Rié suddenly remembered the winter beauty of Mount Fuji, which she had been able to see from the second floor of the house soon after her marriage. She had been told by her mother-in-law to bring down the dinner service reserved for the New Year’s celebrations and had gone obediently up to the storage room on the second floor. She had seen Fuji from there. She had tied a red cord across her sleeves to keep them down as new brides did.
Rié noticed that the rain had stopped and the evening light was limpid. Thinking to dispel her worries by looking at Fuji, she went up to the storage room on the second floor for the first time in many years. She climbed over the stacked guest bedding and opened the window with its opaque glass panes. The postwar sky, unlike that of former days, was bright, but an isinglass cloudiness had settled everywhere. Fuji was not visible.
39
HONDA AWAKENED with a need to urinate.
Tattered ends of interrupted dreams.
He had felt like strolling about a small residential district of Tokyo with its rows of little hedged gardens. The houses were tiny, and in front of them bonsai had been placed on shelves in the yards; some had small flower patches bordered with shells. The gardens were damp and filled with the inevitable snails. Two children sat facing each other on the edge of a veranda drinking warm sugar water and savoring wafers with broken corners. It was one of those Tokyo districts from which such scenes had now totally vanished. He had come to a dead-end alley surrounded by hedges. A decrepit wooden wicket gate stood at the farther end.
When he opened the wicket and stepped in, it proved to be the bright front garden of an old-fashioned hotel, and a garden party was in progress. The manager with a Ronald Colman moustache came forward and bowed respectfully.
Just then the brilliant, pathetic sound of bugles rose from the buffet tent, the ground suddenly split asunder, and Princess Moonlight clad in a golden dress emerged on the wings of a golden peacock. The assembly applauded as the peacock flew over their heads making a bell-like sound with its wings.
Princess Moonlight’s shiny, brown thighs astride the golden peacock exposed her privates, and in short order she sent down a shower of fragrant urine onto the upturned faces of the onlookers.
Why had she not gone to the toilet? Honda wondered. He must scold her for such outlandish manners. He entered the hotel in search of a bathroom.
Inside, the building was completely still and contrasted with the commotion outdoors.
The door of each room was unlocked and slightly ajar. Honda opened each one and saw that every room was empty except for a coffin on the bed.
A voice told him that that was the toilet he was looking for.
Unable to contain himself longer, he entered a room and tried to urinate into the coffin, but he could not out of fear of committing blasphemy.
It was at that point that he awakened.
Such dreams were merely the pitiful signs of old age when the urge to urinate came at shorter and shorter intervals. After returning from the toilet, completely awake and clear-headed, he was taken up with recapturing the broken threads of the dream. He knew that there was undeniable happiness to be found there.
He wished to recapture the feeling of radiant joy by making it go on. In it a brilliantly pure, unreserved delight existed to the fullest. And the joy was real. If, even in a dream, Honda could not think that the joy of capturing an unrepeatable segment of time in his life was real, what else could reality be? When he glanced up to the sky he caught sight of the transformed figure of the Peacock Wisdom King set in a complete harmony of affinity and sympathy, soaring astride the golden peacock. Ying Chan was his.
The next morning even after he awakened, the happy feeling distinctly persisted, and Honda was in high spirits.
Of course, the dream that he had had in his second sleep was so vague and shapeless that he could not possibly recall it. He could only remember that it had contained none of the happiness of the first. But the brilliant light in this latter had pierced the accumulation of the second dream that was like a snowdrift and had stayed in his memory until morning.
All day he again thought of Ying Chan, using her absence as a lever. He was astonished when he realized that something like the passion of the youthful first love he had never known infused his fifty-seven-year-old body.
On reflection, falling in love for him was not only extraordinary, but rather comical. By having closely observed Kiyoaki Matsugae, he knew full well what sort of man should fall in love.
Falling in love was a special privilege given to someone whose external, sensuous charm and internal ignorance, disorganization, and lack of cognizance permitted him to form a kind of fantasy about others. It was a rude privilege. Honda was quite aware that since his childhood he had been the opposite of such a man.
He had often observed the contrariness of human fate that let one individual participate in history out of ignorance and another fail to because of eagerness. Thus he believed that the greatest reason for not obtaining what one wished lay in the desire to obtain. Because Honda had never wanted money, millions had come to him.
That was how he thought. His inability ever to obtain anything was not the result of any shortcoming or innate flaw in himself, nor was it some bad luck he carried with him. It was his habit to formulate everything into laws, to universalize. So it was no small wonder that he set out to circumvent this particular one. It was his manner to do everything by himself, thus he could easily play both the role of legislator and violator. In other words, he limited what he wanted to what he could never get. If by chance he obtained the object of his desire, it invariably proved worthless. Thus he strove to attribute all manner of impossibilities to this object, to put it at as great a distance as he could. In other words, he kept a passionate apathy in his heart.
