Mandarins (11 page)

An uncle of mine had died of laryngeal cancer in November, and another kinsman, a youth, had run away from home at the beginning of the new year. Yet what followed—my cousin's incarceration—was by far the greatest shock. I was now obliged, together with his younger brother, to conduct negotiations with which I had not the remotest experience. Moreover, the emotional problems among relatives that spring from such incidents tend to create complications of the sort
that will hardly be comprehensible to anyone not born and bred in T
ō
ky
ō
. I could not help thinking that once I had seen my cousin, I would go off somewhere to spend a tranquil and restful week . . .

Surrounding the prison was a high embankment covered with withered grass. The thick wooden bars in the door of the gate lent it a medieval appearance; looking through them, I glimpsed a gravel-strewn garden, with frost-burned cypress trees.

I presented my calling card to the gray-bearded guard, a seemingly good-natured soul, who led me to a visitors' waiting room close by, the elongated eaves covered with a thick layer of dried moss. There were others, sitting on rush-matted benches. Conspicuous among them was a woman in her midthirties, wearing a jacket of black silk crepe over her kimono and reading a magazine.

An extraordinarily brusque and sullen guard would come into the room to read out, in a monotonous voice, the numbers of the next visitors whose turn had come. Mine did not, though I had waited since about ten in the morning. My wristwatch now told me that it was ten minutes before one.

I was, naturally, beginning to feel hungry, but what was truly unendurable was the cold, for the room was quite without any sign of heating. As I continually stamped my feet, trying to keep my annoyance in check, I was surprised to observe that no one else in the crowd seemed perturbed. There was, for example, an apparent gambler, wearing two cotton-padded kimonos, who, instead of whiling away the time with a newspaper, slowly ate mandarins, one after another.

As the guard came and went, however, the crowd steadily dwindled. I finally walked out of the waiting room and began walking the graveled garden. There was, to be sure, the light of the wintry sun, but a wind had arisen and was blowing dust in my face.

Nonetheless resolved to defy Nature, I remained outside until
four. Unfortunately, even then I was not called, although it appeared that others who'd arrived after me had been. The room had largely emptied.

I went back in and made my way to the gambler. With a deferential bow, I addressed him, seeking his advice. Without smiling, he replied in a voice that sounded as though he were reciting an old ballad, mixing harsh reality with a measure of compassion: “A fella's only allowed one visitor a day, you know. Yours may have had his already.”

His words were, of course, quite distressing. When the guard returned to call more numbers, I decided to ask him whether I would be able to see my cousin. Without so much as glancing at me, he gave no reply and walked away, followed by the gambler and two or three others.

I stood in the middle of the bare earthen floor and mechanically lit a cigarette. As time passed I felt my loathing for the sullen guard growing stronger. (I am constantly surprised at my lack of immediate anger in response to such insults.) He returned about five. Doffing my hat, I tried to pose my previous question once again. He turned his face aside and briskly walked away. This was clearly the moment in which I sensed that enough was enough. I gave a toss to my cigarette butt and walked toward the prison entrance at the other side of the waiting room.

Several guards dressed in traditional Japanese clothing were on duty behind a glass window to the left of a stone staircase. I opened the window and spoke as softly as I could to a man wearing a crested jacket of black pongee. I was quite conscious of looking pale and nervous.

“I am here to visit T. Will that be possible?”

“Wait your turn.”

“I have been waiting here since about ten o'clock.”

“You'll be called in due time.”

“Am I to wait even if I am
not
called, even though it is already nightfall?”

“Well, in any case, wait until you are called. Just wait.”

He seemed to be worried that I might cause a disturbance. Though quite annoyed, I felt a measure of sympathy for him. I was also not unaware of an ironic similarity: I was the family representative, he the prison representative.

“It is already past five. Please try to allow me a visit.”

With this as my parting shot, I decided to return for the time being to the waiting room, which by this time was already dark. The woman who had been reading the magazine now had it placed facedown on her lap and was looking straight ahead. Her hair was arranged in the fashion of one already married; her face somehow suggested a Gothic sculpture. I sat down in front of her, still filled with the antipathy that the powerless feel toward penal institutions as a whole.

It was nearly six o'clock before I was finally summoned. I was led to the interview room by a round-eyed, seemingly quick-witted guard. The “room”—such that it was—measured no more than a few square feet. There were other similar enclosures as well, each with its own painted door, giving one quite the feeling of being in a public lavatory. At the end of a narrow passageway was a half-moon window; it was through this opening that visitors showed themselves.

Through the dim light of the window I could see my cousin's plump, round face. It was heartening to see that he had undergone surprisingly little change. With no pretense of sentimentality, we had a terse and businesslike discussion. To my right, apparently there to see an elder brother, was a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl, whose ceaseless weeping we could not help noticing.

“Please tell everyone that I am entirely innocent of the charge.”

My cousin spoke with stiff formality. I looked back at him in silence, my very lack of reply overwhelming me with a suffocating feeling. To my left, an old man with bald patches on his head was talking through the half-moon window to a prisoner who, it seemed, was his son:

“When I'm alone and haven't seen you for a while, I remember all sorts of things to say, but when I come here, I forget what they were . . .”

As I left the interview room, I felt that I had somehow failed my cousin—but also that in this there was a measure of shared responsibility. Again I was led by a guard and now found myself striding down the corridor toward the entrance in the bone-piercing cold.

