At the table where a family sat, with Shunsuke, the youngsters were discussing the movies. The eldest son, who had been with the Special Attack Forces, was dressed in a becoming suit and was explaining to his fiancee the difference between the automobile motor and the airplane engine. His mother was telling a friend about an ingenious widow who took orders for dyeing rugs and made stylish shopping bags. The friend was the wife of a former Zaibatsu who, since her only son had died in the war, had immersed herself in psychic phenomena. The head of the family was insistently filling Shunsuke’s beer glass and repeating: “How about that? My family could be made into a novel, couldn’t it? If you took it and described it just as it is—as you can see, beginning with my wife we’re a fine set of characters.”
Shunsuke smiled faintly and looked around at this run-of-the-mill family. Unfortunately, the father’s pride was misguided. There are many such families—families so much alike that there is nothing they can do but read detective stories avidly in order to cure themselves of the sickness of humdrum health.
He must get back to his own table. If he stayed away too long people would suspect him of being in collusion with Yuichi.
When Shunsuke reached the table he found that Yasuko and Mrs. Kaburagi had risen in response to requests to dance. He sat down at the side of Kaburagi, who had been left alone.
Kaburagi did not ask where he had been. He silently poured Shunsuke a highball and said: “Where did Minami go?”
“Oh, I saw him in the hall a little while ago.”
“Is that so?”
Kaburagi folded his hands on the table and stared at the tips of his index fingers, which he held up vertically.
“Look at this, won’t you? They don’t tremble at all, do they?” he said, referring to his hands.
Shunsuke didn’t answer but looked at his watch. He estimated five numbers would take twenty minutes. Counting the time he was in the hallway, that would be thirty minutes—not an interval to be easily borne by a new wife who had come here to dance with her husband.
After one dance number Mrs. Kaburagi and Yasuko came back to the table. The two of them were rather pale. Both had been forced by what they had seen to make an unhappy judgment about themselves, and since they had reason not to discuss it, they were left with little to say.
Yasuko was thinking of her husband, who had just finished two dances with a woman in a Chinese dress. She smiled at him when they danced near, but perhaps because he didn’t see her Yuichi didn’t smile back.
The jealousy and suspicion that had plagued Yasuko while they were engaged and which led her to say to herself, “Yuichi has another girl,” were dispelled once they were married. To be more exact, she dispelled them herself with her newly gained rationality.
Idly Yasuko fidgeted with her gloves—now holding them in her hand, now drawing them on. Wearing gloves of itself gives a person the look of being lost in thought.
Yes. Thanks to her newly acquired rationality, she had cleansed herself of suspicion. Back there in K-, Yasuko had been filled with anxiety and presentiments of misfortune by Yuichi’s melancholy. But when she thought about it at all after their marriage, in her innocent girlish pride she held herself responsible for everything and decided that the reason he had lain awake worrying was her lack of responsiveness to his advances. Looked at in this way, those three nights of limitless torture for Yuichi during which nothing happened were the first evidence that he loved her. He was fighting against desire; there was no doubt about it.
With his extraordinarily strong self-respect, he certainly had feared rejection and froze. She felt she had won the proud privilege of ridiculing, of despising her former childish suspicion that Yuichi had another girl friend while they were engaged. There was, after all, no clearer proof of his purity than that he had refrained from laying so much as a hand on the innocent girl lying beside him silent as stone, her body rigid, for three nights running.
Their first visit to her home was happy. Yuichi seemed in Yasuko’s parents’ eyes to be a completely endearing, conservative youth, and his future in her father’s department store, where he would be especially useful with women customers, was assured.
He seemed to be a dutiful son, upright, and on top of that, inclined to be careful of his reputation.
It was on the first day he went back to school after the wedding that he had started to come home late, after dinner. He could not get around treating some bad companions, was his excuse. Yasuko did not need instruction from her deeply experienced mother-in-law to tell her that this was the way it would be with a newlywed husband and his friends ...
