KANAME had abandoned himself to a search for the passages that have given The Arabian Nights its dubious reputation. Even this first volume, which went only from the first to the thirty-fourth nights, contained three hundred and sixty octavo pages, however, and to comb through the whole seventeen would be a formidable task. Sometimes he stopped at an engaging illustration, but the text beside it generally turned out to be quite ordinary. The table of contents—"Tale of the Wazir and the Sage Duban," "Tale of the Three Apples," "The Nazarene Broker's Story," "Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince"—was little help. He began reading over the notes (there were careful notes on almost every page of this Burton Club edition, the first complete translation). Many of them were concerned with linguistic problems of little interest to Kaname, but among them he found some that described intriguing Arab customs or suggested something about the contents of the text proper.

"A large hollow navel is looked upon not only as a beauty, but in children it is held a promise of good growth. . . .

"A slight parting between the two front incisors, the upper only, is considered a beauty by Arabs; why it is hard to say except for the racial love of variety....

"The King's barber is usually a man of rank for the best of reasons that he holds his Sovereign's life between his fingers. One of these noble Figaros in India married an English lady who was, they say, unpleasantly surprised to find out what were her husband's official duties....

"In the Moslem East a young woman, single or married, is not allowed to appear alone in the streets; and the police has a right to arrest delinquents. As a preventive of intrigues the precaution is excellent. During the Crimean war hundreds of officers, English, French and Italian, became familiar with Constantinople; and not a few flattered themselves on their success with Turkish women. I do not believe that a single bona fide case occurred; the 'conquests' were all Greeks, Wallachians, Armenians, or Jews....

"Lane (i, 124) is scandalized and naturally enough by this scene, which is the only blot in an admirable tale admirably told...."

Kaname drew up short—here it was, finally—and quickly reread the last footnote. "Lane (i, 124) is scandalized... admirable tale admirably told. Yet even here the grossness is but little more pronounced than what we find in our old drama (e.g., Shakespeare's King Henry V) written for the stage, whereas tales like The Nights are not read or recited before both sexes."

He turned immediately to the beginning of "The Porter and the Three Ladies of Bagdad," the tale thus annotated. He had gone no farther than the first five or six lines when he heard steps from the direction of the Japanese wing and Takanatsu came in.

"Can't you put that away for a few minutes?"

"What's the trouble?" Kaname made no motion toward getting up from the sofa, but, reluctant though he was to leave off reading for even a moment, he did lay the volume face-down on his leg.

"I've just heard something very odd."

"And what have you heard that's very odd?"

Takanatsu walked silently up and down beside the table for a time, his cigar trailing a line of smoke off behind him like a mist.

"I've actually been told that Misako has no guarantees for her future."

"No guarantees for her future?"

"You're sometimes careless yourself, but Misako is really much too careless."

"What are you talking about? Please don't go throwing thunderbolts about with no explanation."

"Misako and Aso have made no promise to go on loving each other. Aso says he can't promise because love has a way of wearing off and there's no way of being sure what might happen. Misako seems to have agreed."

"That's the sort of thing he'd say." Kaname, finally resigned to being interrupted, folded over the page, closed the book, and pulled himself up from the sofa.

"I don't know him myself of course and I'm in no position to attack him, but I don't approve of his argument. It could seem fairly vicious, depending on how you chose to look at it."

"But does a decent man make promises just to please a woman? Isn't it more honest to refuse to?"

"I don't like that sort of honesty. It's not honesty, it's lack of steadiness."

"You have your nature, others have theirs. No matter how well matched two people seem to be, the time comes when they get tired of each other, and there's a great deal of merit in saying that you can't make promises about the future. If I were Aso, I think I should do very much the same thing."

"And when they do get tired of each other they separate?"

"Getting tired of each other and separating are different matters. When the first love begins to fade, a sort of domestic affection takes its place. Isn't that what most marriages are built on, as a matter of fact?"

"That's very well if this Aso is dependable, but what if he should say he's sick of her and throw her away? Isn't it a little disturbing to think that there are no guarantees against it?"

"I don't think he's likely to do that."

"I suppose you had a private detective after him before you let things go this far?"

"I did not."

"You had some other way of investigating, then?"

"I didn't really do anything in particular.... I don't like the idea of spying, and it's such a nuisance."

"You're impossible." Takanatsu almost spat out the words. "When you said he was such a fine, upstanding individual, I assumed you had investigated him. This is really too irresponsible. How do you know he's not a sex fiend or a swindler out after Misako? What would you do if he should turn out to be?"

