Spring Snow (42 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
Satoko and Tadeshina seemed to be somewhat vexed with one another. He noticed that Satoko’s makeup was not as becoming as usual, and he realized that she was using it to make herself look healthy at all costs. Her voice, moreover, sounded dulled, and her hair had lost its luster. He felt that he was looking at a fine painting whose colors, once brilliant, were fading horribly before his very eyes. What he had spent ten days praying to see in an agony of expectation had undergone a subtle change.
“Can we meet tonight?” he asked impetuously, but even as he did so, he sensed that the answer would be no.
“Please don’t be so unreasonable.”
“Why am I being unreasonable?”
His words were aggressive enough, but his heart was empty. Her head was drooping and her eyes were now filled with tears. Tadeshina, fearful that the other customers would notice, took out a white handkerchief and shook Satoko by the shoulder. Her gesture struck Kiyoaki as harsh, and he glared at her angrily.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she retorted, her words full of rudeness. “Don’t you realize, young master, that I’ve been driving myself frantic for you and Miss Satoko? And not just you, young master—Miss Satoko, you don’t understand what I’ve been through either. It would be better if old people like me had already departed this earth.”
A waiter had placed three bowls of red bean soup on the table in front of them, but nobody touched them. A bit of hot bean paste clung to the edge of the small lacquer cover on one of them like a daub of slowly hardening mud.
Their time together was short. The two parted with no more than a vague promise to meet again in ten days.
That night his agony of mind raged unchecked. He wondered if Satoko would ever agree to meet him at night again, and felt rejected by the whole world. Now that he was plunged in despair, he could no longer doubt his love for her.
When he had seen her tears today, he saw that she belonged to him wholeheartedly. But at the same time he understood that a mere rapport no longer had the strength to sustain them.
What he was experiencing now was genuine emotion. When he compared this to the various sentiments of love that had once occupied his imagination, he knew that this was something crude and blunt, violent and sinister, an emotion that was altogether far removed from elegance. It was hardly the stuff that poems are made of. For the first time in his life, he accepted raw ugliness as indeed being part of him.
After a sleepless night, he went to school next day with his face pale and haggard. Honda noticed this at once and questioned him; his eyes filled with tears in response to his friend’s shy kind-heartedness.
“This is what’s the matter: Satoko’s not going to sleep with me any more, I think.”
Honda’s face flushed with virginal consternation.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s because the betrothal ceremony’s finally been arranged for December.”
“And so she feels she can no longer . . . ?”
“That seems to be it precisely.”
Honda could think of nothing to say to console his friend. This was a situation outside his range of experience, and he was saddened to think that he had nothing to offer but his usual generalizations. Even if it were futile, he would have to climb to a vantage point in place of his friend, survey the lay of the land, and then offer a psychological analysis.
“That time when she was with you at Kamakura, didn’t you say that you happened to get a feeling that you might tire of her someday?”
“But that was only for an instant.”
“Perhaps she’s only putting you off like this because she wants you to love her more fiercely and more deeply.”
For once, however, Honda had miscalculated in attempting to make use of Kiyoaki’s delusions of vanity as a means to console him. For he had not the slightest interest in his own attractiveness any more, nor even in Satoko’s love for him.
He was only concerned with when and where the two of them could meet without anxiety, as freely as they liked, regardless of anyone else. And he feared that by now it could only happen in some place beyond this world, and only when this world had been destroyed. The vital issue was not feeling but circumstance. In his weary, desperate, bloodshot eyes there was a vision of a world thrown into chaos for their sake.
“If only there were a great earthquake! If so, then I could rescue her. Or a major war would do just as well. If it broke out, what couldn’t I do then! . . . But no, what I’m after is something that will shake the whole country to its foundations.”
“And who is going to bring about this great event of yours?” asked Honda, looking at this elegant young man with pity in his eyes. He knew that irony and a touch of scorn were now the best means of strengthening his friend. “Why don’t you give it a try yourself?”
Kiyoaki made no attempt to hide his distress. A young man obsessed with love had no time for such things. But there was more than that in his expression. Honda felt a shiver of fascination when he saw the destructive gleam momentarily kindled in Kiyoaki’s eyes by his taunt.
It was as if a pack of wolves went raging through the darkness of a sacred precinct. The malevolence fell short of realization: it escaped the notice of Kiyoaki himself: it was born and died in his eyes—but for an instant they flashed with the image of a savage destroyer.
“How am I going to break out?” Kiyoaki muttered as if to himself. “Would power do it? Or money?”
Honda thought it more than a little ridiculous for the son of Marquis Matsugae to be talking in these terms.
“Well, as far as power goes, what are your prospects?” he asked coldly.
“I’ll do everything I can to acquire some. But still, that takes time.”
“There has never been the slightest chance that either power or money would be of any use. You’re not forgetting, are you? From the very beginning you’ve been bewitched by
impossibility
—something which is outside the scope of authority and money. You were drawn in precisely because the whole thing was impossible. Am I wrong? And if it were to become possible now, would it have any value for you?”
impossibility
—something which is outside the scope of authority and money. You were drawn in precisely because the whole thing was impossible. Am I wrong? And if it were to become possible now, would it have any value for you?”
“But it did once become possible.”
“You saw an illusion of possibility. You saw the rainbow. What else do you want now?”
“What else . . . ?”
Kiyoaki faltered and his words came to a stop. Beyond this interruption spread a vast great void, unfathomable to Honda. He shuddered.
