Mandarins (3 page)

“Even now?”

“Yes, but they're rare.”

The four of us burst out laughing. Now coming toward us were two men, fish baskets dangling from their hands. Their prey was
nagarami
, a variety of spiral shellfish. Clad in red loincloths, they were sturdy and muscular. Glistening wet from the sea, they also seemed less pitiable than simply wretched. As they passed, N-san replied to their perfunctory greeting by calling out: “Come for a bath at the inn!”

“What a dreadful occupation!” I exclaimed. It occurred to me that I myself might very well wind up becoming a diver for
nagarami
.

“Yes, dreadful indeed!” said N-san. “First, you have to swim out into the offing, then dive again and again to the bottom.”

“And to make it all the worse,” added H, “if you get caught in a channel, the chances are eight or nine to ten that you won't come back again.”

Waving his walking stick in the air, H told us many a tale about the channels, even of the one that extends from shore for a full league and a half.

“Tell us, N-san. When was it, the matter about the ghost of the
nagarami
fisherman?”

“Last year. No, it was in the autumn, the year before last.”

“There really was one?”

N-san's voice was already betraying a chuckle as he responded.

“It wasn't a ghost. But where the said ghost supposedly appeared was in a cemetery at the back of a slope that reeks of the sea, and when, to top it all, the remains of the fisherman in question came to the surface, they were covered with shrimp, so even though no one would have taken the story at face value, it was certainly an eerie one. But then finally a retired naval officer who had been keeping watch in the cemetery after dusk made a positive sighting. He pounced on the phantom, but when he took a good look, it was nothing of the sort—just a teahouse strumpet the fisherman had promised to marry. But even so, it had for a time stirred up talk of will-o'-the-wisps and ghostly voices, all in all, a total madhouse!”

“So the woman hadn't any intent to frighten people?”

“No, not in the least. She merely would go visit the grave of the fisherman around midnight and stand in front of it as though lost in a daze.”

N-san's story was a splendidly appropriate comedy of errors for this seaside setting, though none of us laughed but rather, for whatever reason, merely walked on in silence.

“Well now, perhaps it's time to turn back,” said M.

There had already been a lulling of the wind as he spoke; we were walking a now utterly deserted shore. It was still light enough that on the broad expanse of sand the footprints of the plovers were faintly visible. Yet even as the sea drew along the shore its vast arc of foam, stretching as far as the eye could reach, the entire horizon was slipping away into darkness.

“We shall take our leave then.”

“
Say
ō
nara
.”

Having parted company with H and N-san, M and I made our way
unhurriedly back along the chilly edge of the waves. Their roar was in our ears—and then from time to time the clear tone of the evening cicadas'
³
singing in the pine wood that lay more than three hundred meters away.

“What do you say?” I asked M. At some point, I had fallen five or six steps behind him.

“What do you mean?”

“About us going back to T
ō
ky
ō
too?”

“Hmm . . . Can't say that would be a bad idea.”

And then he began whistling ever so cheerily: “It's a long way to Tipperary . . .”

“One can't be too careful these days. Even Wada's taken up with a geisha.”

Fujii, a lawyer, drained his cup of
l
ă
oji
Å­
, and, with an exaggerated flourish, looked around at the faces of his listeners. Sitting at the table were the six of us, middle-aged men who had once lived in the same school dormitory. It was a rainy evening in June, on the second floor of the T
ō
t
ō
tei in Hibiya. I need hardly say that by the time Fujii had made this remark, his cheeks, as well as our own, were ruddy with drink.

“Having made that shocking discovery,” he continued to declaim, apparently warming to the subject, “I was struck by how times have changed.

“Back in the days when Wada was studying medicine, he was a
j
Å«
d
ō
champion, a ringleader in the room-and-board protests, a great admirer of Livingstone, and the sort of stoic who could go coatless
in the dead of winter. In other words, he was quite the dashing young man, was he not? The very idea that he would become acquainted with a geisha! And apparently she's from Yanagibashi and goes by the name of Koen.”

“Have you changed your drinking haunts?”

This shot from the dark came from Iinuma, a bank branch manager.

“Changed drinking haunts? Why do you ask?”

“Didn't you take him to wherever it was? Wasn't it then that he met this geisha?”

“Now let's not jump rashly to conclusions! Who said anything about
taking
Wada anywhere?”

Fujii haughtily arched his eyebrows.

“It was—let me see—what day last month? In any case, it was on a Monday or a Tuesday. I hadn't seen Wada in some time. He suggested going to Asakusa. Now, mind you, I'm not that keen on Asakusa, but as I was with an old friend, I immediately agreed. We set out in broad daylight for Rokku . . .”

“And you met her in the cinema?” I interrupted.

“
That
would have been preferable. As it happened, it was at the merry-go-round. And to make matters worse, we each wound up astride a wooden horse. Looking back, I'm struck by the absurdity of it all! I didn't suggest it, but he was so eager . . . Riding a merry-go-round isn't easy. Someone like you, Noguchi, with your weak stomach, should stay off altogether.”

“We're not children. Who at our age would ride a merry-go-round?” remarked Noguchi, a university professor. He laughed scornfully, his mouth full of S
ō
nghu
ā
eggs, but Fujii continued nonchalantly, glancing occasionally at Wada, a look of triumph in his eyes.

“Wada sat on a white horse; mine was red.
What
is
this
? I thought,
as we began to go around in time with the band. My rump was dancing, my eyes were spinning, and it was only quite fortuitously that I did not go tumbling off. But then I saw that outside the railing there was a woman in the crowd who appeared to be a geisha. With pale skin and moist eyes, she had a strange air of melancholy about her.”

