But within, Honda was afraid of Makiko, and she probably was just as frightened of him. She had revived the old association with him in order to protect her name. Honda had no illusions as to her true character; he knew that she was quite capable of bearing false witness, of telling at the critical moment the most thoroughly believable lies.
Other than that, Honda was likable, unobjectionable to the women. How freely they talked in front of him, whereas they at once hid behind innocuous social chatter when Rié approached. Honda liked to observe these once beautiful, but no longer young women, their perpetual sad conversations, their confusion of their own sensuality with the past, memories and realities encroaching one upon the other, and their habit of distorting nature and reality to suit their whim. He also liked their ability to bestow automatic lyricism on everything beautiful they saw, like a bailiff stamping every piece of furniture he finds. As if this were a way of protecting themselves from whatever beauty they might perceive. Honda liked to see them romp and gambol like two inspired waterfowl who, having stumbled clumsily onto land, slip back into the water, exhibiting forthwith unexpected grace and nimbleness as they swim and dive with abandon. When they composed a poem, they would display unreserved freedom in mental sunbathing, quite without fear of the resultant exposure. It brought to mind the young Princess and the old ladies at Bang Pa In.
Would Ying Chan really come? Where had she stayed the night? Concern suddenly inserted a rough wooden wedge into his mind.
“What a beautiful garden! Hakoné to the east and Fuji to the west. It’s a crime that you dawdle around without writing a single poem. While we’re forced to produce poetry under the polluted skies of Tokyo, you read law books here. What an unfair world!”
“I gave up on legal books long ago,” said Honda, offering them some sherry. The movement of kimono sleeves and the graceful motion of their fingers as the two women accepted the sherry glasses were extremely lovely. Actually Mrs. Tsubakihara slavishly aped Makiko, from the gesture of lightly holding up her sleeve to the way she curled her ringed fingers when picking up the glass.
“How happy Akio would have been to see this garden!” said Mrs. Tsubakihara, mentioning her dead son. “He adored Mount Fuji, and even before entering the Navy, he had a framed photograph of it in his study so he could always look at it. Such clean-cut, youthful tastes.”
Every time she mentioned his name, the ripple of a sob touched her cheeks, as though a precision mechanism existed in the depth of her heart, automatically activated at every reference to him, independent of her wishes, and producing an unvarying facial expression. As an emperor’s name is always mentioned with a reverent expression, the fleeting trace of sobs was practically synonymous with the name Akio.
Makiko had spread a notebook on her lap and composed a poem.
“You’ve already written one!” exclaimed Mrs. Tsubakihara, looking jealously at her teacher’s bent head. Honda looked too. The slim, white, fragrant nape that had once attracted young Isao lingered like a fading moon in his eyes.
“That’s Mr. Imanishi. I’m sure it must be!” cried Mrs. Tsubakihara, looking at the man crossing the lawn. Even from that distance, the white forehead and tall figure walking in the characteristically infirm manner, trailing its long shadow, were recognizably his.
“How horrible! He’s sure to start that vulgar talk again. He’ll ruin our enjoyment straightaway,” said Mrs. Tsubakihara.
Yasushi Imanishi was about forty and a specialist in German literature. He had introduced the younger German writers during the war and now indiscriminately wrote all kinds of essays. Currently he was dreaming about the Millennium of Sex that he was going to write, but as yet there was no sign of his having done so. Probably he had lost interest in writing it now that he had discussed with everyone the details of its contents. What relevance the Millennium, which was altogether weird and gloomy, could hold for him no one could say. He was the second son of the head of Imanishi Securities and was living the comfortable life of a bachelor.
His face was pale and nervous, but he was congenial, talkative, and both the financial world and left-wing writers found him amusing. He really felt that he had discovered for the first time in his life something that suited his personality in this postwar iconoclastic period directed against established authority and convention. This was the struggle taken up by rugged, pale intellectuals. He advocated the political significance of sexual fantasy, which he had adopted as his specialty. Until then, he had been merely a Novalislike romanticist.
Women liked the manner he had of gallantly spicing his aristocratic ways with obscenities. Those who called him degenerate were only revealing that they were holdovers from feudal days. At the same time, Imanishi never failed to disappoint serious progressives by his silly future map of the Millennium.
He never spoke in a loud voice. For that presented the danger of taking matters from the area of delicate sensuality and transforming them into ideology.
The four guests passed the time in the arbor basking in the afternoon sun, while they waited for the others to arrive. The gurgling sound of the stream running just below insisted on intruding itself into their awareness. Honda could not help but remember the words: “Everything is in constant flux like a torrent.”
Imanishi had called the kingdom of his fantasy “The Land of the Pomegranate.” He had named it after the small, ruby-red bursting seeds. He claimed that he traveled to his kingdom asleep and awake, and everyone asked for news of it.
“What’s happening in ‘The Land of the Pomegranate’ these days?”
“As usual the population is well under control. All sorts of problems arise because of the high incidence of incest. A single woman is often aunt, mother, sister, and cousin to the same man. As a result, half the babies are incredibly beautiful, while the other half are ugly and deformed.
