The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (17 page)

It seemed at that moment as if the sun had broken through the clouds, but it may have been a mere illusion on my part. Yet the entire composition of the park had lost its harmony. I felt that tiny cracks had begun to open up over all the surface of the picture in which we were contained-that pellucid picture which included the pine forest, the shining reflection of the river, the hills in the distance, the white surface of the rocks, the azaleas scattered here and there.

Evidently the expected miracle had occurred and Kashiwagi gradually stopped groaning. He raised his head, and as he raised it, he once more cast a derisive grin in my direction.

"I'm all right now," he said. "You've cured me. Strange, isn't it? When it starts hurting and you do that to me, the pain invariably stops."

He took the girl's hair in both hands and lifted up her face. She looked up at him with the expression of a faithful dog and smiled. At that moment the white clouded light made this beautiful girl's face look exactly like the face of that old woman in her sixties about whom Kashiwagi had once told me.

Having accomplished his miracle, Kashiwagi was in high spirits. He was in such high spirits, indeed, as to be almost demented. He laughed loudly, lifted the girl onto his knees and began kissing her. His laughter echoed in the branches of the pine trees at the bottom of the hill.

"Why don't you make love to that girl?” he said to me as I sat there quietly. “I brought her along especially for you, you know. Or are you shy because you think she'll laugh at you if you stutter? Go ahead-stutter, stutter! For all you know, she may fall in love with a stutterer."

“Do you stutter?” said the girl to me, as though this was the first time that she had realized it. “Well, well, almost all the deformities are represented today!"

Her words struck me violently and made me feel that I could no longer stay where I was. But, strangely enough, the hatred that I felt for the girl was transformed into a sudden desire for her and I was overcome with a sort of dizziness.

“Why don't We split up?” said Kashiwagi, looking down at the young couple, who were still sitting on the swing. "We'll each take our partners to some secluded place and we'll meet here again in two hours"

I left Kashiwagi and his companion and, accompanied by the girl from the lodging-house, went down the hill and then walked up a gentle slope to the east.

"He's gone and made that girl think she's a saint. It's his usual trick."

“How do you know?" I said, stuttering badly.

"Well, I've had an affair with Kashiwagi myself, you see."

"It's finished between you two now, isn't it?” I said. "And yet you can take it all so lightly.”

"Yes, I take it lightly, all right. With a deformed fellow like that, it can't be helped.”

This time her words, instead of angering me, filled me with courage and my question emerged smoothly: "You loved his deformed feet, didn't you?"

“Stop it
!!"
she said. “I don't want to talk about those frog-feet of his. But I do think he has lovely eyes"

At this, I once more lost my self-confidence. Whatever Kashiwagi might believe, this girl loved some good point of his that he himself had not noticed; and, as I now realized, my own arrogant conviction that there was nothing about myself of which I was not aware resulted from my having singled myself out as the one person who could have no such good points whatsoever.

When We reached the top of the slope, we came to a small, peaceful field. In the distance through the pines and the cedars one could vaguely make out Daimonjiyama, Nyoigatake, and other mountains. A bamboo thicket stretched from the hill where We were and down the slope which led to the town. At the edge of the thicket stood a single late-blossoming cherry tree which had still not shed its blossoms. These were indeed late blossoms, and I wondered whether it wasn't because they had kept on stuttering when they first opened up that they were thus delayed.

I had an oppressive feeling in my chest and my stomach was heavy. But it was not because of what I had drunk. Now that the crucial moment was approaching, my desire increased in weight, become an abstract structure separated from my own body and descended onto my shoulders. It felt like a heavy, black piece of iron machinery.

As I have already mentioned many times, I appreciated the fact that Kashiwagi, whether out of kindness or out of malice, had urged me on toward life. I had already long since recognized that I, who in my middle-school days had deliberately scratched the scabbard of my schoolmate's sword, was not qualified to enter life through its bright surface. It was Kashiwagi who had first taught me the dark by-way along which I could reach life from the back. At first sight this appeared to be a method that could only lead to destruction; yet it was replete with unexpected strategems, it transformed baseness into courage, it could even be called a sort of alchemy that restored what is known as immorality to its original state of pure energy. And this indeed was life of a kind. It was a life that advanced, that captured, that changed, that could be lost. It would hardly be called typical life, yet it was endowed with all the functions of life. Assuming that in some invisible place we are confronted with the premise that every form of life is meaningless, then this life that Kashiwagi had shown me must increasingly assume a value equivalent to the more commonplace types of life.

It could not be said, I thought, that Kashiwagi himself was free of intoxication. I had long since realized that in any form of knowledge, however gloomy, there lurked the intoxication of knowledge itself. And what, after all, served to intoxicate people was alcohol.

The girl and I sat down next to some faded, worm-eaten irises. I could not understand why she should want to associate with me in this way. I could not understand—and I use this cruel expression intentionally-what impulse drove her to this
desire for contamination.
In this world of ours there should be a nonresistance that is full of shyness and gentleness; but this girl simply let my hands gather on her own small, plump hands, like flies gathering on someone who is taking a nap. Yet the drawn-out kiss and the feel of the girl's soft chin awakened my feeling of lust. This was what I was supposed to have been dreaming about for so long, but the feeling itself was thin and shallow. My lust did not seem to advance directly, but to run round a circuitous track: The cloudy white sky, the rustling of the bamboo grove, the strenuous efforts of the ladybird as it crawled up the leaf of an ins—all these things remained as they had been before, scattered and without order.

