After the Banquet (12 page)

Soichi Yamazaki was a protégé of Committee Chairman Kusakari, at whose suggestion he was dispatched to Noguchi’s house. This master of campaign strategy was completely uninterested in working in the public eye; a disillusioned former Communist, he had developed into a daring, alert, red-faced practical politician who turned his back on theories of any kind. Ever since Yamazaki began his visits Kazu had made it her practice to take off Mondays—in other words, to prolong by one day her absence from the Setsugoan. Her first glance at Yamazaki’s face told her that she had found in him the kind of man who could vow a lasting friendship with no romantic complications. He was dynamic, but with a human touch, rather reminiscent of Genki Nagayama. He was the first of this type Kazu encountered in the Radical Party.

Yamazaki’s human touch was born of political despair. It was strange that it should accidentally resemble so closely the Conservative politicians’ touch, born of an incurable optimism. Kazu instinctively recognized this indispensable attribute of the practical politician. She at once became friendly with Yamazaki.

A telephone call by Genki Nagayama to the Setsugoan had brought Kazu her first knowledge of her husband’s decision to stand for office. Nagayama, laughing on the wire, plunged directly into the conversation. “What a crazy decision! Yes, your husband’s really made a blunder, hasn’t he?”

Kazu’s instinct told her at once that he referred to Noguchi’s candidacy in the election for governor, and it wounded her to think that even before her husband told her the news it had reached the ears of her old acquaintance, Noguchi’s thick-skinned “political rival.” Kazu pretended not to know what Nagayama meant, but deliberately played the part badly. She played it in such a way as virtually to proclaim, under the thin disguise of feigned ignorance, her joy and pride in her husband’s decision. At the same time she adroitly and politically shifted the resentment she then felt toward her husband for his indifference. “What’s all this about a blunder?” she demanded. “If my husband’s been unfaithful, just let it pass. I’m shutting my eyes to such things, and I intend to keep them shut all the way.”

Nagayama, taking no notice of her artifice, related the bare facts. His tone was not like the old Nagayama’s, and seemed to reveal a change of attitude. “Anyway, he’s made a foolish decision. It’ll ruin him politically. What do you intend to do about it? Please, as his wife, urge him on bended knees to change his mind. All right? I’m telling you as an old friend.”

With that he hung up.

During the following days Committee Chairman Kusakari called at the Noguchi house, and the Chief Secretary also paid several visits. The houseboy provided Kazu at the Setsugoan with a detailed register of all Noguchi’s visitors, stating the time of each visitor’s arrival and departure, indications of his business with Noguchi, and the master’s humor at the time—everything.

Three days after Nagayama’s telephone call, news of Yuken Noguchi’s candidacy appeared in the press. It was utterly typical of Noguchi, but that evening, after the news had already been publicly reported, he summoned Kazu home from the Setsugoan, and when the two were alone in the parlor, he informed her, as if he were revealing an immense secret, of his decision. He assumed as a matter of course that his wife never read the newspapers. Noguchi had absolutely no grounds for this belief, but it was normal for him to decide, for example, that Kazu disliked dogs when she did not, or to assume arbitrarily that she liked fermented soybeans, a dish she could not abide. Noguchi, a victim of illusions he himself had created, had apparently come to be convinced that his wife was uninterested in politics.

Kazu listened with the air of one hearing important news for the first time to his proclamation delivered in samurai accents, then made the brave reply—contrary to Nagayama’s suggestion—“Now that you have accepted, I hope you will throw yourself into it completely.”

Ever since the morning she had received Nagayama’s telephone call, Kazu had become the captive of her daydreams. The flames of vitality were lit anew; the tedium of her moribund life had vanished without a trace, and she sensed that days of struggle with her own reckless impulses had begun.

It had been an unusually warm day for winter. Kazu went that afternoon to a piano recital given in Ginza Hall by the daughter of a certain industrialist, a patron of the Setsugoan. As Kazu looked down from the fifth-story window at the twilit Ginza, the unfamiliar rear view of its uneven line of roofs plainly visible, she felt for the street an affection it had never previously inspired in her.