At my cousin's house uptown, his wife, my blood relative, would be awaiting my arrival. I walked through the squalid streets to Yotsuya-Mitsuke Station and got on a crowded train. The words of the strangely enfeebled old man rang in my ears: “When I'm alone . . .” They struck me as ever so much more human than the wailing voice of the girl. Gripping the hand strap as I looked out through the lingering light of day at the electric lamps burning in the houses of K
ō
jimachi, I could not but be reminded of the term
charactres
¹
and of the sheer diversity of human personality.

Thirty minutes later I stood in front of the house, pressing the button of the bell on the concrete wall. I heard a faint ringing sound and saw the glass door at the entrance illuminated. An elderly maid opened it a crack, let out an exclamation, and then led me up to a room on the second floor, which looked out on the street.

As I threw my overcoat and hat on the table, I felt myself yielding to the fatigue that for the time being I had forgotten. The maid lit the gas stove and left me there in the room alone. Being a bit of a manic collector, my cousin had two or three oil and watercolor paintings hung on the walls. As I gazed absentmindedly at them, I
was again reminded of the various ancient words that point to life's vicissitudes.

My blood relative and her husband's younger brother had arrived within a few minutes of each other. Even she appeared to be in a calmer frame of mind than I had anticipated. I explained as accurately and precisely as I could what my cousin had told me and launched into a discussion of what measures might be taken, a subject in which she showed no burning interest. As I was speaking, she picked up my Astrakhan hat:

“Quite unusual. Foreign, I should think.”

“This? It's the kind of hat that Russians wear.”

For his part, my younger cousin had proved to be more “enterprising” than his imprisoned sibling in foreseeing obstacles in our way.

“Anyway, some sort of friend of his recently sent round a journalist in the society department of The X News, entrusting him with his calling card, on the back of which he'd written: ‘I've paid half the hush money out of my own pocket. You pay the rest.' We looked into the story. It was, of course, the friend himself who had talked to the journalist in the first place. And naturally there hadn't been any hush money paid. He was merely trying to trick us out of the sum, with some newsman as his confederate . . .”

“Being a journalist myself, I'll thank you to spare me such hurtful comments.”

I was resorting to levity as a means of rousing my own spirits, but the younger brother went on talking, as though delivering a speech, his eyes bloodshot from drink. He had a menacing look that would allow for no trifling.

“And to boot, my brother has a friend who, just to set the examining judge's teeth on edge, cornered him in order to offer his own rousing defense.”

“Perhaps if you had spoken to him . . . ,” I ventured.

“Of course, I did just that. I went bowing and scraping to him to say that while we are so grateful for his consideration, any remarks that antagonize the judge will, for all his good intentions, have a most adverse effect.”

My cousin was sitting in front of the gas heater, playing with my Astrakhan hat, and it was to this, I must honestly say, that my attention was now solely directed, even as her brother-in-law was speaking. I could not bear the thought that she might drop it into the fire . . . I had already sometimes imagined that. A friend had searched the Jewish quarter in Berlin for such a hat and then, quite by chance, on a trip to Moscow, had at last been able to find it.

“And I take it that that was not to his liking . . . ,” I remarked.

“That's not the word for it! He told me: ‘I've gone to great lengths to help the two of you and find it most annoying to be treated rudely.' ”

“So it really does seem that nothing can be done.”

“I'm afraid not. It's a matter of neither legality nor morality. From the looks of it, the friend had expended much time and trouble, but only to help dig a deeper hole for my brother . . . I'm by nature the fighting sort, but with someone like that, I'm quite at a loss.”

As we were talking, we were suddenly surprised by cries of “
T-kun banzai!
”
²
I parted the curtains with one hand and looked through the window down to the street. The narrow pavement was crowded with people, some carrying lanterns with the name of the local youth association written on them. I looked at my cousin and remembered that her husband was serving as a leader.

“I suppose we should go out to thank them.”

My cousin, looking quite as though she had finally reached the limits of endurance, gave us alternating glances.

“Well, I'll be right back,” he said.

He left the room nonchalantly. I felt envious of his combativeness, even as I avoided my cousin's face by turning to look at the paintings on the wall above me. Though painfully aware of my taciturn behavior, I thought that any perfunctory remark of mine would only reduce us both to sentimental insincerity. I silently lit a cigarette and looked at the portrait of my imprisoned cousin on the wall, studying the distorted perspective in it.

His wife finally spoke to me in a strangely hollow tone of her own:

“This is hardly a time for us to be greeted with
banzai
, though I suppose it's useless to say so . . .”

“The neighborhood doesn't know yet?”

“No . . . But what on earth has happened?”

“Happened?”

“I mean, concerning T, Ot
ō
san . . .”

“Anyone who looks at T-san's side of things will see that there were various factors and circumstances.”

“So it is, is it then?”

I was beginning to feel nervous and annoyed. I turned my back to her and walked to the window. The cheers from below continued, coming in waves of three:
Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!
” The younger brother was standing at the entrance, bowing individually to each of the many people holding lanterns. His elder brother's two small daughters stood next to him on each side, their hands in his, giving their pigtailed heads an occasional, oddly forced nod . . .

The years passed. One bitterly cold night I found myself in the living room of my cousin's house, sitting across from her and drawing on the peppermint pipe to which I had recently taken. We had just
observed the seventh-day ceremony, the house eerily still. In front of her husband's plain memorial tablet, a single lantern wick was burning; in front of the table on which the tablet had been placed, the two daughters were buried under quilts in the bedding on the floor. My cousin had noticeably aged, and as I looked at her, I suddenly remembered the events of that long-ago day of torment. Yet my only remark was quite humdrum: