Trying to sound as casual as possible, he did his best to discover if there were not some note in her voice that differed from the cheerful warmth of two nights before, or some suggestive change in her expression. Once more the clarity of his self-possession was becoming blurred.
Her nose was as well molded as that of an ivory doll, without being so sharply defined as to give her a haughty profile. And her face seemed to glow and fall into soft shadow; alternating with the quick, vivacious movement of her eyes. Alertness of eye is usually considered a vulgar trait in women, but Satoko had a way of delivering her sidelong glances that was irresistibly charming. Her smile followed close upon her words, as her glance did upon her smile—the graceful sequence heightening the bewitching elegance of her expression. Her lips, although somewhat thin, concealed a subtle inner voluptuousness. When she laughed, she was always quick to hide the sparkle of her teeth with the slender, delicate fingers of one hand, but not before the young men had noticed a white brilliance that rivaled that of the chandeliers above.
As Kiyoaki translated the extravagant compliments of the princes for Satoko, he noticed a blush spreading to her earlobes. Almost hidden by her hair, they were shaped with the fluid grace of raindrops, and however hard he peered at them, he was unable to decide whether they owed their heightened color to some cosmetic or to embarrassment.
One thing about Satoko, however, transcended all artifice. This was the force of her bright eyes. It unnerved him as it always did. He felt pierced by its uncanny keenness; its power sprang from her very essence.
The bell rang to announce the beginning of The Rise and Fall of the Taira, and the audience began to file back to their seats.
“She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve seen since my arrival in Japan. How lucky you are!” said Chao P. in a low voice as he and Kiyoaki walked down the aisle. Judging by the look in his eyes, one could gather that he had recovered from his attack of homesickness.
9
KIYOAKI’S TUTOR IINUMA had come to realize that the six years and more that he had spent in service to the Matsugae household had not only blighted the hopes of his youth but had dissipated the consequent indignation he had felt at first. When he brooded over his frustrating circumstances, he did so with a chill resentment quite different from the hot anger he had once felt. Of course the atmosphere of the Matsugae household, so unfamiliar to him, had had much to do with the changes in him. From the very beginning, however, the main source of contagion had been Kiyoaki, now eighteen years old.
The boy would be nineteen this coming year. If Iinuma could only see to it that he graduated from Peers with good marks and then that he was entered in the law school of Tokyo Imperial University when the autumn of his twenty-first year came round, he would be able to feel that his own responsibility had been properly discharged. However, for some reason that Iinuma could not fathom, Marquis Matsugae had never seen fit to take his son to task over his school record. And as things stood now, there seemed little chance of Kiyoaki’s studying law at Tokyo University. After graduating from Peers, there seemed to be no other course open to him but to take advantage of his privileges as a member of the nobility and enter either Kyoto or Tohoku Imperial University without having to take an entrance examination. Kiyoaki’s performance at school had been indifferent; he put no effort into his studies, nor did he compensate for this at all by trying to shine at athletics instead. Had he been an outstanding student, Iinuma could have shared in the glory, giving his friends and relatives in Kagoshima cause to be proud. But by now, Iinuma could only dimly recall the fervent hopes he had once entertained. And besides, he realized bitterly, no matter how far short of the mark Kiyoaki fell, he was still assured of a seat in the House of Peers.
The friendship between Kiyoaki and Honda was another source of irritation. Honda was close to the top of his class, but he made no attempt to influence his friend for the good, despite Kiyoaki’s regard for him; quite the reverse, in fact. He behaved, in Iinuma’s eyes, like an uncritical admirer, blind to Kiyoaki’s every shortcoming.
Jealousy, of course, played its part in Iinuma’s resentment. Being a friend and classmate, Honda was in a position to accept Kiyoaki as he was, whereas for Iinuma, he was an eternal monument to his own failure.
