Authors: Yukio Mishima
Temple Of Dawn (26 page)
Only after the sun had dyed the clouds to the left of Mount Fuji had all the guests assembled.
When the four made their way from the arbor to the house, Keiko’s American lover, the Army lieutenant, was helping her in the kitchen. Shortly, the aging erstwhile Baron and Baroness Shinkawa arrived; then at intervals, Sakurai, a diplomat; Murata, the president of a construction company; Kawaguchi, an important newspaper man; Akiko Kyoya, a singer of French songs; and Ikuko Fujima, a traditional Japanese dancer. Such a motley group of guests would have been unthinkable in Honda’s former household. Honda’s heart, too, was heavy: Ying Chan had not put in an appearance.
26
FORMER BARON SHINKAWA
was seated in a chair by the fireside from which point he coldly observed the other guests.
He was now seventy-two. Grumbling and complaining without fail whenever he left home, he could not forego the joy of going out; at even his age his love for parties had not diminished. He had been very bored during the period of the postwar purges and had fallen into the habit of accepting all invitations. This had continued on into the postpurge years.
But now everyone considered him and his garrulous wife to be the most boring of guests. His sarcasm had lost its bite, and his epigrammatic expressions had become longwinded and shallow. He was never able to recall people’s names.
“That . . . what was he called? . . . remember . . . he was often depicted in political cartoons . . . don’t you remember? . . . a small, fat man, round as a butterball . . . what was his name? . . . a very common one . . .”
His listener could not help but recognize Shinkawa’s losing battle with the invisible monster of forgetfulness. This quiet, but tenacious animal would occasionally withdraw only to reappear at once, clinging to Shinkawa, brushing his forehead with its shaggy tail.
At last, he would give up and continue his story.
“. . . anyway, this politician’s wife was a remarkable woman.” But the episode in which the most important name was missing no longer held any flavor. Each time he would stamp his foot in sheer vexation, so anxious was he to impart to others the flavor of the tale he alone could savor. It was then that Shinkawa would be aware of a mendicant-like emotion, one he had previously never experienced. In his struggle to find someone to appreciate his simple punning jokes, as though begging for understanding, he had unconsciously become obsequious.
He was pathetically compelled to tear down the refined pride he had so long possessed, and gradually his prime concern became the assumption of an attitude of contemptuousness—something that he had exhibited most casually on the tip of his nose like cigar smoke in former days. But at the same time, he took great pains to avoid revealing this hidden contempt to anyone. He was fearful that he might not receive other invitations.
In the midst of a party, he would occasionally pull at his wife’s sleeve and whisper in her ear:
“What a despicable pack. They don’t know the first thing about how to speak of the indelicate in a refined way. Japanese ugliness is so complete it’s almost impressive. But you mustn’t let them suspect how we think.”
Shinkawa’s eyes suddenly became glazed before the flames in the fireplace; he recalled the garden party at the Marquis Matsugae’s some forty years ago, proudly remembering that there too he had felt nothing but contempt for his host.
But only one thing had changed. In former times, the object of his contempt could do him no harm; but now just being there profoundly wounded him.
Mrs. Shinkawa was vivacious.
At her age she increasingly found an indefinable interest in talking about herself. Her search for listeners harmonized beautifully with the attempt to abolish class distinctions that was now in style. She had never once been concerned about the quality of her audience.
She paid exaggerated compliments to the singer of French songs as though she were talking to royalty, in return for which she obtained a hearing. She shamelessly praised Makiko Kito’s poems and then imposed her own tale on the poor woman—once she had been complimented by an Englishman who had called her a poet. He had made the remark when she had compared the late summer clouds over Karuizawa to a Sisley painting.
Now, moved by some uncanny intuition, she began to talk about the garden party at the Matsugae estate as she joined her husband by the fireplace.
“As I think back, those were stupid and uncivilized times when expensive parties entailed nothing more than having a few geisha dance and make music at home. How unimaginative people were then. I must say Japan has made quite a bit of progress: the barbarous customs are gone and it’s ordinary for wives to be included in social affairs. Look at them, the women at this party are no longer silent. Conversations that took place at garden parties used to be excruciatingly boring, but now the women converse very wittily.”
But it was doubtful whether she had ever listened to anyone’s conversation, either now or at any time in the past forty years. She had never tried to talk about anything except herself.
Mrs. Shinkawa suddenly left her husband’s side. She cast a glance into a dark mirror mounted on a wall. Looking-glasses never frightened her. They all functioned as waste-baskets into which she could discard her wrinkles as she stood before them.
Jack, a first lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps, was working hard. The guests looked with pleasure at this member of the “Occupation Forces” who was so gentle and loyal. Keiko treated him grandly, with incomparable regal skill.
Sometimes Jack would extend an arm and encircle her from behind, mischievously touching her breast. She permitted herself a calm, wry smile as she clasped his hairy, ringed fingers.
