The cigarette’s lit tip is steadily burning down and an inch of ash, like some gray caddis-case, plopped down onto the blanket. My master, ignoring that declension, stares intently at the rising smoke. Stirred by the light spring breeze, the smoke floats up in loops and vortices, finally to gather in a kind of clinging haze around the ends of his wife’s just-washed black hair. Gentle reader, please accept my apologies. I had completely forgotten to mention that lady’s presence.
Mrs. Sneaze is sitting so that her bottom presents itself before her husband’s face. You think that impolite? Speaking for myself I would not call it so. Both courtesy and discourtesy depend on one’s point of view.
My master is lying perfectly at ease with his cupped face in close proximity to his wife’s bottom: he is neither disturbed by its proximity nor concerned at his own conduct. His wife is equally composed to position her majestic bum bang in her husband’s face. There is neither the slightest hint nor intention of discourtesy. They are simply a much-married couple who, in less than a year of wedlock, sensibly disengaged themselves from the cramps of etiquette. Mrs. Sneaze seems to have taken advantage of the exceptionally fine weather to give her pitch-black hair a really thorough wash with a concoction made from raw eggs and some special kind of seaweed. Somewhat ostentatiously, she has let her long straight hair hang loose around her shoulders and all the way down her back, and sits, busy and silent, sewing a child’s sleeveless jacket. In point of fact, I believe it is purely because she wants to dry her hair that she’s brought both her sewing-box and a flattish cushion made from some all-woolen muslin out here. It is similarly to present her hair at the best angle to the sun that, deferentially, she presents her bottom to her spouse. That’s my belief, but it may, of course, be that my master moved to intrude his face where her bum already was.
Now, to return to that business of the cigarette smoke, my master lay watching with fascinated absorption the way in which the smoke, floating upward through his wife’s abundant and now loosened hair, was itself combed into an appearance of filaments of blue-gray air. However, it is in the nature of smoke to go on rising, so that my master’s fascination with this singular spectacle of hair-entangled smoke compels him, lest he miss any phase of its development, steadily to lift his gaze. His eyes, first leveled on her hips, move up her back, over her shoulders, and along her neck. And it was after his concentrated stare had completed the ascent of her neck and was focused on the very crown of her head that he suddenly let out an involuntary gasp of surprise.
For there, on the very summit of the lady whom he had promised to love and cherish till death did them part, was a large round patch of baldness. That unexpected nakedness, catching the clear spring sunshine, threw back the light and shone with an almost braggart self-confidence. My master’s eyes remain fixed open in surprise at this dazzling discovery and, disregarding the danger of such brightness to his own uncovered retinal tissue, he continues to goggle at her skin’s bright mirror. The image that then immediately shot into my master’s mind was of that dish on which stood the taper set before the altar in the household shrine handed down in his family for untold generations. My master’s family belongs to the Shin sect of Buddhism, a sect in which it is the established custom to lay out substantial sums, more indeed than most of its adherents can afford, on household shrines. My master suddenly remembers how, when he was a very small boy, he first saw the shrine in the family safe-room. It was a miniature shrine, somber though thickly gilded, in which a brass taper-dish was hanging. From the burning taper a faint light shone, even in the day time, on the rounded dish.
Bright against the shrine’s general darkness, that image of the shining dish, seen in his childhood time and time again, leapt back into his mind as he gaped at his wife’s bald patch. But that first remembrance quickly vanished, to be replaced by memories of the pigeons at the Kannon Temple in Asakusa. There seems no obvious connection between temple doves and Mrs. Sneaze’s gleaming scalp, but in my master’s mind the association of images is clear and very close. It, again, is an association deriving from his early childhood. Whenever then he was taken to that temple, he would buy peas for the pigeons. The peas cost less than a farthing a saucer. The saucers, made of an unglazed reddish clay, were remarkably similar, both in size and color, to his wife’s bare patch.
“Astonishingly similar.” The words escape from his lips in tones of an awed wonder.
