The Decay Of The Angel (18 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: The Decay Of The Angel
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A sugar bowl bright with betrayal in the morning sunlight. Feelings of guilt for having reached out simultaneously. It wounded Honda to think that this had been the first suggestion of a parental bond.
Tōru was pleased at more than this open confusion. He could see the hesitation as Honda found himself unable to preach the obvious lesson: that one must show more confidence in and respect for a person whom one has even tentatively called teacher. For the first time the controversy within Honda and the evil hidden in his educational policies became clear. Tōru felt like a liberated child spitting out a watermelon seed.
“Well, leave it to me. You just go on doing as you’ve always done. Don’t worry yourself over anything but your studies. Leave everything else to me. The first thing is to get you through your examinations.”
“How right you are.” Tōru smiled a beautiful smile.
Honda deliberated for a day. The next day he asked an acquaintance in the Public Security Division of the Metropolitan Police to investigate. A report came some days later. Furusawa had been a member of an extremist student faction. Honda invented a trivial pretext for dismissing him.
20
 
 T
ŌRU OCCASIONALLY
wrote to Kinué, and got long answers. He had to be careful when he opened them, because each one contained a pressed flower for the season. Sometimes she would apologize for having sent a hothouse flower, there being no wildflowers in bloom.
Wrapped in paper, the flower would be like a dead butterfly. There was pollen for wing dust, letting one imagine that when it lived it had flown. Dead wings and dead petals are the same. The remembrance of color that has flown through the sky, and the remembrance of color in stillness and resignation.
Only after reading the letter did he recognize one fragment, dry and brown like the skin of an Indian, strong red threads torn and jagged from having been pressed flat, as the petal of a red hothouse tulip.
The letters were the endless confession she had brought to the signal station. And she always offered in much detail a description of her loneliness for Tōru and her wish to come to Tokyo. He always replied that she must be patient, however many years passed. He would find an occasion to summon her.
Sometimes he almost thought, after having been away from her for so long, that she was beautiful. And immediately he would laugh. Yet he was coming to see what the mad girl had meant to him.
He needed lunacy to dim his own clarity. He had to have someone beside him who would see as something quite different all the things he saw with such clarity, clouds or ships or the gloomy old hallway of the Honda house, or the schedule of all his lessons until examination day posted on the wall of his room.
Tōru sometimes longed for liberation. The direction was clear. It must be the direction of uncertainty, the realm behind this clearly defined world, a realm whose phenomena were flowing over a waterfall.
Kinué unconsciously played the role of the gentle guest who brought freedom into the cage.
Nor was that all.
She brought balm for certain itches within him. He itched to do injury. His heart was a sharp drill protruding from a sack, itching to cut someone. Having cut down Furusawa, it was looking for someone else. Its cleanness, free of the least speck of rust, must sooner or later turn savage. Tōru saw that he could do something other than observe. The awareness brought tension, and Kinué’s letters brought rest from it. Because of her madness she was beyond his harming.
The strongest bond between them was his certainty that he could not himself be wounded.
A successor to Furusawa was found, a student of the most ordinary common-sense sort. Tōru hoped that within the next two months he could get rid of the other tutors as well, for he did not want to seem in their debt when he had passed his examinations.
But caution held him back. Honda would begin to have certain suspicions were Tōru to waste his energies on such minor personages. He could come to discount Tōru’s complaints, and, accepting the faults complained of, find fault in the complaints themselves. And the secret pleasure would disappear. Tōru concluded that he must be patient. He must wait until someone far more worth wounding appeared. Whoever it was would provide a way, albeit an indirect one, of wounding Honda himself. A way that left no room for resentment. A clean, unsullied way of Tōru’s very own, leaving Honda with no one but himself to blame.
And who would come into his life, like a ship on the far horizon? As the ships had first taken firm shape in Tōru’s mind, so would his victim appear one day, a shadow neither ship nor mirage, unsuspecting and vulnerable, following the dictates of the drill in his heart. Tōru came almost to have hopes.
21
 
