The Frolic of the Beasts Page 12

  Kōji shut his eyes. He was lying with his head pointing north, and he was afraid of catching sight of Ippei over the edge of the mosquito net as he passed by the veranda.

  “Yūko…Yūko,” called Ippei, as he walked along the wide veranda.

  “I’m in here.” Her voice came trippingly from the dark, musty-smelling twelve-mat guest room.

  With his eyes closed, Kōji followed only their conversation.

  As the night wore on it started to get a little blustery outside. The wind, dissipated now as it sifted through the mesh of the net, played lightly on his skin, and all the more made him acutely aware of the oppressive heat.

  “Cold,” said Ippei. There was a needlessly assertive tone in his voice as he emphasized the word, almost like a stout, heavy stick tapping around in the darkness.

  “Cold? It’s not cold. You mean it’s cool, don’t you?” Yūko was saying.

  “Cool…I want…to sleep here.”

  “Eh?”

  “It’s cool. Here. I want to sleep here…from tomorrow,” said Ippei.

  * * *

  —

  Before they set to work protecting the greenhouses against the approaching typhoon, Kōji and Teijirō spent the whole of the next day busily loading plants into the truck that had arrived, as it did at regular intervals, from Tokyo Horticulture. Tokyo Horticulture had a number of greenhouses around the Izu Peninsula with which it placed direct orders. The president had recommended that Yūko choose the area around Iro Village, since it was conveniently located to join the chain of their direct-order greenhouses that lay in range of the truck route.

  In this way, in exchange for being paid by check each month, what was tantamount to a fixed commission by the head office, the greenhouse could do business without the fear of its prices being knocked down at market or the unfavorable competition from the foliage plants supplied direct from Osaka or the roses sold by Tokyo rose growers.

  The three-ton truck from Tokyo Horticulture stopped by two or three times a month without fail, and then returned again loaded up with fifty or sixty potted plants each visit. Depending on the season, it would sometimes take as many as a hundred pots. In the summertime, it was mainly foliage plants and orchids. Unable to compete with the produce from areas around Den-en Chofu, the Kusakado greenhouse would ship the cheaper plants, such as gloxinia, to Numazu. These plants were removed from their pots and packed in boxes, and then Kōji took them by handcart to the port.

  With great difficulty, the truck climbed sluggishly up the slope as far as the entrance to the Kusakado greenhouse. Yūko was concerned with looking after the drivers, giving them presents of things such as Ippei’s Italian-made ties and English socks, together with a grandiose explanation of their origin.

  When it was time for the shipment, Kōji always felt sad at parting with the plants he had cultivated with so much tender care. The cymbidium, with its leaves similar to those of pampas, displayed an elegance as though it had caught some kind of disease-like “beauty,” through the form of its flowers, which float in the air like a sudden vision—a characteristic of orchids, together with its pale purple brushed petals, and lips with purple flecks scattered on a yellow background. To a greater or lesser extent European orchids had that same feel about them. The light red flowers of the dendrobium afforded a glimpse of dark purple in the depths of their tubes, yet they did not attempt to keep their bashfulness in the shade, rather, they seemed to explicitly reveal it. The Hawaiian anthurium was lurid red like synthetic resin with a rough feline tongue projecting from it. A seaweed-like delicate appearance of tiger tail contrasting with the tough nature of its dark green spotted leaves bordered with pale yellow. The large oval leaves of the Decora, an improved variety of rubber plant. The Ananas, with its audacious green bromeliad leaves sporting horizontal black stripes. The lady palm with a profusion of glossy leaves growing from thin hairy stems…

  All these had left Kōji’s care and were now lined up on the dirty truck like a group of cold, silent prostitutes taken away by the police. Kōji dreamed of the worlds infiltrated by his dispersed flowers and leaves. He imagined a society of dazzling immensity and grotesque pitch-dark complication where these flowers and leaves hung, as if they were little ribbons secured here and there over its body. The flowers were mere caricatures there. These flowers and leaves would scatter and infiltrate shrewdly, like germs, a variety of entirely useless places in society for the purposes of practical sentimentalism, hypocrisy, peace and order, vanity, death, disease…

  After loading the truck, Kōji placed the wrapped gloxinia on the handcart and hurried to the port to make the last shipment of the day. It was getting cloudier, and the wind had started to rise.

