To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (6 page)

He asked quite seriously that Sunaga introduce him to the uncle he had previously spoken of, the one living on Uchisaiwaicho, saying he wanted to have an interview with him for that very purpose. This uncle was the husband of the younger sister of Sunaga's mother. He had gone into business after leaving government service and was now connected to several companies. Sunaga apparently had no intention of asking his uncle for help in finding a position. Keitaro remembered Sunaga's once saying that this uncle had offered him any number of possibilities, but that none of them appealed to him.

Sunaga had arranged, he said, to see his uncle that morning, but a sore throat had prevented him from going out. In a few days he would be able to, so at that time he would definitely speak to his uncle about Keitaro. Then he added, whether as a precaution or for some other reason, "He's a very busy man, you know. Besides, he has job applicants from all over. I have no idea what he'll say, but it wouldn't hurt to go see him." Keitaro interpreted these words as a warning not to expect too much. One interview would at least be better than none, and in contrast to his usual behavior he pleaded with Sunaga to inquire on his behalf.

Actually, though, Keitaro was not as worried or as anxious as his words implied. It was true, as he had himself asserted, that he had been and still was racking his brains and wasting no effort running about trying to find a job since his graduation from university. But there was exaggeration in the painful tone of voice— in half of it at least—with which he appealed to others, claiming he had not yet been given even the first glimmer of hope. He was not, as Sunaga was, the only child in his family, but like Sunaga he had only his mother at home, his younger sister having married. While he had no house or lot to rent as Sunaga did, he did own a small plot of farmland in the country. This tenanted land brought him yearly yields of rice—not much, but enough so that when the harvest was converted to cash according to the market price, he had no difficulties over the twenty or thirty yen required for his room and board each month. Furthermore, many a time had he requested extra expenses from his indulgent mother as if, so to speak, he were preying on himself. Under these circumstances, his clamoring for a position, though not altogether false, was certainly raised aloud through vanity in the hope of boasting about it to the people back home, to friends, and even to himself. Had the position itself been his real concern, he ought to have worked harder at the university in compiling a better record, but romantic that he was, he had made it a point to be as idle as he possibly could, the result being that his graduation was hardly a brilliant success.

Keitaro talked with Sunaga for an hour or so. He had himself brought forward those urgent questions of position and subsistence, but since he was more concerned about the woman he had seen from behind a while ago, he was not as seriously attentive to those momentous issues as his words implied. At one point when he suddenly heard the laughing voice of a young woman coming from the drawing room below, he felt tempted to ask if Sunaga had a visitor. Yet the very moment in which he was weighing the question became the instrument for destroying the naturalness of its utterance and making it an untimely remark. And so it remained unasked after all.

As for Sunaga, he tried bringing up topics that would humor Keitaro's curiosity as much as possible. He described how the back street he lived on just off the streetcar line was divided by small houses and narrow lanes into cubes that formed a hive of nameless townspeople in almost each of whose homes a drama was being enacted which would never surface to society at large.

He began with a woman who lived several houses down from his, the mistress of a retired hardware dealer whose store was in Nihombashi. She had apparently taken a lover, an actor belonging to some theatrical troupe. The retired merchant knew about the affair but said nothing. On a side street opposite her home was a neat little nondescript house with lattice doors in front owned either by a pettifogger or an employment agency, and sometimes the blackboard in front had such advertisements as "Immediate Openings: Woman Reporter. Woman Cook." Once a pretty woman twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old came looking for a job. Enfolded in her long dark blue twilled mantle with frills on it, she resembled a Western nurse. The gist of the story was that both the master of that house and his wife were surprised to discover she was the daughter of the man he had once served as a houseboy.

Sunaga next mentioned a gray-haired usurer that lived with his wife, who was about twenty years old, in a back alley behind Sunaga's house. It was said he had taken her as security for a loan. The neighboring residence was occupied by a professional gambler. While his dice-rolling cronies gathered there rubbing bloodshot eyes, the wife of one of the gamesters, a baby on her back under a nursing coat, occasionally came to fetch her husband, who was frenzily engrossed in his wagering. Crying, she would beg him to return, and the husband would assure her he would, but only in an hour when he had won back his losses. And then, almost hanging on to him, she would plead with him to leave at once, saying that the more he would try to win back, the more he would lose. Along that frozen midnight street the voice pleading for return and the one adamant against it would disturb the sleep of the neighbors.

As Keitaro listened to these stories, he began to suspect that Sunaga, who had long been in this place rampant with such real-life novels, might likewise be playing a part in a secret drama of his own but feigning innocence. Of course, behind this conjecture was the faint shadow cast by the woman Keitaro had seen from behind.

"While you're on the subject, let me in on your own story," Keitaro said, trying to attack, but Sunaga merely brushed aside the remark with a slight smile. "Well," he replied, "I've got a sore throat today." It sounded as if he had a story to tell, but not to Keitaro.

