Her mother brought tea and withdrew. The two had met several times before, but for the first time they were alone. That fact did not produce new tensions. Momoko was safe in the knowledge of having obeyed instructions. He must awaken her to danger, thought Tōru.
He had been put off by all the solemn attentions during dinner. But his annoyance was about to leave. A match was being made. Delicate love was being picked up in pincers, tinted. The bonbon had already been put in the oven. To Tōru it made no difference whether he had gone in of his own accord or been put in. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with himself.
The first thing Momoko did when they were alone was to choose an album from four or five numbered ones and offer it to Tōru. Thus he was made aware of her essential mediocrity. He opened it on his knees, and he saw an infant in a bib, its legs spread wide. Pants all swollen with diapers, like a Flemish knight’s. The dark pink of a mouth not yet filled out with teeth. Tōru asked who the infant might be.
Momoko’s consternation was rather wondrous. She glanced at the album and put a hand over the picture and snatched the album from him. Clutching it to her breast, she turned to the wall. Her breathing was heavy.
“How perfectly dreadful. The numbers were wrong. I didn’t mean for you to see this one. Whatever will I do?”
“Is it such a secret that you were once a baby?”
“Aren’t you cool. Like a doctor.”
Calm again herself, Momoko replaced the album. Tōru was sure, from his misstep, that in the next album he would see Momoko at seventeen.
But the next album was most ordinary, pictures from a recent trip. Each picture showed how popular Momoko was. It was a record of tedious happiness. Far more than to pictures of a recent trip to Hawaii, Tōru was drawn to Momoko in the garden beside a bonfire, one evening the previous fall. The bonfire was a rich, sensuous vermilion. Crouched beside it, Momoko had the grandeur of a witch.
“Are you fond of fires?” he asked.
He caught hesitation in her eyes. He had a strange confidence that she had been menstruating as she sat looking into the fire. And now?
How pure abstract malice would have been if it had been free from sexual attraction! He saw that this new challenge would not be as easy as dismissing his tutor had been. But he had confidence in his coldness, however much he might be loved. It lay in the indigo realm within him.
23
RELUCTANT TO LEAVE Tōru by himself, Honda took him to Hokkaido that summer. Their schedule was an easy one. They did not want to tax themselves. Keiko, for whom it had become difficult to travel with Honda, went off by herself to Geneva, the Japanese ambassador to Switzerland being a relative. The Hamanakas wanted to have two or three days with the Hondas, and so the two families took rooms in Shimoda. Overwhelmed by the summer heat, Honda rarely left his air-conditioned room.
It was agreed that they would have dinner together each night. The Hamanakas came for Honda. Where was Momoko, they asked. She had come a little earlier, said Honda, and was out in the garden with Tōru. And so the Hamanakas sat down and waited for the young couple to return.
Honda was standing by the window, a cane in his hand.
It was all very stupid. He was not hungry, and the menu was an impoverished one. He knew without going to the dining room that vulgar family merriment awaited him. And Hamanaka table conversation was tedium itself.
The old had politics forced upon them. Even though he ached in all his joints, a man of seventy-eight could hide his want of interest only under a show of wit and good humor. A want of interest was important all the same. It was the only way to win out over the idiocy of the world. The unconcern of a beach receiving each day the waves and the driftwood.
Honda had thought that, purse-lipped and surrounded by lackeys, he had yet a little life in him, a little sharpness with which to hinder the purse-lipped days and the lackeys; but it had deserted him. All he really had was an overwhelming sense of folly, and of a vulgarity that melted into a monotone. How myriad were the manifestations of the vulgar. The vulgarity of elegance, the vulgarity of ivory, the vulgarity of holiness, the vulgarity of the craze, erudite vulgarity, the vulgarity of the academic pretender, coquettish vulgarity, the vulgarity of the Persian cat, the vulgarity of monarchs and beggars, of lunatics, of butterflies, of blister beetles. Reincarnation was retribution for vulgarity. And the chief and indeed the only source of it all was the wish for life. Honda himself was without doubt a part of it. What distinguished him was his uncommonly keen sense of smell.
