He took good care of his relationships within the neighborhood, and when there was a misfortune there, the devout Fukujiro would wrap up a votive offering and set out for the temple. Then he would sit for a long time silently before the Buddha, paying no attention to the other mourners. There was in his wasted frame, so devoid of charm, something that gave the impression of bad luck.
Somehow he could not surrender his place at the counter of the coffee shop to someone else. But it was not a wise policy in this student neighborhood to have such an unsociable old codger at the cash register all day. Even his regular customers would have left him if they had seen him assiduously going over the day’s receipts for a full hour every night after closing.
Meticulousness and niggardliness were the substance of Fukujiro’s religious zeal. If the sliding doors were left slightly open, or even if the door pulls supposed to be on the left and the right somehow turned up in the middle, he had to get up right away and fix them. Fukujiro’s uncle came from the country and ordered rice and eels for supper. Minoru was aghast to see Fukujiro exact the price of the meal from his uncle.
One could not compare young Yuichi’s body with that of Fukujiro, who was nearly forty. Not only that, Yuichi was to Minoru a vision of the hero out of so many action movies and the daring youth of adventure stories. Everything that Minoru wished to be he saw embodied in Yuichi. Shunsuke had used Yuichi as the material of a work he dreamed of; but Minoru used countless old tales as the material of a dream of Yuichi.
Yuichi would turn his head sharply—in the boy’s eyes he had turned his head in order to defend himself against the terrible onslaughts of young villains. Minoru fancied himself to be the boy companion sure to be accompanying such a hero. He was confident in the very depths of him in the courage of his master. He was a pure servant who felt that when he died it would be with his master. As a result, it was not love he manifested so much as sexual loyalty, the joy of imaginary renunciation and self-sacrifice. What he exhibited was a perfectly natural boyish propensity to dream. In his dreams one night, Minoru saw Yuichi and himself on the battlefield. Yuichi was the beautiful young officer; Minoru was his beautiful boy orderly. The two were simultaneously struck in the chest by rifle bullets and died embracing, their lips locked in a kiss. Another time Yuichi was a young seaman; Minoru was a boy sailor. The two landed on an=island in the torrid zone, and while they were there the ship, at the order of the crafty captain, set sail. There on the island the two castaways were attacked by savages. They warded off countless poison arrows fired from the bushes, using a great scallop shell for a shield.
Thus a night the two spent together was a fabulous night. Around them swirled the night of a gigantic, hostile world. Villains and bitter enemies and savages and assassins prayed for their misfortune. The eyes of adversaries who would shout for joy if they died were outside, peering through the dark window panes. Minoru was sad that he could not sleep with a pistol under his pillow. What would he do if some scoundrel had hidden himself in the wardrobe and was opening the door a crack and taking dead aim at the sleeping forms of the two with a revolver? He could not help feeling that Yuichi, sleeping undisturbed by these fancies, had courage beyond that of other men.
The unreasoning fear from which Minoru had longed to escape suddenly was transformed into a sweet, fabulous fear that made him feel only the joy of living under its influence. When he came upon articles in newspapers about opium smuggling and secret societies, he would read them avidly, thinking that each was an incident involving themselves.
Yuichi had been slightly infected by these proclivities in the boy. The stubborn bias against society that Yuichi once held—and still held—was in this dreamer something to encourage fantasies, romantic enmities, Romanesque perils, plebeian defenses against justice and nobility, the unyielding, reasonless prejudice of the rabble. When he saw this, Yuichi felt better. When he realized, moreover, the source of these inspirations—that it was he, Yuichi, nothing else —he was amazed at his own intangible power. “Those guys”—the only term by which the boy referred to society—“are after us, aren’t they? We’ve got to watch out,” Minoru liked to say. “Those guys would like to see us dead!”
“What do you mean? Those guys don’t give a damn. They hold their noses and pass us by, that’s all,” said his realistic protector, six years his senior. His opinion, however, did not convince Minoru.