“The beautiful children of both sexes are separated in infancy from the ugly ones and assembled in a place called ‘The Garden of the Loved Ones.’ The facilities are magnificent, a veritable paradise on earth. An artificial sun constantly gives out exactly the ideal number of ultraviolet rays. No one wears clothes, and all devote themselves to swimming and other physical exercises. Flowers bloom in profusion, and small animals and birds are never caged. The children there eat good nourishing food, but never grow fat, for they are checked weekly by medical examiners. They can only grow more and more beautiful. But reading is strictly forbidden. It spoils natural beauty, so the taboo makes sense.
“But when they reach adolescence, they’re brought from the garden once a week to become objects of, sexual amusement for the ugly ones outside. After two or three years of this sort of activity, they are destroyed. Don’t you think it’s true brotherly love to terminate life while beautiful people are still young?
“The creative powers of all artists in the land are utilized to develop various means of slaughter. That is to say, there are theaters throughout the country devoted to sexual murder, in which the beautiful boys and girls are cast in all manner of roles where they are tortured to death. They recreate all sorts of mythological and historical personalities who were sadistically murdered while young and beautiful. But of course there are many new creations too. They are nobly murdered in magnificent, sensual costumes, with splendid lighting, brilliant stage settings, and wonderful music; but usually they are toyed with by members of the audience before they are quite dead, and after that the bodies are consumed.
“The graves? The graves are right outside ‘The Garden of the Loved Ones.’ It’s a beautiful place, and ugly deformed people stroll among the tombs on moonlit nights, lost in romantic moods. As statues of the beautiful ones are erected as gravestones, there’s no cemetery in the world with so many beautiful bodies.”
“Why do they have to kill them?”
“Because they’re soon bored by living people.”
“The people in ‘The Land of the Pomegranate’ are infinitely wise. They know very well that there are only two
roles for humans in this world: those who remember and those who are remembered.
“Now that I have told you this much, I must inform you about their religion. Such custom is based on religious belief.
“They don’t believe in rebirth in ‘The Land of the Pomegranate.’ Because God is manifest at the supreme instant of sexual climax, and the true nature of godliness lies in its unique appearance. There is no possibility that one would become more beautiful after rebirth, and that means that resurrection would hold no meaning. It’s unthinkable that a faded shirt should be whiter than a brand-new one, isn’t it. So the gods of ‘The Land of the Pomegranate’ are used once and thrown away.
“The religion of the country is polytheistic, but in a temporal sort of way; and countless numbers of gods squander their total physical existence, disappearing once they have expressed this highest moment in eternity. Now you know: ‘The Garden of the Loved Ones’ is a factory for making gods.
“To transform history in this world into a chain of beautiful events, the sacrifice of gods must continue infinitely. Such is the theology. Don’t you think it’s rational? Furthermore, the people display absolutely no hypocrisy; so beauty and sexual attractiveness are synonyms. They are very well aware that only through sexual desire may one approach God; that is, beauty.
“One possesses a god by means of sexual desire, and sexual possession occurs at the climax of pleasure. But an orgasm does not endure, therefore possession can mean only one thing: the unification of the unenduring with the ephemeralness of the object of sexual desire. The surest method is the elimination of this object at the moment of climax. Therefore, the people of the country are clearly aware that sexual possession is consummated in murder and cannibalism.
“It is certainly wonderful that this paradox of sexual possession controls even the economic structure of the country. The fundamental rule of possession is ‘to kill the loved one,’ which means that completion of any possession signifies simultaneous termination of possessing, and continued possession is a violation of love. Physical labor is permitted only to create beautiful physiques, and the ugly are exempted from it. Actually industrial production is completely automated and does not require human power. The arts? The only arts are found in the infinite variety of the murder theater as well as in the erection of statues to the beautiful dead. From the religious point of view, sensual realism is the basic style, and abstraction is completely rejected. Incorporation of ‘life’ in the arts is strictly forbidden.
“The approach to beauty is through sexual desire, but what records this moment of beauty for all eternity is memory . . . Now you have a rough understanding of the fundamental structure of ‘The Land of the Pomegranate,’ I think. The basic concept is memory, and in a manner of speaking, memory is national policy.
“Orgasm, a phenomenon something like a corporeal crystal, is further crystallized in memory, and following the death of the god of beauty, one can recall the highest degree of sexual excitement. The people live only in order to reach this point. Compared to this heavenly jewel, the physical existence of human beings, whether the lover or the beloved, the killer or the killed, is only the means of reaching this point. This is the ideal of the country.
“Memory is the sole matter of our spirit. Even should a god appear at the climax of sexual possession, then that god becomes ‘the remembered one,’ and the lover becomes ‘the one who remembers.’ Only through this time-consuming process is the presence of the god really proved, is beauty attained for the first time, and is sexual desire distilled into love that is independent of possession. Hence, gods and humans are not separated in space, but there is a time lag between them. Here lies the essence of temporal polytheism. Do you understand?
