Spring Snow (30 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: Spring Snow
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Throughout the day the sun, engulfed in cloud, had shone like white gold and now in the evening the sultry heat it had left behind was not appreciably diminished. As they sat talking, the two young men wore light summer kimonos with a Kasuri pattern.
Honda had had some sort of premonition about Kiyoaki’s visit, but it had by no means prepared him for what was to come. As soon as Kiyoaki began to speak, Honda was startled to realize that the young man sitting beside him on the old leather couch along the wall of the reception room was someone radically different from the Kiyoaki he had known before. He had never seen eyes flash so openly. They were unmistakably the eyes of a worldly adult, but Honda had a lingering regret for the melancholy look and the downcast eyes that he had grown used to in his friend.
Despite this, however, he was delighted that Kiyoaki had chosen to confide in him without reservation what was a secret of the gravest consequence. Honda had been hoping for a gesture like this for a long time, and it had come about without the slightest urging on his part. On reflection, he realized that Kiyoaki had kept his secrets even from his friend, as long as they had concerned nothing but his own inner struggles, but now that it was a matter of reputation and serious wrongdoing, he had poured it all out in an impetuous flood of words. Considering the gravity of the confession and the limitless trust it implied, Kiyoaki could hardly have given him greater cause for happiness. As he studied his friend, he found Kiyoaki noticeably matured, and some of the beauty that had belonged to the face of an irresolute young boy was gone from his features. They now shone with the determination of the passionate young lover, and his words and gestures were free of any hint of reluctance and uncertainty.
He was the very image of a man proud of his conquest. As he told his story to Honda, his cheeks glowed with color, his teeth gleamed, and his voice was firm and clear, although he paused shyly at times and there was a new gallantry evident even in the set of his eyebrows. Almost nothing seemed more alien to him than introspection, or so it struck Honda, whether because the tale came so abruptly to an end or because of the incoherence of his outpourings.
“Listening to you, the oddest thing came to my mind—why, I don’t know,” said Honda. “One day, when we were talking—I’m not sure when it was—you asked me if I remembered anything about the Russo-Japanese War. And then afterwards, when we were at your house, you showed me a collection of war photographs. And I remember you telling me that the one you liked best had written under it ‘Vicinity of Tokuri Temple: Memorial Services for the War Dead’—a strange picture, in which all the soldiers looked as if they had been assembled like actors in a huge pageant. At the time it struck me as being an odd preference for you since you had so little taste for anything that smacked of military life.
“But at any rate, as I was listening just now, the memory of that dusty plain in the picture came to my mind and somehow seemed to fuse with your beautiful love story.”
Honda had managed to surprise himself. He was startled not only by the obscurity of what he had said and the fervor with which he had said it, but also by the admiration he felt for Kiyoaki’s wanton disregard of commandment and precept—he, Honda, who had long ago decided to become a man of the law!
Two servants entered with small tables on which their dinners had been placed. His mother had arranged things like this so that the two could eat and talk as friends without any constraint. A saké bottle stood on either table, and Honda offered him some.
“Mother was rather worried. She didn’t know how well you’d take to the food we serve, seeing as you’re accustomed to such luxuries,” he remarked, turning the conversation to something more commonplace.
He was happy to see Kiyoaki starting to eat as though, in fact, he found the food much to his liking. So for a little while the two young men stopped talking and gave themselves over to the healthy pleasures of eating.
∗
Enjoying the further brief silence that usually follows a good meal, Honda asked himself why, after hearing his classmate confess to so romantic an exploit, he had felt so happy about it, without a twinge of jealousy or envy. He was refreshed by it the way a lakeside garden is imperceptibly steeped in moisture during the rainy season.
“Well then, what do you intend to do?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“I don’t have the least idea. I’m slow off the mark, but once I get started, I’m not the type to stop halfway.”
Honda stared at him wide-eyed. He had never dreamed that he would ever hear Kiyoaki say something like this.
“You mean you want to marry Miss Satoko?”
“That’s out of the question. The sanction has already been granted.”
“But you’ve already violated the sanction. Why can’t you marry her then? Couldn’t the two of you run away—go abroad and get married there?”
“You just don’t understand,” he answered. Then he lapsed into silence, and for the very first time that day, Honda noticed a trace of the old melancholy in the lines that suddenly appeared between his eyebrows.
Perhaps he had been expecting as much, but now that he had seen it, he felt a slight uneasiness cast a shadow over his own mood of exhilaration. As he sat staring at his friend’s handsome profile, whose fine and delicate lines would defeat all but the most skilled artist, he wondered just what it was that Kiyoaki hoped to get from life. He felt a shudder pass through him.
Kiyoaki picked up his strawberries, got up from the couch and sat down in front of the scrupulously tidy desk where Honda worked. He propped his elbows on its austere surface and casually began to swing the swivel chair from side to side. As he did so, he put his weight on his elbows and restlessly eased the posture of his head and torso, his bare chest showing at the neck of his loose-fitting kimono. Then, after arming himself with a toothpick, he began lightly spearing the strawberries one by one and popping them into his mouth. It was a display of relaxed bad manners that showed how glad he was to escape the strict decorum of his own home. He spilled some sugar, which dropped down onto his light-skinned chest, but he brushed it off with no sign of embarrassment.
