Hawaii - James Michener [407]
Instead, he stood dumb as she approached. His eyes followed her and his big arms quivered, and as she passed she knew that this Kamejiro who was earmarked for Hawaii would watch her constantly throughout the following days, and she began to look for him at strange locations, and he would be there, stolid, staring, his arms hanging awkwardly down. Without ever acknowledging by a single motion of her own that she had even seen him, she conveyed the timeless message of the village: "It would not be unreasonable if you were to do so."
Therefore, on a soft spring night when the rice fields were beginning to turn delicate green, the sweet promise of food to come, Sakagawa Kamejiro secretly dressed in the traditional garb of the Hiroshima-ken night lover. He wore his best pair of trousers, his clean straw zori and a shirt that did not smell. The most conspicuous part of his costume, however, was a white cloth mask which wound about his head and covered his nose and mouth. Thus properly attired, he slipped out of the Sakagawa home, down a back path to Yoke's and waited several hours as her family closed up the day's business, blew out the lights and threw no more shadows on the shoji. When he was satisfied that Yoko had retired, with a reasonable chance that her parents might be sleeping, he crept toward the room which from long study he had spotted as hers, and in some mysterious way known only in the villages, she had anticipated that this was the night he would visit her, so the shoji had been left unlocked, and in a moment he slipped bemasked into the room.
Yoko saw him in the faint moonlight, but said nothing. Without removing his mask, for that was essential to the custom, he crept to her bed and placed his left hand upon her cheek. Then he took her right hand in his and held her fingers in a certain way, which from the beginning of Japan had meant, "I want to sleep with you," and of her own accord she changed the position of his fingers, which timelessly had signified, "You may."
With never a word spoken, with never a mask removed, Kamejiro silently slipped into bed with the intoxicating girl. She would not allow him to remove her clothing, for she knew that later she might have to do many things in a hurry, but that did not inconvenience Kamejiro, and in a few stolid, fumbling moments he made her ready to accept him. Not even at the height of their passion did Yoko utter a word, and when they collapsed mutually in blazing gratification and he fell asleep like an animal, she did not touch the mask, for it was there to protect her. At any moment in the love-making she could have pushed him away, and he would have had to go. The next day they could have met on the village street--as they would tomorrow--and neither would have been embarrassed, for so long as the mask was in place, Yoko did not know who was in her room. So long as the mask protected him, Kamejiro could not suffer personal humiliation or loss of face, for no matter what Yoko said or did, it could not embarrass him, for officially he was not there. It was a silly system, this Hiroshima courtship routine, but it worked.
When Kamejiro wakened, there was a moment when he could not recall where he was, and then he felt