After the Banquet (14 page)

All of a sudden Kazu caught Yamazaki’s hand. “Let’s join them! Let’s dance with them!” she cried, starting off.

“Well,” said the assistant mayor, “this is certainly a surprise, Mrs. Noguchi.”

Kazu’s eyes were no longer on the scenery. She let the dancing teacher guide her into the crowd of folk dancers. The wives and daughters of the town, all in matching happi, were led by the members of the Folk Song Association in the singing of the
Kiso-bushi
as they danced. Kazu’s hands automatically imitated the dancers’ hands, and her feet as naturally followed.

“Clumsy, aren’t you?” Kazu said, tapping Yamazaki’s shoulder. He looked ungainly in a business suit, and kept confusing the movements of his hands and feet. “I’ll stand in front and you follow me.”

“You’re a genius, Mrs. Noguchi,” exclaimed the teacher as they danced, “there’s no need to give you instruction.”

The assistant mayor stood outside the circle of dancers, looking on in dumb surprise.

Before long the two citified newcomers, the only dancers not wearing happi, became the object of the others’ attention. Kazu was already intoxicated. Perspiring freely in the bright sunlight, she melted into the human organism. She had only to brush against the bodies of the dancing women and smell their odor to forget at once her individuality and lose herself in the dance. She could feel no wall of any sort between herself and these strangers whose town she was visiting for the first time. The frantic beating of the drum on the platform and the piercing wail of the record were all Kazu’s body needed to become one with the dancers; the perspiration which trickled an instant later down her cheeks was no longer hers alone.

As soon as the song came to an end Kazu turned to the assistant mayor. “I feel completely happy,” she said. “I want to sing the
Sado Okesa
for everybody. There’s a microphone on the stand, isn’t there?”

A crowd of faces of village housewives gathered around Kazu. Most were past middle age, and looked as if they now enjoyed comfortable little incomes, but the sweat had ruined their holiday make-up and exposed leathery skins burnt by the sun of half a lifetime’s labor. The small eyes bright with curiosity, the friendly goldtoothed smiles, the
frizzy
back hair—Kazu had absolute confidence before such faces.

The assistant mayor, making his way through the crowd, escorted Kazu onto the platform. The steps were steep, but a certain amount of danger of this kind made Kazu happy. The assistant mayor called into the microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have with us today the wife of the famous statesman of the Radical Party, Yuken Noguchi. She has come all the way from Tokyo to see our Folk Song Festival. I’d like to ask Mrs. Noguchi to sing for us the
Sado Okesa
.”

Kazu stepped up to the microphone and greeted the crowd. “I am the wife of Yuken Noguchi. It has given me so much pleasure just to see you enjoy yourselves that I thought I’d like to sing you a song, if you’ll pardon my voice. Please, everybody, dance as I sing.”

Kazu clapped her hands to give the time to the young drummer. A general stir went through the crowd below, watching her, but once she began to sing it grew still, and then everybody started to dance as if loosened of all inhibitions.

Kazu stayed until dusk, by turns climbing down from the platform to dance and climbing back to sing. Several women from the Folk Song Association went up on the platform with her and taught her one of the local ballads.

At dusk the lanterns strung on branches all over the park were lit simultaneously. Kazu, entreated to sing a third
Sado Okesa
, again climbed the platform alone. The blackness of the surrounding mountains seemed to close in on them, now that the lanterns were lit. When Kazu had finished the song applause echoed from the hillside, a rare occurrence at such a festival. Yamazaki excitedly climbed up to the platform. “You’re a great success,” he said into Kazu’s ear. “The housewives of the Folk Song Association are saying that they won’t let you leave tonight. You’ve conquered Santama at last.”

“Do you think so?” Kazu asked, her eyes going out to the distant mountainside as she wiped the perspiration with a handkerchief.

“You must be tired.”

“No, I don’t feel too bad.”

