He was pathetically compelled to tear down the refined pride he had so long possessed, and gradually his prime concern became the assumption of an attitude of contemptuousness—something that he had exhibited most casually on the tip of his nose like cigar smoke in former days. But at the same time, he took great pains to avoid revealing this hidden contempt to anyone. He was fearful that he might not receive other invitations.
In the midst of a party, he would occasionally pull at his wife’s sleeve and whisper in her ear:
“What a despicable pack. They don’t know the first thing about how to speak of the indelicate in a refined way. Japanese ugliness is so complete it’s almost impressive. But you mustn’t let them suspect how we think.”
Shinkawa’s eyes suddenly became glazed before the flames in the fireplace; he recalled the garden party at the Marquis Matsugae’s some forty years ago, proudly remembering that there too he had felt nothing but contempt for his host.
But only one thing had changed. In former times, the object of his contempt could do him no harm; but now just being there profoundly wounded him.
Mrs. Shinkawa was vivacious.
At her age she increasingly found an indefinable interest in talking about herself. Her search for listeners harmonized beautifully with the attempt to abolish class distinctions that was now in style. She had never once been concerned about the quality of her audience.
She paid exaggerated compliments to the singer of French songs as though she were talking to royalty, in return for which she obtained a hearing. She shamelessly praised Makiko Kito’s poems and then imposed her own tale on the poor woman—once she had been complimented by an Englishman who had called her a poet. He had made the remark when she had compared the late summer clouds over Karuizawa to a Sisley painting.
Now, moved by some uncanny intuition, she began to talk about the garden party at the Matsugae estate as she joined her husband by the fireplace.
“As I think back, those were stupid and uncivilized times when expensive parties entailed nothing more than having a few geisha dance and make music at home. How unimaginative people were then. I must say Japan has made quite a bit of progress: the barbarous customs are gone and it’s ordinary for wives to be included in social affairs. Look at them, the women at this party are no longer silent. Conversations that took place at garden parties used to be excruciatingly boring, but now the women converse very wittily.”
But it was doubtful whether she had ever listened to anyone’s conversation, either now or at any time in the past forty years. She had never tried to talk about anything except herself.
Mrs. Shinkawa suddenly left her husband’s side. She cast a glance into a dark mirror mounted on a wall. Looking-glasses never frightened her. They all functioned as waste-baskets into which she could discard her wrinkles as she stood before them.
Jack, a first lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps, was working hard. The guests looked with pleasure at this member of the “Occupation Forces” who was so gentle and loyal. Keiko treated him grandly, with incomparable regal skill.
Sometimes Jack would extend an arm and encircle her from behind, mischievously touching her breast. She permitted herself a calm, wry smile as she clasped his hairy, ringed fingers.
“Such a child. He’s incorrigible,” she said in a dry, didactic tone, looking around at everyone. Jack’s posterior encased in his Army uniform was capacious, and the guests would compare it with Keiko’s majestic buttocks, arguing which was the larger.
Mrs. Tsubakihara was still talking with Imanishi. She was taken aback to meet for the first time someone who completely scorned her precious sorrow, but she did not change in the least the idiotic expression of mourning on her face.
“No matter how much you grieve, your son will not come back to life. Besides you’ve a balloon in your heart so filled with grief that nothing else can possibly get in. It gives you a secure feeling, doesn’t it. Let me be rude a bit more: you’re convinced that no one else will do you the favor of filling your balloon, so you fill it youself with homemade sorrowgas that you pump into it at a moment’s notice. That releases you from the fear of being bothered by any other emotion.”
“What a horrible thing to say! How cruel . . .”
Mrs. Tsubakihara looked up at Imanishi from the handkerchief in which she muffled her sobs. He thought the look in her eyes was that of an innocent little girl who craved to be raped.
The president of the Murata Construction Company was offering a hyperbolic compliment to Shinkawa, hailing him as a great patron in the financial world. Shinkawa was irked to be assigned to the same category as the vulgar builder. Murata had erected immense billboards bearing his name on all the company’s construction sites; the self-advertising was everywhere. But no one looked less like a construction expert. A pale, flat face revealed his background as a reformist bureaucrat of prewar days. He was an idealist who lived parasitically off others. No sooner had he stopped clinging and achieved independent success in business than he discovered a bright, vast ocean where his inherent crassness could disport itself without restraint. Murata had made the dancer Ikuko Fujima his mistress. Ikuko was wearing a sumptuous kimono interwoven with silk and lacquer threads, and a five-carat diamond blazed on her finger; when she laughed, she held her neck and back rigidly erect.
“An extremely fine house, sir, but if you’d let me build it for you, I could have saved you a lot of money. What a shame,” Murata repeated at least three times to Honda.
The diplomat Sakurai and the senior reporter Kawaguchi were discussing international problems, standing on either side of Akiko Kyoya. Sakurai’s fishlike skin and Kawaguchi’s, marked by age and spoiled by saké, provided a good contrast between the two and their careers. One was cold- and the other hot-blooded. They were discussing weighty problems, as men are wont to do in the company of women, in an effort to impress the singer Akiko. She, on the other hand, was completely oblivious to the subtle rivalry and inane vanity, constantly helping herself to the canapés, glancing alternately with her melancholic, dark eyes at the disheveled white hair and the overly groomed head. She pursed her mouth into the shape of an O and tossed one tidbit after another between her goldfish lips.
