After the Banquet Read Online Free PDF

lunch together.”
    The clouds broke up as they were walking down the gently sloping stone pavement behind the university hospital, and a pale, watery sunlight fell over the landscape.
    Kazu had kept a car waiting, but she sent it back when Noguchi suggested that they walk.
    Noguchi’s voice when he proposed the walk, making a point of deliberately sending back the car, had a ring of moral conviction. It gave Kazu the impression that her extravagance was being indirectly criticized. Kazu was later to have numerous occasions to correct this initial impression, but Noguchi’s appearance and manner of speech were always so exceedingly dignified that his least whim or caprice seemed a kind of moral judgment.
    They started to cross the street on their way toward Ikenohata Park. The road swarmed with cars weaving in and out. Kazu was confident she could easily get to the other side, but Noguchi, surprisingly cautious, showed no sign of venturing across. When Kazu started to make a break for it, he restrained her with a “Not yet!” and she was obliged to let a good opportunity slip. The opening in the traffic through which they surely could have crossed was immediately swallowed up by the flow of oncoming vehicles, their windshields reflecting in the winter sun. Kazu finally lost patience. “Now—now’s our chance,” she cried. Instantly she caught Noguchi’s hand firmly in hers and began to run.
    Kazu still clung to Noguchi’s hand even after they had reached the other side. The hand was exceedingly desiccated and thin, rather like a botanical specimen, but when Kazu seemed reluctant to let go, Noguchi gradually, almost furtively, withdrew it Kazu had been quite unconscious of still holding his hand, but Noguchi’s gingerly manner of disengaging it made her aware of her indiscretion. His hand escaped like a peevish child twisting its body from the arms of an adult.
    Kazu inadvertently glanced at Noguchi’s face. The sharp eyes under the severe eyebrows were quite unperturbed, as if nothing had happened.
    They went up to the pond in the park and started clockwise on the path around it. The faint but bitterly cold wind blowing over the pond shook wrinkles over the surface. The blue and cloud of the winter sky mingled in the trembling water, the sparkling blue rifts stretching to the water’s edge at the opposite shore. Five or six boats were out on the pond.
    The embankment was carpeted with slender willow leaves, some yellow but others mottled with light green; the fallen leaves looked much fresher than the dusty shrubbery around them, flecked with scraps of paper.
    A group of middle-school students out for running practice in white gym suits approached from the opposite direction. They seemed to have run once or twice around the pond already, and their youthful, delicate brows contracted with painful breathing recalled the Asura statue in the Kofukuji Temple. The boys ran past the two strollers, not looking to either side, leaving behind the sound of their sneakers lightly striking the ground. One boy had a pink towel tied around his neck, and it could still be seen in the distance under the row of barren trees long after he had gone by.
    Noguchi seemed unable to resist calling Kazu’s attention to the close to half a century separating him from these youngsters. “They’re wonderful—kids are certainly wonderful. A friend of mine’s a boy scout leader. I used to think that was a silly way to spend his time, but I see now why he’d want to throw himself into that kind of work.”
    “Yes,” Kazu responded, “it’s marvelous how unsophisticated children are.” But such innocence seemed so remote and unattainable to Kazu that it arose no envy. She felt moreover that Noguchi’s observation had been excessively plain and uninspired.
    They watched the boys run around the pond into the distance, casting their reflections in the water. Beyond the pond stretched the melancholy clusters of buildings at Ueno Hirokoji.