Light and dark

[86]

IN THE presence of this unaccountable man, O-Nobu felt her mind whirl in confusion. First of all, she failed to comprehend him. Second, she felt no sympathy. Finally, she had doubts about his seriousness. Defiance, dread, contempt, suspicion, ridicule, disgust, curiosity — the tangle of sentiments intersecting in her breast rejected any attempt at organization. As a consequence they served only to unseat her. Finally, she framed a question.

“So you’re saying you came over here just to make me dislike you?”

“No, that wasn’t my purpose. My purpose was to pick up the overcoat.”

“So you came to get the coat, and as long as you were here you thought you might as well make me dislike you?”

“Not at all. It may surprise you to know that I consider myself a perfectly ingenuous person, a natural man. Compared with you, Mrs. T, I believe I’m guileless.”

“That’s beside the point, why won’t you answer directly?”

“But I have. I’ve told you I am without artifice, a natural man. And that’s what makes you dislike me.”

“And that’s your purpose?”

“But it isn’t a purpose — it may be a fundamental desire.”

“What’s the difference between a purpose and a desire?”

“Could they be the same?”

Hatred flashed in O-Nobu’s small eyes.. The glance that stabbed at Kobayashi read, “Don’t toy with me because I’m a woman.”

“Don’t get angry,” Kobayashi said. “I was just trying to explain that I’m not striking back at you for any trivial reasons of my own. I went out of my way to say what I did because I want you to understand that I have no choice, that Providence commands me to be a wretch and make people dislike me. I want you to recognize the fact that I have no evil objective. I want you to realize that I have no purpose and never have. Providence may have a purpose. And that purpose may be manipulating me. Being manipulated may even be what I desire.”

O-Nobu’s own thinking was insufficiently rigorous to uncover the lapses in Kobayashi’s anfractuous logic. Nor was her mind sufficiently trained to determine whether it should be unconditionally accepted or rejected. But she was more than quick-witted enough to grasp the essentials of the argument he had confronted her with, and she promptly demonstrated her swiftness.

“So on the one hand you admit to being nasty so that people will dislike you, and on the other hand you say that you’re not in any way responsible.”

“Exactly. That’s the gist of it.”

“That’s so cowardly.”

“It’s not cowardly. Where there’s no responsibility, there’s no cowardice.”

“Of course there is. In the first place, I don’t recall ever having done anything bad to you. If I have I’d like to hear about it.”

“Mrs. T! I’m a person the world treats like a vagabond.”

“What does that have to do with me and Tsuda?”

Kobayashi laughed, as if he had been waiting for the question.

“From where you both stand, probably nothing. But as I see it, more than plenty.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

This time, Kobayashi declined to reply. With an expression that seemed to say “You’ll understand if you think about it carefully,” he began smoking a cigarette in silence. O-Nobu felt even more distressed. She wanted to say she’d had enough and to ask him to leave. Kobayashi, as if he had read her mind and dismissed her feelings as insignificant, was unperturbed, an attitude that further infuriated her. Just then O-Toki returned, a moment she had been impatiently awaiting, and as a result her turmoil had to be dissipated before she had an opportunity to express it cogently.