Quicksand Read online

  On the following day, though, my husband announced in the morning that he had to begin going in to the office on business for a few hours, and he insisted that I swear I wouldn’t leave the house or make a phone call during his absence. Otherwise he would take me along with him to Osaka.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said. “I’d be worried to have you go out alone.”

  “Why should that worry you?” he asked.

  “If you secretly went to tell the Tokumitsus what you know, I couldn’t keep on living.”

  “I’d never do that behind your back,” he declared. “I wouldn’t go there without your permission. I’ll swear to it—will you swear to me too?”

  Then I told him: “If you’ll just promise not to do anything mean, I’ll wait here patiently for you while you’re gone. Please go ahead and take care of your work; don’t worry about me. I think I’ll rest a little while you’re away.”

  It was around nine o’clock when I sent him off, and I went back to bed for a time, but I was so strangely excited that I couldn’t sleep. Besides, my husband telephoned me as soon as he arrived in Osaka, and he kept calling about every half hour, as I paced up and down the bedroom, trying to soothe my nerves, with all kinds of thoughts racing through my mind. Suddenly it occurred to me that while we were struggling day after day in this contest of wills, Watanuki was likely to be up to something— and Mitsuko too: what had she been thinking since I left her the other day? Had she been waiting for me yesterday from morning till night? Anyhow, since my threats about killing myself weren’t having the desired effect, why not bring matters to a head, and yet without causing too great a scandal, by going off with her to some nearby place like Nara or Kyoto? Then we could have Ume come rushing frantically to my husband, to tell him: “My mistress and your wife ran off together! Please go after them, or there’ll be an awful to-do when her family finds out!” And we’d have her bring him to us just as we were about to commit suicide. . . . Today was our one chance to act—that was what I thought, but because I couldn’t go out, I phoned Mitsuko and asked her to hurry over to my house.

  “I’ll tell you all about it after you’re here, so please come right away!”

  Then I warned our maid: “You mustn’t mention this to the master.” And I settled down to wait for Mitsuko. About twenty minutes later she arrived.

  As long as my husband kept telephoning me I felt reassured that he was in Osaka, but still, just in case he came home unexpectedly, I had Mitsuko’s parasol and sandals taken around to the garden side, and as a further precaution I met with her in the parlor downstairs, so that she could make a hasty departure by the back way. Mitsuko looked pale and anxious. During the time that we were apart, she seemed to have become exhausted. As she listened to my story, tears filled her eyes.

  “So you had to put up with all that too, did you, Sister?”

  It seems that from the night before, and throughout the day yesterday, she had been bullied unmercifully by Watanuki.

  “You and Sister have been plotting against me,” he accused her, “so I decided to outsmart you by going to Mr. Kakiuchi’s office in Imabashi and telling him all about his wife. That’s why he came to Kasayamachi to investigate. Once he took her home like that, there’s no use waiting for her to come back anymore!”

  29

  AFTER THAT, Watanuki had said he was sure Mitsuko knew he had exchanged written vows with Sister. “But by now that’s only a scrap of paper—I left my copy with her husband, just to prove what I told him. And here’s the receipt,” he added, taking it from his pocket to show her.

  “There, it’s all down in writing: ‘He will take responsibility for his wife . . .’” and so on. One by one Watanuki read the provisions to her, but he held the receipt so that his hand concealed the one my husband wanted.

  “Now that I have this in writing from Mr. Kakiuchi, we needn’t be concerned about Sister any longer, so I’d like you to sign a pledge with me too.”

  At that, Mitsuko said, he produced what looked like another draft agreement from his pocket. When she read it, she saw that it was full of brazenly self-serving conditions: Mitsuko and Watanuki were to be forever united in body and spirit; she would follow Watanuki in death; if she violated their pledge she would be subject to retribution; and on and on.

  “If these terms are acceptable, please sign your name here and affix your seal.”

  But Mitsuko refused.

