After the Banquet (24 page)

“Mr. Noguchi said, ‘After all the trouble I’ve caused you since the election clearing up my personal affairs, Kazu has betrayed me. I’m down on my knees, and I’m asking your pardon. Please call off the negotiations.’”

“What negotiations?”

“Please don’t pretend you don’t know, Mrs. Noguchi. Breaking up the Setsugoan into lots, of course.”

“What did he mean by saying I’d betrayed him?”

“He knows about the subscription book.”

“Does he?” Kazu stared through the front window of the car into the darkness. The dim light at the gate of the Noguchi house fell on the road. A bare line of pale yellow was still visible in the darkening sky. The cherry trees on the embankment were masses of black shadows.

“Really, Mr. Yamazaki, I’ve caused you nothing but trouble,” Kazu said after a pause.

“That’s a strange thing to say. I haven’t thought so myself particularly. I trust that in the future I may still look forward to the pleasure of your acquaintance.”

“I’m happy to hear you say so, but there’s no denying it, the trouble all started from my insistence on having my own way.”

“I’ve known that all along.” Yamazaki was coolly objective.

It occurred then to Kazu that, if only by way of acknowledgment of a year’s friendship with Yamazaki, she should have informed him (if no one else) beforehand of the subscription book. But this secret belonged to a category quite apart from the world in which Yamazaki lived. On second thought, she had probably done right in not informing him.

“I’ll be going now,” Kazu said. She braced herself to rise from her seat, and in so doing her hand brushed against Yamazaki’s on the seat beside her. His cold, silent hand crouched discontentedly in the dark.

Kazu’s conscience bothered her, and at the same time she felt sorry for Yamazaki, left isolated. Aware that some bodily gesture would speak far better for her than words, she lay her hand over his and squeezed it hard. This had never happened before in their long acquaintance.

Yamazaki’s eyes when he turned toward her in surprise glittered in the reflected light of the distant street lamps. He was not one, however, to misunderstand even so abrupt a gesture. It did not come as such a surprise that the resolution of the year since he first met Kazu at Noguchi’s house should take this form. If this was not friendship, it was certainly not love. It was the self-indulgent relationship between two human beings, and since Yamazaki had hitherto preserved his objectivity by showing an unlimited tolerance, it could not be said that only Kazu was self-indulgent. In the end, like a painter destroying a carefully composed picture with the final stroke of his brush, Kazu had suddenly destroyed everything by her sudden, incongruous gesture of taking his hand. But Yamazaki, retreating to another angle, could easily forgive even such conduct, shallow in a lover and profanatory in a friend. His most vivid impression was of the strange power wrapped in Kazu’s hand, soft and warm as a feather quilt. It was an illogical, ambiguous warmth that swept all before it, concealing strong destructive powers. It filled her flesh with its density, and this flesh had its own irreplaceable weight, heat, and darkness.

Kazu at last released his hand. “I’ll say good-bye now . . . After all you went through I can certainly see why you’d feel pretty discouraged. My husband and I have been floundering around in much the same mood. Whatever we may do in the future . . .”

“Whenever you pass before a telegraph pole you’ll remember the posters that were pasted there.”

“Yes, that’s right. It’s unfortunate, but there are telegraph poles everywhere, even here in the backwoods.”

This time Yamazaki disinterestedly patted the back of Kazu’s hand. “It can’t be helped. You’ll recover by-and-by. Everybody feels the same way for a while after a party.”

Kazu remembered the empty reflections of the gold screen in the main dining room of the Setsugoan after a banquet had ended.

When the red taillights of the car carrying Yamazaki had receded into the distance, Kazu walked alone over the now completely darkened street toward her house. She wandered outside the gate for a while, unable to enter.

Finally, she made up her mind and went inside. She called to the maid in a deliberately loud voice. “Has the master finished his dinner?”

“No, ma’am. I’m preparing it now. Will you have your dinner too, Mrs. Noguchi?”

“Let me see. I’m not very hungry.” Kazu paused. She could not picture herself and her husband sitting down together to dinner this evening. “I’ll let you know later if I feel like eating.”

