Spring Snow (19 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
The preparations got underway with the construction of a temporary stage at a spot near the pond, just at the foot of the grassy hill. If the weather turned out to be fine, the Prince and his party would undoubtedly make a full tour of the estate in order not to miss any of the blossoms. The traditional red and white curtains that must be extended along his route were far larger than those required by more ordinary events. The work of decking the interior of the Western-style house with cherry blossoms and decorating its banqueting table to suggest a rural spring scene demanded all the attentions of a large group of helpers. Finally, on the day before the party, the hairdressers and their assistants were driven into a frenzy of activity.
Happily, April 6 was clear, even if the sunshine left something to be desired. It came and went, and there was even a chill in the morning air.
An unused room in the main house was set aside as a changing room for the geishas and was filled with all the available mirrors. His curiosity aroused, Kiyoaki went there to take a look for himself, but the maid in charge quickly chased him away. His imagination, however, was caught by the room, scoured and swept in preparation for the women who were soon to come. Screens were set up, pillows scattered everywhere, and mirrors glinted through their brightly colored covers of printed Yuzen muslin. At the moment there wasn’t the faintest hint of the scent of cosmetics in the air. But within no more than half an hour, there would be a transformation; the place would be filled with lovely voices as the women gathered about the mirrors, donning and shedding their costumes with unflurried self-possession. Kiyoaki found the prospect fascinating. He was caught up by the seductive magic of the occasion, which did not emanate from the rough stage that had just been built in the garden, but rather was concentrated here in this room with its promise of intoxicating fragrance soon to come.
As the Siamese princes had very little concept of time, Kiyoaki had asked them to come as soon as lunch was over. They arrived at about one thirty. He invited them up to his study for the moment, startled to see that they were wearing their school uniforms.
“Is that beautiful girl of yours coming?” Prince Kridsada asked loudly in English before they were through the door.
Prince Pattanadid, always gently reserved, was affronted; he scolded his cousin for his unthinking rudeness and apologized to Kiyoaki in halting Japanese.
Kiyoaki assured them that she would come, but he caused surprised glances by asking that they refrain from speaking about him and Satoko in front of either the imperial guests or the Matsugaes and Ayakuras. The princes had apparently assumed that the relationship was common knowledge.
By now the two princes were showing no sign of their former homesickness, and they seemed to have settled into the rhythm of life in Japan. In their school uniforms, they struck Kiyoaki as being almost indistinguishable from his other classmates. Prince Kridsada, who was a gifted mimic, did an imitation of the dean that was good enough to make Chao P. and Kiyoaki laugh out loud.
Chao P. walked over to the window and looked out over the grounds of the estate at a scene quite different from what one saw on ordinary days. The red and white curtain that wound through it was waving in the wind.
“From now on it must surely get warmer,” he said forlornly, his voice filled with longing for the hot summer sun.
Kiyoaki was quite taken with this touch of melancholy. He stood up and was about to walk over to the window himself, but as he rose, Chao P. gave a sudden, boyish cry that aroused his cousin and brought him out of his chair.
“There she is!” he exclaimed, slipping into English. “There’s the beautiful lady we mustn’t mention today.”
And indeed it was Satoko, unmistakable in her long-sleeved kimono as she came along the path beside the pond toward the main house with her parents beside her. Even at a distance, Kiyoaki could see that the kimono was a beautiful cherry-blossom pink, its pattern reminiscent of the fresh green profusion of a spring meadow. As she turned her head momentarily, pointing out the island, he caught a glimpse of her profile, the delicate pallor of her cheek set off by her shining black hair.
No red and white curtains had been hung on the island. It was still too early to see the first tinges of spring green, but the curtains that marked the twisting path up the maple hill beyond cast wavering reflections on the surface of the water, their colors putting Kiyoaki in mind of striped cookies. Although the window was shut, he felt that he could hear Satoko’s warm, bright voice.
Two young Siamese and a Japanese . . . they stood in a trio at the window, each catching his breath. How strange, thought Kiyoaki. When he was with the two young princes, was it that he found their passionate natures so infectious that he could believe himself to be the same, and feel able to show it openly? At this moment he could tell himself without a qualm: “I love her. I’m madly in love with her.”
Six years before, he had had all too brief a glimpse of the Imperial Princess Kasuga’s beautiful profile as she turned to glance back at him; it had filled his heart with a hopeless and lingering yearning, but now as Satoko left the pond, she turned her face toward the main house with a graceful movement of the head, and although she was not looking directly at his window, Kiyoaki suddenly felt liberated from that former obsession. In one moment, he had experienced something that surpassed it. Six years later, he now felt that he had recaptured a fragment of time, sparkling and crystalline, from a different perspective. As he watched Satoko walking in the pale watery spring sunshine, she suddenly laughed, and as she did so, he saw her raise her arm in a fluid movement, hiding her mouth behind the graceful curve of her white hand. Her slim body seemed to vibrate like a superb stringed instrument.
18
BARON SHINKAWA
and his wife were uniquely matched as a couple: absentminded detachment was here quite literally wedded to frenzy. The Baron took not the slightest notice of anything his wife said or did, while the Baroness, oblivious to her effect on others, kept up a ceaseless outpouring of words. This was their customary behavior, whether at home or in public. Despite his abstracted manner, the Baron was perfectly capable on occasion of mercilessly nailing a person’s character with a single, incisive, pithy observation, on which, however, he never deigned to elaborate. His wife, on the other hand, no matter what torrent of words she might expend on that same individual, never succeeded in bringing him to life.
