“Please do.”
“But it will be difficult for just the three of us to cover so much ground. Would it be satisfactory if we just left ice in the thermos bucket and requested the guests to help themselves?”
“Surely. The ones who stray as far as the arbor will probably be young couples anyway, and it might be just as well not to disturb them. Be doubly sure not to forget the mosquito repellent when it starts to get dark.”
Honda was truly shocked to hear his wife speaking in such a manner. Her voice was pitched unnaturally high and her words floated on the air. The frivolity she had presumably despised more than anything in the world over the years now so infused her voice and words that he suspected her of sarcasm.
The alert movements of the waiters in their white uniforms seemed to have charged the household with straight lines. Their well-starched jackets, their youthful efficiency of movement, their apparent respectfulness, and their professional polish turned the household into a strange and refreshing world. All private matters were swept aside, and arrangements, consultation, commands, and orders flew about as if they were indeed the butterflies in whose shape the white napkins had been folded.
A buffet had been set up beside the pool to permit the guests to eat in their swimming suits. The familiar appearance of the house had instantly changed. Honda’s treasured desk, covered with a white tablecloth, now served as an outdoor bar. Although he himself had directed the alterations, once underway they turned into a kind of violent transformation.
Driven back by the gradually intensifying sunlight, he watched everything in amazement. Who had planned all this? And to what end? To spend money? to invite impressive guests? to play the role of the complacent bourgeois? to boast of the completed swimming pool? As a matter of fact, this was the first private pool in Ninooka either before or since the war. There are many generous people in this world who will forgive another’s wealth if only they are invited to his house.
“Dear, please put these on,” said Rié, bringing him a pair of dark-brown summer worsted trousers, a white shirt, and a bow tie with tiny brown polka dots. She placed them on the table under the beach umbrella.
“You want me to change here?”
“Why not? There are only the waiters. Besides I’m going to ask them to take an early lunch break now.”
He took up the bow tie, the extremities of which were shaped like gourds. Holding one end between two fingers, he playfully held it up to the light of the swimming pool. It was an informal, miserable, limp strip of fabric. It reminded him of the procedure of the “summary order” of a police court. “Notification of summary procedure and demur of the accused.” It was Honda himself who most detested the approaching party . . . except for one ultimate kernel, one scintillating point of hopelessness.
Old Mrs. Mashiba was the first to arrive with her three grandchildren. These consisted of an unmarried girl and her two extremely ordinary, bespectacled, and studious-looking younger brothers, one a senior and the other a sophomore in college. The three immediately retired to the dressing rooms where they changed into swimming suits. The grandmother, wearing a kimono, remained under the umbrella.
“While my husband was alive, especially after the war, we fought at every election. I always voted Communist just to spite him. And then I was a great admirer of Kyuichi Tokuda.”
The old widow adjusted her kimono collars incessantly or nervously tugged at her sleeves like a grasshopper ducking its head and rubbing its wings. She was reputed to be a completely unconventional and entertaining person; hidden behind mauve glasses, sparkled prying eyes, relentlessly speculating on the finances of one and all. Exposed to her cold gaze, everyone felt as if he were her dependent.
The three young people who returned dressed for swimming possessed bodies typical of good families, modest and sleek-limbed. One after the other they jumped into the water and in a relaxed way began swimming. Honda regretted above all that Ying Chan was not to be the first to enter the water in his pool.
Soon Rié came from the house escorting Prince and Princess Kaori, who were already in their bathing suits. Honda apologized for having been unaware of their arrival and for not having come up to greet them. He scolded Rié for not warning him; but the Prince merely shook hands, dismissing the whole matter, and went into the water. Mrs. Mashiba watched this exchange with a bemused look as though she were observing boorish people. After the Prince had circled the pool once and climbed up on the edge, she spoke to him from where she was in her shrill voice: “How young and manly you are, Prince! Ten years ago I should have challenged you to a race.”
“I may not be up to you even now, Madame. Just swimming fifty yards and I’m already out of breath, as you see. Anyway, how wonderful that we can swim in Gotemba, though the water’s a trifle chilly.”
He shook the drops from his body as though sloughing off ostentation. Black dots spattered on the concrete.
The Prince himself had not noticed that people sometimes regarded him as cold because of his great efforts to behave on all occasions with the nonchalance and informality that had come after the war. When it was no longer necessary to maintain dignity, he became confused about human relationships. Confident because of his elite position that he had the right to dislike tradition more than anyone else, he slighted those who held it in esteem in this day and age. That might have been all right if when he remarked that someone showed no progressiveness it had not come to mean the same thing as when he had commented in former days that someone was too low-born. The Prince rated all progressives, as he did himself, as “sufferers in the fetters of tradition.” Thus, paradoxically, the next step would have him thinking of himself as a commoner.
When the Prince removed his glasses before swimming, Honda saw his face for the first time without them. They were for him a rather important bridge to the world. When his bridge was removed, his plain face held a certain vague melancholy, partly because of the glare. It was a melancholy where the gap between long-gone nobility and the present was somehow confused, out of focus.