“Cripes! Women, now”—Minoru spat toward a group of girl students going by. Then he threw out words of sexual vituperation that he had learned only recently, so that the girls could hear: “Women, now, what are they? All they have tucked away between their legs is a smelly, dirty pocket, ain’t that right? And all they’ve got stuffed in that pocket is rubbish.”
Yuichi, who of course was keeping his wife a secret, smiled at this remark.
The walks that he had formerly taken alone Minoru now took with Yuichi. Everywhere about the dark street corners imaginary assassins lurked. Without a sound, the assassins were treading close behind the two of them. Giving them the slip, or teasing them, or playing practical jokes on these nonexistent adversaries was Minoru’s favorite pastime.
“Look, Yuchan!” Minoru proposed a prank that would certainly result in their being followed. He took the wad of gum from his mouth and stuck it to the door handle of a foreigner’s shiny car at the curb. This accomplished, he acted as if he didn’t know a thing about it and hurried Yuichi away.
One evening Yuichi went with Minoru to the roof of the Ginza Hot Springs for beer. Having downed one, the boy proffered his glass for a second. The evening breeze on the roof was quite cool; their shirts, which had stuck to their backs with sweat, started billowing in the breeze like hoods. Red, yellow, and water-green lanterns swung above the dark dance floor as two or three couples took turns to the guitar music. Yuichi and Minoru, although they wished to dance, did not join them. It was difficult for men friends to dance together here. They looked on fixedly at the fun the others were having and, caught up in the activity, left their seats to lean against the railing. The gleam of the street enveloped the summer evening. In the south there was a dark shadow among the populated areas. They decided it must be the forest of the Hama Detached Palace Park. As they looked idly in the direction of that forest, Yuichi put his arm about Minoru’s shoulders. From the midst of the forest a glow began to rise. Fireworks spread out from a great green ball, then with a noise like thunder turned yellow, then collapsed into pink parasol shapes, then shattered and went out, and all was silent.
“Pretty, isn’t it, like that?” said Minoru. He paraphrased a passage he had read in a detective story: “If you took everybody in the world and sent them up in fireworks and killed them—all the guys that cause trouble, one at a time, and made fireworks of them and killed them—there’d be only Yuichi and me left in the whole world!”
“Then who would have the children?”
“Who needs children? If we got married and had kids, the kids would grow up and make fools of us, or if not that, they’d become just like us, that’s all.”
These words sent a shiver through Yuichi. He felt that divine intervention had made Yasuko’s child a female. The youth grasped Minoru’s shoulder gently. In this rebellious spirit that lay within Minoru’s soft boyish cheek and his pure smile, Yuichi somehow usually found balm for his basically uneasy nature. As a result, their sympathies strengthened the sensual tie between them and in turn cultivated the most essential elements, as well as the most decent elements, of their friendship. The boy’s imaginativeness pulled at the youth’s doubts and pertinaciously set them in motion. Thus, even Yuichi was plunged into infantile dreams. One night, for instance, he kept himself awake earnestly imagining that he had set out on an exploring expedition into the upper reaches of the Amazon.
When it was quite late they went to the boathouse on the shore across from the Tokyo Theater, intending to take a boat ride. The boats were all moored at the dock, the light in the boathouse shack was extinguished,
its Nanking lock tightly fastened. There was nothing to do but sit down on the boards of the dock and let their legs dangle over the water, and smoke. The Tokyo Theater across the way was closed. The Shimbashi Playhouse, on the other side of the bridge at the right, was closed too. The water reflected hardly any light. No more remnants of the heat, it seemed, would rise from that dark, still surface.
Minoru thrust out his forehead: “Look, I have prickly heat!” He showed Yuichi the faint red signs. This boy showed everything to his lover: his notebooks, his shirts, his books, his socks—whatever new thing he was wearing.
Suddenly Minoru burst out laughing. Yuichi looked at the dark path along the river near the Tokyo Theater to see what was making him laugh. An old man in a bath garment had fallen off his bicycle and lay on the path beside it. He had landed on his hip, perhaps, and could not get up.
“A fine thing, riding a bike at his age. I wish he’d fallen in the river.”
