Authors: Yukio Mishima
Spring Snow (10 page)
Honda had no desire to spend his time mulling over the problem like this, or to steep himself in the wisdom of the ancients. Being a law student, he was inclined to support the establishment of law, but he was persistently troubled by doubts and misgivings about the operative system that was his subject. His struggles with its painfully intricate and tangled structure had taught him that a broader view was sometimes necessary; this was to be found not only in natural law, with its apotheosis of reason that was at the heart of operative law, but also in the seminal wisdom of the Laws of Manu. From this vantage point, he could enjoy two worlds—the clear blue of midday or the star-filled night.
The study of law was certainly a strange discipline. It was a net with mesh so fine as to catch the most trivial incidents of daily life, yet its vast extension in time and space encompassed even the eternal movements of the sun and stars. No fisherman seeking to increase his catch could be more greedy than the student of law.
Lost for so long in his reading and oblivious to the passage of time, Honda at last realized with some anxiety that he had better go to bed if he was not to look exhausted when he met Kiyoaki at the Imperial Theater the next night. When he thought of his friend, so handsome and so hard to fathom, and then considered how unlikely it was that his own future would be anything but ordinary and predictable, he could not suppress a slight shudder. He idly turned over in his mind the triumphs with which his classmates so proudly regaled him, such as using a rolled-up cushion to play rugby in a Gion teahouse with a flock of young geishas.
Then he thought of an episode in his own home this spring that would have been insignificant in a more worldly environment but which set off immense reverberations in the Honda household. A memorial service to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his grandmother’s death had been held at the temple in Nippori where the family remains were buried, and afterwards the immediate family relatives had shared their hospitality. Shigekuni’s second cousin Fusako was both the youngest of the guests, and the prettiest and most vivacious. In the staid Honda household, her loud peals of laughter caused a few raised eyebrows.
Despite the day’s religious overtones, the awareness of death was not enough to hinder the contented babble of conversation among relatives who had not seen one another for so long. And so they talked, touching on the dead grandmother from time to time, perhaps, but much more concerned with telling one another about the children who were the pride of each family.
The thirty-odd guests wandered about the house from room to room, astonished at finding themselves confronted with books at every turn. A few of them asked to see Shigekuni’s study and poked around his desk for a time, then they left one by one, until Fusako alone remained with him.
The two of them sat down on a leather couch by the wall. Shigekuni was wearing his school uniform, and Fusako a formal purple kimono. Once they became aware that they had been left alone, they became rather awkward with each other, and Fusako’s peals of laughter ceased.
Shigekuni was wondering whether it would be the right thing to show Fusako a picture album or something like that, but unfortunately he had nothing of the sort at hand. To make matters worse, Fusako suddenly seemed displeased. Until now, he had not been particularly attracted to her, with her excess of physical energy, her loud, interminable laugh, her habit of teasing him although he was a year older than she, and her constant flurry of activity. Admittedly she had the warm bloom of a midsummer flower, but Shigekuni had already come to a private decision: he would rather not have a woman like her for his wife.
“I’m tired, you know. How about you, Shige, aren’t you?”
Before he could reply, she seemed to fold at the waist and fall toward him in her wide obi, like a wall suddenly collapsing. An instant later, her head was snuggled in his lap, and he found himself contemplating the warm fragrant weight across his knees.
He was totally at a loss. He looked down at the supple burden settled in his lap and things remained that way for what seemed a very long time. He felt powerless to move even a muscle, and Fusako, too, once she had so contentedly buried her head in the blue serge of her cousin’s uniform, gave no sign that she ever intended to remove it.
But then the door suddenly opened to reveal his mother and an aunt and uncle. His mother paled, and Shigekuni’s heart gave a thump. Fusako, however, merely looked slowly in the direction of the newcomers, and then oh so languidly raised her head.
“I’m so very tired. And I have a headache too.”
“My goodness, we can’t have that. Shall I get you something for it?”
Not for nothing did his mother hold office in the Women’s Patriotic League, as she stepped into the breach as a volunteer nurse.
“No, thank you, I don’t believe it’s that serious.”
This episode added considerable spice to his relatives’ conversation, and although it fortunately did not reach his father’s ears, his mother took him severely to task for it. And as for Fusako, despite being his cousin, she was never invited to the house again. Honda, however, would never forget those few brief moments when her warm weight lay heavy in his lap.
And although he had supported her whole upper body in its kimono and obi, it was the subtly complex beauty of her head and hair that had most attracted him. Its luxuriant mass had pressed against him with the clinging heaviness of smoldering incense. The blue serge of his trousers could not conceal its constant, penetrating warmth. It was like the heat of a distant fire—what caused it, he wondered. It had radiated from her as if from coals in a fine china vase. It implied that her affection for him was somehow excessive. And hadn’t the pressure of her head been a stinging reproof as well?
And then there were Fusako’s eyes. While her cheek was on his lap, he had been able to look down into her wide, dark eyes. They were small and vulnerable, as glistening as raindrops, like dancing butterflies momentarily at rest. The flutter of her long lashes was the flutter of their wings, which were as beautifully speckled as the pupils of her eyes.
So insincere, so close to him yet so indifferent, so ready to dart away—he had never seen such eyes that roamed ceaselessly in discontent. First focused, then vacant, they were as unsettled as the bubble in a spirit level.
