After the Banquet (21 page)

“No, that’s out of the question. I’ve taken out three mortgages on the property to the tune of eighty-five million yen, and there’s a mortgage of seven million yen on the movables . . . It’s not a sum of money you can pay back overnight, even if the restaurant does pretty well. It’s only been four months and a little more since I shut the place, but it doesn’t take people long to forget these days. There’s one other thing I haven’t told you, but while I was away three million yen of the restaurant’s money were embezzled. That’s what you call rubbing salt into a wound, isn’t it? . . . In any case, reopening the restaurant is impossible. I’ve solemnly promised my husband to sell the Setsugoan, and after asking your help with the negotiations, I really can’t back out now.”

Yamazaki had no way to refute this admirable statement of the situation. “What can I do for you today?” he asked, after draining the chilled grape juice in one gulp.

“Nothing special. I wanted to ask you about dividing the Setsugoan, and I thought I might invite you to go with me to the movies for a little distraction.”

“Did you leave Mr. Noguchi alone in the house?”

“No. Today he went to attend a high school class reunion or something of the sort. He was afraid that if he didn’t show up people would say it was because he was ashamed to have lost the election. I got permission to go out by telling him that an old friend was giving a recital. I took the precaution of sending a present to the dressing room, just to make sure.”

“Those oranges a little while ago?” Yamazaki had not heard their destination.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“You think of everything, don’t you, Mrs. Noguchi?”

They exchanged glances and laughed. Then they returned to a more businesslike matterSS—Noguchi’s determination last month, after much pondering, to wind up his affairs. He had decided to sell his house and all the furnishings, pay his debts, then move to a small rented house already selected in a remote part of the suburbs. Noguchi’s tangible personal property was by no means negligible, and together with the house and land was likely to fetch fifteen or sixteen million yen. The auction of the property would be held on the deserted premises of the Setsugoan. Noguchi’s collection of paintings, antiques, and rare European books had already been carted off to the Setsugoan.

“The auction’s the day after tomorrow, isn’t it?” Yamazaki asked.

“Yes. I only hope it doesn’t rain.”

“What difference does it make?”

“But they’ll have to use the garden, won’t they? You should know, Mr. Yamazaki.”

They sent for an evening paper and tried to pick a movie worth seeing. It would have to be something light and amusing since their purpose was to be diverted. The trouble was that Kazu disliked comedies.

Kazu leaned her head over the newspaper spread before them, all but brushing her cheek against Yamazaki’s. He watched with oppressive feelings her ringed fingers, white and delicate, travel down the columns of print. “What am I to her?” he asked himself. Only when she was with a man she did not love could Kazu behave like a natural lover, an easy-going mistress; she was simple, capricious, and even showed a touch of rusticity. But in the presence of a man she loved, Kazu’s “naturalness” disappeared. Yamazaki was unquestionably seeing a Kazu completely unknown to Noguchi. But Yamazaki had no reason to feel especially grateful for this privilege.

Their efforts to select a suitable film ended by thoroughly wearying them. Kazu said, “I don’t feel like going to the movies any more.”

“You don’t have to force yourself. There’s no point in looking too hard for amusement at this stage. You’re busy now and there are things to distract you, but by-and-by an emptiness you can’t do a thing about will come over you. An emptiness you won’t even want to lift a finger against.” Thus spoke the expert on elections.

The auction of Noguchi’s property took place at the Setsugoan two days later, beginning in the morning. Noguchi had put up every last possession for sale.

The large household objects were set out on a carpet spread over the lawn. The sunlight was remarkably intense that day, a day that suggested summer had returned. A pair of beds on the lawn caught the attention of prospective buyers. These were the twin beds in which Mr. and Mrs. Noguchi had slept until the previous night. They created a strangely pathetic, raw impression, despite the damask bedspreads now covering them. The twin beds were placed apart from the other furniture in the center of the lawn. The pale green damask shone with an unpleasantly strong luster in the glaring early autumn sunlight. The beds, however, seemed curiously in their element in the middle of the garden with its unmowed grass so high it smelled like hay, the blue sky visible at breaks in the rows of tall pines, chestnuts, and nettle trees.

