FROM THE seed of the writing box’s recovery an unlikely relationship had sprouted between Sōsuke and his landlord. Previously, their dealings having been confined to the monthly dispatching of Kiyo with the rent payment and the subsequent delivery of a receipt, any semblance of neighborly friendliness had been as absent as if a family from abroad had dwelled up there.
On the afternoon of the day that Sōsuke returned the box, a detective turned up, as Sakai had predicted, to examine the area behind the couple’s house, at the foot of the embankment. The detective was accompanied by Sakai, giving Oyone her first look at the man she had heard so much about. In addition to the mustache that she had originally been led not to expect, she was mildly surprised by the uncommonly polite manner in which he spoke, even when addressing her.
“Sakai-san actually does have a mustache, doesn’t he,” she noted to Sōsuke with some emphasis when they were alone again.
Two days later a maid descended on them, bearing a magnificent basket of treats and Sakai’s calling card. She thanked them for their kindness, adding as she took her leave, “The master hopes to call on you himself in due time . . .”
That evening Sōsuke opened the basket and stuffed his mouth with one of the toasted sweet dumplings he found inside.
“Giving presents like this—well, he can’t be all that stingy. Whoever told you he wouldn’t let other children play on the swing must have been lying.”
“Yes, that can’t be right,” Oyone agreed.
Despite this new level of cordiality in the couple’s relations with their landlord since the burglary, neither Sōsuke nor Oyone entertained any notion of pursuing greater familiarity in this quarter. They were not so bold as to put themselves forward in the name of sociability or affability, and were not the sort to engage in calculations of potential self-interest arising from such a relationship. By their lights, then, it was only to be expected that in the natural course of things time would slip by quickly, with no efforts made by them to tend this new relationship, which would soon enough revert to the same footing on which the two parties had been before: the Sakais atop the embankment, Sōsuke and Oyone below, as far apart emotionally as they were topographically.
But three days later, around sundown, Sakai unexpectedly showed up at the couple’s door wrapped in a warm-looking cloak with an otter-skin collar. Not used to having guests simply drop by in the evening, they at first reacted with near consternation. When Sakai had taken a seat in the parlor he proceeded to express sincere gratitude for their recent help, and, unchaining his gold-encased pocket watch from his white crepe sash for them to see, said, “Thanks to you, the stolen item was recovered.”
Since it was the law, he had reported the theft to the police, but the watch was an old one, making it easier for him to accept the loss. Then suddenly yesterday a small package arrived, bearing no return address and containing the stolen watch, neatly wrapped.
“The thief must have found it too hot to handle, or not worth the risk for the money he could get for it, and so decided that he had no choice but to give it back—whatever the case, definitely unusual,” said Sakai with a laugh. “But for me, at any rate, it was the writing box that was of real value.” Then, by way of an explanation, he confided, “You see, it was bestowed on my grandmother when she was in attendance at court, so it’s a kind of family heirloom.”
Steering the conversation this way and that, Sakai stayed on that evening for almost two hours. Neither Sōsuke, who sat with him, nor Oyone, who listened in from the sitting room, could fail to be impressed by the range of topics he touched on.
“He certainly gets around,” Oyone commented after he had left.
“He’s got all the time in the world on his hands,” Sōsuke replied.
The next day, on his way home from work, Sōsuke got off the streetcar and was walking down the side street near the furniture store when he caught a glimpse of Sakai’s overcoat with the familiar otter-skin collar attached. Sakai, standing in a position that presented his profile to Sōsuke, was engaged in conversation with the proprietor, who was peering up at Sakai through large spectacles he had not paused to remove. Just as Sōsuke, not wishing to interrupt, was about to pass by in silence, Sakai shifted his gaze toward the street.
“Well, hello! Thanks for last night. On your way home now?”
Addressed by the landlord in this hail-fellow-well-met manner, Sōsuke could not simply forge ahead with a token nod; slackening his pace, he doffed his hat. At which Sakai, his business evidently concluded, advanced from the storefront.