While Kazu had been singing this time, something on a mountainside across the valley had caught her attention. It was a point of fire, now visible, now vanishing, on the black surface of the mountain which seemed to close in with the coming of night. Too feeble to be called a flame, it looked more like sparks thrown up now and then by a fire. Kazu could not remember having seen by day any houses in the fold in the mountains where the flame now rose, illuminated the area, then died out again. She looked carefully and noticed a trail of smoke extending diagonally upward to the ridge.

“What is that fire?” Kazu asked the young drummer. He had peeled off his shirt and was busy wiping the sweat.

“That fire?” he asked, turning to another young man. “What do you think it is?”

“That’s the chimney of the municipal crematorium.” The insolent looking, long-faced boy answered carelessly. Kazu remembered with feelings of sweetness Noguchi and the Noguchi family grave.

The customers at the Setsugoan dwindled each day. First of all, Genki Nagayama stopped coming. The last time he appeared sparks had flown between him and Kazu when she visited his room.

“You certainly seem to be throwing yourself into the fray,” Nagayama said, grinning.

“What would that refer to, I wonder?”

“But people are saying, ‘The enemy is elsewhere.’”

“You talk more and more in riddles.”

“All I mean to say is that you needn’t go to such extremes just because you’re in love with your husband.”

“Really? I’ve always thought that when a woman fell in love she could even commit murder without any qualms.”

“Murder could be forgiven. But there are worse things than murder. You’ve sold our tricks to the enemy.”

“When have I ever sold any secret of yours?”

“I’m not talking about secrets. I’m talking about tricks. What you’re doing now is to teach little baby Radical Party wicked tricks. The kind of wicked tricks which have always been our exclusive property.”

“The tricks I learned from you don’t amount to much.”

“I suppose it’d be useless to try to stop you, with your nature. Go ahead, do what you please. But remember, violations of the election law by the Radical Party can’t be overlooked. Be careful. Your pals can thank their stars they’ve never had any money before. That’s what’s kept them out of jail.”

“Thank you for your kind advice. But don’t forget, if I’m caught I’ll have quite a bit to tell the district attorney myself.”

Nagayama colored, and he fell silent. Then, perhaps deciding that it would seem childish to stalk out of the party on the spot, he treated the other guests to a few of his usual dirty stories before leaving much sooner than his accustomed time. Kazu started to show him down the hall to the door when Nagayama, putting his arm around Kazu’s shoulder, lightly patted her breasts. Such a dismal pretense at love-making irrevocably alienated Kazu from Nagayama.

The following day, when Yamazaki visited the Setsugoan at Kazu’s request, he found her in her room. She was being massaged and wore only a thin undergarment. Yamazaki was dazzled by the superb pink of the under-robe, but he recognized at once that Kazu’s slatternly pose, which might easily have been mistaken for enticement, represented the informality she permitted herself only with a man she did not love. The pink underrobe became disarranged as Kazu’s hips were massaged, and Yamazaki caught a glimpse of her dazzlingly white thighs. The thighs had a glossy luminosity incredible in a woman in her middle fifties. Kazu felt no sense of responsibility about leaving her thighs exposed.

“What can I do for you?” Yamazaki demanded. “Please tell me quickly before I get the wrong ideas.”

“Nothing special. I called you just to take a load off your mind.” Kazu raised herself a little, rather warily, like a woman getting up on a rocking boat. “I’d like you to stop worrying. Whatever we do there’s absolutely no danger of being arrested.”

“What makes you so sure? That’s the Committee Chairman’s biggest worry.”

“I did a little threatening, and now everything will be all right.” Kazu, without listening to Yamazaki’s reply, turned over on her stomach. As the masseur was rubbing her arm she added, “Now about that labor union dinner you requested the other day. I’ll be glad to take it on, but please let me decide the cost.”

“Thank you very much, but remember, they’re not very well off.”

“Surely they can afford 300 yen a head?”

“Three hundred yen?” The figure was so low Yamazaki was astonished.

“Yes, three hundred yen. I know we’ll be needing their help more and more from now on, and I’d like to invite them without charge, but that would only burden them with feelings of obligation. Of course I’ll provide the finest quality of food and drink.”

