Even those plants and trees that had gotten the worst of the storm, now green and dripping, washed and clean again, respired the faint, fresh scent of earth. It was as if everything, breathing through its pores a life deep in lively freshness, aware only now of the full authority and the benevolence of nature, steeped itself single-mindedly in its own happiness.
Moving their cushions to the veranda edge of the room, the wife and guest lost themselves in the lovely scene, which even in the dullest person alive must have distilled a drop of its charm and touched his heart. In the guest's heart also there was a happy contentment. Beyond the moral, negative satisfaction of not having slept with his friend's wife, he felt a pleasure approaching arrogance in the fact that today, of all days, he had attentively, intimately, honestly, and stringently, as if holding a baby in his hands, steadily, from beginning to end, looked at his heart, the heart that usually was so difficult to grasp, and especially that while doing so, he had nakedly exposed that heart to the glamour of such a temptation.
"The fact that Takebe didn't do anything wrong is a mere result of circumstance. For me it was otherwise. When I thought to go forward, I went forward. But when I did so, my feelings were not timid. I did not command them, nor did I compel them in any way. But I never let them out of my sight. That was all! I did not let myself get moralistic. I was truly pure. I might have wrestled with myself from thinking too much about it, but that's nothing to be ashamed of.. ." Looking back on himself, the guest gave himself good marks. Whether or not he was right to is not this writer's concern. But surely he was right to try to see himself clearly ...
Just then a man in a livery coat, apparently a gardener, came running along the far side of the hedge. As soon as he caught sight of the wife's face, he bowed hurriedly and called out, "Madam. There's a fire. Over there. It was set off by that worst thunderbolt."
The man immediately dashed off again. From where he had pointed to, some white smoke, which one might have mistaken for a remnant of the low clouds, quietly climbed into the now windless sky. With a start, the wife exclaimed, "But that's close by the river... do you think it's all right?"
"Didn't that man say the lightning struck the water-wheel shed?"
"No, he never said that. What are you talking about?"
"Perhaps. But somehow I feel as if he did say that."
"Wake up, now. Do you think it's all right?"
"Yes, it's all right."
"Is it really all right?"
"It's all right, I tell you."
"It's bad when you don't mean what you say."
"If you like, we can send Takebe over for a look."
"You're as cool as a cucumber, aren't you?"
"It's not that... it's just that it's all right."
A few minutes later the houseboy, dutifully getting ready, dashed off in his stocking feet. His figure, half-visible above the rice ears, rapidly receded along the twists and turns of the paddy's ridge path and before long was lost to sight. Abruptly a shaft of sunshine broke through a rift in the clouds. Gliding across the green paddies, it fanned out in a broad sweep of light toward the west.
"Strange. Why did I think that man said the lightning hit the water-wheel shed? I felt sure he did."
"You were daydreaming. Besides, the shed is right around there."
"And that's where the lightning struck. Sometimes a thing comes clear to me all by itself. It's as if I was a god. Ask them when they get back. I know that's what happened."
"Oh, here they come!"
In the gently slanting sunlight, across the beautiful, wet, shining color of the rice paddies far in the distance, the tiny figures of the houseboy and her husband were spotted by the keen-eyed wife.
"Oh. Where?"
"Way over there, by that tree. The one with the dense foliage. Just to the left. See them?"
"Which tree?"
"What poor eyes you have. You still don't see? Well, so much for your theory about the water-wheel shed ... no, no, much more toward us."
"This and the water-wheel shed are two different things."
Touching shoulders, they gave their warmth to each other. They were so close that they were almost cheek to cheek. But they were completely unaware of that . . . now and then a low peal of thunder echoed quietly in the distance. But already any danger was all gone.
In the distance the husband began to wave his hat.
It was the garden of an old family named Nakamura. In the Edo period (1603-1868) their house had been an official inn for daimyo and the nobility.
For ten years or so after the Meiji Restoration, the garden somehow preserved its old appearance. There was a pond in the shape of a gourd, and the pines of an artificial knoll dipped their branches to its calm surface. There were also two summer houses, called Stork's Nest Inn and Pure Heart Pavilion. From a mountain ledge at one end of the pond a stream whitely cascaded. A stone lantern, which had been named by Princess Kazu no Miya as she journeyed from the capital, stood among yellow roses that grew and spread with the years. But flowers could not disguise the air of desolation that hung over the garden. Particularly in early spring, when the trees inside and outside the garden put out their buds at the same time, one sensed with unease an uncouth power that was all the more evident for the picturesque, contrived scenery. A gallant old Nakamura gentleman lived here in retirement with his aged wife, who suffered from boils around the head. Sitting by the kotatsu in the main house that gave onto the garden, they passed the day pleasantly enough at go or cards. Sometimes, however, when he had been beaten five or six times running, the old man would become very angry.
The eldest son and family head, with his young wife, who was also his cousin, lived in a separate building connected to the main house by a roofed corridor. This son, whom I will call Bunshitsu, "Detached Ward," had a violent temper. Naturally his sickly wife and younger brothers and even the old man were afraid of him. Only Seigetsu, a mendicant sage then resident in the town, came often to see him. The son took an uncharacteristic delight in serving him sake and challenging him to calligraphic contests. "'The mountain cuckoo, in the lingering fragrance of flowers—' Seigetsu." "'Now and again, the glimmering cascade—' Bunshitsu." Such linked verses as these have survived.
Besides Bunshitsu, there were two other sons. The second had been adopted by relatives in the grain business, and the youngest worked for a major wine merchant in a town about fifteen miles away. As if they'd agreed on it beforehand, they almost never came home. Besides living at a distance, the third son was temperamentally incompatible with the present head of the family. The second son, as a result of wild living, was scarcely to be seen even at his adoptive home.
In two or three years the garden's desolation gradually increased. The pond had begun to clog with duckweed, and dead trees mingled with live in the plantations. Meanwhile, during a summer of severe drought, the old man had died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Four or five days before this, as he had sat drinking some cheap sake, a court noble in white ceremonial robes had repeatedly entered and emerged from the Pure Heart Pavilion across the pond. Such was the vision, at any rate, that appeared to him in the noonday light. Late the following spring, having appropriated the money of his adoptive family, the second son eloped with a waitress. That autumn, the eldest son's wife prematurely gave birth to a boy.
After his father's death, the eldest son lived in the main house with his mother. The detached quarters had been rented to the headmaster of the local grade school. The headmaster was an adherent of Fukuzawa Yukichi's utilitarian theories, and persuaded the eldest son to plant fruit trees in the garden. Now when spring came around, peaches, apricots,