Yasushi Inoue - Counterfeiter and Other Stories

"All right, Toyama. You take over the management of the parties," said Kagebayashi looking up at the September harvest moon which was floating across the clear black sky. The moon is a beautiful thing indeed .

That evening there was still another guest at that tea house. He was Jiro Kaibar a, a man whose name was known in some quarters because he was a sports commentator and because he contributed columns to the newspapers. He happened to have come to that tea house with a group of newspapermen, but as he was about to leave, he heard that Miyuki Kagebayashi was there, so he decided to poke his head into their room. Kaibara had graduated from a junior high school in a country village at the neck of the A — Peninsula in Aichi Prefecture. Ever since his junior high school days he had been very good at baseball. The fact that he won the championship in the All-Japan Interscholastic Baseball Match when he was a junior in high school ultimately made it difficult for him to divorce himself from baseball for the rest of his life. From the time Kaibara was at B — University, a private college, he had become famous as an incomparable pitcher, and when he started working for the newspaper, he also acquired renown as a baseball reporter. For a while after the war he had brilliant prospects as the manager of a professional baseball team, but saké was his curse, and it currently appeared that he was out of the running as a top-notch figure and wasn't doing much of anything.

Kaibara had often thought that he would like to meet the industrialist Miyuki Kagebayashi once, if the opportunity ever presented itself. This was because he knew that Kagebayashi had graduated from the same junior high school as he but eight years earlier and that he had been registered as a member of the same baseball team. He had absolutely no idea how much Kagebayashi had played, but he had decided that it would be a good idea to meet the industrialist who had attended his alma mater before him.

Kaibara had gotten this message across in advance to the proprietress, and in no time at all, this five-foot-ten hulk of a man was sluggishly making his way into Kagebayashi's room.

Kagebayashi also already knew that Kaibara had been a student at his alma mater. When they got to talking about their home town and about their junior high school back home, Kaibara said, "I once played catch-ball with you, Shacho . Don't you remember?"

Kagebayashi was surprised. As a university student, when he went home for summer and other vacations he used to go over to the junior high school back home, and there was no denying that he used to play catch-ball with his juniors there; however he had absolutely no recollection of this big fellow's being one of them.

"You had an amazingly fast ball. You were a tough customer to deal with," said Kaibara.

"Really?"

"I'll bet that no one at your company knows about their shacho's varsity days. I don't know too much about them myself — but you sure had a fast ball — really!"

Both Toyama and Kitazaka were amazed by what Kaibara had said. They had never before even thought in terms of a fast speed-ball hurled by the arm of their slender-framed new president. There were also half-credulous, half-sceptical looks on the faces of the proprietress and her geisha.

Kagebayashi thought that Kaibara must have mistaken him for somebody else. However, if there was no reason to correct him, there was also no basis for refuting him.

The night was getting cold, so they closed the sliding doors. From then on, everybody there really began to down the saké in earnest. Teruko, who had been urged to drink indiscriminately by Kaibara, got drunk. She kept calling to Toyama—"Toyama-san, Toyama-san, Toyama-san" — but the fact that he always kept his reserve and did not crumble became terribly exasperating, so with a flaunting air of showing off in front of him, Teruko several times threw herself into the lap of Miyuki Kagebayashi.

III

FROM THE year after Kagebayashi replaced Otaka and took over the reins of the presidency of S — Industries, moon-viewing parties were held annually. During Otaka's regime, the place had been fixed in the southside at Kagiya's, but when Toyama began managing them, places where they would have to stay overnight were always chosen for the moon-viewing parties which were now built around Kagebayashi.

In 1951, they went to Waka-no-ura; in 1952, to Katada on the shore of Lake Biwa. Then from 1953 on, because a large number of officers moved up to Tokyo when the main office was moved there in the spring of that year, places around the Tokyo area were constantly selected for the moon-viewing banquets.

In 1953 they went to Choshi; in 1954, to Mito; in 1955, to Shimoda; and in 1956, to Hakone-Sengokubara. In most cases, acting on the advice of Toyama that he would be tired if he went on the night of the banquet, Kagebayashi left the day before. Normally Kagebayashi was being worked to death just by the pressure of business, and he never took trips except to Osaka or Fukuoka, and for these he traveled only by plane both ways. But once a year he seemed to be able to manage his work so that he could get away just for these annual moon-viewing parties. They continued having these parties ever since Otaka's regime, without ever missing a single year. Kagebayashi was exceedingly reluctant to disrupt these moon-viewing parties. He reacted toward them as though they were commemorating the fact that there happened to be a harvest moon the day that he assumed the rank of shacho in place of Otaka.

Besides that, there was something else. It had been a by-product of these moon-viewing parties and only Toyama and two or three others in the company knew about it, but it provided Kagebayashi with a unique excuse for being able to spend the night with Teruko.

On the night that Kagebayashi became president of the company, Teruko had gotten very drunk and had slept with Kagebayashi, who had been equally as drunk, but this had been completely unanticipated by Teruko. If it had been Toyama with whom she had gone to bed, she could have understood that, but sleeping with Kagebayashi seemed completely incredible to her. And having sexual relations with Kagebayashi instead of Toyama, whom she loved, radically changed her entire way of thinking with regard to sex. At any rate, the time when a woman is young is very short. Toyama has a wife and children, and even if I have relations with him, I can't marry him, so maybe it makes sense, after all, to choose President Kagebayashi instead of Mr. Toyama.

Every month Teruko extracted large sums of money from Kagebayashi. She made herself rationalize that her whole relationship with Kagebayashi was actually for money, but despite that there was also some feeling of attachment and even jealousy over him. When Kage-bayashi moved his residence to Tokyo, Teruko also moved — to Kamakura, where she bought about an eighth of an acre of land and built a small house in which she lived with a maid. If Kagebayashi was busy and didn't show up for some days, Teruko became furiously angry. At those times: I'll just have to pump some more money out of him. .

From Kagebayashi's point of view, thanks to these moon-viewing parties, he could get away on these two-day trips and travel to some unfamiliar place with this young sweetheart of his whom he never could see enough of because of his work, and on these nights of the mid-autumn full moon and the night just preceding, Teruko dragged Kagebayashi from his work and from his family and possessed him exclusively. Generally, on the first night there was a fight and a great tumult over separating or not separating, and on occasion they even had to have Toyama intervene. But by moon-viewing time the next day they were back in a good mood. Kagebayashi would go to the restaurant where the banquet was all set up, and it was late before he returned. Teruko would be by herself on the veranda of the inn, facing the moon. At first Teruko had been bitter and angry over being left to view the moon alone, but at some point she got used to it as though she had been born to do so. There she would be, counting her paper money or manicuring her fingernails, on the veranda where the moonbeams fell. And that was the way she viewed the moon wherever they went; the moon at Waka-no-ura, the moon at Katada, then Choshi, Mito, Shimoda, and Hakone. And all that she knew of all these places was the mid-autumn full moon.