Seven Japanese Tales Page 9

  Has the water upstream

  Become a lazy current?

  The sound of the mortar is rarely heard.

  Even today, the sound of a water mortar echoes through the garden of the well-known Hall of Poets, the home of the early Edo poet Ishikawa Jozan in the northern suburbs of Kyoto. There, too, is displayed an explanatory text written in Chinese by Jozan. I suppose the reason why we had a water mortar is that my grandfather went there, read the description, and got the impulse to copy the device for his own house. It is said that Jozan's Poem about not wishing to cross the Kamo River was written as a polite way of declining an invitation from the Emperor:

  Alas, I am ashamed to cross it

  —

  Though only a Shallow Stream

  It would mirror my wrinkled age.

  A rubbing of the poem hangs in an alcove in the Hall of Poets, and we had one at our house too.

  When I was about three or four, I was enchanted by the clack, clack of our water mortar.

  “Tadasu!” Mother would call. “Don't go over there or you'll fall in the pond!” But no matter how often she stopped me, I would run out into the garden and make my way through the tall bamboo grass of the artificial hill, trying to get to the edge of the stream.

  “Wait! It's dangerous! You mustn't go there alone!” Mother or Okane would hurry after me in alarm and seize me by the back of my sash. Squirming forward while one of them held fast to me, I would peer down into the stream. As I watched, the green bamboo tube of the mortar slowly filled, dropped with a sharp rap against the block of wood, spilling its water into the pond, and then sprang back into place. After a few minutes it was full again, repeating the process. I suppose this clacking noise is my earliest memory of our house. Day and night it echoed in my ears, all the while that I was growing up.

  Okane was always on her guard with me, hardly daring to let me out of her sight. Yet my mother often scolded her. “Do be careful, Okane!” she would say. There was an earth-covered footbridge over the pond, and whenever I tried to cross it Okane was sure to stop me. Sometimes Mother came running after me too. Most of the pond was shallow, but it was over six feet deep at one place, where a hole had been sunk so that the fish could survive if the rest of the water dried up. The hole was near the bridge, and Mother warned me about it time and again. “It would be dreadful if you fell in there,” she used to say. “Even a grownup couldn't get out.”

  On the other side of the bridge was an arbor, and next to it the teahouse, my favorite playroom.

  “Wait outside, Okane!” I would tell my nurse. “You mustn't come in after me.” I was delighted with the low-roofed, narrow little building because it seemed exactly like a toy house for a child. I would play there for hours: sprawling out on its straw-matted floor, going through the tiny doorways, turning the water on and off in the pantry, untying the braided cords of the wooden boxes I found and taking out the tea objects, or putting on one of the wide rush hats the guests wore when coming to the tea ceremony in the rain.

  Okane, who was standing outside, would begin to worry. “Tadasu!” she would call. “Don't stay any longer — your mother won't like it.” Or again: “Look! There's a great big centipede here! It's terrible if a centipede bites you!” I actually did see large centipedes in the teahouse a few times, but I was never bitten.

  I was far more afraid of the half dozen stone figures of Buddhist saints which stood here and there on the hill and around the pond. These were only three or four feet high, considerably smaller than the Korean statues before the inner gate, but their ugly, grotesque faces seemed somehow very Japanese. Some of them had hideously distorted noses and seemed to be staring at you out of the corners of their eyes; others seemed on the verge of a sly, malicious laugh. I never went near them after sunset.

  Now and then Mother called me over to the veranda when she fed crumbs to the fish.

  “Here, little fish,” she said, scattering crumbs out into the pond as the carp and crucian came swimming up from their hiding place in that deep hollow. Sometimes I sat close to her on the edge of the veranda, leaning against the low rail and tossing crumbs to them too; or else I sat on her lap, feeling the warm, resilient touch of her rather full thighs as she held me snugly in her embrace.

  In the summer my parents and I used to have supper by the pond, and sit there to enjoy the cool of evening. Occasionally we ordered food from a restaurant or had a man come in from a caterer, bringing all the ingredients and cooking them in our huge kitchen. Father would put a bottle of beer under the spout of the bamboo mortar. Mother would sit at the edge of the pond and dangle her feet in the water, where they looked more beautiful than ever. She was a small, delicately built woman, with plump, white little dumpling-like feet which she held quite motionless as she soaked them in the water, letting the coolness seep through her body. Years later, after I was grown up, I came across this line of Chinese verse:

  When she washes the inkstone,

  the fish come to swallow ink.

  Even as a young child I thought how pleasant it would be if the fish in our pond came gliding playfully around her beautiful feet, instead of coming only when we fed them.

  I remember that on one of those summer evenings I noticed some long, thin, slippery-looking leaves in my soup, and asked Mother what they were.

  “That's called nenunawa,” she said.

  “Oh? What's that?”

  “A kind of water plant, like a lotus — they gather it at Mizoro Pond,” she explained in her soft, well-bred voice.

  Father laughed. “If you say it's nenunawa people won't know what you're talking about,” he told her. “They call it junsai nowadays.”

