After the Banquet (22 page)

Kazu’s rich shoulders and breasts had lost nothing of their beauty, despite all the summer’s exertions. Her sunburned neck, however, emerging light-brown, like a faded flower, from the snow-white skin below, showed the effects of the election campaign. The sunlight striking the surface of the mirror still kept a lingering summer intensity, but Kazu’s white shoulders and breasts were an icehouse. The fine-grained, saturated whiteness repelled the light, suggesting that it concealed within a cool, dark summer interior.

It was nothing short of astonishing how little indication of her age Kazu’s skin gave. Her skin seemed to have slipped softly through the hard fetters of age. This pliant skin, which hid an alertness and cunning beneath its normal composure, had a smooth self-sufficiency, like milk filling a basin to the brim. Her extremely fine pores seemed to expand self-indulgently in the morning sun, giving her skin a mellower glow than ever.

“What a lovely skin you have!” the maid said. “It’s enough to make even a woman want to pounce on you!”

“I have no time for compliments,” Kazu answered. In her heart she permitted and accepted this praise, but her eyes were directed toward the mirror with an intensity bordering on ferocity. She daubed her skin with toilet water, had the maid apply it to the nape of her neck, then patted powder on top. She used foundation cream to shade off the excessively sharp line of demarcation of her sunburn. Kazu had never thrown herself with such concentration and strain into her beauty preparations, nor had she ever had so little time.

“The car’s ready to leave whenever I want, isn’t it?”

“Yes, madam.”

Kazu ordered the maid to send for the chauffeur even as she began her dressing. The young chauffeur came as far as the corridor outside her room and knelt on one knee at the door. The proprietress of the Setsugoan, busy tying her undersash, gave the chauffeur a hard look. “You’re not to tell anybody where we’re going today—do you understand? If anybody finds out, there’ll be hell to pay. No matter who asks you, you’ll be sorry if you tell.”

That evening Kazu returned to the Setsugoan in unusually good spirits. She had been urged to remain when she started to leave Sawamura’s house, and that hard-to-please old man had taken lunch with her. Kazu described everything to her trusted maid. She took a quick bath to wash off the talcum powder. Then she changed to a conservative kimono and set off immediately for the new house in Koganei.

Noguchi made no comment. He merely inquired briefly about her condition and did not listen very carefully to her answer.

Seeing how the removal was progressing was enough to inspire Kazu with fresh thoughts about the coldness of the world. The Radical Party had sent only two clerks, and there was no sign anywhere of the young people who had flocked so enthusiastically to Noguchi during the campaign. Yamazaki was there, clumsily carrying a tea cabinet. The only other helpers were the houseboy and the maids, originally from the Setsugoan.

The house faced the Koganei Embankment, not far from the Hara-Koganei Station on the Seibu Electric Line. The paved road along the opposite bank of the waterworks canal was the Itsukaichi Highway. The road on this side was unpaved. The grass on the embankment and the hedges before the houses were white with dust.

The new house had seven rooms and a fairly large garden, but it was of cheap construction and shook every time a truck passed by. The gate posts were trees of natural growth, and the garden also boasted a willow, a cedar, and a hemp palm, among other attractions.

By the following afternoon the house was in sufficiently good order for Mr. and Mrs. Noguchi to take their first walk. They strolled for a while upstream on a path over the weed-covered embankment.

Kazu’s only remembrances of living in such a countrified place went back to the distant days of her girlhood. Heavy traffic flowed over the Itsukaichi Highway, but apart from an occasional truck or bicycle they saw nothing resembling a car on this bank, and they naturally encountered no one along the path. Kazu noticed for the first time in years how hollow a dog’s barking sounds in the daytime.

The path hummed with the chirpings of many kinds of insects. The huge masses of pampas grass were already in ear, and their feathery spikes, bending gracefully, shone a fresh silver. The bamboo grass and the tall weeds, dust-covered only on the side facing the road below, brought to mind some exquisite work in plaster of Paris, but the plants atop the embankment were fresh and green. The grass around the path under the avenue of cherry trees had been left to grow wild, and one could imagine the sultry grass fumes in summer. The grass grew so thick that they could not even glimpse the surface of the canal. Chestnuts and silk trees stretched their branches unhindered across the water; here and there branches from both banks interlaced, and vines twisted round them. All they could hear was the rather lighthearted sound of the water below. If they had wished to see the water they would have had to step to the edge of the grass-covered embankment and risk falling over.

