The Decay Of The Angel (8 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

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Since they would be separated at the table, Keiko spoke to him quietly in the procession. “I brought up
Robe of Feathers
. But I’ve never been to Mio. Take me there some day soon. There are so many places I’ve never been.”
“Any time. I’ve just been to Nihondaira Heights, but I wouldn’t mind going again. I’ll most happily be your escort.”
His stiff shirt insisted on pressing at his chin.
8
 
 A
T THE OPENING
of
Robe of Feathers
, two fishermen, one of them the deuteragonist, are engaged in conversation. “The boatmen call out as they make their way up the tempestuous Mio channel.” There comes a description of the journey. “Suddenly, a thousand leagues off, the friendly hills are enshrouded in clouds.” A fine long robe of silk hangs on the pine at center rear. Hakuryō starts off with it, thinking to make it his own. The protagonist, the angel, appears. He ignores her pleas that he return it. She is desolate, unable to fly back to the heavens.
“Hakuryō clutches the robe. She is helpless. Her tears like the dew in her jeweled hair, she weeps. The flowers fade, the five signs of the decay of the angel come forth.”
On the express from Tokyo Keiko was humming the prologue. “And what,” she asked with sudden earnestness, “are the five signs of the decay of the angel?”
Honda was well informed. He had looked into the matter of angels after that dream. The five signs are the five marks that death has come to an angel. There are variations, depending on the source.
Here is the account in the twenty-fourth fascicle of the
Ekottara-augama:
“There are thirty-three angels and one archangel, and the signs of death in them are fivefold. Their flowered crowns wither, their robes are soiled, the hollows under their arms are fetid, they lose their awareness of themselves, they are abandoned by the jeweled maidens.”
And
The Life of the Buddha
, fifth fascicle: “There are five signs that the allotted time has run out. The flowers in the hair fade, a fetid sweat comes from under the arms, the robes are soiled, the body ceases to give off light, it loses awareness of itself.”
And the last fascicle of the
Mahāmāyā-sūtra:
“And at that time Mahā gave forth in the heavens five signs of her decay. Her crown of flowers wilted, a sweat poured from under her arms, her halo faded, her eyes came to blink without pause, she lost all satisfaction with her rightful place.”
So far the similarities are more striking than the variations. The
Abhidharma-mahāvibhāsā-sāstra
describes the five greater signs and the five lesser signs in considerable detail. The five lesser signs are first.
As an angel soars and pirouettes it usually gives forth music so beautiful that no musician, no orchestra or chorus can imitate it; but as death approaches the music fades and the voice becomes tense and thin.
In normal times, day and night, there floods from within an angel a light that permits of no shadows; but as death approaches the light dwindles sharply and the body is wrapped in thin shadows.
The skin of an angel is smooth and well anointed, and even if it immerses itself in a lake of ambrosia it throws off the liquid as does the leaf of a lotus; but as death approaches, water clings and will not leave.
At most times an angel, like a spinning wheel of fire, neither stops nor is apprehensible in one place, it is there when it is here, it dodges and moves and throws itself free; but when death approaches, it lingers in one spot and cannot break free.
An angel exudes unblinking strength, but as death approaches the strength departs and blinking becomes incessant.
Here are the five greater signs: the once-immaculate robes are soiled, the flowers in the flowery crown fade and fall, sweat pours from the armpits, a fetid stench envelops the body, the angel is no longer happy in its proper place.
It will be seen that the other sources enumerate the greater signs. So long as only the lesser ones are present, death can still be put off, but once the greater signs appear the issue is not in doubt.
In
Robe of Feathers
, one of the greater signs has already made its appearance, and yet the angel will recover if the robe is returned. It may be imagined that Zeami allowed himself a poetic hint of decay and decline and did not worry about the meticulous letter of the law.
Honda remembered with extraordinary freshness the five marks of decay in the Kitano Scroll, a national treasure he had seen long before in the Kitano Shrine. He had a photographic copy which called up something, a song of horrid foreboding, perhaps, to which he had earlier been deaf.
In a garden blocked off by the beautiful foundations of a Chinese pavilion, crowds of angels are plucking on zithers, beating on drums. But there is no suggestion of vitality, the music has fallen to the dull buzz of a fly on a summer afternoon. Pluck though they may, beat though they may, the strings and skins are slack and tired and decayed. There are flowers in the forward parts of the garden, and among them a grieving cherub presses its sleeves to its eyes.
Death has come too suddenly. Incredulity is written on beautiful, otherwise inexpressive white angel faces.
Within the pavilion are angels in postures of disarray. Some seek ineffectively to cut graceful arcs with their sleeves, some are twisting and writhing. They stretch their hands languorously over finite spaces but cannot touch, their robes are senselessly dirty, filth pours from their bodies.
What is happening? The five signs have come. The angels are as princesses with no escape, caught by the plague in a close, tropical garden.
The flowers in their hair are limp, their inner spaces are suddenly bloated with water up to the throat. The gathering of soft, graceful figures has at some point been pervaded by a transparent decay, and in the very air they breathe there is already the smell of death.
These sentient beings who by the mere fact of their existence lured men into realms of beauty and fantasy must now look on helpless as, in an instant, their spell is stripped away like flaking gold leaf and swept up in the evening breeze. The classically elegant garden is an incline. The gold dust of all-powerful beauty and pleasure drifts down. Absolute freedom soaring in emptiness is torn away like a rending of flesh. The shadows gather. The light dies. Soft power drips and drips from the beautiful fingers. The fire flickers in the depths of flesh, the spirit is departing.
The brightly checkered floor of the pavilion, the vermilion balustrades, have faded not at all. Relics of grandeur, they will be there when the angels are gone.
Beneath shining hair beautiful nostrils are turned upward. The angels seem to be catching the first fore-scent of decay. Petals twisting beyond clouds, azure decay coloring the sky, all pleasures of sight and of spirit, all the joyous vastness of the universe, gone.
“Good, good.” Keiko sounded a full stop. “You are so well informed.”
Nodding vigorously, Keiko touched a fashionable bottle of Estée Lauder to her ears. She had on pantaloons with a serpentine pattern and a blouse of the same material, a chamois belt reversed at the hips, and a black cordovan sombrero of Spanish make.
Honda had been somewhat startled by the ensemble when he had first caught sight of her at Tokyo Station, but he refrained from commenting upon her chic.
Five or six minutes more and they would be in Shizuoka. He thought of that last sign, a loss of awareness of place. He who had had no such awareness to begin with lived on. For he was no angel.
Vacantly, Honda remembered a thought he had had in the cab that had brought him to the station. He had asked the driver to hurry, and they had taken the expressway from West Kanda. An early-summer drizzle had been falling, he could not have said for how long. They made their way through the rows of banks and brokerages at fifty miles an hour. Huge, solid, the buildings spread great wings of steel and glass. Honda said to himself: “The moment I die they will all go.” The thought came to him as a happy one, a sort of revenge. It would be no trouble at all, tearing this world up by the roots and returning it to the void. All he had to do was die. He took a certain minor pride in the thought that an old man who would be forgotten still had in death this incomparably destructive weapon. For him the five signs of decay held no fear.
9
 
