Now this unhappy writer, past sixty and still unable to find within himself the power to stand guard over his own will, was using money to eradicate the foolishness that could still cause him trouble under the delusion that he was spending it on beauty. Is there any intoxication more false? Was it not true that Shunsuke had anticipated this indirect betrayal he held against Yasuko now, this crime whose pain tore his heart so exquisitely? Poor Shunsuke, always unhappy, never once the party to blame.
All the while Yuichi was taken with the face of the beautiful youth that stared at him out of the mirror in the lamplight. The deep, mournful eyes under the intelligent brows stared fixedly in his direction.
Yuichi Minami tasted the mystery of that beauty. The face he had always known, filled with the energy of youth, carved with the depth of masculinity, bearing the unhappy bronze substance of youth—it was his own. Until now Yuichi had felt only loathing in his consciousness of his own beauty. The beauty of the boys he loved, on the other hand, filled him with longing. As men in general do, Yuichi forbade himself ever to believe that he was beautiful. But the fervent praise of this old man before him now rang in his ears; and that artistic poison, the powerful poison of his words, loosened those inhibitions that had persisted so long. He now permitted himself to believe that he himself was beautiful. Now for the first time Yuichi saw himself in all his beauty. Within that little round mirror appeared the face of a surpassingly beautiful youth he had never seen before. The manly lips exposed a row of white teeth that involuntarily broke into a smile.
Yuichi could not have known the passion of Shunsuke’s rankling, indeed poisonous vindictiveness. Nevertheless his curious, hasty proposal demanded an answer.
“What do you say? Will you make an agreement with me? Will you accept my help?”
“I don’t know. Right now there are some things I can’t figure out that might cause trouble later.”
Yuichi said this as if out of a dream.
“It won’t hurt if you don’t answer now. If you decide to accept my offer just send me a telegram saying so. I’d like to get things going soon and I wish you’d let me make one of the speeches at your wedding reception. Afterward I want you to move in accordance with our plan. It will be all right. Not only will you never have any trouble, you’ll also get the reputation of being a husband who runs after women.”
“If I’m married—”
“If so, then I shall be absolutely necessary,” said the old man, cocksure of himself.
“Is Yuchan here?” said Yasuko, from the other side of the sliding door.
“Come in,” said Shunsuke.
Yasuko slid the door open and met the glance of Yuichi, who looked up without realizing he was doing so.
She saw in his face the enchanting beauty of a young man’s smile. Consciousness had changed his smile. Never before had Yuichi radiated such beauty as he did at this moment. Yasuko blinked as if dazzled. Then, in the manner of women who have been touched, in spite of herself she felt a presentiment of happiness.
Yasuko had washed her hair in the bath, and while her hair was still wet she had found it impossible to get Yuichi out of Shunsuke’s room. Leaning out of the window, she had dried her hair. The passenger ferry, which started at O-Island, then came to K-, and tomorrow morning in the false light before dawn would dock at Tsukishima, was now entering the harbor, its lights gleaming off the water.
There was not much music in the town of K-. Every time a boat docked, the sound of a popular song could be heard through the summer air from the loudspeaker on the upper deck. The lights of the official greeters from the inns flocked about now, down on the docks. After a time the sharp sound of the docking whistle pierced the night and entered Yasuko’s ears like the cry of a startled bird.
Her hair was drying rapidly and made her feel cold. A few stray strands of hair across her temple felt as if they were not hers but were the touch of cold wet leaves. There was something frightening about the feel of her own hair. The touch of her hand against her drying hair gave her a startling sense of death.
I just can’t figure out what Yuchan is fretting about, Yasuko thought. If he tells me about it and it’s something he must die for, I won’t find it difficult at all to die with him. Surely that thought was part of my intention in getting him to come here with me.
Thus, for a time, while doing her hair, her mind ranged over many things. Suddenly she was seized by the unhappy thought that Yuichi was not in Shunsuke’s room but in some place she was not aware of. She got up and hurried into the hall. She called and opened the door, and then she met that smile. It was natural that she feel a presentiment of happiness.
