The Sound of the Mountain Read Free

would share one. Perhaps she had considered these possibilities.
    ‘But were there only three in the store?’ asked Yasuko, not alive to such subtleties. ‘You only brought three, and there are four of us.’
    ‘We didn’t need another. Shuichi didn’t come home.’
    Yasuko smiled what should have been a wry smile, but, perhaps because of her age, it ended up as something less than that.
    No trace of a shadow passed over Kikuko’s face, nor did she ask what might have happened to Shuichi.
    She was the youngest of eight children.
    The other seven were also married, and all had numerous progeny. Shingo sometimes thought of the fecundity she had inherited from her parents.
    She would complain that he had not yet learned the names of her brothers and sisters. He was even further from remembering the names of her nieces and nephews. She had been born at a time when her mother no longer wanted children or thought herself capable of having them. Indeed, her mother had felt rather ashamed, at her age, and had considered abortion. It had been a difficult birth. Forceps had been applied to Kikuko’s head.
    Kikuko had told Shingo of having heard these facts from her mother.
    It was difficult for him to understand a mother who would speak of such things to her daughter, or a girl who would reveal them to her father-in-law.
    Kikuko had held back her hair to show a faint scar on her forehead.
    The scar, whenever he chanced to glimpse it afterwards, somehow drew him to her.
    Still, Kikuko had been reared as the pet of the family, it seemed. She was not spoiled, precisely, but she seemed to expect affection. And there was something a little weak about her.
    When she had first come as a bride, Shingo had noted the slight but beautiful way she had of moving her shoulders. In it, for him, there was a bright, fresh coquetry.
    Something about the delicate figure made him think of Yasuko’s sister.
    Shingo had as a boy been strongly attracted to the sister. After her death Yasuko had gone to take care of the children. Yasuko had quite immersed herself in the work, as if wishing to supplant her sister. It was true that she had been fond of the brother-in-law, a handsome man, but she had also been in love with her sister, so beautiful a woman as to make it difficult to believe that the two could have had the same mother. To Yasuko her sister and brother-in-law had been like inhabitants of a dream world.
    She worked hard for her brother-in-law and the children, but the man behaved as if he were quite indifferent to her feelings. He lost himself in pleasure, and for Yasuko self-immolation became a career.
    And so Shingo had married her.
    Now more than thirty years had passed, and Shingo did not think the marriage a mistake. A long marriage was not necessarily governed by its origins.
    Yet the image of the sister remained with both of them. Neither spoke of her, and neither had forgotten her.
    There was nothing especially unhealthy about the fact that, after Kikuko came into the house, Shingo’s memories were pierced by moments of brightness, like flashes of lightning.
    Married to her less than two years, Shuichi had already found another woman, a source of some surprise for Shingo.
    Unlike Shingo himself, reared in the provinces, Shuichi showed no evidence of deprivation in matters of love and desire. Shingo could not have said when his son had had his first woman.
    Shingo was certain that whoever now held Shuichi’s attention was a business woman, perhaps a prostitute of sorts.
    He suspected that affairs with women in the office meant no more than dancing after work, and might be only for purposes of distracting his father’s attention.
    She would not in any case be a sheltered girl like the one before him. Somehow Shingo had sensed as much from Kikuko herself. Since the beginning of the affair there had been a ripening in the relations between Kikuko and Shuichi. There had been a change in Kikuko’s body.
    Waking in the night – it was