To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (19 page)

With these words Taguchi drew toward himself a portable smoking set, rummaged through its drawer, and pulled out a long thin earpick made of horn. Inserting it in his right ear, he poked around as if he had an unendurable itch. Keitaro felt something ominous in the frowning face of Taguchi, who seemed to be deliberately looking at him while pretending not to, apparently absorbed entirely with his ear.

"The truth is that a woman was standing at the stop," Keitaro said, driven at last to confess.

"Was she young or old?"

"Young."

"Ah, I see."

Taguchi did not follow this brief remark with anything. Keitaro too was brought to a standstill. Face to face, they remained silent for some time.

"No, whether she was young or old, I shouldn't have asked about her. Since that's your own concern, let's drop the subject. What concerns me is only the result of your investigation of the man with the mole on his face."

"But the woman took part in whatever the man did. First of all, she was waiting for him."

"Oh?" Keitaro's words had evidently been unexpected. "Well, then she wasn't an acquaintance of yours, was she?"

Keitaro did not of course have the courage to say that she was. Even though he felt awkward about it, he had to admit honestly that he had never seen her or spoken to her before.

Taguchi merely replied in a calm way, "Is that so?" showing no sign of further inquiry, but then suddenly asked in an easy tone of voice, "What kind of woman was she? The woman you spoke of. What about her looks?" As he spoke he thrust over the portable smoking set a face suffused with interest.

"Well, she's not worth mentioning," said Keitaro, compelled to answer under the circumstances. He actually felt, recalling her now, that this was so. Yet if he had been speaking to a different companion in a different situation, he might have said quite naturally that she wasn't half bad. Hearing Keitaro's judgment, Taguchi burst into a loud laugh. Keitaro, though hardly able to understand the meaning behind Taguchi's outburst, felt as if a huge wave had broken overhead. His face flushed.

"That's quite all right. Then what happened? When the man came to the stop where the woman was waiting?" Taguchi returned to his usual tone of voice as he seriously prepared to listen to how the event had worked out.

Actually, Keitaro had intended in his opening remarks to amplify his own difficulties in obtaining the information he was reporting on, from his puzzlement about the two stops with the same name to his bringing forth and making good use of the walking stick in which the mysterious oracle was working as a living force, recounting these details fully so that his merit might sound all the higher in Taguchi's ears. However, having immediately been attacked about staying too long at the stop and having been made to feel awkward by ascribing his extended surveillance to a woman who, in the course of the talk, had turned out to be an utter stranger hardly worth supplying him a valid reason for staying—Keitaro was deprived of the courage to advertise himself before Taguchi. So he reported quite simply on those events from the moment the man and woman entered the restaurant, the result being that the account, as he had feared when he left his boardinghouse, turned out as meager as if he had opened his hand before Taguchi's nose and had shown him a fistful of intangible gray cloud.

Yet Taguchi's face did not show any displeasure. His calm manner remained unchanged as he listened with arms folded. He merely threw in at times a "Hmm" or "Really?" or "And then?" in order to allow Keitaro to keep the account going. Even when the report ended, Taguchi's demeanor did not change too soon, apparently expecting something yet to come. Keitaro had to say, "That's all," adding, "I'm really sorry the results are so poor."

"No, you've furnished me with quite a bit of information. Thanks for your pains. It was probably a difficult job."

Taguchi's compliment did not contain much gratitude, but as Keitaro had just made himself look quite stupid, this much affability was more than enough for him. Only now did he feel any relief in finding he had narrowly escaped being disgraced. At the same time a feeling of relaxation so worked on him that he immediately said to Taguchi, "Who
is
that man?"

"Well, who could he be? What do you guess him to be?"

The image of the man in the black fedora dressed in his salt-and-pepper cloak with its open collar vividly appeared before Keitaro's eyes. He had a clear vision of everything about the man—his appearance, his way of speaking, his walk—yet he could come out with no reply to Taguchi's question.

"I don't have the slightest idea."

"Then what kind of personality do you think he has?"

Keitaro had some idea about that. "I thought he seemed like a quiet person," he said, responding as he had actually observed the man to be.

"You're just saying that because you saw him talking to a young woman, aren't you?"

Noticing the flicker of a smile at the corners of Taguchi's lips the moment these words were said, Keitaro closed his mouth again just as it was about to form an answer.

"All men are tender to young women, you know. Probably even you are not without some experience in that area. That fellow especially may be tenderer than most," said Taguchi, bursting into unrestrained laughter. Even while laughing, however, Taguchi kept his eyes on Keitaro.

Imagining what a simpleton he must appear to anyone seeing him there, Keitaro had to laugh too, even though he was pained inwardly.

"Well, what kind of woman do you think she was?" asked Taguchi, suddenly shifting the topic and now putting this sort of question to Keitaro.