“Out for a bit of shopping?” asked Sōsuke.
“Hardly,” Sakai replied dismissively as he fell in step with Sōsuke for the walk home. After they had gone forty or fifty feet Sakai declared, “That geezer is a real crook. I was just giving him a piece of my mind for trying to pass off a fake Kazan[35] on me.”
This was the first indication Sōsuke had received that Sakai shared the pastime common among the well-to-do of dabbling in rare objects. It then crossed his mind that he really should have showed the recently sold Hōitsu to someone like him before putting it on the market.
“Does that dealer know a lot about calligraphy and painting?” Sōsuke asked.
“Not really—in fact he’s downright ignorant about the lot. All you have to do is take a glance around his shop: You won’t find anything that smacks of an antique. As it is he’s come a long way, seeing as he started off as a junkman.” Sakai apparently knew a great deal about the man’s background.
The Sakai family, according to the local greengrocer, had ranked sufficiently high under the Tokugawa regime to be accorded some titular governorship[36] and had the most impressive family pedigree in the area. They had not followed the last shogun to Sunpu[37] at the time of the old regime’s collapse—or had they gone off only to reemerge soon from exile? Sōsuke had been told the details, but he could no longer recollect them.
Sakai went on to dredge up tales involving the junkman from their boyhood days. “Even as a kid he was a troublemaker, you know. He was the local bully and was always picking fights.”
But how on earth, Sōsuke wondered aloud, had the man imagined he could foist a fake Kazan on Sakai?
“Well, since we’ve given his family some business from my father’s time on, once in a while he’ll just turn up with some odd item,” Sakai explained with a chuckle. “He more than makes up for his lack of taste with a huge capacity for greed. He’s a real piece of work. On top of that, his appetite was whetted when he got me to buy a Hōitsu screen.”
Sōsuke was startled but, not wanting to interrupt, held his tongue. Sakai went on about how, emboldened by this one sale, the furniture dealer had shown up regularly with scrolls and paintings that he himself made no pretense of knowing anything about, and how, under the misapprehension that it was real, he prominently displayed a “medieval Korean” ceramic bowl that had in fact been made in Osaka. “Except maybe for a dining table or, say, one of those factory-made iron kettles, I wouldn’t buy anything in that shop,” he cautioned.
They had reached the top of the slope. From here Sakai would be turning right, while Sōsuke had to proceed down the other side. Sōsuke wanted to accompany Sakai a little farther in order to ask him more about the screen. But going out of his way like that would appear odd, he realized, and so he took his leave.
“Would you mind if I paid you a visit sometime soon?” Sōsuke asked.
“Not at all,” Sakai replied cordially.
Although the day had been perfectly calm and the sun had shone brightly, Sōsuke came home to find Oyone waiting for him in the parlor, where, claiming that the house was still piercingly cold, she had set up the portable kotatsu in the middle of the room and hung his change of clothes over it.
It was the first time this winter that the kotatsu had been put to use by day. Although they had been using it at night for some time now, they had stored it by day in the six-mat room.
“But why did you drag it out in the middle of the parlor today?” Sōsuke asked.
“Well, we’re not expecting any guests, so it shouldn’t matter. Koroku is using the six-mat room, after all, and it would just be in his way there.”
This brought home to Sōsuke, as if for the first time, that Koroku was here to stay. He did up the sash around the warm machine-woven robe that Oyone helped him drape over his undershirt, and said, “True, this is our frigid zone here—we’ll have to install a fixed kotatsu just to make it bearable.” If the tatami in Koroku’s six-mat room were less than pristine, the room itself, with its southern and eastern exposure, was the warmest spot in the house.
After a few sips of the hot tea Oyone had brought him, he asked, “Is Koroku home?”
