Sanshiro Read online

  “No, not yet. He should be here soon.”

  She hesitated for a moment. In one hand she held a large basket. Sanshirō found the material of her kimono unfamiliar again today. He was aware, at least, that it did not gleam as the others had. The fabric looked almost bumpy and had some kind of stripes or pattern, a most haphazard design.

  A leaf would drop now and then from the cherry tree above. One settled on the lid of the basket. Hardly had it come to rest than it was blown away. The wind embraced the woman. The woman stood in the midst of autumn.

  “And you are…?”she asked when the wind had moved on to the neighboring garden.

  “They wanted me to come and clean up,” he said, then realized with some amusement that she had found him sitting and daydreaming. She smiled, too, as she spoke to him.

  “Perhaps I ought to wait here with you…?” It pleased him that she seemed to be asking his permission to stay.

  “Well,” he replied, which, to his way of thinking, was meant to serve as a shorter “Well, please do,” but she did not move. All he could do was ask her the same thing she had asked him. “And you are…?” She set her basket on the veranda and handed him a name card from the folds of her obi.

  *

  “Satomi Mineko,” it said. She lived in Hongō, Masago-chō, just a short walk from there down one hill and up the next. She sat on the edge of the veranda while Sanshirō was reading her card.

  When he had put the card into the sleeve of his kimono, he looked up and said, “We’ve met before. Do you remember?”

  “I think so. Once, in the hospital…”She returned his glance.

  “And once before that.”

  “By the pond,” she answered immediately. She had seen him, then, and she remembered. Sanshirō ran out of things to say. She closed the subject with an apology.

  “I’m afraid I was very rude.”

  “No, not at all,” he replied.

  The exchange was executed with the greatest concision. They began looking at the cherry tree. A few worm-eaten leaves still clung to its branches. The Professor’s belongings were taking a very long time to arrive.

  “Did you want to see the Professor about something?” Sanshirō asked without warning. She had been gazing intently at the withered upper branches of the tall cherry tree, but now she spun around to look at him. Oh, you’re terrible, you startled me, her expression seemed to say, but her reply carried no hint of accusation.

  “They asked me to help, too.”

  Sanshirō noticed a layer of sand on the veranda where she was sitting. “Look at all the sand here. Your kimono is going to get dirty.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, glancing to either side. She did not move. After their brief survey of the veranda, her eyes turned to Sanshirō. “Have you cleaned up?” She was smiling. Sanshirō found something in her smile that told him they could be friends.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Why don’t we start helping them now? We can work together.”

  Sanshirō stood up at once. She did not move. Where were the broom and duster? she asked. There weren’t any—he had come empty-handed; perhaps he should go and buy some? That would be a waste, she insisted; better borrow them from a neighbor. He went next door. When he came hurrying back with the borrowed broom and duster—and bucket and rags, too—she was in the same place on the veranda, looking up at the high branches of the cherry tree.

  “Oh, you found them?” she said.

  Sanshirō had the broom on his shoulder and the bucket dangling from his right hand. “Here they are,” he replied, stating the obvious.

  She stood up on the sandy wooden deck. Each step she took in her white stockings left a slender footprint. She produced a white apron from the sleeve of her kimono and tied it on at the waist. The apron had a lacy border. It was far too pretty for doing housework. She picked the broom up.

  “Let’s sweep first,” she said, slipping her right arm from the kimono sleeve, which she then draped over her shoulder. Bare past the elbow, the arm was lovely. A beautiful under-kimono showed at the edge of the raised sleeve. Sanshirō, who had been watching entranced, darted around to the kitchen door, his bucket rattling.

  *

  Mineko swept the wooden floors, and Sanshirō wiped them after her. Sanshirō beat the floor mats clean while Mineko dusted the shoji. By the time the job was finished, the two were well on the way to becoming friends.

  Sanshirō went to the kitchen to change the water in the bucket, and Mineko went upstairs with the duster and broom.

  “Could you come up here a minute?” she called to him.

  “What is it?” he said, approaching the foot of the stairs, bucket in hand. It was dark where she stood. He could see nothing but her apron, stark white. He climbed up a few steps with the bucket. She remained very still. Sanshirō climbed two more steps. Their faces came to within a foot of each other in the shadows.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, it’s so dark.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know, it just is.”

  He decided not to pursue the matter. Slipping by Mineko, he continued up the stairs. He set the bucket down on the second-story veranda and started to open the storm doors. Indeed there was a problem: he did not know how to work the bolt. Soon Mineko came up.

  “Can’t you open it?” She went to the other side. “It’s over here.” Without a word, Sanshirō moved toward her. His hand was about to touch hers when he stumbled against the bucket with a loud thump. He managed to open one of the shutters at last, and a strong burst of sunlight flooded into the room. It was dazzling. The two looked at each other and laughed.

  They opened the rear window as well. It had a bamboo lattice, through which they could look down on the landlord’s garden. There were chickens down there. Mineko started sweeping again. Sanshirō bent down on all fours and began wiping the floor after her.

  “My goodness!” she exclaimed, looking down at him with the broom in her hands.