  He loaded the plants onto the boat and watched it as it departed from the quayside. He noticed that the stern lines of some fishing boats moored nearby were creaking more than usual with a high-pitched whine. The quay where he stood was bright in the sunlight. The sun was shining from the pale blue sky in the west through a cleft in the thick clouds. Far off, some shining clouds drifted tranquilly in the not-so-large clear sky, as if it were a painting enclosed in a frame. The shape of the clouds was like a gabion stuffed with copious amounts of light…

  When Kōji got back, Teijirō was in a real fluster. He had heard on the radio news that the typhoon was approaching much more quickly than expected.

  Determined to work through the night, they set to the difficult task of sticking long, stout plywood sheets, which they had prepared specially, diagonally across the window frames of the greenhouses, and then further protecting the glass panes by hanging straw matting over the top.

  After what had happened the previous night, Yūko avoided Kōji and obdurately did her best not to speak to him. Her attitude repeatedly hampered their busy work. But Kōji worked on diligently without complaint—a little like an unheeded child engrossed completely in the task in front of him. If anything, this state of rejection was necessary in order for him to find some value in his work.

  Buffeted by the moisture-laden wind, which intensified as night came on, Kōji found the continuation of his earnest, silent labor agreeable. This work had been “bestowed” on him; it had been the same sort of labor that had delivered the prisoners from resignation to their oppressive fate.

  The night wore on. Having progressed more quickly than he had expected, Kōji set about working on the roof of the last greenhouse to finalize their work. Climbing from the top of the ladder onto the roof, he straddled the ridge—taking care not to step on the glass panes—and took hold of the long plywood panels that Teijirō handed to him. To help them with their work, all the fluorescent lights were ablaze in the greenhouses, and the resultant brightness lent the garden an otherworldly appearance.

  Thick clouds drifting in the sky jostled with one another. Kōji gazed down between his legs at the shapes of the flowers and plants inside the bright, still greenhouse—undisturbed by the wind outside. He fancied that he had never seen such self-sufficient flowers, quietly breathing in the night air, and unaware of human scrutiny. Furthermore, with their primary colors, this colony of statue-still flowers and leaves, crowded into the uninhabited interior of the greenhouse, created almost a sense of danger.

  Cheerfully maintaining his balance in the face of the rain-laden wind—like a sailor perched on top of a ship’s mast—Kōji hammered in one nail after another with a well-practiced hand, before shifting his body slightly and quickly driving a nail into the next sheet. The sound of the hammer rang clear as it pierced the warm wind. Just as he thought it would strike his face, the light rain receded and was now falling onto the top of the mimosa tree. He could feel the solemn, turbulent sky pressing down overhead. The wind gave Kōji’s mind a colossal freedom of emotion, as if in an instant it would carry away into the boundless distance all his words. Mimicking a professional carpenter, he placed several nails between his lips. The
indescribably sweet taste of the steel. He felt frighteningly free.

  He saw Yūko—who was wearing slacks—come down into the garden from the edge of the veranda of the main building. When he recognized this ill-tempered mistress, his sense of freedom withered in a moment. It was well past her and Ippei’s usual bedtime. She had what looked like a Coca-Cola bottle in each hand. It seemed she had come out to reward them for their hard work. As before, she decided not to speak to Kōji, but as she called out to Teijirō, her loud voice was broken and carried by the wind so that Kōji was able to hear only snatches.

  “You’ve worked hard. Why don’t you take a short break? Is there anything I can do to help?”