He glanced sideways at the aging couple before him. Why had the two of them come into his life? The superfluity of their presence ran against his sense of order. But there was no help for it now. There they were, smiling on his sofa, as if prepared to wait a decade or so.
Shigehisa Hamanaka, aged fifty-five, was the former chief of a feudal clan in the northeast. He sought to cover the now-empty pride of family in Bohemianism, and had even written a book of essays, The Chief, which had been a modest success. He was the president of a bank, the head office of which was in his old fief, and he had made a name in the pleasure quarters as an old-style man of taste. There was still a full, rich head of black hair over the gold-rimmed glasses and the almond-shaped face, but the stronger impression was of vapidity. A confident raconteur, he always allowed an appropriate pause before a witty conclusion. A clever talker who made a great point of skipping the preliminaries, a person of gentle irony who never forgot his respect for the aged, he would not have dreamed he was a bore.
His wife Taeko too came from the military aristocracy. She was a fat, rough-featured person, and fortunately the daughter looked like the father. All Taeko could talk about was family. She had seen neither movies nor plays. She passed her life before a television set. They were very proud of the fact that their other three children were married and on their own, and only Momoko remained.
Old-fashioned elegance had thus become shallowness. It was more than Honda could bear to hear Shigehisa talk permissively of the sex revolution, and to hear Taeko’s shocked responses. Shigehisa used his wife’s old-fashioned responses as a part of his act.
Honda wondered why he could not be more tolerant. He knew, as it became more and more of a burden to make new acquaintances, how difficult it was to muster a smile. Contempt was of course the emotion that came first, but even that was rather a lot of trouble these days. He thought how much easier it would be to respond with spittle than with words, even as the words came to his lips, but words were the task that remained. With them an old man could twist the world as he might squash a willow lattice.
“How young you look standing there,” said Taeko. “Like a soldier.”
“A very inappropriate simile, my dear. You must not liken a judge to a soldier. I have never forgotten an animal trainer I once saw in a circus in Germany. That is what Mr. Honda is like.”
“A far more inappropriate simile, I should think, my dear.” Taeko was dreadfully amused.
“I am not striking a pose, you must believe me. I am standing here so that I can see the sunset and the young people in the garden.”
“You can see them?”
Taeko came and stood beside Honda, and Shigehisa too, with dignity, left his chair.
The garden was spread below the third-floor window. It was circular, bordered by a walk that led down to the sea, and there were two or three benches among the shrubs. A few family groups were returning, towels over shoulders, from the pool a level below. They cast long evening shadows over the lawn.
Momoko and Tōru were walking hand in hand halfway along the circle. Their shadows stretched far out to the east. It was as if two great sharks were biting their feet.
Tōru’s shirt was full in the evening breeze, and Momoko’s hair was blowing. They were a most ordinary boy and girl; but to Honda they were as insubstantial as gossamer mosquito nets. The shadows were the substance. They had been eaten away by the shadows, by the deep melancholy of a concept. That was not life, thought Honda. It was something
less easy to excuse. And the terrible fact was that Tōru probably knew.
If the shadow was the substance, then the all too transparent something clinging to it must be wings. Fly! Fly over the vulgarity! The limbs and the heads were a superfluity, too concrete. If the contempt in him was only a little stronger, Tōru could fly off, the girl’s hand in his; but Honda had forbidden it. Honda longed with all the powers of his senile impotence to put his envy to work and give the two of them wings; but not even envy burned very hot in him any more. Only now did he see it for what it was, the most fundamental emotion he had felt toward Kiyoaki and Isao, the source of all lyricism in intellectual man, envy.
Very well, then. Suppose he were to think of Tōru and Momoko as the basest, the least tempting morsels of youth. They would act, fall into each other’s arms, like a pair of puppets. He only had to move a finger. He moved two or three of the fingers on his stick. The pair on the lawn walked toward the cliff path.
