“She’s out,” the clerk answered automatically. The response seemed too quick to be genuine. As Honda asked two or three questions the sharp-eyed youths all stared at him. The stifling night air made him feel as though he were in the waiting room of some little tropical airport.
“Could you tell me her room number?”
“It’s against the rules. You can see the students only in this lobby and only by their consent.”
When Honda gave up and left, the young men returned to their magazines. Brown ankles jutted out sharply like thorns from all the pairs of crossed legs.
He could walk freely through the front garden, but no one was there. The sound of a guitar came from a brightly lit room on the third floor, and the windows were open wide to the humid weather. A melody sung in a high but soft voice resembling a high-pitched Chinese viol twined around the sounds of the strings like a yellowed vine. Listening to the sad voice, Honda recalled the unforgettable nights in Bangkok just before the war.
If only he could slip in, he wanted to go through every room, for he did not believe that Ying Chan was out. She was everywhere in the humid evening darkness of the rainy season. In the faint fragrance of flowers that had probably been cultivated by foreign students, in the distinct yellow gladioli or the pale violet of the Roger’s bronze leaf intermingling in the dark . . . Minute elements of Ying Chan floating all about gradually coalesced into shape and solidified into her being. He could sense her even in the faint whir of mosquito wings.
Most of the windows were dark. Only one room at the corner of the third floor cast a bright radiance through moving lace curtains. Curious, Honda gazed at the window. Someone was standing just inside looking down at the garden. The wind caused the curtains to flutter and he caught a fleeting glimpse. It was Ying Chan wearing a slip. Involuntarily he ran toward the window and came directly under a street lamp. Ying Chan seemed shocked on recognizing him. Immediately the light was turned off and the window was closed.
Honda leaned against the corner of the building and waited a long time. The minutes dripped away and the blood throbbed in his temples. Time dripped like drops of blood. He pressed his cheek against the thin blue moss growing on the concrete, letting it cool his hot old cheeks.
After a while, a rustling like that of a snake’s tongue sounded from the third-floor window. It was slowly opened, and something soft and white fell at Honda’s feet. He picked it up and opened a piece of crumpled white paper. Inside was a wad of cotton large enough to fill his palm. It seemed to have been pressed into a compact mass, for as he released the outer wrapping it swelled like something alive. Honda fumbled with the layers of cotton. Inside lay the emerald ring protected by the golden yakshas.
He glanced up to the window again, but it was tightly closed and there was not the faintest ray of light.
When he left the Foreign Student Center and came to his senses, Honda realized that he was only a couple of blocks from Keiko’s. Customarily he did not use his car for his rendezvous. He could summon a taxi, but he decided to punish himself by walking in spite of the pain in his back and hips. Even if she were not in, he could not possibly go straight home without first knocking at her door.
Were he young, he would have cried aloud as he walked. If he were young! But he had never cried when he was young! He had been a promising youth who thought he should use reason to bring success to himself and others instead of wasting time in shedding tears. What sweet sorrow, what lyrical despair! He permitted himself to feel like this only in a hypothetical past tense. By so doing, he eradicated all authenticity from his present emotion. If only sweet romanticism were allowed to one of his years! But neither now nor when he had been young had his makeup permitted anything of sweetness to himself. His only recourse was to daydream about a different kind of self in the past. How different? It had been quite impossible to become a Kiyoaki or an Isao.
If Honda’s imagination let him dream that he would have been of this or that personality were he only young and thus served to protect him through the years at every dangerous emotional point, then his reluctance to recognize his present emotional condition was probably the result of such self-denial in his youth. At any rate, it was impossible for him to cry aloud as he walked—not when he was young and not now. In anyone’s eyes this old gentleman in his Burberry coat and Borsalino would appear to be just a nocturnal stroller, whimsical, solitary.
Thus, as a result of the unpleasant self-consciousness that made him to refer to all emotions only indirectly, Honda had become so safe that he no longer had to worry about self-consciousness. It had become possible for him to act on any impulse or any desire, however shameless. If one studied his every action, one might conclude incorrectly that he was a man who acted on impulse. His hasty trip to Keiko’s house along this nocturnal road, threatened at any moment by heavy showers, was one of his idiotic impulses. As he walked, he felt the urge to thrust his hand down his throat and, as though drawing a pocket watch from his vest, extract his heart.
It was improbable that Keiko would be home at this hour of the night, but she was.
Honda was at once shown into the resplendent drawing room. The Louis Quinze chairs with their straight backs would not let him relax, and he felt he was about to pass out from sheer exhaustion.
The cryptomeria doors were half open just as they had been the other day. The night solitude in the drawing room was enhanced by the overpowering brilliance of the chandelier. Through the window he saw the lights of the town twinkling through the far end of the grove in the garden, but he did not have the energy to walk over and out. It was better to endure the demoralizing heat and disintegrate in perspiration.
