I had heard from my friend that there were certain to be “chastity eaters” at such a place. One would imagine rather older women, but such is– not always the case. Women are sometimes interested in education even when they are young. A surprising number of them are good-looking. Their pride dictates against submitting to a sexual virtuoso. They prefer to become tutors and leave a lasting impression on young hearts. The interest in young male purity derives from the pleasure of leading into temptation; and yet, because it is quite clear that the women themselves have no sense of guilt, the pleasure must derive from leaving the man with the guilt which has carefully been nurtured elsewhere. Some are bright and happy, others of a melancholy turn. There is no standard, but they are all like hens warming eggs of sin. They are less interested in hatching the eggs than in cracking the heads of young roosters.
In the course of the evening I made the acquaintance of one of them, a rather well-dressed girl of twenty-five or twenty-six. She said I must call her Nagisa, “Miss Brink,” and did not tell me her real name.
Her eyes were almost uncomfortably large, and she had thin, malicious lips. Yet there was in her face a warm richness as of a rustic orange. Her bosom was a startling white and she had good legs.
“Really!” That was her favorite expression. She was not at all reluctant to ask questions herself, but she greeted every question in return with a “Really!”
Since I had told Father that I would be home at nine, there was only time for dinner. She drew a map and gave me a telephone number and said that since she lived alone there was no need for shyness.
I want to be as precise as possible about what happened when, some days later, I went calling. Because the event itself is so filled with sensual exaggeration and imaginings and disappointments and the events are so distorted, a person departs from the truth in the very effort to be cool and objective; and if he seeks to portray the intoxication, he falls into conceptualizing. I must take up all three, sexual pleasure and the trembling curiosity of a new experience and an oppressive disharmony that could be either sensual or rational. I must cleanly separate them, allowing none to encroach upon the others, and I must transplant them, perfect and undamaged. The task will not be an easy one.
She seemed at first to have overestimated my shyness. She reassured herself repeatedly of the fact that I was “new to the experience.” I did not want to appear under false colors, nor, on the other hand, did I want to be one of those young men who seek to attract a certain sort of woman with their inexperience—not after all a very attractive trait. And so I assumed a delicate arrogance, which was nothing but shyness cloaking itself in vanity.
The woman seemed torn between a desire to put me at my ease and a desire to excite me; but she was really thinking of herself. She knew from experience that over-ardent instruction can make the young person stumble. That was the reason for her sweet reserve. It was the perfume with which she had carefully touched herself. I could see a little gauge wavering in her eyes.
Since it was quite obvious that she was using my eagerness and curiosity to arouse herself, I was reluctant to have her look at me. It was not that I was feeling particularly shy; but I made the gesture as I brushed her eyes shut seem like a demand of shyness. I suppose that thus rolling in the dark a woman feels only the wheel that runs over her.
It goes without saying that my feelings of pleasure were over as soon as they began. I was much relieved. Only with the third try did I feel anything like real pleasure.
And so I saw: pleasure has an intellectual element in it from the start.
Which is to say: a certain distance is established, a play of pleasure and awareness is established, calculation and reckoning are established, and so, until one is able to look clearly down upon one’s pleasure from without, as a woman looks down at her breasts, there is no pleasure. To be sure, my pleasure took a rather thorny shape.
But the knowledge that the shape of something attained to after considerable practice lies concealed in the initial brief and insubstantial satisfaction was not good for my pride. That very first something was not at all the essence of impulse, it was the essence of concept, long in the making. And the intellectual operations of pleasure thereafter? Do they perhaps make the slow (or precipitous) collapse of concept a small dam, and use the electric power to enrich impulse bit by bit? If so, the intellectual road to the beast is very long.
“You’re great,” said the woman afterward. “You have real possibilities.”
How many ships has she seen out of harbor with that same bouquet?
I am avalanching.
Yet I have nothing at all to do with the collapse and ruin of self. This avalanche, willfully destroying family, house, doing injury, bringing shrieks from an inferno, is something that the winter sky has caused to fall gently upon me, and it has nothing to do with my own basic nature. But in the instant of the avalanche, the softness of the snow and the hardness of the cliff change places. The agent of the disaster is the snow and not the self. It is the softness and not the hardness.
For a very long time, indeed since the beginning of natural history, my sort of heart, a heart of irresponsible hardness, has been ready. Most commonly, in the form of a stone. In the purest form of all, a diamond.
But the too-bright sun of winter penetrates even into the transparency of my heart. It is at such times that I see myself with wings that have no obstacles, and I see too that I shall do nothing at all with my life.
I shall probably achieve freedom, but freedom akin to death. None of the things I have dreamed of will come to me in this world.
Like the winter view from the signal station on Suruga Bay, when I could see even the reflections from the automobiles on the Izu Peninsula, I can see with these eyes every detail of the future.
I will no doubt have friends. The clever ones will betray me, and only the stupid ones will remain. It is strange that betrayal should come to a person like me. I suppose that everyone, faced with my clarity, feels the urge to betray. There can be no greater victory for betrayal than to betray such clarity. Probably all the people who are not loved by me are confident that they are so loved. The ones who are loved by me will probably guard a beautiful silence.
