After the Banquet by Yukio Mishima Read Free Book Online Page B

afraid.
    That day Noguchi lost his Dunhill lighter in the theater. His consternation when he discovered that the lighter was missing was quite astonishing: all the dignity and calm of a moment before melted away. It was in the middle of the second play of the evening that he noticed the lighter was gone, and he half rose out of his seat to search every pocket for it. The expression on his face as he muttered, “Not here, not here either,” bore no resemblance to the usual Noguchi.
    “What’s the matter?” Kazu asked, but he did not deign an answer. Noguchi finally bent over and thrust his head under the seat. A thought crossed his mind while he was searching, and he said to himself in a fairly loud voice, “The foyer. That’s it. I’m sure I dropped it in the foyer.”
    The spectators around him turned in his direction with frowns and disapproving clucks. Kazu, leading the way, got up and Noguchi followed her out. Once they were out in the foyer, Kazu asked, “Could you please tell me what you lost?” This time she was the calm one.
    “My Dunhill lighter. I’ll never in the world find one of the old ones in Japan now if I try to replace it.”
    “Over there is where we were talking during the intermission, isn’t it?”
    “That’s right. It was over there.”
    Noguchi was virtually gasping, and Kazu felt sorry for him. They went to the spot where they had stood, but nothing was lying on the bright scarlet carpet. The attendant at the reception desk, a middle-aged woman in uniform who apparently had time on her hands during the performance, came up and asked, “I wonder if this is what you are looking for?” The object she held forth was unmistakably Noguchi’s lighter.
    Kazu was to remember long afterward the look of unconcealed joy on Noguchi’s face when he saw the lighter, and she would often tease him, “I wish you’d show that expression not only to lighters but to human beings too.” But such incidents did not in the least daunt Kazu. Her eyes were free of prejudice, and she saw only Noguchi’s childish, simple-minded attachment to his possession.
    There were other similar incidents. Noguchi had said at the meeting of the Kagen Club, “Why don’t we drop all this talk about the old days? We’re still young, after all,” and that in fact expressed his attitude toward reminiscences over bygone glories, but when it came to articles belonging to the past, his attachment was extreme. As Kazu got to know Noguchi better, she often noticed him take out an old pocket comb and tidy his silver hair. When she asked him about the comb, it proved to be one he had used for thirty years. When Noguchi was young his hair had been so thick and unruly that the teeth of any ordinary comb were quickly broken. He had had this one specially made for him, a strong comb of boxwood.
    Noguchi’s tenacious attachment to old possessions could not be laid simply to stinginess or poverty. By way of protest against the superficial elegance created by the relentless pursuit of novelty under an American-style consumer economy, Noguchi stubbornly maintained the English-style elegance of clinging to old customs. The Confucian spirit of frugality went well with these aristocratic tastes. Kazu had difficulty in understanding Noguchi’s brand of dandyism which exaggerated its unconcern with fashion.
    Kazu, out for the morning promenade that she never missed even in the dead of winter, would wonder as she crushed underfoot the sparkling ice needles, which she liked better, which attracted her more in Noguchi, his aristocratic career as a former cabinet minister, or his present faith in radical ideas. His career had a glittering brilliance which readily appealed to the common run of men; his ideas, though she did not understand them, made her aware of something living and directed toward the future. Kazu had come to think of these two aspects of Noguchi as rather like complementary physical features, and, put as a question of