  “I won’t do anything of the kind!” she told him. “I’ve never heard of demanding pledges the way you do. You just want to blackmail people.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about, as long as you don’t intend to change your mind.” He tried to thrust a pen into her hand.

  “It’s not as if I’m borrowing money! Do you think you can tie down a person’s feelings with a contract? This looks like another of your nasty schemes.”

  “And you won’t sign it because you may change your mind, is that it?”

  “Whether I sign or not, one can’t foresee the future,” she retorted.

  “Well, you’ll regret it if you don’t! I’ve got all the proof I’d need to blackmail you.” As he spoke, he took a photograph out of his wallet and showed it to her. Surprisingly enough, it was a picture of the document my husband had retrieved.

  “I thought Mr. Kakiuchi might not be willing to return it,” Watanuki said, “so I had the photo made before I went to Imabashi the other day—I’m not the sort of man to be taken in. If I show it to a reporter, along with my receipt, he’ll want to buy them both. I don’t know what I may be driven to. . . . You’d better listen to me, or you’ll be in serious trouble!” he warned her.

  “You see!” said Mitsuko. “That’s how contemptible you are! But I don’t care—go ahead and sell your story to the newspapers, or anywhere you like, and stop bothering me!”

  With that, they parted angrily.

  And so, Mitsuko told me, she had stayed away from Kasayamachi today in order to avoid looking weak. She was just wondering what to do next, when she got my phone call and responded eagerly.

  As long as Watanuki didn’t think his relations with her were hopeless, he was unlikely to take any steps that might harm himself too. But now that things had come to a crisis, it was vital to get my husband on our side. We decided to carry out my plan.

  “If you’d like to go somewhere nearby, how about our villa at Hamadera?” Mitsuko asked.

  That summer only a caretaker couple were living there, and if Mitsuko said she wanted to go to swim in the ocean, and take Ume along with her, she could arrange to stay four or five days without worrying her family in the least. Meanwhile I could slip out of my house to meet them at the Namba station; by the time the three of us reached Hamadera, my husband would discover that I was gone. No doubt his first move would be to telephone Mitsuko’s house. As soon as he knew where she was, he would call Hamadera, and we’d have Ume answer the phone:

  “Your wife and my mistress have taken some kind of drugs—they’re both unconscious! They’ve left notes behind, so they must have meant to commit suicide! I was just going to call our house and then call you. Please come right away!”

  He’d be sure to get there as fast as he could.

  Ume’s little speech was an important part of the plot, but being in a realistic coma was more important, even for a hoax like this. We had to take just enough medicine so a doctor would say our lives were in no danger and we’d be all right after two or three days of rest. We didn’t know the proper dose for that, but Mitsuko was in the habit of taking Bayer sleeping pills, which were perfectly harmless.

  “They say even a boxful of these tablets couldn’t kill you,” she explained, “so if we take less than that, we’ll be on the safe side. Though I wouldn’t care if I did have an overdose, since we’d be together, Sister!”

  “I wouldn’t care either!” I said.

  And so, once my husband had hastened to our bedside, we would have Ume ready with a story for him:

  “They’
re still groggy, as you see, but the doctor says they’re out of danger, and now and then they open their eyes; they’re mostly conscious by now. Maybe I ought to report this to my mistress’s family, but I know she’ll scold me if I do, and I suppose Mrs. Kakiuchi will too, so I haven’t called them. Please keep it to yourself. Anyway, your wife can’t go home tonight—I hope you’ll let her stay for a while, as if she’s here on a visit, till she’s all well again.”

  After that we could spend a few more days in bed, sometimes acting delirious, talking in our sleep, or waking up and crying, and Ume would advise him to leave us alone if he wanted us to recover fully. He would have to agree.

  “When shall we do it, then?” Mitsuko asked.

  “It ought to be today. We won’t have a better chance, now that I’m in prison like this.”

  “I want to hurry too, or Watanuki will be after me again.”