But she was not flirting. Her look conveyed even less than it had when she was chattering gaily a few minutes before. Her eyes seemed to express nothing more significant than the headstrong passion that surged in her. The unnerving force of such sweetness and fragrance sprang from something far more elemental than a desire for flirtation.
What, then, was the pervasive mood of those moments of physical contact which had seemed to stretch into an eternity?
8
THE MAIN PRODUCTION
at the Imperial Theater from the middle of November to the tenth of December was not a popular modern piece involving actresses, but two Kabuki plays featuring such masters of the craft as Baiko and Kojiro. Kiyoaki had picked the classical theater because he felt that this kind of entertainment would have more appeal for his foreign guests. But as he didn’t know much about Kabuki, he was unfamiliar with that evening’s two offerings,
The Rise and Fall of the Taira
and
Lion Dance.
And so he persuaded Honda to spend his lunch hour in the library looking up the plays in order to explain them to the princes beforehand.
The two princes were inclined to bring no more than idle curiosity to bear on foreign plays. Kiyoaki had introduced them to Honda, who had come home from school with him. And now, after dinner, he noticed that they were not paying much attention to his friend’s English summary of the evening’s plays.
In such circumstances, Honda’s loyalty and utter solemnity moved Kiyoaki to both guilt and pity. Certainly none of the theater party that night was much concerned with the plays themselves. Kiyoaki, for one, was preoccupied; Satoko might have read the letter after all and hence might break her promise to come.
The butler came in to announce that the carriage was waiting. The horses neighed and their breath flared white from their nostrils, to swirl up into the black, wintry sky. Kiyoaki enjoyed seeing horses proudly displaying their strength in winter, when their usual musky smell was fainter and their hooves rang clearly on the frozen ground. On a warm spring day, a galloping horse was only too clearly a sweating animal of flesh and blood. But a horse racing through a snowstorm became one with the very elements; wrapped in the whirling blast of the north wind, the beast embodied the icy breath of winter.
Kiyoaki liked riding in a carriage, especially when he was oppressed by some concern or other. For the bouncing would jolt him out of the dogged, steady rhythm of his worry. The tails arching away from bare rumps close to the carriage, the manes trailing wildly in the wind, the saliva falling in a gleaming ribbon from the gnashing teeth—Kiyoaki liked to savor the contrast between the animals’ brute strength and the elegant fittings in the interior of the carriage.
Kiyoaki and Honda wore overcoats over their school uniforms. The princes, though they themselves were huddled in immense, fur-collared overcoats, shivered miserably.
“We’re not used to the cold,” said Prince Pattanadid, an unhappy look in his eye. “Some cousins of ours studied in Switzerland, and they warned us that it was cold. But no one said anything about how cold Japan was.”
“But you’ll get used to it in no time,” said Honda to console them; they were already on good terms despite their short acquaintance.
Since it was December, the season for the traditional end-of-year sales, the streets were bright with advertising banners and crowded with shoppers in heavy cloaks, all of which prompted the princes to ask what festival was being celebrated.
For the past two days or more, the faces of both Prince Pattanadid and even the heedless and irrepressible Kridsada had become more and more downcast, an unmistakable proof of homesickness. Naturally they were careful not to be too open about this, as they did not wish to affront Kiyoaki’s hospitality. Yet he knew that their thoughts were elsewhere, adrift on some broad ocean. But he was pleased by it, for to him the idea of human emotions remaining steadfast and inextricably anchored in the body, in the here-and-now, was unbearably oppressive.
As they were passing Hibiya Park and approaching the moat of the Imperial Palace, the three-storied white theater loomed up ahead in the early darkness of the winter evening.
When they entered the theater, the new play that came first on the program was already in progress. Kiyoaki picked out Satoko where she sat beside her old servant, Tadeshina. Their seats were two or three rows behind and somewhat to one side of the young men. Seeing her there and catching the hint of a flashing smile, Kiyoaki was ready to forgive her everything.
During the rest of the first play, while two rival generals of the Kamakura era marshaled their forces against each other on stage, Kiyoaki watched as though in a daze. Everything on stage paled before his self-esteem, now that he was delivered from any threat to it.
“Tonight Satoko is more beautiful than ever,” he thought. “She has taken extra care over her toilette. She’s come looking just as I hoped she would.”
Kiyoaki was delighted with the way things had turned out. He congratulated himself over and over again as he sat there secure in his contentment, unable to turn and look in Satoko’s direction but basking in the warmth of her beauty so close at hand. He could not wish for anything more.
What he had wanted of her tonight was a beautiful presence, a demand that he had never previously made on her. On reflection, he realized that he had not been accustomed to thinking of Satoko in terms of beauty. Though he had never exactly considered her as a confirmed enemy, she was nevertheless like fine silk disguising a sharp needle, or rich brocade that hid an abrasive underside. Above all, she was the woman who loved him without having bothered to consult him at all in the matter. This Kiyoaki could not bear. Not for him the meek acceptance of favors granted. He had always firmly shuttered his heart against the rising sun, for fear that a single ray of its harsh, overcritical brilliance might pierce through.
The intermission came. Everything went off naturally. First Kiyoaki turned to Honda and whispered to him that by a remarkable coincidence, Satoko was there. And although the look in his friend’s eye, after a quick glance backward, left no doubt that he knew that something more than chance was at work, this, surprisingly enough, did not shake Kiyoaki’s complacency in the least. For Honda’s look was eloquent proof of Kiyoaki’s concept of friendship, which never demanded an excess of honesty.
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