Noguchi was in a room at the end of the house. Kazu called to him through the shoji, “I’ve just got back now.”

There was no answer, but Kazu went in and sat down. Noguchi was reading a book. He did not so much as turn in Kazu’s direction. She noticed first his head, almost completely white since the election, then the back seam of the kimono over his frail but erect shoulders. Noguchi, as always, wore his kimono awkwardly, and the seam was twisted to the left. His back, however, was extremely far removed; she knew that even if she had thought to straighten the seam, her hands could never reach it now.

“I’ve been informed of all your activities,” Noguchi said after a while, his back still toward her. “Perhaps they were unavoidable as far as you were concerned, but I find them unpardonable. You’ve been unfaithful.”

“What do you mean by that, please?” Her retort had a defiant ring. Noguchi was surprised at such forcefulness from Kazu, but he realized the next instant that there had been a simple verbal misunderstanding. He turned toward his wife for the first time and explained. Noguchi’s voice showed no trace of agitation, and his words were calm, but she could sense somewhere a terrible fatigue which provided a curious contrast to the high-minded content of his remarks.

Noguchi believed that there was no room for divergence in human conduct, whether in politics or love. He was convinced that all human actions were based on the same principles, and that politics, love, and morality must, like the constellations, be governed by fixed laws. Thus, any one act of betrayal was exactly equal to the other acts of betrayal, and all were nothing less than betrayals of the fundamental principles as a whole. An adulteress’s political chastity and a chaste woman’s political betrayal represented the same kind of immorality. The worst crime was for an act of betrayal to spread infection to successive persons, thereby hastening a collapse of the entire structure of principles. According to this old-fashioned, Chinese-style political philosophy, Kazu’s circulation of a subscription book among Noguchi’s political enemies was tantamount to adultery: she had “slept” with these men.

Kazu listened distractedly to Noguchi’s words. In the end, she knew, she would never understand these ideas. But she was scarcely less confident than Noguchi that her beliefs were ultimately correct.

The present incident had made Noguchi despair utterly of Kazu. He gave up any illusions about the possibility of correcting each of her transgressions. His extreme slowness in making this discovery spoke for the optimistic side of this upright man. Noguchi was so blinded by his own righteousness that he failed to perceive the essence of things. Why had he made Kazu his wife? Was it not perhaps because the deeper Noguchi believed in his principles, the more he unconsciously required this woman to desecrate them?

Noguchi was angry also because Kazu, though accommodating herself on the surface to his educational zeal, had not in fact responded sincerely to a single thing he taught her. Kazu, however, had completely failed to recognize in her husband’s educational zeal anything stemming from fundamental beliefs; she could only suppose that his zeal was a mark of affection. It is generally impossible to educate and change a mature person, and when her husband’s eyes shone, bewitched by this impossibility, she was right in interpreting this as a sign of affection. She had responded straightforwardly to this affection with a gentle submissiveness, having no choice but to get along as best she could with this logical passion for the impossible.

It was inconceivable that Noguchi could have failed to perceive Kazu’s passion for things in constant motion, her fervor for activity, her innate love for rushing about, throwing herself completely into whatever she did. Kazu’s attraction for him undoubtedly resided in these qualities, precisely the ones to arouse the pedagogical ardor of a conscientious man like Noguchi.

Noguchi required that Kazu faithfully obey his principles, but she was not so presumptuous as to hope that Noguchi would obey hers. Herein lay the loneliness implicit in her vitality: Kazu was hazily aware that she alone was capable of acting in accordance with her own principles. She possessed no logical passion of any kind. Logic merely chilled her. And it was this knowledge of the loneliness of her vitality that made Kazu always afraid of the loneliness after death.

Noguchi’s next words, deliberately pronounced, were of course calculated to ignite these fears in Kazu. “Listen carefully. These are my final words. If you are willing to change your mind now, abandon your plans for reopening the Setsugoan, and sell the place, I am willing to pardon your almost unpardonable conduct, and to start again on a fresh footing . . . If you say ‘Yes’ now, you will barely make this last-minute reprieve. But if you say ‘No’ . . . I think you are fully aware of what that means, but I must ask you to remember that our relations will be at an end.”

