After the Banquet (18 page)

Kazu, disliking the Western-style mosquito netting which clings to the bed, had put up instead a room-sized white linen mosquito net, but even so there was not enough breeze to stir it. The glass doors facing the garden had been left open. The light from the bedside lamp permeated the motionless mosquito net, setting in relief the stiff folds in the white linen, and suggesting to Kazu that she was in some strict convent. Kazu knelt in her nightgown on the tatami and held the basin high.

She sometimes heard, at respites in Noguchi’s prolonged gargling noises, the dinning of the night locusts tangled in the garden treetops. Their cries seemed to thread the night stillness with a sharp needle, but the short final notes were always twisted and sucked into the stillness. The nights in this neighborhood were astonishingly quiet. Sometimes a car would stop in the distance and drunken cries could be heard, only to disappear with the whine of the departing car.

Kazu enjoyed her posture at such times. Her body was no less tired than her husband’s, but she forgot her fatigue when she pictured herself waiting on her husband in the attitude of a priestess at a shrine. This was the posture of service and self-sacrifice openly offered, and it did not matter if some spume from her husband’s gargling fell on her face.

Kazu’s back also ached, but she refused to be massaged in her husband’s presence. Her vocal cords, fortunately, were strong, and her voice never became hoarse, no matter how many speeches she made.

When she looked up, there would be Noguchi in his pajamas, a glass in his right hand, his left hand pushed into the quilt behind him, elaborately gargling, his head thrown back. Occasionally he inclined his head from side to side, the better to circulate the water. The lamp caught the grayish wrinkles along his thin throat. The sound came to a boil and bubbled furiously, only to halt painfully again, a sequence repeated over and over.

Kazu was enraptured by the pathos of the scene. She felt as her eyes followed him intently that she was being assimilated into her aged husband’s excessive, illogical exertions. The sound of his gargling—foamy, granular, bubbling—seemed a proof that he was definitely there, alive before her. If that were true, she too was alive, and there was place for neither boredom nor inaction in such a life.

At length the third bout of gargling ended, and Noguchi, his mouth full of water, lowered his head to the basin. He spat out the water with a desolate sound, and the basin in Kazu’s hands grew somewhat heavier. Noguchi sighed. His face was a little flushed.

Noguchi then, for the first time in five days of this daily routine, offered Kazu the glass and asked, “Why don’t you gargle too?”

Kazu could hardly believe her ears. There would be no reason for her throat to be sore (and therefore, no necessity to gargle) unless she had been electioneering for him. For her husband to suggest that she gargle was more than mere sympathy; it clearly implied a tacit recognition of Kazu’s daily efforts. The thought struck her heart with sudden joy. Looking straight into the eyes of her unsmiling husband, she reverently accepted the glass.

The newspapers, radio, and television during the first week were unanimous in reporting a lead for Noguchi. But in the second week his strength in the suburbs began to crumble. The suburban “bedroom” of Tokyo had always been a stronghold of the Radical Party; a weakening of the party’s position there now was undoubtedly due largely to the effects of the scurrilous pamphlet, but party strategy all along had been to take these districts for granted and to skimp in their campaign efforts. Kazu’s indomitable nature convinced her that it was still not too late. She toured the surburban residential streets in a loudspeaker truck, stopping here and there to make speeches. The well-to-do neighborhoods were torpid, most of the residents being away at summer resorts. Upper-class sections were in any case not Radical Party strongholds, so she moved on to Setagaya, the Toyoko Line and other areas with larger numbers of working people.

The truck stopped one day under a heavy canopy of greenery at the entrance to a small park. The park contained a wading pool for children, and their splashing and shouting provided an uninterrupted background noise for the speeches. A crowd gathered immediately in the vacant lot between the entrance to the park and the railway level crossing, obviously waiting for Kazu to speak. She noticed the young men in the crowd, probably delivery boys, sitting on their bicycles, one foot on the ground. Their faces, unlike those of the boys downtown and in the farming villages, had somehow sophisticated or even derisive expressions. That wasn’t all—people in the audience kept whispering to one another, and gossiping every time they looked at her.

When it came time for Kazu to speak, she turned fretfully to the party worker beside her and asked, “What shall I do? They’re all gossiping about me.”

