Some Prefer Nettles Page 10

  "Don't be cross, now. Let's have another," said Kaname.

  "What would you like?"

  "Anything. Something I know if that seems possible."

  "How about 'Snow'?" The old man poured Kaname a cup of saké. "Kaname's probably heard that."

  " 'Snow' and 'Dark Hair' are almost the only ones I do know."

  As Kaname listened to the music, a memory came back from his childhood. Before the earthquake, the merchants' houses in the Kuramae district of downtown Tokyo, where he grew up, had latticed fronts, rather like those in the Nishijin craftsmen's section of Kyoto now, so narrow that the houses looked smaller from the outside than they actually were. Room followed room in a straggling line back from the lattice, until one came to a tiny court and garden, and over a corridor skirting it to a fairly large detached wing at the very back where the family living-rooms were. The houses to the left and right were built on the same plan, so that when one looked out from the second floor, one could see a garden and a veranda beyond spike-topped fences on either side.... The old merchants' quarter, when he thought back on it, was wonderfully quiet for all that the neighbors were so close. Memory had of course been blurred by the years, but it seemed to him that he had never heard a sound from either of the two neighboring houses. It was as though no one lived beyond those fences, so quiet was it, so completely undisturbed by human voices—as though one had ventured into an old samurai villa in a dying provincial castle town.

  And yet now and then, he hardly knew when, there had been the low echo of a girl's voice singing to a koto. It belonged to one Fu-chan, he heard. Fu-chan was reputed to be a very pretty girl, but he had never seen her and had no particular desire to meet her. One day, however—it must have been an evening in summer—he was looking out from an upstairs window and saw turned toward him the faint, white face of a girl who had taken a cushion out to the veranda and sat with her back against the open summer doors, looking up at the evening sky and the mosquitoes in their column-like swarms. His young heart ravished at the sight, he pulled back from the window almost as though he had taken fright at something, so quickly that he retained no clear impression of her features. The attraction was perhaps too slight a one to be called a first love. Still, it dominated his childhood thoughts and dreams for some time after, and it was probably the first sprouting of that woman-worship Takanatsu noted.

  Even now he had no idea how old the girl had been. To a boy of seven or eight, fourteen or fifteen and twenty alike look grown up, and as her slender figure gave an impression of maturity, she seemed all the more his senior. He remembered uncertainly that there was an ashtray at her knee and that she held a long pipe in her hand; but there was in those days still something left in the manner of the women of downtown Tokyo that suggested the bold urbanity of the last years before Japan was opened to the West—his mother, for instance, liked to tuck up the sleeves of her kimono in warm weather—and the fact that the girl smoked was not real evidence that she was grown up.

  Kaname's family moved away from Kuramae perhaps four or five years later, leaving him with only that one glimpse over the fence at Fu-chan. He found himself listening afterwards to the koto and the songs it accompanied. His mother told him that one song the girl seemed especially to like was called "Snow." It was composed originally for the koto, she explained, but it was sometimes sung to the samisen, and in Tokyo it was known as "an Osaka song." Kaname did not hear it again after they left Kuramae, and it lay in his mind dormant and as well as forgotten until ten years or more later when he was on a pleasure trip to Kyoto and was watching a little Gion dancer in a teahouse. One of her dances, he recognized with an indescribably poignant surge of memory, was to the accompaniment of this same "Snow." An old geisha, of perhaps fifty, was singing, her voice heavy with the sad mellowness of age, and the Kyoto samisen had a muffled, languid tone, a sort of low tolling quality—Kaname thought he knew what the old man meant when he demanded more "coarseness." O-hisa's singing was indeed too pretty, too lacking in this throaty suggestiveness. But Fu-chan those years before had had the same bell-like voice as O-hisa. The latter's singing was therefore a still more powerful inciter of memories, and her samisen, tuned in the Osaka style, called up the sound of the koto more effectively than the low, dull Kyoto samisen could.

  O-hisa's samisen was made so that the neck could be detached, dismembered, and put inside the body. When they went on outings the old man always took it along and forced the reluctant O-hisa to play for him. This happened at hotels and inns, and if the spirit moved him he was as likely as not to take out the samisen in a busy roadside teahouse or under a blossoming cherry tree. They had floated singing down the River Uji under the October full moon the year before, and it was the old man who had caught the severe cold.

  "Now it's your turn." O-hisa pushed the samisen toward the old man.

  "Did you understand the words, Kaname?" He took up the samisen with a show of indifference and began tuning it to a lower key, but he was not quite able to hide his pleasure at having an audience. Possibly because he had had some training in Kyoto music before he left Tokyo, he was not without skill at Osaka folksongs, late though he had come to them. The amateur listening to him found a certain charm and polish in his style. Vastly proud of himself, he made the way difficult for O-hisa by scolding her as a famous teacher might.

