Kazu now belonged to the same family as these people, and she would some day be buried in their family temple. And to think that she would dissolve into one stream with them, never to separate! What a source of comfort that was, and what a priceless trick on society! The comfort and the trickery would be completed when Kazu was actually buried there. For all Kazu’s successes, her money, her prodigious largesse, people had never really been taken in by her. She had begun her career through trickery and in the end she would trick eternity itself. This would be the bouquet of roses Kazu would toss to the world . . .
At length Kazu unclasped her hands and rose from prayer. She examined the inscription on the side of the monument, and asked Noguchi about the most recent of the persons listed, “Sadako Noguchi. Died August 1946.”
“It’s my former wife. I’m sure you must’ve heard her name.” Noguchi’s expression was somber. He found it unnatural for Kazu deliberately to have asked such a question.
Kazu’s next remark was even more unnatural. “That’s right. Your wife is buried here too. I had forgotten.” Kazu’s voice was good cheer itself: it was precisely the high-pitched voice overflowing with energy that she used when giving orders to the maids at the Setsugoan. Not a trace of envy could be detected in this voice. Noguchi had to smile despite himself.
“Whom have you come to pay your respects to, anyway? You’ve never known any of these people.”
“But they’re your ancestors, aren’t they?” answered Kazu with an unclouded smile.
On their way back from the cemetery they stopped in town and did some shopping. Kazu seemed in seventh heaven all that day, and was so playful that she startled Noguchi.
A deep languid sense of security began that day to creep over Kazu, and before long she had come gradually to neglect her work at the Setsugoan. Fortunately there were few guests, summer being the slack season. Suddenly she felt with terrible urgency that she was growing old.
The couple frequently took trips to the countryside to escape the heat, and wherever they went Kazu would exaggerate her emotions. By this exaggeration she succeeded only in isolating herself from Noguchi. It may be wondered if she was not mistaken in wanting to light a fire under the peaceful existence Noguchi craved.
Kazu had successfully seen to it that Noguchi was always kept in freshly laundered shirts, but her suggestions that the tailor make him some new suits were firmly rejected. Noguchi insisted that if suddenly after his marriage he were to appear in new clothes, people acquainted with the meagerness of his income would be quick to point at him with scorn. Kazu could not understand why it was wrong for her to use her money to order clothes for her husband. Noguchi was frequently obliged to caution her on that score. “You seem to think that giving people money will make them happy, but you’re badly mistaken. Why can’t you understand that the bigger the tip you give for some foolish reason, the more the other person will suspect your sincerity? The nature of my work is such that I must enjoy the full confidence of people, and this necessitates living simply. Please give up this snobbery of yours.”
Kazu had the utmost respect for her husband’s character, but it was hard for her to see wherein lay the difference between his politics and those she had seen and heard at the Setsugoan. Her glimpses of Conservative Party politicians at the Setsugoan had inculcated in Kazu a splendid notion of the nature of their work. Politics meant pretending to step out to the men’s room and then completely disappearing, forcing a man’s back to the wall while cheerfully sharing the same fire, making a show of laughter when one is angry or flying into a rage when one is not in the least upset, sitting for a long time without saying a word, quietly flicking specks of dust off one’s sleeve . . . in short, acting very much like a geisha. The exaggerated odor of secrecy clinging to politics confirmed its resemblance to the business of romance; politics and love affairs were in fact as alike as peas in a pod. Noguchi’s brand of politics, however, was not quite romantic enough.
It was not in Kazu’s nature, even though she neglected her work at the Setsugoan, to shut herself up in her house, to cook for her husband and patiently await his return. She often found herself wondering what to do with herself. She began to think that her customers connected with the Conservative Party were gradually drifting away. One of them in fact had said as much to her face. “I wish you’d persuade your husband to bolt the Radical Party and join us. We’d be glad to welcome back one of our senior statesmen, and we’d find it easier, for that matter, to come here. Don’t you think you could move your husband if you put your mind to it?”
This was a very shabby way to speak of Noguchi, and Kazu bit her lip as she listened in silence. She thought, “It’s my fault that a former cabinet minister should be treated like a restaurant owner.” She brooded over the matter until finally she decided that wiping out the insult to Noguchi meant clearing her own honor. Then she turned to the valued customer and declared, “I have no desire to listen to such talk. Please be kind enough not to come here again.”
Business setbacks owing to love or pride were, irrespective of magnitude, a new experience for Kazu. Her pride became more easily wounded each day. Kazu supposed that it was not merely her own pride that had become inflated, but that Noguchi’s, added to hers, had doubled it.
One day late in autumn Kazu, spending her usual kind of weekend in Noguchi’s house, suddenly jumped up and called him to the window. “Look, look—a crane’s flying up there, a crane!”
Noguchi took no notice of her, but Kazu raised such a fuss that finally he reluctantly got up and looked out the window. He could see nothing. “Nonsense,” he said, “do you suppose there’d be a crane flying in the middle of Tokyo?”
