Authors: Yukio Mishima
Temple Of Dawn (42 page)
Yes, yesterday he had killed a snake near the arbor. It was a striped one some two feet long, and he had killed it by crushing its head with a rock so that it should not frighten the guests expected today. The little massacre had occupied his entire day. Blue-black steel springs, the image of the smooth, writhing body of the snake struggling against death lingered in his mind. Knowing that he too could kill something gave him a gloomy sense of power.
And the swimming pool. Again Honda stretched his hand and troubled the surface of the water. The reflection of summer clouds shattered into fragments of frosted glass. The pool had been completed six days before, but no one had yet used it. Honda had been here with Rié for three days, but under the pretext that the water was cold he had not once been in.
His sole reason for constructing the pool had been to see Ying Chan naked; nothing else mattered.
The sound of hammering could be heard in the distance. Keiko’s house was being remodeled. Since her place in Tokyo had been released by the Occupation Forces, Keiko came less and less to Gotemba, and somehow her relationship with Jack had cooled. Honda’s new house had stimulated her sense of competition, and she had started to remodel her own on a grand scale, almost to the extent of building a new one. She maintained that she would not be able to live in it during the summer and would probably spend the season in Karuizawa.
Honda, leaving the swimming pool to avoid the sun that was growing gradually stronger, with difficulty opened the beach umbrella planted in the middle of a table. He seated himself on a chair in the shade and again directed his gaze to the surface of the water.
The morning coffee still provided a numbing sensation at the back of his head. In the bottom of the twenty-seven by sixty foot pool, white lines showed through the ripples of blue paint, reminding him of the lime markings and mint-scented saromethyl ointment inextricably associated with the athletic competitions of his distant youth. A clean white line was drawn geometrically on everything, and from it something started and something ended. But the memory was faulty. Honda had had nothing to do with athletic competition in his youth.
Rather the white line reminded him of the center marking running down a highway at night. He suddenly remembered the little old man who had always carried a cane on his night excursions into the park. The first time he had met him on a sidewalk swept by the dazzling headlights of automobiles, the old man was walking with his chest thrust out and an ivory-handled cane on his arm. If he had walked normally the cane would have dragged on the ground, and he had raised his bent arm unnaturally high so that his posture was even stiffer. The fragrant May woods lay to one side of the walk. The little man looked like some retired Army officer carefully concealing his now valueless decorations in the inner pocket of his jacket.
The second time he had happened on him in the darkness of the woods, Honda had observed in detail the cane’s function.
When lovers met in the woods the man would usually press the woman back against a tree and begin to caress her. Seldom was the reverse true. And so when a young couple was thus involved the little man would take up his position on the opposite side of the trunk.
In the darkness not far from where Honda happened to be, he could see the cane’s U-shaped ivory handle gradually edging around the tree trunk. He peered into the darkness, watching the floating white shape. When he discovered that the handle was ivory, he knew at once to whom it belonged. The woman’s arms encircled the man’s neck, while his arms met behind her back. The oily hair on the back of the man’s head glistened in the beams of the passing headlights. The white handle roamed for a while in the darkness, and then as though having determined its course, it brushed the hem of the woman’s skirt. Once the garment was hooked, the cane lifted it skillfully and quickly with one sweep up to her waist. The woman’s white thighs were exposed, but he did not make the mistake of being found out by touching them with the cold ivory.
Then the woman whispered: “No, no.” And finally: “It’s cold.” But the man, in seventh heaven, made no answer, and the woman seemed not to notice that his arms were completely occupied in embracing her.
This cynical and debasing mischief, this dedicated selfless cooperation always brought a smile to Honda’s lips whenever he recalled it. But when he remembered the man who had spoken to him some time ago in broad daylight at the entrance to the Matsuya PX the slight edge of humor was replaced by a chilling sensation of fear. It was outrageous that his pleasure might disgust others and thereby subject him to their everlasting repugnance and further that such disgust might one day grow to be an indispensable element of pleasure.
Chilling self-disgust fused with the sweetest allurement . . . the very denial of existence joining with the concept of immortality that can never be healed. This unhealable existence was the unique essence of immortality.
Returning to the edge of the swimming pool, he bent down and took the flickering water in his hands. This was the feel of the wealth he had acquired at the end of his life. As he felt the darting arrows of the aestival sun striking his bended neck, it was as though he were the target of the enormous malice and derision of the fifty-seven summers of his life. It had not been such an unfortunate existence. All had been guided by the oar of reason, and the reefs of destruction had been skillfully avoided. To claim that he had not had a happy moment would be pure hyperbole. Nevertheless, how boring the voyage had been! It would be closer to his true feelings if he dared exaggerate and say that his life had been spent in complete darkness.
To declare his life unrelieved black seemed to express a certain acute empathy toward it. (There was no compensation, no joy in my association with you. Though I not once asked for you, you imposed your tenacious friendship and coerced me into this outlandish tightrope walking called living. You made me frugal with my infatuations, gave me ridiculously excessive possessions, transformed justice into wastepaper, converted reason into mere furniture, and confined beauty to its shabbiest form.) Life strove mightily to exile orthodoxy, hospitalize heresy, and trap humanity into stupidity. It was an accumulation of used bandages soiled with layers of blood and pus. Life was the daily changing of the bandages of the heart that made the incurably sick, young and old alike, cry out in pain.
He felt that somewhere in the brilliant blue of the sky over this mountainous region were concealed the gigantic, supple white hands of a sublime nurse engaged in futile daily treatments and demanding chores. The hands touched him gently and again encouraged him to live. The white clouds floating in the sky over Otomé Pass were dazzlingly new, almost hypocritically hygienic white bandages that had been strewn about.
