When they went out, the street at ten on that spring evening was cold. Nobutaka stopped a taxi and ordered it to Nihonbashi. Tonight they were celebrating the opening of a nightclub featuring service until 4 a.m. in the basement of a famous Nihonbashi stationery store.
The manager, in a tuxedo, stood at the reception desk greeting the guests. What Yuichi found out when he got there was that Nobutaka, an old friend of the manager, had been invited this evening for a free party. This evening’s celebration was to be on the house.
A number of so-called famous people came. Yuichi uneasily watched Nobutaka passing out his cards from Far East Marine Products. There were artists and literary men. It almost seemed as if Shunsuke’s “meeting” would be this one, but of course he was nowhere here. The music blared constantly; many couples danced. Hostesses who had been rounded up for the opening wore their latest-style hired dresses buoyantly. Their evening gowns were certainly unsuited to the interior decoration of a mountain hut.
“Let’s drink until morning,” the beautiful woman dancing with Yuichi said. “Are you that man’s private secretary? Let’s give him the slip. Come sleep at my house and get up at noon. I’ll fry you some eggs. Since you’re just a boy, though, you like scrambled eggs better, don’t you?”
“Me? I like an omelet.”
“Omelet? Oh, you’re cute.” The drunken woman kissed him.
They went to their seats. Nobutaka was waiting with two gin fizzes. He said, “Let’s make a toast.”
“To what?”
“To the health of Mrs. Kaburagi.”
The curiosity of the women was piqued by this toast so full of hidden meaning. Yuichi looked at the lemon floating with the crushed ice in his glass. Around that circumference of lemon a hair, seemingly a woman’s, was twined. He closed his eyes and drank it down, as if it were a hair belonging to Mrs. Kaburagi.
It was one o’clock when Nobutaka Kaburagi and Yuichi left. Nobutaka started for a cab. Yuichi unconcernedly walked off. He’s sulking, thought the man who loved him. He must have known we would sleep together after all this. If not, he wouldn’t have come this far. My wife isn’t here, so he can stay at my house with impunity.
Yuichi did not turn around; he walked quickly toward the Nihonbashi intersection. Nobutaka followed behind him, breathing painfully: “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home.”
“Don’t be stubborn.”
“I have a family.”
A cab arrived. Nobutaka opened the door. He took Yuichi by the arm. The youth was stronger than he. He pulled his arm away and said, “You go on home alone.” The two stood glaring at each other for a time. Nobutaka gave up and closed the door in the face of the grumbling driver.
“Let’s walk a little and talk. While we’re walking we’ll sober up.”
“I have something to say, too.”
Nobutaka’s breast palpitated uneasily. They walked for a time on the deserted sidewalk, the sound of their shoes echoing.
On the trolley street, cruising cabs slipped back and forth. One step into the alleys, however, the firm steadfast calm of the city’s center reigned. After a time they walked in back of the N-Bank. There the round street lamps shone bright. The bank structure towered darkly in a collection of tall strong ridges. Except for the night watch, the residents of this section were all gone. Only piles of stones in disciplined ranks remained. The windows were shut, dark behind iron bars. In the cloudy sky, distant thunder sounded. Lightning faintly lit a surface of the round pillars of the bank next door.
“What did you want to say?”
“I think we should break up.”
Nobutaka did not answer. For a time only the sound of their footsteps echoed in the broad expanse of the street.
“Why so sudden?”
“The time has come.”
“Aren’t you being selfish?”
“I’m being objective.”
The childishness of that word “objective” made Nobutaka laugh.
“I can’t leave you.”
“Suit yourself; but I’m not going to sleep with you anymore.”
“But, Yuchan, since I met you, philanderer though I have been, I haven’t once been untrue to you. I lived for you alone. The hives that appear on your chest on cold nights, your voice, your profile in the dawn at the gay party, the smell of your pomade: if these things were gone .. .”
The youth muttered in his heart: “Then buy the same pomade and smell it to your heart’s content. How’s that?” He found the pressure of Nobutaka’s shoulder against his distasteful.
