Spring Snow (27 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
The three boys could see the lights burning in the other dormitory buildings as they flickered through the trees, and they also heard shouting and loud conversation coming from various directions. It was time for the dining room to open for the evening meal. One student making his way along the path through the grove was burlesquing an ancient song, to the raucous laughter of his companions. The princes’ eyes widened as though in fear that at any moment monsters of the mountains or rivers would appear out of the darkness.
Kiyoaki’s return of the ring on this occasion was to lead to an unpleasant incident.
∗
A few days later, there was a telephone call from Tadeshina. The maid informed Kiyoaki, but he did not go to the phone. Another call came next day. He did not accept that one either.
The calls unsettled him to some extent, but he fell back on his established rule: he put Satoko out of his mind and concentrated on the anger Tadeshina’s rudeness provoked in him. All he had to do was to think about the cunning, lying old woman who had deceived him outrageously time and time again, and his consequent fury was strong enough to outweigh any slight misgivings he might have had about not going to the phone.
Three days passed. It was well into the rainy season, and it poured without let-up. When Kiyoaki came back from school, Yamada came up to him carrying a lacquered tray and respectfully presented a letter that lay face down upon it. Glancing at it, he was startled to see that Tadeshina had brazenly put her own name on it. The thick, oversized envelope had been carefully sealed, and to go by the feel of it, so was the letter inside. He felt afraid that if left to himself he might not be able to restrain himself from opening the letter. So, steeling himself to act deliberately, he tore it to shreds intentionally in front of Yamada and then ordered him to dispose of what was left of it. He knew that if he threw it into the wastebasket in his own room, he would be tempted to take it out and reassemble the fragments. Yamada’s eyes flickered with surprise behind his glasses, but he said not a word.
A few more days passed. The matter of the torn-up letter began to weigh on Kiyoaki and his reaction took the form of anger. This was more than mere irritation that a supposedly trivial letter should have such power to unsettle him. What was agonizing was the realization, impossible to ignore, that he now regretted the decision not to open it. At first he had been able to regard the letter’s destruction as proof of his strength of will, but in retrospect he was now beset by the feeling that on the contrary he had acted out of sheer cowardice.
When he had torn up that thick, plain white envelope, his fingers had encountered stiff resistance, as though the letter had perhaps been written on paper reinforced with tough linen fiber. But it was not the paper’s composition that mattered. He now realized that had it not been for his burst of willpower, it would have been impossible for him to tear it up. Why should he have been afraid? He had no desire to become painfully involved with Satoko again. He hated the very thought of being re-enveloped in that fragrant haze of anxiety that she could conjure at will, especially now that he had finally achieved command over himself again. But despite all this, when he had been ripping up that thick letter, he had had the feeling that he was tearing a gash in Satoko’s skin with its soft white glow.
On his way back from school one torrid Saturday afternoon during an unseasonal break in the wet weather, he noticed a hum of activity at the entrance of the main house. The grooms had prepared one of the carriages and were now loading it with a bulky package whose purple silk wrapping immediately identified it as a present. The horses were twitching their ears, and bright streams of saliva dropped from their mouth as they gaped to reveal yellowed teeth. In the hot sunlight their dark coats glistened as if smeared with grease, and their throbbing veins stood out on their necks beneath the fine, thick coats.
Just as he was about to go up the steps into the house, his mother appeared dressed in bulky ceremonial robes marked with the family crest.
“Hello,” he said.
“Oh, welcome home. I’m just on my way to the Ayakuras to extend our congratulations.”
“Congratulations for what?”
Since his mother disliked discussing important matters in front of the servants, she did not answer at once but drew Kiyoaki over to a dark corner of the wide entrance next to an umbrella stand before beginning to speak in a low voice.
“This morning the imperial sanction was graciously granted at last. Would you like to go with me?”
Before her son replied, the Marquise noticed that her words had caused a flash of grim pleasure in his eyes. Naturally she did not have time to reflect what it meant. Furthermore, her next words there by the doorway were eloquent proof of how little she had derived from that moment.
“After all, a joyful event is a joyful event,” she said, her mask of classic melancholy on her face. “So no matter how badly you are at odds with her, the only correct thing to do on such an occasion is to be polite and offer your congratulations.”
“Please send my regards. I’m not going to go.”
He stood at the entrance and watched his mother leave. The horses’ hooves scattered the gravel with a noise like a sudden squall, and the gold crest of the Matsugaes on the carriage seemed to quiver in the air as it flashed through the pines that stood in front of the house as the vehicle disappeared. Their mistress had gone, and Kiyoaki could sense the consequent relaxation of the servants. The tension in their muscles dissolved with a fall like a noiseless snowslide.
He turned back toward the house, so empty without either master or mistress. The servants, their eyes cast down, stood waiting for him to enter. At that moment, he was certain that he was holding the seeds of a problem immense enough to fill the vast emptiness of the building. Without bothering to glance at the servants, he went inside and hurried down the corridor, anxious not to waste a single moment reaching his room where he could seal himself off from the rest of the world.
