Then Honda told her the history of the ring.
In 1947, Honda heard that Prince Toin had lost his title after the war and had bought up art objects cheaply from members of the former nobility overburdened with property taxes. He had opened an antique shop for foreigners. The Prince would not have remembered him even if Honda had gone to see him, but he had been moved to look in at the shop out of sheer curiosity without identifying himself. In a glass case, he discovered the ring of Princess Chantrapa, which the Siamese prince Chao P. had lost in the dormitory of the Peers School thirty-four long years before.
It was obvious that the ring, which had been believed mislaid at the time, had in reality been stolen. The sales clerk, of course, did not disclose the origin of the object, but it must have come from the house of some former noble. The man who had had to sell it must have been a student at the school when Honda was there. He was moved by an old sense of justice to purchase it, wanting to return it himself somehow to the original owner.
“Then are you going to Thailand to give it back? To clear the name of your alma mater?” teased Keiko.
“I intended to someday. But it’s not necessary, now. The Princess has come to Japan to study.”
“A dead girl here to study?”
“No, no, Chantrapa the second—Ying Chan, I mean,” said Honda. “I’ve invited her to the party tomorrow. I intend to put the ring on her finger then. She’s seventeen years old, with beautiful black hair and bright eyes. She speaks Japanese quite well; she must have studied hard before leaving her country.”
25
THE NEXT MORNING Honda awoke alone in the villa, and for protection against the cold, donned a woolen scarf, a cardigan, and a thick winter coat. He crossed the lawn and walked to the arbor at the west end of the garden. More than anything else he had been anticipating watching Fuji at dawn.
The mountain was tinted crimson in the sunrise. Its tip glowed the color of a brilliant rose stone, and to his eyes it was a dreamlike illusion, a classical cathedral roof, a Japanese Temple of Dawn.
Sometimes Honda was confused as to whether he sought solitude or frivolous pleasure. He lacked something essential to become a serious pleasure-seeker.
For the first time somewhere within—and at his age!—a desire for transformation had awakened. Having earnestly observed other men’s reincarnation without so much as turning an eye, he had never brooded over the impossibility of his own. And now that he was reaching an age when the last glow of life revealed the expanse of his past, the certainty of its impossibility heightened the illusion of the possibility of rebirth all the more.
He too might do something unexpected. To this day all his actions had been predictable, and his reason had always cast its light one step ahead, like a flashlight held by someone walking along a dark road at night. By schemes and predictions he had been able to avoid surprising himself. The most frightening thing was that all mysteries, including the miracle of transmigration, finished by being cut and dried.
He needed to be surprised. It had become almost a necessity of life. If there were a special right in scorning reason and trampling it, he had the rational self-conceit to think that it was permitted only to him! He had to involve his stable world in some amorphous turmoil again, in something with which he was not at all familiar!
Honda knew very well that he had lost all physical qualifications for that. His hair had grown thin, his sideburns were streaked with white, and his stomach had swollen like remorse itself. All the characteristics of early old age which he had considered so ugly as a youth now marked his body unsparingly. Of course, even when young, he had never regarded himself as handsome, like Kiyoaki, but he had not thought himself to be particularly ugly either. At least he had not found it necessary to place himself among the negative numbers in a world of beauty and to construct his equations in consequence. Why was it that now when his ugliness had become so obvious, the world about him was still beautiful? This was indeed far worse than death itself; the worst death!
It was twenty minutes past six. Two thirds covered by snow, Fuji had brushed off the colors of dawn and stood against the blue sky in sharply etched beauty. It was almost too clearly visible. The texture of the snow was delicate, full of the sensitive tension of its undulations. It called to mind the fine play of lean muscle. Except for the lower slopes, there were only two slightly reddish black patches near the top and near the Hoei summit. The blue sky was hard and cloudless; had he thrown a rock, the sharp sound of stone hitting it would have echoed back.
This Fuji influenced all dispositions, controlled all emotions. It was the pure white essence of questionability itself that rose before him.
