The Decay Of The Angel (23 page)
Read The Decay Of The Angel Online
Authors: Yukio Mishima
There was a dim light from the snow. Though the sky was dark, the light of the snow signaled a strange time of its own, different from the time of day. Behind the house across the street it settled into hollows between the blocks of a concrete fence.
An old man, umbrella-less, in a brown coat and black beret, came up from the right. There was a pronounced swelling toward the bottom of his coat. He was embracing it. It would seem that he had a parcel of some sort which he wanted to keep dry. I could see a gaunt, hollow face under the beret, quite out of keeping with the stout figure.
He stopped at our gate. There was a low gate beside the main one. I thought he would be some unusually impoverished caller with a request to make of my father. He looked around him, however, not bothering to brush the snow from his now white coat and making no motion toward coming in.
The swelling disappeared. A parcel fell to the ground, as if he had laid a great egg. I gazed at it. At first I could not make out what it might be. A spherical object of many colors glowed darkly from the snow. I saw that it was scraps of fruits and vegetables in a plastic kerchief. The kerchief bulged with bits of red apple, orange carrot, pale green cabbage. If he had gone out to throw them away, then he must be a strict vegetarian who lived alone. In such quantities, they gave the snow a strange, fresh spectrum. Even the bits of green cabbage seemed to breathe with a strangled breathing.
Riveted on the bundle, my eyes fell behind the old man as he walked off. He took tiny steps through the snow. I saw him from behind. Even taking into consideration the hunched shoulders, the coat was shapeless and unnatural. It was still swollen, though not so much as before.
He walked off. He was probably unaware of it himself, but five or six yards from the gate something fell from his coat like a great ink spot.
It was a dead bird, a crow, apparently. Or perhaps a turkey. I even thought I could hear the sound of the wings as it struck the snow; but the old man walked on.
The bird was a puzzle. It was a considerable distance away, blocked by the trees in the garden and further obscured by the snow, and there was a limit to my powers of vision. I thought of going for binoculars or going out to look, but an overpowering inertia held me back.
What sort of bird was it? As I looked at it, for almost too long a time, it came to seem not a bird but a woman’s hair.
Momoko’s sufferings had begun, like a conflagration from a cigarette. The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.
As planned, I became the petitioner. I sought to cajole her, and I followed her lead in saying the most dreadful things about Nagisa. She wept as she told me I must put an end to the affair. I said I would like nothing more, but needed her help. With some exaggeration, I said I would need her help if I was to break off with that devil of a woman.
She agreed to help me, but on one condition. I must throw away the necklace, and she must be witness to the act. Since it was nothing to me, I agreed. The two of us went to the bridge in front of Suidōbashi Station. I took it off and handed it to her, and told her to throw it with her own hand into the filthy canal. She flung it from her, arching it high into the sunlight of the winter evening. It hit the stinking water over which a barge was just then passing. She fell on me, her breathing as heavy as if she had just committed murder. Passers-by looked at us curiously.
It was time for my special night classes. I left her, with a promise to meet on Saturday afternoon.
I had Momoko write to Nagisa a letter of my dictating.
I wonder how many times I used the word “love” that Saturday afternoon. I said that if I loved Momoko and Momoko loved me, then we must plan together to avert disaster, we must write a fraudulent letter.
We met at a bowling alley by the Meiji Gardens. After several strings, we went out hand in hand through the warm winter afternoon, through the shadows of the bare gingko trees, and into a new coffeehouse on Aoyama Avenue. I had brought paper and stamp and envelope.
Applying the anesthetic, I whispered of love as we walked along. In the course of time I had turned her into a person no different from the mad Kinué. She breathed easily only under the most obvious misconception, that our love was unchanging.
The two of them are alike in their denial of reality, Kinué in her belief that she is beautiful, Momoko in her belief that she is loved. Momoko needs help with her delusion, however, while Kinué needs no word from outside. If only I could raise Momoko to the same level! Since there was in the wish a pedagogical urge—love, so to speak—my protestations of love were not wholly without substance. But was there not a methodological contradiction in having an affirmer of reality like Momoko become a denier? It would not be easy to have her, like Kinué, do battle with the whole world.
But while reading the sacred formula “I love you” over and over, endlessly, a change comes to the heart of the reader. I could almost feel that I was in love, that some corner of my heart was drunk in the sudden and abandoned liberation of the banished word. How similar the tempter is to the flying instructor who must go flying with a beginner!
Momoko’s other requirement, altogether appropriate for a somewhat old-fashioned girl, was no more than a purely “spiritual” affirmation, and all that was needed to satisfy it was a word or two. Words, casting a clear shadow on the earth in their passage—might they not have been the essential I? I had been born to use words thus. If so (these sentimental locutions greatly annoy me, of course), then perhaps the basic mother tongue I have kept hidden is after all the language of love.
While the patient himself is ignorant of the truth, his family goes on telling him that he is certain to recover. So, with the most intense earnestness, I whispered over and over to Momoko of love, there in the beautiful network of shadows from the winter trees.