They owned a Rolls Royce, the second ever purchased in Japan; it was a distinction they treasured as evidence of their social position. It was the Baron’s custom to don a silk smoking jacket after dinner and, thus attired, to spend the rest of the evening ignoring his wife’s inexhaustible flood of chatter.
At the Baroness’s invitation, Raicho Hiratsuka’s circle met at the Shinkawa residence once a month, calling themselves the Heavenly Fire Group after a famous poem by Lady Sanunochigami. However, since it invariably rained on the appointed day, the newspapers amused themselves by referring to them as the Rainy Day Club. Any sort of serious thought was beyond the Baroness, who was amazed at the intellectual awakening among Japanese women. She observed it with the same excited curiosity that might have been aroused in her by hens laying eggs of some novel shape—pyramids, for instance.
The Shinkawas were both irritated and flattered by the Matsugaes’ invitation to the blossom viewing. Irritated because they realized how bored they would be. Flattered because it would give them an opportunity to display their authentically European manners in public. The Shinkawas were an old and wealthy merchant family, and while it was, of course, essential to maintain the mutually profitable relationship established with the men from Satsuma and Choshu who had risen to such power within the government, the Baron and his wife held them in secret contempt because of their peasant origins. This was an attitude inherited from their parents, and one that was at the very heart of their newly acquired but unshakable elegance.
“Well, now that the Marquis has invited Prince Toin to his house,” the Baron remarked, “perhaps he’ll organize a brass band to greet him. That family views the visit of an imperial prince as a sort of theatrical event.”
“We just have to keep our enlightened views to ourselves, I’m afraid,” was his wife’s reply. “I think that it’s rather chic to remain au courant as we do without seeming to, don’t you think so? In fact it’s rather amusing, don’t you agree, to mix unobtrusively with old-fashioned people like them. For example, I think it’s frightfully amusing the way Marquis Matsugae is so obsequious in front of Prince Toin at one moment and then tries to behave as though they were old friends the next. But I wonder what I should wear? We’ll be leaving early in the afternoon, so I imagine it wouldn’t quite do to go in formal evening dress. When all is said and done, I suppose a kimono would be the wisest. Perhaps I should hurry and put in an order at Kitaide in Kyoto and have something made up, perhaps in that lovely blossoms-by-firelight pattern? But for some reason I never look well in a Suso pattern. I’m never sure if it’s just me who thinks that the Suso pattern looks frightful on me and that it’s really just the thing, or whether other people also think it looks frightful. So I just don’t know what to do—but what do you think I should do?”
On the day itself, the Shinkawas received a note from the Matsugaes. They were respectfully requested to arrive some time before the time set for the imperial couple’s arrival, and although they chose with cool deliberation to make their appearance five or six minutes after the time the Toinnomiyas were expected, they were chagrined to discover that they were still early. The Marquis had apparently allowed for such maneuvers. This display of country manners ruffled the Baron.
“Perhaps His Imperial Highness’s horses had a stroke on the way,” he observed by way of a greeting. But no matter how biting the Baron’s sarcasm, his speech was mumbled and his expression blank in true English fashion, so that no one heard him.
A dispatch from the distant main gate announced the appearance of the imperial carriage, and the host and his party immediately took up their positions at the entrance of the main house to welcome the Prince.
His carriage was splattered here and there with spring mud as the horses, the gravel spurting under their hooves, trotted up under the pine tree that stood in the drive in front of the house. They snorted irritably and tossed their heads, and for a moment their flying gray manes made Kiyoaki think of the seething crest of a huge wave about to break on the shore. At the same instant, the imperial chrysanthemum on the door blurred in a whirlpool of gold and then was still as the carriage came to a halt.
Prince Toin’s fine gray moustache was well set off by a black derby. The Princess, following her husband, walked into the entranceway, crossing the threshold onto the white carpeting that had been spread over the floors of the main house that morning to obviate the necessity of changing into slippers. The imperial couple naturally gave a brief nod before entering the house, but the formal ritual of welcome was to be enacted in the reception room.
As the Princess passed him, Kiyoaki’s eye was caught by the black tips of her shoes flashing beneath the frilly white material of her skirt. They were like pods of seaweed, he thought, bobbing in a rippling eddy. The elegance of it so fascinated him that he was even more reluctant to look up at her face, which was beginning to show signs of age.
In the reception room, Marquis Matsugae presented the other guests to the Toinnomiyas. The only person who was new to them was Satoko.
“What have you been up to, Ayakura,” the Prince chided her father, “hiding such a beautiful young lady from me?”
Kiyoaki, standing to one side, was seized by a slight shudder that he could not explain. He felt that Satoko had suddenly been transformed into a rare work of art on public display.
Since the Prince was so close to the court of Siam, the two princes had been presented to him immediately on arrival in Japan. He now chatted with them familiarly, asking whether or not they liked their fellow students at Peers. Chao P. smiled brightly, his reply the very model of dutiful courtesy: “They all help to make things easier for us in every way; it’s as if we’d been friends for years. We lack for nothing.”
Since the princes had hardly ever appeared at school until now and apparently had no friends at all there, except for himself, Kiyoaki found this enthusiastic testimony very funny.
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