Satoko had caught his interest. Although a willing prisoner of his discontent, he was still angry with Satoko, who always had a ready supply of fresh ambiguities and riddles to disconcert him. And he was also angered by his own indecision when faced with finding a solution to her teasing.
When he and Honda had been resting in the grass on the island, he had indeed said that he was looking for “something absolutely definite.” What it was he didn’t know, but whenever this bright certainty seemed to shine within his grasp, the fluttering sleeves of Satoko’s aquamarine kimono interposed themselves, trapping him once again in the quicksands of indecision. Though he had sensed something definite, a flash of intuition, distant, unattainable, he chose to believe that Satoko was the barrier that prevented him from taking a single step toward it.
It was even more galling to have to admit that his very pride, by definition, cut him off from all possible means of dealing with Satoko’s riddles and the anxiety they provoked. If, for example, he were now to ask someone: “What does Satoko mean about not being here any more?” it would only betray the depth of his interest in her. “What could I do,” he thought. “No matter what I did to convince them I wasn’t interested in Satoko but only in an abstract anxiety of my own, nobody would believe me.” A multitude of such thoughts raced through his head.
Ordinarily a bore, school under these circumstances offered Kiyoaki some relief. He always spent his lunch hours with Honda, even though Honda’s conversation had taken a somewhat tedious turn of late. On the day of the Abbess’s visit, Honda had accompanied the others to the main house. And there Her Reverence had addressed them with a sermon that had completely seized his imagination. Now he couldn’t wait to assault Kiyoaki’s inattentive ears with his own exegesis of each point.
It was curious that while the sermon had left the dreamy Kiyoaki quite indifferent, it struck rationalistic Honda with the force of cogency.
The Gesshu Temple on the outskirts of Nara was a convent, quite a rarity in Hosso Buddhism. The gist of the sermon had strongly appealed to Honda, and the Abbess had been careful to introduce her listeners to the doctrine of Yuishiki
∗ by using simple examples of no sophistication at all.
“Then there was the parable that Her Reverence said came to her when she saw the dog’s body hanging over the falls,” said Honda, thoroughly caught up in himself. “I don’t think there’s any doubt whatever that her use of it shows how fond she is of your family. And then her way of telling it—court phrases blending with old-fashioned Kyoto dialect. It’s an elusive language that is filled with all sorts of subtle nuances. It certainly did a great deal to heighten the impact.
“You remember that the story is set in Tang China. A man named Yuan Hsaio was on his way to the famous Mount Kaoyu to study the teachings of Buddha. When night fell, he happened to be beside a cemetery, so he lay down to sleep among the burial mounds. Then in the middle of the night he awoke with a terrible thirst. Stretching out his hand, he scooped up some water from a hole by his side. As he dozed off again, he thought to himself that never had water tasted so pure, so fresh and cold. But when morning came, he saw what he had drunk from in the dark. Incredible though it seemed, what had tasted so delicious was water that had collected in a human skull. He retched and was sick. Yet this experience taught something to Yuan Hsaio. He realized that as long as conscious desire is at work, it will permit distinctions to exist. But if one can suppress it, these distinctions dissolve and one can be as content with a skull as with anything else.
“But what interests me is this: once Yuan Hsaio had been thus enlightened, could he drink that water again, secure in the knowledge that it was pure and delicious? And don’t you think that the same would hold true for chastity? If a boy is naïve, of course, he can worship a prostitute in all innocence. But once he realizes that his woman is a slut, and that he has been living an illusion that merely serves to reflect the image of his own purity, will he be able to love this woman in the same way again? If he can, don’t you think that would be marvelous? To take your own ideal and bend the world to it like that. Wouldn’t that be a remarkable force? It would be like holding the secret key to life right there in your hand, wouldn’t it?”
Honda’s sexual innocence was matched by Kiyoaki’s, who was therefore unable to refute his strange ideal. Nevertheless, being headstrong, he felt that he was different from Honda, that he already had the key to existence within his grasp as a sort of birthright. He did not know what gave him this confidence. Ominously handsome and a dreamer, so arrogant yet so much a prey to anxiety, he was certain that somehow he was the youthful repository of a peerless treasure. Because at times he seemed to wear a quite physical radiance, he bore himself with the pride of a man marked down by a rare disease, even though he suffered neither aches nor painful swellings.
