Now Yuichi felt embarrassed by the excess of truth that comes with confession. Last night’s three hours had changed the quality of his sincerity.
Shunsuke filled the lady’s sake cup. The sake overflowed and ran over onto her shiny jacket.
Yuichi drew a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and wiped it.
The bright white gleam of the handkerchief somehow made her feel a delicious tenseness.
' Shunsuke wondered what it was that had made his old hand shake so. He had frozen in his jealousy of the woman, whose eyes did not stray from Yuichi’s face. Even though self-indulgence would spoil everything for Shunsuke, and it was necessary for him to suppress all emotion, Yuichi’s unexpected cheerfulness made the old man act irrationally. He reflected about it for a moment: it is not true that it is the beauty of this youth that has caught me and moved me; it is only that I have fallen in love with his unhappiness, I suppose.. ..
As for Mrs. Kaburagi, she was moved by the warmth of attention shown her by Yuichi. With most men she quickly surmised that their kindnesses were for their own benefit; only Yuichi showed her kindnesses she could not help believing were genuine.
Yuichi, on the other hand, felt embarrassed by the rashness with which he had brought out the handkerchief. He felt he had been insincere. It was as if he were becoming sober after a period of drunkenness and was now struck by the thought that his words and actions might be taken as flirtatious. The habit of reflection had at last reconciled him with his unhappy self. His eyes darkened, as usual. Shunsuke noticed it and felt relieved at the joy of seeing something to which he had been accustomed. Not only that, it was as if the luminous youthfulness Yuichi had exhibited earlier was all an artifice designed to help Shunsuke achieve his objectives. The look the old man now turned toward Yuichi had in it a mixture of gratefulness and of understanding.
The original mistake occurred when Mrs. Kaburagi visited the Hinoki home an hour before the time at which Shunsuke had invited her. That hour which Shunsuke had set aside to find out how things had gone with Yuichi she purloined in her usual offhand way, greeting Shunsuke nonchalantly with, “I didn’t have anything to do, so I thought I’d come over right away.”
Two or three days later she would write Shunsuke a letter. One line would bring a smile to his face: “At any rate, that young man was elegant.”
This was not the reaction he expected from a well-bred lady who admired wildness. Was Yuichi frail? Never. It seemed likely, therefore, that what she wanted to convey with the word “elegant” was her objection to what she perceived as a courteous indifference in the way Yuichi treated women.
Now, away from his women, alone with Shunsuke, he was obviously relaxed. Shunsuke, long accustomed to stiff, polite young admirers, enjoyed watching him. This was what Shunsuke would have called elegant.
When it came time for Mrs. Kaburagi and Yuichi to go home, Shunsuke suggested that Yuichi come with him to his study to help find the book he had promised to lend him. Yuichi looked mystified for a moment; Shunsuke winked. It was his method of getting the youth away from the woman without being rude. Mrs. Kaburagi had never read so much as one book.
The sixteen-by-sixteen-foot library, whose windows were festooned outside with masses of the hard, armor-like magnolia leaves, was next to the study wherein the diary once filled with hatred and the works overflowing with magnanimity were still being turned out. Few people were ever admitted here.
The beautiful youth followed unconcernedly into the very heart of the odor of mildew and leather and dust and gold foil. Shunsuke felt that even the most important works of his large and imposing collection were blushing in shame. Before life itself, before this gleaming, living work of art, most of his works seemed useless and therefore embarrassing.
The gold on the covers and spines of his specially bound collected works had not lost its brightness, but the gold on the cropped edges of the assembled pages of expensive paper almost reflected the features of a human being. When the young man took out one of these works, Shunsuke felt as if the deathly odor of the accumulated documents was purified by the youthful face in the shadow of this great quantity of pages.
“Do you know of anything in the Japanese Middle Ages like the worship of the Virgin Mary in European ^medievalism?” Shunsuke asked. Taking it for granted that the answer would be negative he continued: “It was a worship of the catamite. It was a time when the catamite was given the seat of honor at the banquet and was the first to receive the Lord’s sake cup. I have a reproduction of an interesting and esoteric book of that period.” Shunsuke took a manuscript of slender Japanese binding from the shelf at hand and showed it to Yuichi. “I had a copy made from a book in the Eizan library.”
