“Do you remember me? I am Mrs. Hisamatsu. It’s been some time since we met in Gotemba,” said Keiko. Ying Chan did not even thank her for that occasion and only nodded charmingly.
Keiko introduced Katsumi, who offered his seat. Honda knew at once that the boy had been strongly impressed by Ying Chan’s beauty.
She casually opened her hand on which she wore the emerald, but not in any effort to show it off to Honda. In the candlelight the stone reflected a green like the wings of some iridescent insect that had just flown in. The protecting yakshas’ impressive golden faces were angry and full of shadows. Honda interpreted the fact that Ying Chan had worn the ring as an expression of her sweetness.
Keiko immediately spotted the jewel and without ado drew Ying Chan’s hand to her.
“How unusual. Is it Thai?”
She could not have forgotten her close inspection of the stone at Gotemba, but her manner was so natural and convincing it quite seemed to have slipped her mind.
Staring into a candle flame, Honda silently wagered with himself whether Ying Chan would tell that it had been a gift from him.
“Yes, it’s from Thailand,” said Ying Chan simply. He was relieved by the answer and charmed with the graceful naturalness of the entire episode he had created.
As though she had already forgotten about the ring, Keiko, taking the initiative, arose.
“Let’s go to Manuela’s. Since we shall be going to a night-club anyway, we might just as well have dinner there. The food is quite good.”
Katsumi was driving a Pontiac that had been purchased under some American name. It would take them less than two minutes to reach their destination.
Ying Chan sat beside the driver, and Honda and Keiko rode in back. Keiko’s bearing when getting in and out of cars was spectacular. As far back as she could remember, she had always had the habit of climbing in before anyone else. She never sidled along on skirted hips to the far seat, but would aim at the place where she would be sitting and in one motion, without hesitation, deposit there her amphora-like buttocks.
Ying Chan’s long black hair cascaded over the back of the seat, and from behind it was especially magnificent. It reminded Honda of black ivy hanging from the ramparts of some deserted castle. During the day, the inevitable lizard would be resting in the shade. . . .
Miss Manuela owned a small, fashionable nightclub in the basement of a building across from the Japan Broadcasting Association. The brunette Eurasian dancer cheerfully greeted her faithful customers as soon as she recognized Keiko and Katsumi coming down the staircase in the vanguard of the little party.
“Oh, welcome! Katsumi, too! You’re very early tonight. Feel free to take over.” At this early hour no one was to be seen on the dance floor, and only music came across its emptiness like a north wind scattering the fragments of light from the mirror ball as if they were scraps of white paper flying about on midnight streets.
“Wonderful! We have the club to ourselves!” said Keiko, stretching her sumptuously ringed hands into the dark space. Over this sweeping exclamation, the gleaming wind instruments sounded sadly.
“Oh, don’t bother,” said Keiko, stopping Miss Manuela, who, in place of the waiter, was on the point of taking orders for drinks. “Do sit down.” Katsumi stood up and offered her a chair. Only after he had done so did Keiko introduce Ying Chan and Honda, and referring to the latter, added: “This gentleman is my new friend. I’ve acquired a Japanese taste.”
“That’s fine. You’re really too Americanized. It’s better to get rid of some of that American odor.”
Miss Manuela pretended to sniff around Keiko in an exaggerated way, and Keiko responded theatrically by acting ticklish. Ying Chan laughed heartily at these antics and nearly upset a glass of water on the table. Honda was a little perplexed, and he and Katsumi glanced at each other. On reflection, he realized that this was the very first time their eyes had met.
Keiko, as if suddenly remembering, recovered her dignity.
“Did you have trouble when the power failed a while ago?” she asked fatuously.
“Of course not. We serve only by candlelight,” Miss Manuela answered with a lordly air; and white teeth gleaming in the gloom, she turned her friendly smile to Honda.
Members of the orchestra would greet Keiko when they left their seats, and she would answer by waving her white hand. Everything rotated around her.
The four had dinner, and while Honda did not enjoy eating in dark places, he had no alternative. The blood oozing from his slice of Chateaubriand should have been bright red, but it appeared dismally dark.
Customers began to increase in number. Honda was aghast when he imagined how others would regard him, acting young in a place of entertainment such as this. The sooner the revolution the better; people were saying there would be one.
Honda was caught by surprise when his three companions simultaneously arose. The two women had stood up to go to the powder room and Katsumi had risen in accordance with prescribed etiquette. Katsumi sat down again, and the man of fifty-seven and the other of twenty, left together in the midst of music and dancing, remained silent, looking in different directions, having nothing to say.
Suddenly Katsumi spoke up rather hoarsely: “She’s charming.”
“Do you like her?”
“I’ve always been taken by dark, petite, and glamorous types that can’t talk Japanese very well. How shall I say? . . . I probably have somewhat peculiar tastes.”
“Really?” Honda responded with a soft smile, yet he was repelled by Katsumi’s words.
“What do you think about the body?” he asked.
“Well, I’ve never given it much thought. Do you mean sensualism?” the young man answered glibly, quickly lighting Honda’s cigarette with his Dunhill lighter.