The whole world will wish my death; and, each trying to outdo the others, seek to prevent it.
My purity will presently wander beyond the horizon to that invisible realm. Probably at the end of unbearable pain I shall seek to become a god. The pain! I will know all of it, the pain of absolute silence, of a world of nothing at all. I will crouch trembling in a corner, like a sick dog. And the happy ones will sing songs around me.
There is no medicine for it. No hospital. It will be written in tiny gold letters, somewhere in the history of the race: that I was evil.
I vow it: that when I am twenty I will cast Father into hell. I must start making plans.
It would have presented no difficulty at all to go walking arm-in-arm with Nagisa where I had promised to meet Momoko. But I did not wish so hasty a solution, nor did I wish to see Nagisa stupidly intoxicated with victory.
She had given me a little silver chain and medal inscribed with her monogram, “N.” It would not do for school or home wear, but I wore it around my neck when I met Momoko. I knew from the bandage incident that it was not easy to attract Momoko’s attention. Despite the cold, I wore an open shirt and a V-neck sweater, and made sure that my shoe was badly tied. The medal was sure to fall out and catch the sun when I retied it.
It was a considerable disappointment that though I tied my shoe three times Momoko did not notice the medal. The inattentiveness came from complete confidence in her own well-being. I could not, for my own part, make too obvious a show.
In desperation I took Momoko swimming at the heated pool of a large Nakano sports center. She was delighted at this little reminder of our happy summer days in Shimoda.
“You’re a man, aren’t you?”
“I believe so.”
This classical excha
nge between man and woman was taking place here and there beside the pool, where one of those Harunobu scenes, men and women indistinguishable, was being posed in the nude. There were long-haired men indistinguishable from women. I have the confidence to fly symbolically over the head of sex, but I have never felt the urge to melt into the other sex. I have no wish to be a woman. The very structure of woman is the foe of clarity.
I had had a swim and was sitting on the edge of the pool. Momoko was leaning toward me. The medal was no more than three or four inches away.
Finally it caught her eye.
She took it in her hand.
“What does ‘N’ stand for?” Finally she asked the question.
“Guess.”
“Your initials are T.H. What might it be, I wonder.”
“Think about it for a moment.”
“I know. It stands for Nippon.”
I felt rather let down. I began putting myself at a disadvantage by asking questions in return.
“It was a present. Who from, do you think?”
“‘N.’ I have relations named Noda and Nakamura.”
“And why would I be getting presents from your relatives?”
“I know. It’s for ‘north.’ It did occur to me that the design around the edge was like a compass. You got it from a shipping company or something. At a launching. North, for a whaler. Right? Am I right? A whaler, and it was sent to your signal station. No doubt about it.”
I cannot be sure whether Momoko really thought so, or whether she was trying to put herself at ease, or whether she sought to conceal her uneasiness in a play of innocence. I had lost the urge, in any case, to tell her she was wrong.
And so my operations turned to Nagisa. She was a phlegmatic sort, and I could appeal to her bland, harmless curiosity. If she had time to spare, I said, she might like to see my young fiancée from a distance. She accepted immediately. She asked me over and over again whether I had slept with Momoko. She seemed very interested in the practical application her pupil had made of her lessons. I told her when I was to meet Momoko at the Renoir and made her promise to act like a stranger. I knew that she was not one to keep a promise.
I was aware that shortly after our arrival Nagisa had arrived and taken a seat behind us, on the other side of the fountain. Silently and lazily, like a cat, she seemed to be glancing at us from time to time. Since Momoko was the innocent one, the understanding between Nagisa and myself was suddenly closer, and it was as if most of my remarks were being directed at her. The silly expression “physical bond” took meaning.
I was sure that she could hear us through the murmur of the fountain. In the awareness of being overheard, my words took on a certain appearance of sincerity. Momoko was delighted that I was in such good spirits. She was congratulating herself, I could see, that we got on so nicely, though she did not know why.
Tired of conversation, I took the medal from my collar and bit at it. Far from reproving me, Momoko laughed happily. I caught a taste of silver, and against my tongue it felt like an indissoluble pill. The chain brushed my lip and chin. It was pleasant all the same. I felt like a bored dog.
Through the corner of my eye I saw that Nagisa had stood up. I knew from Momoko’s wide eyes that she was standing beside us.
Suddenly a red-nailed hand was tugging at the medal.
“You’re not to eat my medal.”
I stood up and introduced the two.
“I’m sorry to have interrupted you.” Nagisa walked off. “I’ll see you later.”
Momoko was blanched and trembling.
It was snowing. I spent a tedious Saturday afternoon at home. There is a window at the landing of the Western staircase. Only from it do you get a good view of the street. My chin on the sill, I knelt looking out at the snow. It was a quiet street even on ordinary days, and today the automobile tracks were blotted out.
