After the Banquet (7 page)

Kazu was accustomed to seeing famous politicians calmly accept presents of cash. She had in the past been touched for gifts of one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, and even a million yen by Genki Nagayama, who needed the money for his personal expenses. But with Noguchi it was different. The money became the occasion for their first quarrel She discovered that Noguchi looked on the forthcoming journey in truly uncomplicated terms. “All I need pay is your railway ticket and hotel room. I was invited from the start and my expenses are taken care of. When I told the others I was taking the proprietress of the Setsugoan with me, everybody was delighted. The newspaper people offered to invite you too, but I insisted on paying for your share. Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

“But the way I see it, this is our first trip together and I’d like to go to some quiet place where we can be alone.”

“Would you? I thought I’d like to introduce you to my friends.”

Their long argument abruptly subsided with these last words. Kazu was moved. The pure and unadulterated sentiments of such a man stirred an almost ostentatious joy within her. “Very well,” she said, “we’ll do as you say. But how would it be if after the trip I invited everybody to the Setsugoan by way of thanks for having been allowed to go along?”

“That’s a good idea,” Noguchi agreed without visible enthusiasm.

The party assembled at Tokyo Station on the morning of the twelfth before boarding the express train which was to depart at nine. Kazu was surprised to notice how young Noguchi looked. This was perhaps natural, considering that three of the five men present were over seventy.

Kazu had taken great pains with her clothes for the journey, which would mark, as it were, the first public announcement of her relations with Noguchi. She had the idea of dyeing some element of the name Yuken Noguchi into the design of her kimono. The only character of his name which lent itself to pictorial representation was
No
, or “meadow.”

Kazu had begun her preparations well before the departure. After much thought she had decided that even if nobody else caught onto the meaning of a pattern connected with Noguchi’s name, it would be sufficient if she alone understood. She ordered a kimono dyed with a pattern of white horse-tails and dandelions on a black slubbed crepe, the plants shaded with gold paint, to suggest a spring “meadow.” She wore a sash of light green striped silk, easy to fold and suitable therefore for a journey, and a sash clasp with a cloud ring pattern. Her plain gray cloak, patterned in narrowing vertical stripes, had a lining of grape purple. Her greatest ingenuity was devoted to the lining.

The white-haired octogenarian, a distinguished figure who deserved his reputation as the trail blazer among Japanese journalists, was treated with the utmost deference by the others. He was a Doctor of Laws, and moreover had published numerous translations of English literature. A cynic in the English manner, this old bachelor favored every form of social reform except for the anti-prostitution laws. He was one of the rare people who called Noguchi by a diminutive. The retired industrialist was an eccentric haiku poet by avocation, and the financial critic could be counted on for an unending flow of malicious gossip.

The old gentlemen were all congenial, neither ignoring Kazu nor making any obvious attempts to ingratiate themselves. The journey to Nara passed agreeably. The financial expert successively characterized different figures of the world of politics and finance as fools, blockheads, scoundrels, opportunists, mental incompetents, lunatics, wolves in sheep’s clothing, smart alecks, misers without equals in history, cases of hardened arteries, simpletons, and epileptics. The conversation then turned to haiku.

“I can only look at haiku as a Westerner might,” said the aged journalist. After a moment’s pause for effect he continued, drawing on his encyclopedic memory, “There’s a story in the
Chats on Haiku
by Torahiko Terada about a young German physicist who came to Japan on a holiday and fell in love with everything Japanese. One day he proudly announced to his Japanese friends ‘I’ve composed a haiku,’ and showed it to them. This is what he wrote:

“To be sure, his haiku had the regulation five, seven, and five syllables, but it wasn’t precisely poetic. My haikus are not a whole lot different from his. Here’s one I thought up while listening just now to our friend here.

Everybody laughed, though if the same joke had come from the mouth of a young man nobody would have cracked a smile. When the conversation got onto the subject of haiku, Kazu became uneasy about the design on the lining of her cloak. She kept the cloak on, even though the railway carriage was warmly heated, for fear the lining might be seen. Before long the conversation drifted from the subject of haiku.

