The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (19 page)

We had no rice for supper that evening, only boiled vegetables and heavy black bread. Fortunately it was a Saturday and a number of people from the temple had already gone out in the afternoon. Saturday was known as the "inner opening curtain": one could leave the temple early and did not have to be back until eleven o'clock; besides, the following morning was called "sleeping oblivion” and We were allowed to stay in bed late. The Superior had already gone out.

The sun finally set at half past six. It began to be windy. I waited for the sound of the first bell of the night. At eight o'clock the high clear sound of the Ojikicho bell at the left of the center gate announced the first watch of the night; it rang eighteen times and its echo hung for a long time in the air.

Near the Sosci, a small waterfall, half surrounded by a weir, carried the water from a lotus pond into the large Kyoko Pond. It was here that the irises grew in the greatest profusion. They were exceptionally beautiful at that time. As I approached, I heard the clusters of irises rustling in the night wind. The lofty purple petals trembled within the quiet sound of the water. It was very dark in that part of the garden: the purple of the flowers and the dark green of the leaves looked equally black. I tried to pick a few of the irises; but in the wind the flowers and the leaves managed to avoid my hands, and one of the leaves cut my finger.

When I finally arrived at Kashiwagi's lodging-house with an armful or irises and cattails, he was lying down reading a book. I was afraid of meeting the girl who lived here and who had come on the picnic, but fortunately she seemed to be out.

My small theft had made me feel cheerful. The first things that my contact with Kashiwagi always produced were small acts of immorality, small desecrations, small evils. These always made me cheerful; but I did not know whether a steady increase in the quantity of this evil would produce a corresponding increase in my cheerfulness.

Kashiwagi was delighted with my present. He went to the landlady's room to borrow a bucket and various other utensils needed for his flower arrangement.The lodging-house was a one-storied building; Kashiwagi lived in a small room in an outhouse.

I picked up his flute, which was leaning against the alcove, put my lips to the mouthpiece and tried playing a small étude. I managed extremely well, much to the surprise of Kashiwagi, who just then returned to his room. But the Kashiwagi whom I met that evening was not the same one who had visited the Golden Temple.

“You don't stutter at all when it comes to the flute, do you? When I taught you how to play, I was hoping to hear what stuttering music sounaea like!"

With this single remark he pulled us back to the situation that had existed when we first met. He recovered his own position, Thereupon I was able to ask nonchalantly what had happened to the young lady from the Spanish-style house.

"Oh, that girl?” he replied simply. "She got married ages ago. I didn't leave a stone unturned, though, in showing her how to hide the fact that she was no longer a virgin. But her husband is a healthy, innocent type of fellow and things seem to have gone all right"

As he spoke, he removed the irises one by one from the bowl of water where they had been soaking and examined them carefully. Then he put the scissors into the bowl and cut the stems in the water. Each time that he held an iris in his hand, the large shadow of the flower would move across the straw-matted floor of the room. Then suddenly he said: "Do you know the famous words in the chapter of Popular Enlightenment in the
Rinsairoku?
‘When ye meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha! When ye meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor!...'"

“‘When ye meet a disciple of Buddha,'" I continued, “‘kill the disciple! When ye meet your father and mother, kill your father and mother! When ye meet your kin, kill your kin! Only thus will ye attain deliverance.'”?

"That's right. And that was the situation, you see. That girl was a disciple or Buddha.”

"And so you delivered yourself?"

"Hm,” said Kashiwagi, arranging some of the irises that he had cut and gazing at them. "There's more to killing than that, you know.”

The flower bowl was full of limpid water; it was painted silver on the inside. Kashiwagi examined the flower holder and carefully adjusted one of the spikes that was slightly bent. I felt ill at ease and tried to fill the silence by chatting away.

“You know the problem about Father Nansen and the kitten, don't you? Immediately after the war ended, the Superior called us all together and gave us a sermon about it.”

