One Hot Summer in Kyoto by John Haylock

Author:John Haylock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press

23

“Are you feeling all right, Mr. Meadowes?”

“Yes,” I answer, untruthfully. “I think it must have been the fish.”

It is the second time that Miss Goto has asked me this question as we travel across the city to the wretched temple which she wants me to see. I must look distrait or worried and the Japanese are extraordinarily quick to sense one’s mood. I am worried, in a way. Is Kazumi deceiving me? Obviously, she made a plan. Has she really fallen for Bob or is she just using his philanderer’s nature to taunt me? By the time our taxi has turned out of Kawaramachi into Shijo Street I have assumed the latter contingency. Kazumi is with Bob in order to make me jealous. I told her I was lunching with him at the Kyoto Hotel and she guessed, rightly, that I was lunching there and went there with Bob to confront me. She must be furious that she missed me. Did she see Miss Goto? We turn right at the Yasaka Shrine and join the line of snorting, stinking trucks going south along Higashiyama-dori.

We leave the taxi at the foot of the steps outside the temple. The sun beats down on my bare head and Miss Goto puts up her parasol and holds it over me. If Kazumi has fallen for Bob, why didn’t she do so before? Or is she one of his regulars?

A priest in white kimono tears our entrance tickets in two after we have taken off our shoes, and then an old man with a scraggly, gray beard and a stick, dressed only in long cotton underpants and a vest, takes charge of us. Miss Goto mumbles about the temple into my ear, but the old man wishes to show he still has some use in the world and, taking hold of my shirt sleeve, tugs me along the polished boards of the veranda, off which are matted rooms with painted sliding doors. We stop at the first room.

“The Cherry Blossom Room,” he says, pointing to the shoji, “Painted by Hasegawa Tohaku for Hideyoshi in 1592.”

“The temple is almost a complete renovation,” explains Miss Goto, who is on my other side.

“Very old,” says the old man.

“Due to a fire,” says Miss Goto.

The voices of the old man and Miss Goto are like those unwanted and unrequested tunes that are boomed into one’s ears in cafes, bars, and hotels, and so I do not pay much attention to what my two guides are saying. The heat and Kazumi have sent me into a daze.

“Founded by Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun . . .” The old man is determined to impart his knowledge.

What about Bob’s wife? Can she be so much the Japanese spouse, so casanière that she never knows what her husband is doing?

“This temple was originally in the Kii Peninsula . . .”

“Burnt down.” The ominous words come from Miss Goto and sound peculiarly oracular.

Bob must be the sort of man who covets other people’s possessions or lovers, though Kazumi has been neither possessed nor loved by me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.