Beauty in Disarray. Harumi Setouchi
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and Noe's father rushed up to Tokyo. The members of her family weren't that surprised. I guess they expected it. Noe had the habit of saying that she and her husband would never die peacefully in their beds like ordinary people.
"Oh yes, now I remember. When my husband went up to Tokyo to get Noe and Osugi's ashes, Mr. Toyama was kind enough to lend them his car for as long as they needed it. They told me that several men, Mr. Toyama's followers, protected them as guards. They said there was fear of an attack by some of those right-wingers.
"Yes, that's the way my husband was, and I guess Mr. Toyama was also the kind that took a liking to men of character, even if their principles were different and even if they were his opponents. He treated Noe with affection, and it seems that he gave her pocket money sometimes. Once, thanks to Mr. Toyama's help, Noe went to Shimpei Goto's house to get some money. I remember hearing that Mr. Goto, laughing, told Mr. Toyama everything with the remark 'She's an interesting girl.' It seems that Noe grabbed the money, which had been placed on a table, and as if it were natural to not even bow in thanks, had quietly left. There must have been many times when my husband took the trouble to help Osugi meet Mr. Toyama and Mr. Goto. At first, when Noe ran off to live with Osugi, my husband was very angry with him, but discovering at last that Osugi was a great man, my husband took charge of Osugi's body when he died. You see, a big gravestone, unusual since it didn't have any names on it, was set up in Imajuku for the three victims. What had been put up was merely an unworked stone, but the grave site was big enough to serve as a play area for children, and it became an attraction. Even that grave my husband built. Later the stone was removed due to some city-planning ordinance, but I don't know what became of it, though I heard that someone thought it interesting and in the middle of the night secretly carted it off and put it in his own garden. But not long afterwards, I heard that he fell into his garden pond and drowned. These are the only things I remember... Well, I'm really sorry, seeing you have come all this way..."
In the Dai home there were two large thick calico-covered albums that Junsuke Dai had assembled. The pictures of Osugi and Mako were carefully laid out, and I also found a photograph of that gravestone for the three victims, a stone that no longer existed but had looked like some queer abstract work of art. From just one of those albums I could surmise the history of the opulent, showy life of the Dai family, and I could imagine the life and character of Junsuke Dai, something of a big shot with his mind bent on business and a fondness for politics.
Mako searched one of the albums for a large photograph of a high school graduation and showed it to me. It was Noe's graduation picture from Ueno Girls' High School. Attired in a long-sleeved kimono and wearing a ceremonial skirt and a formal black jacket decorated with her family crest, Noe, her hair in the long chignon style of graduation ceremonies at girls' high schools of the time, was in the middle of the top row. While all the other students directly faced the camera, Noe was standing with her body sideways, her profile taken as her eyes stared at the sky. The moment the visiting photographer, completely hidden behind the black, red-lined cloth of his old-fashioned camera, had shouted out, "All right, I'm ready to shoot!" and released the shutter by pressing the round rubber ball with a theatrical gesture of his hand, Noe had struck this pose, her manner of looking up at the empty sky either affected or sulky. At eighteen years of age according to the Japanese method of counting, Noe had put on weight, her face, shoulders, and breasts visibly plump.
When Noe went up to Tokyo, she often continued studying through the night for her entrance examinations, all of a sudden deciding to take them to enroll in the fourth-year class at Ueno Girls' High School, where her cousin Chiyoko, two years older than Noe, was in attendance. Noe succeeded. As a result, she finished high school in only two years. This was the fruit of Noe's effort to reduce as much as possible the burden of her uncle Junsuke Dai's school expenses, but it also revealed she was endowed with real talent. In a corner of this graduation picture was a round photograph of Jun Tsuji.
It was in the spring when Noe was in the fifth-year class that Jun Tsuji assumed his post as an English teacher at the school. Pictured as a handsome man with delicate features on a slender face, Jun Tsuji is wearing glasses whose thin frames seem to be made of silver, his kimono neckband joined so tightly at the neck and showing his dark undergarment that instead of looking like an English teacher at a girls' high school, he appears more like a Japanese dancing instructor or a young actor impersonating a female. His features alone give the impression of a nervous person.
We left the Dai home, and while we were on our way to Imajuku, Mako had the driver stop in front of a large house that manufactured Hakata dolls sold wholesale. The lower floor was a kind of storeroom, the clerks visibly quite busy packing these Hakata dolls for shipping.
When we went upstairs directly from the entranceway, we found the second story formed the business office. While we were looking at several Hakata dolls in glass cases lining the walls, someone called out behind and Mako introduced me to a young woman in Western dress.
"This is Louise."
Ruiko, who had changed her name from Louise, sat smiling on a sofa. She seemed quite young, perhaps in her twenties or early thirties at most, but if I remember correctly, she had been born in 1922. When her parents were killed, she must have been a year and three months old.
As I had expected, her pretty oval-shaped face, though longer than Mako's, had the Yorozuya eyebrows and Yorozuya eyes, but her large eyes and round line of chin immediately reminded me of the Osugi I had seen in the photographs. It was either the slender legs under her skirt or the attractiveness of her hairdo bound into a chignon after being combed up at the nape that made me feel she was a strange woman whose youth, like that of a small girl, still remained in her entire body. No sign of age was visible on her smooth wide forehead.
The former owner of the doll factory had been an anarchist living in Fukuoka, and it was this association that had helped Louise acquire a side job painting these dolls. She told me she had just brought in her finished dolls and was going to take back some unglazed ones. I could see the extent of Mako's kindness in silently providing me with every convenience. And Louise also talked in an utterly unaffected way, her face all smiles.
"Well, with parents like ours, we've never benefited at all, have we? Even when I married, my husband's family was dead set against it, telling him to put an end to marrying an Osugi girl, that even a geisha or whatever would be better. The result was he left his family and cut off all connections to them so that now he lives only with me.
Her manner of speaking was also as indifferent as if she were talking about the concerns of someone else. Even this woman, who was much less bound to her parents than Mako had been, had carried on her back from the time she was aware of what was going on around her the burden of the names of her unusual parents.
"At any rate, the times we were raised in were hard times, weren't they?"
When she stood up, I realized Louise was also small. I imagined that both women resembled their mother in build. Was it right to assume that Mako, who had been told that when she was young looked more like her father than her sisters or brother had, had come to take on her mother's features as she grew older? As I gazed into the youthful and beautiful eyes of these sisters who were long past forty and nearing their fifties, I could well imagine their beauty during the heyday of their youth. What with Louise talking about her marriage and Mako's having referred previously to her second marriage, I guessed that the unusual passion in the blood of Osugi and Noe had been inherited by their daughters.
It took less than thirty minutes to get to Imajuku from there. The car ran along a straight road leading to Karatsu and before we realized it, we found the sea glittering to the right of our car window.
The blue of Hakata Bay is whiter and nearer the blue of sky than the waters of the Seto Inland Sea. Inside the bay the usually raging waves from the Sea of Genkai had calmly and quietly settled, and we could see the shadows of boats gently floating on the clear waters of the sea. The beach along the coast is narrow, and I was reminded of the seacoast of Shonan with its smooth flat feeling without rocks or stones.
No one was on the beach. Our driver told us it was just at this hour that the area was the quietest and offered the best view. In summertime this coast is as thick with crowds as the coast of Shonan, so there is no room to take even a