He heard Keiko’s footsteps as she descended the spiral marble staircase to the entrance hall. She was wearing a colorful mumu with a long train. She entered the drawing room and closed the door with the cranes behind her. Her black hair was standing erect as if in a storm, flying about, shapelessly swollen, making her face with its light makeup appear unusually small and pale. She walked around among the chairs and sat down facing Honda in front of the niche with its mural of golden clouds. Cognac had been placed on the small table between them. Beneath the hem of her dress peeked her bare feet in bedroom slippers adorned with bouquets of dried tropical fruit. The red lacquer of her toenails was the same color as the large hibiscus flowers on her black mumu. Nevertheless, the abundance of dark hair standing on her head in front of the golden clouds added immeasurably to the gloom.
“Please excuse me. My hair looks mad. Your sudden visit upset even that. Unfortunately I just washed it a little while ago. I was going to set it tomorrow. You men don’t know about such ordeals. But is something wrong? You look pale.”
Briefly Honda told her what had happened, but he was disgusted to be speaking like a defense lawyer. He could not escape the habit of describing logically, inductively, even in this matter of such burning urgency. His words were useful only for arranging events into some sort of order. He had wanted to appeal to her by wordless, senseless screams for help. At least he had until he entered the house.
“The moral of the story is not to rush into things, it would seem,” said Keiko. “I told you to leave everything to me. I don’t know what to do either. Even so, Ying Chan was very, very rude. I wonder if that’s the way in the South where she comes from. But I know that you’re quite taken with her capricious manners.” She offered him cognac and said: “And what are you suggesting I do?”
She did not sound at all annoyed, but displayed her characteristic melancholy enthusiasm.
Honda was slipping the ring on and off his little finger. “I would like you to return this to Ying Chan and ask her to accept it. The separation of this ring from her body makes me feel as though the relationship between her and my past is permanently severed.”
Keiko was silent, and Honda feared that she was angry with him. She held the glass of cognac at eye level and watched how the once rippling liquid gradually slipped down the concave surf
ace of the snifter, forming viscous, transparent cloud patterns. Her large eyes under the black mountain of hair were almost frightening. Her serious expression was too natural for someone trying to suppress a sardonic smile. Honda thought that her eyes were like those of a child who has watched the crushing of an ant. “I came to ask you merely to do that,” he said encouragingly. “That’s all.”
He was gambling on an extremely trivial exaggeration. Where could he find pleasure except in a kind of ethical principle not to neglect the ludicrous? He had picked Ying Chan out of this garbage pail of a world, and though he ached to possess her he had not so much as laid a finger on her. He was seeking to intensify this idiocy to the point where his lust would intersect the orbits of the stars.
“Why don’t you forget about the girl?” said Keiko finally. “Just the other day I heard she was dancing cheek to cheek with some vulgar student at a thé dansant at the Mimatsu.”
“Forget her? I can never do that. Leaving her alone is allowing her to mature.”
“And I suppose you have the right to stop her from maturing. How about your previous feeling that you didn’t want her to be a virgin?”
“I thought it would change her overnight into a completely different woman. But that failed, thanks to your stupid nephew.”
“He’s quite a fool, isn’t he,” said Keiko, breaking into laughter. She examined her long nails through her glass in the light of the chandelier. They were painted with red lacquer and shone through it, glowing within the convexity like a small, mysterious sunrise.
“The sun’s coming up, see!” said Keiko, indicating her glass. She was drunk.
“A cruel sunrise,” Honda murmured, ardently wishing that the fog of shabbiness and irrationality would completely envelop this overly bright room so that he would be unable to see a thing before him.
“What would you do if I turned you down?”
“My future would be completely black.”
“What an exaggeration!” Keiko put the glass on the table and thought a while longer. She murmured something about always being in the position of helping others. After a while she said:
“The real problem deep down is always childish. When a man makes up his mind, he’ll set off on an African expedition to look for a single misprinted stamp.”
“I think I’m in love with Ying Chan.”
“Oh dear!” Keiko laughed loudly, quite unconvinced.
There was a decisive note in her voice when she spoke again. “I understand now. You need to do something absolutely simple and silly right now. For instance,” she lifted the hem of her mumu a little. “For instance, how about kissing the arch of my foot? It’ll cheer you up . . . studying the foot of a woman you don’t love at all. Don’t worry, I’ve just taken a bath and I’m quite scrubbed. It won’t hurt you.”
“If this is in exchange for my request, I’ll be glad to oblige right now.”
“All right, go ahead. It’ll do you good to try something like that just once . . . in view of your well-known pride. The credit side of your reputation will be even further enhanced.”
Keiko was obviously carried away by her passion as a preceptor. She stood directly under the splendid chandelier and with both hands brushed back her abundant hair, causing the sides to wave like elephant’s ears.
Honda tried in vain to smile. He looked around and slowly bent down. The pain in his hip increased sharply, so that he crouched and prostrated himself on the carpet with grim determination. From this viewpont, Keiko’s sandals resembled religious paraphernalia guarding the firmly planted, slightly sinewy arches of her feet. Clusters of brown, tan, purple, and white dried fruit hung over the vermilion toenails. As Honda put his lips close to the sandaled feet, they artfully drew away. Ultimately, unless he lifted the hem of the hibiscus skirt and thrust his head underneath, his lips could not reach the arches of her feet. Putting his head inside, he found that the mumu was filled with the faint warm fragrance of perfume. Suddenly he was in unknown country. When he raised his eyes after having kissed Keiko’s feet, the light was all dark vermilion through the flower print, and two beautiful white columns with pale patterns of veins stood before him. In the distant sky hung a small black sun sending out disheveled black rays.