  When she was done, Mineko dropped the broom on the floor mats and went to the rear window, where she stood looking out. Sanshirō was soon finished with his wiping. He plopped the damp rags into the bucket and joined Mineko at the window.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Guess.”

  “The chickens?”

  “No.”

  “That big tree?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know, then. What?”

  “I’ve been watching those white clouds.”

  He saw what she meant. White clouds were moving across the broad sky. They sailed steadily onward like thick, shining wads of cotton against the endlessly clear blue. The wind appeared to be blowing with tremendous force. It tore at the ends of the clouds until they were thin enough for the blue background to show through. Sometimes they would become frayed in clumps and form bunches of soft, white needles. Mineko pointed to this and said, “They look like ostrich-feather boas, don’t you think?”

  Sanshirō did not know the word “boa,” and he said so. Again Mineko exclaimed, “My goodness!” but she was quick to offer him a detailed explanation.

  “Oh, I’ve seen plenty of those,” he said. He went on to tell her, as Nonomiya had told him, that the clouds were made of snowflakes and that they would have to be traveling with greater than hurricane velocity to look so fast from down here.

  “Oh, really?” Mineko looked at him. “That takes all the fun out of it,” she declared in a manner that would permit no disagreement.

  “How does it do that?”

  “Because, it just does. A cloud should be a cloud. Otherwise, it’s not worth watching in the distance like this.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “What do you mean? Don’t you care if it’s made of snow?”

  “You like to look at things up high, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Mineko went on looking at the sky through the bamboo lattice. White clouds sailed past, on
e after another.

  *

  Soon there came the far-off sound of a wagon. The way the ground was rumbling, the wagon had obviously just turned off the quiet back street and was drawing nearer.

  “They’re here,” said Sanshirō.

  “They’re early,” said Mineko, pausing to listen intently, as though the sound of the moving wagon had something to do with the white clouds’ movement across the sky. The wagon drew relentlessly nearer through the placid autumn. Finally it reached the gate and stopped.

  Sanshirō left Mineko and bounded down the stairs. He reached the front door just as Yojirō came in through the gate. Yojirō was the first to speak.

  “You got here early.”

  “Well, you got here late!” Sanshirō answered, quite the opposite of Mineko.

  “Late? Maybe so. I did it all in one trip, and there was just me. The only help I had was the maid and the porter.”

  “How about the Professor?”

  “He’s at school for the ceremonies.”

  While they were talking, the porter began to unload the wagon. The maid came in, too. She and the man were to handle the kitchen things while Yojirō and Sanshirō brought the books to the Western room. There were lots of books, and putting them in the shelves would be a major undertaking.

  “Didn’t Satomi Mineko get here yet?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “What’s she doing up there?”

  “How should I know? She’s up there.”

  “Look, I’m serious.”

  A book in his hand, Yojirō walked down the hall to the foot of the stairway and called out in his usual tone of voice, “Mineko! Come and help us straighten out the books, will you?”

  “I’ll be right down.” Mineko calmly started down the stairs, broom and duster in hand.

  “What have you been doing?” Yojirō grumbled from below, trying to hurry her.

  “Cleaning the upstairs,” she answered from above.

  Too impatient to wait for Mineko, Yojirō walked ahead of her to the doorway of the Western room, where the porter had deposited several piles of books. Sanshirō was squatting among them, his back to Yojirō. He had become absorbed in reading.

  “My goodness, look at all the books. What are we supposed to do with them?”

  Sanshirō, still squatting, looked around when he heard Mineko’s voice. He wore a big grin.

  “What do you think we’re supposed to do with them?” Yojirō snapped. “We just move them inside and put them away. Anyhow, it won’t be too bad. The Professor should be here soon to give us a hand. —Ogawa, get up and get to work. If you’re so interested in that book, borrow it later and read it on your own time.”

  Mineko and Sanshirō sorted books at the doorway and handed them in to Yojirō, who arranged them on the shelves.

  “Not so wild, please. There should be another volume to go with this one.” Yojirō brandished a slim, green book.

  “No, that’s the only one,” said Mineko.

  “It can’t be.”

  “Here it is!” Sanshirō said.

  “Oh, let’s see.” Mineko leaned close to Sanshirō to see the book he had found. “History of Intellectual Development.30 That’s it!”

  “Of course it is. Come on, let’s have it.”

  *

  The three of them put in half an hour of concentrated effort, by which time Yojirō had stopped his nagging. One minute he was hard at work, and the next he was seated cross-legged on the floor, facing the bookcases. Mineko nudged Sanshirō, who smiled and called out to him, “Hey Yojirō, what’s going on?”

  “Oh, nothing. It’s maddening, though. What does the Professor think he’s going to do with all these useless books? He should sell them and buy stocks or something and really make some money. What’s the use?” he sighed without budging from his cross-legged position.

  Sanshirō and Mineko looked at each other and smiled. As long as the brains of this operation was not functioning, they could relax a bit, too. Sanshirō began flipping through a book of poems. Mineko opened a large picture book on her lap. The maid and the porter had a noisy argument going in the kitchen.

  “Look at this,” Mineko said softly. Sanshirō leaned over her to look down at the album. He caught the scent of cologne in her hair.

