His father, Marquis Matsugae, watched his son’s part in the festivities, absorbing the boy’s brilliant appearance in his beautiful ceremonial costume, and savoring the complacency of a man who sees a lifelong dream fulfilled. This triumph dispelled completely his lingering fears of still seeming an imposter, for all his attempts to establish himself as someone fit to receive the Emperor in his own home. For now, in the person of his own son, the Marquis had seen the ultimate fusion of the aristocratic and the samurai traditions, a perfect congruence between the old court nobles and the new nobility.
But as the ceremony continued, the Marquis’s gratification at the praise people had lavished on the boy’s looks changed to feelings of discomfort. At thirteen, Kiyoaki was altogether too handsome. Putting aside natural affection for his own son, the Marquis could not help noticing that he stood out even in comparison with the other pages. His pale cheeks flushed crimson when he was excited, his brows were sharply defined and his wide eyes, still childishly earnest, were framed by long lashes. They were dark and had a seductive glint in them. And so the Marquis was roused by the flood of compliments to take note of the exceptional beauty of his son and heir, and he sensed something disquieting in it. He was touched by an uneasy premonition. But Marquis Matsugae was an extremely optimistic man, and he shook off his discomfiture as soon as the ceremony was over.
Similar apprehensions were more persistent in the mind of young Iinuma, who had come to live in the Matsugae household as a boy of seventeen the year before Kiyoaki’s service as a page. Iinuma had been recommended as Kiyoaki’s personal tutor by the middle school of his village in Kagoshima, and he had been sent to the Matsugaes with testimonies to his mental and physical abilities. The present Marquis’s father was revered as a fierce and powerful god in Kagoshima, and Iinuma had visualized life in the Matsugae household entirely in terms of what he had heard at home or at school about the exploits of the former Marquis. In his year with them, however, their luxurious way of life had disrupted this expectation and had wounded his youthfully puritanical sensibilities.
He could shut his eyes to other things, but not to Kiyoaki, who was his personal responsibility. Everything about Kiyoaki—his looks, his delicacy, his sensitivity, his turn of mind, his interests—grated on Iinuma. And everything about the Marquis and Marquise’s attitude toward their son’s education was equally distressing. “I’ll never raise a son of mine that way, not even if I am made a Marquis. What weight do you suppose the Marquis gives to his own father’s tenets?”
The Marquis was punctilious in observing the annual rites for his father, but almost never spoke of him. At first, Iinuma used to dream that the Marquis would talk more often about his father and that his reminiscences might reveal something of the affection in which he held his father’s memory, but in the course of the year such hopes flickered and died.
The night that Kiyoaki returned home after performing his duties as an imperial page, the Marquis and his wife gave a private family dinner to celebrate the occasion. When the time came for Kiyoaki to hurry off to bed, Iinuma helped him to his room. The thirteen-year-old boy’s cheeks were flushed with the wine that his father, half as a joke, had forced upon him. He burrowed into the silken quilts and let his head fall back on the pillow, his breath warm and heavy. The tracery of blue veins under his close-cropped hair throbbed around his earlobes, and the skin was so extraordinarily transparent that one could almost see the fragile mechanism inside. Even in the half-light of the room, his lips were red. And the sounds of breathing that came from this boy, who looked as though he had never experienced anguish, seemed to be the mocking echo of a sad folksong.
Iinuma looked down at his face, at the sensitive darting eyes with their long lashes—the eyes of an otter—and he knew that it was hopeless to expect him to swear the enthusiastic oaths of loyalty to the Emperor that a night like this would have invoked in any normal young Japanese boy striving toward manhood, who had been privileged to carry out so glorious a task.
Kiyoaki’s eyes were now wide open as he lay on his back staring at the ceiling, and they were filled with tears. And when this glistening gaze turned on him, Iinuma’s distaste deepened. But this made it all the more imperative for him to believe in his own loyalty. When Kiyoaki apparently felt too warm, he pulled his bare arms, slightly flushed, out from under the quilt and started to fold them behind his head; Iinuma admonished him and pulled shut the loose collar of his nightgown: “You’ll catch cold. You ought to go to sleep now.”
