“You cannot kill Mr. Honda or me. Your sort of evil is a legal sort of evil. All puffed up by illusions born of abstract concepts, you strut about as the master of a destiny even though you have none of the qualifications. You think you have seen to the ends of the earth. But you have not once had an invitation beyond the horizon. You have nothing to do with light or enlightenment, there is no real spirit in flesh or in heart. At least Ying Chan’s spirit was in the shining beauty of her flesh. Nature has not had a glance for you, it has not had a glimmer of hostility toward you. The person Mr. Honda is looking for has to be one to inspire jealousy of nature at its own creation.
“You’re a clever boy, no more. If someone pays your expenses you swim through the entrance examinations and a good job is waiting for you at the other end. A model student for the Education Fund. Propaganda material for the do-gooders who say that if material wants are taken care of, all sorts of hidden treasures will emerge. Mr. Honda was too good to you, and gave you too much confidence. He prescribed the wrong dose, that is all. Give you the right dose and you’ll be back on the track. Make you the secretary to some vulgar politician and you’ll wake up. I’ll be happy to introduce you to one, at your convenience, any time.
“You will do well to remember what I have said. You have seen and think you have seen it all; but it is no more than the little circle in a thirty-power telescope. You would have been happier, I suppose, if we had let you go on thinking that was the whole world.”
“It was you who dragged me out of it.”
“And what made you come so happily was the thought that you were different.
“Kiyoaki Matsugae was caught by unpredictable love, Isao Iinuma by destiny, Ying Chan by the flesh. And you? By a baseless sense of being different, perhaps?
“If destiny is something that takes hold of a person from outside and drags him after, then the other three had destiny. And has anything caught you? Only we, Mr. Honda and I.” Letting the green and gold peacock on her bosom take the fire as it would, Keiko laughed. “We are two bored, cold, cynical old people. Can your pride really permit you to call us destiny? A nasty old man and woman? An old voyeur and an old lesbian?
“You may think you have taken stock of the world. The ones who come summoning a boy like you are the ones who have taken stock of the world. The one who drags out the conceited purveyor of awareness is the veteran practitioner of the same trade. No one else would have come knocking on your door, you may be sure. You would have gone through life without the knock, and the results would have been the same. Because you have had no destiny. The beautiful death was not for you. It was not for you to be like the other three. The drab, dreary heir, that is the role for you. I invited you tonight to let you learn all about it.”
Tōru’s hand was trembling, and his eye was on the poker beside the fire. It would have been easy to reach for it, pretending to stir the fire. He would arouse no curiosity, and then he had only to swing it. He could feel the weight of it in his hand, he could see the blood spurting over gold chair and gold doors. But he did not reach out. He was fearfully thirsty, but he did not ask for water. The anger that enflamed his cheeks seemed to him like the first passion he had known. It remained shut up within him.
28
REMARKABLY, Tōru came to Honda with a request. He wanted to borrow Kiyoaki’s diary.
Honda was reluctant to lend it, but even more reluctant not to.
He let Tōru have it for two or three days. They became a week. On the morning of the twenty-eighth, when he had resolved to have it back, he was startled by an outcry from the maids. Tōru, in his bedroom, had taken poison.
It being the end of the year, the family doctor was not available. Honda had to take the risk of publicity and call an ambulance. There was a wall of onlookers when the ambulance came shrieking up. They were eager for another scandal from a house that had already provided one.
Tōru remained in a coma and there were convulsions, but his life was not in danger. He felt severe pains in the eyes, however, when he regained consciousness. Impediments developed in both eyes, and he totally lost his sight. The poison had attacked the retina, which had deteriorated beyond hope of recovery.
The poison was industrial wood alcohol, stolen under cover of the year-end confusion from a factory that belonged to a relative of one of the maids. The maid, who followed Tōru unquestioningly, wept and insisted that she had not dreamed he would drink it.
The blind Tōru said almost nothing. After the turn of the year Honda asked him about the diary.
“I burned it just before I took the poison,” he answered briefly.
His answer when asked for an explanation was much to the point.
“Because I never dream.”
Honda asked for Keiko’s help any number of times while all this was taking place. There was something strange about her. It was as if she alone knew the motive for the attempted suicide.
“He has twice the pride of most boys. I should imagine he did it to prove he’s a genius.”
When pressed, she admitted that she had revealed everything at her Christmas party. She said she had done it out of friendship, but Honda replied that he wished to see no more of her. He thus announced the end of a beautiful friendship that had lasted more than twenty years.
The declaration of incompetence was revoked, and now it was the blind Tōru who needed a guardian. Honda drew up a notarized will and named the most reliable guardian he could think of.
Tōru dropped out of the university, remained shut up in the house, and spoke to no one except Kinué. The maids were dismissed, and Honda hired a woman who had had experience as a nurse. Tōru spent most of the day in Kinué’s cottage. All through the day Kinué’s soft voice could be heard through the doors. Tōru did not seem to weary of making reply.
