Read The Decay Of The Angel Online
Authors: Yukio Mishima
The Decay Of The Angel (7 page)
“Wait just a minute,” she said between breaths. “I have something good for you.”
Placing a small pan on the embers, she rubbed it with greased paper. She poured neat circles of batter on the hot grease.
It was the taste of those hotcakes that Honda so often remembered in dreams: the taste of honey and melted butter that snowy afternoon. He could remember nothing more delicious.
But why should that one detail have become the germ of a memory he was to carry through life? There could be no doubt that this unwonted fit of gentleness on the part of his severe mother had added to the enjoyment. There was a strange sadness entangled with the memory: the profile of his mother as she blew on the embers; the glow on her cheeks as they lighted up, with each breath, embers that were not permitted to warm the parlor of this frugal house, dusky even in the light from the snow; the play of light and darkness, shadows coming over his mother’s cheeks each time she took a breath. And perhaps concealed in the intensity of her motions and the rare display of gentleness was a pain that she had refused all her life to give voice to. Perhaps it had come transparently and immediately across to him, in the full round flavor of the hotcakes, through the untrained young palate, in the sense of affection. Only thus could the sadness find explanation.
Sixty years had gone by, as an instant. Something came over him to drive away his consciousness of old age, a sort of pleading, as if he had buried his face in her warm bosom.
Something, running through sixty years in a taste of hot-cakes on a snowy day, something that brought knowledge to him, dependent not on an awareness of life but rather on a distant, momentary happiness, destroying the darkness of life at least for that moment, as a light far out on a dark moor destroys an infinity of darkness.
A moment. Honda could feel that nothing at all had happened in the interval separating the Honda of sixteen from the Honda of seventy-six. An instant, time for a child in a game of hopscotch to hop over a ditch.
He had seen often enough how the Dream Diary kept so faithfully by Kiyoaki had come true. He had had evidence enough of the superiority of dreams to waking. But he had not thought that his own life would ever be so filled with dreams. There was happiness in the dreams that poured over him like floods over Thai paddy lands; but they had only nostalgia for a past that would not return to set against the delicious fragrance of Kiyoaki’s dreams. A young man who had not dreamed had become an old man who dreamed occasionally, and that was all. His dreams had little to do with symbol or with imagination.
This chewing-over of dreams as he lay in bed each morning came in part from a fear of the arthritic pains that were certain to follow. With the memory of yesterday’s scarcely endurable pain in the hips, the pain this morning would move to his shoulders and sides. He did not really know until he got out of bed where it would be. He did not know while he still lay in bed, flesh withered and bones creaking in the gelatinous remains of dreams, in thoughts of a day that was certain to bring nothing of interest.
It was a chore even to reach for the house phone he had had installed some five or six years before. He would have to endure the housekeeper’s shrill morning greetings.
He had kept a law student in the house after Rié’s death, but he had soon come to find the youth irksome and sent him away; and since then there had been only Honda and two maids and a housekeeper in the big house. The women were constantly changing. At odds with the slovenliness of the maids and the dishonesty of the housekeeper, Honda became aware that his sensibilities were not up to the modish habits and words of today’s women. However diligently they might work, all their mannerisms, up-to-date locutions like “fun game” and “well, sorta,” a door opened without proper ceremony, a loud guffaw without a respectful hand over the mouth, a mistake in honorifics, gossip about television actors, all of them brought physical revulsion. When in his inability to control it he would let slip a word of complaint, he could be sure that the woman would be gone the next day. He would vouchsafe a complaint to the masseuse he called almost every night, and a domestic tempest would ensue. The masseuse had acquired the fashionable predilection for being called “Ma’am” and would refuse to answer if not so addressed; but Honda could not do without her.
However frequently he might complain, there was dust on the parlor shelves. The master of flower-arranging who came for a weekly lesson also spoke of it.
