The Decay of the Angel

  He had that summer brought the mad Kinué from Shimizu and installed her in the garden cottage.

  “Her? Oh, she’s a very sad case. In my Shimizu days she helped me this way and that. She wanted to come to Tokyo because at home everybody made fun of her and the children were always chasing after her and shouting at her. So I persuaded her parents to let me have her. They’d kill her if they put her in an asylum. Yes, she’s crazy, no doubt about it, but she’s harmless.”

  Casual acquaintances among the elders of the family were much taken by Tōru, but they were courteously and skillfully turned away when they sought to enter his life. They were inclined to lament that a man once so keen and intelligent as Honda should have fallen so hopelessly into senile delusions. They had long memories, remembering that windfall of more than twenty years before. Envy was at work.

  A day in Tōru’s life.

  There was no longer a need to look at the sea and await ships.

  There was no need to attend classes either, but Tōru did so to inspire confidence. He went by automobile, despite the fact that the university was a ten-minute walk away.

  The habit of rising early had not left him. Judging from the light through the curtains that a quiet summer rain was falling, he would go over the ordering of the world he controlled. Were the evil and the arrogance going like clockwork? Was no one yet aware of the fact that the world was wholly under the control of evil? Was order being preserved, everything proceeding after the laws, with not the smallest spot of love to be detected anywhere? Were people happy under his hegemony? Had transparent evil, in form a poem, been spread over their heads? Had “the human” been carefully wiped away? Had careful arrangements been made for every sign of warmth to be ridiculed? Was spirit quite dead?

  Tōru was confident that if he but laid a beautiful white hand upon it, the world would succumb to a beautiful illness. And it was natural too that he should expect windfall to follow unanticipated windfall. For reasons that he did not know, an impoverished signalman had been chosen as the foster son of a rich old man, and an old man with one foot in the grave. One of these days a king would come from some country or other and ask to adopt him.

  Even in the winter he would run to the shower room he had had installed next to his bedroom and have a cold shower. It was the best thing for waking a person up.

  The cold water would liven his pulse, lash at his chest with its transparent whip, thousands of silver needles would stab at his skin. He would take it against his back for a time and turn to face it again. His heart had still not quite made friends with it. It was as if a sheet of iron were pushing at his chest, as if his naked flesh were encased in a tight suit of armor. He twisted and turned, like a corpse dangling from a rope of water. Finally his skin had awakened. Young skin stood there regally, turning off the drops of water. At that moment Tōru raised his left arm and looked down at the three moles like three shining black pebbles in a cascade. They were the sign of the elite, visible to no one, hidden under a folded wing.

  He dried himself. He breathed deeply. His body was flushed.

  It was the duty of the maid Tsuné to bring his breakfast the moment he called for it. Tsuné was a girl he had picked up in a Kanda coffeehouse. She obeyed all his orders.

  It was only two years since he had first known a woman, but he had quickly learned the rules for making a woman serve a man who did not love her. And he knew how to spot instantly a woman who would do what he told her. He had dismissed all the maids likely to follow Honda’s wishes and hired women whom he had discovered and slept with, and given them the title “maid,” using the English word. Tsuné was the stupidest one among them, and the one with the largest breasts.

  When breakfast was on the table, he poked at a breast by way of good morning.

  “Nice and firm.”

  “Yes, in very good shape.” Tsuné answered respectfully if expressionlessly. The heavy, dark flesh itself was respectful. Particularly deferential was the navel, deep as a well. The beautiful legs were somehow incompatible with the rest of Tsuné. She was aware of that fact. Tōru had seen how, as she brought coffee past on the uneven floor of the coffeehouse, she had brushed her calf against the lower branches of the starving rubber plant, like a cat rubbing against a bush.

  Tōru thought of something. Going over to the window, he looked down into the garden, the chest of his bathrobe open to the morning breeze. Even now Honda scrupulously respected the hour for his morning walk, just after he was out of bed.

