His knees in his arms, Tōru was nodding sleepily. He had made up his mind. But good manners demanded that he defer his assent until the superintendent could be a little prouder of the sweat he had expended.
He was happier than ever with his faculty for not dreaming. He had lighted mosquito repellent for the benefit of the superintendent, but the mosquitoes were at his own feet and ankles. The itching shone through his drowsiness like moonlight. He thought vaguely that he must again wash the hands with which he was scratching.
“Well, I’m afraid you’re sleepy. You have every right to be. The night’s practically over. Dear me. Eleven thirty already. I’ve stayed much too long. So the story sounds good to you? You agree?” As he stood up to leave, the superintendent laid a persuasive hand on Tōru’s shoulder.
Pretending to have awakened only now, Tōru said: “Yes. I agree.”
“You agree?”
“I agree.”
“Thank you, thank you. I’ll take care of everything else. Think of me as your father. All right?”
“Yes. I’d be very grateful if you would.”
“But it will be a loss for the station, letting a good boy like you go.”
He was far too drunk to drive. Tōru went for a taxi and saw him home.
15
TŌRU WAS off duty the next day. He spent the day at a movie and watching the ships in the harbor. He was on duty from nine the next morning.
After a number of typhoons, the late-summer sky for the first time displayed summery clouds. He was more attentive than usual to the clouds, thinking that this would be his last summer at the station.
The sky that evening was beautiful. Lines of cloud hovered over the ocean like the god of storms himself.
But the grand, orange-tinted forest of clouds was decapitated by yet another layer of clouds. Here and there the powerful muscles of the storm clouds were flushed over with shyness, and the blue sky behind poured over them in an avalanche of high azure. This layer was dark, that shone like a bright bow.
It was the nearest and highest layer of clouds. In exaggerated perspective, the layers that trailed off behind seemed to descend in steps beyond the clear sky. Perhaps, thought Tōru, it was a fraud perpetrated by the clouds. Perhaps the clouds, making a show of perspective, were deceiving him.
Among clouds like antique white clay images of warriors were some that suggested dragons twisting angrily and darkly upward. Some, as they lost their shape, were tinged rose. Presently, they separated themselves into bland reds and yellows and purples, and their stormy powers left them. The white shining face of the god had taken on the ashen hue of death.
16
SURPRISED to learn that Tōru’s birth, on March 20, 1954, came before the death of Ying Chan, Honda ordered further investigation. He went ahead with the adoption proceedings all the same.
He regretted that he had learned from her sister only that her death had come in the spring, and that he had not sought more specific information. Inquiring at the American Embassy about the residence of the sister, who had returned to America, he sent off two or three queries, but not the smallest fragment of information came in response. He had a friend in the Foreign Office make inquiry through the Japanese Embassy in Bangkok, but the only reply was that an investigation was in progress. There followed silence.
He could think of any number of devices if he did not mind the expense; but, with badly misplaced frugality and the impatience of old age, he neglected looking into the matter of the princess’s death even as he pushed forward with arrangements for the adoption. It seemed too much trouble.
The nerves of the Honda of 1944, uneasy about classic monetary principles, were probably still young and resilient. Now, when the classic common sense was falling apart, Honda clung to it stubbornly, and the result was a quarrel with a financial consultant fifteen years younger than he.
This last quarter of a century he had all the same amassed a fortune of perhaps two million dollars. The million that had come to him in 1948 he had cleanly divided into three parts, which he had put into stocks, real estate, and savings. The portion in real estate had increased tenfold and the stocks threefold and the savings had diminished.
He had not lost his taste for the stocks preferred by old gentlemen who, in wing collars, played billiards at English-style clubs. He was not free from the tastes of an age when the mark of class was to be the holder of “elegant, reliable” stocks like Tokyo Fire and Marine, Tokyo Electric Power, Tokyo Gas, and Kansai Electric Power, and to have a contempt for speculation. Yet the uninteresting stocks that exclusively made up his portfolio had tripled in value. Because of the fifteen-percent tax deduction for dividends, he paid scarcely any taxes at all from his dividend income.
Tastes in stocks were like tastes in neckties. Wide, gaudy, modish prints were not for an old man. If he did not reap the benefits of bold tastes, neither did he take the risks.
In the decade since 1960 it had become possible, as in America, to guess a man’s age from the stocks he owned. The bright celebrities among stocks were day by day becoming more vulgar, day by day taking on the look of the hoi polloi. The makers of small transistor parts, recording annual sales of ten billion yen, with stocks once fifty yen a share now touching fourteen hundred—they were altogether too ordinary.
While paying careful heed to his taste in stocks, Honda was quite insensitive to taste in real estate.
He had made a very good profit from the houses he had put up in 1953 for American soldiers near the Sagamihara Base. In those days it took more money to build houses than to buy land. Upon the advice of his financial consultant, Honda at first ignored houses and bought up some ten acres of unimproved land at a hundred yen or so per square yard. Each square yard was now worth perhaps twenty thousand yen. Land for which he had paid three million yen was now worth perhaps seven hundred and fifty million.
