The Izu Dancer and Other Stories: The Counterfeiter, Obasute, The Full Moon

by Inoue Yasushi

  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 Kaibara, 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 Β-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 Kage-bayashi'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

  FROM 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: PU 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 h
ad 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.

  After moving to Tokyo, Kagebayashi attended all of these moon-viewing parties in Japanese-style clothes, just like former president Otaka. Wearing Japanese clothes on these occasions was not the only way in which Kagebayashi was like his predecessor. He had also gradually gotten to be like him in his reticence and in his moodiness which would alter the color of his face if anything at all displeased him. Fortunately, they did not encounter rain on any of these occasions, but for two successive years, when they were at Choshi and Mito, it was cloudy and the moon showed its face only slightly. And at such times Kagebayashi was frightfully unpleasant.

  Generally, through the good offices of Toyama, the proprietress of Wakimoto's was invited up from Osaka to attend these annual banquets. In addition to inviting the proprietress, he also expressly invited and assembled several of the Osaka geisha who were at the banquet the night that Kagebayashi became the shacho. The number of geisha decreased year by year. Some of the women had retired as geisha and others had built homes and did not go out as freely as before. And because Kagebayashi even became upset over this, Toyama's problems as the manager of the banquets were multiplied. For Toyama, in addition to his anguish over capricious natural phenomena —such as whether or not the sky would be clear on these days—and his worry over the naturally phenomenal capriciousness with which geisha ran their lives, there was yet another thing connected with these banquets that caused him concern. Ever since the Mito moon-viewing party, the outspoken Kitazaka, fed up with Kagebayashi's "one-man-show" tactics, became reluctant to participate.

  "I beg you, please come along, just this one evening," pleaded Toyama.

  To this Kitazaka merely replied, "Thanks to Emperor Kagebayashi, you have become a Director so you have to play your role, but I, I'm exempt, huh?"

  Toyama had become a Director. As Kitazaka said, his becoming a Director, albeit the lowest ranking one, was solely on Kagebayashi's recommendation. For working for Kagebayashi like a horse and exhausting himself; for going into the kitchen at Kagebayashi's home and fawning over and flattering Kagebayashi's wife; for acting as a buffer between the wife and Teruko; and for being involved in that whole miserable mess—this had been the reward.

  One thing that invariably caused the group to get fed up with these moon-viewing parties was the long-winded-ness of Jiro Kaibara, who had been placed under contract with the company after he became acquainted with Kagebayashi. Every year he retold the same stories about Kagebayashi as an old-timer on his baseball team and the same stories about how nobody, no matter what he did, could get the fast-ball hurled by Kagebayashi when he came to coach the school team.

  With his flair for oratory, Kaibara embellished the details of the story every year. Newly-inducted company personnel used to wonder what he was doing in the company, but they listened with interest to the stories by this big man who was known to them as a popular baseball commentator. But after the second year, they thought it would be a nice thing if he just stopped. Kaibara's stories year by year became more and more exaggerated, but they really sounded true. The stories were tinged with a sort of strange excitement as though Kaibara was really reliving those days himself.

  Kagebayashi, for his part, never grew weary of hearing Kaibara's stories. By the time Kaibara sat down, Kagebayashi was vividly recalling the glorious days of his youth when he was selected for the baseball team. Before his eyes there even floated visions of Kaibara in baseball uniform unable to manage the speed of his ball.

  At the time of the Shimoda party of 1955 a small incident occurred. When Kaibara was telling his stories about baseball, Kitazaka, who was reluctantly attending at Toyama's request, finally got fed up. "Hey! That's enough. Quit your spoofing!" he shouted.

  Kaibara scratched his head, started to act like a clown, brought his story to an abrupt end, and returned to his seat. Some of the people studied the face of Kagebayashi, who at that time simply gave the impression that he had not been paying any attention to 'this. He had silently turned his face toward the veranda, where the gleaming sea could be seen reflecting the moonbeams.

  As might have been expected, what Kitazaka had yelled out had cut Kagebayashi to the core. While everyone who had witnessed all this had come to their own conclusions watching him—oh well, ignorance is bliss—he was recalling an intolerable situation some years back during President Otaka's era when Kitazaka had revealed a similar lack of self-control and had shouted at one of Otaka's cohorts. Otaka at the time had said nothing but had lifted up a saké cup and, with a gesture as if he were brushing something aside, threw it in the direction of Kitazaka. The cup took a slow curve, went sailing over the heads of several people, caught Kitazaka on the right eyebrow, and fell on the veranda behind him, smashed.

