Quicksand Read online

“It was awfully lucky my mistress wore that kimono today! What could she have done if you hadn’t worried about her, Mrs. Kakiuchi? What if you told her you wouldn’t come: she’d have to get out of it the best way she knew how.”

  “I thought about doing just that. But at first I couldn’t imagine what was going on, I was so startled by that tearful voice over the phone. And hateful as she was, I couldn’t bring myself to hate her, so when I suddenly pictured her there, naked and trembling, I felt a rush of pity. . . . That may seem ridiculous to you, Ume, looking at it from outside, but that’s exactly how it was.”

  “Oh yes, I can see what you must have felt. . . .”

  “And then asking me to bring the man’s things too, not just things for herself, and whispering together right at the telephone, as if they wanted me to hear—how could she! She used to call me Sister in front of everyone, and said she’s never let anyone but me see her in the nude—I wonder how they looked, naked there together!”

  By then I was talking so wildly I hardly knew where we were. Apparently we had turned west off Sakai Avenue at Shimizucho; I remember seeing the lights of the Daimaru department store on Shinsaibashi beyond us, but before we got to it we headed south along the Tazaemon Bridge avenue, and the taxi driver said: “This is Kasayamachi—where do you want to get off?”

  “I’m looking for a restaurant called the Izutsu,” I said.

  We drove around for a while but couldn’t find it, and when we asked someone in the neighborhood, we were told it wasn’t a restaurant at all, it was really an inn.

  “And where is that?” I inquired.

  “Down the little side street just ahead.”

  Even though it wasn’t far from Soemoncho and Shinsaibashi Avenue, the whole area was dark and rather lonely. There were a number of geisha houses and little restaurants and inns, but they were all narrow, modest buildings, as quiet as private houses. From the entrance to the side street that had been pointed out to us, we could see hanging from one of the eaves a lamp with the words “Hotel Izutsu” in small characters.

  “Wait here for me, Ume,” I said, and went on alone.

  Although it called itself a hotel, the Izutsu was a dubious-looking establishment at the end of the street. I hesitated a moment after opening its lattice door, but someone seemed to be busy on the telephone in the kitchen, and I called out over and over, with no response. Finally I shouted a loud “Hello!” and a maid came out. As soon as she saw me she seemed to know who I was. Before I could say another word, she asked me to come in and led me up a stairway to the second floor.

  “Here’s the lady you were expecting,” she announced, opening a sliding door. I went into a little three-mat antechamber and found a fair-skinned young man in his twenties sitting there on the floor in a formal posture.

  “Excuse me, but are you the lady who is a friend of Mitsuko’s?” he asked.

  When I said I was, he stiffened and then made a deep bow, all the way down to the floor.

  “I don’t know how to apologize for what happened tonight,” he said. “Mitsuko will have to give you her own explanation shortly. She says she can’t bear to face you, especially the way she looks now, so please wait until she has had time to put on the kimono you were good enough to bring her.”

  The young man had the sort of regular features and feminine good looks that were likely to appeal to Mitsuko; his slender eyebrows and narrow eyes gave an impression of slyness, but the moment I saw him I thought: What a handsome boy! He was supposed to have lost his clothes too, but he was wearing a neat unlined kimono of ordinary striped silk—later I heard he had borrowed it from one of the hotel employees.

  “Here’s the change of clothing I brought you,” I said, handing him the package.

  He accepted it politely. “Thank you very much,” he said, and he opened a sliding door in the corner, thrust the package into the inner room, and quickly shut the door again, so that I had only a glimpse of a low bed screen. . . .

  It would take an awfully long time to tell you everything that happened that night. Anyway, I had delivered the clothing I brought for them, and since he was there, I decided it was useless to see Mitsuko. So I wrapped the thirty yen in paper and told him: “I’ll leave now—please give this to Mitsuko.”

  He wouldn’t hear of my going.

  “No, no, please stay—she’ll be right out,” he said, and settled himself down before me once again. “Actually, this is something Mitsuko herself will have to explain, but I think I owe you an explanation of my own. I hope you’ll be willing to listen to what I have to say.”

