The Decay Of The Angel

Kiyoaki and Isao and Ying Chan had had to make do without them, and had been punished for their contempt and arrogance. They had been too proud even in their sufferings.

18

THE THREE TUTORS were all highly gifted students from Tokyo University. One taught sociology and literature, one mathematics and science, and one English. It was known that in 1971 the prep-school entrance examinations would have more essay questions and fewer short-answer questions, and that there would be more emphasis on English dictation and Japanese composition. Tōru was suddenly set to English newscasts. He took them on tape and repeated them over and over.

Here is a question on geography and the movements of the heavenly bodies:

In what position is Venus present longest for morning observation? Indicate on the chart. What is the shape of Venus when viewed in this position? Please indicate which of the following you believe to be the correct answer:

1. The east half is light.

2. The west half is light.

3. It is shining in a thin crescent, like the moon.

4. It is round.

What is the position of Mars when it is visible in the southern evening sky? Please indicate on the chart.

What is the position of Mars when it is visible in the southern midnight sky? Please indicate on the chart.

Tōru immediately circled “B” on the chart, and so answered the first question successfully. He chose the third possibility for the second question, circled “L” for the third question, and, finding spot “G” at which the sun, the earth, and Mars were in a line, circled it.

“Have you been asked this question before?”

“No.”

“Then why were you so quick?”

“I see Venus and Mars every day.”

Tōru answered quite as if he were a child describing the habits of his pets. As a matter of fact Venus and Mars were like the mice that occupied the signal station. He knew all about their feeding habits.

It was not, however, as if he felt nostalgic for nature or regretted the loss of his telescope. He did have a sense of that uncommonly simple work as his own, and the world beyond the horizon was a source of happiness for him; but he did not feel in the least deprived by the loss of them. It was his task, from now until he was twenty or so, to explore a cave with an old man.

Honda had taken pains to choose as tutors bright, companionable, talented young men of a sort Tōru might look to as models. He made a slight miscalculation in the case of Furusawa, Tōru’s literature teacher. Much pleased with Tōru’s disposition and intelligence, Furusawa would take him to nearby coffee houses when they were tired of their lessons, and sometimes they would go on long walks together. Honda was grateful for these services and liked the cheerful Furusawa.

Furusawa did not at all mind saying unpleasant things about Honda. Tōru enjoyed them, though he was careful not to nod too quick an assent.

One day the two of them walked down Masago Rise past the ward office and turned left toward Suidōbashi. The street was torn up for a new subway line, and Kōrakuen Park was hidden behind construction towers. The twilight of late November came through the framework of a roller coaster as through an empty basket.

Passing trophy shops and sports shops and short-order restaurants, they had come to the Kōrakuen gate. Two rows of lights over the red gate flashed from left to right: “We will no longer be open in the evening after November 23.” So the shining nights would soon be over.

“How about it?” asked Furusawa. “How about a good shaking in a teacup?”

“Well.” Tōru thought of himself in a dirty pink teacup, now rather lonely and short of customers among its blinking little lights. He thought of himself being so shaken and twisted by it that objects became streaks of light.

“Well, do you want to or don’t you? You only have ninety-two days left till the examinations, but I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.”

“I’d rather have a cup of coffee.”

“Such dissipation.”

Furusawa led the way down the steps of a coffeehouse called the Renoir. It was across the street from the third-base side of the baseball stadium, which was like a huge trophy pouring forth darkness.

The Renoir was larger than Tōru would have expected from the outside. The tables were generously spaced around a fountain. The lights were soft and the carpet was beige. There were few other guests.

“I had no idea there was such a place so close to home.”

“A cloistered maiden like you wouldn’t.”

Furusawa ordered two cups of coffee. He offered Tōru a cigarette, upon which Tōru leaped.

“It’s not easy to keep it out of sight.”

“Mr. Honda’s much too strict. It’s not as if you were an ordinary middle-school boy. You’ve been out in the world. He wants to make a child of you again. But you just have to wait till you’re twenty. You can spread your wings once you’re in the university.”

“Exactly my own idea. But I have to keep it to myself.”

Furusawa frowned and laughed a pitying laugh. It seemed to Tōru that he was trying to be older than twenty-one.

Furusawa wore glasses, but his good-natured face was very engaging when he smiled, and wrinkles formed around his nose. The horns were bent, and he was forever shoving the glasses back up on his nose, the gesture with his forefinger as if he were reprimanding himself. He had large hands and feet, and he was considerably taller than Tōru. He was the gifted son of a railway worker. Hidden in him was a spirit like a squirming red lobster.

Tōru had no urgent wish to destroy the image Furusawa had of him, as another son of the poor, holding onto the windfall that had come to him. Others, all of them, painted free pictures of him, but it was their freedom. What was most certainly his own was contempt.

“I don’t really know what Mr. Honda is up to, but I should imagine he’s making a guinea pig of you. But that’s all right. He has a big fat estate, and you don’t have to dirty your hands the way other people do clawing your way to the top of the garbage heap. But you do have to hang on to your self-respect. Even if it kills you.”

“Yes,” answered Tōru succinctly. He refrained from saying that he had a great deal of self-respect in reserve.

He was in the habit of tasting his answers. If they seemed sentimental he bit them back.

Honda was off at a dinner with some legal colleagues. Tōru would have something to eat with Furusawa before they went home. He was required, whatever else might happen, to have dinner with Honda at seven every evening when Honda was at home. Sometimes there were other guests. The evenings with Keiko were the greatest trial.

His eye was cool and clear when he had finished his coffee. But there was nothing to see. He looked at the half circle of coffee dregs. The bottom of the cup, round like the lens of a telescope, obstructed his view. The bottom of this world showed a clean white face of porcelain.

Turned half away, Furusawa suddenly spoke as if throwing the butt of his words into the ashtray. “Have you ever thought of suicide?”

“No.” Tōru was startled.

“Don’t look at me like that. I haven’t thought of it all that seriously myself. I don’t like the weak and the sick sort of people that commit suicide. But there is one variety I accept. People who commit suicide to establish themselves.”

“What sort of suicide is that?”

“Are you interested?”

“A little, maybe.”

“Then I’ll tell you.

“Take a mouse that thinks it’s a cat. I don’t know how, but it does. It’s gone through all the tests and concluded that it’s a cat. Its view of other mice changes. They are its meat, that’s all, but it tells itself it refrains from eating them just to hide the fact that it’s a cat.”

“A rather large mouse, I suppose.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not a question of size but of confidence. It’s sure that the concept ‘cat’ has taken on the guise ‘mouse,’ nothing more. It believes in the concept and not the flesh. The idea is enough, the body doesn’t matter. The happiness from the contempt is all the greater.

“But then one day”—Furusawa shoved his glasses up and drew a persuasive line beside his nose—“but then one day the mouse meets a real cat.

“‘I’m going to eat you,’ says the cat.

“‘You can’t,’ replies the mouse.

“‘And why not?’

“‘Cats don’t eat cats. It’s impossible as a matter of instinct and as a matter of principle. I’m a cat myself, whatever else I may look like.’

“The cat rolls over laughing. It laughs so hard it’s clawing the air and its white furry belly is heaving. Then it gets up and starts to eat the mouse. The mouse protests.

“‘What are you eating me for?’

“‘Because you’re a mouse.’

“‘I’m a cat. Cats don’t eat cats.’

“‘You’re a mouse.’

“‘I’m a cat.’

“‘Prove it.’

“So the mouse jumps into the laundry tub, all white with suds, and drowns itself. The cat wets a forepaw and has a lick. The suds taste horrible. So it leaves the body floating there. We all know why the cat goes off without eating the mouse. Because it’s not something for a cat to eat.

“That’s what I’m talking about. The mouse commits suicide to establish itself. It doesn’t of course make the cat recognize it as a cat, and it didn’t think when it killed itself that it would. But it was brave and perceptive and filled with self-respect. It saw that there are two parts to mouseness. First is that it is a mouse in every physical detail. Second is that it is, for a cat, worth eating. Those two. It has long ago given up in the first matter, but in the second there is still hope. It dies in front of the cat without being eaten, and it establishes itself as something that cats don’t eat. In those two respects it has proved it wasn’t a mouse. That much. To prove besides that it was a cat is simple. If something that had the form of a mouse wasn’t a mouse, then it can be anything else. And so the suicide is a success. The mouse has established itself. What do you think?”

Tōru was weighing the parable. He had no doubt that Furusawa had polished it by telling and retelling it to himself. He had long been aware of the disjuncture between Furusawa’s genial appearance and his inner workings.

If only Furusawa himself was concerned, there was nothing to worry about; but if he had detected something in Tōru to make fun of, then Tōru must be careful. Tōru sent out a probing mental hand. It came upon nothing dangerous. Furusawa had sunk deeper and deeper into himself as he talked; he could not see out from so far below the surface.

“And did the mouse’s death shock the world?” Furusawa was no longer paying attention to his audience. Tōru saw that he had only to listen as to a soliloquy. It was a voice of slow, moss-covered pain, such as he had not before heard from Furusawa. “Did the view the world had of the mouse change in any way? Did the true word spread that there existed something that had the form of a mouse but was not a mouse? Was there a crack in the confidence of the cats? Were the cats sufficiently concerned to obstruct the spread of the word?

“Do not be surprised. The cat did nothing at all. It had forgotten. It was washing its face and settling down for a nap. It was full of catness, and not even aware of that fact. And in the sluggishness of its nap it became with no effort at all what the mouse had so desperately wanted to become, something other than itself. It could become anything, through inaction, through self-satisfaction, through unconsciousness. The blue sky spread over the sleeping cat, beautiful clouds drifted by. The wind carried to the world the cat fragrance, the heavy snores were music.”

“You’re talking about authority now.” Tōru felt compelled to put in a word of recognition.

Furusawa’s face broke into a good-natured smile. “Yes. You’re very quick.”

Tōru was disappointed. It had ended up as the sad sort of political parable the young are so fond of.

“You’ll understand some day yourself.” Although there was no danger of being overheard, Furusawa lowered his voice and brought his face close to Tōru’s. Tōru remembered the smell of his breath, forgotten for a time.

Why had he forgotten? He had smelled Furusawa’s breath frequently enough in the course of their lessons. He had not been especially repelled by it; but now he was.

There had been no touch of malice in the story, and yet it had somehow angered Tōru. He did not choose to reprove Furusawa for it, however, and feared that to do so would be only to lower himself. He needed another reason, a quite adequate one, for disliking and even being angry at Furusawa. So the smell of his breath became unendurable.

Oblivious to what was happening, Furusawa went on: “You’ll understand, one of these days. With deception as its starting point, authority can only sustain itself by spreading deception. It’s like a germ culture. The more we resist, the greater are its powers of endurance and propagation. And before we know it we have the germs in ourselves.”

They left the Renoir and had a bowl of noodles nearby. Tōru found it far more appetizing than a dinner with his father and all those dishes.

As he ate, eyes narrowed against the steam, Tōru was measuring the degree of danger in his relations with this student. He could not doubt that there was sympathy between them. But somehow the harmony was muted. It was possible that Furusawa had been hired by Honda to test Tōru. He knew that after one of these expeditions Furusawa presented a report on where they had been and a bill for his expenses. Honda had of course asked that he do so.

They passed the Kōrakuen again on their way back, and again Furusawa suggested a ride in the teacups. Tōru assented, knowing that Furusawa wanted a ride. The teacups were just inside the gate. No other customers appeared, and presently, with reluctance, the attendant turned on the switch for just the two of them.

Tōru got into a green cup, and Furusawa chose a pink cup a considerable distance off. They were decorated with a cheap flower design, reminiscent of teacups on special sale somewhere out in the suburbs, at the too brightly lighted front of a tableware shop.

The cup started moving. Furusawa was suddenly close, and then, shoving his glasses up on a smiling face, he darted off again. The cold Tōru had felt at the seat of his trousers became a cold blast. He turned up the speed. He liked to have it so fast that he could feel nothing and see nothing. The world became a gaseous Saturn.

When the cup had come to a stop, shaking gently from the inertia, like a floating buoy, Tōru stood up. Dizzy, he sat back down again.

“What’s the trouble?” Furusawa came smiling toward him over a platform that still seemed to be moving.

Smiling back, Tōru remained seated. It displeased him to have the world, until now all a blur, importunately line up its sordid details, the peeling posters and the backs of Coca-Cola signs, like great red electric heaters.

19

“FURUSAWA TOOK ME to the Kōrakuen,” said Tōru at breakfast the next morning. “We had a ride in the teacups, and then we had Chinese noodles for dinner.”

“That’s nice,” said Honda, showing his false teeth. It should have been the bland, insubstantial old smile that went with false teeth; but Honda seemed to be genuinely pleased. Tōru was wounded.

Since he had come to Honda’s, Tōru had known every morning the luxurious pleasure of scooping up the meat of an imported grapefruit, cut into sections by a thin curved knife. The rude abundance of juice, in the faintly bitter, glossy white meat of fruit ripe to bursting, sank into his lazy morning gums with its warmth.

“Furusawa has bad breath. I can hardly stand it when we’re studying together.” Tōru smiled an equivocal smile.

“I wonder why. Do you suppose he has stomach trouble? But you’re too fussy. You can put up with that much. You’re not likely to find a more able tutor.”

“I suppose not.” Retreating a step, Tōru finished his grapefruit. A carefully scrutinized piece of toast gave off in the November morning light a glow as of well-tanned leather. Tōru watched the butter melt into it, and then took a bite, careful to follow the instructions he had had from Honda.

“Yes, Furusawa is a good man,” he said after the first bite. “But have you looked into his ideas?”

It pleased him to see confusion of the most vulgar sort come out on Honda’s face.

“Has he said something to you?”

“Nothing specific. But I can’t get over feeling that he either has been or still is involved in some political movement.”

Honda was startled. He trusted Furusawa, and was sure that Tōru liked him. From Honda’s point of view, Tōru’s warning was based on confidence and understanding; but from Furusawa’s it was clearly the report of a secret informant. It amused Tōru to observe how Honda would dispose of this delicate ethical problem.

Honda saw that he was not to pass the light judgment he usually passed upon good and evil. Judged against a broader humanity of which Honda was fond of thinking, Tōru’s behavior was ugly; but judged against the image Honda had for Tōru himself, it passed muster. Honda was at the point of confessing that what he looked for in Tōru was ugliness.

To put Honda at his ease and offer occasion for mild reproof, Tōru tore off a childish mouthful of toast, spreading crumbs liberally on his knee. Honda took no notice.

It would not do to reprove Tōru for the element of meanness in this first mark of trust he had vouchsafed. On the other hand Honda’s old sense of ethics demanded that he inform Tōru of the impropriety of turning informant, whatever the reason; and so something rather petty was by way of coming into this happy breakfast scene.

Their hands bumped awkwardly as they both reached for the sugar bowl.

A sugar bowl bright with betrayal in the morning sunlight. Feelings of guilt for having reached out simultaneously. It wounded Honda to think that this had been the first suggestion of a parental bond.

Tōru was pleased at more than this open confusion. He could see the hesitation as Honda found himself unable to preach the obvious lesson: that one must show more confidence in and respect for a person whom one has even tentatively called teacher. For the first time the controversy within Honda and the evil hidden in his educational policies became clear. Tōru felt like a liberated child spitting out a watermelon seed.

“Well, leave it to me. You just go on doing as you’ve always done. Don’t worry yourself over anything but your studies. Leave everything else to me. The first thing is to get you through your examinations.”

“How right you are.” Tōru smiled a beautiful smile.

Honda deliberated for a day. The next day he asked an acquaintance in the Public Security Division of the Metropolitan Police to investigate. A report came some days later. Furusawa had been a member of an extremist student faction. Honda invented a trivial pretext for dismissing him.

20

TŌRU OCCASIONALLY wrote to Kinué, and got long answers. He had to be careful when he opened them, because each one contained a pressed flower for the season. Sometimes she would apologize for having sent a hothouse flower, there being no wildflowers in bloom.

Wrapped in paper, the flower would be like a dead butterfly. There was pollen for wing dust, letting one imagine that when it lived it had flown. Dead wings and dead petals are the same. The remembrance of color that has flown through the sky, and the remembrance of color in stillness and resignation.

Only after reading the letter did he recognize one fragment, dry and brown like the skin of an Indian, strong red threads torn and jagged from having been pressed flat, as the petal of a red hothouse tulip.

The letters were the endless confession she had brought to the signal station. And she always offered in much detail a description of her loneliness for Tōru and her wish to come to Tokyo. He always replied that she must be patient, however many years passed. He would find an occasion to summon her.

Sometimes he almost thought, after having been away from her for so long, that she was beautiful. And immediately he would laugh. Yet he was coming to see what the mad girl had meant to him.

He needed lunacy to dim his own clarity. He had to have someone beside him who would see as something quite different all the things he saw with such clarity, clouds or ships or the gloomy old hallway of the Honda house, or the schedule of all his lessons until examination day posted on the wall of his room.

Tōru sometimes longed for liberation. The direction was clear. It must be the direction of uncertainty, the realm behind this clearly defined world, a realm whose phenomena were flowing over a waterfall.

Kinué unconsciously played the role of the gentle guest who brought freedom into the cage.

Nor was that all.

She brought balm for certain itches within him. He itched to do injury. His heart was a sharp drill protruding from a sack, itching to cut someone. Having cut down Furusawa, it was looking for someone else. Its cleanness, free of the least speck of rust, must sooner or later turn savage. Tōru saw that he could do something other than observe. The awareness brought tension, and Kinué’s letters brought rest from it. Because of her madness she was beyond his harming.

The strongest bond between them was his certainty that he could not himself be wounded.

A successor to Furusawa was found, a student of the most ordinary common-sense sort. Tōru hoped that within the next two months he could get rid of the other tutors as well, for he did not want to seem in their debt when he had passed his examinations.

But caution held him back. Honda would begin to have certain suspicions were Tōru to waste his energies on such minor personages. He could come to discount Tōru’s complaints, and, accepting the faults complained of, find fault in the complaints themselves. And the secret pleasure would disappear. Tōru concluded that he must be patient. He must wait until someone far more worth wounding appeared. Whoever it was would provide a way, albeit an indirect one, of wounding Honda himself. A way that left no room for resentment. A clean, unsullied way of Tōru’s very own, leaving Honda with no one but himself to blame.

And who would come into his life, like a ship on the far horizon? As the ships had first taken firm shape in Tōru’s mind, so would his victim appear one day, a shadow neither ship nor mirage, unsuspecting and vulnerable, following the dictates of the drill in his heart. Tōru came almost to have hopes.

21

TŌRU ENTERED the preparatory school of his choice.

In his second year there came a proposal, through a suitable mediator. A certain person had a marriageable daughter he thought Tōru might be interested in. Tōru had reached the legal age of consent, but he was still only eighteen. Honda laughed the proposal off. The other person was persistent, however, and the proposal came through another mediator. Since the second man was an eminence in the legal world, Honda could not turn him away unconditionally.

Honda longed for something: a young bride who would be twisted with grief at the loss of her twenty-year-old husband. She would wear the pale, beautiful hues of tragedy; and so, at no expense, Honda would have another meeting with a pure crystallization of beauty.

