"You think you might go, then?" Misako asked several times during the morning.

Kaname as usual was evasive, however, and Misako found it impossible to make up her own mind. The morning passed. At about one o'clock she took a bath and dressed, and, ready for either eventuality, sat down inquiringly beside her husband. He said nothing. The morning newspaper was still spread open in front of him.

"Anyway, your bath is ready."

"Oh." Kaname lay sprawled on a couple of cushions, his chin in his hand. He pulled his head a little to the side as he caught a suggestion of Misako's perfume. Careful not to meet her eyes, he glanced at her—more accurately he glanced at her clothes— in an effort to catch some hint of a purpose that might make his decision for him. Unfortunately, he had not been paying much attention to her clothes lately. He knew vaguely that she gave a great deal of attention to them and was always buying something new, but he was never consulted and never knew what she had bought. He could make out nothing more revealing than the figure of an attractive and stylish matron dressed to go out.

"What would you like to do?" he asked.

"It doesn't really matter. If you're going, I'll go too. If not, I can go to Suma."

"You've promised to go to Suma?"

"Not really. Tomorrow would do as well."

Seated stiffly, her eyes fixed firmly on a spot two or three feet over Kaname's head, Misako began buffing her nails.

Today was not the first time they had been faced with this difficulty. Indeed, whenever they had to decide whether or not to go out together, each of them became passive, watchful, hoping to take a position according to the other's manner. It was as if they held a basin of water balanced between them and waited to see in which direction it would spill. Sometimes the day passed without their coming to a decision, sometimes at the last moment they suddenly knew what they would do. Today was a little different, however. Kaname sensed that they would finally go out together. His refusal even so to be a little more positive was not entirely a matter of perverseness or laziness. He thought of their tense trips alone together, no less tense for being, as today, only the one-hour trip to downtown Osaka. He sensed too what Misako wanted to do. She did not have to go to Suma, she said, but there was not much doubt that she would rather go there to see Aso than be bored at the puppet theater with her father. It seemed necessary somehow to bring her feelings out into the open.

Misako's father had called from Kyoto the day before and asked if the two of them would join him at the theater. Misako had been out, and Kaname had been rash enough to say that they "probably could." As a matter of fact he could not very well have refused. "Let me know the next time you come down for the theater," he had remarked once in a somewhat hypocritical attempt to please the old man. "I haven't been in much too long myself." He had evidently been taken at his word. Then too, quite aside from the play, it was not entirely impossible that he and Misako's father might not have another chance to talk at their ease together. The old man, now nearly sixty, was in retirement in Kyoto, where he lived the life of the conservative man of taste. While Kaname's own tastes were rather different and he was often enough annoyed at the old man's displays of connoisseurship, still the latter had played the gallant in his youth, it was said, and there remained something open and easy in his manner that Kaname found very attractive. The thought that soon they might no longer be father-in-law and son-in-law gave him considerable regret —in fact, he sometimes told himself ironically, the regret at divorcing his father-in-law might be somewhat stronger than the regret at divorcing his wife —and, though ordinarily such an idea would not have troubled him, he wanted one last chance to demonstrate his sense of filial duty.

Still, it was a mistake not to have consulted Misako. He was usually very careful to consider her wishes. She had gone out the evening before "to do some shopping in Kobe," and as he talked to the old man the picture had come into Kaname's mind of the two of them, the old man's daughter and Aso, walking along the shore at Soma, arm in arm, and with it the flicker of a conviction that if she was seeing Aso then, she need hardly see him again the following day. But maybe he was being unjust. Misako never hid things from him. She disliked lying and she had no need to lie, and when she said she was going shopping, perhaps she was indeed going shopping. It was not pleasant, though, for Kaname to be told baldly of each visit to Aso, she must know, and perhaps he was not being too suspicious when he took her "shopping in Kobe" to mean something else. In any case, she would not accuse him of malice in having accepted the invitation, he felt sure—and then again, even assuming that she had seen Aso the evening before, she might want to see him again. At first her visits had been fairly infrequent, once every week or ten days, but it was not uncommon now for her to see him two and three days running.

When Kaname came back from the bath, ten minutes or so later, she was still polishing mechanically at her fingernails, her eyes still fixed on the wall.

"Do you want to see it?" she asked.

She avoided looking at him. out on the veranda now, a bathrobe hung loosely from his shoulders, parting his hair in a hand mirror. As she spoke she brought the shiny, pointed nails of her left hand up close to her eyes.

