The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (26 page)

There was a sound of wild sobbing, as of someone being
strangled to death. Then Mother's hand reached out and be
gan slapping me feebly across the check,

"You undutiful son! Have you no sense of your obligations?"

The policeman looked at me in silence as I received my slaps. Mother's fingers lost their co-ordination and all the
power seemed to leave her hand; as a result, the tips of her nails clattered against my check like hailstones. I noticed that,
even
while she was striking me, Mother did not lose her look of supplication, and I averted my eyes.

After a while she changed her tone. "You've been—you've
been and gone all that way,” she said. “How did you manage for money?"

"Money? I borrowed it from a friend, if you want to know.”

"Really?" said Mother. “You didn't go and steal it?”

"No, I didn't steal it."

Mother gave a sigh of relief, as if this was the only thing that had been worrying her.

"Really? So you haven't done anything wrong?"

‘‘No, nothing.”

"Really? Well, that's good anyway. Of course, you'll have
to make your humble apologies to the Superior. I've apologized myself, but now you'll have to go and beg him from the
bottom of your heart to forgive you. The Superior is a broad-
minded man and I think he'll let the matter pass. But you're
going to have to turn over a new leaf this time, or it'll be the death of your poor old mother! I mean it, Sonl It'll be the death of me if you don't change yourself. And you've got to become a great priest... But the first thing is to go and make your apologies."

The policeman and I followed Mother in silence. Mother was so excited that she had even forgotten to address a conventional word of greeting to the policeman. She walked along with quick, short steps. As I gazed at her soft sash, which hung down in the back, I wondered what it was that made Mother so particularly ugly. Then I understood. What made her ugly was-hope. Incurable hope, like an obstinate case of scabies, which lodges, damp and reddish, in the infected skin, producing a constant itching, and refusing to yield to any outer force.

Winter came. My decision became more and more firm. Again and again I had to postpone my plan, but I did not grow tired of this steady prolongation. What worried me during that half-year period was something entirely different. At the end of each month Kashiwagi would demand that I repay the loan which he had made me. He would notify me of the total amount, taking the full interest into account, and would then torment me with all sorts of foul abuse. But I no longer had any intention of repaying the money. So long as I stayed away from the University, I did not have to meet Kashiwagi.

It may seem strange that I do not give an account of how, having once made this decision, I soon became unsettled and began to waver back and forth. The fact is that such waverings were now a thing of the past. During this period of half a year my eyes were fixed steadfastly on a single point in the future. It may well have been that at this time I knew the meaning of happiness.

In the first place, my life at the temple became pleasant When I thought that, whatever happened, the Golden Temple was going to be burned down, unbearable things became quite bearable. Like someone who is anticipating his death, I now began to make myself agreeable to the other people in the temple. My manner became pleasant and I tried to reconcile myself to everything. I even become reconciled to nature. Each morning when the birds came to peck at what was left of the holly, I looked at their downy breasts with a feeling of real friendliness.

I even forgot my hatred for the Superior! I had become free—free of my mother, free of my companions, free of everything. But I was not foolish enough to believe that this newfound comfort in my daily life was the result of my having transformed the world without even laying hands on it. Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result. In making myself view things from the standpoint of the result, in feeling that the decision to bring about this result rested in my own hands—here lay the basis for my sense of freedom.

Although my decision to set fire to the Golden Temple had been such a sudden one, it fitted me perfectly, like a suit that has been carefully made to measure. It was as though I had been planning it ever since my birth. At least, it was as though the idea had been growing within me, waiting for the day of its full flowering, since I had first visited the Golden Temple with Father. The very fact that the temple should have struck a young boy as so incomparably beautiful contained the various motives that were eventually to lead him to arson.