  More phone calls had come from my husband while we were making our plans, and we began to be afraid we might not have time to escape or, if we did, he would discover it before we reached Hamadera. We would need up to three hours from the time we left before he found us, or the plan wouldn’t work. At first I thought of calling his office and telling him I wanted to sleep till evening. “Don’t wake me,” I’d say, and then lock the bedroom door from inside, crawl out the window, and jump down. But we have a two-story Western house, with a smooth wall that doesn’t offer a foothold, and the beach in front would be crowded with bathers too; I couldn’t do anything like that before all those people. So we talked it over and decided it was better for me to be on my good behavior two or three more days, and then, after my husband and our maid had relaxed their vigilance, I’d make my escape by pretending to go for a swim.

  All I had to do was wait a few days until he began to trust me again; then, as he was about to leave for the office, I’d declare: “If I stay cooped up in this house, I might as well be an invalid; let me go have a swim at least. I’ll put on a bathing suit and just go to the beach in front of our house.” And I’d actually walk out the door in my bathing suit. Ume would be waiting for me at the beach and would have brought something of Mitsuko’s for me to put on, preferably a one-piece dress I could slip over my bathing suit, and a low-brimmed hat or parasol to hide my face. The beach would be swarming with people, so no one would notice me, but since I hardly ever wore Western-style dresses in those days, I was even less likely to be recognized, no matter who saw me. We were to meet between ten A.M. and noon—a time when my husband was sure to be in Osaka. Ume was to come three days from now, unless it rained, but if anything went wrong she would come again the following day, on the fourth day, or the fifth, and so on.

  That was what we planned. Then we had another good idea: Mitsuko would go ahead to Hamadera on the evening of the second day, and when my husband called her family they would tell him she had gone to the villa yesterday. When he called Mitsuko, she’d come to the telephone herself and say: “Sister doesn’t know I’m here, so I don’t expect her.” He’d think I hadn’t gone very far and might even have drowned myself. Before anything else, he’d want to begin a search for me.

  A little later, when the time was right, we’d have Ume call him: “Mrs. Kakiuchi just got here—before I knew it, something awful happened!”

  We estimated it would be an hour and a half to two hours before the maid went to look for me. After that she would phone my husband in Osaka; he would make his own phone calls and wouldn’t get back to Koroen for another hour or so; then he’d spend one or two more hours asking bathers if they’d seen me and searching all along the shore; finally, after that phone call from Ume, it would take him an hour and twenty or thirty minutes to come from Koroen to Hamadera—in all, we would have five or six hours, which was plenty of time for us to carry out our preparations. Only, I felt sorry for Ume, who would have to go with Mitsuko to Hamadera the day before and then come all the way to Koroen by ten o’clock in the morning and wait an hour or two on the beach in the worst of the heat. If by some chance I had to let her wait in vain, she’d need to come back a second or a third day. But Mitsuko assured me I could count on her.

  “She likes to do that kind of thing.”

  We made all the necessary arrangements, down to the last detail, reminded each other to be careful, and Mitsuko left for home. That was around one P.M. My husband came back at almost the same time, just missing her. It was really lucky I wasn’t trying to escape today, I thought.

  30

  . . . YES, I DID manage to escape on the third day. The weather and the timing were exactly as I had hoped: a little past ten o’clock, I put on my bathing suit and went down to the beach. When I saw Ume, I signaled to her with a glance, and we walked as fast as we could along the beach for about half a mile, not saying a word, before I stopped to slip on a light cotton print dress. Then Ume gave me a handbag containing ten yen, and a parasol to shield my face, as we separated and headed out to the highway. Luckily a taxi came along, and I got in and went straight to Namba. So I reached the villa before eleven-thirty, and Ume arrived half an hour later.

  “My, but you were quick!” she exclaimed. “I never thought it would go so well. Now come out to the cottage with me, before we begin getting those phone calls!”

