The guests knocked at the gate of the Noguchi house as it was growing dark. The faces of Kimura, the Chief Secretary, and Kurosawa, the Executive Director of the Radical Party, were familiar from political cartoons, and Kazu had already met them at the wedding. Kimura looked like a gentle, doddering old preacher, and Kurosawa resembled a coal miner.
Kazu, accustomed as she was to Conservative Party politicians, found it somehow unbearably funny that Radical Party politicians also exchanged the usual polite greetings when they met, and observed normal etiquette on entering a house. There was something false about these actions, as if they were calculated to throw people off their guard. Kazu found Kimura’s smiling, soft-spoken behavior particularly puzzling. Something about his appearance and manner of speech recalled a quiet old tree dropping a leaf or two in the sunlight every time a gentle breeze stirred its branches.
The two guests showed Noguchi the deference due a senior. Kimura refused again and again to sit in the place of honor, and could only be persuaded with much difficulty.
Kazu sensed that a certain dryness of the skin was common to all three men, including Noguchi. Their skins were parched by long absence from positions of real authority, as some men’s skins are parched by long absence from a woman’s body. Their polite greetings and gentle smiles were darkened by the shadow of an enforced asceticism; Kimura’s gestures of the old professor and Kurosawa’s rather ostentatious simplicity were both rooted in the same life of asceticism.
Kimura politely praised the meal, a mark, Kazu thought, of his social ineptness. Noguchi displayed his usual nervous reaction, his face plainly revealing his embarrassment that cooking that was not his wife’s should be praised. As for Kurosawa, he merely munched away in silence.
“I’m no tower of strength,” Noguchi was saying. “You’re badly deluded if you think I’d make a strong candidate. I’m the forgotten man.”
Noguchi’s tipsiness, increasing with each successive cup of saké, showed itself in the proud repetitions of such disclaimers, and each time Kimura and Kurosawa almost mechanically expressed simultaneous dejection.
Kazu poured the saké for the party, as Noguchi had commanded. It only gradually dawned on her that Noguchi’s disavowal, repeated every five minutes, was being made for her benefit; she was aghast at her own obtuseness. She surely must have recognized ever since her first meeting with Noguchi his old-fashioned, obstinate bashfulness. He undoubtedly felt that to reveal to his wife in the presence of others his political ambitions was no different from letting others see his sexual desire.
Kazu immediately found some casual pretext to step out of the room. She returned to her own room, summoned a maid, gave orders. When the maid had departed, Kazu was left with nothing to do, and she began listlessly to tidy up. Kazu kept Noguchi’s personal accessories in one of the drawers of her bureau. Three little boxes filled with his old, foreign-made cuff links were in the drawer.
Kazu, to pass the time, emptied out the different sets of cuff links on a small table. One set was in solid gold with the royal coat of arms of some small European country, another had precious stones, another in gold—apparently the gift of a Japanese princely family—was shaped like a chrysanthemum, and one set consisted of carved ivory images of Shiva . . . All were probably gifts, but they made up an odd collection.
It was like a collection of shells picked up on summer strands at many places, old remembrances of the sea. Noguchi’s wrists, which they were to adorn, were withered and mottled now, but the shells would always harbor reflections of bygone sunsets. Kazu flicked them like marbles with her fingertips, and listened to the faint, cold clinks when they collided. She wondered if she couldn’t play chess using the cuff links for pieces. Her first choice for the king was the cuff links with the unicorn crest of the small European kingdom. The imperial chrysanthemum cuff links would be the queen, she decided, but somehow this didn’t seem right. The imperial chrysanthemum would have to be the king, after all . . . “I’m sure he’ll accept,” Kazu thought, guided mainly by her political intuition. A joyous excitement welled up inside her. The heavy intellectual walls of Noguchi’s study separating him from herself were surely about to crumble. And, just as surely, the day was coming which would demonstrate that their lives had not already come to a close.