One irreverent customer remarked, “That’s certainly convenient. They ought to leave the beds there all the time.”

As twilight approached the shadows of the branches fell on the beds, and the voices of the evening cicadas enveloped them.

Nothing so frightened Kazu as Yamazaki’s prediction that an emptiness would soon steal over her against which she would not want to move a finger. When would it come? Ten days hence? Tomorrow? Or perhaps it had come already, and she merely hadn’t noticed it?

The thought produced in Kazu an indescribable weariness. She had no confidence that she could endure the predicted emptiness. She had, it is true, experienced emptiness a number of times in her life, but she had a premonition that this time it would be on an incomparably vaster scale than before. She tried in various ways to picture the features of this monster, but her imagination did not extend to something she had never seen. No matter how dreadful a face it might have, she would be glad at least if it had one, for the monster might be faceless.

Her experience during the election had opened Kazu’s eyes to her own nature. The self she had previously believed in only vaguely had been dissected, and many precise characteristics—how strong this part was, how weak that one was, how much patience she could show under certain circumstances, how much she leaned in a certain direction—were now clear, and she knew now that she could never again bear any form of emptiness. Full, if tragic, circumstances were preferable to a void. Kazu far preferred the north wind tearing her body to a vacuum.

During these fretful deliberations, however, gilt letters kept flashing constantly in her head, saying, “Reopen the Setsugoan.” The project was hopeless, indeed impossible, and there was no way to alter this situation. Kazu was well aware of the fact. Yet this knowledge did not prevent her eyes from being drawn incessantly to the little sun shining like silver in a corner of the overcast sky. The impossibility was the source of its radiance. It glittered. It hung beautifully in the heavens. However often she averted her eyes, they would return to this brilliance, again because of its impossibility. And once her glance had traveled there, everywhere else seemed only darkness.

For days Kazu balanced in her mind the coming emptiness against the impossible reopening. She was famed for the rapidity of her decisions, but she could not make up her mind between these two exceedingly vague and formless alternatives. In such a predicament, what good would it do even to consult a reliable astrologer?

She tried to review as carefully as she could the several months of the election. The Conservative Party, she realized, had not won because of its political principles. Nor had it won because of its logic, its lofty sentiments, or the superiority of its candidate. Noguchi was indisputably a splendid man, his logic was impeccable, and he possessed noble sentiments. The Conservative Party had won entirely thanks to its money.

This was certainly a crude lesson, and it was not to be taught such a lesson that Kazu had poured her energies into the election. A belief in the omnipotence of money was not especially novel to Kazu. But when she had used her money she had at least thrown in her heart and her prayers, while her opponents’ money advanced like a robot, trampling all before it. The conclusion Kazu reached was not so much regret that her money had been insufficient as regret that her heart and Noguchi’s logic had been expended to no avail. It was regret that the human tears, smiles, friendly laughter, warmth of flesh—everything Kazu believed in during this campaign to which she had devoted her heart and soul—had proved futile.

This came to her almost as a physical shock, and made her lose faith in her tears and the magic of her smiles. It was a common-sense assumption of the old-fashioned society in which Kazu grew up that a woman’s attractions were a powerful weapon which could conquer money and authority, but such a belief now seemed to Kazu, in the light of her experiences during the election, no more than a distant myth. This was Kazu’s blunt evaluation of the election: “femininity” had been beaten by “money.” It was the opposite of the clear victory of flesh when a woman abandons her indigent lover to give herself to a rich man she does not love.

Noguchi’s defeat was reflected in Kazu’s eyes as a natural corollary to this principle: the “man” Noguchi was beaten by “money.”

Kazu felt hatred and indignation for this power which had so ruthlessly demonstrated the ineffectuality of logic, sentiments, physical attractions, and the rest, but she soon perceived also that this mental blind alley was inseparably linked to the impossibility of reopening the Setsugoan. Until the last days of the election she had kept alive within her a belief in the power of miracles to change the impossible into the possible. Now that was dead. Her confidence in a miracle at the end of the election campaign could certainly be said to have been a confidence in politics itself, but politics had not responded to this confidence, and Kazu in turn had completely lost her mystic confidence in politics.

