Spring Snow (46 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: Spring Snow
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The first picture on the scroll was that of an abbot in a brown robe and a young widow seated facing each other in front of a screen. The style was that of haiku illustrations, done with a light, humorous touch. The face of the abbot was drawn in caricature to look like a large penis.
In the next picture the abbot sprang upon the young widow without warning, intent on raping her, and although she was putting up a fight, her kimono was already in disarray. In the next they were locked in a naked embrace and the woman’s expression was now blissfully relaxed. The abbot’s penis was like the twisted root of a giant pine, and his brown tongue stuck out in great delight. In accordance with this artistic tradition, the young widow’s feet and toes were painted with Chinese white, and curved sharply inward. Tremors ran the length of her white, clinging thighs and ended finally at her toes, as though the tension there embodied her straining effort to hold back the flood of ecstasy that was about to gush out into eternity. The woman’s exertions were altogether admirable, thought the Count.
On the other side of the screen, meantime, a number of novice monks were standing on a wooden drum and a writing table, and boosting one another onto their shoulders, desperately keen to see what was going on behind the screen while simultaneously engaged in a comic struggle to keep down those parts of their anatomy that had already swollen to massive proportions. Finally the screen fell over. And as the stark-naked woman attempted to cover herself and escape, and the abbot lay exhausted with no strength left to reprimand the novices, a scene of total disorder began to unfold.
The monks’ penises were drawn to appear nearly as long as their owners were tall, the usual proportions being inadequate for the artist to convey the magnitude of their burden of lust. As they set upon the woman, the face of each of them was a comic study in indescribable anguish, and they staggered about under the weight of their own erections.
After such punishing toil, the woman’s entire body turned deathly pale and she died. Her soul flew out of her and took refuge in the branches of a willow tree blown by the wind. And there she became a vengeful ghost, her face drawn in the image of a vulva.
At this point, the scroll lost whatever humor it had once had, and became permeated with fearful gloom. Not one but many ghosts, all similar, assaulted the men, hair streaming wildly, crimson lips gaping. Fleeing in panic, the men were no match for the phantoms, who swarmed over them in a whirlwind, tearing out their penises as well as the abbot’s with their powerful jaws.
The final scene was by the seashore. The emasculated men lay naked on the beach, howling desperately, while a boat weighed down with their mutilated penises was just setting sail on a dark sea. The ghosts crowded the deck, hair streaming in the wind, pale hands waving derisively, their vaginal faces mocking the wretched cries of their victims on the shore. The prow of the boat, too, was carved in the form of a vulva, and as it pointed toward deep water, a tuft of hair clinging to it waved in the sea breeze.
∗
When he finally looked up from the scroll, the Count felt inexplicably depressed. The saké, far from soothing him, had only increased his feelings of apprehension. But he had Kitazaki bring more of it, and drank it in silence. His mind was still filled with the vivid image of the woman in the scroll, her toes bent inward. The lewd whiteness of her painted legs still flashed before his eyes.
What he did next could only have been due to the languid heat of that night in the rainy season and to his own disgust. Fourteen years before that wet evening, when his wife had been pregnant with Satoko, he had favored Tadeshina with his attentions. Since even then she had been past forty, this had been an extraordinary whim, and did not last long. Fourteen years later, with Tadeshina well into her fifties, he never dreamed that anything of the sort would happen again. At any rate, because of what took place this time, he was never to set foot across the threshold of Kitazaki’s inn again.
Events and circumstances—the Marquis’s visit, the crushing blow to his pride, the rainy night, the isolated rear parlor of Kitazaki’s house, the saké, the sinister pornography—all crowded in on the Count, intensifying his mood of resentment and (it could hardly have been otherwise) inflaming him with a desire to debase himself, which drove him to do what he did. Tadeshina’s response, devoid of any reproach, set the seal on his feelings of self-loathing.
“This woman,” he thought, “she’ll wait fourteen, twenty, a hundred years—it makes no difference to her. And no matter when she hears the voice of her master, she’ll never be caught unawares.”
Through circumstances which had been none of his doing, he was driven by his seething resentment to plunge into a dark wood where the ghost from the pornographic scroll was lying in wait for him. Moreover, Tadeshina’s unruffled composure, her deferential flirting, the evident pride she took in her exhaustive knowledge of sexual technique, all worked on him just as coercively as they had fourteen years earlier.
Perhaps there had been some collusion between her and Kitazaki who left the room and did not return. Afterwards, in the darkness, shut in by the pervasive sound of falling rain, neither of them spoke. Then the soldiers’ voices broke through once more, and this time the Count clearly heard the words of their song:
To the battlefield
Torn with steel and fire,
The fate of the nation’s defense
Falls on you.
Forward, brave comrades!
Forward, Imperial Army!
The Count suddenly became a child again. He felt the need to unburden himself of the anger that was devouring him, and he gave Tadeshina a detailed account of something that belonged to a sphere from which servants were excluded. For he felt that his anger was not merely his alone, but rather an emotion that incorporated the wrath of his ancestors.
Marquis Matsugae had paid a visit that day. And when Satoko had come into the room to pay her respects, he had stroked her bobbed hair. And then perhaps under the influence of the sake he had drunk, he spoke abruptly in front of the child: “What a beautiful little princess you have become! When you grow up, you will be so beautiful that nobody will find words to describe you. And as for finding a handsome husband, you just leave that to Uncle, and don’t worry about a thing. If you trust Uncle completely, I’ll get you a bridegroom without equal anywhere in the world. Your father won’t have a thing to worry about. I’ll line up a trousseau on golden satin for you when you become a bride. What a long, long, proud procession that will be!—such as has never been seen in all the generations of Ayakuras.”
