In this state they moved together with a degree of closeness that was rare. And, merged as they now were, something strange happened. They took up with ease a subject they had been avoiding until now. Together as one person, they began devising an approach to resolving the Kyoto impasse.
The same presentiment gripped them both. Their hearts were constricted by a worrisome certainty that nothing they could do would correct the situation. O-Hide could be counted on to take action. It would surely be directed at Kyoto. And the result was certain to prove disadvantageous to them. To this point they were aligned. When it came to deciding on a corrective measure, their opinions diverged, and it was no simple task to synthesize a compromise.
O-Nobu designated Uncle Fujii as her first choice for a mediator. Tsuda objected. He knew that both his uncle and aunt were on O-Hide’s side. He proposed Okamoto. This time it was O-Nobu who demurred, on grounds that Okamoto had never been closely associated with Tsuda’s father. She suggested paying a visit to O-Hide herself with an eye to a simpler reconciliation. Tsuda had no particular objection. In his view, even if it weren’t for this most recent incident, it was meet, assuming they wished to avoid a total break, that relations between the two families should be renewed on one pretext or another. That didn’t mean, however, that they shouldn’t try to come up with a slightly more efficient approach in addition to O-Nobu’s visit. They bethought themselves.
In the end the name Yoshikawa came to both of them. Yoshikawa’s position, his connection to Tsuda’s father, the fact that he was even now looking after Tsuda in accordance with a special request from his father — the more they thought about it, the clearer it seemed that he was admirably equipped to handle things to their advantage. There was, however, an impediment. If they intended to ask someone as difficult to approach intimately as Yoshikawa to speak for them, it would first be necessary to enroll his wife. But O-Nobu found Madam Yoshikawa impossible to be around. Before agreeing to Tsuda’s proposition, she deliberated a minute. Tsuda pressed for his recommendation because, close friends with Madam Yoshikawa, he felt it highly likely to succeed. In the end O-Nobu gave in. Having concluded this conversation in mutual openness, they took warm leave of each other.
[114]
AIDED BY his fatigue from the restless night before, Tsuda’s sleep that night was unexpectedly sound. Awakening with clear sunlight in his eyes, he peered through the window glass at the bright day and heard the familiar swish-swash of scrubbing from the laundry next door, a sound that somehow invoked an autumn mood.
“If you be going, go in this! Oh yes! Oh my…”
The laundry men were singing a popular song, adding at the end of every verse a made-up refrain, “O yes! Oh my! No flies on me!” The song helped Tsuda imagine their busy hands as they bent to their work.
Abruptly, the launderers emerged from an odd opening onto the roof with arms full of white cloth. Approaching the clothes pole, they spread the cloth as if it were a single piece beneath the autumn sky. This activity, repeated daily since his arrival here, was monotonous. But it was also industrious. If there was significance in that, it escaped Tsuda.
But he had more pressing matters to consider. An image of Madam Yoshikawa rose to his mind. When he tried imagining his future, the picture was all too vague. When he attempted to render it more sharply, the matron always came into focus. Today there seemed to be more than ordinary significance in this focal point representing his future.
First of all, there was the remnant of his recent visit that continued to trouble him. On that occasion it was she who had abruptly shined a light in his mind on an issue that had been closed between them and sealed. He had struggled, resolved not to hear what more she might have to say. Simultaneously he had willed her to continue. Inasmuch as it was she who had broken the seal, it occurred to him that he had a right to unpack the contents.
Second, he was concerned about Kyoto. The relative weight of the two matters aside, it was the latter that pressed upon him more urgently. Clearly he was well advised to meet with her as soon as possible. Lumbered with a body that would be unable to move for four or five days, he had gone so far, before O-Nobu had left the previous day, to urge her to visit the matron in his stead. O-Nobu had declined to go, leaving him without a plan, but he still felt strongly that a visit from her was the appropriate move to make.
It struck Tsuda as passing strange that O-Nobu was so opposed to paying the lady a visit. A woman who normally would have stepped into a delicate situation like this eagerly without a word of encouragement! Such was his thought at the time. He had even tried to persuade her that the errand was a pretext for coming into Madam’s presence that he had prepared expressly for her. But she had not relented, and Tsuda hadn’t felt inclined to apply further pressure at the time. His reluctance was partly a function of the mutual openness they had managed to achieve as a couple, but it was also a reflection of her reason for declining. If she were to go, she had insisted, she would certainly fail. She declined to offer an explanation, saying only that Tsuda himself was certain to succeed. When he objected that timeliness rather than success was the issue, pointing out that a meeting would be impossible until he had left the hospital, which might be too late, her response had surprised him. Madam Yoshikawa would certainly be coming to the clinic for a visit, she declared. She insisted that the matter might be handled most naturally and simply by making use of that opportunity.
Gazing at the laundry drying on the roof next door, Tsuda gathered in this manner, as though hauling in a net, fragments of the previous day’s conversation and examined them one after the other. He began to feel that Madam Yoshikawa might indeed pay him a sick call. It also seemed she was unlikely to come. He was unsure why O-Nobu had insisted so emphatically that she would appear. He pictured the large group that was said to have sat down to dinner in the restaurant in the theater. He tried assembling in a novelistic manner the conversation that might have transpired between O-Nobu and Madam Yoshikawa. But he was unable to isolate anything in particular that would have led to her prediction, and he had to admit that he was baffled. He acknowledged in O-Nobu a certain degree of the intuition that the heavens unfortunately had chosen to deny him. This gift put him always a little in awe of her, and he lacked the courage it would have taken to dismiss it carelessly. At the same time, he was altogether incapable of relying on it, and he considered whether he might not contrive by himself to draw the lady to the clinic. A phone call occurred to him at once. He tried hard to think if there mightn’t be a way to call that would induce her naturally, without seeming presumptuous or deliberate, to pay a visit. He might as well have been struggling to build something out of foam. No matter how he labored to work something out, it seemed to evaporate before he had managed to complete it. When he realized he was scheming to actualize a fundamentally unreasonable fantasy and was accordingly doomed to failure, he smiled with a certain bitterness and returned to gazing through the window glass.