Read The Decay Of The Angel Online
Authors: Yukio Mishima
The Decay Of The Angel (14 page)
The rent was twelve thousand five hundred yen a month, and two hundred fifty yen besides went each month into a common maintenance fund. Tōru thanked the superintendent for the half of the rent paid by the company.
“But aren’t you lonely, all by yourself?”
“I’m used to being alone. I’m alone at the station too.”
“That’s true, of course.”
The superintendent took a bottle of Suntory Square from his bag, and side dishes as well, shredded cuttlefish and prawn crackers. If Tōru had no glasses, he said, cups would do as well.
Something unusual was afoot. It was not the superintendent’s practice to come calling upon subordinates thus provisioned. The visit could mean no good. Since Tōru had nothing to do with the accounts, it was not likely that he was about to be charged with fiscal venalities; but he must have made a grievous blunder without himself being aware of it. And here was the superintendent pressing liquor upon the boy he had scolded for his addiction to tobacco. Tōru was reconciled to dismissal; but he knew well enough that, even without a labor union, it was a world in which industrious young men were not to be treated roughly, though they might be no more than signalmen third class. There were plenty of other jobs, if he took the trouble to look for them. In control of himself once more, he glanced at the superintendent with something like pity. He was confident that he could meet with dignity whatever came, even if it be notice of his dismissal. Whatever his adversary might think, Tōru knew that he was a jewel not easily come by.
Refusing the whiskey the superintendent pressed upon him, Tōru sat in an airless corner, his beautiful eyes alight.
He might be alone in the world, but he lived in a small castle of ice, quite free of the ambition and greed and lust upon which people lose their step. Because he disliked comparing himself with others, he was quite free from envy and jealousy. Because he had cut off the road to mundane harmony from the outset, he quarreled with no one. He let people think of him as a gentle, harmless, cuddly white bunny. The loss of a job was the smallest triviality.
“I had a call from the main office the other day.” The superintendent was drinking to build up courage. “I wondered what it might mean, and it turned out to be a summons from the president himself. Let me tell you I was surprised. I went into his office wondering what would come next, and I have to admit that I was shaking in spite of myself. And there he was, all smiles. Have a seat, he said. I knew the news wasn’t going to be bad, but it turned out not to be good and not to be bad either as far as I myself was concerned. What do you think it was? Well, it had to do with you.”
Tōru’s eyes were fixed on him. The news proved to be quite beyond his imagining. Dismissal had nothing to do with the case.
“Wasn’t I surprised, though. It had come through an older man who had done a great deal for the president. There’s someone who wants to adopt you. And it’s up to me to make you agree, even if I have to force you. That’s quite a responsibility, coming from the president himself. Someone’s put a high price on you. Or it might be that someone knows a good article when he sees it.”
An intimation came to Tōru. It had to be the elderly lawyer who had left his calling card.
“I should imagine his name is Honda.”
“That’s right. How did you know?” The superintendent was astonished.
“He came once to look at the station. But it seems odd that he should want to adopt me after just the one time.”
“It seems that he’s made two or three very careful investigations.”
Tōru frowned. He remembered the tidings from Kinué. “Not a very pleasant sort of thing to do to a person.”
The superintendent hurried on in some confusion. “But it’s all right. He found out that you’re a model young man. Not a mark against you.”
It was not so much the elderly lawyer Tōru was thinking of. It was that spoiled, Westernized old woman, from a world utterly alien to Tōru, spreading her scaly powder like a gaudy moth.
The superintendent kept Tōru awake until eleven thirty. Sometimes, his knees in his arms, Tōru would doze off; but the superintendent, now in his cups, would shake him and go on talking.
The man was a wealthy and famous old widower. He saw that it would far better serve the interests of the Honda family and of Japan to adopt a truly talented and willing young man than to take in a dolt from a high-placed family. He would hire tutors as soon as the adoption had been accomplished, to put Tōru into the best preparatory school and university. The prospective father rather hoped that Tōru would choose law or business, but the final choice must of course be his own, and the father would be quite unstinting with his help. He did not have long to live, but there were no family complications, and the whole of his estate would go to Tōru. Could any proposal be more attractive?
But why? The question tickled at Tōru’s self-respect.
The other person had jumped over something. It corresponded, by wonderful coincidence, to something Tōru himself had jumped over. It seemed to the other and to Tōru himself that the irrationality of it all was natural; and the ones who had been taken in were the common-sense ones in between, the president and the others.
The news came to Tōru as nothing to be surprised by at all. He had been prepared for a curious denouement the moment he had met the quiet old man. He was confident that no one would find him out, but the faculty of not being caught by surprise had given him the confidence to pass generous judgment on wholly outrageous mistakes about himself and to swallow the results. If in the end they came to nonsense, they were the results of beautiful error. If a confusion in the world’s awareness was taken to be a self-evident premise, then anything could follow. The view that all the benevolence and malevolence directed at him were based upon error brought a blinding of self-respect, and self-denial as the final conclusion to cynicism.
