4

Between then and around ten he went to the bathroom twice. But it wasn’t easy to pretend he had gonorrhea. Furthermore, he hadn’t had any real sleep since the previous night; drowsiness was gradually spreading in him, and if he wasn’t careful, there was the danger that he would oversleep the next hour. After ten, he had hoped to doze off in a light sleep, but before he knew it, he had fallen into a deep slumber. When his eyes popped open, he was surprised to find it was already eleven thirty.

“Ow—this is bad, it’s been an hour and a half already.”

He hastily went off to the toilet and managed to be seen by two or three people. Of course, a plan that had him going to the bathroom every hour seemed crazy even to him. If Urawa was to be the place for the crime, the round trip from the boardinghouse to Urawa took two hours, no matter how fast you went. So up to two hours was okay. If he couldn’t get solid sleep for two straight hours at a time from now through the next ten days, he’d be totally exhausted, and then he’d be lost if he got to the crucial twenty-fifth and overslept because he was so tired. Rethinking his scheme, he decided to stretch the one hour to two. And so, after the eleven-thirty visit, he let himself sleep exactly the two hours, until one thirty.

He usually had his lunch meal around two, and the maid he’d talked to earlier brought it in to him on a tray.

“How’s your illness doing, Mr. Mizuno?”

“Hey—what do you mean, ‘illness’?”

“But didn’t you say so yourself, sir? Where did you catch it?”

“How should I know, I have it pretty much all the time. It’s chronic, and I’m often hit with it at the change of season. This recent shift from fall to winter has been particularly bad. Don’t be so mean to me—I need a little sympathy.”

She chortled. “How should I be sympathetic?”

“Well, never mind. Despite your kind offer, I have other people who will sympathize.”

“Well, I’m amazed—even though you’ve been sick, you still haven’t learned from experience? Really, should I go buy some medicine for you?”

“Oh yeah, you certainly are kind to me. You could go get it for me, but I have trouble remembering its name.”

“What’s it called?”

“Sandalwood oil smells and it’s bad for the stomach, so that’s no good. Let’s see—is it Santolmonal, or Methylene Blue, or could it be Aleol? That might be it, maybe …”

He kept the maid for as long as he could, idly chatting, and then he suddenly thought of another plan: he could take a diuretic. That would in fact make him have to pee often, so even if he were asleep, he would wake up naturally. And besides, while it was vulgar to say so, if he took the medicine with the Blue in it, his urine would be dyed blue, and that alone would catch people’s attention and advertise that he was ill.

When he finished eating, he set out for a pharmacy in the neighborhood of the rear gate to the university. There he bought a bottle each of Santolmonal and Methylene Blue and ostentatiously placed them on his desk. It had taken him thirty minutes to do all this.

But anyway, in the evening he had to go find some place to be with a woman. Unfortunately his wallet, which had held only a single ten-yen note, now had only five or six yen remaining because of the medicines he had bought. It was hopeless to think of going out to seek entertainment every night for the next ten days without two or three hundred yen in his breast pocket. Furthermore, he was blocked in every direction because he owed quite a bit to a number of the houses he frequented. It was even awkward to go to the pawnshops because he was behind in paying the interest to them; besides, as he looked out over his possessions, he saw nothing at all left of any significance to pawn. Well, his pocket watch was the only thing he could possibly take to them, but at this point his watch was more essential than anything else.—Oh wait, that’s right, he mustn’t forget to wind the watch! He’d be in real trouble if he got careless and made a mistake in the time.—So there was nothing to do but go whine to The People and get them to give him an advance on the manuscript fee. But here, too, in addition to piling debt upon debt, there was the question of whether this time he could even write the manuscript.

It was well over ten years since he had appeared in the literary world as a creative writer, and now he was approaching the age of forty. He should be more trustworthy, but when it came to money matters, his reputation was bad everywhere. That was because from his youth he had believed that to be a genius one had to lead a self-indulgent life, and that narcissism was still indelibly impressed on his mind. His “diabolism” was essentially a means to evade payment to teahouses, houses of pleasure, the magazine companies, and friends.

And then, too, he took pride that he lived alone, feeling it demonstrated his qualification as a brilliant writer and diabolist, but that was probably no more than a self-defensive rationalization, basically a result of having lost friends and being ostracized because of his real-life money problems. Another thing he took as a point of pride was that he never wrote too much at any time, but this, too, was not really a matter of his deep artistic conscience but was simply because he was a loafer. Actually, all he wanted to do for the next ten or twenty days until his money gradually ran out was just lie around.

The debt he had long put off paying back to The People must probably have reached around a thousand yen at this point. He didn’t even remember the exact amount. Over the past two or three years he had borrowed a hundred or two hundred yen at a time, always with the same promise: “I’ll return it for sure with the next one.” But it kept piling up and must have reached that much. The company had finally resigned itself to cut its losses and leave what he’d already borrowed unredeemed and instead decided to absolutely refuse to make him any new loans. Indeed, the company owner, being a sharp man, and knowing that Mizuno was the kind of man who wouldn’t really work unless he was shown the money, came up with the bright idea that they wouldn’t pay except in exchange for the exact number of pages actually written, whether it was ten pages or even five. Even so, these terms were quite a bit more generous than other magazines, and for the present he put up with the humiliating conditions and made The People his favored client. So while he was writing “To the Point of Murder,” whether he wrote five or ten pages, he’d hand them over and get paid for just that much.—“ ‘Well, give me this much or that much, and I’ll take off my petticoat. And, um, for the next one, give me this much and I’ll take off my stockings …’ Mizuno’s way of getting paid for his manuscripts made him just like a Western prostitute. The owner of The People has really worked it out.” That’s how the gossip of the day cynically had it.

