A Dark Night's Passing Page 9

  Kensaku remembered an anecdote about Fukiko recounted to him by Ogata four or five days before. She already had a regular patron—so his story went—some rich merchant. He knew all about her relationship with Ogata, but, apparently choosing to ignore it, continued to be generous to her and her mother. An employee of his, angered by her conduct, went to her house and accused her of being a wanton and an ingrate. In fury she brought out the kimono the patron had given her that spring and in the employee’s presence tore it to shreds. Then she rushed out of the house, found a taxi, and went to Ogata’s house. Not daring to go into the house, she stood outside helplessly, still weeping. By chance Ogata’s younger brother was late coming home that night—it was about one in the morning—and he found this pathetic figure standing by the gate. She begged him to let her see Ogata.

  This was the way Ogata had ended his anecdote: “I was of course in bed when my brother came to me with the message. I had heard the taxi outside the house, and I was wondering if it might be her. But once you’re in bed, it’s not that easy to get up and rush outside.

  So I decided to stay where I was and do nothing. She went away before long. I haven’t seen her for two months.”

  Just as they were about to finish their meal the geisha called Chiyoko arrived. Unlike the old geisha she was large, supple-bodied and beautiful, altogether a magnificent woman. In physique she reminded one a little of Koine. But what caught Kensaku’s attention most were her eyes. They had a strength and quiet beauty which made one feel strangely restful.

  The two men left the restaurant soon afterward, and parted company at the bottom of Akasakamitsuke. With no particular destination in mind Kensaku slowly walked up the hill toward Hibiya, thinking not of the beautiful Chiyoko whom he had just met, but of Okayo, the waitress at Seihintei, and repeating to himself Ogata’s remark that she had wanted to see him.

  The truth was he was drawn to almost every woman he saw—Tokiko, say, or the young mother on the streetcar, or Chiyoko; and for the present at least, to Okayo most of all. And before he could stop himself, he was asking himself the unwelcome question: “What is it that I want?” He knew the answer; but it was so unpleasant, he wanted to hide from it.

  8

  A younger friend named Miyamoto dropped in to see Kensaku, carrying a basketful of mushrooms. He had been away for a while in the Kyoto area. The two friends were upstairs in Kensaku’s room chatting when a messenger came from the neighborhood caterer’s to say there was a telephone call for Kensaku. It was early evening.

  The caller turned out to be Okayo. “Come and join us,” she said.

  “Is Ogata there?” Kensaku asked.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Then please tell him to come here right away and have dinner with us. Say it won’t be much of a meal, but we do have Kyoto mushrooms.”

  In her characteristically quick-tempered way Okayo said, “I certainly will not!”

  “But why not? It will be all right if we come over to your place after dinner, surely.”

  “It’s far too complicated, and a nuisance for O-san too.”

  After a few more exchanges of this sort Kensaku finally gave in. “All right, my friend and I will be there after dinner.”

  Two hours later Kensaku and Miyamoto went to Seihintei. They found Ogata in a small private room, drinking whiskey with Osuzu and Okayo. Okayo was sitting beside him. “She’s got a lot of cheek, this one,” he said, grabbing her by the shoulder and shaking her. “How dare she turn down your invitation without asking me first.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Osuzu said. “You probably missed a very good dinner.”

  “But Mr. Tokitō himself said there wasn’t going to be anything special,” said Okayo.

  “What did you expect him to say!” exclaimed Osuzu. “Do you expect a host to praise his own dinner?”

  “Oh, don’t be so dense,” Okayo said, glaring at Osuzu. “I managed to get them all here, didn’t I?”

  “Osuzu,” Ogata broke in, “how about all of us going to Hashizen for some tempura and sake?”

  “I don’t know that I even want to look at tempura,” said Miyamoto quietly.

  “You don’t want to go?” said Ogata. “All right, then, we won’t.”

  “Quite right,” Osuzu said. “This isn’t the best time of year for tempura. It’s always wise not to take chances between seasons.” In the manner of an actor addressing the audience in an aside, Okayo said, “There is much wisdom in this old lady.”