His happy laughter and his cruel teeth, white and luminous in the darkness, were beautiful. Yuichi could not help thinking of the ways beyond imagination that Minoru was like himself.
“You must be living with a steady boy friend. How do you manage to stay out so late and get away with it?” “I suppose his weak point is that he’s in love with me. And he’s become my foster father to boot. It’s legal.”
There was something laughable in the word “legal” coming from this boy’s mouth. Minoru went on: “You have a steady boy friend, too, I guess.”
“Yes, but only an old man.”
“I’ll go kill that old man.”
“No use. He’s one you can kill and he won’t die.”
“Why, now, do young, pretty, gay fellows all have to be somebody’s prisoner?”
“It’s more convenient so.”
“They buy you clothes and give you all kinds of money. And you get attached to them, even though you hate them.” As he said this the boy spat a great white wad of saliva into the river.
Yuichi put his arm around Minoru’s waist. Then he brought his lips close to the boy’s cheek and kissed him. “That’s awful,” said Minoru, kissing him back unrestrainedly. “You kiss me and I get an erection. Then I don’t want to go home.”
After a time Minoru said: “Ah, a cicada!” Through the stillness that followed after a trolley car had thundered over the bridge, the mincing, tangled voice of the night cicada threaded its way. There was not much foliage in the area. The cicada must have blundered out of a park somewhere. It flew low over the surface of the river, then headed for the lights of the bridge on the right, where tiger moths were flitting about.
Thus the night sky came irresistibly into their eyes. It was a splendid starry sky, returning its brilliance to the street glare unflinchingly. Yet Yuichi’s nostrils were full of the stench of the river, close to whose surface their shoes dangled. He really liked this boy, but he could not help thinking that people talk of love as if they were ditch rats.
Fukujiro Honda had begun to entertain definite suspicions about Minoru. The heat was terrible. One night when sleep was difficult, he was reading a samurai adventure magazine under the mosquito netting, unhappily waiting for the tardy Minoru to come home. His head was filled with mad thoughts. At one o’clock in the morning, he heard the back door opening, then the sound of shoes being removed. Fukujiro turned off the light by his pillow^
The light went on in the adjoining room. Minoru seemed to be undressing. Then an interminable period of time passed by while Minoru, it seemed, sat naked at the window, smoking. Thin smoke, glinting with lamplight, was visible rising above the room partitions.
Minoru had slipped naked into the mosquito netting in his room and was about to get into bed. His body was suddenly pinned by Fukujiro’s body. He had a rope coiled in his hand, with which he bound Minoru’s hands. Then he passed the rest of the long rope several times around Minoru’s chest. All the while Minoru struggled silently, his cries muffled by a pillow pressed against his face and held there by Fukujiro’s forehead as he worked to tie the boy.
The tying was finally done, and Minoru pleaded half audibly from under the pillow: “Ouch! You’re killing me. I won’t yell; just take away the pillow.”
So that the boy could not flee, Fukujiro straddled his body. He took away the pillow, but kept his right hand near Minoru’s face in case he cried out. With his left hand he grasped the boy’s hair and, giving it small tugs, said: “All right, let’s have it! Who’s the dark horse you’re stepping out with? Come on, out with it!”
Minoru was suffering. His hair was being pulled; his bare chest and arms were chafed by the rope. Yet even with Fukujiro’s old-fashioned accusation ringing in his ears, this fanciful youth never once imagined that the ever dependable Yuichi would arrive here to rescue him. He thought of practical ruses that he had been taught by worldly experience.
“Stop pulling my hair and I’ll tell you,” Minoru groaned. When Fukujiro let go his grip, the boy slumped as if dead. Fukujiro was seized with panic and shook the boy’s shoulders. “This rope is killing me,” Minoru gasped. “Untie the rope and I’ll tell you.” Fukujiro turned on the light at the head of the bed. He untied the rope. Minoru applied his lips to the sore places on his wrists. He kept his head down and said nothing.
