The Sound of the Mountain
had only been his secretary.
    He felt, of course, that he would like to keep her. Yet she was in no sense his captive.
    ‘But I think it’s my fault that you want to quit. I had you show me that house, and I made things unpleasant for you; and I imagine it isn’t easy to have to see Shuichi.’
    ‘It has been hard.’ Her answer was unequivocal. ‘But when I thought about it all afterwards, it seemed the natural thing for a father. And I saw that I had been wrong, too. I was very proud of myself when he took me dancing, and I went to Kinu’s house. It was depraved of me.’
    ‘That seems a little strong.’
    ‘But I did get worse.’ Her eyes were half closed, in sorrow. ‘If I quit work, I’ll ask Kinu to give him up. To pay you back for all you’ve done.’
    Shingo was startled. It was as if something had brushed against a ticklish spot.
    ‘That was his wife at the door?’
    ‘Kikuko?’
    ‘Yes. It was very hard for me. I decided I really had to speak to Kinu.’
    He felt a certain lightness in her, and a lightening of his own spirits.
    It was not impossible, the thought came to him, that by even such light devices the problem might be solved, and with unexpected dispatch.
    ‘I can’t really ask you to do that.’
    ‘I’m doing it of my own free will, to pay you back for all you’ve done.’ That such a grand statement should have come from Eiko’s small lips made Shingo once again feel aware of the ticklish spot.
    And he thought of telling her not to rush into affairs that were no concern of hers.
    But Eiko seemed much affected by her own ‘decision’.
    ‘I can’t understand him, when he has such a good wife. I don’t like watching him with Kinu, but I couldn’t be jealous of his wife, I don’t care how close they might seem to be. Or is it that men are dissatisfied with women who don’t make other women jealous?’
    Shingo smiled wryly.
    ‘He was always saying what a child she is.’
    ‘To you?’ There was sharpness in the words.
    ‘Yes, and to Kinu. He said you were fond of her because she was a child.’
    ‘The fool!’ Shingo looked at her.
    ‘But he doesn’t anymore,’ said Eiko in some confusion. ‘He doesn’t talk about her anymore.’
    Shingo was almost trembling with anger.
    He sensed that Shuichi had referred to her body.
    Had he wanted to find a prostitute in his bride? There was astonishing ignorance in the fact, and Shingo felt in it too a frightening paralysis of the soul.
    Did the immodesty with which he spoke of his wife to Kinu and even to Eiko arise from that same paralysis?
    He sensed cruelty in Shuichi. And not only in him: in Kinu and Eiko too he sensed cruelty toward Kikuko.
    Did Shuichi not feel the cleanness in her?
    The pale, delicate, childlike face of Kikuko, baby of her family, floated before him.
    It was a little abnormal, Shingo could see, for him to feel a sensual resentment toward his son because of his son’s wife; but he could not help himself.
    There was an undercurrent running through his life, the abnormality that made Shingo, drawn to Yasuko’s sister, marry Yasuko, a year his senior, upon the sister’s death; was it exacerbated by Kikuko?
    When Shuichi had found another woman so remarkably early in their marriage, Kikuko had seemed at a loss to control her jealousy; and yet it seemed that, in the presence of Shuichi’s cruelty and moral paralysis, indeed because of them, she had awakened as a woman.
    He remembered that Eiko was less well developed physically than Kikuko.
    Shingo fell silent, seeking somehow to control his anger through his sadness.
    Eiko too was silent. Taking off her gloves, she smoothed her hair.

4
    Shingo was in Atami. In the garden of the inn a cherry tree was in full bloom. It was January.
    Winter cherries, he had been told, had been blooming from before the end of the year; but he felt as if he had come upon spring in a wholly different world.
    He mistook the red plum blossoms for peaches, and wondered if the white might

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