Once we were at our ease in the coffeehouse, I told her of Nagisa’s nature, as if I were asking her advice and following it. I described in outline certain stratagems likely to be effective. I of course created my Nagisa with complete license.
Since Momoko was my fiancée and loved me, Nagisa was not the sort of woman likely to be moved by a plea that she give me up. Such a plea would only arouse her contempt and lead her on to greater unpleasantness. She was a woman who did battle with the word “love” and sought to bring it down by assault from the rear. She had resolved to leave her brand on boys who would one day be good husbands and fathers, and so to jeer from the shadows at marriage itself. Yet she had her amiable defects. She gave no ground in her hatred of love, but she had a certain strange sympathy for a woman who was struggling to make her way. I had heard her describe several representatives of the species. The argument most likely to move her was that she was obstructing not love but money and security.
So what should we do?
“Make me a girl who does not love you but needs you for your money.”
“Precisely.”
The thought greatly excited Momoko. What fun, she said dreamily.
The excitement that had replaced her gloom was altogether too bright and open. It put me out of sorts.
She continued. “And of course there is a grain of truth in it. Mother and Father make a great secret of it, and I have never said anything myself; but we’re not all that well off. There was trouble in the bank and Father took responsibility and all the land at home is mortgaged. Father is such a good-natured man. He was the victim.”
She was as entranced with the effort to make herself into a mean, crass woman (certain that she could never be one) as a young girl with her part in the school play. This is the letter which, to that end, I devised for her there in the coffeehouse.
Dear Nagisa,Because I am about to make a request of you, please read my letter through to the end. The truth is that I want you to stop seeing Tōru.I will tell you the reasons as honestly as I can. Tōru and I would seem to be tentatively engaged, but we do not love each other. I do think of us as good friends, but my feelings go no deeper. What I really want is affluence and freedom, married to an intelligent husband who has no difficult family problems. In this I am following my father’s wishes. Tōru’s father has not much longer to live, and when he dies Tōru will inherit the whole of his estate. My father has his own interests in the matter. There have been difficulties at the bank, of which we do not speak, and we are somewhat pressed financially, and need the help of Tōru’s father and of Tōru himself once his father is dead. I do love my mother and father, and if Tōru’s affections were to turn elsewhere it would mean the end of all my plans and hopes. And so, to put the matter quite bluntly, the marriage is of very great importance for financial reasons. I have come to think that there is nothing more important in this world than money. I do not see anything dirty in it, and I think expressions like “love” and “affection,” leaving it out of consideration, are misplaced. What may for you be a moment’s dalliance is a matter of the greatest importance for my whole family. I am not saying that because I love Tōru you must give him up. I am speaking as a more mature and calculating girl than you may think.This being the case, you are mistaken if you tell yourself that it will be all right for you to go on seeing Tōru in secret. The secret is certain to leak out, and it will not do to have Tōru think me a woman willing to close her eyes to everything for the sake of money. It is precisely for the sake of money that I must watch over him and preserve my pride.You must not show this letter to Tōru. It has taken all my resolution to write it. If you are an evil woman, then show it to him and make it your weapon for getting him away from me; but you will have to live the rest of your life with the knowledge of having taken from another woman not love but her very living. We must dispose of the matter with cool heads, since the emotions of neither of us are involved. I feel quite capable of killing you if you show this letter to him; and I doubt that it will be an ordinary sort of murder.Most sincerely,Momoko“The ending is good.” Momoko was still excited.“If I were to see it anything could happen.” I smiled.“I’m not worried.” She leaned toward me.I had her address the envelope and put a special delivery stamp on it, and we went off hand in hand to mail it.Today I went to Nagisa’s apartment and saw the letter. Trembling with anger, I snatched it from her and ran out. At home later that night, I went into Father’s study and, heartbroken, showed it to him.
25
TŌRU BEGAN
preparatory school at seventeen, two years later than most boys, and he would enter the university at twenty, in 1974, when he reached legal maturity. During his third year in preparatory school he had no recess from studies for the university examinations. Honda cautioned him against overwork.
One autumn day in that third year Honda dragged a protesting Tōru out for a weekend of nature. Tōru did not want to go far from home, and so they followed his wishes and drove to Yokohama for a look at the ships, his first in a very long time. The plan was that they would have dinner in the Chinese quarter of Yokohama.
Unfortunately the sky of early October was clouded over. The sky is high and wide over Yokohama. They got out at South Pier. The sky was an expanse of rough mackerel clouds, with only here and there a spot of white. Like the aftertone of a bell, there was a touch of blue beyond Central Pier. It seemed on the verge of disappearing.
“If we had our own car I could drive you. A driver is a useless expense.”
“Not yet. I’ll buy you one, I promise, when you get into the university. It will only be a little longer.”
Sending Tōru off to get tickets for the terminal building, Honda leaned on his stick and looked wearily up at the stairs he must climb. He knew that Tōru would be willing enough to help him, but did not want to ask.
Tōru was happy from the time they reached the harbor. He had known that he would be. Not only Shimizu but every harbor was like a crystalline medicine that worked an immediate cure on him.
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