After the Banquet (16 page)

Yamazaki applied himself with painstaking care to the explanation. Kazu’s face suddenly shone like the garden in the first rays of the morning sun. Yamazaki, looking on her miraculously transformed face, thought it beautiful. It was as if a smiling face, complete to the last detail, had unexpectedly surfaced from under her other face, revealing in its new-born freshness not the faintest trace of the raging emotions of the moment before.

“You don’t say!” she cried. “Well, this calls for a celebration! Tonight I’ll drink a toast with you!” Kazu stood and, throwing open the sliding doors, danced into the adjoining banqueting hall. At the other end of the room stood a beautiful screen painting by Tatebayashi Kagei depicting in the manner of Korin a curved bridge over a silvery stream and ranks of irises. Kazu opened the banqueting hall shoji facing the garden, and Yamazaki saw now a green corner contiguous to the wet landscape visible from the small room where he sat.

Now that the Setsugoan was closed, it looked even lovelier in the early twilight of a rainy day than when filled with noisy guests. The chilly gloom of the banqueting hall actually lent greater resplendence to the lacquered furniture and painted screens. Kazu appeared to Yamazaki, looking at her from behind, to have become half a shadow picture, but she so overflowed with vitality that she seemed to have gathered into herself all the life which once filled this huge, empty room.

Kazu stepped onto the veranda and, looking out on the garden, caught the door frame with the toes of her white-encased feet, like a parrot on a perch, and balanced herself precariously. The action had no particular meaning, but she remained on her uncertain roost.

She stared at her toes. They stood out white and distinct between the dimness of the room and the hazy green outside, firmly curled, like an intelligent little animal. She spread open her toes. The shining wrinkles bulged in her tabi. Then the strain of being supported only by her toes in this unsteady posture spread through her body, bringing with it a kind of pleasurable sensation of danger. Just a little relaxation of the tension and her body would tumble onto the wet shrubs and the garden stones, and sink into the rain-soaked greenery.

Yamazaki, stepping into the banqueting room, noticed Kazu’s body teetering back and forth in a strangely unnerving manner. He rushed up in alarm, calling, “Is there anything wrong, Mrs. Noguchi?”

Kazu turned round and laughed aloud, showing her teeth. “What an awful thing to say! I’m not old enough yet for apoplexy! I was just amusing myself . . . But it’s time now for our drinking.”

Kazu and Yamazaki made the rounds of the bars and cabarets. Yamazaki could not help noticing out of the corner of his eye, even in his drunkenness, that Kazu was busily distributing the extra-large visiting cards, even to the waitresses and bus boys.

Noguchi bluntly rejected the compromise plan offered him by the Conservative Party through two or three devious channels. Several days later the counsel for Fujikawa Associates abruptly informed Noguchi’s lawyer that he could not agree to the terms for the sale of the Setsugoan. Noguchi’s lawyer discovered on investigation that pressure applied by Prime Minister Saeki was responsible for this new development. The Prime Minister, it was understood, had made a sudden telephone call to Genzo Fujikawa: “This is no time to buy the Setsugoan. It’s putting ammunition in the enemy’s hands, just before an election.”

Noguchi was furious at the report. Yamazaki, who never got angry, declared that they now had a favorable opportunity to engage the enemy, and after urging Noguchi at some length, arranged for a public interview with the Prime Minister.

Noguchi called on Saeki, his junior in years, at the official residence. In his usual pompous, awkward phraseology he condemned the Prime Minister for his underhanded interference in the settlement of a private transaction. The Prime Minister, smiling, protested deferentially that he had absolutely no recollection of such an occurrence. “Besides, I find the story a little too dramatic to be believable. Does it seem reasonable that the prime minister of a nation would make a telephone call like some cheap broker? Please use your common sense. I wonder if the simplest explanation isn’t that Fujikawa used my name in order to furnish himself with a plausible excuse for refusing?”

Saeki treated Noguchi like an extremely old man, all but offering his hand to help him sit down or get up from his chair, wounding the pride of the old diplomat by such excessive politeness. True finesse requires a silken touch, but Saeki’s at best was rayon. “What does the little trickster think he’s doing?” Noguchi thought.