There was a dim light from the snow. Though the sky was dark, the light of the snow signaled a strange time of its own, different from the time of day. Behind the house across the street it settled into hollows between the blocks of a concrete fence.
An old man, umbrella-less, in a brown coat and black beret, came up from the right. There was a pronounced swelling toward the bottom of his coat. He was embracing it. It would seem that he had a parcel of some sort which he wanted to keep dry. I could see a gaunt, hollow face under the beret, quite out of keeping with the stout figure.
He stopped at our gate. There was a low gate beside the main one. I thought he would be some unusually impoverished caller with a request to make of my father. He looked around him, however, not bothering to brush the snow from his now white coat and making no motion toward coming in.
The swelling disappeared. A parcel fell to the ground, as if he had laid a great egg. I gazed at it. At first I could not make out what it might be. A spherical object of many colors glowed darkly from the snow. I saw that it was scraps of fruits and vegetables in a plastic kerchief. The kerchief bulged with bits of red apple, orange carrot, pale green cabbage. If he had gone out to throw them away, then he must be a strict vegetarian who lived alone. In such quantities, they gave the snow a strange, fresh spectrum. Even the bits of green cabbage seemed to breathe with a strangled breathing.
Riveted on the bundle, my eyes fell behind the old man as he walked off. He took tiny steps through the snow. I saw him from behind. Even taking into consideration the hunched shoulders, the coat was shapeless and unnatural. It was still swollen, though not so much as before.
He walked off. He was probably unaware of it himself, but five or six yards from the gate something fell from his coat like a great ink spot.
It was a dead bird, a crow, apparently. Or perhaps a turkey. I even thought I could hear the sound of the wings as it struck the snow; but the old man walked on.
The bird was a puzzle. It was a considerable distance away, blocked by the trees in the garden and further obscured by the snow, and there was a limit to my powers of vision. I thought of going for binoculars or going out to look, but an overpowering inertia held me back.
What sort of bird was it? As I looked at it, for almost too long a time, it came to seem not a bird but a woman’s hair.
Momoko’s sufferings had begun, like a conflagration from a cigarette. The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.
As planned, I became the petitioner. I sought to cajole her, and I followed her lead in saying the most dreadful things about Nagisa. She wept as she told me I must put an end to the affair. I said I would like nothing more, but needed her help. With some exaggeration, I said I would need her help if I was to break off with that devil of a woman.
She agreed to help me, but on one condition. I must throw away the necklace, and she must be witness to the act. Since it was nothing to me, I agreed. The two of us went to the bridge in front of Suidōbashi Station. I took it off and handed it to her, and told her to throw it with her own hand into the filthy canal. She flung it from her, arching it high into the sunlight of the winter evening. It hit the stinking water over which a barge was just then passing. She fell on me, her breathing as heavy as if she had just committed murder. Passers-by looked at us curiously.
It was time for my special night classes. I left her, with a promise to meet on Saturday afternoon.
I had Momoko write to Nagisa a letter of my dictating.
I wonder how many times I used the word “love” that Saturday afternoon. I said that if I loved Momoko and Momoko loved me, then we must plan together to avert disaster, we must write a fraudulent letter.
We met at a bowling alley by the Meiji Gardens. After several strings, we went out hand in hand through the warm winter afternoon, through the shadows of the bare gingko trees, and into a new coffeehouse on Aoyama Avenue. I had brought paper and stamp and envelope.
Applying the anesthetic, I whispered of love as we walked along. In the course of time I had
turned her into a person no different from the mad Kinué. She breathed easily only under the most obvious misconception, that our love was unchanging.
The two of them are alike in their denial of reality, Kinué in her belief that she is beautiful, Momoko in her belief that she is loved. Momoko needs help with her delusion, however, while Kinué needs no word from outside. If only I could raise Momoko to the same level! Since there was in the wish a pedagogical urge—love, so to speak—my protestations of love were not wholly without substance. But was there not a methodological contradiction in having an affirmer of reality like Momoko become a denier? It would not be easy to have her, like Kinué, do battle with the whole world.
But while reading the sacred formula “I love you” over and over, endlessly, a change comes to the heart of the reader. I could almost feel that I was in love, that some corner of my heart was drunk in the sudden and abandoned liberation of the banished word. How similar the tempter is to the flying instructor who must go flying with a beginner!
Momoko’s other requirement, altogether appropriate for a somewhat old-fashioned girl, was no more than a purely “spiritual” affirmation, and all that was needed to satisfy it was a word or two. Words, casting a clear shadow on the earth in their passage—might they not have been the essential I? I had been born to use words thus. If so (these sentimental locutions greatly annoy me, of course), then perhaps the basic mother tongue I have kept hidden is after all the language of love.
While the patient himself is ignorant of the truth, his family goes on telling him that he is certain to recover. So, with the most intense earnestness, I whispered over and over to Momoko of love, there in the beautiful network of shadows from the winter trees.
Once we were at our ease in the coffeehouse, I told her of Nagisa’s nature, as if I were asking her advice and following it. I described in outline certain stratagems likely to be effective. I of course created my Nagisa with complete license.