Thirst for Love Read Free Page B

really think.
    Rationalizing in this way, she recast the diary passage:
    September 21 (Wednesday)
    Another painful day has ended. How I ever got through this day is a mystery to me. In the morning, I went to the distribution center to get our ration of miso . The child of the people who run the distribution center had pneumonia but was brought around by penicillin and seems to be mending. That’s too bad! If the child of that woman who goes around talking about me behind my back should die, I would get some consolation, anyway.
    When one lives in the country, one has to have a simple soul. Just the same, the Sugimotos, with their rotten, stuck-up effeteness, make country life increasingly more painful. I love the simple soul. I even go so far as to think that there is nothing so beautiful in this world as the simple spirit in the simple body. When, however, I stand before the deep chasm that lies between my soul and that soul, I do not know what to do. Is it possible to transfer the obverse of a coin to the reverse? Simply take a coin with an unbroken surface and make a hole in it. That is suicide.
    Every once in while I come close, driven by a decision to lay my life on the line. My partner flees—to some infinitely distant place. And thus, again, I am alone, surrounded by boredom. Those calluses on my fingers—they are ridiculous.
    Etsuko went by the creed, nevertheless, that one should never take anything too seriously. One who walks barefoot will end up cutting his feet. To walk one needs shoes, just as to live one needs a ready-made objective. Etsuko turned the pages heedlessly and talked to herself.
    Just the same, I am happy. I am happy. Nobody can deny it. In the first place, there is no evidence.
    She thumbed ahead in the diary. The white pages went on and on. And so, finally, a year of this happy diary came to an end . . .
    Meals in the Sugimoto household followed a peculiar routine. There were four groups: Kensuke and his wife on the second floor, Asako and her children on the first floor, Yakichi and Etsuko in another part of the first floor, and Miyo and Saburo in the servant’s quarters. Miyo cooked rice for everyone, but the other dishes were prepared by the group that ate them. Out of Yakichi’s willfulness sprang the custom by which the two sons’ families were allotted a fixed sum monthly for household expenses and expected to manage within it. Only he, he felt, did not have to conform to so straitened a regimen. His invitation to Etsuko—who had nowhere to turn with her husband dead—was based on nothing but the wish to utilize her services as cook. It was a simple impulse, nothing more.
    Yakichi took the best of the fruits and vegetables harvested. Only he had the right to pick the nuts from the Shiba chestnut tree, the most delicious of them all. The other families were forbidden to do so. Only Etsuko shared them with him.
    When he arrived at the decision to bestow on Etsuko these perquisites, perhaps a certain ulterior motive was already moving within Yakichi. The best Shiba chestnuts, the best grapes, the best Fuyu persimmons, the best strawberries, the best peaches—the right to share these seemed to Yakichi a privilege for which no compensation was too great.
    Thanks to these marks of special favor received by Etsuko so soon after her arrival, she became the object of the jealousy and resentment of the other two families. That jealousy and resentment soon excited a further, vicious surmise, an exceedingly plausible calumny that seemed somehow to reach Yakichi and direct his conduct. Yet the more satisfactory succeeding events were in corroborating the suspicions aroused by the first hypothesis, the more difficult it became for the one who arrived at it to believe what he saw.
    Could this woman whose husband was dead less than a year willingly enter into a physical relationship with her father-in-law? She was still very young, still supremely eligible for marriage; could she have voluntarily