Tōru had only contempt for inevitability, and to him volition was nothing. If he imagined himself caught up in an antiquated comedy of errors, he had ample reason. There could be no doubt that nothing was more ridiculous than the anger of a volitionless person who thought his volition was being trampled on. If he behaved in a coolly rational manner, then to say that he had no particular wish to become an adopted son amounted to the same thing as saying that he was quite prepared to become an adopted son.
Most people would immediately have become suspicious of the inadequate reasons offered. But that was a matter of weighing the appraisal of another against one’s self-esteem, a road which Tōru’s thoughts did not choose to travel. He compared himself with no one. In the measure, indeed, that the proposal was child’s play lacking inevitability and became something very like the whim of an old man, the element of the inescapable grew more tenuous, and the proposal easier for Tōru to accept. A person without fate or destiny is not bound by the inescapable.
The proposal came, in sum, to alms masking themselves as educational endeavor.
An ordinarily proud and high-spirited boy could have said: “I’m no beggar.”
But that sort of protest had about it the smell of boys’ magazines. Tōru had the more enigmatic weapon of a smile. He accepted by denying.
As a matter of fact, the play of light, when he investigated his enigmatic smile in a mirror, sometimes made it seem like that of a young girl. Perhaps a young girl in some distant land, speaking some incomprehensible language, had just such an enigmatic smile as her only route of communication. He did not wish to be understood as saying that the smile was girlish. Yet it was not a man’s smile. It had in it a quality as of a bird waiting in its nest at the most delicate moment, free of either coquetry or timidity, between hesitation and resolution, preparing because of an adversary for a crisis as of walking a dark path. Between dark and dawn, neither road nor hill could be made out, and each step might mean drowning. It sometimes seemed to Tōru that it was a smile he had inherited from neither of his parents, but acquired rather from a young girl, a stranger, he had met in his distant youth.
Nor was it conceit that made him think so. He could see himself from corner to corner and the confidence that the most perceptive of persons could not see him as he saw himself was the basis of his self-respect; and so long as it was to the Tōru seen by others, the offer of alms was an offer to a shadow of the real Tōru, quite incapable of wounding his self-respect. Tōru was secure.
But were the motives of the man so incomprehensible? There was nothing in the least incomprehensible about them. Tōru understood perfectly. The victim of boredom is quite capable of selling a world to a rag-picker.
His knees in his arms, Tōru was nodding sleepily. He had made up his mind. But good manners demanded that he defer his assent until the superintendent could be a little prouder of the sweat he had expended.
He was happier than ever with his faculty for not dreaming. He had lighted mosquito repellent for the benefit of the superintendent, but the mosquitoes were at his own feet and ankles. The itching shone through his drowsiness like moonlight. He thought vaguely that he must again wash the hands with which he was scratching.
“Well, I’m afraid you’re sleepy. You have every right to be. The night’s practically over. Dear me. Eleven thirty already. I’ve stayed much too long. So the story sounds good to you? You agree?” As he stood up to leave, the superintendent laid a persuasive hand on Tōru’s shoulder.
Pretending to have awakened only now, Tōru said: “Yes. I agree.”
“You agree?”
“I agree.”
“Thank you, thank you. I’ll take care of everything else. Think of me as your father. All right?”
“Yes. I’d be very grateful if you would.”
“But it will be a loss for the station, letting a good boy like you go.”
He was far too drunk to drive. Tōru went for a taxi and saw him home.
15
TŌRU WAS
off duty the next day. He spent the day at a movie and watching the ships in the harbor. He was on duty from nine the next morning.
After a number of typhoons, the late-summer sky for the first time displayed summery clouds. He was more attentive than usual to the clouds, thinking that this would be his last summer at the station.
The sky that evening was beautiful. Lines of cloud hovered over the ocean like the god of storms himself.
But the grand, orange-tinted forest of clouds was decapitated by yet another layer of clouds. Here and there the powerful muscles of the storm clouds were flushed over with shyness, and the blue sky behind poured over them in an avalanche of high azure. This layer was dark, that shone like a bright bow.
It was the nearest and highest layer of clouds. In exaggerated perspective, the layers that trailed off behind seemed to descend in steps beyond the clear sky. Perhaps, thought Tōru, it was a fraud perpetrated by the clouds. Perhaps the clouds, making a show of perspective, were deceiving him.
Among clouds like antique white clay images of warriors were some that suggested dragons twisting angrily and darkly upward. Some, as they lost their shape, were tinged rose. Presently, they separated themselves into bland reds and yellows and purples, and their stormy powers left them. The white shining face of the god had taken on the ashen hue of death.
16
SURPRISED
to learn that Tōru’s birth, on March 20, 1954, came before the death of Ying Chan, Honda ordered further investigation. He went ahead with the adoption proceedings all the same.
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