After the Banquet (13 page)

Kazu’s frankness and honesty easily became exhibitionist before a man she did not especially love. She deliberately affected this mannerism in order to destroy any illusions people might have about her, but it was hardly likely that anyone would entertain illusions about Kazu. There was a plebeian warmth to her plump beauty; not having a single weak spot, it retained, regardless of the jewelry or splendid clothes with which it might be adorned, the fragrance of black loam, a heritage from her native soil. As a matter of fact, this impression of physical opulence saved her chatter from being annoying, and made it seem instead a complementary feature.

Yamazaki was a good listener. Kazu had the impression when talking to him that her words were not slipping through his face as through a sieve, but sinking deeply and certainly into the heavy face with its unchanging smile. Kazu said, “Please feel free to tell me anything with absolute frankness.” During her short married life Kazu had already developed a hunger for frankness.

Noguchi suspected nothing. He could remain entirely ignorant because he made no effort to learn anything beyond what directly met his eyes and ears. His lordly indifference of the
grand seigneur
(or of the high-ranking bureaucrat) permitted Kazu to dispense with elaborate precautions to keep her activities secret from him. Five days of the week, moreover, she was away at the Setsugoan.

Kazu’s heart, however, was less and less in the operation of the Setsugoan. She raced about incessantly in her car and met Yamazaki often. His slumbers were not infrequently disturbed late at night by a telephone call from Kazu, acting on sudden inspiration.

As for Noguchi, two hours of the week, as usual, he listened attentively to Yamazaki’s lecture, and the rest of the time he did nothing. It had been decided that all questions of policy, campaign funds, and election personnel were to be handled through Yamazaki, who was therefore in a position to give Noguchi advice on every subject. Noguchi, truly imbued with a spirit of respect for the law, intended to refrain from any campaigning until the election was officially proclaimed. The secret meetings of Kazu and Yamazaki were, however, well known to the leaders of the Radical Party. They issued instructions to Yamazaki, their policy being to let Kazu do what she pleased, providing she did not get out of hand. The Radical Party had never before had a powerful backer with so much money and enthusiasm and who, on top of everything else, was a woman. When word occasionally reached Noguchi’s ears of activities resembling a pre-election campaign, he assumed that they were financed entirely by Radical Party funds. Having spent half of his life on money provided by the national budget, “public funds” to him suggested appropriations so enormous one could not possibly use them all up.

The visiting cards were ready in a day or two. Kazu distributed them to cigarette stands and to waitresses in restaurants. One day when Yamazaki was riding with Kazu in her car, she ordered the chauffeur to stop before a large, long-established bakery. She went in and Yamazaki followed. Kazu bought 3,000 yen worth of jelly rolls, too many to carry by herself. Yamazaki, picking up bags of jelly rolls in both hands, was astonished to see Kazu produce one of the extra-large visiting cards and offer it to the proprietress, saying, “This is my husband’s card. I hope you won’t forget us.”

Once they were back in the car Yamazaki said, “That was certainly a surprise, Mrs. Noguchi. Don’t you know that the owner of the bakery is a Conservative member of the prefectural assembly?”

“Is he? I had no idea. Well, I’m sure I’ve at least succeeded in confusing the enemy.”

“What do you intend to do with all these jelly rolls?”

“I’m taking them to the Koto District Orphanage.”

“Orphans can’t vote, you know.”

“But they have lots of sentimental adults around them.”

Yamazaki accompanied Kazu without protest to the orphanage, where he was again obliged to witness a display of the extra-large cards.

Kazu came to be a familiar figure at festivals, beauty contests, and every other kind of public gathering in the prefecture. She made donations. She distributed visiting cards. She even sang on request. She attended housewives’ meetings dressed as a cook, and won her way into the hearts of these simple people too insensitive to detect the ruse.

Kazu showed herself extremely critical of the Radical Party’s failure to win general support except among the intellectuals. When informed that the party was weak in Koto District and in the Santama rural districts, she felt convinced that here were corners where many hearts beat which only she, Kazu, could capture. She would frequently ask Yamazaki, “Haven’t we any good contacts in Santama?”