Makiko Kito took the trouble of going up to Imanishi and saying: “You have the most peculiar tastes.”
“Must I get your permission every time I make love to your pupil? It’s as though I were making love to my mother, I feel a kind of sacred tremor. At any rate, I’ll never make the mistake of making love to you. What you think of me is written all over your face. I’m the type that repels you sexually more than any other, right?”
“You know very well you do.”
Makiko felt relieved and spoke in a most charming voice. Then she laid a strip of silence between them, that resembled the black edge of tatami matting.
“Even if you should succeed in making love to her, you could never assume the role of her son. Her dead son is extremely sacred and beautiful to her; she is a holy priestess serving him.”
“Well, I don’t know. To me everything looks suspicious. It’s blasphemy that a living person should continue harboring pure emotions and expressing them.”
“That’s why I say she is serving the pure sentiment of the dead.”
“Anyway she does it out of her necessity to live. That already makes it suspicious.”
Makiko narrowed her eyes and laughed in sheer repulsion.
“There isn’t a real man at this party,” she said. With that she left Imanishi as Honda called to her. Mrs. Tsubakihara was seated on the edge of a bench built into the wall, crying as she leaned back. Outside, the night air was extremely cold, and condensed droplets of moisture trickled down the panes.
Honda intended to ask Makiko to take care of Mrs. Tsubakihara. If her tears stemmed less from her painful memories than from the small amount of liquor she had consumed, she could well be a sentimental drinker.
Rié, her face pallid, approached Honda and whispered
in his ear.
“There’s been a strange noise. It started a little while ago in the garden . . . I wonder if I’m hearing things.”
“Did you look?”
“No, I was afraid to.”
Honda strode to one of the windows and cleared the steam from the pane with his fingers. Beyond the dead grass, above the cypresses, hung a spectral moon. A wild dog was snooping about, dragging its shadow after it. Stopping and curling up its tail, it threw out its furry white chest that shone in the moonlight and howled mournfully.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Honda asked his wife. The cause of her childish fear had been too easily revealed and Rié did not immediately agree, but merely smiled a vague, indecisive smile.
As he listened further, two or three dogs responded from beyond the cypress grove.
The wind had increased.
27
IT WAS MIDNIGHT. From the window of his second-floor study, Honda watched a small, ghostly moon traverse the sky. Ying Chan had not put in an appearance. The moon had come instead.
The party had come to a close near midnight. Only the overnight guests still remained, gathered in a small circle. Gradually they withdrew to their assigned bedrooms. After the two guest rooms upstairs, came Honda’s study, which in turn adjoined the master bedroom. Once she had seen the guests off, exhaustion had settled in, numbing Rié’s body to the very tips of her swollen fingers. She had retired to her bedroom after bidding her husband good night. Alone in the study, Honda still saw the backs of his wife’s hands which were so swollen they gave off a dull sheen. Rié had triumphantly shown them to him.
The malice spreading inside had pushed outward, swelling her skin, erasing the angularity of her hands, which had taken on a strangely puffy, childish appearance that stayed with him a long time. He had suggested a private celebration in their bedroom on the occasion of the house-warming, but he had been turned down. If his suggestion had not been vetoed, what would have happened? Something desolate must flow under that nauseous subcutaneous fat of kindness and sympathy.
Honda looked about his Western study, with its pretentious bright window and its clean desk. When he really worked hard, the study was never like this. Then it had an unmanageable disorderliness, like that of living itself, and it smelled like a chicken roost. Now, on the arty desk fashioned from a single zelkova plank an English writing set of Moroccan leather had been placed. In the pen plate were several pencils neatly sharpened, all in a line, embossed letters freshly shining like the insignia on cadets’ collars. There was also his bronze alligator paperweight—inherited from his father—and an empty letter box of meshed bamboo.
He rose frequently and crossed over to wipe the panes in the bay window with its curtains still open, for the moon shining through the glass was clouded and distorted by the heat in the room. He was certain that unless the moon were permitted to stay clear, the emptiness and disgust that flooded his heart would expand and expand, and the dark turmoil would be transformed into sexual desire. It astonished him to discover that it was just such a landscape that awaited him at the end of his life’s journey. The dog’s mournful bark sounded again, and the fragile cypress trees creaked in the wind.
It was some time since his wife had gone to sleep in the next room. Honda switched off the light in the study and walked over to the bookcases that flanked the wall of the guest room. Quietly he took down a number of Western books and piled them on the floor. What he had himself labeled the “disease of objectivity” now overcame him. The minute he surrendered to it he would be forced to antagonize all society which until now had been on his side.
