“Owe your life to him?” She looked up at him, her mouth open.
“That’s right. It happened during the war—we were still young children then. At that time Watanabe was just an ordinary boy. I don’t think anyone could’ve guessed what sort of man he’d become twenty years later, though he did have a tendency to boss the other girls around.”
“The war . . . Was it something to do with an air raid?”
“Yes, it was during a raid. An incendiary bomb landed very close to our shelter, and soon the whole area was turned into a sea of fire. Everybody was running, crazed with fear. Somehow in the confusion I took the wrong direction. Then I broke my leg. I’ve never been able to recall how it happened—I was in such a panic—but I couldn’t go on . . .” For a moment he seemed to look through the distance of twenty years. “I tried to crawl, but the blaze was all around, closing in on me. Then suddenly I stopped being scared. Calmly I thought this was the end of me—I’d be dead in another minute.”
“It was then that Watanabe saved you?”
“Yes. He dragged me onto a bicycle trailer left nearby and began to push me through that inferno, risking his own life . . . Because of Watanabe, I’m alive today.”
Etsuko’s mind began to clear. It was like the morning mist being lifted by a fresh wind.
Yoshihiro sighed and said, “It depends on how you look at it, I guess. I could say I’ve already repaid my debt to him many times over. I’ve often helped him out with money over the years, right up to this day . . . But can money pay for life? This may sound strange to you, but I still can’t turn him away, even today.”
What a warm-hearted person he was, Etsuko thought, deeply touched. Her eyes became misty again.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “Without knowing this part of your past, I’ve been thinking and saying a lot of silly things . . . I’ve been aware of that scar around your neck since the other day. Is it a reminder of that dreadful day during the war?”
“No,” he said, hesitating for a moment. “Since then I’ve been through another terrible experience in a fire. The scar around my neck belongs to the second fire.”
“Oh, dear.” She sighed deeply. Was it any wonder he had a morbid fear of fire when he had been trapped in it twice?
“Okay,” he said, “let’s forget about it for now. Koike and his wife will be here any minute . . . Wait, I think they’re here now.”
The bell rang and Yoshihiro went to the entrance. He opened the door and was faced by a uniformed policeman.
“Excuse me,” the policeman said, raising his hand to his cap. “May I come in for a moment?” He stepped inside.
“What is it?” Yoshihiro asked, and Etsuko was surprised by the strange tension in his voice and the stiffening of his face. He joined his hands behind his back, and she noticed that his left thumb was twitching.
“This is just a routine check, sir. Some goods were stolen from two ground-floor apartments here last night. You’ve nothing missing, have you, sir?”
Yoshihiro’s face relaxed and his thumb stopped twitching. “No, I don’t think so,” he said.
“Haven’t heard any unusual noise last night?”
“No.”
“Or seen any stranger acting suspiciously on the premises?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s all then. Excuse me for the intrusion, sir.” At the door the policeman added, “Please make sure your doors and windows are securely locked when you go out, sir. There’ve been quite a few thefts reported in this area in the past few days.”
He saluted and left, and almost at the same time Mr. and Mrs. Koike walked in. Now completely relaxed and smiling, Yoshihiro introduced Etsuko to them.
Shoichi Koike was about Yoshihiro’s age, with a body that looked masculine and energetic. Despite his youth he was a man of commanding presence, and Etsuko thought he must be a very competent lawyer.
His wife, Reiko, was the type of beauty who made even women stop and stare. She was about twenty-four—twenty-five at the most—and was dressed according to the latest whim of the season. She looked as if she had just sneaked out of a fashion parade. Her diamond ring must have cost him at least a few hundred thousand yen. In her presence Etsuko was painfully aware of her own lack of height and excess weight.