They suddenly realized that the river was just in front of them. Several boats tied up along the pier were incessantly emitting heavy, squeaky sounds. Headlight beams of the automobiles on the bridge across the way crisscrossed and threw out great shadows.
They turned back, walking again. Nobutaka talked constantly and excitedly. He stubbed his toe against something that went rolling off with a faint, dry noise. It was a branch of an imitation cherry tree used as decoration for a department-store sale. The dirty paper cherry tree rustled with the sound of waste paper.
“Do we really have to part? Do you mean it? Yuchan, is our friendship really at an end?”
“Friendship? That’s odd. If we were friends, we wouldn’t have had to sleep together, would we? We’ll be able to meet as friends from now on, if that’s what we are.”
Nobutaka said nothing.
“Well, you don’t like that.”
“Yuchan, please, don’t leave me alone.” They entered a dark alley. “I’ll do anything you like. Anything. If you ask me to kiss your shoes, I’ll do it.”
“Stop the theatrics, won’t you?”
“I’m not acting. I mean it. I’m not acting.”
Possibly a man like Nobutaka is only himself on the occasions when he is involved in a big act. In front of a candy store, its iron grating pulled down over its display window, he knelt down on the sidewalk. He embraced Yuichi’s leg and kissed his shoe. The smell of shoe polish threw him into ecstasy. He even kissed the toes of the shoes, which had become dusty. He unbuttoned the youth’s coat and attempted to kiss his trousers, so Yuichi bent over and with all his power tore himself free from Pope’s arms, which were clinging to his calves like a trap.
Terror took possession of Yuichi. He started running.
Nobutaka did not follow. He got up and brushed off the dust. He took out a white handkerchief. He wiped his lips. The handkerchief was smudged with shoe polish. Nobutaka was already the Nobutaka he had always been. He walked off in his affected, turn-a-screw-walk, turn-a-screw-walk gait.
On one street comer he could see the far-off shape of Yuichi stopping a taxi. The cab moved off. Count Kaburagi wanted to walk until the night brightened. His heart called not Yuichi but the name of his wife. She was his partner, his partner in crime and also his partner in calamity, in disappointment, and in grief. Nobutaka thought he would go to Kyoto alone.
Chapter 21 CHUTA IN OLD AGE
NOW SPRING SUDDENLY became itself. It rained often, but between the rains it was very warm. There was one unusually cold day; for about an hour snow flurried.
The day approached when Kawada would take Shunsuke and Yuichi to dine in the Takajo style; meanwhile the Hinoki menage, consisting of a maid and a houseboy, found Shunsuk6’s ill temper hard to bear. It wasn’t only the maid and the houseboy. When the admirer-turned-chef was called one evening to cook for Shunsuke’s guests, he was treated to a surprise. Usually Shunsuke would praise the skill of his cooking in friendly fashion. He would never forget to have a drink with him and thank him for his pains. The man was amazed this time, therefore, when Shunsuke, without a kind word of comment, went up to his second-floor study and shut himself in.
Kaburagi came over to announce that he was going to Kyoto and to leave a keepsake for Yuichi. Shunsuke accorded him a lukewarm reception and sent him packing.
Shunsuke thought so many times of phoning Kawada to call off the date. But he c
ould not—why, Shunsuke himself could not explain.
Yuichi’s words, “I only let him have my body,” nagged him.
The night before, Shunsuke worked very late. He had stretched out on the little bed in the corner of his study. The night was far gone. When he bent his knees and tried to sleep, they suddenly became acutely painful. His right knee had required medication lately because of frequent seizures of neuralgia. He still used the analgesic Pavinal, morphine in powdered form, which he washed down with water from the bottle on his night table. Although the pain stopped, he remained wakeful.
He arose and went to his desk again. He relighted the gas heater which he had earlier turned off. The desk is a mysterious piece of furniture. Once a writer faces it, he is mysteriously seized by it and held fast. After that it is only with great effort that he can tear himself away.