“At least you were in such a state as to understand that much,” interjected Iinuma. “Your claim to dizziness sounds a bit dubious.”

“Am I not telling you what I saw in the midst of it? Her hair was, of course, drawn up into a ginkgo-leaf bun, and she was wearing a pale-blue striped serge kimono, with some sort of multipatterned obi. In any case, there she stood, a woman as delicately lovely as one might imagine in any illustration from a novel set in the demimonde.

“And now what do you suppose occurred? She happened to catch my eye and offered me an exquisitely demure smile.
Uh-oh!
I thought to myself, but it was already too late. We were still riding our horses, and before I knew it, we had turned, so that all I had in front of my red wooden mount was that blasted music band.”

We all burst out laughing.

“The next time round, she smiled again—but then was gone. And after that it was nothing but the jumping horses and the bouncing coaches—or else the trumpeting bugles and banging drums . . . I turned the matter over in my mind and thought that this was a fitting symbol of life. Our all-too-real humdrum existence puts us on a merry-go-round, and when perchance we encounter ‘happiness,' it passes us by ere we can grasp it. If we really wish to seize the opportunity, we should jump off . . .”

“Jump off? Oh, surely not . . .”

This was said mockingly by Kimura, head of engineering at an electric company.

“Don't be ridiculous!” protested Fujii. “Philosophy is philosophy;
life is life . . . But now imagine that as I was mulling it over, I came round the third time, when it suddenly dawned on me, much to my astonishment, that it was not, alas, I at whom she had smiled but rather, yes, that same room-and-board protest ringleader and Livingstone admirer, ETC. ETC: Wada Ry
ō
hei, M.D.”

“Still, it's fortunate you weren't so philosophically consistent as to leap off after all.”

Normally taciturn Noguchi chimed in with his own joke. Fujii, however, was zealously forging ahead.

“And when the woman appeared before that Wada, he took great delight in bowing to her, though as he was still astride his white horse, he could only do so timorously, so that it was really only his dangling necktie that did the honors.”

“Nothing but a pack of lies!”

Wada had at last broken his silence. For some time now he had been imbibing
l
ă
oji
Å­
, a wry smile on his face.

“What? How should I be telling lies?” retorted Fujii. “And that was the least of it. When we finally got off the merry-go-round, I found Wada chatting with her, as though suddenly quite oblivious to my very existence. ‘Sensei, Sensei!' she kept saying . . . And there I was, left holding the sack.”

“Indeed!” said Iinuma, extending a silver spoon into the large pot of shark fin soup as he glanced toward Wada sitting next to him. “A most curious story . . . Look, old man, in light of what we've heard, I'd say that you're the one to be treating us all tonight!”

“Nonsense! That woman is the mistress of a friend of mine.”

Wada was leaning on both elbows as he spat out these words. As seen from across the table, he was more swarthy than the rest of us, and his features were hardly those of an urbanite. Moreover, his
closely cropped head was solid as a rock. In an interschool competition, he had once felled five opponents despite a sprained left elbow. For all of his accommodation to current fashion, with his dark suit and striped trousers, there clearly lingered something of the titan from days gone by.

“Iinuma! Is she
your
mistress?”

Fujii posed the question with a tipsy grin, though without looking Iinuma directly in the eye.

“Perhaps she is.” Iinuma coolly parried the thrust and turned once more to Wada. “Who is this friend of yours?”

“The businessman Wakatsuki . . . Isn't there someone here who knows him? He graduated from Kei
ō
, it seems, and now works in his own bank. He's about our age. He's light complexioned and has a gentle sort of look. Sports a short beard . . . In a word, a handsome man with, one may expect, a keen appreciation for the finer things of life.”

As I had just been to a play with that same businessman four or five days before, I now entered the fray myself.

“Wakatsuki Minetar
ō
? The haiku poet who goes by the nom de plume of Seigai?”

“That's right. He's published
Seigai-kush
Å«
¹
. . . He's Koen's patron—or rather was until two months ago. They've now made a clean break of it.”

“What? So this Wakatsuki fellow . . .”

“He and I were classmates in middle school,” said Wada.

“Well, well,” exclaimed Fujii merrily, there's more to you than I thought. Quite behind our backs, you and your middle-school chum have been off plucking the flowers and climbing the willow tree!”

“Nonsense! I met her when she came to the university hospital. I was simply doing Wakatsuki a bit of a favor. She was having some sort of operation for sinusitis . . .”

Wada took another sip of
l
ă
oji
Å­
, a strangely contemplative look in his eyes.

“But, you know, that woman is an interesting one . . .”

“Are you smitten with her?” asked Kimura, quietly teasing him.

“Perhaps I am indeed—and perhaps not in the least. But what I should like to talk about is her relationship with Wakatsuki.”

Having provided his remarks with this preface, Wada issued what was for him an unusual burst of oratorical eloquence.

“Just as Fujii has said, I recently ran into Koen. I was surprised as we talked to learn that she had ended her liaison with Wakatsuki some two months before. When I asked her why, she gave me nothing that could be called a reply, though she said with a lonely sort of smile that she had never been the person of refinement that Wakatsuki is.

“I had already pried enough and so took my leave. But then just yesterday . . . in the afternoon . . . It was raining, as you all remember, and just as it was coming down hardest, I received a note from Wakatsuki, asking me whether I might come round for a bite to eat. Having some time on my hands as well, I arrived early at his house and found him, as always, in his stylish six-mat study, quietly reading.