But because he had no other recourse, when he went to the bathroom around 4:00 P.M. he tried making a phone call to Nakazawa. The man was flustered, but he openly pressed Mizuno: “Oh, hey, I was just thinking I’d stop by to see you one of these days soon. How about it—how’s the manuscript coming along? Have you gotten a good bit of it done?”

“Oh, yeah, well, it’s coming along bit by bit, but not as fast as I’d hoped …”

“About how many pages are done?”

“Well, let’s see, there’s finally at least—” Hell, he couldn’t say only seven pages, and so he went on, “seven—teen, eighteen, maybe around twenty?”

“Is that enough, just that much?”

“It’s fine, you know, I’ve almost gotten up to speed, and I’m planning to really push up my output from here on.” He left it at that, and then immediately shifting into a plaintive tone of voice, continued,

“Actually, um, the reason I called you was that this would be the chance to ask something of you.… How about, well, I haven’t asked for an advance in quite a while, and I just wondered if I couldn’t get a loan of, say, three hundred yen or so?” There was no response from the phone; he could almost see Nakazawa’s conflicted face shrunk into silence.

“Ah, hello, hello …?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, how about it? …”

“Um, that’s a real problem …”

“But anyway, do talk to the owner for me, won’t you? If I don’t get that money, the fact is, well, I’m …” Until then he hadn’t thought of an excuse, but he was accustomed to such things, and so instantly the words slipped smoothly from his mouth:

“It’s about that high-interest loan I must have told you a bit about at some point. The guy’s been making a big stink, threatening to sue.… It’s not that I’m afraid of being sued, but he comes around threatening just about every day, and as a result I can’t get down to work, and I’m just wiped out with the commotion.” He emphasized the phrase, “as a result I can’t get down to work.”

“I don’t think it’ll work, but …,” Nakazawa said, leaving the phone and going off to be Mizuno’s intermediary with the company owner. He returned directly within two or three minutes. “Um, this is what the owner says, that just as he’d stated before, he can’t very well pay without receiving the manuscript in exchange. But how would it be if I came over to pick up what you’ve done so far? If you have twenty pages, that would amount to 160 yen we could pay out …”

“If that’s the best you can do, well, that’ll have to be it, I guess.”

“But, you know, these cutthroat lenders, even if they talk about suing, they don’t do it, you know. If it’s three hundred yen, and you offer them half, that’ll hold them for a while. As for the rest, you can only pay if you can write, so they really can’t complain.”

When it was clearly laid out that way, Mizuno had no comeback.

“Ah, hello? Hello? How about it? If that’s all right, I’ll come right away to pick it up …”

“Ah-h-h, so you’d come over?”

“I’m actually busy today, so I’ll just ask one of the office boys to do it.”

“You’d have him bring the money with him, the 160 yen?”

“Yes, of course. In exchange, there’s no mistake, is there? We’ll get the twenty manuscript pages from you?”

If it’s only a clerk, I’ve got it made, I’ll get the money from him, and I can give him an envelope with just ten pages in it.—He decided this was his last resort.

“Mr. Mizuno, a clerk is here from The People.” It was past five fifteen when the maid conveyed this information to him.

“What kind of person?”

“An office boy, sir, around sixteen or seventeen. He says he’d like to see you, and you have something to give him.”

“Ah, that’s right, I’m coming right down, so tell him to wait.” He quickly took a piece of manuscript paper and scribbled on it in pencil:

Apologies for my recent phone call. This is inexcusable, but even though I’ve done twenty pages, when I just re-read it, there were a number of things I didn’t like, and I think I’d like to do some more work on them. But anyway, for the time being, here are at least the first ten pages, and after revising the rest post haste I’ll deliver them to you. I’ve truly never put so much effort into a work …

Maybe this was too much of a lie, doesn’t writing this way seem rather sleazy, he wondered. Well, it is shameless, and if that makes Nakazawa too angry, he may come right away to negotiate with me.… He ripped it up and tried re-writing the main paragraph:

Nakazawa, I am truly, truly sorry, I’ve deceived you, I didn’t mean to, but the result is that I have come to deceive you …

But this too was unseemly: this made it seem that he was groveling. Maybe it was after all better to simply, frankly apologize, as if it were no big deal …

The clerk had come an hour ago, and it would have been better if Mizuno had used the time to think and write. But he was the type to want to put off something unpleasant even a bit longer, so he would have had trouble writing such a letter if he had not been pressed by this very present crisis. If he could, he would have, like with those automatic writing game boards, let his hand move by itself and write out random phrases while he kept his eyes closed. He always felt that way, and he wanted to write so quickly that he wouldn’t even remember what he had written. But the faster he wrote, the more he got caught up with trivialities of phrasing, and only after writing and ripping up two or three pages would he get to the point of being able to write something smoothly in one move. In the end, that day, too, he wasted five or six pages and finally returned to the first opening line, “Apologies for my recent phone call,” and from there went on like this:

… I’ve truly never put so much effort into a work, and I have not in any way been slacking off [the “in any way” sounded to him a bit brazen, so he immediately crossed it out heavily and made it “intended to be”]. The fact is, these ten pages are not as fully realized as I had hoped, but it would be unforgivable for me to take the money without giving you a single page, and so I entrust this to you on the assumption that whenever it comes time to print, I will be allowed to go over them again. I should properly take payment for just the ten pages, but as I have told you, because that bloodsucker would not let me off without getting at least half the amount, I have had to take advantage of the exigent circumstances. Under these serious conditions, I beg your understanding.

Even as he imagined how furious it would make them, he folded the letter in fourths and slipped it into the envelope; and then he opened it again two or three times and rewrote the address. But having now put so much care into the letter, he pulled the pages in question out from the drawer where he’d stuffed them and, as if handling some cursed object, put them in the envelope without re-reading them, and sealed it.

Manuscript Fee: One Hundred Sixty Yen

After removing the bills and putting them away at the bottom of the drawer, for a while he sat gazing at the square Western-style envelope on which this was written. So I did a good job of squeezing this out of them; this is the money I got by cheating—even as he thought this, the thick black well-formed letters came to look blurry.

