Masks by Fumiko Enchi Read Free Book Online Page A

our times without aging a day. There was something unusual about her. Will she be staying here long?”
    “Yes. For good.” Yasuko glanced up, moving only her eyes.
    Mieko’s mother had also died, it seemed, and after the war the family had fallen on hard times; certain of the relatives were even fighting one another in court over settlement of the estate. Finally, on the pretext that her brother, Akio, was dead now anyway, Harumé had been sent back to her mother.
    Ibuki puzzled over the strangeness of the woman’s destiny, to be shuttled hither and yon, like a child, at the whims of other people. He wondered if there might be something wrong with her. And Yasuko’s wish to be free ofthe Toganō family seemed bound up in some way with Harumé’s return.
    “Does Mieko seem fond of her?” he asked. Yasuko slowly shook her head.
    Before he could learn any more about Harumé or about Yasuko’s own intentions, the train emerged from a long tunnel.
    Outside the window, lights of the resort town of Atami sprang up in the evening dusk, spilling down the hillside toward the sea like a scattering of jewels.
    Watching idly as a porter manhandled someone’s luggage, Ibuki was seized suddenly by an idea. He leaped to his feet.
    “Yasuko, let’s get off here.”
    “What?”
    Ignoring her dubious expression, he grabbed their suitcases from the overhead rack and hastily placed her scarlet coat around her shoulders.
    The train had stopped. Carrying their two suitcases in one hand, he pushed her ahead of him out onto the platform. No sooner had they stepped off the train than it began to glide away.
    “What are you doing? Where are we going?” Yasuko stood huddled next to Ibuki’s tall frame, looking up at him, her head on his chest. Her small body glowed with the excited agitation of a stolen bride. Ibuki transferred the bags lightly to his other hand and wrapped his left arm firmly around her shoulders, squeezing her arm with his fingers as they walked down the platform stairs.
    —
    One afternoon a week later, Ibuki was seated importantly at his desk in the department office, correcting proof sheets for a new book. Professor Makino had no classes that day, and his other two colleagues had already gone home, leaving Ibuki with the room to himself.
    Sounds of footsteps and the ringing of a phone came to him occasionally through the thick wall separating his office from the library next door. Now and then he would flick a cigarette ash into the ashtray and let his gaze wander out the third-story window, where yellow bird-shaped ginkgo leaves swayed on the branches with the soft heaviness of blossoms at their peak, almost ready to fall and scatter. At five o’clock the steam in the pipes was shut off, and the room grew steadily colder.
    The feel of Yasuko’s agile, fairylike body in his arms that night in the Atami hotel came to him time and again like a shifting beam of light, leaving him restless and unsettled. With a tremor he recalled the pliant smoothness of her waist and the backs of her hands, the way she had withstood positions so contorted that he had feared her wrists or arms might pull apart; and then, abandoning the dry and colorless world of the dusty books and folders spread before him on the desktop, he gave himself over to the fantasy that he was soaring birdlike, through a void of such brilliant intensity that all color had blended into pure light.
    Only after parting with her did he realize that he knew no more about the goings-on at the Toganō house, or about Yasuko’s own private plans, than what she had told him already on the train.
    Roused by her casual admission aboard the train that she intended to marry Mikamé, he had acted impetuously, seeking by force to make her his, yet the only result had been a sensual feast of astonishing richness, and in the end she had gone away, leaving nothing of herself behind.
    Back home, he sighed despondently at the sight of his small daughter toddling about, and his