Quicksand Read online

  “Yes, that’s right,” she was saying. “No, we’ve been expecting her, but she hasn’t come yet. . . . Yes. Yes, I’ll give her the message. . . . Not at all. . . . We’re grateful for your generosity in having our mistress over so often. . . .”

  That sounded funny to me, so I inquired: “Was that phone call from the Tokumitsus?”

  “Yes, it was,” she said, with a giggle.

  “And didn’t you say ‘having our mistress over so often’? Who was that supposed to be?”

  Again she giggled. “Don’t you know, madam?” she asked pertly. “I was talking about you, as your personal maid.”

  When I went on questioning her, I was told she had been instructed to say she was at my husband’s office in Osaka.

  I repeated all this to Mitsuko and asked if it was true.

  “Yes, of course,” she replied casually. “I told my family he has two offices, one in Imabashi and one over here, and I gave them this number. Why don’t you tell your husband something like that too, Sister? You could say it’s a branch of our Semba shop if you want to, or just make up anything you like.”

  So I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand, and although I said to myself I had to escape, by this time I was helpless. I knew I was being used by Mitsuko and that all the while she was calling me her dear sister she was actually making a fool of me.

  . . . Yes, now that I think of it, Mitsuko once told me: “I’d much rather be worshiped by someone of my own sex. It’s natural for a man to look at a woman and think she’s beautiful, but when I realize I can have another woman infatuated with me, I ask myself if I’m really that beautiful! It makes me blissfully happy!”

  No doubt that was the kind of vanity that made her want to steal away my love for my husband, and yet I was sure Mitsuko’s own heart was drawn to Watanuki. Still, I felt I couldn’t stand being parted from her again, and so, jealous as I was, I kept pretending to be confident of her love, never breathing a syllable of Watanuki’s name. I’m sure she saw through my pretense. Even though she always called me her older sister, I had become the one to defer to her, as if I were the younger one.

  One day when we were together at the inn as usual, she said: “Sister, would you be unwilling to see Watanuki? . . . I don’t know what you think of him, but he hasn’t been able to get over feeling sorry for what happened, and he says he’s anxious to meet you again, so that we can all be friends. Eijiro’s not a bad person; I believe you’d like him if you got to know him.”

  “Yes, we ought to get acquainted. It’s strange not to have anything to do with each other, and if that’s what he says, I’d like to meet him too. If he’s somebody you’re fond of, Mitsu, I’m sure I’ll be fond of him myself.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you will. Then you’ll see him today?”

  “Anytime at all. But where is he now?”

  “He came here to the inn a while ago.”

  That was what I had been expecting, and I said: “Have him come in, then.”

  Watanuki promptly joined us.

  “Ah, Sister, it’s you!” Now he was calling me Sister, though I had been Mrs. Kakiuchi to him the time before. But the moment he saw me he knelt down into a formal posture, as if he felt intimidated. “I can’t apologize enough for the other night. . . .”

  Anyway, that first meeting had been late at night, when he was in someone else’s kimono; this time it was bright daylight, and he was wearing a dark-blue jacket and white serge trousers. I had a different impression—he seemed about twenty-six or -seven, but with an even fairer complexion than I remembered. How extraordinarily handsome! I thought. And yet in fact I found him rather expressionless, pretty as a picture but somehow out of another era.

  “He reminds you of that matinee idol Okada Tokihiko, doesn’t he?” Mitsuko remarked. Actually, he looked much more feminine than Tokihiko—his eyes were narrow, with rather plump eyelids, and there was something shifty about him, a sort of nervous twitch to his eyebrows.

  “Eijiro, you needn’t be so ceremonious. Sister doesn’t have anything against you.”

  Mitsuko was doing her best to intercede, but for my part I couldn’t warm up to him. I couldn’t overcome my dislike for the fellow. Maybe Watanuki sensed that, for he kept to his formal pose, solemn and unsmiling.

  Only Mitsuko seemed to enjoy the situation.