“What is?” says his wife without even turning toward him.
“What is? There’s a big bald patch on the crown of your head. Did you know?”
“Yes,” she answers, still not interrupting her sewing. She seems not the least embarrassed by his discovery. A model wife, at least in point of imperturbability.
“Was it there before we married or did it crop up later?”Though my master does not come out with an open accusation, he clearly sounds as if he would regard himself as having been tricked into marriage if the bald patch was, in fact, present in her maidenhood.
“I don’t remember when I got it. Not that it matters. Whatever difference could a bald patch make?” Quite the philosopher, isn’t she just.
“Not that it matters! But it’s your own hair that we’re talking about.”
My master speaks with a certain sharpness.
“It’s just because it is my own hair that it doesn’t matter.” An effective answer, but she may have been feeling slightly self-conscious for she lifted her right hand gently to stroke the spot. “Oh dear,” she said, “it’s got much bigger. I hadn’t realized that.” Her tone conceded that the patch was larger than would be normal at her age and, now driven onto the defensive, she added, “Once one starts doing one’s hair in the married style, the strands at the crown come under a very real strain. All married women lose hair from the top of the head.”
“If all married women lost hair at your rate, by the time they were forty they’d be bald as kettles. You must have caught some kind of disease. Maybe it’s contagious. You’d better go round and have it looked at by Dr. Amaki before things go too far,” says my master, carefully stroking his own head.
“That’s all very well, but what about you? White hairs in your nostrils! If baldness is contagious, white hairs will be catching.” Mrs. Sneaze begins to go over to the attack.
“A single, white hair in the nostrils is obviously harmless, and it doesn’t even show. But fox-mange on the crown of the head cannot be ignored. It is, especially in the case of a young woman, positively unsightly. It’s a deformity.”
“If you think I’m deformed, why did you marry me? It was you who wanted the marriage, yet now you call me deformed. . .”
“For the simple reason that I didn’t know. Indeed, I was unaware of your condition until this very day. If you want to make an issue of it, why didn’t you reveal your naked scalp to me before we got married?”
“What a silly thing to say! Where in the world would you find a place where girls had to have their scalps examined before they could get married?”
“Well, the baldness might be tolerable but you’re also uncommonly dumpy, and that is certainly unsightly.”
“There’s never been anything hidden about my height. You knew perfectly well when you married me that I’m slightly on the short side.”
“Of course I knew, but I’d thought you might extend a bit, and that’s why I married you.”
“How could anyone grow taller after the age of twenty? Are you trying to make a fool of me? Eh?” She drops the sleeveless jacket and, twisting around to face her husband, gives him a threatening look as if to say,
“Now watch your step, you go too far, and you’ll be sorry.”
“There is surely no law forbidding people from growing taller after the age of twenty. I cherished a faint hope that, if I fed you up on decent food, you might prolong yourself.” With every appearance of meaning what he said, my master was about to develop his curious reasoning, when he was cut off by a sharp ringing of the doorbell followed by a loud shout of
“Hello.” Snuffling after the scent of that shepherd’s purse on the roof, the dogged Suzuki seems at last to have tracked down Sneaze’s den.
My master’s wife, temporarily postponing their domestic row, snatches up the jacket and her sewing-box and vanishes into an inner room. My master scrabbles his gray blanket up into a ball and slings it into the study. The maid brings in the visitor’s card and gives it to my master, who, having read it, looks a little surprised. Then, having told the maid to show the visitor in, he goes off into the lavatory with the card still clasped in his hand. If it is beyond one’s comprehension that he should thus suddenly take to the loo, it is even more difficult to explain why he should have taken with him the visiting-card of Suzuki Tōjūrō. It is, in any case, very hard luck on the soul of that visiting-card that it should have to accompany him to that noisome place.