Honda’s hunger sharpened in the tranquility. He looked forward to his breakfast of bread purchased in Tokyo and the soft-boiled egg and coffee he would make as he listened to the chirping of the birds. His wife was due to arrive with Princess Ying Chan at eleven o’clock to begin preparations for the party.
After breakfast he returned to the garden.
It was close to eight. Little by little small wisps of cloud had begun to rise like snow drifting on the other side of Mount Fuji. They spread stealthily, as if to spy on the near side, extending their tentacles as they progressed. Suddenly they were swallowed up by the ceramic blue sky. These seemingly insignificant ambushes were not to be ignored. Such clouds tended to regroup up to noon, repeating their surprise attacks and eventually covering the entire mountain.
Honda sat absentmindedly in the arbor until about ten o’clock. He had stored away the books that all his life had never been far from him and was dreaming of raw materials from which life and emotion had not been filtered out. He sat motionless, doing nothing. A cloud, which had appeared faintly to the left and which soon stopped at the Hoei summit, raised its tail like a leaping dolphin.
His wife, who he insisted be punctual, arrived at eleven o’clock in a clamorous taxi. Princess Ying Chan was not beside her. “Oh dear, you’re alone!” said Honda at once to this bloated, sour woman as she removed several packages from the car.
Rié did not answer for a minute, but raised her eyelids like heavy sunshades.
“I’ll explain later when I’ve more time. I’ve had so much trouble. Help me with these packages first.”
Rié had waited until the designated time, but Princess Ying Chan had not made her appearance. This was after two or three telephone calls. She had finally phoned the only available contact, the Foreign Student Center, and was told that the Princess had not returned to her dormitory the night before. She had been invited to dine at the home of some Japanese family where a new student from Thailand was staying.
Rié had been worried and had considered delaying the time of her own arrival at the villa. But she had no way of informing Honda, since they did not yet have a phone. Instead, she had hurried to the Foreign Student Center where she left a note written in English with the caretaker, carefully explaining with a map how to get to the villa. If things went well, the Princess should arrive by the time the party started in the evening.
“Well, if that was the trouble, you could have asked Makiko Kito to help find her.”
“But I couldn’t possibly impose on a guest. Even she would have a hard time locating a girl from a foreign country she doesn’t know at all and then bringing her all the way over here. And besides, you can’t expect a celebrity like Makiko to go out of her way. She probably thinks she’s doing us a favor just by coming.”
Honda fell silent. He would reserve judgment.
When a picture is removed from the wall where it has long hung, it leaves a fresh whiteness the exact size and shape of the frame. The resulting image is pure, to be sure, but it is quite out of step with its environment; it is too strong, too insistent. Now that Honda had retired from his professional activities on the bench he had left all matters concerning justice to his wife. The whiteness of the wall was always claiming: I am just, I am right, who could possibly blame me?
To begin with, i
t was the wealth into which Honda had unexpectedly come and the ugliness of age which Rié had begun to notice in herself that had removed the framed portrait of the quiet submissive wife from the wall. As her husband grew rich, Rié became afraid of him. But the more fearful she was, the more arrogant she became, showing unconscious hostility to everyone, talking constantly of her chronic kidney ailment, and yet more than ever wanting affection. This desire for love made her even more homely.
As soon as she arrived at the villa and had carried the packages of food to the kitchen, Rié began noisily to wash Honda’s breakfast dishes. She was sure her fatigue would aggravate her illness and was preparing the excuse of being made to work too hard though no one had ordered her to do so. She kept doing what was harmful to her health, expecting Honda to stop her. If he did not do so now, things would be difficult later.
“Why don’t you rest a while and do that later?” he said kindly. “We have plenty of time. Ying Chan really causes a lot of trouble, doesn’t she? She was saying she wanted so much to help. After all that, I have to pitch in at the last minute.”
“Your help will make things worse.”
Rié returned to the living room wiping her wet hands.
