Yuichi was not, however, displeased to see before him such clear evidence of his power. He was rather jealous of the drunken fear the woman was experiencing. This Narcissus was unhappy that Mrs. Kaburagi, unlike her clever husband, would not allow him to intoxicate himself with his own beauty.
“Why,” Yuichi fidgeted, “why won’t she let me lose myself as I would like to? Is she going to leave me in this cloying loneliness forever?”
Mrs. Kaburagi moved to a distant chair and closed her eyes. The front of her lemon-colored sweater rolled in waves. The continuous rattling of the glass door seemed to shrivel the skin of her temples. Yuichi felt she had suddenly aged by three or four years.
In this dreamlike state, Mrs. Kaburagi did not know how she was going to get through this short tryst of one hour. Something had to happen. A great earthquake or explosion, some catastrophe had to come and blow them both to smithereens. If not that, during this painful assignation she would welcome having her body turned to stone by slow, ineluctable torture.
Suddenly Yuichi cocked his head to one side. He had the expression of a young animal concentrating on a distant sound.
“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Kaburagi said. Yuichi did not answer.
“What do you hear?”
“Wait a minute. I just thought I heard something.”
“Aren’t you awful! You’re just doing that because you’re bored.”
“There, I heard it again. It’s a fire-engine siren. Things will burn well today.”
“You’re right—they sound as if they’re coming down the road by the gate. I wonder where.”
The two looked at the sky. All they saw was the second story of the main house, now an inn, towering on the other side of the hedge of the little garden.
The siren approached with a clamor. In the wind the sound of the wildly beaten alarm bell rose and suddenly retreated. Again there was only the rattling of the glass door.
Mrs. Kaburagi got up to change her clothes. Yuichi idly went to the stove that was only faintly warm and stirred the coals with a poker. It sounded as if he were stirring bones. The coal was all but consumed.
Yuichi opened the door. He bathed his face in the wind.
My, this is good, he thought. This wind doesn’t give you any time to think.
Mrs. Kaburagi appeared; she had taken off her slacks and put on a skirt. In the dimness of the hall only the freshness of her lipstick was visible. She saw Yuichi sticking his head out into the wind but said nothing. Her last-minute primping, her way of holding up her spring coat in one hand and of signaling simply that she was going out, made her look as if she had lived with this youth for a year. This phony wifely affectation seemed to Yuichi to be an insinuation of some kind.
He walked as far as the gate with her. There was another little garden gate along the path that led from the entranceway to the street outside. On either side stood a hedge the height of a man. The hedge was covered with dust. Its greenness had no strength.
On the other side of the garden gate, the sound of Mrs. Kaburagi’s high-heeled shoes along the paving stones halted. Yuichi, wearing a pair of the sandals that were kept in the entranceway, followed her, but was stopped by the closed gate. Thinking she was playfully holding it closed, he pushed against it. She resolutely pressed the bodice of her lemon sweater against the woven bamboo in the gate and held it closed with all her strength. There was a hostile earnestness in her effort. The youth drew back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“It’s all right. This is far enough. If you come with me any farther, I won’t be able to go.”
She walked parallel to the hedge and stood on the other side. The hedge hid the lower half of her from sight. Her hair—she wore no hat—waved in the wind, clung to the edges of the leaves of the tight-clipped hedge. She wore a gorgeous watch that looked like a little gold snake around her wrist. Her white hand moved and loosened it.
Yuichi stood in front of Mrs. Kaburagi with the hedge between them. He was taller than she. He placed his arms lightly on the top of the hedge, then bent his face toward it and looked at her. His face was hidden except for his eyes. The wind again came down the dusty little path. It mussed Mrs. Kaburagi’s hair and blew it around her face. Yuichi lowered his head to shield his eyes.
