Spring Snow

  “What’s got into you all of a sudden?” he asked, trying desperately to keep his voice steady.

  “Mother and Father took the train to Kyoto last night. One of our relatives is seriously ill. I was left all by myself, and I began to think how very much I would like to see you, Kiyo. After thinking about it all night, I saw the snow this morning, and then more than anything else in the world I wanted to go riding through the snow with you. I’ve never done anything so impulsive in all my life. You’ll forgive me, won’t you, Kiyo?” Satoko spoke rather breathlessly in a child’s voice that was quite unlike her.

  They had already started to move. Their ears rang with the shouts of the two rickshaw men, one of whom was pushing, the other pulling. The snow had splashed into patterns that turned from white to yellow in the confinement of the tiny front window of the enclosed cab. In the interior, the light flickered dimly in time to the constant swaying.

  Kiyoaki had brought a green tartan blanket that now covered their legs. Since those forgotten days of childhood, this was the first time that they had ever been so close together, but Kiyoaki was distracted by the pale light flooding through the cracks in the bonnet of the rickshaw that narrowed and widened as a stream of snow filtered through them, by the snow itself turning to water on the green blanket, by the loud rustle of the snow pelting down on the hood as if onto dry banana leaves.

  “Go wherever you like. Take us anywhere you can go,” said Kiyoaki in answer to the rickshaw man. He knew that Satoko’s mood was his own.

  As the men raised the poles, ready to start, both of them sat back in their seats, their bodies slightly tensed. As yet, neither of them had even attempted to hold hands. Yet the inevitable contact of their knees under the blanket was like a spark flaring secretly under the snow.

  Kiyoaki’s gnawing doubt persisted: had Satoko really not read the letter? “Tadeshina denied it so emphatically she can’t have,” he thought. “But in that case, is Satoko just playing with me now, in the conviction that I am completely inexperienced with women? How could I tolerate such an insult? I was so anxious for her not to read the letter, but now I wish she had, because then to meet me in this insane way on such a snowy morning could mean only one thing: she’d be throwing down the gauntlet to a man of the world. And there’d be advantages for me in that. The only problem is that I am in fact inexperienced and I suppose there’s no way to hide it.”

  Kiyoaki’s thoughts twisted and turned as he sat in the small, dark, square confines of the swaying rickshaw. Since he would not look at Satoko, there was nothing else to do but stare out at the snow, flashing brightly through the narrow window of yellow celluloid. Finally, however, he put his hand under the blanket, where Satoko’s was waiting, already in possession of the one warm, narrow refuge available.

  One of the snowflakes blew in and lodged itself on Kiyoaki’s eyebrow. It made Satoko cry out, and without thinking, Kiyoaki turned toward her as he felt a cold trickle on his eyelid. She closed her eyes abruptly. Kiyoaki stared at the face with its closed lids; only the subdued crimson of her lips glowed in the shadows, and because of the swaying of the rickshaw, her features, like a flower held between trembling fingertips, were softly blurred.

  Kiyoaki’s heart thumped violently. He felt as if he were being choked by the high, tight collar of his uniform jacket. Never had he been confronted with anything as inscrutable as Satoko’s white face, eyes closed, quietly waiting. Beneath the blanket, he felt her grip on his hand tighten slightly. He realized that she was telling him something, and so, despite his terrible sense of vulnerability, he felt that something gentle but irresistible was drawing him on. He pressed a kiss on her lips.

  A moment later, the shaking of the rickshaw was about to force their lips apart, but Kiyoaki instinctively resisted the movement, until his whole body seemed to balance on that kiss, and he had the sensation that a huge, invisible, perfumed fan was slowly unfolding where their lips met.

  At that instant, although totally engrossed, he was still keenly aware of his own good looks. Satoko’s beauty and his: he saw that it was precisely this fine correspondence between the two that dissolved all constraint and allowed them to flow together, merging as easily as measures of quicksilver. All that was divisive and frustrating sprang from something alien to beauty. Kiyoaki now realized that a fanatical insistence on total independence was a disease, not of the flesh but of the mind.