"When you put it that way, it does worry me a little.... But when I met him he seemed a very high type, not the sort you suggest at all. Actually, though, I put my faith more in Misako. She's no child, and she can surely tell the difference between a decent man and a scoundrel. If Misako is sure of him, that's enough to satisfy me."

"But that's exactly what you can least count on. Women may seem clever enough, but they're fools."

"I'd rather you wouldn't talk that way. I've tried to keep my mind off the worst possibilities."

"And let everything take its course. You are a strange one. It's exactly because you leave problems like this unsettled that you haven't been able to work yourself into a decision on the divorce itself."

"I suppose I should have investigated earlier. But it can't do any good now." Kaname spoke as if it were no problem of his and fell listlessly over on the sofa again.

He had no idea what sort of feelings Misako and Aso had for each other. To try to imagine the nature of his wife's love affair is hardly pleasant for even the coldest husband, and while Kaname did sometimes feel a certain curiosity, he always hurried to push disturbing speculations from his mind.

The affair between Misako and Aso dated from some two years before. Kaname came back from the city one day to find Misako on the veranda talking to a strange man. "Mr. Aso," she said shortly. Since they had in the course of time come to build up their own independent friendships, Kaname did not find any further explanation necessary. He gathered that Misako and Aso had become acquainted at a school in Kobe where Misako had taken up French as a cure for boredom. That was all he knew at the time. Misako began to be more careful of her appearance, but Kaname quite overlooked the assortment of cosmetics and toilet articles steadily building up on her dresser—testimony indeed to the apathy into which he had fallen as a husband. It was nearly a year before he finally noticed the change.

One night as she lay in bed with the covers pulled up to her forehead, he heard her sobbing quietly; long into the night he lay staring into the darkness of the room, listening. It was not the first time he had been assailed by this sobbing in the night. A year or two after they were married, when he was beginning to withdraw from her sexually, he had often enough had to meet the same accusing evidence of the woman's wretchedness. He knew what it meant and he felt intensely sorry for her. At the same time he was conscious of being pushed farther from her; and, at a loss for a way to console her, he let the sobbing pass in silence. Would he have to spend the rest of his life with it, who knew how many years?—the prospect made him long to be alone and free. Gradually she seemed to accept her loneliness, however, and the sobbing stopped.

And now, after years of respite, it had started again. Kaname at first doubted his ears, then asked himself how to account for this extraordinary development. Why should she have started again? What case could she be pleading now? Had she never resigned herself at all, only waited for the day when his affection for her would return, and now, after years of waiting, had she found it impossible to wait any longer? What a fool the woman was, he thought; and, as years before, he let the tears pass in silence. But night after night they continued. Quite unable to find an explanation, he finally told her she was making a nuisance of herself.

At that Misako broke into open and unrestrained sobbing. "Forgive me. There's something I've kept from you," she said softly, her voice choked with tears.

Kaname could not have denied that he was a little shocked at the words, but more than that he felt as though the shackles had opened, as though a heavy weight had suddenly and unexpectedly been lifted from his shoulders. He could go out into the wide fields again and breathe freely of the clean air—and as if to prove it, he took in a long breath to the bottom of his lungs as he lay there face-up in bed.

Misako said that the affair had gone no farther than a declaration of affection, and he saw no reason to doubt her. Even so, her confession seemed enough to cancel out the debt he had been carrying. Had he in fact turned her, pushed her to another man, he wondered—if he had, then he could only be revolted at his own baseness. But in all honesty he had simply held a secret hope that something like this might happen. He had never told her of it, and so far as he could remember he had never created incidents that might bring about her fall. In an excess of pain at being unable to love her as a husband should, he had only nursed a prayer, almost a dream, that someone might come along to give the luckless woman what he himself could not. But Misako's character being what it was, he had never thought the prospects very good.

"And have you found someone too?" she asked after she had told him of Aso. It was clear that she had nursed a hope not too different from his.

He answered that he had not. Perhaps the really unforgivable thing was that he had forced her to remain continent while he had not been at pains to remain so himself. He had found no one, he said; but he had in fact let his curiosity and his physical appetites drive him—indeed, only for a moment now and then—to the company of certain unwholesome women. For Kaname a woman had to be either a goddess or a plaything. Possibly the real reason for his failure with Misako was that she could be neither. Had she not been his wife he might have been able to look on her as a plaything, and the fact that she was his wife made it impossible for him to find her interesting.

"I've kept this much respect for you, I think," he said later that same night. "I may not have been able to love you, but I've been careful not to use you for my own pleasure."

At that Misako broke into violent sobbing. "I understand that—I'm even almost grateful for it. But I've wanted to be loved more than I have been, even if it meant being used."

