He was the very image of a man proud of his conquest. As he told his story to Honda, his cheeks glowed with color, his teeth gleamed, and his voice was firm and clear, although he paused shyly at times and there was a new gallantry evident even in the set of his eyebrows. Almost nothing seemed more alien to him than introspection, or so it struck Honda, whether because the tale came so abruptly to an end or because of the incoherence of his outpourings.
“Listening to you, the oddest thing came to my mind—why, I don’t know,” said Honda. “One day, when we were talking—I’m not sure when it was—you asked me if I remembered anything about the Russo-Japanese War. And then afterwards, when we were at your house, you showed me a collection of war photographs. And I remember you telling me that the one you liked best had written under it ‘Vicinity of Tokuri Temple: Memorial Services for the War Dead’—a strange picture, in which all the soldiers looked as if they had been assembled like actors in a huge pageant. At the time it struck me as being an odd preference for you since you had so little taste for anything that smacked of military life.
“But at any rate, as I was listening just now, the memory of that dusty plain in the picture came to my mind and somehow seemed to fuse with your beautiful love story.”
Honda had managed to surprise himself. He was startled not only by the obscurity of what he had said and the fervor with which he had said it, but also by the admiration he felt for Kiyoaki’s wanton disregard of commandment and precept—he, Honda, who had long ago decided to become a man of the law!
Two servants entered with small tables on which their dinners had been placed. His mother had arranged things like this so that the two could eat and talk as friends without any constraint. A saké bottle stood on either table, and Honda offered him some.
“Mother was rather worried. She didn’t know how well you’d take to the food we serve, seeing as you’re accustomed to such luxuries,” he remarked, turning the conversation to something more commonplace.
He was happy to see Kiyoaki starting to eat as though, in fact, he found the food much to his liking. So for a little while the two young men stopped talking and gave themselves over to the healthy pleasures of eating.
∗
Enjoying the further brief silence that usually follows a good meal, Honda asked himself why, after hearing his classmate confess to so romantic an exploit, he had felt so happy about it, without a twinge of jealousy or envy. He was refreshed by it the way a lakeside garden is imperceptibly steeped in moisture during the rainy season.
“Well then, what do you intend to do?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“I don’t have the least idea. I’m slow off the mark, but once I get started, I’m not the type to stop halfway.”
Honda stared at him wide-eyed. He had never dreamed that he would ever hear Kiyoaki say something like this.
“You mean you want to marry Miss Satoko?”
“That’s out of the question. The sanction has already been granted.”
“But you’ve already violated the sanction. Why can’t you marry her then? Couldn’t the two of you run away—go abroad and get married there?”
“You just don’t understand,” he answered. Then he lapsed into silence, and for the very first time that day, Honda noticed a trace of the old melancholy in the lines that suddenly appeared between his eyebrows.
Perhaps he had been expecting as much, but now that he had seen it, he felt a slight uneasiness cast a shadow over his own mood of exhilaration. As he sat staring at his friend’s handsome profile, whose fine and delicate lines would defeat all but the most skilled artist, he wondered just what it was that Kiyoaki hoped to get from life. He felt a shudder pass through him.
Kiyoaki picked up his strawberries, got up from the couch and sat down in front of the scrupulously tidy desk where Honda worked. He propped his elbows on its austere surface and casually began to swing the swivel chair from side to side. As he did so, he put his weight on his elbows and restlessly eased the posture of his head and torso, his bare chest showing at the neck of his loose-fitting kimono. Then, after arming himself with a toothpick, he began lightly spearing the strawberries one by one and popping them into his mouth. It was a display of relaxed bad manners that showed how glad he was to escape the strict decorum of his own home. He spilled some sugar, which dropped down onto his light-skinned chest, but he brushed it off with no sign of embarrassment.
“You’re going to attract ants, you know,” said Honda, laughing through a mouthful of strawberries.
Kiyoaki’s delicate eyelids, usually too pale, were now diffused with color, thanks to the saké he had drunk. As he kept turning the swivel chair from side to side, his bare flushed forearms still propped on the desk, he happened to move too far in one direction, and his body was oddly twisted. It was just as if he had suddenly been stricken by some vague pain of which he himself was unaware.
There was no mistaking the faraway look in those eyes beneath their fine, graceful brows, but Honda was well aware that their flashing glance was not directed toward the future. Unlike his usual self, he had a cruel desire to inflict his growing uneasiness on his friend—an urgent impulse to pretend to raise his own hand to destroy Kiyoaki’s all-too-recent sense of happiness.
“Well, what are you going to do? Have you even thought about what will come of this?”
Kiyoaki raised his eyes and looked at him steadily. Honda had never seen a gaze of such burning eagerness and yet such gloom.
“Why must I think about it?”
“Because all those people around you and Miss Satoko are moving slowly but inexorably toward a dénouement. You don’t think the two of you can hover forever in mid-air like two dragonflies making love?”
