Death in Midsummer & Other Stories (19 page)

MAN A: You've saved me a bit of money. Thanks very much. I'd like to take you to dinner - nothing special, of course - just to show my appreciation.

MAN C : Miss, I'll take you to a really good French restaurant.

MAN E : How about a dance ? Eh ? After dinner together.

KIYOKO: Thank you all, but I have something to discuss with the proprietor.

MAN A
[with the brusque movements of a man of decision, he takes
some money from his wallet and hands it to the
DEALER]: Understand? You're not to start any trouble. You'll listen quietly to what this young lady has to say, like a father. No more nonsense about the police. Understand?
[He takes a pencil from his
pocket. To
KIYOKO] Young lady. Let me know immediately if this man uses rough language or starts threatening to take you to the police. Would you show me those cards you were just given? [KIYOKO
holds up the three cards.]
Here we are.
[He takes
one of the cards.]
This is mine. I'll put a mark on it so you won't mistake it.
[He makes a mark with his pencil.]
I'll be waiting for your call when you've finished your business. You can get me at the telephone number on the card for another two hours.
[He
returns the card, c and
E,
dismayed at this turn of events, glower.]

You'll be sure to come, won't you ? I'm hoping very much I can take you to dinner, to show my appreciation.

KIYOKO: Supposing I call you...

MAN A: Yes?

KIYOKO: Supposing I call you... would you still want to see me even if my face were completely changed ?

MAN A: Very witty, very witty, I'm sure, young lady. I'm afraid I don't quite get the point, but still...

KIYOKO: Even if I turned into a horrible old witch?

MAN A: Every woman has many different faces. It takes more than that to surprise a man at my age. Well, I'll be seeing you later.

[A
saunters out cheerfully.
C
and
E
follow reluctantly.]

DEALER : Quite the little terror, aren't you ? [KIYOKO
turns round
and starts after
A. DEALER,
alarmed, stops her.]
Don't get so excited. I'm a little on edge myself. ... You said you were a 134

dancer.
[To himself]
Dancer, indeed. I can imagine the kind of dancer she is.

KIYOKO: Please listen to what I have to say without interrupting.

DEALER
[sitting on one of the chairs
]: Very well. I'm listening. I won't interrupt. But to think that someone so young, with such a beautiful, sweet face -

KIYOKO: Yes. That's what I want to talk to you about - my beautiful, sweet face.

DEALER
[to himself]:
How cheeky they are, the girls these days!

KIYOKO: Yasushi was my lover.

DEALER: The young man who got killed inside the wardrobe?

KIYOKO: Yes. He was my lover, but he jilted me and became the lover of Mrs Sakurayama, a woman ten years older than himself. He - yes, that's right - he was the kind of man who always prefers to be loved.

DEALER: That was too bad for you.

KIYOKO: I thought you said you weren't going to interrupt -

Perhaps, I can't be sure, it was my love that drove him away.

Yes, that may have been it. Rather than a happy, easy-going, open love affair, he preferred uneasiness, secrecy, fear - that sort of thing. He was such a handsome boy. When the two of us went out walking together, everybody would say what a perfectly matched couple we made. When we walked together, the blue sky, the woods in the park, the birds - they all were glad to welcome us. The blue sky and the night sky filled with stars belonged to us, you might say. And yet, he chose the inside of a wardrobe.

DEALER: This wardrobe's so big. Maybe there was a sky inside it with stars, and a moon coming up from one corner and sinking in another.

KIYOKO: Yes, he slept inside, woke up inside, and sometimes he ate his meals inside. In this strange, windowless room, this room where the wind never blew and trees never rustled, a room like a coffin, a tomb where he was buried alive. He chose to live in a coffin even before he was killed. A room of pleasure and of death, enveloped in the lingering scent of the woman's perfume, and the odour of his own body.... His body smelled of jasmine.

135

DEALER [
gradually warming to the description
]: Buried, not among flowers, but among her racks on racks of clothes. '

KIYOKO: Lace flowers, satin flowers, cold, dead, strong-scented flowers.

DEALER
[to himself
]: It was damned clever of him. I'd like to die that way myself.