Even after Misako's confession, Kaname made no effort to urge her into Aso's arms. He said only enough to show that he claimed no right to pronounce her love affair improper and that he could not object, whatever it might develop into. And yet almost certainly his very refusal to call it improper had the indirect effect of sending her on to Aso. What she wanted from him was not this understanding, this sympathy, this generosity. "I don't know myself what to do. I'm terribly mixed up," she said. "If you tell me I should, I can still back out." She would probably have been overjoyed had he said imperiously: "This foolishness must stop." And even had he called her affair not illicit but only unwise, she would probably still have been able to leave Aso. That was what she wanted. Deep in her heart she no longer hoped for any love from the husband who had withdrawn so from her; but she did hope that he would somehow bring this new love of hers under control, put an end to it. When she asked what to do, however, he only sighed and said: "I have no idea." Aso's visits became more frequent and Misako took to going out oftener and to staying out later at night, and Kaname never attempted to interfere or indicated any displeasure by so much as a frown. She would have to dispose of this new passion, the first in her life, by means of her own.

Even afterwards he sometimes heard her sobbing in the night, no doubt from an excess of wretchedness at being turned away by this stone of a husband and yet unable to throw herself decisively into the world of her new love. Especially on nights after she had had a letter from Aso or had met him somewhere, Kaname would hear her quiet sobbing, muffled by the bedclothes, through to the dawn. One morning, perhaps half a year later, he called her into the western wing. "I've something to talk to you about," he said. There were early daffodils on the table, he remembered, and the electric stove was going. It must have been a bright, clear winter morning. They faced each other swollen-eyed across the table—she had cried until daybreak again the night before and he himself had not been able to sleep. He had thought of talking to her during the night, but there was a possibility that Hiroshi might wake up, and there was a possibility too that Misako, always ready with tears even in the daytime, might become still more emotional in the dark. He decided that the fresh morning hours would be better.

"There's something I've been thinking for a long time I'd like to talk over," he said, trying to sound light and pleasant, as though perhaps he were inviting her out for a picnic.

"And there's something I've been wanting to talk over," Misako parroted back as she pulled her chair up near the stove. There was a suggestion of a smile in the corners of her eyes, red though they were from lack of sleep.

It presently became clear that the two of them had reached very much the same conclusions by the same route. Kaname said that it was impossible for them to love each other now, and that, though they might with their recognition of each other's good points and their knowledge of each other's weaknesses find themselves happily mated ten, twenty years hence, on the edge of old age, there was no point in relying on anything as indefinite as that; and Misako said she agreed. They had both concluded too that, while they were held together by affection for Hiroshi, it would be foolish to make fossils of themselves for no better reason than that. But when Kaname asked: "Would you like to separate, then?" Misako answered: "Would you?" They knew that divorce was the solution, and yet neither had the courage to propose it, each was left face to face with his own weakness.

Kaname had no real cause to throw his wife out. He would only feel worse once the separation was over if the initiative had been his, and he wanted to be the passive partner. Since Misako had someone to marry and he had no one, he hoped that she would make the decision. But for Misako the fact that she had a lover and Kaname had none, that she alone of the two would be happy, only made it the more difficult to take the first step. True, she was not loved by her husband. She could not say, though, that she had been cruelly mistreated. If one was always looking for something better, then of course there was no end to one's demands; but the world was full of unfortunate wives, and Misako, unloved but with little else to complain of, could not find it in her to make that alone the reason for abandoning her husband and child. In a word, both husband and wife wanted to be discarded; each hoped to put himself in a position where that would happen. But why, since they were presumably adults, did they find themselves so paralyzed at the task before them? Why were they so afraid to do what reason told them must be done? Was it simply that they were incapable of turning away from the past? Others had evidently found that time softened the pain (though certainly there was pain), once a separation was complete.

"With us I suppose it's that we're more afraid of what's in front of our noses than of what's still a distance off," Kaname said with a laugh.

At the end of the conversation Kaname came to his proposal. "We'll have to arrange," he said by way of preface, "so that we'll be drifting into a divorce and hardly knowing it."

The ancients would perhaps have called it girlish sentimentality, this inability to face up squarely to the sorrow of a farewell. Nowadays, however, one is counted clever if one can reach a goal without tasting the sorrow, however slight it may be, that seems to lie along the way. Kaname and Misako were cowardly, and there was no point in being ashamed of it. They could only accommodate themselves to their cowardice and follow its peculiar way to happiness.

Kaname recited the set of principles he had been carrying nicely composed in his mind:

"1. To satisfy appearances, Misako is for the present to remain Kaname's wife.