"Oh, ‘Nansen Kills a Kitten'?
”
said Kashiwagi, while he determined the length of a cattail ana held it against the flower basin. "That's a problem that crops up several times in a person's life, always in a slightly different form. It's a rather eery problem, you know. Each time that you come across it at some turning-point in your life, it's changed both in appearance and in meaning, though the problem itself is always the same. First let me tell you that the kitten which Father Nansen killed was a rascally creature! She was beautiful, you know, incomparably beautiful. Her eyes were golden, her fur was glossy. Every pleasure and beauty in this world was flexed taut like a spring within that little soft body of hers. Most of the commentators have forgotten to mention the fact that the kitten was a bundle of beauty. Except for me, that is. The kitten jumped out of a clump of grass all of a sudden. Her gentle, cunning eyes were hining and she was caught by one of the priests-just as if she had done it all on purpose. And it was this that resulted in the quarrel between the two halls of the temple. Because, although beauty may give itself to everyone, it does not actually belong to anybody. Let me see.

"How shall I put it? Beauty-yes, beauty is like a decayed tooth. It rubs against one's tongue, it hangs there, hurting one, insisting on its own existence, finally it gets so that one cannot stand the pain and one goes to the dentist to have the tooth extracted, Then, as one looks at the small, dirty, brown, blood-stained tooth lying in one's hand, one's thoughts are likely to be as follows: ‘Is this it? Is this all it was? That thing which caused me so much pain, which made me constantly
fret about its existence, which was stubbornly rooted within
me, is now merely a dead object. But is this thing really the,same as that thing? If this originally belonged to my outer existence, why-through what sort of providence-did it become attached to my inner existence and succeed in causing me so much pain? What was the basis of this creature's existence? Was the basis within me? Or was it within this creature itself? Yet this creature which has been pulled out of my mouth and which now lies in my hand is something utterly different. Surely it cannot be
that?'

"You see,” continued Kasniwagi, "that's what beauty is like. To have killed the kitten, therefore, seemed just like having extracted a painful decayed tooth, like having gouged out beauty. Yet it was uncertain whether or not this had really been a final solution. The root of the beauty had not been severed and, even though the kitten was dead, the kitten's beauty might very well still be alive. And so, you sec, it was in order to satirize the glibness of this solution that Joshu put those shoes on his head. He knew, so to speak, that there was no possible solution other than enduring the pain of the decayed tooth."

This interpretation of Kashiwagi's was completely original, but I could not help wondering whether he himself, having seen into my inmost heart, was not being the satirist at my expense. For the first time I became really frightened of him. I was afraid to remain silent and hastened to ask: "So which of the two are you? Father Nansen or Joshu?"

"Well, let's see. As things are now, I am Nansen and you're Joshu. But some day you might become Nansen and I might become Joshu. This problem has a way of changing -like a cat's eyes."

While Kashiwagi was talking,his hands had been moving delicately, first arranging the little, rusty flower holder in the bowl, then inserting the cattail, which occupied the role of Heaven in the arrangement, next adding the irises, which he had adjusted into a three-leaf set. Gradually a flower arrangement of the Kansui school had taken shape. A pile of tiny, well-washed pebbles, some white and some brown, lay next to the bowl, waiting to be used for the fihishing touches.

The movement of Kashiwagi's hands could only be described as magnificent. One small decision followed another, and the effects of contrast and symmetry converged with infallible artistry. Nature's plants were brought vividly under the sway of an artificial order and made to conform to an established melody. The flowers and leaves, which had formerly existed
as they were,
had now been transformed into flowers and leaves
as they ought to be.
The cattails and the irises were no longer individual, anonymous plants belonging to their respective species, but had become terse, direct manifestations of what might be called the csscncc of the irises and the cattails.

Yet there was something cruel about the movement of his hands. They behaved as though they had some unpleasant, gloomy privilege in relation to the plants. Perhaps it was because of this that each time that I heard the sound of the scissors and saw the stem of one of the flowers being cut I had the impression that I could detect the dripping of blood.

The Kansui flower arrangement was now complete. On the right-hand side of the bowl, where the straight line of the cattail blended with the pure curve of the iris leaves, one of the flowers was in bloom and the other two were buds that were about to open. Kashiwagi placed the bowl in the alcove; it filled almost the entire space. Soon the water in the bowl became still. The pebbles concealed the flower holder, and at the same time gave precisely the pellucid impression of a water's edge.