This was of course a windfall. He had had good luck with some of his land, rather poorer luck with other, but none of it had lost value. He regretted now that he had not left half that million dollars’ worth of forest land as it was.
His experience in making money had been a strange one. He could, to be sure, have made tenfold more if he had been bolder; but he could not think that he had come the wrong way. His prudence had guaranteed against loss. Yet there were small regrets and feelings of dissatisfaction. Pushed to their conclusion, they amounted to a dissatisfaction with his own innate nature; and a certain morbid lyricism was an inevitable result.
Honda had achieved security by clinging to his old-fashioned principles even though he was quite aware of the sacrifices they required. He worshipped the trinity of classical capitalism. There was something sacred about it, the harmony of liberal economics. It was symbolic, it had in it the slow, studied intellectual arrogance and sense of balance the gentlemen of the home country had toward colonies still in the primitive insecurity of monoculture.
Such things survived in Japan, then? As long as the tax laws remained unchanged, and enterprises continued to depend on sources of money other than their own capital, and as long as banks continued to demand land as security for loans, the giant article in pawn known as the land of Japan would have no part of the classic principles, and land prices would continue to rise. Inflation would cease only with the end of economic growth or with a Communist government.
While perfectly aware of these facts, Honda remained faithful to the old illusion. He took life insurance, and became an almost foolish defender of a currency system that was day by day falling to pieces. Perhaps a distant mirage of the age of the gold standard, when Isao was living so passionately, remained with Honda.
It had been long ago that the beautiful dream of harmony so dear to the liberal economists had faded, and the dialectical inevitability of the Marxists too had come to look rather peculiar. What was supposed to die had increased and multiplied, what was supposed to grow (it did grow, of course) changed into something quite different. There was no room left for pure
doctrine.
It was simple to believe in a world headed for destruction, and had he still been twenty Honda himself would perhaps have so believed; and the very refusal to collapse kept the person who had to slip over life like a skater and presently die constantly on the alert. Who would be so foolish as to skate if he knew the ice was cracking? And if the ice was quite certain not to crack, then a person was denied the pleasure of seeing others fall in. The only question was whether the ice would crack or not while one was skating, and Honda had not a great deal of time left to skate.
And while he was about it, his holdings gradually increased from interest and various sorts of profit.
People thought at any rate that their holdings increased. If they kept ahead of inflation they did increase. But something that increased by laws fundamentally in opposition to those of life could exist only by eating away at what stood on the side of life. Growing profits were the incursions of the white ants of time. A slight increase here and there brought the gentle, steady gnawing.
And then one became aware of the fact that time bearing profits and time for life were of a different nature.
These were thoughts that inevitably went through Honda’s mind as he lay awaiting daylight, altogether too awake, and indulged in the sport of chasing thoughts.
Interest accrues like moss over a great plain of time. We are not up to pursuing it forever. That is because our own time leads us relentlessly downhill to a cliff.
It had been a still-young Honda who thought that self-awareness was entirely a matter of the self. It had been a still-young Honda who had named “self-awareness” the awareness of a reality like a dark, thorny sea cucumber floating in the transparent cask of the self. “Like unto a violent torrent, ever flowing, ever changing.” He had apprehended the principle intellectually when he was in India, but it had taken him thirty years to make it a part of himself.
As he grew older, awareness of self became awareness of time. He gradually came to make out the sound of the white ants. Moment by moment, second by second, with what a shallow awareness men slipped through time that would not return! Only with age did one know that there was a richness, an intoxication even, in each drop. The drops of beautiful time, like the drops of a rich, rare wine. And time dripped away like blood. Old men dried up and died. In payment for having neglected to stop time at the glorious moment when the rich blood, unbeknownst to the owner himself, was bringing rich drunkenness.
Yes. The old knew that time held intoxications. And when the knowledge came there was no longer enough liquor left. Why had he not stopped time?
Even though he reproved himself, Honda did not think that it had been because of his own laziness and cowardice that he had not stopped time while he could.
Feeling the approach of daylight through his eyelids, Honda indulged in a soliloquy.
“No, there was never for me a moment when I had to do it, stop time. If I have something that might be called a destiny, then it has been in this inability to stop time.
“There was for me nothing that might have been called the pinnacle of my youth, and so no moment for stopping it. One should stop at the pinnacle. I could discern none. Strangely, I feel no regrets.
“No, there is still time after youth has gone by a little. A pinnacle comes, and then the moment. But if the eye that discerns the pinnacle is called an eye of awareness, then I must offer a small objection. I doubt that anyone has been more diligent than myself in putting the eye of awareness to work, more relentless in keeping it open. It is not enough for detecting the pinnacle. The help of destiny is needed. I am quite aware that few have been given that in shorter supply than myself.
“It is easy to say that strength of will kept me back. Was that really the case? Is not the will the leavings of destiny? Between will and determination, are there not inborn differences, as between castes in India? And is not the poorer one the will?
“I did not think so when I was young. I thought that human volition sought to make history. And where did history go? That stumbling old beggar woman.