The maids would invite errand boys in for cups of tea, and the whiskey he valued so highly was being drunk up by he did not know whom. Occasionally he would catch a burst of insane laughter from far down a hallway.
His ear branded by the housekeeper’s morning courtesies, he would have trouble bringing himself to order breakfast, and the sticky clinging of feet to the mats in the corridor as the two maids opened the shutters irritated him indescribably. The hot-water faucets were forever getting stopped up, and an empty toothpaste tube was never replaced until he ordered it to be. The housekeeper kept a good enough watch on his laundry and cleaning, but it took a laundry tag scratching at his neck to tell him that that was the case. His shoes were polished but the sand was carefully preserved within, the catch on his umbrella was left unrepaired. He had been unaware of such details while Rié lived.
The smallest tear or scratch and an article was discarded. There were unpleasant scenes.
“You tell me to have it repaired, but there isn’t a place in town that would repair it.”
“All right, go ahead and throw it away, then.”
“It’s not all that valuable.”
“Whether it’s valuable or not has nothing to do with the case.”
There would be instant contempt for his penuriousness in the woman’s eyes.
Such incidents made him more and more dependent on Keiko.
Keiko had become energetic in her pursuit of Japanese culture. It was her new exoticism. For the first time in her life she began to go to Kabuki, and she would compare inept actors with famous French actors. She began to learn Nō music and make the rounds of temples in pursuit of Buddhist art.
She was always asking him to go to likely temples with her, and once he had been on the point of suggesting the Gesshūji. But it was not a temple for a lighthearted outing with Keiko.
Not once in these six decades had Honda visited Satoko, Abbess of the Gesshūji. Though he had heard that she was still alive and well, he had not once exchanged letters with her. In the war years and after, he had any number of times been taken by an impulse to call on her and apologize for his neglect; but always misgivings had been stronger, and he had kept his silence.
He had not for a moment forgotten the Gesshuuji. But as the years of silence went by, a self-imposed restraint grew stronger, a feeling that the Gesshuuji was too precious, that he must not after all this time invade her sanctuary with memories, or look upon her in her old age. He had heard from Tadeshina in the bombed-out ruins of Shibuya that Satoko was only more beautiful, as a spring is more limpid. Nor was he himself beyond imagining the ageless beauty of the aging nun. He had heard an Osaka friend describe it in awed tones. But Honda was afraid. He was afraid to see a relic of past beauty, and he was more afraid of present beauty. Satoko would by now of course have reached a level of enlightenment far beyond Honda’s reach, and were Honda in his old age to visit her he would cause not so much as a ripple upon the tranquillity. He knew that she was beyond being intimidated by memories. But the image of Satoko, safe in indigo armor from all the slings of memory, seemed when he looked through the eyes of the dead Kiyoaki another germ of despair.
And it weighed on him to think that he must visit Satoko as Kiyoaki’s representative, bearing memories.
“The sin is ours, Kiyo’s and mine, and nobody else’s,” she had said on the way back from Kamakura.
Sixty years had gone by and the words were still in his ears. Were he to visit Satoko she would probably after a quiet laugh talk easily about the chain of memories. But the journey was too much for him. Old and ugly and stained with sin as he was, the complications seemed only to increase.
The Gesshuuji itself, gently enveloped in a spring snow, was layer by layer more distant, with memories of Satoko, as the years passed. More distant, but not with a distance as of withdrawing into the heart. As he sought to remember it, the Gesshuuji was on a snowy pinnacle, like a temple in the Himalayas, its beauty turned to harshness, its softness to a day of wrath. The ultimate in clarity, a moon temple quite at the ends of the earth, dotted a single dot with the purple cassock of an aging and ever more delicately beautiful abbess, seemed to send off an ice-light, as if it stood at the very limits of awareness and reason. Honda knew that he could be there in no time by airplane or express train. But the Gesshuuji had become not a temple for a man to visit and look upon, but a ray of moonlight through a rent in the extremities of his consciousness.