  Kagebayashi, still facing the veranda, felt welling up in him a similar impulse to throw a cup now, but he squelched it. He did not understand why he wanted to take revenge on him by throwing a cup as Otaka had done. But Kagebayashi waited for a while until that impulse abated and did not throw the cup. Instead of that, he decided to make Kitazaka a consultant and on that basis ease him out of the company.

  Two months after that incident, Kitazaka became a consultant and the following spring he resigned.

  Soon after that Kagebayashi noticed that a hostile attitude was developing toward Toyama among the members of the Board of Directors. It appeared that for some time they had been treating Toyama harshly because there was a general concern over the increases in personnel and the over-expansion of business, and they found it impossible to talk with Kagebayashi.

  Kagebayashi was expanding the organization at the Kyushu Branch Office, and he thought that he would make Toyama the President of the Branch Office there. This was for Toyama's sake, as well as for Kagebayashi's.

  Toyama was extremely dissatisfied with this transfer. He was beginning to hate Kagebayashi who was just using him and was becoming estranged from him. But as ordered, Toyama went to Kyushu as President of the Branch Office. About six months after Toyama assumed this post, however, a charge of breach of faith was raised against Kagebayashi by the labor union at the Kyushu subsidiary. Union Members came up to Tokyo and distributed pamphlets around inside the company. While it could not be charged that Toyama had instigated this, everyone at the Tokyo Main Office felt that Toyama had for some reason condoned it, and he seemed to be watching further developments with great interest.

  This being the case, Toyama for the first time did not put in an appearnce at the 1956 moon-viewing banquet in Hakone. Toyama was not there; Kitazaka was not there; the proprietress of Wakimoto's caught a cold and did not come up from Osaka. So in the eyes of everyone, the Sengokubara banquet was a desolate affair.

  When the banquet ended, Kagebayashi, accompanied by Kaibara, returned to the inn where Teruko was spending the night. The three of them went out of the inn together and walked for about thirty minutes along the gleaming white moon-lit roads between the residences which were scattered here and there. Because the night air was cold for Kagebayashi, he left Kaibara with Teruko and returned to the inn ahead of them.

  On returning to the inn, he caught a glimpse of Teruko's handbag inadvertently lying half-open on the made-up bed. Two match boxes were in evidence, one from Japan Air Lines and the other from an inn in Fukuoka, Kyushu. As Kagebayashi had not been oversee
ing Teruko's daily life completely, he was then struck with the feeling that for the first time he did not know what on earth she was usually doing.

  About thirty minutes later, Teruko returned to the inn.

  "When did you go to Fukuoka by plane?" asked Kagebayashi. Teruko was startled and turned pale. On receiving a postcard from Toyama saying that he was not going to the moon-viewing party this year, Teruko knew that she would not be able to go by car with him to wherever the party was to be held as she had done every year until now. She had suddenly realized that she was still as much in love with him as she had been all these years. And she wondered if, after all, it wasn't just to have this drive with Toyama once a year that she even had this sort of relationship with Kagebayashi and had kept it going. Thus reasoning, she had been struck by the feeling that she didn't know what she should do, but she had bought a ticket to Fukuoka and had left Haneda Airport by JAL on the afternoon of the day that she received the postcard.

  Toyama had gone to meet her at Fukuoka airport. From there they went together by car to Hakozaki and spent the night at an inn there. And the next day, Toyama went to the Kyushu Branch Office while Teruko headed back to the airport in a separate car. Since her car had traveled along the seacoast, she must gone through Fukuoka, but she had no specific recollection of any place in that city.

  For a while, Kagebayashi and Teruko looked daggers at each other, but Teruko quickly regained her composure. She did not believe that Kagebayashi could possibly know of her surreptitious rendezvous with Toyama which had been carried out with such careful precautions. At worse, somebody may have seen me getting on that plane.

  "I heard there was a good diamond there, and I went to see it. What's the matter? Why are you looking like that? If you think that's strange and if you don't believe it, then you just think about this for a while. All month long I stay at home alone like somebody on a shelf. What if I did go to buy a diamond?"