Kiyoaki knew nothing about the history of Gesshu Temple and saw no need to remedy this lack. Honda by contrast, who had no personal ties with it at all, had taken the trouble to do some research in the library. Gesshu, he discovered, was a comparatively new temple, built at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A daughter of the Emperor Higashiyama, wishing to observe a period of mourning for her father, who had died in the prime of life, devoted herself to the worship of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, at the Kiomizu Temple. She soon came to be deeply impressed by the commentaries of an old priest from the Joju Temple on the Hosso concept of existence, and consequently she became a fervent convert to this sect. After her ritual tonsuring, she declined to accept one of the benefices reserved for imperial princesses, deciding instead to found a new temple, one whose nuns would devote themselves to study of the scriptures. And it still preserved its unique place as a convent of the Hosso sect. Satoko’s greataunt, however, though an aristocrat, had the distinction of being the first abbess who was not an imperial princess.
Honda suddenly turned on Kiyoaki.
“Matsugae! What’s the matter with you these days? You haven’t paid the slightest attention to anything I’ve said, have you?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” Kiyoaki replied defensively, for once caught off guard. His beautiful clear eyes looked back at his friend. If Honda thought him insolent, it did not bother Kiyoaki in the least. What he feared was that his friend should become aware of his agony of mind. He knew that if he gave Honda the least encouragement in this direction, there would soon be nothing at all about him that Honda did not know. As this would be an unforgivable violation, he would have lost his only friend.
Honda was immediately alert to Kiyoaki’s tension. He knew that to retain Kiyoaki’s affection he must check the unthinking roughness that friendship ordinarily permitted. He had to treat him as warily as one would a freshly painted wall, on which the slightest careless touch would leave an indelible fingerprint. Should the circumstances demand it, he would have to go so far as to pretend not to notice Kiyoaki’s mortal agony. Especially if such assumed obtuseness served to point up the elegance that would surely characterize Kiyoaki’s ultimate suffering.
At such moments, Honda could even love Kiyoaki for the look of mute appeal in his eyes. Their beautiful gaze seemed to hold a plea: leave things as they are, as gloriously undefined as the line of the seashore. For the first time in their relationship—a protracted, warily transacted negotiation in the coin of friendship—Kiyoaki’s composure was about to shatter; he was pleading. Honda was thus transformed into an aesthetic observer. Those who considered Kiyoaki and Honda to be friends were not mistaken, for as it stood, their relationship gave to each of them exactly what he desired.
5
ONE EVENING about ten days later, Marquis Matsugae happened to return home unusually early and so Kiyoaki had dinner with both his parents, something that happened very rarely. Since the Marquis was fond of Western food, dinner was served in the small dining room of the Western-style house, and he himself had gone down to the wine cellar to choose the wine. He had taken Kiyoaki with him and had gone to great lengths to expou
nd on the characteristics of the various wines cradled in the shelves that filled the cellar. His father had gone on to explain what wine went with which foods, what wine should be served only on the occasion of the visit of a member of the Imperial Family, and so on, beaming all the while. The Marquis never seemed as happy as when dispensing useless knowledge of this kind.
While they were sipping their aperitifs, his mother, who had been driven to Yokohama two days before by her young coachman, described the shopping expedition as if it were an event of great significance.
“I was simply astounded at the way people stared at my Western clothes, and in Yokohama of all places! Some dirty little children actually ran after the carriage shouting, ‘Foreign lady! Foreign lady!’”
His father ventured something to the effect that he was thinking of taking Kiyoaki with him to the launching of the warship Hie, but he spoke as though it were a foregone conclusion that his son would not be interested.
At this point, both parents were at a loss for viable topics of conversation and began to flounder, their discomfiture evident even to Kiyoaki. Somehow, however, they finally happened upon the congenial subject of Kiyoaki’s Otachimachi, the divination ritual that had taken place three years before when he was fifteen.