Shunsuke’s creative powers were returning to life, like the reviving flowers. He had written two or three fragmentary books brimming with a mysterious energy. They were recrudescences of the time of the Taiheiki, novels filled with arabesques like the display of decapitated heads, or the burning of monasteries, or the revelation of the child of the Hannya Temple, or the love affair of the Great Priest of the Shiga Daitoku Temple and the Great Imperial Concubine of Kyogoku. They also turned to the ancient world of the Kagura songs, and touched upon the heartbreak of the man who must relinquish the boy wearing the hairlock of childhood. The long occasional piece named “Even a Spring Day,” patterned after the “Ionian melancholy” of ancient Greece, had behind it also the paradoxical influence of an actual society like that of the “plague-infested meads” of Empedocles.
Shunsuke put down his brush. He had been attacked by wild, unhappy imaginings. Why do I look on with arms folded? Why? the old man thought. Am I acting the craven part of Chuta at my age? Why don’t I call up and cancel it? Now that I think of it, it’s because Yuichi himself consented. Not only that, he and Kaburagi have already broken up. In short, I am upset that Yuichi belongs to nobody. If so, why don’t I . . .? Oh, it’s not right that I should. It would never be right. It would not be right for me who can’t even look directly at myself in a mirror. Besides, a work of art is by no means the property of its creator.
Now and then the crowing of roosters was audible. Hearing those bursting voices was like glimpsing the redness inside the roosters’ mouths. Dogs, too, barked fiercely from place to place. They were like a band of thieves, each tied up separate from the others, all gnashing their teeth at the ignominy of their bonds and exchanging shouts with one another.
Shunsuke sat down on the sofa that served as a window seat and smoked a cigarette. The collection of old ceramics and the totem doll stirred no emotion in him as they stood around the window in the dawn. He looked at the pitch-black garden trees and the purple sky. When he looked down, he noticed that a rattan lounge chair the old maidservant had forgotten was lying in the middle of the lawn at an angle. Morning was born from the yellowish-brown rectangle above this aging rattan. He was very tired. The lounge chair in the garden gradually brightening in the morning mist taunted him. It was like a long rest floating in the distance, a long layoff forced upon him by death. His cigarette was burning to its end. He defied the cold air, opened the window, and threw out the cigarette. It did not reach the rattan chair but fell into a Kamiyo cryptomeria and came to rest in its foliage. A point of fire burned an apricot color for a while. He went downstairs to his bedroom and slept.
In the evening, Yuichi arrived early and Shunsuke immediately told him the story of Nobutaka Kaburagi’s visit several days before.
After Nobutaka had arranged to sell his house to the inn that occupied the main house, to be used by them as an annex, he had immediately set out for Kyoto. Yuichi was somewhat disappointed that Nobutaka had not said much about him. He had said that the corporation had fallen into bad straits, and he was going to work for the Forestry Bureau or something in Kyoto. Shunsuke gave Yuichi the keepsake from Nobutaka. It was the cat’s-eye ring Nobutaka had received from Jackie on the night when Yuichi first became his.
“Well,” Shunsuke said, with a mechanical cheerfulness brought on by lack of sleep. “This is your party tonight. If you had seen Kawada’s look the other day, you would know that I am not the guest of honor, but really you are. Even so, it was fun the other day, wasn’t it? Our relationship must have been cause for some wondrous suspicions.”
“Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”
“Somehow lately I am like a puppet and you are the puppet master.”
“Just the same I took care of Mr. and Mrs. Kaburagi just as you told me to.”
“By some blessed chance.”
Kawada’s car arrived. The two waited for a time at the Kurohane, and before long Kawada joined them. He was very relaxed from the moment he sat down on a cushion. Gone was the awkwardness of the other day. When we meet men of differing occupations, we like to affect ease like this. Kawada’s old student-teacher relationship with Shunsuke helped: he was trying to exaggerate for Shunsuke the way in which the air of the boorish man of affairs had replaced the literary sensitivity of. his youth. Thus he deliberately made mistakes in the French classics he had learned long ago. He confused Racine’s Phedre and Britannicus and sought a ruling by Shunsuke.
He told a story of the Phedre he had seen at the Comedie Frangaise. He recalled the pure beauty of that youth, closer to the woman-disdaining Hippolytus of ancient Greek tradition than the elegant Hippolyte of traditional French drama. He seemed to be uttering a long, tedious, self-centered statement of opinions in order to demonstrate his complete lack of literary sensibility.