“Am I interrupting anything?” she asked.
The old man averted his gaze, conscious that her concern, her cocked-head coquetries, were clearly not intended for him. He imagined Yasuko at the age of seventy.
There was a stiffness in the air. As anyone might do at such a time, Yuichi glanced at his watch. It would soon be nine o’clock.
Suddenly the house telephone in the alcove started ringing. All three stared at the instrument as if it had stabbed them. No one moved a finger.
At last Shunsuke picked up the receiver. Then he looked in Yuichi’s direction. It was a long-distance call from Yuichi’s home in Tokyo. He went down to the office in order to take the call; Yasuko went with him, not wishing to be alone with Shunsuke.
After a time the two returned. Yuichi’s eyes had lost their composure. He explained quickly, without being asked: “My mother is suffering from atrophy of the kidney, they believe. Her heart is getting weaker and she’s terribly thirsty, they tell me. Whether they take her to a hospital or not, they want me home right away.” Excitement enabled him to deliver this news, which ordinarily he could not have uttered.
“She keeps repeating all day long that she’d be content to die after seeing my bride. Sick people are just like children, aren’t they?” As he said these words he realized that he had decided to marry. Shunsuke sensed this resolution. A dark joy floated in Shunsuke’s eyes.
“At any rate, you’d better get back, hadn’t you?”
“We can still make the ten o’clock boat. Ill go with you,” said Yasuko. She ran to her room to pack. There was joy in her steps.
Mother love is an extraordinary thing, thought Shunsuke, whose mother had found it impossible to love him, ugly as he was. With all the power of her kidneys she came to the rescue of her son in his moment of danger. Somehow something told her that Yuichi wanted to return sometime tonight.
As Shunsuke marveled, Yuichi was deep in reverie. Looking at his narrow downturned brows, his eyebrows cast in graceful masculine shadows, Shunsuke shuddered slightly. This is really a strange night, he thought. I must be careful about introducing a pressure that wouldn’t go well with his concern over his mother. Never mind. The boy is coming around to my way of thinking.
They barely made the ten o’clock embarkation. The first-class cabins were taken, so they were given two places in a second-class cabin for eight, Japanese-style. When he was told about this, Shunsuke nudged Yuichi, “You’ll surely sleep well tonight,” he said.
As soon as the two young people got on board, the gangplank was raised. On the pierhead two or three men, dressed only in their underwear, held up miner’s lamps and made indecent remarks to a woman on the deck. She answered back with all the power of her shrill voice.
Yasuko and Yuichi were embarrassed by this exchange. Smiling fixedly, they waited until the boat was a fair distance from Shunsuke. Between the boat and pier a silent expanse of water, gleaming evenly as if oiled, slowly widened. Then it grew, gradually and silently, like a living thing.
The author’s right knee hurt slightly from the night air. The pain of neuralgic seizures provided the only passion of many of his months and days. He had hated those months and days. Now he did not hate them at all. The unpredictable pain in that right knee became for him at times a secret refuge for his passion. He sent the clerk with his lanter
n ahead and slowly returned to the inn.
A week later, immediately after he got back to Tokyo, Shunsuke received Yuichi’s wire consenting to their arrangement.
Chapter 3 THE MARRIAGE OF A DUTIFUL SON
THE WEDDING DATE was set for a lucky day between the twentieth and thirtieth of September. Two or three days before the ceremony Yuichi decided that once he was married he would have no opportunities to eat alone. Actually he almost never ate alone anyway; but on the half-formed pretext to do so he walked down the street. On the second floor of a Western restaurant which gave off a back street, he took his supper. Surely this luxury was something a wealthy man with 500,000 yen could afford.
It was five o’clock, rather an early hour to dine. The place was quiet; the waiters moved about sleepily.
His glance fell on the street, bustling in the lingering afternoon heat. Half of the street was extremely bright. Across the way, under the awnings of the stores selling Western goods, he could see the rays of the sun extending into the back of the show windows. Like a shoplifter’s hand, the sun’s rays slowly approached the shelf on which jade seemed to be resting. While Yuichi waited for his food to arrive, that one point on the shelf shimmering in the silence struck his eye from time to time. The lone youth felt thirsty and sipped at his water continually. He was quite uncomfortable.