On March 17, 1950, I completed the preparatory course at Otani University. Two days later I had my twenty-first birthday. My record for the three years of the preparatory course was quite splendid. Among seventy-nine students I had managed to rank seventy-ninth. My lowest marks were in Japanese, for which I received the grand total of forty-two. I had been absent for two hundred and eighteen hours out of six hundred and sixteen-in fact, more than one third of the time. Yet since everything at this university was based on the Buddhist doctrine of mercy, there was no such thing as failure and I was allowed to advance into the regular course. The Superior gave his tacit approval to this step.

I continued to neglect my studies, and during the lovely days from late spring until early summer I spent my time visiting various shrines and temples that one could enter without paying. I used to walk as long as my legs would carry me. I remember one such day.

I was walking along the road in front of the Myoshin Temple when I happened to notice a student striding ahead of me at the same pace as mine. He stopped at a little tobacco shop which was housed in a building with ancient eaves, and I noticed his profile as he
stood
there in his student's cap buying a pack of cigarettes. It was a sharp, white profile with narrow eyebrows. From his cap I could tell that he came from Kyoto University. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes. It was as though dark shadows had drifted together. I knew intuitively that he was a pyromaniac.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon-hardly the time for arson. A butterfly fluttered from the asphalt road where the buses passed, and clung to a drooping camellia that stood in a vase at the front of the tobacco shop. The withered parts of the white flower looked as though they had been burned by a brown fire. It was a long time before a bus came. The clock that hung over the road had stopped.

I do not know why, but I was convinced that the student was moving step by step toward arson. I suppose it was just that he looked so unequivocally like a pyromaniac. He had resolutely chosen the broad daylight, the most difficult time of all for arson, and now he was directing his steps slowly towards the destination on which he had firmly resolved. In front of him lay fire and destruction; behind was the world of order that he had abandoned. There was something stern about the back of his uniform which made me feel this. Perhaps I had for some time been imagining that this was how the back of a young pyromaniac would look. His black serge back, on which the sun shone down, was full of unhappiness and anger.

I slowed down and decided to follow the student As I walked behind him and observed that he carried one of his shoulders a little lower than the other, I felt that his back
was,
in fact, my own. He was far more beautiful than I, but I had no doubt that he was being impelled to commit the same act as myself because of the same loneliness, the same unhappiness, the same confused thoughts about beauty. As I followed him, I began to feel that I was witnessing my own deed in anticipation.

Such things are liable to happen on a late spring afternoon, because of the brightness and the languid air. I became double and my other self imitated my actions in advance, thus clearly showing me the self that I should not be able to see when the time came for me to put my plan into execution.

The bus still did not come. There was no one on the road. Gradually the great South Gate of the Myoshin Temple approached. The doors were wide open and the gate seemed to have taken in every possible type of phenomenon. Within its magnificent frame, as I observed it from my particular
angle
of vision, it combined the overlapping of the pillars of the Imperial Messengers' Gate and the two-storied Sammon Gate, the tiles of the Buddhist Hall, numerous pine trees, a part of the blue sky, which had been vividly cut off from the
rest,
and numerous tufts of faint cloud. As I approached the gate, more was constantly being added-the stone paving that ran lengthwise and crosswise within the vast temple precincts,
the walls of the pagoda building, and endless other things. And once one had passed through the gate, one realized that this mysterious structure contained the entire blue sky within itself and every single cloud in that sky. Such was the nature of a cathedral.

The student passed through the gate. He went round the outside of the Imperial Messengers' Gate and stopped by the lotus pond in front of the Sammon Gate. He then stood on the Chinese-style stone bridge that crossed the pond and looked up at the Sammon Gate, which towered above him. That gate, I thought, must be the object of his intended arson.

The superb Sammon Gate was indeed suited for being wrapped in flames. On such a clear afternoon the fire would probably be invisible. The smoke would coil about the gate and rise into the air; but the only way in which one could tell that those invisible flames were licking the sky would be to observe how the blue heavens were bent and trembling. As the student approached the Sammon Gate, I went to one side, where I could not be seen, and watched him closely. It was the time at which the mendicant priests returned to the temple, and I noticed a group of three of them approaching along the path. They walked side by side over the stone paving, wearing straw sandals and carrying their wicker hats in their hands. As they passed me, they turned to the right. They walked along in complete silence, observing the rule of mendicant priests according to which they must not look more than a few feet ahead until they were back in their cells.

