Beauty in Disarray. Harumi Setouchi
she stared at her teacher's face without even blinking. No matter which classroom he entered, the eyes of one or two students from among the many tens stared straight at him on the platform, but not one of those glances could obliterate the flamelike intensity burning in Noe's eyes. It was not long before Tsuji was told by Nakano, who was in charge of Noe's class, that the girl had suddenly been allowed to enter as a fourth-year student the previous year by a special selection committee, that she was poorest in English because she had until then been living in some out-of-the-way place in Kyushu, but that she was an extraordinary student with something of a natural gift for literature. Tsuji easily surmised Nakano cherished some great expectation from this flicker of talent in Noe. When Nakano showed him the school newspaper edited by her, Tsuji for the first time came to have a better opinion of the girl. That mimeographed newspaper which was brought out almost solely by Noe herself was, while immature, bolstered by a youthful single-minded passion overflowing with the vigor of purity. Already her essays and descriptive impressions, even while their touch was stiff and puerile, were products of an eye that could see with originality.
"It's decent enough, isn't it?" said Tsuji to his colleague, and for a while he still found himself following Noe's firm masculine prose on the mimeographed sheet.
From the time Tsuji began teaching her, Noe's progress in English was extraordinary. Putting aside the study of her other subjects, she immersed herself only in English. Her classmates, much quicker than their teacher Tsuji, stared in wonder at the way Noe's English improved so remarkably. There were occasions during his classes when even Tsuji, elaborating some grammatical point or offering an explanation of a particular translation, noticed Noe's enthusiasm and progress as he directed his glance at her flamelike eyes. The persons most involved were quite at ease, the last to notice they were already deliberately being whispered about by some of the more perceptive girls sensitive to the delicate pattern of feelings between Noe and Tsuji.
In those days Tsuji felt no attraction to Noe as a woman other than finding her "an interesting student." Eyebrows and eyes pressed closed to each other on her dark face, her eyes aflame and her thick lips voluptuous, Noe was emitting from every part of her body an odor and feeling like that of a wild beast warming itself in the sun. To Tsuji's eyes, with their taste for Edo culture, especially for the elegance of the downtown quarters, Noe's untidy negligence of dress was a reflection of her rustic and even dirty background. However, as her teacher he could not be indifferent to her avaricious pursuit of knowledge and the delicate susceptibility with which, like litmus paper moistened with water, she revealed a vivid reaction with precision and speed to everything he taught her. He found it interesting that without exception all the women teachers disliked her, saying she was quite assertive and conceited about everything she did and there was nothing pleasant about her. Tsuji rather felt Noe's stubbornness and serious rebellion wild and lovely.
Gradually he found himself stimulating Noe's talents outside the classroom and enjoying his endeavors at helping the hidden sprouts within her expand.
He would leave his own manuscripts with Noe, who late after classes were over was mimeographing in a corner of the teachers' room. "I've finished this. If you can use it, go ahead." Hardly daring to breathe, Noe read his translations of Gourmont, Shestov, and Wilde, and while reading his reviews of the recent works of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki and Kafu Nagai, she was unaware she was being taught how to appreciate literature. She became all the more engrossed in the school paper just to be able to receive Tsuji's manuscripts. Finally the rumors of her classmates reached her, but these made Noe with her unyielding spirit all the more rebellious, all the more daringly attracted to Tsuji.
She had come to feel she was not in school at all if on even a single day she did not see his face. She began to regard things the same way he did and to regard them with his sensibilities. Having from childhood adhered to her own strong ideas, Noe was at this late date quite indifferent to the opinions of others. After school she mimeographed the school paper out of the sheer desire to have Tsuji look at it, and once she finished her work, she went to the music room to search for him. She knew that usually every day until evening he played the piano there. Though he was a teacher of English, he revealed an extraordinary passion for music, and without fail he would turn up at all the student concerts, his own performance on the piano and organ as skillful as that of the music teacher. Noe had already heard from Tsuji himself that his playing of the many-holed shakuhachi bamboo flute, in which he had even more ability than he had on the piano, would have put a professional to shame. Sometimes Tsuji would capriciously turn back to Noe, sitting behind him as he was playing the piano, her chin cupped in her two hands, her body never stirring, and he would make her sing. Though she was at first somewhat shy, she would soon begin a Schubert nursery song she had learned at school, or the chic lyric of a love song she had been taught by her father, or some provincial sad lullaby. Her clear voice was lovely and maidenly and more than made up for the trace of wildness in her features.
Tsuji was quick to accompany her on any of these songs, and thinking to startle her he taught her some English hymns. Eventually the students came to catch sight of the figures of Tsuji and Noe keeping each other company on the way to and from school. By the time Tsuji accidentally realized it, he always found Noe walking beside him. Whether by investigation or other means, Noe had some great animal instinct for Tsuji's activities. But at those times the conversation of the two strollers was somewhat stiff and formal, quite far removed from any whispers of love. Usually it was talk of the kind in which Noe would give her impressions of the book she was reading at the moment and Tsuji would offer a proper response. Her facial expression, which had somehow looked gloomy and introverted, became brighter, her behavior much more lively and buoyant.
In those days Tsuji was secretly enjoying a slight infatuation with a girl quite unlike Noe. Okin-chan, the daughter of a sake-dealer in Yoshiwara, was a genuine Tokyoite. Her graceful figure was perfectly suited to her kimono of yellow silk with its black neckband, her shimada coiffure with its cloth chignon band of dappled scarlet typical of a woman of the downtown quarter. A beautiful girl who looked as if she had stepped out of one of Kyoka's novels, she also resembled a girl in love with literature, a devotee of a Kyoka story. Though she had left Ueno Girls' High School in midcourse, she was two or three years older than Noe.
Up to that time Tsuji had been attracted to several women, for example, the girl he had been friends with since childhood, her father a man who put on magic lantern shows; the daughter of an elderly minister of a church he had in his boyhood temporarily visited as if he were in a daze; and the wife of a diplomatic official living in Mukojima, whom Tsuji had taught English conversation a few times a week as a side job before he was employed at the girls' high school. With each of these women he had felt some mutual attraction bordering on love, but every instance had ended merely as passing infatuation. What had made him more timid toward women than one might have thought was the fact that he had not lived comfortably enough to wholly abandon himself to love, and there remained a lack of balance between his knowledge, more mature than might have been expected from someone his age, and his own inexperience in the real world. Even while he kept sending long love letters every day to the sake-dealer's daughter, whom he had met by chance, the fact remained he could not even bring himself to hold her hand.
Though Okin was not intellectual, she was literary enough to forward a thick reply to his letters of affection, so their relationship had lasted a comparatively long time, and they were sufficiently content to believe themselves in love. Occasionally Okin came to Tsuji's office because the school was her alma mater, and she even spent time talking with her old classmates. Noe, with a sensitivity common to those in love, was quick to suspect the relationship between the two, but her only displeasure was in wondering why Tsuji could like such a dull downtown type whose single qualification was a beauty similar to that of a toy doll. Noe was totally unaware that the jealousy of a girl in love had instinctively made her dislike this beautiful girl. Nor was Noe yet conscious that her affection for Tsuji was love.
From the time her parents had abruptly brought up the subject of marriage while she was at home during her summer vacation when she was a fifth-year student, Noe became all the more rapidly intimate with Tsuji. Against her will she had gone through the marriage ceremony in her hometown, and returning to Tokyo by herself after cutting short her summer vacation much earlier than expected, she went on foot directly to Tsuji's house and cast before him the disaster that