“I’m sure he’ll accept!” Kazu was instantly convinced. She could hear from the room across the hall the unfamiliar sound of Noguchi’s laughter mingled with that of the guests. Kazu deliberately slid open her door and looked toward them. In the lamplight spilling into the hall from the sitting room, waves of rather mournful laughter, like fits of coughing, could still be heard.
The guests departed about an hour later. Kazu thoughtfully telephoned for a hired limousine to drive them back. Noguchi saw the guests to the door, Kazu accompanied them all the way to the front gate. The cold wind had intensified since nightfall, and beyond the clouds frantically scudding back and forth in the sky was the moon, like a drawing pin stuck into a wall.
Kimura’s face under the dim gate lamp looked small and mouselike. The face as a whole was almost immobile, but around his mouth the flesh was curiously pliant and elastic, and when he muttered something in a low voice, this flesh with his mustache would hover unnecessarily around the words.
Kazu, catching him by the shoulder of his suit, abruptly pushed him against the wall. She whispered, “You’ll trust me, won’t you, even though I run a restaurant for the Conservative politicians?”
“Of course, Mrs. Noguchi.”
“Has my husband agreed to run in the gubernatorial election?”
“You certainly know what’s going on! I’m astonished. We couldn’t get an immediate answer, but he promised to give us his decision in the next couple of days.”
Kazu pressed her clasped hands to her breast girlishly. The gesture signified that she was tightening into a plan the thoughts which had flashed into her mind, as she might tighten a loose knot. “Please persuade my husband somehow. As far as money goes—excuse me for mentioning this—please leave everything to me. I promise I shan’t cause the Radical Party any trouble.”
Kimura started to say something, but Kazu had a gift of getting the jump on people in conversation and thereby effectively preventing them from interrupting. “But you mustn’t say a word of this to my husband. Please keep it an absolute secret. I accept full responsibility on that one condition.”
After delivering these remarks with lightning rapidity, Kazu suddenly raised her voice and, intoning the customary parting salutations in clear tones audible as far as the front door, she bundled the guests into the car. “Oh, dear,” she cried, “doesn’t the Radical Party provide you with someone to carry your brief case? Such a heavy brief case to hold on your lap! Well, I must say.”
These final observations were in fact the only ones which reached Noguchi standing in the entrance, and Kazu was later reprimanded for these uncalled-for comments.
11
“The New Life”—The Real Thing
A new feature was added to the daily routine of the Noguchi household. Every Monday a man named Soichi Yamazaki came to deliver a two-hour lecture mainly concerned with the administration of Tokyo Prefecture. Noguchi would open his notebook like a diligent junior high school student and, listening attentively, take painstaking notes, using a fountain pen he had bought twenty years before. All week long he studied intently, reviewed his lessons, and did absolutely nothing else.
Soichi Yamazaki was a protégé of Committee Chairman Kusakari, at whose suggestion he was dispatched to Noguchi’s house. This master of campaign strategy was completely uninterested in working in the public eye; a disillusioned former Communist, he had developed into a daring, alert, red-faced practical politician who turned his back on theories of any kind. Ever since Yamazaki began his visits Kazu had made it her practice to take off Mondays—in other words, to prolong by one day her absence from the Setsugoan. Her first glance at Yamazaki’s face told her that she had found in him the
kind of man who could vow a lasting friendship with no romantic complications. He was dynamic, but with a human touch, rather reminiscent of Genki Nagayama. He was the first of this type Kazu encountered in the Radical Party.
Yamazaki’s human touch was born of political despair. It was strange that it should accidentally resemble so closely the Conservative politicians’ touch, born of an incurable optimism. Kazu instinctively recognized this indispensable attribute of the practical politician. She at once became friendly with Yamazaki.
A telephone call by Genki Nagayama to the Setsugoan had brought Kazu her first knowledge of her husband’s decision to stand for office. Nagayama, laughing on the wire, plunged directly into the conversation. “What a crazy decision! Yes, your husband’s really made a blunder, hasn’t he?”
