Authors: Yukio Mishima
After the Banquet (25 page)
Kazu’s eyes were still shut.
At this instant Noguchi felt utter bafflement at the prospect of being trapped within a domestic life of eternally renewed instability. He was sure that even if he put his hand on Kazu’s shoulder and shook her, she would not budge, that she had solidified on the spot and would go on sitting there. And perhaps the months and years until he died would pass in stagnation, and the world would coagulate, not as he had expected, but in this weird form.
Kazu slowly opened her eyes.
While her eyes were shut her mind had resolutely crossed the mountain, and she had reached the only answer possible for her. She had immersed herself in the darkness of her closed lids and—perhaps now for the first time completely under her husbands’s influence—she answered as never before with perfect logic. “I’m sorry, there’s no other way. I intend to reopen the Setsugoan. I intend to pay back the money I borrowed if I have to work the flesh from my bones.”
Noguchi was suddenly filled with terrible hatred for Kazu. He had spent the whole of the previous night in a rage, but today, since seeing Yamazaki and then Kazu, his rage had entirely subsided, and he had been able to act with an indifferent, cold resignation. He had not foreseen the hatred that suddenly welled up within him when he heard Kazu choose with dignity one of the two alternatives he had forced on her.
Which answer had Noguchi expected? Would he have hated her less if she had chosen the other alternative?
In any case, when he struck her in displeasure over her irresponsible actions during the campaign, he had not been so upset as now, when Kazu had evidently stolen his own weapon of logic and become his enemy fair and square.
Unlike previous occasions, Kazu had not shed a single tear. Her fair-skinned face actually seemed cheerful, and her ample figure, sitting perfectly erect, had the exquisite poise of a finely carved doll.
Kazu looked into Noguchi’s eyes; one glance and she perceived the hatred blazing in the old man’s thin, dignified frame. This was by no means the expression of the educator, nor was it the admonitory look in the eyes of the hard-to-please stoical father . . . Kazu, seeing it, trembled with joy.
Not a sound could be heard from the world outside the tightly shut shoji. The lights in the room seemed suddenly to brighten: Noguchi’s simple bookshelves and desk, the scissors on his desk, the paint on the few articles of furniture, shone and seemed to stand out in more detailed relief than usual. The new tatami gave off a grassy fragrance.
They stared at each other for a long while. This was the first time Kazu had been able to look squarely into her husband’s eyes in this way. Noguchi’s shoulders twitched with anger; his whole body loathed Kazu. She feared that he might collapse on the spot.
Then she became genuinely afraid. She considered one way and another to look after him. But she was too far removed for her hand to reach him; the strength which only Kazu now possessed to soothe Noguchi’s chagrin was no longer for him. The same was true of Noguchi. Although his hatred was bit by bit subsiding, he knew that only makeshift expedients were left. From the moment that Kazu made her answer, his fist would no longer reach her body. Ludicrous as it may seem, a kind of courtesy now restrained his hand. This courtesy made Kazu feel as if a damp shroud were being wrapped around her body.
After a long silence Noguchi said finally, “That’s your decision, is it? In that case, I intend to start divorce proceedings. You have no objection, I take it.”
19
Before the Banquet
By mutual consent Noguchi struck Kazu’s name from the family register. Kazu gathered together her belongings and returned to the Setsugoan. When rumors of these events got around, the former employees of the Setsugoan, who had scattered in all directions when the place closed, reappeared one after another to request that they be taken back. Kazu’s eyes filled with tears of joy.
The house itself was run down, but the garden was a wilderness. The former gardener came with several young assistants, and announced that by way of celebrating the reopening, he was offering his services gratis. He undertook to restore the garden as quickly as possible to its former condition.
Whenever she had a moment’s leisure, Kazu delighted in going down into the garden to watch the gardeners at their daylong labors of mowing the lawn and pruning the shrubbery. At night owls hooted, and by day she saw the trim silhouettes of the kites which built their nest at the top of the tallest pine. Sometimes, as the weeds were being cut down, a small pheasant would scurry off toward the far end of the garden. The elder tree, which had been allowed to spread unhindered, was dotted with purple fruits, but still kept a few faded summer blossoms whose fragrance hovered faintly like some ghostly presence. The hedge of
dodan
bushes, the leaves now most brilliantly tinted, cast lovely shadows by the old gate at the entrance.
dodan
bushes, the leaves now most brilliantly tinted, cast lovely shadows by the old gate at the entrance.
