When Onodera awoke from the doze he had fallen into as soon as he had gotten into Yoshimura’s car, his section chief was driving along a road next to a beach. Their destination, Yoshimura had said, was a villa on Sagami Bay. After they had passed through Zushi, he turned off onto a private road that climbed to a heavily wooded height, atop which stood an oddly built structure lit by floodlights, its curved roof thrust into the air like a huge plastic egg.
They got out of the car, and Yoshimura led the way into the house through French windows opening onto the garden. They passed an angular, powerfully built girl in the corridor. She was dressed in bell-bottoms, and she was holding a cigarette in the sinewy fingertips of the same hand that gripped her drink.
“Good to see you,” she said. Her voice was somewhat slurred with alcohol. “They’re all expecting you.”
“Rei?” asked Yoshimura casually.
“She’s here. She’s a bit maudlin tonight.”
They opened a white plastic door at the end of the corridor to enter what was apparently the main room. Its oval floor was spread with carpeting of a subdued, moss-like green, around which curved beige-colored walls. An ivory grand piano stood against the wall. Gathered around a glass palette-shaped table, four or five men and women were sitting in chairs of odd but evidently comfortable design. In another corner of the room there was a bar, behind which stood a girl whose pale face was half covered by her long hair. Holding a cocktail shaker in both hands, she turned to Yoshimura and Onodera as they entered.
“Hello,” she said, her voice listless.
“Well, now,” said Yoshimura, in full control of events, “let me do some introducing. This is Mr. Onodera of our undersea section.”
“Please join us—here,” said a pleasant, light-skinned young man, offering Onodera a chair. He wore an aloha shirt of subdued coloring. “What are you drinking?”
Onodera stood there awkwardly. These people, he was thinking, were sophisticated and refined men and women. He sensed that he would not readily fit in. The names he heard, one by one, as he was introduced were names he had somehow heard before, names that were always striking his eye whenever he glanced through a magazine or book. He began more and more to feel that he had without a doubt gotten himself into an awkward position.
Finally, Yoshimura brought him over to the girl standing by the bar. When he learned that she, Reiko Abe, was the owner of the villa and thus the one whom he was to meet in this informal miai, Onodera did not know quite where to look.
“Want to drink this?” asked Reiko, holding out the cocktail shaker and looking at Onodera with a weary, bored expression. “It’s a martini. Here.” She thrust it under his nose, the handle of a strainer sticking out of it.
Muttering his thanks, Onodera took the heavy cocktail shaker from the girl.
Reiko put her head back slightly and laughed a short, dry laugh. “Here you are a guest for the first time . . . Please forgive me,” she said, her tongue somewhat twisted. “But, you see, we don’t have a single cocktail glass left. I’ve smashed every one.”
“It’s quite all right,” said Onodera, forcing a smile. “Thank you very much.” So saying, he put the cocktail shaker to his lips, strainer and all, and drank the martini. Then, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he handed it back.
“A fine drink.” He turned abruptly and walked back to the table.
“Say, Mr. Onodera . . .” The young man in the aloha shirt, who had offered him a chair before, did so again, cordially bringing him into the conversation. “I’ve heard about you again and again from Mr. Yoshimura. Now, tell me, there’d be no problem about you being able to manage a submarine designed for sight seeing, would there?”
“Well, it depends,” said Onodera.
“What we have in mind is something truly unique—an under sea amusement park,” said another man, who was a well-known economist. “It’s really nothing of consequence, of course, but what we want to incorporate in it are entirely new kinds of entertainment. From available tourism capital, funds should be forthcoming, you see.”
“We’ll even build an underwater concert hall,” said the young man in the aloha shirt, casually spreading a sketch out on the table. He pointed to a young avant-garde composer by the piano. “He’s now experimenting with an underwater sym phony. It’s quite interesting.”
For some time, the sketch in their midst, they carried on an animated discussion of this novel project, and Onodera, despite himself, began to have a good time, helped, of course, by the liquor. At the same time, however, a suspicion began to take form in his mind. He noticed Yoshimura talking earnestly to Reiko, who might or might not have been listening to him as she held her cocktail glass in a limp hand and, from time to time, brushed back a troublesome lock of hair that kept falling over her face. Sometimes she giggled drunkenly and once she threw back her head and gave a loud, dry laugh. Was this cordial discussion about the amusement park part of Yoshimura’s scheme? Onodera wondered. It would have been the shrewd sort of move to be expected from him.
Reiko left Yoshimura and came over to the table, her walk unsteady. She was tall, and though she was slender enough, there was ample evidence that she had the splendid figure of a mature woman.
“I’m going for a swim,” she cried. She stripped off her dress briskly, and the sun-bronzed body so suddenly bared, save for a faded bikini, proved indeed to be surprisingly strong and well formed as she stood with her chest thrust out and her legs apart.
“Not again?” said the youth in the aloha shirt.
“Count me out,” said the economist, stuffing his pipe.
“How about you?” asked Reiko, turning to Onodera. “A swim, Mr. Onoda?”
“I’ll go.” Onodera took off his shirt. “And by the way, my name is Onodera.”
Reiko laughed, wholly unabashed, and led the way out of the room. Onodera followed her, his eyes on her splendid back, which shone as though rubbed with oil. Once out on the terrace, he got rid of his pants. Reiko led the way to a corner of the terrace, where there was a small elevator half hidden by pine branches. His body and Reiko’s touched slightly during the ride down, though he drew back as much as he could. They left the glare from the house behind them, and all at once the night was filled with the sound of waves and of pine branches creaking in the wind. Onodera was acutely aware of Reiko breathing close beside him in the darkness, a sensation that stirred an odd embarrassment in him. There were no stars. The breeze was warm.
“In this elevator,” said Reiko in a flat voice, breaking the silence at last as they were approaching the foot of the cliff, where a mercury lamp was burning, “how many men, do you think, have kissed me?”
“Well . . . ah . . .” Onodera hesitated.
“Just one.”
A plank walkway led from the edge of the narrow concrete elevator platform to a large yellow rectangular cork float, wet from the waves gently rocking it.