After the Banquet (17 page)

The young party worker, alarmed, returned the microphone, and Kazu resumed, talking again at inordinate length. Kazu’s passing fury afforded the crowd a magnificent spectacle. The moment when her face, shining bright red in the late afternoon sun and glittering with drops of ice, was transfigured with rage in the eyes of the large crowd, there was an instant of dead silence. People felt they had seen her naked.

Kazu’s long orations ended, however, the first day. The exasperated party workers at campaign headquarters requested Kazu through Yamazaki henceforth to confine her speeches to half a page, or in time, to one minute. Her self-indulgent gushing over personal emotions was also restricted. There was a danger that if her emotions were allowed free course, they might easily wash away prefectural reform and democracy too.

Committee Chairman Kusakari, Chief Secretary Kimura, and Executive Director Kurosawa traveled throughout the prefecture giving speeches, following the schedule laid down by Campaign Headquarters—that is, Yamazaki. Noguchi delivered speech after speech, in the morning at selected strategic spots, in the afternoon at specified locations, and at night at campaign meetings and dinners. He appealed for support even to groups of day laborers and to fishermen on the wharfs. A “spy car” of the other party trailed Noguchi’s truck on his far-flung peregrinations, always just out of sight, and a spy car from the Radical Party similarly followed Gen Tobita’s public-address truck.

Kazu spent the whole day racing around in typical fashion, her bucketful of cracked ice beside her in the car, aiming at places where her husband was unlikely to be.

On the morning of the third day the loudspeaker truck stopped at a place on Kagurazaka Rise. Various party orators delivered addresses, and then Kazu stepped forward to make her one-minute speech. A face in the crowd of thirty or forty, a middle-aged man’s, filled her heart with terror.

The summer sun beat mercilessly on the steeply sloping road. Few working men were to be seen in the faces upturned toward the campaign orators on the truck. The crowd consisted mainly of old people, housewives returning from shopping, children, and students. The truck had pulled over to the shade and stopped there, but the spectators overflowed into the sunshine, some covering their heads with handkerchiefs. The Radical Party attracted simple, decent-looking audiences everywhere. The sunlight reflecting from their clear white summer shirts deepened this impression. Most of the time the crowd jostling under the truck was distinguished by rows of white teeth smiling under straw hats, by schoolgirls with glowing, downy faces untouched by cosmetics, and, in general, by arms and necks burnt a healthy tan by outdoor work. Kazu liked such listeners.

The middle-aged man she had noticed in the crowd, however, wore a grimy, wrinkled, open-collared shirt with two fountain-pen clips glittering in the breast pocket. His hands propped an old brief case against his chest, and a cigarette dangled between the fingers of one hand. He was hatless, and the fierce sunlight shining on his closely cropped gray-white hair made him twist his mouth into a smirk. Kazu took a moment to recognize him because of the short haircut. His features were above average, but old and faded, with the peculiar unpleasantness of the face of a handsome man who has gone to seed without losing his looks.

Kazu as usual began her speech with, “I am the wife of Yuken Noguchi.” She felt as if the man were grinning at her. She finished her one-minute address, and the student volunteers thanked the audience for its kind attention. The crowd started to disperse and the truck prepared to leave for the next speaking engagement. At that moment Kazu saw the man stretch out his hand and rap against the side of the truck.

“Mrs. Noguchi!” the man called, baring his nicotine-stained teeth in a smile. “Mrs. Noguchi!”

Kazu immediately got down from the truck and approached the man. Her heart was throbbing strangely under the towel she had inserted in the breast of her kimono to catch the perspiration. She raised her voice deliberately. “Well! I haven’t seen you in years. It really is a small world, isn’t it? But what a surprising place for you to find me!”

She remembered his name—Totsuka—perfectly, but she prudently avoided mentioning it. She narrowed her eyes as if the sunlight were too much for her, but actually to keep her uneasiness from showing. She could see the train going over the elevated tracks at Sakashita. The few clouds in the sky had been melted by the sun into vague blobs.

“What do you want?” Kazu asked in a low voice.

“I’d like to talk with you for a minute,” the man answered.

Kazu cheerfully called to the people on the truck, “I’ve met an old acquaintance, and I’d like a few words with him. Would you mind resting a minute or two, please?”