Yuichi couldn’t read the characters on the cover— “Chigokanjo”—and he asked the old man about them. “ ‘Chigokanjo,’ the Anointment of the Catamite, that is. This book is divided into the Anointment of the Catamite and The Mysteries of the Great Cult of Catamite Worship, with the name Eshin under the title The Mysteries of the Great Cult of Catamite Worship, but of course that is a barefaced lie. He lived in a different time. What I want you to read is a section of The Mysteries of the Great Cult of Catamite Worship that goes into detail concerning the miraculous ceremony of the caress. What subtle technical terminology indeed! The organ of the boy that was loved became the ‘Flower of the Law,’ the organ of the man loving him was called the ‘Fire of Darkness.’ What I’d like you to understand is this idea of the Anointment of the Catamite!”
He nervously riffled the pages with his aged fingers. He read one line aloud: “ ‘Thy body is the deep seat of holiness, the ancient Tathagata. Thou art come into this world to save the multitude.’.
“The word ‘thy’ here,” said Shunsuke, “shows that a child is being addressed. ‘From today forward we shall add the character Maru to your name, and you shall be called so-and-so Maru.’ After the naming ceremony, it was customary to recite that mystical phrase of praise and admonition. However”—Shunsuke’s laugh had a tinge of irony— “let’s talk about how your first step toward salvation has gone. It’s a success, it seems.”
For a moment Yuichi failed to understand.
“When Mrs. Kaburagi sees a man who interests her, it is said that within a week something happens. That’s the truth. There are countless instances. The intriguing thing, however, is that even if a man whom she is not interested in pursues her, something will come just that close to happening. At the last critical stage, though, there is a certain fearful contrivance. I got caught by it. In order not to disturb your illusions about this lady, I won’t tell you what it is. Just wait a week and you and she will come to a critical moment. But you will cleverly escape—of course, with my help. And let another week go by. There are all kinds of ways to tantalize her so that she won’t give you up. Just let another week go by. Then you will achieve a terrific power over that woman. In short, you will take my place and save her.”
“But she’s someone else’s wife,” said Yuichi innocently.
“That’s just what she says. ‘I am someone else’s wife,’ she announces. She doesn’t appear to be separated from her husband, but she isn’t faithful to him either. Whether her failing is her inconstancy or her eternal fidelity to a husband like hers, a third party simply cannot distinguish.”
When Yuichi laughed at this irony, Shunsuke teased him with the comment that he was laughing like a happy fool today. Since marriage had worked out well, surely he now liked women, the highly suspicious man probed. Yuichi told him what had happened. Shunsuke was amazed.
As the two descended to the Japanese room, Mrs. Kaburagi was whiling away the time by smoking. Her cigarette was held tightly between her fingers as she pondered. She was thinking about the large young hands she had just been looking at. He had told her stories about sports— about swimming and high jumping, both solitary sports. If the word solitary was not right, they were at least sports that could be participated in without a partner. Why did this you
th choose such sports? And what about dancing? Suddenly Mrs. Kaburagi felt a pang of jealousy. She had thought of Yasuko. She forced herself to concentrate upon the solitary image of Yuichi.
Somehow, she thought, that man is like a wolf that avoids the pack. It is not that he is like a renegade; surely the energy locked up inside him is not rebellious or subversive. What is he made for? Surely for some intense, vast, deep, absolutely dark, useless something. Beneath that man’s clear, transparent laughter, a metallic despair lies submerged like a weight.
That simple, warm palm, enfolding security like a farmhouse chair ... I’d like to sit on it. Those brows like narrow-bladed swords ... his double-breasted blue suit becomes him. His movements, like those of a graceful, alert wolf when he senses danger, twists his body and points up his ears. That innocent drunkenness! As a sign that he couldn’t drink any more, he put his hand over his cup, and as he twisted his face at an angle and looked down drunkenly, his glossy hair fell right over his eyes. I felt the wild urge to reach out and grasp that hair. I wanted his hair oil to cling to my hand. My hand seemed as if it would suddenly reach out...