“So—what’ll I do now? Maybe I should go out somewhere.”

As he continued staring fixedly at that “One Hundred Sixty Yen,” after a while it seemed to him that the letters began taking various foul shapes. The inside of his head became a kaleidoscope, and various faint white curved lines, like the branches of a tree, waved back and forth here and there. Were these women he knew, or movie stars he’d seen on film? Whichever, these objects, which had at various in the past stimulated his senses, became resurrected as fantasies, all of them vivid and even more beautiful. At the same time, angel-like wings sprouted from his body, and he began to float from branch to branch between the lewd trees.…

It was only 160 yen, but as he looked down at the money, he realized that it meant that anytime he wanted he could go right out and have a good time, restless as he was. And his first objective completely flew out the window. Strangely enough, from the instant that square Western envelope came fluttering into his heart, what he had been fearing until now, what he was worried about, what on earth his motive had been for contriving to get this money—all of it completely evaporated, and all that remained behind was the single passionate desire: “Woman.” … No matter how bad a person was or what kind of bad things he did, surely he must feel some kind of remorse. But Mizuno, even after taking money under false pretenses, still didn’t feel as dirty as he had from similar experiences up to now. Instead, rather to the contrary, he thought, “I did well; cheating or not, I did right to take it.” Not only that: did this money just buy him pleasure? No, it swept away the shadow of the fear that had been menacing him like a bad dream these past several months. In that sense, it was a double god of salvation.

“Hmm … well, what do you know, it was worth resorting to these extreme measures like that.” As usual, he couldn’t help but rationalize his actions.

Oh, yeah, this is so right I don’t know why I didn’t get the money earlier. Just 160 yen—and when I see how effective it is, the menacing worries I’ve had all this time seem pretty trivial. If I just had money, my nervous attacks would stop. Not having been with a woman for so long is what messed up my head …

“Oh—are you going out, Mr. Mizuno?”

Ignoring the smirking maid, sometime after sunset he walked out onto the slope that cut through the hills in the direction of the Boulevard, cheerfully twirling his walking stick.

“Ah-ha—the means has become the end!” He spoke out loudly to himself, and there was excited happiness in his voice. In this state, the threads of his associations were being paid out even more violently, and like the motion of microbes under a microscope, they variously bonded and separated. So for some reason at that point he found himself thinking of that Kabuki hero Oishi Kuranosuke. Yes, that’s right, even while he was plotting, Oishi Kuranosuke went out to enjoy himself … just as I’m doing now, he must have been restless and sallied forth from Yamashina. “Oishi, Oishi,” he blurted out as he walked on.

It was strange that even though he was near forty, his heart still leapt like this when it came to going out to play. Now that he thought about it, he felt the same as he had when he first got a taste of dissipation, when he was around twenty. It might seem that it was because he was single now, but even before, when he was married, it was even more pleasurable to sneak out precisely because he had a wife. So it could very well be just the same when I’m fifty or sixty, maybe. Because the anticipation was so intense, whenever at last he arrived at his intended destination and found one of those women right before his eyes, he hardly ever experienced as much pleasure as he had been expecting. Was this really the woman he’d been so much longing for, he asked himself, and mostly he’d be disappointed and leave with a sense of disgust. But still he never seemed to learn from experience and would set right out again, and his heart would be pounding just as much as before. And so times like this, when he had money stuffed in his wallet and walked along with wild imagination for what lay ahead of him in the next hour or two, that’s when he was most happy. “Don’t rush, you mustn’t rush,” he firmly admonished his aroused heart. And he felt exhausted trying to figure out what would be the most effective way to use the 160 yen.

He owed every house something in the neighborhood of a hundred yen. So that meant that the hundred he had now would disappear within this night, and for the nine days from tomorrow, he’d have to get by with just sixty yen. Well, there’s no helping it. Shall I go to the House of Ivy in Tsukiji? I know I owe them sixty or seventy yen for sure, and I do kind of like that woman Kokin. Her face isn’t much, but she’s built …

“Ah,” he sighed and suddenly tossed his head as if clearing it. That’s because suddenly everything beyond his feet grew dark, and it seemed to his imagination that, like a swarm of caterpillars, complex, white, undulating, supple figures were spreading before him: roundish or long and slender, big, little, some beautiful, some ugly. In a delirium he stood at the Ueno Hirokoji intersection and hailed a taxi. “To Tsukiji,” he ordered, but then as they were approaching Manseibashi suddenly he changed his mind and yelled out to the driver’s back, “Hey—no, take me to the Ginza, somewhere in the Kyobashi area.” … He realized that before he did anything, he should attend to his empty stomach, accompanied with a cheery drink or two.

He could handle saké fairly well, but he was actually not much of a drinker, and at best, two or three carafes were enough for him. But it was his habit at times like this to drink strong Western whiskey to get drunk quickly, and so thirty minutes later he was occupying a chair in a corner of the London Bar on the Ginza. The seating in the place was in booths facing each other as in a third-class train car, with a table in between. The seatbacks were high and the spaces between the partitions were narrow, which was fine with him because he didn’t like being seen by other people, and that’s why he went there from time to time. However, that night the scene was quite lively, and there wasn’t a single booth with both sides unoccupied. Sitting across from him were two men who looked like businessmen and a woman in Western dress who might be a typist. In fact it was because a glimpse of the woman’s uncovered arms had caught his attention, that he took advantage the empty seat right across from her and happily wedged himself in. As he sat down, he could hear the woman say in German, “Nein, nein, ich kann nur Whiskey trinken.”

