Authors: Yukio Mishima
Spring Snow (44 page)
“Well, it doesn’t seem that Kiyoaki is mentioned anywhere here by name, does it?”
“Please, that part about ‘within the family.’ One glance should be enough to tell you it’s an insinuation. But, whatever else, I heard it from his own lips. He confessed that it was his child. In other words, you’re on your way to becoming a great-grandmother, Mother, and of an illegitimate child at that.”
“Perhaps Kiyoaki is protecting someone and his confession is false.”
“You’ll say anything at all, won’t you, Mother? Please go ahead and ask Kiyoaki yourself.”
She turned to Kiyoaki at last and spoke to him affectionately, as if he were a child of five or six.
“Listen, Kiyoaki. Look at me straight, now. Look Granny straight in the eye and answer my question. Then you can’t tell fibs. Now, what your father said—is it the truth?”
Kiyoaki turned toward her, mastering the pain he still felt in his back and clutching the now blood-soaked handkerchief to his nose, which was still bleeding. With tears in his eyes and careless streaks of blood clinging to the tip of his prominent nose, he seemed pathetically young, like a wet-nosed puppy.
“It’s true,” he said quickly in nasal tones, immediately seizing the fresh handkerchief proferred by his mother and clapping it to his face.
His grandmother then made a speech that seemed to echo the hoofbeats of horses galloping free, a speech that eloquently tore to shreds the conventional niceties.
“Getting the betrothed of the Imperial Prince pregnant! Now there’s an achievement! How many of these simpering lads nowadays are capable of anything like that? No doubt about it—Kiyoaki’s a true grandson of my husband’s. You won’t regret it even if you are jailed for it. At least they surely won’t execute you,” she said, obviously enjoying herself. The stern lines around her mouth were gone now, and she seemed aglow with a lively satisfaction, as if she had banished decades of stifling gloom, dispersing at a single stroke the enervating pall that had hung over the house ever since the present Marquis had become its master. Nor was she laying the blame on her son alone. She was speaking now in retaliation against all those others, too, who surrounded her in her old age, and whose treacherous power she could sense closing in to crush her. Her voice came echoing gaily out of another era, one of upheavals, a violent era forgotten by this generation, in which fear of imprisonment and death held no one in check, an era in which the threat of both was part of the texture of everyday life. She belonged to a generation of women who had thought nothing of washing their dinner plates in a river while corpses went floating past. That was life! And now, how remarkable that this grandson, who seemed so effete at first glance, should have revived the spirit of that age before her very eyes.
The old lady stared off into space, a look of almost drunken satisfaction on her face. The Marquis and Marquise stared at it in shocked silence—the face of an old woman too stern, too full of rough country beauty to be presented to the public as the matriarch of the Marquis’s household.
“Mother, what are you saying?” said the Marquis weakly, finally shaking himself out of his stupor. “This could mean the ruin of the House of Matsugae—and it’s also a terrible affront to Father.”
“That’s very true,” she replied at once. “And so what you’ve got to think about now is not punishing Kiyoaki but how best to protect the House of Matsugae. The nation is important, of course, but we must think of the family too. After all, we’re not like the Ayakuras, who have enjoyed the imperial favor for more than twenty-seven generations, are we now? So what do you think must be done?”
“Well, we have no choice but to go through with it as if nothing had happened, right up to the betrothal ceremony and the marriage.”
“That’s all very fine and clear, but something has to be done about Satoko’s baby as quickly as possible. And if it’s done anywhere near Tokyo and the newspapers somehow find out, then you’ll have a fine mess. Don’t you have anything practical to suggest?”
“Osaka would be the place,” replied the Marquis, after a moment’s thought. “Dr. Mori would do it for us in the strictest secrecy. And I’ll make it worth his while. But Satoko will have to have some plausible reason for going to Osaka.”
“The Ayakuras have all sorts of relatives down there. So wouldn’t it be a perfect chance to send Satoko down to visit them and tell them in person about her engagement?”
“But if she has to visit a number of relatives and they notice her condition . . . that wouldn’t do at all. But wait. I have it. How about having her go to Gesshu Temple in Nara to pay her final respects to the Abbess before her marriage? Wouldn’t that be best? It’s a temple that’s always been closely associated with the Imperial Family, and so it would only be proper to show the Abbess this honor. All things considered, it would be perfectly natural. The Abbess has been fond of her ever since she was a little girl. So first she goes to Osaka to receive the attentions of Dr. Mori. Then she rests for a day or two, then she goes to Nara. That would be best. And her mother should go with her, I suppose. . . .”
“Not just her mother. That wouldn’t do,” said the old lady sternly. “Count Ayakura’s wife can’t be expected to have our interests at heart. Someone from here has to go along with them and look after the girl both before and after Dr. Mori’s treatment. And it has to be a woman. So . . . ,” she pondered and then turned to Kiyoaki’s mother: “Tsujiko, you go.”
“Very well.”
“And you’ve got to keep your eyes open all the time. You don’t have to go to Nara with her. But once you’ve seen that the crucial thing is done, come back to Tokyo as quick as you can to give us a full report.”
“I understand.”
“Mother’s right,” said the Marquis. “Do just as she says. I’ll talk to the Count and we’ll decide what day she’s to leave. Everything will have to be done so that no one gets the least hint of what’s going on.”
Kiyoaki felt that he had become part of the background and that his life and love for Satoko were being treated as things already terminated. Before his very eyes, his father and mother and grandmother seemed to be carefully planning the funeral, quite unconcerned that the corpse could hear every word. Even before his funeral, something seemed already to have been buried. And so on the one hand he was like an attenuated corpse and, on the other, a severely scolded child who had no one to turn to.