She lifted the languid gaze that had become second nature to her toward the two men who had just come down. On the table stood a bowl filled with grapes and half-filled coffee cups. She felt too independent to say, “You have been away a long time,” or “Would you help me get home?” or words of that sort. So she greeted the two of them without a word.
Yuichi looked at the solitary figure of the woman so engulfed by rumor. He felt for some reason that this woman and he were doubles. With nimble fingers she stubbed out her cigarette in the tray, peered a moment in the mirror in her handbag, and stood up. When she left, Yuichi followed her.
The woman’s actions amazed Yuichi. She never said a word to him. She took the liberty of calling a cab; she took the liberty of ordering it to the Ginza; she took the liberty of escorting him to a bar; she took the liberty of entertaining him with the help of the waitresses; and she took the liberty of escorting him back toward his home.
At the bar, she deliberately took a seat apart from him and stared at him as he sat in the midst of a swarm of women. Unused to a place like this, unused also to his suit, Yuichi now and then, with a charming gesture, pulled from his coat sleeves the white cuffs that kept hiding themselves. Mrs. Kaburagi enjoyed it greatly.
In the narrow space between the chairs, the two danced for the first time. Under a palm in the comer of the bar, the hired musicians played. Dance that threaded its way through the chairs, dance that threaded its way through the cigarette smoke and the endless laughter of the drunks . . . the woman touched the back of Yuichi’s neck with her fingers. Her fingers brushed against his hair, tough as summer grass. She lifted her eyes. Yuichi’s eyes were turned away. She was excited by that. For a long time she sought those haughty eyes that never would look at a woman unless she fell on her knees. . ..
When a week had gone by he had received no word from her. Shunsuke, who had got that elegant note two or three days later, heard of this miscalculation from Yuichi and was appalled. On the eighth day, however, Yuichi received a long letter from her.
Chapter 6 THE VEXATIONS OF WOMANHOOD
MRS. KABURAGI looked at her husband beside her. Not once in the past ten years had she slept with him. What he did, nobody knew, least of all his wife.
The income of the Kaburagi household was the natural result of his laziness and his villainy. He was a member of the board of directors of the Racing Society. He was a member of the Council for the Protection of Natural Wonders. He was the president of the Far East Marine Products Corporation, which produced moray leather for handbags. He was the titular head of a dressmaking school. On the side he speculated in dollars. When his funds ran short, he took advantage of harmless suckers like Shunsuke and practiced some gentlemanly villainy. To him it was a kind of sport. From his wife’s foreign lovers he exacted consolation money on a sliding scale. Some who feared scandal, like a certain buyer, produced 200,000 yen without being asked.
The love that joined this couple together was a model of connubial affection; it was the love of partners in crime. The sexual loathing in which she held her husband was an old story. Her present transparent hatred born of worn-out sexuality was no more than the tightly knotted bond of criminals. Since chicanery constantly isolated them, it was necessary that they live together as they lived in air, by random, long-term habit. Nevertheless, at the bottom of their hearts the two longed to be divorced. The reason they had not yet managed to break apart was only that they both wished to do so. For the most part divorce occurs only when one side does not want it.
The former Count Kaburagi always labored to maintain his fine complexion. His too meticulously groomed face and mustache gave the unwitting impression of manmade filth. His somnolent eyes moved restlessly under their double lids. His cheek rippled now and then like water in the wind, so he was in the habit of clutching the skin of his smooth cheek with a white hand. He prattled to his acquaintances with a cloying aloofness. When he addressed people he did not know well, his high and mighty attitude put them off.
Mrs. Kaburagi looked at her husband again. It was a bad habit. She never looked at his face. When she was thinking, when she was attacked by boredom, when she was visited by disgust, she looked at her husband as an invalid stares at a wasted hand. One blockhead who noticed this look, however, started the rumor that she was still as crazy about her husband as ever.
They were in the lounge that gave off the ballroom of the Industrial Club. Five hundred members of The Monthly Charity Ball Society were gathered there. In accordance with the false splendor of the occasion, Mrs. Kaburagi wore over the bodice of her white chiffon evening gown a necklace of imitation pearls.