“For instance, suppose you have a bunch of grapes. If you grasp them too hard they’ll be crushed. But if you hold them just so as not to bruise them, then the fullness of the skin will put up a subtle resistance to your fingers. That’s what I mean by ‘body.’”
“I think I understand,” answered the young student thoughtfully, eager to act as an adult, doubtless bolstering his self-confidence with the weight of his memories.
“Fine if you do. That’s all I meant,” said Honda, terminating the conversation.
Later Katsumi asked Ying Chan to dance; they returned to the table after three consecutive numbers.
“I couldn’t help but remember your theory about the grapes,” Katsumi said to Honda with a look of innocence.
“What are you talking about?” Keiko asked. The conversation faded into the noisy music and was lost.
Honda never tired of watching Ying Chan dance, though he himself did not know how. In movement she was free of the handicaps of living in a foreign land and her natural disposition was happily revealed. Her slim neck, relatively small for her body, moved well. Her ankles were delicate and quick. She danced on her toes, and under her swaying skirt her beautiful legs, like two tall palms on a distant island, moved swiftly. Languidness and vitality constantly alternated; hesitation and liveliness shifted at every instant, and while she was dancing her smile never disappeared. When she whirled around at Katsumi’s fingertips during a jitterbug number, her body had already turned, but the gleam of her white teeth still remained visible like a half moon.
34
THE WORLD was filled with ominous portents.
A riot broke out in front of the Imperial Palace on May Day. The police shot into the mob and the situation deteriorated. Six or seven demonstrators formed a group and attacked an American car, turning it over and setting it on fire. An assaulted policeman abandoned his white motorcycle, which was immediately burned. An American sailor, who had fallen into the moat around the palace, popped up and down in the water because whenever he lifted his head demonstrators threw stones at him. Flames sprang up all over the square in front of the palace. During the riot American soldiers stood guard with fixed bayonets at the General Headquar
ters in Hibiya and at the Meiji Life Insurance Building.
It was an extraordinary event. No one believed that things would end here, and everyone suspected that other, largerscale riots must be in store for the future.
Honda did not go to his office in the Marunouchi Building that day and did not actually see the demonstration, but when he heard about it on the radio and read the details in the newspapers he felt the situation to be serious enough. He had spent the wartime period rather uninvolved, yet now in peace he could not ignore what was happening about him. He felt insecure with the three customary ways of investing money and resolved to consult about the future with a friend who advised him on financial matters.
The next day, unable to sit still at home, he set out for a walk. The early-summer sun was shining; nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Avoiding the old store that sold serious material such as legal books, he entered a shop in the front of which magazines were displayed in random piles. He had formed the habit over the years of always going to bookstores on his walks.
The multitude of titles on the spines soothed him. Everything was stored away in the form of concepts. Human love and desire, political unrest were all committed to writing and lined up in tranquility. Furthermore, one could find anything one desired, from books on knitting to international politics.
He did not know why he felt so relaxed on entering a bookshop; it was a habit formed in childhood. Kiyoaki and Isao had had nothing like it. How had it come about? he wondered. Did he feel insecure unless he constantly surveyed the entire world? Was it obstinacy that would not let him recognize facts that had not been recorded in print? According to Stéphane Mallarmé, sooner or later everything would be expressed in writing. If the world ended up in a great beautiful book, it would never be too late to dash over to the bookstore after it had all been printed.
Yes, yesterday’s events were already finished. Here there were no flames from Molotov cocktails, no shouts, no violence. One could not even sense the distant repercussions of bloodshed. An amiable citizen trailed by a child was hunting through the books; a fat woman in a light green sweater holding a shopping bag arrogantly asked if the latest issue of some women’s magazine had not yet come out. In the back of the store a vase with an arrangement of irises—a hobby of the storekeeper—had been placed below a framed piece of unskilled calligraphy which read: “Reading is nourishment for the heart.”
Honda circled around in the congested store, bumping into customers. As he could find nothing he liked, he went to the shelves on which popular magazines were displayed. There a young man in a sports shirt, apparently a student, was engrossed in a magazine. From a distance, Honda could see that he had been staring at a single page with extraordinary earnestness. Approaching on the right side of the youth, he casually glanced at the leaf.
He saw a poorly printed, opaque blue photogravure of a naked woman sitting tied with a rope and leaning to one side. The boy never took his eyes from the magazine which he held in his left hand.
Honda noticed that the youth was strangely rigid—the neck, profile, and eyes were somehow unnaturally strained like those of a figure in some Egyptian relief. Then he saw clearly that the youth’s right hand which was thrust into his trouser pocket was violently and mechanically móving.
Honda left the bookstore at once. His stroll had been spoiled.
—Why had he had to do such a thing in front of people? Didn’t he have the money to buy the magazine? If that were so, I would have paid for it myself and given it to him. Yes, why didn’t I do that right away? I really shouldn’t have hesitated to give him the money.
But Honda’s thoughts changed in the interval between two electric poles by the roadside.
—No, I don’t believe that that was the case. If he really wanted the magazine, it was cheap enough for him to buy just by pawning his fountain pen.
