Quicksand Page 11

  “Please wait till tomorrow,” I begged her.

  But she asked why it had to be tomorrow, why I couldn’t tell her today. If I had to get permission from someone else, she didn’t even want to hear it. She certainly wouldn’t cause any trouble for me if I told her in confidence. Nothing less would satisfy her.

  So I retorted: “You say all that, Mitsu, but aren’t you hiding something from me?”

  “What could I be hiding?” she protested. “If that’s how you feel, just ask me—I’ll tell you anything you like.”

  “Really? You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Maybe there’s something I haven’t told you about myself, but it’s not because I’m trying to keep it secret.”

  “Not even about your physical condition?”

  “What on earth are you getting at, Sister?”

  “Well, how about the day you came to my house in so much pain? Were you really pregnant?”

  “Oh, that time,” she said, her face reddening with embarrassment. “But I was putting on an act. I just wanted to see you. . . .”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. I’d like to know whether you were pregnant.”

  “Well, I wasn’t.”

  “And you still aren’t, even now?”

  “Of course I’m not. Why are you being so suspicious?”

  “I can’t tell you why, but I have my reasons.”

  “Oh, Sister!” Suddenly Mitsuko looked as if she understood. “Sister, I’m sure Eijiro told you I was pregnant, didn’t he? That must be it! But the truth is, he isn’t capable of fathering a child—”

  She broke off, teeth clenched, and tears began trickling down her cheeks.

  I was shocked.

  “What do you mean, Mitsu?” I said, doubting my own ears.

  Then she told me, sobbing, that to this very day she had never concealed anything about herself from me, but that Watanuki had a secret he couldn’t possibly reveal, and she had respected his privacy, thinking that if the truth came out, it would be humiliating for both of them and terribly painful for him. But she had no sympathy for a person who would slander her behind her back. He was to blame for getting her into this miserable situation, she said; all her troubles were his doing. Still crying, she started telling me about Watanuki from the first time she met him.

  It seems that they became acquainted the summer before last, while she was at her family’s villa in Hamadera. One evening he asked her out for a stroll and lured her into the shadow of a fishing boat beached along the shore. Since he also lived in Osaka, not far from her, they kept on meeting after summer’s end, finding ways to arrange a rendezvous somewhere or other. But then one day she heard a curious bit of gossip about Watanuki from an old friend, a classmate at her girls’ school. Apparently her friend had seen the two of them walking together at Takarazuka. And so on an evening when Mitsuko was out on the roof garden of the Asahi Hall, after going to a movie alone, this school friend called to her and came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “You were out walking with Mr. Watanuki the other day, weren’t you?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know Mr. Watanuki?”

  “Not personally,” her friend said. “But he’s awfully good-looking, and everybody makes a fuss over him. So he’s just right for a pretty girl like you!” And she gave a meaningful smile.

  Mitsuko told her they weren’t all that involved; they just happened to be on a little excursion together.

  “You needn’t explain yourself! Nobody would be suspicious of you, with that fellow. Do you know his nickname?”

  When Mitsuko said she didn’t, her friend giggled. “They call him the ‘hundred-percent-safe playboy.’”

  Mitsuko had no idea what to make of it, and kept quizzing her to find out. At last her friend told her that Watanuki was rumored to be impotent, a sexual neuter, and moreover there were credible sources to attest to that.

  21

  MITSUKO’S FRIEND had learned about it because someone she knew had been in love with Watanuki and had asked a go-between to inquire about a possible marriage to his family. But for some reason his parents shilly-shallied, avoiding a direct answer, and when they were urged to give their consent, since the two young people seemed to want very much to be married, they said that for certain reasons they couldn’t take a bride for Eijiro. After further investigation, it turned out he’d had the mumps when he was a child, and that had led to inflammation of the testicles. . . . I don’t really understand it, Mitsuko said, but I asked a doctor, and it seems that mumps can bring on serious complications. Of course that’s only what she’d been told; maybe it was the result of all his dissipation. At any rate, from then on the girl simply couldn’t bear Watanuki. . . .

  That part of it makes you feel sorry for him, her friend had said, but why did he have to pursue women and try to win them over with his seductive letters? And he not only made wily comments about “an ideal wife” and so on; he’d invite a girl out for a walk and head straight for some secluded, shadowy place. It seems clear now that it was entirely for his own pleasure. To put it in a nutshell, he wore the mask of a lover in order to take advantage of women.

  What was even more infuriating was that Watanuki would say: “I think it’s wrong to have physical relations before marriage,” and would be admired for his fine character. Then he would tell the girl: “Let’s keep this our secret.” But when she talked about it later to her friends, out of sheer frustration, she learned that others had had the same experience. Watanuki knew perfectly well that he was handsome, very attractive to the opposite sex, and he would turn up boldly wherever women were likely to gather. It was hard to escape his insinuating charms. Still, however passionate the response, he would insist on preserving a chaste, platonic love, which usually led the woman to admire his virtue and idolize him all the more. Then she would be in his power, and after the affair had reached a peak, she would inevitably be jilted.