“Some are all the same endowed with the faculty to cut time short at the pinnacle. I know it to be true, for I have seen examples with my own eyes.
“What power, poetry, bliss! To be able to cut it short, just as the white radiance of the pinnacle comes into view. There comes a foreknowledge in the delicate excitement offered by the slopes, in the changing distribution of the alpine flora, in the approach of the watershed.
“Just a little more and time will be at the peak, and without pausing it will begin its descent. Most people beguile the downward course by taking in the harvest. And what is that? The trails and the waters are only plunging downward.
“Endless physical beauty. That is the special prerogative of those who cut time short. Just before the pinnacle when time must be cut short is the pinnacle of physical beauty.
“Clear, bright beauty, in the knowledge that the radiant white pinnacle lies just ahead. And unhappy purity. In that moment the beauty of a man and the beauty of a gazelle are in wonderful correspondence. Raising its horns proudly, raising the hoof of the white-spotted leg ever so slightly in the face of the denial. Replete with the pride of the farewell, crowned with the white mountain snows.
“It would not have become me to raise my hand in farewell to those who were below, where time still ran on. Had I raised my hand in sudden farewell at a street crossing, I would only have stopped a cab.
“Perhaps, unable to stop time, I had to be content with stopping a succession of cabs. For the purpose, and that only, with firm resolve, of being taken to yet another place where time does not stop. Without the poetry and the bliss.
“Without the poetry, without the bliss! That is the important thing. And I know that only in them lies hidden the reason for life.
“Even if time is stopped there is rebirth. That I know too.
“And I must deny Tōru the terrible poetry and bliss. That must be my policy.”
Honda was by now quite awake. With dull pains here and there and with mucus in his throat to tell him that a new day had begun, he became captive of the need to bring together again things that had fallen apart while he slept. As if opening an old folding chair, he brought himself out of bed. The room was light. It was his practice to give notice of his having awakened through the interphone, but today he preferred not to. Instead he took a lacquered box from the shelf, and from it the report on Tōru he had had from the detective agency.
Report on proposed adoption
Number M-2582
Client 1493: Mr. Shigekuni Honda
August 20, 1970
Dainichi Investigating Agency
Tōru Yasunaga, born March 20, 1954; aged sixteen
Permanent residence: 6–152 Yui, Ihara-gun, Shizuoka Prefecture
Present residence: Meiwasō, 2–10 Funabara-chō, Shimizu, Shizuoka Prefecture
Character and deportment:
The subject is highly intelligent, with the unusual I.Q. of 159. As against 47 percent of examinees with an I.Q. of a hundred, only .6 percent have an I.Q. of over 140. It seems regrettable that such a talented boy should have lost his parents early and, reared by an uncle in straitened circumstances, have been forced to stop his education at middle school. A knowledge of his own abilities, moreover, has not been allowed to go to his head. He has acquitted himself of his rather simple and routine duties with the utmost conscientiousness and diligence, and his modesty and good manners have won him the affection of his colleagues and superiors. Since he is only sixteen, it is too early for a great deal to be reported on his behavior, but it would seem that his ministrations to a demented girl named Kinué who is the sport of the neighborhood have nothing to do with sex but are evidence of a gentle, charitable humanism. She looks up to a youth younger than herself as a god.
Interests and hobbies:
He would seem to have no pronounced interests. On holidays he goes to the library or to a movie, or watches the ships in the harbor. Usuall
y by himself in these pursuits, he would seem to have solitary inclinations. One may perhaps explain his addiction to tobacco despite the fact that he is still a minor as a result of the solitary and routine nature of his work. Smoking would seem to have had no effect on his health.
Marital status:
He is of course single.
Ideological tendencies and associations:
Perhaps because he is still so young, he has shown no interest in extreme political movements. He would on the contrary seem to have a distaste for politics and political movements. The company is without a union, and he has taken part in no movement toward unionization. He is a voracious reader despite his youth, and his interests would seem to be wide. He owns almost no books, but is a devoted user of libraries who relies on remarkable powers of memory to master what he has read. There is no evidence that he has been addicted to extremist writings of either the left or the right. The evidence is rather that he has sought knowledge of a general and varied kind. He sees comrades from his middle-school days occasionally but would seem to have no close friends.
Religious and other beliefs:
The family is Buddhist, but on the subject himself seems to have little interest in religion. He belongs to none of the newer religious sects. He has resisted strong pressure from their adherents.
Family:
Investigations to the third generation on both sides of the family have revealed no evidence of mental illness.
17
HONDA CHOSE a day late in October for Tōru’s first lesson in foreign table manners. The small parlor was set for a banquet in the French style, complete with caterer and butler, and Tōru wore a new navy-blue suit. He was informed that he must sit well back in the chair and bring it close to the table, that he must not put his elbows on the table or lean too low over his soup, and that he must keep his arms close to his sides. There followed instructions in the disposition of the napkin and the taking of the soup, with the spoon tilted toward the mouth for purposes of avoiding noise. Tōru followed all the instructions carefully, repeating over and over again sequences that did not come easily.