The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (25 page)

I heard a dull, quivering sound. Then I heard human voices. It was when I turned my back to the fierce wind and gazed up at the peak of Yuragatake in the back that I heard them.

I looked round for the sight of human beings. A small path led down to the beach along the low cliffs. I knew that work was gradually being carried out to protect those cliffs against the extensive erosion. Concrete pillars lay here and there like white skeletons and there was something curiously fresh about the color of the new concrete against the sand. The dull, quivering sound came from the concrete mixer, which shook the cement as it was poured into the frame. A group of workmen with bright-red noses looked at me curiously as I walked past in my student's uniform. I glanced in their direction. Such was the extent of our human greetings to each other.

The sea subsided conically and abruptly from the beach. As I walked across the granite sand towards the edge of the water, I was seized with joy at the thought that I was without doubt moving step by step toward the single meaning that had flashed through my mind a short time before. The wind was bitterly cold and, since I was not wearing any gloves, my hands were almost frozen, but I did not mind in the slightest.

Yes, this was really the coast of the Sea of Japan! Here was the source of all my unhappiness, of all my gloomy thoughts, the origin of all my ugliness and all my strength. It was a wild sea. The waves surged forward in an almost continuous mass, hardly letting one see the smooth, gray gulfs that lay between one wave and the next. Piled up over the open sea, the great cumuli of clouds revealed a heaviness and, at the same time, a delicacy. For that heavy, undefined accumulation of cloud had for its edging a line as light and cold as that of the most delicate feather, and in its center it enveloped a faint blue sky of whose actual existence one could not be sure. Behind the zinc-colored waters rose the purple-black mountains of the cape. Everything was imbued with agitation and immobility, with a dark, ever-moving force, with the coagulated feeling of metal.

Abruptly I remembered what Kashiwagi had said to me on the day that we first met. It is when one is sitting on a well-mowed lawn on a beautiful spring afternoon, vaguely watching the sun as it shines through the leaves and makes patterns on the grass-it is at such times that cruelty suddenly springs up within us.

Now I was confronting the waves and the rough north wind. There was no beautiful spring afternoon here, no well-mowed lawn. Yet this desolate nature before me was more flattering to my spirits, more intimately linked with my existence, than any lawn on an early spring afternoon. Here I could be self-sufficient. Here I was not threatened by anything.

Was the notion that now occurred to me a
cruel
notion in Kashiwagi's sense of the word? I do not know, but in any case this notion which suddenly came to life within me revealed the meaning that had flashed through my mind earlier, and it made me shine brightly inside. I still did not try to think it out deeply, but was merely seized by the notion, as though I had been struck by light. Yet that idea, which until then had never once occurred to me, began to grow in strength and size as soon as it was born. Far from containing the idea, I myself was wrapped up in it. And this was the notion that enwrapped me: “I must set fire to the Golden
Temple.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

M
EANWHILE
I
continued walking and came to the front of the Tango-Yura Station on the Miyazu Line. When
I
had come here on the school excursion from the East Maizuru Middle School, we had followed the same course and had taken the train from this station. There was hardly anyone on the road in front of the station and it was easy to tell that this was a place where people depended for their living on the short summer season when visitors came in considerable numbers.

I decided to stay at a little inn where I saw a sign saying: “Yura Hall—Inn for Bathers.” I opened the sliding glass window at the entrance and announced my presence, but there was no reply. There was dust on the steps. The shutters were closed and it was dark inside the house. There was not a soul to be seen.

I went to the back door. There was a simple little garden with some withered chrysanthemums. A bucket stood on a high shelf. This was for the benefit of the summer visitors, who used it as a shower to wash off the sand that was sticking to them when they returned from their swimming.

At a short distance from the main building was a small house, where the owner of the inn evidently lived with his family. I could hear the sound of a radio through the closed glass doors. There was a certain hollowness about the unnecessarily loud sound, which made me feci that in fact there was no one at home. A few pairs of wooden clogs lay scattered at the entrance. I stood outside and announced my presence each time that there was a lull in the noise from the radio. But, as I had expected, there was no reply from this building either.

A shadow appeared in the back. The sun soaked faintly through the cloudy sky. I did not notice it until I happened to sec the grain of the wooden clog-box at the entrance turning brighter. A woman was looking at me. She was of a fatness that made the contours of her white body bulge out gently, and her eyes were so narrow that one could hardly tell whether she had any. I asked her for a room. The woman did not even ask me to follow her, but turned on her heels without a word and walked towards the hotel entrance.

