Yours sincerely,
Keiko Hisamatsu
One could if one chose see the letter as a rude and haughty one, but Tōru smiled at the thought of Keiko’s confusion after the September incident. He could read between the lines. Keiko, so proud of her immorality, retreated trembling behind bolted gates in the face of scandal.
But something in the letter aroused Tōru’s delicate guard. That Keiko, so staunch an ally of his father, should be inviting him—might it not be to make sport of him? Might her intention in introducing him to all those pretentious guests as the son of Shigekuni Honda not be to excite them and so to embarrass not Honda but Tōru himself? That was it. There could be little doubt.
Tōru’s combative instincts were aroused. He would go to the party as the son of the notorious Honda. No one of course would touch upon the matter. But he would shine as a son unapologetic for a notorious father.
The sensitive spirit would move silently among them, a faint, beautiful, somehow sad smile on its lips, the skeletons of family scandal (such beastly little affairs), no doing of its own, ranged beside it. Tōru could see all the pale poetry. The contempt and interference of the old would push the girls irresistibly in Tōru’s direction. Keiko’s calculations would prove faulty.
Not owning a tuxedo, Tōru had to put in a quick order for one. He slipped into it when, on the nineteenth, it was delivered, and went over to show Kinué.
“You look very good in it. Lovely. I know how much you wanted to take me dancing in it. What a pity that I should always be so ill. What a real pity. And that’s why you’ve come to show me. How very kind of you. That’s why I like you.”
It was obesity that had rendered Kinué immobile. She was in the best of health and she got no exercise, and in these six months she had fattened beyond recognition. The heaviness and immobility gave more immediacy to her illnesses. She was constantly taking liver pills, and she would gaze from the chaise longue through the trees at the blue sky, so soon to be lost. Her perpetual refrain was that she was not long for this world, and she was a great trial for the maids, whom Tōru had told that they were in no circumstances to laugh.
What Tōru admired was the cunning with which, offered a set of conditions, she would outflank them and raise defenses which would give her the advantage and reinforce her beauty and perhaps add a touch of the tragic to it. She had immediately sensed that he did not mean to take her out. So she had put her illness to the uses of the situation. Tōru thought he had things to learn from this so stubbornly guarded pride. She had become his teacher.
“Turn around. Oh, it’s very nicely cut. The shoulder line is beautiful. Everything looks good on you. Just like me. Well, you must forget all about me tomorrow evening and enjoy yourself. But when you’re enjoying yourself most, think for just a moment of the sick girl you’ve left at home. But just a moment. You need a flower in your lapel. If only I were strong enough I’d go and pick it for you myself. Maid, please. The winter rose, the red one, if you will.”
She had the maid pick a little crimson rosebud just coming into bloom, and herself put it in his buttonhole.
“There.” With the most languorous, evanescent of fingers, she pushed the stem through. She tapped the glossy silk of the lapel. “Go out into the garden and let me have another look at you.”
The corpulent figure seemed to be breathing its last.
At the appointed time, seven in the evening, Tōru pulled up in his Mustang, as directed by the map, at a wide, white-graveled drive in Azabu. There were no other cars yet.
Tōru was astonished at how old-fashioned Keiko’s mansion was. The lamps under the trees set off a circular Regency front. There was something rather ghostly about the place, the effect intensified by red ivy blackened by the night.
Tōru was ushered in by a white-gloved butler past the circular domed hallway to a parlor in the rich Momoyama style, and there seen to a Louis XV chair. He was rather ashamed to find himself the first guest. The house was brilliantly lighted but still. There was a large Christmas tree in one corner. It seemed out of place. Left by himself when the butler had taken his order for a drink, he leaned against the old-fashioned paned window and looked out through the trees at the lights of the city and a sky turned purplish by neon.
A door opened and Keiko came in.
The brilliant formal dress of the septuagenarian before him quite robbed him of speech. Sleeves trailing to the hem of the skirt, her evening dress was beaded over its whole surface. The shifting colors and patterns of the beads from the neck down over the skirt were such as to dazzle the eye. At the bosom, the wings of a peacock in green on a gold ground, waves of purple over the sleeves, a continuous wine-colored pattern down over the waist, purple waves and gold clouds on the skirt, the several boundaries marked in gold. The white of the organdy ground was set off by a threefold Western pattern in silver net. From the skirt emerged the toe of a purple satin slipper, and at the always proud neck was an emerald Georgette stole, draped down over the shoulders and reaching to the floor. Below her hair, cut shorter and closer than usual, hung gold earrings. Her face had the frozen look of one that had more than once been ministered to by plastic surgeons, but the parts that still remained under her control seemed to assert themselves all the more haughtily. The awesome eyes, the grand nose. The lips, like red-black bits of apple beginning to rot, tortured into a yet more shining red.
“I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said brightly. The face with its sculptured smile came toward him.
“My but you’re looking grand.”
“Thank you.” Briefly and abstractedly, in the Western fashion, she showed him her well-shaped nostrils.
The aperitifs came.