Sure enough, in front of the woman was a glass of whiskey. The two businessmen, one in a navy blue suit, the other in brown, had sandwiched the bare-armed woman between them, and the two of them were drinking cocktails. She had just finished speaking in German as Mizuno appeared across from her, and after casting him a glance as if glaring at him with her strong exotic gaze, she then quickly composed herself, stretched out her right hand on the table, and rotated her glass with her thumb, index, and middle finger. The salarymen undoubtedly had been chatting cheerfully, but now that an intruder had appeared they seemed to lose steam and just sipped their cocktails listlessly, as if not knowing what else to do. Mizuno tried to make himself as small as possible, uncertain whether he was doing something right or wrong. It was as if those three fingers surrounding the rim of the whiskey glass could see and couldn’t very well ignore what was right in front of them, say, he’d done something utterly strange like ordering asparagus. Somehow I’m being bad, undressing these fingers and the palm of her hand as I gaze at them; in other words, it’s as if the woman’s whole body is completely nude; she is quite naked, lying here on the table right in front of my eyes … That’s what Mizuno was feeling. They weren’t particularly beautiful fingers, but that aside, the way they played with the glass bespoke a clever, experienced woman, and the way she crooked her little finger was amazingly attractive. This finger was—well, it would be strange to say “pert,” but it was just like a leg, long and pliant. Beyond that, her palm, too, was long, and even though she didn’t move it very much, from just the little way she gripped or released things, you could tell it, too, was amazingly supple.

The three of them were still silent, so it was hard to tell what her relation to the two men was, but on the face of it she didn’t seem to be a “working girl.” She wore no makeup at all, and she was pale, although her skin was dark. But its darkness had a smooth sheen, and the flesh of her arms was so nicely plump that it begged to be bitten into. Her clothing showed a quiet, purely German taste, and the subdued quality of the cloth harmonized perfectly with the color of her skin. The German she had been speaking before and her taste in clothes indicated that she must once have lived in Germany. She appeared to be in her late twenties. She was wearing a hat, so he couldn’t see her hair well, but it seemed to be short and shingled.

“Hey, another whiskey.” The woman finally spoke, and stirring the splendid flesh of her arm, she raised her empty glass.

“You’re really quite something,” Blue Suit said with a kind of vulgar, sycophantic laugh, seeming directed to his boss, and he looked up at the woman out of the corner of his eye.

“Really? I’m not, really.”

“How much can you drink?” now Brown said.

“Oh, depending on how I feel, quite a bit.”

“Well, I’d like to see you feel like ‘wanting to,’ ” said Blue Suit, his nasty voice matching the vulgar laugh present in the look he gave her.

“I don’t really get very drunk, you know. But when I do get drunk, I’m likely to end up passing out anywhere, even on the street.”

“Wow, you’re tough.”

“But that kind of thing hardly ever happens. Only once, on Unter den Linden.”

“In Berlin?”

“Yeah, and I got yelled at by a German cop.”

At this point, the waitress brought the whiskey and the woman drank down three-quarters of it in one gulp. It could be that she was starting to get in the mood.

“What about you guys? Haven’t you been nursing the same cocktails all this time?”

“Hey, aren’t you drinking?” Brown said to Blue, nodding and urging him on.

“I am drinking. Doing it this way, I could drink a lot.”

“What do you mean, ‘doing it this way?’ ”

“Ha, it’s coming out, that German training.”

“Hindenburg, Hindenburg!”

“Why ‘Hindenburg’? Warum Hindenburg?”

“Well, do you always take the offensive? Is it okay if we call you ‘Miss Hindenburg?’ ”

“Make it ‘Fraülein,’ please.”

“So—Fraülein Hindenburg, is it? But whiskey is strange considering your German training, you know. Shouldn’t you be drinking beer?”

“I do, if it’s German, but I hate Japanese beer.”

“Oh, yeah? But they say that Japanese beer is at least as good as German.”

“They may say so, but it’s still no good. If you go to Shanghai, you’ll find Löwenbrau, you know.” She pronounced the umlaut very vividly.

This was strange. The two men and the woman didn’t appear to have known each other before now. Had they just happened to meet up on the street? Or maybe they first began their conversation just now at this table? When Mizuno sat down at their booth, clearly they were only starting to feel each other out. And then Mizuno’s curiosity was increasingly engaged as he realized that the woman was ignoring the two men and looking straight at him. It was just for a moment that she looked directly at him with dark intensity, but in that moment her black eyes opened wide and challenged him as if posing a riddle. When he looked straight back at her, she didn’t flinch, but instead again opened her eyes wide and looked hard at him. A Japanese woman would have never stared like that. This was in fact the look of a Western streetwalker. So then what kind of training had this Fraülein gotten in Germany? “Hey, maybe there’s some chance this girl is available.”—At first it seemed an unachievable dream to Mizuno, but gradually he began to realize that it was not a dream. And this time he returned her look, his eyes filled with that intention, and the eyes that answered his gaze gave the same message. At first it was so unexpected that Mizuno was startled, and he blushed. But their staring match became increasingly insistent, and the two salary workers were left behind as the woman made Mizuno her companion in the conversation she conducted with her eyes.

“How about it, we haven’t had dinner yet, but if you have no other plans, won’t you come along with us?”

“Your treat?”

“Yes, of course. It would be the greatest honor for us to empty our wallets for you.”

“Danke schön! I’ll go anywhere with you.” As she said this, she looked again at Mizuno. “Why don’t you say something? I’m getting out of here with these guys, you know.”—That’s what her eyes said.

“Well, if it’s settled, let’s go, the sooner the better.”

“Hey—the check!” Brown shouted enthusiastically.

“Now, there’s no need to be in such a rush, I want another whiskey.”

“But let’s get out of here … right, Fraülein Hindenburg?”

“Why don’t we make it ‘Hinber’? ‘Hindenburg’ is too long.”

“Never mind that—what are your names? Give me your business cards.”