“Just look at them, would you. Here we are waiting, and it seems they mean to go farther away.”
Taeko stood with her hand on her husband’s elbow. There was a touch of excitement in her voice.
Facing the sea, the young couple went through the shrubbery and sat down on one of the rough wooden benches. Honda could see from the angle of the heads that they were looking at the sunset. A lump of black came out from under the bench. Honda could not make out whether it was a cat or a dog. Momoko stood up in surprise. Tōru, standing up beside her, took her in his arms.
“Well, now.” The voices of her parents, watching through the window, floated up gently as dandelion floss.
Honda was not watching. The cognizant one was not watching through his peephole. There at the bright window, he was half enacting in his heart the movements his awareness had ordered, directing them with the strength of all his faculties.
“You are young, and you must give evidence of a far stupider vitality. Shall I put thunder into you? A sudden flash of lightning? Shall we have some queer sort of electric phenomenon: perhaps send flames darting from Momoko’s hair?”
A tree stretched its branches spider-like toward the sea. They started to climb it. Honda could feel the tension in the pair beside him.
“I shouldn’t have let her wear pants.” Taeko seemed on the edge of tears. “The little hussy.”
They entwined their legs around the branches and swung up and down. Leaves scattered toward the ground. One tree among the others seemed to have gone mad. The two were like a pair of great birds against the evening sky.
Momoko jumped from the tree first. But she did not jump boldly enough, and her hair was entangled in one of the lower branches. Tōru followed her and sought to disentangle it.
“They’re in love.” Taeko, in tears, nodded again and again.
But Tōru was taking too long. Honda knew immediately that he was deliberately entangling the hair more tightly. The delicately overdone efforts brought a twinge of fear. Secure in these ministrations, Momoko sought to pull away from the branch. The pain was sharp. Pretending to make matters unintentionally worse the more he tried, Tōru mounted the low branch like a jockey. Momoko pulled at the long rope of hair, her back to him. She was weeping, and her hands were at her face.
From the third-floor window, across the wide garden, it was like a scene in wax, a quiet little pantomime. The grandeur was in the evening light, an avalanche falling off to the sea, in the high glow of the light glancing off toward the sea from the clouds, relics of sun showers through the afternoon. Because of the light, the trees and the islands in the bay, closer and closer, spread color on hard, thin lines. The clarity was terrible.
“They’re in love,” said Taeko once more.
A bright rainbow arched over the sea, like an outcropping of the sunlight in Honda’s heart at the idiocy of it all.
24
EXCERPTS from Tōru Honda’s diary.
I cannot excuse the several mistakes I am making in the matter of Momoko. That is because one must proceed from clarity, and the smallest element of miscalculation produces fantasy, and fantasy produces beauty.
I have never been a sufficiently ardent devotee of beauty to believe that beauty produces fantasy and fantasy miscalculation. When I was still new at the signal station, I sometimes misidentified a ship. Especially at night, when it is difficult to calculate the distance between mast lights, I would sometimes take a puny little fishing boat for an international freighter, and send out a signal asking it to identify itself. Unaccustomed to such formal treatment, the fishing boat would sometimes flash back the name of a movie star. It was not however a thing of great beauty.
Momoko’s beauty of course meets all the objective standards. Her love is necessary for me, and I must give her the blade with which to cut herself. A paper knife will not suffice.
I know well enough that the more firmly insistent demands come not from reason or will but from sexual desire. The detailed demands of sex are sometimes mistakenly thought logical. I think that, lest I confuse the two, I must have another woman for sex. That is because the most subtle and delicate wishes of evil are not for a physical wound but for a spiritual. I know well enough the nature of evil within me. It is in the insistent demands of awareness itself, awareness transformed into desire. Or to put the matter differently, it has been clarity in its most perfect form acting out its part in the darkest depths.
I sometimes think it would be better if I were dead. For my plans can be realized on the far side of death. For there I can find true perspective. To do it while still alive is more difficult than the difficult. Especially when you are only eighteen!