But why? he wondered. This too was a part of the varied aspects of human behavior which he had objectively observed from the bench or from the lawyer’s seat for so many years. How could it be that observing from those vantage points was perfectly legal, but looking as he would now a violation of the law? Observation in that manner had made him the object of approval by society, while watching like this was subject to reproach and contempt. If this were a crime, it was probably because he derived so much pleasure from it. Yet his experience as judge had taught him the pleasure to be found in a clear mind, devoid of private desire. And if that enjoyment was noble because it was not accompanied by any quickening of the pulse, could it be that the essence of criminality lay in the palpitation of the heart? This innermost response of a human being, this palpitation in the face of pleasure—could that be the most significant ingredient in any violation of the law?
All this was sophistry. As he pulled the books from the bookcase, Honda felt a throbbing in his heart similar to that of a young boy, and he was made sharply aware how weak and vulnerable his very existence was vis-à-vis society. He was alone and helpless. The forces that had held him high as on a scaffolding had now been removed. Like the sand trickling in an hourglass, the inexorable endless descent had started. In that case, law and society were already his enemies. Had he possessed a little more courage and were this not his own study but some corner of a park where young grass grew or perhaps a dark byroad speckled with the lights of houses, he would then in reality become a most shameful criminal. People would jeer: “The judge became attorney, and the attorney a criminal!” They would say that here was a man who had never stopped loving the court throughout his life!
Once the books were removed, a small hole appeared before him in the wall. The dusty, dark space was just large enough for his face. The dusty smell suddenly filled Honda’s heart with keen memories of youth, striking the meager red sparks of the secret pleasures of childhood. He remembered the texture of the dark-blue velvet coverlet mixed with the odor of the toilet. The first obscene word he had discovered in a dictionary. All the melancholic, foul odors of boyhood. He discovered in his throbbing heart the faintest caricature of the noble passion that had urged Kiyoaki toward final catastrophe. Whatever it was, it was a single dark passage that connected the nineteen-year-old Kiyoaki and the fifty-seven-year-old Honda. As he closed his eyes, an illusion sprang up, in the darkness of the bookcase, of scattered particles of red flesh flying about like a cluster of mosquitoes.
The guest room next to his study was occupied by Makiko and Mrs. Tsubakihara. Imanishi occupied the chamber beyond. Honda had definitely sensed some sort of communication between the two rooms; he had heard doors opening surreptitiously and then the sound of muffled voices, scolding whispers, similar to spatterings on the surface of water. The noise stopped and then began again. Something was being precipitated on the plane that inclined into the depth of night, as though an ivory die were cast and was rolling down a tilted board.
He had an idea of what was taking place. But what met his eyes was more than he had imagined.
In the adjacent guest room twin beds had been placed parallel to the wall with the secret opening. The bed directly below the hole was almost completely out of his view, but the other was entirely visible. The night lamp was on, but the bed itself was veiled in shadow.
Honda was startled to see in the pale light a pair of wide-open eyes staring into his. They belonged to none other than Makiko.
She was sitting on the far bed clad in a white night kimono. The collar of the robe was primly closed, and her silvery hair shone dimly in the light that came from one side. She had cleansed her face of cosmetics, and its whiteness of former days had not changed. It still was clear and cold. Her age was revealed in the round shoulders where the plump flesh had drooped, but for the most part her confidence in the imperviousness of her being, never threatened through the long years, was obvious in the regular breathing of her breast. It was as if the essence of night were seated there, clad in white. Honda felt as though he were looking at Mount Fuji on a moonlit night. The gentle slope at the foot of the mountain was covered in the flowing creases of the blue-lined blanket. Makiko’s lap was half hidden under the coverlet on which she languidly leaned her arm.
Her eyes, that appeared at first to have caught Honda’s peeping gaze, were not really turned toward t
he hole. They were lowered and were gazing at the bed placed against the wall.
Seeing only her eyes, one would be convinced that Makiko was concentrating on the creation of a poem as she gazed into some river which happened to lie just beneath. It was that time of night when the human spirit could grasp a certain vivid turmoil in the air and would struggle to crystallize it. In making the effort, one’s eyes would become like those of a hunter about to shoot. Seeing only her eyes, one could but feel the sublimity of her soul.
Makiko was not looking at a river or a fish, but at human forms writhing on the shadowy bed. Honda elevated his head until he struck the top of the bookcase in an effort to see down through the small peephole. He could in this way observe what was taking place on the bed beyond the wall. A man’s thin, pale thighs were twined about those of a woman. Immediately below him were two heaps of withered flesh hardly bursting with vigor, swaying slowly like aquatic animals as they made contact. They gleamed damply in the faint light; the devourer was unmistakably being devoured; obvious trickery was going hand in hand with sincere tremors. Two mounds of moist pubic hair touched and separated; and a white patch where the light struck the woman’s belly, as if a piece of white tissue had been inserted between the two bodies, pierced Honda’s awestricken eyes.
Whatever the situation, Imanishi had shamelessly exposed the pitiful thighs of an intellectual in heat. True to his theories, the cheerless, rippling oscillation of his flat buttocks, between which appeared a wasted coccyx, was merely a momentary illusion. His obvious lack of sincerity angered Honda.
Compared to him, Mrs. Tsubakihara was earnestness itself; he could see her hands stretched out like those of a drowning woman, her fingers desperately grasping at Imanishi’s hair. At last, she called her son’s name. It was a suppressed, faint cry:
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