“In that case,” said Iinuma finally, thanking Honda with extreme formality, “I accept your kindness with gratitude. It will be a privilege to use it to help revive the Seiken School.”
Honda accompanied him to the entrance in the rain. Iinuma’s silhouette disappeared through the side gate beneath the pomegranate leaves. It reminded him, for some reason, of one of those countless nocturnal islands that dot the gloomy waters around Japan. An outlying island with no water except the rain—mad, wild, starving.
32
FAR FROM THE PEACE he had expected on placing the ring on Ying Chan’s finger, Honda was filled with fear.
He was concerned with the difficult question of how to conceal himself to view her nude. How wonderful it would be if, unaware of him, she would move about full of life or take her self-indulgent ease, revealing every secret in her heart, being completely natural. How wonderful to observe like a biologist every detail. But should his presence be known, then everything would at once collapse.
A perfect crystal of quartz, a glass bowl in which nothing exists but the free play of lovely, subjective being. Ying Chan should be in just such a bowl.
Honda was certain that he had played a part in the crystallization of Kiyoaki’s and Isao’s transparent lives. In them he had been the extended helping hand, even though it had proven ineffectual and useless. The important thing was that Honda himself had been unaware of his role; he had played his part quite naturally, as a matter of fact quite idiotically, though he himself was convinced that he had been intelligent about it. But after he had become aware! After a torrid India had unsparingly taught him, what help could he have rendered to life? What kind of intervention, what engagement could there be?
Furthermore, Ying Chan was a woman. Hers was a body which filled the cup to its very brim with the unknown darkness of charm. It seduced him. It attracted him constantly toward life. For what purpose? he wondered. He did not know, but one of the reasons was probably that the life to which he was attracted was destined to involve others through the charm it exuded; it was fated to destroy its own roots. Another reason was that he was obliged to realize completely this time the impossibility of involvement in another’s life.
Of course Honda was convinced that having Ying Chan in a transparent crystal would constitute the core of his pleasure, but he could not separate that from his innate desire for investigation. Was there no way by which he could harmoniously reconcile these two contradictory tastes and overcome Ying Chan, this black lotus that had bloomed from the mud of life’s flow?
In this respect, it would have been better if she had shown some clear sign of being the transmigration of Isao and Kiyoaki. Then Honda’s passion would be cooled. Yet on the other hand, had she simply been a girl who had nothing to do with the mystery of rebirth Honda had witnessed, he would not have been so strongly attracted to her. Perhaps the origin of that strength which sternly held his passion in check and that of the extraordinarily powerful attraction existed together in the same samsara. The source of awakening and the origin of samsara and delusion were both samsara.
As he thought of it, Honda strongly wished that he were a man approaching the end of life, someone propertied and totally complacent. Honda knew a number of such people. Many were discernment itself in turning a profit and rising in the world or in struggling for power; they were adept in grasping the psychology of formidable competitors. Yet when it came to women they were completely ignorant, even though they had slept with several hundreds. Such men were satisfied to surround themselves with the screens of women and flatterers whom they bought with their money and power. Like loons, the women would sit around, showing only one side of their faces. Such men are not free; they’re in a cage! thought Honda. They sit in cages made of things that only their eyes can see, that void the world and shut it out.
