Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
About the Author
By Yukio Mishima
Dedication
Contents
After the Banquet
1. The Setsugoan
2. The Kagen Club
3. Mrs. Tamaki’s Opinion
4. The Leisured Companions
5. Kazu’s Interpretation of Love
6. Before the Departure
7. The Omizutori Ceremony in Nara
8. The Wedding
9. The So-called “New Life”
10. Important Visitors
11. “The New Life”—The Real Thing
12. Collision
13. An Obstacle in the Path of Love
14. The Election at Last
15. Election Day
16. Orchids, Oranges, Bedroom
17. A Grave in the Evening Clouds
18. After the Banquet
19. Before the Banquet
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Epub ISBN: 9781407053103
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Published by Vintage 2001
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Copyright © 1963, copyright renewed 1991 by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Originally published in Japanese by
Shinchosha as Utage No Ato.
Copyright © 1960 by Yukio Mishima
This translation first published in the United States by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1963
Vintage
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About the Author
Yukio Mishima was born into a samurai family and imbued with the code of complete control over mind and body, and loyalty to the Emperor – the same code that produced the austerity and self-sacrifice of Zen. He wrote countless short stories and thirty-three plays, in some of which he acted. Several films have been made from his novels, including The Sound of Waves; Enjo, which was based on The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Among his other works are the novels Confessions of a Mask and Thirst for Love and the short-story collections Death in Midsummer and Acts of Worship.
After Mishima conceived the idea of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy in 1964, he frequently said he would die when it was completed. On November 25th, 1970, the day he completed The Decay of the Angel, the last novel of the cycle, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide) at the age of 45.
BY YUKIO MISHIMA
THE SEA OF FERTILITY, A CYCLE OF FOUR NOVELS
Spring Snow
Runaway Horses
The Temple of Dawn
The Decay of the Angel
Confessions of a Mask
Thirst for Love
Forbidden Colors
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
After the Banquet
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Five Modern Nō Plays
The Sound of Waves
Death in Midsummer
Acts of Worship
THIS TRANSLATION IS DEDICATED TO
Paul C. Blum
CONTENTS
1 The Setsugoan
2 The Kagen Club
3 Mrs. Tamaki’s Opinion
4 The Leisured Companions
5 Kazu’s Interpretation of Love
6 Before the Departure
7 The Omizutori Ceremony in Nara
8 The Wedding
9 The So-called “New Life”
10 Important Visitors
11 “The New Life”—The Real Thing
12 Collision
13 An Obstacle in the Path of Love
14 The Election at Last
15 Election Day
16 Orchids, Oranges, Bedroom
17 A Grave in the Evening Clouds
18 After the Banquet
19 Before the Banquet
1
The Setsugoan
The Setsugoan—the After-the-Snow Retreat—stood on high ground in a hilly part of the Koishikawa district of Tokyo. It had fortunately escaped unharmed during the war; nothing had been damaged either in the magnificent garden, a noted example of the Kobori Enshū style covering over a hundred thousand square feet, or in the buildings: a central gate moved here from a certain famous temple in Kyoto, an entrance and visitors’ pavilion lifted bodily from some ancient temple of Nara, and a banqueting hall of more recent construction.
At the height of the upheaval caused by the capital levy after the war, the Setsugoan had passed from the hands of its former owner, an industrialist who dabbled as a tea master, to those of a beautiful, vivacious woman. Under her management the Setsugoan quickly developed into a distinguished restaurant.
The proprietress of the Setsugoan was called Kazu Fukuzawa. A streak of rustic simplicity in Kazu’s plump, attractive figure, always bursting with energy and enthusiasm, made people with complicated motives who came before her feel ashamed of their complexity. People with drooping spirits, when they saw Kazu, were either considerably heartened or else completely overpowered. Some curious blessing of heaven had joined in one body a man’s resolution with a woman’s reckless enthusiasm. This combination carried Kazu to heights no man could reach.
Kazu radiated open good nature, and her absolutely unyielding disposition had assumed a form both simple and beautiful. Ever since she was a child she had preferred to love rather than be loved. Her air of innocent rusticity concealed a considerable determination to have her own way, and various underhanded acts by petty individuals around her had only served to nurture her infinitely direct and outgoing disposition.