The path was too narrow for them to walk abreast. Noguchi therefore went ahead. He had put up at auction even his snakewood walking stick, and he now used a crudely made stick of cherrywood to clear away the grass in his path. Kazu noticed that the hair at the back of Noguchi’s head had turned completely white. His withered shoulders—perhaps this was only her imagination—had lost their dignity, and the back of his gray shirt smacked of the retired old gentleman.

Kazu, however, was aware that Noguchi was deliberately pretending. He was trying by choice to act the part of the retired old gentleman. His failure to inquire seriously into Kazu’s absence of the day before, his bland good humor even during the confusion of the removal, when normally he would have flown into a rage—these and other instances were indicative of Noguchi’s new posture. In the attempt to enjoy his leisure, after having lost all else, he looked for the seeds of pleasure in every manner of thing. But they were not to be found in a moment. Consequently, Noguchi’s present cheerfulness had something solemn and high-principled about it, a reflection of his former code.

When, for example, they went out on this walk, Noguchi praised the clear air of the suburbs and pronounced the words, “Ah, this is really pleasant,” a total of three times, each time, it is true, with a somewhat different emphasis.

Once Noguchi had fixed his mind on a definite objective, he could not rest until he had adjusted and integrated all other things accordingly. He believed that they would promote his high-principled good cheer, that everything would lend strength. Or so he dreamed. A man with political aspirations has rivals, but a man with poetical aspirations should not expect to have any . . . At present there was still disharmony. Many things remained to be adjusted. But presently everything would be purified, would progress toward harmony and be guided to the “quiet on the hilltop” of Goethe’s
A Wanderer’s Night-Songs
.

Kazu walked with her eyes down. She noticed fragments of green soft-drink bottles and brown beer bottles deeply imbedded in the earth along the path. Washed by the wind and rain, they were now solidly inlaid, and seemed to have been there a very long time. Kazu spoke. “There must be a lot of merrymaking here when the cherry blossoms are in bloom.”

Her words broke the spell of Noguchi’s reveries. But he had an answer carefully prepared. He replied cheerfully, “No, I gather there’s not much of that any more. The cherry trees around here have become pretty old, and they’re not looked after properly. The blossoms are not very impressive. The loud merrymakers all congregate around the cherry blossoms in Koganei Park, I’m told. We won’t be bothered by them. Yamazaki was saying so.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” A certain regret trailed through Kazu’s words. She herself was only vaguely aware of the cause for this regret. Kazu was dreaming of the crowds.

Noguchi paused under a cherry tree and poked with his walking stick into the damp hollows of the trunk. “Look,” he said, “it won’t be long before this one rots to pieces.” His lively gesture with the stick accentuated his old age all the more. Kazu shrank to see how his eyebrows, like worn-out brooms, cast shadows over the gentle smile in his eyes.

Noguchi’s words, delivered in his rather unnaturally cheerful voice, pricked Kazu’s heart one by one like transparent glass fibers. She actually felt unpleasant not to have been scolded for what she did the day before.

She had gone the previous day to In Sawamura with a subscription book for the reopening of the Setsugoan. Kazu broached this request on two levels, in her usual manner. First, she launched precipitously into a request that Sawamura use his influence to persuade the present Minister of Finance and the Minister of Trade and Industry to make special arrangements for a loan. After brief consideration, Sawamura replied that it would be difficult for him, and such highhanded policies would not in any case be to Kazu’s advantage under the circumstances.

Kazu, rebuffed in the first instance, moved to her second stage. She produced the subscription book and begged him to sign. If, she said, Sawamura’s name headed the list, nobody would refuse to join. Sawamura apologized with a sardonic smile for being unable, as a retired person, to offer more than a token. He ordered Umeme to prepare some Chinese ink, then wrote with a brush in a splendid hand, “Ten Thousand Yen. In Sawamura.”