"Not especially. I told him I did, though."

"When?"

"When was it, I wonder.... He got so excited about his puppets that I finally nodded back to make him happy."

Misako laughed pleasantly, as she would for the merest acquaintance. "You hardly needed to do that. You've never been that friendly with Father, after all."

"In any case, maybe we ought to stop by for a few minutes."

"Where is the Bunraku Puppet Theater?"

"It's not at the Bunraku. The Bunraku burned down. It's at a place downtown called the Benten."

"That means we sit on the floor? I can't stand it, really I can't. My knees will be agony afterwards."

"There's no avoiding it. That's the sort of place people like your father go. His tastes have got a little beyond me—and after the way he used to love the movies. I read somewhere the other day that men who are too fond of the ladies when they're young generally turn into antique-collectors when they get old. Tea sets and paintings take the place of sex."

"But Father hasn't exactly given up sex. He has O-hisa."

"She's one of the antiques in his collection, exactly like an old doll."

"If we go we'll have her inflicted on us."

"Then let's have her inflicted for an hour or two. Think of it as filial piety." Kaname began to feel that Misako had some very special reason for not wanting to go.

She went briskly over to the chest, however, and took out a kimono for him, carefully folded in a paper cover. "You're wearing kimono, I suppose."

Kaname was as careful about his clothes as Misako was about hers. A particular kimono required a particular cloak and a particular sash, and each ensemble was planned down even to accessories like the watch and chain, the wallet, the cloak-cord, the cigarette case. Only Misako understood the system well enough to be able to put everything together when he specified the kimono he would wear. Now that she had taken to going out by herself a good deal, she always made sure before she left that his clothes were laid out for him. Indeed, when he thought of it, that was the only function she really discharged as a wife, the only function for which another woman would not do as well. Particularly when, as today, she stood behind him, helping him into his kimono and straightening his collar, he became most keenly aware of what an eccentric thing their marriage was. Who, looking at them now, could know that they were not really husband and wife? Not even the servants, who saw them every day, seemed yet to have suspected it. And indeed weren't they husband and wife? He thought of how she helped him even with his underwear and socks. Marriage was after all not only a matter of the bedroom. He had known women enough in his life who ministered to that particular need. But surely the reality of marriage lay as much in these other small ministrations. Indeed, he could almost feel that through them marriage was revealing itself in its most basic, its most classical form, and he could think of Misako as an entirely satisfactory wife....

Kaname looked down at the back of Misako's neck as he stood tying his sash. She knelt with a black cloak spread on her knee, attaching the cord for him, and the cord pin drew a sharp black line against the white of her hand. Now and then, as she worked the pin into place, the tips of her softly polished nails met with the slightest click. She perhaps knew from experience what sort of emotions the occasion would arouse in him, and, as if to ward off the possibility that she herself might be drawn into the same sentimentality, she went at her duties precisely, impersonally. That in itself, however, made it possible for him to look down on her, a sort of mute regret rising in him, without fear of meeting her eyes. He saw the curve of her back, he saw the soft roundness of her shoulders in the shadow of her kimono, he saw, where her kimono was kicked aside at the skirt, an inch or two of ankle above her sock, white and crisply starched in the Tokyo manner. Her skin, under these stolen glimpses, seemed fresher and younger than her almost thirty years, and had it belonged to someone else's wife he could have found it beautiful and exciting. Even now sometimes in the night he felt a certain desire to press close, to caress it as he had in those first nights after they were married. But the sad thing was that, since those early nights, her skin had quite lost its power to excite him. The very youth and freshness might indeed be due to the fact that he had forced on her a sort of widow's existence—the thought came to him less sad than strangely chilling.

"And it's such a beautiful day." She had the cord ready and moved around to help him into the cloak. "It seems a shame to waste it in a theater."

Kaname felt her hand brush against his neck two or three times, but her touch was as cool and impersonal as a barber's.

"Shouldn't you telephone Aso?" He suspected that she was thinking of more than the weather.

"No...."

"I wish you would."

"It isn't at all necessary."

"Won't he be waiting?"

Misako hesitated. "I suppose so.... When will we be back?"

"If we go now and stay for an act or so, we should be out by five or six."

"I wonder if it would be too late to go to Suma then."

"It probably wouldn't be too late, but we don't know what plans your father has. If he wants us to go to dinner we can't very well refuse.... All in all, maybe you ought to wait till tomorrow."

As he finished speaking, a maid came in to say that Misako had a call from Suma.