This was the last happy moment of her life. Happiness is so ugly, thought Shunsuke. At that moment the mother made a gesture as if to run her hand, on which an old-fashioned diamond ring gleamed, over her hip. Perhaps she was saying that she wished to urinate. A middle-aged woman nearby, in a wisteria-colored dress, bent her head toward her and whispered something, then gave her hand to Yuichi’s mother and helped her up. They made their way through the crowd, throwing greetings to the guests, and proceeded to the hall toward the rest rooms.
When he saw that swollen face so close by, Shunsuke was reminded of the dead face of his third wife, and he shuddered.
“It’s not something we see often nowadays,” said Mrs. Kaburagi coldly.
“Shall I arrange for you and Yuichi to meet sometime?”
“It’s rather difficult right after the wedding, isn’t it?”
“How about when he gets back from the honeymoon?”
“Promise? I’d like to have one long talk with that bridegroom.”
“You don’t have any preconceived notions about marriage, do you?”
“Other people’s marriages. Even mine isn’t my marriage but someone else’s. I don’t have anything to do with it,” said this coolly poised lady.
The attendants, at a signal, began to announce dinner. The crowd of about a hundred guests surged toward one of the dining rooms in a body. Shunsuke was placed at the main table with the honored guests. The old writer bitterly regretted that, from his seat, he could not watch the expression of discomfiture that had been flashing on Yuichi’s face since the ceremonies began. Perceptive onlookers could tell that the dark eyes of the bridegroom were surely an outstanding feature of the evening.
The banquet moved along without interruption. As was customary, the bride and groom were applauded as they rose from their seats. The couple serving as matchmakers spared no effort in helping this grown-up yet childish pair of newlyweds. Yuichi had great difficulty with the tie of his traveling suit and had to retie it several times.
Finally, he and the matchmaker were standing near the car for them at the entrance, waiting for Yasuko, who was still getting ready. The matchmaker, a former cabinet minister, importuned Yuichi to have a cigar. The young bridegroom clumsily lit the cigar and looked down the street.
They did not wish to wait in the car; it was too warm, and they were a little tipsy from the wine. So the two men leaned against the shiny car, its surfaces lit intermittently by the headlights of passing traffic. They chatted idly.
“Don’t worry about your mother,” said the matchmaker. “I’ll take good care of her while you’re away.”
Yuichi listened to these kindly words from this old friend of his father’s with joy. Though he thought he had become altogether cold-hearted, he was still quite sentimental about his mother.
At that moment a slender man, not Japanese, crossed the sidewalk from a building opposite. He wore a suit of eggshell color and a bright bow tie. He approached what seemed to be his own late model Ford parked in the street and inserted the key. As he did so a young Japanese appeared behind him and stood for a time on the stone staircase, looking about. He wore a slim, double-breasted suit, obviously tailor-made, with a checked pattern. His necktie, which was vivid yellow, was visible even in the dark. In the light from the building his oily hair glistened as if sprinkled with water. Yuichi looked again and started. It was the young waiter of a few days ago.
The Westerner called to the youth, who jumped into the front seat with practiced ease. His companion joined him, sliding beneath the steering wheel and slamming the door with a loud bang.
“What’s wrong?” said the matchmaker. “You’re white as a sheet.”
“Yes, I guess I’m not used to cigars. I smoked only a little of it, but I feel terrible.”
“That’s not good. Give it to me, I’ll dispose of it.” The matchmaker put the lighted cigar in a silver-plated cigarshaped receptacle and closed the lid with a snap. The noise caused Yuichi to jump again. At that moment Yasuko, in a traveling suit and wearing lace gloves, appeared among a crowd of well-wishers at the entrance.
The two went to Tokyo Station by car. From there they took the seven-thirty train bound for Numazu, on the way to Atami, their destination. Yasuko’s happiness was such that she was barely conscious of her behavior; it made Yuichi uncomfortable. His gentle spirit had always been capable of including love, but now it had become a thin vessel, not really meant for so volatile a substance. His heart was like a dark storehouse filled with ceremonial notions.