The men in their conversation laid an entirely excessive emphasis on accuracy and minuteness of memory. Their conversation somehow reminded Kazu, listening without saying a word, of young men trying to outdo one another in boasting of their knowledge of women. These old men were at great pains to impart credibility to their remarks by insisting on a quite unnecessary precision, and by referring to meaningless details. For example, where a younger man would have been satisfied with a, “Let me see, it happened in 1936 or 37,” these old gentlemen would relentlessly pursue the date. “Let me see, it happened in 1937, the seventh of June. Yes, I’m sure it was the seventh. A Saturday, I believe. I can remember getting off early from work.”

The livelier the conversation became the more desperately they were obliged to struggle with natural decline, and these efforts on the surface at least resembled vigor. But in this respect too Noguchi was an exception. Kazu did not understand what could possibly interest him so in these men that he could enjoy their company; he alone maintained his youth by his dignity. As usual, he contributed an absolute minimum to the conversation, and if he became bored with a subject he would carefully count the segments in a tangerine he had peeled, and silently share the fruit with Kazu, giving her precisely half the segments. Even though Noguchi apportioned her the same number of segments, their size varied, and Kazu’s share was actually less than half the tangerine. Kazu, suppressing her amusement, stared at the wrinkled bits of thin peel, the color of the harvest moon, still sticking to the fleshy fruit.

As soon as the train arrived in Osaka at half-past six that evening, the party boarded a car sent to meet them, and drove directly to the Nara Hotel. They had no time to rest before they all went to the dining room. Nara was unusually warm for this time of the year. Kazu had long since been schooled on the bitterness of the cold at the Omizutori ceremony, and was therefore no less delighted than the old men at the warmth of this evening.

The rites at the Nigatsu Hall begin each year on the first of March, but they do not reach their climax until the night of the twelfth with the burning of the crate-like torches, followed by the dipping of the sacred water and the secret Tartar rituals performed early on the morning of the thirteenth. The ceremonies on the night of the twelfth attract the largest crowds.

The party hurried after dinner to the Nigatsu Hall, and was surprised to see how many people had already gathered below the hall. The crowd seemed less like participants in a religious ceremony than spectators at an extraordinary event.

The moment for the lighting of the huge pine-torches was at hand, and the party, guided by a priest, made its way in the darkness through the milling crowd under the platform of the Nigatsu Hall. Noguchi, taking Kazu’s hand, marched ahead, oblivious of the precarious footing underneath. He bore no resemblance to the Noguchi who had hesitated to cross the road at Ueno; he feared cars but apparently not human beings. His bearing as he pushed through the rustic-looking people revealed his ingrained authority.

The distinguished guests were guided directly up to the bamboo grill erected to prevent the crowd from surging into the temple. Directly before them, just over the railing, a flight of stone steps led up to the platform where the ceremony would take place. The aged journalist, exhausted by the walk, clung to the railing to catch his breath. The newspaper executive, constantly worried about his old friend, had provided a small folding chair for him.

The climb had ruined Kazu’s zori. The party stood now on sloping ground sparsely covered with dead grass, a sea of thawed mud, and Kazu, in order to protect her footing a little, clung to the railing. She turned her head and threw a smile at Noguchi, but his face was enveloped in the darkness. High above his head loomed the majestic balustrade of the platform and the swelling curves of the projecting eaves. The under parts of the eaves were mysteriously luminous. Clusters of stars were shining between the towering cedars around the hall.

