Yasuko replaced the purse. She was still sitting beside it, however. ‘And what is wrong with being interested in the affairs of your own daughter? Maybe she’s come to us without enough money to buy the children candy. I want to know how things are with her. That’s all.’

Shingo glared at her.

Fusako came back from the bath.

‘I looked inside your purse, Fusako,’ said Yasuko the moment her daughter stepped into the room, ‘and so I got a scolding from your father. If it was wrong I apologize.’

‘If it was wrong!’ snorted Shingo.

This way of taking Fusako into her confidence only irritated him more.

He asked himself whether it might be true, as Yasuko’s manner suggested, that such incidents were routine between mother and daughter. He was shaking with anger, and the fatigue of his years came flooding over him.

Fusako looked at him. It was possible that she was less surprised at her mother’s behavior than at her father’s.

‘Please. Go ahead and look! Help yourself!’ she said, half flinging the words out and slapping the purse down at her mother’s knee.

Her manner did nothing to lessen his irritation.

Yasuko did not take up the purse.

‘Without any money I wouldn’t be able to run away, Aihara thought. I couldn’t run away if I didn’t have any money. So of course there’s nothing in it. Go ahead and look.’

Kuniko, her hands still in Kikuko’s, suddenly collapsed. Kikuko picked her up.

Fusako lifted her blouse and presented her breast. She was not a beautiful woman, but she had a good figure. Her carriage was erect and the milk-swollen breast was firm.

‘Is Shuichi away somewhere?’ she asked. ‘Even on Sunday?’

She seemed to feel that she must do something to relieve the tension.

Almost home, Shingo looked up at the sunflowers blooming beside a neighboring house.

He was directly beneath the blossoms, which hung down over the gate.

The daughter of the house paused behind him. She could have pushed past him and gone into the house, but because she knew him, she waited there.

‘What big flowers,’ he said, noticing her. ‘Remarkable flowers.’

She smiled, a little shyly. ‘We pinched them back to one flower for each plant.’

‘Oh? That’s why they’re so big, then. Have they been blooming long?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many days now?’

The girl – she was perhaps twelve or thirteen – did not answer. Apparently lost in silent calculation, she looked at Shingo, and then, with him, at the flowers again. Her face was round and sunburned, but her arms and legs were thin.

Thinking to make way for her, Shingo looked down the street. Two or three doors further on there were more sunflowers, three to each plant. The blossoms were only half the size of these.

As he started off he looked up again.

Kikuko was calling him. Indeed, she was standing right behind him. Stalks of green soybeans protruded from her market bag.

‘You’ve been admiring the sunflowers?’

Of more concern to her, no doubt, than the fact that he admired the sunflowers, was the fact that he had come home without Shuichi. Almost home, he was viewing sunflowers by himself.

‘They’re fine specimens,’ he said. ‘Like heads of famous people.’

Kikuko nodded, her manner casual.

Shingo had put no thought into the words. The comparison had simply occurred to him. He had not been searching for one.

With the remark, however, he felt in all its immediacy the strength of the great, heavy, flowering heads. He felt the regularity and order with which they were put together. The petals were like crowns, and the greater part of the central discs was taken up by stamens, clusters of them, which seemed to thrust their way up by main strength. There was no suggestion that they were fighting one another, however. They were quietly systematic, and strength seemed to flow from them.

The flowers were larger in circumference than a human head. It was perhaps the formal arrangement of volume that had made Shingo think of a brain.

The power of nature within them made him think of a giant symbol of masculinity. He did not know whether they were male or not, but somehow he thought them so.

The summer sun was fading, and the evening air was calm.

The petals were golden, like women.

He walked away from the sunflowers, wondering whether it was Kikuko’s coming that had set him to thinking strange thoughts.

‘My head hasn’t been very clear these last few days. I suppose that’s why sunflowers made me think of heads. I wish mine could be as clean as they are. I was thinking on the train – if only there were some way to get your head cleaned and refinished. Just chop it off – well, maybe that would be a little violent. Just detach it and hand it over to some university hospital as if you were handing over a bundle of laundry. “Do this up for me, please,” you’d say. And the rest of you would be quietly asleep for three or four days or a week while the hospital was busy cleaning your head and getting rid of the garbage. No tossing and no dreaming.’

‘You must be tired,’ said Kikuko, a shadow passing over her face.

‘I am. Today someone came to see me in the office. I took a puff on a cigarette and laid it down and lighted another and laid it down, and I saw that there were three of them, lighted and almost unsmoked. It was very embarrassing.’

He had thought on the train of sending his head to a laundry, it was true, but he had been drawn not so much to the idea of the laundered head as to that of the sleeping body. A very pleasant sleep, with head detached. There could be no doubt of it: he was tired.

He had had two dreams toward dawn this morning and the dead had figured in both.

‘Aren’t you taking a vacation this summer?’

‘I’d thought of going to Kamikochi. There’s no one I can leave my head with, and so I think I’d like to go have a look at the mountains.’

‘Oh, go, by all means,’ said Kikuko, a little too gaily.

‘But we have Fusako with us now. She’s come for a rest too. What do you think? Would it be better for her with me in the house, or away?’

‘I envy her, having such a good father.’ Kikuko did not seem wholly at ease.

Had he hoped, he wondered, to badger her, throw her off the scent, distract her from the image of his own solitary figure, coming home without his son? Such had not been his conscious intention; and yet he wondered.

‘Are you being sarcastic?’ he asked.

He spoke lightly, but Kikuko seemed surprised.

‘Take a look at Fusako and then tell me whether I’ve been a good father.’

She flushed to the ears. ‘It wasn’t your fault about Fusako,’ she said, and he felt consolation in her voice.

Shingo disliked cold drinks even in hot weather. Yasuko did not give them to him, and the habit of not taking them had formed over the years.

In the morning when he got up and in the evening when he came home he would have a brimming cup of tea. Kikuko always saw to supplying it.

When they got home from viewing the sunflowers she hurried for his tea. He drank about half of it, changed to a cotton kimono, and took his cup out to the veranda, sipping as he went. Kikuko came after him with a cold towel and cigarettes and poured more tea. Then she went for his glasses and the evening paper.

He looked out at the garden. It seemed too much of an effort, when he had wiped his face, to put on his glasses.

The grass was rough and untended. On the far side was a clump of bush clover and pampas grass, so tall that it almost looked wild.

There were butterflies beyond. Shingo could see them flickering past gaps in the leaves, more than one butterfly, surely. He waited to see whether they would alight on the bush clover or come out from behind it. They went on fluttering through the leaves, however.

He began to feel that there was some sort of special little world apart over behind the shrubbery. The butterfly wings beyond the leaves of bush clover seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful.

He thought of the stars he had seen through the trees on the hilltop, that night a month earlier, when the moon had been near full.

Yasuko came out and sat down beside him.

‘Shuichi will be late again?’ she asked, fanning herself.

Shingo nodded and continued to look at the garden. ‘There are butterflies behind the shrubbery.’

But as if they disliked being seen by Yasuko, the butterflies flew up over the bush clover. There were three of them.

‘Swallowtails.’

For swallowtails they were small, and their color was somehow muddy.