Free The Crane Pavilion by I. J. Parker Page B

his business in the quarter and on the market. The shop is run by his son.”
    “What about his family? A rich man has many wives and sons. What are they like?”
    Mrs. Ozaki downed another cup of wine. “No wife. She died. At his age, he likes the harlots much better. He has a son and three daughters. The son’s married. They say the daughters are very ugly, but two have husbands. I expect that cost him dearly. The third keeps house for her father. It’s not a big job. He’s never home. In the daytime he goes about making money, and the night he spends with the whores.”
    Genzo chuckled. “What a life!”
    Mrs. Ozaki snapped, “It got him killed, didn’t it? So you’d best think again.”
    Genzo protested, “It wasn’t the money or the sex that got him killed. It was a clumsy shampoo girl. He should’ve grown a beard.” He felt his own clean-shaven chin. “Maybe I’ll grow one myself.”
    They laughed at him. Mrs. Ozaki cried, “Too late for you, unless you can grow more than hair.” This amused her so much she fell into choking giggles and had to have her back thumped by Saburo.
    Genzo raised an admonitory finger. “Don’t trust a woman, Saburo, even if she’s borne you seven children.”
    Struck by the truth of this saying as much as by the fact that his guests were getting into a drunken quarrel, Saburo paid for the wine and left.

9

The Tides of Life
    The next morning, Akitada felt a great yearning to go to Tamako’s room and sit there, thinking of her, talking to her, perhaps telling her about the suicide of Lady Ogata and about the strange characters he had met that day.
    Alas, it was not to be. Even this intangible bond with his wife was denied him. He went to his own room when he got home. It was blessedly empty of Saburo, but here the deepest darkness seemed to reside, a loneliness so profound that he could not bear it any longer.
    He stepped out onto his narrow veranda. The weather had turned. The sky was clouded over and the scent of rain hung in the air. The garden was still lush with foliage, a small bird darted at a worm and flew off, and a few gnats still danced above the fish pond. It was late in the year, and soon the bird would huddle on a branch, shivering in the cold. A fish jumped for the gnats, but the pond, too, would become still and dark, and the fish would burrow into the muddy bottom.
    He spotted something white on the side of the pond and went to investigate. It was a dead koi . He bent to pick it up by its tail and saw that it was a female. Laying it gently among some of the ferns, he took it as another omen that death would walk beside him from now on, that, even though at a great distance from Tamako when she died, he had become contaminated by death. His Shinto faith forbade physical closeness to death and dying, but it struck him that a physical closeness between two people in life must necessarily mean that one person’s death would touch the other. So it had been when he had lost his first son.
    He stared at the dead fish, then went to move one of the rocks behind the pond. Using his bare hands to make a shallow hole in the soft earth underneath, he laid the fish in it. Then he replaced the rock.
    He had missed Tamako’s funeral.
    The day they returned from Kyushu, his sister Akiko and her husband Toshikage had arrived before Akitada had been able to do more than greet his children and flee to his room. In the weeks of travel, he had tried to prepare himself for this homecoming. He had built a shell around his heart, impervious to the raw emotions he would encounter and feel. It had not worked. When he had stepped out onto the veranda, grief had seized him so violently that he had been forced to grasp hold of the support beam or his knees would have buckled.
    Akiko had burst in at that moment, crying out her pity for him, clasping him in her arms, looking him over, informing him that he looked dreadful, and then she had sat him down to describe in detail Tamako’s