anxiously when I hear the noise, which in its way is as haunting as the distant strumming of a samisen; and it is a summer noise. A bell rings. A caller for Kazumi? I turn on the light, but before I have got out of bed a door slides open and tinkling bells tell me that the late visitor is for the house opposite.
6
I am reminded this morning that the wet season is not over, for the rain is pouring down in torrents, making such a roar that I feel I am excused from doing any writing. I spend the time in the bedroom looking at the water pelting onto the tiles of the outhouse and the temple roof, filling the gutters and flooding the garden. Misa-san asks me about Kazumi.
“She did not sleep here last night?” she asks.
“She slept in her apartment.”
“Aa so? She slept in her apato? Is that so? So?”
“Yes. She told me she was going to sleep in her apartment last night.” I must save face.
“So?”
“Yes.”
An hour later after saying for the third time, “Isn’t it coming down!” Misa-san repeats, “So Kazumi-san slept in her apato last night?” She is as curious as Mrs. Webb used to be about such matters.
“Yes.”
“Is that so?”
“That is so.”
Misa-san flicks a feather brush round the bedroom, where I am sitting, and goes slowly down the stairs. “What rain!” she says. She doesn’t descend sideways as I do, but she clings tightly to the walls.
I try to go on with my essay on Li Ho, but only succeed in copying from my notebook the saying “To keep love fresh and passionate is as hard as trying to grow violets among nettles.” How true! At least it is true as far as my affair with Noriko is concerned; the violets of love have all been stifled by the nettles of familiarity and staleness. My thoughts turn to Kazumi. Was she willing to act as caretaker out of the loyalty she feels she still owes Oliver? Or because she wanted to see what I was like and hoped to have an affair with me? If the last, why did she turn down my advances? Can it be that she doesn’t find me attractive? Why did she not come home last night? I have no answers to these questions. All I know is that she has succeeded in worming herself into my mind, if not into my heart. I wonder if I had let my flat to someone like Simpson and put Noriko in charge, whether he would have had an affair with her. I fear not, for Noriko is not prone to stray; if she were, then my lust for her might not have waned.
The trouble with the rainy season is that it is also sticky hot and although a raincoat keeps the rain off, the sweat it generates causes one to get thoroughly damp from within. The answer is to have only an umbrella and not care about getting one’s legs wet. Misa-san has only a flimsy, pink umbrella, a plastic affair, but at noon, when she has done her morning’s work, she launches herself into the liquid lane with a smile, exclaiming, “It’s still falling!”
I don’t go out. What is the point of shopping for myself? If Kazumi is not going to be here, I shall not cook dinner for myself; to do so is miserable. I like to try out new recipes, but not on myself. I need a victim. I have bread and salami for lunch, then I read, sleep, read; after that I shower off the sweat in the bathroom and then I sit upstairs at the desk and scribble and moon, moon and scribble. I am encouraged in this almost non-activity by one of the Chinese philosophers I am studying who said, “Idle contemplation is superior to lively or clever action.”
It is six o’clock, the rain has stopped, but there is no wind. I drip for half an hour, then go downstairs, find the evening newspaper stuck to the door, pour myself a whiskey, and repair to the coolness of the air-conditioned room.
After three whiskeys I feel tipsy, but this preprandial sensation is not exciting when one is alone and no dinner party is in the offing. I keep making arrangements about what to do when Kazumi returns. I look at my watch. “If she comes now,” I say when it is seven-thirty, “I’ll cook the steaks I bought for Bob last night.”
At ten past eight I go out forlornly and walk all the way to Kawaramachi, the main street, and enter an air-conditioned steak restaurant. I sit at the counter on the other side of which are the chefs, properly hatted and aproned, the scullions, and the stoves. A couple at a table nearby stare and both of them smile when I order a steak and a whiskey in my bad Japanese. I wish the people of this country would get used to foreigners and stop regarding them as people from Mars. Japan or at least Tokyo and Kyoto have been infested with foreigners long enough for them to be accepted without curiosity. Are Japanese gazed at in London? I hope not. I am sure that if I lived here for thirty years I should still feel as conspicuous as I do not after five. Bob claims he is at home here, but Bob doesn’t have much imagination.
My shirt is soaked with perspiration by the time I reach my lane. There is a pair of man’s shoes on the genkan step and there is a light in the sitting room. Kazumi must be back. She is. I find her sprawled full length along one of the bench seats in a blue, sleeveless blouse and brief blue shorts to match; her legs and feet are bare and her head is propped up by an arm as she talks to a Japanese man with gapped teeth and thinning hair who is sitting on the other bench seat. She retains her languid pose when I enter, but he rises in the Western manner and seems embarrassed.
“Mr. Ohno,” Kazumi says.
“How do you do!” Mr. Ohno and I chorus as we shake hands.
“Please,” he says, waving a hand at his bench.
“No, no.” I quickly sit on the floor.
Ohno seems uncomfortable. I feel as de trop as a cuckolded husband who has returned home a day earlier than expected.
Kazumi speaks to her friend in rapid Japanese, which I cannot follow. I wait for a pause and chip in with, “I waited for you last night. What happened?”
“Nothing. I spent in my apato.” Kazumi then goes on with her Japanese conversation which I soon tire of listening to. I get up and slide open the fusuma.
“You going to bed?” she asks.
“Yes,” I reply, curtly. “Good night.”
Mr. Ohno rises.
“Good night,” I repeat and leave the room.
“Oyasumi nasai,” Kazumi cries after me in a cold singsong.
The first impulse that comes to me when I reach my bedroom is to go downstairs again and order Kazumi and her friend out of the house. I feel incensed at her rudeness: inviting a friend into what legally is my house; lolling on the sofa after my entrance; casually informing me that she has slept at her apartment. What right has she to behave in such a way: Does she think that she is aping Western manners? My sweat-heavy vest rips as I pull it over my head. “Damn her!” I exclaim as I hurl the garment into a far corner.
After some hesitation I decide that the way of dignity is not to go downstairs and order them out, but simply not to reappear, even though my staying upstairs means forgoing a shower and the cleaning of my teeth. My terse “good night” has shown my displeasure. The Japanese may be slow on the uptake when it comes to verbal subtleties in English, but they are very quick to sense a mood. Therefore I am certain that both Kazumi and her friend know that I, the master of the house, the danna-san, am annoyed, and despite her origin and subsequent westernization, respect for the master, the basic rule in Japanese society, is too deeply ingrained in her to have been completely eradicated.
I comfort myself with this thought and with de Sade’s Justine. The former conjures up a scene of contrition in which Kazumi plays the main part, but the latter, though pornography usually leaves me cold, gives me prurient thoughts and makes me feel envious of what she and her friend may be getting up to in the sitting room. I don’t imagine that the Japanese with the gapped teeth and the thinning hair is practicing any of de Sade’s enormities, but nevertheless I am jealous.
My jealousy mounts as the torture perpetrated on Justine increases, so I get out of bed and begin to creep down the stairs;