In the case of Ying Chan the shrouding in mystery of this thick-petaled Thai rose was achieved almost completely after the incident that night in Gotemba. It consisted in relegating her to some unattainable place, somewhere his perception could never penetrate. (In the first place, the length of his arm and that of his perception were the same.) The pleasure one gets by seeing necessarily presupposes some unseeable sphere. Honda felt that he had seen to the ends of the world during his experience in India. And he wanted to know the feeling of an indolent animal licking its resin-smeared fur and relaxing in a pool of sunshine, sending its prey someplace where the claws of perception could never reach. In trying to simulate such an animal, was he not trying to imitate God?
It was unbearable for Honda that his carnal desires should so perfectly overlap with his desire for perceiving; and he knew very well that love would never be born in him unless he could separate the two. How could a rose spring up between a pair of gigantic trunks entwined and ugly? Love should not open up like a parasitic orchid on either one with their shameless hanging roots, nor from his insipid desire for perception, nor from his rank fifty-seven-year-old lust. It was necessary that Ying Chan should exist beyond the reach of his desire for perceiving, that he deal only with the impossibility of his desire.
Absence was the best for this. It was indeed. It was the only pure, perfect material for his love. Without absence the nocturnal beast of perception would immediately begin to glare and soon tear everything apart with its sharp claws. Biting into the unknown, transforming everything into familiar corpses, stepping into the morgue of perception—this frightfully boring disease had once been cured by India, had it not? What India and Benares had taught him was that, escaping the ultimate of perception, Ying Chan like a single remaining rose should be locked tightly away at the back of a dusty ebony shelf; he could pretend to know it already so that it would escape the eyes of his perception. That Honda had achieved. He had locked the cupboard himself, and it was by his will that he did not open it.
Long ago Kiyoaki, fascinated by the completely impossible, had committed an impropriety. But Honda created the impossible so that he would commit no violation of it. For the minute he attempted a vio
lation, beauty could no longer exist in this world.
He remembered the freshness of the morning when Ying Chan had vanished. A part of himself had been driven by fear, yet another part had enjoyed the situation. Even after he had discovered that she was no longer in her room, he did not panic and at once summon Katsumi. He was totally engrossed in savoring her ubiquitous lingering fragrance.
It had been a beautiful sunny morning. The bed was rumpled. He detected in the minute wrinkles in the sheet evidence of where her feverish body had tossed and turned in her distress. Honda picked up a curly wisp of hair hidden under the swells of the blanket that was like a nest where some lovely little animal had suffered. He looked to see if there were traces of Ying Chan’s transparent saliva in the hollow of the pillow that still held its innocent indentation.
Only then had he gone down to tell Katsumi.
Katsumi had turned white. Honda had no difficulty in concealing the fact that he was not at all surprised.
They decided to join forces to search for her.
It would be untrue for Honda to deny he was then entertaining the thought of Ying Chan’s death. He did not believe she was dead, but in this sunny interval in the rainy season death wafted even in the wasted fragrance of the morning coffee. Something tragic enclosed the morning like a fine silvery edging. It was the proof of grace Honda had dreamt about.
Though he had absolutely no intention of doing so, he suggested to Katsumi that perhaps they should notify the police and enjoyed seeing the extremely alarmed expression this evoked.
Honda visualized with a thrill Ying Chan’s body floating in the swimming pool that reflected the blue sky. He went out to the terrace and looked into the rain puddles in the excavation. He felt that the glass that demarcated the real from the unreal had been completely shattered that moment and that he could thus easily step into the world of the unknown. The universe could be anything that morning. Anything was possible: death, murder, suicide, even universal destruction right in the midst of the bright fresh panorama.
As he and Katsumi descended the narrow lane across the soaking lawn toward the mountain stream, Honda enjoyed, in a swift flight of imagination, a foreboding of his once considerable social prestige collapsing amidst great fracas if a suicide scandal were to appear in the newspapers. But this was ridiculous exaggeration. The incident had taken place only between Katsumi and Ying Chan, and no one in the world knew anything about Honda’s peephole.
For the first time in many days one could see Fuji beyond the garden. It was already a summer mountain. Its snowy skirts had been hoisted unexpectedly high, and the color of the earth in the morning sun glowed like rain-soaked brick.
They looked in the stream; they searched in the cypress woods.
When they left the grounds Honda suggested that Katsumi go to Keiko’s house where he just might find her in. This he obstinately refused to do, offering instead to check by car along the road to the station. He was terrified of facing his aunt.
Honda himself was hesitant about visiting Keiko at such an early hour, but it was unavoidable in this instance. He pushed the bell. Surprisingly, she appeared, makeup completed and dressed in an emerald-green dress and a cardigan.
“Good morning,” she said quite normally. “You’re looking for Ying Chan? She came over here while it was still dark. She’s asleep now in Jack’s bed. Lucky Jack wasn’t here. What a scene if he had been. Since she seemed upset, I gave her some chartreuse and let her sleep. After that I was wide awake, so I just stayed up. What a horrible man you are! But I asked no questions about what happened. Would you like to see her lovely face while she’s sleeping?”
Honda, still extremely patient, controlled his desire to see Ying Chan. Neither she nor even Keiko had contacted him.
He was waiting for madness to take complete possession of him.