But if such reasons were enough to make Kazu despair of politics, it meant that, like Noguchi, she thought that logic, sentiments, and personal charms constituted the whole of politics. Only these factors, after all, had been exposed as ineffectual. And, it occurred to her, if politics had given her the courage to look for a miracle when the situation around her seemed virtually hopeless, politics—regardless of the outcome—deserved all the less to be despaired over.

The result of thinking in these terms was that the meaning of politics was suddenly transfigured for Kazu.

Her efforts had proved utterly fruitless, but if she flung aside what was doomed to be futile, and relied entirely on her confidence in miracles, perhaps the impossible would become possible, and politics would again come to her aid. Perhaps the glimmering confidence in miracles which her ideals had lit and the efforts to achieve miracles which realism had summoned forth were, in the realm of politics, the same.

The reopening of the Setsugoan might not be impossible.

In the midst of these reflections a splendid political discovery hatched in Kazu’s mind: “The Conservative Party won with its money. That’s why I’m faced with losing the Setsugoan. It’s only fair that Conservative Party money should compensate me.”

This was truly a noteworthy revelation.

Kazu, choosing a time when her husband was not at home, telephoned the residence of In Sawamura in Kamakura. Sawamura, a monumental figure in the forces of Japanese Conservatism, had served as Prime Minister any number of times. Kazu was an old acquaintance of Sawamura’s common-law wife.

Kazu’s heart pounded despite herself as she dialed the number. Now, for the first time (though she herself did not realize it) Kazu had approached the essence of politics—betrayal.

The Sawamura family had been for generations worshippers of the goddess Benzaiten, and in deference to this exceedingly jealous virgin goddess, In Sawamura had never married. He had taken a geisha named Umeme as his common-law wife, and to keep up appearances treated her exactly like a servant. Umeme had never once come to the fore or uttered a word in the presence of guests. She still referred to the man who was in fact her husband as “His Excellency.”

Umeme answered Kazu’s request for an appointment quite unaffectedly. “I’m sure that His Excellency will be glad to see you, but I’ll inquire first about his convenience.”

In the end, a meeting was arranged for eleven in the morning on the fifteenth of September. This appointment could not be changed.

The following day Kazu learned that Noguchi had set the fifteenth of September for the removal to the rented house in Koganei. She was dumbfounded at this extraordinarily unlucky break. She felt sure that if she asked for a postponement of the meeting Sawamura would not grant her a second one. She tried desperately to think how she could slip away on the day of the removal. It was obvious that a housewife must be present on such an occasion. The date of the removal had been determined singlehandedly by Noguchi; as usual, he saw no need to consult with his wife on the matter. It was beyond Kazu’s powers to alter the date.

Once again Kazu felt the strength to make rash decision surging up within her. The day before the removal, she went back to the Setsugoan, alleging that she had things to dispose of. Complaining of a severe headache, she summoned her neighborhood physician, and persuaded him to telephone the Noguchi house and state in his own words that it was advisable for her to spend the night at the Setsugoan. Early the next morning the physician was again summoned, and once again she induced him to telephone Noguchi, this time with the message, “It’s quite out of the question for her to help with the moving today. She must be allowed to rest quietly until evening.”

Kazu hastily got rid of the physician, then dispatched the two young maids to help with the removal, keeping with her only her confidential maid. Kazu rose from her sickbed with remarkable vigor. The maid, understanding the situation, laid out the clothes Kazu would wear. The kimono was an unlined garment of slubbed crepe dyed in shades of sepia with a design of primroses at the hems. The obi had a pattern of insects embroidered in green and silver on a white ground. Kazu, baring herself to the waist, began her toilet before a mirror in the early morning sunlight. The maid stood beside her attentively. Kazu had no need to say a word; a flicker in her eyes reflected in the mirror was enough for the maid to provide whatever was necessary. The maid sensed that the important errand of the proprietress this morning would decide their future.