This ancient ceremony fell on the seventeenth of August according to the lunar calendar. A large wooden basin filled with water was placed in the garden to catch the reflection of the moon, and appropriate offerings were made. If the sky was overcast on this August night of his fifteenth year, bad fortune was expected to dog the boy who stood before the basin, for the rest of his life.
As his parents talked, the scene came back to Kiyoaki vividly. Flanked by his parents and dressed in his hakama, a divided skirt, and kimono blazoned with the family crest, he had stood in the middle of the dew-drenched lawn, the new basin filled with water before him, and a chorus of chirping insects ringing in his ears.
The trees that encircled the now-darkened garden, the tiled roofs of the mansion itself beyond, even the maple hill—the reflection of all this, and more, had been fixed in jagged outline, compressed into the circle of water that was defined by the rim of the basin. That rim of blond cyprus wood had become a frontier where this world ended and another began. Since this ceremony during his fifteenth year was to determine his lifetime fortune, Kiyoaki felt as though his very soul, naked, had been set there on the wet grass. The wooden sides of the basin expressed his outer self; the disk of water, which they in turn defined, expressed his inner.
Everyone was silent, so the sounds of insects throughout the garden filled his ears as never before. He gazed earnestly into the basin. The water within was dark at first, shadowed by clouds as thick as clustered seaweed. A moment later the seaweed seemed to wave and he thought he had seen a faint glow suffuse the water, but then it faded. He could not remember how long he had waited after that. Then all of a sudden the black water in the basin, which had seemed impenetrably obscure, cleared, and there directly in its center shone a tiny image of the full moon.
Everyone broke into exclamations of pleasure, and his mother, rigid all this time, was greatly relieved and began to wave her fan to drive away the mosquitos swarming around her skirt.
“Oh, I’m so glad! Now the boy will have a fortunate life, won’t he?” she said.
Then Kiyoaki was congratulated by everyone present.
But still he felt a certain dread. He could not bring himself to look up into the sky at the moon itself, the origin of the image in the water. Rather he kept looking down into the basin and into the water contained by its curved sides, the reflection of his innermost self, into which the moon, like a golden shell, had sunk so deep. For at that moment he had captured the celestial. It sparkled like a golden butterfly trapped in the meshes of his soul.
Yet, he thought, were these meshes fine enough to hold it? Once caught, would the butterfly not slip out soon and fly away? Even at fifteen he feared its loss. His character was already formed, and each of his triumphs would bring this fear in its wake. Having gained the moon, how much then would he dread life in a world without it. The oppression of such fear! Even if this moon aroused nothing but hatred in him.
For even in the triviality of a single playing card missing from a deck, the world’s order is inevitably turned awry. And for someone like Kiyoaki, the smallest incongruity took on the proportions of a watch deprived of one cogwheel. The order of his universe collapsed and he found himself trapped in terrifying darkness. The lost playing card, of no value in itself, would, in his eyes, assume the significance of a crown over which rival claimants were locked in a struggle that would plunge the world into crisis. His sensibility was thus at the mercy of every unforeseen occurrence, however trivial, and he had no defenses at hand.
As he thought back to his Otachimachi, that night of August 17 three years before, he suddenly shuddered with the realization that Satoko had somehow impinged on his thoughts.
At that moment, to Kiyoaki’s relief, the butler entered in his cool hakama with a rustle of Sendai silk to announce that dinner was ready. Kiyoaki and his parents went into the dining room, each to sit in front of a place set with fine English china decorated with the family crest. Since early childhood Kiyoaki had had to endure the tedium of his father’s lessons in Western table manners. As it was, his mother had never become accustomed to the Western way of eating and his father still behaved with the ostentation of a man eager to seem at home abroad, so he was the only one who ate naturally and at ease.
When the soup course arrived, his mother lost no time in raising a new topic in her calm voice.
“Really, Satoko can be very trying. Only this morning I discovered that the Ayakuras sent a messenger with her refusal. And for a time she gave everyone the distinct impression that she had decided to accept.”