Here and there neon lights had begun to glow, and at a construction site in the distance the steel framework and cranes reaching diagonally across the pale blue sky were dotted with twinkling little lights: the view before her looked exactly like some weird harbor floating over the land. A red and white ad balloon, which had been resting from its daytime labors on the roof of a nearby building, was now beginning an unsteady ascent into the evening sky, trailing a long pennant with a neon advertisement.

Kazu noticed many people moving about in the early evening light above ground level. Two women in identical red coats were climbing the emergency stairs at the rear of a building. A woman with a baby strapped to her back was taking in the shirts left on the line behind a billboard atop some business establishment. Three men in white chef’s hats emerged onto a dirty roof and lit each other’s cigarettes. Nobody was sitting on the chairs by the windows on the fourth floor of the new building across the way, but Kazu caught a glimpse of the feet of a girl wearing red socks as she crossed a green carpet in the back of an office. There was something curiously peaceful about the movements of all these people . . . Chimneys on the rooftops high and low sent up columns of smoke which rose perpendicularly into the almost windless sky.

“I’ll burrow my way into the hearts of each and every one of them,” Kazu thought, intoxicated by her dream fantasy. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could make each of them cast his ballot for Yuken Noguchi! If only I could grab them all in one swoop, right from here! I know that their heads are filled with their love affairs, or worries about money, or thoughts about what they’d like to eat tonight, or their movie dates . . . but somehow I must carve the name of Yuken Noguchi into one corner of their minds. I’ll do anything for that. It doesn’t bother me what people will think or what the law has to say. The distinguished gentlemen who patronize the Setsugoan have all succeeded without worrying about such things.”

Kazu’s breasts swelled under her stiff Nagoya obi, and her fantasies had given her eyelids a puffed, drunken look. She felt as if her feverish body were gradually spreading out in the darkness to engulf the great metropolis.

The bedroom of the Noguchi house had been furnished with twin beds since the wedding. The beds were installed on an old Persian rug, and when Kazu, who was accustomed to sleeping on the floor, lay on her back and looked up at the ceiling, it seemed strangely close, and the walls were strangely oppressive.

Noguchi invariably fell asleep first. Kazu would then switch on the lamp by her pillow, not to read a book or a magazine, but to induce sleep by staring fixedly at something. Sometimes, for example, she would stare at the catches of the sliding doors, shaped like half-moons and delicately worked in metal like swordguards. The catches had for their designs the “four gentlemanly flowers”—plum blossom, chrysanthemum, orchid, and bamboo. The one closest to her was the orchid; in the dimly lit room the blackened metal orchid confronted Kazu’s sleepless eyes.

She had turned off the gas stove a while before, and its warmth now ebbed away like the receding tide. In the course of a similar night, quiet like all their weekends, Noguchi had finally decided to run for office—but by what process of reasoning, his wife had absolutely no way of guessing. His behavior before accepting the nomination, during his deliberations, and after acceptance showed a magnificent uniformity. Even Noguchi must surely have been nervous and worried, must have changed his mind only to revert to his former opinion, but to his wife he revealed nothing of this. All he let her see was his usual spell of coughing before retiring, his usual half-hearted caresses and opaque manner of approach, his usual resignation, his usual sleeping posture, curled up like a dormant chrysalis. Noguchi’s bed suggested somehow a windswept station platform. All the same, he got to sleep more easily than Kazu.

Kazu’s twin bed by comparison suggested a roaring fire. Her body was feverish, not so much with sexual desire as with unbridled imagination. She found it pleasantly cooling to stretch out her hand and touch the dark metal of the orchid. The delicate profile of the chasing transmitted in the dark to Kazu’s fingertips a sensation of stroking a small, hard, expressionless, fastidious face.

“Yes,” Kazu thought, “tomorrow is Monday. Tomorrow I’ll get hold of Yamazaki and start my operations.”

At three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon Kazu secretly met Yamazaki on the mezzanine of the Shiseido, a tea-room in the Ginza.