Everything was thus proceeding smoothly to an altogether satisfactory conclusion, although the person most intimately concerned had no role in it and the wishes of the Ayakuras themselves were being ignored. Even his grandmother, who just a moment before had been speaking so daringly, now seemed to be basking in the pleasures of coping with a family crisis. Her character was essentially different from his, with its delicacy, and while she was endowed with the intelligence to perceive the savage nobility that lay at the root of his dishonorable behavior, once family honor was at stake, this same intelligence enabled her to put aside her admiration and adroitly conceal any such noble manifestations. This faculty, one might well suppose, she owed not to the summer sun that beat down on Kagoshima Bay but to the tutoring of her husband, Kiyoaki’s grandfather.
The Marquis looked directly at Kiyoaki for the first time since he had aimed his billiard cue at him.
“From now on, you are confined to this house, and you are to fulfill your duties as a student. All your energy is to go into studying for the examinations. Do you quite understand? I shall say nothing further about this matter. This is the turning point: either you will become a man or you will not. As for Satoko, I need hardly say that you are not to see her again.”
“In the old days, they called it house arrest, you know,” said his grandmother. “If you get tired of studying sometimes, come over and see Granny.”
And then it dawned on Kiyoaki that his father could never disown him now—he was much too afraid of what the world would say.
40
COUNT
A
YAKURA WAS
a hopeless coward in the face of such things as injury, sickness, and death. There was quite a disturbance on the morning that Tadeshina did not get up. The suicide note left on her pillow was brought to the Countess at once, and when she in turn handed it over to her husband, he opened it at fingertips’ length, as if it were germ-ridden. It turned out to be nothing more than a simple farewell note apologizing for the many defects that had marred her service to the Count and Countess, and to Satoko, and thanking them for their never-failing benevolence, the sort of note that could fall into any hands at all and still not excite suspicion.
The Countess sent for the doctor at once. The Count, of course, did not go to see for himself, but was content to receive a full report from his wife afterwards.
“She took more than a hundred and twenty sleeping pills. She hasn’t recovered consciousness yet, but the doctor told me what she’d done. My goodness, she was flailing her arms and legs and her body was convulsed like a bow—what a commotion! No one knew where the old woman could find such strength. But then, all of us held her down together and there was the injection and then the doctor pumped out her stomach—that was frightful and I tried not to look. And the doctor finally assured me that she was going to live. How wonderful to have such expertise! Before we said anything at all, he sniffed her breath and said: ‘Ah, a smell of garlic. It must be Calmotin tablets.’ He knew right away.”
“Did he say how long it would take her to recover?”
“Yes, he was kind enough to tell me that she would have to rest for at least ten days.”
“Be sure that nothing of this becomes known outside the house. You’ll have to warn the women to keep their mouths shut and we’ll have to speak to the doctor too. How is Satoko taking this?”
“She’s shut herself in her room. She won’t even go and see Tadeshina. In her present condition I think it might not be good for her to visit Tadeshina right now. And then, she hasn’t said a word to her since Tadeshina raised that matter with us, so she probably feels disinclined to rush in to see her. The best thing would be to leave Satoko alone.”
Five days before, Tadeshina, at her wit’s end, had broken the news of Satoko’s pregnancy to the Count and Countess, but instead of flying into a rage and subjecting her to the expected torrent of rebukes, the Count had in fact reacted so listlessly that she had been driven in desperation to write the letter to Marquis Matsugae and then to take an overdose of sleeping pills.
Satoko had persisted in rejecting Tadeshina’s advice. Although the danger was growing more acute with each day that passed, she not only ordered Tadeshina to say nothing to anyone, but she gave no slightest indication that she herself was ever going to come to a decision. And so, unable to bear this any longer, Tadeshina had betrayed her mistress by telling her secret to her mother and father. But the Count and Countess—perhaps because the news was such a stunning blow—had shown no more perturbation than if the news had been of a cat running off with one of the chickens in the backyard.
The day after she told him, and the day after that too, Tadeshina happened to cross paths with the Count, but he gave no sign of being concerned about the problem. He was, in fact, profoundly shaken. But since the problem was at once too vast to deal with on his own and too embarrassing to discuss with others, he made every effort to put it out of his mind.
He and his wife had agreed to say nothing to Satoko until they were ready to take some kind of action. Satoko, however, whose perceptions were now at their keenest, subjected Tadeshina to a cross-examination and so found out what had happened. And with that, she shut herself in her room and would have no more to do with her, and an uncanny silence fell over the house. Tadeshina stopped receiving any communications from the outside world, telling the servants to say that she was sick.
The Count avoided the problem even with his wife. He was fully aware of the fearful nature of the circumstances and of the necessity for immediate action, but he continued to procrastinate nonetheless. This did not mean that he believed in miracles either.
Count Ayakura’s paralysis did have a sort of refinement. Although one could hardly deny that his chronic indecisiveness involved a certain skepticism about the value of any decision at all, he was by no means a skeptic in the ordinary sense of the word. Even though he was plunged in meditation from morning to night, he was loath to direct his immense emotional reserves toward a single conclusion. Meditation had a great deal in common with
kemari
, the traditional sport of the Ayakuras. No matter how high one kicked the ball, it would obviously come down to earth again at once. Even if his illustrious ancestor Namba Munetate could excite cries of admiration when he picked up the white deerskin ball by its thongs of purple leather and kicked it to such incredible heights that it topped the ninety-foot roof of the imperial residence itself, it must inevitably fall back again into the garden.
kemari
, the traditional sport of the Ayakuras. No matter how high one kicked the ball, it would obviously come down to earth again at once. Even if his illustrious ancestor Namba Munetate could excite cries of admiration when he picked up the white deerskin ball by its thongs of purple leather and kicked it to such incredible heights that it topped the ninety-foot roof of the imperial residence itself, it must inevitably fall back again into the garden.
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