“Perhaps we should turn down the lights.”
The butler turned off the chandelier lights. In the flickering of the Christmas tree, Keiko’s eyes flickered, as did the beads on her dress. Tōru was beginning to feel uneasy.
“The others are late. Or is it that I am too early?”
“The others? You’re my only guest this evening.”
“So you were lying about the others?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I changed my plans. I thought I would have my Christmas alone with you.”
“I think I’ll ask to be excused, then.”
“Why?” Seated quietly, Keiko made no motion toward stopping him.
“Some sort of plot. Or a trap. Something in any case you’ve talked over with Father. I’m tired of being made fun of.” He had disliked this old woman from their first meeting.
Keiko was motionless. “If it were something I’d talked over with Mr. Honda, I wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble. I invited you because I wanted to have a good talk with you, all by ourselves. It is true that I lied to you, because I knew you wouldn’t come if you knew you were to be my only guest. But a Christmas dinner with only two people is still a Christmas dinner. Here we are both of us in party dress.”
“I suppose you want to give me a good lecturing.” Tōru was angry at himself for having let her make her excuses.
“Nothing of the sort. I just want to talk with you quietly about some things Mr. Honda would throttle me for if he were to find out. They are secrets that only Mr. Honda and I know. If you don’t want to listen, well, that is that.”
“Secrets?”
“Just sit down there quietly, if you will.” An elegantly sardonic smile on her lips, she pointed to the somewhat worn Watteau garden party on the chair Tōru had just vacated.
The butler announced dinner. Opening doors Tōru had taken to be a wall, he ushered them into the next room, where the table was set with red candles. Keiko’s dress jingled.
Not one to encourage conversation, Tōru ate in silence. The thought that the skill with which he managed his knife and fork was the result of Honda’s assiduous tutelage enraged him all over again. Tutelage to make people think him a long-time adept of a cravenness he had not known until he met Honda and Keiko.
Keiko’
s fingers at knife and fork, beyond the heavy baroque candlesticks, absently quiet and diligent, like an old woman at her knitting, were a young girl’s fingers brought into old age.
The chilled turkey was tasteless, like the dry skin of an old man. The chestnut stuffing and the cranberry jelly had for Tōru the sourly saccharine taste of hypocrisy.
“Do you know why you were so suddenly sought after to become heir to the house of Honda?”
“How should I?”
“Very easygoing of you. You haven’t wanted to know?”
Tōru did not answer. Putting down her knife and fork, Keiko pointed through the candle smoke at his tuxedo front.
“It’s all very simple. It’s because you have three moles on your left chest.”
Tōru was unable to hide his surprise. Keiko knew of those three moles, the root of his pride, which through all his life should have attracted the attention of no one but himself. An instant later he had brought himself under control. The surprise had come from the fact that, by chance, the symbol of his own pride had coincided with a symbol of something for someone else. Though the moles may have set the something in motion, that need not mean that he had been found out. But Tōru had underestimated the intuitions of the aged.
The surprise so clear on his face seemed to give Keiko greater confidence. The words poured forth.
“See? You can’t believe it. It was all too foolish, too nonsensical from the start. You have told yourself that you have managed everything coolly and realistically, but you swallowed the nonsensical premises whole. Who would be so foolish as to want to adopt a complete stranger on a single meeting just because he had taken a liking? What did you think when we first came with the proposal? We made all sorts of excuses to you and to your superiors, of course. But what did you really think? It puffed you up, I should imagine. People like to think they have their strong points. You thought that your childish dreams and our proposal matched admirably? That your strange childish confidence had been justified? That’s what you thought?”
Tōru was for the first time afraid of Keiko. He felt not the slightest constraint because of class, but there are persons endowed with a special nose for scenting out worth. They are the angel-killers.
The conversation was interrupted by dessert. Tōru had let the moment for an answer pass. He knew that he had underestimated his adversary.
“Do you think that your hopes and those of someone else coincide, that your hopes can be smoothly realized for you by someone else? People live for themselves and think only of themselves. You who more than most think only of yourself have gone too far and let yourself be blinded.
“You thought that history has its exceptions. There are none. You thought that the race has its exceptions. There are none.
“There is no special right to happiness and none to unhappiness. There is no tragedy and there is no genius. Your confidence and your dreams are groundless. If there is on this earth something exceptional, special beauty or special evil, nature finds it out and uproots it. We should all by now have learned the hard lesson, that there are no ‘elect.’
“You thought, didn’t you, that you were a genius beyond compensation. You thought of yourself, didn’t you, as a beautiful little cloud of evil floating over humanity.
“Mr. Honda saw it all the minute he saw your moles. He decided in that instant that he must have you with him, to save you from the danger. He thought that if he left you as you were, if he left you to your ‘fate,’ you would be killed by nature at twenty.
“He tried to save you by adopting you, by smashing to bits your ‘godlike’ pride, by drilling into you the world’s rules for culture and happiness, by making you over into a perfectly ordinary young man. You did not recognize that you had the same starting point as the rest of us. The sign of your refusal to recognize was those three moles. It was affection that made him adopt you without telling you why he wanted to save you. The affection, of course, of a man who knew too much of the world.”
