Alongside the desk was a Secession bookshelf in the same functional, rectilinear style. It also had two drawers, but as both slid open with no resistance when she tried the ring handles she felt disappointment in advance of examining them. A place so easily accessed was unlikely to reveal a new discovery. She riffled idly the pages of bound volumes like notebooks filled with writing from the past. Reading each page would be a task. Nor could she imagine that the things she wanted to know would be lurking in these jottings. She was well aware of her husband’s cautious nature. His extreme fastidiousness would not permit him to strew secrets about without placing them under lock and key.
Opening the doors of the cabinet, O-Nobu looked to see if there was anything locked. But it was empty. Sundry papers and booklets and other junk had been stacked carelessly on top of it. The space beneath was jammed with wooden storage boxes.
Turning back to the desk, O-Nobu selected from the rack on top of it a number of letters that had arrived addressed to Tsuda and began to examine them. She felt certain more or less that nothing suspicious would have been left in a place like this. Nonetheless, these letters, which she had noticed right away and refrained from touching, had continued to beckon her interest, drawing attention to themselves as requiring, after all, perusal before she was finished. Telling herself that this was just for the sake of thoroughness, she had finally felt obliged to reach for them.
One by one the envelopes were turned over and the letters unrolled in order as she came to them. Some were quarter sheets, some halves, the rest were full size, but all were read by O-Nobu in silence. When she was finished she returned them to their original places in the order in which she had read them.
Of a sudden, a flame of suspicion ignited in her breast. An image of Tsuda pouring oil on a packet of old letters and carefully incinerating them in the garden rose vividly to her mind. As scraps of blazing paper fluttered into the air, he had pinned them to the ground with a bamboo pole as if afraid they would get away. The cold wind of early autumn had just begun to knife into the skin. It was a Sunday morning. The scene had occurred not five minutes after they had finished breakfast, facing each other across their trays. Putting aside his chopsticks, Tsuda had gone straight upstairs and had returned carrying a package bound with narrow cord; by the time she noticed he had stepped into the garden, circling around by way of the kitchen, he had set the package on fire. The heavy wrapper was already charred when she stepped out to the engawa, the letters inside it just visible. O-Nobu had asked why he was burning the package. Because it was bulky and a nuisance to dispose of, he had replied. When she inquired why he didn’t save it for scrap paper that would be useful when she was putting up her hair and at other times, he hadn’t replied. Instead, he continued to jab away with the bamboo pole at the letters appearing from the bottom of the package. Each time he stabbed at the smoldering package, thick smoke obscured the end of the pole and the burning letters. Gasping, Tsuda had turned his face away from O-Nobu….
Until O-Toki came upstairs to urge her to come down to lunch, O-Nobu pursued these thoughts, sitting as motionlessly as a doll on a stand.
[90]
SOMEHOW THE clock had advanced to past noon. O-Nobu once again sat down to lunch by herself with O-Toki helping her to rice. This was precisely the routine they repeated daily when Tsuda was away at the office. Today, however, O-Nobu was not herself. She appeared stiffened, though her mind was careeningly in motion. Even the kimono she had changed into when she was preparing to leave the house earlier contributed to an intensified sense of stepping out that was dramatically different from how she was accustomed to feeling.
If O-Toki hadn’t let slip a remark that touched on her agitation that day, she might have finished the meal in silence. The truth was she had no appetite and was attempting to get by with the merest show of eating to avoid giving O-Toki cause to wonder.
For her part, as if out of consideration, O-Toki pointedly refrained from conversation. But when O-Nobu put aside her chopsticks after a single bowl of rice, she asked, “Is something the matter?” and, receiving a mere “No—” in reply, left the tray in place without taking it to the kitchen.
“I hope you’ll forgive me—”
This was regret for her arbitrary decision to go to the clinic. As for O-Nobu, she had other things on her mind.
“I was really loud a while ago — could you hear me down in the maid’s room?”
“No, Missus—”
O-Nobu turned a doubting eye on O-Toki. As if to evade her glance, O-Toki spoke at once.
“That visitor, he had no right—”
O-Nobu didn’t reply. As she merely waited in silence for what was to come, O-Toki was obliged to continue. This provided an impetus to the conversation that developed between them.
“Mr. Tsuda was really surprised. ‘He has some nerve,’ he said, ‘showing up here at the house without an invitation and no warning and speaking with you directly when he knew perfectly well that I was in the hospital.’”
O-Nobu let out a soft laugh of disdain. But she withheld her own comments.
“Did he have anything else to say?”
“He said to give him the coat and get him out of here at once. And he asked whether you were discussing anything with him, and when I told him yes you were, he made an awful sour face.”
“Was that all?”
“No, he asked what you were talking about.”
“What did you say?”
“I went ahead and told him I couldn’t say much because I didn’t know.”
“And then?”
“And then he looked even more sour. ‘Opening the door to every hound dog that passes by is reckless,’ he said, and—‘damn irresponsible.’”
“He said that? But what choice is there if it’s an old friend?”
“That’s just what I went ahead and said. Besides, I told him, the Missus happened to be changing when he showed up and couldn’t come down downstairs right away so there wasn’t nothing else to do.”
“Exactly — and then?”
“And then he made fun of me for always taking Missus’s side no matter what. He said it was amazing how well the Okamotos had trained me and how impressed he was.”
O-Nobu smiled uncomfortably.
“You poor thing. Was that all?”
“There’s more. He wanted to know whether Kobayashi-san had maybe been drinking. I didn’t notice anything, but I couldn’t imagine a person getting drunk in the morning even though it wasn’t New Year’s and then visiting someone at their house—”
“No, I suppose you couldn’t.”
O-Nobu appeared to be expecting there was more to come. Sure enough, O-Toki hadn’t finished.
“Missus — Mr. Tsuda said I should be sure to say this to you when I got home.”
“Say what?”
“There’s no telling what that Kobayashi will say. He’s a dangerous cur particularly when he’s drunk. And no matter what he says, you’re not to pay him any mind. Just take everything he says as lies and you won’t go wrong.”
“I see—”