Death in Midsummer & Other Stories Read Free Page A

money.
    He took a taxi to Tokyo station. He felt nothing he could really call emotion. He felt rather what a detective might feel 16

    on his way to the scene of a crime. Plunged less in speculation than in deduction, he quivered with curiosity to know more about the incident that involved him so deeply.
    She could have telephoned. She was afraid to talk to me.
    With a husband's intuition, he sensed the truth. But in any case the first problem is to go and see for myself.
    He looked out of the window as they came near the heart of the city. The sun of the midsummer morning was even more blinding because of the white-shirted crowds. The trees along the road cast deep shadows directly downwards, and at the entrance to a hotel the gaudy red-and-white awning was taut, as if the sunlight were a heavy metal. The newly dug earth where the street was being repaired was already dry and dusty.
    The world around him was quite as it had always been.
    Nothing had happened, and if he tried he could believe that nothing had happened even to him. A childish annoyance came over him. In an unknown place, an incident with which he had had nothing to do had cut him off from the world.
    Among all these passengers none was so unfortunate as he.
    The thought seemed to put him on a level above or a level below the ordinary Masaru, he did not know which. He was someone special. Someone apart
    No doubt a man with a large birthmark on his back sometimes feels the urge to call out: 'Listen, everyone. You don't know it, but I have a big, purple birthmark on my back.'
    And Masaru wanted to shout at the other passengers: 'Listen, everybody. You don't know it, but I have just lost my sister and two of my three children.'
    His courage left him. If only the children were safe. ... He began trying to think of other ways to interpret the telegram.
    Possibly Tomoko, distraught over Yasue's death, had assumed that the children were dead when they had only lost their way.
    Might not a second telegram be waiting at the house even now?
    Masaru was quite taken up with his own feelings, as if the incident itself were less important than his reaction to it. He regretted that he had not called the Eirakuso immediately.
    The plaza in front of ltd station was brilliant in the mid*
    17

    summer sun. Beside the taxi stand was a little office, no bigger than a police box. The sunlight inside it was merciless, and the edges of the dispatch sheets on the walls were brown and curled.
    'How much to A. Beach?'
    Two thousand yen.' The man wore a driver's cap, and had a towel around his neck. 'If you're in no hurry, you can save money going by bus. It leaves in five minutes,' he added, either out of kindness or because the trip seemed too much of an effort.
    'I'm in a hurry. Someone in my family has just died there.'
    'Oh? You're related to the people who drowned at A. Beach?
    That's too bad. Two children and a woman all at once, they say.'
    Masaru felt dizzy under the blazing sun. He did not say another word to the driver until the taxi reached A. Beach.
    There was no particularly distinguished scenery along the way. At first the taxi climbed up one dusty mountain and down the next, and the sea was rarely in sight. When they passed another car along a narrow stretch of road, branches slapped at the half-open window like startled birds, and dropped dirt and sand rudely on MasaruTbarefully pressed trousers.
    Masaru could not decide how to face his wife. He was not sure that there was such a thing as a 'natural approach' when none of the emotions he had ready seemed to fit. Perhaps the unnatural was in fact natural.
    The taxi pulled through the darkened old gate of the Eirakuso. As it came up the driveway, the manager ran out with a clattering of wooden sandals. Masaru automatically reached for his wallet.
    Tm Ikuta.'
    'A terrible thing,' said the manager, bowing deeply. After paying the driver, Masaru thanked the manager and gave him a thousand-yen note.
    Tomoko and Katsuo were in a