Other men are somewhat wiser. They are rich, powerful, and more aware of human nature. They can know everything about a man, they can penetrate to the core of things by interpreting the slightest surface indication. Super-psychologists who master the taste of life by the bitterness of smartweed vinegar. Whenever they wish they can order the trees and rocks and shrubs shifted in their beautiful little yards, they possess diminutive, refined gardens made of well-organized and well-arranged extractions of the world and life: gardens of real connoisseurs. Such precincts consist of rocks of deception, crape myrtle of coquetry, horsetails of guileness, washbasins of flattery, small waterfalls of loyalty, and the craggy rocks of countless betrayals. They sit the whole day before such allegorical plots, soaking themselves in the quiet pleasure of having disarmed the world and life of all resistance. Yet like a pricelessly rare teacup filled with foaming light green tea they firmly grasp in their hands the bitterness and superiority of cognizant men. Honda was not such a man. He was neither self-satisfied nor secure. And yet he was no longer ignorant either. He had seen only the borderline between the knowable and the unknowable; still it was enough to make him aware. And uncertainty was an incomparable treasure that man could steal from youth. Honda had already taken part in the lives of Kiyoaki and Isao, and had seen forms of fate where it was completely meaningless to extend his hand. It was as if he had been deceived. From the standpoint of fate, living was like being swindled. And human existence . . . signified nothing but the lack of fulfillment, and that he had thoroughly mastered in India.
Nevertheless, the absolutely passive life or life’s ultimately ontological form which is not commonly revealed had attracted Honda too much. And he was tainted by the extravagant concept that without such forms there was no life. He quite lacked the qualifications of a seducer. For seducing and deceiving were futile from the standpoint of fate, and “the will to seduce” was itself futile. When one recognized that there was no other form of living except to be naively deceived by fate alone, how was it possible to interfere? How could one even glimpse the pure form of such existence? For the moment, one could conceive of such a being only in its absence. Ying Chan, who was self-sufficient in her universe, she who was a universe in herself, must be isolated from him. At times, she was a kind of optical illusion, a corporeal rainbow. Her face was red and her neck orange, her breasts were yellow and she had a green stomach, blue thighs, indigo calves, and violet toes. Above her head was an invisible infrared heart, and below her firmly planted feet were the invisible ultraviolet footprints of memory. The extremity of the rainbow had fused with the heaven of death. She was a rainbow bridging the firmament of death. If “not knowing” was the first factor in eroticism, the ultimate had to be the eternally unknowable . . . death.
When the unexpected amount of money came into his possession, Honda thought like everyone else that he would spend it for his own gratification, but such money was useless for his most essential pleasure. Participation, caring, protection, possession, monopoly—all these things required money, and money had its use; but Honda’s pleasure rejected all of them.
He knew that in inexpensive joys lurked thrilling pleasure. The feel of wet moss on the tree trunks in the grove where he had hidden himself, the subtle scent of dead leaves on the ground where he had knelt on a May night of the previous year in the park. The fragrance of young leaves was pungent and lovers lay disheveled on the grass. Auto headlights came and went ruthlessly on the road around the grove. Their beams illuminated the coniferous trees that were like the columns of some shrine and then would tragically and swiftly sweep down the shadowy shafts one after the other; he had shuddered as the light swept over the grass. Momentarily it picked out the almost cruelly sacred beauty of white turned-up underclothes. Only once Honda saw a ray of light pass directly across a woman’s face with dreamy eyes. As he had glimpsed the reflection of a speck of light, they must surely have been open, if only partially. It was a ghastly moment when the darkness of human existence was abruptly unveiled, and he had inadvertently seen what he should not have.
To match his tremors with those of the lovers, to synchronize his palpitations with their
s, to share their fear, and at the end of such uniting, to remain an outsider who saw but was not seen. Celebrants of this furtive spying lurked here and there under the trees and in the bushes like crickets. Honda was one of these nameless men.
Young men and women . . . bodies entwined . . . white lower parts exposed. Tenderness of hands moving where the shadows were deepest. White buttocks of men moving like Ping-Pong balls. The almost legal authenticity of their sighs.
Yes, when the headlights momentarily peeled off the darkness of existence, the woman’s face had been unexpectedly illuminated. But it was not the ones being observed who were startled, but those who watched behind the trees. When the distant and lyrical siren of a patrol car resounded far outside the night park, where the reflections of neon signs glowed like embers, the watched women did not leave off their debauchery, and their men infallibly raised their virile torsos like young wolves.