It was of course certain that his brother was there. But not the faintest sound could be heard from the six-mat room, and it seemed impossible that there could be anyone inside. As Oyone rose to call Koroku, Sōsuke stopped her: There was no need to speak to him right now. Then, burrowing under the quilt attached to the portable kotatsu, he lay stretched out on his side. Twilight had already made its presence felt in this room, where the shoji all faced the steep embankment. His arm pillowed beneath his head, he simply gazed into the dark, confined space, his mind blank. The noise made by Oyone and Kiyo in the kitchen sounded as remote to him as the stirrings of faceless neighbors. Before long the room was shrouded in darkness; he could see only the pale white of the shoji. And yet he kept perfectly still. He moved not a muscle, not even to call for a lamp.
When Sōsuke emerged from the darkness to take his place at the dinner table, Koroku also appeared out of the six-mat room and sat across from his brother. Apologizing for her forgetfulness, Oyone went to close the parlor shutters. Sōsuke felt an impulse to point out to Koroku that as evenings came on it might be nice if he helped his busy sister-in-law a bit by lighting lamps, closing shutters, and the like, but then, not wishing to say anything jarring to one so recently arrived under their roof, decided to say nothing at all.
Having waited for Oyone, the brothers picked up their bowls as soon as she returned to the table. Sōsuke took this opportunity to tell them about his chance encounter with Sakai outside the furniture shop on the way home, and how Sakai had bought a Hōitsu screen from the furniture dealer with the oversize glasses.
“Well!” Oyone murmured in surprise. After scanning her husband’s face for a moment, she said, “It must have been our screen, no doubt about it.”
Koroku was silent at first, but once he had heard enough of the couple’s exchange for the context to become clear, he asked, “So, just how much did you sell it for?”
Oyone darted a glance at her husband before answering this question.
As soon as dinner was over Koroku went straight to his room. Sōsuke returned to the kotatsu in the parlor. After a while Oyone came in to take the chill off her feet. In the course of their chat they agreed it would be a good idea to call on the Sakais next Saturday or Sunday and have a look at the screen.
The following Sunday, as was his habit, Sōsuke frittered away most of the morning, luxuriating in this once-a-week opportunity to sleep in. Oyone said she felt sluggish again and leaned back against the rim of the brazier, too weary, it seemed, to do anything. It crossed Sōsuke’s mind that at times like this she used to retreat for the morning to the six-mat room, when it was available, and he realized with a stab of remorse that in assigning the room to Koroku he had in effect deprived her of her one place of refuge.
He urged her to pull out the bedding and lie down in the parlor if she felt poorly, but she demurred. In that case, why not set up the portable kotatsu again, he persisted, saying that in fact he’d like to share it with her; and in the end he had Kiyo get out the quilt and frame and set them up in the parlor.
Koroku, having gotten up slightly before Sōsuke, had gone out somewhere and was not to be seen for the rest of the morning. Sōsuke made no effort to grill Oyone about his brother’s whereabouts. Lately he had been trying to spare Oyone the embarrassment of having to respond to such questions. Better that she castigated her brother-in-law’s conduct openly, he sometimes thought; he could then rebuff her accusations, or commiserate, as the situation demanded.
Even at noontime, Oyone was still resting by the kotatsu. Thinking that she was best left in peace, Sōsuke quietly informed Kiyo in the kitchen that he was off to the landlord’s, draped a sleeveless, Inverness-style cape over his everyday kimono, and went outside.
After being cooped up all morning in the gloomy parlor, Sōsuke found his spirits rising once he reached the street. The muscles beneath his bare skin taut against the cold wind, he reveled in the wintry sensation of instant bodily contraction, which led him to reflect as he walked along that it was not good for Oyone to stay indoors all the time like this; that as soon as the weather warmed up a bit, he must get her out in the fresh air before her health was seriously affected.
