9
THERE WAS one matter weighing on Honda’s mind as he escorted Keiko to the pine grove at Mio. He feared ruining her good spirits by showing her the utter vulgarity to which this most beautiful of Japanese scenic spots had been reduced.
It was a rainy weekday, but the huge parking lot was jammed with automobiles, and the dirty cellophane in the souvenir shops caught an ashen sky. They did not seem to bother Keiko in the slightest.
“Beautiful. Perfectly lovely. Smell the fresh air and the salt. The sea is so near.”
As a matter of fact the air was strangled with gasoline fumes and the pines were on the point of asphyxiation. Honda felt better. He had visited the place some days before, and he had known what Keiko would see.
Benares was sacred filth. Filth itself was sacred. That was India.
But in Japan, beauty, tradition, poetry, had none of them been touched by the soiled hand of sanctity. Those who touched them and in the end strangled them were quite devoid of sanctity. They all had the same hands, vigorously scoured with soap.
Even at the pine grove of Mio, angels in the empty skull of poetry answered to the unspeakable demands of men, and were forced into myriads and myriads of twists and turns, like circus performers. The cloudy skies were traced as if with a mesh of silver high-tension wires by their dances. In dreams men would meet with only the marks of the decay of angels.
It was past three. “The Pine Grove of Mio. Nihondaira Prefectural Park.” The rough-scaled bark of the tree was enshrouded in the green of moss. Above a gentle flight of stone stairs, the pines sent rude bolts of lightning across the sky. The blossoms, veils of green smoke that even the branches of strangling pines will send forth, shut off a lifeless sea.
“The sea!” said Keiko joyously.
Honda did not trust the joy. There was a little of her party manner in it, of flattery for the villa at which she was a guest. Yet exaggeration can spawn pleasure in something that is nothing at all. At least the two of them were not lonely.
Outside a pair of shops, their cantilever shelves bulging with red Coca-Cola cartons and souvenirs, stood a pair of photographer’s dummies with apertures for two faces: Jirōchō, the boss of Shimizu Harbor, in a pale grove of pines, and Ochō, his lady friend. Jirōchō’s name was on the triangle of the umbrella he cradled in his arm. He was in travel dress, with a walking stick, light-blue mittens and leggings, and a hitched-up kimono in narrow blue and white stripes. Ochō had a high chignon, and wore a black satin kimono and an obi of yellow Hachijō plaid.
Honda urged Keiko on toward the grove, but she was entranced by the dummies. She repeated Jirōchō’s name over and over to herself. She knew nothing about him except his name, not even the elementary fact that he was a famous gambler; and Honda’s lecture on the subject left her yet more entranced.
The nostalgic hues, the fresh, wild vulgarity, quite enthralled her. Wherever she might search in her own life with its distant harvest of the carnal, she could catch no sound so wild and sad in its vulgarity. Her great virtue was that she was without preconceptions. What she had never seen and never heard of was, the last bit of it, “Japanese.”
Almost angrily, Honda sought to break up her love affair with the dummy.
“Oh, stop it. You’re making a fool of yourself.”
“You think the two of us still have the luxury of being fools?”
Serpent-twined legs spread wide, hands on hips, Keiko struck a pose as of an Occidental mother scolding a child. There was anger in her eyes. He had besmirched the poetry.
Honda surrendered. They were beginning to attract a crowd. The cameraman came running up with a tripod and a red velvet cloth. As Honda dodged behind the dummy to avoid curious eyes his face appeared at the aperture. The crowd laughed, the diminutive cameraman laughed, and, though it seemed not entirely appropriate that Jirōchō should be laughing, Honda laughed too. Keiko tugged at his sleeve and took his place. Jirōchō had changed sex, and so had Ochō. The merriment was louder. Honda was drunk. He had known much of peep holes, but he had not had the experience of mounting a guillotine for the pleasure of boisterous masses.
The cameraman took rather a long time with his lens, perhaps because he had become a cynosure.