“Iinuma, you know . . . I made a blunder today. If you promise not to tell Father or Mother, I’ll say what it was.”
“What was it?”
“Today, when I was carrying the Princess’s train, I stumbled a little. But the Princess just smiled and forgave me.”
Iinuma was repelled by these frivolous words, by the absence of any sense of responsibility, by the tearful look of rapture in those eyes, by everything.
2
IT WAS HARDLY SURPRISING, then, that by the time Kiyoaki turned eighteen, his preoccupations had served to isolate him more and more from his surroundings. He had grown apart from more than just his family. The teachers at the Peers School had instilled in their pupils the supremely noble example of the principal, General Nogi, who had committed suicide to follow his Emperor in death; and ever since they had started to emphasize the significance of his act, suggesting that their educational tradition would have been the poorer had the General died on a sickbed, an atmosphere of Spartan simplicity had come to permeate the school. Kiyoaki, who had an aversion to anything smacking of militarism, had come to loathe school for this reason.
His only friend was his classmate Shigekuni Honda. There were of course many others who would have been delighted to be friends with Kiyoaki, but he didn’t like the youthful coarseness of his contemporaries; he shunned their rough, coltish ways and was further repelled by their crude sentimentality when they mindlessly roared out the school song. Kiyoaki was drawn only to Honda, with his quiet, composed, rational temperament, unusual in a boy of his age. Even so the two had little in common in appearance or temperament.
Honda seemed older than he was. Though his features were quite ordinary, he tended to assume a somewhat pompous air. He was interested in studying law, and was gifted with keen intuition, but it was a power he tended to disguise. To look at him was to believe that he was indifferent to sensual pleasures, but there were times when he seemed fired by some deep passion; at these moments, Honda—who always kept his mouth firmly shut, as he kept his somewhat near-sighted eyes severely narrowed and his brows in a frown—was to be caught with a hint of parted lips in his expression.
Kiyoaki and Honda were perhaps as different in their makeup as the flower and the leaf of a single plant. Kiyoaki was incapable of hiding his true nature, and he was defenseless against society’s power to inflict pain. His still unawakened sensuality lay dormant within him, unprotected as a puppy in a March rain, body shivering, eyes and nose pelted with water. Honda, on the other hand, had quite early in life grasped where danger lay, choosing to shelter from all storms, whatever their attraction.
Despite this, however, they were remarkably close friends. Not content to see each other in school, they would also spend Sundays together at one or the other of their homes. And because the Matsugae estate had more to offer in the way of walks and other amusements, Honda usually came to Kiyoaki’s house.
One October Sunday in 1912, the first year of the Taisho era, on an afternoon when the maple leaves were almost in their prime, Honda arrived in Kiyoaki’s room to suggest that they go boating on the pond. Had this been a year like any other, there would have been a growing number of visitors coming to admire the maple leaves, but as the Matsugaes had been in mourning since the Emperor’s death the previous summer, they had suspended normal social activities. An extraordinary stillness lay over the park.
“Well, if you want to. The boat will take three. We’ll get Iinuma to row us.”
; “Why do we need anybody to row us? I’ll row,” said Honda, remembering the dour expression of the young man who had just needlessly escorted him with silent but relentless obsequiousness to Kiyoaki’s room.
Kiyoaki smiled. “You don’t like him, do you, Honda?”
“It’s not that I don’t like him. It’s just that, for all the time I’ve known him, I still can’t tell what’s going on inside his head.”
“He’s been here six years, so I take him for granted now, like the air I breathe. We certainly don’t see eye to eye, but he’s devoted to me all the same. He’s loyal, he studies hard, you can depend on him.”