The dream was rather out of accord with his educational policies. Yet if there had been no margin at all for the dream, and if there had been no sense of crisis, Honda would scarcely have bothered with policies calculated to give Tōru a long and beautyless life. What Honda feared was what Honda hoped for, what Honda hoped for was what Honda feared.

The proposal was repeated at appropriate intervals, like water dripping through a floor. It amused Honda to be visited by this eminence and to hear his desperate plea. He thought it too early to tell Tōru.

Honda was fascinated with the photograph the old man brought. The girl was eighteen and a beauty, with a thin delicate face that had in it nothing of the bright and modern. There was beauty in the faint air of bewildered resentment with which she faced the photographer.

“Yes, she is very beautiful. And is she strong physically?” asked Honda, the intent of his question quite the opposite of what his friend must have supposed it to be.

“I can assure you that I know her very well. She is much stronger than this picture would lead you to believe. She has had no serious illnesses. Health is of course the most important thing. It was her father who chose the picture, and I think he chose a rather old-fashioned one.”

“She is of a cheerful disposition, then?”

“Not, I fear, if that expression contains a suggestion of frivolity.”

It was an equivocal response. Honda wanted to meet the girl.

It was clear that the proposal had taken Honda’s wealth into account. Only that could explain the eagerness for an eighteen-year-old bridegroom, however talented he might be. The tempting object must be snatched up before someone else saw its possibilities.

Honda was perfectly aware of all this. And if he were to accept the proposal, the obvious reason would be to control the urges of a difficult eighteen-year-old. But Tōru here before him seemed quite under control already. So the interests of the two parties were more and more divergent, and Honda saw no reason at all to pursue the talks. He felt a certain curiosity about the contrast between the parents and the beautiful candidate herself. He wanted to see greedy self-respect give way. The family that made the proposal was of much prominence, but such considerations no longer troubled Honda.

A dinner party was proposed at which Tōru and the girl would be present. Honda declined. Instead he and the person who had brought the proposal had dinner with the girl’s family.

For two or three weeks the seventy-eight-year-old Honda was in the grip of temptation. He had seen the girl at dinner, and they had exchanged brief remarks. He had received several more photographs. Hence the temptation.

He had not given a favorable answer, nor had he reached a decision; but his aging heart was the victim of impulses which his reason could not control. The willfulness of old age gave him the itch. He longed to show the pictures to Tōru and see his response.

Honda did not himself know what had possessed him, but happiness and pride were at work in the temptation. He knew that if in fact he were to inform Tōru of the proposal he would have passed the point of no return. But willfulness did not see reason.

He longed to see all the results of the match, of bumping the two of them together, a white billiard ball and a crimson. It would be good if Tōru was fond of the girl and it would be good if she was fond of him. She would mourn him when he died, he would be aroused by her greed and come to see humanity for what it was. Either would for Honda be a pleasing result. A sort of festival.

Honda was much too old to have solemn thoughts about the nature of human life. He was at an age when he could justify malicious games. Whatever the malice, death was near, to make amends. He was at an age when youth was a plaything, humanity a collection of clay dolls, an age when, putting ceremony to his own uses, he could turn honesty and sincerity into the play of the evening sky.

When others were as nothing, surrender to such temptations became a kind of destiny.

Late one evening Honda called Tōru into his study. Mildewed by the summer rains, it was the English-style study he had inherited from his father. Honda disliked air-conditioning, and there was a faint glow of sweat on Tōru’s white chest. It seemed to Honda that a doomed white hydrangea was in bloom before him.

“It will soon be summer vacation.”

“But exams come first.” Tōru bit at the chocolate mint Honda had offered.

“You eat like a squirrel.” Honda smiled.

“Oh?” Tōru too smiled, the smile of one whom it is not possible to injure.

Looking at the pale face, Honda thought that this summer the sun must burn it to a crisp. It was a face that did not seem in danger of pimples. With a studied casualness, he opened a drawer and laid a photograph on the table before Tōru.

Tōru was rather splendid. Honda missed no detail. Tōru first examined it with the solemn attention of a guard examining a pass. His questioning eyes looked up at Honda and back again at the picture. Then came boyish curiosity, and he flushed to the ears. Putting the photograph back on the table, he plunged a rough finger into an ear.

“She is very beautiful,” he said, a touch of anger in his voice.

Very, very splendid, thought Honda. There was something poetic in the youthfulness of the response (and it had been in a moment of crisis). Honda forgot that Tōru had responded as he had wanted him to respond.

It was a complex amalgam, as if Honda’s self-awareness had itself for an instant played a boyish role, hiding confusion with a touch of roughness.

“Would you like to meet her?” Honda asked quietly.

He coughed somewhat nervously, hoping that the next response would be as appropriate. Tōru sprang lightly to his feet and went over to beat on Honda’s back.

“Yes.”

The word was almost a growl. Taking advantage of the fact that his father could not see, his eyes were aglow as he said to himself: “The wait has been worth it. Here is someone worth injuring.”

Yet farther on, beyond the window, it was raining. A sad, lonely rain, like a black liquid, giving the bark of the trees a steamy glow in the light from the window. At night the subway trains, here running on elevated tracks, shook the ground. The bright lights in the windows as the train plunged underground again brought a vision to Tōru, still beating on his father’s back. There was no sign tonight of a ship.

22

SUPPOSE YOU keep company with her for a while. If you don’t like her you just have to say so. There is no commitment.”

Tōru went to dinner one night when summer vacation had begun. After dinner, upon a suggestion from her mother that it might be nice to show him her room, Momoko Hamanaka led him upstairs. It was a large Western room, girlish from corner to corner, Tōru’s first experience of the utterly girlish. It was luxuriantly pink. There was girlishness in every detail of the wallpaper, the dolls, the accessories. They quite breathed a beguiling young charm. Tōru took a seat in an armchair. The thick multicolored cushion made sitting difficult.

Momoko had a mature look, and yet there could be no doubt that all these details were of her own choosing. The cool pallor, somewhat blanched, was in keeping with old-fashioned features not too deeply carved. The solitary earnestness made her the only object at odds with the beguiling charm. Her beauty was too formally perfect; and as in the formal perfection of a paper crane it had in it something ominous.

Her mother brought tea and withdrew. The two had met several times before, but for the first time they were alone. That fact did not produce new tensions. Momoko was safe in the knowledge of having obeyed instructions. He must awaken her to danger, thought Tōru.

He had been put off by all the solemn attentions during dinner. But his annoyance was about to leave. A match was being made. Delicate love was being picked up in pincers, tinted. The bonbon had already been put in the oven. To Tōru it made no difference whether he had gone in of his own accord or been put in. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with himself.

The first thing Momoko did when they were alone was to choose an album from four or five numbered ones and offer it to Tōru. Thus he was made aware of her essential mediocrity. He opened it on his knees, and he saw an infant in a bib, its legs spread wide. Pants all swollen with diapers, like a Flemish knight’s. The dark pink of a mouth not yet filled out with teeth. Tōru asked who the infant might be.

Momoko’s consternation was rather wondrous. She glanced at the album and put a hand over the picture and snatched the album from him. Clutching it to her breast, she turned to the wall. Her breathing was heavy.

“How perfectly dreadful. The numbers were wrong. I didn’t mean for you to see this one. Whatever will I do?”

“Is it such a secret that you were once a baby?”

“Aren’t you cool. Like a doctor.”

Calm again herself, Momoko replaced the album. Tōru was sure, from his misstep, that in the next album he would see Momoko at seventeen.

But the next album was most ordinary, pictures from a recent trip. Each picture showed how popular Momoko was. It was a record of tedious happiness. Far more than to pictures of a recent trip to Hawaii, Tōru was drawn to Momoko in the garden beside a bonfire, one evening the previous fall. The bonfire was a rich, sensuous vermilion. Crouched beside it, Momoko had the grandeur of a witch.

“Are you fond of fires?” he asked.

He caught hesitation in her eyes. He had a strange confidence that she had been menstruating as she sat looking into the fire. And now?

How pure abstract malice would have been if it had been free from sexual attraction! He saw that this new challenge would not be as easy as dismissing his tutor had been. But he had confidence in his coldness, however much he might be loved. It lay in the indigo realm within him.

23

RELUCTANT TO LEAVE Tōru by himself, Honda took him to Hokkaido that summer. Their schedule was an easy one. They did not want to tax themselves. Keiko, for whom it had become difficult to travel with Honda, went off by herself to Geneva, the Japanese ambassador to Switzerland being a relative. The Hamanakas wanted to have two or three days with the Hondas, and so the two families took rooms in Shimoda. Overwhelmed by the summer heat, Honda rarely left his air-conditioned room.

It was agreed that they would have dinner together each night. The Hamanakas came for Honda. Where was Momoko, they asked. She had come a little earlier, said Honda, and was out in the garden with Tōru. And so the Hamanakas sat down and waited for the young couple to return.

Honda was standing by the window, a cane in his hand.

It was all very stupid. He was not hungry, and the menu was an impoverished one. He knew without going to the dining room that vulgar family merriment awaited him. And Hamanaka table conversation was tedium itself.

The old had politics forced upon them. Even though he ached in all his joints, a man of seventy-eight could hide his want of interest only under a show of wit and good humor. A want of interest was important all the same. It was the only way to win out over the idiocy of the world. The unconcern of a beach receiving each day the waves and the driftwood.

Honda had thought that, purse-lipped and surrounded by lackeys, he had yet a little life in him, a little sharpness with which to hinder the purse-lipped days and the lackeys; but it had deserted him. All he really had was an overwhelming sense of folly, and of a vulgarity that melted into a monotone. How myriad were the manifestations of the vulgar. The vulgarity of elegance, the vulgarity of ivory, the vulgarity of holiness, the vulgarity of the craze, erudite vulgarity, the vulgarity of the academic pretender, coquettish vulgarity, the vulgarity of the Persian cat, the vulgarity of monarchs and beggars, of lunatics, of butterflies, of blister beetles. Reincarnation was retribution for vulgarity. And the chief and indeed the only source of it all was the wish for life. Honda himself was without doubt a part of it. What distinguished him was his uncommonly keen sense of smell.

He glanced sideways at the aging couple before him. Why had the two of them come into his life? The superfluity of their presence ran against his sense of order. But there was no help for it now. There they were, smiling on his sofa, as if prepared to wait a decade or so.

Shigehisa Hamanaka, aged fifty-five, was the former chief of a feudal clan in the northeast. He sought to cover the now-empty pride of family in Bohemianism, and had even written a book of essays, The Chief, which had been a modest success. He was the president of a bank, the head office of which was in his old fief, and he had made a name in the pleasure quarters as an old-style man of taste. There was still a full, rich head of black hair over the gold-rimmed glasses and the almond-shaped face, but the stronger impression was of vapidity. A confident raconteur, he always allowed an appropriate pause before a witty conclusion. A clever talker who made a great point of skipping the preliminaries, a person of gentle irony who never forgot his respect for the aged, he would not have dreamed he was a bore.

His wife Taeko too came from the military aristocracy. She was a fat, rough-featured person, and fortunately the daughter looked like the father. All Taeko could talk about was family. She had seen neither movies nor plays. She passed her life before a television set. They were very proud of the fact that their other three children were married and on their own, and only Momoko remained.

Old-fashioned elegance had thus become shallowness. It was more than Honda could bear to hear Shigehisa talk permissively of the sex revolution, and to hear Taeko’s shocked responses. Shigehisa used his wife’s old-fashioned responses as a part of his act.

Honda wondered why he could not be more tolerant. He knew, as it became more and more of a burden to make new acquaintances, how difficult it was to muster a smile. Contempt was of course the emotion that came first, but even that was rather a lot of trouble these days. He thought how much easier it would be to respond with spittle than with words, even as the words came to his lips, but words were the task that remained. With them an old man could twist the world as he might squash a willow lattice.

“How young you look standing there,” said Taeko. “Like a soldier.”

“A very inappropriate simile, my dear. You must not liken a judge to a soldier. I have never forgotten an animal trainer I once saw in a circus in Germany. That is what Mr. Honda is like.”

“A far more inappropriate simile, I should think, my dear.” Taeko was dreadfully amused.

“I am not striking a pose, you must believe me. I am standing here so that I can see the sunset and the young people in the garden.”

“You can see them?”

Taeko came and stood beside Honda, and Shigehisa too, with dignity, left his chair.

The garden was spread below the third-floor window. It was circular, bordered by a walk that led down to the sea, and there were two or three benches among the shrubs. A few family groups were returning, towels over shoulders, from the pool a level below. They cast long evening shadows over the lawn.

Momoko and Tōru were walking hand in hand halfway along the circle. Their shadows stretched far out to the east. It was as if two great sharks were biting their feet.

Tōru’s shirt was full in the evening breeze, and Momoko’s hair was blowing. They were a most ordinary boy and girl; but to Honda they were as insubstantial as gossamer mosquito nets. The shadows were the substance. They had been eaten away by the shadows, by the deep melancholy of a concept. That was not life, thought Honda. It was something less easy to excuse. And the terrible fact was that Tōru probably knew.

If the shadow was the substance, then the all too transparent something clinging to it must be wings. Fly! Fly over the vulgarity! The limbs and the heads were a superfluity, too concrete. If the contempt in him was only a little stronger, Tōru could fly off, the girl’s hand in his; but Honda had forbidden it. Honda longed with all the powers of his senile impotence to put his envy to work and give the two of them wings; but not even envy burned very hot in him any more. Only now did he see it for what it was, the most fundamental emotion he had felt toward Kiyoaki and Isao, the source of all lyricism in intellectual man, envy.

Very well, then. Suppose he were to think of Tōru and Momoko as the basest, the least tempting morsels of youth. They would act, fall into each other’s arms, like a pair of puppets. He only had to move a finger. He moved two or three of the fingers on his stick. The pair on the lawn walked toward the cliff path.

“Just look at them, would you. Here we are waiting, and it seems they mean to go farther away.”

Taeko stood with her hand on her husband’s elbow. There was a touch of excitement in her voice.

Facing the sea, the young couple went through the shrubbery and sat down on one of the rough wooden benches. Honda could see from the angle of the heads that they were looking at the sunset. A lump of black came out from under the bench. Honda could not make out whether it was a cat or a dog. Momoko stood up in surprise. Tōru, standing up beside her, took her in his arms.

“Well, now.” The voices of her parents, watching through the window, floated up gently as dandelion floss.

Honda was not watching. The cognizant one was not watching through his peephole. There at the bright window, he was half enacting in his heart the movements his awareness had ordered, directing them with the strength of all his faculties.

“You are young, and you must give evidence of a far stupider vitality. Shall I put thunder into you? A sudden flash of lightning? Shall we have some queer sort of electric phenomenon: perhaps send flames darting from Momoko’s hair?”

A tree stretched its branches spider-like toward the sea. They started to climb it. Honda could feel the tension in the pair beside him.

“I shouldn’t have let her wear pants.” Taeko seemed on the edge of tears. “The little hussy.”

They entwined their legs around the branches and swung up and down. Leaves scattered toward the ground. One tree among the others seemed to have gone mad. The two were like a pair of great birds against the evening sky.

Momoko jumped from the tree first. But she did not jump boldly enough, and her hair was entangled in one of the lower branches. Tōru followed her and sought to disentangle it.

“They’re in love.” Taeko, in tears, nodded again and again.

But Tōru was taking too long. Honda knew immediately that he was deliberately entangling the hair more tightly. The delicately overdone efforts brought a twinge of fear. Secure in these ministrations, Momoko sought to pull away from the branch. The pain was sharp. Pretending to make matters unintentionally worse the more he tried, Tōru mounted the low branch like a jockey. Momoko pulled at the long rope of hair, her back to him. She was weeping, and her hands were at her face.

From the third-floor window, across the wide garden, it was like a scene in wax, a quiet little pantomime. The grandeur was in the evening light, an avalanche falling off to the sea, in the high glow of the light glancing off toward the sea from the clouds, relics of sun showers through the afternoon. Because of the light, the trees and the islands in the bay, closer and closer, spread color on hard, thin lines. The clarity was terrible.

“They’re in love,” said Taeko once more.

A bright rainbow arched over the sea, like an outcropping of the sunlight in Honda’s heart at the idiocy of it all.

24

EXCERPTS from Tōru Honda’s diary.

I cannot excuse the several mistakes I am making in the matter of Momoko. That is because one must proceed from clarity, and the smallest element of miscalculation produces fantasy, and fantasy produces beauty.

I have never been a sufficiently ardent devotee of beauty to believe that beauty produces fantasy and fantasy miscalculation. When I was still new at the signal station, I sometimes misidentified a ship. Especially at night, when it is difficult to calculate the distance between mast lights, I would sometimes take a puny little fishing boat for an international freighter, and send out a signal asking it to identify itself. Unaccustomed to such formal treatment, the fishing boat would sometimes flash back the name of a movie star. It was not however a thing of great beauty.

Momoko’s beauty of course meets all the objective standards. Her love is necessary for me, and I must give her the blade with which to cut herself. A paper knife will not suffice.

I know well enough that the more firmly insistent demands come not from reason or will but from sexual desire. The detailed demands of sex are sometimes mistakenly thought logical. I think that, lest I confuse the two, I must have another woman for sex. That is because the most subtle and delicate wishes of evil are not for a physical wound but for a spiritual. I know well enough the nature of evil within me. It is in the insistent demands of awareness itself, awareness transformed into desire. Or to put the matter differently, it has been clarity in its most perfect form acting out its part in the darkest depths.

I sometimes think it would be better if I were dead. For my plans can be realized on the far side of death. For there I can find true perspective. To do it while still alive is more difficult than the difficult. Especially when you are only eighteen!

I find it very hard to understand the Hamanakas. There can be no doubt that they want us to be engaged for five or six years, and that they will presently exercise their option and bring the two of us together, fully recognized members of society, in high matrimony. But what guarantee have they? Should they have such confidence in their daughter’s beauty? Or is it that they put high hopes on payments for breach of promise?

No, I doubt that they have made any real calculations at all. They take the crudest, most common-sense view of relations between man and woman. To judge from their gasps of admiration when they heard my I.Q., I should imagine that all their energies go into the study of talent, and especially talent with money.

Momoko telephoned from Karuizawa the day I got back from Hokkaido. She wanted to see me and so I must come to Karuizawa. I have no doubt that her parents were behind it. There was just a touch of artificiality in her voice, and so I made bold to be cruel. I replied that since I was deep in studies for my university entrance examinations I was unable to accept her kind invitation. And when I hung up I felt a quite unexpected twinge of sadness. Denial is itself a sort of concession, and it is natural that the concession should bring a shadow of sadness over one’s self-respect. I am not afraid of it.

Summer is almost over. I am very much aware of its passage. As strongly as words can express. There were mackerel clouds and cumulus clouds in the sky today, and a faint touch of sharpness in the air.

Love should follow along, but my emotions must not follow anything.