Kazu gathered an unexpected harvest during the course of the conversation that day. She learned for the first time from some casual remarks made by Yamazaki, who assumed she already knew of the incident, that several months before the war ended Noguchi had petitioned the emperor to open peace negotiations. Kazu was overjoyed at this proof of Noguchi’s enlightened views, and reproached Yamazaki for not having mentioned it before.

Kazu proposed that they immediately prepare a pamphlet utilizing this information, but Yamazaki hesitated to do so without Noguchi’s knowledge. Yet if they revealed their project to Noguchi he would be certain to express his unalterable opposition. Kazu’s determination to carry through her scheme without informing Noguchi suggested that she now recognized no restraints.

She spoke fluently. “There’s no need, of course, to consult with my husband. We couldn’t hope for better material. It’s obvious that our only possible reason for using it is to help him, and we’d be guilty of negligence, wouldn’t we, if we allowed such valuable material to lie idle.”

In the end Yamazaki was talked into consenting. Kazu also got him to agree to a marvelous plan she had thought up one sleepless night—to print 500,000 calendars with Noguchi’s photograph. Each calendar would cost about four yen, and they would have to have a stylish design. The calendars would be distributed to all labor unions, and through the teachers’ union would find their way to the walls of the pupils’ homes.

Kazu described to Yamazaki the full range of her fancy, forgetting as usual the passage of time . . . The calendars would be hung on factory walls, next to seamstresses’ sewing machines, in children’s study rooms. Noguchi’s name would come up in family conversations even at the dinner table. “Who’s that man on the calendar?” “Yuken Noguchi, of course. Don’t you know about him?” . . . His photograph would always be smiling—but how rare were the photographs of Noguchi smiling! His photograph, graced by his dignified, elderly gentleman’s smile, must watch benevolently over many scantily laid dinner tables and accept cheerfully on its face the steam rising from the dishes. The calendar must steal in everywhere—by the bird cage, under the old wall clock, beside the television set, just above the little kitchen blackboard with its shopping list of vegetables and fish, next to the cupboard where the family cat sleeps—and Noguchi’s smile must hover over all. Then his silver-haired dignity and his smile must cause him to merge imperceptibly in voters’ minds with dear old uncles who many years ago brought them candy and stroked their heads whenever he visited the house. The smile must confuse memories, revive old, heavily romantic dreams of justice triumphant, and, as the name of an old ship in the harbor becomes a synonym for the future when it sets sail, his name must become another name for a future which would see wretched, smoke-stained walls battered down.

“When,” Kazu pursued, “the family cat gets up and stretches, it will rub its back against Noguchi’s face on the calendar. Then, as the old gentleman of the house picks up the cat, he’ll see the smile on Noguchi’s face. Never will his expression look so dear, so indulgent as it does at that moment.”

As Yamazaki was leaving, Kazu whispered one final bit of information. “You don’t need to worry about money. I’ve mortgaged the Setsugoan. Tomorrow I’ll have at my disposal about twenty-five million yen.”

The Radical Party and the labor unions were experienced when it came to elections with up to 300,000 votes, but they had no idea of the proper strategy when it came to an electorate of five million; they were in fact completely bewildered. Word to this effect from Yamazaki had inspired Kazu with greater confidence than ever. She came to think that the election was her Heaven-appointed task. It was a game in which one used one’s full energies against a virtual vacuum for an adversary, a constant wager directed against something whose existence could not be verified. She felt that however excited she became, she could never be excited enough, that however dispassionate she acted, she could never be dispassionate enough, and there was no standard by which to judge either. Kazu was exempt from one worry, the fear that she might be going too far. Yamazaki was no match for her in this. The time-tested veteran of Radical Party elections had gradually developed into an admirer of the grand-scale methods which Kazu invariably adopted.

One dark day of unbroken rain Kazu, returning to the Setsugoan toward evening, noticed one of her trusted maids standing at the inside entrance, a look of distress on her face. “Mr. Noguchi is here,” she said.

“Where is he?”