Free Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata Page B

thunder.’
    ‘So you said over the telephone.’
    ‘I’m like my mother in all sorts of trivial ways. When I was little, Mother used to cover my head with her kimono sleeves whenever it thundered. And when she went out in the summertime, she would look up at the sky and ask if anyone thought it would thunder. Even now, sometimes, I want to cover my head.’ Shyness seemed to creep in from her shoulders toward her breast. ‘I brought the Shino bowl.’ She stood up.
    She laid the bowl, still wrapped in a kerchief, at Kikuji’s knee.
    Kikuji hesitated, however, and Fumiko herself untied it.
    ‘I suppose your mother used the Raku for an everyday cup? It was Ryōnyū?’
    ‘Yes. But Mother didn’t think ordinary tea looked right in either red or black Raku. She used this bowl instead.’
    ‘You can’t see the color against black Raku.’
    Kikuji made no motion toward taking up the Shino before him.
    ‘I doubt if it’s a very good piece.’
    ‘I’m sure it’s very good indeed.’ But he still did not reach for it.
    It was as Fumiko had described it. The white glaze carried a faint suggestion of red. As one looked at it, the red seemed to float up from deep within the white.
    The rim was faintly brown. In one place the brown was deeper.
    It was there that one drank?
    The rim might have been stained by tea, and it might have been stained by lips.
    Kikuji looked at the faint brown, and felt that there was a touch of red in it.
    Where her mother’s lipstick had sunk in?
    There was a red-black in the crackle too.
    The color of faded lipstick, the color of a wilted red rose, the color of old, dry blood – Kikuji began to feel queasy.
    A nauseating sense of uncleanness and an overpowering fascination came simultaneously.
    In black enamel touched with green and an occasional spot of russet, thick leaves of grass encircled the waist of the bowl. Clean and healthy, the leaves were enough to dispel his morbid fancies.
    The proportions of the bowl were strong and dignified.
    ‘It’s a fine piece.’ Kikuji at length took it in his hand.
    ‘I don’t really know, but Mother liked it.’
    ‘There’s something very appealing about tea bowls for women.’
    The woman in Fumiko’s mother came to him again, warm and naked.
    Why had Fumiko brought this bowl, stained with her mother’s lipstick?
    Was she naive, was she tactless and unfeeling? Kikuji could not decide.
    But something unresisting about her seemed to come over to him.
    He turned the cup round and round on his knee. He avoided touching the rim, however.
    ‘Put it away. There will be trouble if old Kurimoto sees it.’
    ‘Yes.’ She put it back in the box and wrapped it up.
    She had evidently meant to give it to him, but she had lost her chance to say so. Perhaps she had concluded that he did not like it.
    She took the package out to the hall again.
    Shoulders thrust forward, Chikako came from the garden. ‘Would you mind taking out Mrs Ota’s water jar?’
    ‘Couldn’t you use one of ours, with Fumiko here and all?’
    ‘I don’t understand. Can’t you see that I want to use it because she is here? We’ll have this keepsake with us while we exchange memories of her mother.’
    ‘But you hated Mrs Ota so.’
    ‘Not at all. We just weren’t meant for each other. And how can you hate a dead person? We weren’t meant for each other,and I couldn’t understand her. And then in some ways I understood her too well.’
    ‘You’ve always been fond of understanding people too well.’
    ‘They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily.’
    Fumiko appeared at the veranda, and sat down just inside the room.
    Hunching her left shoulder, Chikako turned to face the girl.
    ‘Fumiko, suppose we use your mother’s Shino.’
    ‘Please do.’
    Kikuji took the Shino jar from a drawer.
    Chikako slipped her fan into her obi, tucked the box under her arm, and went back to the cottage.
    ‘It was something of a shock to hear that you’d moved.’ Kikuji too