Free Quicksand by Junichirô Tanizaki

he said, and he opened a sliding door in the corner, thrust the package into the inner room, and quickly shut the door again, so that I had only a glimpse of a low bed screen. . . .

    It would take an awfully long time to tell you everything that happened that night. Anyway, I had delivered the clothing I brought for them, and since he was there, I decided it was useless to see Mitsuko. So I wrapped the thirty yen in paper and told him: “I’ll leave now—please give this to Mitsuko.”
    He wouldn’t hear of my going.
    â€œNo, no, please stay—she’ll be right out,” he said, and settled himself down before me once again. “Actually, this is something Mitsuko herself will have to explain, but I think I owe you an explanation of my own. I hope you’ll be willing to listen to what I have to say.”
    Obviously Mitsuko found it hard to talk to me, and they had arranged to have him speak for her while she was changing clothes. And then this suave fellow—oh, at that point he said: “My wallet was taken, so I don’t have a calling card, but my name is Watanuki Eijiro. I live near Mr. Tokumitsu’s shop in Semba.” What this Watanuki told me was that while Mitsuko was still living in Semba, around the end of last year, he and Mitsuko had fallen in love and had even intended to be married. However, this spring the talk of marriage with M had come up, and they were afraid their own plans were doomed. Fortunately the rumor of a lesbian affair had the effect of breaking off M’s proposal.
    . . . Well, that was more or less how he began. They never tried to use me, he insisted, even if it might have seemed that way at first. But gradually Mitsuko had been stirred by my own passion and had fervently returned my love, more than she ever loved him. He felt unbearably jealous; if anyone was used, it was he himself. And although he had never met me before, he had heard all about me from Mitsuko. She told him that love between women was entirely different from their kind of love, and if he wouldn’t let her see me she wouldn’t go on seeing him either. Lately he had yielded to her wish.
    â€œMy sister has a husband too,” Mitsuko would say, “and I’m willing to marry you. But married love is one thing and love for another woman is something else, so please realize that I won’t give up Sister as long as I live. If you can’t accept that, I won’t marry you.”
    Mitsuko’s feeling for me was absolutely sincere, Watanuki said. Again I felt I was being made a fool of, but he was really a smooth-talking fellow and didn’t leave any room for me to argue with him. It was wrong to go on hiding his relations with Mitsuko from me, he thought, and he had told her to ask me to agree to the situation, since he had already agreed. Mitsuko understood that it was clearly for the best, but whenever we were face-to-face she found it hard to come out with. She kept thinking there might be a better opportunity, until finally things had turned out as they did tonight.
    Also, Mitsuko had said over the phone that they were robbed, but in fact it wasn’t an ordinary robbery—the people who had taken their clothes weren’t robbers; they were gamblers. The more he told me, the truer it seemed that a bad deed never goes unpunished. That night some people were gambling in another room at the inn, he said, and it seems there was a police raid. When Mitsuko and he heard all the commotion, they were so alarmed they fled blindly from their room, she in her underslip and he himself in his nightclothes, escaping by the roof over to the next-door house, where they hid under the floor of a laundry drying platform. The gamblers took off in all directions: Most of them got away, but one laggard couple came wandering in confusion down the corridor past the open door to their room, just after the two of them had left, and went in to hide. Then