  As she spoke, the scarf, which she had thrown on carelessly, was whipped away from her hair by a sudden gust of wind and blown high in the air, coming to rest on a corner of the glass roof in front of Kōji. As the scarf came away from her head, Yūko looked to Kōji like a beautiful animal, with her flame-like, tangled mass of hair. Holding the bottles in her hands, she had been unable to save her scarf from the wind. Placing the bottles by the entrance to the greenhouse, she raised her hands in the air. One half of her face appeared pale in the light of the greenhouse, and her unsmiling countenance lifted and for the first time turned toward Kōji—as if in prayer.

  Kōji reached out and took hold of the scarf. A design of ivy had been hand-painted in gold on the extremely fine black georgette. At once, he spat the nails out and wrapped them in the material to hold the scarf down, and then shouted, “I’m going to throw it. There’s a weight inside, so keep out of the way.”

  Yūko observed Kōji’s movements closely and gave an affirmative nod. With a feeling of mild admiration, she watched as Kōji’s youthful form adopted a throwing position against the agitated gray night sky, sitting astride the greenhouse roof with the wind tugging at his clothes. The scarf balled into a small black mass and dropped to the concrete floor in front of the greenhouse.

  She drew near and, cautiously reaching out—as if it were an unfamiliar object—touched her hand against the scarf. Then she shook out the nails, stroked her hair, and, this time just to make sure, tied the scarf ends securely under her pale chin. Then she stood up and waved at Kōji on the roof. She smiled at him for the first time since the previous evening. Without applying too much or too little pressure, Kōji used his jeans-clad thighs to brace himself against the sloping glass and his body appeared all the more as if bound to the roof. Yūko’s actions seemed to him a selfish sign of reconciliation.

  * * *

  —

  In the end, the typhoon veered away from West Izu.

  Kōji had a patient debate with Teijirō about whether they ought to completely remove the protective sheets they had gone to great lengths to fix in place. Ultimately, they decided to leave half of them in place so that the sunlight would not be impeded. There was no way of knowing when the typhoon might come again.

  One afternoon, several days later, Kōji was delivering some flowers to Taisenji temple. Yūko had asked him to take them that morning. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted to meet with the priest, who, whenever Kōji came, would always persuade him to stay awhile and serve him tea. Then he would invite him to sit on a cushion at the edge of the veranda overlooking the back garden, where, as always, the honeybees droned. The priest, Kakujin, didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in probing into Kōji’s affairs, and yet, in looking at Kōji’s face he appeared to have detected something from his irritation-fueled put-on cheerfulness and from his red eyes—the unmistakable consequence of too little sleep.

  Of course, Kōji didn’t say anything either. He had not come to talk.

  The night of the high winds, when he returned to his own room after that moment of reconciliation with Yūko, Kōji had sensed something was different. Without any prior notification, he discovered that the twelve-mat room next to his had been turned into Yūko and Ippei’s bedroom.

  As a result of his intense fatigue, Kōji had slept soundly that night. But the following night he couldn’t get to sleep. I’ll get used to it before long, he thought. After all, he had even become accustomed to that dirty bathhouse and the three-minute-interval buzzer.

  In any event, it would likely take him a long time to grow used to it, and when he finally did, it was clear that something had definitely come to an end. Kōji was reluctant to suggest to Yūko that his room be moved downstairs, next to Teijirō’s room or someplace like that. The reason was that Yūko hadn’t notified him at all of her own room change (and clearly she was doing as Ippei desired!); added to which, Kōji’s self-respect implored him to protect his small six-mat castle.

  Incidentally, this slight rearrangement in the pattern of living in the Kusakado household had, by the following day, suddenly become general knowledge throughout the village. The young maid who lived out of the house had made sure everybody knew about it.

  The villagers delighted in the fact that this strange family had at length come to this pass. There was pleasure in guessing how their immoral behavior would turn out. Several mothers with disabled children expected that before long a child more conspicuously ugly and deformed than any in the village would be born to the Kusakado household.