“Oh, how impolite of us. Here’s mine—”

“I work in the same company, and we hope that from here on, our acquaintance will—” Brown and Blue both took cards out of their wallets and placed them before the woman.

“Ah, yes, so you work for an insurance company.”

“And we’d like one of your cards, too.”

“I didn’t bring mine with me, but I was a typist at the German embassy. I’m on my own now.”

“How about if you come to work at our company?”

“Anywhere would be fine, so I might just do that, you know. If you don’t mind someone who drinks, do arrange it for me.”

What fools they are. They seem not to have noticed yet what kind of a woman this “Fraülein” is. The woman is sending them all kinds of signals, and they’re not getting them at all. A typist who drinks! They’re probably thinking, what an interesting gal we’ve found, let’s invite her to dinner, and have a good time! The woman knows this, and her secret contempt for them shows in her eyes: “What jerks!” Furthermore, the two of them look like they’ve graduated school not long ago, and so they probably don’t have far to go to empty their wallets. The woman undoubtedly is thinking of them as rookies, and that’s why she’s been throwing all those sexy glances at me. So I should work my hardest to get her to switch from these novice businessmen to me.—Mizuno was sure that’s how the wind was blowing, but if so, how should he proceed? He’d never before come up against a “modern girl” like this one. But, of course, he was drunk, too, so it would be terrible if his supposition were mistaken. “Modern girls” might exchange intense glances with men for no reason at all, and it might be premature to decide that the woman was wicked, just from her glances. If he were to insert himself into the situation carelessly, he might just get his ears boxed by that strong arm of hers …

Even though he was so shameless, Mizuno knew that he didn’t cut much of a figure with women, so he didn’t have much male pride. The two insurance company employees might not have had much on the ball, but all the same, they were quite a bit younger than he, and they were brimming with health and vigor like fresh, lively fish. Was the woman going to switch from them to him? … Huh, don’t be stupid, no matter how much you think of yourself, take it easy, the geisha Kokin is the right level for me, why would this fancy “modern girl” have anything to do with me?

This is what he was thinking to himself when he felt something touch the tip of his foot. What the—he thought, and then it touched again … once, twice, three times …

“Well, then, come on with us—”

“Yes, it’s probably a bother for you, but we would certainly like to have you keep us company.”

“Well, all right—but I’d rather go to a good drinking place than to eat.”

“Leave it to us, we’ll show you a good time.”

The two men had stood up and were urging the woman on, but Mizuno felt this thing on the front of his foot several times. Even without looking under the table, he could tell what it was because it was written on the woman’s face. Her sharp shoes were pressing down on the big toe of his blue tabi-clad foot on its fine wooden geta. Was there some established Western way by which he could signal “Yes” or “No”? For example, he had heard that if a woman winked at him, and he winked back, she would immediately come over to him. But this was under the table: would it be all right if he pressed his foot back on hers? If he didn’t do something, the woman might be angry or have contempt for him: “This guy seems to be interested in me, but even though I signaled him directly, he’s not answering.”—He hastily but timidly scraped along the floor with his geta, searching for the toe end of her shoe, but he couldn’t find it. He was caught: he might run into one of the men’s shoes, and if he stretched his foot out farther, he’d have to change his position. The woman drank down the last drops of whiskey and put the glass down on the table. Then she took up the squirrel-fur-trimmed coat that had been hanging across the back of the seat and stood up.

“Here—won’t you help me on with my coat?”

“Wha-a-t?”

“Don’t be such a lump—if you’re going to be like that, then you’re not qualified to be a ‘modern boy.’ ”

The woman’s beautifully taut shoulders, lustrous in the reflected light of the lamps, were turned toward Blue Suit, who stood and took the coat from her. Brown had gotten out of the booth a step ahead and was warming himself at the Junker heater placed in the middle of the bar.

“You sure have a great body; that’s really rare for a Japanese woman.”

“Really? Thanks.” Her splendid arms slid smoothly into the sleeves and were hidden by them. The woman opened her makeup case, put on her gloves, and adjusted her hat in the mirror attached to the case.—That was the moment: Mizuno felt something pressing down on his big toe, long and hard. The woman was on the other side of the table from him and standing above him, so when he looked up at her, her face was hidden in the shadow of the lid of the case, but he suddenly realized that the lid was at something of an angle, and he could see her left eye alone, fully visible, looking down at him. He felt a jolt through his entire body. This was not the time to hesitate. I have to do something or other, quick, quick …

As if to say, “Don’t be a worm!” she stepped on his toe again, hard enough to hurt. And then, moving her eye away and snapping the lid shut, the woman turned her back on him, while his foot remained paralyzed from the pain of his crushed toe.…

Until the woman had gone through the door with the two men on either side of her, he had hoped against hope that there might possibly still be some kind of chance, that maybe the god of good fortune would bestow on him some unexpected miracle, and he did not abandon all hope, but the three figures finally disappeared out into the street.… One minute, two, three … still Mizuno persevered, and sat watching so as not to miss a single customer coming in. Maybe she’d ditch the two men and come right back. He continued to sit there like that for the next thirty minutes, but the woman did not come back. There’s nothing I can do, I let something terrific get away. What a dope I am! I thought I didn’t have to do any work myself. I couldn’t have been more of a dolt. Didn’t I know full well from the beginning that it would come to this? And it’s not that I didn’t have the chance. The woman made the moves for me—how about this? This?—And yet I didn’t do anything. I dropped the ball. Even after they went outside, if I’d run after her, I still would have had a chance. The woman seemed to be a professional with all the arts of understanding, as if I could leave it all up to her and everything would work out just fine. No matter how devilish she was, her sense of vanity would carry the day, and even if I did not attempt much myself, something more could have been possible. All the more because there wasn’t anything cheap about her. Well, just think about it—where could you find anyone else like her? Her liveliness, her smart short hair, her face without heavy powder, her experience abroad. It’s not that such a woman is not to my taste. Rather, I didn’t approach her because I thought she’d probably not want to keep company with me, whether for money or whatever. And now I’m drowning in regret that I’ll never get an opportunity like this again. Damn it—what a jerk I am!