Passing through the Sakais’ gate he noticed a bright red swatch, incongruous at this season, tucked in the hedge that separated the approaches to the main entrance and to the kitchen door. On closer inspection he discovered it to be a doll’s tiny nightgown fastened to a branch of the hedge by means of a bamboo skewer inserted through the little sleeve. How resourceful, he thought, admiring the expert way in which it had been hung—and charming to boot! Sōsuke, who had no experience at all of being a father, let alone of having raised girls to the stage where they could manage such a neat trick, stood there for a while and gazed at the tiny red nightgown drying out nicely in the sun. It brought to mind the red shelves, with their array of five musician dolls, which, more than two decades ago, his parents had set up for his now deceased younger sister, along with the elegantly shaped rice cakes and the festive, cloudy cordial that looked sweet but actually tasted bitter.[38]
Sakai was at home, but Sōsuke was asked by the maid to wait in another room until the master had finished with his meal. No sooner had he been seated than there came from the next room the chatteringvoices of the persons responsible for the laundering of the little nightgown. When the maid slid open a panel to bring in some tea, Sōsuke could see behind her two pairs of wide-open eyes peering out in his direction. Later, when she carried in a brazier, a different face presented itself. All of this being quite new to him, it seemed that each time the panel opened there was a complete change of faces, and he could not keep track of how many children he had seen. When the maid had at last ceased her coming and going, one of the children slid the thickly papered panel open ever so slightly, no more than an inch, and in the gap revealed her shining black eyes. Beguiled, Sōsuke beckoned her silently. At this the door was slammed shut and, just behind it, a chorus of three or four voices erupted in peals of laughter.
Presently, one girl piped up, “All right, let’s play house again.” To which another, evidently an older sister, replied, “Okay, but today we’ll play house—foreign style. Now that means,” she went on to explain, “Tōsaku-san will be called ‘Papa’ and Yukiko-san ‘Mama.’”
“That’s silly—talking about your own mother like a stepmom.”[39] He heard another voice giggling with delight.
Then still another voice: “But what about me? I always have to be the O-baba,[40] so you have to tell us what the word for that is, too.”
“For ‘O-baba,’” explained the older sister, “just ‘O-baba’ is fine.”
There ensued a prolonged exchange of effusive greetings: “Please forgive the intrusion, but is anybody home?,” “And where might you come from, sir?,” interspersed with attempts to mimic a telephone ringing and the like. To Sōsuke’s ear it all sounded both delightful and exotic.
Just then Sōsuke heard the sound of approaching footsteps: no doubt the master of the house. As soon as they reached the next room a voice was heard commanding, “This is no place for you to be fooling around—we have a guest. Now go back where you belong.”
Immediately a little boy could be heard in protest, “No, Daddy, I won’t . . . Buy me a nice big horsey, please . . . or I won’t go.” The boy seemed very young; his words were not well formed, and they came out in awkward spurts, rendering his protest far from forceful. Sōsuke found this particularly charming.
By the time Sakai sat down with Sōsuke and apologized for keeping him waiting so long, the children had gone off somewhere else.
“Such high spirits—it’s wonderful,” Sōsuke exclaimed in all sincerity, but Sakai seemed to think he was only being polite.
“No, I’m afraid their behavior is pretty wild, as you saw,” he responded apologetically, then proceeded to recite the many needs of children and the endless trouble they caused. There was the time, for example, when they adorned the alcove with an elegant Chinese basket they’d stuffed full of charcoal briquettes; and another, when they filled a pair of lace-up boots he’d just had made with water and left some goldfish swimming around in them. These pranks struck Sōsuke as highly inventive. And then, Sakai continued, with most of his children being girls, there was the constant fuss about new clothes, and to make matters worse, if he went on a trip for so much as a couple of weeks, they looked as though they’d grown at least an inch when he returned. What with one thing or another, he felt he had his back against the wall even now, but then all too soon they’d be getting married, and the preparations would not only be ferociously hectic but no doubt financially ruinous. The childless Sōsuke took this all in without much sympathy. On the contrary, observing how for all Sakai’s complaints about his children, his face betrayed no trace of suffering at all, he felt envious.
