Perhaps his previous dream of the snake was impinging upon this one. What he heard were the cries of jungle birds, the buzzing of flies, the rainlike patter of falling leaves. And then there was an odor like sandalwood—he recognized it because once he had lifted the lid and sniffed inside a sandalwood tobacco box that his father prized—a melancholy, lonely odor, the sweet, bodylike odor of old wood. Suddenly he thought of something that resembled it: the odor of the blackened embers that he had seen on the path through the rice fields in Yanagawa.
Isao felt that his flesh had lost definite form, turned into flesh that was soft and swaying. He was filled with a mist of soft, languid flesh. Everything became vague. Wherever he searched, he could find no order or structure. There was no supporting pillar. The brilliant fragments of light that had once sparkled around him, ever drawing him on, had disappeared. Comfort and discomfort, joy and sorrow—all alike slid over his skin like soap. Entranced, he soaked in a warm bath of flesh.
The bath by no means imprisoned him. He could step out whenever he liked, but the languid pleasure kept him from abandoning it, so that staying there forever, not choosing to go, had become his “freedom.” Thus there was nothing to define him, to keep him under strict control. What had once wound itself tightly round and round him like a rope of platinum had slipped loose.
Everything he had so firmly believed in was meaningless. Justice was like a fly that has tumbled into a box of face powder and smothered; beliefs for which he had meant to offer up his life were sprayed with perfume and melted. All glory dissolved in the mild warmth of mud.
Sparkling snow had melted away entirely. He felt the uncertain warmth of spring mud within him. Slowly something took form from that spring mud, a womb. Isao shuddered as the thought came to him that he would soon give birth. His strength had always spurred him with violent impatience toward action, had always responded to a distant voice that conjured up the image of a vast wilderness. But now, that strength had left him. The voice was silent. The outer world, which no longer called to him, now, rather, was drawing closer to him, was touching him. And he felt too sluggish to get up and move away.
A sharp-edged mechanism of steel had died. In its place, an odor like that of decaying seaweed, an entirely organic odor, had somehow or other permeated his body. Justice, zeal, patriotism, aspirations for which to hazard one’s life—all had vanished. In their place came an indescribable intimacy with the things around him—clothing, utensils, pincushions, cosmetics—an intimacy in which he seemed to flow into and merge with all the minutiae of gentle, beautiful things. It was an intimacy of smiles and winks, one that was almost obscene, outside the range of Isao’s previous experience. The only thing that he had been intimate with had been the sword.
Things clung to him like paste, and, at the same time, lost all their transcendental significance.
Trying to arrive at some goal was no longer a problem. Everything was arriving here from elsewhere. Thus there was no longer a horizon, no longer any islands. And with no perspective at all evident, voyages were out of the question. There was only the endless sea.
Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to be required to give constant proof of one’s manliness—to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today. To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak.
But to be a woman? It seemed to mean being a woman at the beginning and being a woman forever.
The smoke of incense came to him. There was the echo of gongs and whistles—apparently a funeral procession passing by the window. He caught the muffled sound of people sobbing. But nothing clouded the contentment of the woman dozing on a summer afternoon. Fine beads of sweat covered her skin. Her senses had stored up a vast variety of memories. Her belly, swelling slightly as she breathed in her sleep, was puffed like a sail with the marvelous fullness of her flesh. The delicate navel, which checked that sail by tugging from within, its color the fresh, rosy tinge of the bud of a wild cherry blossom, lay quietly beneath a tiny pool of sweat. The lovely tautness of the breasts of so regal an aspect seemed all the more to express the melancholy of the flesh. The skin, stretched fine, seemed to glow as though a lantern burned within. The smoothness of the skin extended as far as the tips of the breasts, where, like waves pressing in upon an atoll, the raised texture of the areolas emerged. The areolas were the color of an orchid filled with a quiet, pervasive hostility, a poisonous color meant to attract the mouth. From that deep purple, the nipple rose up piquantly, like a pert squirrel lifting its head. The effect was mischievously playful.
When he clearly saw the figure of this sleeping woman, even though her face was shrouded with sleep and its contours blurred, Isao thought that it had to be Makiko. Then a strong whiff of the perfume Makiko had worn when they parted came to him. Isao shot out his semen, and he awakened.
An indescribable sorrow remained. Though the sensation that he had been transformed into a woman had persisted in his dream, he could not recall the point at which the course of the dream had shifted so that he seemed to be gazing at the body of a woman whom he took to be Makiko. And this confusion was the source of his disturbed feeling. Furthermore, though it was a woman, Makiko apparently, whom he had defiled, he, the defiler, strangely enough could not rid himself of the vivid sensation that he had felt before, that the whole world was turned inside out.
The fearfully dark emotion that had enveloped him in sadness—never before had he experienced such an incomprehensible emotion—lingered on and on even after his eyes were open, and hung in the air under the dim light cast down by the feeble bulb in the ceiling like a yellowish pressed flower.
Isao did not catch the sound of the guard’s hemp-soled sandals coming down the corridor, and, taken by surprise, he had no time to shut his eyes before they met the guard’s peering in through the observation slot.