“Quiet, please.” The crowd was quiet.
Honda’s austere face protruded from the low-slung hole over the yellow plaid. Stooped, hips thrust out, he had taken up his pose at the peep hole in Ninooka. Behind the scene of these humiliating antics a subtle quick change took place as, indifferent to the crowd’s laughter, Honda confirmed that his whole world hung on the act of observing. He resumed this role, and the viewers became the viewed.
There was a sea, there was a great pine, its trunk roped off: the pine of the heavenly robe. The gentle, sandy slopes leading up to it thronged with spectators. Under the cloudy sky the several colors of their dress were uniformly somber, the wind in their hair made them look like a rotting upturned pine. There were clusters of people, there were couples off by themselves; and the great white eye of the sky crushed down upon them. And in the wall that was their foremost rank laughter was forbidden. They gazed at Honda with a stony blankness.
Women in kimono, shopping bags in their hands, middle-aged men in badly cut suits, boys in green-checkered shirts and plump-legged girls in blue miniskirts, children, old men, Honda saw them gazing at their own death. They were waiting for something, some occurrence so amusing that it must have its own grandeur. Lips were relaxed in good-natured smiles. Eyes were aglow with a naked bestiality.
“Quiet!” The cameraman raised his hand.
Keiko promptly withdrew her head from the hole. She stood before the multitude stately as a knight commander. Jirōchō, shaking her head, had become a person in serpentine pantaloons and a black sombrero. The crowd clapped. Keiko calmly wrote down her address for the cameraman. Several young persons, having decided that she was a famous actress from an earlier day, came up for her autograph.
Honda was exhausted by the time they reached the pine.
It was a giant pine on the point of death, spreading its arms in several directions like an octopus. Rents in the trunk had been filled with cement. People disported themselves around a tree that lacked even a proper supply of needles.
“Do you suppose the angel was in a swimming suit?”
“Is it a he-pine? Is that why the woman picked it?”
“She couldn’t reach the top.”
“Not much of a pine, when you get a good look at it.”
“But isn’t it nice they’ve managed to keep it alive. Just feel the sea wind.”
And indeed the pine leaned more aggressively to sea than a sea-trained pine should have, and the sea scars on its trunk were numberless as on a beached hulk. Toward the sea from the marble enclosure a pair of binoculars stood perched on a fresh vermilion bipod like a tropical bird. The Izu Peninsula loomed whitely beyond. A large cargo ship was passing. As if the sea had set out its wares for sale, a circle of driftwood and empty bottles and seaweed marked the high tide.
“Well, there you have it, the spot where the angel danced the heavenly dance to get back her feathered robe. There they all are getting their pictures taken again. That’s the way to do it. Don’t even look at the pine, just get your picture taken. Do you suppose they think it makes so much difference that they should be at a spot where something remarkable happened and stay long enough to get a shutter clicked in their faces?”
“You take it too seriously.” Keiko sat down on a stone bench and lighted a cigarette. “It’s beautiful. I’m not in the least disappointed. It may be dirty and the tree may be about to die, but it has a spell. If it were all pretty and dreamy the way it is in the play, then it would be a lie. The naturalness is very Japanese. I’m glad we came.” So Keiko seized the lead.
She enjoyed everything. That was her queenly prerogative.
In the vulgarity, as heavy and all-pervasive as a sultry sand-laden wind during the summer rains, she happily, gaily saw her sig
hts, and she took Honda with her. On their return they looked in on the Mio Shrine. At the eaves of the sanctuary, on a rough framed board, was a votive painting in low relief of a newly built passenger ship. Sending out its wake over a blue sea, it seemed exactly right for a harbor shrine. Against the rear wall of the sanctuary was a large fan-shaped board on which was carved the cast for a Nō performance. It had been given six years before in the Dance Pavilion.
“A ladies’ day. Kamiuta, Takasago, Yashima, and then Robe of Feathers.” Keiko was impressed.
In the aftermath of the excitement she picked up and ate a cherry from under one of the trees that lined the path.
“See what I’m doing. I’m inviting death.”
His steps somewhat uncertain, Honda began to regret that vanity had kept him from bringing his stick. Panting and gasping, he had fallen behind when Keiko called out the warning.
Low on the rope that joined the trunks of the trees, numbers of identical signs waved in the breeze.
“Danger. Poisonous insecticides. Do not pick or eat.”
The branches, heavy with fruit from faint pink to blood red, were clustered with little knots of paper that carried prayers and petitions. Some of the cherries had been picked to bare seeds by the birds. Honda suspected that the signs were empty threats. And he knew that a small dose of poison was not enough to carry off Keiko.
10
WAS THERE nothing more to see, was there nothing more to see, asked Keiko. Though exhausted, Honda ordered the driver to go back to Shizuoka by way of Mount Kuno. They stopped before the signal station Honda had seen some days earlier.
“Doesn’t it strike you as a rather interesting building?” Honda looked up from the profusion of portulaca at the stone base.
“I think I see a pair of binoculars. What’s it for?”
“It keeps watch on ship movements. Shall we look inside?”
Though curious, neither had quite the courage to knock.
They had climbed the stone steps that encircled the base and were at the foot of the iron stairway when a girl brushed past them with a clanging of iron, so near a miss that one of them called out a warning. Kicking up her skirts like a yellow tornado, she passed so quickly that they did not see her face; but she left all the same an impression as of a fleeting distillation of ugliness.
It was not that she had a bad eye or an objectionable scar. It was just that a hangnail of ugliness for an instant obstructed the view and went against all the careful, delicate ordering known as beauty. It was like the darkest of dark, fleshly memories rasping against the heart. But if one wished to view her in a more quotidian manner, she need be no more than a shy maiden returning from a tryst.
They climbed the stairs and paused at the door to catch their breath. It was half open. Honda pushed his way inside. The room seemed empty. He called up the narrow stairway to the second floor. Each time he called he was seized by a violent fit of coughing.
There was a creaking at the top of the stairs. “Yes?” A boy in an undershirt looked down.
In surprise, Honda noted the blue flower hanging over his forehead. It seemed to be a hydrangea. As he looked down, the flower fell and rolled to Honda’s feet. The boy was startled. He had forgotten the flower. It was brownish and worm-eaten and badly wilted.
Keiko, still in her sombrero, surveyed the scene over Honda’s shoulder.
Though the stairway was dusky, it was apparent that the boy had a fair, handsome face. An almost disquietingly fair face, it seemed, despite the fact that the light was behind it to send down its own light. The need to return the flower his excuse, Honda carefully but briskly made his way up the steep stairs, his hand against the wall. The boy came halfway down to take it.
Their eyes met. Honda knew that the cogs of the same machine were moving both of them, in the same delicate motions at precisely the same speed. Honda’s duplicate down to the finest detail, even down to an utter want of purpose, was there as if bared to a cloudless void. Identical to his own in hardness and transparency despite the difference in their years, the delicate mechanism within this boy corresponded precisely to a mechanism within Honda, in terror lest someone destroy it, the terror hidden in its deepest recesses. In that instant Honda saw a workerless factory polished to a perfection of utter bleakness, Honda’s mature self-awareness in juvenile form. Producing interminably without consumers, endlessly throwing away, horribly clean and perfectly regulated for heat and humidity, rustling forever like a flow of satin. Yet there was a possibility that the boy, though he was Honda himself, misunderstood the machine. His youth would be the reason. Honda’s factory was human from an utter want of humanity. If the boy refused to think of his own as human—that was all right. Honda rested in the confidence that though he had seen all of the boy, the boy could not have seen all of him. In the lyrical moods of his youth, he had been wont to think the machine the culmination of ugliness; but that was only because a youthful miscalculation had confused fleshly ugliness with the ugliness of the machine within him.
