At midnight the band starts to pack away their instruments. The dancers-for-hire sit down and rub their aching calves. The waitresses are tired too. They move from booth to booth collecting bills, their sandals scuffing the wooden floor. Startling from a short sleep, Makiyama drops a banknote on the table, crams his hat on his head, and strides down to the Ginza Crossing, where he stops a one-yen taxi by stepping in front of it and spreading his arms. They squeeze, all four of them, into the back. Makiyama calls an address to the driver, who seems to know it. They jolt forwards, cruise awhile under the lights of the Ginza, then turn up towards the park and into the darker, emptier streets around the government buildings.
As they travel, and the wind stirs the litter from the night-stalls, Makiyama starts to sing. It’s the lovers-parting-in-the-dawn-mist song from a new musical he’s invested in at the Moulin Rouge in Shinjuku. Then he breaks off and says it’s a shame, a damned shame what they did to your father. Writing a few lines about the Emperor — what was it? Fifteen years ago? — really came back to kick him in the teeth, eh? It was tough. It was damned tough. But certain things just couldn’t be allowed any more, and if the people at the top didn’t set an example, what could you expect from the riff-raff? It wasn’t personal. Just a question of discipline, of being ready for what was coming, of showing the world that Japan meant business. Even so, yes, he was sorry for what had happened, genuinely sorry for the Takano family’s misfortune.
Yuji, trapped against the car door, bows as best he can. The speech has surprised him. He is also surprised at how grateful he feels, though it’s inconceivable that Makiyama has ever read the 482 pages of Democratic Principles and the Japanese Constitution, or has the slightest real grasp of Father’s arguments. The same, of course, could be said about most of the others, those whose muttering — or in some cases shrieking, hysterical shrieking — made, in the end, Father’s situation intolerable. And now that they have pulled him down, they will, perhaps, like Makiyama, begin to pity him, so that in a few years it will appear he fell through something as natural and implacable as bad luck, his enemies nothing more than bystanders, innocent witnesses to an event they could not possibly have altered the outcome of.
They stop at the mouth of a stone-paved alley somewhere in Sanbancho. The neighbourhood is poorly lit. The houses have their eaves pulled low, like caps. The alley is so narrow they have to go in single file. At the end, there is a little shrine to the fox god. A woman is praying there, but hearing the men, she lifts the hems of her kimono and hurries, on wooden soles, through a doorway where a lantern marked with the characters for falling leaves swings its crimson light in the wind.
They follow her inside. Makiyama shouts for service. The hostess of the house appears, trotting out of her booth and calling a welcome. Recognising Makiyama, telling him how well he’s looking, how prosperous, she leads them up the stairs and along a corridor to a room at the back of the house. From the tobacco haze, the smell of fish, it’s evident the room has only recently been vacated. A maid appears and straightens out the sitting cushions, polishes the table. Yuji slips the catch on the window. There’s a courtyard below with a few shrubs, a line of sake kegs outside the open doorway of the kitchen. On the far side of the courtyard, where shadows blur and focus behind the paper windows, a girl’s voice is singing to the accompaniment of a shamisen: ‘Yes, I am in love. They were talking about me before daylight . . though I began to love without knowing it . .’
The maid brings in a tray of tea and sweets, then a tray with sake flasks and sake cups. Yuji shuts the window and joins the others at the table. The hostess is telling them the local scandals — affairs, jealous lovers, who’s in money trouble, who’s disgraced. After twenty minutes the doors slide open. Two girls are kneeling in the corridor. They chant their greeting and enter. One of them Yuji recognises as the waitress from the Don Juan. The other is perhaps also a waitress, though with her purple kimono, the ribbons of raw silk in her hair, she could pass for a certain grade of geisha. She is not as pretty as the girl from the Don Juan but when she starts to talk it’s obvious she’s a natural storyteller, an excellent mimic. Soon she’s the favourite, and takes her place beside the sprawling Makiyama. The other girl, seeing that Ito and Kiyooka can have no interest in her, kneels in front of Yuji, picks a flask from the table, and fills his cup. She asks him if he likes to drink, if he likes the Ginza, if he likes tango or prefers some other kind of music. Does he ever go skiing in the winter? For herself, she has never skied, though sometimes she thinks she would like to try. How cold it is these last days. Cold as anything.
Every minute or two (though minutes are no longer evenly divided but float like globs of fat in water) Yuji holds out his cup and watches her replenish it. Now and then she lets him fill a cup for her. He wants to make her drunk — as drunk as he is himself. Then they will be helpless as children, and the worst that could happen is they wake in a pile on the mat together, daylight streaming through the window. He doesn’t mind that. What worries him is that she’s been given orders — by the hostess, by Makiyama even — to do something with him (or whichever of the men shows a taste for her). He steals glances at her while she pours for him, and sees, with inebriated clarity, that what is natural in her, her youth — she’s several years younger than him — her laboured, youthful interest in him, is not yet entirely sunk in artifice or the fatigue of her trade. She has little in common, then — little beyond the obvious — with the woman in the room behind Yokohama Docks, but it’s her he starts to think of now, of the hour he spent with her after the negotiations with Momoyo’s family had failed and in his anger, in the violence of his disappointment, he had set out to prove that love was an itch any man could satisfy by spending a few yen.
The place he chose, a street of unlicensed women, he had heard about from a student bragging at the university, and though it meant a train ride it also offered anonymity, for in Tokyo, a city where one is always running into the same people, where coincidences grow like bindweed (read Kafu), who knew who might, at the wrong moment, look out of a restaurant window, a passing taxi. .
The room he finally entered — he had walked the length of that street a dozen times, building his resolve — had nothing but a narrow mattress on the floor, and walls so thin any passing sailor could have punched a hole and watched the woman laugh at him, his ignorance. She called him, as she unbuttoned his shirt, her ‘little virgin’, and when, hotly, he protested this, telling her how his mother’s friend Mrs Sasaki, under the guise of giving him some of her deceased husband’s good clothes, had, shortly after his nineteenth birthday, made him ‘a man who knows women’, she applauded with her fingertips, crying, ‘So you’ve done it once! With one of Mama’s friends! Congratulations!’ And with this woman, with her gold teeth, her tongue like a stick, he let himself be intimate, had lain on her, gasping and writhing as though swimming through sewage.