“I know we can’t,” Kiyoaki replied, breaking off the exchange and casually glancing elsewhere. He gave himself over to an examination of the shadows in the various nooks and crannies of the room, such as the intricate patterns beneath the bookcases and the ones beside the wicker wastepaper basket—those elusive little shadows that crept into Honda’s plain and functional study night after night, insidious as human emotions, to lurk wherever they could find cover.
As Honda watched him, he was struck by the prominence of his graceful eyebrows. They were like shadows themselves, bent into elegant bows. They seemed to be an embodiment of an emotion, yet nevertheless had force enough to check its expression. He imagined them guarding the dark, brooding eyes beneath, loyally following their master’s glance wherever it went, like zealous servants with impeccable training.
Honda decided to come out directly with something that had been taking form in a corner of his mind.
“A bit earlier,” he began, “I said something very odd. I mean about thinking of the picture from the Russo-Japanese War while you were telling me about you and Miss Satoko. I wondered why that came to me, and now that I’ve given it a little more thought, I have an answer. The age of glorious wars ended with the Meiji era. Today, all the stories of past wars have sunk to the level of those edifying accounts we hear from middle-aged noncoms in the military science department or the boasts of farmers around a hot stove. There isn’t much chance now to die on the battlefield.
“But now that old wars are finished, a new kind of war has just begun; this is the era for the war of emotion. The kind of war no one can see, only feel—a war, therefore, that the dull and insensitive won’t even notice. But it’s begun in earnest. The young men who have been chosen to wage it have already begun to fight. And you’re one of them—there’s no doubt about that.
“And just as in the old wars, there will be casualties in the war of emotion, I think. It’s the fate of our age—and you’re one of our representatives. So what about it then? You’re fully resolved to die in this new war—am I right?”
Kiyoaki’s only answer was a flickering smile. At that moment a strong breeze, heavy with the rain’s dampness, found its way in through the window and, in passing, cooled their foreheads, which were covered
with a light film of sweat. Honda was perplexed at Kiyoaki’s silence. Was his answer so obvious that no reply was necessary? Or had his words really struck a responsive chord in his friend, while his way of putting them had been so extravagant that there was no way for him to answer frankly? He thought that it had to be one or the other.
29
THREE DAYS LATER, when two canceled classes gave Honda a free afternoon, he went to watch the district court in session, accompanied by a law student who was one of the family houseboys. It had been raining since morning.
Honda’s father was a justice of the Supreme Court and, even within his own family, was a strict observer of principles. He was greatly pleased by the promise shown by his nineteen-year-old son, who had applied himself to the law even before entering college. His father thus felt confident enough to conclude that his son would eventually succeed him. Up to this year, the office of judge had been for life, but the previous April a large-scale reform of the juridical system had been put into effect. As a result, more than two hundred judges had been laid off or requested to hand in their resignations. Justice Honda, wanting to show his solidarity with his unfortunate old friends, had offered his own resignation, but it had not been accepted.
The experience, however, seemed to have marked a turning point in his views on life, which, in their turn, affected what had been a rather formal relationship with his son. From then on, he brought to it a warmth of generosity that resembled the affection shown by a high official to the subordinate he has selected to succeed him. Honda himself was determined to work harder than ever at his studies to try to be worthy of such unprecedented favor.
One result of his father’s changed views was that he permitted his son to attend court sessions even though he was not yet an adult. He did not, of course, go so far as to let him come into his own court, but he gave him permission to watch whatever civil or criminal cases he liked, as long as he was accompanied by the young retainer who was also a law student.
His father explained to Shigekuni that since all his familiarity with the law came from books, it would be extremely valuable for him to come in contact with the actual process of law in Japan and to experience it at a practical level. Justice Honda had more than this in mind, however. Truth to tell, his main concern was to expose his still sensitive, nineteen-year-old son to those elements of human existence that were dredged up in all their shockingly sordid reality in criminal court. He wanted to see what Shigekuni was able to draw from such experience.
It was a dangerous sort of education. Still, when the Justice considered the greater danger of allowing a young man to form his character out of an assimilation from careless popular behavior, cheap entertainment and so on, from whatever might please or appeal to his immature taste, he felt confident of the advantages of this educational experiment. There was a good chance that it would at least make Shigekuni acutely aware of the stern and watchful eye of the law. He would see all the amorphous, steaming, filthy detritus of human passions processed right then and there according to the impersonal recipes of the law. Standing by in such a kitchen should teach Shigekuni a great deal about technique.
Honda hurried through the dark corridors of the courthouse on his way to the 8th District Criminal Court, a route lit only by the faint light that filtered through the rain soaking the ravaged grass of the quadrangle. The pervasive atmosphere of this building had absorbed the raw essence of the criminal spirit; the place struck him as being altogether too sinister for the palace of reason it was supposed to be.