Reason was threatened by an extreme of anxiety, and just as the old fox in the farce Fox Hunt jumped at his prey although he was quite aware of the danger of a trap, Honda was waiting for the moment when he would be driven into blind self-destruction despite his experience and knowledge, accomplishment and skill, reason and objectivity—or rather, he was waiting for the moment when the accumulation of them all would drive him to it.
Just as a boy must wait for maturity, so a fifty-seven-year-old too had to attend his own ripening; and that was toward catastrophe. When all the trees in the withered November thickets had lost their leaves and the underbrush had yellowed and when in the clarity of the winter sun the place appeared as white and dry as the Pure Land, like the snake gourd, a single spot of crimson among dead vines, he fervently awaited his ripening toward catastrophe.
Whether what he sought was a flamelike lack of discernment or death, Honda’s age made it difficult for him to know. Someplace, he knew not where, something was being slowly and carefully prepared. And now the only thing certain in the future was death.
At his office in the Marunouchi Building, when he heard a young law clerk receiving a private telephone call, shielding it so that his superiors would not know, Honda was overcome by intense loneliness. The call was obviously from a woman, and the young man, concerned about those around him, pretended reluctance; but in the distance Honda could almost hear the clear, attractive voice of the young woman.
Probably the two shared a secret language and communicated with each other by using business jargon. Honda suddenly conceived a plan for firing the young man whose eternally well-groomed hair, romantic eyes, and arrogant lips were all so unbecoming to a law office.
The best time to catch Keiko, who spent her days going to luncheons, cocktail parties, and formal dinners, was now at eleven o’clock in the morning. After having overheard the young clerk, Honda was loathe to make the call from the small office in his loud voice. Saying he was going to do some shopping, he went out.
The shopping arcade in the Marunouchi Building was one of the few places where prewar Tokyo still lingered on, and Honda enjoyed window-shopping at the haberdasheries or selecting paper for calligraphy. Gentlemen, obviously prewar types, were hunting for reasonable purchases that would not be too hard on their pockets; they walked cautiously to avoid slipping on the mosaic floor that was particularly slippery after the rain.
Honda called Keiko from a pay phone.
As usual she did not answer at once, but he was positive she was at home. He pictured her magnificent, opulent back; she must be in her slip putting on makeup after having selected her attire for the luncheon party and was oblivious to the telephone.
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” she said in her rich, leisurely voice. “I’ve been thoughtless not to call. Have you been well?”
“Quite well, thanks. I wondered if we could have lunch sometime soon.”
“Oh, how kind! But you really want to see Ying Chan, not me.”
Honda was at once at a loss for words and decided to wait for Keiko’s lead. “I’m sorry I’ve troubled you. By the way, she never contacted me after that night. Have you seen her?”
“No, not since then. I wonder what she’s doing. Isn’t she taking exams or something?”
“I don’t think she studies much.”
Honda was amazed by his own ability to carry on the conversation so calmly.
“But you want to see her anyway,” began Keiko. Then she thought for a moment. The interval of silence was neither heavy nor important. White powder was probably floating in the shafts of morning light falling through the bedroom windows. Honda knew that she was not the kind of woman to feign mystery, so he waited, leaving everything up to her.
“I shall pose a condition, I think,” she said.
“What is that?”
“Ying Chan escaped to my place and she trusts me completely. So if I tell her that I shall be present too, she won’t turn you down straightaway. Is that all right?”
“What do you mean is it all right? I was going to ask you to do precisely that.”
“I really want to let you see her alone, but
for a while . . . Where shall I call to give you the answer?”
“At my office. I’ve decided to go there every morning from now on,” replied Honda and hung up.
The world was transformed from that moment on. How could he bear to wait for the next hour, the next day? He made a little wager with himself: if Ying Chan wore the emerald ring when she met him, that would mean she had forgiven him; if she did not, that would signify the opposite.
40
KEIKO’S HOUSE was situated in the higher section of Azabu and was deep-set with a driveway that led up to the entrance. There was a semicircular Regency facade built by Keiko’s father in memory of his youth in Brighton. One warm afternoon toward the end of June, Honda had accepted an invitation to tea and entered the mansion with the feeling of returning to prewar Japan.
Following a typhoon and thunder and rain, suddenly in the summer light, unusual for the rainy season, the quiet woods on the front grounds seemed to store remembrances of an entire period. He thought he was returning to nostalgic old music. This kind of mansion, now almost the only one remaining in the burned ruins, had become even more privileged, sinful, and gloomy by reason of its solitariness. It was just as though remembrances left behind by the times were to have their impact suddenly heightened with the passing of the years.
A formal invitation had come to him announcing that Keiko’s house had been released by the American Occupation Forces, and that she wished to give a tea to celebrate the occasion. She did not touch on the matter of Ying Chan. Honda came bearing a bouquet of flowers. While the house had been confiscated, Keiko had lived with her mother in a separate dwelling that had once been the steward’s, and she had never invited guests to visit in Tokyo during that time.
A servant in white gloves met him at the door. The circular entrance hall was high-domed. The cryptomeria doors on one side were painted with cranes, while on the other they opened onto a spiral staircase of marble that led to the second floor. Halfway up the stairs, in a dark niche, stood a bronze Venus with eyes demurely lowered.