  “Oh? It happened to you too?”

  “Yes, yes. Exactly the same thing.”

  You heard this from everyone—at a certain point he would quietly slip away. Another oddity was that, unlike genuine platonic love, where even kissing would be out of place, there was nothing so chaste about his affairs. None of the women had realized what was going on, but once it was over they all had the same story to tell. They had been jilted in the same way.

  “As soon as there was any definite talk of marriage, he would simply disappear,” they said.

  Of course a few sympathized with him, but Watanuki went on amusing himself with one virgin after the next, unaware of how many women knew his secret. There was always another innocent for him to seduce.

  “Mr. Playboy has another conquest. . . .”

  “That’s nothing to be jealous about!”

  To people in the know, he was a laughingstock.

  “I imagine you were in the dark about his reputation too, Mitsuko,” her friend had said, “so I wanted to warn you. If you think it can’t be true, just ask anybody.”

  “My, what a repulsive man! He hasn’t kissed me yet,

  but I suppose he’d get around to it soon enough.”

  Mitsuko left it at that, without revealing her own relations with him. But as soon as she got home, she told Ume everything she had heard from her friend and asked if she thought it was all true.

  Ume turned the question back on her. “Can’t you tell if it’s true or false, miss?”

  No doubt Ume thought that Mitsuko could hardly fail to know. Still, it was her first romantic experience with a man, and she had no reason to be suspicious when he told her it would never do for them to have a baby. She really didn’t know whether to believe her friend or not.

  That startled Ume. “Maybe she was just running him down because you and the gentleman make such a perfect couple, like a pair of dolls. Why don’t we have somebody look into it for us?”

  They hired a private detective to investigate, and, sure enough, he reported that Watanuki
had a sexual deficiency. He couldn’t say if it was the result of mumps, but it seemed to have existed from childhood. Strangely, though, the detective had discovered that before his involvement with girls like Mitsuko, Watanuki had frequented the brothels of the South Quarter; inquiries there revealed that even veteran women of the quarter, once Watanuki began to visit them, usually fell madly in love with him. It was all very mysterious, however handsome he was, and people said he must have a remarkable technique. For a while he became wildly popular, though none of those women would talk about it. So the rumors spread, and it was only after following up all kinds of leads that the detective learned that Watanuki had at first managed to keep his defect a secret—until a certain woman got wind of it and, because she happened to be an accomplished lesbian, taught him how to satisfy her sexually in spite of his deficiencies. Later it seems they began to call him a “boy-girl,” or a “pansy,” but around that time he stopped going to the quarter. He never turned up again at any of the teahouses. I saw that detective’s report myself, and it was extremely detailed; he had gone into every last thing as thoroughly as possible.

  So while Watanuki was amusing himself in the brothel quarter, he must have become self-confident, confident enough to hunt for inexperienced women, which is when Mitsuko was caught in his snare . . . That’s just a guess, but I’m certain it’s what happened. When Mitsuko realized she was being toyed with that way, she felt she couldn’t go on living. She told me she had planned to kill herself but made her mind up to confront him with her grievance before she did.

  “How about getting properly married?” she asked him one day, to see how he would answer. “I’ve already had my parents’ approval, if it’s all right with you.”

  He immediately became evasive. “Of course that’s what I want, but it’s a little awkward now. . . . We need to wait another year or two.”

  “In fact, you can never get married, can you?”

  Watanuki turned ashen. “Why not?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, “but I’ve heard some rumors about you.”

  Now that they’d gone this far, she told him, he couldn’t just leave her; she thought they should commit suicide together. But he kept insisting that the rumors were all lies. Then she showed him the detective’s report, and he looked crushed.

  “I’m truly sorry,” he said. “Please forgive me.” And then: “I’m ready to die with you.”

  But by now suicide seemed out of the question, and after she had vented her bitterness, Mitsuko even began to feel sympathetic toward him once more. Finally she agreed to go on seeing him.

  I suppose that was because, in her heart of hearts, Mitsuko couldn’t stop loving him and wanted to continue their relationship as long as possible. Watanuki must have been aware of it and asked himself why he had to deny his condition, since she knew all that and yet still appeared to be in love. He told Mitsuko that he always expected women to reject him as soon as they discovered his physical limitation, no matter how they had felt before. He knew he had an affliction; still, he didn’t think it was such a fearful defect. If that disqualified him as a man, what was a man’s essential value? Was it really so superficial? If it was, he didn’t care to be a man. Didn’t the saintly recluse Gensei of Fukakusa set burning moxa on the very emblem of his masculinity, because it was an obstacle to virtue? And weren’t the greatest spiritual leaders of all—even Christ and the Buddha—nearly asexual? Maybe he himself approached a human ideal. In Greek sculpture, for example, you could find an androgynous beauty, neither wholly masculine nor wholly feminine. Even the bodhisattvas Kannon and Seishi had that kind of beauty. When you think of it, you realize that these are the most exalted forms of humanity. He had hidden his weakness only because he was afraid of being abandoned. Actually, wanting to bring children into the world, in the name of love, was just an animal impulse. That would be meaningless to anyone who cherished a spiritual love. . . .