“I’m sure I saw one—a white crane with a red crest. It started to come down on the roof next door, but then it flew off again that way.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
Thereupon the two began a rather gloomy argument. Kazu had missed her chance to admit playfully, “I was fooling you.” She was as much to blame as Noguchi, and she had been mistaken to persist with such excessive earnestness and intensity in acting out her childish trick.
Kazu had finally realized at this late date how troublesome her disposition made things: she could not go on living unless she were constantly excited about something. The changes she tried to introduce into the routine of their lives were all rebuffed by her husband; Noguchi obstinately continued to lead his accustomed life. Even so, Kazu’s affection for her husband remained unchanged. On Saturday evenings he sometimes showed a surprising loquacity, and though jokes were rare as ever in his conversation, he would on occasion discuss foreign literature or lecture her on socialism.
10
Important Visitors
It was obvious at any rate that Noguchi thought of this marriage as his final abode, and Kazu, for her part, felt she had found her tomb. But people cannot go on living inside a tomb.
During Kazu’s normal weekdays at the Setsugoan the houseboy kept her informed in detail of Noguchi’s activities. It came as a fresh surprise each time to discover how extremely uneventful his life was. Noguchi, despite his advanced years, devoted himself completely to his studies.
“Yesterday,” the houseboy reported, “he spent from three in the afternoon until his bedtime in the library, studying. He ate his dinner in the library too.”
“If he keeps studying that way I’m afraid he’ll get sick from lack of exercise. I must give him a good talking-to next Saturday.”
Kazu had strong prejudices concerning the intellectual life. For her it signified a kind of dangerous indolence into which men of promise were likely to fall. She rejoiced, however, that despite her intention of giving her husband “a good talking-to” he was not a man ever to listen to her advice.
About this time a little incident took place at the Setsugoan.
The night before there had been bright moonlight, and the thief had apparently concealed himself in the shadows of the garden to wait until everyone wa
s asleep. The shrubbery around the huge ilex tree afforded an ideal hiding place. The thief had evidently sneaked into the garden when everybody was busy with the parties in full swing upstairs and the front entrance was left unattended. He must have spent a couple of hours quietly waiting. Probably he had refrained from smoking for fear that the lighted ends of his cigarettes might be seen, but Kazu discovered two or three wads of masticated chewing gum. From this she deduced that the thief was still young.
The thief had tried Kazu’s room first, but after forcing open the window a couple of inches, he decided not to enter. Kazu’s slumbers were undisturbed. There was a safe in her cupboard, but the thief could not have guessed that the occupant of such a cramped little room was the proprietress.
The thief then slipped into the sleeping quarters of the five resident maids. His shoe struck something soft, and the next instant powerful shrieks assailed him. He made his escape without stealing a thing.
Once the police arrived that night they created such an uproar that Kazu was unable to get back to bed again. It was during the course of her customary stroll the next morning that she discovered at the base of the sunlit ilex tree, the lumps of chewing gum looking for all the world like glistening white teeth.
Kazu somehow couldn’t get it out of her head that the thief, after looking into the room where she lay, had decided not to go in. To think that she had been sleeping all the while and knew nothing! In recollection, she was relieved, frightened, and also slightly dissatisfied. An empty suspicion rose within her as she felt the autumn wind pierce through her open sleeves to the base of her breasts, that the thief might have touched her body as she slept and then changed his mind. No, such a thing was unlikely. She was in the dark, and the window was open only two or three inches: there was no reason to think that he had gone so far as to examine her body.
But as she walked alone through the garden, the morning breeze playing on her, Kazu felt somehow the incipient decay of her flesh. She was exceptionally sensitive to the heat in summer, and had the habit of cooling herself by exposing directly to the electric fan not merely her breasts but her thighs, even before her maids or intimates. She could do this because she had confidence in her flesh. A shudder of doubt went through her now as she wondered about next summer. It seemed to her that marriage had made her body flabby.
It was at this point in her reveries that Kazu happened to look down and notice at the base of the tree some objects resembling human teeth. Kazu squatted down and discovered on careful examination that they were wads of chewing gum painstakingly rolled into balls. No guest or employee of the Setsugoan would chew gum in such a place, and the neighborhood children had no way of getting into the garden.
“They’re the thief’s,” Kazu instantly guessed. The uncleanness of the gum struck her less vividly than the thought of the lonely hours the man had waited here. She even felt there was something very endearing about his loneliness. She could visualize the young, dissatisfied, strong, rough rows of teeth that had chewed the gum. The thief had chewed at time, at the dull rubbery society which did not admit him, and at the uneasiness hanging over him. And there he waited in the lovely moonlight filtering through the leaves of the ilex tree.
Such unbridled fancy transformed the thief who had fled without stealing anything into Kazu’s secret, unknown friend. The youth hidden in the moonlight, though terribly dirty, was a being whose wings had half sprouted.
“Why didn’t he wake me, I wonder? If it was money he needed, I’d have given him all he wanted. If only he had said just a word to me!” Kazu felt somehow as if the young thief belonged to her circle of most intimate acquaintances. These were truly novel sentiments for Mrs. Yuken Noguchi.