 T
ŌRU ENTERED
the preparatory school of his choice.
In his second year there came a proposal, through a suitable mediator. A certain person had a marriageable daughter he thought Tōru might be interested in. Tōru had reached the legal age of consent, but he was still only eighteen. Honda laughed the proposal off. The other person was persistent, however, and the proposal came through another mediator. Since the second man was an eminence in the legal world, Honda could not turn him away unconditionally.
Honda longed for something: a young bride who would be twisted with grief at the loss of her twenty-year-old husband. She would wear the pale, beautiful hues of tragedy; and so, at no expense, Honda would have another meeting with a pure crystallization of beauty.
The dream was rather out of accord with his educational policies. Yet if there had been no margin at all for the dream, and if there had been no sense of crisis, Honda would scarcely have bothered with policies calculated to give Tōru a long and beautyless life. What Honda feared was what Honda hoped for, what Honda hoped for was what Honda feared.
The proposal was repeated at appropriate intervals, like water dripping through a floor. It amused Honda to be visited by this eminence and to hear his desperate plea. He thought it too early to tell Tōru.
Honda was fascinated with the photograph the old man brought. The girl was eighteen and a beauty, with a thin delicate face that had in it nothing of the bright and modern. There was beauty in the faint air of bewildered resentment with which she faced the photographer.
“Yes, she is very beautiful. And is she strong physically?” asked Honda, the intent of his question quite the opposite of what his friend must have supposed it to be.
“I can assure you that I know her very well. She is much stronger than this picture would lead you to believe. She has had no serious illnesses. Health is of course the most important thing. It was her father who chose the picture, and I think he chose a rather old-fashioned one.”
“She is of a cheerful disposition, then?”
“Not, I fear, if that expression contains a suggestion of frivolity.”
It was an equivocal response. Honda wanted to meet the girl.
It was clear that the proposal had taken Honda’s wealth into account. Only that could explain the eagerness for an eighteen-year-old bridegroom, however talented he might be. The tempting object must be snatched up before someone else saw its possibilities.
Honda was perfectly aware of all this. And if he were to accept the proposal, the obvious reason would be to control the urges of a difficult eighteen-year-old. But Tōru here before him seemed quite under control already. So the interests of the two parties were more and more divergent, and Honda saw no reason at all to pursue the talks. He felt a certain curiosity about the contrast between the parents and the beautiful candidate herself. He wanted to see greedy self-respect give way. The family that made the proposal was of much prominence, but such considerations no longer troubled Honda.
A dinner party was proposed at which Tōru and the girl would be present. Honda declined. Instead he and the person who had brought the proposal had dinner with the girl’s family.
For two or three weeks the seventy-eight-year-old Honda was in the grip of temptation. He had seen the girl at dinner, and they had exchanged brief remarks. He had received several more photographs. Hence the temptation.
He had not given a favorable answer, nor had he reached a decision; but his aging heart was the victim of impulses which his reason could not control. The willfulness of old age gave him the itch. He longed to show the pictures to Tōru and see his response.
Honda did not himself know what had possessed him, but happiness and pride were at work in the temptation. He knew that if in fact he were to inform Tōru of the proposal he would have passed the point of no return. But willfulness did not see reason.
He longed to see all the results of the match, of bumping the two of them together, a white billiard ball and a crimson. It would be good if Tōru was fond of the girl and it would be good if she was fond of him. She would mourn him when he died, he would be aroused by her greed and come to see humanity for what it was. Either would for Honda be a pleasing result. A sort of festival.
Honda was much too old to have solemn thoughts about the nature of human life. He was at an age when he could justify malicious games. Whatever the malice, death was near, to make amends. He was at an age when youth was a plaything, humanity a collection of clay dolls, an age when, putting ceremony to his own uses, he could turn honesty and sincerity into the play of the evening sky.
When others were as nothing, surrender to such temptations became a kind of destiny.
Late one evening Honda called Tōru into his study. Mildewed by the summer rains, it was the English-style study he had inherited from his father. Honda disliked air-conditioning, and there was a faint glow of sweat on Tōru’s white chest. It seemed to Honda that a doomed white hydrangea was in bloom before him.
“It will soon be summer vacation.”
“But exams come first.” Tōru bit at the chocolate mint Honda had offered.
“You eat like a squirrel.” Honda smiled.
“Oh?” Tōru too smiled, the smile of one whom it is not possible to injure.
Looking at the pale face, Honda thought that this summer the sun must burn it to a crisp. It was a face that did not seem in danger of pimples. With a studied casualness, he opened a drawer and laid a photograph on the table before Tōru.
Tōru was rather splendid. Honda missed no detail. Tōru first examined it with the solemn attention of a guard examining a pass. His questioning eyes looked up at Honda and back again at the picture. Then came boyish curiosity, and he flushed to the ears. Putting the photograph back on the table, he plunged a rough finger into an ear.
“She is very beautiful,” he said, a touch of anger in his voice.
Very, very splendid, thought Honda. There was something poetic in the youthfulness of the response (and it had been in a moment of crisis). Honda forgot that Tōru had responded as he had wanted him to respond.
It was a complex amalgam, as if Honda’s self-awareness had itself for an instant played a boyish role, hiding confusion with a touch of roughness.
“Would you like to meet her?” Honda asked quietly.
He coughed somewhat nervously, hoping that the next response would be as appropriate. Tōru sprang lightly to his feet and went over to beat on Honda’s back.

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