Yasuko handed him the popular magazine she had been reading. From its table of contents the word “Jealousy” flashed out in bold type. For the first time he felt able to attach that motive to his own dark impulses. Jealousy was what seemed to be the source of his unhappiness.
Of whom?
He thought of the youth, the waiter he had seen a short time earlier. Here he was bound on his honeymoon journey, in the company of his bride, and he was feeling jealous of a youth he had barely seen. He recoiled at the thought of himself. He must be some strange creature indeed, he thought, without shape or semblance of anything human.
Yuichi rested his head against the linen-draped chair. He watched Yasuko’s downturned face distantly. Surely he could not make her out to be a boy! This eyebrow? This eye? This nose? These lips? He clucked at himself like an artist who had failed in sketch after sketch. Finally he closed his eyes and tried to think of Yasuko as a man. Something perverse in this imaginative process, however, made of the lovely woman in front of him something less lovable than a woman—in fact, more and more the image of something ugly and impossible to love.
Chapter 4 FOREST FIRE IN THE DISTANT TWILIGHT
ONE EVENING early in October, Yuichi ate supper and went to his study. He looked around him. It was a student’s quarters, simply furnished. The concentration of its only occupant loitered there chastely, like an unseen sculpture. This was the only place in the house not yet wedded to woman. Only here could the unhappy youth breathe freely.
Ink bottle, scissors, pencil, vase, knife, dictionary—he loved to see them glitter brilliantly in the lamplight. Things are solitude. When in their happy circle he hazily conjectured that surely this was what the world meant by “family circle.” The ink bottle looked at the scissors and said nothing about whether it had yet taken certain steps regarding their mutually independent reasons for being. The clear, inaudible laughter of that circle. The circle’s only qualification for mutual security ...
When that word “qualification” entered his mind, it gave him pain. The outward peace of the Minami household was like an accusation leveled against him. The smiling face of his mother, who, fortunately, was not suffering because of her kidney condition and had not been hospitalized; Yasuko’s misty smile that hovered on her face night and day; this repose . . . Everybody was asleep; he was the only one awake. He felt uneasy that he should be living with a sleeping family. He was tempted to arouse them deliberately out of their sleep. But if he did . . . indeed his mother, Yasuko, even Kiyo would wake up. And from that instant they would hate him. It was a kind of betrayal for one to be awake while the others slept. The night watchman, however, guards by betrayal. By betraying sleep he protects sleep. Ah, this human watch, maintaining truth beside the sleeping! Yuichi felt a hatred toward the night watchman. He hated his human role.
It was not yet time for exams. All he had to do was look over his notes. Economic history, public finance, statistics -—all his notes were arranged there, transcribed meticulously in tiny characters. His friends were amazed at the preciseness of his notes, though it was a mechanical precision. Mornings in the sunlit autumn classroom, amid the rustling agitation of hundreds of pens, the machinelike character was what particularly marked Yuichi’s pen. What made his passionless jottings look almost like shorthand was his habit of treating thought as nothing more than an exercise in mechanical self-discipline.
Today he had gone to school for the first time since the we
dding. School was a real refuge. Then he had returned. There was a call from Shunsuke. From the receiver came the dry, clear, high voice of the old man.
“It’s been a long time. Aren’t you well? I haven’t wanted to bother you. Can you have dinner with me tomorrow night? I wish I could invite your wife, too, but I’d like to hear how things are going, so this time just you alone. Better not tell her you’re coming here. When she answered the phone, she said something about coming over with you to see me on Sunday; you’d better act on that day as if it were your first visit since your honeymoon. So come tomorrow. The time? Well, five o’clock. Someone else will be here that I want you to meet.”
When he thought of that phone call, he felt as if a great, importunate moth had tumbled across the surface of the page he was studying. He closed his notebook. “It’s another woman,” he muttered—that alone was enough to make him feel thoroughly worn out.
