She was as entranced with the effort to make herself into a mean, crass woman (certain that she could never be one) as a young girl with her part in the school play. This is the letter which, to that end, I devised for her there in the coffeehouse.
Dear Nagisa,
Because I am about to make a request of you, please read my letter through to the end. The truth is that I want you to stop seeing Tōru.
I will tell you the reasons as honestly as I can. Tōru and I would seem to be tentatively engaged, but we do not love each other. I do think of us as good friends, but my feelings go no deeper. What I really want is affluence and freedom, married to an intelligent husband who has no difficult family problems. In this I am following my father’s wishes. Tōru’s father has not much longer to live, and when he dies Tōru will inherit the whole of his estate. My father has his own interests in the matter. There have been difficulties at the bank, of which we do not speak, and we are somewhat pressed financially, and need the help of Tōru’s father and of Tōru himself once his father is dead. I do love my mother and father, and if Tōru’s affections were to turn elsewhere it would mean the end of all my plans and hopes. And so, to put the matter quite bluntly, the marriage is of very great importance for financial reasons. I have come to think that there is nothing more important in this world than money. I do not see anything dirty in it, and I think expressions like “love” and “affection,” leaving it out of consideration, are misplaced. What may for you be a moment’s dalliance is a matter of the greatest importance for my whole family. I am not saying that because I love Tōru you must give him up. I am speaking as a more mature and calculating girl than you may think.
This being the case, you are mistaken if you tell yourself that it will be all right for you to go on seeing Tōru in secret. The secret is certain to leak out, and it will not do to have Tōru think me a woman willing to close her eyes to everything for the sake of money. It is precisely for the sake of money that I must watch over him and preserve my pride.
You must not show this letter to Tōru. It has taken all my resolution to write it. If you are an evil woman, then show it to him and make it your weapon for getting him away from me; but you will have to live the rest of your life with the knowledge of having taken from another woman not love but her very living. We must dispose of the matter with cool heads, since the emotions of neither of us are involved. I feel quite capable of killing you if you show this letter to him; and I doubt that it will be an ordinary sort of murder.
Most sincerely,
Momoko
“The ending is good.” Momoko was still excited.
“If I were to see it anything could happen.” I smiled.
“I’m not worried.” She leaned toward me.
I had her address the envelope and put a special delivery stamp on it, and we went off hand in hand to mail it.
Today I went to Nagisa’s apartment and saw the letter. Trembling with anger, I snatched it from her and ran out. At home later that night, I went into Father’s study and, heartbroken, showed it to him.
25
One autumn day in that third year Honda dragged a protesting Tōru out for a weekend of nature. Tōru did not want to go far from home, and so they followed his wishes and drove to Yokohama for a look at the ships, his first in a very long time. The plan was that they would have dinner in the Chinese quarter of Yokohama.
Unfortunately the sky of early October was clouded over. The sky is high and wide over Yokohama. They got out at South Pier. The sky was an expanse of rough mackerel clouds, with only here and there a spot of white. Like the aftertone of a bell, there was a touch of blue beyond Central Pier. It seemed on the verge of disappearing.
“If we had our own car I could drive you. A driver is a useless expense.”
“Not yet. I’ll buy you one, I promise, when you get into the university. It will only be a little longer.”
Sending Tōru off to get tickets for the terminal building, Honda leaned on his stick and looked wearily up at the stairs he must climb. He knew that Tōru would be willing enough to help him, but did not want to ask.
Tōru was happy from the time they reached the harbor. He had known that he would be. Not only Shimizu but every harbor was like a crystalline medicine that worked an immediate cure on him.
It was two in the afternoon. The register for nine in the morning had been posted: the Chung Lien II, Panamanian, 2,167 tons; a Soviet ship; the Hai-i, Chinese, 2,767 tons; the Mindanao, Philippine, 3,357 tons. The Khabarovsk, a Soviet ship bringing numbers of Japanese passengers from Nahodka, was due at two thirty. The view of the ships was good from the second floor of the terminal building, slightly higher than their decks.
They looked out over the prow of the Chung Lien, and the stir in the harbor beyond.
It was not unusual for the two of them, as the seasons passed, to stand thus side by side in confrontation with grandeur. Perhaps indeed it was the position best for the Hondas, father and son. If the “relationship” between them consisted in using nature as a mediator between their separate awarenesses, knowing that evil results from a direct meeting, then they were using nature as a giant filter to turn brine into potable water.
Below the prow of the Chung Lien was the lighter anchorage, like an accumulation of bobbing driftwood. Marks and signs on the concrete pier forbidding automobiles suggested the aftermath of a game of hopscotch. A dirty smoke drifted in from somewhere, and there was an incessant chugging of engines.
The paint had flaked from the dark hull of the Chung Lien. The bright red of the rust-preventive painted a pattern around the prow like an aerial map of harbor installations. The rusty stockless anchor clung to the hawse pipe like a great crab.
“What is the cargo, all done up in neat, long bundles? Like spindles.” Honda was already scrutinizing the stevedores at work on the Chung Lien.
“Boxes of some sort, I’d imagine.”
Satisfied that his son knew no more than he, Honda turned his attention to the shouts of the stevedores and labor such as he had not known in his life.
The astonishing thing was that the flesh, the muscles, the organs (the brain aside) given to a human being should through the whole of a long life of indolence have been blessed with health and a superfluity of money. Nor had Honda wielded great powers of creativity or imagination. Only cool analysis and solid judgment had been his. He had made money enough through them. He felt no pangs of conscience at the sweating stevedores he saw in action or in pictures, but he did feel a nameless irritation. The scenes and the objects and the movements before him were not the reality of something he had touched and taken profit from. They were a barrier, an opaque wall forever laughing derisively at both sides, daubed all over with smelly paint, between him and some unseen unreality and the unseen people taking profit from it. And the figures so vivid on the wall were themselves in the tightest bondage, controlled by someone else. Honda had never wanted to be thus in opaque bondage, but he had no doubt that they were the ones who had their anchors like ships, deep in life and being. Society paid recompense only for sacrifice. Intelligence was paid in measure proportionate to the sacrifice of life and being.