The little present Momoko gave me in Shimoda is here on my desk. It is a framed bit of white coral. On the back, in two pierced hearts, it carries the inscription: “From Momoko to Tōru.” I do not understand how she can go on being prey to these childish tastes. The case is filled with little bits of tinfoil that float up like the white sands of the sea when you shake it, and the glass is half frosted with indigo. The Suruga Bay I have known is compressed into a frame five inches square, it has become a lyrical miniature forced on me by a girl. But small though it is, the coral has its own grand, cold cruelty, my inviolable awareness at the heart of her lyric.

Whence come the difficulties in my being? Or to put it another way, the ominous smoothness and facileness of my being.

I sometimes think that the ease of it all comes from the fact that my being is a logical impossibility.

It is not that I am asking any difficult questions of my being. I live and move without motive power, but that is as much an impossibility as perpetual motion. Nor is it my destiny. How can the impossible be a destiny?

From the moment I was born on this earth, it would seem, my being knew that it flew in the face of reason. I was not born with any defect. I was born like an impossibly perfect human being, a perfect film negative. But this world is full of imperfect positives. It would be a terrible thing for them to develop me, change me into a positive. That is why they are so afraid of me.

The source of greatest amusement to me has been the solemn injunction that I be faithful to myself. It is an impossibility. Had I sought to follow it I would immediately have been dead. It could only have meant forcing the absurdity of my existence into unity.

There would have been ways if I had not had self-respect. It would have been easy, without self-respect, to make others and myself as well accept all manner of distorted images. But is it so very human to be hopelessly monstrous? Though of course the world feels secure when the monstrous is reality.

I am very cautious, but I am greatly wanting in the instinct for self-preservation. And I am so brightly wanting in it that the breeze through the gap sometimes makes me drunk. Since danger is the ordinary, there is no crisis. It is very well to have a sense of balance, since I cannot live without a miraculous sort of balance; but suddenly it becomes a hot dream of imbalance and collapse. The greater the discipline the greater the tendency toward violence, and I grow weary of pressing the control button. I must not believe in my own docility. No one can know what a sacrifice it is for me to be gentle and docile.

But my life has been only duty. I have been like an awkward novice sailor. Only in seasickness and nausea have I escaped from duty. The nausea corresponded to what the world calls love.

For some reason, Momoko is reluctant to come home with me. We talk for an hour or so after school at the Renoir. Sometimes we have our innocent fun in the park, riding the roller coaster. The Hamanakas do not worry a great deal about having their daughter come home late if it is not after dark. Though I sometimes take her to a movie, of course, I must let them know in advance that we are going to be later. There is not much pleasure in these public dates, and so we also have our assignations, brief ones.

Momoko came to the Renoir again today. She may seem old-fashioned, but she is just like any other girl in the unpleasant things she has to say about her teachers, in gossip about her friends, in talk, all contemptuously masked with indifference, of the scandalous behavior of movie stars. I humor her a little, showing a manly tolerance.

I lack the courage to write further, for my reservations on the surface seem no different from the unconscious reservations of all other teen-agers. Whatever my perversity, Momoko does not feel it as such. So I let my feelings have their way. Unintentionally, I become sincere and honest. If I really were, then the ethical contradictions in my being should be exposed like mud banks at low tide; but the troublesome ones are the banks not yet exposed. As the waters recede they pass a point at which my frustrations are no different from the frustrations of any other young person, the sadness that furrows my brow draws a line no different from that on the brow of any other. It would not do for Momoko to catch me there.

I have been wrong in thinking that women are tormented by doubts as to whether they are loved. I have wished to plunge Momoko into doubt, but the swift little beast has eluded capture. It would do no good to tell her I do not love her. She would think I was lying. My only recourse is to bide my time and make her jealous.

I sometimes ask myself if I was not somehow changed by the dissipation of my sensibilities in welcoming all those ships. There had to be some effect on me. Ships were born of my consciousness and grew into giants and had names. Only so far were they my concern. Once in port, they were of a different world. I was too busy receiving other ships. I did not have the art to become alternately ship and harbor. That is what women demand. The concept of woman, become sensible reality, would in the end refuse to leave port.

I have known secret pride and pleasure in seeing the concept on the horizon gradually take shape. I have put my hand in from outside the world and created something, and I have not tasted the sensation of being brought into the world. I have not felt myself brought in like laundry brought in before a shower. No rain has fallen to give me existence within the world. On the verge of intellectual drowning, my clarity has been confident of proper sensual rescue. For the ship has always passed. It has never stopped. The sea winds have turned everything to spotted marble, the sun has turned the heart into crystal.

I have been self-reliant to the point of sadness. I wonder when I first fell into the habit of washing my hands after each brush with humanity, lest I be contaminated. People have diagnosed the habit as uncommon fastidiousness.

My misfortune has clearly had its origins in nonrecognition of nature. It is natural that I should not have recognized nature, for nature, containing all rules, should be an ally, and “my” nature has not been. I have accomplished the nonrecognition with gentleness. I have not been spoiled or pampered. Always feeling the shadow of persons clamorous to do me injury, I have been careful about expenditures of gentleness certain to do injury to others. One may see in the care a very human sort of solicitude. But mixed in with the very word “solicitude” are unpleasant shreds of weariness.

I have thought that, in comparison with the nature of my own being, the affairs of the world, delicate and complicated international problems and the like, have not been problems at all. Politics and art and ideology have been so many watermelon rinds. Only watermelon rinds left on the seashore, mostly white but tinged with the faint pink of sunrise. For though I have hated the vulgar, I have recognized in them the possibility of eternal life.

Incomprehension and error have seemed preferable to a relentless probing of my depths. This last means indescribable rudeness and discourtesy, not possible without the nastiest hostility. When did a ship ever understand me? It was enough for me to understand. Spiritlessly, punctiliously, it gave me its name and without another word slipped into harbor. It has been fortunate for the ships that not one of them was aware of the situation. Had any one of them shown the slightest misgivings, in that instant it would have been wiped out by my consciousness.

I have put together a delicate machine for feeling how it would be if I were to feel like a human being. The naturalized Englishman is more English than the native Englishman, they say; and I have become more of an expert on humanity than a human being. More, in any case, than an eighteen-year-old. Imagination and logic are my weapons, more precise than nature or instinct or experience, quite waterproof in awareness of and accommodation to probability. I have become a specialist in humanity, as an entomologist might become a specialist in South American beetles. With odorless flowers I have explored the ways in which human beings are captured by the odor of certain flowers, caught up in certain feelings.

So it is to see. I have seen from the signal station how an international freighter sets its sights from a certain distance out at sea, and makes toward shore at twelve and a half knots with the most urgent dreams of home. That was mere probing, my eye was really turned on an invisible realm far beyond the horizon. What is it to see the invisible? That is the ultimate vision, the denial at the end of all seeing, the eye’s denial of itself.

But sometimes I fear that all these thoughts and all these plans of mine begin in me and end in me. It was so, in any event, at the signal station. All the images flung into that little room like fragments of glass cast their light upon the walls and ceiling and left no trace behind. Is it not the same with other worlds too?

I must be my own support and go on living. Because I am always floating in air, resisting gravity, on the borders of the impossible.

Yesterday in school one of our more ostentatiously erudite teachers taught us a fragment of a Grecian lyric:

Those born with the bounty of the gods

Have the duty to die beautiful,

Not dissipating the bounty.

For me, for whom the whole of life is a duty, this particular duty does not exist. Because I have no knowledge of having received a bounty.

Smiling has become a heavy burden, and so I have taken it upon myself to be out of sorts with Momoko for a time. I leave room for the perfectly ordinary view, even while offering a glimpse of the monster, that I am a sulky, frustrated boy. And because it is an unrelieved piece of acting, because it is altogether too stupid, I too must have a measure of passion. I have looked for a reason. I have found the most plausible one. It is the love born in me.

I almost burst out laughing. For I had become aware of the significance of lovelessness as a self-evident premise. It is in the freedom to love indiscriminately at any time. Like a truck driver napping in the summer shade, certain that the moment he awakens he can drive off again. If freedom is not the essence of love but its enemy, then I have friend and enemy in hand at once.

My sulkiness seems to have been convincing. That is most natural, for it is the form taken by love that is free, asking while denying.

Momoko promptly lost her appetite. She looked at me with a worried face, as she might look at a pet bird. She had the vulgar notion that happiness is to be apportioned to all, like a big loaf of French bread. She did not understand the mathematical principle that happiness for one must be unhappiness for another.

“Has something happened?” It was an inappropriate question coming from those elegant lips, on that face shaded over with quiet tragedy.

I laughed vacantly and did not answer.

It was the only time she asked the question. She was soon lost in her own talk. It was the part of the faithful listener to be silent.

She noticed the middle finger of my right hand, which I had injured on the buck in gymnastics class that day. I saw the relief on her face the moment she saw the bandage. She thought she had found the cause of my ill temper.

Apologizing for not having noticed earlier, she said with a great show of concern that it must hurt a great deal. I answered brusquely that it hurt scarcely at all.

As a matter of fact it did not. I was unable to excuse her for finding such a simple explanation. And it displeased me that, despite the fact that I had been at pains to hide the bandage from her, she had taken so long in finding it.

I turned off her sympathies with stronger and stronger assurances that it did not hurt in the least. With an expression on her face as of having seen through all the pretense and all the feigned bravery, she was more and more insistently sympathetic, having convinced herself that she must extract an admission from me.

She insisted upon going off to a drugstore immediately for a fresh bandage. The old one was already a dirty gray, and dangerous. The stronger my denials the greater her awareness of my powers of abnegation. Finally we went off together and had the bandage changed by a lady who was obviously a former nurse. Momoko looked aside in terror, and so I was able to hide the fact that the wound was only a scratch.

How was it now, she asked earnestly.

“The bone is showing.”

“No! How horrible!”

“You needn’t be alarmed,” I said sullenly.

She was terrified at a casual hint that the finger might have to be amputated. The extravagant horror showed all too clearly her sensual egotism, but it did not displease me.

We talked as we walked along. As usual, the chief burden of conversation was hers. She was happy in the warmth, the brightness and the propriety of her home. It irritated me that she felt not the slightest doubt about her parents.

“I should imagine that your mother has spent quiet nights with another man or two. She’s lived a long time.”

“Absolutely not.”

“How do you know? There were things that happened before you were born. Ask your brothers.”

“It isn’t true.”

“And I imagine your father has a pretty woman off somewhere.”

“No, no. Absolutely not.”

“What’s your proof?”

“You’re dreadful. No one has ever said such dreadful things to me before.”

We were on the point of a quarrel, but I do not like quarrels. Sullen silence was called for.

We were on the sidewalk below the Kōrakuen pool. As always, it was teeming with people in search of inexpensive pleasure. Few of the young people could have been described as well dressed. They were in the ready-made shirts and machine sweaters of the fashionable provincial set. A child suddenly squatted down in the middle of the street and began picking up beer caps. It was scolded by its mother.

“Must you be so nasty?” Momoko seemed near tears.

I was not being nasty. It was kindness on my part not to tolerate smugness. I sometimes think I am a fearfully moral beast.

We had turned as our stroll took us, and were at the gate to the Kōrakuen garden of the Mito Tokugawa family. “The gentleman troubles himself on the world’s behalf; only then does he take his pleasure”—hence the name Kōrakuen, “Garden of After-pleasure.” Near though it is, I had not before visited it. The sign informed us that the garden closed at four thirty and that tickets were not sold after four. It was ten minutes till four. I urged Momoko inside.

The sun was directly ahead as we went through the gate. The insects of early October were singing.

We passed a party of perhaps twenty people on their way out. Otherwise the paths were empty. Momoko wanted to hold my hand, but I showed her the bandage.

Why, with precarious emotions, were we walking in the late afternoon like lovers, down the quiet path of the old garden? I had of course a picture of our unhappiness in my heart. A scene of beauty threatens the heart, gives it fever and chills. Had she been of sufficient sensibility, I would have liked to hear her rambling on in a delirium. I would have liked to see her lips parched with the horror of having met the unfathomable.

Seeking complete solitude, I walked down past the Waterfall of Awakening. It was dry and the pool was cloudy. The network on its surface like a mesh of threads was from water striders. Seated on a rock we gazed down into the pond.

I could see that she at length found my silence threatening. I was confident that she did not know its source. I had introduced an emotion experimentally, and was fascinated to see it producing agnosticism in another. Without emotion we can link together in any number of ways.

The surface of the pond—rather the swamp—was screened off by leaves and branches, but here and there it caught the rays of the western sun. The inappropriate light set off the accumulation of leaves on the shallow bottom like an unpleasant dream.

“Look at it. If you were to turn a light on them, our hearts would be just as shallow and dirty.”

“Not mine. Mine is deep and clean. I’d like to show it to you.”

“How can you say you’re an exception? Give me your proof.”

An exception myself, I was irritated at another’s claim to be an exception. I did not see in any case how mediocrity could claim to be an exception.

“I just know it, that’s all.”

I could sense well enough the inferno into which she had fallen. She had not once felt the need to prove herself. Soaked in a bliss that dripped sadness, she had dissolved everything from the girlish gewgaws to love itself in the obscure liquid. She was up to the neck in the bathtub of herself. It was a dangerous position, but she was not prepared to ask for help, and indeed refused the helping hand. To wound her, it was necessary to drag her out of it. Otherwise the blade would fall short, deflected by the liquid.

There were autumn cicadas in the evening groves, and the roar of the subway came through the calls of the birds. A yellow leaf dangled from a spider web on a branch far out over the swamp, catching a divine light each time it revolved. It was as if a tiny revolving door were floating in the heavens.

We gazed at it in silence. I was asking what world would be opening beyond the dark gold each time it turned. Perhaps, as it revolved in the busy wind, it would give me a glimpse of the bustle in some miniature street beyond, shining through some tiny city in the air.

The rock was cold. We had to hurry. There was only a half hour till closing time.

It was a walk as irritating as a hangnail. The quiet beauty of the garden was caught up in the restlessness of sunset. The waterfowl on the pond were astir, the pink of the bush clover beside the wasted iris had faded.

The closing hour was our pretext for hurrying, but it was not our only reason. We were afraid of the mood of the autumn garden, sinking into our hearts; and we wanted the swiftness of our pace to turn up voices inside us more shrilly, like a record that is revolving too fast.

We stood on a bridge along the circular path. There was no one else in sight. Our shadows stretched out over the moving carp, with the shadow of the bridge. We turned our backs to the pond, out of distaste for the huge patent-medicine sign beyond. We were facing a little round artificial hillock tangled with dwarf bamboo, and the net flung by the setting sun upon the groves beyond. I felt like the last fish resisting the violent light and refusing to be caught in the net.

Perhaps I was dreaming of another world. I felt as if a moment containing death had brushed past the two of us, high-school students in pale sweaters on a bridge. The sexual fullness of love suicide crossed my heart. I am not one to call for help, but if help were to come, I thought, it would come only with the end of consciousness. There would be joy in the rotting of consciousness there in the evening light.

The little pond to the west was choked with lotuses.

Like jellyfish in the evening breeze, the lotus pads blocked off the water. Covered with a powder, the green leathery pads buried the valley below the hillock. They softened the light radically, catching the light of other pads, the delicate shadow of a maple branch. They wavered uncertainly, competing for the evening light. It was as if I could hear them in faint chorus.

I saw how complicated their movements were. The wind might come from one direction, but they did not bow obediently in the other. One spot was forever in motion, another obstinately still. One pad would show its underside, but the others would not imitate it. They bowed sluggishly, painfully, to the left and right. Winds that brushed the surfaces and winds that loitered along the stems produced immense disorder. I was beginning to find the evening breeze chilly.

Most of the pads were fresh at their centers but eaten by rust at the edges. The decay seemed to spread from the spots of rust. There had been no rain for two days, and there were brown water stains at the concave centers. Or dead maple leaves.

The sun was still bright, but from somewhere darkness pressed in. We exchanged brief remarks. Though our faces were near, it was as if we were calling out to each other from far off in an inferno.

“What is that?” As if in fright, Momoko pointed to a cluster at the foot of the hillock, a tangle of rich red threads.

It was a cluster of shining spider lilies, a powerful red.

“It’s closing time,” said the old attendant. “Hurry up, please.”

Our afternoon at the Kōrakuen brought me to a decision.

It was a trivial decision. If I was to wound Momoko not in the flesh but in the spirit, then there was an urgent need for another woman.

To make Momoko taboo was at the same time a responsibility and a logical contradiction. And if my carnal interest in her was the hidden source of my rational interest, then my dignity was left with nothing to stand on. I must wound her with the shining scepter of “love that is free.”

To have another woman did not seem difficult. I went to a go-go hall on my way home from school. All I had to do was dance as I had learned to at the houses of friends, whether skillfully or not did not matter. I had several friends who had a healthy routine. Each day after school they would spend an hour or so alone at a go-go house before settling down after dinner to studies for entrance examinations. I went with one of them, and persevered over Coca-Cola after the hour had passed. A countrified girl with thick makeup spoke to me, and I danced with her. She was not, however, what I was after.

I had heard from my friend that there were certain to be “chastity eaters” at such a place. One would imagine rather older women, but such is– not always the case. Women are sometimes interested in education even when they are young. A surprising number of them are good-looking. Their pride dictates against submitting to a sexual virtuoso. They prefer to become tutors and leave a lasting impression on young hearts. The interest in young male purity derives from the pleasure of leading into temptation; and yet, because it is quite clear that the women themselves have no sense of guilt, the pleasure must derive from leaving the man with the guilt which has carefully been nurtured elsewhere. Some are bright and happy, others of a melancholy turn. There is no standard, but they are all like hens warming eggs of sin. They are less interested in hatching the eggs than in cracking the heads of young roosters.

In the course of the evening I made the acquaintance of one of them, a rather well-dressed girl of twenty-five or twenty-six. She said I must call her Nagisa, “Miss Brink,” and did not tell me her real name.

Her eyes were almost uncomfortably large, and she had thin, malicious lips. Yet there was in her face a warm richness as of a rustic orange. Her bosom was a startling white and she had good legs.

“Really!” That was her favorite expression. She was not at all reluctant to ask questions herself, but she greeted every question in return with a “Really!”

Since I had told Father that I would be home at nine, there was only time for dinner. She drew a map and gave me a telephone number and said that since she lived alone there was no need for shyness.

I want to be as precise as possible about what happened when, some days later, I went calling. Because the event itself is so filled with sensual exaggeration and imaginings and disappointments and the events are so distorted, a person departs from the truth in the very effort to be cool and objective; and if he seeks to portray the intoxication, he falls into conceptualizing. I must take up all three, sexual pleasure and the trembling curiosity of a new experience and an oppressive disharmony that could be either sensual or rational. I must cleanly separate them, allowing none to encroach upon the others, and I must transplant them, perfect and undamaged. The task will not be an easy one.

She seemed at first to have overestimated my shyness. She reassured herself repeatedly of the fact that I was “new to the experience.” I did not want to appear under false colors, nor, on the other hand, did I want to be one of those young men who seek to attract a certain sort of woman with their inexperience—not after all a very attractive trait. And so I assumed a delicate arrogance, which was nothing but shyness cloaking itself in vanity.

The woman seemed torn between a desire to put me at my ease and a desire to excite me; but she was really thinking of herself. She knew from experience that over-ardent instruction can make the young person stumble. That was the reason for her sweet reserve. It was the perfume with which she had carefully touched herself. I could see a little gauge wavering in her eyes.

Since it was quite obvious that she was using my eagerness and curiosity to arouse herself, I was reluctant to have her look at me. It was not that I was feeling particularly shy; but I made the gesture as I brushed her eyes shut seem like a demand of shyness. I suppose that thus rolling in the dark a woman feels only the wheel that runs over her.

It goes without saying that my feelings of pleasure were over as soon as they began. I was much relieved. Only with the third try did I feel anything like real pleasure.

And so I saw: pleasure has an intellectual element in it from the start.

Which is to say: a certain distance is established, a play of pleasure and awareness is established, calculation and reckoning are established, and so, until one is able to look clearly down upon one’s pleasure from without, as a woman looks down at her breasts, there is no pleasure. To be sure, my pleasure took a rather thorny shape.

But the knowledge that the shape of something attained to after considerable practice lies concealed in the initial brief and insubstantial satisfaction was not good for my pride. That very first something was not at all the essence of impulse, it was the essence of concept, long in the making. And the intellectual operations of pleasure thereafter? Do they perhaps make the slow (or precipitous) collapse of concept a small dam, and use the electric power to enrich impulse bit by bit? If so, the intellectual road to the beast is very long.

“You’re great,” said the woman afterward. “You have real possibilities.”

How many ships has she seen out of harbor with that same bouquet?

I am avalanching.

Yet I have nothing at all to do with the collapse and ruin of self. This avalanche, willfully destroying family, house, doing injury, bringing shrieks from an inferno, is something that the winter sky has caused to fall gently upon me, and it has nothing to do with my own basic nature. But in the instant of the avalanche, the softness of the snow and the hardness of the cliff change places. The agent of the disaster is the snow and not the self. It is the softness and not the hardness.

For a very long time, indeed since the beginning of natural history, my sort of heart, a heart of irresponsible hardness, has been ready. Most commonly, in the form of a stone. In the purest form of all, a diamond.

But the too-bright sun of winter penetrates even into the transparency of my heart. It is at such times that I see myself with wings that have no obstacles, and I see too that I shall do nothing at all with my life.

I shall probably achieve freedom, but freedom akin to death. None of the things I have dreamed of will come to me in this world.

Like the winter view from the signal station on Suruga Bay, when I could see even the reflections from the automobiles on the Izu Peninsula, I can see with these eyes every detail of the future.

I will no doubt have friends. The clever ones will betray me, and only the stupid ones will remain. It is strange that betrayal should come to a person like me. I suppose that everyone, faced with my clarity, feels the urge to betray. There can be no greater victory for betrayal than to betray such clarity. Probably all the people who are not loved by me are confident that they are so loved. The ones who are loved by me will probably guard a beautiful silence.

The whole world will wish my death; and, each trying to outdo the others, seek to prevent it.

My purity will presently wander beyond the horizon to that invisible realm. Probably at the end of unbearable pain I shall seek to become a god. The pain! I will know all of it, the pain of absolute silence, of a world of nothing at all. I will crouch trembling in a corner, like a sick dog. And the happy ones will sing songs around me.

There is no medicine for it. No hospital. It will be written in tiny gold letters, somewhere in the history of the race: that I was evil.

I vow it: that when I am twenty I will cast Father into hell. I must start making plans.

It would have presented no difficulty at all to go walking arm-in-arm with Nagisa where I had promised to meet Momoko. But I did not wish so hasty a solution, nor did I wish to see Nagisa stupidly intoxicated with victory.

She had given me a little silver chain and medal inscribed with her monogram, “N.” It would not do for school or home wear, but I wore it around my neck when I met Momoko. I knew from the bandage incident that it was not easy to attract Momoko’s attention. Despite the cold, I wore an open shirt and a V-neck sweater, and made sure that my shoe was badly tied. The medal was sure to fall out and catch the sun when I retied it.

It was a considerable disappointment that though I tied my shoe three times Momoko did not notice the medal. The inattentiveness came from complete confidence in her own well-being. I could not, for my own part, make too obvious a show.

In desperation I took Momoko swimming at the heated pool of a large Nakano sports center. She was delighted at this little reminder of our happy summer days in Shimoda.

“You’re a man, aren’t you?”

“I believe so.”

This classical exchange between man and woman was taking place here and there beside the pool, where one of those Harunobu scenes, men and women indistinguishable, was being posed in the nude. There were long-haired men indistinguishable from women. I have the confidence to fly symbolically over the head of sex, but I have never felt the urge to melt into the other sex. I have no wish to be a woman. The very structure of woman is the foe of clarity.

I had had a swim and was sitting on the edge of the pool. Momoko was leaning toward me. The medal was no more than three or four inches away.

Finally it caught her eye.

She took it in her hand.

“What does ‘N’ stand for?” Finally she asked the question.

“Guess.”

“Your initials are T.H. What might it be, I wonder.”

“Think about it for a moment.”

“I know. It stands for Nippon.”

I felt rather let down. I began putting myself at a disadvantage by asking questions in return.

“It was a present. Who from, do you think?”

“‘N.’ I have relations named Noda and Nakamura.”

“And why would I be getting presents from your relatives?”

“I know. It’s for ‘north.’ It did occur to me that the design around the edge was like a compass. You got it from a shipping company or something. At a launching. North, for a whaler. Right? Am I right? A whaler, and it was sent to your signal station. No doubt about it.”

I cannot be sure whether Momoko really thought so, or whether she was trying to put herself at ease, or whether she sought to conceal her uneasiness in a play of innocence. I had lost the urge, in any case, to tell her she was wrong.

And so my operations turned to Nagisa. She was a phlegmatic sort, and I could appeal to her bland, harmless curiosity. If she had time to spare, I said, she might like to see my young fiancée from a distance. She accepted immediately. She asked me over and over again whether I had slept with Momoko. She seemed very interested in the practical application her pupil had made of her lessons. I told her when I was to meet Momoko at the Renoir and made her promise to act like a stranger. I knew that she was not one to keep a promise.

I was aware that shortly after our arrival Nagisa had arrived and taken a seat behind us, on the other side of the fountain. Silently and lazily, like a cat, she seemed to be glancing at us from time to time. Since Momoko was the innocent one, the understanding between Nagisa and myself was suddenly closer, and it was as if most of my remarks were being directed at her. The silly expression “physical bond” took meaning.

I was sure that she could hear us through the murmur of the fountain. In the awareness of being overheard, my words took on a certain appearance of sincerity. Momoko was delighted that I was in such good spirits. She was congratulating herself, I could see, that we got on so nicely, though she did not know why.

Tired of conversation, I took the medal from my collar and bit at it. Far from reproving me, Momoko laughed happily. I caught a taste of silver, and against my tongue it felt like an indissoluble pill. The chain brushed my lip and chin. It was pleasant all the same. I felt like a bored dog.

Through the corner of my eye I saw that Nagisa had stood up. I knew from Momoko’s wide eyes that she was standing beside us.

Suddenly a red-nailed hand was tugging at the medal.

“You’re not to eat my medal.”

I stood up and introduced the two.

“I’m sorry to have interrupted you.” Nagisa walked off. “I’ll see you later.”

Momoko was blanched and trembling.

It was snowing. I spent a tedious Saturday afternoon at home. There is a window at the landing of the Western staircase. Only from it do you get a good view of the street. My chin on the sill, I knelt looking out at the snow. It was a quiet street even on ordinary days, and today the automobile tracks were blotted out.

There was a dim light from the snow. Though the sky was dark, the light of the snow signaled a strange time of its own, different from the time of day. Behind the house across the street it settled into hollows between the blocks of a concrete fence.

An old man, umbrella-less, in a brown coat and black beret, came up from the right. There was a pronounced swelling toward the bottom of his coat. He was embracing it. It would seem that he had a parcel of some sort which he wanted to keep dry. I could see a gaunt, hollow face under the beret, quite out of keeping with the stout figure.

He stopped at our gate. There was a low gate beside the main one. I thought he would be some unusually impoverished caller with a request to make of my father. He looked around him, however, not bothering to brush the snow from his now white coat and making no motion toward coming in.

The swelling disappeared. A parcel fell to the ground, as if he had laid a great egg. I gazed at it. At first I could not make out what it might be. A spherical object of many colors glowed darkly from the snow. I saw that it was scraps of fruits and vegetables in a plastic kerchief. The kerchief bulged with bits of red apple, orange carrot, pale green cabbage. If he had gone out to throw them away, then he must be a strict vegetarian who lived alone. In such quantities, they gave the snow a strange, fresh spectrum. Even the bits of green cabbage seemed to breathe with a strangled breathing.

Riveted on the bundle, my eyes fell behind the old man as he walked off. He took tiny steps through the snow. I saw him from behind. Even taking into consideration the hunched shoulders, the coat was shapeless and unnatural. It was still swollen, though not so much as before.

He walked off. He was probably unaware of it himself, but five or six yards from the gate something fell from his coat like a great ink spot.

It was a dead bird, a crow, apparently. Or perhaps a turkey. I even thought I could hear the sound of the wings as it struck the snow; but the old man walked on.

The bird was a puzzle. It was a considerable distance away, blocked by the trees in the garden and further obscured by the snow, and there was a limit to my powers of vision. I thought of going for binoculars or going out to look, but an overpowering inertia held me back.

What sort of bird was it? As I looked at it, for almost too long a time, it came to seem not a bird but a woman’s hair.

Momoko’s sufferings had begun, like a conflagration from a cigarette. The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.

As planned, I became the petitioner. I sought to cajole her, and I followed her lead in saying the most dreadful things about Nagisa. She wept as she told me I must put an end to the affair. I said I would like nothing more, but needed her help. With some exaggeration, I said I would need her help if I was to break off with that devil of a woman.

She agreed to help me, but on one condition. I must throw away the necklace, and she must be witness to the act. Since it was nothing to me, I agreed. The two of us went to the bridge in front of Suidōbashi Station. I took it off and handed it to her, and told her to throw it with her own hand into the filthy canal. She flung it from her, arching it high into the sunlight of the winter evening. It hit the stinking water over which a barge was just then passing. She fell on me, her breathing as heavy as if she had just committed murder. Passers-by looked at us curiously.

It was time for my special night classes. I left her, with a promise to meet on Saturday afternoon.

I had Momoko write to Nagisa a letter of my dictating.

I wonder how many times I used the word “love” that Saturday afternoon. I said that if I loved Momoko and Momoko loved me, then we must plan together to avert disaster, we must write a fraudulent letter.

We met at a bowling alley by the Meiji Gardens. After several strings, we went out hand in hand through the warm winter afternoon, through the shadows of the bare gingko trees, and into a new coffeehouse on Aoyama Avenue. I had brought paper and stamp and envelope.

Applying the anesthetic, I whispered of love as we walked along. In the course of time I had turned her into a person no different from the mad Kinué. She breathed easily only under the most obvious misconception, that our love was unchanging.

The two of them are alike in their denial of reality, Kinué in her belief that she is beautiful, Momoko in her belief that she is loved. Momoko needs help with her delusion, however, while Kinué needs no word from outside. If only I could raise Momoko to the same level! Since there was in the wish a pedagogical urge—love, so to speak—my protestations of love were not wholly without substance. But was there not a methodological contradiction in having an affirmer of reality like Momoko become a denier? It would not be easy to have her, like Kinué, do battle with the whole world.

But while reading the sacred formula “I love you” over and over, endlessly, a change comes to the heart of the reader. I could almost feel that I was in love, that some corner of my heart was drunk in the sudden and abandoned liberation of the banished word. How similar the tempter is to the flying instructor who must go flying with a beginner!

Momoko’s other requirement, altogether appropriate for a somewhat old-fashioned girl, was no more than a purely “spiritual” affirmation, and all that was needed to satisfy it was a word or two. Words, casting a clear shadow on the earth in their passage—might they not have been the essential I? I had been born to use words thus. If so (these sentimental locutions greatly annoy me, of course), then perhaps the basic mother tongue I have kept hidden is after all the language of love.

While the patient himself is ignorant of the truth, his family goes on telling him that he is certain to recover. So, with the most intense earnestness, I whispered over and over to Momoko of love, there in the beautiful network of shadows from the winter trees.

Once we were at our ease in the coffeehouse, I told her of Nagisa’s nature, as if I were asking her advice and following it. I described in outline certain stratagems likely to be effective. I of course created my Nagisa with complete license.

Since Momoko was my fiancée and loved me, Nagisa was not the sort of woman likely to be moved by a plea that she give me up. Such a plea would only arouse her contempt and lead her on to greater unpleasantness. She was a woman who did battle with the word “love” and sought to bring it down by assault from the rear. She had resolved to leave her brand on boys who would one day be good husbands and fathers, and so to jeer from the shadows at marriage itself. Yet she had her amiable defects. She gave no ground in her hatred of love, but she had a certain strange sympathy for a woman who was struggling to make her way. I had heard her describe several representatives of the species. The argument most likely to move her was that she was obstructing not love but money and security.

So what should we do?

“Make me a girl who does not love you but needs you for your money.”

“Precisely.”

The thought greatly excited Momoko. What fun, she said dreamily.

The excitement that had replaced her gloom was altogether too bright and open. It put me out of sorts.

She continued. “And of course there is a grain of truth in it. Mother and Father make a great secret of it, and I have never said anything myself; but we’re not all that well off. There was trouble in the bank and Father took responsibility and all the land at home is mortgaged. Father is such a good-natured man. He was the victim.”

She was as entranced with the effort to make herself into a mean, crass woman (certain that she could never be one) as a young girl with her part in the school play. This is the letter which, to that end, I devised for her there in the coffeehouse.

Dear Nagisa,

Because I am about to make a request of you, please read my letter through to the end. The truth is that I want you to stop seeing Tōru.

I will tell you the reasons as honestly as I can. Tōru and I would seem to be tentatively engaged, but we do not love each other. I do think of us as good friends, but my feelings go no deeper. What I really want is affluence and freedom, married to an intelligent husband who has no difficult family problems. In this I am following my father’s wishes. Tōru’s father has not much longer to live, and when he dies Tōru will inherit the whole of his estate. My father has his own interests in the matter. There have been difficulties at the bank, of which we do not speak, and we are somewhat pressed financially, and need the help of Tōru’s father and of Tōru himself once his father is dead. I do love my mother and father, and if Tōru’s affections were to turn elsewhere it would mean the end of all my plans and hopes. And so, to put the matter quite bluntly, the marriage is of very great importance for financial reasons. I have come to think that there is nothing more important in this world than money. I do not see anything dirty in it, and I think expressions like “love” and “affection,” leaving it out of consideration, are misplaced. What may for you be a moment’s dalliance is a matter of the greatest importance for my whole family. I am not saying that because I love Tōru you must give him up. I am speaking as a more mature and calculating girl than you may think.

This being the case, you are mistaken if you tell yourself that it will be all right for you to go on seeing Tōru in secret. The secret is certain to leak out, and it will not do to have Tōru think me a woman willing to close her eyes to everything for the sake of money. It is precisely for the sake of money that I must watch over him and preserve my pride.

You must not show this letter to Tōru. It has taken all my resolution to write it. If you are an evil woman, then show it to him and make it your weapon for getting him away from me; but you will have to live the rest of your life with the knowledge of having taken from another woman not love but her very living. We must dispose of the matter with cool heads, since the emotions of neither of us are involved. I feel quite capable of killing you if you show this letter to him; and I doubt that it will be an ordinary sort of murder.

Most sincerely,

Momoko

“The ending is good.” Momoko was still excited.

“If I were to see it anything could happen.” I smiled.

“I’m not worried.” She leaned toward me.

I had her address the envelope and put a special delivery stamp on it, and we went off hand in hand to mail it.

Today I went to Nagisa’s apartment and saw the letter. Trembling with anger, I snatched it from her and ran out. At home later that night, I went into Father’s study and, heartbroken, showed it to him.

25

TŌRU BEGAN preparatory school at seventeen, two years later than most boys, and he would enter the university at twenty, in 1974, when he reached legal maturity. During his third year in preparatory school he had no recess from studies for the university examinations. Honda cautioned him against overwork.

One autumn day in that third year Honda dragged a protesting Tōru out for a weekend of nature. Tōru did not want to go far from home, and so they followed his wishes and drove to Yokohama for a look at the ships, his first in a very long time. The plan was that they would have dinner in the Chinese quarter of Yokohama.

Unfortunately the sky of early October was clouded over. The sky is high and wide over Yokohama. They got out at South Pier. The sky was an expanse of rough mackerel clouds, with only here and there a spot of white. Like the aftertone of a bell, there was a touch of blue beyond Central Pier. It seemed on the verge of disappearing.

“If we had our own car I could drive you. A driver is a useless expense.”

“Not yet. I’ll buy you one, I promise, when you get into the university. It will only be a little longer.”

Sending Tōru off to get tickets for the terminal building, Honda leaned on his stick and looked wearily up at the stairs he must climb. He knew that Tōru would be willing enough to help him, but did not want to ask.

Tōru was happy from the time they reached the harbor. He had known that he would be. Not only Shimizu but every harbor was like a crystalline medicine that worked an immediate cure on him.

It was two in the afternoon. The register for nine in the morning had been posted: the Chung Lien II, Panamanian, 2,167 tons; a Soviet ship; the Hai-i, Chinese, 2,767 tons; the Mindanao, Philippine, 3,357 tons. The Khabarovsk, a Soviet ship bringing numbers of Japanese passengers from Nahodka, was due at two thirty. The view of the ships was good from the second floor of the terminal building, slightly higher than their decks.

They looked out over the prow of the Chung Lien, and the stir in the harbor beyond.

It was not unusual for the two of them, as the seasons passed, to stand thus side by side in confrontation with grandeur. Perhaps indeed it was the position best for the Hondas, father and son. If the “relationship” between them consisted in using nature as a mediator between their separate awarenesses, knowing that evil results from a direct meeting, then they were using nature as a giant filter to turn brine into potable water.

Below the prow of the Chung Lien was the lighter anchorage, like an accumulation of bobbing driftwood. Marks and signs on the concrete pier forbidding automobiles suggested the aftermath of a game of hopscotch. A dirty smoke drifted in from somewhere, and there was an incessant chugging of engines.

The paint had flaked from the dark hull of the Chung Lien. The bright red of the rust-preventive painted a pattern around the prow like an aerial map of harbor installations. The rusty stockless anchor clung to the hawse pipe like a great crab.

“What is the cargo, all done up in neat, long bundles? Like spindles.” Honda was already scrutinizing the stevedores at work on the Chung Lien.

“Boxes of some sort, I’d imagine.”

Satisfied that his son knew no more than he, Honda turned his attention to the shouts of the stevedores and labor such as he had not known in his life.

The astonishing thing was that the flesh, the muscles, the organs (the brain aside) given to a human being should through the whole of a long life of indolence have been blessed with health and a superfluity of money. Nor had Honda wielded great powers of creativity or imagination. Only cool analysis and solid judgment had been his. He had made money enough through them. He felt no pangs of conscience at the sweating stevedores he saw in action or in pictures, but he did feel a nameless irritation. The scenes and the objects and the movements before him were not the reality of something he had touched and taken profit from. They were a barrier, an opaque wall forever laughing derisively at both sides, daubed all over with smelly paint, between him and some unseen unreality and the unseen people taking profit from it. And the figures so vivid on the wall were themselves in the tightest bondage, controlled by someone else. Honda had never wanted to be thus in opaque bondage, but he had no doubt that they were the ones who had their anchors like ships, deep in life and being. Society paid recompense only for sacrifice. Intelligence was paid in measure proportionate to the sacrifice of life and being.

But there was no point in worrying at this late date. All he had to do was enjoy the movements before him. He thought of the ships that would come into the harbor after he was dead, and sail off for sunny lands. The world overflowed with hopes of which he was not part. If he were a harbor himself, however hopeless a harbor, he would have to give anchorage to a number of hopes. But as it was, he might as well declare to the world and to the sea that he was a complete superfluity.

And if he were a harbor?

He glanced at the single little boat in Honda Harbor, Tōru here beside him, engrossed in the unloading operations. A boat that was exactly the same as the harbor, rotting with the harbor, refusing forever to leave. Honda, at least, knew it. The ship was cemented to the pier. They were a model father and son.

The great dark holds of the Chung Lien were agape. The cargo overflowed the mouths of the holds. The figures of stevedores in brown sweaters and green bellybands of gold-threaded wool were half visible on the mountains of cargo, their yellow helmets bobbing as they shouted up at the cranes. The myriad iron lines of the derrick shook with their own shouts, and as the cargo wavered precariously in the air it blotted out and then revealed again the gold-lettered name of the passenger ship tied up at Central Pier.

An officer in a white cap was supervising the operations. He was smiling. It would seem that he had shouted a loud joke to encourage the stevedores.

Tired of the unloading operations, the father and son walked to a point from which they could compare the stern of the Chung Lien with the prow of the Soviet ship.

The prow was astir with life, the low stern was deserted. Ochre vents pointed in several directions. Rough piles of garbage. Ancient casks with rusty iron hoops. Life jackets on white railings. Ships’ fittings. Coils of ropes. The delicate white folds of lifeboats under ochre covers. An antique lantern still burned under the Panamanian flag.

The stillness was like that of a Dutch still life, tinged over with the sadness of the sea. It was as if napping with its private parts exposed to the forbidden gaze of landsmen, all the long hours of tedium aboard ship.

The black prow of the Soviet ship with its thirteen silver cranes pressed down from above. The rust of the anchor clinging to the hawse pipe had streaked the hull with red spider webs.

The ropes tying them to land marked off great vistas, three crossed ropes each, trailing beards of Manila hemp. Between the immovable iron screens moved the unresting bustle of the harbor. Each time a little tug with old black tires hanging at its side or a white streamlined pilot boat moved past, it would leave a smooth track in its wake, and the dark irritability would for a time be soothed.

Tōru thought of Shimizu as he had studied it alone on holidays. Something was wrested from his heart each time, he would feel something like a sigh from the great lungs of the harbor, and as he covered his ears against the shouting and roaring and grating, he would taste simultaneously of oppression and liberation, and be filled with a sweet emptiness. It was the same today, though his father had an inhibiting effect.

“I think it was a good thing,” said Honda, “that we broke off with the Hamanaka girl early in the spring. I can talk to you now that you have gotten over it and seem so lost in your studies.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Annoyed, Tōru put a touch of boyish melancholy and gallantry into his words. They were not enough to stop Honda. Honda’s real purpose lay not in apology but in the question he had long been wanting to ask.

“But that letter. Doesn’t it strike you as altogether too stupid? Wasn’t it really too much to have a young girl speak openly of what we had been perfectly aware of and closed our eyes to? Her parents made all sorts of excuses, and the man who first came with the proposal had nothing to say at all when he saw the letter.”

It displeased Tōru that Honda, who had until now not touched upon the matter, should be speaking so plainly, almost too plainly. He sensed that Honda had taken as much pleasure in breaking the engagement as in making it.

“But don’t you suppose all the proposals that come to us are the same?” Elbows on the railing, Tōru did not look up. “Momoko was honest, and so we were able to take early measures.”

“I quite agree. But we mustn’t give up. We’ll find a good girl yet. But that letter—”

“Why should you be so worried about it now?”

Honda gave Tōru a gentle nudge with his elbow. Tōru felt as if he had been jabbed by a bone. “You had her write it?”

Tōru had been expecting the question. “Suppose I did. What would you do?”

“Nothing at all. The only point is that you have found a way of getting through life. We must describe it as a dark way, with no sweetness in it.”

Tōru’s self-respect had been affronted. “I would not want to be thought sweet.”

“But you were very sweet while it was all in process.”

“I was doing as you wanted me to do, I should imagine.”

“Yes.”

Tōru shuddered as the old man bared his teeth to the sea wind. They had reached a point of agreement, and it brought Tōru to thoughts of murder. He could easily enough let them have their way by pushing Honda over; but he feared that Honda was aware of even that impulse. It left him. To have to live was blacker than the most cheerless black. To have to see every day a man who sought to understand, and did understand, the deepest thing inside him.

They had little more to say. After a round of the terminal building, they stood for a time looking at the Philippine ship on the far side.

Directly in front of them was an open door to the crew’s cabins. They could see the scarred linoleum, glowing dully, and, around a corner, the iron rail of a stairway leading downward. The short, empty corridor of the quotidian, of frozen human life, never for a moment away from human beings, on whatever remote seas. In the great white transient ship, that one spot was representative of a dark, dull afternoon corridor in every house. In a vast, unpeopled house as well, where lived only an old man and a boy.

Honda ducked. Tōru had just made a violent motion. Honda caught a glimpse of the word “Notebook” on the rolled-up tablet Tōru had taken from his briefcase. He flung it past the stern of the Philippine ship.

“What are you doing?”

“Notes I don’t need. Scribblings.”

“You’ll be fined if they catch you.”

But there was no one on the pier, and on the ship only a Philippine sailor who looked down at the sea in surprise. The rubber-bound tablet floated for an instant and sank.

A white Soviet ship with a red star on its prow and the name “Khabarovsk” in gold letters was being brought against the pier by a tugboat with masts the color of a thorny broiled lobster. There was a cluster of welcomers at the rail, their hair blowing in the wind. Some were on tiptoes. Children on the shoulders of adults were already shouting and waving.

26

THE VERY QUESTION was indignant when Keiko asked Honda how Tōru meant to spend the Christmas of 1974. Since the September incident, the eighty-year-old Honda had been afraid of everything. His incisiveness had quite left him. He seemed to cower and tremble perpetually, to be a victim of unrelieved disquiet.

This state of affairs was to be explained not only by the September incident. They were now in the fourth year since Honda had adopted Tōru. Through most of those years Tōru had seemed quiet and docile, and there had been little change in him; but this spring he had reached maturity and entered Tokyo University, and everything was changed. He had suddenly come to treat his father as an adversary. He was prompt in putting down every sign of resistance. After Tōru had hit him on the forehead with a fire poker, Honda went to a clinic for a few days to have the wound treated—he told the doctors that he’d had a bad fall. Thereafter he was most attentive in reading and deferring to Tōru’s wishes. Tōru was studiously rude to Keiko, whom he recognized as Honda’s ally.

From long years of avoiding relatives who might be after his money, Honda had no allies prepared to sympathize with him. Those who had opposed the adoption were pleased. Everything had turned out as expected. They set no stock whatsoever by Honda’s complaints. He was only trying to arouse sympathy. Their sympathies were rather with Tōru. Such beautiful eyes, such impeccable deportment, such a devoted sense of filial duty—they could only conclude that a suspicious old man was maligning him. And indeed Tōru’s manners were above reproach.

“There seem to be troublemakers around. Who can have told you such a silly story? Mrs. Hisamatsu, I’m sure. She’s a nice person, but she believes everything Father tells her. I’m afraid he’s pretty far gone. He has delusions. I imagine that’s what happens when you spend so many years worrying about money; but he treats even me, right here under the same roof, like a thief. After all, I am young, and when I talk back he starts telling people I’m not good to him. The time he fell in the garden and hit his head against the root of the plum tree—remember?—he told Mrs. Hisamatsu I’d hit him with a poker. She actually believed it, every last word of it, and that doesn’t give me much room to fight back.”

He had that summer brought the mad Kinué from Shimizu and installed her in the garden cottage.

“Her? Oh, she’s a very sad case. In my Shimizu days she helped me this way and that. She wanted to come to Tokyo because at home everybody made fun of her and the children were always chasing after her and shouting at her. So I persuaded her parents to let me have her. They’d kill her if they put her in an asylum. Yes, she’s crazy, no doubt about it, but she’s harmless.”

Casual acquaintances among the elders of the family were much taken by Tōru, but they were courteously and skillfully turned away when they sought to enter his life. They were inclined to lament that a man once so keen and intelligent as Honda should have fallen so hopelessly into senile delusions. They had long memories, remembering that windfall of more than twenty years before. Envy was at work.

A day in Tōru’s life.

There was no longer a need to look at the sea and await ships.

There was no need to attend classes either, but Tōru did so to inspire confidence. He went by automobile, despite the fact that the university was a ten-minute walk away.

The habit of rising early had not left him. Judging from the light through the curtains that a quiet summer rain was falling, he would go over the ordering of the world he controlled. Were the evil and the arrogance going like clockwork? Was no one yet aware of the fact that the world was wholly under the control of evil? Was order being preserved, everything proceeding after the laws, with not the smallest spot of love to be detected anywhere? Were people happy under his hegemony? Had transparent evil, in form a poem, been spread over their heads? Had “the human” been carefully wiped away? Had careful arrangements been made for every sign of warmth to be ridiculed? Was spirit quite dead?

Tōru was confident that if he but laid a beautiful white hand upon it, the world would succumb to a beautiful illness. And it was natural too that he should expect windfall to follow unanticipated windfall. For reasons that he did not know, an impoverished signalman had been chosen as the foster son of a rich old man, and an old man with one foot in the grave. One of these days a king would come from some country or other and ask to adopt him.

Even in the winter he would run to the shower room he had had installed next to his bedroom and have a cold shower. It was the best thing for waking a person up.

The cold water would liven his pulse, lash at his chest with its transparent whip, thousands of silver needles would stab at his skin. He would take it against his back for a time and turn to face it again. His heart had still not quite made friends with it. It was as if a sheet of iron were pushing at his chest, as if his naked flesh were encased in a tight suit of armor. He twisted and turned, like a corpse dangling from a rope of water. Finally his skin had awakened. Young skin stood there regally, turning off the drops of water. At that moment Tōru raised his left arm and looked down at the three moles like three shining black pebbles in a cascade. They were the sign of the elite, visible to no one, hidden under a folded wing.

He dried himself. He breathed deeply. His body was flushed.

It was the duty of the maid Tsuné to bring his breakfast the moment he called for it. Tsuné was a girl he had picked up in a Kanda coffeehouse. She obeyed all his orders.

It was only two years since he had first known a woman, but he had quickly learned the rules for making a woman serve a man who did not love her. And he knew how to spot instantly a woman who would do what he told her. He had dismissed all the maids likely to follow Honda’s wishes and hired women whom he had discovered and slept with, and given them the title “maid,” using the English word. Tsuné was the stupidest one among them, and the one with the largest breasts.

When breakfast was on the table, he poked at a breast by way of good morning.

“Nice and firm.”

“Yes, in very good shape.” Tsuné answered respectfully if expressionlessly. The heavy, dark flesh itself was respectful. Particularly deferential was the navel, deep as a well. The beautiful legs were somehow incompatible with the rest of Tsuné. She was aware of that fact. Tōru had seen how, as she brought coffee past on the uneven floor of the coffeehouse, she had brushed her calf against the lower branches of the starving rubber plant, like a cat rubbing against a bush.

Tōru thought of something. Going over to the window, he looked down into the garden, the chest of his bathrobe open to the morning breeze. Even now Honda scrupulously respected the hour for his morning walk, just after he was out of bed.

Tottering along on his stick in the stripes of November sunlight, Honda smiled and managed a good morning Tōru could barely hear.

Tōru smiled and waved. “I’ll be damned. The old man’s still alive.” That was his good morning.

Still smiling, Honda skirted a dangerous steppingstone. He did not know what would come flying down upon him if he were so incautious as to say more. He had only to endure this moment of humiliation. Tōru would be out of the house at least until evening.

“Old people smell bad. Go away.” Honda’s offense had been to come too near.

Honda’s cheek twitched with anger, but he had no recourse. If Tōru had shouted at him, he could and would have shouted back. But Tōru had spoken softly and coolly, gazing at Honda with his clean, beautiful eyes, a smile on his pale face.

Tōru’s dislike seemed to have grown through the four years they had been together. He disliked everything, the ugly, impotent flesh, the useless chatter that covered the impotence, the tiresome repetitiveness, five and six times over, the automatism that became fretful at the repetitiveness itself, the self-importance and the cowardice, the miserliness and the self-indulgence, the pusillanimity in the constant fear of death, the complete permissiveness, the wrinkled hands, the gait like a measuring worm, the mixture of arrogance and obsequiousness on the face. And Japan was teeming with old people.

Back at the breakfast table he kept Tsuné on duty to pour his coffee. He had her put in sugar. He complained about the toast.

It was a sort of superstition that the success of a day depended upon a smooth beginning. The morning must be an unflawed crystal. He had been able to endure the boredom of life at the signal station because observation did not damage self-respect.

Once Tsuné said: “The manager of the coffee shop used to call me Asparagus. Because I am long and white, he said.”

Tōru replied by pressing his lighted cigarette against the back of her hand. Stupid though she was, Tsuné thereafter minded her words. Especially when she served him at breakfast. The four “maids” took turns on duty. Three of them looked after Tōru, Honda, and Kinué, and the fourth was off duty. The one who served Tōru his breakfast was the one he received in his bed at night. When he had finished with her she was dismissed. No one was permitted to spend the night with him. They thus enjoyed his favors once every four days, and were allowed to leave the house once a week. Honda secretly admired the tightness of the control and the want of dissension. The maids followed Tōru’s orders as if to do so were in the nature of things.

He had taught them all to call Honda “the old master,” and otherwise trained them impeccably. Occasional callers would say that nowhere else these days did they see such beautiful and well-trained maids. Tōru left Honda wanting for nothing even while humiliating him.

Having made himself ready for school, Tōru always looked in at the garden cottage. Carefully made up, wearing a negligee, Kinué always received him from the chaise longue on the veranda. Her newest coquetry was illness.

Tōru would sit on the veranda and face the ugly woman with the warmest, most sincere gentleness.

“Good morning. And how are you feeling this morning?”

“Not too bad, thank you. I doubt if there is anything more beautiful in this world than the moment when a beautiful woman with only the strength to make herself up, all weak on her couch, receives a caller and manages a feeble ‘Not too bad, thank you.’ The beauty of it all waves like a heavy flower, and it is there on her eyelids as she closes her eyes. Isn’t it? I think of it as the one thing I can do for all your kindness. But I’m very grateful. You’re the one kind man in the world who gives me everything and asks nothing in return. And now that I’m here I can see you every day and don’t have to go out. If only your father weren’t here.”

“Don’t worry about him. He’ll give up and die one of these days. The September business has been taken care of and everything is going fine. I think next year maybe I can buy you a diamond ring.”

“How nice! That’s what will keep me alive, the thought of it. But today I’ll have to make do with flowers. The white chrysanthemum in the garden is my flower for today. Will you pick it for me? How nice. No, not that one. The one in the pot. That’s it. The big white one with the petals all drooping like threads.”

Heedlessly, Tōru broke off the white chrysanthemum so carefully tended by Honda. Like an ailing beauty, Kinué turned it languorously in her fingers. Then, with an all-too-fleeting smile on her lips, she put it in her hair.

“Be off with you. You’ll be late for school. Think of me between classes.” And she waved him good-bye.

Tōru went to the garage. He started up the Mustang sports car he had had Honda buy him that spring upon his entry into the university. If the absent, romantic engine of a ship could cut through waves so cleanly, kick up such a wake, then why could not the six delicately alert cylinders of the Mustang scatter the stupid crowds, cut through the masses of flesh, scatter splashes of red as the other scattered splashes of white?

But it was held in quiet control. It was coaxed and wheedled into a gentle pretense of docility. People admired it as they admire a sharp, shining blade. It forced a smile from its beautiful hood, paint all ashine, to assure them that it was not dangerous.

Capable of a hundred and twenty-five miles per hour, it debased itself by keeping to the twenty-five-mile speed limit as it made its way through the Hongō morning crowds.

The September third incident.

It began with a little spat Tōru and Honda had in the morning.

Through the summer Tōru had been happily rid of Honda, who had taken refuge from the heat at Hakoné. Reluctant to rebuild after his Gotemba villa burned down, Honda had left the land as it was and, always sensitive to the heat, spent his summers at a Hakoné inn. Tōru preferred to stay in Tokyo and drive here and there, to the mountains and the sea, with friends. Honda returned to Tokyo on the evening of September second. He saw Tōru for the first time in some weeks. There was clear anger in the eyes that greeted him from the sun-blackened face. Honda was frightened.

Where was the crape myrtle, he asked in surprise as he went out into the garden on the morning of the third. The old crape myrtle by the garden cottage had been cut at the roots.

Kinué, who had been in the main house, had moved to the cottage early in July. It had been from fear of Tōru after the poker incident that Honda had first taken her in.

Tōru came out. He had the poker in his left hand. His room was a remodeled parlor. It had the only fireplace in the house. Even in summer there was a poker on the nail beside it.

Tōru of course knew that the mere sight of it would make Honda cower like a whipped dog.

“What are you doing with that thing? This time I’ll call the police. Last time I kept quiet because I didn’t want publicity, but it won’t be so easy for you this time.” Honda’s shoulders were quivering, and it had taken all his courage to speak.

“You have a stick, don’t you? Defend yourself with that.”

Honda had been looking forward to the crape myrtle in bloom, its blossoms shining against a trunk smooth like the white skin of a leper. But there was none. The garden had been made over, he knew, in the Alaya, the Storehouse, into a different garden. Gardens too must change. But in the instant that he so felt, uncontrollable anger came from another source. He cried out, and even as he cried out he was afraid.

The summer rains had ended and the heat had come after Kinué had moved to the cottage. The crape myrtle was in bloom. She disliked it, she said. It gave her a headache. She started saying that Honda had planted it there to drive her mad; and so Tōru cut it down after Honda’s departure for Hakoné. It was as simple as that.

Kinué herself was out of sight, far back in the dusky recesses of the cottage. Tōru offered Honda no explanation. There would be no advantage in it.

“I suppose you cut it down?” said Honda, more softly.

“That I did.” Tōru’s answer was cheerful.

“Why?”

“It was old and useless.” Tōru smiled a beautiful smile.

At such times Tōru would lower a thick glass door before his eyes. Glass that came down from the sky. Glass made from exactly the same material as the limpid morning sky. Honda knew that no shout, no word would reach Tōru’s ears. Tōru would only see false molars. Honda already had inorganic teeth. He was already beginning to die.