  Obviously Mitsuko found it hard to talk to me, and they had arranged to have him speak for her while she was changing clothes. And then this suave fellow—oh, at that point he said: “My wallet was taken, so I don’t have a calling card, but my name is Watanuki Eijiro. I live near Mr. Tokumitsu’s shop in Semba.” What this Watanuki told me was that while Mitsuko was still living in Semba, around the end of last year, he and Mitsuko had fallen in love and had even intended to be married. However, this spring the talk of marriage with M had come up, and they were afraid their own plans were doomed. Fortunately the rumor of a lesbian affair had the effect of breaking off M’s proposal.

  . . . Well, that was more or less how he began. They never tried to use me, he insisted, even if it might have seemed that way at first. But gradually Mitsuko had been stirred by my own passion and had fervently returned my love, more than she ever loved him. He felt unbearably jealous; if anyone was used, it was he himself. And although he had never met me before, he had heard all about me from Mitsuko. She told him that love between women was entirely different from their kind of love, and if he wouldn’t let her see me she wouldn’t go on seeing him either. Lately he had yielded to her wish.

  “My sister has a husband too,” Mitsuko would say, “and I’m willing to marry you. But married love is one thing and love for another woman is something else, so please realize that I won’t give up Sister as long as I live. If you can’t accept that, I won’t marry you.”

  Mitsuko’s feeling for me was absolutely sincere, Watanuki said. Again I felt I was being made a fool of, but he was really a smooth-talking fellow and didn’t leave any room for me to argue with him. It was wrong to go on hiding his relations with Mitsuko from me, he thought, and he had told her to ask me to agree to the situation, since he had already agreed. Mitsuko understood that it was clearly for the best, but whenever we were face-to-face she found it hard to come out with. She kept thinking there might be a better opportunity, until finally things had turned out as they did tonight.

  Also, Mitsuko had said over the phone that they were robbed, but in fact it wasn’t an ordinary robbery—the people who had taken their clothes weren’t robbers; they were gamblers. The more he told me, the truer it seemed that a bad deed never goes unpunished. That night some people were gambling in another room at the inn, he said, and it seems there was a police raid. When Mitsuko and he heard all the commotion, they were so alarmed they fled blindly from their room, she in her underslip and he himself in his nightclothes, escaping by the roof over to the next-door house, where they hid under the floor of a laundry drying platform. The gamblers took off in all directions: Most of them got away, but one laggard couple came wandering in confusion down the corridor past the open door to their room, just after the two of them had left, and went in to hide. Then this man and woman decided to pretend they were there on a rendezvous—it seems they understood that the detectives in charge of rounding up gamblers were different from the ones who were after illicit lovers. But the detectives were too clever for them and arrested them on suspicion, to take them off to the police station. That’s when they put on the kimonos that Mitsuko and Watanuki had left in the clothes box by their bedside. You see, this couple had changed into inn robes to gamble, and during the raid their own clothes were in a different room. So to keep up the pretense that they weren’t gamblers, they had to put on the clothes they found there by the bed. Then when Mit
suko and he at last felt safe enough to come back after their narrow escape, their clothes were gone—they hadn’t even been left a wallet or handbag, and the innkeeper had been arrested too, so there was no one to help them. They couldn’t even go home.

  Another worry, according to Watanuki, was that they might be identified by Mitsuko’s Hankyu train pass, which was in her bag, and by the calling cards in his own wallet. It would be disastrous for them if the police carried the investigation to their families; that’s why they were at such a loss when she telephoned me. But since I had been kind enough to come all the way here, and seemed to care so much for Mitsuko, perhaps I would also take the trouble to go back with her to Ashiya and say that we had spent the evening together at the movies. And just in case the police had called, he said, he counted on me to find some plausible way to explain it.

  11

  “PLEASE, MRS. KAKIUCHI, I’m sure you must be angry about tonight, but it’s something I have to beg of you.” Again he bowed deeply, till his forehead touched the floor. “I don’t care what happens to me, but please, please take Mitsuko safely home. I’ll be forever grateful.” By the end he was clasping his hands prayerfully.

  For my part, even though I felt I had been terribly mistreated, I’m so easily moved that I couldn’t bring myself to refuse. Still, out of sheer bitterness, I simply glared at him in silence for a time as he groveled there before me. At last I gave in and said merely: “All right.”