“Go to sleep,” the guard said hoarsely, and then moved on.
Spring was drawing near.
His mother came often with packages for him, but she was never allowed to see him. She told him in a letter that Honda was going to defend him at the trial, and Isao wrote a long reply. Such good fortune was more than he had hoped for, he wrote, but he would have to refuse it unless Honda agreed to defend him together with his comrades as a group. No answer to this ever came. Nor was he given the opportunity to meet with Honda, something that should have been readily granted. In the letters he received from his mother there were many words and phrases deleted with black ink—no doubt the news of his comrades that he wanted so much to hear. No matter how he scrutinized the portions blotted out with black ink, he could not make out a single letter, nor could he deduce anything from the context.
Finally Isao began a letter to the man he felt least inclined to write to. He did his best to suppress all emotion, and he chose his words with the intent of not bringing further trouble upon Sawa, whom the authorities must at least have questioned about his contribution of money. Yet he hoped that the pangs of conscience would drive Sawa to do what he could to better their situation. He waited and waited, but no answer came, and Isao’s anger took a despairing turn.
Since he had heard nothing further by way of his mother, Isao wrote a long letter of appreciation to Honda himself, addressing it in care of the Academy. In it he gave fervent expression to his desire that Honda act as defense counsel for the entire group. A reply came at once. With well-chosen words, Honda expressed his sympathy for the way Isao felt. He said that, since he had gotten into this affair, he might as well go all the way, and so he would be willing to defend them as a group, except, of course, for those who would be tried as juveniles. Nothing could have strengthened Isao more in his prison cell than this letter.
Isao was moved by the way in which Honda responded to his expressed desire to take all the punishment upon himself and
have his comrades absolved: “I understand your wanting to do this, but neither judges nor lawyers conduct themselves on the basis of their emotions. Since tragic feelings are certainly not of long duration, what is important now is to remain calm. I think that I can count upon you, as an expert in kendo, to understand what I mean. Leave everything to me—that is what I am for—take earnest care of your health, and bear your lot with patience. During the exercise periods, by all means give your body a vigorous workout.” Honda had correctly perceived that the sense of tragic heroism in Isao’s heart, like the colors of a sunset, was gradually fading.
One day, since there was still no indication that he would be allowed to see Honda, Isao put his trust in the sympathetic manner of the judge in a preliminary hearing, and asked casually: “Your Honor, when will I be allowed to see someone?”
The judge hesitated for a moment, obviously uncertain whether or not to reply. Then he said: “Not as long as the prohibition against it is in force.”
“And who has laid that down, Your Honor?”
“The Prosecutor’s Office,” the judge answered, his intonation conveying his own discontent with this measure.
34
HIS MOTHER’S LETTERS kept on coming frequently, but no other letters had so many blotted portions. Sometimes a section would be clipped out, or even a whole page removed. His mother obviously lacked the wit to write in such a way as not to run afoul of the censor. But one day there was a change. The censor’s job had apparently been taken over by a new man. The blotted portions were noticeably fewer, but, since his mother wrote under the impression that everything in her previous letters had been conveyed to him, his impatience was aggravated by the difficulty of deciphering. It was as though he were receiving later letters before their predecessors. But then there was one line, reading: “The letters . . . are piled up like a mountain. They say there are at least five thousand of them, and when I think . . . my eyes fill up with tears,” in which, even though two sections had been inked over, the ink had been lightly applied as though the censor had been careless. Isao realized that the man had done so deliberately, to encourage him. In one section Isao was able to read without difficulty “letters asking for leniency,” and in the other, though it was more obscure, “when I think of the sympathy people have.” For the first time Isao learned about the public reaction to the affair.
He was loved! He who had never in the least wanted to be loved. Perhaps a gentle, sympathetic concern had been stirred by his youth, by the immature purity that people naturally expected in the young, by considerations of his “promising” future, and this had inspired the clemency letters. It was a conjecture that caused Isao some pain. The mass of petitions sent in after the May Fifteenth Incident must have been of a different nature.
“The world does not take me seriously.” Ever since his imprisonment Isao had been haunted by that single relentless thought. “If people ever suspected the fearful, blood-smeared purity I revere, they’d hardly be able to feel any love for me.”
Not feared nor, much less, hated, only loved, he found himself in a situation that wounded his pride. It was spring. Most of all, he yearned for the letters from Makiko that arrived one after another at regular intervals, well aware though he was how ill such a desire became that resolve, tough as hardened glass, that he had long embraced.
In fact, I have always been peculiarly favored, thought Isao. Something murky lay in the depths of that favor.
Was it not that the nation, the laws of the nation, perhaps in just the same way as the public, refused to take him seriously?
Then too, when he was being questioned in an interrogation room on a cold day, the police would urge him to sit closer to the hibachi, and, if he was hungry, they would bring him a dish of noodles with fried bean curd. Once an assistant inspector pointed at the flowers on the table and said, “What do you think of these camellias? Aren’t they pretty? There are winter camellias blooming in my garden, and this morning I cut these and brought them here. During interrogation, you see, it’s most important to be at ease, and flowers make everyone feel more congenial.” The odor of a vulgarized refinement bent on using nature clung to the inspector’s words, much like that given off by the white shirt that he wore day after day despite its cloud pattern of grime. Still, three pure white camellias pushed aside tough, dark green leaves with their outspread petals. Drops of water lay upon them as though upon white lard.
