Gen was attending Tokyo University, the
nation's top school. The graduates were virtually assured of
good careers. Almost three-quarters of the civil servants and
half of the judiciary were graduates of the nation's top
school. The sons of former feudal lords, bureaucrats, military
officers, landowners, merchants and industrialists vied for a
place. Fuku's father had staked the family's future on a modern
education for his son. "The old ways are dead." he
had often told him. "There is no future for you here in
the country. Taxes are rising every year, faster than the price
of rice. The Tokugawas fell because they tried to cling to the
past. We can't prevent the future; it is as inevitable as the
tide. " His wisdom was based on bitter experience. He had
lost his feudal stipend as the village tax collector. In the
political shuffle that followed, he had disdained the political
manoeuvrings that would have won him a position in the new
government. The family's financial situation grew increasingly
perilous as he sold off land to pay his daughters' dowries and
his wife's increasing medical bills.
Gen studied hard and won a scholarship
that covered the tuition, but monthly expenses for books and
for room and board in Tokyo were high. Bit by bit Fuku's father
sold off acreage so he could send his son a monthly stipend.
A few weeks, later, Fugu received a letter
from her brother. She tore it open eagerly, anxious to read his
excited descriptions of telegraphs, automatic weaving machines
other new technology from the West.
“My dearest sister," read a
spidery script, “please don't tell Father. This must
remain a secret between us. Last week, I coughed up some blood.
I finally went to see Dr. Nomiya as you have been urging me to
do. It's consumption, I'm afraid. Not merely overwork and
careless habits, as I had thought, though the doctor said they
were a contributing factor.
“So, little one, you were quite
right to nag and I was wrong not to listen. Don't worry
yourself, though. The good doctor gave me a list of
things to do. Regular meals. No more late nights. Plenty of
rest and fresh air. I promise to faithfully follow his regimen.
“I know this news will worry you,
but don’t tell Father. Let’s keep this between us.
Patience! In only one more semester, I will be an engineer.
“Your loving brother Gen."
As she finished the letter, the world
seemed to go black for a moment, and Fugu had to sit down. Her
breathing felt labored and she loosened her sash. Gen was
coughing up blood. How could her strong, handsome older brother
be sick? Brilliant Gen, for whose education her father had sold
off the family lands, whose student projects had already
attracted job offers, whose success was to rescue the
family from poverty. Fugu threw herself on the floor and
clutched a pillow to her mouth to stifle her sobs.
As spring ripened into summer, Fugu
withdrew into a silent shell of worry. Her thoughts were
constantly with her family. She felt increasingly detached from
Shoichi, who was getting old enough to beguile his grandmother.
He gurgled and cooed and waved his fists, but hardly ever
cried. Whenever he spied a friendly face, a quick open-mouthed
smile radiated down his limbs in delighted shudders.
Oharu was pleased that her grandson was
growing into an amusing little person. Most afternoons she
commandeered the fat and placid baby and played with him in her
garden.
First the wet-nurse, and now this, Fugu
thought with resignation. She began to understand that as far
as Oharu was concerned, Shoichi was not Fuku's child at all,
but an Omura family heirloom. Fugu had provided the womb, but
the boy's upbringing was too important to be entrusted to her.
This family was full of surrogates, Fugu thought. The mother
does not suckle the child and the wife does not sleep with the
husband.
She busied herself with housework to
stifle her regret, her dismay, her worries. Her mother remained
unwell, and Gen was failing quickly.
In the fall he slipped into a coma. His
landlady wired their father, but by the time he arrived in
Tokyo, Gen was dead. Fugu received her father's telegram on a
cold night just as the snow began to fall. It seemed to Fugu
that the stars were falling silently out of the sky in big wet
flakes.
Oharu offered a few stiff words of
condolence. Then Tomio drew her aside for more bad news, his
bull-like forehead bulging with embarrassment. “I can't
afford to send you home for the funeral. Shoichi is too young
for you to leave, and I cannot afford the train fare for both
you and the wet-nurse."
“I understand," said Fugu, and
turned her head so he would not see the tears that dropped from
her blank eyes and made dark splashes on her sleeve. Tomio laid
his hand on her shoulder, “I'm sorry," he said, but
Fugu could hardly hear him. The world seemed far far away, the
tatami floor as tiny as a doll's house. She was balanced high
above the house on a tall dark cloud of grief.
Somehow she got through the winter,
treasuring the letters he received from her father. In spite of
his troubles, he remained gracious and cheerful. In his most
recent letter to Fugu he had written, "The house feels
empty without you. I persuaded Ryuichi to buy the persimmon
trees. Now the whole side of his house is orange with drying
fruit." Ryuichi was a neighbor, a wealthy peasant to whom
Fuku's father had been selling off land.
"The maples are bare. Their leaves
lie in the garden moss like red and gold stars." he
continued. "Your mother is enjoying the crisp air."
Fugu pictured her mother in the garden,
swaddled in blankets, her thin face etched with fine lines in
the late afternoon light. Her father never wrote about her
mother's health, so she could only infer a continued decline.
"Your brother's sitting for exams next week. I worry that
he's not getting enough rest. Write to him, will you? Tell him
not to work too hard."
It wasn't as if Fugu did not try to be a
good wife. but there was an unnameably basic quality of
femininity that was missing in her. She had a way of looking
nakedly at him that filled him with dread. Her face was like a
moody sky. Insecurity, puzzlement and the desire to please
shifted across her face too openly. Her manner removed the
mystery and excitement that he considered essential in his
relationships with women: cajolery and coquetry, layers of
manipulation, thoughts and emotions unspoken. Besides, Fugu was
not physically attractive to him. She was wiry where she should
have been round.
In the spring, just as the blossoms began
to float off the plum trees and the willows began to leaf out
in hopeful green, Fugu received a letter from her home village.
Instead of the spare elegance of her father's impeccable brush,
the envelope was addressed in pencil, in a clumsy hand. Fugu
tore open the envelope. Thick, ropey characters twisted down
the page like thick grey worms. "Ojosama," the
letter began. "Honored daughter of the house. My heart is
breaking as I write this letter." As she tried to
read further, tears filled her eyes and refracted the
message like prisms, scattering shards as jagged as her fear,
as disjointed as her thoughts – "the master
and mistress," "high fever," "too
late," "tragic loss."
There was no longer any reason to live,
Fugu thought. Her father and mother were dead, and her beloved
brother Gen. Her husband was distant and her son unreachable.
Surely there was no reason to stay in this house that her
mother-in-law dominated like a poisonous spider. Fugu waited
until after midnight, then quickly packed the kimonos from her
dowry and stole out of the house.