Spring Snow (34 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
The princes startled Honda and Kiyoaki by falling to their knees as soon as they saw the statue. With no thought for their freshly creased white linen trousers, they knelt unhesitatingly on the wet, moldering leaves that covered the path and pressed their palms together in reverence toward the distant figure bathed in summer sunlight.
The other two were irreverent enough to exchange a quick glance. Faith such as this was so removed from their experience that they had never even thought of it ever touching their lives. Not that they felt the least inclination to mock the princes’ exemplary devotion. But they felt that these two young men, whom they had come to regard as students much like themselves, had suddenly flown away into a world whose ideals and faith were quite alien to them.
32
THE WALK IN THE MOUNTAINS
behind the house was followed by a complete tour of the garden. All this exertion taxed their energy, so that the four of them were finally quite happy to rest for a while in the living room of the villa. There they enjoyed the sea breeze from the terrace while they sipped lemonade brought from Yokohama and cooled in the villa’s well. They were soon ready to set off again, however. This time they gave in to the impulse for a quick swim before sunset and hurried to their rooms to dress for the occasion according to their individual taste. Kiyoaki and Honda put on the red loincloths used for swimming at Peers, and over them they threw the thin cotton tunics decorated with feather-stitching that completed the uniform. Then they put on straw hats and would have been on their way to the beach if they had not been delayed by the two princes. When these two finally appeared, they were dressed in striped English bathing suits that showed their brown shoulders to advantage.
Kiyoaki and Honda had been friends for a long time, but Kiyoaki had never before invited him to the family villa during the summer, though he came once in the fall to gather chestnuts. This was therefore the first time that he had gone swimming with Kiyoaki since they both were boys together at the school villa at Katasé beach, when their present intimacy had hardly begun.
The four of them plunged impetuously down the garden slope, broke through the border of young pines, and dashed across the narrow vegetable field onto the beach.
Here Honda and Kiyoaki paused to perform the prescribed pre-swimming calisthenics, a formality that made the two princes double up with laughter. Perhaps this was a mild form of retaliation against the two Japanese for not having joined them in kneeling to the distant Great Buddha. In the eyes of the princes, this modern, totally self-centered penance was the funniest thing in the world.
However, the very nature of their laughter showed that they were feeling more at ease than ever before; not for a long time had they looked so cheerful. After they had enjoyed themselves in the water to their hearts’ content, Kiyoaki felt that he could forget about playing host for a while; the princes paired off to talk in their own language, and he and Honda talked Japanese until all four fell asleep on the beach.
The setting sun was blurred by a thin film of cloud. It had lost much of its earlier heat, but this was a pleasant time to lie in it, especially for someone whose skin was as white as Kiyoaki’s. Dressed only in his red loincloth, he threw his wet body down on the sand and lay face up, his eyes shut.
To his left, Honda sat cross-legged in the sand staring out at the waters of the bay. Though the sea was calm, its rolling waves fascinated him. As he watched, the crest of the sea seemed to be level with his eyes. How strange, he thought, that it should come to an abrupt end and give way to the land right in front of him.
He kept pouring dry sand from one palm to the other. When he had spilled a good part of it in the process, he reached down automatically and began again with a fresh handful, his thoughts completely taken up with the sea.
It ended a few feet from where he sat. The sea, broad and vast, with all its mighty force, ended right there before his eyes. Be it the edge of time or space, there is nothing so awe-inspiring as a border. To be here at this place with his three companions, at this marvelous border between land and sea, struck him as being very similar to being alive as one age was ending and another beginning, like being part of a great moment in history. And then too the tide of their own era, in which he and Kiyoaki lived, also had to have an appointed time to ebb, a shore on which to break, a limit beyond which it could not go.
The sea ended right there before his eyes. As he watched the final surge of each wave as it drained into the sand, the final thrust of mighty power that had come down through countless centuries, he was struck by the pathos of it all. At that very point, a grand pan-oceanic enterprise that spanned the world went awry and ended in annihilation.
But still, he thought, this final frustration was a gentle, soothing one. A small, lacy frill, the wave’s last farewell, escaped from disintegration at the last moment before merging into the glistening wet sand as the wave itself withdrew, and vanished into the sea.
Starting a good way out in the offing at a point where the whitecaps thinned out, the incoming waves went through four or five stages, each of which was visible at any given moment—a swelling, a cresting, a breaking, the dissolution of its force and an ebbing—a constantly recurring process.
The breaking wave let out an angry roar as it showed its smooth, dark green belly. The roar tailed off to a cry and the cry to a whisper. The charging line of huge white stallions yielded place to a line of smaller ones until the furious horses gradually disappeared altogether, leaving nothing but those last imprints of pounding hooves on the beach.
Two remnants, streaming in from left and right, collided roughly, spread like a fan, and sank into the bright mirror of the sand’s surface. At that moment, the reflection in the mirror came to life, catching the next white-crested wave just as it was about to come crashing down, a sharp vertical image that sparkled like a row of icicles.
Beyond the ebb, where other waves kept rolling in one after the other, none of them formed smooth white crests. They charged at full power again and again, aiming for their goal with determination. But when Honda looked out to sea in the distance he could not escape the feeling that the apparent strength of these waves that beat upon the shore was really no more than a diluted, weakened, final dispersion.
