When a hundred years had passed since that morning, the perspective would, no doubt, once more be altered. Nineteen years before was too recent a time for generalizations and too distant for minute assessment. Kiyoaki’s image was not yet confused with the rough, wholly insensitive image of boys of the kendo team pursuing their cult of toughness. Nevertheless, Kiyoaki’s particular kind of “heroic figure,” as a forerunner of that brief and fleeting period at the beginning of the Taisho era when a wholehearted surrender to the emotions enjoyed favor, had already, viewed from across the years, lost much of its vividness. The earnest passion of that time, except for its fond persistence in a man’s memory, had now become something to provoke laughter.
Each passing year, never failing to exact its toll, keeps altering what was sublime into the stuff of comedy. Is something eaten away? If the exterior is eaten away, is it true, then, that the sublime pertains by nature only to an exterior that conceals a core of nonsense? Or does the sublime indeed pertain to the whole, but a ludicrous dust settles upon it?
When Honda reflected upon his own character, he had no choice but to conclude that he was a man possessed of a will. At the same time, however, he could not avoid misgivings as to the ability of that will to change anything or to accomplish anything even in contemporary society, let alone in the course of future history. Often his courtroom decisions had determined whether a man lived or died. Such a verdict might have seemed of extreme significance at the time, but as the years passed—since all men were fated to die—it turned out that he had merely hastened a man’s fate; and that the deaths had been neatly consigned to one corner of history, where they soon disappeared. And as for the disturbing conditions of the present world, though his will had had nothing to do with bringing these about, he as a judge was ever at their beck and call. How much the choices made by his will proceeded from pure reason and how much, without his realizing it, they were coerced by the prevailing thought of the period was a question he was unable to decide.
Then again, when Honda looked at the world around him, no matter how searchingly, nowhere did he see any effect traceable to a youth called Kiyoaki—to his violent emotion, to his death, to his life of beauty. Nowhere was there evidence that anything had come about as a result of his death, that anything had changed because of it. It seemed to have been smoothly expunged from history.
In the course of such reflections, Honda came to realize that his exposition of nineteen years before had contained an odd presage. For, after explaining the frustration in store for a will that insisted upon having an effect on history, Honda had at last discovered that his own usefulness lay exactly in the frustration of that will. And now, nineteen years later, he found himself envying Kiyoaki’s lack of anything remotely like it, envying Kiyoaki’s having left not a single trace in the world. He could not help but recognize in Kiyoaki, whose image had become lost to history, an inner substance superior to Honda’s for participating in history.
Kiyoaki had been beautiful. His life had been useless, devoid of any purpose whatsoever. He had passed swiftly through the world, his beauty severely limited to but a single lifespan, to an instant like that depicted in the chanted line: “Drawing our brine cart along, how briefly we live in this sad world, how fleetingly!”
The truculent face of another young man rose sharply into view amidst the swirling froth of vanishing beauty. It was Kiyoaki’s beauty alone that would truly occur but once. Its very excess made a renewed life essential. There had to be a reincarnation. Something had remained unfulfilled in Kiyoaki, had found expression in him only as a negative factor.
The face of that other young man . . . He had ripped off his kendo mask, its bars glittering in bright summer sunlight. Sweat poured down over his features. His nostrils flared as he breathed violently. His lips formed a line as straight as a sword.
The figures that Honda gazed upon on a stage misted with light were no longer the gorgeous figures of the shité and his companion as two women dipping up sea water. The two who were there carrying out a task imbued with futility, now standing, now sitting with a singular elegance in the moon’s rays, were two young men of diverse eras. Two young men the same age. From a distance, they looked alike, but, seen closer, their diametrically opposed characters became evident. The sturdy hands of one of them callused from the sword handle, the white hands of the other soft from indolence—these hands were devoted in turn to dipping up water of the sea of time. At intervals the sound of a flute, like a moonbeam darting through a break in the clouds, pierced the mortal forms of the two young men. By turns, they were drawing the brine cart, its two fourteen-inch wheels hung with scarlet damask, through the mirroring water at the sea’s edge. This time, however, what sounded in Honda’s ear was not the elegant, somewhat wearied verse “Drawing our brine cart along, how briefly we live in this sad world, how fleetingly!” The lines suddenly altered to a sutra verse: “Six paths for reborn sentient beings to tread, like the turning wheel, without respite.” And on stage the wheels of the brine cart began turning round and round.