Yamazaki’s description of the meeting may be found in
The Election in Retrospect
, the book he later published. “I had previously called a number of times at Noguchi’s house, and was favorably impressed by his wife’s lively, frank disposition. But the first time I met Mrs. Noguchi alone on the outside, I noticed as I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine of the Shiseido that despite her usual liveliness and energy, she seemed like a terribly lonely woman. It was extraordinary that at this moment, when her head was filled with plans for her husband’s election campaign, she should have created such an impression of solitude. When we began to talk (we did not say a word that was not related to the election), she spoke with her habitual impassioned eloquence and overwhelmed me in a matter of moments.”

Kazu had made a list of items to ask Yamazaki, and she fired her questions straight as arrows. There were probably six to ten months before the election, but this was up to the present governor, who might resign at any time. Kazu personally intended in the meanwhile, though she realized it was prohibited by law, to push forward a pre-election campaign, keeping this a secret from Noguchi. She had such-and-such an amount of money available for this purpose, and she was resolved, in case this should prove inadequate, to mortgage the Setsugoan forthwith. She wanted specific advice on the most effective pre-election campaign, one which would stay clear of the clutches of the law.

Yamazaki gave her systematic instructions. “First, have some visiting cards—especially big ones—printed with your husband’s name in the largest available type.”

“Depend on me for that. Would you mind stopping with me at the printer’s on our way back?” Kazu spoke breathlessly.

“Would you like an idea of how big a proposition it is to elect a governor of Tokyo? Just supposing you stick two posters on each telegraph pole in Tokyo. There must be 150 or 160 thousand telegraph poles. That means you’ll need 300,000 posters. Each poster costs three yen—that makes 900,000 yen—and figuring one yen apiece for the men who stick on the poster, it comes to a total of 1,200,000 yen. That alone is enough money to run a small election.” Yamazaki was quick to cite figures apropos of anything, and they often convinced people.

Kazu’s insistence on discussing in a loud voice the possibilities of a pre-election campaign and ways of evading the law, quite oblivious of the people at the next table, made Yamazaki look nervously around them. Aware of the danger, he proposed a return condition: in exchange for his promise to keep all Kazu’s activities—her financial support and everything else—a secret from Noguchi, he requested that henceforth she consult with him beforehand on every step, however trifling. Kazu agreed.

“I feel better, now that we’ve had this frank talk,” Kazu said, with a cheerful pat on her obi. “There’s no getting around it, my husband simply doesn’t understand the hearts of the ordinary Japanese people. He reads foreign languages and studies in his library, he’s a born gentleman, but he doesn’t understand the feelings of his own maids. Am I wrong in thinking that you and the others understand only with your heads? But it’s no problem for me to slip straight into the hearts of the common people. Why, I’ve even peddled fried fish balls when I was down on my luck. How about it, Mr. Yamazaki, I don’t suppose you’ve ever peddled fried fish balls, have you?”

Yamazaki, embarrassed, gave a sheepish grin. “Logical arguments can reach only a limited area. We need emotional weapons to capture the five million qualified voters, and you certainly have them, Mrs. Noguchi. You’re a big comfort to all of us.”

“You don’t have to pay me any foolish compliments, Mr. Yamazaki,” Kazu murmured sensuously, lifting her sleeve to her face in mock embarrassment. Then she continued with premature professional experience, “We can worry about party policies and the rest later on. The only important things in an election are money and feelings. I intend to attack with just those two weapons. I’m only an uneducated woman, after all, but I’ve got enough warmth in me to divide among five million people and still have some to spare.”

“I understand you perfectly. I hope you’ll plunge recklessly ahead.”

Kazu was pleased to recognize in Yamazaki the mature man’s half-baffled generosity toward a woman. “Make the maximum use of me, please. You’ll find that I’m a woman worthwhile using.” Kazu’s tone seemed to terminate the discussion.

Yamazaki drank his coffee and ate a great wedge of strawberry shortcake to the last crumb. It reassured Kazu to see a ruddy-faced man, necktie firmly in place, eat a big piece of cake.

Kazu then suggested that he should know her personal history, and for about an hour she held forth, summarizing all her troubles since she was born. This frankness, as it turned out, amply justified itself, for it later induced Yamazaki to stand by her with more loyalty than he would have shown otherwise.