After the Banquet (10 page)

The magnificent garden of the Setsugoan faded from Kazu’s thoughts, and its place was taken by the clearly perceived vision of a small, dignified gravestone. This explains Kazu’s first request of Noguchi after their return from the honeymoon trip, a visit to the Noguchi family grave. Noguchi, who disliked going to the cemetery, put her off with various excuses but finally, one Sunday in the rainy season, Kazu managed to inveigle Noguchi into taking her to Aoyama Cemetery.

The day was gloomy with occasional showers of a powdery rain that gave the young leaves in the cemetery a fresh green look. Kazu and Noguchi, sharing one umbrella, followed the grave keeper along the path. He carried sprays of anise, incense sticks, and a pail of water for offering to the dead.

Kazu said, “I don’t suppose the departed ones can sleep very peacefully what with all this endless flow of traffic right next to them.”

“The family plot’s fortunately in a slightly more secluded place,” Noguchi answered.

The tomb, though not the imposing monument Kazu had envisioned, was of a gray stone carved with the family crest and showed something of the ancient lineage and pride of an illustrious family. Kazu was genuinely fond of such things. From stone to stone could be traced the genealogy, utterly untainted by fakery, of a splendid line of people. Kazu, protected by the umbrella Noguchi held over her, knelt before the tomb and prayed a quite unnaturally long time.

The smoke curling vigorously upward in the fine rain from the bundle of incense sticks caught in Kazu’s hair and strayed among the locks. Its strong odor caused Kazu something like a vertigo of delight. What a truly immaculate, proud family! Kazu had had no opportunity even at the wedding to meet the living members of Noguchi’s family, but she could imagine how the dead ones with their high principles and absolute incorruptibility had transmitted the family’s heritage to succeeding generations. Grinding poverty, obsequiousness, lies, contemptible natures—these were no concern of this family. Confused memories returned of obscene parties in country restaurants, of drunken customers thrusting their hands inside an innocent girl’s kimono, of a runaway girl shrinking in terror as she boarded a night train, of back alleys in the city, of bought caresses, of petty ruses of every sort employed to protect herself, of the domineering kisses of cold-hearted men, of contempt mixed with affection, of a persistent craving for revenge against an unknown adversary: such experiences were surely undreamed of by this family. No doubt someone in the family was eating in a French restaurant or feeding a pet canary even as Kazu, still a girl, was washing the underclothes of the woman she worked for.

Kazu now belonged to the same family as these people, and she would some day be buried in their family temple. And to think that she would dissolve into one stream with them, never to separate! What a source of comfort that was, and what a priceless trick on society! The comfort and the trickery would be completed when Kazu was actually buried there. For all Kazu’s successes, her money, her prodigious largesse, people had never really been taken in by her. She had begun her career through trickery and in the end she would trick eternity itself. This would be the bouquet of roses Kazu would toss to the world . . .

At length Kazu unclasped her hands and rose from prayer. She examined the inscription on the side of the monument, and asked Noguchi about the most recent of the persons listed, “Sadako Noguchi. Died August 1946.”

“It’s my former wife. I’m sure you must’ve heard her name.” Noguchi’s expression was somber. He found it unnatural for Kazu deliberately to have asked such a question.

Kazu’s next remark was even more unnatural. “That’s right. Your wife is buried here too. I had forgotten.” Kazu’s voice was good cheer itself: it was precisely the high-pitched voice overflowing with energy that she used when giving orders to the maids at the Setsugoan. Not a trace of envy could be detected in this voice. Noguchi had to smile despite himself.

“Whom have you come to pay your respects to, anyway? You’ve never known any of these people.”

“But they’re your ancestors, aren’t they?” answered Kazu with an unclouded smile.

On their way back from the cemetery they stopped in town and did some shopping. Kazu seemed in seventh heaven all that day, and was so playful that she startled Noguchi.

A deep languid sense of security began that day to creep over Kazu, and before long she had come gradually to neglect her work at the Setsugoan. Fortunately there were few guests, summer being the slack season. Suddenly she felt with terrible urgency that she was growing old.

