Counterfeiter and Other Stories (13 page)

Kagebayashi lifted the receiver of the telephone in the hall and called the southside restaurant. It was the proprietress of the restaurant who answered.

"The party is all over and everybody's just leaving," she said. Kagebayashi, heedless of all the other people there, had her call Kitazaka to the phone and told him where he was.

"Celebrating already?" Pretty fast! said Kitazaka. Then he lowered his voice to a near-whisper and added, "I'm coming right over."

A half hour later there was the sound of a car pulling up, and Kitazaka's flushed face appeared at the door of the room. He looked as serious as usual. On seeing Toyama there, Kitazaka looked at him as though he thought Toyama was out of place there, but otherwise ignoring him, he said, "Pretty fast, huh? Celebrating your presidency, I mean."

Toyama now knew definitely from what Kitazaka had said that Kagebayashi had really been made president of the company.
Yon see, anything at all can happen
. From then on Toyama also, without compunction, called Kagebayashi
shacho.

At about that time, the moon appeared for the first time. When the moon came out, a maid opened the sliding doors of the veranda. Various forms of Japanese pampas grass were ornately arranged in a flower vase. Although the other people did not move from their places on the
tatami
, Teruko went out onto the veranda and sat down there to gaze at the moon. At this moment Teruko became clearly aware that she was really in love with Toyama and that she had slipped away from the southside restaurant just to be alone beside him.

The party was getting lively. Four or five young geisha appeared and surrounded the new company president. The woman who owned the tea house also went over and sat beside him. Kagebayashi was being called
shacho
by everybody. At some point along the line he began to get used to it, and it even began to seem natural for him to be called
shacho.

"When a man makes money, he starts to want power and rank; after that, women; and when he finds no pleasure even in women, then it's prestige and decorations and honors, huh? What makes me think so is that even a man like President Otaka went blindly after decorations," said Kitazaka.

Kitazaka had joined the company five or six years after Kagebayashi, and in actual age he was in his mid-forties, ten years younger than Kagebayashi, but he looked older than the new
shacho
. He was of a sincere and outspoken nature and never frivolous.

Kagebayashi chimed in with, "Man is a very curious beast," but deep down in his heart, he realized that he—Kagebayashi—actually had always played a role in getting Otaka what he wanted—money, power, women, and decorations.
How I suffered in secret because I tried to protect that man! It was no common ordinary task to be Otaka's wet nurse!
The weight of all those long years of working like a horse under Otaka was suddenly bending the body of the reeling, drunken Kagebayashi.

"Um-h!" Kagebayashi unwittingly let out a little grunt as though he were groaning.

"What are you groaning about?" the proprietress laughed. But Kagebayashi found nothing to laugh about in what had caused him to let out a grunt.

Kitazaka was talking. Kagebayashi's attention was caught when he heard Kitazaka's words vaguely drifting toward him: "So, it ends up that this year's moon-viewing party at Kagiya's has been canceled."

It had been the custom every year for some twenty-odd officers of the company to get together with Otaka and hold a moon-viewing party on the evening of the full moon either in September or October. Kagebayashi would not entrust the management of these banquets to any of the young Division Chiefs or Section Chiefs but always undertook the responsibility himself. There was a reason for not simply fixing the date in either September or October. If it happened to rain on that day, they would certainly incite the displeasure of Otaka. As he did every year when September rolled around, Kagebayashi sent someone to the Weather Bureau to investigate the probable weather conditions; if he found out that it would definitely be clear around that time, they would go ahead with the preparations, but if there was the slightest danger of rain, he would postpone the moon-viewing till October.

This year too, the same as every year, Kagebayashi had turned his attention to the moon-viewing party. When inquiries were made at the Weather Bureau ten days before, they were told that it probably would rain in September around full-moon time, so they had given up and had decided to postpone until October. As it turned out however, instead of raining, it was a beautifully clear day. But it was on that very day that it was unexpectedly decided that Kagebayashi was to become the President of the Company.