Yasuko now took off the lavender gloves. Suddenly something made her distinctly uneasy. She was horrified to see, right in front of her, exactly like herself in a mirror, Mrs. Kaburagi, wearing the same distraught look. Perhaps Yasuko’s despair was a contagion caught from Mrs. Kaburagi’s inexplicable melancholy. Perhaps that’s why I feel a certain kinship with this woman, she thought. Before long both of them were invited to dance.
Yasuko saw that Yuichi was still dancing with the girl in the Chinese dress. This time she looked past him without a smile.
Mrs. Kaburagi also observed the couple. She did not know the woman. Mrs. Kaburagi’s derisive spirit detested the outrageous pretext of charity, a detestation she expressed in her imitation pearls. She had never come to this dance before and so did not know Kyoko, one of the organizers of the affair.
Yuichi finished the five dances as agreed.
Kyoko returned to the table occupied by her group, accompanied by Yuichi, and introduced him. He was plainly fidgety, because he had not yet made up his mind when it would be well to confess to the lie that his wife had not come. Then a school friend, a cheerful young man who had talked with him at the Kaburagis’ table, came by and, catching his eye, settled matters by saying: “Oh, you deserter! Your wife has been sitting for the longest time alone at that table.” .
Yuichi looked at Kyoko’s face. She returned his look; then she averted her eyes.
“Go, I humbly beg of you. The poor thing,” she said. This counsel, given courteously and in a quiet tone, made Yuichi turn beet red with humiliation. Once in a while a sense of honor serves in place of passion. Impelled by a vigor that surprised himself, he ran to Kyoko’s side.
“I want to talk to you,” he said and led her to a comer. Kyoko was filled with a cold fury; however, if Yuichi had been aware of the weight of passion the fierceness of his actions indicated, he would have known why this beautiful woman got up from her chair and followed him as if she had surrendered. His black eyes accentuating the impression of sincerity and with the air of one deeply in love, Yuichi said: “I lied; I have no words to apologize for it. I couldn’t help it. I thought if I told the truth, you’d never dance five numbers in a row with me.”
Kyoko’s eyes opened wide at his forthrightness. Moved almost to tears out of the womanly generosity that makes for self-sacrifice, she quickly forgave Yuichi, and while she watched his retreating form hurrying off to the table where his wife waited, this impressionable woman memorized the shape of his back down to the tiniest wrinkle in his suit.
Back where he had left them, Yuichi found Mrs. Kaburagi exchanging jokes with the men with new-found hilarity and Yasuko half-heartedly joining in, along with Shunsuke, who was preparing to leave. Shunsuke wished at all costs to avoid a confrontation with Kyoko before these people. When he saw Yuichi returning, therefore, he hastened his departure.
Yuichi felt uncomfortable there and offered to accompany Shunsuke as far as the stairs.
Shunsuke laughed with delight when he heard how Kyoko had acted. He tapped Yuichi on the shoulder and said, “Tonight, please forget about playing around with your boy. This is a night when you had better do your husbandly duty and get your wife in a good humor. Kyoko is going to meet you somewhere again in a few days completely by accident. I’ll let you know when.”
The old man gave him a youthful handshake. He descended the red-carpeted
staircase leading to the main exit, and on the way put his hand in his pocket, where he felt something jab his finger. It was an old-fashioned opal necktie pin. Earlier he had dropped by the Minami home in order to give Yuichi and his wife a ride. They had already departed, but Yuichi’s mother invited this famous friend into the living room and courteously gave him a memento of her dead husband.
Shunsuke happily accepted this gift from a bygone era. He imagined the motherly sentiments she would probably pass on to Yuichi later on: “When you give something like that away, you can look at people with pride.”
He looked at his finger. A drop of blood had congealed there like a jewel. It had been a long time since so much color had appeared on his body. He was amazed at the trick of fate that permitted an old person with kidney disease to do him so unwitting a bodily injury just because she was a woman.