  Tottering along on his stick in the stripes of November sunlight, Honda smiled and managed a good morning Tōru could barely hear.

  Tōru smiled and waved. “I’ll be damned. The old man’s still alive.” That was his good morning.

  Still smiling, Honda skirted a dangerous steppingstone. He did not know what would come flying down upon him if he were so incautious as to say more. He had only to endure this moment of humiliation. Tōru would be out of the house at least until evening.

  “Old people smell bad. Go away.” Honda’s offense had been to come too near.

  Honda’s cheek twitched with anger, but he had no recourse. If Tōru had shouted at him, he could and would have shouted back. But Tōru had spoken softly and coolly, gazing at Honda with his clean, beautiful eyes, a smile on his pale face.

  Tōru’s dislike seemed to have grown through the four years they had been together. He disliked everything, the ugly, impotent flesh, the useless chatter that covered the impotence, the tiresome repetitiveness, five and six times over, the automatism that became fretful at the repetitiveness itself, the self-importance and the cowardice, the miserliness and the self-indulgence, the pusillanimity in the constant fear of death, the complete permissiveness, the wrinkled hands, the gait like a measuring worm, the mixture of arrogance and obsequiousness on the face. And Japan was teeming with old people.

  Back at the breakfast table he kept Tsuné on duty to pour his coffee. He had her put in sugar. He complained about the toast.

  It was a sort of superstition that the success of a day depended upon a smooth beginning. The morning must be an unflawed crystal. He had been able to endure the boredom of life at the signal station because observation did not damage self-respect.

  Once Tsuné said: “The manager of the coffee shop used to call me Asparagus. Because I am long and white, he said.”

  Tōru replied by pressing his lighted cigarette against the back of her hand. Stupid though she was, Tsuné thereafter minded her words. Especially when she served him at breakfast. The four “maids” took turns on duty. Three of them looked after Tōru, Honda, and Kinué, and the fourth was off duty. The one who served Tōru his breakfast was the one he received in his bed at night. When he had finished with her she was dismissed. No one was permitted to spend the night with him. They thus enjoyed his favors once every four days, and were allowed to leave the house once a week. Honda secretly admired the tightness of the control and the want of dissension. The maids followed Tōru’s orders as if to do so were in the nature of things.

  He had taught them all to call Honda “the old master,” and otherwise trained them impeccably. Occasional callers would say that nowhere else these days did they see such beautiful and well-trained maids. Tōru left Honda wanting for nothing even while humiliating him.

  Having made himself ready for school, Tōru always looked in at the garden cottage. Carefully made up, wearing a negligee, Kinué always received him from the chaise longue on the veranda. Her newest coquetry was illness.

  Tōru would sit on the veranda and face the ugly woman with the warmest, most sincere gentleness.

  “Good morning. And how are you feeling this morning?”

  “Not too bad, thank you. I doubt if there is anything more beautiful in this world than the moment when a beautiful woman with only the strength to make herself up, all weak on her couch, receives a caller and manages a feeble ‘Not too bad, thank you.’ The beauty of it all waves like a heavy flower, and it is there on her eyelids
as she closes her eyes. Isn’t it? I think of it as the one thing I can do for all your kindness. But I’m very grateful. You’re the one kind man in the world who gives me everything and asks nothing in return. And now that I’m here I can see you every day and don’t have to go out. If only your father weren’t here.”

  “Don’t worry about him. He’ll give up and die one of these days. The September business has been taken care of and everything is going fine. I think next year maybe I can buy you a diamond ring.”

  “How nice! That’s what will keep me alive, the thought of it. But today I’ll have to make do with flowers. The white chrysanthemum in the garden is my flower for today. Will you pick it for me? How nice. No, not that one. The one in the pot. That’s it. The big white one with the petals all drooping like threads.”

  Heedlessly, Tōru broke off the white chrysanthemum so carefully tended by Honda. Like an ailing beauty, Kinué turned it languorously in her fingers. Then, with an all-too-fleeting smile on her lips, she put it in her hair.