Kazu sensed Noguchi’s bad humor when he returned, and comforted him without saying a word. It was hopeless now to try to sell the Setsugoan. Kazu did her best to hide her joy. She decided that she would have to make up for the treachery of her emotions by her political fidelity.

The governor of the prefecture resigned from office in the last week of July, and an election was immediately proclaimed. The fifteen days up to the tenth of August was the period sanctioned for campaigning. It was an extremely hot summer. Kazu, strenuously active again, took a second mortgage on the Setsugoan and raised thirty million yen. An election office was opened on the second floor of a downtown building.

She and Noguchi had another altercation on the long-awaited morning of the election proclamation, just as Noguchi was about to leave the house to deliver his first campaign address. Kazu had, in anticipation of this day, purchased summer suiting of the finest English material, and had been at great pains to get a tailor to take her husband’s measurements. Noguchi, however, disliked the suit. He intended to deliver his first street address wearing a linen suit which had turned completely yellow with age.

“I am standing for office as Yuken Noguchi, and not as a tailor’s dummy,” he announced. “I can’t wear such a thing.”

Such childish drivel, as anyone could see, covered an undercurrent of narrow-minded dread. Who in his audience seeing the old man’s new suit would conceivably guess that his wife had provided it? Even Yamazaki had said, “He’s just acting like a spoiled child for your benefit, Mrs. Noguchi. Don’t worry about him. Just order the suit to the measurements of his old clothes.”

Kazu was not one to place much reliance on divine help in times of need, but that morning she rose at four and lit a candle before the Buddhist altar. She had decided to persuade the late Mrs. Noguchi to join their cause and cooperate in the interest of a Noguchi victory. Mosquitoes drifted in from the pre-dawn darkness of the garden and circled round Kazu’s hands when she joined them in prayer. There was no trace of piety in her tone as she silently addressed the late Mrs. Noguchi. “What do you say? Let’s join hands, one woman to another, and help him win somehow.” Kazu felt as if a beautiful friendship for this woman she had never met was rapidly materializing, and she wept a little. “What a fine lady, a fine lady. I am sure that if you were still alive we’d become good friends!”

The mosquitoes repeatedly stung Kazu’s mellow flesh. She felt as though it would somehow help Noguchi to win if she could endure the itching. In this manner Kazu communed for quite a long time with the late Sadako Noguchi.

In the meantime, sunrise brought the first intense light of the summer day to the garden. The garden was full of trees, and the sunlight shining through the stencils of leaf clusters stamped complicated shadows like paper cutouts in the center of the garden. Glancing over her shoulder at the garden stones, now a shining white, Kazu felt as if an auspicious crane had glided down through the sunrise: the stones suggested a crane with outstretched wings. She remembered now—when was it?—telling Noguchi as a joke that a crane was flying over the garden, and it had proved no lie. To see a crane now was indeed a lucky sign, but fearing Noguchi’s rebuke, she decided not to tell him.

Noguchi woke soon afterward and took breakfast with Kazu, his usual silent ritual.

“Wouldn’t you like a raw egg?” Kazu finally asked.

He bluntly refused. “I’m not taking part in a grammar school athletic meet.” Noguchi was extremely vain about his unexcitability, presumably a product of his English training, but he completely lacked the sardonic, sophisticated humor which in an Englishman reinforces this detachment. Noguchi deliberately acted disagreeable that morning in order to prove that he was maintaining his usual calm.

Yamazaki arrived, followed by the people from campaign headquarters. Kazu, as previously arranged, brought forward in Yamazaki’s presence the new summer suit in a clothes box and a white rose. Noguchi gave the clothes box a glance and said, “What’s this? You don’t expect me to wear such clothes?” Kazu, though resolved not to become emotional, wanted so badly to have her wishes gratified that she burst into tears. Noguchi for his part grew only the more obstinate, and Yamazaki, interceding, attempted to mollify him. At last Noguchi grudgingly tried on the new coat, but he absolutely rejected the flower pinned to the lapel.

The time for Noguchi’s departure had come, and everyone went to the door to see him off. Kazu was moved to see Noguchi’s immaculate shirt and new suit. When she reached out her hand to straighten his collar though it did not need straightening, Noguchi with extraordinary alertness gripped her right hand firmly but inconspicuously. Even an acute observer might have interpreted this as a gesture of reserved affection, but Noguchi said in a low voice, “Stop your foolishness. It’s disgraceful.”