Honda thought of the various doctrines of transmigration and reincarnation that he had encountered when he had on occasion given himself over to this study. The word for both transmigration and rebirth was “samsara” in Sanskrit. According to the doctrine of transmigration, mankind’s lot was to traverse the six states of the Sphere of Illusion without surcease—the Earth Hell, the Hell of Starvation, the Hell of Beasts, the Hell of Pandemonium, human existence, and ethereal existence. The term “rebirth,” however, was sometimes used to designate the transition from the Sphere of Illusion to the Sphere of Enlightenment. In that event, transmigration would be at an end. Transmigration necessarily involved rebirth, but rebirth did not necessarily involve transmigration.
At any rate, Buddhism recognized that there was a subject who underwent this transmigration, but it did not recognize this subject as constituting a constant and unchanging core. Since Buddhism denied the existence of the self, there was no place in it for the existence of the soul either. There was nothing but an extremely subtle nucleus at the center of mental activity, something that pertained to the innermost functioning of the phenomena surrounding the continual birth and death that accompanied transmigration. This, then, was the subject—something that the doctrine of Yuishiki, “awareness only,” designated “Alaya Awareness.”
Since none of the things of this world, even sentient beings, had souls as their core subject, and since insentient beings, emerging through causality, lacked even a core subject, there was nothing within the universe truly possessed of its own substance.
If the subject of transmigration was the Alaya Awareness, then the mode of activity of transmigration constituted its Karma. The theories thence grew quite numerous, the “one hundred thousand diverse exegeses” that characterized Buddhism. One theory held that the Alaya Awareness was already defiled by sin and was therefore itself Karma. Another held that the Alaya Awareness was half-defiled, half-undefiled, and hence could serve as the bridge to salvation.
Honda remembered having, in the course of his study, gone through these intricate theories of Karma and of the origin of things as well as through the difficult metaphysics of the Five Aggregates, which were the source of continuation, but the truth of the matter was that his grasp of them had grown uncertain.
In the meantime, Matsukazé had advanced to the climax of its first half.
SHITÉ: Into this pail, too, has the moon’s image entered.
CHORUS: Fortunate event! Into it, too, has the moon’s image entered.
SHITÉ: The moon is but one.
CHORUS: Two are its images. We bear the moon itself, shining in the floodtide, on our cart tonight. Now this toil no longer seems wretched, as we draw our burden home.
For Honda it was once more the beautiful Matsukazé and Murasamé who held the stage. The waki, in the role of a priest, arose from his position by the waki pillar. Honda could now clearly distinguish the face of each spectator an
d hear each beat of the drum.
That sleepless night at the Hotel Nara after he thought he had been confronted with proof of Kiyoaki’s reincarnation now seemed to Honda like a vaguely remembered event of the distant past. A crack had certainly appeared in the foundation of reason. But earth had filled the crack at once, and the lush grass of summer sprouted from it, completely hiding the memory of that night. As in the Nō drama before him, a phantom had confronted his reason, and his reason had for a brief time suspended its function. Isao was not necessarily the only young man to have a cluster of moles in the same spot as Kiyoaki. The meeting beneath the waterfall was not necessarily beneath the falls that Kiyoaki had spoken of in his delirium. Two chance occurrences of this sort provided but a flimsy basis for concluding that Kiyoaki had been reincarnated.