This is the way it is, Mrs. Kaburagi thought. Even in this short period when our eyes try to meet, something comes between us. The wind let up. The two searched each other’s eyes. Mrs. Kaburagi no longer knew what emotion she wished to read in Yuichi’s eyes. I love something I do not understand in the slightest, something dark, she thought —clear, limpid darkness. As for Yuichi, he was uneasy to think that everything he couldn’t fathom hung on the slight emotional displays of such moments, that other people would not stop finding in him something that went beyond what his consciousness was able to detect. That truth revolved again and enriched his consciousness—it was almost as if he were thinking about someone else.
Finally, Mrs. Kaburagi burst out laughing. It was a forced laugh, a laugh of parting.
This separation, even if it ended with her return in two hours, was like a rehearsal for a complete break, Yuichi thought. He was reminded of the many solemn rehearsals for military inspections and graduation ceremonies in his middle school days. The representative of the class would carry an empty lacquered tray—containing no diploma— and back away respectfully from the principal’s chair.
After Mrs. Kaburagi left, he went back to the vicinity of the stove and picked up an American fashion magazine. Presently a telephone call came from Nobutaka. Yuichi told him his wife had departed. Nobutaka decided to give the conversation a personal turn; he broke into his ridiculous cat-petting tone: “Who was the young man I saw you walking with in the Ginza the other day?” He always asked wheedling questions like this on the phone. Yuichi would sulk if he put them to his face.
Yuichi answered: “It was just a friend. He asked me to come with him to look at some suit materials, so I did.”
“Do you walk with ‘just friends’ with your pinkies hooked together?”
“You don’t seem to have any business to talk about. I’m hanging up.”
“Wait a minute. Yuchan, I shouldn’t have said that. When I heard your voice, I couldn’t resist. I’m coming to see you right now by car. Don’t go anywhere until I get there. Well? Answer me.”
“All right. I’m waiting—Mr. Chairman.”
Nobutaka arrived thirty minutes later.
In the car, Nobutaka realized that in all he could remember of Yuichi in the past several months there was never a false note. Whatever the luxury or the splendor, he met it all without surprise. What is more, he never seemed to be guilty of the flimsy expedient of deliberately warning himself not to be surprised. He wanted nothing, and so one wished to give him all, but one never found he was any the more affectionate in his gratitude. Even if one took him among nobles and monks, the hoi-polloi, the good breeding of this beautiful youth and his complete freedom from pretense made people take him at the highest value. In addition to all that, he was spiritually cruel. This was the reason Nobutaka’s dreams were built to a height greatly beyond necessity.
Nobutaka was a master of concealment. He had succeeded in seeing his wife every day without ever being caught red-handed. He gave himself up to the joy of savoring his own slyness. But he was becoming extremely deficient in prudence.
Without so much as removing his overcoat, Nobutaka proceeded up to his wife’s sitting room, where Yuichi waited. The maid saw that he had not taken off his coat; she stood behind him in confusion, wondering what she was supposed to do. “And what are you gawking at?” he said testily.
“Your coat, sir,” she said hesitantly.
He tore the coat off and flung it into her arms. Then he said to her loudly: “Go down there, and if I want anything I’ll call.”
He tapped the youth’s elbow, led him to the concealment of the curtains and kissed him. Whenever he came in contact with the roundness of Yuichi
’s lower lip, he went mad. The gold buttons on the chest of Yuichi’s uniform collided with Nobutaka’s tie clasp with a sound like gnashing teeth.
“Let’s go upstairs,” said Nobutaka.
Yuichi pulled away, looked him in the face and giggled: “My, you do like it, don’t you?”
Five minutes later, the two of them were in Nobutaka’s den, “conferring.”
It must be said it was no accident that Mrs. Kaburagi got home earlier than planned. In her hurry to get back to Yuichi, she looked for a cab and found one right away. When she got to the office her business was rapidly transacted. Then, too, that “friendly” foreigner offered to drive her home. His car sped. When he dropped her off at their gate, she invited him in, but the foreigner was pressed for time, and promising to come another time, drove off.