  It was a picture of a mermaid, naked and in a sitting position, with her fishtail curled around behind her. She faced forward combing her hair, holding the overflowing tresses in one hand. The sea stretched away in the background.

  Sanshirō’s and Mineko’s heads touched, and together they whispered, “A mermaid.”

  Still cross-legged on the floor, Yojirō seemed to snap out of his mood. “What is it? What are you looking at?” he asked, coming out to the hallway. The three of them, heads together, examined the picture book a page at a time. The critical remarks were many and varied, and based on nothing much.

  At that point Professor Hirota arrived from the Emperor’s Birthday ceremonies wearing a frock coat. They set the picture book aside to welcome him. He wanted the books, at least, to be taken care of right away, he said, which inspired another serious effort. With the Professor here, they would have to work more seriously, and an hour later the books were out of the hallway and on the shelves. The four of them stood in a row to inspect the neatly arranged volumes.

  “We’ll get the other stuff put away tomorrow,” Yojirō said, all but instructing Hirota to be satisfied with what they had done.

  “You have so many books,” said Mineko.

  “Have you read them all?” Sanshirō asked as though he had a real need to ascertain this fact for his own future reference.

  “Hardly! Sasaki here might do it, but not me.”

  Yojirō scratched his head. Sanshirō explained that he had a serious purpose in asking the question. He had been reading books from the University library in recent weeks, and he found that every book he looked at had been read by someone before him. Once, as a test, he had taken out a novel by someone named Aphra Behn, and even that had marks in it. What was the limit to the breadth of one’s reading?

  “Aphra Behn? I’ve read her stuff,” said Hirota. Sanshirō was amazed.

  “That’s astounding,” said Yojirō. “You read books that no one else ever reads, Professor.”

  Laughing, Hirota walked into the parlor, probably to change his clothes. Mineko followed him out. Left to themselves now, Yojirō said to Sanshirō, “That’s why I call him the Great Darkness. He reads everything, but he doesn’t give off any light. I wish he would read something a little more fashionable and make himself a little more conspicuous.”

  Yojirō was not being critical of the Professor. He spoke with true feeling. Sanshirō stared at the bookcases. Mineko called out to them from the parlor, “Come and have some lunch, you two.”

  *

  They walked down the hall and found Mineko’s basket, uncovered, in the middle of the parlor floor, full of sandwiches. Mineko sat next to it, distributing the contents onto four plates.

  “How nice. You didn’t forget to bring lunch,” said Yojirō.

  “No, you were very specific about that.”

  “Did you buy the basket, too?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You had this thing in the house?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s huge. Your rickshaw man must have helped you with it. As long as you brought him, you should have kept him here to work for a while.”

  “He was on an errand today. Besides, the basket isn’t all that big. A woman can handle it.”

  “You can handle it. Any other young lady would have left it at home.”

  “Really? Perhaps I should have.”

  Mineko continued to arrange the plates of food while she carried on this dialogue with Yojirō. She responded without hesitation, but unhurriedly, with the utmost calm, and hardly ever looking at Yojirō. Sanshirō was filled with admiration for h
er.

  The maid brought tea from the kitchen. Sitting around the basket, the four began to eat their sandwiches. No one spoke for a time. Then Yojirō addressed Professor Hirota.

  “Professor, about that writer you mentioned before, somebody-or-other Behn, was it?”

  “Aphra Behn, you mean?”

  “Who is Aphra Behn?”

  “She was a famous English novelist. Seventeenth century.”

  “Seventeenth century? That’s old stuff, nothing the magazines would want.”

  “It’s old all right. But she was the first professional woman novelist. That’s why she’s famous.”

  “So she’s famous, but I still don’t know anything about her. What did she write?”

  “The only thing I’ve read is a novel called Oroonoko. You must have come across that title in her complete works, Ogawa?”

  Sanshirō had no recollection whatever.

  It was the story of Oroonoko, said the Professor, an African prince who was tricked by an English sea captain, sold as a slave and made to suffer great hardships. It was believed to be the author’s actual eyewitness account.

  “That’s quite a story,” said Yojirō. “How about it, Mineko? Why don’t you write something like Oroonoko?”

  “I wouldn’t mind, but I’ve never been an ‘actual eyewitness’ to anything.”

  “If it’s an African hero you need, you’ve got Ogawa here, the Kyushu black man.”

  “You’re terrible,” she said as if in defense of Sanshirō, but then she turned to him and asked, “May I write about you?”

  When he looked into her eyes, Sanshirō recalled the moment when she had appeared with her basket at the garden gate this morning. He felt a wave of intoxication come over him, but it was more paralyzing than pleasurable. For him to have answered “Oh yes, please do” would have been out of the question.

  *

  Professor Hirota began to smoke, as usual. Yojirō remarked that what the Professor blew from his nose was the smoke of philosophy. And in fact the smoke did emerge in a somewhat unusual manner. Two thick shafts slipped slowly from his nostrils. One shoulder blade against the sliding paper door, Yojirō stared at the pillars of smoke in silence. Sanshirō’s eyes wandered out to the garden.