Honda twisted clear and stood up with difficulty.
“There. I’ve done my part.”
“And I’ll do mine,” said Keiko, accepting the ring with a serene smile becoming to her age.
42
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Rié called from the house to her husband, who had still not come in for his breakfast.
“I’m looking at Fuji,” he answered from the terrace. The voice remained directed not toward the room but rather toward the mountain beyond the arbor at the western edge of the garden.
It was six o’clock of a summer morning, and Fuji was flushed the color of wine. Her contours were hazy. Like powder painted on the nose of a child in preparation for a summer festival, a brush mark of snow was visible around the eighth station.
After breakfast, Honda went out again, wearing only a pair of shorts and polo shirt, and lay down beside the swimming pool under the brilliant morning sky. He playfully scooped up some water.
“What are you doing?” Rié called again as she cleaned away the breakfast things. This time he made no answer.
From the window Rié glared at this evidence of madness in her fifty-seven-year-old husband. In the first place, she did not like the way he was dressed. A man in the legal profession should never wear shorts. His stiff, emaciated white legs stood out below them. She did not fancy his shirt either. As if in punishment for wearing a polo shirt without possessing the virile fullness of youth, the sleeves and back drooped limply. She had come to the point where she took interest in seeing just how far her husband would go in his follies. It was a sort of perverse pleasure as in bearing down on an aching tooth.
Sensing through his back that his wife had given up and retreated to her room, Honda gazed to his heart’s content at the beauty of the morning scene reflected in the pool.
Cicadas had begun to sing in the cypress grove. Honda raised his eyes. Mount Fuji which had had an alcoholic flush had now turned a rich purple. It was eight o’clock, and in the graduated greens of the foothills floated the faint contours of woods and villages. As he looked at the deep blue of Fuji in summer, Honda invented a little game he could enjoy alone. It consisted in visualizing a midwinter mountain in midsummer. After staring at the dark blue Fuji for a while, he would then suddenly shift his gaze to the blue sky to one side; the afterimage on his retina would turn completely white and momentarily he could see a pure milky mountain in the blue sky.
After discovering the way to create this illusion, Honda came to believe that there were two mountains. Beside the summer Fuji there always existed a winter one; in addition to the real image, an essence of the mountain, pure white, also existed. As he shifted his gaze to the swimming pool, he saw that the reflection of Hakoné occupied a much greater area than that of Fuji. The mass of mountain covered with green was hot and stifling. Birds flying through the sky reflected in the water and a familiar nightingale visited the feeding box.
Yes, yesterday he had killed a snake near the arbor. It was a striped one some two feet long, and he had killed it by crushing its head with a rock so that it should not frighten the guests expected today. The little massacre had occupied his entire day. Blue-black steel springs, the image of the smooth, writhing body of the snake struggling against death lingered in his mind. Knowing that he too could kill something gave him a gloomy sense of power.
And the swimming pool. Again Honda stretched his hand and troubled the surface of the water. The reflection of summer clouds shattered into fragments of frosted glass. The pool had been completed six days before, but no one had yet used it. Honda had been here with Rié for three days, but under the pretext that the water was cold he had not once been in.
His sole reason for constructing the pool had been to see Ying Chan na
ked; nothing else mattered.
The sound of hammering could be heard in the distance. Keiko’s house was being remodeled. Since her place in Tokyo had been released by the Occupation Forces, Keiko came less and less to Gotemba, and somehow her relationship with Jack had cooled. Honda’s new house had stimulated her sense of competition, and she had started to remodel her own on a grand scale, almost to the extent of building a new one. She maintained that she would not be able to live in it during the summer and would probably spend the season in Karuizawa.
Honda, leaving the swimming pool to avoid the sun that was growing gradually stronger, with difficulty opened the beach umbrella planted in the middle of a table. He seated himself on a chair in the shade and again directed his gaze to the surface of the water.
The morning coffee still provided a numbing sensation at the back of his head. In the bottom of the twenty-seven by sixty foot pool, white lines showed through the ripples of blue paint, reminding him of the lime markings and mint-scented saromethyl ointment inextricably associated with the athletic competitions of his distant youth. A clean white line was drawn geometrically on everything, and from it something started and something ended. But the memory was faulty. Honda had had nothing to do with athletic competition in his youth.
Rather the white line reminded him of the center marking running down a highway at night. He suddenly remembered the little old man who had always carried a cane on his night excursions into the park. The first time he had met him on a sidewalk swept by the dazzling headlights of automobiles, the old man was walking with his chest thrust out and an ivory-handled cane on his arm. If he had walked normally the cane would have dragged on the ground, and he had raised his bent arm unnaturally high so that his posture was even stiffer. The fragrant May woods lay to one side of the walk. The little man looked like some retired Army officer carefully concealing his now valueless decorations in the inner pocket of his jacket.