Moved by a sudden impulse—not at all an extraordinary thing with her—she entered from the garden and ascended to the sitting room from the veranda. She thought she would surprise Yuichi, who should have been there.
The maid met her and told her that the count and Yuichi were having a conference in the second-floor den. She decided that she would like to see Yuichi taking part in a serious conference. She wanted to see Yuichi involved in something while unaware that she was looking.
Out of a surplus of love, she wished to peep for a moment at the beloved image of Yuichi in a situation without her, her participation suppressed—to see in the eternal form his image assumed when she was not there the vision of happiness her appearance for one moment would have destroyed.
Keeping the sound of her footsteps quiet, she ascended the staircase and stood by her husband’s den. The door had been closed, but the latch had not hooked. So there was a crack of an inch or two in the door. She stood against the door and peered into the room.
Thus Mrs. Kaburagi saw what she was bound to see.
When Nobutaka and Yuichi came down, Mrs. Kaburagi was nowhere to be found. The documents had been placed on the table. An ash tray served as a paperweight. In the ash tray a cigarette, barely smoked, lipstick clinging to it, had been stumped out. The maid said only that her mistress had come home and seemed to have gone out after a short time.
The two awaited her return, but when she did not arrive, they went to town to have a good time. Yuichi got home about ten o’clock.
Three days went by. Mrs. Kaburagi had still not returned.
Chapter 19 MY HELPMATE
YUICHI WAS EMBARRASSED about visiting the Kaburagi home. Nobutaka had to call and leave word many times before he finally complied one evening.
When, some days earlier, Nobutaka Kaburagi and Yuichi had come downstairs and failed to find Mrs. Kaburagi, Nobutaka was not greatly concerned. When a day passed and she had not returned, he began to worry. This was no ordinary absence. There was no doubt that she was concealing her whereabouts. What was more, there could be only one reason why she had disappeared.
On this evening the Nobutaka whom Yuichi saw was a different person. He was haggard; he needed a shave—a state Yuichi had never seen him in before. The cheeks that always had such good color were baggy and had lost their glow.
“Hasn’t she come back yet?” Yuichi said. He sat down on the arm of the sofa in the den and tapped the end of a cigarette against the back of his hand.
“That’s the way it looks. We were seen.”
This laughable solemnity was so unlike the usual Nobutaka that Yuichi agreed with him purely out of cruelty: “I suppose so.”
“That’s the way it looks. I can’t think of anything else.”
Actually, Yuichi had noticed that the latch was not in place, and had realized immediately what might have happened. His extreme embarrassment had come to be diluted after a few days by a sense of liberation. At the same time he fell into the coldly heroic state of feeling neither embarrassment for himself nor sympathy for Mrs. Kaburagi.
This was why Nobutaka seemed ridiculous in Yuichi’s eyes. He suffered pain and lost weight only because he had been “seen.”
“Have you notified the Missing Persons Bureau?”
“I don’t like to do that. It isn’t that I don’t have some idea.”
Yuichi observed that Nobutaka’s eyes were misty, and he marveled. Then Nobutaka said: “I hope she hasn’t done anything regrettable.”
These words, incongruously sentimental as they were, pierced Yuichi’s heart. There had never been one word to indicate so clearly the spiritual harmony between this strange couple. Only a heart forced to feel tremendous understanding of the love that his wife felt for Yuichi would be capable of such minute powers of the imagination. That same heart would have been wounded in the same degree by his wife’s spiritual unchastity. In the consciousness that none other than his own wife was in love with the person he himself loved, Nobutaka became a cuckold twice over; what is more, he tasted the pain of using his wife’s passion to whip up his own. The wounds of this heart Yuichi now saw for the first time.
This is how necessary Mrs. Kaburagi has been to Count Kaburagi, Yuichi thought. Perhaps it was beyond the youth’s powers of understanding. However, through these considerations, Yuichi momentarily arrived for the first time at a supremely tender feeling toward Nobutaka. Did the count see this ever so tender look in the eyes of the one he loved?