There flashed before Kazu’s eyes an unvisited grave in some desolate cemetery, belonging to someone who had died without a family. This vision of the end of a life of solitary activity—a lonely, abandoned grave covered with weeds, leaning over, beginning to rot—sent a fathomless dark fear stabbing into Kazu’s heart. If Kazu were no longer a member of the Noguchi family, she would assuredly travel a straight road leading to that desolate grave. This intuition of the future was insolently precise.

But something was calling Kazu from the distance. An animated life, every day wildly busy, many people coming and going—something like a perpetually blazing fire called her. That world held no resignation or abandoned hopes, no complicated principles; it was insincere and all its inhabitants fickle, but in return, drink and laughter bubbled up lightheartedly. That world seen from here looked like the torchlight of dancers scorching the night sky on a hilltop beyond dark meadows.

Kazu had no choice but to plunge in that direction, as her active energy commanded. Nothing, not even Kazu herself, could oppose its commands. And yet, Kazu’s energy in the end would certainly lead her to a lonely, tumble-down, unattended grave.

Kazu shut her eyes.

It gave Noguchi an uneasy sensation to see his wife, sitting erect, her neckline straight, her eyes shut. He thought that he was all too well acquainted with this woman’s incomprehensibility, but such an understanding was a hindrance: her present incomprehensibility was of an order entirely different from anything he had known before. He did not notice that Kazu was turning into a different woman.

Noguchi was thinking, “She’s trying to discover some way to suit her own convenience again, no doubt about that. Her next step may be to persuade me with her tears. Whatever it is, I’m worn out by this woman. That’s possibly a sign that I’m getting old, but as far as I’m concerned, exhaustion is the only accurate way to describe my feelings.”

All the same, he was agitated by the childish expectancy and anxiety one feels in the moment of waiting before fireworks explode in the sky.

Noguchi had in this manner raised his final resolve into an airtight structure, and had driven Kazu inside. The course of events which led to Kazu’s being forced into choosing between two alternatives had, however, been initiated by Kazu herself, and one might more properly say that Noguchi had erected this stockade without a loophole, not precisely against his will, but out of a kind of weariness. He felt that whichever answer Kazu made would be all right with him.

Noguchi dreaded most Kazu’s next, not unlikely change of heart, and the bother any shift would entail. On the surface he showed an adolescent fretfulness, but he yearned now to settle in some permanent fashion, at the first possible moment, the few remaining years left him. He had no further inclination for repairs, rebuilding, modifications in the blueprints, or recasting of plans. His mind and flesh were incapable now of enduring any uncertainties. Quivering like a piece of fruit inside a dish of jello, he waited impatiently for the moment when the gelatine would kindly harden. It seemed to him that the coagulation of the world would have to be completed before he could look up to the blue sky with an easy mind and admire to his heart’s content the sunrise and sunset and the rustling of the treetops.

Noguchi, like many other retired politicians, had wished to save “poetry” for his declining years. He had never had the leisure to appreciate that desiccated storage food, nor did he expect that it would taste good, but to such men as Noguchi, poetry lay hidden not in poetry itself so much as in an untroubled craving for poetry; poetry in fact symbolized the unshakable stability of the world. Poetry would make its appearance—indeed, would have to appear—when there was no further danger of the world changing, when one knew that there would be no further assaults of uncertainty, hopes, or ambitions.

At such a time, he expected, the moral constraint of a lifetime and the armor of logic would melt and dissolve into poetry, like a column of white smoke rising in the autumn sky. But when it came to the poetry of security, Kazu was his senior, and she knew much better than he its ineffectuality.

Noguchi did not realize that he would never love nature. If he could have loved nature he would assuredly have loved Kazu more expertly. During his walk he had taken pleasure in the last traces of old Japan visible in the Koganei area, supposing them to be the beauty of nature, but the aged cherry trees, the towering elms, the clouds, the evening sky had been no more than the idealized self-portrait his honest clumsiness had painted.