Kazu, watching the garden take on day by day more of its former beauty, could not feel that the image gradually emerging like a thermotype was the same garden she had known. It certainly looked the same, but it was not the garden that Kazu had once treasured in her mind like a precisely drawn map that she had memorized and cupped in the palms of her hands. The transparent garden she had known to the last corner was lost. Each tree, each stone, in its proper place, had corresponded perfectly with Kazu’s carefully arranged catalogue of the known human emotions, but this correspondence was now lost.
The grass was mowed and rolled. The branches which had intricately multiplied were lopped down and the sky brightened. The gradually emerging face of the garden was as beautiful as a woman gently waking from sleep and shadowy dreams, and its features were remarkably similar to those she had known, but for Kazu not one dot, one stroke, belonged to the known world.
One day it rained and the gardener took the day off. The weather cleared toward evening, and the island in the pond, its thick growth of bamboo grass, and the water of the pond sparkled in the sunlight. The uncertain scattered light flickered across the pond, and the garden seemed to Kazu to express an uncanny joy she had never known. Again, on another morning the garden was enveloped in mist, and the pines thrusting their branches through the mist seemed to be surrendering themselves to some kind of unpleasant memories.
Around this time Yamazaki sent an answer to the long letter Kazu had written him. She went into the garden that morning, thinking she would read the letter in the lingering, Indian summer warmth.
The southeast pond glittered in the sun, and the sedate dark green of a huge ilex tree at the center, surrounded by old imposing pines, chestnuts, nettle trees, and oaks, marked the exact apex of the wood in the background. The stone lantern, the focal point of the broad expanse of lawn, alone benefiting from the long closure of the Setsugoan, had gained an antique repose; when the area around it was carefully weeded, it stood out more prominently and vividly than ever. The sky was clear today, and fine cirrus clouds drifted between the treetops.
The garden, once folded up so small, had swelled like a paper flower in water and had become a vast park filled with riddles and mysteries. In it plants and birds pursued their quiet occupations unmolested. The garden was full of things Kazu knew nothing of; each day she brought back one from the garden and, little by little making it her own, she would grind it in a small mortar . . . She tried rubbing it in her palms, her fingers, as she might rub a medicine, but the garden’s hoard of fresh, unknown ingredients was limitless, and would probably enrich Kazu’s fingers inexhaustibly.
Kazu, stepping through the stripes of sunlight filtering through the trees, walked to a bench by the path, sat, and began to read Yamazaki’s letter.
Thank you for your letter and invitation to the banquet celebrating the reopening of the Setsugoan. It may not seem entirely appropriate for me to offer congratulations, but forgetting my position for the moment, I should like to express my heartfelt best wishes.
Your letter did not touch in the least on the recent unfortunate events, but was concerned exclusively with an account of how the garden is being readied for the reopening. I believe that I can imagine what prompted you to write in that way.
When I think how in the past couple of years your confidence in your knowledge of people has been shattered, how you have obtained in place of peace of mind only uncertainty, and in place of happiness a new, painful knowledge, how when you tried to love you learned recognition, how you ended at the place where you thought you would begin, and began at the place you had ended . . . how you have been able to secure your present, peaceful uncertainty by sacrificing everything, my nature is such that I feel less sympathy than respect.
When I look back now, I think perhaps you might have been able to enjoy happiness had it not been for the election. Mr. Noguchi might have been happy too. But it now seems to me that the election cannot be said to have been a misfortune in a real sense, for it smashed every kind of counterfeit happiness and resulted in you and Mr. Noguchi showing each other your naked selves. I have been wallowing in the bog of politics for a long time, and I have in fact come to be quite fond of it. In it corruption cleanses people, hyprocrisy reveals human character more than half-hearted honesty, and vice may, at least for a moment, revive a helpless trust . . . Just as when you throw laundry into a centrifugal dryer, it rotates so fast that the shirt or underwear you’ve just thrown in vanishes before your eyes, what we normally call human nature instantly disappears in the whirlpool of politics. I like its fierce operation. It doesn’t necessarily purify, but it makes you forget what should be forgotten, and overlook what should be overlooked. It works a kind of inorganic intoxication. That is why, no matter how badly I fail, no matter what disastrous experiences I encounter, I shall never leave politics as long as I live.
You were probably right in returning to warm blood and a human vitality, and Mr. Noguchi right too in returning to lofty ideals and beautiful principles. It may seem cruel of me to say it, but in the eyes of an outsider, everything has found its place, the birds have all returned to their nests.
This winter seems unusually warm, but I hope that you will please not neglect your health. After all the terrible mental and physical exhaustion you have experienced, you will be kept very busy now by your work at the Setsugoan. The pressure of work will undoubtedly serve to distract you, but I hope that you will be as careful as possible about your health.
I shall be delighted to be present on the night of the reopening.
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