Ordinarily he would get intoxicated from just slowly sipping a single gin-and-bitters, but this night he gulped down three glasses almost in desperation. And from time to time he would glance below the table and look reproachfully at the faint muddy signs of the shoes on the toe ends of his navy tabi.

“What’s up? You’re drinking quite a bit tonight.”

Availing himself of the opportunity when one of the waitresses came to light his cigarette, he asked, “You remember the woman who was here earlier, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s she from?”

“Let’s see—she’s a typist somewhere, isn’t she?”

“She come here often?”

“Not much here, but I hear that she often goes to the Monaco …”

“Where’s that—Monaco?”

“Straight ahead in the Shimbashi direction, half a mile or so.”

Hey—so I don’t have to lose hope yet! I’ll figure out the timing and go and wait at this Monaco. Depending on how things go, I might yet get together with her tonight.

The vision of Kokin was no longer in his head. All he wanted to do now was call back that lost opportunity, somehow or other. I can meet her, I can meet her, before this night is out, I can meet her. From the moment I left my boardinghouse this evening, I’ve had a premonition that something good was going to happen. Maybe it wasn’t an accident; maybe it was the god of good fortune who showed the woman to me. Some karmic connection made me stop at this bar, when my usual practice would have had me go straight to Tsukiji. And it was the same kind of karmic connection that had the woman come to this bar and seated her right across from me, when she always went to the Monaco. And then when we were put face to face, she immediately started coming on to me. That such a classy woman would indicate an interest in a man like me, who would otherwise never get a second glance from her—this just has to be fate. Probably the god of good fortune placed me in her eyes. And it just so happens that at this very moment I have 160 yen in my wallet. Everything’s working out this way, just as I would want it to, and that means that Heaven has given her to me. Right—I must manage to seize this chance. If I can’t meet her tonight, I will go to the Monaco every night. And if, despite that, I don’t meet her, probably they know her at the Monaco, so if I ask, I could visit her house or write her a letter; there’d be some way to get in touch. It’s bound to happen, if I screw up my courage. Somehow or other, within the next four or five days, I will see her again …

The woman left here a little past seven. If they were going to have dinner, that would probably take about two hours. So if at that point they go on to the Monaco, that would be around nine. Or maybe one of the guys would come up with some story, and they’d go stay at some geisha house or whatever. No, a woman like that probably wouldn’t do a house. It would be a hotel room, or maybe she has a nest of her own. Somewhere in Kojimachi, or Azabu, or Akasaka, one of those quiet areas in the heights, a neat, cozy, little Western-style house … It would be good quality, tight shuttered, set up as if someone from an embassy or the Foreign Ministry lived there, and the light outside the entrance would be so dim that you couldn’t even read the nameplate, and with the door firmly shut it would be as quiet as if the house were unoccupied. When you pushed the bell, a person like a Chinese amah would come and silently open the door. And then she’d say quietly “Herein!” in German. You’d follow the woman to the second floor, and there would be the secret bedroom. Your body would sink into the overstuffed easy chair; there would be the chaise longue, the double bed, the lace curtains, the mantel over the fireplace.… Gradually as drunkenness whirled around him, Mizuno wildly imagined this dreamlike scene, and it was as if he had become the hero of a dirty French novel. It was a dream that such a woman should make the rounds right in the middle of Tokyo, and that she would come trolling for men in the Ginza cafés and bars. Come to think of it, that meant Tokyo was quite a civilized place. He had never heard of such a thing, either in gossip or in the newspapers. At any rate, if word of it reached police ears, it probably wouldn’t last long, so truly it was now or never. He’d have to move quickly.

At quarter of nine he left the London Bar and hurried down Ginza Avenue. Five minutes later he stood in front of Café Monaco. But before he could go in, there were the three of them just coming out, joking and chatting animatedly.

“Look at them—I knew it!”

Mizuno felt as if he would jump up, his body wound tight as a spring. Damn! This is really too close! I’d have missed them if I’d come just a little later, but to bump into them face to face like this means more and more that tonight is clearly quite out of the ordinary. Well then, I’m not going to run away anymore. I’m sticking with them no matter where they go. This kind of woman obviously will state her conditions openly in businesslike terms: “Well then, how much will you pay me?” Okay, let’s finish our negotiations quickly. Come on, let me know what the deal is. I’ll do whatever I can. For you, I’ll sacrifice any amount, because there’s no way I’m letting you go.… He didn’t know where he was going, but just kept following them, as he continued to talk to her back.… Hello, hello, here, right behind you, here’s a good sucker with quite a bit of money in his wallet, hey.… Isn’t there some way to say something to let her know this? If I did, surely she’d come to me right away, now …

“Where are we? Tokyo? Yokohama?”

“We’re at Unter den Linden.”

“Hey, you can’t fall asleep just because you’re drunk.”

“No, I’m going to lie down, really.”

Brown and Blue both shouted “Hey!” at the same time. She had been walking arm in arm with the two of them on either side of her, but now all of a sudden she let her legs go limp and hung from the two of them.

“Hey, come on, no joking, in a place like this!”

“She’s heavy, this woman!”

“Natürlich! Ich habe …”

“We know, we know, enough of the German. Bitte. Auf japanisch!”

“Hey, I’m impressed, that you can say that much …”

“Well, never mind, we’d like you to get up.”

“Where is this, here? Isn’t it too dark to be Ginza?”

“We’re walking on one of the side streets. We’re almost up to Yurakucho, over there.”

“Well then, come on, drag me along just like this.”

“This is hopeless, I’ve never seen a woman as much of a mess as this one.”

“Hey, she’s not really that drunk. She hasn’t had that much to drink, you know.”