Now it appeared extremely rash to Honda, versed as he was in the procedural methods of criminal law, to have come to that conclusion on no stronger evidence. The desire to believe in Kiyoaki’s reincarnation shone within him like a small puddle of water at the bottom of a dry well, but Honda’s reason had already told him in unequivocal terms that the well was dry. Whether or not there was something dubious about the very foundation of his reason was a matter that was certainly better left unexamined. The wisest course was to let matters stand as they were.
“How foolish!” he exclaimed, feeling as if he had suddenly come to his senses. “How very foolish! Hardly a thing to be expected from a thirty-eight-year-old judge.”
However subtle the systems that Buddhism constructed, they pertained to problems outside of Honda’s jurisdiction. He felt refreshed, as though he had that instant skillfully solved the vexing riddle that he had been mulling over these many months. He had regained his clarity of soul. He was now not at all unlike those accomplished men around him, who had come to this Nō theater to escape for a time the urgent demands of their work.
The Nō stage, so close at hand, shone like the world beyond. Spirits walked there, and Honda was stirred. That was sufficient. When he thought of how, that night in Nara, the pain of a bereavement incurred nineteen years before had quickened again within him and caused him to succumb to a delusion of such proportions, he saw that what had been reborn in all likelihood was not Kiyoaki himself but merely his own sense of loss.
When he returned home, Honda, for the first time in long months, felt the urge to read the dream journal that Kiyoaki had left to him.
20
OCTOBER BEGAN with a stretch of fine weather. Isao was returning from school and had almost reached home when, drawn by the sound of the wooden clappers used to attract children to a storyteller’s “paper theater,” he turned into a side lane, making a slight detour. A crowd of children had gathered at a street corner.
The warm rays of the autumn sun struck the curtain of the tiny stage mounted on the rear of a bicycle, where a succession of pictures would illustrate the tale. It was clear at a glance that the storyteller was a man out of work. He needed a shave. He wore a wrinkled jacket over his dirty shirt.
The unemployed of Tokyo—as though acting in concert, it seemed—affected an appearance that made obvious their being out of work, giving not the least indication that they wanted to hide their condition. Some kind of invisible pockmark covered their faces. Those who had caught the disease of unemployment, like men struck by a secret plague, seemed anxious to be recognized as set apart from others. The storyteller, striking his sticks together, glanced hastily in Isao’s direction. Isao knew that the man saw him as a naïve, sheltered schoolboy.
The children, eager for the storyteller to open the curtain, were imitating the laugh of the Golden Bat. Isao did not stop, but as he passed, the image that appeared through the parting curtain caught his eye: the glaring yellow skull mask of the Golden Bat, who, in green tunic and white tights, trailed his crimson cloak as he flew through the sky. It was a crude and distorted image. Isao had once heard that pictures of this sort were drawn by poor boys, who were paid the considerable wage of one yen, fifty sen a day.
The storyteller cleared his throat and began his preliminary narration: “Well now, the Golden Bat, the champion of justice . . .” The sound of his gravelly voice followed Isao as he walked on, leaving the paper theater and the crowd of children behind him.
As he turned into a quiet street in Nishikata with a wall running along one side of it, that gold-skulled phantom who soared through the sky pursued him. How grotesque an image of justice was that bizarre golden figure!
He found no one at home when he got there, and he walked around to the back yard. Sawa was doing his laundry at the side of the well, humming the while. He was quite pleased that the weather was so suited to drying.
“Welcome home. Nobody’s here. They all went to help with Mr. Koyama’s seventy-seventh birthday celebration. Your mother too.”
The old gentleman was a luminary of the world of the right, and Iinuma was one of those who had long enjoyed his patronage. Sawa, for fear of committing some breach of etiquette, had probably been ordered to remain behind to look after the house.