Kazu had for many years enjoyed the company of a number of male friends with whom she had no romantic connections. Genki Nagayama, a politician who worked behind the scenes in the Conservative Party, was a comparatively new friend, but he loved Kazu, twenty years his junior, as he might a younger sister. “You won’t find many women
like her,” he would always say. “One of these days she’s going to do something sensational. It wouldn’t be too much for Kazu if you told her to stand Japan on its head. Any man with her ability would rank as a child of destiny, but the most you can say about Kazu, since she’s a woman, is that she’s got plenty of natural endowments. When the day comes that a man coaxes some honest-to-goodness love out of her, she’ll really explode.”
Nagayama’s comments did not upset Kazu when they were relayed to her, but a few days later, sitting beside him, she said, “You’ll never coax any romance out of me, Genki. I don’t respond when a man comes charging at me bursting with confidence. You’re clever enough when it comes to sizing up people, but you’re no good at persuasion.”
“I’ve no intention of trying to persuade you. If ever I tried courting you, that would be the end of me!” There was malice in the old politician’s tone.
The maintenance of the garden of the Setsugoan was all that its popularity demanded. The focal point of the garden, especially at moon-viewing parties, was a pond directly south of what had been the visitors’ pavilion of a Nara temple. Trees of an age and grandeur rarely encountered nowadays in Tokyo surrounded the garden, and each pine, chestnut, nettle tree, and oak rose majestically into a blue sky untroubled by the face of any incongruous modern construction. A pair of kites had for years been accustomed to build their nest at the top of one of the trees, a conspicuously tall pine. Every variety of bird visited this garden at its appointed time of year, but nothing could compare to the numbers and din in the migration season, when flocks of birds swooped down from the sky to peck at the nandin fruits or the insects in the broad expanse of lawn.
Every morning Kazu took a stroll through the garden. She never failed to give instructions of one sort or another to the gardener. Sometimes her suggestions were appropriate, but as often they missed the mark. In any case, giving instructions had become part of Kazu’s daily routine and her good humor. The head gardener, though an expert at his trade, consequently never dared oppose her.
Kazu walked in her garden. This walk was the sum of her pleasure in being unmarried and the occasion for unhampered reveries. Almost her entire day was spent chatting with her guests or singing for them; she was never alone. Entertaining guests, however familiar a part of her life it had become, never ceased to exhaust her. Kazu’s morning promenade was in fact evidence of the serenity of a heart unlikely ever again to fall seriously in love.
Love no longer disturbed her private life . . . This certainty enraptured Kazu, even as she watched the sunlight shine majestically through the haze-enshrouded trees and glitter magically on the green moss of the path ahead. It had been a long time since she and love had parted company. Her last affair was already a distant memory, and she was unshakably convinced that she was proof against all manner of dangerous sentiments.
This morning stroll was the poem of Kazu’s security. She was over fifty, but no one seeing this carefully groomed woman, whose complexion and sparkling eyes had lost none of their loveliness, as she sauntered through the huge garden could help but be struck and moved to romantic conjectures. But, as Kazu herself realized better than anyone, for her romantic stories were a thing of the past, her poem was dead. Kazu naturally sensed the latent strength within her, but she was well aware at the same time that this strength had been bent and curbed, and would never cast off its shackles and break loose.
This huge garden and house, deposits in the bank, negotiable securities, powerful and generous customers from the world of finance—these all were adequate guarantees for Kazu’s old age. Having achieved this security, it no longer bothered her that people might dislike her or gossip behind her back. Her roots were firmly planted in the society of her choosing, and she could look forward to spending her remaining years comfortably, respected by everyone, devoting herself to refined pursuits, scattering largesse on her travels and in social expenses, eventually tutoring a suitable successor.
At times, when such thoughts crowded her mind, it made her pause in her walk. She would sit on the garden bench and let her eyes wander far down the moss-covered path, taking in the morning sunlight spilling onto the path and the delicate movements of birds alighting.