His heart was beating with a strange excitement, and he was feverishly hot. The solemn words “imperial sanction” seemed suspended before his eyes. The imperial sanction had been graciously granted. Tadeshina’s repeated phone calls, the bulky letter—they must have represented a last, desperate flurry before it came. Their object had clearly been to obtain his forgiveness, to be relieved of a feeling of guilt.
All that day, he let his imagination run loose. He was oblivious of the outside world. The clear, calm mirror of his soul had now been shattered. There was a turmoil in his heart that churned with the force of a tropical storm. He was now shaken by a violent passion that bore no trace of the melancholy that had been such a part of its feeble precursors. But what emotion now had him in its grip? It must be called delight. But it was a delight so irrational, so passionate, that it was almost unearthly.
If one were to ask what was its cause, the only possible answer would be that it sprang from an impossibility, a sheer impossibility. Just as the string of a koto cut by a sharp blade yields with an abrupt, poignant note, so the tie that bound him to Satoko had been cut by the shining blade of the imperial sanction. In the midst of his wavering inconsistency, this was something that he had dreamed of and hoped for in secret ever since he had begun to grow out of boyhood.
To be more precise, the dream had begun to form in the moment when he had looked up from Princess Kasuga’s train and had been dazzled by the nape of her white neck with its peerless beauty, forever unattainable. That instant certainly foreshadowed today’s fulfillment of his hopes. Absolute impossibility—Kiyoaki himself had helped to bring it about by single-mindedly shaping events to the pattern of his every caprice, his every twist of feeling.
But what kind of joy was it? Something in it obsessed him; there was something sinister, ominously threatening about it. Long ago he had resolved to recognize his emotions as his only guiding truth and to live his life accordingly, even if this meant a deliberate aimlessness. That principle had now brought him to his present sinister feelings of joy, which seemed to be the brink of a racing, plunging whirlpool. There seemed to be nothing left but to throw himself into it.
He thought back once again to himself and Satoko all those years before, copying verses from the Hundred Poets during their writing exercises. He bent over the scroll trying to inhale a trace of Satoko’s fragrance that might have remained from that day fourteen years earlier. As he did so, he caught a scent of incense that was not far removed from mildew, something faint and so distant that still evoked such a powerful nostalgia that he felt he had laid bare the very source of all his emotion, so aimless and at the same time so impetuous.
Each piece of the Empress’s confection, the prize for winning at
sugoroku
, had been molded in the form of the imperial crest. Whenever his small teeth had bitten into a crimson chrysanthemum, the color of its petals had intensified before melting away, and at the touch of his tongue, the delicately etched lines of a cool white chrysanthemum had blurred and dissolved into a sweet liquid. Everything came back to him—the dark rooms of the Ayakura mansion, the court screens brought from Kyoto with their pattern of autumn flowers, the solemn stillness of the nights, Satoko’s mouth opening in a slight yawn half-hidden behind her sweep of black hair—everything came back just as he had experienced it then, in all its lonely elegance. But he realized that he was now slowly admitting one idea that he had never dared entertain before.
sugoroku
, had been molded in the form of the imperial crest. Whenever his small teeth had bitten into a crimson chrysanthemum, the color of its petals had intensified before melting away, and at the touch of his tongue, the delicately etched lines of a cool white chrysanthemum had blurred and dissolved into a sweet liquid. Everything came back to him—the dark rooms of the Ayakura mansion, the court screens brought from Kyoto with their pattern of autumn flowers, the solemn stillness of the nights, Satoko’s mouth opening in a slight yawn half-hidden behind her sweep of black hair—everything came back just as he had experienced it then, in all its lonely elegance. But he realized that he was now slowly admitting one idea that he had never dared entertain before.
25
SOMETHING SOUNDED
within Kiyoaki like a trumpet call:
I love Satoko
. And no matter how he viewed this feeling he was unable to fault its validity, even though he had never experienced anything like it before.
Then a further revelation released the flood of desire he had pent up for so long: elegance disregards prohibitions, even the most severe. His sexual impulses, so diffident until now, had been lacking just such a powerful impulse. It had taken so much time and effort to find his role in life.
“Now at last, I’m sure that I do love Satoko,” he told himself. And the impossibility of fulfilling that love was proof enough that he was right in his conviction.
He could not stay still. He rose from his chair and then sat down again. His thoughts had always been preponderantly melancholy and anxious, but now he was swept by a surge of youthful energy. He felt that everything previous had been mere delusion. He had allowed his sensitivity and melancholy to dominate, smother him.
Opening the window, he took a deep breath as he stood looking out at the pond, whose surface glinted in the bright sunshine. He smelled the strong fresh odor of the zelkovas. In the midst of the clouds that were massed to one side of the maple hill, he noticed a hint of brightness that told him summer had come at last. His cheeks were hot and his eyes bright. He had become a new person. Whatever this might hold in store, he was at least nineteen years old.
26
HE GAVE HIMSELF
over to passionate daydreams while he waited impatiently for his mother to return from the Ayakuras. Her presence there did not fit in with his plans at all. Finally he could wait no longer, and took off his school uniform, dressing in a Satsuma splashed-pattern kimono and
hakama.
Then he called one of the servants and told him to have a rickshaw waiting for him.
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