After the Banquet (23 page)

But to look at things in this manner was naturally for Kazu also a means of self-defense. If she did not, her existence held a blade so sharp that it would surely wound herself and her husband; unless she could view things from a height, this touching picture of an aged couple out for their melancholy stroll would suddenly change and be transformed into a picture too ugly to bear contemplation.

Noguchi was plainly enjoying every moment of this serene walk. The signs of his pleasure were apparent in his carriage, in his eyes when from time to time he looked up at the sky, in his walk, in his way of swinging his stick. But she could detect in his enjoyment an exclusive, obstinate quality; Kazu’s existence did not seem absolutely indispensable. Kazu thought as she walked behind Noguchi that she must give him the sympathy of a person who steals a glance over an artist’s shoulder at the picture he is painting on canvas. Now she lacked even the qualifications to bother Noguchi. She must not disturb his thoughts.

Kazu’s sympathy was extended to each instant illuminated by the afternoon sun of late autumn. She could understand that Noguchi, aware also that he would not be blessed a second time with such a well-ordered, serene state of mind, should try desperately to preserve this serenity. Kazu had no wish to destroy it now. She had no reason to deny that each successive moment—even if it was a sham—was creating a picture of a kind of happiness.

They saw how the rays of the sun, slanting into a grove of tall cryptomerias to the left of the road, caused a mysterious, golden mist to coil between the trunks of the trees. A truck passed alongside, raising an immense cloud of dust. The dust remaining drifted among the cryptomerias, and again turned a peaceful gold.

They saw too the sun sink beautifully in the sky ahead of them as they walked. The sunset clouds tinted the clumps of trees here and there in colors like those of fresh vegetables. The evening clouds glowed vividly, but amidst their flaming there was also one scrap of cloud which contained the colors of darkness. Kazu recognized in this dim gray fragment the shape of a gravestone, the gravestone of the Noguchi family.

Strangely enough, the familiar vision of this gravestone, which always stirred Kazu’s heart, today failed to evoke any excitement. She thought vaguely that it would be her grave, but she watched undisturbed as the gravestone trailed distantly, indistinctly in the sky. The gravestone tumbled over, collapsed, dissolved . . . And the bright evening clouds around it suddenly turned the color of ashes.

In October Noguchi received a dinner invitation from the old friends with whom he had gone to the Omizutori Ceremony in Nara. Kazu was not invited.

The usual forces gathered in a spacious room overlooking the Sumida River in a geisha establishment in Yanagibashi. No doubt the same newspaper which had paid for the trip to Nara was paying this time too. The octogenarian journalist sat in the place of honor. Noguchi, the newspaper executive, and the financial critic made up the rest of the party.

Halfway through the dinner Noguchi got up to go to the lavatory, and the old man followed him. A geisha started to lead him by the hand, but he firmly rebuffed her. He stopped Noguchi at a corner of the hallway and said, “You may already have heard about it, Noguchi, but the others decided that we had to tell you in case you didn’t know. The unpleasant task fell on me, as the oldest. It’s really difficult to know how to begin,” the old man hesitated, “but your wife has recently been circulating among various people in the cabinet and the financial world a subscription book for the reopening of the Setsugoan. I gather that In Sawamura was the first she approached, and she seems as a result to have collected quite a lot of money. I don’t suppose this comes as news to you.”

“No, it’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Noguchi interrupted hurriedly.

Noguchi’s distress when he returned to the party was plainly visible to the other guests. A glance at his expression and they understood that the old journalist had broken the news, and that Noguchi had suspected nothing. Their sympathy for Noguchi was apparent from the kindness they showed him. These men were sufficiently polished to manage such a difficult and delicate expression of friendship, but their polish wounded Noguchi all the more. He excused himself. A message had been left for him that Kazu would spend that night at the Setsugoan. She had not returned to the house in Koganei.

While Noguchi was in Yanagibashi, Kazu was seeing Genki Nagayama in Akasaka.

Nagayama, when she first requested a meeting, had answered lightly, obviously well aware of everything, “I suppose it’s your subscription book.” Kazu suggested a meeting at his “office,” but he insisted on an expensive restaurant of his choosing in Akasaka. It embarrassed Kazu to join Nagayama at this restaurant, which was run by an acquaintance, but in the end she went. She arrived punctually, and was then kept waiting half an hour.