  “Be off with you. You’ll be late for school. Think of me between classes.” And she waved him good-bye.

  Tōru went to the garage. He started up the Mustang sports car he had had Honda buy him that spring upon his entry into the university. If the absent, romantic engine of a ship could cut through waves so cleanly, kick up such a wake, then why could not the six delicately alert cylinders of the Mustang scatter the stupid crowds, cut through the masses of flesh, scatter splashes of red as the other scattered splashes of white?

  But it was held in quiet control. It was coaxed and wheedled into a gentle pretense of docility. People admired it as they admire a sharp, shining blade. It forced a smile from its beautiful hood, paint all ashine, to assure them that it was not dangerous.

  Capable of a hundred and twenty-five miles per hour, it debased itself by keeping to the twenty-five-mile speed limit as it made its way through the Hongō morning crowds.

  The September third incident.

  It began with a little spat Tōru and Honda had in the morning.

  Through the summer Tōru had been happily rid of Honda, who had taken refuge from the heat at Hakoné. Reluctant to rebuild after his Gotemba villa burned down, Honda had left the land as it was and, always sensitive to the heat, spent his summers at a Hakoné inn. Tōru preferred to stay in Tokyo and drive here and there, to the mountains and the sea, with friends. Honda returned to Tokyo on the evening of September second. He saw Tōru for the first time in some weeks. There was clear anger in the eyes that greeted him from the sun-blackened face. Honda was frightened.

  Where was the crape myrtle, he asked in surprise as he went out into the garden on the morning of the third. The old crape myrtle by the garden cottage had been cut at the roots.

  Kinué, who had been in the main house, had moved to the cottage early in July. It had been from fear of Tōru after the poker incident that Honda had first taken her in.

  Tōru came out. He had the poker in his left hand. His room was a remodeled parlor. It had the only fireplace in the house. Even in summer there was a poker on the nail beside it.

  Tōru of course knew that the mere sight of it would make Honda cower like a whipped dog.

  “What are you doing with that thing? This time I’ll call the police. Last time I kept quiet because I didn’t want publicity, but it won’t be so easy for you this time.” Honda’s shoulders were quivering, and it had taken all his courage to speak.

  “You have a stick, don’t you? Defend yourself with that.”

  Honda had been looking forward to the crape myrtle in bloom, its blossoms shining against a trunk smooth like the white skin of a leper. But there was none. The garden had been made over, he knew, in the Alaya, the Storehouse, into a different garden. Gardens too must change. But in the instant that he so felt, uncontrollable anger came from another source. He cried out, and even as he cried out he was afraid.

  The summer rains had ended and the heat had come after Kinué had moved to the cottage. The crape myrtle was in bloom. She disliked it, she said. It gave her a headache. She started saying that Honda had planted it there to drive her mad; and so Tōru cut it down after Honda’s departure for Hakoné. It was as simple as that.

  Kinué herself was out of sight, far back in the dusky recesses of the cottage. Tōru offered Honda no explanation. There would be no advantage in it.

  “I suppose you cut it down?” said Honda, more softly.

  “That I did.” Tōru’s answer was cheerful.

  “Why?”

  “It was old and useless.” Tōru smiled a beautiful smile.

  At such times Tōru would lower a thick glass door before his eyes. Glass that came down from the sky. Glass made from exactly the same material as the limpid morning sky. Honda knew that no shout, no word would reach Tōru’s ears. Tōru would only see false molars. Honda already had inorganic teeth. He was already beginning to die.

  “I see. It makes no difference.”

  All through the day Honda sat still in his room. He barely touched the food that the “maid” brought. He knew what she would report to Tōru.

  “The old man’s being awful sulky.”

  Perhaps the sufferings of the old man did in fact come to nothing more than sulkiness. Honda could see in them foolishness beyond defending. It had all been his own doing and not Tōru’s. There was no need for surprise at the change in Tōru. Honda had seen at the first glance the “evil” in the boy.