Yuichi feared the night like a child. Tonight was a night when he could at least feel liberated from his sense of duty. This one night, he would stretch himself out luxuriously on his bed; he would receive the coveted reward of rest for having, until the night before, repeatedly performed his duties. He would awaken on pure, unrumpled sheets. This was the greatest of all rewards. Ironically, however, this night his repose was denied him by the promptings of desire. Desire lapped and retreated at the dark edges of his insides, like water on the shore; it retreated and then it quietly stole back again.
Grotesque, passionless acts, over and over. The icy play of sensuality, over and over. Yuichi’s first night had been a model of the effort of desire, an ingenious impersonation that deceived an inexperienced buyer. In short, the impersonation had succeeded.
Shunsuke had instructed Yuichi carefully about contraceptive methods, but Yuichi feared that these methods would get in the way of the vision he had worked hard to construct, and he abandoned them. Reason told him to avoid conceiving a child, but he feared more the embarrassment he would suffer if he failed in the act with which he was immediately concerned. The next night, too, out of a kind of superstition, he came to believe that the success of the first night was facilitated by his avoidance of contraceptive measures, and fearing the obstacles they might place in his path, he repeated the blind actions of the first night. On the second night the successful impersonation became a faithful impersonation of an impersonation!
When he thought of those hazardous nights—cold from beginning to end—he had somehow struggled through, Yuichi shuddered. First night of mystery in that Atami hotel, bride and groom overcome by the same fear. While Yasuko was taking her bath, he went out on the balcony, far from calm. The hotel’s dog barked in the night.
There was a dance hall down below the hotel, where all the lights lit the vicinity of the station. He could clearly hear the music from it. When he looked carefully he could see black human shapes within the windows, moving, stopping when the music stopped. When it stopped he could feel his pulse quicken. He recited Shunsuke’s words to himself as if invoking a charm.
“Just make believe she’s a bundle of sticks, a cushion, a side of beef hanging from a beam in the butcher shop.” Yuichi ripped off his necktie and laced it like a whip against the iron railing of the balcony. He needed to act, to use his power.
Finally, when the lights were out, he had to fall back on his imaginative powers. Impersonation is a superlative act of creativity. While involved in impersonation, however, Yuichi felt that he had nothing to impersonate. Instinct intoxicates man with a commonplace originality, but his anti-instinctive, excruciating originality did not intoxicate him in the slightest. “Guys who do this are never alone, before or after. I am alone. I have to think it up, then do it. Every moment waits, holding its breath for the command of my imagination. Look! At the cold scenery of another of my will’s victories over instinct; at how a woman’s joy blows up like a tiny, dusty whirlwind in the middle of this desolate landscape.”
For all that, it was not right that there was not another beautiful male in Yuichi’s bed. A mirror was needed between him and the woman. Without help, success was doubtful for him. He closed his eyes and embraced the woman. In doing so he embraced his own body in his mind.
In the dark room the two of them slowly became four people. The intercourse of the real Yuichi with the boy he had made Yasuko into, and the intercourse of the makeshift Yuichi—imagining he could love a woman—with the real Yasuko had to go forward simultaneously. From this double vision at times a dreamlike delight spurted. This gave way immediately to a boundless exhaustion. Yuichi several times saw a vision of the empty athletic field of his school after hours, with not a soul visible. In the face of this rapture he would throw himself on the ground. With this momentary suicide the act was over. Beginning with the next day, however, suicide became a custom.
Overwhelming weariness and nausea stalked their honeymoon’s second day. They ascended toward the top of the town, which hung over the sea at a perilous angle. Yuichi felt as if he were displaying his good fortune before men.
They went out on the wharf and for amusement peered through the three-minutes-for-five-yen telescope. The sea was clear. On the top of the cape on the right they could see clearly an arbor in Nishikigaura Park, bright in the morning sunlight. A twosome crossed the arbor and melted into the gleam of a patch of pampas grass. Another couple entered the arbor and drew close together. The forms of the two became one. On turning the telescope to the right they saw a stone-paved road sloping gently upward where, at various points, several groups were ascending. The shapes of each group were etched sharply on the stone pavement. Yuichi was overwhelmed with relief to see these identical shapes following his footsteps.