“Well, this is a pleasure,” Koike said cordially, with an easy smile on his strong, handsome face. “You are Mr. Ogata’s daughter, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve great respect for your father—faced him once in a civil action, two or three years ago. He was senior counsel for the plaintiff, and I was junior counsel for the defendant. This may sound funny, but I was greatly impressed by his performance, even though he was representing the other side. I was a raw youngster at the time and had the depressing feeling he was altogether too good for us. We lost, of course . . .”
Etsuko went through the motions—answering questions, paying compliments, smiling cheerfully always at the right time, laughing at jokes—but her heart was not in it. Whenever she had a moment to herself, she kept thinking of the scene which had taken place just before the Koike’s arrival. Yoshihiro’s reaction to the appearance of that policeman had been most unusual . . .
Admittedly, some people felt uncomfortable in the presence of a policeman even if they didn’t have a guilty conscience. But Yoshihiro’s behavior had suggested he was afraid of the police. When he had realized the policeman’s business concerned a simple stealing incident, his tenseness eased immediately . . .
Would he by any chance have a criminal record? The idea cropped up unexpectedly, and she immediately dismissed it. If he had a record, he couldn’t work as a lecturer at a fairly well known university.
But she could think of no other reason for him to be afraid of the police . . . This was torture. Her doubts were like a crazy balloon that kept expanding and deflating all the time.
Sitting beside him in the car, Etsuko glanced at Yoshihiro’s profile. Certainly there was a shadow lurking there somewhere. But even when she tried to look at him with the most critical eyes, she simply couldn’t believe he was a bad man . . .
The Koike couple in the front seat looked perfectly blissful. Somehow they gave Etsuko the impression that every single cell in their bodies was thoroughly enjoying the new married state. If she became Yoshihiro’s wife, could they be as happy as those two? She felt that strange anxiety gnawing at her again.
On the evening of December 19, Etsuko and Yoshihiro were sitting in a Chinese restaurant, enjoying a special dish. It was after seven o’clock, and to her relief their day together had passed without any disturbing incident. This was a change, she thought wryly, feeling that at last she was beginning to regain her peace of mind.
They were about to get up and leave when once again the unexpected happened. But this time it was Etsuko, not Yoshihiro, who turned pale. The moment she saw the two men walk into the restaurant the blood began to drain from her face.
One of them was an old man of about sixty, wearing haori and hakama—the full Japanese dress. She didn’t know him, but she knew only too well his companion, Tetsuya Higuchi . . .
Higuchi noticed her immediately. He stopped at the entrance for a moment and shot her a sharp glance. She closed her eyes without being conscious of it. If this had happened any other time she mightn’t have panicked so much, but only that morning she had asked him on the phone to postpone their date till tomorrow, giving him a plausible excuse. Now she felt as if she had been caught red-handed . . .
She imagined Higuchi boil up inside with rage, march over to their table, demand to know who her companion was, and then run straight to her father and tell him all about it. It was sure to happen, she thought, but there was nothing she could do about it now.
Well, too bad . . . She decided she couldn’t care less and opened her eyes.
&
nbsp; Higuchi seemed to have just made up his mind—he began to walk toward them. Then to Etsuko’s amazement the old man in full dress called out, “Hey, is that you, Yoshihiro?”
Yoshihiro awkwardly rose to his feet and made one or two half-hearted steps toward the man.
“I’m glad to see you, Mr. Kumagaya,” he mumbled as they met.
“How are you, my boy? Haven’t seen you for ages! You’ve changed so much—look so respectable—that’s why I didn’t recognize you straight away.”
“You are looking well, Mr. Kumagaya.” Yoshihiro’s politeness couldn’t hide his discomfort.
Etsuko thought he was either embarrassed by the old man’s emotional approach, or just wasn’t very keen to meet him for some reason. She would have liked to listen to their conversation, but Higuchi had just reached her. He kept his eyes on her but didn’t say anything, and she decided to take the initiative.
She stood up and said, “I’ll introduce you.”