“You’re going to attract ants, you know,” said Honda, laughing through a mouthful of strawberries.
Kiyoaki’s delicate eyelids, usually too pale, were now diffused with color, thanks to the saké he had drunk. As he kept turning the swivel chair from side to side, his bare flushed forearms still propped on the desk, he happened to move too far in one direction, and his body was oddly twisted. It was just as if he had suddenly been stricken by some vague pain of which he himself was unaware.
There was no mistaking the faraway look in those eyes beneath their fine, graceful brows, but Honda was well aware that their flashing glance was not directed toward the future. Unlike his usual self, he had a cruel desire to inflict his growing uneasiness on his friend—an urgent impulse to pretend to raise his own hand to destroy Kiyoaki’s all-too-recent sense of happiness.
“Well, what
are
you going to do? Have you even thought about what will come of this?”
Kiyoaki raised his eyes and looked at him steadily. Honda had never seen a gaze of such burning eagerness and yet such gloom.
“Why must I think about it?”
“Because all those people around you and Miss Satoko are moving slowly but inexorably toward a dénouement. You don’t think the two of you can hover forever in mid-air like two dragonflies making love?”
“I know we can’t,” Kiyoaki replied, breaking off the exchange and casually glancing elsewhere. He gave himself over to an examination of the shadows in the various nooks and crannies of the room, such as the intricate patterns beneath the bookcases and the ones beside the wicker wastepaper basket—those elusive little shadows that crept into Honda’s plain and functional study night after night, insidious as human emotions, to lurk wherever they could find cover.
As Honda watched him, he was struck by the prominence of his graceful eyebrows. They were like shadows themselves, bent into elegant bows. They seemed to be an embodiment of an emotion, yet nevertheless had force enough to check its expression. He imagined them guarding the dark, brooding eyes beneath, loyally following their master’s glance wherever it went, like zealous servants with impeccable training.
Honda decided to come out directly with something that had been taking form in a corner of his mind.
“A bit earlier,” he began, “I said something very odd. I mean about thinking of the picture from the Russo-Japanese War while you were telling me about you and Miss Satoko. I wondered why that came to me, and now that I’ve given it a little more thought, I have an answer. The age of glorious wars ended with the Meiji era. Today, all the stories of past wars have sunk to the level of those edifying accounts we hear from middle-aged noncoms in the military science department or the boasts of farmers around a hot stove. There isn’t much chance now to die on the battlefield.
“But now that old wars are finished, a new kind of war has just begun; this is the era for the war of emotion. The kind of war no one can see, only feel—a war, therefore, that the dull and insensitive won’t even notice. But it’s begun in earnest. The young men who have been chosen to wage it have already begun to fight. And you’re one of them—there’s no doubt about that.
“And just as in the old wars, there will be casualties in the war of emotion, I think. It’s the fate of our age—and you’re one of our representatives. So what about it then? You’re fully resolved to die in this new war—am I right?”
Kiyoaki’s only answer was a flickering smile. At that moment a strong breeze, heavy with the rain’s dampness, found its way in through the window and, in passing, cooled their foreheads, which were covered with a light film of sweat. Honda was perplexed at Kiyoaki’s silence. Was his answer so obvious that no reply was necessary? Or had his words really struck a responsive chord in his friend, while his way of putting them had been so extravagant that there was no way for him to answer frankly? He thought that it had to be one or the other.
29
 
T
HREE DAYS LATER
, when two canceled classes gave Honda a free afternoon, he went to watch the district court in session, accompanied by a law student who was one of the family houseboys. It had been raining since morning.
Honda’s father was a justice of the Supreme Court and, even within his own family, was a strict observer of principles. He was greatly pleased by the promise shown by his nineteen-year-old son, who had applied himself to the law even before entering college. His father thus felt confident enough to conclude that his son would eventually succeed him. Up to this year, the office of judge had been for life, but the previous April a large-scale reform of the juridical system had been put into effect. As a result, more than two hundred judges had been laid off or requested to hand in their resignations. Justice Honda, wanting to show his solidarity with his unfortunate old friends, had offered his own resignation, but it had not been accepted.
The experience, however, seemed to have marked a turning point in his views on life, which, in their turn, affected what had been a rather formal relationship with his son. From then on, he brought to it a warmth of generosity that resembled the affection shown by a high official to the subordinate he has selected to succeed him. Honda himself was determined to work harder than ever at his studies to try to be worthy of such unprecedented favor.
One result of his father’s changed views was that he permitted his son to attend court sessions even though he was not yet an adult. He did not, of course, go so far as to let him come into his own court, but he gave him permission to watch whatever civil or criminal cases he liked, as long as he was accompanied by the young retainer who was also a law student.
His father explained to Shigekuni that since all his familiarity with the law came from books, it would be extremely valuable for him to come in contact with the actual process of law in Japan and to experience it at a practical level. Justice Honda had more than this in mind, however. Truth to tell, his main concern was to expose his still sensitive, nineteen-year-old son to those elements of human existence that were dredged up in all their shockingly sordid reality in criminal court. He wanted to see what Shigekuni was able to draw from such experience.

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