“Magnificent!” I said. "Where did you learn it?”

"There's a woman living nearby who gives lessons in flower arrangement. She'll be coming here any minute now, I expect. I've struck up a friendship with this woman and at the same time she's been teaching me flower arrangement. But now that I can make this sort of arrangement by myself, I'm getting a bit bored with it all. She's still quite young, this teacher, and good-looking. I understand that during the war she had an affair with an officer and became pregnant. The child was still-born and the lover was killed in the war. Since then she's been constantly running after men. She's got a snug little nest of money of her own and evidently only gives these lessons as a hobby. Anyhow, if you want to, you can take her out somewhere this evening. She'll go anywhere.”

As I heard this, I was overcome with the most confused feelings. When I had seen her from the top of the gate of the Nanzcn Temple, Tsurukawa had been next to me. Now, three years later, she was to appear before me and I was to see her, instead, through Kashiwagi's eyes. Hitherto I had viewed this woman's tragedy with a bright look of mystery; but from now on I would sec it with the dark look of someone who believed in nothing. For the stark reality was that her breast, which I had seen in the distance like a white moon in the daylight, had since then been touched by Kashiwagi's hands, and that her legs, enveloped then in that magnificent, flowing kimono, had been touched by Kashiwagi's clubfeet. The reality was that she had already been defiled by Kashiwagi, that is to say, by knowledge.

This thought tormented me greatly and made me feel that I could no longer stay where I was. Yet curiosity kept me from leaving. I could, in fact, hardly wait for the arrival of this woman, whom I had originally seen as a reincarnation of Uiko, but who was now to appear as the discarded mistress of a crippled student. For, having become Kashiwagi's accomplice, I was prepared to indulge in the illusory pleasure of defiling my precious memories with my own hands.

When the woman arrived, I did not feel the slightest tremor of excitement. I still vividly remember that moment. That faintly husky voice of hers, her ceremonious manners and her formal way of speaking, which contrasted so strikingly with the wild expression that flashed in her eyes, the sadness that emerged from her tone when she spoke to Kashiwagi, despite her obvious embarrassment at my presence—I saw all this and then for the first time I understood why Kashiwagi had asked me to his room that evening: he intended to use me as a barrier.

There was no connection between this woman and the heroine of my vision. She gave me the impression of a completely different individual whom I was seeing for the first time. Although she did not alter her polite manner of speech, I could tell that she was gradually becoming distraught. She did not pay the slightest attention to me.

Finally her misery seemed to become unbearable, and I had the impression that she had decided for a while to abandon her efforts to make Kashiwagi change his mind. She made a pretence of having suddenly calmed down, and looked round the room. Although she had been there for half ail hour, she now evidently for the first time noticed the flower arrangement that was so conspicuously installed in the alcove.

"That's a wonderful Kansui arrangement," she said. "You've really done it well, you know."

Kashiwagi, who had been waiting for her to say this, now brought things to their conclusion.

"Not too bad, is it
?"
he said. ‘‘Now that I've reached this point, there's really nothing more that you can teach me. I don't need you any longer. Yes, I mean it
!"

Kashiwagi spoke with formal emphasis. I noticed the color draining from the woman's face and I turned away. She seemed to be laughing slightly; but still she did not abandon her ceremonious manner as she advanced on her knees towards the alcove. Then I heard her say: "What? What sort of flowers are these? Yes, what are they?" In a moment, the water had all been spilled on the floor, the cattails had fallen over, the blossoms of the open irises had been torn to shreds: all the flowers that I had procured by my theft lay in utter disorder. I had been kneeling on the floor, but now I automatically jumped to my feet. Not knowing what to do, I leaned against the window. I saw Kashiwagi seize the woman by her slender wrists. Then he grasped her hair and slapped her across the check. Kashiwagi's succession of rough actions revealed exactly the same quiet cruelty that I had observed not long before when he was cutting the leaves and the stems of the flowers; they seemed, indeed, to be a natural extension of his earlier movements.