I was given a small corner room on the second story, facing toward the sea. The room had been closed up for a long time and the feeble fire from the brazier, which the woman had brought for me, rapidly filled the air with fumes and made it almost unbearably musty, I opened the window and exposed myself to the north wind. In the direction of the sea the clouds were pursuing that leisurely, ponderous game of theirs, which they did not mean anyone to see. These clouds seemed to be a reflection of some aimless impulse of nature. In certain parts of them one could see fragments of the sky-
small, blue crystals of clear intelligence. The sea itself was invisible.

Standing by the window, I began to pursue my earlier notion. I wondered why I had not arrived at the idea of
killing the Superior before I had thought of setting fire to the temple. The possibility of killing the Superior had, I
now realized, flitted through my mind; but I had instantly
understood how useless it would be. For even if I should
succeed in killing the Superior, his shaven priest's head and that evil of his, which was compounded of powerlessness, would keep on reappearing endlessly from the dark horizon. In general, things that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature's various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply. If the purpose of a murder was to destroy the once-and-for-all quality of one's victim, then that murder was based on a permanent miscalculation. Thus my thoughts led me to recognizing more and more clearly that there was a complete contrast between the existence of the Goiaen Temple and that of human beings. On the one hand, a phantasm of immortality emerged from the apparently destructiole aspect of human beings; on the other, the apparently indestructible beauty of the Golden Temple gave rise to the possiblity of destroying it. Mortal things like human beings cannot be eradicated; indestructible tilings like the Golden Temple can be destroyed. Why had no one realized this? There was no doubting the originality of my conclusion. If I were to set fire to the Golden Temple, which had been designated as a National Treasure in 1897, I should be committing an act of pure destruction, of irreparable ruin, an act which would truly decrease the volume of beauty that human beings had created in this world.

As I continued thinking on these lines, I was even overcome by a humorous mood. If I burn down the Golden Temple, I told myself, I shall be doing something that will have great educational value. For it will teach people that it is meaningless to infer indestructibility by analogy. They will learn that the mere fact of the Golden Temple's having continued to exist, of its having continued to stand for five hundred and fifty years by the Kyoko Pond, confers no guaranty upon it whatsoever. They will be imbued with a sense of un-easiness as they realize that the self-evident axiom which our survival has predicated on the temple can collapse from one day to another.

The continuity of our lives is preserved by being surrounded by the solidified substance of time which has lasted for a given period. Take, for example, a small drawer, which the carpenter has made for the convenience of some household. With the passage of time, the actual form of this drawer is surpassed by time itself and, after the decades and centuries have elapsed, it is as though time had become solidified and had assumed that form. A given small space, which was at first occupied by the object, is now occupied by solidified time. It has, in. fact, become the incarnation of a certain form of spirit. At the beginning of the
Tsukumogami-ki,
a medieval book of fairy tales
,
we find the following passage: "It is written in the Miscellany on the cosmic forces, Yin and Yang, that, after a hundred years have passed and objects have been transformed into spirits, the hearts of men are deceived; and this is given the name of Tsukumogami, the year of the mournful spirit. It is the custom of the world to remove one's old household utensils each year before the advent of Spring and to throw them into the alley; and this is known as the house-sweeping. In the same way, every hundred years men must undergo the disasters of the Tsukumogami."

Thus my deed would open the eyes of men to the disasters of the Tsukumogami and save them from those disasters. By my deed I should thrust the world in which the Golden Temple existed into a world where it did not exist. The meaning of the world would surely change.

The more I thought about it, the more cheerful I became, The end and downfall of the world—of that world which now surrounded me and lay before my eyes-were not far off. The rays of the setting sun lay across the land. The Golden Temple was shining in their light, and the world that contained the Golden Temple was assuredly slipping away moment by moment, like sand trickling between one's fingers.

My stay at the Yura Hall was brought to an end after three days, when the landlady, who was suspicious of me because I had not taken a single step out of the inn during this time, went and fetched a policeman. When I saw him enter my room in his uniform, I was frightened that he would detect my plan, but I realized at once that I had no grounds for such fear. In reply to his questions, I told him exactly what had happened—that I had wanted to get away from my temple life for a short time and that I had fled. Then I showed him my university identification papers, and later I made a special point of settling my bill in full while he was watching. The policeman consequently adopted a protective attitude. He immediately telephoned the temple to make sure that my story was correct and then informed me that he would take me back there himself. To avoid any possible damage to "my future,” as he called it, he took the trouble to change out of his uniform for the journey.

