But if Tōru was counterfeit? If he was to live on and on, and Honda, unable to keep up with him, to waste away?
The roots of the strangling desire within him were in the uncertainty. If he was to die first, then he could not refuse the basest of desires. He might all along have been destined to die in humiliation and miscalculation. The miscalculation about Tōru may itself have been the trap laid by Honda’s destiny. If a person like Honda had a destiny.
The fact that Tōru’s awareness was too much like his own had long been a seed of disquiet. Perhaps Tōru had read everything. Perhaps Tōru knew that he would live a long life, and, reading the determined malice in the practical education given him by an old man confident of his early death, had plotted his revenge.
Perhaps the eighty-year-old and the twenty-year-old were even now engaged in close combat over life and death.
Night in the Meiji Gardens, for the first time in twenty years. The car had turned left from the Gondawara entrance and was on the circular drive.
“Keep going, keep going.” Each time Honda gave the order he added a cough, like a bothersome accessory.
Egg-colored shirts appeared and disappeared among the night trees. For the first time in a very long while, Honda felt that very special throb in his chest. Old desire still lay piled under the trees like last year’s leaves.
“Go on, go on.”
The car turned right behind the art gallery, where the groves were thickest. There were two or three couples. The lighting was as inadequate as ever. Suddenly there was a glaring cluster of lights to the left. In the middle of the park the entrance to the expressway gaped with a multitude of lights, like a deserted amusement park.
To the right would be the grove on the left side of the art gallery. The night trees cut off the dome, and branches poured out over the sidewalk, a tangle of firs, plantains, pines. Even from the moving car he could hear the insects in the clump of agaves. As if it had been yesterday, he remembered the ferocity of the mosquitoes in the thickets and the sound of slapping against naked skin.
He dismissed the car at the parking lot by the art gallery. The driver glanced at him from under a narrow forehead. It was the sort of glance that can sometimes work collapse. You may go, Honda said again, more strongly. Pushing his stick out on the sidewalk ahead of him, he climbed from the car.
The parking lot was closed at night. A sign said that access was forbidden. A barricade blocked off the entrance. There was no light in the attendant’s shelter, and no sign of life.
Looking after the car, Honda walked down the sidewalk past the agaves. They flung out harsh leaves, a pale green in the darkness, quiet, like a clump of malice. There were few passers-by, only a man and woman on the sidewalk opposite.
Having come as far as the façade of the art gallery, Honda stopped and looked at the great empty scheme in which he found himself. The dome and the two wings rose powerfully into the moonless night. The rectangular pond and the white gravel of the terrace, long streaks of light from the lamps cutting off the dim white of the gravel like the line of the tide. To the left loomed the round wall of the Olympic Stadium, its now-dark floodlights high against the sky. Far below, lamps, like a mist, touched the outermost branches of the trees.
In the symmetrical plaza, which contained no shadow of desire, Honda felt as if he were at the center of the Womb Mandala.
The Womb Mandala, one of the two elemental worlds, is paired with the Diamond Mandala. Its symbol is the lotus, and its Buddhas manifest the virtue of charity.
The womb has also the meaning of inclusiveness. Just as the womb of the beggar woman held the embryo of the Lord of Light, so the muddied heart of the ordinary man holds the wisdom and mercy of all Buddhas.
The perfect symmetry of the shining mandala holds at its center the Court of the Eight-Petaled Lotus, abode of the Lord of Great Light. Twelve courts stretch out in the four directions, and the abodes of the several Buddhas are fixed with delicate and detailed symmetry.
If the dome of the art gallery, high in the moonless night, was taken for the central court, then the avenue where Honda stood, separated from it by the pond, was perhaps the abode of the Peacock Lord, to the west of the Court of Emptiness.