Kazu walked diagonally across the street and, intending that Totsuka should accompany her, marched into a sherbet parlor. The blue and white curtains of glass beads at the entrance looked cheerful enough, but the interior of the shop with its row of battered chairs was gloom itself. No sooner did Kazu set foot in the shop than she called in a loud voice, “Twenty sherbets for the people on the truck! Right away!” Then, “Two orders of sherbet here. Serve us after the others. Take the orders out to the truck as soon as they’re ready.”

Kazu and the man sat at a dark table under a calendar. The table was wet from the ices slopped over by the previous customer. Kazu had a sudden intuition, though she knew it was impossible, that the calendar above her head was graced with Noguchi’s photograph. She looked up. She saw a movie actress in a yellow bathing suit floating in the water on blue-spotted water wings.

“What do you want?” Kazu asked again, impatient to be freed of her uncertainties.

“Don’t be in such a hurry. I’ve got to hand it to you, all the same, the way you’re going at it in this broiling weather. Your speech was damned good. Years ago I predicted that one day you’d be famous.”

“Out with it, if you’ve something you want from me. Money, is it?” Kazu addressed this man she had not seen in thirty years with brutal directness. Her eyes flashed feverishly as she watched Totsuka’s every move. The only sounds inside the shop was the steady rumble of the machine shaving the ice.

“Not very friendly, are you? To tell the truth, I’ve been doing a bit of writing recently.” Totsuka ran his spread-out fingers over the old brief case and, after much fumbling, opened the bag. It was stuffed with wrinkled papers. Totsuka peered inside and searched for an interminable length of time. Reflections from the sunlight falling on the tiled floor at the entrance caught Totsuka’s exceptionally long eyelashes as he looked down into the brief case. He had been proud of his long lashes when he was young, Kazu remembered. Now they shone an ashen color, but with their same remarkably lyrical beauty, shaded his wrinkle-set eyes.

“Ah, here we are,” Totsuka said, pulling out a flimsy pamphlet and throwing it carelessly on the table. The cover was inscribed, “The Life of Mrs. Yuken Noguchi. By a Frolicsome Angler.”

Kazu’s hand trembled violently as she turned the pages. Each chapter bore a suggestive heading. The parts dealing with the youthful Kazu’s arrival in Tokyo and her several years together with Totsuka described Totsuka (under his real name) as a handsome young man of pure and guileless emotions, and Kazu as a nymphomaniac. But, the book declared, it was her fixed policy, when there was a choice between love and ambition, to throw love to the winds and set her course for ambition. Each of her subsequent affairs was chronicled, with detailed excursions into the successive bedchambers. Kazu was pictured as nothing less that a vampire, trading on her beauty, who used men as stepping stones to her present position. As Kazu leafed rapidly through the last chapter she suddenly realized the purpose of the pamphlet. There she found Noguchi described as angelically naïve, and herself as an unscrupulous monster who had hoodwinked Noguchi and was now trying to be installed as the governor’s wife.

Kazu, dry-eyed, whispered, “How dare you write such irresponsible lies?”

“Nobody knows but you and me whether they’re lies or not.” Totsuka’s words, delivered with another flash of his stained teeth, were so reminiscent of the stereotype blackmailer in an old-fashioned melodrama that they suggested he need not be taken too seriously. Kazu, reassured, felt emboldened for the first time to look Totsuka in the face. Under her stare he dropped his long eyelashes. He’s afraid too, Kazu thought.

The waitress brought the ices.

“Have some,” Kazu haughtily commanded. The man, protecting the mound of shaved ice with one hand, mashed it down with his spoon, then thrust his mouth against the ice so as not to spill a drop. His long fingernails were rimmed with black dirt.

“Well, what’s your price?” Kazu demanded cuttingly.

Totsuka quickly lifted his face from the ices. His eyes had a puppy’s innocence. He pulled out a scrap of paper with some fussy calculations. Three thousand copies at three hundred yen a copy came to 900,000 yen, but he had rounded it off a bit to make a million yen.

“Very well. Come to my house tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. But you won’t get a penny if I find that even one of the three thousand copies is missing. I’ll pay you cash on delivery for all three thousand.”