The maid deposits a printed, cotton cushion on the floor in front of the alcove-recess, invites the guest to be seated in that place of honor, and then removes herself. Suzuki first inspects the room. He begins by examining the scroll displayed in the alcove: its Chinese characters, allegedly written by Mokuan, that master calligrapher of the Zen sect, are, of course, faked, but they state that flowers are in bloom and that spring is come to all the world. He next tarns his attention to some early-flowering cherry-blossoms arranged in one of those celadon vases which they turn out cheap in Kyoto. Then, when his roving glance chances to fall upon the cushion provided for his particular convenience, what should he find but, planted serenely smack in its center, a squatting cat. I need hardly add that the cat in question is my lordly self.
It was at this point that the first quick tremor of tension, a ripple so small it did not show on his face, quaked in Suzuki’s mind. That cushion had undoubtedly been provided for himself but before he could sit down on it, some strange animal, without so much as a by-your-leave, had dispossessed him of the seat of honor and now lay crouched upon it with an air of firm self-confidence. This was the first consideration to disturb the composure of his mind. In point of fact, had the cushion remained unoccupied, Suzuki would probably have sought to demonstrate his modesty by resting his rump on the hard matfloor until such time as my master himself invited its transfer to the comfort of the cushion. So who the hell is this that has so blithely appropriated the cushion which was destined, sooner or later, to have eased Suzuki buttocks? Had the interloper been a human being, he might well have given way. But to be pre-empted by a mere cat, that is intolerable. It is also a little unpleasant.
This minor animality of his dissedation was the second consideration to disturb the composure of Suzuki’s mind. There was, moreover, something singularly irritating about the very attitude of the cat. Without the least small twitch-sign of apology, the cat sits arrogantly on the cushion it has filched and, with a cold glitter in its unamiable eyes, stares up into Suzuki’s face as if to say, “And who the hell are you?” This is the third consideration to ruffle Suzuki’s composure. Of course if he’s really irked, he ought to jerk me off the cushion by the scruff of my neck. But he doesn’t. He just watches me in silence. It is inconceivable that any creature as massive and muscular as man could be so afraid of a cat as not to dare to bring crude force to bear in any clash of wills. So why doesn’t Suzuki express his dislike by turfing me off the cushion with summary dispatch? The reason is, I think, that Suzuki is inhibited by his own conception of the conduct proper to a man. When it comes to the use of force any child three feet tall can, and will, fling me about quite easily. But a full-grown man, even Suzuki Tōjūrō, Goldfield’s right-hand man, cannot bring himself to raise a finger against this Supreme Cat Deity ensconced upon the holy ground of a cotton cushion two feet square. Even though there were no witnesses, a man would regard it as beneath his dignity to scuffle with a cat for possession of a cushion. One would make oneself ridiculous, even a figure of farce, if one degraded oneself to the level of arguing with a cat. For Suzuki, the price of this human estimate of human dignity is to endure a certain amount of discomfort in the nates, but precisely because he feels he must endure it, his hatred of the cat is proportionately increased. When, every now and again he looks at me, his face exudes distaste. Since I find it amusing to see such wry distortion of his features, I do my best myself to maintain an air of innocence and resist the temptation to laugh.
While this pantomime was still going on, my master left the lavatory and, having tidied himself up, came in and sat down. “Hello,” he said.
Since the visiting card is no longer in his hand, the name of Suzuki Tōjūrō must have been condemned to penal servitude for life in that evil-smelling place. Almost before I could feel sorry for the visiting card’s ill-luck, my master, saying, “Oh, you!” grabs me by the scruff of my neck and hurls me out to land with a bang on the veranda.
“Do take this cushion. You’re quite a stranger. When did you come up to Tokyo?” My master offers the cushion to his old friend, and Suzuki, having turned it catside-down, dumps himself upon it.
“As I’ve been so busy I haven’t let you know, but I was recently transferred back to our main office in Tokyo.”
“That’s splendid. We haven’t seen each other for quite a long while.
This must be the first time since you went off to the provinces?”