The couple frequently took trips to the countryside to escape the heat, and wherever they went Kazu would exaggerate her emotions. By this exaggeration she succeeded only in isolating herself from Noguchi. It may be wondered if she was not mistaken in wanting to light a fire under the peaceful existence Noguchi craved.

Kazu had successfully seen to it that Noguchi was always kept in freshly laundered shirts, but her suggestions that the tailor make him some new suits were firmly rejected. Noguchi insisted that if suddenly after his marriage he were to appear in new clothes, people acquainted with the meagerness of his income would be quick to point at him with scorn. Kazu could not understand why it was wrong for her to use her money to order clothes for her husband. Noguchi was frequently obliged to caution her on that score. “You seem to think that giving people money will make them happy, but you’re badly mistaken. Why can’t you understand that the bigger the tip you give for some foolish reason, the more the other person will suspect your sincerity? The nature of my work is such that I must enjoy the full confidence of people, and this necessitates living simply. Please give up this snobbery of yours.”

Kazu had the utmost respect for her husband’s character, but it was hard for her to see wherein lay the difference between his politics and those she had seen and heard at the Setsugoan. Her glimpses of Conservative Party politicians at the Setsugoan had inculcated in Kazu a splendid notion of the nature of their work. Politics meant pretending to step out to the men’s room and then completely disappearing, forcing a man’s back to the wall while cheerfully sharing the same fire, making a show of laughter when one is angry or flying into a rage when one is not in the least upset, sitting for a long time without saying a word, quietly flicking specks of dust off one’s sleeve . . . in short, acting very much like a geisha. The exaggerated odor of secrecy clinging to politics confirmed its resemblance to the business of romance; politics and love affairs were in fact as alike as peas in a pod. Noguchi’s brand of politics, however, was not quite romantic enough.

It was not in Kazu’s nature, even though she neglected her work at the Setsugoan, to shut herself up in her house, to cook for her husband and patiently await his return. She often found herself wondering what to do with herself. She began to think that her customers connected with the Conservative Party were gradually drifting away. One of them in fact had said as much to her face. “I wish you’d persuade your husband to bolt the Radical Party and join us. We’d be glad to welcome back one of our senior statesmen, and we’d find it easier, for that matter, to come here. Don’t you think you could move your husband if you put your mind to it?”

This was a very shabby way to speak of Noguchi, and Kazu bit her lip as she listened in silence. She thought, “It’s my fault that a former cabinet minister should be treated like a restaurant owner.” She brooded over the matter until finally she decided that wiping out the insult to Noguchi meant clearing her own honor. Then she turned to the valued customer and declared, “I have no desire to listen to such talk. Please be kind enough not to come here again.”

Business setbacks owing to love or pride were, irrespective of magnitude, a new experience for Kazu. Her pride became more easily wounded each day. Kazu supposed that it was not merely her own pride that had become inflated, but that Noguchi’s, added to hers, had doubled it.

One day late in autumn Kazu, spending her usual kind of weekend in Noguchi’s house, suddenly jumped up and called him to the window. “Look, look—a crane’s flying up there, a crane!”

Noguchi took no notice of her, but Kazu raised such a fuss that finally he reluctantly got up and looked out the window. He could see nothing. “Nonsense,” he said, “do you suppose there’d be a crane flying in the middle of Tokyo?”

“I’m sure I saw one—a white crane with a red crest. It started to come down on the roof next door, but then it flew off again that way.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

Thereupon the two began a rather gloomy argument. Kazu had missed her chance to admit playfully, “I was fooling you.” She was as much to blame as Noguchi, and she had been mistaken to persist with such excessive earnestness and intensity in acting out her childish trick.

Kazu had finally realized at this late date how troublesome her disposition made things: she could not go on living unless she were constantly excited about something. The changes she tried to introduce into the routine of their lives were all rebuffed by her husband; Noguchi obstinately continued to lead his accustomed life. Even so, Kazu’s affection for her husband remained unchanged. On Saturday evenings he sometimes showed a surprising loquacity, and though jokes were rare as ever in his conversation, he would on occasion discuss foreign literature or lecture her on socialism.