Having waited for an opportune moment, Sōsuke now asked his host if he might have a glimpse of the screen that had been mentioned the other day. Sakai agreed with alacrity. Clapping his hands loudly, he summoned a manservant and ordered him to bring the screen over from the storehouse. Turning toward Sōsuke, he said, “It was standing right here until just a couple of days ago, but then the children—them again!—decided it was fun to hide behind the screen and fool around, so I was worried it might get damaged and had it put away in the storehouse.”
Sōsuke regretted having put Sakai to this bother and wished he had not mentioned the screen in the first place. In truth, he entertained only the mildest curiosity about the screen’s fate. After all, once a thing becomes the property of someone else, establishing whether or not it had originally belonged to one was of absolutely no consequence, practically speaking. Regardless of any second thoughts about the matter, however, the screen, as he had requested, was presently brought out from the storehouse, trundled along the veranda, and set before his eyes. As expected, it proved to be the very one that had until recently stood in his own parlor. This realization did not evoke in him any strong reaction at all. Nevertheless, to view it here, surrounded as it now was by the luster of the tatami on which they were sitting, the fine grain of the wooden ceiling, the objects in the alcove, and the patterns on the sliding partitions, to which could be added the elaborate care involved in its being borne from the storehouse by two servants—all of this, Sōsuke had to concede, made the screen look ten times more precious than when still in his possession. At a total loss for words, he went through the motions of gazing intently, as though at something new and fresh, at this thoroughly familiar object.
Under the misapprehension that his guest was a connoisseur, Sakai stood with one hand on the frame, shifting his glance from the screen to Sōsuke’s face and back again. When this failed to elicit the anticipated appraisal, he said, “The attribution is completely solid. Quality will out, they say.”
“Yes, of course,” said Sōsuke.
After another pause, the host repositioned himself just behind Sōsuke and launched into an appreciation of the screen, pointing at one detail or another with his finger and lecturing on the finer points. As one might expect of someone of his extravagance, he explained, the artist had made lavish use of the highest quality paints, which was one of the hallmarks of his works; the coloring was truly exquisite, and so on—remarks that all sounded quite original to Sōsuke, well-worn truisms though they were.
After what seemed to him a decent interval, Sōsuke thanked his host profusely and returned to his seat. Sakai likewise moved back to his cushion, where he started in on the screen’s inscription about “a country lane, the sky above” and the verse’s calligraphic style. Once again Sōsuke was impressed by his host’s extensive interests in haiku and calligraphy. Indeed, so wide was the scope of things about which he appeared knowledgeable that Sōsuke could only wonder when the man had managed to store up all this erudition in his head. Ashamed of his own ignorance, he strained to keep his responses to a bare minimum in order to give full attention to Sakai’s comments.
His guest showing scant signs of interest in haiku and calligraphy, Sakai shifted the conversation back to painting. He graciously offered to show Sōsuke any scrolls or albums among his holdings that he might wish to see, not that there was anything of great distinction, he added. Sōsuke indicated that regrettably he had no choice but to forgo the opportunity . . . but incidentally—and he apologized here for his bluntness—how much, he wondered, had Sakai paid for the recently acquired screen?
“Well, it was really like stumbling on a hidden treasure. I got it for just eighty yen,” his host replied.
Shall I tell him the whole story or not? Sōsuke thought to himself and hesitated for a moment, but it came to him in a flash that owning up to the truth would be entertaining for both of them. At length he said, “Well, actually . . .” and told all, from beginning to end.
Sakai heard his guest out with a few little gasps of surprise along the way. At last he said, “So it was not out of some passion for calligraphy and painting that you asked to see the screen!” and burst out laughing, clearly much amused at his own mistaken assumptions. At the same time he expressed regret at not having dealt directly with Sōsuke nor having settled on a price that was still considerably less than what he had actually paid. He finished with a vehement denunciation of the furniture dealer: “What a scoundrel!”
After this, Sōsuke and Sakai fell into a kind of friendship.