“And they started after spending several hours with Mariye?”
“Yes. You must think I’m some kind of idiot.”
I shook my head no. “Not at all. I felt the same way when I hit puberty and met a girl I liked.”
Menshiki gave a small smile. There was something rueful in it. “That’s when the pointlessness of all my accomplishments and successes, and all the money I’ve accumulated, hit me. That I’m no more than an expedient and transitory vehicle meant to pass a set of genes on to someone else. What other function do I serve? Beyond that, I’m just a clod of earth.”
“A clod of earth.” I tried saying the words. They had a strange ring.
“To tell the truth, I was down in the pit when that realization hit me. Remember, that pit we uncovered behind the shrine, underneath the pile of rocks?”
“How could I forget?”
“If you’d felt like it, you could have abandoned me there. Without food and water, my body would have shriveled and returned to the soil. I would have been no more than a clod of earth in the end.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I remained silent.
“It’s enough for me,” Menshiki said, “that the possibility exists that Mariye and I are related by blood. I feel no compulsion to find out if it’s true or not. That mere possibility has sent a beam of light into my life—now I can look at myself in a new way.”
“I think I understand,” I said. “Maybe not every step in your reasoning, but the way you feel. What I don’t get is what you’re expecting from Mariye. In concrete terms.”
“It’s not that I haven’t given that question any thought,” Menshiki said. He looked down at his hands. They were beautiful hands, with long fingers. “People devote a lot of energy to thinking about things. Whether they want to or not. Yet in the end we all just have to wait—only time can tell how events play out. The answers lie ahead.”
I remained quiet. I had no clear idea what he had in mind, and no compelling desire to find out. Were I to know, my position might become even more difficult.
“I’ve heard Mariye is much more forthcoming with you,” Menshiki said after a long pause. “That’s what Shoko said, at least.”
“That’s probably true,” I said cautiously. “We seem to be able to talk quite naturally when we’re in the studio.”
Of course, I didn’t tell him that Mariye had come to visit me from the adjoining mountain through a hidden passageway. That was our secret.
“Do you think it’s because she’s gotten comfortable with you? Or because she feels some personal connection?”
“The girl is fascinated by painting, maybe artistic expression in general,” I explained. “If a painting is involved, there are occasions—not always, mind you—when she’s quite comfortable talking. She’s not a typical child, that’s for sure. When I taught her at the community center, she didn’t speak much to the other kids.”
“So she doesn’t get along with children her own age?”
“Maybe. Her aunt says she doesn’t make many friends at school.”
Menshiki pondered that for a moment.
“She opens up with Shoko to some extent, I guess,” he said.
“So it seems. From what I’ve heard, she’s much closer to her aunt than she is to her father.”
Menshiki merely nodded. His silence seemed charged with implication.
“What sort of man is her father?” I asked him. “Have you checked?”
Menshiki looked to the side and narrowed his eyes. “He was fifteen years older than she was,” he finally said. “By ‘she’ I mean his late wife.”
Of course, “late wife” meant Menshiki’s former lover.
“I don’t know how they got together, or why they married. I have no interest in those things,” he said. “Whatever the case, though, it’s clear he loved his wife dearly. Her death was a terrible shock. They say he was a changed man after that.”
According to Menshiki, the Akikawas were a big landowning family in the area (much as Tomohiko Amada’s family was in Kyushu). Although they had lost nearly half of their property in the land reform that followed World War Two, they retained many assets, enough that the family could get along comfortably on the income they produced. Yoshinobu Akikawa, Mariye’s father, was the first of two children and the only son, so when his father passed away at an early age he became the head of the family. He built a house for himself at the top of the mountain they owned, and set up an office in one of their buildings in Odawara. From that office, he managed the family properties in the city and its environs: several commercial and apartment buildings, and a number of rental houses and lots. He also dabbled in real estate. In other words, while he kept the business going, he made no attempt to broaden its scale. The core of his enterprise consisted of looking after the family’s assets when the need arose.
Yoshinobu married late in life. He was in his mid-forties when he tied the knot, and his daughter (Mariye) was born the following year. Then, six years later, his wife was stung to death. It was early spring, and she had been walking alone through a big plum grove they owned when she was attacked by a swarm of large hornets. Her death hit him hard. To wipe away anything that could remind him of the tragedy, as soon as the funeral was over he hired men to raze the plum trees, and yank their roots from the earth. What was left was a dreary and barren plot of land. It had been a beautiful grove, so its destruction was painful for many. Moreover, for generations those living nearby had been permitted to pick a portion of the abundant fruit to make pickled plums and plum wine. As a result, Yoshinobu Akikawa’s barbaric act of retaliation deprived many local residents of one of the small pleasures they could look forward to each year. Still, it was his mountain, the plum grove was his, and no one could fail to understand his fury—at the hornets and the trees. As a consequence, those complaints were never voiced in public.
Yoshinobu Akikawa turned into a rather morose man after his wife’s death. He hadn’t been particularly social or gregarious to begin with, and now his introverted side only grew stronger. His interest in spiritual things deepened, and he became involved with a religious sect whose name was unknown to me. It is said that at one point he spent some time in India. At great personal expense, he built a grand hall for the sect’s use on the outskirts of town, where he began spending much of his time. It’s not clear exactly what takes place there. But it appears that a daily regimen of stringent religious “austerities” and the study of reincarnation helped him find a new purpose in life after his wife’s death.
These activities reduced his involvement in the business, but his duties hadn’t been all that demanding in the first place. There were three longtime employees more than capable of managing things when the boss failed to show up. His visits home became more infrequent. When he did return it was usually just to sleep. His relationship with his only daughter had, for some reason, grown more distant after his wife’s death. Perhaps she reminded him of his dead wife. Or perhaps he had never really cared for children. In any case, as a result the child never really took to her father. The responsibility for looking after Mariye went to his younger sister, Shoko. She had taken leave from her job as secretary for the president of a medical college in Tokyo and moved to the house atop the mountain near Odawara on what she expected to be a temporary break to look after the child. In the end, though, the arrangement became permanent. Perhaps she came to love the girl. Or perhaps she couldn’t stand idly by when her little niece needed her so much.
Having reached that point in his account, Menshiki stopped to touch his fingers to his lips.
“Do you happen to have any whiskey in the house?” he asked.
“There’s about a half a bottle of single malt,” I said.
“I don’t want to impose, but could I have some? On the rocks.”
“My pleasure. But aren’t you driving?”