Honda knew that he was sufficiently objective about himself. To other people, he was among the most wealthy lawyers and in a position to enjoy a leisurely old age. This was a reward for having dispensed impartial justice, and there was no record of graft to mar his long life as judge and attorney. Thus he was regarded, if with some envy, at least with no reproach. It was one of those belated remunerations that society sometimes bestows on a persevering citizen. At this point in life, if his little vice were to come out in the open, people would dismiss it with a smile, regarding it as one of those harmless human foibles in everyone. In short, he had everything that was desirable in the eyes of the world, except perhaps children.
The couple had talked about adopting a child, and they had been urged to do so by others, but Rié had grown reluctant to discuss the matter and Honda too had lost interest after he had come into his property. He suspected that people were just after his money.
Voices came from the house.
He listened, wondering whether a guest might have arrived so early in the morning. But it was only Rié talking with Matsudo. Soon the two came to the terrace and looked out over the undulations of the lawn.
“Look,” said Rié. “The lawn over there is so uneven. When you look at Fuji that slope by the arbor is the most conspicuous area of all. The uneven grass will be an embarrassment. A prince is coming, you know.”
“Yes, madame. Shall I mow it again?”
“Would you please.”
The chauffeur, a year older than Honda, walked to the end of the terrace to get the mower from the little storage room where the garden tools were kept. Honda had hired Matsudo not so much because he liked him, but because he appreciated the experience the chauffeur had driving government cars throughout the war and even after it.
His extremely sluggish manner, his faintly arrogant way of speaking, and the absolutely calm attitude of a man whose daily life was based entirely on the principle of safe driving—everything irritated Honda. (You think you can succeed in life simply by being as discreet about things as you are in driving, don’t you? Well, you’re wrong.) As he watched the old chauffeur he realized that Matsudo probably believed his employer to be the same kind of discreet person that he was. And Honda felt offended as though the chauffeur were drawing a rude caricature.
“Sit down here. You have plenty of time,” Honda called to Rié.
“Yes, but the chef and waiters will be here soon.”
“They’ll be late as usual.”
After hesitating slightly, like a thread loosening in water, Rié reentered the house to fetch a cushion. She feared that her kidneys might take cold from the iron chair.
“Chefs and waiters and . . . I can’t stand those people ruining the house,” she said, seating herself in the chair next to Honda.
“If I were like Mrs. Kinkin and loved flamboyance, how I should have enjoyed this style of living!”
“You bring up such ancient subjects!”
Mrs. Kinkin had been the wife of the most celebrated lawyer in Japan not long after the turn of the century. A former geisha, she was famous for her beauty and extravagance. Frequently she could be seen riding a white horse. And she raised eyebrows by wearing long geisha kimonos to funerals. When her husband died, she committed suicide, desperate that she could no longer live in the luxury to which she was accustomed.
“I hear Mrs. Kinkin kept pet snakes and she always carried a little one about in her purse. Oh, I forgot. You said you killed one yesterday. It would be terrible if a snake appeared while the Prince is here.” She called to Matsudo who was walking away with the lawn mower: “Matsudo! If you find a snake, get rid of it, but please don’t let me see it.”
Watching the movement of her throat as she shouted, there where age was so ruthlessly illuminated by the reflection of the pool, Honda suddenly remembered Tadeshina, whom he had met in the ruins of Shibuya during the war.
He recalled the
Sutra of the Peacock Wisdom King
that she had given him.
Sutra of the Peacock Wisdom King
that she had given him.
“If you are bitten by a snake, all you have to do is to chant this spell:
ma yu kitsu ra tei sha ka
.”
ma yu kitsu ra tei sha ka
.”
“Really?” Without a trace of interest, Rié sat back in the chair again. The sound of the mower engine which began immediately permitted them the choice of silence.
Honda took for granted the pleasure his old-fashioned wife showed about the forthcoming princely visit, but he was surprised at her calmness when she learned about the expected arrival of Ying Chan. For her part, Rié was hoping that her long suffering would come to an end if she were to see Ying Chan at her husband’s side.
“Tomorrow Keiko will be bringing Ying Chan along to the opening of the swimming pool, and they’ll stay with us overnight,” Honda had said casually, and she had experienced a kind of tingling pleasure. Her jealousy had been so deeply fraught with uncertainty that her distress, dissipating with every second, was like waiting for thunder after seeing a flash of lightning. What she had feared had fused with what she so anxiously awaited, and the realization that she need wait no longer cheered her.
Rié’s heart resembled a river sluggishly flowing through a vast and desolate plain, eroding its banks. And now, about to enter the unknown sea, it contentedly deposited its muddy sediment at the river mouth. It was here that it would cease being fresh water and would be transformed into the bitter saline sea. If one increases the volume of an emotion to its limits, its nature changes of its own accord; the accumulation of suffering which had seemed to destroy her was suddenly transformed into a strength for living—an exceedingly bitter, exceedingly stern, but suddenly expansive blue strength—the ocean.
Honda had not noticed that his wife had been changing into an unrecognizably bitter and hard woman. The Rié who had tortured him by her ill-humored, silent quest was in fact no more than a chrysalis.
On this bright morning she felt that even her chronic kidney ailment was considerably better.
The distant, lazy sound of the mower made the eardrums of the silent couple vibrate. It was a silence totally alien to that of the picturesque old couple who no longér needed to converse. With some exaggeration Honda interpreted the situation in this way: they were two bundles of nerves leaning against each other and in so doing just managed to avoid collapsing to the ground with a metallic crash. It was as though they were both, with difficulty and in silence, acquiescing to their condition. If he had committed some brilliant crime, he would at least have been able to feel that he was soaring a little higher than his wife. But his pride was deeply hurt when he realized that both his wife’s suffering and his own joy were of the same stature.
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