After the Banquet (15 page)

“He’s waiting in your room, ma’am.”

“What made you take him to such a place?”

“He came here a while ago without any warning, and walked straight to your room himself.”

Kazu stood rooted to the spot. This was Noguchi’s first unannounced visit to the Setsugoan. What sent chills through her was the recollection that the room adjacent to hers was filled with enormous stacks of calendars and pamphlets just off the press.

Her heart beating like a trip hammer, Kazu stood motionless, unable even to remove her wet raincoat. She sensed the dreadful expression her face must present in the hallway light. The old porter, who had accompanied Kazu from the gate, protecting her with an umbrella, stared at her face, forgetting to close his umbrella.

Every conceivable variety of falsehood suggested itself to Kazu. A genius for cheerful evasion was part of her natural endowments, and however serious the predicament facing her, she could always manage to dodge it nimbly, like a swallow threading a narrow path under projecting eaves. In this instance, however, she felt that silence would be the best evasion. There was no doubt about her basic good intentions, and basically she had nothing to feel ashamed of. But Kazu feared Noguchi more than anything else in the world.

As Kazu slowly removed her coat she glanced back at the rain pouring down on the path between the gate and the inside entrance. The driving rain was battering the vermilion pomegranate flowers. Spring was warmer this year than usual, and the flowers had opened very early. Their flame color continued to glow intensely in the approaching darkness outside. The flowers calmed Kazu somewhat.

She kneeled at the threshold of her room. “I’m sorry I was out when you came,” she said.

Noguchi, in Japanese clothes, got up without answering. All but kicking Kazu out of the room with his outstretched foot, he barked, “We’re going home at once. Come!” He strode out into the hallway. Kazu noticed that he had a pamphlet and a folded calendar in his right hand. As Noguchi crossed over the humped bridge of the passageway ahead of her, she suddenly recalled the same view of him the night of their first meeting, and she felt a rush of mingled sadness and affection. It seemed then that all she had done entirely of her own volition was actually the working of an unhappy destiny. She wept as she followed him.

The maids, long accustomed to Kazu’s tears, showed no suspicion that anything was amiss even when she weepingly left the Setsugoan. Noguchi’s mouth was set in an obdurate line. Kazu continued to weep in the car all the way home, but Noguchi did not utter a single word.

When they were back in the house Noguchi, still without a word, led Kazu into his study and locked the door. There was nothing of fire about his anger; it rose like a steep unsurmountable precipice. “Do you know why I went to the Setsugoan?” he demanded.

Kazu, still weeping, shook her head faintly. A trace of coquetry flickered in her attitude as she shook her head, though she herself disapproved of it. The next instant Noguchi slapped her in the face. She collapsed on the carpet and wept.

“Do you understand now?” Noguchi shouted, breathing heavily. “Today there was a telephone call at the house from the printers. I answered it. They said that the bill for the calendars hadn’t been paid, and they wanted their money. They informed me that my wife had ordered the calendars. I asked a few questions. I discovered that it was your doing. Then I went to the Setsugoan, and what did I find? Not only calendars! What is the meaning of this? What intolerable impertinence!”

Noguchi struck Kazu’s face again and again with the pamphlet. She had often enough had arguments with her husband, but never before anything like this. Even as she felt the sting of his blows, she stole an upward glance at him. Noguchi was breathing heavily, but his face was not distorted by anger. The coldness of his fury made Kazu tremble.

“You’ve smeared mud on your husband’s face. Just the kind of thing I could expect of you. You’ve done a wonderful job of besmirching my career. You should be ashamed of yourself, yes, ashamed! Does it make you happy that your husband’s become a public laughing-stock?”

He stamped on Kazu’s body as she lay on the floor, anywhere his feet happened to land, but his frail body was strengthless. Kazu rolled over shrieking, but his feet were in fact repulsed by the rich resilience of her body. Noguchi finally settled himself in a chair on the other side of his desk, and distantly regarded Kazu lying sobbing on the floor.

Noguchi’s denunciation, antiquated both in manner and language, intensified his aura of being the incarnation of the old moral virtues. His wrath was cast in a majestic idiom which delighted Kazu; all but swooning from pain and happiness, she deliberately reflected with her half-conscious faculties that Noguchi was the kind of man who, once he had angrily forbidden whatever deserved to be forbidden, would immediately revert to his normal blindness and deafness. This reflection, many times repeated, made Kazu indulgent again toward Noguchi, and even more so toward herself.