Kiyoaki’s looks, his elegance, his diffidence, his complexity, his disinclination for any exertion, his languid dreaminess, his magnificent body, his delicate skin, his long lashes over those dreaming eyes—all of Kiyoaki’s attributes conspired to betray Iinuma’s hopes with a careless, elegant grace of their own. Iinuma saw his young master as a constant, mocking reproach.
So bitter a frustration, a sense of failure so gnawing in its intensity, can, over a long period, be transmuted into a kind of religious fervor directed at its cause. Iinuma became enraged at anyone who tried to slight Kiyoaki. By a sort of confused intuition of which he himself was unaware, he grasped something of the nature of Kiyoaki’s almost impenetrable isolation. Kiyoaki’s determination, in turn, to keep his distance from Iinuma, doubtless sprang from the fact that he perceived all too clearly the nature of his tutor’s burning fanaticism.
Of all the retinue in the Matsugae household, only Iinuma was possessed by this fervor, something intangible yet quite apparent as soon as one looked into his eyes. One day, a guest asked: “Excuse me, but that houseboy of yours isn’t a socialist, is he?” The Marquis and his wife could not help bursting into laughter at this, for they were well aware of Iinuma’s background, his present behavior, and, above all, the zeal with which day in, day out, he performed his devotions at the “Omiyasama” shrine. It was customary for this taciturn young man, who had no words to waste on anyone, to go to the family shrine early each morning; there he poured out his heart to Marquis Matsugae’s renowned father, whom he had never known in his lifetime. In the early days, his pleas were shot through with a radical anger, but as he grew older, they began to be shaped by a pervasive discontent that now had spread to envelop every aspect of his world.
He was the first to rise every morning. He washed his face and rinsed out his mouth, then putting on his indigo-striped kimono and his Okura hakama, he set off in the direction of the shrine.
He walked along the path that led past the maids’ quarters at the rear of the main house and through the grove of Japanese cypresses. In cold weather, like this morning’s, the frost tortured the dirt of the path into tiny spiral mounds; when these were crushed by the blunt impact of Iinuma’s wooden clogs, they shattered into pure, glittering fragments. The morning sun, lying bright and gauzy over the withered brown and green leaves that still clung to the cypresses, shone on his frosty breath rising in the winter air. He felt utterly purified. Incessant birdsong filled the pale blue morning sky. However, despite the stimulation of the cold air briskly striking his bare skin under his open-necked kimono, something wrung his heart with bitter regret: “If only the young master would come with me, just once!”
He had never succeeded in communicating this vigorous, masculine sense of well-being to Kiyoaki. No one could hold him responsible for this failure. To force the boy to accompany him on these morning walks was out of the question, yet Iinuma continued to blame himself. In six years he had not been able to persuade Kiyoaki to participate even once in this “virtuous practice.”
On the flat crest of the small hill, trees gave way to a fairly broad clearing of grass, now brown and dry, through which a gravel path led to the shrine. As Iinuma gazed at it and the full force of the morning sun struck the granite torii in front of it and the two cannon shells to either side of its stone steps, a feeling of self-possession came over him. Here in the dawn, he found a bracing air of purity, free from the stifling luxury penetrating the Matsugae household. He felt as if he were breathing in a new coffin of fresh white wood. Since early childhood, all that he had been taught to revere as honorable and beautiful was to be found, as far as the Matsugaes were concerned, in the proximity of death.
After Iinuma had climbed the steps a
nd taken up his position before the shrine, he saw a small bird, a glimpse of dark red breast, as it hopped about the branches of a sakaki, rustling the gleaming leaves. Then, with a piercing cry, it flew away. A flycatcher, he thought.
He pressed his palms together and, as always, invoked Kiyoaki’s grandfather as “Reverend Ancestor.” Then in silence he began to pray: “Why is our era one of decadence? Why does the world despise vigor and youth and worthy ambitions and single-mindedness? You once cut men down with your sword, you were wounded by the swords of others, you endured the most terrible dangers—all to found a new Japan. And finally, having achieved high office and esteemed by everyone, you died, the greatest hero in a heroic age. Why can we not recapture the glory of your era? How long must this age of the effete and the contemptible endure? Or is the worst still to come? Men think only of money and women. Men have forgotten everything that should be becoming to a man. That great and shining age of gods and heroes passed away with the Meiji Emperor. Will we ever see its like again? A time when the strength of youth will unstintingly give of itself once more?
