After the Banquet (4 page)

“Yes, I’ll see to that. Exactly as Mrs. Tamaki wishes.”

The two returned without another word along the corridor. Not until they were halfway back did Noguchi break the silence. “Tonight, at any rate, once we get him into the hospital, I think I’ll go back home for a while. I’ll visit him tomorrow about noon. I have nothing else to do.”

The guests in the main banqueting hall had apparently all gone home. The sounds of merrymaking had faded away. The night, empty and cavernous now that the banqueting was over, had taken possession of the Setsugoan. Kazu led Noguchi through the banqueting room, the shortest way. The maids clearing up bowed to them. Kazu and Noguchi passed before the two large six-fold gold screens which had served as the background for the evening’s entertainment. After the banquet the gold of the screens had settled. They still held a faint glow of warmth, but produced a curiously gloomy atmosphere.

“I didn’t appear at this party. Did people say anything when it was breaking up?” Kazu asked one of the maids. The middle-aged, intelligent maid looked up dubiously at Kazu. It was Kazu’s practice never to ask questions about business before guests, and Noguchi was obviously a guest.

“No,” the maid answered, “everybody was in fine spirits when the party broke up.”

Noguchi and Kazu quietly slid open the door of the room where Tamaki lay. Mrs. Tamaki, attending the sick man, looked up sharply at them. Her eyebrows were penciled in an extremely thin line, and the pin holding her black hat in place, slipped somewhat out of place, flickered in the light from the hallway.

Ambassador Tamaki was soon afterward moved to the university hospital. When Kazu went to visit him about noon the following day, she was informed that he was still in a coma. She sent to Tamaki’s room the basket of fruit she had brought, then withdrew to a chair some distance down the corridor, where she waited for Noguchi. Kazu knew from her impatience—she thought Noguchi would never arrive—that she must be fond of him.

Kazu, now that she thought of it, realized that for all her headstrong temperament, she had never loved a man younger than herself. A young man has such a surplus of spiritual and physical gifts that he is likely to be cocksure of himself, particularly when dealing with an older woman, and there is no telling how swelled up with self-importance he may become. Besides, Kazu felt a physical repugnance for youth. A woman is more keenly aware than a man of the shocking disharmony between a young man’s spiritual and physical qualities, and Kazu had never met a young man who wore his youth well. She was moreover repelled by the sleekness of a young man’s skin.

Kazu mulled endlessly over such matters as she waited in the gloomy, dimly lit hospital corridor. Tamaki’s room was easily distinguishable at the end of the long corridor by the baskets of flowers protruding from the door. Kazu was suddenly aware of many dogs barking, and looked out the window. She could see under the cold overcast sky a large area enclosed in wire netting, a pen for the stray dogs used in laboratory experiments. An immense number of roughly built kennels, absolutely devoid of any semblance of order, was jammed together. Some were built like chicken coops; others were the usual watchdog kennels. No two kennels stood at the same angle: some leaned precariously, others had tumbled over on one side, no doubt tugged over by the dogs chained to them. The dogs were no less disparate: some were mangy and emaciated looking, but others were healthy and well-fed. All were simultaneously howling pitifully, as if appealing for sympathy.

The hospital employees were apparently hardened to the dogs’ howling, and no one even paused as he went by the wire netting. Beyond the enclosure an old three-storied building—a laboratory—bared a row of small, gloomy windows. The panes reflecting the cloudy sky seemed like sluggish eyes which had lost all sense of curiosity.

Kazu’s heart swelled with a warm rush of sympathy as she listened to the pathetic howling of the dogs. The intensity of her agitation came as quite a surprise even to herself. “Those poor dogs! Those poor dogs!” She was in tears. She tried desperately to think if there were not some way of saving them. This helped to relieve the tedium of waiting.

Noguchi arrived to find Kazu weeping. One look at her face and he demanded, “Is he dead?” Kazu quickly reassured him, but in her embarrassment she had no chance to explain her tears.

Noguchi blurted out the childish, nonsensical question. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“No,” Kazu answered distinctly. A smile at last rose to her well-rounded cheeks.