Now the “Sevenfold Messages” were beginning. The chief votary, holding aloft a blazing brand, ran up and down the stone steps again and again, a bold figure in his girded-up robes. The stentorian voice proclaiming each of the “messages”—the offering of incense, the business of the ritual, the attendance at the worship, and the rest—combined with the dripping of the flames from the torches to complete the aura of solemnity. To these spectators who knew nothing of the ancient traditions of esoteric Buddhism or Dual Shinto, the somehow significant presence of the chief votary, his distracted bearing, his intent movements, all seemed like portents of a great calamity about to begin. Then, when the votary was gone and the torchlight no longer illuminated the stone steps, the utter desolation suggested that something would surely occur at any moment on the emptiness of the steps. Kazu was not especially devout and was seldom moved by anything she could not see with her own eyes, but as she stood there, clutching the bamboo railing, and looked up the stairs rising chilly and faintly white in the darkness, her eyes following them to the temple and platform above, she felt as if soon her heart would also mount the stone steps and share in some momentous happening in an invisible world.

Kazu, for all her good cheer and optimism, from time to time worried about what would happen to her after she died. She invariably linked such thoughts directly to her sins. Now, as she felt the warmth of Noguchi’s overcoat pressing on her back and side, all the past love affairs which she had never before remembered in Noguchi’s presence returned to life. Men had killed themselves for Kazu when she was young. Some had lost their wealth and position, and others had sunk to the lowest depths of society, all because of her. Strangely enough, Kazu had never known love for her to ennoble a man or help him to success. Through no evil design on Kazu’s part, men generally went down in the world once they met her.

Kazu’s eyes were still on the stone staircase rising into the darkness as her thoughts turned to death. The past piece by piece crumbled away under her feet, and she was left with nothing to support her. If she went on in this way, there would probably not be a single person to mourn her when she died. Reflections on death convinced her that she must find someone she could depend on, have a family, lead a normal life. But the only way to do this was to go through with the formalities of love. She could not help tremble at the thought of still further sins. Only very recently—last autumn, it was—she had in the course of her promenade each morning at the Setsugoan looked at the world and at people with the same clarity as she surveyed the garden. She was absolutely convinced that nothing could disturb her anymore. But now she wondered if that transparency itself were not a portent of hell . . . The priest with them had explained that the Omizutori ceremony was from beginning to end a disciplinary rite of penitence and atonement. Kazu felt a personal awareness of what this meant.

The murmur arose around her that the torches were about to move out. The twelve immense torches had already been prepared and arranged beside the temple bathhouse. Each consisted of a huge bamboo, roots and all, some as big as a foot or more in circumference and twenty-five feet long. To the end of the bamboo trunk was fixed the torch itself, a circular crate over four feet in diameter.

Several priests in gold brocade copes with high triangular collars stood on the other side of the bamboo grill blocking Kazu’s view. She tried to catch a glimpse between their shoulders of the arrival of the torches, but being by no means tall was unsuccessful. She whispered to Noguchi, “Lift me on your back, won’t you?” Noguchi, smiling ambiguously, shook his head buried in his muffler. At that moment a roar went up and Noguchi’s face was suddenly caught in the glare of flames.

Kazu hurriedly turned to see what had happened. The noise was caused by the ignition of the flames which now brilliantly illuminated the white walls of the temple, even to the cracks and scribblings, giving them a yellowish glow. A great sheet of flames suddenly blazed up before them, and the high-collared priests, shielding their faces from the fire with raised fans, turned into silhouettes. Exploding clusters of fire and the green cypress leaves atop the torches caught her eyes. The powerful arms of the youths bearing the enormous bamboo stakes glowed in the firelight. Kazu held her breath as she watched the mass of flames mount the stone steps.

The youths climbed the stairs, carrying on one shoulder the burning brands, which weighed close to 150 pounds. Cascades of sparks showered down, leaving crimson lotuses blossoming here and there on the steps. Sometimes the flames ignited a pillar of the roofed stairway and set it smoldering, only for a white-clad attendant following the youths up the steps to swab the flames with a broom soaked in water and extinguish the fire.

Kazu’s eyes grew moist with excitement at the wild solitary beauty of the fire caught in the intent stares of the crowd swarming under the hall. With an inarticulate throaty moan she gripped Noguchi’s hand in her sweaty hand. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” the words finally came out. “It was worth coming to Nara just for that.”