At the end he looked at Yuichi and remarked: “It would be a pity if you don’t take a trip abroad while you’re young.” Who in the world was there to help him do it? Kawada had been calling Yuichi “Nephew San” constantly, going by the statement Shunsuke had made the other day.
In the Takajo fashion a metal grill is placed over burning charcoal before each person. Each guest is covered with an apron from the neck down and cooks his meat himself. Shunsuke, his face flaming from the effects of wine and with a ridiculous apron tied to his neck, looked indescribably silly. He compared Kawada’s and Yuichi’s faces. He could not figure out what on earth had led him to accept the invitation and bring Yuichi here when he had full knowledge what was going to happen. It was quite painful for him to compare himself with the aged high priest in the book he had seen in the Daigo Temple. He felt perhaps that he preferred the role of Chuta, the intermediary.
Beautiful things always intimidate me, Shunsuke thought. More than that, sometimes they drag me down. How can that be? Is it a superstition that beauty elevates mankind?
Kawada spoke to Yuichi about his choice of a profession. Yuichi half-humorously said that once he started depending on his in-laws he would probably not be able to hold his head up in their presence for the rest of his life.
“Do you have a wife?” asked Kawada, surprised.
“Don’t worry, Kawada, old fellow,” the old novelist put in, before he realized what he was saying. “Don’t worry. This young man is Hippolyte.” The meaning of this slightly clumsy metaphor was quickly understood by Kawada.
“Fine. Hippolyte, that’s good. I’d like to do what I can in the matter of finding employment for you.”
Their dinner progressed pleasantly. Even Shunsuke was cheerful. He felt a strange pride at seeing the desire mounting in Kawada’s eyes as he looked at Yuichi.
Kawada sent the waitresses away. He wanted to talk of something in the past that he had never told anyone about. He had looked forward to the opportunity of telling this to Shunsuke. It seems he had maintained his bachelorhood up until this time only by heroic effort. He had even had to take desperate measures when he was in Berlin. When it was nearly time to return home, he had deliberately lavished money on a low-class prostitute and, holding his nose, had moved in with her. He then sent a letter off to his parents for permission to marry. The elder Yaichir
o Kawada had some business to do in Germany and stopped by to have a look at his son’s intended wife. He was shocked when he saw her.
The son pleaded that if he was not permitted to marry her he would die, and displayed the revolver in his inside pocket to show he meant it. The woman acted as one would have expected her to. The elder Yaichiro Kawada was a man of dispatch. He gave this pure-hearted German “lotus, in the mud” money to help her bear her lot, and by way of controlling his son, took him back to Japan on the Chichibu Maru. On the ship’s deck, he never left his son’s side. His anxious eyes were always fixed on the region of his son’s belt, ready to grab it if the boy tried to jump overboard.
When he got back to Japan, the son would listen to no marriage proposal. He could not forget his German Cornelia. On his desk there was always a picture of her. When it came to work he became a practical, hard German taskmaster; when it came to living, he acted the part of a pure German dreamer. He persisted in this conduct and remained single.
Kawada tasted to the lees the pleasure of pretending to be what he himself despised. Romanticism and the habit of dreaming were among the utterly stupid things he had discovered in Germany. Just as a traveler buys by impulse, he out of his great wisdom bought and donned the flimsy hat and mask needed for his fancy ball. Chaste emotions and certainty of the superiority of the inner world in the style of Novalis, and out of reaction to them a dry-as-dust practical life and a misanthropic will: these he maintained effortlessly until the time when these attitudes were no longer suited to him. He lived ostensibly by an idea he felt would never affect him. Perhaps Kawada’s facial twitch had come from this constant internal betrayal. When there was talk of his marriage, he put on a show of misery that he had enacted so many times before. Everyone found it easy to believe at such times that his eyes were fixed on the vision of Cornelia.
“I looked over there. Exactly in the direction of the lintel,” he said, indicating with the hand that held his sake cup. “There. Don’t my eyes look just as if they’re fixed on a memory?”
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