Plum Wine: A Novel

Chapter 5

5 T he campus festival was held in early February instead of the traditional time, in mid-fall; Miss Fujizawa had been away in October, chairing a national conference on women’s rights. In spite of the following week’s exams, the students had transformed the campus. Banners and kites hung from the buildings and there were stalls in the courtyards where the girls offered roast chestnuts , yakitori, and cups of tea. Barbara and her advisees in the English Club were to perform their scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the auditorium. Although Barbara was directing the play, Mr. Doi had chosen it, ordering , without consulting her, paperback copies of the version he’d edited . They’d had a tense little conversation about it in the mailroom. “An unusual time of year for A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she said. Her students had wanted to do Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. “Actually we have some disunity inside the play regarding time,” Mr. Doi said. “Does it take place in May or midsummer?” She confessed she didn’t 4 40 4 4 41 4 know. “You see! Moreover, we Japanese hang a winter scroll in summer and vice-a-versa. Contrast is part of our aesthetic.” In the dressing room Barbara changed into her Titania costume, a musty white wedding dress, then took her place on the stage, lying beneath a stylized Japanese pine the students had made of cardboard . Contrast was certainly going to be part of this performance, she thought. The set looked more Noh than Elizabethan. The stagehands were having some trouble with the curtain. Mr. Doi, in his King Oberon get-up of red bathrobe and glittery paper crown, worked frantically on the pulleys. The hum of voices beyond the curtain grew more pronounced. Barbara hoped Miss Fujizawa wasn’t in the audience. She’d intimated that there were some prestigious guests expected for the student festival. Maybe—given her opinion of Barbara—she was touring them through the calligraphy and tea ceremony exhibits instead. Rie stood beside Barbara, ready to rush forward for her opening monologue. She was an overweight but enthusiastic Puck in her turned-up shoes, green fringed tunic, and pointed cap. A bizarre metamorphosis, Barbara reflected, given Rie’s animosity to Western culture. “Only Christians of the West are afflicted with original sin,” she had written in her sketchy final paper. “In Japan we have no sin.” Finally the curtain groaned upward and shuddered to a stop. Rie skipped to the front of the stage. With a flourish of her arms and a deep bow, she said, “Welcome to this effort by the English Club. I, Puck, will do some summary of the midsummer mischief. Just recently our King Oberon has become angry at his Queen Titania because she was jealous of his flirting with other girls. To teach her a lesson, he has asked me, naughty Puck, to sprinkle confusion juice in her eyes.” Rie skipped heavily across the stage and bent over her, breathing hard. She straightened and said in a loud stage whisper, “Now Titania will love the next creature she looks upon. By coincidence, the rustic man named Bottom has recently been turned into an ass.” There was laughter as Hiroko, in wooden geta clogs, a Japanese workman’s outfit, and the donkey ears, came onto the stage and began to sing. Barbara sat up and stretched. “What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” She gasped and scrambled up when she saw Bottom; the audience howled as she pursued him around the stage. “We will now skip some part,” Rie said, “and the rustics will perform their play.” Barbara returned to her tree, for an improvised second sleep. The rustics, with Hiroko/Bottom as Pyramus, Chieko as Thisbe, and Sumi as the wall, began to act out the play of the ill-fated lovers in comic pantomime—the actual lines being difficult to deliver, and comprehend, in English. Barbara shut her eyes, listening to the movements on stage and to the ripples of laughter from the audience as Sumi opened her fingers as a chink for the lovers to talk through, and the lion bounded on and off the stage. The suicides were to be performed as ritualistic disembowelment, with a cardboard dagger and exaggerated, Kabuki-like gestures. That had been Rie’s idea; the audience would understand this form of suicide, she insisted. Barbara hadn’t wanted to argue with...