  “What’s wrong, Eijiro?” she said, laughing. “You seem out of sorts. With a face like that, you’re not being very polite to Sister, are you?” He was still looking serious as she gave him a meaningful glance and poked his cheek with her fingertip. “Listen, Sister. The truth is, he’s jealous.”

  “That’s not so! It really isn’t. That’s a mistake!”

  “It is too so! Shall I tell her what you said just now?”

  “And what was that?”

  “You said you hated being a man, didn’t you? You wished you’d been born a woman like Sister.”

  “Maybe I did—but that’s not jealousy!”

  Possibly they had planned this silly quarrel to flatter me, but I kept silent, thinking it would be foolish to join in.

  “Anyway,” Watanuki said, “don’t embarrass me like that, in front of Sister.”

  “Then why not try to be a little more pleasant?”

  Finally they dropped the subject, and the three of us left to have dinner at the Tsuruya restaurant. We even went to a movie at the Shochiku on the way home. Still, we didn’t seem to feel at ease with one another.

  17

  OH YES, I forgot to mention it, but when I left the Kasayamachi inn phone number at my house, I said it was where Mitsuko’s father’s mistress lived.

  I suppose that sounds odd—Mitsuko had suggested saying it was a branch of their Semba shop, but meeting at a place like that seemed even stranger. Maybe I should say she was in the hospital, I thought at first, until it occurred to me that she couldn’t be staying very long at the hospital, not to mention the danger of my husband’s deciding to stop in on his way home from work! Just as I was racking my brain over what to do, Ume came up with this new idea.

  We’d have to say that Mitsuko was still pregnant—the medicine she took didn’t work, and the doctor refused to give her an abortion—and that as her stomach got bigger and bigger, she finally confessed to her mother and it was arranged for her to be taken in by her father’s mistress until the baby was born. His mistress was living at the Izutsu inn in Kasayamachi, we’d say; I would give its actual name in case my husband tried to look it up in the telephone book. He could even come to meet me there.

  At this Mitsuko burst out laughing. “I’ll have to stuff padding around my stomach before I come to your house!” she said. But that’s what we decided, to be on the safe side.

  My husband was completely taken in. “So Mitsuko’s really pregnant, is she?” he asked, looking quite sympathetic.

  “You told me not to get any more involved, you know. That’s why I wouldn’t help her, no matter what she said. So she has to stay cooped up indoors; she can’t set foot outside until the baby is born. It’s like being in prison—she’s so bored she wants me to visit her every day. What should I do? . . . I’m afraid she might develop a grudge against me. I couldn’t sleep at night if I left her all alone.”

  “I suppose that’s true, but it’ll make trouble for you if you get mixed up with her again.”

  “Mm, yes, I thought so too. But this time she’s been through so much that she’s a changed person. Now she’ll have to be allowed to marry Watanuki, she tells me, and her family seems to agree. Anyway, nobody goes to see her these days—I’m the only one she has to rely on. Even if it’s all her own fault, Mitsuko’s in a really pitiful state. ‘Listen, Sister,’ she says, ‘now that I’m pregnant how can anyone have the wrong idea about us? I’ll come over one of these days with Watanuki to apologize to your husband, so can’t we go on seeing each other like real sisters?’ That’s all she wants.”

  He didn’t seem ready to accept that. But in the end he
let me do as I pleased and only said: “Just be as careful as you can.”

  From then on I openly received phone calls from Kasayamachi, asking if madam was in, and I called home without hesitation myself; sometimes my husband would call me at the inn around dinnertime and ask: “Won’t you be back soon?” That’s the way things were going, and I felt that Ume had hit on a good idea.

  As for my relations with Watanuki, Mitsuko had managed to bring us together, but we remained wary of each other and wouldn’t let down our guard. Neither of us suggested meeting again, and Mitsuko herself seemed to have given up trying to make us friends. Anyway, one day—about two weeks after we all went to the Shochiku, I think it was—Mitsuko and I had spent the afternoon at the inn, but about five-thirty she chased me out:

  “Do you mind leaving before me, Sister? I have a little something to take care of.”

  That was always happening, so I didn’t feel particularly annoyed.

