Naomi - Junichiro Tanizaki

FOUR

NAOMI was constantly begging me to take her to Kamakura. We went at the beginning of August with the intention of staying two or three days.

"Why does it have to be only two or three days?" she asked. "It's no fun unless we go for a week or ten days." Her face showed her displeasure as we left the house. But I'd come back early from the country with the excuse that I was busy at work, and out of deference to my mother, I didn't want to risk my ruse being exposed. If I'd put it to Naomi in this way, though, she'd have felt humiliated. Instead I said, "Try to be content with two or three days his year. Next year I'll take you for a longer stay somewhere else. All right?"

"But just two or three days . . ."

"I know, but if you want to swim when we get back, you can go to the beach at Omori."

"I can't swim in a filthy place like that."

"You shouldn't say things like that when you don't really know. Be a good girl. I'll buy you something to wear, instead. Didn't you say you wanted some Western clothes? I'll get some for you."

Caught with the bait of Western clothes, she finally agreed.

In Kamakura we stayed in the Golden Wave Pavilion at Hase, an unremarkable inn for bathers. It makes me laugh to think of it now. There was no need to economize, because I still had most of my semiannual bonus. Thrilled to be taking my first overnight trip with Naomi, I wanted to leave her with the most beautiful impressions possible: we'd stay in a high-class place and not worry about the cost. But when the day came and we boarded a second-class coach bound for Yokosuka, we were seized by a kind of timidity. The train was full of women and girls headed for Zushi and Kamakura, sitting in resplendent rows. In their midst, Naomi's outfit, to me at least, looked wretched.

As it was summer, of course the women couldn't have been particularly dressed up. But when I compared them to Naomi, I sensed an unmistakable difference in refinement between those who are born to the higher classes of society and those who aren't. Though Naomi seemed to have become a different person from the cafe girl she'd been, there's no concealing bad birth and breeding. And if this is what I was thinking, she must have felt it even more. How pitiful it looked now, that muslin kimono with the grape design that had made her seem so stylish. Some of the women sitting around us were wearing simple summer robes, but their fingers glittered with gemstones and their luggage was luxurious; everything bespoke their wealth and station, while Naomi had nothing to show but her velvety skin. I can still remember how she hid her parasol selfconsciously under her sleeve. And well she might—though the parasol was brandnew, anyone could see it was a cheap item, worth no more than seven or eight yen.

At first, then, we'd pictured ourselves staying at the Mitsuhashi Inn, or even at the Kaihin Hotel. But when we approached the buildings, we were so intimidated by their magnificent gates that we walked up and down the Hase road two or three times until we finally found ourselves at the Golden Wave Pavilion, a second- or third-class establishment, by local standards.

There were too many noisy students staying at the inn to allow for any relaxation there, so we spent nearly all of our time on the beach. Tomboy that she was, Naomi cheered up as soon as she saw the ocean and forgot how dispirited she'd been on the train.

"I must learn how to swim this summer," she said, clinging to my arm and splashing about wildly in the shallows. I held her with both hands and showed her how to float on her belly, taught her how to kick, as she grasped a post in the water, and let her go suddenly, so that she tasted the brine. When she tired of that, we practiced riding the waves, played with the sand as we lay on the beach, and, in the evening, rowed out toward the bay in a rented boat. With a big towel wrapped around her bathing suit, she'd sit on the stern or lie back against the gunwale, gaze at the blue sky, and sing the Neapolitan boat song "Santa Lucia"—her favorite—in a shrill voice: