It took place in an ordinary apartment. Ippei was sitting up on the bed at the back of the room, dressed in a silvery gray silk gown. At his feet sat Machiko, wearing an identical gown, her hands thrust in the pockets. They were both naked underneath. A stand-type electric fan generously waved its drooping neck above their heads. Since the apartment had been hastily arranged, the color and design of the curtains and furniture did not match. Unfinished drinks stood on the bed table together with an ashtray. A three-sided mirror with its wings spread out appeared as if it was about to swallow up the room. With his pallid, tired face, Ippei looked sick.
A little while after they had knocked, Machiko appeared at the door, having adjusted the collar of her gown. Yūko slipped sideways into the room, followed by Kōji. Machiko drew back and sat on the bed, and Ippei quickly pulled his gown around him and propped himself up.
There was no great outcry or quarrel, events so far had run as fluidly as water—and then stopped; the four of them observed one another as if looking through a transparent glass wall, a glass wall that had suddenly been erected before their eyes, and that was extremely difficult to negotiate.
There was a marvelously surreal aspect to this truly wretched, mundane portrayal of reality. It was almost hallucinatory in its crystal clarity. Kōji recalled how the thoroughly creased sheet, which had appeared from beneath the displaced feather quilt, looked very much like a collection of lines drawn by an abstractionist depicting a diagram of movements.
There was something in the way Ippei hurriedly donned his gown and sat upright that brought to mind the behavior of a comic strip character and was the only flaw in the sequence of actions; even Ippei seemed to be aware that in that instant Kōji considered it so. For in thrusting his arm into the sleeve of the gown, while he hadn’t actually committed the blunder of missing the opening completely, the action was certainly performed with a little too much haste.
Having entered that silk labyrinth, Ippei’s emaciated, white, forty-year-old arm had thrashed about inside two or three times and, after struggling each time against the irresolute, unkind silk resistance of the lining cloth, had, at length, succeeded in grasping the awaiting air on its way out. There were certainly elements at work within this behavior that, had it continued even a fraction longer, would have upset the completion of this tableau vivant, but Ippei, when all was said and done, managed to exercise a modicum of subtle restraint.
The foursome, motionless, stared at one another. The act of looking seemingly transformed the person being looked at into some kind of monster. Like the chairman of a meeting, Ippei probably felt obliged to be the first to break the silence, and he spoke to Kōji. As far as Ippei was concerned, it was very fortunate that Kōji was there.
“Ah, I see you have come along as well. You’ve well and truly searched us out, haven’t you? Madam is no doubt grateful to you.”
Kōji sensed that this indirect form of address “Madam” had hurt Yūko terribly.
But, more than that, he felt bitterly disappointed and even betrayed. For at the moment Yūko appeared, Ippei failed to express intense delight or anything remotely resembling it. He thought about what had happened. Wasn’t it just such an expression of delight I had truly wanted to see? If it were not so, how have I endured six months of so much self-renunciation and humiliation?
Had not Kōji desired to witness the very instant when the truth of perverse human nature begins to shine? The moment when a fake jewel emits the luster of the genuine article? Sheer delight itself? The manifestation of an irrational dream? The very moment when the ridiculous becomes the sublime? Kōji had loved Yūko out of such expectations; he had hoped to shatter the reality of her protected world, and he had even been prepared to accept that the consequences might ultimately lead to Ippei’s happiness.
He would have at least rendered his services for the sake of somebody.
Whereas, what he had actually witnessed was nothing other than things he had grown utterly tired of seeing: the mediocre concealment of human shame, the irony of keeping up appearances. He had unexpectedly witnessed the ungraceful collapse of the drama he had believed in. The wind having been taken out of his sails, Kōji thought to himself, If that’s how it is, then it can’t be helped. If nobody can change it, then by this hand I…
But he didn’t know how to change it, and he steadily felt himself losing his composure.
Yūko spoke with an enervated, hoarse voice. “Why don’t you return home quietly, dear?”
Those words sounded awfully deflated, and Kōji wondered whether she hadn’t lost her mind. Ippei extricated his legs from where he had thrust them under the quilt. He moved them as though he were swimming, fishing around on the floor for his slippers with those hirsute, white, spindly limbs, and having located them, he arranged his gown and sat upright on the bed. He began to talk in a tone of soft persuasion, but the import was quite the opposite.
“Come now, displaying that kind of attitude and telling me to go home will produce nothing but the opposite effect, don’t you think? It’s a foolish thing to say and doesn’t become you at all. And as for myself, I shall return home when I consider it fit to do so and not when instructed to do so by my wife. Bringing matters to a conclusion at the eleventh hour is not a good idea. Now, darling, you run along first with Kōji here, and I will join you later. I trust there are no objections? I must also consider the position of this lady.”
Just then, Kōji noticed Machiko quivering all over like a dog that, having returned home through the rain, suddenly vigorously shook off all the raindrops. And yet for all that, her pale made-up face remained completely expressionless.
But then Yūko dropped her parasol to the floor, and Kōji was startled as she covered her face with her hands and began to cry. It was a bitter, coarse, primitive cry, and one that he had no reason to have heard from her before. She slumped to her knees, still crying, and gave vent to a ceaseless torrent of indistinct utterances. How Ippei had hurt her despite her love, how she had persevered against these hardships, and how she had been waiting in the hope that his heart would return to her. This indulgent whining carried around the room in every direction as it left Yūko’s body—which now lay crumpled on the carpet. It were as if dirty water was splashing through the air from a broken vase that had been dropped on the floor, and listening to this torrent Kōji wanted to cover up his ears—in the end, he screamed out in his mind: Hurry up and die! Please let this woman die quickly!
He may have hated Yūko, but, losing his presence of mind, his heart felt overwhelmed with sadness.
He became confused, so that he wasn’t sure whom he hated. He felt miserable, as though he were being ignored—like a slender pencil barely managing to stand on end.
The three stood idly by for what seemed like quite some time, gazing at Yūko’s crouching figure. Machiko stood up and made as if to help Yūko to her feet, and as she did so, Kōji saw how she was pulled up short by a look in Ippei’s eye. That momentary failed action appeared meaningless and transparent, as if watching sand crumble and fall to pieces as it rises up from the seabed. Kōji wondered why it was that human beings occasionally make such strange gestures. It was the same type of behavior a bird exhibits when, perched on top of an unstable branch, it suddenly stretches up tall and then retracts its neck.
In any case, it wasn’t of any great significance. Yūko continued crying and jabbering. Despite the rotating electric fan, the room, with its closed curtains, was grossly hot. At length, she stood up, the hem of her skirt in disarray, and rushed toward Ippei, appearing to leap on top of his knees, screaming as she went, “Go home! Go home right away!”