  But at the moment he wanted to measure the depth of the wound inflicted on his self-respect by what he had asked for.

  Honda disliked air-conditioning and was at an age when he feared stairs. He had a large twelve-mat room on the ground floor, looking out over the garden to the cottage. Built in the medieval shoin style, it was the oldest and gloomiest room in the house. Honda ranged four linen cushions in a row. He lay down and then sat up on his heels. With all the sliding doors pulled shut, he let the heat accumulate. Sometimes he would crawl to the table for a drink of water. It was as warm as in full sunlight.

  Time went past along the indefinable line between waking and sleeping, like a nap at the ultimate end of anger and sadness. Even the pain in his hips would have been a distraction, but today there was none. He was only exhausted.

  An unfathomable disaster seemed to be coming down on him, only made worse by the fact that it had precise, delicate gradations, and, like a subtly compounded potion, was having the predicted effect. Honda’s old age should have been free of vanity, ambition, honor, prestige, reason, and above all emotion. But it wanted cheer. Although he should have forgotten all feeling long ago, black irritation and anger continued to smolder like a bed of embers. Stirred, they sent off a reeking smoke.

  There was autumn in the sunlight on the paper doors, but isolation contained no signs of movement, of change into something else, like the change of the seasons. All was stagnation. He could see them clearly in himself, anger and sadness that should not have been there, like puddles after a rain. The feeling born this morning was like a bed of leaves ten years old, and new each instant. All the unpleasant memories poured in upon him, but he could not, like a youth, say that his life was unhappy.

  When the light at the window told him that evening was near, sexual desire stirred in the crouching Honda. It was not a sudden onset of desire, but rather something tepid that had gestated through hours of sadness and anger and coiled round his brain like a red worm.

  The driver he had used over the years had retired, and his successor had been guilty of certain indiscretions. And so Honda had sold his automobile and now used rented cars. At ten he called a maid on the interphone and asked her to order a car. He took out a black summer suit and a gray sports shirt.

  Tōru was out. The maids looked with curiosity upon the nocturnal departure of the eighty-year-old Honda.

  When the car turned into the Meiji Gardens, Honda’s desire had become something like a faint attack of nausea. Here he was again, after twenty years.

&
nbsp; But it was not sexual desire that had burned in him all through the ride.

  His hands on his stick, more erect than usual, he had been muttering to himself: “I only have to endure it six months more. Just six months more. If he’s the real thing.”

  That “if” made him tremble. If Tōru were to die in the six months before his twenty-first birthday, everything could be forgiven. Only the awareness of that birthday had made it possible for Honda to endure the arrogance. And if Tōru was counterfeit?

  The thought of Tōru’s death had been a great comfort. In his humiliation he had concentrated upon Tōru’s death, in his heart already killed him. His heart was quiet, happiness welled up, his nose twitched with tolerance and pity when he saw death, like the sun through isinglass, beyond the violence and cruelty. He could be drunk on the open cruelty of what is called charity. Perhaps that was what he had found in the light upon the vast, empty Indian plain.

  He had not yet detected in himself symptoms of a fatal illness. There was nothing to be alarmed about in his blood pressure or his heart. He was confident that if he lasted another half year he would outlive Tōru, perhaps by only a few days. What quiet, secure tears he would be able to shed! Before the foolish world, he would play the part of the tragic father deprived of the son he had come upon so late in life. He could not deny that there was pleasure in looking forward to Tōru’s death, in looking ahead to it with the quiet love, oozing sweet poison, of one who knows everything. Tōru’s violence, beguiling and lovable, seen through the time ahead as through a Mayfly’s wing. People do not love pets that will outlive them. A short life is a condition for love.

  And perhaps Tōru was fretting at a prospect like a strange, unheard-of ship suddenly appearing on a horizon which he had been scanning for days. Perhaps a foretaste of death was moving him, irritating him. The possibility brought unbounded gentleness over Honda. He felt that he could love not only Tōru but the whole human race. He knew the nature of human love.