Thirst for Love by Yukio Mishima Read Free Book Online Page A

right. Etsuko will make sure you get better. Don’t worry about a thing. If you died, I’d die too.” (Who would hold her to that false pledge? There were no witnesses anyway—not even God, whom Etsuko didn’t believe in.) “But that isn’t going to happen. You’re going to get better; that’s certain.”
    Etsuko kissed her husband’s parched lips frenziedly. They were constantly exhaling hot breath, as if fed by subterranean heat. Etsuko’s lips moistened her husband’s blood-smeared lips, thorny as roses. Under his wife’s face, Ryosuke’s face writhed.
    The gauze-wrapped door handle turned, and the door opened slightly. Etsuko heard the sound and released her husband. It was a nurse, beckoning to Etsuko with her eyes. They went out into the hall. A woman was there, in a long dress and fur cape, leaning by the window at the end of the hall.
    It was the woman of the pictures. At first glance she seemed to be Eurasian. Her teeth were so lovely they looked false. Her nostrils were shaped like wings. The wet paraffin paper around the bouquet she was carrying struck to her red fingernails. There was something impotent, frustrated, about this woman’s bearing, as if she were an animal standing on its hind legs trying to walk. She could have been forty: the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes would suddenly spring out as if from ambush, belying the twenty-five years one might first have given her.
    “How do you do?” the woman said. There was in her words a faint, elusive accent. Etsuko saw her as a woman stupid men might find exotic. Yet this was the woman who had caused her so much pain. Etsuko found it difficult at this short notice to bring together that past pain and this present embodiment of its cause. Her pain had already matured (strange way of saying it!) to the point at which it was something imaginative, having no connection with this concrete entity. The woman was an extracted tooth; it hurt her no more. Like a sick man who has weathered all the little, phony illnesses and now is face to face with the killer itself, Etsuko found herself demeaned by the thought that this woman had been the cause of all her troubles.
    The woman held out a calling card with a man’s name on it, saying she had come in her husband’s place. On the card was the name of the general manager of the firm for which Ryosuke worked. “He is not supposed to have visitors,” Etsuko said; “no one is allowed in.” Something like a shadow darted across the woman’s eyes.
    “But my husband asked me to see him and find out how he is.”
    “Well, that’s how my husband is: no one can see him.”
    “If I could just look in at him, my husband would be satisfied.”
    “If your husband were here I would let him in.”
    “Why is it that my husband could go in, but I can’t? That doesn’t make sense. The way you talk makes me feel you’re worried about something.”
    “All right, nobody is to go in to see him. Does that satisfy you?”
    “I find the way you speak extraordinary. Are you his wife—Ryosuke’s wife?”
    “I am the only woman who calls my husband ‘Ryosuke!’”
    “Please, may I, please, just look in at him? I beg of you. Here, this is not much, but I thought it would brighten up his room.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Mrs. Sugimoto, may I see him? How is he? He isn’t seriously ill, is he?”
    “He may live, and he may die—no one knows.”
    Etsuko’s derisive tone shook the woman. She threw etiquette aside and said: “Well, if that’s the way it is, I’m going to see him whether you like it or not.”
    “Come right this way. If you don’t mind going in, make yourself at home.” Etsuko turned and led the way back to the room. “Do you know what my husband has?”
    “No.”
    “Typhoid.”
    The woman stopped, her color changing. “Typhoid?” she whispered.
    Here was an uncouth woman, surely. Her shocked reaction was that of the old wife who upon hearing someone has tuberculosis says: “Heavens