“Now take my wife,” Ippei said, as he deliberately drew the stem of his cocktail glass through his fingers. “She’s a real odd case. I’ve yet to meet a stranger girl.”
“Everyone at work says how pretty your wife is. But I’ve never seen her in the store.”
Confronted by such flattery, Ippei gave the youngster an affected and supercilious look of contempt.
“Flattery will get you nowhere, my boy, at your age. I’m telling you she is odd. She’s frightfully tolerant, and to this day has not once exhibited any jealousy. A wife, that is to say, if she is a normal type of girl, is jealous every time her husband breathes. You’ll find out, too, when you get one yourself. But mine isn’t like that. I’ve tried to scare her often enough. But she doesn’t frighten at all. You could fire a pistol right in front of her eyes and she would probably just delicately turn her face aside. You may have heard it from the others, I’ve tried to make her jealous, I’ve tried everything, really I have.”
“Maybe your wife is good at hiding her emotions. Maybe she has a strong sense of self-esteem, and…”
“How perceptive of you. A splendid analysis,” said Ippei, attempting to thrust his extended index finger at the bridge of Kōji’s nose. “Likely as not you’ve hit the nail on the head. But she hides it so cleverly, so perfectly. So you see, you would be grossly mistaken in thinking that she doesn’t love me, because she does. She loves me terribly. She loves me with more than a wife’s usual moderation. It’s always the same gloomy, overly serious, stubborn frontal attack, always in that precise order. It’s her army of love. A solemn army. And she always makes sure that I clearly see it march past, and then feigns indifference. I don’t hate my wife. It’s rather an embarrassing confession: I don’t hate any woman who will love me. Even supposing it’s my wife, do you see? I get awfully tired sometimes. This is all I wanted to tell you.”
Ippei struck a match and lit an English cigarette with the deliberate composure of one who has just finished confessing all to one whose worth he values very little. There was something condescendingly tolerant about the way he struck the match, and Kōji hated it.
It is true to say that Kōji, who had yet to meet Yūko, fell in love with her that same night. And in all probability that, too, was a part of Ippei’s plan. Kōji was clearly jealous of Ippei’s corrupt heart. Notwithstanding this, his first impression of Ippei, having spent an evening with him in leisurely conversation, can only be described as insubstantial. Ippei was nothing more than a worthless, boring, middle-aged well-to-do playboy of the sort that can be found in any large city, and he had merely devised a slightly eccentric pretext for his dissipated lifestyle.
Early one particular afternoon close to Christmas, however, Kōji was surprised to find that the impression he had formed of Ippei during the latter’s confession in the bar that night was belied by what he now saw. For Ippei, dressed in a good-quality suit, received his valued clients with cups of coffee, conversing with them as he nimbly went back and forth between shop front and office.
“If it were a gift of slightly higher quality, I could show you a Meissen plate or perhaps a Sèvres vase. Admittedly it’s a little on the expensive side, but I’m sure if it is your good self, sir, you could manage it if you abstained from your customary drink for one night.” Or, alternatively, “Ah, yes, a sixty-piece coffee set for a year-end gift, wasn’t it? May I recommend our own gift paper? I guarantee, wrapped in this the item will appear at least three times its price…”
Kōji thought, How on earth can someone possessing several volumes of his own literary work bring himself to say such a thing?
Moreover, Ippei knew how to manipulate the provincial millionaires, using his reprimanding, pedantic tone to force purchases that exceeded the customer’s expectations.
Kōji hadn’t the faintest idea of the complex sequence of events behind Ippei’s sometimes childlike, sometimes adult character—the injured self-pride (notwithstanding the way he spoke to his customers), which he always gloomily clung to, and which he believed, by some strangely fixed notion, would only be salved by Yūko’s jealousy; his wife’s refusal to cooperate in this, and her rejections; and his numerous, hysterical love affairs. Nor did Kōji understand the strange passion that tore Ippei between the servility of the dealer and the superiority of the intellectual while working to further the irreparable ruptures occurring in every aspect of his personal life and in his state of mind.
Kōji thought only of Yūko. He wasn’t to know until much later how much of a hopeless love affair theirs would prove to be, and absorbed in his fantasy he formed an exceedingly simple schematic picture in his mind. First of all, there was a miserable, despairing woman. Then there was a self-indulgent, heartless husband. And last, a hot-blooded, sympathetic young man. And with that the scenario was complete.
That summer’s day, which had begun with the assignation at the hospital—Yūko carrying her sky-blue parasol—and which had culminated in the incident at nine o’clock in the evening, took place some six months after Kōji had first met Yūko. That is to say, it occurred after he had taken a shop delivery around to Ippei’s residence in Shibashirogane, where he first made her acquaintance.
The more frequent their meetings, the more Kōji felt driven to despair, right from the start of the days they were scheduled to meet. It was as if a cold torrent was beginning to flow clamorously in his innermost heart, and he hated himself more than he had done on any other morning. The request for a date would always come from him, and he would importune her before approval was eventually obtained. Moreover, Yūko would take him along only on shopping excursions, trips out for lunch, or else to a dance if he was lucky, and then she would promptly leave whenever it suited her.
On the morning of their last tryst, Kōji lifted his head out from under his quilt and gazed over at his university notebooks piled up on his desk, their voluminous open pages curling up in the summer sunlight as it came in through the window. As he did so he recalled the bundle of papers that Yūko, after considerable hesitation, had disclosed to him at their last meeting. The papers were a private investigator’s report she had commissioned, a compilation of the names of Ippei’s female acquaintances that detailed the name and address of one girl in particular—Machiko—as well as the fact that Ippei visited her every Tuesday evening.
“You must never tell my husband about this, do you understand? In any case, I’m content just knowing about it. It’s just that, well, he mustn’t find out I’ve checked up on him like this. That’s all I have to live for at the moment. Promise you will keep it secret? I shall die if you betray me.”
That was the first time Kōji had seen Yūko cry. It wasn’t a stream; on the contrary, the tears spread out faintly from the corners of her eyes and in an instant had become a sparkling thin film covering the whole of the surface. Kōji felt that, if he were to touch those tears, which had clearly been shed out of pride, his finger would freeze.
He recalled experiencing a dream at the time. In it, Ippei was gripped by a wild ecstasy, having seen the bundle of papers, and burning with conviction he determined to renounce all the other women and rush back to his wife’s side. Once there, however, he discovered not his wife but her corpse. This quick drama had flashed across Kōji’s mind in one noisy instant. It was like listening to the siren of an ambulance as it dashed along a deserted street late at night. Kōji almost lent a hand in the accomplishment of that tragedy.