“Doesn’t matter—let’s get her into a taxi.”

The two men seemed to be quite overwhelmed. The three of them staggered along in a tangle for thirty feet or so through the dark side streets, and then Brown ran off to the main street to find a taxi, saying “Wait, wait here.”

Oops, now I’m in trouble if I don’t get myself a cab, too, Mizuno thought; and while he was thinking, a taxi stopped in front of the woman and Brown jumped out of it.

Blue called out to the driver, “Hey, take this baggage to Yurakucho Station for us.”

“Oh, her alone?”

“Yeah, we’re not going.”

“Well then, am I going to get paid?”

“What’ll we do, shall we pay ahead for her?”

“Do you suppose she has that much with her?”

The two men, working together, folded the legs of the woman, who seemed to have become dead drunk, and shoved her into the cab. Behind it as it dashed off, Mizuno ran at full speed to Yurakucho.

This day of greatly changing fortunes had been filled with worry and nervousness, as if he had picked up a jewel in his hand but then dropped it, but this was his last great effort. All would be decided by whether or not he could successfully get to the station by the time the taxi got there and the woman changed to the electric train line. This would be the final accounting of the day.… As he thought this, Mizuno ran for all he was worth. He was thin and rangy, useful for running, but he was wearing a kimono and cape, and besides, he spent all his time locked up in his room and got no exercise, so that when on occasion he did run, he immediately found himself panting. But when he had run two or three hundred feet and still hadn’t seen the woman’s car, it was his legs that began to give out. He’d stop from time to time, gasping and pressing down on his pounding heart, which seemed ready to burst at any moment. There was another problem: whether or not it was his particular constitution, when he ran hard enough to become short of breath, he would always get the urge to throw up. Although it happened even when he had an empty stomach, this night he had crammed so much into his stomach that it was even more urgent. As he ran, he gulped down the heaves that were becoming painful belches and threatening to erupt, but his breath became more and more constricted, and in the end his throat convulsed and he retched, vomiting the liquor and Western food he had just eaten onto the street. It was even comical: as he threw up, he could recognize each bit clearly—here are odds and ends of the beefsteak, there’s the gin, that’s the salad. He could imagine how it looked, his passage from Ginza to Yurakucho marked every several hundred feet by the remains on the pavement. He had a new worry: he’d eaten particularly fatty food to store up energy for the night’s campaign, and he realized that he might be losing it all.… Probably the woman was from Yokohama, but how often did the trains run to Sakuragicho? Every five minutes? Every ten? … Supposing they weren’t as frequent at night as during the day; could it be every ten minutes? If that was so, at best I mustn’t be more than ten minutes late! … He should have been able to grab a taxi along the way, but the only one that passed just continued on even though he raised his hand. Maybe not another one went by, or maybe he was just in so much of a rush that he didn’t notice any.

“One second-class ticket to Sakuragicho!” Just guessing, he bought the ticket and raced up the stairs to the platform at Yurakucho Station. For sure he was more than fifteen minutes behind the woman, but for no reason at all, as he climbed he had a feeling that she would be on the platform.

Sure enough, the woman was leaning at an angle on a bench as if she’d been thrown there, sleeping with her hands holding her coat together around her shoulders as if she were cold. Below the hem of her skirt there was nothing but the flesh-colored stockings, so that from a distance it could have been a man lying with his kimono tucked up behind him and a workman’s jacket thrown over himself. From this angle, she was all legs. Five or six passengers passed back and forth in front of her in surprise, but Mizuno took no notice of them. Silently, without hesitation, he sat down beside the woman and slowly took out a cigarette from his kimono sleeve. Right before him were the woman’s shoes on her feet. With her knees tucked together, they looked as if they would flip into the air.

“Huh, so these are were what were stepping on my blue tabi a while ago,” Mizuno thought, and he gazed vaguely for some time at the shoe tips. Certainly, I’ve caught her but … And without a doubt I am now sitting side-by-side with her on this bench, but … now what do I do? Whatever I do, anyway, the woman is here. Whatever, I just wait until she wakes up. He forced down the grin that was bubbling up inside him. He, too, was drunk, but all the same, it was strange that he could behave as shamelessly as this. And then, when the woman wakes up, would she remember him right away? “Oh, you’re here, sorry I was so impolite back there.”—It would be great if she said something appropriate like that, but what if that earlier stuff was just a whim that she’d have forgotten in her drunkenness? He found himself hoping that he’d have a good long time to sneak the pleasure of having her collapsed dead drunk here at his side as he gazed at the blood vessels showing translucent in the arch of her foot through the stockings.

“Hello … hello, hello …” As the station employee came and tried to get the woman up, he looked suspiciously at Mizuno.

“No, it would probably be better to leave her as she is for a bit more. She’s drunk quite a lot of whiskey.”

“This lady—is she with you?”

“Yes,” he said in a low voice, hoping against hope that she would hear him …

The train stopped hard at the platform. Great numbers of passengers were spat out, and as many were sucked back in. The sky after it roared away glittered with the illumination from the motion picture advertising billboards for the Hogakuza Motion Picture Theater. Above his head the lights signaling arrivals and departures blinked and changed color. These things all reflected meaninglessly in Mizuno’s eyes. The cool night breeze that came from across Marunouchi touched the concrete floor and blew upward as if to scoop him up, and it felt good against his burning cheeks. Then, after an hour or so, around eleven o’clock, he began to readjust the woman’s position, as her hips seemed from time to time to be about to slide down. Just as he was thinking it might be getting to be time for her to awaken, sure enough, leaning untidily just as she was, she touched her hat lightly with her hand and seemingly half asleep stood up unsteadily. A train for Sakuragicho just happened to come at that point and she staggered onto the second-class car. Mizuno followed her closely, with literally no space between them, and he took a seat just to the left of where she had plopped down, drawing so close that for all the world he looked as if maybe he was her husband. By good chance, the train car was nicely crowded. In other words, the seats were now full where the two had just sat down, and then another three or four people piled on and stood in a clump in front of them, shielding them from view from the other side. The woman was in a corner seat near the conductor’s post, and she was leaning on one elbow, holding her chin against her hand, sound asleep again.

