Death in Midsummer & Other Stories Read Free Page B

room adjoining the room where Yasue's coffin lay. The body was packed in dry ice ordered from It5, and would be cremated now that Masaru had arrived.,
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    Masaru stepped ahead of the manager and opened the door.
    Tomoko, who had lain down for a nap, jumped up at the sound.
    She had not been asleep.
    Her hair was tangled and she had on a wrinkled cotton kimono. Like a convicted criminal, she pulled the kimono together and knelt meekly before him. Her motions were aston-i ishingly quick, as though she had planned them in advance. She stole a glance at her husband and collapsed in tears.
    He did not want the manager to see him lay a comforting hand on her shoulder. That would be worse than having the most intimate bedroom secrets spied on. Masaru took off his coat and looked for a place to hang it.
    Tomoko noticed. Taking a blue hanger from the lintel, she hung up the sweaty coat for him. Masaru sat down beside Katsuo, who had been awakened by his mother's weeping and lay looking up at them. The child, on his knees, was as unresisting as a doll. How can children be so small? he wondered. It was almost as if he were holding a toy.
    Tomoko knelt weeping in a corner of the room.
    'It was all my fault,' she said. Those were the words Masaru most wanted to hear.
    Behind them, the manager too was in tears. 'I know it's no business of mine, sir, but please don't blame Mrs Ikuta. It happened while she was taking a nap, and through no fault of hers.'
    Masaru felt as if he had heard or read of all this somewhere.
    'I understand, I understand.'
    Obeying the rules, he stood up with the child in his arms, and, going over to his wife, laid his hand gently on her shoulder. The gesture came easily.
    Tomoko wept even more bitterly.
    The two bodies were found the next day. The constabulary, diving all up and down the beach, finally found them under the headland. Sea creatures had nibbled at them, and there were two or three creatures up each little nostril.
    Such incidents of course go far beyond the dictates of custom, and yet at no time are people more bound to follow 19

    custom. Tomoko and Masaru forgot none of the responses and the return gifts custom demanded.
    A death is always a problem in administration. They were frantically busy administering. One might say that Masaru in particular, as head of the family, had almost no time for sorrow. As for Katsuo, it seemed to him that one festival day succeeded another, with the adults all playing parts.
    In any case, they steered their way through the whole complex affair. The funeral offerings came to a considerable sum. Funeral offerings are always larger when the head of the family, who can still provide, is a survivor than when it is his funeral.
    Both Masaru and Tomoko were somehow braced for what had to be done. Tomoko did not understand how this almost insane grief and this careful attention to detail could exist side by side. And it was surprising too that she could eat so heavily without even noticing the taste.
    What she dreaded most was having to see Masaru's parents.
    They arrived from Kanazawa in time for the funeral. 'It was all my fault,' she forced herself to say again, and by way of compensation she turned to her own parents.
    'But who should they feel sorriest for? Haven't I just lost two children? There they all are, accusing me. They put the whole blame on me, and I have to apologize to them. They all look at me as if I were the absent-minded maid who dropped the baby in the river. But wasn't it Yasue? Yasue is lucky she's dead.
    Why can't they see who's been hurt? I'm a mother who has just lost two children.'
    "You're being unfair. Who is accusing you? Wasn't his mother in tears when she said she felt sorrier for you than anyone?'
    'She was just saying so.'
    Tomoko was thoroughly dissatisfied. She felt like one de-moted and condemned to obscurity, one whose real merit went unnoticed. It seemed to her that such intense sorrows should bring special privileges with them,