The magazine should not have been purchased and taken home. From this point on, Honda’s imagination ran riot. For some reason the youth did not quite seem to be a total stranger.
Not wishing to go home and face his wife with such thoughts on his mind, he chose a roundabout way and continued straight on instead of turning when he came to the corner of the Methodist Church.
Probably the reason the youth had not taken the magazine home was not at all because his family was strict or because he had no place to hide it. Honda arbitrarily came to the conclusion that the young man lived alone in a rooming house. It was obvious that as soon as the youth returned home the loneliness eagerly awaiting him would jump at him like a house pet; and he would have been afraid to open the picture of the trussed and naked woman, to share his pleasure with the loneliness. There, probably, waited the absolute freedom of the prison which the youth had himself constructed. In the tiny space, barren and square, in the dark nest filled with the smell of semen, he must have been afraid to face the naked blue woman writhing under the tightening rope that crushed her breasts, her nostrils spread like the wings of a dove. It was like committing murder to face a tightly bound woman in such perfect freedom. Thus he had chosen to expose himself to the public gaze. He had wanted to project himself into the role of a man tied by the ropes of people’s eyes and to face the woman bound in danger and humiliation. The odious conditions he had chosen represented the sine qua non as subtle and delicate as silk thread that is concealed in all sexual love.
The seductions of a very special, extraordinarily sweet vulgarity . . . The boy would not have been consumed with desire for the girl had she been a beautiful photographic model. Sexuality that storms day and night like a gale through the metropolis. A great dark overabundance. The streets across which shoot the flames of Molotov cocktails. The great underground canal of hidden sexual passion. When Honda saw the imposing stone pillars of his house, standing since his father’s days, he realized he would have to live in a fashion very different from the way his father had lived out his old age. When he pushed open the side gate and saw the great white magnolia flowers in full bloom on the tips of their tall branches, he suddenly felt the fatigue of his walk and wished he could devote the rest of his life to creating haiku.
35
HONDA SUGGESTED a talk with Keiko and Katsumi, inasmuch as he had to pick up a box of cigars which he had asked her to get. Katsumi drove to meet him at his office building. It was an early summer afternoon and the sun was strong.
Genuine Havana cigars were unavailable, but tobacco products from Florida could be purchased at the PX. Since Keiko would be shopping for cigars at the former Matsuya department store, now the PX, Katsumi informed him they were to meet her there.
Honda could not himself enter the PX, of course. He had Katsumi stop in front, and they watched the exits from the car window. Outside the white-curtained PX windows numerous caricaturists loitered about, hounding the American soldiers who emerged. The young soldiers, apparently back from Korea, put up little resistance as they amiably stood to be sketched. Among them an American girl wearing blue jeans, probably on a shopping trip, was sitting on the brass rail of a window having her portrait done.
It was an interesting scene to watch while killing time in the car. The serious-faced American soldiers, looking quite professional, posed for the drawings with no feelings of shyness before the spectators. It was hard to tell which was the customer. Spectators surrounded them, and as soon as someone grew tired of watching and left, another immediately took his place. The rosy faces of the tall Americans stood out like the heads of statues above the mass of bystanders.
“She’s late,” Honda commented to Katsumi as he got out of the car to stretch his legs in the sunlight.
He joined the crowd to look at the American girl. Hardly pretty, she was swinging her blue-jeaned legs. She wore a short-sleeved plaid blouse that looked like a man’s shirt. A shaft of light falling through the buildings fell diagonally across half of her freckled cheek and was regularly deflected by the movements of her jaw as she chewed a wad of gum. She was not particularly cold or arrogant.
The curious stares had not affected her natural poise in the slightest, and the deep-set brown eyes, as if propped open, gazed blankly into space almost without moving.
She looked at the people as though she were watching the air; such a girl might be someone Honda was looking for. When he realized it, he felt a sudden stir of interest like rapidly curling ends of hair that have been set on fire. It was then that a man standing next to him spoke. He had been glancing at Honda’s face for some time. “We’ve met somewhere before, haven’t we?” he said at length.
Honda saw a shortish, rodentlike man in a seedy suit. His hair was cut straight at the temples, and his restless eyes held the glint of an ominous obsequiousness. At once Honda felt uneasy.
“Who could you be? I’m sorry, but I don’t seem to . . .” he said coldly.
“Don’t you remember? We’re peeping chums under the trees in the park,” he said, stretching to whisper in Honda’s ear.
Despite his efforts not to, Honda paled.
“What do you mean?” he said coolly. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else.” A bitter sneer instantly appeared on the little man’s face. Honda knew that this sneer was like cracks in underground strata that sometimes had the power of instantly toppling great buildings. But at the moment there was no real proof. And still better, Honda no longer had any prestige to guard. It was thanks to this sneer that he clearly realized his present lack of social position.
Honda shouldered the man aside and began to walk toward the entrance of the PX. Opportunely Keiko appeared.
She came out, breasts high, dressed in a purple suit and followed by an American soldier whose face was almost completely hidden behind a mountainous armful of paper bags. Honda thought it might be her lover, Jack, but it was not.
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