Read The Decay Of The Angel Online
Authors: Yukio Mishima
The Decay Of The Angel (17 page)
Tōru had no urgent wish to destroy the image Furusawa had of him, as another son of the poor, holding onto the windfall that had come to him. Others, all of them, painted free pictures of him, but it was their freedom. What was most certainly his own was contempt.
“I don’t really know what Mr. Honda is up to, but I should imagine he’s making a guinea pig of you. But that’s all right. He has a big fat estate, and you don’t have to dirty your hands the way other people do clawing your way to the top of the garbage heap. But you do have to hang on to your self-respect. Even if it kills you.”
“Yes,” answered Tōru succinctly. He refrained from saying that he had a great deal of self-respect in reserve.
He was in the habit of tasting his answers. If they seemed sentimental he bit them back.
Honda was off at a dinner with some legal colleagues. Tōru would have something to eat with Furusawa before they went home. He was required, whatever else might happen, to have dinner with Honda at seven every evening when Honda was at home. Sometimes there were other guests. The evenings with Keiko were the greatest trial.
His eye was cool and clear when he had finished his coffee. But there was nothing to see. He looked at the half circle of coffee dregs. The bottom of the cup, round like the lens of a telescope, obstructed his view. The bottom of this world showed a clean white face of porcelain.
Turned half away, Furusawa suddenly spoke as if throwing the butt of his words into the ashtray. “Have you ever thought of suicide?”
“No.” Tōru was startled.
“Don’t look at me like that. I haven’t thought of it all that seriously myself. I don’t like the weak and the sick sort of people that commit suicide. But there is one variety I accept. People who commit suicide to establish themselves.”
“What sort of suicide is that?”
“Are you interested?”
“A little, maybe.”
“Then I’ll tell you.
“Take a mouse that thinks it’s a cat. I don’t know how, but it does. It’s gone through all the tests and concluded that it’s a cat. Its view of other mice changes. They are its meat, that’s all, but it tells itself it refrains from eating them just to hide the fact that it’s a cat.”
“A rather large mouse, I suppose.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not a question of size but of confidence. It’s sure that the concept ‘cat’ has taken on the guise ‘mouse,’ nothing more. It believes in the concept and not the flesh. The idea is enough, the body doesn’t matter. The happiness from the contempt is all the greater.
“But then one day”—Furusawa shoved his glasses up and drew a persuasive line beside his nose—“but then one day the mouse meets a real cat.
“‘I’m going to eat you,’ says the cat.
“‘You can’t,’ replies the mouse.
“‘And why not?’
“‘Cats don’t eat cats. It’s impossible as a matter of instinct and as a matter of principle. I’m a cat myself, whatever else I may look like.’
“The cat rolls over laughing. It laughs so hard it’s clawing the air and its white furry belly is heaving. Then it gets up and starts to eat the mouse. The mouse protests.
“‘What are you eating me for?’
“‘Because you’re a mouse.’
“‘I’m a cat. Cats don’t eat cats.’
“‘You’re a mouse.’
“‘I’m a cat.’
“‘Prove it.’
“So the mouse jumps into the laundry tub, all white with suds, and drowns itself. The cat wets a forepaw and has a lick. The suds taste horrible. So it leaves the body floating there. We all know why the cat goes off without eating the mouse. Because it’s not something for a cat to eat.
“That’s what I’m talking about. The mouse commits suicide to establish itself. It doesn’t of course make the cat recognize it as a cat, and it didn’t think when it killed itself that it would. But it was brave and perceptive and filled with self-respect. It saw that there are two parts to mouseness. First is that it is a mouse in every physical detail. Second is that it is, for a cat, worth eating. Those two. It has long ago given up in the first matter, but in the second there is still hope. It dies in front of the cat without being eaten, and it establishes itself as something that cats don’t eat. In those two respects it has proved it wasn’t a mouse. That much. To prove besides that it was a cat is simple. If something that had the form of a mouse wasn’t a mouse, then it can be anything else. And so the suicide is a success. The mouse has established itself. What do you think?”
Tōru was weighing the parable. He had no doubt that Furusawa had polished it by telling and retelling it to himself. He had long been aware of the disjuncture between Furusawa’s genial appearance and his inner workings.
If only Furusawa himself was concerned, there was nothing to worry about; but if he had detected something in Tōru to make fun of, then Tōru must be careful. Tōru sent out a probing mental hand. It came upon nothing dangerous. Furusawa had sunk deeper and deeper into himself as he talked; he could not see out from so far below the surface.
“And did the mouse’s death shock the world?” Furusawa was no longer paying attention to his audience. Tōru saw that he had only to listen as to a soliloquy. It was a voice of slow, moss-covered pain, such as he had not before heard from Furusawa. “Did the view the world had of the mouse change in any way? Did the true word spread that there existed something that had the form of a mouse but was not a mouse? Was there a crack in the confidence of the cats? Were the cats sufficiently concerned to obstruct the spread of the word?
“Do not be surprised. The cat did nothing at all. It had forgotten. It was washing its face and settling down for a nap. It was full of catness, and not even aware of that fact. And in the sluggishness of its nap it became with no effort at all what the mouse had so desperately wanted to become, something other than itself. It could become anything, through inaction, through self-satisfaction, through unconsciousness. The blue sky spread over the sleeping cat, beautiful clouds drifted by. The wind carried to the world the cat fragrance, the heavy snores were music.”