"2. Similarly for the sake of appearances, Aso is to be for the present a friend only.

"3. To the extent that it will not arouse suspicion, Misako's love for Aso, both physical and spiritual, is to be given free license.

"4. If after a period of two or three years it appears that Misako and Aso are affectionate and compatible and are in prospect of being happily married, Kaname will take principal responsibility for gaining the consent of Misako's family, and will formally relinquish her to Aso.

"5. This period of two or three years is therefore to be considered a testing of the affections of Misako and Aso for each other. If it appears that the test has failed, and that the two, because of incompatibilities which have emerged, could not make a successful marriage, Misako will remain in Kaname's house as she has to now.

"6. If, happily, the experiment is a success, Kaname will continue to regard the two as friends after they are married."

As Kaname finished speaking, he saw Misako's face light up bright as this winter morning. "Thank you," she said simply. There were happy tears in her eyes, as though for the first time in years the turmoil in her heart had quieted, as though she could finally look up untroubled into the open sky. Kaname, as he watched her, felt that his chains too had snapped. In all the years they had been together they had been tormented by an irritant like a fragment lodged between two back teeth. Now, ironically, they felt it dissolve, they felt a coming together without restraint, when for the first time they spoke openly of separation.

It was of course a bold adventure, but unless they closed their eyes and let themselves fall step by step into a position from which there would be no withdrawing, the divorce probably would never come. It was not likely that Aso would object. Indeed, Kaname took special pains, when he explained the proposal, to point out its risks. "There are probably countries in the West where no one would raise an eyebrow at this sort of thing. But Japan hasn't yet come that far, and if we are to carry it off I'm afraid we're going to have to be extremely careful. The most important thing of course is for us to trust each other. And no matter what good intentions we may have, it will be easy enough to make mistakes. We shall all of us be in a difficult position, and we shall have to be careful not to hurt any feelings and not to cause any unnecessary emharassment. You will keep all of this in mind, I'm sure."

After that Aso's visits stopped and Misako began "going to Suma."

Kaname closed his eyes to the affair. If only he relaxed, his fate would take care of itself—thus he gave himself up to the current and made no effort of die will other than that required to cling, blindly and with singleness of purpose, to the direction in which it seemed to be taking him. But the end of the experiment, the day when a decision would have to be made, loomed ever more fearsome. No matter how he tried to glide along, there was still the moment of parting to be faced. It could not be avoided. He felt as though, on a course that had seemed calm and smooth, a typhoon belt had appeared and was somehow to be got through. He had kept his eyes carefully shut, but they would one day have to open. The prevision of it made him the more prone to seek yet a moment's refuge in the comfortable drift.

"On the one hand you say it's hard to leave her, and on the other you pamper yourself with this wild unsteadiness. I couldn't tolerate it myself," Takanatsu said.

"My unsteadiness is nothing new. Anyway, it seems to me that ethics have to be modified a little to suit the individual. Everyone has to build his own scheme and try to apply it."

"True, I suppose. And in your scheme unsteadiness is a virtue?"

"I don't say it's exactly a virtue, but I do say it's wrong for someone who was born indecisive to go against his nature and force himself into decisions. If he does, he generally adds to his losses and in the end he is worse off than ever. Indecisive people have to choose a course that suits them. To take my case: the final goal is a divorce, and if I reach that goal eventually, it doesn't matter how many evasions and detours I go through on the way. I don't think it would matter if I were even more unsteady —as you call it—than I am."

"I suspect from the way you talk that it will take a lifetime for you to get through to your goal."

"I've honestly thought so too. They say that in the West adultery is a common thing, at least among the upper classes. Most often it's not the kind where the husband and wife are deceiving each other, but the kind where each one recognizes and ignores it—very much like my own case. I often think that if society in this country would only allow it, I could be content with some such arrangement as that for the rest of my life."

"It's out of style even in the West. Marriages aren't held together any more by religion."

"But it's not only a question of religion. I wonder if even foreigners aren't afraid to cut the old ties too quickly."

"Well, I shall leave you to do as you like. I'm through." Takanatsu brusquely took up the volume of The Arabian Nights, which had slipped to the floor.

"Why do you say that?"

"You should know. It's not for an outsider to get himself involved in a problem as cloudy as yours."

"But it will be harder if you don't help."

"Let it be harder, then. I've nothing to suggest."

"Whether you have or you haven't, it will be hard for us if you run away. It will only make things cloudier still. Really, I beg of you."

"Well, tonight I'll take Hiroshi to Tokyo with me." There was little encouragement in Takanatsu's voice as he leafed coldly through the book.