She entered the gate of the nearby high school. The hush of evening had settled over the schoolyard. As she passed through the quadrangle, three young boys appeared from the opposite direction, chasing dragonflies. The large, grass-covered playground stood empty. Clear on the other side, by the clump of oleanders framing the back gate, she saw a tall man in a white summer kimono with two little girls in tow. He had a birdlime pole and was looking up into the trees.
She cut across the playground toward the swimming pool. Beside the pool stood three tall poplars. These three poplars were what she had come to paint. She had come to paint them once before, during summer vacation last year, but she’d found the swim team using the pool and watched their practice instead. Today no voices came from the pool. She broke into a run and dashed up the embankment.
“Oh no!” she exclaimed.
The pool was dry. She stood there gaping in surprise and disappointment.
“I can’t believe it! There’s no water.”
Suddenly it all seemed funny, and she started to laugh. Eggplant and sesame grew in a tiny little garden someone had planted on top of the embankment. Who would be tending a garden in a place like this?
She decided to draw the three poplars from a position diagonally across the pool and sat down at one corner. The pool without water would make an interesting effect, actually. The far end was shallow, to about half way, and then there was a steep drop that made this end much deeper. Tiles in dotted white lines marked the lanes on the bottom, and a few stray pebbles lay here and there. She would have expected the empty pool to be encrusted with dried moss, but it looked as though someone had polished it clean. Perhaps they really did that.
A popular song blared from the coffee shop behind the school:
We’ll meet again tomorrow Under the apple tree.
A steady breeze blew through the early evening light. The branches of the poplars swayed and rustled without pause, their leaves in rapid motion like the vibrating of a stringed instrument. How she loved to watch the poplars swaying tall in the wind! They seemed to blow the murky gloom in her heart completely away. No, that wasn’t true. They didn’t blow it completely away, but somehow they softened it. As she watched the leaves fluttering in the wind, she had the feeling that they were all speaking some fervent message—though she could not tell what that message might be.
Do thoughts like these come to me because I’m depressed? she wondered. I can’t understand my own behavior anymore. I mean, look at the other night, when I made myself so sick guzzling all that whiskey, one glass after another. Looking back on it now, I can’t think why I would have done such a thing. And I wonder that I didn’t die of alcohol poisoning. No matter how desperately alone I might have felt, how could I have been so reckless and vulgar as to swill down the whole rest of that bottle by the glassful?—especially when I knew it might not be safe. I really can’t understand myself anymore. It frightens me that I could do such a thing.
My husband really lit into me the next morning. Why had I gone and done such a fool thing? he demanded over and over, and the more I didn’t answer, the angrier he got, until finally he stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him. But I just couldn’t answer. “You could think about Michiko a little, too, you know,” he said. I guess I really was being a bad mother.
But I simply had no room for Michiko in my mind. It was all I could do to think about my own problems. What might affect my child ten or twenty years in the future is hardly my first concern when I can barely sustain myself from one day to the next right now. So even if people say I’m a bad mother, there’s really nothing I can do about it. Of course, I love Michiko. She’s such a good-natured child, and she’s been learning so much so fast recently that watching her grow isn’t just a pleasure, it’s endless amazement. If I were to lose her now, I’d be so devastated, I can’t begin to imagine what it would mean. But I’ve come to doubt even my ability to go on living, and stumbling through each day as it comes is the best I can do. Maybe I went terribly astray somewhere along the way. Maybe I got spoiled growing up in my grandmother’s care and turned into an incurable egotist. Maybe all my suffering comes simply from loving myself too much.
It was thoughts like these that had made her life seem an impossible burden to bear. She had come to the school ground with her watercolors precisely to forget such thoughts, but here she was caught up in them again, her palette and brushes abandoned at her side. Four or five damselflies had appeared in the sky above the poplars, circling round and round.
She heard voices and turned to see three boys walking from the dormitory toward the tennis courts, swinging their rackets as they went. One of them wore no shirt. Were they going to play tennis with three? Oh, if only I could play, too, she thought. To run back and forth across the court, chasing the ball, laughing without restraint, soaking myself in perspiration—just think how refreshing that would feel! Oh, how I wish I could be a student again! When I was young I had a world of my own, and everything in the larger world matched up perfectly with my own world. I was the ruler of that world. There, in complete abandon, I could bask in the sunshine and breathe the air and fly on the wind like a bird. Surrounded constantly by benevolence and love, I never knew a moment’s despair. If only I could go back to that world! If only I could be like the monkey magician Songoku and fly back instantaneously to that wonderful, lost world!
No, no, forget all that. It’s not true. Wanting to go back to my school days is nothing but sour grapes. But I’ll tell you, oh dear God, what I truly do want. One thing, and one thing alone: I want my husband to love me. When I say all that stuff about doubting myself and barely being able to go on living—those are just ways of avoiding the real issue. I want my husband to love me, and to love me alone. That’s the real issue. Let me say it now without hiding the truth. I want my husband to love me. That’s my whole life.
The husband was writing in his diary when he became aware of muffled sobs coming from the kitchen downstairs. He felt a sharp stabbing in his heart but decided to wait and see what might happen.
At that moment he had been writing about going to the symphony with his girlfriend last night, so he had good cause to be startled when the house suddenly filled with his wife’s late-night sobs. Indeed, it was a concert his wife had wanted to attend. She hadn’t said so directly, but her hints had been clear enough. And, in fact, he could have taken her; at one point he had even thought he might. But one day as he and the girl were leaving the office together, he found himself making a date with her instead. She had mentioned the concert first—speaking very much as though she wished she could go, needless to say. Thinking of his wife, he hesitated. If he had already made a definite date with his wife by then, he would no doubt have let the girl’s remarks pass unanswered. In retrospect, though, he had to admit that he’d probably delayed saying anything to his wife precisely because he thought he might want to ask the girl, and he wanted to keep that possibility open.
The husband himself was not that much of a music lover. Without someone else to nudge him into action, he wasn’t one to go and buy expensive tickets to a concert on his own. Even if he had decided to go with his wife, it would have been essentially as a favor to her. So you could say his decision to go with his girlfriend rather than his wife simply reflected the natural inclinations of his heart. At any rate, silencing his guilty conscience as best he could, he had lied to his wife and invited the girl to the concert. He discovered that the mixture of thrill and anxiety he experienced from going out in public with the girl—just the two of them, where anybody could see them—easily eclipsed the pain of lying to his wife. His earlier qualms remained almost entirely forgotten until the concert was over and he returned home.
As he listened, the sobs came faster and at a higher pitch—like a child cutting loose after some catastrophic disappointment. His twenty-four-year-old wife was crying with her whole body, a body that had not yet lost all its girlishness. He had never heard her cry like this before.
Now she’s really getting hysterical, he thought with a grim frown. This is serious; it’s going to be troublesome.