  Once his anxiety had been erased and he felt increasingly sure of the girl who was the source of his happiness, their kiss became increasingly, passionately intense; Satoko’s lips were growing more pliant, and then just as he began to fear that his very essence might be melted and drawn into the sweet fragrance of her mouth, his fingertips stirred with the desire to touch her flesh. He pulled his hand out from under the blanket and passed it around her shoulders to hold her chin. He felt the small, fragile bones of a woman’s jaw with his fingertips and so gained a renewed awareness of a physical presence quite outside his own. This realization, however, only intensified the passion of his kiss.

  Satoko had begun to cry, as he realized when her tears wet his own cheeks. He felt a surge of pride, which owed nothing to his recent mood of altruism, the complacent desire to benefit mankind that had seized him; and in the same way, Satoko’s manner had lost all trace of her former condescension, so like that of a critical older sister. As he moved his hands over her body, touching first her earlobe, then her breast, the softness under his fingers excited him. This must be the true nature of caresses, he thought. At last his sensuality, given to drifting away like a rising mist, had settled upon something tangible. His mind was now filled with nothing but his own joy. And this, for Kiyoaki, was the height of abandon.

  The moment when a kiss ends—it was like awakening reluctantly from sleep, struggling drowsily against the glare of the morning sun as it struck their eyelids, as they yearned to hold on to the fragment of unconsciousness left to them. That is the moment when sleep is sweetest.

  When their lips parted, an ominous silence seemed to fall, as though the birds had suddenly stopped their attractive song. They looked away from each other and stared fixedly into space. The movement of the rickshaw, however, saved the silence from becoming too oppressive. At least they could feel part of some other activity.

  Kiyoaki dropped his eyes. Beneath the bottom of the green blanket, the toe of a woman’s white tabi edged out timidly, like a nervous white mouse peeping out of its grassy burrow. It was already covered with a light dusting of snow. He felt his cheeks burning, and so he reached over as spontaneously as a child to touch her cheek, pleased to discover the same warmth in her. It was like a tiny promise of summer.

  “I’ll open it up.”

  She nodded. He reached out and unfastened the front flap of the cab. The layer of snow that had collected on it to form a momentary square of solid white crumbled away without a sound.

  The rickshaw men, noticing movement inside the cab, suddenly stooped.

  “No, no! Keep going!” Kiyoaki shouted. Spurred on by the young man’s tone, they broke into a trot again.

  “Keep going! And as fast as you can!”

  The cab glided through the snow, the rickshaw men giving cries of encouragement to each other.

  “Somebody might see,” said Satoko, sitting back in the seat, unwilling to show her eyes still wet with tears.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The decisive ring in his own voice took Kiyoaki by surprise. Suddenly he understood. What he really wanted to do was to challenge the world.

  As he looked up, the sky above seemed to be a fury of boiling white. The snow was now lashing down right on their faces. If they opened their mouths, it lay on their tongues. To be buried in such a drift . . . it seemed like heaven.

  “Now there’s snow in here,” she said dreamily. Apparently, she meant that it had melted in a trickle from her neck to her breast. There was nothing anarchic in the falling snow, however: it fell with the steady solemnity of an ordere
d ritual. He felt his cheeks grow cold, and gradually became aware that his heart was fading within him.

  By now the rickshaw had climbed to the top of a hill in the fashionable Kasumi section of Azabu. The edge of the slope was skirted by a field that allowed a clear view of the parade ground and barracks of the Azabu Third Regiment below. On the white expanse of parade ground, there was not one soldier to be seen. Suddenly Kiyoaki had the illusion of seeing a huge mass of troops drawn up, just as in the familiar picture of the memorial ceremony near Tokuri Temple for the fallen of the Russo-Japanese War. With bowed heads, thousands of soldiers stood in groups around a white wood cenotaph and an altar covered with white cloths that were blowing in the wind. This scene differed from the photo only insofar as the soldiers’ shoulders were covered with snow and the visors of their caps had turned white. The moment he saw these phantoms, Kiyoaki understood that they had all died in battle. The thousands of troops below had massed not only to pray for fallen comrades, but to mourn their own lives as well.

