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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: Temple Of Dawn
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The edifice stood on the bank of a stream bordered by the mimosa trees of Nakhon Pathom Road.
The reddish brown portals of the Marble Temple, protected by a pair of stone horses with mandorlas like white crystal flames in the ancient Khmer style, stood open. On either side of the straight flagstone walk leading from the entrance to the main building set in glistening emerald-green grass, stood a pair of pavilions in classic Javanese style with upturned roofs. The mimosa trees on the green-sward were cut in round shapes and blossoming; frolicking white lions on the eaves of the pavilions trampled flames underfoot.
The white columns of Indian marble directly in front of the main building, the pair of guardian marble lions, the low European-type balustrade, and the facade, also of marble, reflected the dazzling rays of the westering sun and formed a pure white canvas that served to bring out the rich decorative patterns of gold and vermilion. The inner frames of the pointed-arch windows were limned in scarlet and encircled by ornate golden flames that rose, engulfing them. Even the white columns of the facade were decorated in brilliant gold with coiled
naga
-serpents that sprang abruptly from the capitals. Rows of golden snakes with raised heads edged the upsweeping roofs, composed of tier upon tier of red Chinese tiles, and the tips of each subordinate roof were formed of thin, golden serpent tails, like the spike heels of a woman’s shoe, thrusting upward, as if in competition, to the blue sky, to the very heavens. All this gold shone rather darkly in the sun, enhancing the white of the pigeons that idled along the gables.
But when the white birds, startled, suddenly flew up into the gradually darkening sky, they were as black as particles of soot. The soot from the golden flames, repeated in the ornaments of the temple, became birds.
In the garden the towering palms seemed petrified in amazement, arboreal fountains like bows, shooting their greenery farther and farther skyward.
Plants, animals, metal, stone, and Indian red, mingling in harmony, frolicked in the light. Even the marble heads of the white lions guarding the entrance appeared to be for all the world like sunflowers. Serrated seedlike teeth lined their gaping mouths; their lion faces were angry white sunflowers.
Prince Achitto Apar’s Rolls Royce drew up in front of the gate. The Young Men’s Military Band, dressed in red uniforms, had lined up on the lawn by the pavilions and were playing their instruments, brown cheeks puffing. The polished mouths of the horns reflected minutely the figures of the youths in their bright uniforms. Under the tropical sun no instrument was more appropriate.
A servant clad in a white coat and red sash followed the Prince, holding a grass-colored parasol over the royal head. The Prince, wearing decorations on his white military jacket, entered the temple escorted by a chamberlain in a blue sash, holding offerings, and ten royal guardsmen.
His visits usually lasted some twenty minutes. During this period spectators waited on the grass, roasting in the sun. At length came the sound of a Chinese viol in the inner precincts, mingled with delicate chimes, and the footman bearing the parasol moved to the entrance. He raised the umbrella, to the tip of which was attached a delicate golden pagoda, to his shoulder, and four guardsmen wearing monk-like hats with flaps hanging down over the napes of their necks lined up on the stone steps. The interior, hidden from view, was so dark that one could barely glimpse the flickering of the candles inside. Voices chanting a sutra rose rapidly to a crescendo, then stopped at the sound of a single bell.
The servant opened the green umbrella, respectfully holding it over the departing Prince, and the guardsmen saluted by hoisting their swords. The-Prince passed quickly through the gate and entered his Rolls Royce.
After a while the spectators who had watched the departure scattered, the military band left, and the quiet of evening gently settled over the temple. Some of the saffron-garbed priests strolled out to the riverbank; some read books, others conversed. Withered red flowers and dead fruit floated in the water that reflected the mimosa on the opposite bank and the beautiful clouds in the evening sky. The sun sank behind the temple, and the grass darkened. At length only the marble pillars, the lions, and the facade of the temple retained a fading evening whiteness.
Wat Po.
There one must push one’s way through the crowds streaming among the late-eighteenth-century pagodas and the central hall constructed under Rama I.
