Spring Snow (11 page)

Read Spring Snow Online

Authors: Yukio Mishima

There was a bustle of talk and movement as everyone went out into the lobby. Kiyoaki and his friends strolled under the chandeliers to meet Satoko and her maid in front of a window that looked out over the castle moat and the ancient stone walls of the shogun’s castle. His ears burning with unaccustomed excitement, he introduced Satoko to the two princes. Realizing how inappropriate cold formality would be, he observed all etiquette, but put on the same show of naïve enthusiasm he had displayed when he had first mentioned Satoko to the princes.
He knew that the expansive surge of emotion, the liberating power of his newly won sense of security, enabled him to adopt an alien maturity. Abandoning his characteristic melancholy, he reveled in his freedom. For Kiyoaki knew that he was not at all in love with Satoko.
Tadeshina had retired to the shelter of a pillar with all sorts of deprecating gestures. Judging from the tightness of the embroidered plum-colored collar of her kimono, one would gather that she had decided to treat these foreigners with circumspection. Her attitude pleased Kiyoaki, who was thus spared her high-pitched acknowledgment of his introduction.
Although the two princes were delighted to be in the company of such a beautiful woman, Chao P. was not too involved to notice the remarkable alteration in Kiyoaki’s manner when he introduced Satoko. Never imagining that Kiyoaki was in fact modeling himself on his own boyish earnestness, the prince began to feel a real fondness for Kiyoaki, believing that for the first time he was seeing him behave as a young man should.
Honda, in the meantime, was lost in admiration for Satoko, who, although she did not speak a word of English, maintained exactly the right degree of poise before the two princes. Surrounded as she was with four young men, and wearing an elaborate formal kimono, she nevertheless carried herself without the least sign of constraint; her beauty and elegance were self-evident.
As Kiyoaki translated for the two princes, who were taking turns at plying Satoko with questions, she smiled at him as if to seek his approval. It was a smile that seemed to imply much more than the circumstances demanded. Kiyoaki became uneasy.
“She’s read the letter,” he thought. But no, if she had read the letter, she would not be behaving like this toward him tonight. In fact, she would not have come at all. Surely she could not have received the letter before he telephoned. But there was no way of knowing whether or not she had read it after his call. It would be pointless to confront her with a direct question because she would be quick to deny it. But still, he grew angry with himself for not daring to do it.
Trying to sound as casual as possible, he did his best to discover if there were not some note in her voice that differed from the cheerful warmth of two nights before, or some suggestive change in her expression. Once more the clarity of his self-possession was becoming blurred.
Her nose was as well molded as that of an ivory doll, without being so sharply defined as to give her a haughty profile. And her face seemed to glow and fall into soft shadow; alternating with the quick, vivacious movement of her eyes. Alertness of eye is usually considered a vulgar trait in women, but Satoko had a way of delivering her sidelong glances that was irresistibly charming. Her smile followed close upon her words, as her glance did upon her smile—the graceful sequence heightening the bewitching elegance of her expression. Her lips, although somewhat thin, concealed a subtle inner voluptuousness. When she laughed, she was always quick to hide the sparkle of her teeth with the slender, delicate fingers of one hand, but not before the young men had noticed a white brilliance that rivaled that of the chandeliers above.
As Kiyoaki translated the extravagant compliments of the princes for Satoko, he noticed a blush spreading to her earlobes. Almost hidden by her hair, they were shaped with the fluid grace of raindrops, and however hard he peered at them, he was unable to decide whether they owed their heightened color to some cosmetic or to embarrassment.
One thing about Satoko, however, transcended all artifice. This was the force of her bright eyes. It unnerved him as it always did. He felt pierced by its uncanny keenness; its power sprang from her very essence.
The bell rang to announce the beginning of
The Rise and Fall of the Taira
, and the audience began to file back to their seats.
“She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve seen since my arrival in Japan. How lucky you are!” said Chao P. in a low voice as he and Kiyoaki walked down the aisle. Judging by the look in his eyes, one could gather that he had recovered from his attack of homesickness.
9
 