With the Buddhas disposed geometrically on the golden mandala transferred to the dark groves of the symmetrical plaza, the expanse of gravel and the emptiness of the sidewalk were suddenly filled, merciful faces were everywhere, dizzying in the full light of day. The more than two hundred holy faces, and more than two hundred of the Diamond Mandala as well, were shining in the groves, and the ground was ablaze with light.
The vision faded as he walked off. The night was filled with the singing of insects, cicada voices stitched the shadows like needles.
The familiar path was still there through the groves, to the right of the art gallery. He remembered with longing that the smell of the grass and of the night trees had been an indispensable part of desire.
He felt the return of a sharp sense of pleasure, as if he were crossing a tideland, at his feet the workings of fish and shellfish and starfish and crustaceans and seahorses, as at night on a coral reef, the water lapping warm against the soles of his feet, in danger of being cut at each step by the pointed rocks. Pleasure dashed ahead, the body was unable to follow. Signs, indications, were everywhere. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he saw white shirts scattered through the groves, like the aftermath of a slaughter.
There was a previous caller in the shadows where Honda hid himself. Honda could tell from the dark shirt if from nothing else that it was a veteran peeper. The man was so short, coming only to Honda’s shoulders, that Honda at first took him for a boy. When he made out the grizzled head, the moist breathing so near at hand seemed heavy and stupid.
Presently the man’s eyes left their object and were trained on Honda’s profile. Honda looked studiously away, but he had felt that the short gray hair bristling from the temples was somehow related to a disconcerting memory. He struggled to bring it out. The usual cough rose to his throat, though he fought to keep it back.
A certain confidence came into the man’s breathing. Raising himself to his full height, he whispered in Honda’s ear.
“So we meet again. You still come, do you? You haven’t forgotten?”
Honda turned and looked into the rodent eyes. A memory came back from twenty-two years before. It was the man who had stopped him in front of the Ginza P.X.
And he remembered with fear how coldly he had treated the man, asserting mistaken identity.
“You needn’t worry. Here is here and there is there. Let’s let bygones be bygones.” This way of forestalling Honda’s thoughts added to the uneasiness. “But you’ll have to stop that coughing.” He turned to look busily off beyond the tree trunks.
Breathing more easily as the man moved some distance away, Honda looked into the grasses beyond the tree. The throbbing had departed, however. It had been replaced by uneasiness and, again, anger and sadness. Self-forgetfulness withdrew as he pursued it. Though the spot was well suited for viewing the man and woman on the grass, there was a false quality about them, as if they knew they were being watched and were acting parts. There was none of the joy in seeing, there was neither the sweet pressure from the recesses of scrutiny nor drunkenness of clarity itself.
Though they were only a yard or two away, the light was too dim for him to make out details or the expressions on the faces. There seemed to be no screen between him and them, and he could approach no nearer. He hoped that if he went on looking the old throb would return. One hand against the trunk of the tree, one hand on his stick, he looked down at the couple.
Although the little man showed no disposition to interfere with his sport, Honda went on remembering things he should not have remembered. Since his own stick was uncurved, he could not hope to imitate the virtuosity of the old man who used his stick to lift skirts. The man had been old then, and no doubt he was dead by now. No doubt rather large numbers of the old
men in the “audience” had died in the course of these twenty years. And not a few among the young “performers” too would have married and gone away, or died in traffic accidents or from juvenile cancer or high blood pressure or heart and kidney ailments. Because movements and transfers are far brisker among the performers than in the audience, some of them would be in apartment clusters in bedroom towns an hour or so by private railway from Tokyo, ignoring wives and children and abandoning themselves to the joys of television. And the day was at hand when some of them would join the audience.
Something soft brushed his right hand. A large snail was making its way down the tree.
He pulled his hand gently away. The flesh and the shell in succession, like the celluloid of the soap dish after the sticky suds, left revulsion. From just such a tactile impression the world could melt away, like a corpse in a tank of sulfuric acid.