She had invited Yuichi and his wife to the ball. In the bulky letter that accompanied the two tickets were ten or so sheets of blank paper. She wondered just how he must have reacted on seeing those blank pages. He would not have known that she had inserted in the envelope the same number of sheets that made up the passionate letter she had written first and then burned.
Mrs. Kaburagi was an impetuous woman. She did not believe in the vexations of womankind. Like the heroine of Sade’s novel Juliet, who it was predicted would come to no good end, thanks to the indolence of vice, she unfortunately arrived at the opinion that she was somehow loafing on the job since that uneventful evening spent with Yuichi. She was, in fact, indignant. She had wasted so many hours with that boring young man. Not only that, she rationalized that her laziness was to be ascribed to the fact that Yuichi was quite deficient in charm. This way of thinking set her free to some extent. She was shocked to realize, though, that all the other men of the world seemed to have lost their charm.
When we fall in love we are filled with the sense of how defenseless human beings are, and we tremble at the daily existence we have led in blissful obliviousness until this time. For this reason people are occasionally made virtuous by love.
As the world sees it, Mrs. Kaburagi was almost old enough to be Yuichi’s mother. Perhaps for this reason she was conscious that Yuichi might be held back by the taboo against love between mother and son. She thought of Yuichi in the same way the world’s women might think of their dead sons. Were not these symptoms evidence that her intuition had perceived in his haughty eyes how impossible were her wishes and that she had fallen in love with that impossibility?
Mrs. Kaburagi, proud that she never dreamed about men, saw in her dreams the innocent lips of Yuichi speaking and shaping themselves as if in complaint. She interpreted those dreams to mean that she was to be unlucky. For the first time she felt the need to protect herself.
This was the only reason that this woman, who had the reputation of becoming sexually intimate with any man within a week’s time, had accorded Yuichi such exceptional treatment. In the effort to forget him, she had made up her mind not to see him. On a whim, she wrote him a long letter she had no intention of mailing. She wrote it with
a smile on her face, stringing together half-jesting, seductive phrases. When she read it over, her hand began to tremble. Afraid to read more, she struck a match and set fire to the pages. They flamed up more violently than she had expected, so she hastily threw open the window and cast them into the rain in the garden below.
The flaming letter fell halfway on the baked earth under the eaves and halfway in a puddle. It burned for a while longer—it seemed a long, long time. For some reason or other she put her hand to her hair. A white substance came away on her fingertips. The fine ash from the burning paper had tinged her hair as does remorse.
Rain? she wondered ... the music had stopped while the bands changed. The sound of countless approaching feet advanced like rain. Through the wide-open doors leading to the balcony, one had a quite ordinary view of a city evening—the starlit sky and the sprinkle of lights from the windows of tall buildings. The white shoulders of crowds of women, warmed by dancing and wine despite the night air, moved smoothly and imperturbably back and forth.
“It’s young Minami. Mr. and Mrs. Minami, over there,” said Mr. Kaburagi. His wife picked them out at the congested threshold where they stood scanning the lounge.
“I invited them,” she said. Yasuko led the way as they threaded through the crowd and approached the table. Mrs. Kaburagi greeted them with perfect composure. When she had seen Yuichi without Yasuko, she had felt jealousy toward her. Why she breathed easier when Yasuko stood beside him, Mrs. Kaburagi could not explain.
She barely looked toward Yuichi. She directed Yasuko to the chair beside her and praised her charming couture.
Yasuko had secured the imported cloth cheaply from the buying office of her father’s department store and had ordered it early for her fall wardrobe. Her evening gown was of an ivory-colored taffeta. The billowing skirt did justice to the effect of the stiff, cold, voluminous taffeta, on which the grain of shifting light flowed and opened up its quiet, silver, dead, long, slender eyes. Color was provided by a cattleya pinned to her bodice. The faint yellow, pink, and purple vellum, surrounded by violet petals, imparted the coquetry and shyness peculiar to members of the orchid family. From her necklace of little Indian nuts strung on a yellow gold chain, from her loose lavender elbow-length gloves, from the orchid on her bodice, the fresh odor of perfume like the air after a rain wafted its charms.
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