“I see. It makes no difference.”

All through the day Honda sat still in his room. He barely touched the food that the “maid” brought. He knew what she would report to Tōru.

“The old man’s being awful sulky.”

Perhaps the sufferings of the old man did in fact come to nothing more than sulkiness. Honda could see in them foolishness beyond defending. It had all been his own doing and not Tōru’s. There was no need for surprise at the change in Tōru. Honda had seen at the first glance the “evil” in the boy.

But at the moment he wanted to measure the depth of the wound inflicted on his self-respect by what he had asked for.

Honda disliked air-conditioning and was at an age when he feared stairs. He had a large twelve-mat room on the ground floor, looking out over the garden to the cottage. Built in the medieval shoin style, it was the oldest and gloomiest room in the house. Honda ranged four linen cushions in a row. He lay down and then sat up on his heels. With all the sliding doors pulled shut, he let the heat accumulate. Sometimes he would crawl to the table for a drink of water. It was as warm as in full sunlight.

Time went past along the indefinable line between waking and sleeping, like a nap at the ultimate end of anger and sadness. Even the pain in his hips would have been a distraction, but today there was none. He was only exhausted.

An unfathomable disaster seemed to be coming down on him, only made worse by the fact that it had precise, delicate gradations, and, like a subtly compounded potion, was having the predicted effect. Honda’s old age should have been free of vanity, ambition, honor, prestige, reason, and above all emotion. But it wanted cheer. Although he should have forgotten all feeling long ago, black irritation and anger continued to smolder like a bed of embers. Stirred, they sent off a reeking smoke.

There was autumn in the sunlight on the paper doors, but isolation contained no signs of movement, of change into something else, like the change of the seasons. All was stagnation. He could see them clearly in himself, anger and sadness that should not have been there, like puddles after a rain. The feeling born this morning was like a bed of leaves ten years old, and new each instant. All the unpleasant memories poured in upon him, but he could not, like a youth, say that his life was unhappy.

When the light at the window told him that evening was near, sexual desire stirred in the crouching Honda. It was not a sudden onset of desire, but rather something tepid that had gestated through hours of sadness and anger and coiled round his brain like a red worm.

The driver he had used over the years had retired, and his successor had been guilty of certain indiscretions. And so Honda had sold his automobile and now used rented cars. At ten he called a maid on the interphone and asked her to order a car. He took out a black summer suit and a gray sports shirt.

Tōru was out. The maids looked with curiosity upon the nocturnal departure of the eighty-year-old Honda.

When the car turned into the Meiji Gardens, Honda’s desire had become something like a faint attack of nausea. Here he was again, after twenty years.

But it was not sexual desire that had burned in him all through the ride.

His hands on his stick, more erect than usual, he had been muttering to himself: “I only have to endure it six months more. Just six months more. If he’s the real thing.”

That “if” made him tremble. If Tōru were to die in the six months before his twenty-first birthday, everything could be forgiven. Only the awareness of that birthday had made it possible for Honda to endure the arrogance. And if Tōru was counterfeit?

The thought of Tōru’s death had been a great comfort. In his humiliation he had concentrated upon Tōru’s death, in his heart already killed him. His heart was quiet, happiness welled up, his nose twitched with tolerance and pity when he saw death, like the sun through isinglass, beyond the violence and cruelty. He could be drunk on the open cruelty of what is called charity. Perhaps that was what he had found in the light upon the vast, empty Indian plain.

He had not yet detected in himself symptoms of a fatal illness. There was nothing to be alarmed about in his blood pressure or his heart. He was confident that if he lasted another half year he would outlive Tōru, perhaps by only a few days. What quiet, secure tears he would be able to shed! Before the foolish world, he would play the part of the tragic father deprived of the son he had come upon so late in life. He could not deny that there was pleasure in looking forward to Tōru’s death, in looking ahead to it with the quiet love, oozing sweet poison, of one who knows everything. Tōru’s violence, beguiling and lovable, seen through the time ahead as through a Mayfly’s wing. People do not love pets that will outlive them. A short life is a condition for love.

And perhaps Tōru was fretting at a prospect like a strange, unheard-of ship suddenly appearing on a horizon which he had been scanning for days. Perhaps a foretaste of death was moving him, irritating him. The possibility brought unbounded gentleness over Honda. He felt that he could love not only Tōru but the whole human race. He knew the nature of human love.

But if Tōru was counterfeit? If he was to live on and on, and Honda, unable to keep up with him, to waste away?

The roots of the strangling desire within him were in the uncertainty. If he was to die first, then he could not refuse the basest of desires. He might all along have been destined to die in humiliation and miscalculation. The miscalculation about Tōru may itself have been the trap laid by Honda’s destiny. If a person like Honda had a destiny.

The fact that Tōru’s awareness was too much like his own had long been a seed of disquiet. Perhaps Tōru had read everything. Perhaps Tōru knew that he would live a long life, and, reading the determined malice in the practical education given him by an old man confident of his early death, had plotted his revenge.

Perhaps the eighty-year-old and the twenty-year-old were even now engaged in close combat over life and death.

Night in the Meiji Gardens, for the first time in twenty years. The car had turned left from the Gondawara entrance and was on the circular drive.

“Keep going, keep going.” Each time Honda gave the order he added a cough, like a bothersome accessory.

Egg-colored shirts appeared and disappeared among the night trees. For the first time in a very long while, Honda felt that very special throb in his chest. Old desire still lay piled under the trees like last year’s leaves.

“Go on, go on.”

The car turned right behind the art gallery, where the groves were thickest. There were two or three couples. The lighting was as inadequate as ever. Suddenly there was a glaring cluster of lights to the left. In the middle of the park the entrance to the expressway gaped with a multitude of lights, like a deserted amusement park.

To the right would be the grove on the left side of the art gallery. The night trees cut off the dome, and branches poured out over the sidewalk, a tangle of firs, plantains, pines. Even from the moving car he could hear the insects in the clump of agaves. As if it had been yesterday, he remembered the ferocity of the mosquitoes in the thickets and the sound of slapping against naked skin.

He dismissed the car at the parking lot by the art gallery. The driver glanced at him from under a narrow forehead. It was the sort of glance that can sometimes work collapse. You may go, Honda said again, more strongly. Pushing his stick out on the sidewalk ahead of him, he climbed from the car.

The parking lot was closed at night. A sign said that access was forbidden. A barricade blocked off the entrance. There was no light in the attendant’s shelter, and no sign of life.

Looking after the car, Honda walked down the sidewalk past the agaves. They flung out harsh leaves, a pale green in the darkness, quiet, like a clump of malice. There were few passers-by, only a man and woman on the sidewalk opposite.

Having come as far as the façade of the art gallery, Honda stopped and looked at the great empty scheme in which he found himself. The dome and the two wings rose powerfully into the moonless night. The rectangular pond and the white gravel of the terrace, long streaks of light from the lamps cutting off the dim white of the gravel like the line of the tide. To the left loomed the round wall of the Olympic Stadium, its now-dark floodlights high against the sky. Far below, lamps, like a mist, touched the outermost branches of the trees.

In the symmetrical plaza, which contained no shadow of desire, Honda felt as if he were at the center of the Womb Mandala.

The Womb Mandala, one of the two elemental worlds, is paired with the Diamond Mandala. Its symbol is the lotus, and its Buddhas manifest the virtue of charity.

The womb has also the meaning of inclusiveness. Just as the womb of the beggar woman held the embryo of the Lord of Light, so the muddied heart of the ordinary man holds the wisdom and mercy of all Buddhas.

The perfect symmetry of the shining mandala holds at its center the Court of the Eight-Petaled Lotus, abode of the Lord of Great Light. Twelve courts stretch out in the four directions, and the abodes of the several Buddhas are fixed with delicate and detailed symmetry.

If the dome of the art gallery, high in the moonless night, was taken for the central court, then the avenue where Honda stood, separated from it by the pond, was perhaps the abode of the Peacock Lord, to the west of the Court of Emptiness.

With the Buddhas disposed geometrically on the golden mandala transferred to the dark groves of the symmetrical plaza, the expanse of gravel and the emptiness of the sidewalk were suddenly filled, merciful faces were everywhere, dizzying in the full light of day. The more than two hundred holy faces, and more than two hundred of the Diamond Mandala as well, were shining in the groves, and the ground was ablaze with light.

The vision faded as he walked off. The night was filled with the singing of insects, cicada voices stitched the shadows like needles.

The familiar path was still there through the groves, to the right of the art gallery. He remembered with longing that the smell of the grass and of the night trees had been an indispensable part of desire.

He felt the return of a sharp sense of pleasure, as if he were crossing a tideland, at his feet the workings of fish and shellfish and starfish and crustaceans and seahorses, as at night on a coral reef, the water lapping warm against the soles of his feet, in danger of being cut at each step by the pointed rocks. Pleasure dashed ahead, the body was unable to follow. Signs, indications, were everywhere. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he saw white shirts scattered through the groves, like the aftermath of a slaughter.

There was a previous caller in the shadows where Honda hid himself. Honda could tell from the dark shirt if from nothing else that it was a veteran peeper. The man was so short, coming only to Honda’s shoulders, that Honda at first took him for a boy. When he made out the grizzled head, the moist breathing so near at hand seemed heavy and stupid.

Presently the man’s eyes left their object and were trained on Honda’s profile. Honda looked studiously away, but he had felt that the short gray hair bristling from the temples was somehow related to a disconcerting memory. He struggled to bring it out. The usual cough rose to his throat, though he fought to keep it back.

A certain confidence came into the man’s breathing. Raising himself to his full height, he whispered in Honda’s ear.

“So we meet again. You still come, do you? You haven’t forgotten?”

Honda turned and looked into the rodent eyes. A memory came back from twenty-two years before. It was the man who had stopped him in front of the Ginza P.X.

And he remembered with fear how coldly he had treated the man, asserting mistaken identity.

“You needn’t worry. Here is here and there is there. Let’s let bygones be bygones.” This way of forestalling Honda’s thoughts added to the uneasiness. “But you’ll have to stop that coughing.” He turned to look busily off beyond the tree trunks.

Breathing more easily as the man moved some distance away, Honda looked into the grasses beyond the tree. The throbbing had departed, however. It had been replaced by uneasiness and, again, anger and sadness. Self-forgetfulness withdrew as he pursued it. Though the spot was well suited for viewing the man and woman on the grass, there was a false quality about them, as if they knew they were being watched and were acting parts. There was none of the joy in seeing, there was neither the sweet pressure from the recesses of scrutiny nor drunkenness of clarity itself.

Though they were only a yard or two away, the light was too dim for him to make out details or the expressions on the faces. There seemed to be no screen between him and them, and he could approach no nearer. He hoped that if he went on looking the old throb would return. One hand against the trunk of the tree, one hand on his stick, he looked down at the couple.

Although the little man showed no disposition to interfere with his sport, Honda went on remembering things he should not have remembered. Since his own stick was uncurved, he could not hope to imitate the virtuosity of the old man who used his stick to lift skirts. The man had been old then, and no doubt he was dead by now. No doubt rather large numbers of the old men in the “audience” had died in the course of these twenty years. And not a few among the young “performers” too would have married and gone away, or died in traffic accidents or from juvenile cancer or high blood pressure or heart and kidney ailments. Because movements and transfers are far brisker among the performers than in the audience, some of them would be in apartment clusters in bedroom towns an hour or so by private railway from Tokyo, ignoring wives and children and abandoning themselves to the joys of television. And the day was at hand when some of them would join the audience.

Something soft brushed his right hand. A large snail was making its way down the tree.

He pulled his hand gently away. The flesh and the shell in succession, like the celluloid of the soap dish after the sticky suds, left revulsion. From just such a tactile impression the world could melt away, like a corpse in a tank of sulfuric acid.

Honda looked down again at the man and woman. There was almost a pleading in his eyes. Make me drunk, the earliest moment possible. Young people of the world, in ignorance and silence, let me get drunk to my heart’s content on the forms of your passion, which have no room for the old.

Sprawled out in the singing of insects, the woman raised herself and put her arms around the man’s neck. The man, who was wearing a black beret, had his hand deep under her skirt. Her fingertips moved energetically over the wrinkles of his shirt. She was twisted against his chest, like a spiral stairway. Panting, she raised her head and kissed him, as if she were gulping down medicine.

As Honda gazed, so intently that his eyes ached, he felt a surge of desire, like the first rays of the morning sun, from depths until then empty.

The man reached into his hip pocket. The thought that in the very middle of desire he feared being robbed brought a sudden chilling of Honda’s own desire. The next instant he was doubting his eyes.

The object the man took from his pocket was a spring knife. His forefinger touched it and there was a sound as of a rasping snake’s tongue. The blade gleamed in the dark. Honda could not be sure where the woman had been stabbed, but there was a scream. The man sprang up and looked around. The beret had slipped back. For the first time Honda saw the hair and face. The hair was a pure white, and the emaciated face was that of a sixty-year-old, wrinkled to every corner.

The man brushed past Honda, now in a state of shock, and ran off with a speed that belied his years.

“Let’s get out of here,” muttered the rat-like little man in Honda’s ear. “There’s going to be hell to pay.”

“I couldn’t run if I wanted to,” said Honda weakly.

“Too bad. They’ll suspect you if you don’t get away.” The man bit at his fingernail. “Maybe you should stay and be a witness.”

There was a whistle, a rush of footsteps, and a stir of people getting to their feet. The beam of a flashlight came from surprisingly near in the shrubbery. Policemen were standing around the woman, discussing the problem in loud voices.

“Where’d he get her?”

“In the thigh.”

“It’s not much of a cut.”

“What sort of man was he? Tell us what sort of man he was.”

The policeman who had been crouching beside the woman with his flashlight in her face stood up.

“An old man, she says. He won’t have gone very far.”

Trembling, Honda pressed his face against the tree. His eyes were closed. The bark was damp. It was as if a snail were crawling over his face.

He opened his eyes narrowly. He could feel the beam from the flashlight. Someone shoved at him, from so low that it had to be the little man. Honda stumbled from the shelter of the big tree. His face almost fell against one of the policemen. The policeman grabbed his wrist.

A reporter for a weekly magazine specializing in scandal happened to be at the police station. He was delighted at news of the stabbing in the Meiji Gardens.

The woman, her leg heavily bandaged, was asked to identify Honda. It took three hours for Honda’s innocence to be established.

“I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t this old gentleman,” said the woman. “I met the other one a couple of hours ago on a streetcar. He was an old man, but he dressed very young, and he was a good talker, a good mixer, you might say. I’d never have dreamed he could do such a thing. That’s right. I don’t know the first thing about him, his name or where he lives or what he does or anything.”

Before the woman confronted him, Honda was firmly tied up and his identity was established and he was forced to reveal the circumstances that had brought a person of his standing to the park at such an hour. It was a nightmare, that precisely the foolish story he had heard upward of twenty years ago from his old legal friend should now be his own experience. They all seemed to have the lucidity of a nightmare, quite divorced from reality; the shabby police station, the dirty walls of the interrogation room, the strangely bright light, the bald head of the detective.

He was allowed to go home at three in the morning. A maid got up and suspiciously opened the gate. He went to his room. He was troubled by bad dreams.

He came down with a cold the next day and was a week getting over it.

The morning he began to feel a little better, Tōru paid an unexpected visit. Smiling, he put a weekly magazine by Honda’s pillow.

It carried this headline: “Troubles of His Excellency Mr. Judge-Voyeur, Falsely Accused of Stabbing.”

Honda took up his glasses. There was an unpleasant throbbing in his chest. The article was astonishingly accurate, even carrying Honda’s real name. This was the climactic sentence: “The appearance of an eighty-year-old voyeur would seem to indicate that the control of Japan by the aged extends even to the world of deviates.”

The statement that his proclivities were not new but that for some twenty years he had had numbers of acquaintances among the voyeurs made Honda sure who the informant had been. The police themselves must have introduced the reporter to the little man. A suit for libel would only add to the embarrassment.

It was a vulgar incident that deserved to be laughed away; but Honda, who would have hoped that he no longer had prestige and honor to lose, saw in the loss of them that they were in fact still present.

It seemed certain that for rather a long time people would associate his name not with his spiritual and intellectual endowments but with the scandal. People were not quick to forget scandals. It was not moral indignation that made them remember. For encapsulating a person a scandal was the simplest and most efficient container.

The stubbornness of the cold told him that he was crumbling physically. To have been a suspect was an experience which, in the complete absence of intellectual dignity, seemed to bring a collapse of flesh and bones. Knowledge, learning, thought, could do nothing for it. What good would it have done to confront the detective with the fine details of the concepts he had acquired in India?

Henceforth Honda would take out his calling card:

“Shigekuni Honda”

“Attorney-at-Law”

People would insert a line in the cramped space between the other two:

Shigekuni Honda

Eighty-Year-Old Voyeur

Attorney-at-Law

And so Honda’s career would be compressed into a single line.

“Former judge, eighty-year-old voyeur.”

And so the invisible edifice which Honda’s awareness had built through his long life had collapsed in an instant, and a single line was inscribed on the foundation. It was as concise as a white-hot blade. And it was true.

After the September incident Tōru moved coolly to have things his way.

He took as his lawyer an old lawyer with whom Honda had feuded, and consulted with him upon the possibility of having Honda declared incompetent. An examination would be required to establish mental debility, but the lawyer seemed confident of the results.

And as a matter of fact the change in Honda was clear. After the incident he stopped going out and he seemed afraid of everything. It should be easy enough to establish the symptoms of senile delusions. Tōru had only to appear before a court of domestic relations and have Honda declared incompetent, and the lawyer would be appointed his guardian.

The lawyer consulted a psychiatrist with whom he was on good terms. Behind Honda’s much-publicized misconduct the psychiatrist drew a picture of senile unease. Two ailments emerged, “vicarious sexual desire,” an obsession like a fire reflected in a mirror, not to be made light of, and incontinence resulting from senility. Everything else could be left to the legal system, said the lawyer. He added that it would be good if Honda were to begin spending his money unwisely, in such a way as to give rise to fears that the estate might be endangered, but unfortunately there were no such tendencies. Tōru was in any case worried less about money than about power.

27

LATE IN NOVEMBER a splendid engraved invitation, in English, came to Tōru from Keiko.

There was a letter with it.

Dear Tōru,

I have been very bad about keeping in touch.

Everyone seems to have made arrangements for Christmas Eve, and so I am having a premature Christmas party on the twentieth. I have until now always invited your father, but I have had to conclude that because of his advanced years an invitation this year would be a disservice, and I am inviting you instead. I think we should keep the matter secret from him. That is why I have addressed the invitation to you.

I fear that to say so will be to reveal too much of myself, but the truth is that since the September affair I have found it difficult to invite your father, out of deference to the other guests. I know it will seem to you that I am a bad friend, but in our world it is the final stroke when the private becomes public. I must be very careful.

My real reason for inviting you is that through you I want to continue relations with the Honda family. I will be delighted therefore if you can accept this invitation.