Kiyoaki’s room was on the second floor facing the pond. It had originally been in Japanese style, but had been redecorated to look Western, with a carpet and Western furniture. Honda sat down on the windowsill. Looking over his shoulder, he took in the whole sweep of the pond, the island and the hill of maples beyond. The water lay smooth in the afternoon sun. Just below him, he could see the boats moored in a small inlet.
At the same time, he was mulling over his friend’s lack of enthusiasm. Kiyoaki never took the lead, though sometimes he would join in with an air of utter boredom only to enjoy himself in his own way. The role of exhorter and leader, then, always fell to Honda if the pair were to do anything at all.
“You can see the boats, can’t you?” said Kiyoaki.
“Yes, of course I can,” Honda replied, glancing dubiously behind him.
∗
What did Kiyoaki mean by his question? If one were forced to hazard a guess, it would be that he was trying to say that he had no interest in anything at all. He thought of himself as a thorn, a small, poisonous thorn jabbed into the workmanlike hand of his family. And this was his fate simply because he had acquired a little elegance. A mere fifty years before, the Matsugaes had been a sturdy, upright samurai family, no more, eking out a frugal existence in the provinces. But in a brief span of time, their fortunes had soared. By Kiyoaki’s time, the first traces of refinement were threatening to take hold on a family that, unlike the court nobility, had enjoyed centuries of immunity to the virus of elegance. And Kiyoaki, like an ant that senses the approaching flood, was experiencing the first intimations of his family’s rapid collapse.
His elegance was the thorn. And he was well aware that his aversion to coarseness, his delight in refinement, were futile; he was a plant without roots. Without meaning to undermine his family, without wanting to violate its traditions, he was condemned to do so by his very nature. And this poison would stunt his own life as it destroyed his family. The handsome young man felt that this futility typified his existence.
His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions—gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose.
At the moment nothing interested him. Boating? His father had thought the little green and white boat he had imported from abroad to be stylish. As far as his father was concerned the boat was culture; culture made tangible. But what of it? Who cared about a boat?
Honda, with his inborn intuition, understood Kiyoaki’s sudden silence. Although they were the same age, Honda was more mature. He was, in fact, a young man who wanted to lead a constructive life, and he had made up his mind about his future role. With Kiyoaki, however, he always took care to seem less sensitive and subtle than he was. For he knew that his friend was quite receptive to his careful displays of obtuseness—the only bait that seemed to draw a rise from Kiyoaki. And this streak of deception ran through their whole friendship.
“It would do you good to get some exercise,” said Honda brusquely. “I know that you can’t have been reading all that much, but you look as if you’d read your way through a library.”
Kiyoaki smiled by way of reply. Honda was right. It was not his books that had drained him of energy but his dreams. A whole library wouldn’t have exhausted him as much as his constant dreaming night after night.
The very night before, he had dreamed of his own coffin, made of unpainted wood. It stood in the middle of an empty room with large windows, and outside, the pre-dawn darkness was shading to a deep blue; it was filled with the sound of birdsong. A young woman clung to the coffin, her long black hair trailing from her drooping head, her slender shoulders wracked with sobs. He wanted to see her face but could make out no more than her pale, graceful forehead with its delicate peak of black hair. The coffin was half covered with a leopard-skin bordered in pearls. The first muted glow of the dawn flickered on the row of jewels. Instead of funeral incense, a scent of Western perfume hung over the room with the fragrance of sun-ripened fruit. Kiyoaki seemed to be watching this from a great height, though he was convinced that his body lay inside the coffin. But sure as he was, he still felt the need to see it there by way of confirmation. However, like a mosquito in the morning light, his wings lost all power and ceased beating in mid-air; he was utterly incapable of looking inside the nailed-down coffin lid. And then, as his frustration grew more and more intense, he woke up. Kiyoaki took out his secret journal and wrote all this down.
∗
Finally, the two of them went down to the landing and unfastened the mooring rope. The calm surface of the water reflected the flaming scarlet maples beginning to turn on the hill beyond. As they stepped into the boat, its wild rocking evoked in Kiyoaki his favorite feelings about the precariousness of life. At that instant, his inner thoughts seemed to describe a wide arc, clearly reflected in the fresh white trim of the boat. His spirits rose.