In the dusky chamber where a patch of afternoon sun lay by the window, Rié’s eyes under her puffy lids looked like the small holes in a woman’s No mask. The regrets of a barren woman, uncured, worsening over the years, a body bloated with regrets like a billowing tarpaulin. “I am right, but I’m a failure.” The unchanging gentleness she had shown her deceased mother-in-law had come from this self-reproach. If she had had children, if only she had had many children, she would have been able to melt her husband with the accumulation of their soft, sweet flesh. But deterioration had long since begun in a world where propagation was denied, just as a fish cast up from the sea on an autumn afternoon gradually rots away. Rié shuddered before this rich husband of hers.
Honda had thoughtfully ignored the distress of his wife, who was always hoping for the impossible. Now he could not bear the truth that he craved that too and in so doing was reduced to her level. But this fresh abhorrence made the existence of Rié quite important.
“Where did Ying Chan stay last night? Why did she stay away? There’s a housemother at the Foreign Student Center and supervision is probably strict. Why did she? Who was she with?” said Honda, pursuing his thought.
It was simply uneasiness. It was the same daily unsettled feeling, the precise category of emotion he experienced mornings when he shaved himself badly or nights when he could not find a comfortable position for his head on the pillow. It was a far cry from concern for a fellow human; it was somewhat detached and yet it seemed to conform to an urgent necessity in life. He had felt as though some foreign object had been cast into his mind, something like a small black Buddha image carved in black ebony from the Thai jungles.
His wife continued to prattle on about insignificant details such as how to receive the guests and which rooms should be given to those who were spending the night. All that was of no interest to Honda.
Gradually Rié became aware that her husband’s mind had wandered. In the past she had never felt any suspicion about her husband when he ensconced himself in his study, for it was certain that his law studies had bound him there; but now his absentmindedness signified the burning of an invisible flame, and his silence betokened some kind of scheme.
Rié’s eyes followed her husband’s gaze in an effort to find the source of his distraction. But there beyond the window lay only the garden with its dead grass on which two or three little birds had come to sport.
The guests had been invited to come at four, since Honda wanted them to see the view while the sun was still in the sky. Keiko came at one with an offer to help. Both Honda and Rié were pleased with this unexpected assistance.
Among all her husband’s new friends, strangely, it was only to Keiko that Rié opened up. She felt intuitively that Keiko was not an enemy. The reason was Keiko’s kindness, her great bosom and huge hips, her calm speech. Even the fragrance of her perfume seemed to lend a sort of security to Rié’s innate modesty, like the official red seal of approval stamped conspicuously on certificates hung in bakeries.
Seated next to the fireplace Honda, mellowed, opened the morning paper that Rié had brought from Tokyo, listening absently to the women’s conversation in the kitchen.
The headline on the first page was: ENTIRE ADMINISTRATIVE TREATY APPENDICES, according to which sixteen American Air Force bases were to be retained after the Japanese-American peace treaty went into effect. Printed to one side was a talk by Senator Smith expressing American determination—OBLIGATION TO PROTECT JAPAN. WILL NOT TOLERATE COMMUNIST AGGRESSION. On the second page American economic trends were reported under the title DECREASE IN CIVILIAN PRODUCTION: NEW REVERSAL RESULTS FROM ECONOMIC SLUMP IN WESTERN EUROPE, which appeared in bold print and showed definite concern.
But Honda’s mind was constantly brought back to Ying Chan’s absence. He conjured up all sorts of situations and his unshackled imagination made him uneasy. From the most ominous to the most obscene, reality had the multilayered cross section of wood agate. He had never seen reality take such form insofar as he could recall.
Honda was startled by the loud crackling of the newspaper as he folded it. The page facing the fire was hot and dry. He idly mused that it was impossible for a newspaper to be so hot. The sensation was strangely bound with the sluggishness that lingered deep in his slackened body. Then the flames curling over a fresh log suddenly reminded him of the funeral pyres at Benares.
Keiko appeared in a large apron and said: “How about serving sherry and whiskey and water, and perhaps some Dubonnet for aperitifs? Cocktails are too much trouble. Let’s not serve them.”
“I leave everything up to you.”