On one occasion Honda had lunched with an experienced lawyer, who passed on a bit of gossip he had overheard at some police station. The nasty scandal had never appeared in the papers. It concerned a highly respected man prominent in legal circles, who enjoyed the prestige and respect due his eminent position. He had become an habitual voyeur and had been apprehended by the police. He was sixty-four years old. A young policeman asked for his personal card, ruthlessly demanding an account of the old man’s offenses. The hapless lawyer was literally shaking with shame as he was forced to reconstruct in detail the setting of his voyeurism. During this time he was sternly lectured by the officer. As soon as the young policeman learned of the offender’s high social status, he ridiculed the poor man for his own amusement, emphasizing the incredible gap between the prestige he enjoyed and the sordidness of his crime. He was fully aware that it was humanly impossible to bridge such a chasm, and yet he had tortured the man. Under the upbraiding by someone young enough to be his grandson, the old man had become obsequious, hanging his head and incessantly wiping his sweaty forehead. After being stuffed with mud slung by one so low in the governmental bureaucracy, he was finally discharged. Two years later he died of cancer.
How would he have behaved? Honda wondered.
Honda was supposed to know all about the secret of how to bridge such a hopeless abyss. The secret formula from India should have proven effective.
Why hadn’t the old judge been able to explain the nature of his pleasure by using legal jargon?—a pleasure so strong that it brought tears to the eyes, the most modest pleasure in life. But even though Honda pretended to listen casually and to regard it as a piece of amusing gossip, he could not help wondering throughout the meal whether there were not some deeper motivation behind the subject his colleague had brought up. He took care to smile contemptuously at the critical points just like the narrator, but he was confused by the cruel contrast between the solemnity of the pleasure produced and the misery it evoked. Such an act was as worthless to the world as a worn-out pair of straw sandals; yet solemnity was concealed in its very core, and that was true of any kind of pleasure. As a result of that hour-long ordeal, he had completely renounced the thrill of his habit. Fortunately, that side of him was known to no one.
It could not be that he was oblivious to danger, because he had overtly humiliated his own reason. The real adventure of a dangerous action is reason, and courage too came from that.
If money could not guarantee security and purchase for him real thrills, then what could he do to grasp fresh life at his age? And yet his hunger for living seemed never to decrease but rather to sharpen with age.
Thus, though he did not wish it, it would be necessary for him to use some sort of intermediary. Even if Ying Chan should by some chance sleep with him, as long as what he really wanted was something she could never show him, then it would be imperative that he employ some roundabout, artificial method to obtain what he needed so much.
Tortured by these thoughts and unable to sleep, he would take out the Sutra of the Great Golden Peacock Wisdom King, which had for some time remained undisturbed, accumulating dust on his bookshelf.
At times he murmured the mantra that stood for the achievement of the peacock: ma yu kitsu ra tei sha ka.
It was merely a game of conundrums. If he had survived the war because of this sutra, then life sustained by such means seemed all the more worthless.
33
KEIKO SHOWED great interest in the story of the Sutra of the Peacock Wisdom King.
“You say that it’s efficacious against snakebite? Then I’d love to learn it. There are lots of snakes in my garden at Gotemba.”
“I remember just a little of the opening passage. It goes: ta do ya ta icchi mitchi chiri mitchi chiribiri mitchi.”
Keiko laughed. “Sounds like the song ‘Chiribiribin’.”
Honda felt a childish vexation at her flippant reaction and fell silent.
Keiko had brought along a student from Keio University whom she introduced as her nephew. He was wearing an imported suit and an expensive imported wristwatch. He had narrow eyebrows and thin lips. Honda was startled to realize that his own eyes, when looking at this frivolous modern young man, had involuntarily taken on the censorious stare typical of the members of the old kendo team.
Keiko maintained her self-composure at all times. She gave directions to everyone in regal, placid tones. Any request made of her was followed by elaborate instructions.