“Such a child. He’s incorrigible,” she said in a dry, didactic tone, looking around at everyone. Jack’s posterior encased in his Army uniform was capacious, and the guests would compare it with Keiko’s majestic buttocks, arguing which was the larger.
Mrs. Tsubakihara was still talking with Imanishi. She was taken aback to meet for the first time someone who completely scorned her precious sorrow, but she did not change in the least the idiotic expression of mourning on her face.
“No matter how much you grieve, your son will not come back to life. Besides you’ve a balloon in your heart so filled with grief that nothing else can possibly get in. It gives you a secure feeling, doesn’t it. Let me be rude a bit more: you’re convinced that no one else will do you the favor of filling your balloon, so you fill it youself with homemade sorrowgas that you pump into it at a moment’s notice. That releases you from the fear of being bothered by any other emotion.”
“What a horrible thing to say! How cruel . . .”
Mrs. Tsubakihara looked up at Imanishi from the handkerchief in which she muffled her sobs. He thought the look in her eyes was that of an innocent little girl who craved to be raped.
The president of the Murata Construction Company was offering a hyperbolic compliment to Shinkawa, hailing him as a great patron in the financial world. Shinkawa was irked to be assigned to the same category as the vulgar builder. Murata had erected immense billboards bearing his name on all the company’s construction sites; the self-advertising was everywhere. But no one looked less like a construction expert. A pale, flat face revealed his background as a reformist bureaucrat of prewar days. He was an idealist who lived parasitically off others. No sooner had he stopped clinging and achieved independent success in business than he discovered a bright, vast ocean where his inherent crassness could disport itself without restraint. Murata had made the dancer Ikuko Fujima his mistress. Ikuko was wearing a sumptuous kimono interwoven with silk and lacquer threads, and a five-carat diamond blazed on her finger; when she laughed, she held her neck and back rigidly erect.
“An extremely fine house, sir, but if you’d let me build it for you, I could have saved you a lot of money. What a shame,” Murata repeated at least three times to Honda.
The diplomat Sakurai and the senior reporter Kawaguchi were discussing international problems, standing on either side of Akiko Kyoya. Sakurai’s fishlike skin and Kawaguchi’s, marked by age and spoiled by saké, provided a good contrast between the two and their careers. One was cold- and the other hot-blooded. They were discussing weighty problems, as men are wont to do in the company of women, in an effort to impress the singer Akiko. She, on the other hand, was completely oblivious to the subtle rivalry and inane vanity, constantly helping herself to the canapés, glancing alternately with her melancholic, dark eyes at the disheveled white hair and the overly groomed head. She pursed her mouth into the shape of an O and tossed one tidbit after another between her goldfish lips.
Makiko Kito took the trouble of going up to Imanishi and saying: “You have the most peculiar tastes.”
“Must I get your permission every time I make love to your pupil? It’s as though I were making love to my mother, I feel a kind of sacred tremor. At any rate, I’ll never make the mistake of making love to you. What you think of me is written all over your face. I’m the type that repels you sexually more than any other, right?”
“You know very well you do.”
Makiko felt relieved and spoke in a most charming voice. Then she laid a strip of silence between them, that resembled the black edge of tatami matting.
“Even if you should succeed in making love to her, you could never assume the role of her son. Her dead son is extremely sacred and beautiful to her; she is a holy priestess serving him.”
“Well, I don’t know. To me everything looks suspicious. It’s blasphemy that a living person should continue harboring pure emotions and expressing them.”
“That’s why I say she is serving the pure sentiment of the dead.”
“Anyway she does it out of her necessity to live. That already makes it suspicious.”
Makiko narrowed her eyes and laughed in sheer repulsion.
“There isn’t a real man at this party,” she said. With that she left Imanishi as Honda called to her. Mrs. Tsubakihara was seated on the edge of a bench built into the wall, crying as she leaned back. Outside, the night air was extremely cold, and condensed droplets of moisture trickled down the panes.
Honda intended to ask Makiko to take care of Mrs. Tsubakihara. If her tears stemmed less from her painful memories than from the small amount of liquor she had consumed, she could well be a sentimental drinker.
Rié, her face pallid, approached Honda and whispered in his ear.
“There’s been a strange noise. It started a little while ago in the garden . . . I wonder if I’m hearing things.”
“Did you look?”
“No, I was afraid to.”
Honda strode to one of the windows and cleared the steam from the pane with his fingers. Beyond the dead grass, above the cypresses, hung a spectral moon. A wild dog was snooping about, dragging its shadow after it. Stopping and curling up its tail, it threw out its furry white chest that shone in the moonlight and howled mournfully.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Honda asked his wife. The cause of her childish fear had been too easily revealed and Rié did not immediately agree, but merely smiled a vague, indecisive smile.
As he listened further, two or three dogs responded from beyond the cypress grove.
The wind had increased.
27
IT WAS MIDNIGHT
. From the window of his second-floor study, Honda watched a small, ghostly moon traverse the sky. Ying Chan had not put in an appearance. The moon had come instead.
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