“This sunshine is nice, isn’t it?” said the inspector, as he asked the policeman standing by to open the window. From where Isao was sitting, the winter camellias occupied half of his field of vision. The iron bars of the window let pass the warm, abstract winter sunshine, their shadows cutting through it with a precision that made it seem still more devoid of substance.
The probing ray of sunshine like a warm hand upon his shoulder—this for Isao was something quite different from the brilliant summer sun that he had seen pressing down with glittering authority upon the heads of the troops drilling upon the Azabu Regiment parade ground. This ray spoke of the kindliness of the judicial system come down to touch him upon the shoulder after many a twist and turn. It had nothing at all to do with the summer sun of the Imperial Benevolence, Isao thought.
“With patriots like you and your friends, I don’t need to worry about the future of Japan. You shouldn’t have violated the law, of course, but that shining sincerity of yours is something that even we can understand. And now, about you and your friends making your vows, when and where was that?”
Isao responded automatically. That evening of the summer before, in front of the shrine . . . there rose in his mind the memory of all twenty of them clasping each other’s hands, one hand over another, like white fruit whose weight bent the branches that bore it. Yet to call up the memory had become painful. As Isao answered, he looked away from the inspector, who kept watching him intently, and he gazed at the sunlight and one of the white camellias by turns. Dazzled by the sun, his eyes saw the whiteness of the camellias as pitch black, the flower a small, lustrous knot of hair. And, in the same way, the dark green leaves seemed to form a collar of pure white. He had a secret need for this play of the senses to help him withstand the discordance within him. For when he spoke the “truth”—“Yes, sir. There were twenty of us. We bowed twice and clapped twice before the shrine. And then I recited the vows, one part at a time, and the others repeated it in unison”—giving an account that was totally unembellished, the words no sooner passed his lips than, here before the judicial authorities, they seemed to grow scales and become wrapped in a falsehood that made him shudder.
And then all at once Isao heard the white winter camellia groan.
Startled, he looked back at the inspector. There was no surprise in the inspector’s eyes. It was only later that Isao realized that chance had not dictated the choice of this second-floor room, with its open window, for the interrogation on this particular day. The room was across a narrow alley from a drill hall, its windows shuttered even at midday, but with lights visible through the transoms.
“You’re third degree in kendo, I hear. You know, if you hadn’t got yourself involved in this business and stayed with your kendo, you and I might have had a pleasant match in that hall down there.”
“Are they practicing kendo now?” Isao asked, feeling sure that they were not. The inspector did not answer.
Some of the sounds that carried up to the room were like kendo yells, but the groan that had seemed to come from the white camellia had nothing of kendo about it. The crash of staves on thick-padded kendo gear was different. This was the dull, somber sound of blows striking upon flesh.
Isao recalled that the white camellia, which seemed to be sweating in the heat generated by the clear winter sunshine, had somehow become sacred after the cries and groans of the tortured had filtered through it. Free of the inspector’s debased refinement, the flower began to give off the scent of the law itself. His eyes could not help looking beyond the lustrous leaves of the
camellia, through the transom where lights burned at midday, at the thick ropes swinging back and forth with what must have been a heavy burden of flesh.
Isao looked into the inspector’s eyes once more, and the latter answered his unspoken question: “Yes. It’s a Red. Stubborn ones bring this kind of thing on themselves.”
Obviously the police intended to make him realize that, in contrast, he was being treated with the utmost gentleness, that the kindly law was showering benefits upon him. But it had the opposite effect. At that moment Isao felt a choking of anger and humiliation. “My ideas—what do they amount to?” he asked himself in a rage. “If real ideas have to be beaten like that, are mine supposed to be unreal?” Isao was vexed with frustration: despite the enormity of what he had plotted, there had been no adequate reaction. If they realized the core of terrible purity within him, he thought, they would surely hate him. Though officers of the Emperor, they could not help but hate him. On the other hand, however, if their ignorance persisted, his ideas would never gain the weight of flesh, never grow wet with agonized sweat. And, as a consequence, they would never give out the loud cries of beaten flesh.
Isao glared at his cross-examiner and shouted: “Torture me! Torture me right now. Why can’t you do the same thing to me? Can you tell me why not?”
“Easy now. Calm down, don’t be foolish. It’s very simple. You don’t give us any trouble.”
“And that’s because my ideas are rightist?”
“That’s part of it. But rightist or leftist, anyone who gives us trouble is going to pay for it. Still, when all is said and dene, those Reds . . .”
“Is it because the Reds won’t accept our national structure?”
“That’s it. In comparison to them, Iinuma, you and your friends are patriots. Your thoughts are in the right direction. It’s only that you’re young. The trouble is, you’re too pure, so you went to extremes. Your purpose is good. It’s your methods. What about making them more gradual, toning them down a bit? If you made them a little more flexible, everything would be fine.”