“In the present day—when places called cafés are springing up everywhere, drawing in thousands of idle people with money to squander, when male and female students behave so shockingly in streetcars that it has become necessary to segregate them—men have lost all trace of that fervor that drove their ancestors to accept the most frightening challenges. Now they are good for nothing but to flutter their effeminate hands like dry, fragile leaves shaken by the merest puff of air.
“Why all this? How did such an age come about, an age which has defiled everything that once was sacred. Alas, Reverend Ancestor, your own grandson, whom I serve, is in every way a child of this decadent era, and I am powerless to do anything about it. Should I die to atone for my failure? Or have things taken their course according to some great design of yours?”
Oblivious to the cold in the fervor of his devotions, Iinuma stood there, a virile figure with his matted chest showing through his open kimono. In truth, he secretly regretted that his body did not correspond to the purity of his zeal. On the other hand, Kiyoaki, whose body he saw as a sacred vessel, lacked the single-minded purity required of all true men.
Then suddenly, at the height of his ardent outpouring, as he was getting warmer and warmer despite the chill morning air swirling under the skirt of his hakama, he began to feel sexually aroused. He immediately snatched a broom from its place under the floor and began to sweep out the shrine in a frenzy of energy.
10
SHORTLY AFTER the new year, Iinuma was called to Kiyoaki’s room. There he found the old lady, Tadeshina, whom he knew to be Satoko’s maid.
Satoko herself had already been to the Matsugae house to exchange New Year’s greetings, and today, finding occasion to bring some traditional Kyoto bran mash as her own New Year’s present, Tadeshina had made her way inconspicuously to Kiyoaki’s room. Though Iinuma was aware who Tadeshina was, this was the first time he had ever been brought together with her intentionally, and the reason for it was not yet clear to him.
The New Year was always lavishly celebrated in the Matsugae household. Some twenty or more people came from Kagoshima, and after going to the residence of the traditional head of the clan to pay their respects, they were entertained at the Matsugaes’. The New Year’s dinners, cooked in the Hoshigaoka style and served in the black-beamed main hall, were famous, largely because of such desserts as ice cream and melon, which were delicacies almost never tasted by country people. This year, however, because the period of mourning for the Meiji Emperor was not yet over, no more than three guests came up from Kagoshima; among them, the principal of Iinuma’s middle school, a gentleman who had the honor of having known Kiyoaki’s grandfather.
Marquis Matsugae had established a certain ritual with the old teacher. As Iinuma waited on him at the banquet, the Marquis would speak graciously to the old man: “Iinuma has done well here.” This year, too, the formula had been invoked, and the principal had murmured the usual politely deprecating words, as predictably as someone stamping his seal on a routine document. But this year, perhaps because there was only a handful of guests present, the ceremony struck Iinuma as being insincere, a perfunctory formality.
Of course Iinuma had never presented himself to any of the illustrious ladies who came to call on the Marquise, so he was taken aback at being confronted in his young master’s study by a New Year’s guest who happened to be a woman, however elderly.
Tadeshina wore a black kimono patterned with crests, and though she sat upright in her chair with extreme propriety, the whiskey that Kiyoaki had urged on her had evidently taken some effect. Beneath her graying hair, gathered neatly into a knot and still unruffled, the skin on her forehead glowed through the layer of white makeup with a shade of snow-covered plum blossom.
After acknowledging Iinuma with a brief glance, she returned to the story she had been telling about Prince Saionji.
