Free Death in Midsummer & Other Stories by Yukio Mishima Page B

already gone off together to Hakone a number of times. To Kawase this was startling news. Although it was broad daylight, he summoned Asaka to their usual rendezvous, a snack bar over a Ginza shoe-shop.
    His indignation did not entirely make sense. One could ask, in the first place, if it was not out of proportion to his affection for her. All his relations with women contained a tacit understanding that he would not marry. He lost no opportunity to 61

    comment cynically on those who longed for normal married life, and he always demanded that the woman join in the laughter. It followed that she would hold herself back in self-defence, and so the two would come to look upon their relationship as frank and sprightly. They wished and strove to think it so. Half for reasons of expediency and half for reasons of taste, Kawase was determined to have just such an affair with Asaka.
    In the end the effort touched their vanity and brought a dim light of despair, and an emptiness came into their quips and jokes. They fell into the illusion that they were beyond being wounded.
    Then Kikuchiyo brought her report. Whether true or not, it was inevitable. Kikuchiyo was merely the one who happened to be on hand when the moment arrived.
    Quite aware that his indignation might be comical, Kawase was taken with another impulse, to have a try at seeing where the indignation would lead him. In fact it was for a time like the first touch of ardour he had known. He was rather pleased.
    But Asaka's response was wholly unacceptable. After his own wilful fashion, he had thought that, as she had responded to his jokes with jokes of her own, so she would respond to this first show of ardour with ardour of her own. Hating to be the only comical one, he had hoped that the woman too would give herself up to the comedy and answer with appropriate excitement.
    Stubbornly silent, she sat with almost excessive propriety by the window of the snack bar, almost empty in the mid-afternoon lull. The silence seemed to Kawase evidence of obtuseness. She had not seen that his excitement amounted to a first avowal of love.
    He had expected to see unconcealed pleasure come into her eyes at his persistent accusations. All his troublesome pride seemed to hang on it. If he could but see the pleasure, he would forgive her everything.
    It was not long before Kawase had said all he had to say and they both fell silent, avoiding each other's eyes. It was a cloudy autumn afternoon. The streets below were crowded. The dust-, 62

    covered neon tubes of the cabaret across the way could be studied in great detail.
    Asaka looked stubbornly out of the window. Without the slightest change of expression, she began to weep. She scarcely moved her lips as she said: 'I think I'm going to have a baby.
    Your baby.'
    That single remark made Kawase, who had not thought of leaving her, decide to do just that. What a cheap trick! All memory of the brisk, clean affair seemed to vanish, fallen into the dirty world of bargaining and haggling. He did not even feel like saying what most men would have said, that there was no way of knowing whose child it was. He said it all the same, very clearly, with an eye on what was to come later. If she wanted a bout of mud-slinging, he would give her what she asked for.
    For the first time Kawase found himself disliking those dance-like gestures, the thick, white, professional make-up. They had Seemed like the essence of the elegant and the stylish, but now they were only symbols of vulgarity and lack of sensitivity.
    He was glad that her insincerity had made up his mind for him.
    'As a matter of fact, my own boy ...' Although Asaka perhaps did not guess the content of the remarks he was on the verge of making, she may have sensed that he was in danger of saying something better left unsaid. She stopped him in the Western manner, with a light, somewhat intoxicated wink.
    It was nicely timed. The fact that he was stopped not by himself but by her brought a