Spring Snow (8 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
“This temple is special for me. On the voyage here to Japan, I often dreamed about it. Its golden roofs seemed to float up out of the night sea. The ship kept on moving, and even by the time the entire temple was visible, it was still a long way off from me. Having risen from the waves, it glistened under the stars the way the light of the new moon shines across the surface of the water. Standing on the deck of the ship, I put my hands together and bowed in reverence toward it. As happens in dreams, although it was night and the temple was so far away, I could make out the smallest details of the gold and scarlet decoration.
“I told Kri about this dream and said that the temple seemed to be following us to Japan. But he laughed at me and said that what was following me to Japan was not the temple but the memory of something else. He made me angry at the time, but now I’m inclined to agree with him. For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible. Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
“He certainly puts it in a difficult, roundabout way,” said Prince Kridsada, breaking in, “but what he’s really thinking about is the girl he loves back in Bangkok. Chao P., show Kiyoaki her picture.”
Prince Pattanadid flushed, but his dark skin hid the rush of blood to his cheeks. Seeing his guest’s discomfiture, Kiyoaki turned the conversation back to their previous topic.
“Do you often dream like that?” he asked. “I keep a diary record of my dreams.” Chao P.’s eyes flashed with interest as he replied: “I wish my Japanese were good enough to let me read it.”
Kiyoaki realized that even though he was having to speak in English, he had just succeeded in conveying to Chao P. his fascination with dreams, something he had never dared reveal even to Honda. He felt himself liking Chao P. more and more. From then on, however, the conversation lagged, and Kiyoaki, noticing the mischievous twinkle in Prince Kridsada’s eyes, suddenly realized the difficulty: he had not insisted on seeing the picture, which was what Chao P. had wanted him to do.
“Please show me the photo of the dream that followed you from Siam,” he hastened to ask.
“Do you mean the temple or the girl?” Kridsada interjected, as playful as ever. And although Chao P. scolded him for his frivolous bad manners, he was unrepentant. When his cousin finally took out the photograph, he thrust out his hand eagerly to point.
“Princess Chantrapa is my younger sister. Her name means ‘moonlight.’ But we usually call her Ying Chan.”
Looking at the picture, Kiyoaki was rather disappointed to see a much plainer young girl than he had imagined. She wore Western clothes, a dress of white lace. Her hair was tied with a white ribbon and she wore a pearl necklace. She looked modest and unsophisticated. Any student at Peers might well be carrying a picture of a girl like her. The beautiful, waving fall of her hair to her shoulders showed signs of care. But the rather strong brows over wide, timid eyes, the lips slightly parted like the petals of an exotic flower before the rains come—her features all gave the unmistakable impression of girlish innocence unconscious of its own beauty. Of course that had its charm, but much like a young nestling quite oblivious of its power to fly, she was too passively content.
“Compared with this girl,” Kiyoaki thought, “Satoko is a hundred, a thousand times more of a woman. And isn’t that why she is often so hateful to me—because she is so much a woman? Besides, she’s far more beautiful than this girl. And she knows how beautiful she is. There’s nothing she doesn’t know, unfortunately, including how immature I am.”
Chao P., seeing how Kiyoaki was staring at the picture of his sweetheart and perhaps feeling slightly alarmed that he might be too attracted to her, suddenly reached out his fineboned, amber-skinned hand and retrieved it. As he did so, Kiyoaki’s eye was caught by a flash of green, and for the first time he noticed Chao P.’s beautiful ring. Its stone was a rich, square-cut emerald. On either side of it, the fierce beasts’ heads of a pair of yaksha, the warrior gods, had been finely etched in gold. All in all, it was an immense ring of such quality that for Kiyoaki to have overlooked it until now was proof of how little he was inclined to take notice of others.
“I was born in May. It’s my birthstone,” Prince Pattanadid explained, slightly embarrassed again. “Ying Chan gave it to me as a farewell present.”
“But if you wore something as magnificent as that at Peers, I’m afraid they’d order you to stop,” warned Kiyoaki.
Taken aback by this, the two princes began to confer earnestly in their native language, but quickly realizing their inadvertent rudeness, they switched back to English for Kiyoaki’s sake. Kiyoaki told them that he would speak to his father about making arrangements for them to have a safety deposit at the bank. After this had been settled and the atmosphere had warmed still further, Prince Kridsada brought out a small photograph of his own sweetheart. And then both princes urged Kiyoaki to do the same.
“In Japan we are not accustomed to exchanging pictures,” he said hastily, under the spur of youthful vanity. “But I’ll certainly introduce her to you very soon.” He did not have the courage to show them the pictures of Satoko that filled the album he had kept from early childhood.
It suddenly dawned on Kiyoaki that although his good looks had excited praise and admiration all his life, he had nearly reached the age of eighteen in the gloomy confines of the family estate without a single female friend other than Satoko.
And Satoko was as much an enemy as anything else; she was far from being the ideal of womanhood, sweetness and affection incarnate, that the two princes would admire. Kiyoaki felt his anger rising against the many frustrations that hemmed him in. What his somewhat tipsy father had said to him on that “evening stroll”—though his tone had been very kind—now seemed in retrospect to contain a veiled scorn.
The very things that his sense of dignity had made him ignore up to now had suddenly gained the power to humiliate him. Everything about these lively young princes from the tropics—their brown skin, the flashing virility in their eyes, their long, slender, amber fingers, already so experienced in caresses—all this seemed to taunt Kiyoaki: “What? At your age, not even a single love affair?”