In contrast, the Princess, slightly plump in her bathing suit, was imbued with natural grace. When she floated on her back and raised one arm and smiled, she looked like some innocent, lovely waterfowl happily swimming against the background of Hakoné. One could but assume that she was one of those rare people who knew what happiness was.
Honda was mildly irritated by the Mashiba grandchildren who, having emerged from the water, now surrounded their grandmother and were conversing politely with the Prince and Princess. The subject of the young people’s conversation was exclusively America. The oldest girl talked about the fashionable private school where she had studied, and her younger brothers only about the universities where they were going once they had graduated from their respective Japanese colleges. Everything was America. Television was already widespread there . . . how nice if that were true of Japan . . . but at the present rate it would probably be over ten years before they enjoyed television here . . . and on and on . . .
Mrs. Mashiba did not like conversations about the future. She interrupted immediately.
“You’re all laughing at me, thinking I’ll not be here to see it anyway. Very well, then. I’ll appear as a ghost on your screens when you’re watching every night.”
The manner in which the grandmother ruthlessly controlled the young people’s conversation was extraordinary, as was the way the youngsters immediately fell silent and listened the moment she spoke. Honda thought they were like three intelligent rabbits.
The host was becoming skilled in greeting his guests as they appeared one after another in their bathing suits at the entrance to the terrace. On the other side of the pool, flanked by two couples from neighboring villas, Imanishi and Mrs. Tsubakihara clad in street clothes raised their hands in greeting. Imanishi was wearing an aloha shirt with a large print design in which he was completely out of character, while Mrs. Tsubakihara wore her usual black kimono of silk gauze that resembled a mournin
g outfit. She was striving for effect: a single ominous black crystal set in the brilliance of the swimming pool. Honda saw through her right away and concluded that Imanishi had put on his ludicrous shirt to flout his simple mistress who was always trying to play roles quite unsuited to her.
Lagging behind the animated guests in their bathing suits, the couple slowly walked along the edge of the water that made their black and yellow reflections rock.
The Prince and Princess knew Imanishi and Mrs. Tsubakihara well. The Prince frequently attended postwar meetings of the so-called cultural elite and was on sufficiently friendly terms with Imanishi to talk quite informally with him.
“That amusing man has just arrived,” he remarked to Honda.
As soon as Imanishi was seated, he took out the crumpled wrapper from a pack of imported cigarettes, threw it away, and drew out a new package. When he had stripped off the wrapping, he tapped the bottom and skillfully extracted a cigarette. “I can’t sleep at all these nights,” he said perfunctorily as he put it to his lips.
“Are you worried about something?” the Prince asked, placing the plate from which he had just been eating on the table.
“Not especially. But I’ve got to have someone to talk to in the middle of the night. We talk and talk until morning, and when the sun comes up we feel like committing suicide. Then we solemnly take sleeping pills. But we wake up and nothing has happened. The morning’s the same as ever.”
“What sort of conversations do you have night after night?”
“There’s ever so much to talk about if you know that this is going to be your last. We cover every possible subject in the world. What we’ve done, what others have done, what the world has experienced, what mankind has gone through, or things a forgotten continent has dreamt of for several thousands of years. Anything will do. There are all kinds of subjects. The world is going to end tonight.”
The Prince looked most interested and questioned further.
“But if you’re alive the next day, what do you talk about then? You’ve covered everything.”
“That’s no problem. You just talk it all over again.”
Amazed by this answer that sounded as though Imanishi were putting him on, the Prince fell silent.
Honda stood to the side listening. He did not know how serious Imanishi was. “By the way, what ever happened to the Land of the Pomegranate?” he asked, recalling the weird tale he had once heard.
“Ah . . .” said Imanishi, turning his cold eyes on him. His face looked more dissipated than ever these days, and it contrasted strangely with the colorful Hawaiian shirt and the American cigarettes, creating, Honda felt, the impression of a certain type of interpreter who worked for the Occupation Forces. “It’s been destroyed! It exists no more.”
This was his usual manner of speaking and the statement in itself did not surprise Honda. But if the millennium of sex, once called the Land of the Pomegranate, had perished in Imanishi’s illusions, it also had to disappear in the mind of Honda, who hated these fantasies. It existed no more. Imanishi was guilty of slaughtering the fantasy, and Honda could imagine how he must have been intoxicated by the fanciful bloodletting in destroying the kingdom he had created. He could picture the harrowing scene that night. He had created by words and destroyed by words. Although the kingdom had never possessed reality, still it had once manifested itself somewhere, and now it was destroyed by cruel whim. Seeing Imanishi’s drug-roughened yellowish brown tongue lick his lips, Honda vividly pictured imaginary mountains of corpses and rivers of blood.
Compared to the desires of this sallow weakling, his own wants were far more quiet and modest. Yet they were equally impossible of fulfillment. Seeing Imanishi who showed not a trace of sentimentality and hearing him announce with his typically affected nonchalance the destruction of the Land of the Pomegranate, Honda was pierced to the core by the frivolousness of it all.
But his thoughts were immediately interrupted by Mrs. Tsubakihara speaking in his ear. The fact that she whispered in a particularly low voice bespoke the fact that she had nothing of importance to relate.