The momentum of Fukujiro’s faint-hearted outburst was by this time half-spent. He saw Minoru’s firmness, and thinking now to bring him around by tears, he bowed his head to the floor before the naked boy who sat crosslegged and begged forgiveness for his violent behavior. On the boy’s white chest the pink rope marks were still visible. Naturally, this theatrical display of pain, too, had an indeterminate ending.
Fukujiro feared having his own conduct discovered, so he decided against calling in a private detective agency. Beginning the next evening, however, he neglected the shop and again went on the trail of the one he loved. He found no trace of Minoru. He gave some money to a trusted waiter and set him to the task. This clever, faithful fellow reported triumphantly that he had seen the face of Minoru’s companion and had been able to ascertain that he was named Yuchan.
Fukujiro went about to the various hangouts, which he had not visited for a long time. One of his old acquaintances who had not yet freed himself of his bad habits came by, and, taking him along, Fukujiro was able to inquire about Yuchan’s identity at many quiet coffeehouses and bars.
Yuichi was under the impression that his own affairs were not known beyond a very small circle, but in this inquisitive little society which had nothing to talk about but itself, intimate information concerning him had spread far and awide.
The middle-aged men of that street were jealous of Yuichi’s beauty. They were willing to admit that they would be happy to make love to him, but this youth’s cold way of turning people away plunged them into jealousy. The same was true of young men not so beautiful as Yuichi. Fukujiro easily garnered a number of details about him.
In the prattle of these persons the malice of women abounded. When it came to information they did not have, they would display a paranoiac kindness and introduce Fukujiro to some other individual in possession of new gossip. Fukujiro would meet with that person, who would then introduce him to another, who would also put himself out gossiping. In a short time, Fukujiro met ten men he had never seen before.
If he had known about it, Yuichi would have been amazed. Not only was his relationship with Count Kaburagi discussed, but even his affair with Kawada, who was so careful about appearances, was bandied about in detail. Fukujiro relentlessly searched out everything from the identity of Yuichi’s in-laws to his home address and telephone number. When he returned to his shop, he pondered various low stratagems that cowardice leads men into.
Chapter 28 HAILSTONES FROM A CLEAR SKY
EVEN WHEN YUICHI’S FATHER WAS ALIVE, the Minami family did not have a cottage. His father did not like to be tied down to the same place whether avoiding the heat or avoiding the cold, so while he, always busy, remained in Tokyo, his wife and child s
pent summers in hotels in Karuizawa, Hakone, and the like, and he visited them on weekends. At Karuizawa they had many friends, and summers passed there were busy. About that time, however, Yuichi’s mother noticed his predilection for being by himself. Her beautiful son, his age, his robust health, and his physique notwithstanding, preferred to spend summers in Kamikochi or places where he would meet as few acquaintances as possible, rather than Karuizawa, where he had company all the time.
Even when the war became intense, the Minami family was not in a hurry to evacuate. The head of the family was not concerned about anything like that. A few months before the air raids started, in the summer of 1944, Yuichi’s father died at his Tokyo home of a cerebral hemorrhage. His resolute widow refused to give in to the urging of those around her and stood her ground in her Tokyo residence, guarding her husband’s ashes. Perhaps her spiritual power threw the fear of God into the incendiary bombs; the house was still standing when the war ended.
If they had had a cottage, they could have sold it at a high price and tided themselves over the postwar inflation. Yuichi’s father’s estate, besides the present house, amounted in 1944 to 2,000,000 yen in savings, negotiable securities, and personal effects. The widow was only upset that she would have to sell her valuable jewels to a broker for a song in order to get through the emergency. She managed, however, to get the help of a former subordinate of her husband, a man who knew his way around in matters of this kind, who took care of minimizing the estate tax, then skillfully went through the negotiations over the securities and the savings accounts and overcame the hazards of the emergency currency regulations without a hitch. When the economy was stabilized, they still had a savings account of 700,000 yen and the economic acumen of Yuichi, brought up in this confused period. Then the kind adviser left this world with the same illness as Yuichi’s father. His mother blithely turned over the household accounts to her old maidservant, whose old-fashioned incompetence, and Yuichi’s amazement when he found the crisis she had precipitated, has already been told.
Forbidden Colors Page 38