  Miyamoto could hold his drink. He was having peppermint liqueur, and it appeared he could drink any amount of the sweet stuff and remain sober. Indeed, he seemed unusually withdrawn. He hadn’t slept on the train last night, he had told Kensaku earlier that day, and perhaps that was the reason.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Okayo said to Miyamoto who sat opposite her, peering into his downcast face. “Do cheer up. You can’t sulk all by yourself when everyone else is trying to have fun.” She turned to Kensaku. “What is the matter with him?” She sat up, and as she did so, Kensaku’s hand, innocently resting on the back of her chair, got caught between it and her back. “He didn’t get enough sleep last night,” he said, trying gently to extricate his hand.

  “I wonder who kept him up,” Okayo said, looking at Kensaku coquettishly and ever so slightly increasing the pressure on his hand.

  “Nothing of the sort,” Kensaku said shortly, yanking his hand free. “He was on the night train.” He wondered if his abruptness might have annoyed her, but her face was perfectly nonchalant.

  He had acted ungraciously, mostly out of distaste for her kind of flirtation. Now a part of him regretted his action. What was he being such a prig about anyway? Besides, an opportunity had been presented to him right under his nose, and he had rejected it. The trouble with him, he decided, was that he was too sober. He pointed at the bottle of peppermint liqueur which he had earlier refused to touch. “Pour me some of that,” he said.

  Okayo watched him drink down the liqueur in a gulp. “See, there’s more to him than you might think,” she said. She herself was quite drunk now. Her eyes shone seductively, her lips had become a brilliant red. And her manner was gradually getting rougher.

  Some of the liqueur had spilled on the thick, starched tablecloth, and under the gaslight the green stains looked rather pretty. “What a lovely color,” Osuzu said, bringing her head closer to the table.

  “In that case, I’ll make you some more,” Okayo said, and with the salt spoon started sprinkling the liqueur all over the cloth.

  “What do you think you’re doing!” Osuzu said.

  Okayo glared back at her. “I thought you said you liked the spots.”

  “They are pretty, I must say,” said Kensaku.

  “Aren’t they,” Okayo said, bringing her face close to his and then nodding meaningfully.

  He was not sure what the nod meant, but anxious to do the right thing this time, nodded back. But somehow the nod wasn’t timed quite right, and succeeded only in making him feel very foolish. Miyamoto, who hadn’t spoken a word for some time, suddenly said in a coy, effeminate Kyoto voice, “My, what good friends you two have become.”

  Kensaku thought that Miyamoto was laughing at his awkwardness. His pride was now at stake. He sidled up to Okayo and whispered loudly into her ear, “You know, I like you.” It was all done very badly.

  Surprised by Kensaku’s unexpected behavior, Okayo seemed for a moment to lose her composure. But she rallied quickly, and with uncharacteristic simplicity and sweetness said, “Thank you.”

  Much bolder now, Kensaku pressed his shoulder against hers and said, “What are we going to do about it?”

  Okayo was her old self again. “Oh, let’s do something about it,” she said in a girlish, wheedling tone, then rested her head on his shoulder. Kensaku sat still, conscious of her hair brushing against his cheek.

  “What a scene!” said Osuzu, and laughed loudly.

  Putting his arm around her, Kensaku
brought his mouth close to hers and made as if to kiss her. Their foreheads touched, but their lips were two or three inches apart. They stayed in this position for a while. Their faces, made hot by the drinking, seemed to heat the very air between them. The sensation Kensaku experienced then was so pleasurable he almost fell into a trance.

  Sensing at last the silence around him, he looked up. The heavy curtain had been drawn discreetly across the entrance. Their companions had all disappeared somewhere.

  Okayo sat up, her face moist with sweat. Feeling suddenly sober and awkward, they couldn’t even manage a nervous joke.

  “I bet they’re in the next room,” she said.

  “Let’s go and see.”