  “All right, I’ll go on ahead of you,” I said.

  But as soon as I left the inn I heard a low voice calling: “Sister!” When I turned to look, it was Watanuki.

  “Are you on your way home, Sister?” he asked.

  “Yes, I am. Mitsu’s waiting, so hurry on in,” I replied sarcastically, and started walking down the street toward Someoncho to look for a taxi.

  “Please . . . just a moment,” he called after me, following close behind. “There’s something I want to discuss with you. Could we walk around the neighborhood for an hour or so, if you don’t mind?”

  “I’m perfectly willing to hear what you have to say,” I told him, “but she is waiting for you.”

  “Well, maybe I ought to phone her,” Watanuki said.

  We stopped in at the nearby Umezono tearoom for a snack, and he telephoned Mitsuko. After that we strolled north along the Tazaemon Bridge Avenue.

  “I told her some important business had come up and I might be an hour late,” he said. “Would you promise to keep our meeting secret, Sister? I can’t talk unless you do.”

  “If I’m told to keep it to myself, you can be sure I will!” I replied sharply. “But sometimes while I’m trying not to break a promise, I find that people are making a fool of me. . . .”

  “Oh, Sister. You think Mitsuko acts as she does because I’ve been pulling the strings, don’t you? I know you have your reasons for thinking so.” He looked down and sighed. “That’s precisely what I want to talk to you about. Which of us do you believe she loves most, you or me? I’m sure you feel you’re the victim and that you’ve been used, but I feel the same way. I admit I’m jealous. According to Mitsuko, having you visit her is just a convenient trick to deceive her parents; that’s why she’s seeing you, she says. But does she need to do that any longer? Isn’t it bound to come between us? If Mitsuko loves me, why hasn’t she been willing to marry me?”

  I listened intently, but as far as I could tell, Watanuki was deadly serious. And what he said seemed to make sense.

  “If she won’t marry you it must be because her family is opposed, don’t you think? She always tells me she’d like to get married.”

  “That’s what she says, of course. I’m sure her family would be opposed to me. Even so, she’d find a way to win them over if she really wanted to. All the more so in her present condition—where else could she go?”

  . . . Yes, from what he was telling me, Mitsuko must have been pregnant after all! I listened with amazement as he went on.

  “She says her father is positively furious and would never let her marry anyone who isn’t worth at least a million yen, certainly not a penniless, no-account fellow. If she has a baby, they’ll send it out for adoption. That’s ridiculous! Most of all, there’s the poor baby— it’s inhuman, isn’t it? What do you think, Sister?”

  But he seemed amazed when I said: “Actually, this is the first I’ve heard that Mitsu’s pregnant. Is she quite sure about that?”

  “What? The first you’ve heard?” He stared incredulously into my eyes.

  “Yes, it is. Mitsu hasn’t said a word to me.”

  “But still—she came to see you about an abortion, didn’t she, Sister?”

  “Yes, but that was an out-and-out lie, just a pretext for trying to get together with me again. When I told my husband Mitsuko was pregnant, I only wanted an excuse to go to see her.”

  “Oh, is that so?” said Watanuki. Suddenly the color drained from his face, though his eyes looked bloodshot.

  18

  BUT, SISTER, why wouldn’t she tell you she was pregnant? Did she have to lie about it, to you of all people? You really didn’t know?”

  He kept pressing me, as if he had his doubts, but the fact is that Mitsuko hadn’t told me anything of the sort. According to Watanuki, she was already in her third month and had been to see a doctor. In that case, she would have been pregnant at the time she made that scene about hemorrhaging, though at around three months only a doctor could have told her what her condition was—and I had even heard her say from her own lips: “I don’t think I could be having a baby.” There’s no question that she was putting on an act that day, but if what Watanuki said was true, she still might have been trying to conceal her pregnancy from me.

  “Did she say why she couldn’t have a baby?” Watanuki asked. “Was it because she was following the instructions in that book or because she had some kind of physical condition?”

  Of course I’d always tried to avoid anything to do with Watanuki, so I never pursued it with her. . . . And then only the other day she had remarked playfully: “I’ll have to stuff padding around my stomach before I come to your house, Sister!”