“You’re talking about authority now.” Tōru felt compelled to put in a word of recognition.
Furusawa’s face broke into a good-natured smile. “Yes. You’re very quick.”
Tōru was disappointed. It had ended up as the sad sort of political parable the young are so fond of.
“You’ll understand some day yourself.” Although there was no danger of being overheard, Furusawa lowered his voice and brought his face close to Tōru’s. Tōru remembered the smell of his breath, forgotten for a time.
Why had he forgotten? He had smelled Furusawa’s breath frequently enough in the course of their lessons. He had not been especially repelled by it; but now he was.
There had been no touch of malice in the story, and yet it had somehow angered Tōru. He did not choose to reprove Furusawa for it, however, and feared that to do so would be only to lower himself. He needed another reason, a quite adequate one, for disliking and even being angry at Furusawa. So the smell of his breath became unendurable.
Oblivious to what was happening, Furusawa went on: “You’ll understand, one of these days. With deception as its starting point, authority can only sustain itself by spreading deception. It’s like a germ culture. The more we resist, the greater are its powers of endurance and propagation. And before we know it we have the germs in ourselves.”
They left the Renoir and had a bowl of noodles nearby. Tōru found it far more appetizing than a dinner with his father and all those dishes.
As he ate, eyes narrowed against the steam, Tōru was measuring the degree of danger in his relations with this student. He could not doubt that there was sympathy between them. But somehow the harmony was muted. It was possible that Furusawa had been hired by Honda to test Tōru. He knew that after one of these expeditions Furusawa presented a report on where they had been and a bill for his expenses. Honda had of course asked that he do so.
They passed the Kōrakuen again on their way back, and again Furusawa suggested a ride in the teacups. Tōru assented, knowing that Furusawa wanted a ride. The teacups were just inside the gate. No other customers appeared, and presently, with reluctance, the attendant turned on the switch for just the two of them.
Tōru got into a green cup, and Furusawa chose a pink cup a considerable distance off. They were decorated with a cheap flower design, reminiscent of teacups on special sale somewhere out in the suburbs, at the too brightly lighted front of a tableware shop.
The cup started moving. Furusawa was suddenly close, and then, shoving his glasses up on a smiling face, he darted off again. The cold Tōru had felt at the seat of his trousers became a cold blast. He turned up the speed. He liked to have it so fast that he could feel nothing and see nothing. The world became a gaseous Saturn.
When the cup had come to a stop, shaking gently from the inertia, like a floating buoy, Tōru stood up. Dizzy, he sat back down again.
“What’s the trouble?” Furusawa came smiling toward him over a platform that still seemed to be moving.
Smiling back, Tōru remained seated. It displeased him to have the world, until now all a blur, importunately line up its sordid details, the peeling posters and the backs of Coca-Cola signs, like great red electric heaters.
19
“FURUSAWA TOOK ME
to the Kōrakuen,” said Tōru at breakfast the next morning. “We had a ride in the teacups, and then we had Chinese noodles for dinner.”
“That’s nice,” said Honda, showing his false teeth. It should have been the bland, insubstantial old smile that went with false teeth; but Honda seemed to be genuinely pleased. Tōru was wounded.
Since he had come to Honda’s, Tōru had known every morning the luxurious pleasure of scooping up the meat of an imported grapefruit, cut into sections by a thin curved knife. The rude abundance of juice, in the faintly bitter, glossy white meat of fruit ripe to bursting, sank into his lazy morning gums with its warmth.
“Furusawa has bad breath. I can hardly stand it when we’re studying together.” Tōru smiled an equivocal smile.
“I wonder why. Do you suppose he has stomach trouble? But you’re too fussy. You can put up with that much. You’re not likely to find a more able tutor.”
“I suppose not.” Retreating a step, Tōru finished his grapefruit. A carefully scrutinized piece of toast gave off in the November morning light a glow as of well-tanned leather. Tōru watched the butter melt into it, and then took a bite, careful to follow the instructions he had had from Honda.
“Yes, Furusawa is a good man,” he said after the first bite. “But have you looked into his ideas?”
It pleased him to see confusion of the most vulgar sort come out on Honda’s face.
“Has he said something to you?”
“Nothing specific. But I can’t get over feeling that he either has been or still is involved in some political movement.”
Honda was startled. He trusted Furusawa, and was sure that Tōru liked him. From Honda’s point of view, Tōru’s warning was based on confidence and understanding; but from Furusawa’s it was clearly the report of a secret informant. It amused Tōru to observe how Honda would dispose of this delicate ethical problem.
Honda saw that he was not to pass the light judgment he usually passed upon good and evil. Judged against a broader humanity of which Honda was fond of thinking, Tōru’s behavior was ugly; but judged against the image Honda had for Tōru himself, it passed muster. Honda was at the point of confessing that what he looked for in Tōru was ugliness.
To put Honda at his ease and offer occasion for mild reproof, Tōru tore off a childish mouthful of toast, spreading crumbs liberally on his knee. Honda took no notice.
It would not do to reprove Tōru for the element of meanness in this first mark of trust he had vouchsafed. On the other hand Honda’s old sense of ethics demanded that he inform Tōru of the impropriety of turning informant, whatever the reason; and so something rather petty was by way of coming into this happy breakfast scene.
Their hands bumped awkwardly as they both reached for the sugar bowl.
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