And so do please honor me by coming alone. Among the other guests will be several ambassadors and their wives and daughters, the Foreign Minister and his wife, the president of the Federation of Economic Organizations and his wife, and numbers of other pretty ladies as well. You will see from the invitation that it is to be black tie. It would be a great help if you could let me know soon whether or not you will be able to attend.

Yours sincerely,

Keiko Hisamatsu

One could if one chose see the letter as a rude and haughty one, but Tōru smiled at the thought of Keiko’s confusion after the September incident. He could read between the lines. Keiko, so proud of her immorality, retreated trembling behind bolted gates in the face of scandal.

But something in the letter aroused Tōru’s delicate guard. That Keiko, so staunch an ally of his father, should be inviting him—might it not be to make sport of him? Might her intention in introducing him to all those pretentious guests as the son of Shigekuni Honda not be to excite them and so to embarrass not Honda but Tōru himself? That was it. There could be little doubt.

Tōru’s combative instincts were aroused. He would go to the party as the son of the notorious Honda. No one of course would touch upon the matter. But he would shine as a son unapologetic for a notorious father.

The sensitive spirit would move silently among them, a faint, beautiful, somehow sad smile on its lips, the skeletons of family scandal (such beastly little affairs), no doing of its own, ranged beside it. Tōru could see all the pale poetry. The contempt and interference of the old would push the girls irresistibly in Tōru’s direction. Keiko’s calculations would prove faulty.

Not owning a tuxedo, Tōru had to put in a quick order for one. He slipped into it when, on the nineteenth, it was delivered, and went over to show Kinué.

“You look very good in it. Lovely. I know how much you wanted to take me dancing in it. What a pity that I should always be so ill. What a real pity. And that’s why you’ve come to show me. How very kind of you. That’s why I like you.”

It was obesity that had rendered Kinué immobile. She was in the best of health and she got no exercise, and in these six months she had fattened beyond recognition. The heaviness and immobility gave more immediacy to her illnesses. She was constantly taking liver pills, and she would gaze from the chaise longue through the trees at the blue sky, so soon to be lost. Her perpetual refrain was that she was not long for this world, and she was a great trial for the maids, whom Tōru had told that they were in no circumstances to laugh.

What Tōru admired was the cunning with which, offered a set of conditions, she would outflank them and raise defenses which would give her the advantage and reinforce her beauty and perhaps add a touch of the tragic to it. She had immediately sensed that he did not mean to take her out. So she had put her illness to the uses of the situation. Tōru thought he had things to learn from this so stubbornly guarded pride. She had become his teacher.

“Turn around. Oh, it’s very nicely cut. The shoulder line is beautiful. Everything looks good on you. Just like me. Well, you must forget all about me tomorrow evening and enjoy yourself. But when you’re enjoying yourself most, think for just a moment of the sick girl you’ve left at home. But just a moment. You need a flower in your lapel. If only I were strong enough I’d go and pick it for you myself. Maid, please. The winter rose, the red one, if you will.”

She had the maid pick a little crimson rosebud just coming into bloom, and herself put it in his buttonhole.

“There.” With the most languorous, evanescent of fingers, she pushed the stem through. She tapped the glossy silk of the lapel. “Go out into the garden and let me have another look at you.”

The corpulent figure seemed to be breathing its last.

At the appointed time, seven in the evening, Tōru pulled up in his Mustang, as directed by the map, at a wide, white-graveled drive in Azabu. There were no other cars yet.

Tōru was astonished at how old-fashioned Keiko’s mansion was. The lamps under the trees set off a circular Regency front. There was something rather ghostly about the place, the effect intensified by red ivy blackened by the night.

Tōru was ushered in by a white-gloved butler past the circular domed hallway to a parlor in the rich Momoyama style, and there seen to a Louis XV chair. He was rather ashamed to find himself the first guest. The house was brilliantly lighted but still. There was a large Christmas tree in one corner. It seemed out of place. Left by himself when the butler had taken his order for a drink, he leaned against the old-fashioned paned window and looked out through the trees at the lights of the city and a sky turned purplish by neon.

A door opened and Keiko came in.

The brilliant formal dress of the septuagenarian before him quite robbed him of speech. Sleeves trailing to the hem of the skirt, her evening dress was beaded over its whole surface. The shifting colors and patterns of the beads from the neck down over the skirt were such as to dazzle the eye. At the bosom, the wings of a peacock in green on a gold ground, waves of purple over the sleeves, a continuous wine-colored pattern down over the waist, purple waves and gold clouds on the skirt, the several boundaries marked in gold. The white of the organdy ground was set off by a threefold Western pattern in silver net. From the skirt emerged the toe of a purple satin slipper, and at the always proud neck was an emerald Georgette stole, draped down over the shoulders and reaching to the floor. Below her hair, cut shorter and closer than usual, hung gold earrings. Her face had the frozen look of one that had more than once been ministered to by plastic surgeons, but the parts that still remained under her control seemed to assert themselves all the more haughtily. The awesome eyes, the grand nose. The lips, like red-black bits of apple beginning to rot, tortured into a yet more shining red.

“I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said brightly. The face with its sculptured smile came toward him.

“My but you’re looking grand.”

“Thank you.” Briefly and abstractedly, in the Western fashion, she showed him her well-shaped nostrils.

The aperitifs came.

“Perhaps we should turn down the lights.”

The butler turned off the chandelier lights. In the flickering of the Christmas tree, Keiko’s eyes flickered, as did the beads on her dress. Tōru was beginning to feel uneasy.

“The others are late. Or is it that I am too early?”

“The others? You’re my only guest this evening.”

“So you were lying about the others?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I changed my plans. I thought I would have my Christmas alone with you.”

“I think I’ll ask to be excused, then.”

“Why?” Seated quietly, Keiko made no motion toward stopping him.

“Some sort of plot. Or a trap. Something in any case you’ve talked over with Father. I’m tired of being made fun of.” He had disliked this old woman from their first meeting.

Keiko was motionless. “If it were something I’d talked over with Mr. Honda, I wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble. I invited you because I wanted to have a good talk with you, all by ourselves. It is true that I lied to you, because I knew you wouldn’t come if you knew you were to be my only guest. But a Christmas dinner with only two people is still a Christmas dinner. Here we are both of us in party dress.”

“I suppose you want to give me a good lecturing.” Tōru was angry at himself for having let her make her excuses.

“Nothing of the sort. I just want to talk with you quietly about some things Mr. Honda would throttle me for if he were to find out. They are secrets that only Mr. Honda and I know. If you don’t want to listen, well, that is that.”

“Secrets?”

“Just sit down there quietly, if you will.” An elegantly sardonic smile on her lips, she pointed to the somewhat worn Watteau garden party on the chair Tōru had just vacated.

The butler announced dinner. Opening doors Tōru had taken to be a wall, he ushered them into the next room, where the table was set with red candles. Keiko’s dress jingled.

Not one to encourage conversation, Tōru ate in silence. The thought that the skill with which he managed his knife and fork was the result of Honda’s assiduous tutelage enraged him all over again. Tutelage to make people think him a long-time adept of a cravenness he had not known until he met Honda and Keiko.

Keiko’s fingers at knife and fork, beyond the heavy baroque candlesticks, absently quiet and diligent, like an old woman at her knitting, were a young girl’s fingers brought into old age.

The chilled turkey was tasteless, like the dry skin of an old man. The chestnut stuffing and the cranberry jelly had for Tōru the sourly saccharine taste of hypocrisy.

“Do you know why you were so suddenly sought after to become heir to the house of Honda?”

“How should I?”

“Very easygoing of you. You haven’t wanted to know?”

Tōru did not answer. Putting down her knife and fork, Keiko pointed through the candle smoke at his tuxedo front.

“It’s all very simple. It’s because you have three moles on your left chest.”

Tōru was unable to hide his surprise. Keiko knew of those three moles, the root of his pride, which through all his life should have attracted the attention of no one but himself. An instant later he had brought himself under control. The surprise had come from the fact that, by chance, the symbol of his own pride had coincided with a symbol of something for someone else. Though the moles may have set the something in motion, that need not mean that he had been found out. But Tōru had underestimated the intuitions of the aged.

The surprise so clear on his face seemed to give Keiko greater confidence. The words poured forth.

“See? You can’t believe it. It was all too foolish, too nonsensical from the start. You have told yourself that you have managed everything coolly and realistically, but you swallowed the nonsensical premises whole. Who would be so foolish as to want to adopt a complete stranger on a single meeting just because he had taken a liking? What did you think when we first came with the proposal? We made all sorts of excuses to you and to your superiors, of course. But what did you really think? It puffed you up, I should imagine. People like to think they have their strong points. You thought that your childish dreams and our proposal matched admirably? That your strange childish confidence had been justified? That’s what you thought?”

Tōru was for the first time afraid of Keiko. He felt not the slightest constraint because of class, but there are persons endowed with a special nose for scenting out worth. They are the angel-killers.

The conversation was interrupted by dessert. Tōru had let the moment for an answer pass. He knew that he had underestimated his adversary.

“Do you think that your hopes and those of someone else coincide, that your hopes can be smoothly realized for you by someone else? People live for themselves and think only of themselves. You who more than most think only of yourself have gone too far and let yourself be blinded.

“You thought that history has its exceptions. There are none. You thought that the race has its exceptions. There are none.

“There is no special right to happiness and none to unhappiness. There is no tragedy and there is no genius. Your confidence and your dreams are groundless. If there is on this earth something exceptional, special beauty or special evil, nature finds it out and uproots it. We should all by now have learned the hard lesson, that there are no ‘elect.’

“You thought, didn’t you, that you were a genius beyond compensation. You thought of yourself, didn’t you, as a beautiful little cloud of evil floating over humanity.

“Mr. Honda saw it all the minute he saw your moles. He decided in that instant that he must have you with him, to save you from the danger. He thought that if he left you as you were, if he left you to your ‘fate,’ you would be killed by nature at twenty.

“He tried to save you by adopting you, by smashing to bits your ‘godlike’ pride, by drilling into you the world’s rules for culture and happiness, by making you over into a perfectly ordinary young man. You did not recognize that you had the same starting point as the rest of us. The sign of your refusal to recognize was those three moles. It was affection that made him adopt you without telling you why he wanted to save you. The affection, of course, of a man who knew too much of the world.”

Tōru was more and more uneasy. “Why do you say I will die at twenty?”

“I think probably the danger has passed. Let’s talk about it in the other room.”

A bright fire had been lighted in the fireplace. Below the mantel, a gold-clouded alcove in the Japanese style with a Kōtatsu hanging, two small golden doors opened to reveal the fireplace. Tōru and Keiko sat before the fire, a small table between them. Keiko repeated the long story of birth and rebirth she had had from Honda.

Tōru listened, gazing into the fire. He started at the faint sound of a collapsing log.

Clinging to a log with its smoke, the flame would twist and grow, and then show again in the darkness between log and log, its bed rich with a bright, still repose. Like a dwelling, the small floor dizzying in its reds and vermilions was deep in quiet, marked off by a rough frame of logs.

Sometimes the smoke bursting through the somber logs was like a grass fire far out on a night plain. There were great vistas in the fire, and the shadows moving in the depths of the fireplace were a miniature of the flames of political upheaval tracing shadows across the heavens.

As the flames died down on one log, an even expanse of quiet vermilion would show itself from under a delicate tortoiseshell bed of ashes, trembling like a heap of white feathers. The firm bind of logs would collapse at its foundations. Then, maintaining a precarious balance, it would burn up like a great rock in the air.

Everything was flowing, in motion. The quiet chain of smoke, so stable, was forever breaking up. The collapse of a log that had finished its work brought a sort of repose.

“Very interesting,” said Tōru, rather tartly, when he had heard the story to the end. “But where’s the proof?”

“Proof?” Keiko hesitated. “Is there proof for the truth?”

“When you say ‘truth’ it sounds false.”

“If you demand proof, I should imagine Mr. Honda has preserved Kiyoaki Matsugae’s diary all these years. You might ask to see it. He wrote only of dreams, and Mr. Honda says all of them have come true. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe nothing I’ve said has anything to do with you. You were born on March twentieth and Ying Chan died in the spring, and you have those three marks, and so it would seem that you are her reincarnation. But we have not been able to find out exactly when she died. Her twin sister said only that it was in the spring, but she seems unable to remember the exact day. Mr. Honda has investigated in any number of ways, but without success. If she was bitten by a snake and died later than March twenty-first, you go scot free. The spirit wanders around for at least a week. So your birthday has to be a week after she died.”

“Actually I don’t know my own birthday. My father was at sea and there was no one to take care of the details, and the date of registration was put down as the birthday. But I was born before March twentieth.”

“The earlier it was, the dimmer the possibility,” Keiko said coldly. “But maybe it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“It doesn’t matter?” Tōru showed signs of indignation.

Quite aside from whether or not he believed the terrible story he had heard, to be told that it did not matter seemed to him like a naked denial of his reasons for being. Keiko had the ability to make a person seem like an insect. It lay behind her unchanging gaiety.

In the light from the fire the multicolored evening dress was sending off deep, rich hues. It arched and coiled around her like a rainbow in the night.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe from the outset you were a fraud. In fact I myself am rather sure that you are a fraud.”

He glanced at her profile. She had spoken into the fire as if presenting a petition. There was no describing the splendor of that profile, set aglow by the fire. The fire in the eyes enhanced the proud high bridge of the nose. It sent everyone else into childish fretfulness. It dominated relentlessly.

Thoughts of murder came to Tōru. How could he upset this woman, leave her pleading for her life? Were he to throttle her, to shove her head into the flames, he was sure she would look back at him with a proudly burning face, a grand mane of fire swirling around her. Tōru’s self-respect was hurting, and he feared her next words, likely to bring blood. What he most feared was blood pouring from an open wound in his self-respect. Its hemophilia would not permit the flow to be stopped. And so he had until now used all emotions to draw a line between emotion and self-respect, and, avoiding the danger of love, armed himself with countless thorns.

Keiko seemed intent, quietly and ceremoniously, on saying what had to be said.

“We will know for certain that you were a fraud if you don’t die in the next six months. We will know that you are not the regrowth of the beautiful seed Mr. Honda was after, and that you are what an entomologist would call a simulator. I doubt myself that we have to wait a year. It does not seem to me that you are doomed to die in six months. There is nothing inevitable about you, not a thing a person would hate to lose. There is in you not a thing to make a person imagining your death feel that a shadow had come over the world.

“You’re a mean, cunning little country boy of the sort we see sprawled all over the place. You want to get your hands on your father’s money, and so you arrange to have him declared incompetent. You’re surprised, aren’t you? I know everything. And when you have money and power, what do you propose to seek next? Success? Your thoughts don’t go a step beyond those of any mediocre boy. The only way Mr. Honda’s training has gone wrong is that it has done nothing more than bring out your essential nature.

“There is nothing in the least special about you. I guarantee you a long life. You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightning with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself. All you have is a certain premature senility. Your life will be suited for coupon-clipping. Nothing more.

“You cannot kill Mr. Honda or me. Your sort of evil is a legal sort of evil. All puffed up by illusions born of abstract concepts, you strut about as the master of a destiny even though you have none of the qualifications. You think you have seen to the ends of the earth. But you have not once had an invitation beyond the horizon. You have nothing to do with light or enlightenment, there is no real spirit in flesh or in heart. At least Ying Chan’s spirit was in the shining beauty of her flesh. Nature has not had a glance for you, it has not had a glimmer of hostility toward you. The person Mr. Honda is looking for has to be one to inspire jealousy of nature at its own creation.

“You’re a clever boy, no more. If someone pays your expenses you swim through the entrance examinations and a good job is waiting for you at the other end. A model student for the Education Fund. Propaganda material for the do-gooders who say that if material wants are taken care of, all sorts of hidden treasures will emerge. Mr. Honda was too good to you, and gave you too much confidence. He prescribed the wrong dose, that is all. Give you the right dose and you’ll be back on the track. Make you the secretary to some vulgar politician and you’ll wake up. I’ll be happy to introduce you to one, at your convenience, any time.

“You will do well to remember what I have said. You have seen and think you have seen it all; but it is no more than the little circle in a thirty-power telescope. You would have been happier, I suppose, if we had let you go on thinking that was the whole world.”

“It was you who dragged me out of it.”

“And what made you come so happily was the thought that you were different.

“Kiyoaki Matsugae was caught by unpredictable love, Isao Iinuma by destiny, Ying Chan by the flesh. And you? By a baseless sense of being different, perhaps?

“If destiny is something that takes hold of a person from outside and drags him after, then the other three had destiny. And has anything caught you? Only we, Mr. Honda and I.” Letting the green and gold peacock on her bosom take the fire as it would, Keiko laughed. “We are two bored, cold, cynical old people. Can your pride really permit you to call us destiny? A nasty old man and woman? An old voyeur and an old lesbian?

“You may think you have taken stock of the world. The ones who come summoning a boy like you are the ones who have taken stock of the world. The one who drags out the conceited purveyor of awareness is the veteran practitioner of the same trade. No one else would have come knocking on your door, you may be sure. You would have gone through life without the knock, and the results would have been the same. Because you have had no destiny. The beautiful death was not for you. It was not for you to be like the other three. The drab, dreary heir, that is the role for you. I invited you tonight to let you learn all about it.”

Tōru’s hand was trembling, and his eye was on the poker beside the fire. It would have been easy to reach for it, pretending to stir the fire. He would arouse no curiosity, and then he had only to swing it. He could feel the weight of it in his hand, he could see the blood spurting over gold chair and gold doors. But he did not reach out. He was fearfully thirsty, but he did not ask for water. The anger that enflamed his cheeks seemed to him like the first passion he had known. It remained shut up within him.

28

REMARKABLY, Tōru came to Honda with a request. He wanted to borrow Kiyoaki’s diary.

Honda was reluctant to lend it, but even more reluctant not to.

He let Tōru have it for two or three days. They became a week. On the morning of the twenty-eighth, when he had resolved to have it back, he was startled by an outcry from the maids. Tōru, in his bedroom, had taken poison.

It being the end of the year, the family doctor was not available. Honda had to take the risk of publicity and call an ambulance. There was a wall of onlookers when the ambulance came shrieking up. They were eager for another scandal from a house that had already provided one.

Tōru remained in a coma and there were convulsions, but his life was not in danger. He felt severe pains in the eyes, however, when he regained consciousness. Impediments developed in both eyes, and he totally lost his sight. The poison had attacked the retina, which had deteriorated beyond hope of recovery.

The poison was industrial wood alcohol, stolen under cover of the year-end confusion from a factory that belonged to a relative of one of the maids. The maid, who followed Tōru unquestioningly, wept and insisted that she had not dreamed he would drink it.

The blind Tōru said almost nothing. After the turn of the year Honda asked him about the diary.

“I burned it just before I took the poison,” he answered briefly.

His answer when asked for an explanation was much to the point.

“Because I never dream.”

Honda asked for Keiko’s help any number of times while all this was taking place. There was something strange about her. It was as if she alone knew the motive for the attempted suicide.

“He has twice the pride of most boys. I should imagine he did it to prove he’s a genius.”

When pressed, she admitted that she had revealed everything at her Christmas party. She said she had done it out of friendship, but Honda replied that he wished to see no more of her. He thus announced the end of a beautiful friendship that had lasted more than twenty years.