It was safe to assume that nobody as yet knew of this. Once the subscription list had been circulated among the various people Sawamura had suggested—Prime Minister Saeki, Genki Nagayama, and many other men in the world of finance—the secret would be discovered, of course, but for the moment it was inconceivable that Noguchi could have heard of it.

The instant Kazu secured Sawamura’s signature in her book, this unexpected success had caused her heart to burst into flames. Once again her energies spread in every direction like wildfire, and she felt an incomparable joy. The one thing that had weighed on her mind since the preceding night was how to disguise her joy. Kazu finally decided to bend her body to her will, like a feline curbing its excessive energy, and while disbursing a modicum of good cheer, the proper amount to accord with her husband’s new-found happiness, to do her utmost to maintain an expression of gloom. This unnatural effort, however, strained her nerves unnecessarily . . . Kazu thought that the sensitivity of her nerves accounted for her vague apprehensions over Noguchi’s generosity.

But the thought that Noguchi knew nothing made his figure strolling along in his gray shirt, his walking stick held over him, seem unspeakably solitary and tragic; she felt it would be a great relief if Noguchi would only find out. Kazu was not sufficiently aware of having committed a crime to wish to punish herself. At the same time, she hoped a little for Noguchi’s understanding.

“Look!” said Noguchi, again pausing and pointing his stick at the opposite bank. “Just think, in this day and age, such tea stalls still exist! It looks like something out of a play, doesn’t it?”

Kazu looked and saw on the opposite bank, facing the highway, an old-fashioned combination eating place and tea stall. Below the slanting eaves was a display door with a glass panel on top. Slips of varicolored paper dangled from the glass part of the door, and a red carpet covered the lower part. The signs were inscribed in large letters: “Vegetable Stew,” “Dumplings,” and the like.

“How picturesque!” Kazu said with an exaggerated sigh of admiration. She started to step into the grass, which was covered with thick, heavy cobwebs, but Noguchi swiftly swept them away with the point of his stick. The cobweb threads entangled round the stick hovered lightly about it; when the slanting rays of the sun caught them, a delicate glimmering spread slowly in the air.

Kazu was unable to maintain her heavy silence any longer. She burst out with a quite unnecessary suggestion. “You know, it’s a very quiet, livable house, but I think we’d do well to remodel the bathroom at least. It’s a rented house, of course, but we’ll be there a long time.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Noguchi satisfiedly. “It would be nice when I get back from golfing to have a pleasant bath waiting for me.”

“Golfing? Yes, you told me that you used to play a long time ago, when you were abroad . . . But what will you do for clubs?”

“I’ve been thinking that once my life settles into a routine I’ll search the secondhand shops and pick up a set—cheap ones will do. I’ll start again. What gave me the idea was having the Koganei Golf Links so near. I’ll invite my old friends, and once in a while some foreign friends . . .”

“That’s a fine idea. Yes, I certainly hope you’ll take up your golf again. It’ll do you a world of good. I’d been thinking that the worst thing for your health after all that strenuous exercise this summer would be to stop everything suddenly.” Kazu assented, showing an unfeigned pleasure. Her husband would have to move around a bit.

They reached the first bridge over the canal. Leaning on the iron pipe which served as a handrail on this unpretentious little bridge, they looked down through the interlacing leafy branches and caught their first glimpse of the canal. The water flowed fairly swiftly, its surface dappled by the light streaming through the chestnut leaves.

“It’s like a lamé obi,” said Kazu, “though that’s not a fashion I particularly admire.”

Noguchi added, “It’s the first time I’ve seen water since coming here.”

They soon climbed back on the embankment, their faces to the sun in the west, and continued their walk upstream.

Even as they exchanged such remarks Kazu realized that her eyes were now looking down on the scene from some great height. Far below her she could see two tiny figures, an old couple walking along the embankment. Noguchi’s white hair shone, the coral beads of Kazu’s hairpin shone, and occasionally when Noguchi brandished his stick it too gave off a little flash of light. The emotions of the old couple were transparent, filled with melancholy: they overflowed with human loneliness. No foreign element could be intruded.