Yuichi did not know the common truth that a multitude of men who love only men marry and become fathers. He did not know the truth that, though at some cost, they use their peculiar qualities in the “interest of their marital welfare. Fed to satiety with the overflowing bounty of woman in a single wife, they don’t so much as lay a hand on another woman. Among the world’s devoted husbands men of this kind are not few. If they have children, they be-44
come more mother than father to them. Women who have known the pain of being married to philanderers find it wise, should they marry again, to seek out such men. Their married lives are a kind of happy, peaceful, unstimulating, in short, essentially frightful self-desecration. Husbands of this sort find their ultimate justification in the fact that in all the human details of life they rule with a sneer that proclaims their complete self-reliance. To their women, crueler husbands do not exist, even in their dreams.
It takes age and experience to figure out these subtleties. In order to endure such a life, some breaking-in is necessary. Yuichi was twenty-two. Not only that, his utterly crazy patron was consumed by notions that were unworthy of his years. Yuichi had at least lost the tragic conviction that had lent intrepidity to his appearance. He didn’t much care what happened.
His food seemed to be a long time coming, and he began to look idly around the walls. As he did so he became conscious of a gaze fixed upon his profile. When he turned to intercept that gaze, which had come to rest like a moth upon his cheek, it fluttered away. In the corner stood a fair, slim young waiter of nineteen or twenty.
On his breast were two curving rows of buttons in the latest style. His hands were turned backward as if his fingers might have been tapping lightly on the wall. There was something abashed about the way he stood at attention, evidence that he had not been a waiter for long. His jet-black hair gleamed. The languid grace of his limbs went well with the innocence of his small features; his lips were like a doll’s. The line of his hips showed that his legs had the streamlined purity of a boy’s. Yuichi felt unmistakably the stirrings of desire.
Someone called from the back and the boy left.
Yuichi smoked a cigarette.
Like a man who has received his draft notice and spends every effort to use the time until he is inducted in a riot of pleasure and finally ends up doing nothing, he was bored by the endless preliminaries his pleasure seemed to require. As on ten or twenty occasions he had already known, on this one too Yuichi anticipated his desire would vanish without a trace. Some ash fell on the polished knives on his table; he blew it off, and a few flecks collected on the rose in the bud vase.
His soup arrived. The boy he had noticed earlier—napkin on his forearm—brought it in a silver tureen. When the waiter removed the lid and held the tureen over his soup plate, Yuichi drew back from the cloud of steam rising from it. He lifted his head and looked the boy full in the face. They were extremely close. Yuichi smiled. The boy revealed a white canine tooth and for an instant returned the smile. Then he left. Yuichi turned to the brimming bowl of soup before him.
This brief episode, seemingly full of meaning, or perhaps void of any meaning, remained vivid in his memory. Afterward its meaning would become clear.
The wedding reception was held in the annex of the Tokyo Kaikan. The bride and groom, as was customary, sat together in front of a gold screen. It was not fitting, to say the least, that a widower such as Shunsuke sit with them in the role of matchmaker. He was present as the famous and honored guest.
The old man was smoking in the lounge when he was joined by a couple dressed like all the others in formal kimono and morning clothes. The woman, however, stood out above all the others in the lounge with her dignity of mien and her slender, coolly beautiful face. Her serious, clear eyes unconcernedly observed all that was going on around her.
She was the wife of the former count who, with her as accomplice, had extorted 300,000 yen in blackmail from Shunsuk6. To one who was aware of this, the affected detachment of her glance had the aspect of a search for further quarry.
Her stout husband was beside her, squeezing, it seemed, a pair of white kid gloves in both hands. His sidelong glances lacked the quiet confidence of the philanderer as his eyes moved like wary predators about the room. Man and wife had the demeanor of explorers dropped by parachute in an unexplored region. This absurd mixture of pride and fear was a thing rarely encountered among prewar nobility.