The farther out one looked, the darker the color of the water, until it finally became a deep blue-green. It was as if the innocuous ingredients of the offshore water became more and more condensed by the increasing pressure of the water as it got deeper, its green intensified over and over again to produce an eternal blue-green substance, pure and impenetrable as fine jade, that extended to the horizon. Though the sea might seem vast and deep, this substance was the very stuff of the ocean. Something that was crystallized into blue beyond the shallow, frivolous overlapping of the waves—that was the sea.
∗
His staring and his thoughts were at length enough to tire both his eyes and his mind, and he turned to look at Kiyoaki, who was assuredly sound asleep by now. The light skin on his handsome graceful body seemed all the whiter in contrast to the red loincloth that was all he had on. Just above the loincloth, on his pale stomach that rose and fell lightly with his breathing, there had lodged some sand, now dry, and some tiny fragments of seashell. Since he had raised his left arm to put it behind his head, his left side, that ordinarily was hidden, lay revealed to Honda, and behind the left nipple, which made him think of a tiny cherry-blossom bud, a cluster of three small black moles caught his eyes. There was something odd about them, he felt. Why should Kiyoaki’s flesh be marked like that? Though they had been friends for so long, he had never seen them before, and now they embarrassed him too much for him to keep looking at them, as though Kiyoaki had abruptly confessed to a secret better left untold. But when he closed his eyes, he saw the three black moles come into focus against his eyelids, as clear as the shapes of three distant birds flying across the evening sky, so brilliantly lit up by the setting sun. In his imagination he saw them draw closer, turn into birds with flapping wings, and then pass overhead.
When he opened his eyes again, a light sound was coming from Kiyoaki’s well-formed nose, and his teeth glistened wet and pure white through his slightly parted lips. Despite himself, Honda’s eyes fell on the moles on Kiyoaki’s side again. This time he thought that they looked like some grains of sand that had embedded themselves in his white skin.
The dry area of the beach ended right at their feet, and here and there the waves had splashed up beyond their usual limit and left contracted patterns of wet sand behind them, a sort of bas-relief that preserved the trace of the wave. Stones, shells, and withered leaves were embedded here too, for all the world like ancient fossils, and the smallest pebble among them was backed by its own rivulet of wet sand to prove how it had fought the receding wave.
And there were more than stones, shells, and withered leaves. Tangles of brown algae, fragments of wood, pieces of straw, and even orange peelings had been cast up and lay fixed in the sand. He thought it possible that some fine wet grains might also have worked their way up into the white skin that stretched taut over Kiyoaki’s side.
Since he found this idea very disturbing, he tried to think of some way to brush the grains away without waking Kiyoaki. But as he continued to watch, he realized that the black marks were moving in such a free and natural way with the rise and fall of his chest that they could not be foreign matter. They were part of him and so could be nothing other than the black moles he had first taken them to be.
He felt that they were a kind of betrayal of Kiyoaki’s physical elegance.
Perhaps Kiyoaki sensed the intensity of his gaze, because he suddenly opened his eyes, catching Honda’s stare directly. And then he raised his head and began to speak abruptly, as if to prevent his flustered friend from escaping him.
“Would you do something for me?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t really come here to play nursemaid to the princes. That’s a good excuse, but actually I want to give everyone the impression that I’m not in Tokyo. Do you see what I mean?”
“I had guessed that you were thinking something of the sort.”
“What I want to do is to leave you and the princes here sometimes and go back there without anyone knowing. I can’t go for as much as three days without her. So it will be up to you to smooth things over with the princes while I’m gone and also to have a good story ready just on the off chance that someone telephones from Tokyo. Tonight I’m going to go third-class on the last train and I’ll be back on the first one tomorrow morning. So will you do it for me?”
“I’ll do it,” said Honda emphatically.
Delighted at his friend’s firm agreement, Kiyoaki reached up to shake his hand before he spoke again.
“I suppose your father will be attending the state funeral for Prince Arisugawa.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“It was good of the Prince to die when he did. As I heard just yesterday, the Toinnomiyas have no choice but to postpone the betrothal ceremony for a while.”
This remark reminded Honda that Kiyoaki’s love for Satoko was inextricably bound up with the interests of the nation as a whole, and the danger of it sent a shiver through him.
At this point their conversation was interrupted by the two princes who came running over in such enthusiastic haste that they almost fell over each other. Kridsada spoke first, struggling both to regain his breath and to express himself in his scanty Japanese.
“Do you know what Chao P. and I were talking about just now?” he asked. “We were discussing the transmigration of souls.”
33
WHEN THEY HEARD THIS
, the two young Japanese spontaneously glanced at each other, an instinctive reaction whose significance was lost on Kridsada, who was an impetuous sort, not given to gauging his listeners’ expressions. Chao P., on the other hand, had learned a great deal from six months of dealing with the tensions brought on by living in a foreign environment. And now, although his skin was too dark to betray anything as obvious as a blush, he was clearly hesitant about continuing such a conversation. Nevertheless, he did so, using his fluent English, perhaps because he wished to appear sophisticated.
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