Blazing sun. Azure sky. Still the great white columns of the gallery in the main temple are stained like the legs of a white elephant.
The pagoda is decorated with small fragments of porcelain, whose smooth glaze reflects the sun. In the purple Great Pagoda are chiseled tiers of blue mosaic, and innumerable pieces of ceramic, on which are painted countless flowers with petals of yellow, red, and white on a bluish purple ground: a ceramic Persian carpet towering high in the sky.
To one side stands a green pagoda. A pregnant bitch, black-spotted pink teats hanging pendulously, staggers down the flagstone walk as if crushed by the hammer of the sun.
In the Nirvana Hall a great gilded statue of Shakyamuni reclining rests its mass of golden curls on a box-pillow of blue, white, green, and yellow mosaic. His golden arm is stretched far out to support his head, and at the other end of the somber hall gleam his golden heels.
The soles of his feet are inlaid with fine mother-of-pearl; and in each segment, against a finely wrought black background in gleaming iridescent shellwork, are depictions of the Buddha’s life, all decorated with peonies, shells, altar accessories, rocky crags, lotus flowers rising from swamps, dancers, strange birds, lions, white elephants, dragons, horses, cranes, peacocks, ships with three sails, tigers, and phoenixes.
The open windows shine like polished brass panels. Under the lime trees a group of priests passes by in shimmering orange robes, their brown right shoulders bare.
Outside, the air itself seems stricken with some tropical fever. Over the stagnant pond between the pagodas, glistening green mangrove trees let fall their mass of aerial roots. Pigeons while away the time on a center island with rocks painted blue. An immense butterfly is depicted on the rocky facade, and at the crest stands a small, inauspicious black pagoda.
And Wat Phra Keo, guardian temple of the royal palace, famed for its principal statue—an emerald Buddha.
It has never been damaged since its construction in 1785.
A golden
garuda
, half woman, half bird, flanked on either side by gilded spires, glistens in the rain at the top of the marble stairs. The green-bordered tiles of Chinese red sparkle more brilliantly than ever in the luminous rain.
The gallery walls of the Mahamandapa are covered with a series of murals illustrating episodes in the
Ramayana
.
Rather than the virtuous Rama himself, the monkey god, Hanuman, the flamboyant son of the wind god, appears throughout the painted story. The golden beauty, Sita, with teeth of jasmine flowers, is being kidnapped by the fearful
rakshasa
king. Rama fights his many battles with fixed, bright eyes.
Colorful palaces, monkey gods, and battles of monsters appear against mountains painted in the manner of the southern Chinese school or in that of the somber early Venetian landscapes. Above the tenebrous
paysage
soars a god in the seven colors of the rainbow, mounted on a phoenix. A man in golden robes whips a clothed horse that sits motionless. A monstrous fish, rearing its head far above the sea, is about to attack some soldiers standing on a bridge. There is a faint blue lake in the distance; and Hanuman, sword unsheathed, lurks in a bush as he stalks a white horse with a golden saddle that paces silently through the dark forest.
“Do you know the real name for Bangkok?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It’s
Krung thep phra mahanakorn amon latanakosin mahintara shiayutthaya mafma pop noppala rachatthani prilom.”
“What does all that mean?”
“It’s almost impossible to translate. Thai names are like the temple decorations, unnecessarily pompous and flowery, ornate purely for the sake of ornateness.
“Well,
Krung thep
means roughly ‘capital,’ and
pop noppala
is ‘a nine-colored diamond’;
rachatthani
is ‘a large city’; and
prilom
means something like ‘pleasant.’ They choose exaggerated and ostentatious nouns and adjectives and string them together like beads on a necklace.
“In answering a simple ‘yes’ to the king, protocol of the country demands that you say:
phrapout chao ka kollap promkan saikrao sai klamon
, which roughly translates as: ‘Your humble and obedient servant makes reverent obeisance to Your Majesty.’”
Honda, ensconced in a rattan chair, listened to Hishikawa’s words with detached amusement.