I find it very hard to understand the Hamanakas. There can be no doubt that they want us to be engaged for five or six years, and that they will presently exercise their option and bring the two of us together, fully recognized members of society, in high matrimony. But what guarantee have they? Should they have such confidence in their daughter’s beauty? Or is it that they put high hopes on payments for breach of promise?
No, I doubt that they have made any real calculations at all. They take the crudest, most common-sense view of relations between man and woman. To judge from their gasps of admiration when they heard my I.Q., I should imagine that all their energies go into the study of talent, and especially talent with money.
Momoko telephoned from Karuizawa the day I got back from Hokkaido. She wanted to see me and so I must come to Karuizawa. I have no doubt that her parents were behind it. There was just a touch of artificiality in her voice, and so I made bold to be cruel. I replied that since I was deep in studies for my university entrance examinations I was unable to accept her kind invitation. And when I hung up I felt a quite unexpected twinge of sadness. Denial is itself a sort of concession, and it is natural that the concession should bring a shadow of sadness over one’s self-respect. I am not afraid of it.
Summer is almost over. I am very much aware of its passage. As strongly as words can express. There were mackerel clouds and cumulus clouds in the sky today, and a faint touch of sharpness in the air.
Love should follow along, but my emotions must not follow anything.
The little present Momoko gave me in Shimoda is here on my desk. It is a framed bit of white coral. On the back, in two pierced hearts, it carries the inscription: “From Momoko to Tōru.” I do not understand how she can go on being prey to these childish tastes. The case is filled with little bits of tinfoil that float up like the white sands of the sea when you shake it, and the glass is half frosted with indigo. The Suruga Bay I have known is compressed into a frame five inches square, it has become a lyrical miniature forced on me by a girl. But small though it is, the coral has its own grand, cold cruelty, my inviolable awareness at the heart of her lyric.
Whence come the difficulties in my being? Or to put it another way, the ominous smoothness and facileness of my being.
I sometimes think that the ease of it all comes from the fact that my being is a logical impossibility.
>
It is not that I am asking any difficult questions of my being. I live and move without motive power, but that is as much an impossibility as perpetual motion. Nor is it my destiny. How can the impossible be a destiny?
From the moment I was born on this earth, it would seem, my being knew that it flew in the face of reason. I was not born with any defect. I was born like an impossibly perfect human being, a perfect film negative. But this world is full of imperfect positives. It would be a terrible thing for them to develop me, change me into a positive. That is why they are so afraid of me.
The source of greatest amusement to me has been the solemn injunction that I be faithful to myself. It is an impossibility. Had I sought to follow it I would immediately have been dead. It could only have meant forcing the absurdity of my existence into unity.
There would have been ways if I had not had self-respect. It would have been easy, without self-respect, to make others and myself as well accept all manner of distorted images. But is it so very human to be hopelessly monstrous? Though of course the world feels secure when the monstrous is reality.
I am very cautious, but I am greatly wanting in the instinct for self-preservation. And I am so brightly wanting in it that the breeze through the gap sometimes makes me drunk. Since danger is the ordinary, there is no crisis. It is very well to have a sense of balance, since I cannot live without a miraculous sort of balance; but suddenly it becomes a hot dream of imbalance and collapse. The greater the discipline the greater the tendency toward violence, and I grow weary of pressing the control button. I must not believe in my own docility. No one can know what a sacrifice it is for me to be gentle and docile.
But my life has been only duty. I have been like an awkward novice sailor. Only in seasickness and nausea have I escaped from duty. The nausea corresponded to what the world calls love.
For some reason, Momoko is reluctant to come home with me. We talk for an hour or so after school at the Renoir. Sometimes we have our innocent fun in the park, riding the roller coaster. The Hamanakas do not worry a great deal about having their daughter come home late if it is not after dark. Though I sometimes take her to a movie, of course, I must let them know in advance that we are going to be later. There is not much pleasure in these public dates, and so we also have our assignations, brief ones.