  In a moment, the phantoms were gone. Behind a curtain of snow, scene after scene swept past them. The thick straw-colored ropes that supported the pines on the steep side of the Outer Moat bore a dangerous weight of snow. And behind the tight-shut windows of the small houses, the lamps were burning faintly although it was mid-morning.

  “Close it,” said Satoko.

  Kiyoaki shut the front flap, and they found themselves once more in the familiar half-light. The mood of ecstasy, however, was not to be so easily recaptured. Kiyoaki as usual was prey to misgivings. “I wonder how she felt when I was kissing her,” he thought. “She’s probably angry about the way I did it. She knows that I get too carried away, that I was all wrapped up in myself—just like a child. And it’s true. I couldn’t think about anything except how wonderful it felt to me.”

  Then Satoko’s voice broke into his thoughts.

  “Shouldn’t we go home?” she said, her voice altogether too composed.

  “There she goes,” he thought, “leading me by the nose again.” But even as he grumbled to himself, he knew that he was letting pass by the moment when he had the chance to change things. He could say: “No, let’s not go back.” But to do that was to reach out and pick up the dice. And his unskilled hand would have frozen at the very touch of them. He was not ready.

  13

  HE WENT HOME and concocted a story about leaving school early because of a sudden chill. His mother rushed up to his room to take his temperature. In the midst of this commotion, Iinuma appeared to say that Honda was on the phone. Kiyoaki had the greatest difficulty in persuading his mother not to take the call in his place, and when he had finally won his point and had gone downstairs to the phone, he was wrapped in a cashmere blanket, at his mother’s insistence.

  “It’s all very simple: the story is that I did go to school today but came home early. No one here knows anything different. My cold?” Made uneasy by the glass door at his back, he continued in a low, muffled voice. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll be at school tomorrow, and we can talk about it then. Don’t start telephoning just because I wasn’t at school—you do exaggerate!”

  When Honda rang off, he was shaking with anger at Kiyoaki’s icy response to his expressions of concern, but there was more to it than his unfriendly tone or his rudeness. Honda had never once put Kiyoaki in the position of having to share a secret.

  Once he had recovered himself, however, he began to think: “To telephone just because he wasn’t at school today—that’s not very like me.” And indeed, something more than friendly concern had driven him to telephone so hurriedly. When rushing across the snow-covered schoolyard to the administration office at recess to make the call, he had been driven by a feeling of foreboding that he could not pin down.

  Kiyoaki’s desk had been empty all morning. Looking at it, Honda experienced the sense of dread of a man whose worst fears are confirmed. The old desk, with its scars under the new varnish, reflected the direct glare of the snow through the window. It made him think of an upright coffin draped in white, the kind used to bury ancient warriors in a sitting position.

  His gloom persisted even after he had got home. Then there was a phone call; it was Iinuma with a message from Kiyoaki: he was sorry about the way he had spoken to Honda. If he sent a rickshaw to Honda’s house tonight, would he please come to visit him? Iinuma’s heavy, sepulchral tone depressed him still further. He curtly refused, saying that they could discuss things when Kiyoaki was well enough to go back to school.

  When Iinuma delivered this message, Kiyoaki felt the discomfort of real sickness. Afterwards, he called Iinuma to his room late that night, but instead of ordering him to do something, he surprised Iinuma by unburdening himself of his vexations.

  “Satoko causes nothing but trouble. It’s true what they say, isn’t it? A woman will destroy the friendship of men. If Satoko hadn’t behaved so willfully this morning, I wouldn’t have given Honda such cause for anger.”

