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

Yakichi, smoking his pipe, came into her room while she was mending and asked how she had been sleeping lately? This old man with ears turned toward Etsuko’s bedroom every night—ears alive all night to the turnings and wakings of Etsuko in the room down the hall. Are not old men’s ears like pure shells, incessantly washed and filled with wisdom? The ears, which in shape seem more like the property of an animal than any other part of the human body, are in an old man the very incarnation of intelligence. Was it for these reasons that Etsuko saw something other than ugliness in Yakichi’s solicitude on her behalf? Was it as if she were guarded and loved by wisdom?
    And yet giving it such a lovely name is perhaps going too far. Yakichi stood behind Etsuko, looking at her calendar on a doorpost.
    “What’s this? You bad girl. It’s still at last week’s date,” he said.
    Etsuko turned slightly: “Is it? I beg your pardon.”
    “Beg pardon? You don’t have to say that.”
    His voice was filled with good humor; as he spoke Etsuko could hear behind her the sound of pages being torn from her calendar. Then all sound stopped. She suddenly felt her shoulder being grasped, while a cold hand dry as bamboo slipped into her bodice. Her body recoiled slightly, but she said nothing. It was not because she could not cry out; she simply didn’t.
    How can one explain the sense of resignation Etsuko felt at this moment? Was it simply lust? Sloth? Was it the way a thirst-crazed man swallows rusty water that Etsuko accepted this? No. Etsuko was not thirsty in the slightest. Her nature had suddenly become one that asked for nothing. It seemed as if she had come to Maidemmura to find again a basis for that fearful self-sufficiency she had contracted in the Hospital for Infectious Diseases. She drank perhaps like a drowning man helplessly swallowing sea water, in accordance with some law of nature. Not to ask for anything means that one has lost one’s freedom to choose or reject. Once having decided that, one has no choice but to drink anything—even sea water . . .
    Afterward, however, Etsuko exhibited none of the gagging expressions of a drowning person. Until the moment of her death, it seemed, no one would know she was drowning. She did not call out—this woman bound and gagged by her own hand . . .
    April eighteenth was the day for the “mountain journey,” as they called cherry-blossom viewing in this area. It was the custom for everyone to take the day off and gather in family groups to wander about the foothills looking at blossoms.
    Everyone in the Sugimoto household except Yakichi and Etsuko had been eating more than they wished of jami —bamboo-shoot scraps. The former tenant farmer, Okura, would take the bamboo shoots they had harvested out of the shed, load them into the bicycle trailer, and take them to market, where they were graded and sold at three different prices. The bamboo shoots left over were swept up into a great pile and then cooked by the potful to make up the bill of fare for the Sugimotos other than Yakichi and Etsuko in April and May.
    The day of the mountain journey, however, was a grand occasion. A whole feast had been crammed into nested boxes. Clutching decorated mats, the family started out en masse to enjoy their picnic. Asako’s older child, a girl, was in raptures; there was no school.
    Etsuko recalled: We passed a lovely spring day, quite like those one sees boldly pictured in schoolbooks. Everyone became a person boldly painted in a picture—or played that part.
    There in the atmosphere charged with the intimate smell of manure—in the intimacy of country people, somehow the smell of manure is always present . . . And all those insects flying! And the air filled with the droning flight of bees and beetles! And the shining wind replete with sunlight! And the bellies of swallows turning in the wind!
    On the morning of the mountain journey those in the house were busy with