One late spring day Yamazaki brought the following intelligence. “I’m told that the cornerstone of a monument to the war dead has just been laid at Omé in Santama. They’re going to hold a memorial folk song festival in the park, and the local folk-dance teacher, who’s originally from your part of the country, says she’d like to invite you to attend.”

“We couldn’t wish for a better opportunity. I’ll go in a kitchen apron.”

“I wonder if a kitchen apron is quite the appropriate costume for a folk-song festival. I’ll check on that.”

Each activity of this kind Kazu participated in, each disbursement of her money, was based on cool calculation, and however spontaneous an expression of human kindness it might appear, her purpose was invariably the same: to use people in order to win the election. Such was Kazu’s deliberate intent, but she did not reckon on the powerful impression which her self-sacrificing enthusiasm readily produced on people. She would laugh in her sleeve when she listened to people who had genuinely been moved, but when she discovered that some people were saying that she was devoid of honest feelings and governed entirely by calculated expedience, she was furious that her motives should be so misunderstood. This was one respect in which Kazu’s psychology was surprisingly complicated.

One thing Kazu herself failed to anticipate was that her tactics, despite their simple hypocrisy, would prove the major reason that audiences loved her. What Kazu imagined to be her calculation proved to be a kind of sincerity, a sincerity with a peculiar attraction for the masses. Regardless of her motives, her devotion and fervor had the special property of ingratiating her with the people. As a matter of fact, Kazu had little confidence in her detachment. Her obvious stratagems, her reckless attempts to trick people, her shameless, persistent repetitions of her different artifices—these failings actually led simple people to relax their vigilance. The more she tried to exploit the common people, the more they loved her. People might talk behind her back where she went, but she left a mounting popularity. When Kazu decided to appear before the housewives of Koto District wearing an apron, she herself supposed that she was a lady deliberately dressing herself in an apron in order to hoodwink people and to mix the more readily with them. However, the people were not deceived: an apron suited Kazu very well!

One magnificently clear afternoon in late spring Kazu and Yamazaki took a two-hour drive to the city of Omé. While in the car Kazu, as usual, showed Yamazaki the packet wrapped in thick Japanese paper. “Do you suppose 100,000 yen would be the right amount to offer for the war monument?”

“Don’t you think it’s too much?”

“The monument’s being put up by the families of the deceased, not only from Omé, but from the whole Santama area. It may be too little, but it’s certainly not too much.”

“It’s your money. You’re free to use it as you please.”

“There you go again with your cold comments. My money, when you come down to it, is now the party’s money.”

Yamazaki always had to take off his hat to such devoted and loyal sentiments. All the same, of late a note of irreverent sarcasm had crept into his conversations with Kazu. “No doubt when you stand before the foundations of the war memorial a flood of tears will gush forth again, quite naturally.”

“Of course. And naturally too. Nothing makes an impression on people unless it’s natural.”

As they neared Omé the patches of green along the road became more extensive, and they were particularly struck by the beautiful elms they could see here and there. The elms stretched delicate branches high into the blue, and the clustered twigs had the sharp clarity of countless cast nets simultaneously thrown into the sky.

Kazu, enjoying her first excursion into the countryside in a long time, kept pressing on Yamazaki the sandwiches she had brought along, and ate some herself. She supposed that the reason she felt not the least lonely at being separated from her husband today was that her present work was unquestionably for his sake, and this made the spiritual ties between them even stronger than when they were together. But of late the spiritual ties which Kazu was so fond of depicting to herself had come to exist only in her fantasies and her own interpretations.

Omé was an old-fashioned, quiet town spared by the war. Kazu stopped the car before the city hall, and, surrounded by reporters from the local newspapers, earlier alerted by Yamazaki, she proceeded to the mayor’s office. She met the mayor and offered him her contribution for the war memorial. It was then decided that the assistant mayor and the dancing teacher from Kazu’s part of the country would join Kazu in her car and direct her to the monument in Nagayama Park. The way led through the side streets of the town, took them north over a small land bridge, and finally climbed the gentle slope of an automobile road cut into the hill behind the town.