  “But doesn't nenunawa sound long and slippery, just the way it is? That's the name for it in all the old poems, you know.” And she began reciting one of them. From that time on it was always called nenunawa at our house, even by the maids and by the men who came to cook for us.

  At nine o'clock I would be told that it was bedtime, and be taken away by my nurse. I don't know how late my parents stayed up; they slept in the room with the veranda around it, while Okane and I were in a small room of six mats on the north side, across the corridor from them. Sometimes I fretted and lay awake a long time, pleading: “Let me sleep with Mama!”

  Then Mother would come to look in at me. “My, what a little baby I have tonight,” she would say, taking me up in her arms and carrying me to her bedroom. Even though the bed had already been prepared for sleeping, father would not be in it — perhaps he was still out in the pavilion. Mother herself had yet to dress for bed. She lay down beside me just as she was, not taking off her sash, and held me so that my head nestled under her chin. The light was on, but I buried my face inside the neck opening of her kimono and had a blurred impression of being swathed in darkness. The faint scent of her hair, which was done up in a chignon, wafted into my nostrils. Seeking out her nipples with my mouth, I played with them like an infant, took them between my lips, ran my tongue over them. She always let me do that as long as I wanted, without a word of reproach. I believe I used to suckle at her breasts until I was a fairly large child, perhaps because in those days people were not at all strict about weaning their children. When I used my tongue as hard as I could, licking her nipples and pressing around them, the milk flowed out nicely. The mingled scents of her hair and milk hovered there in her bosom, around my face. As dark as it was, I could still dimly see her white breasts.

  “Go to sleep now,” she would murmur; and as she comforted me, patting me on the head and stroking my back, she began to sing her usual lullaby:

  “Go to sleep, go to sleep.

  Don't cry, there's a good child, go to sleep.

  It's Mother cuddling you,

  Mother cradling you,

  Don't cry, there's a good child, go to sleep.”

  She would sing it over and over while I drifted off into a peaceful sleep, still clutching her breasts and running my tongue around her nipples. Often my dreams wer
e penetrated by the distant clack of the water mortar, far beyond my shuttered windows.

  Okane also knew a number of lullabies, such as this one:

  When I asked the pillow, “Is he asleep?”

  The honest pillow said, “He is!”

  She sang many others for me too, but I was never easily lulled asleep by her songs. (Nor, in the room I shared with her, could I hear the sound of the water mortar.) Mother's voice had a seductive rhythm all its own, a rhythm that filled my mind with pleasant fancies and quickly put me to sleep.

  Although I have thus far written “mother” without specifying which of the two I meant, my intention has been to relate only memories of my true mother. Yet it occurs to me that these recollections seem a little too detailed for a child of three or four. Seeing her dangle her feet in the pond, or hearing her talk about nenunawa, for instance — would such things, if they had really happened when I was a child of that age, have left any impression whatever? Possibly impressions of the first mother were overlaid by those of the second, confusing my memory. For early one autumn, just as the chestnut tree at our doorway was beginning to shed its leaves, my twenty-two-year-old mother, who was with child, contracted an infection of the womb and died. I was five at the time. A few years later I had a stepmother.

  I cannot recall my first mother's features distinctly. According to Okane, she was very beautiful, but all that I can summon to my mind's eye is the vague image of a full, round face. Since I often looked up at her as she held me in her arms, I could see her nostrils clearly. The lamplight gave a pink luminosity to her lovely nose: seen from that angle, it appeared to be all the more exquisitely proportioned — not in the least like Okane's nose, or anyone else's. But when I try to remember her other features — her eyes, her mouth — I can only visualize them in a very general way. Here too I am perhaps being misled by the superimposed image of my second mother. After my real mother's death Father used to read the sutras and say prayers for her every morning and evening before her memorial tablet, and I often sat beside him praying too. But as hard as I stared at her photograph, which stood beside the tablet on our Buddhist altar, I never had the sudden poignant feeling that this was my own mother — the woman who had suckled me at her breasts.

  All I could tell from the picture was that she wore her hair in an old-fashioned style, and that she seemed even plumper than I had remembered. It was too faded to re-create in my mind the way she actually looked.

  “Papa,” I asked, “is that really Mama's picture?”

  “Yes, of course it is,” he said. “It was taken before we were married, when she was about sixteen.”

  “But it doesn't look like her, does it? Why don't you put up something better? Don't you have another one?”

  “Your mother didn't like to be photographed, so this is the only one I could find of her by herself. After we were married we had some pictures taken together but the man did such a bad job retouching them that she thought they spoiled her face. Now this one shows her when she was a very young girl, and she may seem different from the way you remember her. But that was how she really looked at the time.”

  I could see then that it did bear a certain resemblance to her, though by no means enough to bring the forgotten image of my mother back to life.

