Temple Of Dawn (39 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
Honda called Keiko from a pay phone.
As usual she did not answer at once, but he was positive she was at home. He pictured her magnificent, opulent back; she must be in her slip putting on makeup after having selected her attire for the luncheon party and was oblivious to the telephone.
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” she said in her rich, leisurely voice. “I’ve been thoughtless not to call. Have you been well?”
“Quite well, thanks. I wondered if we could have lunch sometime soon.”
“Oh, how kind! But you really want to see Ying Chan, not me.”
Honda was at once at a loss for words and decided to wait for Keiko’s lead. “I’m sorry I’ve troubled you. By the way, she never contacted me after that night. Have you seen her?”
“No, not since then. I wonder what she’s doing. Isn’t she taking exams or something?”
“I don’t think she studies much.”
Honda was amazed by his own ability to carry on the conversation so calmly.
“But you want to see her anyway,” began Keiko. Then she thought for a moment. The interval of silence was neither heavy nor important. White powder was probably floating in the shafts of morning light falling through the bedroom windows. Honda knew that she was not the kind of woman to feign mystery, so he waited, leaving everything up to her.
“I shall pose a condition, I think,” she said.
“What is that?”
“Ying Chan escaped to my place and she trusts me completely. So if I tell her that I shall be present too, she won’t turn you down straightaway. Is that all right?”
“What do you mean is it all right? I was going to ask you to do precisely that.”
“I really want to let you see her alone, but for a while . . . Where shall I call to give you the answer?”
“At my office. I’ve decided to go there every morning from now on,” replied Honda and hung up.
The world was transformed from that moment on. How could he bear to wait for the next hour, the next day? He made a little wager with himself: if Ying Chan wore the emerald ring when she met him, that would mean she had forgiven him; if she did not, that would signify the opposite.
40
KEIKO’S HOUSE
was situated in the higher section of Azabu and was deep-set with a driveway that led up to the entrance. There was a semicircular Regency facade built by Keiko’s father in memory of his youth in Brighton. One warm afternoon toward the end of June, Honda had accepted an invitation to tea and entered the mansion with the feeling of returning to prewar Japan.
Following a typhoon and thunder and rain, suddenly in the summer light, unusual for the rainy season, the quiet woods on the front grounds seemed to store remembrances of an entire period. He thought he was returning to nostalgic old music. This kind of mansion, now almost the only one remaining in the burned ruins, had become even more privileged, sinful, and gloomy by reason of its solitariness. It was just as though remembrances left behind by the times were to have their impact suddenly heightened with the passing of the years.
A formal invitation had come to him announcing that Keiko’s house had been released by the American Occupation Forces, and that she wished to give a tea to celebrate the occasion. She did not touch on the matter of Ying Chan. Honda came bearing a bouquet of flowers. While the house had been confiscated, Keiko had lived with her mother in a separate dwelling that had once been the steward’s, and she had never invited guests to visit in Tokyo during that time.
A servant in white gloves met him at the door. The circular entrance hall was high-domed. The cryptomeria doors on one side were painted with cranes, while on the other they opened onto a spiral staircase of marble that led to the second floor. Halfway up the stairs, in a dark niche, stood a bronze Venus with eyes demurely lowered.
The doors with the Kano-style cranes, both half open, led to the drawing room. He found no one there.
Light from a row of small windows brightened the room, and the panes were old-fashioned crystal surfaces that refracted rainbow colors. Further to the interior, one side recessed into a niche. Golden clouds had been painted all over the wall, on which hung a narrow scroll with calligraphy. A chandelier was suspended from the Momoyamastyle latticed ceiling. All the small tables and chairs were splendid Louis Quinze—
d’époque
. The upholstery of each chair bore a different design; altogether they formed the sequence of a fête champêtre by Watteau.
d’époque
. The upholstery of each chair bore a different design; altogether they formed the sequence of a fête champêtre by Watteau.
While Honda was examining the chairs, a familiar fragrance came to him, and turning around, he saw Keiko standing there in a fashionable double-skirted afternoon dress of heavy mustard pongee.
“How do you like them? Aren’t they antediluvian?”
“What a perfectly splendid mingling of East and West!”
“My father’s taste rather ran to this sort in everything. But don’t you think they’re well preserved? The confiscation of the house couldn’t be avoided, but I ran around and did what I could so that it wouldn’t be destroyed by ignoramuses. Since they used the place for Army VIPs, they turned it back to me quite undamaged, as you can see. There are childhood memories for me in every corner. It was lucky that some of the country bumpkins from Ohio didn’t run the place down. I wanted you to see it today.”
“And where are your other guests?”
“They’re all in the garden. It’s hot, but the breeze is pleasant. Won’t you come out?”
Keiko made no reference to Ying Chan.
Opening a door in one corner of the room, she stepped out onto the terrace that led to the garden. In the shade of the large trees cane chairs and small tables were scattered about. The clouds were extremely beautiful, and the colors in the women’s clothes heightened the green of the lawn. Flowerlike hats swayed to and fro.
Upon approaching the group Honda realized that it was composed of old women; furthermore, he was the only male guest there. He felt out of place as he was introduced. Each time the pink hands, blotched and wrinkled, were extended, he hesitated to shake them; he was depressed by the accumulation of hands; they darkened his heart like a cargo of dried fruit in the hold of a ship.