  I couldn’t believe she was pregnant, I told him, and he replied that Mitsuko was determined not to get married, but once her pregnancy was obvious to everyone she’d be forced to, no matter what.

  “I’m sure she’s going to hide it as long as she can,” he said.

  In Watanuki’s opinion, Mitsuko’s real preference was for her lesbian lover; she was much more in love with me, and that was why she didn’t want to get married. . . . She thought I’d abandon her if she married and had his child, so she kept putting things off from day to day, wondering what to do, whether to try to get rid of the baby she was carrying or to find a way to alienate him. . . .

  Maybe it was my own bias, but I simply couldn’t believe that she was so much in love with me.

  “No, no, it’s absolutely true. You’re the fortunate one, Sister!” he said. “Ah, it’s just the opposite with me—what wretched luck I’ve had!”

  He spoke like an actor in a melodrama and looked almost ready to cry. From the first time we met, I had thought of him as rather effeminate, but when he talked like that, his whole expression and manner seemed unpleasantly womanish, weak but insistent, as he kept stealing sidelong glances at me to see how I was reacting. No wonder Mitsuko might not be too fond of him, I began to think.

  Then Watanuki said that the night their clothes were stolen in Kasayamachi, he didn’t want her to call me. She should have had the nerve to borrow a kimono from one of the maids to wear home. She could have told her parents she had become involved with a certain man and it was too late to do anything about it. They could have married right away or just made up their minds to elope, and they would have had nothing to fear. How could she be so shameless as to call Sister at a time like that? Sister, who had no idea what was going on! “Besides,” he had said, “surely she wouldn’t come even if you called her.”

  But Mitsuko refused to listen. “I can’t go home tonight unless I have the right kimono.”

  “Then let’s run away together!”

  “If we do, we’ll get in trouble later,” Mitsuko had said. “I can talk Sister into it, you’ll see. If I ask her, she won’t turn me down. Even if she’s a little mad at me, I’ll find a way to get around her.” And so she went to telephone me.

  “But it seemed somebody else was whispering to her, there by the phone,” I said.

  “Naturall
y I was worried, so I went to the telephone with her,” he told me.

  Before we realized it, Watanuki and I had crossed the Sankyu Bridge and come all the way to Hommachi Avenue. “Let’s go a little farther,” we agreed, crossing the streetcar tracks and heading toward Kitahama. Up till now everything I had imagined about him had been colored by my feelings toward Mitsuko, and I had seen him as a thoroughly despicable person. But this time he didn’t appear to be such a liar, and even that womanish, suspicious manner of his may have been at least partly shaped by Mitsuko—I myself had been warped by all her deceptions. The more I thought of it, the more reasonable it seemed—well, even if he felt he couldn’t trust me, still he gave me the impression of being sincere.

  Of course I didn’t believe that Mitsuko was more in love with me. “You must be mistaken about that,” I said, almost consolingly. “Look, Mr. Watanuki, you’ve just been worrying too much.”

  “No,” he protested. “I’d like to think so, but that’s wrong. Sister, you don’t know Mitsu’s true character.”

  In his view, Mitsuko was the sort of person who found it amusing to pretend to me that she loved Watanuki, and to Watanuki that she loved me. But her real preference was for me. Otherwise she wouldn’t have made up that story about the hospital and come to see me, would she, after we had broken off like that?

  “What did Mitsu say when she came to your house?” he asked me. “How did she ever manage to get back together with you? I heard about it later, but I don’t know any of the details.”

  So I told him all about the convulsions and hemorrhaging, to his astonishment.

  “Is that so?” he exclaimed over and over. “I never dreamed she caused such a commotion! Of course I knew she was pregnant, but I thought she should go ahead and have the baby, so I warned her against trying to get rid of it or doing anything unnatural. I was angry when I heard that she went to ask your advice. But still, even if she did secretly take some kind of medicine, I’m sure she was faking all the pain and hemorrhaging. What do you suppose that so-called blood was?”