  "I have the feeling that I understand vaguely, but I'd probably come up with something wild if I tried to go at it grammatically."

  "Quite true.... The composers didn't think about grammar. If you see generally what was in their hearts, that's really enough. The vagueness is rich in its own way. Take this for example." He began singing:

  "Stagnant as this marsh,

  As the waters of this Nozawa,

  Still my heart lights up,

  If for a moment only,

  At the moon that steals through my window.

  " 'While we move in the wide world,' it goes on from there... but that first part is about a man who visits a woman secretly at night. Instead of anything direct we have the moon stealing in through the window. And isn't it better really to leave things only hinted at? O-hisa sings it without thinking what it means. That's why she misses the spirit of it."

  "I suppose it could mean that, now that you explain it. But I doubt if many people guess—even people who think they know the song."

  "The real charm of these songs is that the composers didn't really care whether most people understood or not. It was enough if a few bothered to puzzle out the meaning. Most of the songs were composed by blind men, after all, and they have a sort of dark, twisted quality themselves."

  The old man had to be a little drunk before he would sing. Having reached the proper stage, he screwed his eyes shut and threw himself into the music as though he were a blind minstrel himself.

  Like most people his age, he was in the habit of going to bed early and getting up early. At eight he was in bed with O-hisa beside him massaging his shoulders. Kaname withdrew to his room across the hall, the influence of the sake still heavy on him. He thought of forcing himself to sleep early, but he was trained to late hours. Although he dozed off now and then, he was not able really to get to sleep. There had been a time when he would have considered it a rare privilege to sleep alone. Kept awake night after night by Misako's sobbing, he used to go away sometimes to a resort near Tokyo where he could rest undisturbed and make up for the nights of wakefulness. Now that he and Misako no longer figured very large in each other's lives, however, it had become possible for him to sleep quite happily beside her, and, indeed, left with a bedroom to himself now for the first time in a great many days, he found that the muffled voices of the old man and O-hisa across the hall disturbed him more than Misako would have. The old man seemed to soften as though into a different person, even the timbre of his voice changed, when he was alone with O-hisa. Apparently they guessed that Kaname would be listening. Their sleepy voices, hushed as though to keep a secret, were no more than an affectionate m
urmur—he might have been less on edge had he been able to make out what they were saying. A low, steady pulsing beat along the floor to his pillow as the massaging went patiently on.

  Still the old man talked. O-hisa answered chiefly in monosyllables, interjecting only now and then a sentence at the end of which Kaname could catch a Kyoto lilt. Though he felt a certain envy when he saw a happily married couple and drew a comparison with himself and Misako, still he was generally conscious of a vicarious pleasure mixed in with it. But this couple with thirty years' difference in their ages did upset him, prepared though he should have been for what he found. He thought how much more upset he would be if the old man were his father, and he thought he understood the strong dislike Misako had for O-hisa.

  The old man seemed to have fallen asleep. Kaname could hear his low, steady breathing, and the soft pulsing as the steadfast O-hisa went on with the massage. It must have been nearly ten when she stopped. Kaname snapped on the light in his room as the light went out in the other. With no better amusement in prospect, he began writing postcards in bed, a picture postcard to Hiroshi with a quick note, and one to Takanatsu in Shanghai with seven or eight lines cramped in beside a view of the straits.

  How have you been? We have got nowhere since you abandoned us, and things are as cloudy as ever. Misako continues to go to Suma. I can here at Awaji with her father, where I am being treated to a demonstration of domestic affection. Misako dislikes O-hisa, but I have to admire her devotion even while I am being made uncomfortable by it.

  I shall let you know when we have a solution-thought it is quite impossible to say now when that is likely to be.

  "GOOD morning," Kaname called in from the hall.

  "May I come in?"

  "Please. We're quite presentable."

  He went into their room, which looked out to the front of the inn, and found O-hisa seated before the mirror at work on the upswept rolls of her Japanese coiffure. She was dressed in a cotton kimono tied at the waist with a narrow checkered sash. The old man, beside her, was on the point of taking out his thick glasses to study a leaflet that lay on his knee. The sea, clear into the distance, was so bright a blue that it turned black as one stared at it. Even the smoke from the ships seemed motionless. Now and then, with the faintest breath of a breeze, the leaflet stirred very slightly and a tear in the paper door rustled like a kite.

  AWAJI GENNOJŌ THEATER

  Licensed by the Ministry of the Interior

  Tokiwa Bridge, Sumoto

  Program for the Third Day

  Morning-Glory Diary

  Firefly Hunt on the River Uji

  Farewell at Akashi

  Yuminosuke's Villa

  Teahouse at Ōiso

  Mount Maya

  Shelter at Hamamatsu

  Tokuemon's Inn

  Along the Way

  Extra

  The Tenth Scene from Taikōki

  The Love of Osbun and Dembei

  Guest Performance

  Stammering Matahei

  (recited by Toyotake Rodayū

  of the Osaka Bunraku Theater)

  Admission:

  50 sen

  30 sen for those entitled to discount

  "Do you know of a scene in a teahouse at Ōiso?" the old man asked O-hisa.