Kazu started to call the gardener, then changed her mind. She decided not to tell anyone about the chewing gum—it might serve as evidence. She stripped some moss from the base of the tree and with her fingers carefully buried the wads of gum.
She waited until Noguchi’s normal rising hour before making an unhurried call to report the incident. After describing briefly all that had happened, Kazu added, “The police were certainly polite and considerate. I’m sure they’d never have bothered themselves that way over a thief breaking into a restaurant if it hadn’t been for you.” This was less Kazu’s honest opinion than what she would have liked to believe. It was by no means clear whether the police were showing such courtesy to the proprietress of a restaurant patronized by the Conservative Party or to the wife of an adviser of the Radical Party.
Noguchi’s comments as he listened to the report of the attempted burglary were extremely detached and superior. He spoke with the voice of an ambassador receiving word from a junior clerk of an automobile accident. “It’s your own fault—you didn’t make sure that the doors were properly locked,” were his first words. Kazu, who had been hoping for some expression of relief that she was safe, was disappointed. Noguchi apparently considered sneak thieves and the like to be purely private household matters.
Such an attitude, as far as Noguchi was concerned, was fair and objective, but it struck Kazu as being extraordinarily cold. It aroused two kinds of reactions within her. The first was wounded pride to think that, after all the years she had run a restaurant by her unaided efforts, she should be criticized for not making sure that the doors were locked, of all things! The second was a fear that Noguchi had coldly seen through the strange emotional excitement she had been experiencing since the night before. But the next moment Kazu decided that the blame for her irritation lay with the telephone. Even at times when Noguchi was pleasant enough if you met him face-to-face, he would adopt a deliberately impersonal tone on the telephone.
“It’s wrong when a married couple can only talk on the telephone,” she thought. “Still, this kind of life was my idea in the first place.”
Kazu listened distractedly to Noguchi’s admonitions, not intending to let them bother her. She examined her fingernails. There were, as always, clearly defined white crescents at the roots of her healthy nails, but she noticed today the cloudy, horizontal streaks on the nails of her middle and ring fingers. “That’s a sign I’ll have lots of kimonos,” she told herself.
Kazu all at once felt the meaninglessness of the large collection of kimonos she had already accumulated, a desolation as if her flesh were suddenly melting away.
The receiver still pressed to her ear, Kazu let her gaze wander. Morning sunlight streamed into the other rooms, and she could see the maids conscientiously dusting. The ridges of the new tatami were glossily defined in the early sunshine. At that moment a duster flickered over the openwork carving of the transom . . . The sunlight accentuated the smooth, persistent movements of the young maids, their backs stooping and rising in the rooms and corridors.
“Are you listening to me?” Noguchi demanded, his voice rather sharp.
“Yes.”
“Something’s come up here too. I’ve just had word that two important guests are coming tonight. You’ll have to receive them.”
“Will they be coming here?”
“No, to the house. I want you to order a dinner, return home, and receive them.”
“But . . .” Kazu enumerated the important customers who had reservations for the Setsugoan that evening, and started to explain why she couldn’t possibly leave the restaurant.
“I think it’s a good idea for you to return when I tell you to.”
“Who are these important guests?”
“I can’t tell you on the phone.”
Kazu was exasperated by such secrecy. “Can’t you? You can’t tell your wife the names of your guests? Very well, if that’s the way you feel.”
Noguchi answered in a voice of unbearable frigidity, “You understand me? You’re to have dinner ready and return home by five o’clock. I won’t take no for an answer.” With these words he hung up.
Kazu was so annoyed that she remained for a while sulking in her room, but eventually it occurred to her that this was the first time Noguchi ha
d broken their agreement under which she returned home only for the weekends. The guests must certainly be very important.
Kazu reached out her hand and opened the window a couple of inches. This was the same window which the police the previous night had searched for fingerprints. Somebody—the thief or a policeman?—had trampled the small yellow chrysanthemums under the window. Some of the flowers were imbedded in the soft earth like inlaid work, quite unblemished, their shapes as clearly defined as those in a heraldic design. Here and there the yellow of a petal had straightened itself and risen from the ground.
An irresistible drowsiness came over Kazu, and she lay down on the tatami under the window. She turned her eyes clouded with anger and sleeplessness toward the bit of sky visible through the barely opened window. The morning sky radiated a distant and serene light. The cloudiness in Kazu’s eyes traced ripples across the sky. She thought, “I don’t need one more kimono. What I want now is something very different.” So thinking, she fell asleep.
Kazu returned “home” after all. To mollify the customers expected that evening, she left word that she had gone home with a fever. She then directed the maids who would accompany her home to carry with them large quantities of the menu for the day packed in lacquer boxes.
Noguchi was in a surprisingly good humor when she arrived, and mentioned quite freely the details he had refused to divulge on the telephone. The guests were the Chief Secretary and Executive Director of the Radical Party. He could more or less guess the nature of their business with him, and he had decided, since he would have to refuse their request, to express his regrets by offering them hospitality at his home. The secret matter which Noguchi had refused to discuss on the telephone amounted, then, to nothing more than this. Such caution at once revealed to Kazu the delicacy of her husband’s political position.
After the Banquet Page 8