Kazu exclaimed in admiration at the beauty of the young leaves alongside the road. Wherever Kazu went she never forgot to praise the scenery. She considered this to be politically important. The politician’s eye must find beauty everywhere in the landscape of his election districts; indeed, it takes a politician to appreciate nature’s glories. He knows that each landscape is filled with a harvest of tempting and succulent fruits.

As expected, the view of the park on the hilltop captivated Kazu. She wept a little before the foundations of the monument to the war dead, and smiled a little to the women of the Folk Song Association who were gathered around the speakers’ platform erected in the middle of an open space. But when she was led to a summerhouse set on a little elevation, the view from the top made her forget the press of everyday affairs.

The landscape unfolded to the southeast to reveal the gentle flow of the Tama River curving round east of the town, and glimpses of the broad river bed beyond the patches of forest shadows. The sweeping panorama was framed by the branches of the innumerable red pines in the park. The fuzzy young leaves on the mountains directly across the valley to the south glowed a saffron color. In spite of the radiance of the late afternoon sun, a haze lay everywhere, and the clumps of young leaves washed in the uncertain light looked as untidy as a woman’s hair when she wakes in the morning. Kazu caught glimpses now and then of the bright colors of a bus flashing among the eaves of the town below.

“The scenery is lovely, isn’t it?” she exclaimed. “What a wonderful view!”

“Yes,” the assistant mayor said, “you won’t find many views in the Tokyo region like the one from Nagayama Park.” Then, using a map rolled around his hand to push aside the strings of festive paper lanterns hung from the eaves of the summerhouse to the branches of a nearby pine, he added, “That’s the Tachikawa Base near the horizon to the east. It looks beautiful when you see it from here, at a distance.”

Kazu turned her eyes in that direction. The course of the Tama River, exposed here and there at breaks in the woods, finally disappeared at the eastern end of the landscape, where a town white as rock salt glittered on the horizon. What she took at first for white chips bouncing into the sky were airplanes. Once they took off they flew low, level with the ground, and vanished into the shadows of the hills to the south. The whole area was so exceedingly white that Kazu thought it might be a cemetery. The Tachikawa Base seen from here did not suggest even remotely a town inhabited by human beings; it looked, rather, like a huge settlement of cold minerals poised at ground level. In the immense sky above drifted clouds of many shapes, hard and congealed the closer they were to the horizon, vaguer in outline higher up, until their form melted imperceptibly into smoke. Midway in the sky was a cluster of clouds glowing along its twisted upper edges, but revealing sculptural shadows below. Alone in this panorama the clouds seemed curiously unreal; they were like some marvelous lantern slide of clouds projected against the sky.

Thus a moment’s light on a late spring afternoon created a strangely delicate yet certain landscape, never to be seen again. Even when the cypress forest in the foreground suddenly darkened, shaded by the clouds, the scenery on the horizon remained motionless, as though fastened in place.

Such a view did not, of course, suggest anything human to Kazu. She sensed the vast, beautiful, inorganic presence confronting her. Nature here bore no resemblance to the garden of the Setsugoan; it was not an exquisite, human miniature which she could hold in her hand. Yet, to gaze at this landscape was surely a political act. To gaze at it, sum it up, control it, was the work of politics.

Kazu’s mind was not given to analysis, but the beauty instantly implanted in her eyes by this vista seemed to deny the political dreams she had entrusted to her ample flesh brimming with passion and tears, and to suggest with cruel mockery her unfitness for politics.

At that moment, as if she had just wakened from a dream, her ears caught the boom of a drum, the squawk of a record blared through a loudspeaker behind her, and then a chorus of many voices singing a folk song in time with the drum and the record. She noticed for the first time the garish colors of the ornamental lanterns hung everywhere. One string of lanterns wound over the tops of a row of maple trees, their branches of soft young leaves festooned at the tips with many small grape-colored flowers.