After the Banquet (11 page)

Such unbridled fancy transformed the thief who had fled without stealing anything into Kazu’s secret, unknown friend. The youth hidden in the moonlight, though terribly dirty, was a being whose wings had half sprouted.

“Why didn’t he wake me, I wonder? If it was money he needed, I’d have given him all he wanted. If only he had said just a word to me!” Kazu felt somehow as if the young thief belonged to her circle of most intimate acquaintances. These were truly novel sentiments for Mrs. Yuken Noguchi.

Kazu started to call the gardener, then changed her mind. She decided not to tell anyone about the chewing gum—it might serve as evidence. She stripped some moss from the base of the tree and with her fingers carefully buried the wads of gum.

She waited until Noguchi’s normal rising hour before making an unhurried call to report the incident. After describing briefly all that had happened, Kazu added, “The police were certainly polite and considerate. I’m sure they’d never have bothered themselves that way over a thief breaking into a restaurant if it hadn’t been for you.” This was less Kazu’s honest opinion than what she would have liked to believe. It was by no means clear whether the police were showing such courtesy to the proprietress of a restaurant patronized by the Conservative Party or to the wife of an adviser of the Radical Party.

Noguchi’s comments as he listened to the report of the attempted burglary were extremely detached and superior. He spoke with the voice of an ambassador receiving word from a junior clerk of an automobile accident. “It’s your own fault—you didn’t make sure that the doors were properly locked,” were his first words. Kazu, who had been hoping for some expression of relief that she was safe, was disappointed. Noguchi apparently considered sneak thieves and the like to be purely private household matters.

Such an attitude, as far as Noguchi was concerned, was fair and objective, but it struck Kazu as being extraordinarily cold. It aroused two kinds of reactions within her. The first was wounded pride to think that, after all the years she had run a restaurant by her unaided efforts, she should be criticized for not making sure that the doors were locked, of all things! The second was a fear that Noguchi had coldly seen through the strange emotional excitement she had been experiencing since the night before. But the next moment Kazu decided that the blame for her irritation lay with the telephone. Even at times when Noguchi was pleasant enough if you met him face-to-face, he would adopt a deliberately impersonal tone on the telephone.

“It’s wrong when a married couple can only talk on the telephone,” she thought. “Still, this kind of life was my idea in the first place.”

Kazu listened distractedly to Noguchi’s admonitions, not intending to let them bother her. She examined her fingernails. There were, as always, clearly defined white crescents at the roots of her healthy nails, but she noticed today the cloudy, horizontal streaks on the nails of her middle and ring fingers. “That’s a sign I’ll have lots of kimonos,” she told herself.

Kazu all at once felt the meaninglessness of the large collection of kimonos she had already accumulated, a desolation as if her flesh were suddenly melting away.

The receiver still pressed to her ear, Kazu let her gaze wander. Morning sunlight streamed into the other rooms, and she could see the maids conscientiously dusting. The ridges of the new tatami were glossily defined in the early sunshine. At that moment a duster flickered over the openwork carving of the transom . . . The sunlight accentuated the smooth, persistent movements of the young maids, their backs stooping and rising in the rooms and corridors.

“Are you listening to me?” Noguchi demanded, his voice rather sharp.

“Yes.”

“Something’s come up here too. I’ve just had word that two important guests are coming tonight. You’ll have to receive them.”

“Will they be coming here?”

“No, to the house. I want you to order a dinner, return home, and receive them.”

“But . . .” Kazu enumerated the important customers who had reservations for the Setsugoan that evening, and started to explain why she couldn’t possibly leave the restaurant.

“I think it’s a good idea for you to return when I tell you to.”

“Who are these important guests?”

“I can’t tell you on the phone.”

Kazu was exasperated by such secrecy. “Can’t you? You can’t tell your wife the names of your guests? Very well, if that’s the way you feel.”

Noguchi answered in a voice of unbearable frigidity, “You understand me? You’re to have dinner ready and return home by five o’clock. I won’t take no for an answer.” With these words he hung up.