KIYOKO: He died exactly as he hoped. I understand that quite clearly now. And yet, why did he do it ? What did he want to run away from ? What was he trying so desperately to escape that he preferred to die?

DEALER: I'm afraid I'm not much help answering that.

KIYOKO: I'm sure what he wanted to escape was me.
[They are
both silent.1
Tell me, what could have made him do it? Run away from me, from such a beautiful, sweet face. Perhaps his own beauty gave him all the beauty he could stand.

DEALER: You've got nothing to complain about. Some women spend their whole lives furious at their own ugly faces. Any number yearn for lost youth. You've got beauty and youth, and still you complain. That's asking too much.

KIYOKO : Nobody else ever ran away from my youth and beauty.

He spurned the only two treasures I own.

DEALER: Yasushi isn't the only man, you know. There must've been something abnormal about his tastes, anyway. Take a man like myself, a man whose tastes are completely healthy...
[He
extends one hand towards her.]

KIYOKO
[striking his hand sharply
]: Stop it. Desire on any other man's face except his turns my stomach. It's as if I saw a toad.

... Look at me carefully. I've become old, haven't I?

DEALER: Don't make me laugh. With your youth -

KIYOKO: But I'm ugly.

DEALER: If you're ugly, then there aren't any beautiful women left in the world.

KIYOKO: You've failed on both questions. If you had said that I was old and ugly, who knows, I might have given myself to you.

DEALER: I know a bit about the psychology of women myself.

Now I'm supposed to repeat, 'Whatever can you be saying?

Never, though I died for it, could I possibly utter so dreadful a lie as to say that you were old and ugly.' Am I right ?

136

KIYOKO: HOW tedious you are. What is it in my face that attracts men I can't stand? I'd like to rip the skin away with my own hands - that's the one dream, the one fantasy left me now. Sometimes I wonder if he wouldn't have loved me better if my face had become hideous and repulsive.

DEALER: The crazy dreams that young, beautiful people have! I long ago became immune to such illogical dreams. Discontent, young lady, is a poison which upsets all the sane principles of the world and makes a mess of your own happiness.

KIYOKO: Discontent! You think you can sum me up with that little word! That's not the kind of world I live in. Something was missing somewhere - a cogwheel - that could have made it possible for him and myself to love each other for ever, for the machine to run smoothly. I've discovered what the missing cogwheel was. It was my face turned hideous.

DEALER: The world is full of missing cogwheels. I don't know about your machine, but it seems to me, at least as far as this globe is concerned, that the one thing that keeps it spinning smoothly is the cogwheels missing here and there.

KIYOKO: Still, if my dream were to come true...

DEALER: Surely he wouldn't come back to life.

KIYOKO: You're wrong. I think he might.

DEALER: YOU keep asking for more and more impossible things.

Now you're thought up something really horrible. You're trying to deny nature.

KIYOKO: Once in a while even a pitiful old miser like yourself is capable of saying something intelligent. You're quite right. My enemy, my rival for his love, was not Mrs Sakurayama. It was nature itself, my beautiful face, the rustle of the woods embracing us, the gracefully shaped pines, the blue sky damp after a rain.

Yes, every unadorned thing was the enemy of our love. Then he left me and ran off into this wardrobe, into a world painted in varnish, a world without windows, a world lit only by an electric bulb.

DEALER: I suppose that's why you have your heart set on buying the wardrobe - you want to try to find your dead lover again inside.

KIYOKO: Yes, I'll spread the word; I'll tell the history of this 137

wardrobe to everybody who might conceivably buy it; I'll disillusion them. I must have this wardrobe and at my price, three thousand yen.

[As she finishes these words, strange inarticulate cries, like those
made by the drummers in a no play, are heard from the left, together
with sounds resembling the no drums and flute. These accompany
the dialogue in the following scene as the two dispute the price of
the wardrobe, producing the effect of the rhythms of the no.]

DEALER: Damn it. Those crazy shouts and that pounding noise have started again in the factory. Sometimes it goes on when I have customers here, and it drives me frantic. One of these days I'll have to buy the property and get rid of that factory. The sound of production - that's what our industrialists call it. Poor fools, as long as they live, they'll never grasp the simple fact that an article only acquires value as it gradually becomes old, obsolete, and useless. They turn out their cheap gadgets as quickly as they can, and after a life haunted by poverty, they die, and that's that.