  Watanuki bowed again.

  “Aah!” he sighed theatrically, in a voice full of emotion. “So you will do it. I’m truly thankful to you; that takes a burden off my mind.” Then, peering into my eyes as if to see how I might react, he added: “In that case, I’ll ask Mitsuko to come in here, but before I do I have one more request to make. She’s so upset by all that’s gone on tonight that I hope you won’t say anything about it. Is that agreeable? Will you promise not to mention it?”

  I couldn’t refuse that either, and he immediately called to Mitsuko through the sliding door.

  “She understands everything,” he assured her. “Please come out!”

  A little while before, I had heard a rustling sound beyond the door as she seemed to be putting on the kimono, but by now it was deadly silent, as if she was straining to hear what we were saying. A few minutes after he called to her, the door finally began to open. Little by little, an inch or two at a time, the door slid open, and then Mitsuko appeared, her eyes reddened and swollen from crying.

  I wanted to see her expression, but the moment our eyes met she dropped her gaze and slipped quietly down to sit nestled-in the young man’s shadow. I only saw her bite her lip—saw those swollen eyelids, the long lashes, the elegant line of her nose—as she sat with both hands tucked into her sleeves, leaning in a kind of abandoned pose, her body twisted, the skirt of her kimono gaping in disarray. And as I looked at Mitsuko sitting there, I was reminded that this very kimono was one of our matching pair, and I thought of the time we ordered them and of how we put them on to have our picture taken together. My anger flared up again: Oh, I should never have had that kimono made! I wanted to fly at her and rip it to shreds—really, if we had been alone I might have done just that!

  Watanuki seemed to sense this, and before we could say a word he urged us to get ready to leave and went to change clothes himself. Afterward, in spite of the protests of the hotel staff, he insisted on giving them some of the money I’d brought, to settle the bill. And, intent on avoiding the least risk, he had another request for me:

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Kakiuchi . . . I’m sorry to trouble you, but I think it would be best if you made a phone call now to your own house, and to Mitsuko’s too.”

  I’d been worried about things at home myself, so I telephoned our maid and asked her: “Have you heard anything from Mitsuko’s family? I’m just about to take her back, and then I’ll come home.”

  “Yes,” she replied, “there was a phone call a little while ago, but I didn’t know what to tell them. So I didn’t say anything about the time, just that you both went in to Osaka.”

  “Has my husband gone to bed?”

  “No, he’s still up.”

  “Tell him I’ll be home soon,” I said.

  Then I called Mitsuko’s house. “We went to the movies at the Shochiku tonight,” I told her mother when she came to the phone, “and after that we were so hungry we dropped in at the Tsuruya restaurant. It’s getting awfully late; I’ll bring Mitsuko back right away.”

  Mitsuko’s mother only said: “Oh, is that what happened? It’s so late that I telephoned your house.” From the way she spoke, it was clear she hadn’t heard anything from the police.

  Things seemed to be turning out well, and we decided to leave by taxi as soon as possible. The young man had only about half of the thirty yen left, but he began passing out tips to the inn servants to make sure there would be no further trouble, telling them just what to say in case of any investigation by the authorities. Even at such a time he seemed incredibly thorough. Finally we left—I had arrived a little after ten and had spent about an hour there, so it must have been past eleven. Then I remembered I’d had Ume wait for me, and I went out and called to her—she was walking up and down the little street—and had her get in the taxi. Watanuki calmly climbed in too, declaring: “I’ll come along part of the way.”

  Mitsuko and I were side by side in the back seat, and Ume and Watanuki perched on the little folding seats facing us. All four of us sat there across from each other without a word as the taxi sped along. When we came to the Muko Bridge, Watanuki at last broke the silence.

  “What do you want to do?” he said, as if the thought had just occurred to him. “I wonder if you shouldn’t be coming home on the train. . . . How about it, Mitsuko?” he asked. “How far do you want to go by taxi?”

  That was because Mitsuko lived only five or six hundred yards from the Ashiyagawa station, in the hills west of the river, near the famous Shiomizakura cherry grove. Still, it was a fearfully dangerous road through a lonely pinewoods where there’d been many rapes and robberies; when Mitsuko came home at night, even along with Ume, she always took a taxi from the station. I suggested changing taxis at Ashiyagawa, but Ume said that would never do, the local drivers knew them, so we ought to get another taxi before that.

