Masks by Fumiko Enchi Page B

sense of time completely.
    He took a sip of the coffee the maid had brought in. “So tell me—what have you found out about Mieko Toganō?”
    “All right. This is from her doctor, who happens to be a friend of my father’s.”
    Mikamé never could tell a story without improving on it, thought Ibuki, resigning himself to considerable embroidery and exaggeration in what was to come.
    Mikamé’s account began back in the time when the Toganō family were wealthy landowners, proprietors of thousands of hectares of farmland in what was now Niigata Prefecture. The estate had been so vast that the head of the family, asked by a fellow member of the House of Peers what the total area was, admitted that he did not know. In any case, it was indeed an enormous tract, so large that one could walk mile after mile in any direction and never set foot on another man’s property. In the Tokugawa era the Toganōs had, of course, enjoyed the privilege of bearing surnames and carrying swords; their sons and daughters had married only the children or kin of feudal lords, upper-class samurai, or priests of influential shrines or temples. They were believed to have descended from a powerful clan in line to become feudal lords, but who had chosen substance over honor by preferring to keep the title to their own lands. The Toganōs’ relations with the many hundreds of tenant farmers on their land had been maintained strictly according to the feudal code. Domestic servants were recruited from tenant families, and by custom,every Toganō male of a certain age was entitled to choose a good-looking tenant girl to serve him as maid and mistress. This method of dealing with women endured for centuries across many generations of Toganō men, who lived six months of the year buried under snow, shut off from the outside world; and the custom did not vanish at the mere uprooting of a man from his native place, for it reached even as far as Mieko’s husband, Masatsugu. When he married Mieko and brought her to the house in Meguro, Masatsugu had already installed there a young housemaid from the country by the name of Aguri.
    Mieko, a beautiful young woman of little worldly experience, who had lived in Tokyo with relatives while attending Ochanomizu Girls’ School, was unquestionably everything Masatsugu wanted in a wife, but there had seemed to him no inconsistency between his marriage to Mieko, on the one hand, and his love for Aguri, on the other.
    Twice Aguri conceived a child, once before Mieko arrived and again shortly after, but each time Masatsugu saved appearances by arranging for an abortion. However desperately Aguri might have wanted to bear the children, she had no choice but to obey when given an order from her lover and master.
    To such a house, where a woman of such desperate wounds lived, Mieko came as a bride of nineteen.
    Uninhibited by the restrictions that living with his parents would have imposed, Masatsugu made love to his new wife openly, as if her bashfulness had given him particular delight. There were occasions, she later realized, when Aguri would have seen them together, but at the time she never suspected what steely eyes were turned on her.
    In less than a year, Mieko became pregnant. Full of joy, Masatsugu and Mieko informed his parents, but their happinessended abruptly when in the third month she suffered a miscarriage. The apparent cause of the mishap was a fall down a flight of stairs; her strength was slow to return, and she lingered in the hospital a long while.
    The doctor who had twice attended Aguri was Mikamé’s father’s friend, and it was he who attended Mieko after her accident as well. According to a nurse who spoke with Mieko’s maid in the hospital, just as Mieko started down the stairs, the hem of her kimono caught on a protruding nail. She tripped and lay dangling helplessly on the staircase. More than the loss of her child, more than the long hospital stay, it seemed that the most terrible part of