Kazu’s instinct told her at once that he referred to Noguchi’s candidacy in the election for governor, and it wounded her to think that even before her husband told her the news it had reached the ears of her old acquaintance, Noguchi’s thick-skinned “political rival.” Kazu pretended not to know what Nagayama meant, but deliberately played the part badly. She played it in such a way as virtually to proclaim, under the thin disguise of feigned ignorance, her joy and pride in her husband’s decision. At the same time she adroitly and politically shifted the resentment she then felt toward her husband for his indifference. “What’s all this about a blunder?” she demanded. “If my husband’s been unfaithful, just let it pass. I’m shutting my eyes to such things, and I intend to keep them shut all the way.”
Nagayama, taking no notice of her artifice, related the bare facts. His tone was not like the old Nagayama’s, and seemed to reveal a change of attitude. “Anyway, he’s made a foolish decision. It’ll ruin him politically. What do you intend to do about it? Please, as his wife, urge him on bended knees to change his mind. All right? I’m telling you as an old friend.”
With that he hung up.
During the following days Committee Chairman Kusakari called at the Noguchi house, and the Chief Secretary also paid several visits. The houseboy provided Kazu at the Setsugoan with a detailed register of all Noguchi’s visitors, stating the time of each visitor’s arrival and departure, indications of his business with Noguchi, and the master’s humor at the time—everything.
Three days after Nagayama’s telephone call, news of Yuken Noguchi’s candidacy appeared in the press. It was utterly typical of Noguchi, but that evening, after the news had already been publicly reported, he summoned Kazu home from the Setsugoan, and when the two were alone in the parlor, he informed her, as if he were revealing an immense secret, of his decision. He assumed as a matter of course that his wife never read the newspapers. Noguchi had absolutely no grounds for this belief, but it was normal for him to decide, for example, that Kazu disliked dogs when she did not, or to assume arbitrarily that she liked fermented soybeans, a dish she could not abide. Noguchi, a victim of illusions he himself had created, had apparently come to be convinced that his wife was uninterested in politics.
Kazu listened with the air of one hearing important news for the first time to his proclamation delivered in samurai accents, then made the brave reply—contrary to Nagayama’s suggestion—“Now that you have accepted, I hope you will throw yourself into it completely.”
Ever since the morning she had received Nagayama’s telephone call, Kazu had become the captive of her daydreams. The flames of vitality were lit anew; the tedium of her moribund life had vanished without a trace, and she sensed that days of struggle with her own reckless impulses had begun.
It had been an unusually warm day for winter. Kazu went that afternoon to a piano recital given in Ginza Hall by the daughter of a certain industrialist, a patron of the Setsugoan. As Kazu looked down from the fifth-story window at the twilit Ginza, the unfamiliar rear view of its uneven line of roofs plainly visible, she felt for the street an affection it had never previously inspired in her.
Here and there neon lights had begun to glow, and at a construction site in the distance the steel framework and cranes reaching diagonally across the pale blue sky were dotted with twinkling little lights: the view before her looked exactly like some weird harbor floating over the land. A red and white ad balloon, which had been resting from its daytime labors on the roof of a nearby building, was now beginning an unsteady ascent into the evening sky, trailing a long pennant with a neon advertisement.
Kazu noticed many people moving about in the early evening light above ground level. Two women in identical red coats were climbing the emergency stairs at the rear of a building. A woman with a baby strapped to her back was taking in the shirts left on the line behind a billboard atop some business establishment. Three men in white chef’s hats emerged onto a dirty roof and lit each other’s cigarettes. Nobody was sitting on the chairs by the windows on the fourth floor of the new building across the way, but Kazu caught a glimpse of the feet of a girl wearing red socks as she crossed a green carpet in the back of an office. There was something curiously peaceful about the movements of all these people . . . Chimneys on the rooftops high and low sent up columns of smoke which rose perpendicularly into the almost windless sky.
