“Oyasumi nasai.” She replies, softly, “Mata kite kudasai. Ki o tsukete kudasai.” Then doors close and there are steps in the lane.
I go back to bed feeling relieved, and yet somewhat uncertain, for a lot can be accomplished in half an hour. And why should she say both “Please come again!” and “Please take care!”? I know these are conventional phrases, but was it necessary to use both of them?
7
I get up early, for during the period of wakefulness, which begins every morning at five-thirty, I decide that it would be clever tactics to be downstairs before Kazumi. I don’t know exactly what I wish to say to her, but I am determined to be pretty scathing.
I put on an egg to boil and get hot and angry searching for an egg-cup, but none is to be found. I had forgotten that many Americans don’t use egg-cups and peel their boiled eggs in a messy way and then eat them from a plate as if they were poached. Reminded that Queen Victoria’s daughter experienced a similar lack of an egg-cup at the German Court, I copy the Prussian royal etiquette and use a liqueur glass.
I rehearse some imaginary scenes with Kazumi in which, in turn, I am hurt, then I am stern but reasonable like a father, then I am heavily sarcastic (the Japanese hate sarcasm), and finally I am a beast. In the last role I slap her twice across the face, first with the palm and then with the back of the hand and say, “Get out!”
While I am enacting in my mind the violent way of reproaching Kazumi, I hear her descend her staircase and go into the bathroom. Then, without any warning, she slides open the sitting room door and before I have been able to lower my newspaper she has murmured “Good morning” and gone into the kitchen. I go on looking at the paper; perhaps having been taken unawares I have hit on the best solution: I shall just ignore her. So when she passes through the sitting room again, I hide behind the newspaper and pay no heed to her second “Good morning.”
I am still staring at the headlines when she returns and continue to do so, though I can see out of the corner of my eye that she is standing over me. Obstinately, childishly, I refuse to recognize her presence. Then, suddenly, she bends over the top of my frail barricade and plants a kiss on my head. “I come back six-thirty,” she says and is out of the room, into her shoes, and down the lane before I have collected my wits, which her startling action has scattered in all directions.
The spot which her lips lightly touched tingles as from a blessing or an accolade and I sit stunned for a while, only giving Misa-san a vague nod on her entrance. I remain in a daze most of the morning, sitting with my back to the desk looking out of the window at the temple wall and thinking of Kazumi, who, of course, is forgiven. After I have grunted farewell to the bowing maid, I take some of the cookery books down from their shelf with the object of deciding about dinner. What shall I give her? I settle on goulash after an unsatisfactory perusal of the books whose recipes seem too complicated for the simple shopping I can do in the vicinity. Goulash is easy; it is one of my specialties.
I am so hot after cutting up onions and chopping meat in the kitchen that I spend the afternoon in the air-conditioned room and do not go upstairs until five o’clock. On the way I notice on the floor of the genkan an air-letter from my wife. I do not even bother to pick it up and continue up the stairs to the bedroom, where I resume my study of the temple roof and the fig tree among whose dark green leaves, I now notice, little round buttons are burgeoning. There is a gray tradesman’s van in the temple compound and a woman is taking down the drenched washing outside the subsidiary temple building, which, I think, must be let off as apartments. How dare my wife write to me! I suppose she got my Kyoto address from my bank. It was quite wrong of the manager to divulge my whereabouts. Her letter is an intrusion. I wanted to spend the months of July and August cut off from her and from any thoughts of her, and now she is pushing herself into my life, and during the summer holidays too. I decide not to read the letter; after five minutes, though, I go downstairs and fetch it. It bears a London postmark. Well, she often goes to London.
God! My wife says she is planning to come out here next month. She has been invited to stay with some friends (the Crawfords; I know them) in San Francisco and thinks of coming on to Japan. She has arranged for our daughter to be with some cousins. I don’t want Monica here. I shall write and tell her that the humid heat is worse than ever this summer, is quite unbearable in fact, and suggest that she either cancel her visit or postpone it until the autumn. She proposes, quite unpractically, that I should return to England with her. “Resign from your silly job,” she says. She doesn’t realize, never did, that one has certain obligations and that a contract is a contract; because of her money, she has been spoiled all her life and has always been able to get out of any commitments she hasn’t wished to fulfill, and she imagines that anyone can do the same.
If she really is coming out, I must hurry up and make hay while the sun shines.
By six-thirty the goulash is ready and I have mashed the potatoes, laid the table, drunk one whiskey, and read the evening paper, but Kazumi does not return until after seven, by which hour the goulash is still ready and the potatoes have begun to burn and I have had three whiskeys.
“Tadaima!” she cries.
“Okaeri nasai,” I reply, stirring the stew.
Kazumi comes into the kitchen. “I am sorry.”
“You did say six-thirty.” I can’t help being prickly.
“They kept me at the office.”
“The potatoes are beginning to burn.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looks sorry too, sorry and concerned; she looks hot. Generously, I suggest she has a shower and gratefully she accepts the offer; therefore by the time she comes to the table in her very brief shorts, sleeveless blouse, and no stockings, I am feeling rather smug. In spite of her protestations I insist on her sitting at the table and my serving the goulash, and to make her feel even more under an obligation I pointedly give her the larger helping and put some of the burnt mashed potato on my plate. As soon as I have made the effort of getting down on the floor and putting my legs under the table, I notice that I have forgotten the salt, so martyrlike, I start to rise. At once she rises, and being younger and nimbler than I she is on her feet first.
“What do you want?”
“The salt.”
“I get.”
“No.” I am standing now and near the kitchen door. “I’ll get it.”
“Please.”
“I insist.”
When I have returned from the kitchen, she is sitting down again, but she has changed the plates round.
With a grunt I drop to the floor. “Why did you do that?” I hand back her plate.
“No. I like this one.”
“No,” I say severely, “that one is mine.”
“No.” She is firm. “Itadakimasu.” She begins to eat. “Very delicious,” she says before she has had time to taste it properly.
“Too liquid,” I say, deprecatingly.
“Very delicious. Oishii.”
Her praise, which I enjoy, is interrupted by a siren and a bell.
“Fire!” she cries. “Fire!” She leaps up as if under a hypnotic compulsion and dashes out of the house. I follow, but not until I have had my fill of goulash. The Japanese don’t care if their food is hot or cold. I do. Down the lane housewives, husbands, grandfathers, children, grandmothers are running, not away from the fire, to safety, but towards it, to watch. There is not much to see: only black smoke billowing out of the first floor window of a shop in the nearby main street. The fire engines have arrived and numerous firemen in blue uniforms and black lacquer helmets are milling around getting out hoses, moving furniture from the stricken room. I return to the goulash with Kazumi.
“Who was he?” I ask, knowing that Kazumi will realize that I am referring to her visitor