Free Death in Midsummer & Other Stories by Yukio Mishima Page A

perceptiveness.
    Lost in the display, Asaka seemed to forget his presence.
    Suddenly she pointed at a thermos flask covered with Scotch plaid.
    'Hamako. You're a big girl now, and you aren't afraid of that any more, are you?'
    'No.'
    'But you still remember the days when you were?'
    'No.'
    'There she is, answering just like a grown-up.' Asaka smiled as if, for the first time, to seek Kawase's assent. Kawase had been looking at the bright sunlight on the pavement, and the smiling face turned towards him seemed to mix with the brilliant white after-image like some weird, luminous mask 59

    floating in the air. He had only been half listening to the exchange, but he felt a painful knot in his chest. A moment later he saw that he must pretend not to understand a conversation that an outsider would not understand.
    'What are you talking about?' he asked, trying to make the matter seem trivial.
    'Nothing, really. But from the time she was about a year and a half old she was terrified of thermos flasks. If there's tea inside, it makes a funny bubbling noise round the cork, and she was terrified of that noise. When she wouldn't obey, I'd bring a thermos flask and threaten her with it. Not that I have to any more.'
    'Children pick strange things to be afraid of.'
    Asaka went on quite as if she were describing the child's unusual talents. 'But who ever heard of a child that was afraid of thermos flasks? Her grandmother had a good laugh over it.
    She said that Hamako would probably have a stroke if she grew up and the president of some thermos-flask company proposed to her.'
    4 Asaka came by herself that evening. She had hired a Negro baby sitter at the hotel, and Hamako had taken remarkably well to the girl.
    They had raw oysters and a crab saute at a French restaurant called the Old Poodle Dog and finished in a blaze of cherries jubilee.
    Kawase had recovered from the jolt the thermos flask had given him. He told himself that he was a victim of silly illusions and blamed his altogether too lively imagination.
    The sadness of his wife's letter came back to him, and for no reason at all he felt that his own wife and child were far sadder than Asaka and her child. It was a foolish, baseless notion, and yet he could not put it from his mind.
    Borrowing the strength of alcohol, he tried to flee from the present by turning to the forbidden subject of the old days.

60
    'Was it during the rainy season, I wonder - once at a hotel you had stomach cramps and we had to call a doctor. You had us all in a cold sweat.'
    'I thought I was going to die. And that brassy doctor only made things worse. I didn't like him at all.'
    The bill was high too.'
    'I remember the kimono I had on that night. It was a summer kimono, naturally, heavy silk with horizontal stripes sewn so that stripes met at the seams in different colours. First a stripe of blurry sepia, maybe three inches wide, then a stripe of grey the same width, and on top of that white. Do you remember?'
    'Very well.' In fact, the memory had dimmed.
    The obi was a good one too - two sprays of white bamboo on a vermilion background. But I never wore it again. I was always afraid of stomach cramps.'
    It was a strange combination: a woman in a black cocktail suit, a jewelled pin on her breast, bringing a lipstick-smeared wineglass to her mouth time after time and talking of an old kimono.
    Only a little more and Kawase would have said it: That business about the thermos flask this morning - it made me wonder if you were getting even with me after all these years. As a matter of fact, my own boy ...' But he caught himself and closed his mouth just in time.
    They had parted five years before in most unpleasant circumstances. The quarrel began when one of Asaka's colleagues, Kikuchiyo, passed on a secret to Kawase. She asked if Kawase knew that Asaka had been very friendly with a big export trader for some months, that he was going to redeem her from her obligations as a geisha, and that the two had