The middle-aged party worker knew that Kazu was haunted by the specter of the pamphlet, but to encourage her he said unconcernedly, “It’s all your imagination. Give it to them, and don’t pull any punches. Just look at the size of the crowd—you’re a success!”

Kazu stepped forward and bowed as usual before the microphone. “I am the wife of Yuken Noguchi, the Radical Party candidate for governor.” She at once caught two or three unmistakable snickers. Kazu, her face tense, spoke as in a trance. She exceeded her one-minute allowance, but the party workers today made no comment. But the more she spoke the more emptily her words scattered over the heads of her listeners.

This impression was half the product of Kazu’s fears. No matter how much feeling she put into her words, one part of her mind was visualizing the figure she cut in the eyes of the crowd. She was sure people saw her in terms of the portrait in the ugly pamphlet—the poverty-stricken girl from the country who sells her body to rise in the world. She thought she detected one middle-aged man staring at her skirt. She imagined she could read his thoughts, “Humph. What’s she got to do with socialism? I’ve heard the shameless tricks she’s played to make fools of men. They say that even when her body’s burning up, she never forgets her ambitions. I’ll bet she’s cold somewhere. I wonder where it is. Do you suppose she’s got a cold backside?”

A couple of groups of schoolgirls were looking at Kazu with wide-open eyes, as if they saw a monster.

Even while she was speaking, Kazu’s cheeks burned with shame. She fancied she could hear words like “bedroom,” “secret affair,” “gold-digger,” “risqué,” “over-sexed” . . . The corrupt jewels that had studded the pamphlet seemed to glitter now in the crowd’s gossip. The phrases from Kazu’s lips—“reform of the prefectural administration,” “positive policies to combat unemployment,” and the like—plummeted to the ground like swarms of winged ants which have lost the strength of their wings, but the words visible on the lips of the crowd dripped like red meat in the sunshine. Old people out for a walk and leaning on their sticks, smugly respectable housewives, little girls in bare-shouldered bathing suits, delivery boys—all were gnawing on bits of Kazu’s flesh, and looked at her with heavy, sated eyes.

The truck was parked in the shade, but it was extremely hot nevertheless. Kazu went on talking. She did not wipe her face with her customary ice-filled handkerchief, but let the cold sweat bathe her whole body. She could feel the eyes of the audience peeling off one layer after another of her kimonos, to leave her naked. Eyes burrowed in from the neckline, ate their way to her breasts, reached all the way to her abdomen. Invisible claws, having soaked in the sweat of her body, seemed to be ripping everything away.

This unspeakable torture gradually induced in Kazu as she stood alone on the loudspeaker truck the martyr’s intoxication. A bell began to ring at the level crossing, black and white crossbars descended from the dazzling blue sky, and a long train bound for the outer suburbs rocked by with a rumbling noise. Faces at every window formed a chain of countless eyes all staring curiously toward her.

Finally Kazu, like a woman being burnt as the stake, lifted her eyes to the sky. Heavy cumulus clouds coiled over the low roofs. The clouds brimmed with light, and stretched grandly to the apex of the sky.

The speech ended. The truck bore Kazu, all but unconscious, to the next destination.

As it happened, the elections for ward councilors were beginning at this time. The Conservative party could consequently legally use a total of three thousand loudspeakers now, one for each candidate. Disposed at every major street corner in Tokyo, they sent out a constant barrage of attacks on Noguchi. The Radical Party barely managed to run four hundred candidates in the ward council elections, and therefore had no more than that number of loudspeakers.

Together with this development, huge sums of money started to pour into the treasury of the Conservative Party. The floodgates were open now, and the money gushed out everywhere. Kazu’s funds, on the other hand, were rapidly running out, and party money-raising schemes had reached an impasse. By the eighth of August it was apparent that everything was collapsing with a roar. Not a single newspaper still predicted a victory for Noguchi.