“That’s fine,” Noguchi said. “It won’t take me long to get through with the visit. Please wait here for me. I have nothing to do, and I imagine that you’re free during the day. People of leisure—that’s what we both are. Let’s go downtown and have lunch together.”

The clouds broke up as they were walking down the gently sloping stone pavement behind the university hospital, and a pale, watery sunlight fell over the landscape.

Kazu had kept a car waiting, but she sent it back when Noguchi suggested that they walk.

Noguchi’s voice when he proposed the walk, making a point of deliberately sending back the car, had a ring of moral conviction. It gave Kazu the impression that her extravagance was being indirectly criticized. Kazu was later to have numerous occasions to correct this initial impression, but Noguchi’s appearance and manner of speech were always so exceedingly dignified that his least whim or caprice seemed a kind of moral judgment.

They started to cross the street on their way toward Ikenohata Park. The road swarmed with cars weaving in and out. Kazu was confident she could easily get to the other side, but Noguchi, surprisingly cautious, showed no sign of venturing across. When Kazu started to make a break for it, he restrained her with a “Not yet!” and she was obliged to let a good opportunity slip. The opening in the traffic through which they surely could have crossed was immediately swallowed up by the flow of oncoming vehicles, their windshields reflecting in the winter sun. Kazu finally lost patience. “Now—now’s our chance,” she cried. Instantly she caught Noguchi’s hand firmly in hers and began to run.

Kazu still clung to Noguchi’s hand even after they had reached the other side. The hand was exceedingly desiccated and thin, rather like a botanical specimen, but when Kazu seemed reluctant to let go, Noguchi gradually, almost furtively, withdrew it Kazu had been quite unconscious of still holding his hand, but Noguchi’s gingerly manner of disengaging it made her aware of her indiscretion. His hand escaped like a peevish child twisting its body from the arms of an adult.

Kazu inadvertently glanced at Noguchi’s face. The sharp eyes under the severe eyebrows were quite unperturbed, as if nothing had happened.

They went up to the pond in the park and started clockwise on the path around it. The faint but bitterly cold wind blowing over the pond shook wrinkles over the surface. The blue and cloud of the winter sky mingled in the trembling water, the sparkling blue rifts stretching to the water’s edge at the opposite shore. Five or six boats were out on the pond.

The embankment was carpeted with slender willow leaves, some yellow but others mottled with light green; the fallen leaves looked much fresher than the dusty shrubbery around them, flecked with scraps of paper.

A group of middle-school students out for running practice in white gym suits approached from the opposite direction. They seemed to have run once or twice around the pond already, and their youthful, delicate brows contracted with painful breathing recalled the Asura statue in the Kofukuji Temple. The boys ran past the two strollers, not looking to either side, leaving behind the sound of their sneakers lightly striking the ground. One boy had a pink towel tied around his neck, and it could still be seen in the distance under the row of barren trees long after he had gone by.

Noguchi seemed unable to resist calling Kazu’s attention to the close to half a century separating him from these youngsters. “They’re wonderful—kids are certainly wonderful. A friend of mine’s a boy scout leader. I used to think that was a silly way to spend his time, but I see now why he’d want to throw himself into that kind of work.”

“Yes,” Kazu responded, “it’s marvelous how unsophisticated children are.” But such innocence seemed so remote and unattainable to Kazu that it arose no envy. She felt moreover that Noguchi’s observation had been excessively plain and uninspired.

They watched the boys run around the pond into the distance, casting their reflections in the water. Beyond the pond stretched the melancholy clusters of buildings at Ueno Hirokoji. Two tomato-colored ad balloons rose in a sky hazy with soot.

Kazu suddenly noticed how worn the cuffs of Noguchi’s overcoat were. Each discovery she made about him seemed to come as a criticism of herself. She felt that this at any rate was one discovery she could do nothing about, that it rejected any meddling on her part from the outset.

Noguchi, surprisingly sensitive to her glance, asked, “Is this what you’re looking at? I had this overcoat made in London in 1928. As long as your heart is young, the older your clothes the better. Don’t you agree?”