It seemed to him that if Satoko was there then she must always be there. If he was chained to eternal life by consciousness then she must be up there an infinite distance from his hell. Doubtless she could see through it at a glance. And he felt that the deathless hell of a straitened and fear-ridden consciousness and her celestial immortality had struck up a balance. He could wait three hundred years, a thousand years, to see her.
He made all manner of excuses, and in the course of time all the excuses in the world came to seem like excuses for not visiting the Gesshuuji. He was like a person denying beauty that was certain to bring destruction. His refusal to visit the Gesshuuji became more than procrastination. He knew that to visit it had become an impossibility, perhaps the narrowest of the gates in his life. If he were to insist upon a visit, might the Gesshuuji not withdraw from him, disappear in a mist of light?
All the same he came to think that, matters of an undying consciousness aside, senility had ripened the moment for a visit. Probably he would make his visit as he was about to die. Satoko had been a person whom Kiyoaki must meet at the risk of his life; and a young and beautiful Kiyoaki calling out still to Honda forbade a meeting unless Honda, witness to the cruel impossibility, gambled his own life. He could meet her if he met death too. Perhaps, in secrecy, Satoko too knew of a time and awaited its coming. An ineffably sweet well of memory flowed over the aging Honda.
That Keiko should be here with him was a little incongruous.
He had rather strong doubts about Keiko’s understanding of Japanese culture. There was something admirable all the same in her expansive half-knowledge. She quite avoided pretense. She went her rounds of the Kyoto temples, and, like artistically inclined foreign ladies stuffed with misconceptions from a first visit to Japan, she would shrill forth her pleasure at objects that no longer interested most Japanese, and arrange them in false nosegays. She was fascinated with Japan as with the Antarctic. She would spread herself out with all the awkwardness of a stockinged foreign lady as she viewed a rock garden. All her life she had known only Occidental chairs.
She was in genuine intellectual heat. She fell into the habit of holding forth with her own peculiar notions about Japanese art and literature, albeit neglecting a detail here and there.
It had long been one of her indulgences to invite the foreign ambassadors in turn to dinner. Now they became the audiences for her proud lectures on Japanese culture. Older acquaintances had not dreamed that Keiko would one day honor them with discourses on gold-leafed screens.
“But they’re passers in the night with no sense of gratitude at all.” Honda warned her of the futility. “They’ll go on to their next posts with not a thought left in their heads for this one. What’s the point in even seeing them?”
“The birds of passage are the ones you don’t have to be on your guard with. You don’t have to worry about ten years from now, and a new audience every night is rather fun.”
But she was taking herself seriously, congratulating herself in a naïve way on furthering international cultural exchange. She would learn a dance and immediately unveil it before ambassadorial guests. It gave her strength to know that her audience was not likely to detect the flaws.
However assiduously Keiko might refine her knowledge, it was not up to plumbing the darkness where stretched the deepest roots of the Japanese. The dark blood springs that had agitated Isao Iinuma were far away. Honda called Keiko’s store of Japanese culture a freezer full of vegetables.
Honda had become recognized at the embassies as Keiko’s gentleman friend. He was always invited with her to dinner.
It angered him when at one embassy the footmen were in formal Japanese dress. “Displaying the natives, nothing more. It’s an insult.”
“I don’t feel that way at all. Japanese men look better in Japanese clothes. Your dinner jacket does nothing for me at all.”
When, at a diplomatic black-tie dinner, the guests would start for the dining room with a gentle stir, the ladies in the lead, and the flowers on the table would throw deep shadows from a forest of silver candlesticks, and outside there would be quiet summer rain, the shining sadness of it all was most becoming to Keiko. She allowed not a flicker of the ingratiating smile so common among Japanese women. There was grand tradition in the grand glowing back of the retreating figure. She even had the husky, melancholy voice of the old Japanese aristocrat. In the company of ambassadors whose weariness was showing through the gilt and of cold-blooded counselors each with his own special affectations, Keiko was alive.
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