  I would think of her wistfully as I leaned on the balustrade and watched the carp swimming in the pond yearn for her as I listened to the clack of the bamboo mortar. But it was especially at night, when I was lying in bed in my nurse's arms, that I felt an indescribable longing for my dead mother. That sweet, dimly white dream world there in her warm bosom among the mingled scents of her hair and her milk — why had it disappeared? Was this what “death” meant? Where could she have gone? Okane tried to console me by singing Mother's lullabies, but that made my grief all the worse. “No, no!” I cried, thrashing about in bed. “I don't like you to sing for me! I want Mama!” Kicking off the covers, I howled and wept.

  At last my father would come in to say: “Tadasu, you mustn't give Okane so much trouble. Now be a good boy and go to sleep.” But I cried even harder.

  “Your mother has died,” he would tell me, his voice thickening and faltering. “It doesn't do any good to cry about it. I feel as much like crying as you do — maybe more — but I'm being brave. You try to be brave too.”

  Then Okane would say: “If you want to see your mama, you ought to pray as hard as you can. If you do, she'll come to you in a dream, and say: 'Tadasu, you're such a good little boy!' But if you cry she won't come!” Sometimes Father would give up in despair at my incessant wailing and screaming, and say: “All right then, come sleep with me.” Taking me along to his room, he would lie down with me in his arms. But I found his masculine smell so different from my mother's fragrance that I was inconsolable. Rather than sleep with him, I preferred to sleep with my nurse.

  “Papa, you make me feel sick. I want to go back to Okane.”

  “Well, go sleep in the other room then.”

  But Okane would scold me for it when I got back into bed with her. “Even if your father does make you feel sick, why do you have to say such an awful thing?” She used to say I looked exactly like him, not like my mother. That made me unhappy too.

  Father always spent an hour morning and evening reading aloud from the sutras before the memorial tablet. As soon as I thought he was going to stop I would steal up to the altar and sit beside him for the few remaining minutes, running my little string of prayer beads through my fingers. But sometimes he led me there by the hand, saying: “Come to pray for your mother”; and I had to sit still beside him for the whole hour.

  The next spring, when I was six, I entered elementary school, and from that time on I seldom made a nuisance of myself at night. But I longed for Mother all the more. Even my unsociable father, who had never cared for any company except my mother's, seemed to feel lonely, and began going out occasionally for diversion. On Sundays he often took Okane and me along to dine at a riverside restaurant in Yamabana, or on an excursion to the hills west of the city.

  One day he said to me: “When your mother was alive we often used to go out to Yamabana for dinner. Do you remember that, Tadasu?”

  “I only remember once. Weren't some frogs croaking in the river behind us?”

  “That's right. Do you remember hearing your mother sing a song there one evening?”

  “I don't think so.”

  Then, as if it had suddenly occurred to him: “Tadasu suppose there was someone just like your mother and suppose she was willing to come and be your mother — how would you feel about that?”

  “Do you really think there is such a person?” I asked dubiously. “Do you know anyone, Papa?”

  “No,” he replied hastily, “I only said 'suppose.'“ He seemed anxious to drop the subject.

  I am not sure exactly how old I was when Father and I had that conversation. Nor have I any way of knowing whether he already had someone in mind, or whether it was simply a chance remark. But when I was in the second grade — in the spring, when the double globeflowers at the mouth of the waterfall were in full bloom — I came home from school one day and was startled to hear the sound of a koto from the inner room. Who could be playing? My mother had been an accomplished musician of the Ikuta school, and I had often seen Father sitting beside her on the veranda, listening absorbedly as she played for him on her six-foot-long koto, which was decorated with a pine-tree pattern worked in gold lacquer. After her death, her beloved koto was wrapped in a cloth dyed with our family crest of paulownia leaves and flowers, placed in a black-lacquered box, and put away in the storehouse, where it had remained undisturbed ever since. Could that be her koto? I wondered, as I came in through the side entrance. Just then Okane appeared, and whispered into my ear. “Tadasu, be very quiet and peek in the other room. There's a pretty young lady here today!”

  When I went through the eight-mat room to the other side, pushed open the sliding doors a little, and peered in, Father noticed me at o
nce and beckoned. The strange lady was engrossed in her koto; even after I came up beside her she kept on playing without so much as turning her head. She sat where my mother used to sit, and in the very same pose, her instrument laid out at the same angle, her left hand stretched out in the same way as she pressed the strings. The koto was not Mother's — it was a plain one, completely unadorned. But Father's position and attitude as he sat there listening so attentively were exactly the same as in my mother's time. It was only after she finished and took off the ivory finger picks that the strange lady turned to smile at me.

  “Are you Tadasu?” she inquired politely, in a well-bred Kyoto accent. “You look just like your father.”

  “Make a nice bow,” Father said, putting his hand on my head.

  “Did you just come home from school?” she asked. Then she slipped the picks back on her fingers and began to play again. I didn't recognize the piece, but it sounded extremely difficult. Meanwhile I sat obediently beside my father and watched her every movement, hardly daring to breathe. Even after she stopped playing for us, she made no attempt to shower me with compliments — all she did was smile when our eyes met. She talked to Father in a calm, relaxed way, and seemed to have an air of composure. Soon a ricksha came for her; she was gone before dusk. But she left her koto with us. We stood it up against the wall in the alcove of the eight-mat room.