“What were you thinking about?”
“About the landlady at Shinichi’s place in Kyoto.”
Soeda had heard the story from Ikuko last year when she returned from a
trip to see Shinichi and to sightsee in Kyoto.
“They went to put her grandfather’s bones into the family grave when
she was seven, and for some reason her mother said to her—You’ll marry
into a different family, you know, so you won’t be allowed into this grave.
She was just a child then, and she felt terribly lonely—but she was saying
that the way things have turned out it looks like she’ll end up in that grave
after all! Can you believe it? She couldn’t help laughing.” Soeda could
remember Ikuko saying this.
The woman was ten years younger than Ikuko. She and her husband had
been childless when he was killed in the war, so she returned to her parents’
house for six or seven years, then remarried into a family with three
children. She was fond of children, and the two young boys had grown to
like her very quickly—so much so that they fought to be allowed to sleep
beside her. But their older sister was almost eleven, and she had been
difficult. Once, at her husband’s suggestion, the woman had tried to open
an old chest of drawers in a room they didn’t ordinarily use, and the girl
had struck fiercely at her waist from behind.
“Stop it! Stop it! That’s my mom’s! She said she’d give it all to me! You
aren’t allowed to touch it!” The girl seemed on the verge of tears. The
stepmother tried her best to get along with the girl, but in the end she gave
up and left. Now she rented a fiveroom house in Kyoto, the rooms of which
she sublet to students.
The fact that Ikuko had been thinking of the landlady as she lay there
unable to sleep suggested something to Soeda—that her thoughts of their
son had led her to think of her own and her daughter’s lives as women. Still
thinking this, he said, “It might not be windy like this in Kyoto tonight, you