While We waited for the train at Tango Yura Station, there was a shower and, since the station had no roof, it immediately become wet. The policeman, now dressed in his ordinary clothes, accompanied me into the station office, where he took particular pride in showing me that the station master and the other employees were his personal friends. Nor was that all, for he introduced me to everyone as his nephew who had come to visit him from Kyoto.

I understood the psyehology of revolutionaries. These country officials, the station master and the policeman, who now
sat chatting round the red embers of the iron brazier, did not
have the slightest presentiment of the great alteration of the world that was advancing before their very eyes, of the de
struction of their own order of things that was so close at
hand.

When the Golden Temple has been burned down—yes, when the Golden Temple has been burned, the world of these
fellows will be transformed, the golden rule of their lives will be turned upside down, their train timetables will be thrown into utter confusion, their laws will be without effect. It made me happy to think that these people were completely unaware that the young man who sat there next to them, warming his
hands over the brazier with an unconcerned look, was a
prospective criminal.

A lively young station official was telling everyone in a loud voice about the film that he was going to see on his next free day. It was a splendid film which could not fail to bring tears to one's eyes and which at the same time was full of action. Yes, on his next free day he would be off to the pictures! This youthful fellow, who was so much sturdier than I, so much more full of life, was going to the pictures on his next free day; he would sit there with his arm round some girl and then he would go to bed. He kept on teasing the station master, telling jokes, and receiving mild rebukes from his superiors, while at the same time he bustled about the place, putting chareoal on the brazier and writing figures
on the blackboard. For a moment I felt that I was on the
verge of being caught up once more in the charm of life or in an envy for life. It was still possible for me to refrain from setting fire to the temple; I could leave the temple for good, give up the priesthood and bury myself in life like this young fellow. But instantly the dark forces brought me back to myself and abducted me from such ideas. Yes, I must burn the Golden Temple after all. Only then could a new life begin that was made specially to order for myself.

The station master answered the telephone. Then he went up to the mirror and carefully adjusted his gold-braided cap. He cleared his throat, threw out his chest and strutted onto the platform, as though he were entering a ceremonial hall. It had stopped raining. Soon one could hear the clear, wet noise of the train as it ran along the tracks that were cut through the cliff, and a moment later it glided into the station.

I reached Kyoto at ten minutes to eight and the plain-clothed policeman took me to the main gate of the temple. It was a chilly evening. As I emerged from the dark row of pines and approached the obdurate gate, I saw that my mother was standing there. She happened to be standing next to the sign on which was written: "Any breach of these regulations will be puhished according to the law.” In the light of the lamp on the gate, her disheveled head looked as if each individual white hair were standing on end. The reflection of the lamplight made her hair look much whiter than it actually was. Surrounded by this bristling white mass, her little face was motionless.

Mother's small body seemed luridly distended. Behind her stretched the darkness of the courtyard, which I could see through the open gate. Her huge form loomed up in front of the darkness; she was foolishly attired in a shabby kimono, which was much the worse for wear, and over this she had tied her best gold-embroidered sash which was now thoroughly worn out. She looked like a dead person as she stood there.

I hesitated to approach her. At the time I could not understand how she happened to be there, but later I found out that, on discovering my departure, the Superior had made enquiries at Mother's place; she had been greatly upset and had visited the temple, where she had stayed until my return.

The policeman pushed me forward. Strangely enough, as I approached Mother's body, it gradually became smaller. Her face was below mine and, as she looked up at me, it was grotesquely twisted.

I was hardly ever deceived by my instinctive feelings and the sight
of
her small, cunning, sunken eyes now brought home to me how justified I had been in my hatred for Mother. Drawn-out hatred over the fact that she should have given birth to me in the first place, memories of that deep affront to which she had exposed me—an affront which, as I have already explained, did not leave me any room for planning my revenge, but instead simply isolated me from Mother. Those bonds had been hard to break.
Yet
now, while I sensed that
she was half immersed in maternal grief, I abruptly felt that I had become free. I do not know why, but I felt that Mother
could never again threaten me.