The ugliest of machines, very youthful, very exaggerated, romantic, self-advertising. But that was all right. Honda could so name it today with the coolest of smiles. Exactly as he could name a headache or a pain in the diaphragm. It was nice that the ugliest of machines should have so beautiful a face.
The boy was of course unaware of what had happened in that instant.
Halfway down the stairs, he took the flower. He crushed the source of his embarrassment in his hand.
“Damn her.” He spoke to himself. “I’d forgotten all about it.”
Most boys would have flushed. It interested Honda that no transformation at all came over the white composure.
The boy changed the subject. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“Not really. We’re tourists, and we wondered if we might have a look around for our edification.”
“Please. Come on in.”
The boy bowed quickly from the hips and laid out slippers for them.
It was cloudy, but the naked outdoors seemed to be sweeping them suddenly from a dark attic to an open moor. Some fifty yards to the south were Komagoé Beach and the dirty sea. Honda and Keiko knew well enough that old age and affluence dispel reticence. Soon they were seated as if at their own veranda on the chairs pushed toward them. Yet the words that followed the boy back to his desk were very ceremonious.
“Go ahead with your work, please, quite as if we weren’t here. Would you mind, I wonder, if we were to take a look through the telescope?”
“Please. I don’t need it at the moment.” The boy threw the flower into the wastebasket. After a noisy washing of hands the fair profile was bowed over the notebook on the desk as if nothing had happened; but Honda could see curiosity swelling the cheek like a plum.
He invited Keiko to have a look through the telescope and then had a look himself. There were no ships, only a heaping of waves, like a culture of black-green bacteria squirming purposefully under a microscope.
The two were a pair of children soon tired of their toy. They had no particular interest in the sea. All they had really wanted was to intrude for a moment upon a stranger’s life and work. They looked around them, at the several instruments echoing the stir of the harbor, distantly and sadly but faithfully, at “Shimizu Docks” and the name of each dock in large black letters, at the wide blackboard listing the ships in port, at the books ranged on the shelf, Shipping Ledger, Registry of Japanese Shipping, International Codes, Lloyd’s Register of Shipowners 1968–69, at the telephone numbers on the wall, those of the agent and the pilot and the customs and quarantine stations and the provisioners and the rest.
All these details had about them, undeniably, the smell of the sea, the light of the harbor some two or three miles distant. From whatever distance, a harbor announces its languorous turbulence in its own sad metallic tones. It was a gigantic, lunatic zither, sprawled out by the sea and sending an undulant image over the sea, sounding and for a time echoing destruction o
n all the seven giant strings of its docks. Entering the boy’s heart, Honda dreamed of the sea.
Sluggishly pulling in, sluggishly tying up, sluggishly unloading—what an endless compromise it was, this trance-like mating of the sea and the land. They were joined in mutual deceit, the ship wagging a seductive tail and pulling coyly away again with a threatening bleat on its whistle, moving away and then coming in again. What a naked, unstable mechanism!
From the east window he could see the confusion of the harbor frozen under a smoky mist, but an unshining harbor was not a harbor, for a harbor is a row of white teeth bared tensely at a shining sea. The teeth of piers eaten at by the sea. It had to shine like a dentist’s office and smell of metal and water and antiseptic, with cruel derricks pushing down overhead and antiseptics sinking the ships into a motionless sleep, and perhaps, from time to time, a trace of blood.
The harbor and this little signal room. The image of the harbor taken and firmly impounded as toll, until he could almost fancy that it was a ship grounded high on the rocks. There were more than a few likenesses to a dental office: the simplicity and the efficient disposition of the instruments, the freshness of the whites and the primary colors, the readiness for a crisis that could come at any time, the warped window frames gnawed at by the sea winds. And the watch, solitary in the field of white plastic, carrying on an intercourse almost sexual with the sea, through the day and through the night, intimidated by harbor and ship, until gazing became pure madness. The whiteness, the abandonment of the self, the uncertainty and loneliness were themselves a ship. He felt that one could not stay at it long without getting drunk.