Feeling his poise evaporating, Kiyoaki, with his last reserves of aloofness and elegance, hurriedly said, “I’ll introduce her to you very soon.” But how was he to arrange matters? How to show off Satoko’s beauty before his foreign friends? For the very day before, after a long hesitation, Kiyoaki had finally sent a wildly insulting letter to Satoko.
Every phrase in that letter, a letter whose premeditated insults he had worked and reworked with the most painstaking care, was still vivid in his mind. He had begun by writing: “I am very sorry to say that your effrontery toward me compels me to write this letter.” And from that curt opening, he had gone on:
When I think how often you have presented me with these senseless riddles, withholding any clues in order to make them seem more serious than they really are, numbness strikes this hand of mine holding its writing brush until it withers me. I have no doubt that your emotional whims have driven you to do this to me. There has been no gentleness in your method, obviously no affection whatever, not a trace of friendship. There are deep-seated motivations in your despicable behavior to which you are blind, but which are driving you toward a goal that is only too obvious. But decency forbids me to say anything further.But all your efforts and schemes have now become a mere froth on the waves. For I, unhappy though I once was, I have now passed one of life’s milestones, a transition for which I owe you some debt of gratitude, however indirect. My father invited me to go with him on one of his excursions to the Gay Quarters, and now I’ve crossed a barrier that every man must cross. To put it bluntly, I spent the night with a geisha my father had chosen for me. Nothing but one of those exercises in pleasure that society sanctions for men.Fortunately enough, a single night was sufficient to bring about a complete change in me. My previous concepts of women were shattered. I learned to see a girl as nothing but a plump, lascivious little animal, a contemptible playmate. This is the wonderful revelation to be found in my father’s kind of society. And having had no sympathy for his attitude toward women until that night, I now endorse it completely. Every fiber in my body tells me that I am my father’s son.Perhaps at this point you may feel that I am to be congratulated on having finally outgrown the dead old-fashioned views of the Meiji era in favor of more enlightened ones. And perhaps you are smiling contemptuously, secure in the knowledge that my lust for paid women will only serve to enhance my esteem for pure ladies like yourself. No! Let me disabuse you of any such notion. Since that night (enlightenment being exactly what it says) I have broken through all these standards into territory where there are no restraints. Geisha or princess, virgin or prostitute, factory girl or artist—there is no distinction whatever. Every woman without exception is a liar and “nothing but a plump, lascivious little animal.” All the rest is makeup and costumes. And I must say that I see you as being just like all the others. Please believe that gentle Kiyo, whom you considered so sweet, so innocent, so malleable, is gone forever.
The two princes must have been somewhat taken aback when Kiyoaki said an abrupt good night and hurried out of their room fairly early in the evening, although he smilingly observed all the usual proprieties expected of a gentleman, such as checking that their bedding was correctly laid out, inquiring after any further needs, and finally withdrawing with the ritual courtesies.
“Why is it that at times like this, there is never anyone to rely on,” Kiyoaki muttered to himself as he fled through the long corridor that led back to the main house from the Western one. He thought of Honda, but his exacting standards of friendship made him dismiss that possibility.
The night wind howled at the windows of the passageway with its line of dim lanterns stretching into the distance. Suddenly afraid that someone might see him and wonder at his running and being out of breath like this, he stopped, and as he rested his elbows on the ornamental window frame and pretended to stare out into the garden, he tried desperately to put his thoughts in order. Unlike dreams, reality was not so easy to manipulate. He had to conceive a plan. It could not be anything vague and uncertain; it had to be as firmly compact as a pill, and with as sure and immediate a result. He was oppressed by a sense of his own weakness, and after the warmth of the room he had just left, the cold corridor made him shiver.
He pressed his forehead to the wind-buffeted glass and peered out into the garden. There was no moon tonight. The island and the maple hill beyond formed one mass in the darkness. In the faint glow of the corridor lamps he could make out the surface of the pond ruffled by the wind. He suddenly imagined that the snapping turtles had reared their heads out of the water and were looking toward him. The thought made him shudder.
As he returned to the main house and was about to climb the stairs to his room, he encountered his tutor Iinuma, and looked at him very coldly.
“Have Their Highnesses already retired for the night, sir?”
“Yes.”
“The young master is about to retire too?”
“I have some studying to do.”
Iinuma was twenty-three and in his final year of night school. In fact, he had probably just returned from class since he was carrying some books under one arm. To be young and in his prime seemed to have no other effect on him than to deepen his look of characteristic melancholy. His huge dark bulk unnerved Kiyoaki.
When the boy returned to his room, he did not bother to light the stove, but began to pace about anxiously, tossing up plan after plan after plan.
“Whatever I do, I must do it quickly,” he thought. “Is it too late already? Somehow, in the very near future I have to introduce a girl to the princes as being on the fondest terms with me, when I have just sent her this letter. And furthermore, I have to do it in a way that won’t cause gossip.”
The evening paper, which he had no time to read, lay on the chair. For no good reason, Kiyoaki picked it up and opened it. An announcement for a Kabuki play at the Imperial Theater caught his eye, and suddenly his heart began to thump.
“That’s it. I’ll take the princes to the Imperial Theater. And as for that letter, it can’t have arrived already since I sent it only yesterday. There’s still hope. My parents won’t allow Satoko to go to a play with me, but if we met by accident, there’d be nothing wrong with that.”
Kiyoaki rushed out of the room and down the stairs to the room beside the front entrance where the telephone was. Before he went in, however, he looked cautiously in the direction of Iinuma’s room, which was emitting streaks of light. He must be studying.
Kiyoaki picked up the receiver and gave the operator the number. His heart was pounding; his customary ennui had been swept away.
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