His birthday passed on the twentieth of March. He showed no sign of dying. He learned to read Braille. When by himself he listened to records. He could recognize birds by their songs. One day, after a very long silence, he spoke to Honda. He asked that Honda let him marry Kinué. Though aware that her insanity was hereditary, Honda gave his permission immediately.
Decay advanced, the signs of the end appeared quietly. Like hairs tickling his neck when he came back from the barber shop, death, forgotten most of the time, would come tickling when remembered. It seemed strange to Honda that, though all of the preparations for receiving it had been made, death did not come.
Honda had been aware during the excitement of a certain heaviness in the region of his stomach, but he did not, as the old Honda might have been expected to, rush off to a doctor. He diagnosed the trouble as indigestion. He continued to have little appetite after the New Year came. It was not like him to pass it off as only a result of the troubles, nor was it like him to take emaciation as a result of mental anguish.
But it had come to seem that there was no distinguishing between pain of the spirit and pain of the flesh. What was the difference between humiliation and a swollen prostate? Between the pangs of sorrow and pneumonia? Senility was a proper ailment of both the spirit and the flesh, and the fact that senility was an incurable disease meant that existence was an incurable disease. It was a disease unrelated to existentialist theories, the flesh itself being the disease, latent death.
If the cause of decay was illness, then the fundamental cause of that, the flesh, was illness too. The essence of the flesh was decay. It had its spot in time to give evidence of destruction and decay.
Why did people first become aware of that fact only as old age came on? Why, when it buzzed faintly past the ear in the brief noontide of the flesh, did they note it only to forget it? Why did the healthy young athlete, in the shower after his exertions, watching the drops of water hit his shining flesh like hail, not see that the high tide of life itself was the cruelest of ills, a dark, amber-colored lump?
For Honda now, life was senescence, senescence was life. It was wrong that these two synonyms should forever be libeling each other. O
nly now, eighty-one years after he fell into this world, did Honda know the perverse essential at the heart of every pleasure.
Appearing now on this side and now on the other of human will, it sent up an opaque mist, the defense of the will against the cruel and terrible proposition that life and senescence are synonymous. History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity. It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.
We are fodder to stuff some craw. In his shallow way, Imanishi, who died in the fire, had been aware of it. For the gods, for destiny, for history, the only human endeavor imitating the two, it was wise to leave man unaware of the fact until he had grown old.
What fodder Honda had been! What unnutritious, tasteless, dusty fodder! Instinctively refusing to become palatable, he now at the end of it all wanted to stab the mouth of his devourer with the tasteless bones of his awareness; but he was certain to fail.
Tōru went blind in an attempt at suicide. His twenty-first birthday came and went. Honda had no further wish to look into possible traces left behind by the person, unknown, dead at twenty, who was the true reincarnation. If there had been such a person, very well. Honda no longer had the energy to look into that person’s life, nor would it have become him to make the effort. The movements of the heavenly bodies had left him aside. By a small miscalculation, they had led Honda and the reincarnation of Ying Chan into separate parts of the universe. Three reincarnations had occupied Honda’s life and, after drawing their paths of light across it (that too had been a most improbable accident), gone off in another burst of light to an unknown corner of the heavens. Perhaps somewhere, some time, Honda would meet the hundredth, the ten thousandth, the hundred millionth reincarnation.
There was no hurry.
Why hurry? He did not know even where his own rut was taking him. So concluded Honda, a man who had not been in a hurry to die. What he had seen at Benares was human indestructibility as the fundamental essence of the universe. The other world did not lie quivering beyond time, nor did it lie shining beyond space. If to die meant to return to the four elements, to dissolve into the corporate entity, then there was no law holding that the place of birth and rebirth need be no other than here. It was an accident, an utterly senseless accident, that Kiyoaki and Isao and Ying Chan had all appeared beside Honda. If an element in Honda was of exactly the same quality as an element at the other end of the universe, there was no exchange procedure, once individuality had been lost, whereby they could purposely come together through space and time. The particle here and the particle there have precisely the same significance. There was nothing to keep the Honda of the next world from being at the farther side of the universe. When, after the string has been cut and the beads scattered on the table, they are strung in another order, the one indestructible rule, provided no beads have fallen under the table, is that their number must be as before.
Eternity does not come into being because I think I exist: Buddhist doctrine now seemed to Honda mathematically sound. The self was the order of beads determined by the self and therefore without validity.
These thoughts and the almost imperceptible decay of the flesh went together like the wheels of a cart. It was all right, even pleasant, to put the matter so.
In May or thereabouts he began to suffer from pains in the abdomen. They were very stubborn, and sometimes spread to the back. While he was still seeing Keiko, ailments inevitably came into the conversation. He would speak casually of some serious ailment, and with a great stir she would lay it out on the carving board. A stabbing sort of kindness competing with an amiable tendency to exaggerate, she would assign to it all the malignant medical terms she could think of, and he would be off to a hospital in a spirit of something like jest. Now that he was no longer seeing Keiko, he had to an astonishing degree lost this sort of enthusiastic disquiet. Pain such as he was able to endure he left to the ministrations of his masseuse. Even the thought of a doctor was wearing.