The former Count Kaburagi saw Shunsuke and held out his hand. He fumbled with the other scoundrelly hand at one of the buttons of his suit, inclined his head slightly, and, with a broad smile, said, “Go kigen yo!—Cheers.”
Since the institution of the estate tax, snobs had misappropriated this greeting, while it was the silly penchant of the middle class to avoid it completely. Since underhandedness was the outward evidence of the count’s noble arrogance, his “Go kigen yo” gave a perfectly natural impression to whoever heard it. In short, through charity, the snob becomes barely inhuman; through crime, the nobleman becomes barely human.
There was, however, something indefinably revolting in the looks of Kaburagi. Something like a stain in a garment that will not come out no matter how often cleaned, a mixture of discomfiting weakness and audacity, along with a weird, tightly constrained voice—giving one the impression of a carefully planned naturalness....
Shunsuke was suddenly filled with anger. He remembered the Kaburagis’ blackmail scheme. He certainly had no reason to be obligated to Kaburagi because of the polite greeting.
The old man barely acknowledged the greeting. Then he thought that response childish and decided to amend it. He got up from the sofa. Kaburagi was wearing spats over his patent-leather shoes. When he saw Shunsuke stand up he retreated two paces on the polished floor as if he were dancing. Then he remembered that he had not seen one of the ladies here for a long time and greeted her as if sensible of having neglected her. Shunsuke had arisen but now had no place to go. Mrs. Kaburagi immediately came over and led him to a window.
She was usually not given to long-winded greetings. She moved briskly, her kimono moving in correct folds about her ankles. As she stood before the window in which the lamps of the room were reflected clearly against the twilight, Shunsuke was amazed that not a wrinkle marred the beauty of her skin. She was, however, ingenious at selecting just the right angle and just the right lighting at a moment’s notice.
She did not touch on the past. She and her husband worked according to the psychology that if you show no embarrassment the other party will.
“You’re looking well. In this place, my husband looks much older than you.”
“I’d like to a
ge quickly, too,” said the sixty-five-year-old writer. “I’m still committing a lot of youthful indiscretions.”
“You naughty old man/ You’re still romantic, aren’t you?”
“And you?”
“How dare you! I still have a long time to live. As for today’s groom, before you marry him off to play house with that mere child of a bride, I wish you would send him around to me for two or three months of instruction.” “What do you think of Minami as a bridegroom?” As he nonchalantly threw out this question, Shunsuke’s eyes, muddy with yellow blood vessels, observed the woman’s expression attentively. He was absolutely sure that if her cheek quivered ever so slightly, if she displayed the faintest glint in her eye, he would not fail to catch it, enlarge it, dilate it, set it flaming, develop it into the highest state of irresistible passion. In general a novelist does just that: he is a genius at stirring up someone else’s passion.
“I never set eyes on him before today. I’ve heard rumors about him, though. He’s a much more beautiful young man than I thought. But when a young man like this at twenty-two takes an uninteresting bride who knows so little about the world, I foresee a pretty stale romance, and when I do, I get more and more upset.”
“What do the guests he has invited say about him?”
“He’s all they talk about. Yasuko’s classmates, though, are green with envy and finding fault. All they can say is ‘I don’t like his type!’ I can’t say enough about the groom’s smile. It’s a smile filled with the fragrance of youth.”
“How about bringing all this up in your congratulatory speech? Who knows, it may do some good. This marriage is, after all, not the kind of love match that’s so fashionable nowadays.”
“Just the same, that’s what they’re giving it out as.”
“It’s a lie. It’s a wedding of the noblest kind. It is the marriage of a dutiful son.”
Shunsuke’s eyes flicked to the overstuffed chairs in a comer of the lounge. Yuichi’s mother was sitting there. The powder that lay thick on her rather swollen face made it difficult to determine the age of this cheerful middle-aged woman. She was making every effort to smile, but her swollen face prevented it. Heavy, twitching grimaces were continually appearing on her cheeks.
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