Itsui Products Limited had sent this encyclopedic but somewhat strange and seedy character—doubtless a onetime artist—to serve as interpreter and guide for Honda. Already at forty-six, the latter considered it a kind of courtesy to himself to leave things to others, especially in such a sweltering country as this.
He had come to Bangkok at the request of Itsui Products. If a business transaction based on Japanese law has been closed in Japan and a dispute with a buyer arises abroad, even though the suit is brought before a foreign court, it is settled according to international civil law. Furthermore, foreign lawyers are invariably ignorant of Japanese law. In such cases, some eminent Japanese counselor is invited to explain Japanese legal intricacies to the native lawyers and thus to help settle the suit.
Itsui Products had exported one hundred thousand cases of Calos antifever pills to Thailand in January. Of them thirty thousand had been damaged by damp and had been discolored, thereby losing their effectiveness. The cases were dated, indicating a reduction in potency after a given time limit, but that served no purpose now that they were spoiled. Such civil problems should have been solved by reference to the law concerning default of obligation, but the buyers had brought charges of criminal fraud. According to article 715 of the Civil Code, Itsui Products should, of course, have assumed responsibility for indemnifying a non-negligence default for any flaw in merchandise issued by a subcontracting drug company. But they could do nothing without the assistance of a capable Japanese lawyer like Honda in matters of this nature which involved international civil law.
Honda had been assigned a room in the Oriental Hotel—the natives pronounced it Orienten Hoten—with a lovely view of the Menam River. The room was ventilated by a large white ceiling fan, but at nightfall it was better to go out to the garden along the river and enjoy the slightly cooler breezes there. As he sipped his aperitif with Hishikawa, who had come to guide him for the evening, he let his companion take over the conversation. Honda was overcome with weariness; even the spoon felt too heavy for his fingers to raise, and conversing was even more burdensome than a silverplated spoon.
On the opposite bank, the sun was sinking behind Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn. An all-pervading evening glow filled the vast sky over the flat vista of the Thon Buri jungle, broken only by two or three spires silhouetted against the horizon. Like cotton the green of the forest absorbed the glow, changing it to a truly emerald hue. Sampans passed by, crows gathered in great numbers, and a soiled rose color lingered in the river water.
“All art is like the evening glow,” said Hishikawa, watching as he always did when he was preparing to express an opinion, for the effect his words would have on his listener. Honda felt annoyed by these points of silence even more than by Hishikawa’s continuous chatter.
Hishikawa’s profile with its cheeks of Siamese swarthiness and the non-Siamese pasty, taut skin gleamed in the last rays of the sun that came from the opposite bank.
“Art is a colossal evening glow,” he repeated. “It’s the burnt offering of all the best things of an era. Even the clearest logic that has long thrived in daylight is completely destroyed by the meaningless lavish explosion of color in the evening sky; even history, apparently destined to endure forever, is abruptly made aware of its own end. Beauty stands before everyone; it renders human endeavor completely futile. Before the brilliance of evening, before the surging evening clouds, all rot about some ‘better future’ immediately fades away. The present moment is all; the air is filled with a poison of color. What’s beginning? Nothing. Everything is ending.
“There’s nothing of substance in it. Of course, night has its own intrinsic nature: the cosmic essence of death and inorganic existence. Day too has its own entity; everything human belongs to the day.
“But there’s no substance in the evening glow. It’s nothing but a joke, a meaningless, but impressive joke of form and light and color. Look . . . look at the purple clouds. Nature seldom offers a banquet of such a lavish color as purple. Evening clouds are an insult to anything symmetric, but such destruction of order is closely connected with the breakup of something much more fundamental. If the serene white daytime cloud may be compared to moral exaltation, then these riotous colors have nothing to do with morality.
“The arts predict the greatest vision of the end; before anything else they prepare for and embody the end. Gourmets and good wines, beautiful forms and sumptuous clothes—every extravagance human beings can dream up in one era is crammed into the arts. All such things have been awaiting form. Some form with which to pillage and destroy in the shortest time all of human living. And that is the evening glow. And to what purpose? Indeed, for nothing.

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