  There was no one there. But they found Ogata and Miyamoto in the large room beyond, listening helplessly to a loud-mouthed drunk. The latter turned out to be Yamazaki, who had been three years ahead of Kensaku at school and was now a practicing lawyer. Beside him sat a waitress named Okiyo, a small, pretty girl with thin eyebrows.

  Kensaku had never liked this Yamazaki, and had invariably found himself becoming pugnacious in his presence. But suppressing his aversion this time, he sat down with them.

  Yamazaki, the bore that he was, kept on pressing Okiyo to drink more. Holding down one of her hands, he would push the glass up to her lips. She would insist she didn’t want any more, but would then take a drink, seemingly without a qualm.

  Okayo, presumably still drunk, sat quietly beside Okiyo.

  Kensaku was beginning to feel restless. He turned to Ogata and Miyamoto and asked them in an undertone if they would like to go to Nishimidori. Miyamoto refused to commit himself. “I’ll telephone them,” Kensaku said. He stood up, then stumbled on a chair leg and fell to the floor. He picked himself up and started to walk slowly away from the table. Okayo followed him, saying, “I’d better come with you.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. She punched him hard on the back. “You brute!” Looking straight ahead he walked away in what he imagined was dignified silence; but he discovered that uncontrollably a fatuous grin had spread over his face. First he got rid of it, as though it were a mask, then turned around. “Come along then,” he said. “No thank you,” she replied.

  Carefully he made his way down the stairs. He stood still before the telephone for a moment, waiting for the sick feeling in his chest to go away.

  “Tokiko is miles away, and won’t be available this evening,” the maid said on the telephone. “But I’m sure Koine will be free, so please come.”

  Thinking that the wrong person was available, he put the receiver down. As he went slowly up the stairs he could hear only Yamazaki’s loud voice.

  He found him wrapped around Okiyo, trying to kiss her on the mouth. Stubbornly Okiyo kept her face averted. In the end he had to be content with kissing her somewhere on the back of her heavily powdered neck, his face half-hidden behind her kimono collar. “Oh lord, it tickles,” she said, making a face at Okayo who was standing behind them. “Have mercy!”

  Okayo, biting her lower lip in anger, began to shake her fist above Yamazaki’s head.

  Shortly afterward Kensaku, Ogata and Miyamoto left Seihintei. They decided not to go to Nishimidori after all.

  9

  Early in the morning two days later Nobuyuki dropped in. Kensaku was still in bed. His brother was on his way to the office, he was told, so would he please come down immediately? He found Nobuyuki in the entryway, his face ruddy and healthy-looking from exposure to the cold air outside. Kensaku greeted him sleepily. “I can’t come in,” said Nobuyuki. “But here’s a letter that someone sent Sakiko.” He casually pulled out of his overcoat pocket a green, Western-type envelope and handed it to Kensaku.

  The handwriting was in red ink, and looked weak and cheap. Written on the back was a girl’s name, Shizuko. The sender’s address was given as a dormitory in a certain women’s college. And over the sealed edge of the flap this person had written pretentiously, “As yet unopened.”

  “This is the letter I forwarded to Sakiko yesterday,” said Kensaku.

  “That’s right. The fellow knows she’s your sister, and must have assumed she lived here.”

  Expecting to find the content as cheap as the handwriting, Kensaku began reading the letter. Perhaps because he had expected the worst, he decided it wasn’t half so bad as such a letter could be. It was written in an incongruously formal style, and this was the gist of it: he was of the opinion, the writer said, that there was nothing wrong in a man and a woman seeing each other, so long as the relationship was kept pure; he therefore would request a meeting with her on the following day, on her way home from school, in the grounds of Hikawa Shrine, at two or three o’clock; he would not take up more than a few minutes of her time. He had recently graduated from a certain private university, he added, and was now lodging at the home of Viscount X (he named this nobleman) in Kōjimachi. Repeatedly he asked Sakiko to keep the letter confidential; and he ended by saying that if she thought that such a meeting might affect her good name—he understood that a girl of her age had to be careful—she was not to hesitate to say no.