“I’ll burrow my way into the hearts of each and every one of them,” Kazu thought, intoxicated by her dream fantasy. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could make each of them cast his ballot for Yuken Noguchi! If only I could grab them all in one swoop, right from here! I know that their heads are filled with their love affairs, or worries about money, or thoughts about what they’d like to eat tonight, or their movie dates . . . but somehow I must carve the name of Yuken Noguchi into one corner of their minds. I’ll do anything for that. It doesn’t bother me what people will think or what the law has to say. The distinguished gentlemen who patronize the Setsugoan have all succeeded without worrying about such things.”
Kazu’s breasts swelled under her stiff Nagoya obi, and her fantasies had given her eyelids a puffed, drunken look. She felt as if her feverish body were gradually spreading out in the darkness to engulf the great metropolis.
The bedroom of the Noguchi house had been furnished with twin beds since the wedding. The beds were installed on an old Persian rug, and when Kazu, who was accustomed to sleeping on the floor, lay on her back and looked up at the ceiling, it seemed strangely close, and the walls were strangely oppressive.
Noguchi invariably fell asleep first. Kazu would then switch on the lamp by her pillow, not to read a book or a magazine, but to induce sleep by staring fixedly at something. Sometimes, for example, she would stare at the catches of the sliding doors, shaped like half-moons and delicately worked in metal like swordguards. The catches had for their designs the “four gentlemanly flowers”—plum blossom, chrysanthemum, orchid, and bamboo. The one closest to her was the orchid; in the dimly lit room the blackened metal orchid confronted Kazu’s sleepless eyes.
She had turned off the gas stove a while before, and its warmth now ebbed away like the receding tide. In the course of a similar night, quiet like all their weekends, Noguchi had finally decided to run for office—but by what process of reasoning, his wife had absolutely no way of guessing. His behavior before accepting the nomination, during his deliberations, and after acceptance showed a magnificent uniformity. Even Noguchi must surely have been nervous and worried, must have changed his mind only to revert to his former opinion, but to his wife he revealed nothing of this. All he let her see was his usual spell of coughing before retiring, his usual half-hearted caresses and opaque manner of approach, his usual resignation, his usual sleeping posture, curled up like a dormant chrysalis. Noguchi’s bed suggested somehow a windswept station platform. All the same, he got to sleep more easily than Kazu.
Kazu’s twin bed by comparison suggested a roaring fire. Her body was feverish, not so much with sexual desire as with unbridled imagination. She found it pleasantly cooling to stretch out her hand and touch the dark metal of the orchid. The delicate profile of the chasing transmitted in the dark to
Kazu’s fingertips a sensation of stroking a small, hard, expressionless, fastidious face.
“Yes,” Kazu thought, “tomorrow is Monday. Tomorrow I’ll get hold of Yamazaki and start my operations.”
At three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon Kazu secretly met Yamazaki on the mezzanine of the Shiseido, a tea-room in the Ginza.
Yamazaki’s description of the meeting may be found in The Election in Retrospect, the book he later published. “I had previously called a number of times at Noguchi’s house, and was favorably impressed by his wife’s lively, frank disposition. But the first time I met Mrs. Noguchi alone on the outside, I noticed as I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine of the Shiseido that despite her usual liveliness and energy, she seemed like a terribly lonely woman. It was extraordinary that at this moment, when her head was filled with plans for her husband’s election campaign, she should have created such an impression of solitude. When we began to talk (we did not say a word that was not related to the election), she spoke with her habitual impassioned eloquence and overwhelmed me in a matter of moments.”
Kazu had made a list of items to ask Yamazaki, and she fired her questions straight as arrows. There were probably six to ten months before the election, but this was up to the present governor, who might resign at any time. Kazu personally intended in the meanwhile, though she realized it was prohibited by law, to push forward a pre-election campaign, keeping this a secret from Noguchi. She had such-and-such an amount of money available for this purpose, and she was resolved, in case this should prove inadequate, to mortgage the Setsugoan forthwith. She wanted specific advice on the most effective pre-election campaign, one which would stay clear of the clutches of the law.
After the Banquet Page 9