The student still hovered hesitantly by the Sammon Gate. Finally he leaned against one of the pillars and took out of his pocket the pack of cigarettes that he had just bought. He looked round nervously. It occurred to me that he was undoubtedly going to set fire to the gate on the pretext of having a smoke. As I had envisaged, he next put a cigarette into his mouth, moved his face forward, and struck a match.

For an instant the match gave forth a small, clear flash. It looked as if the color of the flame were invisible even to the student. This was because at that moment the afternoon sun had enveloped three sides of the gate, leaving only my side in the shadow. For only an instant the match produced something like a bubble of fire, which flared up next to the face of the student as he stood there leaning against the pillar of the gate by the lotus pond. Then he shook his hand violently and extinguished it.

Even when the match was extinguished, the student did not seem satisfied. He threw it onto one of the foundation stones and assiduously rubbed his foot on it. Then, cheerfully smoking his cigarette, he crossed the bridge and strolled past the Imperial Messengers' Gate, utterly oblivious of the disappointment that I felt as I stood there alone and deserted. Finally he disappeared past the South Gate, through which one could see the main road and vaguely make out a row of houses stretching into the distance.

This was no pyromaniac, but simply a student who had gone out for a walk. In all probability, a rather bored, rather poor, young man.

I had stood watching his actions in detail and I may say that everything about him displeased me“his cowardice, which had made him look round so nervously-not because he was going to commit arson, but simply because he was going to break the rules and smoke a cigarette; the mean pleasure, so typical of students, which he obviously derived from breaking these rules; the way in which he had been so careful to rub his foot on the match although it was already extinguished; and, most of all, his “civilized culture.” It was thanks to this trashy sort of culture that his little flame had been safely brought under control. He probably took great pride in the idea that he himself was the controller of his match, the perfect, prompt controller who protected socicty from the dangers of fire.

One boon of this culture was that since the Meiji Restoration the old temples in and about Kyoto had hardly ever burned down. Even on those rare occasions when fires did accidentally break out, the flames were immediately cut up, divided, and controlled. It had never been like that in the past. The Chion Temple had burned down in 1431 and had suffered from fire numerous times thereafter. The main building of the Nanzen Temple had caught fire in 1393, with the loss of the Buddha Hall, the Hall of Rites, the Diamond Hall, the Great Cloud Hermitage and other structures. The Enryaku Temple was turned to ashes in 1571. The Kenjin Temple was laid waste by fire during the warfare in 1552. The Sanjusangcn Hall was burned down in 1249. The Honno Temple was destroyed by fire during the fighting of 1582.

In those days the fires used to be on intimate terms with each other. The fires were not divided into little fragments and looked down on, as they are nowadays, but were allowed to join hands with each other in such a way that countless separate fires could unite into a single grand blaze. The people of the time were probably like that also. Wherever a fire might be, it could call to another fire and its voice would immediately be heard. The reason that the temple fires mentioned in the old records were never attributed to arson, but were always described as accidental fires, spreading fires, or fires caused by warfare, is that even if there had been someone like myself in the old days, all he would have had to do was to hold his breath and wait somewhere in hiding. Every temple was bound to burn down sooner or later. Fires were abundant and unrestrained. If only he waited, the fire, which was watching for its opportunity, would break out without fail, one fire would join hands with another fire and together they would accomplish what had to be accomplished. It was truly by the rarest chance that the Golden Temple had escaped being burned down. For Buddhist principles and law had strictly governed the world-fires broke out naturally, destruction and negation were the order of the day, the great temples that had been built were inevitably burned down. Even if there were pyromaniacs, they would be bound to make so natural an appeal to the forces of fire that no historian could bring himself to believe that the ensuing destruction was the result of arson.