Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata Read Free Book Online Page B

should have come.’ She stood up and followed him in.
    ‘I didn’t want to upset your relatives,’ he answered – lightly, he hoped.
    ‘That sort of thing doesn’t worry me any more.’ The words were firm and clear.
    In the sitting room, there was a photograph before the urn.
    There were only the flowers Kikuji had sent the day before.
    He thought this strange. Had Fumiko left only his and taken away all the others? Or had it been a lonely memorial service? He suspected that it had.
    ‘A water jar, I see.’
    He was looking at the vase in which she had arranged his flowers. It was a water jar for the tea ceremony.
    ‘Yes. I thought it would be right.’
    ‘A fine Shino piece.’ For a ceremonial jar, it was rather small.
    He had sent white roses and pale carnations, and they went well with the cylindrical jar.
    ‘Mother sometimes used it for flowers. That’s why it wasn’t sold.’
    Kikuji knelt to light incense before the urn. He folded his hands and closed his eyes.
    He was apologizing. But love flowed into the apology, to coddle and mollify the guilt.
    Had Mrs Ota died unable to escape the pursuing guilt? Or, pursued by love, had she found herself unable to control it? Was it love or guilt that had killed her? For a week Kikuji had debated the problem.
    Now, as he knelt with closed eyes before the ashes, her image failed to come to him; but the warmth of her touch enfolded him, making him drunk with its smell. A strange fact, but, because of the woman, a fact that seemed in no way unnatural. And although her touch was upon him, the sensation was less tactile than auditory, musical.
    Unable to sleep since her death, Kikuji had been taking sedatives with saké. He had been quick to awaken, however, and he had had many dreams.
    They had not been nightmares. On awakening, he would be drowsy and sweetly drunk.
    That a dead woman could make her embrace felt in one’s dreams seemed eerie to Kikuji. He was young, and unprepared for such an experience.
    ‘The things I’ve done!’ She had said it both when she spent the night with him in Kamakura and when she came into the tea cottage. The words had brought on the delicious trembling and the little sobs, and now, as he knelt before her ashes and asked what had made her die, he thought he might grant for the moment that it had been guilt. The admission only brought back her voice, speaking of her guilt.
    Kikuji opened his eyes.
    Behind him he heard a sob. Fumiko seemed to be fighting back tears – one sob had escaped, but only one.
    Kikuji did not move. ‘When was the picture taken?’ he asked.
    ‘Five or six years ago. I had a snapshot enlarged.’
    ‘Oh? It was taken at a tea ceremony?’
    ‘How did you know?’
    The photograph had been cut at the throat, showing only a little of the kimono and nothing of the shoulders.
    ‘How did you know it was a tea ceremony?’
    ‘It has that feeling. The eyes are lowered, and she seems to be busy at something. You can’t see the shoulders, of course, but you can feel a sort of concentration in her manner.’
    ‘I wondered if it would do. It was taken a little from the side. But it’s a picture Mother was fond of.’
    ‘It’s a very quiet picture. A very good picture.’
    ‘I can see now that it was a mistake, though. She doesn’t look at you when you offer incense.’
    ‘Oh? That’s true, I suppose.’
    ‘She’s looking away, and down.’
    Kikuji thought of the woman making tea the day before she died.
    As she measured out the tea, a tear fell on the shoulder of the kettle. He went for the tea bowl – she did not bring it to him. The tear on the kettle had dried by the time he had drunk the tea. She fell across his lap the moment he laid down the bowl.
    ‘Mother weighed more when the picture was taken.’ She hurried over the next words: ‘And it would have embarrassed me to have the picture too much like myself.’
    Kikuji looked around at her.
    Her eyes, now on the floor, had been fixed on his back.
    He