Honda looked down again at the man and woman. There was almost a pleading in his eyes. Make me drunk, the earliest moment possible. Young people of the world, in ignorance and silence, let me get drunk to my heart’s content on the forms of your passion, which have no room for the old.
Sprawled out in the singing of insects, the woman raised herself and put her arms around the man’s neck. The man, who was wearing a black beret, had his hand deep under her skirt. Her fingertips moved energetically over the wrinkles of his shirt. She was twisted against his chest, like a spiral stairway. Panting, she raised her head and kissed him, as if she were gulping down medicine.
As Honda gazed, so intently that his eyes ached, he felt a surge of desire, like the first rays of the morning sun, from depths until then empty.
The man reached into his hip pocket. The thought that in the very middle of desire he feared being robbed brought a sudden chilling of Honda’s own desire. The next instant he was doubting his eyes.
The object the man took from his pocket was a spring knife. His forefinger touched it and there was a sound as of a rasping snake’s tongue. The blade gleamed in the dark. Honda could not be sure where the woman had been stabbed, but there was a scream. The man sprang up and looked around. The beret had slipped back. For the first time Honda saw the hair and face. The hair was a pure white, and the emaciated face was that of a sixty-year-old, wrinkled to every corner.
The man brushed past Honda, now in a state of shock, and ran off with a speed that belied his years.
“Let’s get out of here,” muttered the rat-like little man in Honda’s ear. “There’s going to be hell to pay.”
“I couldn’t run if I wanted to,” said Honda weakly.
“Too bad. They’ll suspect you if you don’t get away.” The man bit at his fingernail. “Maybe you should stay and be a witness.”
There was a whistle, a rush of footsteps, and a stir of people getting to their feet. The beam of a flashlight came from surprisingly near in the shrubbery. Policemen were standing around the woman, discussing the problem in loud voices.
“Where’d he get her?”
“In the thigh.”
“It’s not much of a cut.”
“What sort of man was he? Tell us what sort of man he was.”
The policeman who had been crouching beside the woman with his flashlight in her face stood up.
“An old man, she says. He won’t have gone very far.”
Trembling, Honda pressed his face against the tree. His eyes were closed. The bark was damp. It was as if a snail were crawling over his face.
He opened his eyes narrowly. He could feel the beam from the flashlight. Someone shoved at him, from so low that it had to be the little man. Honda stumbled from the shelter of the big tree. His face almost fell against one of the policemen. The policeman grabbed his wrist.
A reporter for a weekly magazine specializing in scandal happened to be at the police station. He was delighted at news of the stabbing in the Meiji Gardens.
The woman, her leg heavily bandaged, was asked to identify Honda. It took three hours for Honda’s innocence to be established.
“I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t this old gentleman,” said the woman. “I met the other one a couple of hours ago on a streetcar. He was an old man, but he dressed very young, and he was a good talker, a good mixer, you might say. I’d never have dreamed he could do such a thing. That’s right. I don’t know the first thing about him, his name or where he lives or what he does or anything.”
Before the woman confronted him, Honda was firmly tied up and his identity was established and he was forced to reveal the circumstances that had brought a person of his standing to the park at such an hour. It was a nightmare, that precisely the foolish story he had heard upward of twenty years ago from his old legal friend should now be his own experience. They all seemed to have the lucidity of a nightmare, quite divorced from reality; the shabby police station, the dirty walls of the interrogation room, the strangely bright light, the bald head of the detective.
He was allowed to go home at three in the morning. A maid got up and suspiciously opened the gate. He went to his room. He was troubled by bad dreams.
He came down with a cold the next day and was a week getting over it.
The morning he began to feel a little better, Tōru paid an unexpected visit. Smiling, he put a weekly magazine by Honda’s pillow.
It carried this headline: “Troubles of His Excellency Mr. Judge-Voyeur, Falsely Accused of Stabbing.”