Chapter 7 ENTRANCE TO THE STAGE
IN THAT PLACE nobody asked Yuichi Minami his address or his station. They called him “Yuchan.” It was the place where he went to meet “Eichan,” who had drawn him the childish map.
It was an ordinary tea shop named Rudon’s, opened after the war on a comer of Yuraku Cho. Sometime later it became a club for men of this persuasion. Men who didn’t know what it was came in there in groups, drank coffee, and left none the wiser.
The proprietor was a second-generation Eurasian, a small, neat man of forty. Everyone called this clever businessman Rudy. Yuichi started calling him Rudy the third time he visited there, imitating Eichan.
Rudy had been around the Ginza area for twenty years. Before the war he had a place in West Ginza called the Blues. He had girls there and two or three beautiful young waiters. Homosexuals, therefore, came to Rudy’s place from time to time.
The men who were in the know had the instinct of animals to smell out their own kind, and as an ant is attracted to sugar, so they did not miss a place that had the slightest sign that what they were after was brewing there.
It is hard to believe, but not until after the war did Rudy know that a secret world of this sort existed. He had a wife and children, but when it came to other objects of affection, he felt that nothing more than his own peculiar aberration existed. He simply indulged a penchant for installing beautiful boys in his restaurant. When he opened Rudon’s in Yuraku Cho immediately after the war, he arranged matters so it was always possible to see five or six such waiters there. Thus the place became very popular among the people of that world and finally became a kind of club.
When he realized this, Rudy refined his business tactics. He recognized that when these men came here once to bring warmth into their lonely lives they would never again succeed in separating themselves from the place. He divided his guests into two types: the young, charming, magnetic guests, whose appearance there could bring him success; and the generous, wealthy guests drawn by the magnetism of the place to spend money like fools. Rudy worked harder to take care of the members of the first group, but once, when one of the regular young guests was invited by one of the well-paying guests to go to a hotel, and fled after going only as far as the hotel door, Yuichi heard with his own ears Rudy’s imprecations: “You’re giving Rudy a bad name, aren’t you? All right. You just see if I ever help you to meet any nice men now!”
It was said Rudy took two hours to put on his makeup every morning. He too had the homosexual’s peculiar public habit, not to be condemned, of boasting: “Men made eyes at me and embarrassed me.” Rudy took it for granted that men who gazed at him were all homosexuals. Even kindergarten children, seeing him on the street, must have turned around in amazement. This man of forty wore circus suits; and his Ronald Colman mustache changed its width and its direction with his mood whenever he trimmed it.
The crowd got together as a rule at sundown. There were always dance records on the restaurant jukebox—it was important that private matters not be noised around for all to hear. When a flush, flashy guest had been served, Rudy would move from the comer table, where he always stationed himself, to the counter in order to look at the check. Then, in respectful tones the proprietor himself would intone: “Your check, sir.” With such courtly practice, the guest had better be prepared to pay double.
Whenever a man entered, all the guests would look up. The man coming in would instantly be bathed in glances. Who could guarantee that the ideal sought for for so long would not suddenly take shape and appear through that glass door? Much of the time, however, the light in those glances suddenly faded and went out in disappointment. Appraisal ended in the first moment. When a young guest who knew nothing about the place entered he would be startled to hear, if the jukebox happened to be silent, appraisals of his person murmured at every table. “What’s he? Not much,” they would say, or, “That one; he’s been rolled everywhere,” or, “His nose is small; probably his tool is too,” or, “I don’t like, the way his lower lip sticks out,” or, “He has good taste in neckties,” or “His sex appeal, though, is, in short, zero.”