Kagebayashi left his place and went out onto the veranda. To Kagebayashi's eyes, the hair at the nape of Teruko's neck, illuminated by the white moonbeams, was mysteriously tantalizing. This was a curious thing for Kagebayashi who had never before permitted his heart to be captured by women.

Then suddenly he heard Toyama's voice. Toyama, who had been talking with Kitazaka, called over to him. "
Shacho
, from now on, to commemorate this night, let's go moon-viewing every year. It would be a pity if the parties came to an end with the end of the Otaka era. So we ought to make a special point of seeing that they continue. What do you say?"

At that instant there suddenly flashed into Kage-bayashi's mind a vision of Otaka at Kagiya's in the big hall with its doors removed, majestically holding court at the head of the table at a moon-viewing banquet.

"All right, Toyama. You take over the management of the parties," said Kagebayashi looking up at the September harvest moon which was floating across the clear black sky.
The moon is a beautiful thing indeed
.

That evening there was still another guest at that tea house. He was Jiro Kaibar a, a man whose name was known in some quarters because he was a sports commentator and because he contributed columns to the newspapers. He happened to have come to that tea house with a group of newspapermen, but as he was about to leave, he heard that Miyuki Kagebayashi was there, so he decided to poke his head into their room. Kaibara had graduated from a junior high school in a country village at the neck of the A——Peninsula in Aichi Prefecture. Ever since his junior high school days he had been very good at baseball. The fact that he won the championship in the All-Japan Interscholastic Baseball Match when he was a junior in high school ultimately made it difficult for him to divorce himself from baseball for the rest of his life. From the time Kaibara was at B——University, a private college, he had become famous as an incomparable pitcher, and when he started working for the newspaper, he also acquired renown as a baseball reporter. For a while after the war he had brilliant prospects as the manager of a professional baseball team, but saké was his curse, and it currently appeared that he was out of the running as a top-notch figure and wasn't doing much of anything.

Kaibara had often thought that he would like to meet the industrialist Miyuki Kagebayashi once, if the opportunity ever presented itself. This was because he knew that Kagebayashi had graduated from the same junior high school as he but eight years earlier and that he had been registered as a member of the same baseball team. He had absolutely no idea how much Kagebayashi had played, but he had decided that it would be a good idea to meet the industrialist who had attended his alma mater before him.

Kaibara had gotten this message across in advance to the proprietress, and in no time at all, this five-foot-ten hulk of a man was sluggishly making his way into Kagebayashi's room.

Kagebayashi also already knew that Kaibara had been a student at his alma mater. When they got to talking about their home town and about their junior high school back home, Kaibara said, "I once played catch-ball with you,
Shacho
. Don't you remember?"

Kagebayashi was surprised. As a university student, when he went home for summer and other vacations he used to go over to the junior high school back home, and there was no denying that he used to play catch-ball with his juniors there; however he had absolutely no recollection of this big fellow's being one of them.

"You had an amazingly fast ball. You were a tough customer to deal with," said Kaibara.

"Really?"

"I'll bet that no one at your company knows about their
shacho's
varsity days. I don't know too much about them myself—but you sure had a fast ball—really!"

Both Toyama and Kitazaka were amazed by what Kaibara had said. They had never before even thought in terms of a fast speed-ball hurled by the arm of their slender-framed new president. There were also half-credulous, half-sceptical looks on the faces of the proprietress and her geisha.

Kagebayashi thought that Kaibara must have mistaken him for somebody else. However, if there was no reason to correct him, there was also no basis for refuting him.

The night was getting cold, so they closed the sliding doors. From then on, everybody there really began to down the saké in earnest. Teruko, who had been urged to drink indiscriminately by Kaibara, got drunk. She kept calling to Toyama—"Toyama-san, Toyama-san, Toyama-san"—but the fact that he always kept his reserve and did not crumble became terribly exasperating, so with a flaunting air of showing off in front of him, Teruko several times threw herself into the lap of Miyuki Kagebayashi.