Indeed general debilitation and rhythmical attacks of pain brought new powers to think. His aging brain had lost all ability to concentrate, but now it returned, and pain even worked aggressively upon it, to bring certain vital faculties other than the purely rational to bear. At the age of eighty-one Honda attained to a wondrous and mysterious realm that had before been denied him. He knew now that a more comprehensive view of the world was to be had from physical depression than from intelligence, from a dull pain in the entrails than from reason, a loss of appetite than analysis. The addition of a single vague pain in the back to a world that had been to the clear eye of reason a minutely detailed structure, and cracks began to appear in the pillars and vaults, what had seemed like hard rock proved to be soft cork, what had seemed to have solid form turned to inchoate jelly.
Honda had by himself reached that honing of the senses, achieved by few in this world, to live death from within. When he looked back upon life from its far side other than as a journey over a flat surface, hoping that what had declined would revive, seeking to believe that pain was transient, clinging greedily to happiness as a thing of the moment, thinking that good fortune must be followed by bad, seeing in all the ups and downs and rises and falls the ground for his own prospects—then everything was in place, pulled tight, and the march to the end was in order. The boundary between man and object disappeared. The portentous ten-floor building in the American style and the fragile human beings who walked beneath it had as a condition that they would outlast Honda, but as a condition of equal importance that they would fall, like the crape myrtle so rudely cut down. Honda no longer had cause to sympathize, and he had lost the imagination that gives rise to sympathy. The loss had been easy, for he had always been short on imagination.
Reason still worked, but it was frozen. Beauty had become a phantom.
And he lost that greatest ill of the spirit, to will and to plan. In a sense that was the great liberation provided by pain.
Honda heard the chatter that envelops the world like gold dust. Conditional talk, noisily claiming permanent residence.
“Let’s go to a hot spring, Grandfather, when you’re feeling better. Would you like Yumoto, or would Ikaho be better?”
“Let’s have a drink when the contract is signed.”
“Let’s.”
“Is it true that now is a good time to get into the stock market?”
“When I grow up can I eat a whole box of cream puffs all by myself?”
“Let’s go to Europe next year.”
“In three years I’ll be able to buy a boat from my savings.”
“I can’t die till he grows up.”
“I’ll get my retirement pay and we’ll build an apartment house and have a quiet old age.”
“Day after tomorrow at three? I don’t know whether I can make it or not. No, you have to believe me, I really don’t. Suppose we say you’ll be there if you feel like it.”
“We’ll have to get a new air-conditioner next year.”
“It’s a real problem. Can’t we at least cut down on entertainment expenses next year?”
“They say you can have as much tobacco and liquor as you want when you’re twenty.”
“Thank you. It’s very kind of you. Next Tuesday evening at six.”
“That’s just the point. That’s the way he is. Just wait two or three days and he’ll be around with a sheepish look on his face to apologize.”
“Good-bye. See you tomorrow.”
Foxes all, walking the path of foxes. The hunter had only to wait in the thicket.
It seemed to Honda that he was a fox with the eyes of a hunter, walking the path of the foxes even though he knew that he would be caught.
Summer and ripeness were approaching.
It was mid-July when Honda finally stirred himself to make an appointment at the Cancer Research Institute.
On the day before the appointment he had one of his rare looks at television. It wa
s a sunny afternoon, the summer rains having just lifted. There was a shot of a swimming pool. In the unpleasantly artificial blue of the water, young people were splashing and jumping and swimming.
The faint, fleeting scent of beautiful flesh!
To deny the flesh, to see them as skeletons disporting themselves by a pool in the summer sun, was ordinary, dull. Anyone could do it. Anyone could deny life, see through to the bones beneath the youthful surface. The most mediocre of persons could do it.
What revenge could there be in that? Honda would end his life without having known the feelings of the owner of beautiful flesh. If for a single month he could live in it! He should have had a try. What must it be like, to wear such a beautiful covering? To see people fall down before it. When admiration passed the gentle and docile and became lunatic worship, it would become torment for the possessor. In the delirium and the torment were true holiness. What Honda had missed had been the dark, narrow path through the flesh to holiness. To travel it was of course the privilege of few.
Tomorrow he would have a thorough examination. He did not know what the results would be. He should at least be clean. He had the bath drawn before dinner.
The middle-aged housekeeper, formerly a nurse, whom he had employed without consulting Tōru, was an unfortunate woman, twice widowed, but she was a model of kindness and devotion. Honda had been thinking that he must provide for her in his will. She even saw him to the bathtub lest he fall, and left behind the frays of her concern like cobwebs in the dressing room. Honda did not like being seen naked by a woman. He took off his bathrobe before the steaming mirror. He looked at himself. His ribs were in sharp relief, his stomach sagged, and in its shadow hung a shriveled white bean; and so down to whitish shins from which the flesh seemed to have been stripped away. The knees were like swellings. How many years of self-deception would it take to find rejuvenation in this ugliness? But he was able to console himself with a long smile of commiseration at the thought of how much worse it would be if he had been beautiful in the first place.