 T
HERE WAS
one matter weighing on Honda’s mind as he escorted Keiko to the pine grove at Mio. He feared ruining her good spirits by showing her the utter vulgarity to which this most beautiful of Japanese scenic spots had been reduced.
It was a rainy weekday, but the huge parking lot was jammed with automobiles, and the dirty cellophane in the souvenir shops caught an ashen sky. They did not seem to bother Keiko in the slightest.
“Beautiful. Perfectly lovely. Smell the fresh air and the salt. The sea is so near.”
As a matter of fact the air was strangled with gasoline fumes and the pines were on the point of asphyxiation. Honda felt better. He had visited the place some days before, and he had known what Keiko would see.
Benares was sacred filth. Filth itself was sacred. That was India.
But in Japan, beauty, tradition, poetry, had none of them been touched by the soiled hand of sanctity. Those who touched them and in the end strangled them were quite devoid of sanctity. They all had the same hands, vigorously scoured with soap.
Even at the pine grove of Mio, angels in the empty skull of poetry answered to the unspeakable demands of men, and were forced into myriads and myriads of twists and turns, like circus performers. The cloudy skies were traced as if with a mesh of silver high-tension wires by their dances. In dreams men would meet with only the marks of the decay of angels.
It was past three. “The Pine Grove of Mio. Nihondaira Prefectural Park.” The rough-scaled bark of the tree was enshrouded in the green of moss. Above a gentle flight of stone stairs, the pines sent rude bolts of lightning across the sky. The blossoms, veils of green smoke that even the branches of strangling pines will send forth, shut off a lifeless sea.
“The sea!” said Keiko joyously.
Honda did not trust the joy. There was a little of her party manner in it, of flattery for the villa at which she was a guest. Yet exaggeration can spawn pleasure in something that is nothing at all. At least the two of them were not lonely.
Outside a pair of shops, their cantilever shelves bulging with red Coca-Cola cartons and souvenirs, stood a pair of photographer’s dummies with apertures for two faces: Jirōchō, the boss of Shimizu Harbor, in a pale grove of pines, and Ochō, his lady friend. Jirōchō’s name was on the triangle of the umbrella he cradled in his arm. He was in travel dress, with a walking stick, light-blue mittens and leggings, and a hitched-up kimono in narrow blue and white stripes. Ochō had a high chignon, and wore a black satin kimono and an obi of yellow Hachijō plaid.
Honda urged Keiko on toward the grove, but she was entranced by the dummies. She repeated Jirōchō’s name over and over to herself. She knew nothing about him except his name, not even the elementary fact that he was a famous gambler; and Honda’s lecture on the subject left her yet more entranced.
The nostalgic hues, the fresh, wild vulgarity, quite enthralled her. Wherever she might search in her own life with its distant harvest of the carnal, she could catch no sound so wild and sad in its vulgarity. Her great virtue was that she was without preconceptions. What she had never seen and never heard of was, the last bit of it, “Japanese.”

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