Every night these box seats looked out on the stage of an empty night street on which some miraculous manifestation was sure to be seen. Religious, one might call it, for it was not far different. One might savor in purer, more direct form the atmosphere of piety and expectation of miracles in the cigarette haze of a homosexual club than in one of today’s indifferent churches. Spreading outside that glass door was their ideal society, a great city conceived in accordance with their outlook. Like the many roads that lead to and from Rome, so countless invisible streets lead from individual beautiful youths scattered like stars in a night sky to clubs like Rudy’s.
According to Ellis, women are fascinated by male strength, but they have no opinions about male beauty. Insensitive almost to the point of being blind, they have a discerning eye for male beauty not greatly different from that of the normal male. Sensitivity to the peculiar beauties of the male is the exclusive property of the homosexual. The establishment of the system of male beauty in Greek sculpture in the field of esthetics had to wait for the advent of Winckelmann, who was a homosexual. When at first the normal boy encounters the fever of homosexual glorification (women are incapable of according to the male such fleshly praise), he becomes transfigured into a dreamy Narcissus. Expatiating on his own beauty, which has become the object of his praise, he imagines an ideal image based on the esthetic ideas of males in general and becomes a full-fledged homosexual. The natural homosexual, on the other hand, cherishes these ideals from infancy. His ideals are those true angels, undifferentiated as to carnal or intellectual; they are akin to the ideal of the Eastern theology which completed its religious carnality through the so-called Alexandrian purification.
The time when Yuichi was to meet Eichan was nine p.m., the busiest hour at the place, and when he entered the door wearing his maroon necktie with the collar of his navy-blue trench coat turned up, he was something of a miraculous advent. Although he did not know it, in that moment he established his supremacy. Yuichi’s entrance on the stage would be a source of legend at Rudon’s for a long time to come.
That evening Eichan left his. place early, and as soon as he passed the door of Rudon’s he said to his young friends: “I really met a terrific one in the park day before yesterday. We spent a little time together that night and I’ve never seen anyone so pretty. He’s coming soon; his name is Yuchan.”
“How’s his face?” said Kimichan, who felt that no youth had a face like his own; he wanted to find fault. Originally he had been a bus boy at the Oasis Dance Hall. He wore a double-breasted, emerald-green suit a foreigner had bought for him.
“How’s his face? He has a manly, deep-cut face. His eyes are sharp, his teeth are white and even, his profile is rather fierce. And you should see his body! He’s an athlete, sure.”
“Eichan, if you get carried away you’ll be ruined. How many times did he do it in that little time?”
“Three times.”
“Amazing! I never heard of someone coming three times. You end up in the sanitor
ium that way.”
“He’s really strong, though. How good he was in bed!” He joined his hands together, then put the back of each hand against his cheeks and postured coquettishly. The jukebox happened to be belting out a conga, and he leaped to his feet and spun about in a wild dance.
“Well, Eichan, did you get taken?” said Rudy, who had been eavesdropping. “And he’s coming here? Who is he?”
“Now, now, the dirty old man gets into it right away!”
“If he’s a nice boy, I’ll treat you to a gin fizz,” said Rudy, whistling innocently.
“You want to bring him around with a gin fizz, don’t you?” said Kimichan. “If there’s anything I hate it’s a usurer.”
The word “usurer” is part of the patois of this world. The idea of selling one’s body for money is at times transformed in this way into the idea of selfish interest.
This was a good time at the place, and it was filled with homosexuals who knew one another well. If an ordinary patron came in the door, he would not notice a sign of anything different except that there happened to be no women. There was an Iranian buyer and two or three other foreigners. There were middle-aged men. There was an affectionate pair of youths of about the same age. They would light their cigarettes, take a drag, and then exchange them.
It is not true there was no sign. Someone once said that homosexuals have on their faces a certain loneliness that will not come off. Besides, in their glances flirtatiousness and the cold stare of appraisal are combined. Although the coquettish looks that women direct at the opposite sex and the appraising glances they direct at their own sex have quite separate functions, with the homosexual both are directed at one and the same person.
Forbidden Colors Page 10