  "What play is it in?"

  "Morning-Glory Diary."

  "Teahouse at Ōiso.... I wonder if there is such a scene."

  "So you see they put in scenes that are hardly ever played in Osaka.... Next comes Mount Maya. What would that be?"

  "Wouldn't it be the one where Miyuki is kidnapped?"

  "You're probably right.... She's kidnapped and taken to Hamamatsu. But in that case what happens to the moor at Makuzu? Isn't there supposed to be a scene on the moor at Makuzu?"

  O-hisa had a comb in her mouth and did not answer. The fingers of her right hand were pressed lightly to one of her rolls of hair. A hand mirror she held behind her to reflect into the dresser sent the sun dancing brightly around the room.

  Kaname still had no real idea how old she was. It suited the old man's tastes to search the old-clothes shops at Gojō and the morning bazaars at Kitano for materials no longer in style, for crepes and brocades tightly woven in small, subdued patterns, heavy and stiff as strands of chain. O-hisa was forced into them, protesting helplessly at "the musty old tatters." The somberness of her dress made her look to be in her late twenties—and indeed it appeared that she had been instructed by the old man to say she was, so that they might seem a slightly better-matched couple—but the glow of her pink fingers, their fine pattern of ridges cleanly marked as she held the mirror in her left hand, was not simply a product of the oil in her hair, Kaname felt sure. He had never seen her so informally dressed before. The flesh of her shoulders and thighs, swelling through the thin kimono, seemed with its richness to deny her pretensions as a delicate, refined Kyoto maiden, and told clearly that she could be no more than twenty-two or twenty-three at the most.

  "Then the inn," the old man continued, "and the last scene on the road."

  "I see."

  "The first I've heard of a travel scene in Morning-Glory Diary," put in Kaname. "Miyuki has finally found Komazawa and they're going off together?"

  "No, I've seen it. They leave the inn, you remember, and Miyuki is stopped at the ford after Komazawa has crossed? Well, in the last scene she's got across and is hurrying down Tōkaidō Highway after him."

  "She's alone?"

  "Someone, a young fellow—what's his name?—has been sent by her family to take care of her," the old man explained.

  "His name is Sekrisuke," O-hisa added. The reflection flashed across the wall again. She went out to the veranda with the basin of hot water she had been using to repair the flaws in her coiffure.

  "Sekisuke. He goes along with her. It's a master-servant scene."

  "And Miyuki has regained her eyesight?"

  "That's right. And won back her place as a samurai's daughter. She goes off down the road dressed as a lady again. It's a bright scene, something like the walk through the cherries in Sembonzakura."

  The theater was a temporary one in a vacant lot somewhere, and the plays lasted from ten in the morning to eleven at night, sometimes even to past midnight. Since the whole program would really be quite impossible to sit through, it might be best to go toward evening, the manager of the inn suggested, but the old man retorted that he had come purposely for the plays and that they would start out immediately after breakfast. He had brought along the usual lacquer boxes, which made up a large part of his pleasure at the theater, and handed them over with elaborate instructions—there would be this vegetable, that omelet—on what was to be put into them for lunch and dinner.

  "Well, O-hisa, let's get ourselves ready," he prodded.

  "Could you pull this tight, please?" O-hisa turned so that the knot of her sash was toward him. Even before the order came she had set about tying the brocade, its material crisp and crackly as a priest's robe, over a solid-colored kimono so stiff that it seemed on the verge of splitting at the creases.

  "Is that tight enough?"

  "A little more, please."

  O-hisa strained forward, bracing herself from the hip. Sweat came out on the old man's forehead.

  "The damned thing refuses to budge. It's almost impossible to tie."

  "You were the one who bought it, I believe. Certainly I never approved. It beats me to exhaustion. Tight, uncomfortable."

  "But it's a good color, isn't it?" Kaname stood admiringly beside the old man. "I don't quite know what you'd call it, but it's something you don't much see these days."

  "A sort of chartreuse, I suppose it would be. It's still used often enough, but the real flavor doesn't come out till it's old and faded like this."

  "What's the material?"

  "Figured satin, I should say. The old silks are the only ones that crackle this way. There's almost always rayon in the new ones."

  Since the theater was within walking
distance, they started out on foot, each with his share of lacquer boxes and small packages.

  "It's bright enough so that I'll need a parasol." O-hisa, always afraid of sunburn, shaded her face with her hand. The sun came through her fingers brilliant as through red parasol paper, and on down over her delicate palm, with its callus from playing the samisen. The shaded upper part of her face seemed even whiter than her sun-bathed chin.