Kazu, howling like some wild beast, begged for forgiveness, and shrieked every imaginable excuse. She would grow calm, apparently losing consciousness, only to howl for forgiveness again, her voice louder than ever. Noguchi prolonged the torture, declaring that he would not let her out of the room until she confessed everything, it being evident that she had spent a considerable amount of money. Kazu babbled incoherently, “Money I saved myself . . . I used it for your sake . . . All for your sake. . . .”

Noguchi listened coldly to these protestations. Then, by way of indicating his refusal to pay attention to a word of her excuses, he took a German book from the shelf and, turning from Kazu, began to read.

A fairly long silence ensued. The room was dark save for the circle of light cast by the desk lamp. All that could be heard, apart from the sound of the rain and the occasional rustle when Noguchi turned a page of his book, was Kazu’s agitated breathing. The plump, middle-aged woman sprawled on the floor, the hems of her kimono twisted, was the only jarring note in this quiet evening in the study. Kazu was aware that her thighs were visible through her skirts, and that they rose and fell slightly with her breathing at the outer edge of the dim lamplight. She knew with certainty which parts of her flesh were exposed by the chill gradually numbing them. She pitied their undeniable futility, and knew by their coldness and numbness that the faintly discernible white parts of her thighs were being subjected to a total rejection. She felt as if Noguchi’s rejection flowed through their numbness into her body.

Kazu at last rearranged her disordered costume, sat properly, and touching her hands to the carpet in a deep bow, declared that she would confess everything. She held nothing back from Noguchi, even to her mortgaging the Setsugoan.

Noguchi said in a surprisingly gentle voice, “There’s no helping what’s already been done. But you are to shut the Setsugoan as of tomorrow, and from now on you will live here all the time. You follow me, I trust? Remember, you’re not to set foot out of the house!”

“Shut the Setsugoan?”

“Yes. If you think I’m asking too much, I’ll have no choice but to divorce you.”

This threat frightened Kazu more than a beating. A great, dark hole opened before her eyes. “If he divorces me, there’ll be nobody to look after my grave when I’m dead . . .” At this thought Kazu made up her mind to pay any compensation Noguchi might exact.

Kazu concluded, as the result of this quarrel, that she had no choice but to offer the Setsugoan for sale. The Setsugoan had already occasioned gossip, and was likely to be used as material for counter-propaganda. As far as Noguchi was concerned, it could only be considered the base of his wife’s undesirable activities. It enraged Noguchi that Kazu had mortgaged the Setsugoan without telling him, and used the money to finance the pre-election campaign. He had come to think that the best thing would be to extirpate the roots of evil by placing the Setsugoan on sale, and then use the money fairly and squarely to meet election expenses. Noguchi had learned for the first time how poor the party was.

The disposal of the Setsugoan was left to Noguchi. Kazu had a fierce attachment for the Setsugoan, and words could not describe her grief at relinquishing it, but in the end she preferred to a beautiful garden the small, mossencrusted tomb of the Noguchi family.

The complications of the sale, however, unexpectedly provided Kazu with a splendid excuse for escaping from confinement in Noguchi’s house and returning to the Setsugoan. Once back there, Kazu did absolutely nothing about liquidating the affairs of the restaurant. Her employees were uneasy about the protracted closing, but she kept them in ignorance of the impending sale. Safe in her retreat at the Setsugoan, she would daily summon Yamazaki and examine with him stratagems of every kind. When a good plan suggested itself, she was so excited she could hardly sit still, and she would immediately order her car to get ready. Thus, despite the severe reprimand she had received, everything in Kazu’s life—save for the closing of the Setsugoan—reverted to normal.

Noguchi had requested a lawyer, a close friend of his, to arrange the sale, and before long a promising buyer turned up, Genzo Fujikawa of Fujikawa Associates. His counsel entered into negotiations with Noguchi’s lawyer, and it seemed as though a quick settlement was in the offing. The other party, however, refused to budge an inch beyond an offer of eighty million yen toward the asking price of one hundred million.

Kazu happened to be at the Setsugoan one day when the maid announced a telephone call from Genki Nagayama. As far as she was concerned, she had broken relations with Nagayama, and she felt no inclination to go to the telephone. But Yamazaki, who was sitting beside her, urged her with a little push to answer.