The Countess had given the slightest of frowns at that moment, but the Count had merely smiled. Instead of smiling in the face of humiliation, his ancestors would have revealed just enough of their elegance, and struck back. But these days—when, for example, the ancestral game of
kemari
was no more than a memory—there were no means left to dazzle the vulgar. And when such men as this imposter, overflowing with goodwill and innocent of any intention to wound a genuine aristocrat, offered their unwitting insults, there was nothing to do but laugh vaguely. However, there was a faintly mysterious element lingering in the smile that came to the lips of the cultured when confronted with the new ascendancy of money and power.
The Count had remained silent for a while after telling Tadeshina all this. If elegance was to have its revenge, he was thinking, how was it to be accomplished? Wasn’t there a revenge proper to court nobles, like the revenge in which incense was inserted into the flowing sleeve of a court robe and allowed to burn slowly to a fine ash while showing hardly a trace of flame? A revenge such as this, that would leave a subtle, fragrant poison permeating the material, so that its potency would remain undiminished down the years?
At last the Count turned to Tadeshina and said: “I am going to ask you, long in advance, to do something. When Satoko grows up, I am afraid that everything will go exactly according to Matsugae’s wishes, and so he will be the one to arrange a marriage for her. But when he’s done that, before the marriage takes place, I want you to guide her into bed with some man she likes, a man who knows how to keep his mouth shut. I don’t care about his social position—just so long as she is fond of him. I have no intention of handing Satoko over as a chaste virgin to any bridegroom for whom I have Matsugae’s benevolence to thank. And so I’ll give Matsugae’s nose a twist without his knowing a thing about it. But nobody is to know about this, and you’re not to consult me about it. It’s something you must do just as if it were a sin committed on your initiative alone. And there’s one more aspect to it: since you are the equivalent of a master of arts in all sexual matters, it’s not asking too much, is it, for you to instruct Satoko thoroughly in two rather different accomplishments? The first is to make a man think he’s taking a girl as a virgin when he’s not. And the second, on the contrary, is to make him think that she’s already lost her virginity when in fact she has not.”
“You need say no more, master,” Tadeshina replied, her voice betraying no sign of hesitation or dismay. “There are such effective techniques with regard to both that there is no danger of arousing the suspicions of even the most experienced and libertine gentlemen. And so I will take great pains to educate Miss Satoko in them. However, might I be permitted to wonder what the Marquis has in mind as concerns the second of these?”
“So that the person who makes a conquest of someone else’s bride before the wedding doesn’t become too exultant about it. If he knows that she’s a virgin, he may become presumptuous about his conquest, and that just won’t do. And so I’m entrusting you with this as well.”
“Everything is quite understood,” answered Tadeshina. Instead of a simple “As the master wishes,” she undertook her appointed task with a grave and formal agreement.
∗
And Tadeshina was now alluding to what had happened that night eight years before. The Count was only too aware of what she wanted to say. But at the same time, he was quite sure that the significance of the unforeseen course of events after she had accepted her commission could not have been lost on a woman of Tadeshina’s shrewdness. The prospective bridegroom had turned out to be a prince of the Imperial Family, and although credit was due to the Marquis, a marriage as fortunate as this would mean the resurgence of the House of Ayakura. In short, the circumstances were very different from those he had envisaged eight years before when he had given Tadeshina his instructions in a burning rage. If, despite all this, she had carried out her task in scrupulous accordance with that ancient promise, the reason must lie in her own desire to do so. Furthermore, the secret had already been spilled to Marquis Matsugae.
Was it possible that she had taken aim against the House of Matsugae out of some grand design, intending to bring down a disaster that would achieve the revenge the Count’s own timidity and listlessness had put beyond his reach? Or was it that her revenge was directed not at the Matsugaes but at none other than the Count himself? Whatever he did, he was at a disadvantage—he could not afford to let her tell the Marquis that bedtime story of eight years before.
He felt it best to say nothing. What was done was done. And as for the Marquis knowing about it, he had to be prepared for a more or less severe rebuke on that score. Still, he reflected, the Marquis would use his immense influence to devise some ploy that would save the situation. Now was the time to entrust the whole matter to somebody else.
About one thing, however, he was quite certain: Tadeshina’s state of mind. However much she professed her guilt, she was in fact quite disinclined to beg forgiveness for what she had done. There she sat, the old woman who had tried to kill herself, still indifferent to his pardon, the russet coverlet about her shoulders, the white makeup clinging to her face as thickly as if she were a cricket that had tumbled into a box of powder. And tiny as her figure was, it somehow seemed to fill the whole wide world with melancholy.
He suddenly noticed that this room was the same size as the rear parlor of Kitazaki’s inn. All at once he could hear the rustling murmur of the rain and, quite out of season, the stifling heat that brings decay struck his cheek as it had done before.
She raised her whitened face once more to say something. Her dry, wrinkled lips were slightly parted and the wet, red cavern of her mouth gleamed in the light of the electric bulb as brightly as the deep scarlet of her court lip rouge.
He could guess what she was about to say. Wasn’t what she had done the result, just as she herself had said, of the events of that night eight years before? And hadn’t she done it for no other reason than to give the Count a forcible reminder of what had occurred that night, since he had never again shown the slightest interest in her?
Suddenly he felt the urge to ask the sort of ruthless question of which only a child is capable.
“Well, happily your life was saved . . . but did you honestly mean to kill yourself?”
He thought that she might either become angry or burst into tears, but instead she merely laughed politely.
“Well now, if the master had deigned to say to me, ‘Kill yourself,’ perhaps I would really have been in the mood to die. And if he should so order me even now, I would try once more. Eight years from now, however, the master might naturally enough have forgotten what he had said, once again.”

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