  During the night it stopped snowing, and the next day was clear and pleasant. Prevailing over his mother and the rest of the household, Kiyoaki left for school. He intended to get there before Honda and be the first to say good morning. But as the sun rose in the sky, the dazzling splendor of this winter morning worked a change of mood. He was affected by a deep, insuppressible happiness that transformed him. Later, when Honda came into the classroom and returned his smile with a nonchalant one of his own, Kiyoaki in a sudden about-face abandoned his intention to tell him everything about the day before.

  Honda had managed a smile, but no words. After putting his book bag down on his desk, he leaned on the windowsill for a few moments and looked out at the snow. Then after a quick glance at his watch that presumably told him there were still thirty minutes to spare before class, he turned without a word and walked out. Kiyoaki felt impelled to follow him.

  A number of small flowerbeds were laid out geometrically along the side of the school, a two-story wooden structure. In their midst was an arbor. Not far beyond the edge of the beds the ground dropped away sharply, and a small path led down the slope to a pond surrounded by a grove of trees. Kiyoaki was reasonably sure that Honda would not go down to the pond, since the melting snow would make walking extremely difficult. Just as he had guessed, Honda stopped in the arbor, brushed the snow off one of the benches and sat down. Kiyoaki, threading his way through the drifts in the flower garden, walked up to him.

  “Why are you following me?” asked Honda, squinting into the brilliant light as he looked up.

  “I behaved very badly yesterday,” Kiyoaki apologized smoothly.

  “Never mind. Your cold was just an excuse, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Copying Honda, Kiyoaki brushed some snow off the bench and then sat down beside him. Because of the glare, the two of them had to squint painfully to look at each other, which greatly reduced the emotional charge in the atmosphere. The pond below was hidden from view, although they only had to stand up to see it through the snow-laden tree branches. They were surrounded by the sound of trickling water, proof that the mounds of snow on the school roof, on the arbor, and on the trees were now melting. The frozen crust that covered the flowerbeds had collapsed here and there, leaving coarse, layered chips of ice that glittered like split granite.

  Honda expected Kiyoaki to divulge some portentous secret and yet he didn’t want to admit to himself that he was curious, which almost made him hope that Kiyoaki would say nothing at all. Any confidence that smacked even remotely of condescension would be bitterly distasteful.

  It was Honda, then, who spoke first, wishing only to find a subject that had no bearing on the issue between them.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about personality lately. Take the times we live in, this school, this society—I feel alien to them all. At least I would like to think I did. And the same can be said for you too.”

  “Yes, of course,” Kiyoaki replied, his tone as uninterested and aloof as
ever, yet with a sweetness that was very much in character.

  “But let me ask you this: what happens after a hundred years? Without us having any say in the matter, all our ideas will be lumped together under the heading, ‘The Thought of the Age.’ Take the history of art, for example: it proves my point irrefutably, whether you like it or not. Each period has its own style, and no artist living in a particular era can completely transcend that era’s style, whatever his individual out-look.”

  “Does our age have its style too?”

  “I think I’d be more inclined to say that the style of the Meiji era is still dying. But how would I know? To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious to its style. You and I, you see, must be immersed in some style of living or other, but we’re like goldfish swimming around in a bowl without ever noticing it. Take yourself: yours is a world of feeling. You appear different from most people. And you yourself are quite sure that you have never allowed your personality to be compromised. However, there is absolutely no way of proving that. The testimony of your contemporaries has no value whatever. Who knows? It may just be that your world of feeling represents the style of this era in its purest form. But then again, there’s no way of knowing.”

  “Well, then, who does decide?”

  “Time. Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though we’re unaware of what it is. And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, they’ll be talking about you and me. We’ll all be lumped together. You detest that bunch on the kendo team, don’t you? You despise them?”

  “Yes,” Kiyoaki said, uncomfortably aware that the cold was beginning to penetrate the seat of his trousers, but gazing nevertheless at some green camellia leaves beside the frame of the arbor. Freshly bared by the melting snow, they were gleaming brightly. “Yes, I not only dislike them, I despise them.”