  Ume hustled Mitsuko and me off to an elegant little thatch-roofed cottage in the garden, quite a long way from the house. Once inside, I saw that beds had been laid out with pills and water right by the pillows; I changed from the dress into a summer kimono and sat down facing Mitsuko, wondering if I might really die and if this might be my last glimpse of her.

  “If it turns out to be a fatal dose for me, would you die too, Mitsu?”

  “And you’d die with me, wouldn’t you, Sister?”

  We wept together, our arms around each other.

  Then Mitsuko showed me two farewell notes she had written, one to her parents and one to my husband. “Please read them,” she said.

  I took out my own farewell notes, and we compared what we had written. They were like real suicide notes, especially Mitsuko’s letter addressed to my husband: “I cannot apologize enough for taking your precious wife along with me. Please find the strength to resign yourself to fate.” When my husband read it, he would surely be so moved that he would forget his bitterness. Even we ourselves, looking at the letters there before us, had to take this seriously. We couldn’t help feeling as if we were actually going to our deaths.

  After spending about an hour like that, we heard the clatter of garden clogs as Ume came running toward us.

  “Miss! Miss! You have a call from Imabashi! Please come out for a minute, if you can.”

  Mitsuko hurried off to the phone, and when she came back, she said: “Everything has gone beautifully. Now we needn’t wait any longer!”

  Once again we embraced, trembling with genuine grief, and we swallowed the pills.

  It seems I was completely unconscious for about half a day. Later I heard that by eight o’clock that evening I began now and then to open my eyes and stare anxiously around, but I have no clear memory of anything for the next two or three days—only a sensation of nausea, of suffocating, of pressure inside my head, along with a kind of confused vision of my husband sitting by my pillow—and through the whole time a series of dreams, one after another. First of all I, my husband, Mitsuko, Ume—the four of us seemed to be off on a trip somewhere, sleeping under a mosquito net in a room at an inn. It was a little six-mat room, and Mitsuko and I were lying there together, with my husband and Ume on either side of us, all under the same net. . . . That image lingered vaguely in my mind like a scene from a dream, but judging from the look of the room, dream and reality must have been mingled. Another thing I heard afterward was that late that night my bedding had been drawn into the next room, but then Mitsuko opened her eyes and started calling for me deliriously: “Sister’s gone! Bring back my sister! Bring her here!” Her tears were flowing, I was told, and they had to bring me back to the same room with her.


  That was the room I had dreamed about, but there were other, stranger dreams. Once, I was taking a nap in another room at an inn, as Watanuki and Mitsuko whispered together beside me.

  “Is Sister really sleeping, I wonder?”

  “We mustn’t waken her.”

  Dozing off from time to time, I could hear snatches of their secret talk. But where on earth was I? It must have been that Kasayamachi inn—unfortunately I was lying with my back toward them and couldn’t see the expression on their faces. Even so, I understood what was going on. I had been deceived after all! Only I had taken the sleeping pills, I thought, and I’d been deluded into letting myself be put into this condition; meanwhile Mitsuko had called Watanuki here. Ah, how hateful! I wanted to leap up and tear the masks off those liars! But try as I might, my body refused to obey. I wanted to cry out, but the harder I tried, the more frustrating it was. My tongue stiffened and wouldn’t move; I couldn’t open my eyes. How infuriating! Yet as I was asking myself what could I do, somehow I began dozing off again. . . . Still I heard voices talking on and on for a long time. Strangely, though, the man’s voice had changed from Watanuki’s to my husband’s. . . . Why was my husband in a place like this? Was he so intimate with Mitsuko?

  “Won’t Sister be angry?”

  “I think it’s what Sonoko’s always wanted.”

  “Then the three of us should be good friends.”

  Snatches of talk like that filtered into my hearing. Even now, I’m not sure what to make of it. Were they really talking with each other, or was it partly my imagination, shaping reality as I dreamed? . . . And then, if that was all, it might have been simply an illusion, the product of my confused mind. I denied it myself, thinking it couldn’t be true, but there was another scene I recalled, a scene I still can’t forget. . . .