Free Thirst for Love by Yukio Mishima Page B

anchored firmly to the ground. Everything floated. Everything was suspended. When the air cleared, one could fancy seeing something like the spirit of the castle detach itself from the material castle and stretch on tiptoe and look about from that height. In Etsuko’s eyes, the tower of Osaka Castle was like a spectral island constantly beguiling the gaze of a castaway.
    No one lives there, I suppose , she thought. Perhaps, somewhere, there are men living in castle towers buried in dust .
    The conclusion that no one lived there relieved her. How unhappy—an imagination that couldn’t keep itself from making wild surmises as to whether someone was or was not living in some far-off old castle! It was this imagination that constantly shook the foundation of her happiness—which was to think about nothing at all.
    “What are you thinking about, Etsuko? Ryosuke? Or . . .” said Kensuke, sitting in the window bay. His voice—though it was not the same at all—was somehow like Ryosuke’s in its shading, and it shocked Etsuko into an honest reply.
    “I was wondering if anyone lives in the castle.”
    Her smoky, suppressed laugh awoke Kensuke’s cynicism. “You like people, after all, don’t you, Etsuko? People, people, people—you are really normal—with a normality I can’t even come close to. You just need to be a little honest with yourself. That’s my diagnosis. If so . . .”
    Chieko, who had gone down to the sink to wash the cups and plates from their late breakfast, came up the stairs carrying the dishes in a tray covered by a towel. A little package dangled perilously from her middle finger, and before she put the tray down she dropped the package in Kensuke’s lap where he sat in the window.
    “It came!”
    “Oh! The medicine I’ve been waiting for?”
    He opened the package and took out a little can marked “Himrod’s Powder.” It was an American asthma remedy that a friend of his in a trading firm in Osaka had managed to have sent over. It had seemed as if the desired medicine would never arrive, and only yesterday Kensuke had complained about his friend.
    Etsuko took the opportunity to leave, but Chieko stopped her, saying: “I come back, you go. It’s enough to make you wonder.”
    Yes, and if I stay here, I don’t have to wonder what’s going to come up , thought Etsuko. Kensuke and his wife had, like all bored people, a sense of kindness that was close to disease. Gossip and a pushy kindness—these two qualities peculiar to country people—had already infected Kensuke and Chieko, without their knowledge, and made them don an upper-class camouflage—a camouflage of criticism and advice.
    “Don’t be nasty, Chieko,” said Kensuke. “I was just giving her advice. She was getting away while she could.”
    “Let her make her own excuses. I have some advice for Etsuko. I’d like to show her I’m on her side. Maybe I should call it goading. It’s close to that.”
    “Go ahead, let her have it. Give it to her good.”
    This newlywed repartee would have been hard for any third party to endure. It was a newlywed situation comedy played every afternoon and every night to a vacant house by this bored pair set down here in the middle of the country. In fact, they never tired of their well-studied parts, their hit show, nor questioned their credentials for the roles. They would be playing them till they were eighty—under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Turtle Dove, perhaps. Etsuko resolutely turned her back on them and went down the stairs.
    “Must you go?”
    “Yes, I have to take Maggie for a walk. When I get back, I’ll see you again.”
    “You have a will of iron,” Chieko said.
    It was a morning in the off-season on the farm, as quiet as such times in the lull of harvests are wont to be. Yakichi was in the pear orchard, looking for something to do. Atsuko, with Natsuo on her back or toddling beside her, had gone to the village distribution center to get government-issue baby food.