Honda pushed against the stone landing with an oar and maneuvered the boat out into the water. As the prow shivered the brilliant scarlet surface of the water, the smooth ripples heightened Kiyoaki’s sense of liberation. The dark water seemed to speak in a deep, solemn voice. “My eighteenth autumn, this day, this afternoon, this moment: never to come again,” he thought, “something already slipping irrevocably away.”
“Shall we take a look at the island?”
“What’s the fun in that? There’s nothing to see.”
“Don’t be a kill-joy. Come on, let’s go and look,” Honda urged. His voice sounded deep in his chest as he rowed with a lively vigor that suited his years.
As Kiyoaki stared fixedly down into the pond, he heard the faint sound of the waterfall far away on the other side of the island; he could not see a great deal because of the cloudy water and the red of the maples reflected in it. There were carp swimming down there, he knew, and at the very bottom snapping turtles lurked in the shelter of the rocks. His childhood fears flared for a moment, then died.
The hot sun struck the backs of their close-shaven necks. It was a peaceful, uneventful, glorious Sunday afternoon. Yet Kiyoaki remained convinced that at the bottom of this world, which was like a leather bag filled with water, there was a little hole, and it seemed to him that he could hear time leaking from it, drop by drop.
They reached the island at a spot where a single maple stood among the pines, and climbed the stone steps to the grassy clearing at the top with the three iron cranes. The boys sat down at the feet of the pair that were stretching their necks upward in an eternal, mute cry, then lay back on the grass to stare up at the late autumn sky. The rough grass pricked through the backs of their kimonos, making Kiyoaki rather uncomfortable. It gave Honda, however, the sensation of having to endure an exquisitely refreshing pain that was fragmented and spread out under his back. Out of the corners of their eyes, they could see the two cranes, weathered by wind and rain and soiled by chalky-white bird droppings. The birds’ supple, curved necks, stretched against the sky, moved slowly with the rhythm of the shifting clouds.
“It’s a beautiful day. In all our lives, we may not have many like this—so
perfect,” said Honda, stirred by some premonition.
“Are you talking about happiness?” asked Kiyoaki.
“I don’t remember saying anything about happiness.”
“Well, that’s all right then. I’d be much too scared to say the things you do. I don’t have that kind of courage.”
“I’m convinced that the trouble with you is, you’re horribly greedy. Greedy men are apt to seem miserable. Look, what more could you want than a day like this?”
“Something definite. What it might be, I’ve no idea,” the young man answered wearily, as handsome as he was indecisive. Fond as he was of his friend, there were times when Kiyoaki found Honda’s keenly analytic mind and his confident turns of phrase—the very image of youthful promise—a severe trial to his capricious nature.
All at once, he rolled over on his stomach on the grass and raised his head, staring across the water at a spot some distance away, in the direction of the garden that fronted the drawing room of the main house. Stepping-stones set in white sand led from it to the edge of the pond, which was intricately scalloped with small inlets crossed by a network of stone bridges. He had noticed a group of women there.
3
HE TAPPED HONDA on the shoulder and pointed in that direction. Honda raised his head and peered across the water until he too spotted the women. And so they stared from their hiding place like two young snipers. His mother went for her daily walk whenever the mood struck her; but her company was not confined to her personal maids today; two guests, one old and one young, were walking just behind her. All except the young girl were wearing kimonos of muted, quiet colors. And although she was in pale blue, the material was richly embroidered. As she crossed the white sand to walk along the water’s edge, it shone pale and silky like the sky at daybreak. The women’s laughter, carrying on the autumn air, betrayed her uncertain footing on the irregular stepping-stones, but it rang too pure and sounded a little artificial. It always irritated Kiyoaki to hear the women of the household laughing like that, but he was well aware of the effect it had on Honda, who had a glint in his eye like a rooster alerted to the clucking of hens. The brittle stalks of dry autumn grass bent under their chests.