  22

  . . . YES, once Watanuki began defending himself he spouted one excuse after another; there was no end to it. And he declared that if Mitsuko still wanted to die, he’d be willing to join her in a double suicide, though he didn’t see why it was necessary. If he killed himself now, the story might get around that he was in despair because of a physical handicap. That was hard for him to bear. He was not so cowardly as to commit suicide for that reason; he wanted to go on living, do important work, show everyone that he was far superior to the ordinary run of human beings. If Mitsuko had enough strength of will to face death, why not get married? Surely she could see there was nothing shameful about taking a man like him as her husband; she should think of it as a noble spiritual union. . . . Of course they might face difficulties, people who wouldn’t understand, so it was just as well not to advertise his disability. Even if there were one or two gossips around, none of them had any actual proof, and if anyone asked her about him, he hoped she would say he was perfectly normal. . . .

  It was terribly contradictory—if he believed he was so superior, with nothing to despair of, wouldn’t he act boldly instead of being secretive? But now all he seemed to care about was getting safely married before anyone tried to block them. That was to be their first aim, and to accomplish it they would have to resort to deception. Why let anything stop them, if they knew in their hearts that they were above reproach?

  That might work with other people, Mitsuko had said; it wouldn’t be so easy to fool her parents. But Watanuki replied that his family would be delighted to have a daughter-in-law who understood his limitation; since it was only her parents who would refuse permission if they found out, it was absolutely necessary to conceal it from them. That could be done, if Mitsuko agreed.

  “And if they do find out?” Mitsuko asked.

  “There’s no use worrying about it in advance, is there? If that happens, we’ll just explain our feelings openly and honestly, and you can say you’ll never marry anyone else. Then if they refuse to let us get married, we can always run away and commit suicide!”

  Watanuki probably couldn’t imagine that his secret was such common knowledge that he’d been nicknamed for it; he must have thought it was known only to a few women in the pleasure quarter and that he had been discreet enough to keep it hidden. In fact, it seemed most unlikely that they could conveniently deceive her parents and proceed with the marriage. Watanuki’s own “parents” were his mother and an uncle who had become his guardian, he had told her, and so Mitsuko only needed to call on them, explain the situation, and say: “One of these days my family may bring you a formal marriage proposal, and I hope you’ll find it acceptable.” His mother would be overjoyed, and his uncle would never do anything to expose him and spoil his one chance for marriage. But Mitsuko felt that before her parents made a proposal, they would undoubtedly look into his background and somehow or other learn the truth. So rather than cause an unnecessary storm of protest, wouldn’t it be better just to go on meeting clandestinely for the time being?

  Watanuki declared that he had no overriding reason to insist on getting married, and he himself realized that it was asking a lot, for someone in his condition; still, Mitsuko could hardly be expected to remain unmarried forever, and he couldn’t help worrying that he was bound to lose her. Moreover, everything he had said to justify himself was the opposite of what he really felt. If he could, he wanted to take a wife and live like a normal man—not just to deceive others but to deceive himself, convince himself that he wasn’t different in the slightest from other men. Not only that, he was vain enough to want to astonish them all by having a rare beauty like Mitsuko as his wife. So he was eager to marry her, even spiteful about it.

  “You keep making excuses, but I imagine you’d accept any good marriage offer!”

  Mitsuko retorted that she would never marry somebody else, even if her parents demanded it, and there were no immediate prospects anyway. Before long she would be twenty-four, free to make her own decision about getting married. Their chance would come, if
he’d only be patient a little longer. . . . Otherwise they’d have no way out but suicide, she said, and at last she got him to agree to wait.

  Mitsuko told me she didn’t really understand her own feelings around that time, but in the beginning she was just trying to calm him down, hoping to break off with him somehow. Whenever she met him she felt remorseful afterward and thought to herself: What a ridiculous state of affairs! Envied for my looks by other women and yet in the clutches of a man like that. I’ve got to put a stop to it once and for all! But strangely enough, after two or three days she would be the one to go chasing after him again. Yet if you asked whether she was so much in love, it seems that she despised the very sight of him and thought of him as contemptible, a man without a shred of character. They were getting together regularly, but they were far from friendly; they always quarreled, and the quarrels would begin with the same old stupid accusations, delivered in a voice dripping with suspicion:

  “How long do you intend to keep me waiting?” he might say, or “You must have given away my secret!”

  Mitsuko herself had no wish to reveal anything so distasteful, so humiliating for both of them, and she didn’t need to be admonished by Watanuki. Still, it was impossible for her to keep it from Ume, and that set off a furious quarrel with him.

  “How could you tell a thing like that to your maid!”

  Mitsuko was not in the least intimidated.

  “You’re a liar and a hypocrite!” she shot back. “What you say and do are entirely different! There’s no real love between us.”

  At last, cornered and white with fury, he shouted: “I’ll kill you!”

  “Go ahead and kill me, if you want to. I’ve been ready to die for a long time.” Mitsuko stood motionless, her eyes shut tight.