Noguchi’s sharp, bony fingers snatched away in an instant’s scuffle the objects Kazu kept tightly concealed in the palm of her right hand. They were flint stones for striking good-luck sparks. Kazu knew how much her husband disliked such customs, but she could not resist her impulse to strike sparks for her husband’s departure before the others. Noguchi had unerringly guessed that she had the stones hidden in her hand.

Once in the car Noguchi silently passed the stones to Yamazaki for his safekeeping. Yamazaki was surprised, but immediately guessed what had happened. He was bothered the whole of the busy day by the stones rolling around in his pocket.

Noguchi went to the Prefectural Office, filed notice of his intention of standing for election, received a sash with his name written on it, then left immediately for the open-air meeting area at the Yaesu Entrance to Tokyo Station. The nine o’clock sunlight of a summer morning glared on the white shirts of the crowd already gathered in the square. Many held fans over their heads to protect them from the sun. Noguchi stepped from his car, and was politely greeted by the officials of the labor unions and supporting groups who had been waiting for him near the loudspeaker truck. Noguchi climbed up the rear of the truck. He announced, without the least trace of affability, “I am Yuken Noguchi, the Radical Party candidate in the gubernatorial election.” He then launched into a long enumeration of his idealistic policies delivered in an absolutely colorless voice. In the midst of a sentence the microphone suddenly went dead. Noguchi, not realizing that the microphone had ceased to function, continued with his address. At that precise moment the opposing candidate, Gen Tobita, began his address at the other end of the square. His microphone blasted out his ringing voice so efficiently that even those standing in the front ranks of Noguchi’s listeners were deafened by Tobita’s voice denouncing Noguchi and the Radical Party. It seemed improbable that Noguchi’s microphone could be repaired immediately, and it was therefore decided to return temporarily to campaign headquarters before starting out afresh for the Koto District. There was no denying that this was an unpromising start.

Noguchi’s first speech had disappointed his young supporters. “I wonder if the old man couldn’t put a little more feeling into his words,” Yamazaki heard one say at headquarters, and then another: “The immediate abolition of horse racing and bicycle racing is all well and good, but it wasn’t very clever of him to come out with it right at the beginning.”

Kazu’s speeches, on the other hand, were the incarnation of feeling, and wherever she went she was showered with applause by audiences listening half with amusement. In the end she delivered a thirty-minute address in the glaring afternoon sunlight of the square before Shibuya Station. A bucket of cracked ice stood at Kazu’s feet, and she frequently wiped her face with a handkerchief full of ice. She spoke in a loud voice, her mouth too close to the microphone, making it difficult for her words to be understood, but she delighted her audience with her passionate, auction-room delivery. Kazu brought up the matter of Noguchi’s memorial to the emperor, using the following line of argument. “I am the wife of Yuken Noguchi. Yet, though I am the wife of Yuken Noguchi, my husband Mr. Noguchi never told even me, his wife, about this memorial. That shows how reluctant a man he is to boast about his achievements. But I can tell you that when I learned the truth of the matter, I was astonished. I hope you will pardon me for mentioning it, ladies and gentlemen, but it is really largely thanks to Mr. Noguchi that all of us, and I include myself, are able today to go about our daily business peacefully. Yes, I was astonished to think of it. Mr. Noguchi was praying for peace all along . . .”

A young fellow on the street heckled her, “Don’t brag so much about your husband!”

Kazu answered the heckler, “Yes, of course I’m bragging about my husband. I hope you’ll let me brag about him. I guarantee you, as his wife, that if you vote for Noguchi you’ll never regret it.” Such exchanges earned her applause. The speech rambled on, with no end in sight, Kazu showing a stately indifference to the frantic signals flashed by the people in charge. Finally one young party worker, unable to bear any more, snatched the microphone away from Kazu. The make-up had been washed from her face by the applications of ice, revealing her healthy, north-country fair complexion. A blush spread over her face now, and an expression of violent anger, hitherto reserved for the maids at the Setsugoan—and Yamazaki—was displayed before the crowd. Kazu, stamping furiously on the floorboards of the sound truck, screamed, “What do you mean taking away the microphone? Do you want to kill Noguchi—is that it?”