Though the train was racing through the night, the darkness was so thick and the sky so overcast that the fields and mountains beyond were almost blotted out, leaving nearly nothing to mark the forward progress of the train. From time to time, a tiny flash of light or the brief glow of a lantern tore a brilliant rent in the curtain of blackness, but these could not provide any orientation. It was not the train that made this rumbling noise, Honda mused. It was something else. Something that enveloped this little thing as it made its insignificant way through the night. The roaring issued from the massive darkness itself.
While Honda had been hurriedly packing to leave the inn at Obitoké, Kiyoaki had obtained a few sheets of cheap stationery from the innkeeper and had written a note which he had then given to Honda, asking him to deliver it to his mother the Marquise. Honda had placed it carefully in the inside pocket of his jacket. Now, for want of anything better to do, he took it out and read it by the poor light of the bulb hanging from the roof of the car.
It was written in pencil, and the hand was unsteady, quite unlike Kiyoaki. He had never drawn his figures with much grace, but there had always been an abundantly vigorous touch to them:
Dear Mother,
There is something that I would like you to give Honda for me. The dream journal in my desk. He’d like it. And since nobody else would want to read it, please see that he gets it.
Kiyoaki
Honda could see that he had used his last reserves of strength to write this as a kind of will. But if it really had been that, he should surely have included a word or two for his mother herself, instead of addressing her in this curt and businesslike fashion.
A groan came from the opposite berth. He quickly put away the note and was beside Kiyoaki in a flash, looking down at his face.
“What is it?”
“My chest hurts. It feels as if I’m being stabbed here.”
Kiyoaki’s breathing was harsh. His words came in spurts. Honda, not knowing what else to do, gently began to massage the lower left side of his chest, the spot where he said the pain was most intense. But in the faint light, he saw that his friend’s face was still contorted.
Despite the contortions, however, it was beautiful. Intense suffering had imbued it with an extraordinary character, carving lines into it that gave it the austere dignity of a bronze mask. The beautiful eyes were filled with tears. Above them, however, the eyebrows were tightly puckered, and the masculine force they conveyed made a striking contrast with the pathos of the flashing dark, wet pupils. As he fought the pain, his finely chiseled nose jutted upward as if he were trying to probe the darkness around him, and his lips, parched with fever, were drawn back to reveal the palely gleaming mother-of-pearl of his teeth.
Finally, the racking pain seemed to subside.
“You’re asleep? Good. It’s what you need,” said Honda. He wondered about the tortured look he had seen on his friend’s face just a moment before. Hadn’t it in fact been an expression of intense joy, the kind to be found nowhere but at the extremity of human existence? Perhaps Kiyoaki had seen something, and Honda envied him that, an emotion that in turn stirred an odd shame and self-reproach in him.
He shook his head slightly. He had begun to feel the numbing weight of grief. Deep within him, as subtly and persistently as the spinning of a silkworm’s thread, an emotion had gradually taken shape. Its significance eluded him, and he was disturbed by it.
Then Kiyoaki, who seemed to have dozed off for a moment, suddenly opened his eyes wide and reached for Honda’s hand. He grasped it tightly as he spoke.
“Just now I had a dream. I’ll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.”
His dream, Honda thought, had taken him to the park around his father’s house. And there, the most vivid of all the images must have been the falls, tumbling down from the crest of the hill in its nine stages.
Two days after his return to Tokyo, Kiyoaki Matsugae died at the age of twenty.
Footnotes
∗ The fundamental doctrine of Hosso Buddhism: all existence is based on subjective awareness.
Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow
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