“This is just between you and me. You know that Makiko’s in Europe, don’t you?”
“So I hear.”
“I’m not talking about the trip itself. I just wanted to tell you that she didn’t invite me to go with her this time. She took some vulgar and untalented pupil along. But of course I’m not criticizing that. Only she didn’t tell me anything about her going. Can you believe it? I went to see her off at the airport, but I was so overcome I couldn’t say a word.”
“I wonder why she didn’t mention it. The two of you were practically inseparable.”
“We were not only inseparable, she was my goddess. And my goddess deserted me.
“It’s a long story, but when her family was in great difficulty after the war—her father, a poet too, was an officer—I came to her assistance before anyone else. I asked her advice in everything. I concealed nothing from her. And I think I lived and wrote poetry just as she wished me to. The feeling of body and soul joined to a goddess kept me alive, though I was a mere shell after I lost my son in the war. My feelings didn’t change at all even after she became so famous, but the only bad thing was that there was too much of a gap between her talent and mine. Or rather it became even clearer than ever to me after I was deserted that I had not had a shred of talent to start with.”
“That’s not true, I’m sure,” said Honda, to be polite, squinting in the light from the swimming pool.
“No, I know it now perfectly well. There’s no harm in facing it, but it’s clear to me that she must have known from the very beginning. Can you think of anything more cruel? Knowing that I was completely without talent, she led me around by the nose, made me obey all her commands, and sometimes patted my back and used me as much as she wished. Then she discards me like an old shoe and goes off to Europe with some other wealthy, fawning disciple.”
“Let’s put aside the question of your talent. Makiko possesses outstanding ability and you know that’s always accompanied by ruthless cruelty.”
“Just as a goddess is cruel . . . But, Mr. Honda, how can I go on living after being deserted by a goddess? Without the one who knew my every thought and deed, what can I do?”
“How about religion?”
“Religion! It’s no use believing in some invisible god who possesses no risk of treachery. It won’t work if I can’t have one who watches over me and tells me to do this and not that, who leads me by the hand into every action, and from whom I can conceal nothing, before whom I am purified and feel no shame.”
“You’ll always be a child . . . and a mother.”
“Yes, Mr. Honda, I shall indeed.”
Already tears were brimming in Mrs. Tsubakihara’s eyes.
The Mashiba children and two new couples were in the swimming pool at the moment. Prince Kaori joined them, and they tossed about a large rubber ball with green and white stripes. The sound of splashing water, the shouting, and the merry laughter added brightness to the diffused light in the pool. The swaying blue surface was whipped up, breaking into a flurry of whitecaps. The water that had been licking quietly at the corners of the pool was now rent by the muscular shining backs of the swimmers, who made deep gashes in its sparkling surface. These instantly closed again and were transformed into quivering swells that engulfed those in the pool. The spray that rose among the shouting on one side produced countless oily rings of light on the other, all elaborately contracting and expanding.
The green and white striped ball, the instant it flew among the swimmers, appeared in chiaroscuro. The color of the water, the tones of the bathing suits, even the people playing there were unrelated to human feelings of any depth. Yet this amount of water and its movement, the laughter and the shouts of the people, somehow all evoked a feeling of tragedy in Honda’s mind. He wondered why.
Could it be because of the sun? He looked up to the sky where the light appeared distorted by the dee
pness of the blue, and began to sneeze. Just then Mrs. Tsubakihara addressed him in her familiar tearful voice, muffled by the inevitable handkerchief that covered her face:
“What a good time they’re having! Who would have imagined during the war that this would ever be possible. I wanted so much to have Akio experience this . . . at least once.”
It was after two when Rié escorted Keiko and Ying Chan onto the terrace in their swimming suits. After having waited so impatiently and for so long, Ying Chan’s appearance seemed to Honda much too routine.
Keiko, in a bathing suit with black and white vertical stripes, seemed voluptuous from across the pool. It was difficult to believe that she was nearly fifty years old. The Westernized life she had led from her childhood had helped to produce long and shapely legs totally unlike those of other Japanese women. Her carriage was excellent, and when seen in profile talking with Rié her curves flowed with statuesque majesty, and the sovereignty of buxom flesh was apparent in the symmetry of the swelling breasts and buttocks.
Ying Chan provided an ideal contrast beside her. Clad in a white suit, she was holding a white rubber bathing cap in one hand and pushing back her hair with the other in a relaxed pose, one leg extended beyond the other. In her manner of placing her leg slightly forward, visible from a distance, was a kind of tropical asymmetry that excited people. Strong and yet slim, the long thighs supporting a well-developed torso somehow imparted a feeling of precariousness. In this she was most different from Keiko. In addition, the white suit brought out the brownness of her skin. The encased breasts and their dusky ripeness reminded Honda of the fresco at the Ajanta cave temple depicting the dying dancer. From this side of the pool he could clearly see her teeth gleaming whiter than her bathing suit when she smiled.
As she drew nearer, Honda stood up to greet this girl he had so eagerly awaited.
“Now everyone’s here,” said Rié, hastening over, but he made no reply.