Honda had found this out two days before when he had taken her to lunch at the Tokyo Kaikan to celebrate her return to the city. He mentioned his wish to introduce Ying Chan to some suitable boy, “aggressive” if possible. The one word gave the whole ploy away to Keiko.
“I see,” she said. “It’s inconvenient for you that she’s a virgin. I’ll bring you my incorrigible nephew the next time we meet. You won’t have to worry about any aftermath with that boy. Later you’ll be able to play the role of the gentle, sweet, overly kind confidant and enjoy her at your leisure . . . what a wonderful plan!”
When Keiko said “wonderful,” the wonderfulness always seemed to vanish. In pleasure she completely lacked emotion—had she been a prostitute she would have had to pretend. She was too methodical.
Keiko embarked upon an explanation of her nephew’s modishness—his name was Katsumi Shimura. She told Honda that he sent his measurements to New York and through an American friend of his father’s ordered Brooks Brothers suits for every season of the year. This anecdote alone told much about the young man.
While the story of the Sutra of the Peacock King was being retold, Katsumi gazed off into the distance, obviously bored. The lobby of the Imperial Hotel was like the entrance to a tomb with low projecting rocks cutting off the mezzanine; in the shop occupying a corner of the lobby gaudily colored American magazines and paperbacks bloomed in disarray like withered flowers left in a graveyard.
Aunt and nephew closely resembled each other in their inability to listen seriously to what anyone else might be saying. In the nephew’s case this was due to mere rudeness, while in the aunt’s it seemed to be part of her good manners. Keiko would have listened with the same casual indifference to confessions horrible enough to freeze a normal person to the very marrow.
“The trouble is . . . I don’t know for certain that Ying Chan will really show up,” said Honda.
“You’ve developed a phobia about that ever since the housewarming. Let’s just relax and wait. If she doesn’t come, we can still have fun. The three of us will go to dinner. Katsumi is not particularly the type to be overly anxious.”
“Oh, yes . . . well, that’s right,” Katsumi answered vaguely with his typically overcrisp intonation.
Abruptly Keiko removed a stick of solid perfume from her handbag and rubbed it on her earlobes, from which hung jade earrings.
As though on signal, all the lights in the lobby went out.
“Tisk! A power failure,” exclaimed Katsumi. What was the point of saying the power had failed when it already had, thought Honda. Some people spoke only as an apology for t
heir laziness.
Keiko, of course, said nothing. The perfume was returned to her bag and the catch clicked in the darkness. The sound seemed to open into a deeper darkness. In the gloom the firm, opulent, sovereign flesh of Keiko’s hips seemed to expand secretly and limitlessly with the spreading fragrance of the scent.
The silence was only momentary. As though pushing aside the darkness, the artificially vivacious conversation of the shipwrecked immediately began.
“During the occupation,” said Honda, “the American forces had priority on the use of what little electricity there was, so we couldn’t help but have blackouts. Yet I’m surprised it goes on.”
“Recently during a massive power failure,” added Keiko, “I was passing through Yoyogi when I saw that only the American Yoyogi Heights was brightly lit; that one section floating over the darkness of the entire area made it seem like a town of people from another planet. It was beautiful but eerie.”
It was dark, but the headlights of the traffic in the streets beyond the pond in the front garden cast light up to the revolving doors of the entrance. One door was rotating from the momentum of someone departing and the headlights shone like luminous stripes in underwater darkness. Honda felt himself quiver slightly as he recalled the scene in the park at night.
“You can breathe so freely and easily in the dark,” said Keiko. Honda wanted to ask: And what about the daytime? Keiko’s shadow loomed up and sped across the wall. A bellboy had brought candles and when they were placed in ashtrays on several tables the lobby became a veritable cemetery flickering with lights to welcome back the dead.
A taxi drew up at the entrance. Ying Chan entered, dressed in a lovely canary-yellow dress. Honda was astounded at the miracle: she was only fifteen minutes late.