His depression still clung to him after he and his companion had taken their seats in the courtroom. He glanced at the highly strung law student who had conducted him here with such anxious haste and was now engrossed in the case book he had brought with him, as though he had completely forgotten his master’s son. Then he turned the same listless gaze on the still empty judge’s bench, the public prosecutor’s desk, the witness stand, the defense attorney’s desk, and so on. Such universal emptiness struck him as being expressive of his own spiritual state on this damp, humid afternoon.
So young and so lethargic! As though he had been born to sit and stare like this. Ever since Kiyoaki had confided in him, Shigekuni, who would have been bright and confident, as befitted such an able young man, had undergone a change. Or rather, the friendship between him and Kiyoaki had undergone a strange reversal. For years, each of them had been extremely careful to intrude in no way on the personal life of the other. But now, just three days before, Kiyoaki had suddenly come to him and, like a newly cured patient transmitting his disease to someone else, had passed on to his friend the virus of introspection. It had taken hold so readily that Honda’s disposition now seemed a far better host to it than Kiyoaki’s. The first major symptom of the disease was a vague sense of apprehension.
What was Kiyoaki to do, he wondered. Was it right for himself, as Kiyoaki’s friend, to do nothing more than sit by idly and let things take their course?
While he waited for the court session to begin at one thirty, he sat engrossed in the reflections provoked by his anxiety, his mind far from the hearings that he had come to attend.
“If I were really to act as a true friend,” he thought, “wouldn’t it be best to persuade him to try and forget Miss Satoko? Up until now I thought it best as his friend to pretend not to notice even if he were in his death agonies, out of respect for that elegance of his. But now that he’s told me everything as he did the other day, shouldn’t I interfere, as I have the right to do in an ordinary friendship, and do my best to save him from the clear danger that’s threatening him? Moreover, I shouldn’t hold back even if it makes him so resentful that he breaks our friendship. In ten or twenty years, he’ll understand why I did it. And even if he never understands, it should make no difference to me.
“There’s no doubt that he’s heading straight for tragedy. It will be beautiful, of course, but should he throw his whole life away as a sacrificial offering to such a fleeting beauty—like a bird in flight glimpsed from a window?
“I know what I have to do. From now on I’ve got to put aside all the niceties and behave like an insensitive and imperceptive friend. And whether he likes it or not, I’ve got to do something to pour cold water on that raging passion of his. I’ve got to use every ounce of my strength to prevent him from fulfilling his destiny.”
∗
This feverish rush of thoughts made Honda’s head ache with the effort they cost. He no longer felt able to sit there patiently and wait for the start of the hearings, in which he had lost all interest. He wanted to leave at once, rush to Kiyoaki’s house and pour out every argument at his command to persuade him to change his mind. And the frustration of realizing that this was impossible caused a new upsurge of anxiety that increased his discomfiture.
He glanced around and noticed that all the seats had been filled. Now he understood why the houseboy had brought him here so early. Among those present were young men who looked like law students, drab middle-aged men and women, and newspaper reporters with armbands who were coming and going with a great show of urgency. He watched as those who had been drawn by nothing more than base curiosity hid their interest behind masks of sober propriety, stroking their moustaches and passing the time with a genteel wave of a fan or using the long nails of their little fingers to dig sulfur-colored deposits out of their ears. It was an instructive sight, and one that, more than anything seen previously, opened his eyes to the moral ugliness of the belief that “Oh, I’m in no danger of ever committing a sin.” Whatever the future might hold, he was determined never to fall prey to that kind of attitude.
The windows were shut against the rain, and they admitted a dull, flat light that lay over all the spectators indifferently like a coat of gray dust; only the shiny black visors of the guards’ caps were exempt from it.
The entrance of the defendant set up a flurry of comment. Flanked by two guards and dressed in a blue prison uniform, she made her way to the dock. He tried to ge
t a look at her as she passed, but there was so much jostling and neck-craning going on among the spectators that he could do little more than catch a glimpse of plump white cheeks with conspicuous dimples. Then after she had entered the dock, all he could see was that her hair was pulled back in the cylindrical bun worn by female prisoners. Although she hunched forward respectfully, he noticed that there was a little sign of nervous strain in the way her plump shoulders were set beneath her uniform.
The defense lawyer had already come in, and now everyone was waiting for the public prosecutor and the judge himself.
“Just take a look at her, young master. Would you think she’s a murderess?” said the young law student, whispering in his ear. “It’s true what they say about not being able to tell a book by its cover.”
∗
The court ritual began with the presiding judge putting the usual questions to the accused about name, address, age, and social status. The courtroom was so hushed that Honda imagined he could hear the busy swish of the recorder’s writing brush.
“Two-five, Nihonbashi Ward, Tokyo City. A commoner. Tomi Masuda,” the woman replied in a voice that was clear and steady but so low that the crowd of spectators pricked up their ears and leaned forward as one, afraid of missing something when the testimony reached matters that were crucial. The responses came smoothly enough until the accused came to her age, and there, whether intentionally or not, she hesitated. Then, after the urgings of her lawyer, she shook herself and said in a louder voice: “I’m thirty-one.”