Here not an echo of the rumbling of streetcars or the blasts of klaxons could reach her. The world had become a still-life picture. How was it possible that emotions which once had flared so brightly could flicker out without a trace? The reasons escaped Kazu. She was at a loss to understand where sensations which had once definitely passed through her body could have gone. The conventional belief that people achieve maturity as they accumulate experiences of every kind seemed to her untrue. She thought it more likely that human beings were no more than blind ditches through which sundry objects flowed, or the stone pavement at a crossroads printed with the tracks of vehicles of every kind which have since passed on. Ditches rot and stone pavement wears away. But once they too were at a crossroads on a festival day.
It had been years since Kazu knew what it meant to be blind. Everything seemed now to have sharp outlines and to be pellucidly clear, like her view of this garden in morning sunlight; not a single point of ambiguity remained in the world. She felt as if even the insides of other people’s minds were now transparent before her eyes. There weren’t so many things to be surprised at any more. When she heard that some man had betrayed his friend for money, she thought it likely; when she heard that another man had failed in business because of infatuation for a woman, that seemed likely too. She was sure of one thing at any rate—such disasters would never overtake her.
When people asked Kazu’s advice about their love affairs, her suggestions were adroit and to the point. Human psychology was for her divided into some twenty or thirty clearly defined compartments, and however difficult the problem, she could supply an answer to all questions merely by combining the different elements involved. There was nothing more complicated to human life. Kazu’s advice was based on a number of precepts and on being in the position to offer accurate advice to anyone at all in her capacity of retired champion. She accordingly (and quite naturally) despised the idea of “progress.” Could anyone, however modern he fancied himself, be an exception to rules of passion which have existed from remote antiquity?
“The young people these days,” Kazu would often remark, “are doing exactly what young people have always done. Only the clothes are different. Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they’re just repeating what others before them have done. The only difference is that society doesn’t make as much fuss about their antics as it used to, and the young people have to go to bigger and bigger extremes in order to attract attention.”
There was nothing new or startling about this pronouncement, but coming from Kazu it had authority.
Kazu, still seated on the bench, took a cigarette from the sleeve of her kimono and enjoyed a quiet puff. The smoke drifted in the morning light and hung in the windless air, bright and heavy as silk. This moment had a savor that a woman with a family would surely never know; it brought the taste of assurance that she could provide herself with a comfortable life. Kazu enjoyed such good health that no matter how heavily she might have drunk the previous night, she could not remember ever having failed to enjoy her morning cigarette.
Kazu could not see it all from where she sat, but the whole landscape of the garden was firmly graven in her mind; she knew it to the last detail as well as she knew the palm of her hand. The tall dusky-green ilex tree that formed the center of the garden, its clusters of glossy, pudgy little leaves, the wild vines twisted about the trees on the hill in back . . . the view from the reception room of the main building, a broad expanse of lawn and an unobtrusive snow-viewing lantern in front, the island in the garden pond with its ancient pagoda and thick growth of bamboo grass: nothing, not the smallest clump of shrubbery, nor the least conspicuous flower, grew in this garden by accident.
As she smoked her cigarette Kazu felt as if the garden’s exquisite perfection had completely enveloped all her memories. Kazu looked on people and society as she now looked on this garden. And that was not all. She owned it.
2
The Kagen Club
Kazu received word from a certain cabinet member that the Kagen Club would like to hold its annual meeting at her establishment. The Kagen Club was a kind of association of former ambassadors who were roughly contemporaries and who met once a year on the seventh of November. They had hitherto been unlucky with their meeting places, and the cabinet member, feeling sorry for them, put in a word with Kazu.
“They’re a bunch of elegant, retired gentlemen,” he said, adding, “All except one, who’s never quite retired. I’m sure you’ve heard of him—old Noguchi, the famous Noguchi who was in the cabinet any number of times before the war. I don’t know what’s come over him, but a couple of years ago he was elected to the Diet on the Radical ticket, only to get beaten in the next election.”
Kazu learned of the club’s plans in the midst of a garden party given by the minister, and she was too busy entertaining the guests to listen to more. The garden had been invaded that day by a crowd of foreign men and women. It was as if a flock of birds—not the usual twittering little creatures, but a chattering swarm of oversized, brightly feathered birds, had swooped down on the Setsugoan.