Since Isao had nothing better to do, he sat down on a ragged clump of grass. Now, at noontime, the faint chirping of insects gave way to the noise of Sawa’s splashing. The sky, piercingly clear, was mirrored, then shattered again and again in the tub water belabored by Sawa. Everything was right with the world. The elements seemed to be doing their best to reduce Isao’s design to a flight of fancy. The trees, the bright sky joined in cooling his burning will, calming the torrent of his violent passion. They were trying to make him seem to himself like one altogether out of touch with reality, possessed by the illusion of a reform that was unwanted. His youthfulness, I owever, was like a steel blade, and the autumn sky, dazzling blue to no purpose, was at least in harmony with that.
Sawa seemed to have no difficulty in sensing what was behind Isao’s silence.
“Have you been going to kendo practice lately?” he asked as he bunched up a white wad in the tub and kneaded it with his thick hands as though making rice balls.
“No.”
“That so?” Sawa did not ask why.
Isao stole a glance into the tub. The amount of Sawa’s laundry seemed hardly in keeping with his extravagant efforts. For Sawa would wash no one’s clothes but his own.
“As hard as I work to keep myself clean,” he said, somewhat out of breath, “I wonder if the day will ever come when I’ll be of service.”
“Maybe tomorrow will be the day,” said Isao, baiting him gently. “And where will Mr. Sawa be but bent over his washtub?”
Sawa never explained what he meant by “be of service” beyond an unswerving insistence that when the hour struck it would be unfitting for any man to be clad in other than dazzling white underwear.
He wrung out his clothes at last. The water struck the dry ground in glittering black drops. Without looking at Isao, he began to speak in a droll tone of voice. “Well, it seems to me that, rather than wait for the master, it might be best to look to young Mr. Iinuma for an early opportunity.”
When he heard this, Isao’s first concern was whether his expression had changed. There could be no doubt that Sawa had sniffed out something. Had Isao himself been guilty of some lapse?
Not giving the least sign that he had caught Isao’s reaction, Sawa draped his laundry over one arm and hastily wiped off the drying pole with a rag.
“When will you be going to Master Kaido’s training camp?” he asked.
“Well, I’m assigned to the week beginning the twentieth of October. It’s all filled up until then. I hear that nowadays a lot of businessmen are attending.”
“Who’s going with you?”
“I asked the ones in my study group at school.”
“You know what? I’d like to go too. Let me see if it’s all right with the master. After all, what good am I but to watch the place when everybody’s gone? So I think he might let me go with you. It would toughen me up and do me a lot of good to get in with you young fell
ows. When you get to be my age, no matter how eager your spirit is, your body’s got a will of its own. Come on now, what do you say?”
Isao found himself without an answer. Indeed, if Sawa did ask his father, the reply certainly would be yes. And if he were to go with them, it would spoil the chance for the crucial talk with his comrades that Isao had gone to such trouble to arrange. Sawa might even be aware of what was up and be trying to draw him out. Furthermore, if Sawa meant to convey his dedication, his request might well be nothing but a roundabout way of communicating his desire to be numbered among Isao’s comrades.
Turning to Isao, Sawa ran the pole through his undershirt and drawers and then fastened his Etchu loincloth to it by its string. Since he had not wrung them out as well as he might, water from his clothes ran down the slanted pole and dripped from its end, but this did not trouble him at all. While he was thus occupied, the back that bulged beneath the khaki shirt, the whole heavy, insensitive mass of flesh before Isao’s eyes, seemed to be pressing him for an answer. Still, Isao did not know what to say.
Just as he had set the drying pole at a convenient level, a gust of wind caught a corner of the wet cloth and slapped it against Sawa’s cheek. Startled as though a huge white dog were licking his face, he pushed it away and stepped hurriedly back. Then, turning to Isao in a carefree manner, he asked: “Is there any reason why you really wouldn’t want me to come along?”
Had Isao been a youth of some sophistication, he might have turned Sawa aside with a light answer. But since he was indeed thinking that Sawa’s coming would cause difficulty, joking was out of the question.