  A child that would play tag with its own shadow, weaving in and out of the dozens of oil drums lined up at the harbor, the sides of which were brightly colored in the sunset, who, teased by the young, fit fishermen, with his tongue dripping saliva, would try to help load the cargo onto the ship. Doubtless, such a child would grow up to be like those mothers’ own sons…

  The rumors were reported that day to the priest’s wife, as a consequence of which the priest, too, soon got to hear of them. The priest had just returned from holding a Buddhist service for the dead. When he heard about them, he fell silent, took hold of the sleeves of his black vestment, and spread his arms out wide. He recalled a line from “Yun Men Stretching Out His Arms” in the Hekiganroku.

  The priest’s affection for Kōji positively overflowed from his affable, small, narrow eyes. It seemed clear to Kōji that he was weighing in his own mind what he was able to impart. Dimpling his ruddy cheeks, and in an extremely circumspect manner, the priest hesitantly began to talk. This was an indication that he was trying to step outside his own small-framed portrait.

  “If there is anything I can do, then I will do my best to help. I would even take counsel with you. You seem to have much that is weighing heavily on your mind. If you are worried about something, it is better to get it off your chest. The soul, you see, is a shy and retiring thing. It lurks in dark places and dislikes sunlight. And so, if you do not keep the skylight open at all times, the soul will rot. It easily decays, like a fresh sea urchin.”

  While he appreciated the priest’s concern, this sort of excessive decorum about the heart and soul only served to arouse Kōji’s suspicions. The priest talked about the soul hesitantly, in a tone that almost suggested he was discussing Kōji’s crime. In that instant, Kōji fancied he saw through the priest’s clumsy way of interrogation. It was like an inexperienced fisherman trying to extract a lobster from inside a creel.

  Had he been a little more experienced in his handling of such situations, the priest ought to have approached Kōji seemingly oblivious to the existence of the soul within and, before Kōji himself had realized what he was doing, skillfully and in no time at all plucked it out by the short hairs. And, if he had succeeded in this, then Kōji, whether willing or not, would no doubt have confided everything.

  This bald-headed priest, with his shiny, ruddy complexion and clean-shaven round face…Discussing and asking questions about his soul in that halting manner only succeeded in causing Kōji to shrink back.

  Why are you talking about my soul? Can’t you deceive a young guy like me more skillfully? Shouldn’t you be appealing to my manhood, rather than my soul?

  Kōji remained silent, and so the priest
spoke again. “Yūko-san…she is a fine woman—”

  “Yes, she’s a fine woman, all right,” interrupted Kōji quickly. “I owe her a lot. But, sir, you must be the only person in the village who says nice things about her.”

  “Well, that’s all right, isn’t it? I will vouch for her.”

  “In that case, we’ll all go to heaven then?”

  With this rejection, Kōji brought the conversation to an end, and the silence was filled with the drone of the honeybees. If anything, Kōji had been hoping for a strong rebuke from the priest, but that was probably asking for too much. While he had stepped up to the threshold of this young man’s soul, in the end the priest withdrew timidly. Kōji detected in this something akin to the restrained respect society showed toward an ex-convict.

  This young man had acquired the privilege of misunderstanding people’s reserve. For him, adopting an ostentatious, gentle attitude appeared to be the real reserve, the only genuine modesty.

  In that lightning-like instant, Kōji felt disappointed by the priest. He had failed to comprehend at all the hurricane-like speed with which Kōji had fallen into a state of despair.

  So the priest stepped back from Kōji at that moment and pinned his hopes on the near future; someday this young man would open his heart and meekly seek the priest’s instructions. Then surely he would be able to attain the heights that no one else his age was capable of.

  Although a harsh westerly sun shone down on the back garden, it disappeared behind the many clouds that scudded across the sky, repeatedly throwing the garden into shadow.

  At that moment, Kōji noticed Ippei and Yūko coming slowly down the slope opposite the garden. It was evidently time for Ippei’s walk. Kōji was suddenly seized with the urge to hide from them. If he were to escape into the inner temple and hide in the shadow of one of the pillars draped with fraying gold-threaded banners or perhaps conceal himself in the shadow of the Buddhist image dais, which was enclosed by a railing with its inverted lotus-carved posts—and where it was dark even in the daytime—they would not pursue him that far. He would hide there forever. How nice that would be, he thought.