After the Banquet by Yukio Mishima Page A

In recollection, she was relieved, frightened, and also slightly dissatisfied. An empty suspicion rose within her as she felt the autumn wind pierce through her open sleeves to the base of her breasts, that the thief might have touched her body as she slept and then changed his mind. No, such a thing was unlikely. She was in the dark, and the window was open only two or three inches: there was no reason to think that he had gone so far as to examine her body.
    But as she walked alone through the garden, the morning breeze playing on her, Kazu felt somehow the incipient decay of her flesh. She was exceptionally sensitive to the heat in summer, and had the habit of cooling herself by exposing directly to the electric fan not merely her breasts but her thighs, even before her maids or intimates. She could do this because she had confidence in her flesh. A shudder of doubt went through her now as she wondered about next summer. It seemed to her that marriage had made her body flabby.
    It was at this point in her reveries that Kazu happened to look down and notice at the base of the tree some objects resembling human teeth. Kazu squatted down and discovered on careful examination that they were wads of chewing gum painstakingly rolled into balls. No guest or employee of the Setsugoan would chew gum in such a place, and the neighborhood children had no way of getting into the garden.
    “They’re the thief’s,” Kazu instantly guessed. The uncleanness of the gum struck her less vividly than the thought of the lonely hours the man had waited here. She even felt there was something very endearing about his loneliness. She could visualize the young, dissatisfied, strong, rough rows of teeth that had chewed the gum. The thief had chewed at time, at the dull rubbery society which did not admit him, and at the uneasiness hanging over him. And there he waited in the lovely moonlight filtering through the leaves of the ilex tree.
    Such unbridled fancy transformed the thief who had fled without stealing anything into Kazu’s secret, unknown friend. The youth hidden in the moonlight, though terribly dirty, was a being whose wings had half sprouted.
    “Why didn’t he wake me, I wonder? If it was money he needed, I’d have given him all he wanted. If only he had said just a word to me!” Kazu felt somehow as if the young thief belonged to her circle of most intimate acquaintances. These were truly novel sentiments for Mrs. Yuken Noguchi.
    Kazu started to call the gardener, then changed her mind. She decided not to tell anyone about the chewing gum—it might serve as evidence. She stripped some moss from the base of the tree and with her fingers carefully buried the wads of gum.
    She waited until Noguchi’s normal rising hour before making an unhurried call to report the incident. After describing briefly all that had happened, Kazu added, “The police were certainly polite and considerate. I’m sure they’d never have bothered themselves that way over a thief breaking into a restaurant if it hadn’t been for you.” This was less Kazu’s honest opinion than what she would have liked to believe. It was by no means clear whether the police were showing such courtesy to the proprietress of a restaurant patronized by the Conservative Party or to the wife of an adviser of the Radical Party.
    Noguchi’s comments as he listened to the report of the attempted burglary were extremely detached and superior. He spoke with the voice of an ambassador receiving word from a junior clerk of an automobile accident. “It’s your own fault—you didn’t make sure that the doors were properly locked,” were his first words. Kazu, who had been hoping for some expression of relief that she was safe, was disappointed. Noguchi apparently considered sneak thieves and the like to be purely private household matters.
    Such an attitude, as far as Noguchi was concerned, was fair and objective, but it struck Kazu as being extraordinarily cold. It aroused