She touched Yoshihiro on the shoulder, and he stopped half way through a sentence and turned from the old man toward them. It was all very sudden and awkward. Yoshihiro looked confused, and she felt her cheeks flush. Only Higuchi remained completely calm.
“Mr. Yoshihiro Tsukamoto, lecturer in economics at Chiyoda University . . . Mr. Tetsuya Higuchi, junior partner in my father’s law firm.”
“How d’you do,” Higuchi said, looking at Yoshihiro like a prosecutor.
“How d’you do,” Yoshihiro echoed, and for a moment there was an ominous silence. Then, as if he had read her mind, he added, “Now, you must excuse us—we have to be on our way . . . Hope to see you again, Mr. Kumagaya, some other time.” He began to walk toward the entrance, his hand firmly planted on Etsuko’s shoulder.
Outside in the chilly night air a little later, she shivered and he tightened his arm around her.
He said, “Isn’t this a queer coincidence? Mr. Kumagaya knew my late father, and the fellow with him happens to be in your father’s firm. It’s a small world, isn’t it?”
“Was Mr. Kumagaya an acquaintance of your father?”
“Yes . . .”
She felt he wanted to say some more but held back for some reason. For her part, she was ready to tell him about Higuchi.
“Yoshihiro,” she said resolutely, “my father wants me to marry Mr. Higuchi.”
She waited for his reaction with bated breath, hoping the next few words would change the course of her life, but nothing happened. He just tightened his arm around her shoulders a bit more and gazed at the neon lights ahead, as if hypnotized by them. She looked up at his face and saw an oddly twisted expression on it, suggesting a conflict in his mind. Or was it just blind anger?
Etsuko felt like bursting into tears. She would have loved to sob, to cry out loudly, to make shrill noises . . .
That night she hardly slept at all, and throughout the following morning kept toying with the idea of calling off her date with Higuchi, pretending to be ill, though she realized this would be a rather transparent excuse. Finally she began to dress. She was ready when Higuchi called in the afternoon.
As she got into his car she was waiting for his questions about Yoshihiro, but he didn’t even raise the subject. He acted as if he had completely forgotten about the whole thing.
If his idea was to punish her by keeping her in suspense, he certainly was succeeding, Etsuko thought. Throughout the afternoon she felt as if she were sitting and walking on pins and needles.
It was not until they had settled down to dinner in a restaurant on the Ginza that he first mentioned the previous night’s incident.
“This Mr. Tsukamoto I met last night—is he really a lecturer in economics at a university?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I wonder.”
“But why?” Etsuko looked at him wide-eyed.
“Well,” Higuchi said, “for a university lecturer he has some strange friends, I must say . . . Do you know who that old man is?”
“No.”
“He’s Sogo Kumagaya, leader of a fairly well known right-wing extremist group.”
“A political group?”
“Yes, and it’s not one of those newfangled terrorist gangs that specialize in blackmail and other criminal rackets. Kumagaya has been right-wing to the core since pre-war days. His organization is called Kokoku Dojinkai. To this day it displays mottoes of the movement which attempted to restore direct imperial rule in the early part of the Showa period. In other words, they’re hopelessly outdated. They claim to be a party concerned only with ideology and high principles, but in their actions they’re not very different from all the other right-wing ratbags. During the US-Japan security pact riot, Kumagaya was seen dashing about at the head of his young followers, wearing a white headband.”
“But what business do you have with a man like that?”
“Not so long ago some of his supporters got themselves into trouble, and I was asked to undertake their defense. So it was necessary for Mr. Kumagaya to brief me on background and some of the facts. I can’t say I’m very enthusiastic about this case—it’s pretty hopeless, anyway—but as you know, I’m duty-bound to do all I can for my clients.” He paused for two gulps of water, lifting the glass to his lips in his best bar-table manner. “What happened was that three chaps from his group were walking past a factory where a strike was being held. A few nasty words were exchanged, and then the young bloods assaulted some of the workers forming the picket line . . . These fellows are like fighting bulls—as soon as they see something red they go for it . . . Well, there isn’t very much I can do for them, really. I was going to base their defense on provocation by the factory workers, but to my dismay the old man ordered me to put the emphasis on ‘activation by an intense spirit of patriotism’ . . .”