August 9, the day before the election, was a gloomy day, a throwback to the rainy season. Rain had been falling since early morning, and it was extremely humid. Yamazaki, as a last resort, had spent all night going through the classified telephone directory, and had compiled a list of fifty thousand names. He decided to send a telegram in the Committee Chairman’s name:
NOGUCHI IN TROUBLE REQUEST YOUR SUPPORT
. On the morning of the ninth he took the list to the Communication Workers Union with the request that they concentrate on these telegrams and not accept any others sent in bulk. The chairman of the union gladly consented.

By the afternoon of the ninth, however, the Conservative Party had got wind of the scheme, and decided to send out opposing telegrams. These were refused at the Central Post Office. Tobita’s faction immediately stirred the Minister of Postal Service into action. He issued what was in effect an administrative order, and in the course of the evening 100,000 telegrams—twice as many as the Radical Party sent—were dispatched by the Conservative Party.

That afternoon at four o’clock a telephone call came for Yamazaki, who was standing by at Noguchi’s house. The place was jammed with newspaper reporters and radio and television men, and Yamazaki had to push his way through the mob to get to the telephone.

The voice at campaign headquarters was excited. “Something terrible’s happened. We’ve just had calls from six different parts of town. Thousands of leaflets are being scattered at this minute in all six places. Some say, ‘Yuken Noguchi Gravely Ill,’ and some say, ‘Yuken Noguchi Dying.’ Newspaper boys are going through the streets shouting, ‘Extra!’ and distributing papers free.”

Yamazaki relayed to the newspapermen present this extraordinary development. Kazu, who had been listening behind the reporters, rushed off to her room with a shriek. Yamazaki hurriedly followed. He found her lying on the floor and weeping. The room was in semi-darkness because of the rain, and the sight unspeakably gloomy.

Yamazaki stroked Kazu’s back, comforting her. She suddenly straightened herself, and with an expression broken by tears and anger, clutched the lapels of Yamazaki’s suit and shook him. “You must catch whoever’s responsible. You must catch them at once. Such a dirty thing to do! Such a dirty trick to try at the last minute! If this means we get beaten in the election, I’ll die, and that’s for sure. I’ve lost everything I had. And if we get beaten because of this—I’ll kill whoever did it. Hurry, go out, catch them—hurry!”

Even as Kazu’s voice repeated again and again the word “Hurry!” it gradually lost its strength, and soon she lay prostrate on the floor, no longer making a sound. Yamazaki left her in the care of a competent maid and, forcing his way through the hubbub in the hall, returned to his post at the telephone.

About nine that night, when everything had calmed down, the television and radio people made electrical transcriptions and films for use the following day. They were recording in advance the impressions of the new governor and his wife in the event Noguchi was elected.

There was a chilling air of unreality about such strange, childish play-acting. Noguchi answered questions unemotionally, and in painstaking, colorless tones related his future aspirations for the prefectural government. The aridity of his delivery had never been heard to better advantage.

“And how about the wife of the governor?” brightly asked the announcer, and at that moment, with a perfect sense of timing, Kazu swept into the drawing room. She had changed into a splendid formal kimono. Her face was lightly powdered, and she was smiling and self-possessed—faultless, in short.

Kazu saw the newsmen to the door, then standing shoulder to shoulder with Yamazaki, said the first defeatist words he had heard issue from her mouth. “You know, Mr. Yamazaki, after all we’ve gone through, I somehow feel we’re going to lose . . . I wonder if I ought to say such things?”

Yamazaki turned to her, but had nothing to say. But suddenly, not waiting for his reply, Kazu’s face shone in the sultry darkness of the hall, as if illuminated by some inner light, and she said in a voice that sounded as if she were half dreaming, “But everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it? I’m sure we’ll win.”

After the rain of the preceding day, the fifteenth of August dawned perfectly clear—ideal weather for voting. Kazu arose early and made a flower arrangement in the bay window of the drawing room. She chose five water lilies of different heights and placed them in a cool-looking basin of water. Even the exertion of arranging the flowers made her perspire.

The limpid clarity of the water under the completed flower arrangement pleased Kazu. The sunrise colors of the hard, sculptural flowers floated on the surface, and the glossy, reddish-purple undersides of the leaves reflected lovely shadows in the water. Kazu felt, as she scrutinized her flower arrangement, as if she were practicing some kind of divination. She wondered if she could not find a clue to her fate in the orderly disposition of these flowers.