KIYOKO: I've told you again and again. I'll buy it for three thousand yen.

DEALER: Three million yen.

KIYOKO: NO, no, three thousand yen.

DEALER: TWO million yen.

KIYOKO
[stamping her feet to the no rhythm]:
No, no, three thousand yen.

DEALER: One million yen.

KIYOKO: No, three thousand yen.

DEALER: Five hundred thousand yen.

KIYOKO: Three thousand yen, three thousand yen, three thousand yen.

DEALER: Four hundred thousand yen.

KIYOKO: When I say three thousand yen, I mean three thousand yen.

DEALER: Three hundred thousand yen.

K I YOKO : Make an effort, one great effort. Come down to my level, all the way down. You'll feel wonderful once you've made the plunge, all the way down to three thousand yen. Come, it takes only one word from you. Three thousand yen.

138

DEALER: Two hundred thousand yen.

KIYOKO: NO, no, three thousand yen.

DEALER: One hundred thousand yen.

KIYOKO : No, no, three thousand yen.

DEALER: Fifty thousand yen.

KIYOKO: No, three thousand yen, three thousand yen, three thousand yen.

DEALER: Fifty thousand yen. I won't come down another penny.

KIYOKO: Three thousand yen.

DEALER: Fifty thousand yen, fifty thousand yen, fifty thousand yen.

KIYOKO
[somewhat weaker
]: Three thousand yen.

DEALER: Fifty thousand yen is my rock-bottom price. I won't come down a penny more.

KIYOKO: You're sure?

DEALER : I said fifty thousand yen and I meant fifty thousand yen.

KIYOKO
[weakening]:
I haven't got that much money.

DEALER: I'm offering it to you at the price it cost me. If you haven't got the money, it's not my fault.

[The noise to left stops completely.]

KIYOKO: Nothing will change your mind?

DEALER : Fifty thousand yen. That's my final offer. Fifty thousand yen.

KIYOKO: I can't afford it. I wanted to buy it and cram it into my tiny apartment, and sit inside thinking of him till I felt my face become hideous - that was my dream. But if I can't have it, that's all right.
[She slowly edges backward towards the wardrobe.]
Yes, if I can't have it, it's quite all right. It's not really necessary to take this wardrobe all the way back to my apartment in order for my jealousy and my dreams and my pains and my anguish to destroy my face. I can leave it here, without moving it...

DEALER: What are you doing?

KIYOKO : It's all right. The next time you see me, you'll drop dead of fright!

[KIYOKO
wheels round and slips into the wardrobe. The doors
slam shut with a terrible finality. The
DEALER
frantically tries to
open the doors, but he is unsuccessful.]

DEALER: Damn it. She's locked it from the inside.
[He bangs
139

furiously on the door. There is no answer; the inside is absolutely
still.]
The shameless hussy. She caught me off my guard and now she's finally managed.... She wasn't satisfied with inter-fering with my business and making me lose a fortune. Now, on top of everything else, she's trying the ruin the wardrobe, and it's defective as it is. What have I ever done to deserve this? Damn her. There's no telling what she may be up to inside this wardrobe.

[He puts his ear to the door.]
What can she be doing in there ?

This certainly a black day for me.... I can't hear a thing. There's not a sound. It's like putting your ear to a bell. Thick iron walls absolutely silent, though sometimes they can deafen you with reverberations. It doesn't make a sound. ... She couldn't, I'm sure, be disfiguring herself. ... No, that was nothing but a threat, a trick to take advantage of my weakness.
[Heputs his ear
to the wardrobe again.]
Still, what can she be doing ? It gives me the eeriest feeling. Oh - she's switched on the light. Her face is reflected in the mirrors all around her, silent, not saying a word.

Ugh - there's something weird about it. ... No, it was just a threat.
[As if he has a premonition]
It was only a threat. There's no reason to suppose she would actually go through with such a thing.

[The
SUPERINTENDENT
of
KIYOKO
's apartment building
rushes in from right.]

SUPERINTENDENT: Has a dancer named Kiyoko come here? A young, beautiful girl? Kiyoko's her name.