It was obvious at any rate that Noguchi thought of this marriage as his final abode, and Kazu, for her part, felt she had found her tomb. But people cannot go on living inside a tomb.

During Kazu’s normal weekdays at the Setsugoan the houseboy kept her informed in detail of Noguchi’s activities. It came as a fresh surprise each time to discover how extremely uneventful his life was. Noguchi, despite his advanced years, devoted himself completely to his studies.

“Yesterday,” the houseboy reported, “he spent from three in the afternoon until his bedtime in the library, studying. He ate his dinner in the library too.”

“If he keeps studying that way I’m afraid he’ll get sick from lack of exercise. I must give him a good talking-to next Saturday.”

Kazu had strong prejudices concerning the intellectual life. For her it signified a kind of dangerous indolence into which men of promise were likely to fall. She rejoiced, however, that despite her intention of giving her husband “a good talking-to” he was not a man ever to listen to her advice.

About this time a little incident took place at the Setsugoan.

The night before there had been bright moonlight, and the thief had apparently concealed himself in the shadows of the garden to wait until everyone was asleep. The shrubbery around the huge ilex tree afforded an ideal hiding place. The thief had evidently sneaked into the garden when everybody was busy with the parties in full swing upstairs and the front entrance was left unattended. He must have spent a couple of hours quietly waiting. Probably he had refrained from smoking for fear that the lighted ends of his cigarettes might be seen, but Kazu discovered two or three wads of masticated chewing gum. From this she deduced that the thief was still young.

The thief had tried Kazu’s room first, but after forcing open the window a couple of inches, he decided not to enter. Kazu’s slumbers were undisturbed. There was a safe in her cupboard, but the thief could not have guessed that the occupant of such a cramped little room was the proprietress.

The thief then slipped into the sleeping quarters of the five resident maids. His shoe struck something soft, and the next instant powerful shrieks assailed him. He made his escape without stealing a thing.

Once the police arrived that night they created such an uproar that Kazu was unable to get back to bed again. It was during the course of her customary stroll the next morning that she discovered at the base of the sunlit ilex tree, the lumps of chewing gum looking for all the world like glistening white teeth.

Kazu somehow couldn’t get it out of her head that the thief, after looking into the room where she lay, had decided not to go in. To think that she had been sleeping all the while and knew nothing! In recollection, she was relieved, frightened, and also slightly dissatisfied. An empty suspicion rose within her as she felt the autumn wind pierce through her open sleeves to the base of her breasts, that the thief might have touched her body as she slept and then changed his mind. No, such a thing was unlikely. She was in the dark, and the window was open only two or three inches: there was no reason to think that he had gone so far as to examine her body.

But as she walked alone through the garden, the morning breeze playing on her, Kazu felt somehow the incipient decay of her flesh. She was exceptionally sensitive to the heat in summer, and had the habit of cooling herself by exposing directly to the electric fan not merely her breasts but her thighs, even before her maids or intimates. She could do this because she had confidence in her flesh. A shudder of doubt went through her now as she wondered about next summer. It seemed to her that marriage had made her body flabby.

It was at this point in her reveries that Kazu happened to look down and notice at the base of the tree some objects resembling human teeth. Kazu squatted down and discovered on careful examination that they were wads of chewing gum painstakingly rolled into balls. No guest or employee of the Setsugoan would chew gum in such a place, and the neighborhood children had no way of getting into the garden.

“They’re the thief’s,” Kazu instantly guessed. The uncleanness of the gum struck her less vividly than the thought of the lonely hours the man had waited here. She even felt there was something very endearing about his loneliness. She could visualize the young, dissatisfied, strong, rough rows of teeth that had chewed the gum. The thief had chewed at time, at the dull rubbery society which did not admit him, and at the uneasiness hanging over him. And there he waited in the lovely moonlight filtering through the leaves of the ilex tree.