‘They’re just like us, aren’t they?” said Yasuko. Stepping away from the telescope, she leaned on the parapet, exposing her forehead to the sea breeze. Now, however, envious of his wife’s certainty, Yuichi was silent.
Returning from his unhappy thoughts to the present, Yuichi gazed from the window. The tower windows opened on a view of the Tokyo horizon on the other side of the trolley tracks and the shantytowns where the factory chimneys bristled. On clear days, that horizon seemed to ascend just a bit higher thanks to the smoke. Nights—perhaps from the night shift, or perhaps, too, from the faint glow of neon lights—the skirts of the sky in that vicinity were tinged from time to time with red.
Tonight’s vermilion, however, was somehow different. The edge of the sky was quite clearly intoxicated. Since the moon had not yet risen, that drunkenness stood out in the light of the faint stars. Not only that, the faint vermilion was fluttering. Striped in smoggy apricot, it looked like a mysterious flag fluttering in the wind.
Yuichi recognized it as a fire.
At the same time there was a darkening of the white smoke around the flame.
The beautiful youth’s eyes were cloudy with desire. His flesh throbbed languidly. He did not know why, but he could stay here no longer. He got up from his chair. He had to get out. He had to get rid of the feeling. He went out the front door and tied the belt of the light navy-blue trench coat he wore over his school uniform. He told Yasuko that he had remembered a reference book he needed and was going to find it if he could.
He went down the hill. On the trolley street, into which the feeble light filtered from the meager shanties, he waited for the car. He would go into the center of town with no particular destination in mind. Soon the glaring streetcar staggered around the corner. There was not a seat to be had; the dozen or so standing passengers were distributed along the aisle, leaning against the windows or hanging on straps.
Yuichi leaned against a window and lifted his glowing face directly into the night wind. The distant fire was invisible from here. Was it really a fire? Was it, on the other hand, the glow of a worse, even more unfortunate catastrophe?
There was nobody by the window adjacent to Yuichi’s. At the next stop two men got on and moved in beside him. All they could see of Yuichi was his back. For no reason at all Yu
ichi circumspectly looked them over.
One was about forty, looked like a store clerk, and wore a gray jacket that had been made over from a suit coat. He had a little scar behind his ear. His diligently combed hair was larded disgustingly with grease that made it glisten. The clay-colored cheeks of his long, oval face were covered with thick, long hairs, like weeds. The other was an ordinary office worker, by the looks of him, dressed in a brown suit. His face reminded one of a rat, though he was extremely fair, even pallid. His shrimp-brown, imitation tortoise-shell glasses accentuated his pallor all the more. His age Yuichi could not estimate.
The two conversed in low tones. Their voices buzzed with a nameless, sticky intimacy and a lip-licking joyful secrecy. Their conversation entered Yuichi’s ears relentlessly.
“Where are you going now?” said the man in the brown suit.
“Men have been pretty scarce lately,” said the clerk. “I really need one. When such a time comes, I just walk around.”
“Are you going to H-Park today?”
“That has a bad reputation. Call it the ‘Park,* in English.”
“Oh, excuse me. Do nice boys come around?”
“Once in a while. The best time is right now. Later on there are only foreigners.”
“I haven’t been there in a long time. I’d like to go again sometime. Today’s out, though.”
“You and I won’t be looked at suspiciously by professionals. They are jealous of those who are younger and prettier than we are because they stand in the way of their business.”
The squeal of wheels broke in on their conversation. Yuichi’s breast was turbulent with curiosity. The ugliness of these kindred spirits he was seeing for the first time, however, wounded his self-respect. Their ugliness struck him right where his long-cultivated agony at being different festered. Compared with them, he thought, Hinoki’s face is venerable, and at least his is a masculine ugliness.
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