While Kazu waited, the proprietress made various attempts to engage her in conversation, a torture to Kazu. The old woman had heard rumors about the reopening of the Setsugoan, and she wanted Kazu to know that she was completely on her side. She gave her encouragement as well. “It was clever of you to get Mr. Sawamura’s signature. You’d never have got far without it. You’ve had such a hard time of it, Mrs. Noguchi, you’re due to blossom out now.” The proprietress eagerly offered to introduce Kazu to a fortuneteller whose predictions were amazingly accurate. It would help in the business, she said. Kazu accepted the offer without enthusiasm. She was afraid, for one thing, of an unfavorable prediction at the very outset, but more importantly, Kazu had faith now exclusively in her own unaided activity.

They heard noises emanating from the far end of the corridor. The proprietress jumped to her feet and cried out in a voice of earsplitting brightness, “We’re tired of waiting! You should never keep a lady waiting!”

Nagayama’s voice could be heard, indifferent as ever to the surroundings, “She’s no lady. The old dame’s a crony of mine.”

“What a thing to say!”

Kazu, sitting formally, trembled slightly with apprehension. She sat again amidst this type of joke, this type of excessive familiarity, this type of broad-minded bad manners. However she might repudiate them, the fact was that she was sitting here. Nagayama had never once attempted to treat her as the wife of a former cabinet minister.

Kazu felt closer now to politics than when she was caught in the whirlpool of a fierce election campaign. She felt as if only now—when surrounded by such jokes, by cheerful banter, by women’s laughter, by the fragrance of incense rising in the tokonoma, by this whole chain of things—did politics first register on all her five senses. Only in this atmosphere could politics show its face and work miracles.

Genki Nagayama strode into the room. He was in Japanese clothes. He greeted Kazu with genuine affability, then sat down, across the table from her.

Kazu, still sitting rigidly erect, gave the face of the ugly old man a hard look. His florid complexion indicated an unpleasant abundance of energy, and gave the impression of flesh quarreling with flesh. His eyes, set in layers of heavy wrinkles, stared out nakedly, as if the wrinkles did not exist. The perfectly white rows of a complete set of false teeth faintly clinked behind his big, thick lips.

Kazu, her eyes riveted to his face, pronounced the word, “Devil!”

“Is that all you have to say?” Nagayama asked, grinning.

“Coward! Monster! The dirtiest villain of them all, that’s you. That disgusting pamphlet—
The Life of Mrs. Yuken Noguchi
—you were behind that too, don’t try to deny it. You haven’t a scrap of decency in you. You stink worse than a worm in a privy. You’re the lowest species of human kind. You’re a cesspool clogged with all the filthy things no normal human being would even think of. I can’t understand how you’ve managed to stay alive all this time without getting yourself killed. I honestly think I could rip you into eight pieces, and still not feel satisfied.”

Kazu grew more and more agitated as she spoke. She had the feeling that her words themselves were driving her on. Her face was terribly flushed, her mouth dry, and tears flowed uncontrollably from her wrathful eyes. Sobbing hysterically, she poured out her abuse. Her hand pounded the table hard enough to smash her turquoise ring. Of course it would not matter if that ring got broken. Kazu never wore her diamond ring when she took around the subscription book.

Nagayama listened, nodding and occasionally interposing, “Is that so?” Presently, however, his eyes blurred with quite incomprehensible tears that flowed down his cheeks along the thick wrinkles. “Yes, I understand,” he said in a heavy voice. “Go on. Say it all.” He clenched his fists covered with reddish hairs and wiped his eyes. A thick, sweet voice, like a nurse’s humoring a baby in a cradle, issued from the lips of this ugly old man. “I understand. I understand. How you must have suffered . . . You must have suffered terribly.”