The declaration of incompetence was revoked, and now it was the blind Tōru who needed a guardian. Honda drew up a notarized will and named the most reliable guardian he could think of.

Tōru dropped out of the university, remained shut up in the house, and spoke to no one except Kinué. The maids were dismissed, and Honda hired a woman who had had experience as a nurse. Tōru spent most of the day in Kinué’s cottage. All through the day Kinué’s soft voice could be heard through the doors. Tōru did not seem to weary of making reply.

His birthday passed on the twentieth of March. He showed no sign of dying. He learned to read Braille. When by himself he listened to records. He could recognize birds by their songs. One day, after a very long silence, he spoke to Honda. He asked that Honda let him marry Kinué. Though aware that her insanity was hereditary, Honda gave his permission immediately.

Decay advanced, the signs of the end appeared quietly. Like hairs tickling his neck when he came back from the barber shop, death, forgotten most of the time, would come tickling when remembered. It seemed strange to Honda that, though all of the preparations for receiving it had been made, death did not come.

Honda had been aware during the excitement of a certain heaviness in the region of his stomach, but he did not, as the old Honda might have been expected to, rush off to a doctor. He diagnosed the trouble as indigestion. He continued to have little appetite after the New Year came. It was not like him to pass it off as only a result of the troubles, nor was it like him to take emaciation as a result of mental anguish.

But it had come to seem that there was no distinguishing between pain of the spirit and pain of the flesh. What was the difference between humiliation and a swollen prostate? Between the pangs of sorrow and pneumonia? Senility was a proper ailment of both the spirit and the flesh, and the fact that senility was an incurable disease meant that existence was an incurable disease. It was a disease unrelated to existentialist theories, the flesh itself being the disease, latent death.

If the cause of decay was illness, then the fundamental cause of that, the flesh, was illness too. The essence of the flesh was decay. It had its spot in time to give evidence of destruction and decay.

Why did people first become aware of that fact only as old age came on? Why, when it buzzed faintly past the ear in the brief noontide of the flesh, did they note it only to forget it? Why did the healthy young athlete, in the shower after his exertions, watching the drops of water hit his shining flesh like hail, not see that the high tide of life itself was the cruelest of ills, a dark, amber-colored lump?

For Honda now, life was senescence, senescence was life. It was wrong that these two synonyms should forever be libeling each other. Only now, eighty-one years after he fell into this world, did Honda know the perverse essential at the heart of every pleasure.

Appearing now on this side and now on the other of human will, it sent up an opaque mist, the defense of the will against the cruel and terrible proposition that life and senescence are synonymous. History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity. It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.

We are fodder to stuff some craw. In his shallow way, Imanishi, who died in the fire, had been aware of it. For the gods, for destiny, for history, the only human endeavor imitating the two, it was wise to leave man unaware of the fact until he had grown old.

What fodder Honda had been! What unnutritious, tasteless, dusty fodder! Instinctively refusing to become palatable, he now at the end of it all wanted to stab the mouth of his devourer with the tasteless bones of his awareness; but he was certain to fail.

Tōru went blind in an attempt at suicide. His twenty-first birthday came and went. Honda had no further wish to look into possible traces left behind by the person, unknown, dead at twenty, who was the true reincarnation. If there had been such a person, very well. Honda no longer had the energy to look into that person’s life, nor would it have become him to make the effort. The movements of the heavenly bodies had left him aside. By a small miscalculation, they had led Honda and the reincarnation of Ying Chan into separate parts of the universe. Three reincarnations had occupied Honda’s life and, after drawing their paths of light across it (that too had been a most improbable accident), gone off in another burst of light to an unknown corner of the heavens. Perhaps somewhere, some time, Honda would meet the hundredth, the ten thousandth, the hundred millionth reincarnation.

There was no hurry.

Why hurry? He did not know even where his own rut was taking him. So concluded Honda, a man who had not been in a hurry to die. What he had seen at Benares was human indestructibility as the fundamental essence of the universe. The other world did not lie quivering beyond time, nor did it lie shining beyond space. If to die meant to return to the four elements, to dissolve into the corporate entity, then there was no law holding that the place of birth and rebirth need be no other than here. It was an accident, an utterly senseless accident, that Kiyoaki and Isao and Ying Chan had all appeared beside Honda. If an element in Honda was of exactly the same quality as an element at the other end of the universe, there was no exchange procedure, once individuality had been lost, whereby they could purposely come together through space and time. The particle here and the particle there have precisely the same significance. There was nothing to keep the Honda of the next world from being at the farther side of the universe. When, after the string has been cut and the beads scattered on the table, they are strung in another order, the one indestructible rule, provided no beads have fallen under the table, is that their number must be as before.

Eternity does not come into being because I think I exist: Buddhist doctrine now seemed to Honda mathematically sound. The self was the order of beads determined by the self and therefore without validity.

These thoughts and the almost imperceptible decay of the flesh went together like the wheels of a cart. It was all right, even pleasant, to put the matter so.

In May or thereabouts he began to suffer from pains in the abdomen. They were very stubborn, and sometimes spread to the back. While he was still seeing Keiko, ailments inevitably came into the conversation. He would speak casually of some serious ailment, and with a great stir she would lay it out on the carving board. A stabbing sort of kindness competing with an amiable tendency to exaggerate, she would assign to it all the malignant medical terms she could think of, and he would be off to a hospital in a spirit of something like jest. Now that he was no longer seeing Keiko, he had to an astonishing degree lost this sort of enthusiastic disquiet. Pain such as he was able to endure he left to the ministrations of his masseuse. Even the thought of a doctor was wearing.

Indeed general debilitation and rhythmical attacks of pain brought new powers to think. His aging brain had lost all ability to concentrate, but now it returned, and pain even worked aggressively upon it, to bring certain vital faculties other than the purely rational to bear. At the age of eighty-one Honda attained to a wondrous and mysterious realm that had before been denied him. He knew now that a more comprehensive view of the world was to be had from physical depression than from intelligence, from a dull pain in the entrails than from reason, a loss of appetite than analysis. The addition of a single vague pain in the back to a world that had been to the clear eye of reason a minutely detailed structure, and cracks began to appear in the pillars and vaults, what had seemed like hard rock proved to be soft cork, what had seemed to have solid form turned to inchoate jelly.

Honda had by himself reached that honing of the senses, achieved by few in this world, to live death from within. When he looked back upon life from its far side other than as a journey over a flat surface, hoping that what had declined would revive, seeking to believe that pain was transient, clinging greedily to happiness as a thing of the moment, thinking that good fortune must be followed by bad, seeing in all the ups and downs and rises and falls the ground for his own prospects—then everything was in place, pulled tight, and the march to the end was in order. The boundary between man and object disappeared. The portentous ten-floor building in the American style and the fragile human beings who walked beneath it had as a condition that they would outlast Honda, but as a condition of equal importance that they would fall, like the crape myrtle so rudely cut down. Honda no longer had cause to sympathize, and he had lost the imagination that gives rise to sympathy. The loss had been easy, for he had always been short on imagination.

Reason still worked, but it was frozen. Beauty had become a phantom.

And he lost that greatest ill of the spirit, to will and to plan. In a sense that was the great liberation provided by pain.

Honda heard the chatter that envelops the world like gold dust. Conditional talk, noisily claiming permanent residence.

“Let’s go to a hot spring, Grandfather, when you’re feeling better. Would you like Yumoto, or would Ikaho be better?”

“Let’s have a drink when the contract is signed.”

“Let’s.”

“Is it true that now is a good time to get into the stock market?”

“When I grow up can I eat a whole box of cream puffs all by myself?”

“Let’s go to Europe next year.”

“In three years I’ll be able to buy a boat from my savings.”

“I can’t die till he grows up.”

“I’ll get my retirement pay and we’ll build an apartment house and have a quiet old age.”

“Day after tomorrow at three? I don’t know whether I can make it or not. No, you have to believe me, I really don’t. Suppose we say you’ll be there if you feel like it.”

“We’ll have to get a new air-conditioner next year.”

“It’s a real problem. Can’t we at least cut down on entertainment expenses next year?”

“They say you can have as much tobacco and liquor as you want when you’re twenty.”

“Thank you. It’s very kind of you. Next Tuesday evening at six.”

“That’s just the point. That’s the way he is. Just wait two or three days and he’ll be around with a sheepish look on his face to apologize.”

“Good-bye. See you tomorrow.”

Foxes all, walking the path of foxes. The hunter had only to wait in the thicket.

It seemed to Honda that he was a fox with the eyes of a hunter, walking the path of the foxes even though he knew that he would be caught.

Summer and ripeness were approaching.

It was mid-July when Honda finally stirred himself to make an appointment at the Cancer Research Institute.

On the day before the appointment he had one of his rare looks at television. It was a sunny afternoon, the summer rains having just lifted. There was a shot of a swimming pool. In the unpleasantly artificial blue of the water, young people were splashing and jumping and swimming.

The faint, fleeting scent of beautiful flesh!

To deny the flesh, to see them as skeletons disporting themselves by a pool in the summer sun, was ordinary, dull. Anyone could do it. Anyone could deny life, see through to the bones beneath the youthful surface. The most mediocre of persons could do it.

What revenge could there be in that? Honda would end his life without having known the feelings of the owner of beautiful flesh. If for a single month he could live in it! He should have had a try. What must it be like, to wear such a beautiful covering? To see people fall down before it. When admiration passed the gentle and docile and became lunatic worship, it would become torment for the possessor. In the delirium and the torment were true holiness. What Honda had missed had been the dark, narrow path through the flesh to holiness. To travel it was of course the privilege of few.

Tomorrow he would have a thorough examination. He did not know what the results would be. He should at least be clean. He had the bath drawn before dinner.

The middle-aged housekeeper, formerly a nurse, whom he had employed without consulting Tōru, was an unfortunate woman, twice widowed, but she was a model of kindness and devotion. Honda had been thinking that he must provide for her in his will. She even saw him to the bathtub lest he fall, and left behind the frays of her concern like cobwebs in the dressing room. Honda did not like being seen naked by a woman. He took off his bathrobe before the steaming mirror. He looked at himself. His ribs were in sharp relief, his stomach sagged, and in its shadow hung a shriveled white bean; and so down to whitish shins from which the flesh seemed to have been stripped away. The knees were like swellings. How many years of self-deception would it take to find rejuvenation in this ugliness? But he was able to console himself with a long smile of commiseration at the thought of how much worse it would be if he had been beautiful in the first place.

The examination took a week. He went to the hospital for the results.

“You must come in immediately. The sooner you come in the better.” So it had happened. “We didn’t catch a trace of it all those other times, and it seems unfair to have it jump out all of a sudden without warning. A person can’t be too careful.” The doctor smiled a beatific smile, as if reproving Honda for some dereliction. “But there seems to be no more than a benign growth on the pancreas. All we have to do is cut it away.”

“It wasn’t the stomach?”

“The pancreas. If the gastroscope pictures turn out I’ll show them to you.”

The diagnosis had coincided with his own personal one. He asked a week’s reprieve.

He wrote a long letter and had it sent special delivery. It was to inform the Gesshuu Temple that he would be visiting on July twenty-second. Since the letter would arrive on the twentieth, the day after posting, or the twenty-first, he hoped that the Abbess might be persuaded to receive him. He described his career over the past sixty years and apologized for not having awaited an invitation. The matter, he explained, was rather urgent.

On the twenty-first, the morning of his departure, he went out to the cottage.

The housekeeper had pleaded that he take her with him to Nara, but he had said that he must make the journey alone. She gave him elaborate instructions. She packed his suitcase with warm clothes to protect him from air-conditioning. It was almost more than an old man could lift.

She also gave elaborate instructions for his visit to the cottage. It seemed to Honda that she might be apologizing for what she considered oversights on her part.

“I must tell you that Mr. Tōru wears that one white kimono like a bird its feathers. Miss Kinué is terribly fond of it, and when I tried to take it off and wash it she bit my finger, and so there it is still on him. Mr. Tōru is, as you know, a very undemanding person, and it doesn’t seem to bother him at all to wear that one kimono day and night. You must be prepared for it. And then, I don’t know quite how to say it, the maid who takes care of the cottage says Miss Kinué vomits a great deal and has strange eating habits. She seems delighted that she should really be sick. I wonder. Anyway, you must be prepared.”

She probably did not see how Honda’s eyes shone at this oracle telling him his line would be cut off from the eye of reason.

Pushing at his cane, Honda sat down on the veranda. The door was open. He had been able to see into the cottage from the garden.

“Well, Father,” said Kinué. “Good morning.”

“Good morning. I’m off to Kyoto and Nara for a few days and I wanted to ask you to look after the house.”

“A trip? How nice.” Uninterested, she returned to her work.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready for the wedding. Do you like it? Not just for me, for Tōru too. People say they’ve never seen a more beautiful couple.”

Tōru, in dark glasses, sat silently between the two.

Honda knew nothing of Tōru’s inner life since he had lost his sight, and he kept his always limited powers of imagination under control. Tōru lived on. But nothing was more capable of conveying heaviness to Honda than this lump of silence no longer a threat.

The cheeks below the dark glasses were paler and the lips redder. Tōru had always sweated heavily. There were beads of sweat at the open neck of the kimono. He sat with legs crossed and left everything to Kinué, but the effort of putting Honda aside was evident in the nervousness with which he scratched his leg and wiped at his chest. There was no strength in the motions. It was as if he were moved by strings from the ceiling.

Though his hearing was apparently keen, he gave no sign that he was taking the outside world in through his ears. No doubt other people, save only Kinué, would have had the same impression, but however confidently the visitor approached, he was for Tōru a discarded scrap of the outside world, a rusty can overgrown by the summer grasses.

Tōru had no contempt, no resistance. He sat in silence.

Though known to be fraudulent, the beautiful eyes and smile had brought him the tentative recognition of the world. Now the smile had left him. There might be some comfort if even regret or sorrow were visible, but he showed emotion to no one except Kinué, and she did not speak of what she saw.

The cicadas had been noisy since morning. Through the branches of the neglected garden, the sky shone like a string of blue beads. The cottage seemed even darker than usual.

The tea garden was reproduced in the circles of dark glasses that would in any case have turned away the outer world. There were no flowering trees now that the crape myrtle was gone from beside the stone basin. The shrubs among stones that did not quite add up to a landscape and the light through the trees were caught in the glasses.

Tōru’s eyes no longer took in the outside world. The scene outside, no longer related to vision and awareness, filled the black lenses in intricate detail. It seemed strange to Honda that all he saw was himself and the little garden behind him. If the sea and the ships Tōru had seen all through the day and their strong funnel marks were an intimate part of his awareness, then behind the glasses and the eyes moving whitely from time to time, the images must be locked in forever. If for Honda and for everyone Tōru’s inner workings had become forever a mystery, then it need not surprise them that sea and ships and funnel marks too were shut up within.

But if they belonged to a world outside of and irrelevant to Tōru, they should be sketched in detail on the lenses. Had Tōru perhaps completely merged the outer world and the inner? A white butterfly flew across the dark glass picture.

Tōru’s heels looked up from the skirt of his kimono. They were white and wrinkled as those of a drowned corpse, and patches of dirt were scattered like bits of foil over them. The kimono had gone quite limp. Sweat drew clusters of yellow clouds at the neckline.

Honda had for some time been aware of a strange odor. He saw that the dirt and oil on the kimono had mixed with the sweat into the smell as of a dank canal that young men put out in the summer. Tōru had lost his fastidiousness.

And there was no smell of flowers. The room was strewn with flowers, but they gave off no odor. There were red and white hollyhocks everywhere, no doubt ordered from a florist, but they were several days old, and dry and wilted.

Kinué’s hair was garlanded with white hollyhocks, not inserted into the hair but leaning this way and that, held unevenly in place by rubber bands. As her head bobbed they sent forth a dry rustling.

She would stand up and sit down again, decorating Tōru’s still rich hair with red hollyhocks. There was a band around his head. She would poke three and four dry red hollyhocks into it and then, like a student of flower arranging, stand back and survey the results. Flowers falling over his ears and cheeks should have been an annoyance, but Tōru had abdicated control of the regions above his neck.

After a time Honda went to dress for the journey.

29

HAVING LEARNED that the road to Nara was now excellent, Honda took a room in Kyoto. He stayed at the Miyako Hotel and hired a car for noon on the twenty-second. The clouds were out of keeping with the heat. Showers seemed likely up in the hills.

So he was here, thought Honda, content. Sensations came as through screens to his weary body and heart, beneath old-fashioned unbleached linen. He had brought a blanket as defense against the air-conditioning. The shrilling of the cicadas in the Keagé district near the hotel sank through the windows.

He made a firm resolution as the car started off. “Today I am not going to see skeletons beneath flesh. They are only a concept. I will see and remember things as they are. It will be my last pleasure, my last effort. My last good look. I must look. I must take in everything, with an unoccupied heart.”

The car passed the Sambōin Temple at Daigo. From the bridge at the Kajuuji Temple it turned onto the National Nara Highway, and from Nara Park the Tenri Highway. In an hour it was at Obitoké.

Honda had noticed numbers of Kyoto women with parasols, not often seen in Tokyo. Some of the faces beneath were shining, some—because of the designs on the parasols, perhaps—were dark. Some were beautiful shining, some were beautiful dark.

As they turned from the southern outskirts of Yamashina they were in suburban wastes, a region of small factories burning in the summer sun. Waiting with several women and children at a bus stop was a pregnant woman, warm in a bold Western print. The faces wore a certain stagnation, as of tea leaves floating on the torrents of life. Beyond was a dusty tomato patch.

The Daigo district was a clutter of all the dreary details of new construction, to be seen throughout Japan: raw building materials and blue-tiled roofs, television towers and power lines, Coca-Cola advertisements and drive-in snack bars. Among heaps of rubble below cliffs where wild daisies stabbed at the sky were automobile dumps, blue and yellow and black, piled precariously one on the other, the gaudy colors molten in the sun. At this sad accumulation, kept hidden at most times by the automobile, Honda thought of an adventure story he had read as a child, and of the heaps of ivory in the swamp where elephants go to die. Perhaps, sensing the approach of death, automobiles too gather at their own graveyards. In any event, the brightness, the openness, the want of shame seemed to him quite automobilish.

From Uji the hills were for the first time green. A bill-board proclaimed “Delicious Chilled Sweets.” Bamboo leaves arched over the road.

They crossed Moon Bridge in Uji and were on the old Nara Highway. They passed Fushimi and Yamashiro. A sign informed them that Nara was twenty miles distant. Time went by. At each marker Honda thought of the expression “milestones on the way to the grave.” It seemed to him inconceivable that he would return over the same road. Sign followed sign, marking clearly the road he must travel. Nineteen miles to Nara. A mile nearer the grave. He opened a window, stealing an inch from air-conditioning, and the cicadas were ringing in his ears, as if the whole world were sounding in solitude under the summer sun.

Another filling station. More Coca-Cola.

The beautiful green embankment of the River Kizu stretched far away to the right. It was deserted, roily clouds defining its handsome groves. Blue patches glowed in the sky.