Tōru was more and more uneasy. “Why do you say I will die at twenty?”
“I think probably the danger has passed. Let’s talk about it in the other room.”
A bright fire had been lighted in the fireplace. Below the mantel, a gold-clouded alcove in the Japanese style with a Kōtatsu hanging, two small golden doors opened to reveal the fireplace. Tōru and Keiko sat before the fire, a small table between them. Keiko repeated the long story of birth and rebirth she had had from Honda.
Tōru listened, gazing into the fire. He started at the faint sound of a collapsing log.
Clinging to a log with its smoke, the flame would twist and grow, and then show again in the darkness between log and log, its bed rich with a bright, still repose. Like a dwelling, the small floor dizzying in its reds and vermilions was deep in quiet, marked off by a rough frame of logs.
Sometimes the smoke bursting through the somber logs was like a grass fire far out on a night plain. There were great vistas in the fire, and the shadows moving in the depths of the fireplace were a miniature of the flames of political upheaval tracing shadows across the heavens.
As the flames died down on one log, an even expanse of quiet vermilion would show itself from under a delicate tortoiseshell bed of ashes, trembling like a heap of white feathers. The firm bind of logs would collapse at its foundations. Then, maintaining a precarious balance, it would burn up like a great rock in the air.
Everything was flowing, in motion. The quiet chain of smoke, so stable, was forever breaking up. The collapse of a log that had finished its work brought a sort of repose.
“Very interesting,” said Tōru, rather tartly, when he had heard the story to the end. “But where’s the proof?”
“Proof?” Keiko hesitated. “Is there proof for the truth?”
“When you say ‘truth’ it sounds false.”
“If you demand proof, I should imagine Mr. Honda has preserved Kiyoaki Matsugae’s diary all these years. You might ask to see it. He wrote only of dreams, and Mr. Honda says all of them have come true. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe nothing I’ve said has anything to do with you. You were born on March twentieth and Ying Chan died in the spring, and you have those three marks, and so it would seem that you are her reincarnation. But we have not been able to find out exactly when she died. Her twin sister said only that it was in the spring, but she seems unable to remember the exact day. Mr. Honda has investigated in any number of ways, but without success. If she was bitten by a snake and died later than March twenty-first, you go scot free. The spirit wanders around for at least a week. So your birthday has to be a week after she died.”
“Actually I don’t know my own birthday. My father was at sea and there was no one to take care of the details, and the date of registration was put down as the birthday. But I was born before March twentieth.”
“The earlier it was, the dimmer the possibility,” Keiko said coldly. “But maybe it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“It doesn’t matter?” Tōru showed signs of indignation.
Quite aside from whether or not he believed the terrible story he had heard, to be told that it did not matter seemed to him like a naked denial of his reasons for being. Keiko had the ability to make a person seem like an insect. It lay behind her unchanging gaiety.
In the light from the fire the multicolored evening dress was sending off deep, rich hues. It arched and coiled around her like a rainbow in the night.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe from the outset you were a fraud. In fact I myself am rather sure that you are a fraud.”
He glanced at her profile. She had spoken into the fire as if presenting a petition. There was no describing the splendor of that profile, set aglow by the fire. The fire in the eyes enhanced the proud high bridge of the nose. It sent everyone else into childish fretfulness. It dominated relentlessly.
Thoughts of murder came to Tōru. How could he upset this woman, leave her pleading for her life? Were he to throttle her, to shove her head
into the flames, he was sure she would look back at him with a proudly burning face, a grand mane of fire swirling around her. Tōru’s self-respect was hurting, and he feared her next words, likely to bring blood. What he most feared was blood pouring from an open wound in his self-respect. Its hemophilia would not permit the flow to be stopped. And so he had until now used all emotions to draw a line between emotion and self-respect, and, avoiding the danger of love, armed himself with countless thorns.
Keiko seemed intent, quietly and ceremoniously, on saying what had to be said.
“We will know for certain that you were a fraud if you don’t die in the next six months. We will know that you are not the regrowth of the beautiful seed Mr. Honda was after, and that you are what an entomologist would call a simulator. I doubt myself that we have to wait a year. It does not seem to me that you are doomed to die in six months. There is nothing inevitable about you, not a thing a person would hate to lose. There is in you not a thing to make a person imagining your death feel that a shadow had come over the world.
“You’re a mean, cunning little country boy of the sort we see sprawled all over the place. You want to get your hands on your father’s money, and so you arrange to have him declared incompetent. You’re surprised, aren’t you? I know everything. And when you have money and power, what do you propose to seek next? Success? Your thoughts don’t go a step beyond those of any mediocre boy. The only way Mr. Honda’s training has gone wrong is that it has done nothing more than bring out your essential nature.
“There is nothing in the least special about you. I guarantee you a long life. You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightning with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself. All you have is a certain premature senility. Your life will be suited for coupon-clipping. Nothing more.