I tried to escape by thinking of the girl in front of me as the object of my lust. I must think of this as being life. I must think of this as the one barrier in the way of my advancing and my capturing. For, if I were to miss this chance, life would not come visiting me indefinitely. The memories raced through my mind of all the countless times when my words had been blocked by stuttering and been unable to issue from my mouth. At this moment I should resolutely have opened my mouth and said something, even if it meant stuttering. Thus I could have made life my own. Kashiwagi's brutal bidding, that blunt shout of his: "Stutter, stutter!” echoed in my ears and put me on my mettle. Finally I slipped my hand up the girl's skirt.

Then the Golden Temple appeared before me.

A delicate structure, gloomy and full of dignity. A structure whose gold foil had peeled off in different places, and which looked like the carcass of its former luxury. Yes, the Golden Temple appeared before me-that strange building which, when one thought it was near, become distant, that building which always floated clearly in some inscrutable point of space, intimate with the beholder, yet utterly remote. It was this structure that now came and stood between me and the life at which I was aiming. At first it was as small as a miniature painting, but in an instant it grew larger, until it completely buried the world that surrounded me and filled every nook and cranny of this world, just as in that delicate model which I had once seen the Golden Temple had been so huge that it had encompassed everything else. It filled the world like some tremendous music, and this music itself become sufficient to occupy the entire meaning of the world. The Golden Temple, which sometimes seemed to be so utterly indifferent to me and to tower into the air outside myself, had now completely engulfed me and had allowed me to be situated within its structure.

The girl from the loaging-house flew away into the distance like a tiny speck of dust. Inasmuch as the girl had been rejected by the Golden Temple, my efforts at finding life, too, were rejected. How could I possibly stretch out my hands towards life when I was being thus enwrapped in beauty
?
Perhaps beauty also had the right to demand that I relinquish my earlier aim. For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other. Assuming that the meaning of those actions which we direct at life is that we may pledge devotion to a certain instant and make that instant stand still, then perhaps the Golden Temple was fully aware of this and had for a time suspended its usual attitude or indifference towards me. It seemed as though the temple had assumed the form of a single instant of time and had visited me here in this park so that I might know how empty was my longing for life. In life, an instant that assumes the form of eternity will intoxicate us; but the Golden Temple knew full well that such an instant is insignificant compared with what happens when eternity assumes the form of an instant, as the temple itself had now done. It is at such times that the fact of beauty's eternity can really block our lives and poison our existences. The instantaneous beauty that life lets us glimpse is helpless against such poison. The poison crushes and destroys it at once, and finally exposes life itself under the light-brown glare of ruin.

It was only for a short time that I was completely embraced by this vision of the Golden Temple. When I returned to myself, the temple was already hidden. It was merely a building that still stood far to the northeast in Kinugasa and that I could not possibly see from here. The moment of illusion, in which I had imagined myself being accepted and embraced by the Golden Temple, had passed. I was lying on the top of a hill in Kameyama Park. There was nothing near me but a girl who lay there sprawled lasciviously amid the grass and the flowers and the dull fluttering of the insects' wings. At my sudden exhibition of timidity, the girl sat up and looked at me blankly. I saw her hips moving as she turned her back on me and took a pocket-mirror out of her bag. She did not say a word, but her scorn pierced my skin through and through, like the burrs that stick to one's clothes in the autumn.

The sky hung low. Tiny raindrops began to beat against the surrounding grass and the leaves of the iris. We stood up hurriedly and returned along the path to the arbor.

It was not only because the excursion had ended so wretchedly that this day left such an exceptionally gloomy impression. That evening, before the "opening of the pillow," the Superior received a telegram from Tokyo. The contents were immediately announced to everyone in the temple.

Tsurukawa was deaa.The telegram simply said that he had died in an accident, but later we heard the details. On the previous evening Tsurukawa had gone to visit an uncle of his in Asakusa and had drunk a good deal of
sak
é He was not used to drinking and it had evidently gone to his head. On his way back he had been knocked down by a truck that had suddenly come out of a side street near the station. He had suffered a skull fracture and died instantly. His family had been at their wits' end and it was not until the following afternoon that they had realized that they ought to telegraph the temple.

Although I had not cried at Father's death, I cried now. For Tsurukawa's existence seemed to have a closer connection than my father's with the problems that beset me. I had been rather neglecting Tsurukawa since I had come to know Kashiwagi, but now, having lost him, I realized that his death severed the one and only thread that still connected me with the bright world of daylight. It was because of the lost daylight,
the lost brightness, the lost summer, that I was crying.

Though I wanted to hurry to Tokyo to pay a visit of condolence to Tsurukawa's family, I did not have the money. I only received five hundred yen a month from the Superior for pocket money. My mother, of course, was indigent. It was the most she could do to send me two or three hundred yen a couple or times a year,
The reason that she had been obliged to go and live with an uncle in Kasagun after settling matters in Father's temple was that she could not manage to live on the five hundred yen a month that the parishioners contributed and on the minute grant offered by the prefecture.

How could I possibly make sure or Tsurukawa's death in my mind without having seen his corpse and without having attended his funeral?
The problem tormented me. That white-shirted stomach of his that I had once seen shimmering in the rays of the sun as they poured through the trees had been turned to ashes. Who could imagine this boy's flesh and spirit, which had been made only for brightness and which was only suitable to brightness, lying buried in a grave?
He had not carried the slightest mark of being destined for a premature death, he had been constitutionally free of all uneasiness and grief and had born no element that even vaguely resembled death. Perhaps it was precisely because of this that he had died so suddenly. Perhaps it had been impossible to save Tsurukawa from death just because he was composed of only the pure ingredients of life and had the frailty of a pure-blooded animal. In this case it would seem that I, on the contrary, was fated to live to a cursed old age.