“According to what everyone said, the Prince enjoyed tobacco and alcohol from the age of five onward. Samurai families are always so concerned to bring their children up impeccably. But in noble families—I think you know what I mean, young master—parents never discipline their children from the moment they’re born; wouldn’t you agree? For after all, their children receive the court rank of fifth degree at birth, which qualifies them to become retainers of His Imperial Majesty, and so out of reverence to the Emperor, their parents don’t dare to be harsh with them. And in a court nobleman’s house, nobody says anything about his Imperial Majesty that isn’t absolutely prudent. Just as nobody belonging even to the household of a lord would ever dare to gossip openly about their master. And that’s the way it is. And my mistress too has this same deep reverence for His Imperial Majesty. But of course it doesn’t extend to foreign lords.” This last was Tadeshina’s ironic jab at the hospitality extended to the Siamese princes by the Matsugaes. Then she hastened to make some amends: “But then, thanks of course to your great kindness, I was privileged to see a play again after I don’t know how long. I felt that it gave me a new lease on life.”
Kiyoaki let Tadeshina ramble on as she liked. In asking her to come to his study, he had had something quite definite in mind. He wanted to be free of the nagging doubt that had pursued him ever since that night. And so now, after plying Tadeshina with more whiskey, he asked her abruptly if Satoko had in fact taken his letter and thrown it unopened into the fire as requested.
Her answer came more readily than he might have expected: “Oh that! The young lady spoke to me immediately after her telephone conversation with you. So when the letter came next day, I took it and burned it unopened. Everything was taken care of. You need not worry about it at all.”
On hearing this, Kiyoaki felt like a man who has struggled for hours through tangled undergrowth and at last fights his way into the open. A multitude of delightful prospects unfolded before his eyes. Satoko’s not having read the letter did two things: not only did it restore things to their former balance, but Kiyoaki was now happily confident that he had opened up a whole new perspective on life.
Satoko had already made an overture whose implications were dazzling. Her annual New Year’s visit to exchange greetings fell on a day traditionally set aside by the Marquis for the children of his relatives. They would gather at his house, their ages ranging from three to twenty. And on this one day he would don the role of loving father, listening kindly to what each of them had to say and giving counsel when called upon to do so. This year, Satoko had brought some children out to see the horses.
Kiyoaki led them to the stable where the Matsugaes kept their four horses. It was decorated for the holidays with the twisted rope traditional in Shinto observance. The horses, with their powerful, smooth-muscled bodies, suddenly rearing back or kicking their hooves against the boards, struck Kiyoaki as having a pulsating life appropriate to the New Year. The children were enthralled. They asked the groom for each horse’s name. Then, taking ai
m at the huge yellow teeth, they hurled salvos of squashed pieces of crumbling candy they had been clutching in their fists. The high-strung beasts glared sidelong at their tormentors with bloodshot eyes. This delighted the children even more since these baleful looks were proof that the horses regarded them as adults.
Satoko, however, was frightened by the saliva streaming from the horses’ gaping mouths, and withdrew to the shelter of an evergreen some distance away. Kiyoaki walked over to join her, leaving the children to the groom.
Her eyes were showing the effects of the spiced saké that was traditional at New Year celebrations. What she said, therefore—to the accompaniment of the children’s shouts of joy—might have been attributed to this stimulus. At any rate, as Kiyoaki came to her side, she looked at him far from demurely and began to speak with a lilt of excitement in her voice.
“I was so happy that night, you know. You introduced me as though I were your fiancée. I’m sure Their Highnesses were quite surprised that I should be so old. But do you know how I felt then? If I had had to die at that very moment, I would have had no regrets. My happiness lies in your hands. Be careful with it, won’t you? I’ve never been so happy at a New Year as I am now. I never looked forward so much to what the year may bring.”
Kiyoaki did not know what to say. “Why are you telling me all this?” he asked finally, in a strained voice.
“Oh, Kiyo, when I’m very happy, my words come tumbling out like the doves they release at a launching, flying up through a burst of confetti. Kiyo, you’ll understand soon enough.” To make matters worse, Satoko had ended on that phrase calculated to irritate Kiyoaki: “You’ll understand soon enough.”