But how conscious was the woman anyway, to have stood up all alone even though she was supposedly drunk, to get on the train she was supposed to take and promptly find an empty seat? Was she completely unconscious, or did she vaguely know? With whiskey, unlike with Japanese saké, the body can stop working while the mind is still clear, so she might to some degree know what she was doing. If so, mightn’t she be deliberately not showing that she was actually aware of Mizuno? She had sat for so long beside him back there but never once turned her face to Mizuno—wasn’t there something suspicious in that? Mizuno remembered that when they crowded onto the train, he had pushed her shoulder a bit roughly from behind. Even assuming there had been no chance for her to turn around then, now the two of them were flesh partners, jostling against each other and feeling the hardness, arm to arm, hip to hip, separated only by their coats. Further, even though Mizuno was to some extent doing it on purpose, she could be pretending that she didn’t realize he was forcing himself on her. Or maybe he should only think that she was used to a man’s touch, that she slept every night feeling it, so Mizuno’s arm was no more than the back or cushion of a chair. All the same, the amount of bumping was extreme. The woman’s body became separated into three parts, her head, her trunk, her hips, and each swayed separately every time the train shook. When the train stopped with a jerk, her body would bend once to the right, and then snap back toward Mizuno with a bump. Sometimes she seemed about to bump into him, but then she did not seem startled and open her eyes but rather quietly sat there bobbing her head like a bobble-head tiger doll. Again and again, Mizuno felt the brim of her hat and the fur on her collar gently stroking his cheek. Gradually he became bolder, and when she bumped into him, he pushed back. As he did so, little by little he moved his arm around behind her. He imagined that she could perceive it like a bug crawling down her spine. The bug went around from her back to her hips, began to fumble around below her armpit, wound itself around the fingers of her left gloved hand. By the time they passed Kamata, most passengers had cleared out, and so he was quite exposed to the conductor, but by now he had forgotten all shame and decency, and the conductor, who could not have missed what he was doing, averted his gaze. In the end, under cover of the sleeves of his cape, he linked arms with the woman.

When they reached Sakuragicho, the end of the line, two things happened simultaneously: the woman disentangled her arm from his, and Mizuno pulled his hand back. The woman stood up and still without looking back at Mizuno headed down the platform ahead of him without hesitation, her pace much firmer than before.

“Hello, hello,” Mizuno said as soon as they left the station grounds, running up behind the woman as she approached the stop for the city tram. As he matched his pace to her, he doffed his hat and bobbed in two or three obsequious bows.

“Um, I’m the man who met you at the London Bar.”

“Oh, yes?”

“I mean, remember, I was on the other side of the table?”

“Ah, so-o” she said. Her “so-o” had a Western inflection. “Yes, yes, it was you, wasn’t it? You’re good, to recognize me.”

“We’ve been together since the train. I was sitting next to you.”

“Oh, my, I’ve had quite a bit to drink, and so—I’ve been most impolite, haven’t I?” She had passed beyond the tram stop, so he had to run after her as he stuck close to her.

“Um, which way to where you live?”

“Where do you?”

“I—if it weren’t a bother to you, I could see you home in a car.”

“Ah, so-o—hmm, I wonder what I should do? I do, in fact, live in this neighborhood, but I also have a house over in Honmoku.”

Mizuno had not come to Yokohama much, but it’s not that he hadn’t heard rumors of Honmoku, how far it was from the station, or what kind of area it was. And so he thought to himself, I certainly would like to have us go toward Honmoku.

“Well then, where are you going to stay tonight?”

“Let’s see, which shall I do?—” She finally stopped, and as she stood she continued, “—I don’t care which, you know, but I have two younger sisters at the house that’s near here, so it’s small and in kind of a mess.”

“Oh, really? You have younger sisters?” Mizuno’s attention was now drawn to these so-called younger sisters, too, and he began to think it wouldn’t be bad to go there either.

“Yes, the three of us sleep in one room, and it’s pretty tight. So I think it’d be better to go back to Honmoku, after all …”

“This residence in Honmoku, you’re there all alone?”

“Yes, I’ve got the second floor all to myself, and I don’t really have anything to do with the people below. It’s quiet, the sea is right nearby, and it’s a great place.”

“Well then, let’s see you to Honmoku. It sounds like that’s the better choice.”

“Hey, wait, wait a minute,” the woman called to Mizuno as he was about to run to the taxi garage. “I hate taxis. You said a good car, so why don’t you wait here for me while I make a phone call?” She quickly went into a telephone booth by herself.

Whether she was just ordering a car or perhaps had some other business to arrange, her call took quite some time. Mizuno was standing some thirty-five feet away, so he couldn’t hear what she was saying, but when she finished, she again took her coin purse out of the vanity case and put some coins into the phone. He watched the movements of her gloved hands on the other side of the glass door, pressing the button of the case lid, working the metal fittings of the purse, so skillful and bewitching, and the memory of her palm and fingers lying on the table earlier came floating again into his mind. Yes, that’s for sure, the woman is not bad, even as I watch her like this some distance away. There is none of the vulgarity about her that you’d expect of her profession, and she appears as honest as if she’d just come from some company office. I never keep relationships for long, but this time maybe I could enjoy her for quite a while. I could truly have made a good friend, and depending on how things go, maybe I could even make her my wife? …

“Sorry I’ve kept you waiting. They said it’ll be coming right away,” the woman said as she came out. “It’ll be about five minutes,” she added, pulling back the edge of her glove and revealing a sturdy men’s-style watch.