“These words we exchange,” he thought, “they’re like a mass of building blocks lying scattered over a construction site in the dead of the night. With the immense, starry sky spread out about them and its awful pressure of silence, what else can they do but be mute?”
The two of them were talking at the end of the first period of the school day as they walked along the path that led through the grove surrounding Chiarai Pond. Since the second period was almost upon them, they now turned and retraced their steps. A vast variety of objects had come to rest on the path underfoot as it wound its way through the autumn woods—tangled heaps of wet, brown leaves, their skeletons conspicuous, acorns, green chestnuts, split open and rotting, cigarette butts. Then in the midst of all this, Honda saw something that made him stop and stare at the ground. It was a whitish, crumpled lump of fur, sickly white. By the time he had recognized it as the body of a young mole, Kiyoaki had also stopped and squatted down to study it in silence as it lay in the sunlight filtering down through the branches overhead. The dead animal was lying on its back, and the whiteness that had caught Honda’s attention was the fur of its belly. The rest of its body was a sleek, velvet black. Mud was worked into the lines of its tiny, intricately formed white paws, proof of strenuous digging. As it was lying on its back, they could see its pointed beaklike mouth. Its death rictus revealed the soft, pink interior of its mouth behind the two delicate incisors.
At the same moment the two young men thought of the black dog whose dead body had hung over the edge of the waterfall on the Matsugae estate until sent on its way with altogether unexpected funereal solemnity.
Kiyoaki picked the young mole up by its almost hairless tail and laid it gently in his palm. It was already rather shriveled, and so there was nothing distasteful about it. What was disturbing, however, was that this wretched little animal was condemned to labor blindly and without purpose. The very care and delicacy that had gone into the shaping of its tiny paws were odious.
Kiyoaki took the animal by the tail again as he stood up. At this point the path passed close to the pond, and he casually turned and threw the animal into the water.
“Why did you do that?” demanded Honda, frowning at his friend’s offhandedness. This rough behavior, typical of a student, allowed him to read at a glance the depth of his friend’s desolation.
39
SEVEN DAYS PASSED
, then eight, but there was still no word from Tadeshina. After ten days Kiyoaki telephoned the innkeeper in Roppongi and was told that Tadeshina was apparently ill and confined to her bed. More days went by. Then when the innkeeper told him that she was still ill, his suspicions were aroused.
Hounded by wild desperation, he went to Azabu alone one night and walked aimlessly around the streets near the Ayakura mansion. When he passed underneath the light of the gas lamps in Toriizaka, he stretched out his hands. He was shaken to see how pale their backs looked, for he remembered once hearing that invalids near to death look at their hands constantly.
The gate in front of the Ayakura mansion was shut fast. The faint light above it was scarcely enough to read even the lettering of the weather-beaten nameplate that loomed up out of the darkness. This house was always poorly lit. He knew that there would be no chance of seeing a light in Satoko’s room from the street.
He looked at the latticed windows of the empty lodges that flanked the gate. He remembered how he and Satoko had stolen in there as children, and become frightened by the gloom and smell of mold in the deserted rooms. Yearning for the sunlight outside, they had rushed to the windows and grasped the wooden latticework covered with dust. The same layer of dust was still there. The leaves of the trees around the house opposite had been so lush and green that it must have happened in May. Close-worked as the lattice was, it had not shut out this greenery, perhaps because the two young faces peering through it were so small. Just then, a man selling seedlings had gone by, and the two of them, giggling to themselves, had mimicked him as he cried “Morning glories, eggplants,” comically dragging out the syllables.
He had learned much in this house. The smell of ink used in calligraphy invariably had melancholy associations for him. Melancholy, in fact, was inseparably bound up with the elegance that had become part of him. All of the beautiful things that the Count had shown him—sutras copied in gold on purple scrolls, screens with the autumn flower design favored in the imperial palaces in Kyoto—must have emitted a bright ray of carnal desire, he now realized, but in the Ayakura mansion the smell of ink and mold had lain heavy on everything. But now, within these walls that shut him out tonight, that elegance and seductive brilliance had come to life again after the lapse of many years. And he was completely cut off from it.
A faint light went out on the second floor of the house, which was fairly visible from the street. Perhaps Count and Countess Ayakura had gone to sleep. The Count had always gone to bed early. Maybe Satoko was still lying awake. But her light could not be seen. He walked along the wall until he came to the rear gate. There, without thinking, he stretched out his hand to push the cracked and yellowed doorbell, but then drew back.
Stricken with shame at his cowardice, he turned and went home.
More days passed, a terrible period of dead calm. Then still more days. He went to school, but only as a means of somehow getting through each day. When he came home, he gave no thought to his studies.
All around him at school were constant reminders that many of his classmates, Honda among them, were totally absorbed in preparations for the next spring’s university entrance examination. It was no more difficult to recognize the behavior of those who were planning to take the easier route of entering schools that did not have entrance requirements. These students were zealously pursuing their favorite sports. Since he had nothing in common with either camp, Kiyoaki became more and more lonely. If someone spoke to him, he often did not answer, and so his classmates began to be rather unfriendly.
Other books
FAMILY FALLACIES (The Kate Huntington mystery series #3) by Kassandra Lamb
Shadow Baby by McGhee, Alison
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Donovan’s Angel by Peggy Webb
The Winning Hand by Nora Roberts
Stop Me by Richard Jay Parker
The Bordeaux Betrayal by Ellen Crosby
Dispossession by Chaz Brenchley
Highland Master by Hannah Howell