Kazu was so annoyed that she remained for a while sulking in her room, but eventually it occurred to her that this was the first time Noguchi had broken their agreement under which she returned home only for the weekends. The guests must certainly be very important.

Kazu reached out her hand and opened the window a couple of inches. This was the same window which the police the previous night had searched for fingerprints. Somebody—the thief or a policeman?—had trampled the small yellow chrysanthemums under the window. Some of the flowers were imbedded in the soft earth like inlaid work, quite unblemished, their shapes as clearly defined as those in a heraldic design. Here and there the yellow of a petal had straightened itself and risen from the ground.

An irresistible drowsiness came over Kazu, and she lay down on the tatami under the window. She turned her eyes clouded with anger and sleeplessness toward the bit of sky visible through the barely opened window. The morning sky radiated a distant and serene light. The cloudiness in Kazu’s eyes traced ripples across the sky. She thought, “I don’t need one more kimono. What I want now is something very different.” So thinking, she fell asleep.

Kazu returned “home” after all. To mollify the customers expected that evening, she left word that she had gone home with a fever. She then directed the maids who would accompany her home to carry with them large quantities of the menu for the day packed in lacquer boxes.

Noguchi was in a surprisingly good humor when she arrived, and mentioned quite freely the details he had refused to divulge on the telephone. The guests were the Chief Secretary and Executive Director of the Radical Party. He could more or less guess the nature of their business with him, and he had decided, since he would have to refuse their request, to express his regrets by offering them hospitality at his home. The secret matter which Noguchi had refused to discuss on the telephone amounted, then, to nothing more than this. Such caution at once revealed to Kazu the delicacy of her husband’s political position.

The guests knocked at the gate of the Noguchi house as it was growing dark. The faces of Kimura, the Chief Secretary, and Kurosawa, the Executive Director of the Radical Party, were familiar from political cartoons, and Kazu had already met them at the wedding. Kimura looked like a gentle, doddering old preacher, and Kurosawa resembled a coal miner.

Kazu, accustomed as she was to Conservative Party politicians, found it somehow unbearably funny that Radical Party politicians also exchanged the usual polite greetings when they met, and observed normal etiquette on entering a house. There was something false about these actions, as if they were calculated to throw people off their guard. Kazu found Kimura’s smiling, soft-spoken behavior particularly puzzling. Something about his appearance and manner of speech recalled a quiet old tree dropping a leaf or two in the sunlight every time a gentle breeze stirred its branches.

The two guests showed Noguchi the deference due a senior. Kimura refused again and again to sit in the place of honor, and could only be persuaded with much difficulty.

Kazu sensed that a certain dryness of the skin was common to all three men, including Noguchi. Their skins were parched by long absence from positions of real authority, as some men’s skins are parched by long absence from a woman’s body. Their polite greetings and gentle smiles were darkened by the shadow of an enforced asceticism; Kimura’s gestures of the old professor and Kurosawa’s rather ostentatious simplicity were both rooted in the same life of asceticism.

Kimura politely praised the meal, a mark, Kazu thought, of his social ineptness. Noguchi displayed his usual nervous reaction, his face plainly revealing his embarrassment that cooking that was not his wife’s should be praised. As for Kurosawa, he merely munched away in silence.

“I’m no tower of strength,” Noguchi was saying. “You’re badly deluded if you think I’d make a strong candidate. I’m the forgotten man.”

Noguchi’s tipsiness, increasing with each successive cup of saké, showed itself in the proud repetitions of such disclaimers, and each time Kimura and Kurosawa almost mechanically expressed simultaneous dejection.

Kazu poured the saké for the party, as Noguchi had commanded. It only gradually dawned on her that Noguchi’s disavowal, repeated every five minutes, was being made for her benefit; she was aghast at her own obtuseness. She surely must have recognized ever since her first meeting with Noguchi his old-fashioned, obstinate bashfulness. He undoubtedly felt that to reveal to his wife in the presence of others his political ambitions was no different from letting others see his sexual desire.

Kazu immediately found some casual pretext to step out of the room. She returned to her own room, summoned a maid, gave orders. When the maid had departed, Kazu was left with nothing to do, and she began listlessly to tidy up. Kazu kept Noguchi’s personal accessories in one of the drawers of her bureau. Three little boxes filled with his old, foreign-made cuff links were in the drawer.