Etsuko was too impatient to pay much attention to Higuchi. What had been his father’s connection with this eccentric old man? Had they been close friends? As she asked these questions, her doubts about Yoshihiro began to inflate again.
Higuchi said, “Except for some very old men, most academics have connections with left-wing groups, if anything. When it comes to right-wing extremists, they certainly prefer to remain at a respectable distance. Tsukamoto is quite unusual in this, I’d say.”
“Didn’t you ask Mr. Kumagaya about their relationship?”
“Of course I did, but the old man gave an evasive answer, revealing very little. I gained the impression he might be under some obligation to the Tsukamoto family. And he might have decided it wouldn’t be to Tsukamoto’s advantage if he told me about their relationship. In the matter of personal loyalty, no one can beat these right-wing people. I don’t think I would’ve got any further with him if he’d been in the box under oath.”
Higuchi’s every word was a hammer blow, driving the wedge a little further between Yoshihiro and Etsuko. The waiter had just served the soup, but she was hardly aware of its taste.
When they were having coffee at the end of the meal, Higuchi knitted his brows and lowered his voice till it was almost inaudible.
“Etsuko,” he said, “this may sound a little out of place here, but I’m sure we could establish a fine home together . . . With your assistance as my wife, I think I could become a very successful lawyer . . .” This was the first time since they had started going out together that he spelled out his intentions so clearly. His face seemed to be lit up by the spirit of contest. “My decision to ask you to become my wife isn’t based on reckless impulse or obstinacy. I’ve reached the conclusion there’s no other woman as suitable as you are to become my life partner . . .”
Etsuko didn’t answer. Higuchi was a stiff man, she thought, but he was also steady and totally reliable. As a husband his average would be higher than Yoshihiro’s. On the other hand, she couldn’t help feeling that everything he did was based on calculation, and there was no
warmth in him at all.
“. . . Therefore I’m going to stick it out till you say yes, no matter how long it’ll take. I’ll never give up, no matter what you may feel or have on your mind at the moment.” He raised his cup and drank the rest of his coffee, then once again fixed her with his sharp eyes. “And should a rival appear on the scene, I’m ready to engage him—and he’ll lose his footing in the end.” He roughly slammed down the cup on the saucer, almost breaking it.
4
Two days later Etsuko was spending the evening at the home of Takako Shibazaki.
Takako was one of Etsuko’s friends in the Kinome group. Early last year she had married an official of the diplomatic service, and now he had been suddenly transferred to Paris. They were to leave for the new post at the beginning of the new year, and this was Takako’s farewell party.
Etsuko arrived a little late. All the other women were already there.
Takako came to the entrance to meet her. “This is going to be a real chin-wag session,” she said. “My husband will only stay a few minutes before escaping to his book upstairs. Then the girls can really let their hair down.”
“I’m sorry I won’t be able to see you for years, but isn’t it wonderful—going to Paris? I’m very happy for you.”
“It’s not as wonderful as it sounds. My French is terrible, so I’ve already got a headache. I took some panic lessons, and also tried to practice with linguaphone records, but it’s too late, I’m afraid.”
They reached the visitors’ room. Seven young women were sitting around, and one of them was Kyoko Kirishima, his wife . . .
Etsuko knew Kyoko would be there. She was both prepared for it and afraid of it, and now she was amazed she could take it so well. Yoshihiro’s appearance on the scene since she had burnt Kyoko’s wedding invitation not quite two months ago must have worked wonders, she thought. She had imagined that on meeting her friend again, waves of affection and envy would crash, sending up sprays of emotion. But now she only felt ashamed of having hurt Kyoko by avoiding her for more than a year.
Honeymoon to Nowhere Page 5