Kazu, despite her promise to obey Yamazaki’s directions to the letter, was annoyed at this instance of his interference, and at the touch of his hand on her knee she recoiled a foot or two over the tatami. The leopard-like resilience of her comfortably plump flesh made Yamazaki stare in astonishment. Kazu kept her head obstinately averted, her eyes on the garden soaked by the spring rains. The garden was a green blur.

“What makes you get angry? All I did was to suggest that you answer the phone. I think you should.”

Kazu did not reply. She had remembered Nagayama’s thick, olive-brown lips. Nagayama suddenly seemed like the embodiment of all the mud of half a lifetime. This thickset, power-saturated man resembled all the memories most painful to a woman. Even her refusal ever to have relations with Nagayama, her having been treated like a sister, originally stemmed mainly from tarnished self-esteem. However severely Noguchi reviled her, Kazu could always preserve her integrity, but one grin from Nagayama and she felt as if the depths of her being had been laid bare . . . Kazu, in short, disliked her momentary feelings of relief when informed at this juncture of a call from Nagayama.

She rose and slipped off to her own room, where she had the call transferred. She said “hello” into the receiver, all but enfolding it with her body, and the secretary’s voice was presently replaced by Nagayama’s.

“What’s happened? You’re still annoyed with me, is that it? Well, you can snub me all you please, I still consider myself your lifelong friend. I hear, by the way, that you’ve finally got around to closing the Setsugoan. But you’ll still serve me a cup of tea and some biscuits, won’t you? We’re still pals, after all.”

“If I make exceptions, even for one person, the place isn’t closed anymore.”

“I see. Do you intend giving up the restaurant and opening a special-service bathhouse for the working class—is that it?”

“That would suit me. The younger and livelier the customers, the better.”

“That’s funny. I thought your husband’s age was pretty close to mine.”

“I’ve had enough of your offensive remarks. What did you say your business was?”

“Nothing special. I just wondered if we couldn’t have lunch together for a change.”

Kazu refused point-blank, explaining that she was no longer at liberty to do so. In that case, Nagayama said, there was no helping it, he would tell her over the phone. He then quite nonchalantly broached a most unexpected and important matter.

“That stone head of Noguchi’s is giving us a lot of trouble. I sent a man to Noguchi—no doubt you know all about this—with an offer to withdraw the opposing candidate on the condition that if elected Noguchi would choose someone from the Conservative Party as his lieutenant governor. What could be more generous than that? But Noguchi, as usual, stubbornly refused to listen. It’s entirely to his advantage, and as long as he accepts that one condition, he’s sure to be elected. I trust you’ll advise him strongly to accept . . . I should warn you of something. If Noguchi turns down the offer, you’ll probably find you have trouble selling the Setsugoan. I’m telling you this entirely for your own good.”

At this point Kazu hurriedly cut the conversation short. Her walk as she returned along the corridor to the room where she had left Yamazaki betrayed her agitation. Yamazaki could tell merely from the sound of her foot-steps that Kazu was angry.

Kazu slid the door shut behind her and, still standing, angrily exclaimed, “Mr. Yamazaki—how could you be so cruel? To think that an important offer’s been made to my husband, and you’ve never even breathed a word!”

Kazu’s thin eyebrows stood on end when she was angry, and her mouth turned down in a frown. Her obi, tied somewhat low, presented a hard, flat, domineering surface, an impression strengthened by her practice of tying the sash band squarely in front in a countrified style, instead of at a more fashionable angle.

“Please sit down,” Yamazaki said. He patiently explained the situation to Kazu, who sat facing sideways, her head obstinately turned away from him, like a small child. It would only have confused her, he said, if they had told Kazu of the offer, and the right course for her, in any case, was to devote her full energies to the campaign. Noguchi had refused even to consider the honeyed words of the Conservative Party, and if it were a proposal worthy of his consideration, it would be more effective for the party leaders to suggest this than his wife. The present telephone call had delighted Yamazaki because it showed that Kazu’s pre-election campaign was developing into a threat to the enemy. The Conservatives had put up a candidate named Gen Tobita, a desperate choice in whom the Conservative Party itself had no confidence, as the telephone call just now demonstrated. The reluctance of the present governor of the prefecture to resign, though he had long seemed on the point, was owing to the Conservative Party’s failure to obtain the Prime Minister’s endorsement for their candidate. It was a pity that Noguchi did not make political capital out of the offer, but as far as Kazu was concerned, the most important thing was not to become rattled: it was now clear that her efforts were bearing fruit.