“She’s twenty already, isn’t she?” his father replied. “If she continues to be so demanding, she may find herself left an old maid. I’ve been worried about her myself, but what can one do?”
Kiyoaki was all ears as his father went on casually. “I wonder what’s the matter with her? Or did they think he was too much beneath her? No matter how noble a family the Ayakuras once were, their present fortunes hardly allow them to turn down a young man like that, with a bright future ahead of him in the Ministry of the Interior. They should have been glad of him, shouldn’t they, without bothering about what kind of family he came from?”
“That’s exactly how I feel. And that’s why I’m disinclined to do anything more to help her.”
“Well now, we owe them a great deal because of what they did for Kiyoaki. I feel obliged to do all I can to help them build up their family fortunes again. But what could we do to find a suitor whom she’d accept?”
“I wonder if such a man exists?”
As he listened, Kiyoaki’s spirits rose. His riddle was solved. “Kiyo, what would you do if suddenly I weren’t here any more?” Satoko had asked. She had simply been referring to the offer of marriage then pending. At the time she had been inclined to accept but had dropped her hint out of concern for Kiyoaki’s reaction. Now, ten days later, it would appear from his mother that she had formally refused. And her reason for doing this was clear to him. She had done so because she was in love with Kiyoaki.
And with that the clouds faded from his horizon. He was no longer beset by anxieties. The water in the glass was clear once again. For ten days he had been excluded from the small, peaceful sanctuary that was his only refuge. But now he could return to it and breathe easy.
Kiyoaki was enjoying a rare moment of acute happiness, a happiness that without question sprang from his regaining his clarity of vision. The card that had been deliberately concealed had reappeared in his hand. The deck was complete. And so once more it became a mere pack of cards. His happiness shone clear and unmarred. For a moment at least, Kiyoaki had succeeded in breaking the grip of his emotions.
The Marquis and Marquise Matsugae, however, were still looking a
t one another across the table, their insensitivity blinding them even to something as obvious as their son’s sudden rush of happiness. The Marquis confronted the classic melancholy of his wife’s face, and she, in turn, the coarseness of his. Features proper to a man of action had become blurred by the ravages of indolent living that spread beneath his skin.
Despite the seemingly erratic course charted in his parents’ conversation, Kiyoaki had always been aware of adherence to a definite ritual; it was as set as the Shinto ceremony of offering the gods a branch of the sacred sakaki tree, a ceremony in which each syllable of the incantation is meticulously pronounced and each lustrous branch carefully selected.
Kiyoaki had observed the ritual countless times since early childhood. No burning crises. No storms of passion. His mother knew exactly what was coming next. The Marquis knew that his wife knew. Their expressions blank, innocent of foreknowledge, they glided downstream like twigs hand in hand on clear waters mirroring blue sky and clouds, to take the inevitable plunge over the crest of the falls.
Just as predictably, the Marquis left his after-dinner coffee unfinished and turned to his son. “Now, Kiyoaki, what do you say to a game of billiards?”
“Well, then, please excuse me,” said the Marquise.
Kiyoaki was so happy tonight, however, that this kind of charade did not grate on him in the least. His mother returned to the main house and he went with his father into the billiard room. With its English-style oak paneling, its portrait of Kiyoaki’s grandfather, and its large map done in oils depicting the naval battles of the Russo-Japanese War, this room was much admired by visitors. One of the disciples of Sir John Millais, famous for his portrait of Gladstone, had done the huge likeness of Kiyoaki’s grandfather during his stay in Japan. And now his grandfather’s figure loomed in ceremonial attire from the shadows.
The composition was simple, but the artist had evinced a high degree of skill in his judicious blending of idealization and realistic sternness to achieve a likeness that expressed not only the indomitable air expected of a Restoration peer but also those more personal traits dear to his family, down to the warts on his cheek. According to household custom, whenever a new maid came from the ancestral province of Kagoshima, she was taken before the portrait to pay reverence. Some hours before his grandfather’s death, though the billiard room was empty and it was unlikely that the picture cord could have become so worn, the portrait fell to the floor with a crash that echoed throughout the house.