III

F
ROM THE
year after Kagebayashi replaced Otaka and took over the reins of the presidency of S——Industries, moon-viewing parties were held annually. During Otaka's regime, the place had been fixed in the southside at Kagiya's, but when Toyama began managing them, places where they would have to stay overnight were always chosen for the moon-viewing parties which were now built around Kagebayashi.

In 1951, they went to Waka-no-ura; in 1952, to Katada on the shore of Lake Biwa. Then from 1953 on, because a large number of officers moved up to Tokyo when the main office was moved there in the spring of that year, places around the Tokyo area were constantly selected for the moon-viewing banquets.

In 1953 they went to Choshi; in 1954, to Mito; in 1955, to Shimoda; and in 1956, to Hakone-Sengokubara. In most cases, acting on the advice of Toyama that he would be tired if he went on the night of the banquet, Kagebayashi left the day before. Normally Kagebayashi was being worked to death just by the pressure of business, and he never took trips except to Osaka or Fukuoka, and for these he traveled only by plane both ways. But once a year he seemed to be able to manage his work so that he could get away just for these annual moon-viewing parties. They continued having these parties ever since Otaka's regime, without ever missing a single year. Kagebayashi was exceedingly reluctant to disrupt these moon-viewing parties. He reacted toward them as though they were commemorating the fact that there happened to be a harvest moon the day that he assumed the rank of
shacho
in place of Otaka.

Besides that, there was something else. It had been a by-product of these moon-viewing parties and only Toyama and two or three others in the company knew about it, but it provided Kagebayashi with a unique excuse for being able to spend the night with Teruko.

On the night that Kagebayashi became president of the company, Teruko had gotten very drunk and had slept with Kagebayashi, who had been equally as drunk, but this had been completely unanticipated by Teruko. If it had been Toyama with whom she had gone to bed, she could have understood that, but sleeping with Kagebayashi seemed completely incredible to her. And having sexual relations with Kagebayashi instead of Toyama, whom she loved, radically changed her entire way of thinking with regard to sex.
At any rate, the time when a woman is young is very short. Toyama has a wife and children, and even if I have relations with him, I can't marry him, so maybe it makes sense, after all, to choose President Kagebayashi instead of Mr. Toyama.

Every month Teruko extracted large sums of money from Kagebayashi. She made herself rationalize that her whole relationship with Kagebayashi was actually for money, but despite that there was also some feeling of attachment and even jealousy over him. When Kage-bayashi moved his residence to Tokyo, Teruko also moved—to Kamakura, where she bought about an eighth of an acre of land and built a small house in which she lived with a maid. If Kagebayashi was busy and didn't show up for some days, Teruko became furiously angry. At those times:
I'll just have to pump some more money out of him. . . .

From Kagebayashi's point of view, thanks to these moon-viewing parties, he could get away on these two-day trips and travel to some unfamiliar place with this young sweetheart of his whom he never could see enough of because of his work, and on these nights of the mid-autumn full moon and the night just preceding, Teruko dragged Kagebayashi from his work and from his family and possessed him exclusively. Generally, on the first night there was a fight and a great tumult over separating or not separating, and on occasion they even had to have Toyama intervene. But by moon-viewing time the next day they were back in a good mood. Kagebayashi would go to the restaurant where the banquet was all set up, and it was late before he returned. Teruko would be by herself on the veranda of the inn, facing the moon. At first Teruko had been bitter and angry over being left to view the moon alone, but at some point she got used to it as though she had been born to do so. There she would be, counting her paper money or manicuring her fingernails, on the veranda where the moonbeams fell. And that was the way she viewed the moon wherever they went; the moon at Waka-no-ura, the moon at Katada, then Choshi, Mito, Shimoda, and Hakone. And all that she knew of all these places was the mid-autumn full moon.