Nagayama’s hand reached gently from his side of the table to touch Kazu’s heaving shoulders. Her face was hidden by the handkerchief before her eyes, but she sensed his presence, and with her shoulder repulsed his hand.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Nagayama’s voice sounded strained now because he had stooped over and thrust his head under the low table. His hand stretched out to the parcel wrapped in lavender crepe by Kazu’s knee. Nagayama placed the parcel on his lap and undid the knots. He removed the subscription book, and slowly turned the thick pages bound in Japanese style. He wiped his eyes again and again with the back of his hand even as he turned the pages.

A little while later Kazu noticed Nagayama searching for the bell to summon the maid. Kazu, ashamed to be seen by the maid, turned her back to the door, and took the handkerchief from her face.

The maid appeared. “Bring me a writing set,” Nagayama commanded. The maid came back with the set and began to rub the ink stick on the stone. Kazu felt compelled to hide her tears for appearances’ sake. She opened her compact and tidied her face. The maid, frightened by the strange silence and tears of the two guests, disappeared as soon as she had finished preparing the ink.

Nagayama wrote in a skillful hand, “Three Hundred Thousand Yen. Genki Nagayama.” He took a somewhat rumpled check from his breast pocket and pushed it together with the subscription book in Kazu’s direction. “It’s only a token,” he said, “but tomorrow morning—it’s the least I can do to atone for my sins—I’ll squeeze all the money I can out of Yamanashi of the Imperial Bank. It wasn’t because I disliked you, of course, that I did what I did . . . I’ll telephone you tomorrow morning when I hear what Yamanashi has to say. I don’t suppose you want me to call your house.”

“Please telephone me at the Setsugoan.”

“I’d like you to be ready to leave immediately if I call.”

“Yes.” Having said that, Kazu decided she would have to spend the night at the Setsugoan.

Late in the afternoon of the following day Kazu met the person she was to meet and accomplished all that she had to do. She returned then to her house in Koganei. She expected a rebuke from Noguchi, but her heart now was calm. Plans for the reopening of the Setsugoan were at length taking shape: the miracle had been accomplished.

The pampas grass on the Koganei Embankment shone white in the twilight. Overhead a flock of birds crossed the still bright sky. She recalled that this morning she had risen extremely early, too excited to sleep. When she strolled for the first time in months through the neglected garden of the Setsugoan, she heard the noise of wings as a swarm of little birds, resting on the slopes so thickly overgrown that weeds and grass were no longer distinguishable, flew up, startled at her approach. It was as if a single blow had shattered the glassy transparency of the morning air into a thousand fragments.

Kazu ordered the driver to stop the car beside the bridge, some distance this side of her house. She hesitated to have the car park alongside the gate. The driver opened the door, and she started to put out one foot, its white tabi sharply contrasting with the twilit road. Just at that moment, a man emerged from Noguchi’s gate. She saw that he was coming her way. The figure approached unsteadily, with a brief case in one hand. His back was to the sunset and she could not see his face. He looked terribly old, and although his build was powerful, he stooped so badly that he seemed strengthless. The peaceful glow in the western sky seemed somehow to suggest the dying moments of idealism. The sun, sinking at the end of the fields, was lighting hundreds and thousands of candles, like some huge revolving lantern of empty ideals. The man walking with his back to the light was a silhouette pasted on the silk of the lantern, a shadow picture cut from a single sheet of thin black paper, which cast a dancing shadow on the silk. In that case, the man could only be Yamazaki.

Kazu reinstalled herself in the car. Lowering the window glass, she put out her head. The evening wind struck coldly against her face. She called Yamazaki by name when he was close enough so that she would not have to raise her voice. Startled even by this subdued voice, he looked up. “Oh, it’s you, Mrs. Noguchi.”

“Come in the car. I want to talk with you.”

Yamazaki, clumsy as a bear, climbed into the car and sat beside Kazu.

“You’ll be going directly back to Tokyo, won’t you, Mr. Yamazaki?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you use the car? I’m getting out here, and the car has to go back to town in any case.”

“Much obliged. I’ll do that then.”

They sat in silence for a while inside the dark car. Then Kazu, looking straight ahead, asked, “What did you discuss with my husband?”

“Mr. Noguchi put his hands on the tatami, bowed to me, and said he was sorry. I’ve never seen him like that before. I must say, I was in tears.”

Kazu’s heart beat fast with foreboding. “What made him apologize to you?”