The next morning Kazu withdrew the money from the bank and waited for Totsuka. She turned over the money as promised when he appeared, then decided to wait until she had calmed down before burning the three thousand copies of the pamphlet she collected. She had them securely wrapped and thrown into the storeroom. Pleading an indisposition, she excused herself from speechmaking that morning and said nothing, even to Yamazaki, of what had happened.

Several days later, in spite of all promises, the scurrilous pamphlet was distributed free of charge to well-known persons throughout the prefecture. It was estimated that several hundred thousand copies had been printed. “Well,” Yamazaki said, “the indiscriminate bombing has begun at last.” When he showed Kazu the pamphlet he knew at once from the way she paled merely at the cover that she had seen it before. Kazu frankly described all that had happened.

“It’s a shame,” Yamazaki said. “A million yen means a lot to us now. Why didn’t you ask my advice? You can be sure that a scoundrel like that will do all the mischief he can, regardless of whether he gets paid or not. It’s obvious, of course, that the Conservative Party is behind this.”

Genki Nagayama’s face flashed that instant before Kazu’s eyes, but she said nothing. Yamazaki continued, “The worst of it is, a lot of copies of the wretched pamphlet have found their way into the hands of suburban housewives. The aim is clear from the way it’s written—to appeal to the moralistic prejudices of the
petite bourgeosie
. The suburban vote worries me a little . . . Still, on the whole it’s not serious enough to bother us.”

Noguchi’s attitude concerning the pamphlet was truly admirable. He read it, naturally, but he never alluded with so much as a word to the scurrilous document. Kazu, badly wounded and drowning, felt that the manliness of her husband’s silence was like a large buoy floating silently in the dark sea.

Yamazaki was too busy now to meet either Noguchi or Kazu, and Noguchi, like an actor who forgets the director’s instructions and fumbles his lines, tended in the heat of an actual campaign to forget Yamazaki’s long months of guidance. Noguchi had been schooled never to lose his temper with hecklers, but he became visibly annoyed quite often. When he talked at Kichijoji, an enemy squad of twenty or more hecklers infiltrated the crowd. At one point Noguchi finally flared up at some persistent heckling and retorted, “You’re probably too young to understand,” at which the offenders shouted, “That’s right, grandpa!” Noguchi particularly disturbed his advisers by calmly making terrible slips of the tongue in the thick of some of his discourses, without himself realizing it. For example, on three occasions the candidate of the Radical Party quite distinctly referred to “the present Imperial Constitution . . .” Amusingly enough, Noguchi’s audiences for the most part failed to notice such lapses, but his speeches, which were aridity itself, enjoyed considerable popularity among prudent, elderly persons. Yamazaki heard such reports and realized that the peculiar Japanese trust in inept talkers was by no means a thing of the past.

New incidents, large and small, were occurring at the rate of about one a minute in the different election districts. Yamazaki’s voice was hoarse merely from giving instructions on the telephone about each.

“They’re signs of vote-buying in A district of Suginami Ward. A lot of money seems to be floating around.”

“The Investigation Squad should collect the evidence immediately and report it to the police.”

“Noguchi’s posters have been ripped down all over Bunkyo Ward and Tobita’s pasted on top.”

“Right. Paste others over them. I’ll get new posters to you at once.”

“Last night dirty posters were put up in the Santama district from A Street to B Street. There’re about 3,000 of them, and they show a skeleton and a fat woman. They seem to be a take-off on Mr. and Mrs. Noguchi.”

“Report it to the police immediately.”

Yamazaki had not the least faith in the police appointed by the Conservative Party, but the young members of the Radical Party had never made daily trips to the police so joyfully. The police were obliged to thank those who informed them of violations; indeed, it seemed at this stage as if the Radical Party had become the police’s favorite customer.

It had lately become a part of Noguchi’s daily routine to gargle protractedly with a boric acid solution before setting out in the morning and before going to bed at night in order to soothe his throat, which grew sorer every day. At night he took a hot bath and had a massage. Only after the masseur left did Noguchi at last relax. He would sit on the bed in his pajamas, a towel under his neck, and Kazu would hold up a brass basin to catch his gargling. This somber ritual bore little resemblance to their busy activities of the day, but as Kazu lifted up the basin she felt real pleasure to think that the day had at last come to an end.