  “A tentative sort of fellow, isn’t he?” said Kensaku, amused. “True, he doesn’t seem as bad as the last fellow who wrote her. Anyway, will you go and speak to him? Scare him a bit, if need be.”

  “I suppose I can try to see him, if you really want me to … ”

  “I could go myself, but I don’t like to leave the office on an errand like this.”

  “All right, I’ll go. Incidentally, this viscount he mentions happens to be Matsuyama’s grandfather. But I don’t think there’s any need to speak to Matsuyama about the fellow, do you?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Nobuyuki said as he prepared to leave. “He’s probably quite harmless. Of course, it mightn’t do any harm to tell him you know Matsuyama.”

  It was a cold day, with rain falling intermittently as if it couldn’t quite make up its mind. Kensaku went to his room upstairs, had a fire put in the brazier, then for a change sat down before his desk and started writing in his long-neglected diary.

  I feel, he wrote, as if some heavy object were pressing down on me. My head is covered with something black and fearful. Above, there is no sky, only layer upon layer of some dark and oppressive matter. Where does this feeling come from?

  At times I feel like a lamp over the gate of a house, lit before sundown. The dim, orange light burns helplessly behind the blue frosted glass, waiting for the dark to give it brightness. Wait passively, that is all it can do. But this light wants desperately to burst into flame and burn everything around it. It does not want to remain so feeble, a prisoner behind the frosted glass. If only a storm would come and smash the glass, and let the flame reach up to the wooden eaves and envelop all in its fiery arms.

  I must start working seriously. I live and work as though I were in a tight box, I feel so constrained. I must learn to feel free, free to do what I want with a sense of purpose and comfort and generosity. I want to walk with a firm step, swinging my arms, not with such timidity and purposelessness as I do now. I mustn’t hurry, but I mustn’t stop. And I can’t be like the feeble light, wishfully waiting for the coming of the storm.

  I must not seek peace in resignation. I must not throw away anything, I must not give in, I must find peace and satisfaction in having always tried. There is no death for anyone who has done something that is immortal. I do not mean only those in the arts—not any more—but scientists as well. I don’t know much about the Curies. But I am sure that no matter what fate befalls them, what they have done for mankind will always give them the strength to survive, a peace of mind and satisfaction that no accident can touch. I want to have that peace of mind, that comfort. I want to see what no one else has seen, I want to hear what no one else has heard, I want to feel as no one else has felt.

  I do not want to think that the fate that awaits this planet will necessarily determine the fate of mankind. The other animals do not know
what fate will befall our planet. Only man knows, and only man fights against it. And behind his instinctive, insatiable ambition is this blind will to resist his fate. The conscious part of man acknowledges the inevitability of his end. But this blind will in him completely refuses to do so.

  Man progressed as earth’s condition improved, as it became more congenial to him. And when earth’s condition at last begins gradually to worsen, as earth becomes colder and drier, so will man begin to decline; and then, with the death of the very last, solitary human being on earth, our race will come to its end. Not only man, but all other species, too, will become extinct one by one, and all our remains will lie buried under the ice. This is no wild fancy. All living things will as a matter of course meet this dreadful, inescapable fate. But will man—this nervous, struggling creature so committed to progress almost without purpose—ever learn to accept such a fate obediently? Perhaps he will. Perhaps when the condition of this planet has deteriorated and man himself has become a lesser creature, when our descendants gaze without sympathy or understanding upon the strange, useless things that their ancestors had built—at what cost these creatures will never know—perhaps then, man, now without mind or hope, will passively accept his end. But until such time, he will continue his search, perhaps in the name of progress, for a way to forestall his doom.

  Women bear children and men do their chosen work. This constitutes human life. In primitive times, all that a man had to do was work for the happiness of his own immediate family or of his village. Then gradually the notion of the tribe was extended until in Japan it came to be the feudal domain. And later this was replaced by the nation, which in turn was extended to include the race, then finally to mankind at large.