Nobutaka looked down. He was worn out, his confidence gone; his corpulent body, in a flashy dressing gown, was slumped in a chair. He held his downturned cheeks in both hands. His hair, generously oiled and too abundant for his years, made the baggy skin of his unshaven face seem grimy. He avoided the youth’s gaze. Yuichi, however, studied the wrinkles across his neck. Suddenly he remembered the faces of the fellows he had seen in the streetcar that first night in the park.
From that moment of gentleness, Yuichi returned to a more appropriate cruel coldness. I shall become more and more cruel to this man. That’s what must happen, he thought.
The count forgot the existence of the cold lover in front of him. He thought earnestly of the missing helpmate he could not forget and of the long years they had lived together and sinned together, and he wept. Left behind as they were, he and Yuichi shared the same sense of isolation. They were like two castaways on a raft; for many minutes they exchanged not a word.
Yuichi whistled. Nobutaka lifted his head, like a dog that has been called. But he saw only the teasing smile of a youth.
Yuichi poured cognac into a glass. Holding the glass, he went to the window, opened the curtain. There was a banquet going on, with many guests, at the main house this evening. The light from the great hall showered down on the evergreen trees and on kobushi flowers in the inn garden. The sound of singing, so out of place in this residential quarter, was faintly audible. It was a very warm evening. The wind had died down; the sky had cleared. Yuichi felt an inexplicable freedom throughout his body —a freedom like that of the traveler who in his wanderings at last feels refreshed in body and soul, his breathing easier than ever before. He felt the wish to drink a toast to this freedom: “To disorder, banzai!”
The youth blamed his lack of concern over Mrs. Kaburagi’s disappearance on the coldness of his disposition, but this was not necessarily true. Perhaps something intuitive helped him to rationalize his uneasiness.
Mrs. Kaburagi’s Karasuma family also had noble antecedents. When, about the fourteenth century, Nobui Kaburagi was connected with the Northern court, Tadachika Karasuma was connected with the Southern court. Nobui handled tactics and intrigue as superlatively as a magician; Tadachika had a flair for politics, which he handled passionately with an air of simple-minded magnanimity. The two families represented more or less the yang and yin of statecraft. Nobui was the true heir of the politics of the Monarchic Age, an adherent of political esthetics in the worst sense of the term. In that time when tanka poetry and politics were closely intertwined he moved into the realm of statecraft all the defects of the lovers of art, all esthetic subtleties, pragmatism, the doctrine of passionless calculation, the mystique of weakness, de
ception through display, humbug, moral insensitivity, and the like. Nobutaka Kaburagi’s spiritual refusal to fear degradation, his brave refusal to fear base actions, was chiefly the gift of this ancestor.
On the other hand, Tadachika Karasuma’s utilitarian idealism was always troubled by self-contradiction. He perceived clearly that only through passionately refusing to look at oneself directly does one have power enough to realize oneself. His idealistic political theory depended more on fooling himself than on fooling others. Later on Tadachika committed suicide.
At this time, a relative of Nobutaka who was also his wife’s great-aunt, a noble, ancient lady, was the Superior of an old nunnery in Shishigatani in Kyoto. This old lady’s lineage contained the historical point of fusion of the opposing Kaburagi and Karasuma essences. The successive generations of her Komatsu family were made up of a top-rank priest who stayed out of politics, an author of a diary with literary value, an authority on ancient court and military practices and usages—in short, in every generation, men who took up positions as critics and revisionists in opposition to new customs. Now, however, after the death of this old Superior, her line would be no more.
Nobutaka Kaburagi, surmising that his wife had fled thither, dispatched a telegram there on the day after her disappearance. On the evening that Yuichi granted him a visit, there was still no answer to that telegram. The gist of the reply, wired two or three days later, was as follows: “Your wife has not come here. However, since we have some idea about it, when we know more we shall inform you.” Such were the cryptic words.
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