When Keitaro went downstairs, the woman's clogs were no longer at the entrance. Whether their owner had left or they had been put in the clog box or were hidden by discreet hands, he could not guess. As soon as he was out on the street, he hurried into a tobacconist's, urged on by one knew not what, and emerged with a cigar in his mouth. Smoking, he walked along to Sudacho where, just as he was about to board a streetcar, he remembered the regulations against smoking, so he moved on toward Mansei Bridge. With the intention of making the cigar last until he reached his boardinghouse, he sauntered along, still thinking about Sunaga. Now, the image of his friend did not appear just by itself —it was invariably followed by the flitting figure of the woman he had seen.

Ultimately he felt as if he were being jeered at by Sunaga: "How can you expect to come off looking good in romantic exploration by observing the world through a telescope from the third floor of a boardinghouse on Daimachi in Hongo?"

Keitaro had never been familiar with or even interested in what Tokyoites referred to as the "lower-town life." Occasionally passing through some back street around Nihombashi, he had seen a lattice door so narrow that one had to move sideways to pass through it, an iron lantern hanging for no apparent reason above the earthen floor at the entrance, shining inlaid bamboo filling the gap under the stepping-board, and a sliding door whose lower part was paneled with boards of cedar or some other wood so thin that the sunlight had tinged it translucent red. When he took in these items, he was left with a cramped feeling. He thought he could not bear such a constrained life, one with everything around him so tidily ordered in trivial ways, and so glossy too. People living in such houses were, he imagined, so neat and punctual that they were even likely to be particular about the sharpness of a toothpick used after a meal. He conjectured that these minute points in their mode of living were all governed by traditional rules and, like their tobacco sets, shone dreadfully with the luster of custom which generation after generation of their forefathers had rubbed and polished.

Even at Sunaga's house when he saw some useless pine tree guarded against snowfall by straw ropes or the small garden over which dead pine needles had been strewn with excessive scrupulousness, he could not help associating these things with the image of the young master of the house raised tenderly in the bosom of that delicate civilization of Old Edo. For one thing, Sunaga's habit of wearing a stiff sash tightly bound round his kimono waist and his way of sitting squarely on his seat seemed strange to Keitaro. Sometimes Sunaga's mother would come in and join them in their talk. Sunaga had told him she was fond of reciting the classical epic songs, and when Keitaro listened to the words spoken in her sweet, engaging manner, words mellifluous yet quite articulate, he felt in them a delicious refinement not found in ready-made speech, as though they had just been brought from a cellar where they had been kept in storage for ages. He did not of course think that her speech was made up of hackneyed and set phrases, but he could not help recognizing that hidden beneath their surface was the deftness of an age-long practice in phraseology.

In short, Keitaro wanted something freer, something more off the beaten track. However, on that particular day he hadn't been his usual self, at least not in his imagined fancies. He wished he had been brought up in a house of his own inherited from his father, a house along some back street where rows of black-walled residences built in the warehouse style stood with that moist atmosphere of the Tokugawa period still lingering over them. In that neighborhood playmates would have gently called out, "Kei-chan, come and play with us," and they would have played at gangsters or soldiers. Once a month he might have lit a sacred fire as he visited Suitengu Shrine in Kakigaracho or Fudo Temple in the Fukagawa district. (Indeed, Sunaga automatically accompanied his mother in observing this old-fashioned practice.) He might have worn a plain iron-blue
haori
and walked in ecstasy along streets imbued with the atmosphere of the Kabuki world modified by modern taste, discovering some amorous intrigues bound up in the conventions but at the same time vaulting over them.

All at once the name Morimoto came to him, and it turned Keitaro's fancy a strange hue. He had, out of curiosity, willingly sought to shake hands with this shady-eccentric, the result being that he had nearly gotten involved in troubles he least expected. Fortunately. Keitaro's landlord believed in his integrity. If the landlord had had any mistrust in him, Keitaro might have been summoned to the police, his situation open to suspicion. The moment he thought of this possibility, the romantic dream he had been building suddenly lost its warmth and broke away meaninglessly like a bank of clouds made up of ugly fancies. But behind this ruin persisted the image of Morimoto's lean face with its double eyelids and its disheveled drooping moustache. Keitaro felt a certain fondness for that nondescript face, as well as contempt and pity; it seemed to him that behind it there loomed something mysterious. And with all these thoughts he associated that queer walking stick Morimoto had given him as a token of their friendship.

It was a rather simple bamboo cane, its root curving into the handle. It was different from ordinary canes in only one respect: the handle was carved into the shape of a snake. Unlike the vulgar canes with the whole length of a curved snake winding round and round the stick, the kind often exported, his had only a carved snakehead. And that head, with its mouth open as if it were about to swallow something, served as the handle. But what the mouth was about to swallow, whether a frog or an egg or whatever, no one could tell, because the very tip of the handle had been carved round and smooth. Morimoto had said he had cut and carved the cane himself.