Noguchi and Kazu cut across Benten Island, surrounded now by withered lotus leaves, and passed through the entrance of the Gojo Tenjin Shrine to start the climb up Ueno Hill. The pale blue of the winter sky looked like a glass painting behind the delicate shadow pictures of the barren trees. They were still looking up at the sky when they reached the old-fashioned entrance of the Seiyoken Restaurant. The grill room had few guests at lunch time.

Noguchi ordered the table d’hôte meal, and Kazu did the same. Directly before their windowside table they could see an old temple belltower. Kazu, delighted that the room was so comfortably heated, said with undisguised relief, “That was certainly a cold walk!”

Kazu’s mind however had colored that chilly stroll with tints she had never known in her normal busy routine of entertaining customers. The walk had given her a slight surprise. Kazu seldom bothered to analyze her actions at any given moment, preferring to collect and try to understand her thoughts later on. She might, for example, suddenly burst into tears while talking with someone. The tears would flow even though she did not at the time understand what prompted them, her own emotions unperceived by herself.

Even after Kazu commented on how cold it had been, Noguchi did not apologize for having obliged her to walk. Kazu therefore felt impelled to explain in minute detail how much she had enjoyed the walk despite the cold. Finally, after Kazu had gone on at great length, Noguchi broke in, profiting by the appearance of the first course. “I’m glad,” he laconically remarked. Noguchi’s face remained impassive even as he said this, but somehow he seemed happy.

This was Kazu’s first encounter with such a man. Kazu always talked more than her customers, some of whom were extremely close-mouthed, but Noguchi seemed to be manipulating Kazu with his silences. She could not understand how this old man, so simple in all his tastes, could possess such strength.

There was a pause in the conversation and Kazu looked around her at the stuffed bird-of-paradise in a glass case, the sober-colored material of the curtains, the plaque inscribed in Chinese characters “A Hall Filled With Splendid Guests,” an engraving of the old warship
Ise
built at the Kawasaki Shipyard. The picture, executed in the copperplate techniques of the early nineteenth century, showed the battleship
Ise
plowing through the fine lines of the waves, its red hull visible like a petticoat under the waterline. This turn-of-the-century Western-style restaurant, the former cabinet minister eating lunch in his old-fashioned English clothes—in fact, everything around her went so well together that Kazu, who prized the vitality of whatever was currently at the height of its popularity, was somehow irritated.

Noguchi began to speak. “Diplomacy boils down to knowing how to size up people. That’s one art I think I’ve acquired in the course of my long life. My deceased wife was a splendid woman, and I knew it the first time I laid eyes on her. One look was enough for me to decide. But I’m no fortuneteller. I couldn’t predict how long she’d live. My wife took sick and died just after the war ended. We hadn’t any children, so I’m completely alone now . . . Oh—when there’s only a little soup left in your plate you should always tilt it away from you and then put your spoon in. That’s right, like this.”

Kazu was quite taken aback, but she meekly followed Noguchi’s instructions. No man had ever before corrected her manner of eating Western food.

“It won’t be till next February,” Noguchi continued, paying no attention to the expression on Kazu’s face, “but I’ve been invited by friends to see the Omizutori Ceremony in Nara, and I think I’ll go. In all these years I’ve never once seen the Omizutori. How about you?”

“I’ve never gone either. I’ve been invited any number of times, but somehow . . .”

“What do you say—I’m sure you’re busy, but how about coming with me?”

“Yes,” Kazu answered instantly.

The appointment was still three or four months in the future, but hardly was the word “Yes” out of Kazu’s mouth than her spirits soared, and wild fantasies took wing. Her face, glowing from the heat of the room she had entered from the cold, now colored with a rush of blood she could not conceal.

“You’ve got something like a fire inside you,” Noguchi said, manipulating his delicately engraved fish knife. He seemed most satisfied when with full confidence he could foist his observations on others.

“A fire?” Kazu was enchanted to be described in such terms. “A fire?” she repeated. “What does that mean, I wonder? People are always teasing me by saying I’m like a ball of fire, though I don’t think so myself.”

“I didn’t say it to tease you.” Noguchi’s words had an acidulous ring. Kazu fell silent.