Kazu, to pass the time, emptied out the different sets of cuff links on a small table. One set was in solid gold with the royal coat of arms of some small European country, another had precious stones, another in gold—apparently the gift of a Japanese princely family—was shaped like a chrysanthemum, and one set consisted of carved ivory images of Shiva . . . All were probably gifts, but they made up an odd collection.

It was like a collection of shells picked up on summer strands at many places, old remembrances of the sea. Noguchi’s wrists, which they were to adorn, were withered and mottled now, but the shells would always harbor reflections of bygone sunsets. Kazu flicked them like marbles with her fingertips, and listened to the faint, cold clinks when they collided. She wondered if she couldn’t play chess using the cuff links for pieces. Her first choice for the king was the cuff links with the unicorn crest of the small European kingdom. The imperial chrysanthemum cuff links would be the queen, she decided, but somehow this didn’t seem right. The imperial chrysanthemum would have to be the king, after all . . . “I’m sure he’ll accept,” Kazu thought, guided mainly by her political intuition. A joyous excitement welled up inside her. The heavy intellectual walls of Noguchi’s study separating him from herself were surely about to crumble. And, just as surely, the day was coming which would demonstrate that their lives had not already come to a close.

“I’m sure he’ll accept!” Kazu was instantly convinced. She could hear from the room across the hall the unfamiliar sound of Noguchi’s laughter mingled with that of the guests. Kazu deliberately slid open her door and looked toward them. In the lamplight spilling into the hall from the sitting room, waves of rather mournful laughter, like fits of coughing, could still be heard.

The guests departed about an hour later. Kazu thoughtfully telephoned for a hired limousine to drive them back. Noguchi saw the guests to the door, Kazu accompanied them all the way to the front gate. The cold wind had intensified since nightfall, and beyond the clouds frantically scudding back and forth in the sky was the moon, like a drawing pin stuck into a wall.

Kimura’s face under the dim gate lamp looked small and mouselike. The face as a whole was almost immobile, but around his mouth the flesh was curiously pliant and elastic, and when he muttered something in a low voice, this flesh with his mustache would hover unnecessarily around the words.

Kazu, catching him by the shoulder of his suit, abruptly pushed him against the wall. She whispered, “You’ll trust me, won’t you, even though I run a restaurant for the Conservative politicians?”

“Of course, Mrs. Noguchi.”

“Has my husband agreed to run in the gubernatorial election?”

“You certainly know what’s going on! I’m astonished. We couldn’t get an immediate answer, but he promised to give us his decision in the next couple of days.”

Kazu pressed her clasped hands to her breast girlishly. The gesture signified that she was tightening into a plan the thoughts which had flashed into her mind, as she might tighten a loose knot. “Please persuade my husband somehow. As far as money goes—excuse me for mentioning this—please leave everything to me. I promise I shan’t cause the Radical Party any trouble.”

Kimura started to say something, but Kazu had a gift of getting the jump on people in conversation and thereby effectively preventing them from interrupting. “But you mustn’t say a word of this to my husband. Please keep it an absolute secret. I accept full responsibility on that one condition.”

After delivering these remarks with lightning rapidity, Kazu suddenly raised her voice and, intoning the customary parting salutations in clear tones audible as far as the front door, she bundled the guests into the car. “Oh, dear,” she cried, “doesn’t the Radical Party provide you with someone to carry your brief case? Such a heavy brief case to hold on your lap! Well, I must say.”

These final observations were in fact the only ones which reached Noguchi standing in the entrance, and Kazu was later reprimanded for these uncalled-for comments.

A new feature was added to the daily routine of the Noguchi household. Every Monday a man named Soichi Yamazaki came to deliver a two-hour lecture mainly concerned with the administration of Tokyo Prefecture. Noguchi would open his notebook like a diligent junior high school student and, listening attentively, take painstaking notes, using a fountain pen he had bought twenty years before. All week long he studied intently, reviewed his lessons, and did absolutely nothing else.