  All this time Mitsuko kept silent. Occasionally she gave a little sigh and fixed her gaze on Watanuki, across from her, as if telling him something in secret. He looked back at her the same way and said: “Well, maybe we ought to leave this taxi at Narihira Bridge.”

  I knew very well why he was proposing that. The path to the Hankyu station from the bridge was dangerous too, along an embankment with a row of huge pines, not the sort of place for three women to walk alone. Watanuki simply wanted to be with Mitsuko as long as possible, so he thought of getting out of the taxi and seeing us to the station to find another one. The fact that he knew the bridge and the way to the train, even though he’d said he lived near the Tokumitsu shop in Semba, must have been because they had walked there together often. It made me want to tell him: We can’t let anyone see us with a man! If it’s just the three of us, we can make some excuse—you ought to go on home. You said I should see her to her house, so if you’re not leaving, I’ll leave myself.

  But Ume chimed in, agreeing with everything he proposed. “That’s a good idea! Let’s do that!” She seemed to be playing into his hands. “It’s a lot of trouble for you, but you wouldn’t mind coming with us as far as the Hankyu station?”

  I began to think Ume was in on the plot. When we left the taxi at the bridge and headed down the pitch-black path along the embankment, she said: “It’d be scary to walk here in the dark without a man along, wouldn’t it, Mrs. Kakiuchi?” And she made a point of buttonholing me and telling me how this or that young girl had recently been attacked along this path; meanwhile she saw to it that we kept well ahead of Watanuki and Mitsuko. They were a dozen yards or so behind us, still talking about something—I cou
ld barely hear Mitsuko’s replies, but she seemed to be agreeing with him too.

  Watanuki left us in front of the station, and we three lapsed into silence again as we went by taxi from there to Mitsuko’s house.

  “My, my!” her mother exclaimed, coming out to meet us. “Why did you ever let it get so late?” She seemed awfully apologetic toward me and thanked me profusely. “I’m sorry we’re always causing you so much trouble.”

  Both Mitsuko and I looked uneasy, afraid we might betray ourselves if the talk went on too long, so when her mother offered to call a taxi for me, I told her I’d had ours wait—and almost fled from the house.

  I took the Hankyu back to Shukugawa again and went from there to Koroen by taxi, arriving home just at midnight. Kiyo came to greet me at the door.

  “Has my husband gone to bed yet?” I asked.

  “He was up till a little while ago,” she replied, “but now he’s in bed.”

  That’s good, I thought. Maybe he’s gone to sleep without knowing I’m back. I opened the bedroom door as quietly as I could and tiptoed in. There was an open bottle of white wine on the bedside table, and my husband seemed to be sleeping peacefully, with the blanket drawn up over his head. Since he was a poor drinker and hardly ever took a drink at bedtime, I supposed he must have had some wine because he was too worried to sleep.

  I crept stealthily into bed beside him, trying not to disturb his quiet breathing, but couldn’t go to sleep myself. The more I brooded over what had happened, the more bitter and angry I became, until my heart seemed lacerated by rage. How can I manage to avenge myself? I thought. No matter what, I’ll make her suffer for it! By then I was so agitated that I found myself reaching out to the table for a half-full glass of wine, and I drank it down in one gulp. Anyhow, I wasn’t used to drinking either, and I was so worn out from that hectic evening that the wine went right to my head. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling—suddenly I had a splitting headache, as if all the blood in my body had rushed there, and I felt nauseous in the pit of my stomach. Gasping for breath, I was on the verge of crying out: How dare you all try to make such a fool of me! Just wait and see! But even as that thought obsessed me, I realized that my heart was beating wildly, like the throb of sake being poured from a cask; soon I noticed that my husband’s heart was throbbing the same way and that his hot breath was coming out in gasps too. Our breathing and our palpitations grew more and more violent, in the same rhythm, till it seemed that both our hearts were about to burst, when all at once I felt my husband’s arms tight around me. The next moment his panting breath was even nearer and his burning lips grazed my earlobe: “I’m glad you’re home!”