“Yes, nearly ten years ago. Actually, I did sometimes come up to Tokyo, but as I was always flooded with business commitments, I simply couldn’t manage to get round to see you. I do hope you won’t think too badly of me. But, unlike your own profession, a business firm is honestly very busy.”
“Ten years make big changes,” observes my master, looking Suzuki up and down. His hair is neatly parted. He wears an English-made tweed suit enlivened by a gaudy tie. A bright gold watch chain glitters from his waistcoat. All these sartorial touches make it hard to credit that this can really be one of Sneaze’s friends.
“Well, one gets on. Indeed, I’m now virtually obliged to sport such things as this. . .” Suzuki seems a little self-conscious about the vulgarly fashionable display of his watch chain.
“Is that thing real?” My master poses his question with the minimum of tact.
“Solid gold. Eighteen carat,” Suzuki answers, smilingly smug. “You, too,” he continued, “seem to have aged. Am I right in thinking you’ve children now? One? Am I right?”
“No.”
“Two?”
“No.”
“What, more? Three, then, is it?”
“Yes, I have three children now, and I don’t know how many more to come in the future.”
“Still as whimsical as ever. How old is your eldest? Quite big, I suppose.”
“Yes, I’m not quite sure how old, but probably six or seven.”
Suzuki laughed. “It must be pleasant to be a teacher, everything so free and easy. I wish I too had taken up teaching.”
“Just you try. You’d be sorry in three days.”
“I don’t know. It seems a good kind of life: refined and not too stressful, plenty of spare time, and the opportunity to really study one’s own special interest. Being a businessman is not bad, either, though at my present level things aren’t particularly satisfactory. If one becomes a businessman, one has to get to the top. Anywhere lower on the ladder, you have to go around spouting idiotic flatteries and drinking saké with the boss when there’s nothing you want less. Altogether, it’s a stupid way of life.”
“Ever since my school days I’ve always taken a scunner to businessmen. They’ll do anything for money. They are, after all, what they used to be called in the good old days: the very dregs of society.” My master, with a businessman right there in front of him, indulges in tactlessness.
“Oh, have a heart. They aren’t always like that. Admittedly, there’s a certain coarseness about them; for there’s no point in even trying to be a businessman unless your love for money is so absolute that you’re ready to accompany it on the walk to a double suicide. For money, believe you me, is a hard mistress and none of
her lovers are let off lightly. As a matter of fact, I’ve just been visiting a businessman and, according to him, the only way to succeed is to practice the ‘triangled technique’: try to escape your obligations, annihilate your kindly feelings, and geld yourself of the sense of shame. Try-an-geld. You get it? Jolly clever, don’t you think?”
“What awful fathead told you that?”
“He’s no fathead. Smart as a whip, in fact. And increasingly respected in business circles. I rather fancy you know him. He lives up a side street just around the corner.”
“You mean that frightful Goldfield?”
“Goodness me, but you’re really getting worked up. He only meant it, you know, as a kind of joke. It’s simply a way of summarizing the fact that to make money one must go through hell. So please don’t take a joke too seriously.”
“His ‘triangled technique’ may, I grant, be a joke: let’s say it’s screamingly funny. But what about his wife and her nauseating nose? If you’ve been to their house you could hardly have avoided colliding with that beak.”
“Ah, Mrs. Goldfield. She seems a sensible woman of broad understanding.”
“Damn her understanding. I’m talking about her nose. Her nose, Suzuki, it’s a positive monstrosity. Only the other day I composed a haitai poem about it.”
“What the dickens is a haitai poem?”
“Do you mean to say you’ve never heard of the current experiments in the composition of extended haiku?You do seem cut off from what’s going on in the world.”
“True. When one is as busy as I am, it’s absolutely impossible to keep up with things like literature. Anyway, even when a lad, I never liked it much.”
“Are you aware of the shape of Charlemagne’s nose?”
“You are indeed in a whimsical mood.” Suzuki laughed quite naturally. “Of course I haven’t the faintest idea of the shape of Charlemagne’s nose.”