“And what about the Thai princess? We should have a few soft drinks in case she doesn’t indulge.”
“She might not come,” Honda answered placidly.
“Oh?” Keiko said calmly and withdrew. Her impeccable courtesy made her perspicacity rather uncanny. Honda thought that one would often overestimate a woman like her because of this elegant nonchalance.
Makiko Kito was the first to arrive. She was accompanied by her pupil Mrs. Tsubakihara, in whose chauffeured car they had driven over the Hakone mountains.
Makiko’s reputation as a poetess was at its height. Honda had no standards for measuring poetic values; but when he heard Makiko’s name repeated by the most unexpected people, he realized how highly she must be regarded. Mrs. Tsubakihara, from a former zaibatsu family, was about fifty, the same age as Makiko. But she showed deference to Makiko as if she were a goddess.
Mrs. Tsubakihara was in perpetual mourning for her son, a Navy ensign, who had died seven years ago. Honda knew nothing of her past, but she seemed like a sad bit of fruit pickled in the vinegar of grief.
Makiko was still beautiful. Her pellucid skin showed signs of aging, but it retained the freshness of lingering snow; and the creeping gray in her hair, untouched by artificial coloring, gave the stamp of sincerity to her poetry. Her behavior was natural, but she emitted a sense of mystery. She never overlooked strategic presents or dinner invitations to important personalities. She won over those who might speak ill of her. Though all real emotion had long since dried up, she preserved a lingering hint of sorrow and the illusion of being alone.
Compared to her grief, that of Mrs. Tsubakihara seemed immature. The comparison was indeed cruel; Makiko’s aesthetic sorrow, which had been distilled into a mask, produced masterpieces, while the fresh, unhealed grief of her disciple remained in a raw, unformed state, providing no inspiration for the creation of moving poetry. Whatever slight reputation Mrs. Tsubakihara enjoyed as a poetess would at once disappear were it not for Makiko’s support.
Makiko extracted poetic emotion from the raw grief of this constant companion, drawing forth an abstracted sadness that no longer was the possession of anyone and labeli
ng it with her own name. Thus, the unworked gem of sorrow and the skilled craftsman combined to bring forth innumerable masterpieces—mufflers that succeeded in concealing the aging necks that carried them year after year.
Makiko was irritated to have arrived early.
“The chauffeur drove too fast,” she said, looking at Mrs. Tsubakihara beside her.
“Quite so. The traffic was not so congested as we expected.”
“Let’s see the garden first. We were looking forward to that,” she said to Honda. “Please don’t bother, we’ll just take our time and stroll about and maybe write a little poetry.”
Honda insisted on showing them around and took along a bottle of sherry and some tidbits, intending to serve them in the arbor. The afternoon had grown warm. Beyond the garden, which narrowed as it sloped gently to the valley, one could see Mount Fuji to the west. It was veiled by the cotton clouds of spring, and only the snow-clad summit was sharply limned against the azure sky.
“By summer I plan to have a swimming pool built in front of the terrace where the birdhouse is,” Honda explained on the way.
But the ladies’ response was chill, and he suddenly felt like a clerk at some inn escorting guests on a tour of the premises.
Artists and their ilk proved most difficult for Honda to deal with. He had resumed relations with Makiko at the time of the fifteenth memorial service for Isao in 1948. Japanese poetry had not been the cause, as one might have expected. The former perfunctory relationship of counselor and witness (even though it held undertones of conniving) had actually blossomed into friendship, for they both held unvoiced affection for Isao. Honda was at a complete loss for words and had thus broached the inane subject of a swimming pool. Makiko with her pupil at her side stood facing the spectacle of Mount Fuji in the spring.
He knew that the women did not quite feel contemptuous of him, yet he realized they felt easy enough with him to act without constraint. He was outside their circle, alien to their way of life. He could easily imagine Makiko speaking to someone involved in a difficult case: “Mr. Honda’s a friend of mine. No, he doesn’t write poetry. But he’s very understanding, and he’s excellent in both civil and criminal cases. I’ll speak to him for you.”