“Murder sounds harsh, but it is necessary for purifying memory and distilling it into its strongest concentrated element. Besides, these ugly, deformed inhabitants are noble, truly noble. They are experts in altruism; they live for self-denial. These lovers-cum-murderers-cum-rememberers live their roles faithfully, they remember nothing about themselves, but live only in adoration of the memory of the loved ones’ beautiful death. Remembering becomes the single task of their lives. ‘The Land of the Pomegranate’ is also a country of cypresses, beautiful mementoes, and mourning; it is the most peaceful and quiet place in all the world, a country of recollections.
“Every time I go there, I think I never want to return to a place like Japan. The land is full of the sweetest, tenderest elements of humanity. It is a country of true humanism and peace. They have no such savage custom as eating the flesh of oxen and pigs.”
“I would like to ask you one thing. You say that they eat human flesh, but what parts of the human body do they consume?” Makiko asked, amused.
“You know very well without asking,” said Imanishi in a quiet, subdued voice.
Honda thought it more than comical that a former judge could listen without flinching to such manner of talk. He had never even dreamed that a man like Imanishi could ever exist. Had Cesare Lombroso, the criminologist, met him, he would have ordered him immediately banished from society.
Honda was repelled by Imanishi’s sex-oriented interests, yet he himself indulged in another kind. If this were not a product of Imanishi’s imagination, they should all be inhabitants of the sex millennium of the gods. It was a divine theatrical farce that God had made Honda live on as one who would remember, killing off Kiyoaki and Isao as those to be remembered. But Imanishi had stated that there was no rebirth. Samsara might be an idea standing in opposition to resurrection, and its characteristic might be its guaranteeing that life occur only once. In particular, Imanishi’s theory that there was a time lag between human existence and God, and that man could meet God only in memory forced Honda to look back upon his own life and his travels; it evoked something vast and vaguely nostalgic.
What a man Imanishi was!
He intentionally exposed to the sun black inner deformities and was even pleased in so doing. He staked all on the sophistication of his nonchalant face, describing his blackness to others as though it did not concern him at all.
Honda, having long been a part of the legal world, concealed in his heart a certain romantic respect for the self-confident criminal. To be truthful, the confident criminal was extremely rare. Indeed, he had never met anyone who could be so classified except Isao.
It followed that Honda concealed feelings of hatred and contempt for repentant offenders.
Which was Imanishi?
He was probably never repentant, but he quite lacked the nobility of the principled criminal. By his vanity and sophistication he was trying to embellish the meanness of a man who has confessed and thus sought to achieve the advantage of both confession and sophistication. The ugliness of this transparent anatomical model! Honda, nevertheless, persistently refused to recognize the fact that he was somewhat attracted to Imanishi, that the invitation he had extended to him to come to the villa was rooted in a kind of envy for his courage. Furthermore, that he concealed this was not because of his conceit and fortitude in demeaning himself to the baseness of one who has confessed, but doubtless because of his fear of Imanishi’s X-ray eyes. Honda had secretly labeled his own fear the “sickness of objectivity.” It was the ultimate hell, filled with pleasurable thrills, into which a cognition that refused to act was finally precipitated.
The man has eyes like a fish, thought Honda, glancing surreptitiously at Imanishi’s profile as the latter was talking triumphantly to the women.
Only after the sun had dyed the clouds to the left of Mount Fuji had all the guests assembled.
When the four made their way from the arbor to the house, Keiko’s American lover, the Army lieutenant, was helping her in the kitchen. Shortly, the aging erstwhile Baron and Baroness Shinkawa arrived; then at intervals, Sakurai, a diplomat; Murata, the president of a construction company; Kawaguchi, an important newspaper man; Akiko Kyoya, a singer of French songs; and Ikuko Fujima, a traditional Japanese dancer. Such a motle
y group of guests would have been unthinkable in Honda’s former household. Honda’s heart, too, was heavy: Ying Chan had not put in an appearance.
26
FORMER BARON SHINKAWA was seated in a chair by the fireside from which point he coldly observed the other guests.
He was now seventy-two. Grumbling and complaining without fail whenever he left home, he could not forego the joy of going out; at even his age his love for parties had not diminished. He had been very bored during the period of the postwar purges and had fallen into the habit of accepting all invitations. This had continued on into the postpurge years.
But now everyone considered him and his garrulous wife to be the most boring of guests. His sarcasm had lost its bite, and his epigrammatic expressions had become longwinded and shallow. He was never able to recall people’s names.
“That . . . what was he called? . . . remember . . . he was often depicted in political cartoons . . . don’t you remember? . . . a small, fat man, round as a butterball . . . what was his name? . . . a very common one . . .”
His listener could not help but recognize Shinkawa’s losing battle with the invisible monster of forgetfulness. This quiet, but tenacious animal would occasionally withdraw only to reappear at once, clinging to Shinkawa, brushing his forehead with its shaggy tail.
At last, he would give up and continue his story.
“. . . anyway, this politician’s wife was a remarkable woman.” But the episode in which the most important name was missing no longer held any flavor. Each time he would stamp his foot in sheer vexation, so anxious was he to impart to others the flavor of the tale he alone could savor. It was then that Shinkawa would be aware of a mendicant-like emotion, one he had previously never experienced. In his struggle to find someone to appreciate his simple punning jokes, as though begging for understanding, he had unconsciously become obsequious.