"She was even more difficult to understand than the man," Keitaro blurted out.

"Can't you even tell if she's an ordinary woman or a professional?"

"Well," said Keitaro, pausing a moment to think. In rapid succession there welled to the surface of his memory the leather gloves, the white scarf, the beautiful smiling face, and the long coat, yet all these together did not provide him with enough evidence to reply. "She wore a rather somber-colored coat and leather gloves, but . . ."

These two items, which had especially drawn Keitaro's attention among the articles worn by the woman, did not seem to arouse the slightest interest in Taguchi. His face turned serious, and he proceeded to ask further, "Well, don't you have any opinion about their relationship?"

Already complimented a while ago as proof that his report had passed off smoothly, Keitaro had not expected these ticklish inquiries to crop up one after another. What was more, possibly because he was puzzled, he was made to feel each new question increased in difficulty over the preceding one.

Seeing that Keitaro was at a total loss, Taguchi put the same question in other words: "For example, could they be a married couple or a brother and sister or simply friends, or could she be his sweetheart? Of these various relationships, what do you think theirs is?"

"When I saw the woman, I wondered if she was married or not, but somehow they didn't seem like a married couple."

"Granted then that they aren't married, do you think their relationship is physical?"

From the beginning, Keitaro had not been without sprouts of suspicion. If he were to thoroughly reexamine his thoughts on the matter, he might have found that he had a supposition that the two had already established some clandestine relationship exerting its influence on him even from a distance and, because of that influence, intensifying his interest in spying. He was not that much of a theorist to assert that no relationship worthy of note other than a physical one can occur between a man and a woman, but as is usual with warm-blooded young men, he thought that a man and a woman could be considered as "man and woman" only when viewed from this physical aspect. So thinking, he wanted to survey the world as much as possible from this point of view.

To his youthful eyes the large world of humankind was not clearly perceptible; instead, the microcosm of man and woman was vividly mirrored in terms of the physical. Accordingly, he enjoyed reducing most social relationships to sexual ones. It seemed that the relationship between the two people who had met at the streetcar stop had, in the depths of his mind, been linked from the start as one such couple. Moreover, he was not that much of a moralist to fear needlessly some gross sin behind relationships of this kind. He was one of the common lot of men who possess an average awareness of morality, but his own moral outlook, quite unlike his imaginative powers, was not usually active except when the occasion demanded, so he had not experienced any particular offense when he attributed the relationship between the man and woman to the type that most interested him. The only doubts he had about their relationship concerned the considerable difference in their ages. On the other hand, this difference seemed to indicate to him all the more markedly a characteristic feature of "the world of men and women."

To such an extent had he unconsciously given rein to his imagination concerning the two of them, but when he was asked by Taguchi if it were actually true of them, a decisive reply, irrespective of the responsibility for giving it, did not easily reveal itself in definite form to Keitaro's mind. So he said, "Maybe, or maybe not."

Taguchi merely smiled. At that moment the houseboy in
hakama
brought in a calling card on a tray. As Taguchi held up the card for an instant, he replied to Keitaro, "Well, it's only natural you don't know," and then immediately turning to the houseboy, ordered him to show the guest into the Western-style drawing room.

As Keitaro had for some time been in a quandary, he thought of seizing this opportunity to take his leave and was about to rise when Taguchi purposely interrupted him before he was able to. In spite of Keitaro's discomfiture, Taguchi proceeded with his questions. To almost none of them was Keitaro able to give a clear answer, finding them even more trying than the oral examination he had undergone at the university.

"Well, let's make this the last one. You've found out the names of the man and the woman, haven't you?"

To this final question Keitaro had no satisfactory response either. While at the restaurant, he had been paying attention to the conversation of the two people, looking forward to their mentioning "Mr. So-and-so" or "Miss So-and-so" or simply a pet name, but no names, even those of a third party, to say nothing of their own, had ever been referred to, as if they had some particular reason for avoiding them.

"I really don't know their names either."

Hearing this response, Taguchi, his hands moving against the sides of the small brazier, began tapping its paulownia rim with his fingertips, seemingly beating time. Continuing this for a while, he said, "It seems somehow that you missed the main points," but added immediately, "Yet you're honest. That's probably your best quality. Maybe that's much better than reporting what you don't know as if you knew it. If you have one strong point, that's what I appreciate in you," and he burst out laughing.

Keitaro discovered, as he had expected, that his own observations were of no practical value and so felt somewhat ashamed of his failure, but since he firmly believed that only a few hours of attentiveness, patience, and conjecture would not have been enough to obtain a result that would have satisfied Taguchi even if a man ten times more competent had been employed, he did not feel that much pain from Taguchi's evaluation. On the other hand, he was not all that delighted to be praised for his honesty, for to be as honest as he was seemed to him nothing more than what an ordinary person's honesty would be.