Western women, apparently unaware of the gaping zippers on their backs, swung their broad hips and cackled with laughter. Their sunken eyes with brown or blue pupils were focused on things he could not locate. When pronouncing certain words they would open their dark mouths so wide that he could see their tonsils, and they gave themselves to the conversation with a kind of vulgar enthusiasm. One of them, snatching up two or three thin sandwiches with red manicured fingers, turned suddenly to Honda and announced that she had been divorced three times and wanted to know whether the Japanese divorced a lot too.
The colorfully dressed guests strolled about the grove to escape the heat and were visible through the trees. Two or three of them emerged from the entrance to it. There was Ying Chan accompanied by a Western woman on either side.
Honda’s heart pounded as though he had stumbled. This was it, this palpitation was important; thanks to it, life had stopped being solid dead matter and was transformed into a liquid, even gaseous state. Just seeing her had done him good. Sugar cubes melted in tea at the instant of this palpitation; the buildings all became unsteady; all the bridges bent as if they were candy; and life became synonymous with lightning or with the wavering poppy in the wind or with the swinging of a curtain. Extremely self-centered satisfaction and unpleasant shyness intermingled as in a hangover, projecting Honda with one thrust into a dream world.
Escorted by two tall women, Ying Chan in a sleeveless salmon-pink dress, her black hair lustrous as jet falling over her shoulders, suddenly came out of the grove into the sunlight. Honda took double pleasure in being reminded of the Princess’s picnic at Bang Pa In, when she had been attended by the old ladies.
Keiko, unnoticed, was standing at his side.
“How do you like that? Don’t I keep my promises?” she whispered in his ear.
A childlike insecurity welled up in Honda, and he was afraid that he could not possibly go through with the scene unless he depended completely on Keiko for help. Step by step, a smiling Ying Chan approached this incomprehensible fear. He was flustered by his concern to control his emotion before Ying Chan should reach him, but the closer she came, the more it grew. Honda was tongue-tied before he even tried to speak.
“Just act as though nothing ever happened. You’d better not mention anything about Gotemba,” Keiko whispered in his ear again.
Fortunately Ying Chan’s progress was interrupted in the middle of the lawn when another woman stopped her to chat. She seemed not to have noticed him as yet. Ten or fifteen yards away she swayed on the branch of time like a beautiful orange that could be reached in seconds, ripe, heavy with fragrance and juice. Honda examined everything about her: her breasts, her legs, her smile, her white teeth. Everything had been nurtured under the burning summer sun, yet inside, her heart was surely impenetrably cold.
When Ying Chan finally joined the group in the circle of chairs it was still uncertain whether she had really not noticed Honda or was pretending not to have.
“It’s Mr. Honda,” Keiko said encouragingly.
“Oh?” said Ying Chan, turning around with a perfectly relaxed smile. Her face in the summer light was revived and her lips were more relaxed and smiling. Her eyebrows flowed, and in the amber brightness of her face her large, black eyes were luminous. Her face was enjoying its season. Summer had relaxed her as though she were stretching self-indulgently in an ample bath. The naturalness of her pose was complete. As he visualized the hollow between her breasts under her brassiere perspiring as if in a steamroom, he could feel the summer concealed deep within her body.
When she extended a hand her eyes were expressionless. Honda took it somewhat shakily. She was not wearing the emerald ring. Though the wager he had made was with himself, he realized now that he had wanted to lose, to be coldly rejected. He was surprised to note that even rejection gave him a pleasant sensation and did not at all disturb his audacious reveries.
Ying Chan took up an empty teacup, so Honda stretched his arm and touched the handle of the antique silver teapot. But the heat of the metal made him hesitate. He probably was motivated by a fear that the destination of his action would be interrupted by a fog of insecurity, that certainly his hand would tremble, and that he might do something terribly clumsy. A servant’s white-gloved hand immediately came to his rescue and relieved him of his concern.
“You look well, now that summer’s here,” he finally managed to say. While he was quite unaware of it, his manner of speaking was more polite than usual.
“Yes, I like summer.” Smiling softly, Ying Chan answered as if out of a textbook.
The old ladies around her, manifesting their interest, asked him to translate the conversation. The fragrance of the lemon on the table and the smell of old bodies and perfume put Honda’s nerves on edge, but he translated the conversation. The old ladies laughed meaninglessly, commenting that the Japanese word for summer made them feel decidedly warm, conjecturing about a possible tropical etymology for the word.
Intuitively Honda felt Ying Chan’s ennui. Looking around, he saw that Keiko had already gone. Boredom was increasing in Ying Chan like a silent animal sadly rubbing itself against the sultry grass. This intuition of his was the only bond with her. She moved gracefully, smiling and talking in English, but he gradually began to feel that she wanted perhaps to tell him about her boredom. It was a kind of music made by the accumulation of the summer melancholy of her flesh, from her heavy breasts down to her beautiful light legs. It was constantly in his ears, high and low, like the faint hum of insects flitting in the summer sky.
But it did not necessarily mean that she was bored with the party. Rather, the aura of ennui filling her body could have been her natural state that the summer had revived. She was obviously quite at home in this ennui. Retreating slightly into the shade of a tree, she spoke with vivacity, holding her teacup, surrounded by old ladies who addressed her as Your Serene Highness. She suddenly took off a shoe and with one sharp, stocking-clad toe casually scratched the calf of her other leg with the exquisite balance of a flamingo, holding the teacup perfectly steady and not spilling a single drop into the saucer.
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