Honda took up his glasses. There was an unpleasant throbbing in his chest. The article was astonishingly accurate, even carrying Honda’s real name. This was the climactic sentence: “The appearance of an eighty-year-old voyeur would seem to indicate that the control of Japan by the aged extends even to the world of deviates.”
The statement that his proclivities were not new but that for some twenty years he had had numbers of acquaintances among the voyeurs made Honda sure who the informant had been. The police themselves must have introduced the reporter to the little man. A suit for libel would only add to the embarrassment.
It was a vulgar incident that deserved to be laughed away; but Honda, who would have hoped that he no longer had prestige and honor to lose, saw in the loss of them that they were in fact still present.
It seemed certain that for rather a long time people would associate his name not with his spiritual and intellectual endowments but with the scandal. People were not quick to forget scandals. It was not moral indignation that made them remember. For encapsulating a person a scandal was the simplest and most efficient container.
The stubbornness of the cold told him that he was crumbling physically. To have been a suspect was an experience which, in the complete absence of intellectual dignity, seemed to bring a collapse of flesh and bones. Knowledge, learning, thought, could do nothing for it. What good would it have done to confront the detective with the fine details of the concepts he had acquired in India?
Henceforth Honda would take out his calling card:
“Shigekuni Honda”
“Attorney-at-Law”
People would insert a line in the cramped space between the other two:
Shigekuni Honda
Eighty-Year-Old Voyeur
Attorney-at-Law
And so Honda’s career would be compressed into a single line.
“Former judge, eighty-year-old voyeur.”
And so the invisible edifice which Honda’s awareness had built through his long life had collapsed in an instant, and a single line was inscribed on the foundation. It was as concise as a white-hot blade. And it was true.
After the September incident Tōru moved coolly to have things his way.
He took as his lawyer an old lawyer with whom Honda had feuded, and consulted with him upon the possibility of having Honda declared incompetent. An examination would be required to establish mental debility, but the lawyer seemed confident of the results.
And as a matter of fact the change in Honda was clear. After the incident he stopped going out and he seemed afraid of everything. It
should be easy enough to establish the symptoms of senile delusions. Tōru had only to appear before a court of domestic relations and have Honda declared incompetent, and the lawyer would be appointed his guardian.
The lawyer consulted a psychiatrist with whom he was on good terms. Behind Honda’s much-publicized misconduct the psychiatrist drew a picture of senile unease. Two ailments emerged, “vicarious sexual desire,” an obsession like a fire reflected in a mirror, not to be made light of, and incontinence resulting from senility. Everything else could be left to the legal system, said the lawyer. He added that it would be good if Honda were to begin spending his money unwisely, in such a way as to give rise to fears that the estate might be endangered, but unfortunately there were no such tendencies. Tōru was in any case worried less about money than about power.
27
LATE IN NOVEMBER a splendid engraved invitation, in English, came to Tōru from Keiko.
There was a letter with it.
Dear Tōru,
I have been very bad about keeping in touch.
Everyone seems to have made arrangements for Christmas Eve, and so I am having a premature Christmas party on the twentieth. I have until now always invited your father, but I have had to conclude that because of his advanced years an invitation this year would be a disservice, and I am inviting you instead. I think we should keep the matter secret from him. That is why I have addressed the invitation to you.
I fear that to say so will be to reveal too much of myself, but the truth is that since the September affair I have found it difficult to invite your father, out of deference to the other guests. I know it will seem to you that I am a bad friend, but in our world it is the final stroke when the private becomes public. I must be very careful.
My real reason for inviting you is that through you I want to continue relations with the Honda family. I will be delighted therefore if you can accept this invitation.
And so do please honor me by coming alone. Among the other guests will be several ambassadors and their wives and daughters, the Foreign Minister and his wife, the president of the Federation of Economic Organizations and his wife, and numbers of other pretty ladies as well. You will see from the invitation that it is to be black tie. It would be a great help if you could let me know soon whether or not you will be able to attend.