K
IYOAKI’S TUTOR IINUMA
had come to realize that the six years and more that he had spent in service to the Matsugae household had not only blighted the hopes of his youth but had dissipated the consequent indignation he had felt at first. When he brooded over his frustrating circumstances, he did so with a chill resentment quite different from the hot anger he had once felt. Of course the atmosphere of the Matsugae household, so unfamiliar to him, had had much to do with the changes in him. From the very beginning, however, the main source of contagion had been Kiyoaki, now eighteen years old.
The boy would be nineteen this coming year. If Iinuma could only see to it that he graduated from Peers with good marks and then that he was entered in the law school of Tokyo Imperial University when the autumn of his twenty-first year came round, he would be able to feel that his own responsibility had been properly discharged. However, for some reason that Iinuma could not fathom, Marquis Matsugae had never seen fit to take his son to task over his school record. And as things stood now, there seemed little chance of Kiyoaki’s studying law at Tokyo University. After graduating from Peers, there seemed to be no other course open to him but to take advantage of his privileges as a member of the nobility and enter either Kyoto or Tohoku Imperial University without having to take an entrance examination. Kiyoaki’s performance at school had been indifferent; he put no effort into his studies, nor did he compensate for this at all by trying to shine at athletics instead. Had he been an outstanding student, Iinuma could have shared in the glory, giving his friends and relatives in Kagoshima cause to be proud. But by now, Iinuma could only dimly recall the fervent hopes he had once entertained. And besides, he realized bitterly, no matter how far short of the mark Kiyoaki fell, he was still assured of a seat in the House of Peers.
The friendship between Kiyoaki and Honda was another source of irritation. Honda was close to the top of his class, but he made no attempt to influence his friend for the good, despite Kiyoaki’s regard for him; quite the reverse, in fact. He behaved, in Iinuma’s eyes, like an uncritical admirer, blind to Kiyoaki’s every shortcoming.
Jealousy, of course, played its part in Iinuma’s resentment. Being a friend and classmate, Honda was in a position to accept Kiyoaki as he was, whereas for Iinuma, he was an eternal monument to his own failure.
Kiyoaki’s looks, his elegance, his diffidence, his complexity, his disinclination for any exertion, his languid dreaminess, his magnificent body, his delicate skin, his long lashes over those dreaming eyes—all of Kiyoaki’s attributes conspired to betray Iinuma’s hopes with a careless, elegant grace of their own. Iinuma saw his young master as a constant, mocking reproach.
So bitter a frustration, a sense of failure so gnawing in its intensity, can, over a long period, be transmuted into a kind of religious fervor directed at its cause. Iinuma became enraged at anyone who tried to slight Kiyoaki. By a sort of confused intuition of which he himself was unaware, he grasped something of the nature of Kiyoaki’s almost impenetrable isolation. Kiyoaki’s determination, in turn, to keep his distance from Iinuma, doubtless sprang from the fact that he perceived all too clearly the nature of his tutor’s burning fanaticism.
Of all the retinue in the Matsugae household, only Iinuma was possessed by this fervor, something intangible yet quite apparent as soon as one looked into his eyes. One day, a guest asked: “Excuse me, but that houseboy of yours isn’t a socialist, is he?” The Marquis and his wife could not help bursting into laughter at this, for they were well aware of Iinuma’s background, his present behavior, and, above all, the zeal with which day in, day out, he performed his devotions at the “Omiyasama” shrine. It was customary for this taciturn young man, who had no words to waste on anyone, to go to the family shrine early each morning; there he poured out his heart to Marquis Matsugae’s renowned father, whom he had never known in his lifetime. In the early days, his pleas were shot through with a radical anger, but as he grew older, they began to be shaped by a pervasive discontent that now had spread to envelop every aspect of his world.
He was the first to rise every morning. He washed his face and rinsed out his mouth, then putting on his indigo-striped kimono and his
Okura hakama
, he set off in the direction of the shrine.
He walked along the path that led past the maids’ quarters at the rear of the main house and through the grove of Japanese cypresses. In cold weather, like this morning’s, the frost tortured the dirt of the path into tiny spiral mounds; when these were crushed by the blunt impact of Iinuma’s wooden clogs, they shattered into pure, glittering fragments. The morning sun, lying bright and gauzy over the withered brown and green leaves that still clung to the cypresses, shone on his frosty breath rising in the winter air. He felt utterly purified. Incessant birdsong filled the pale blue morning sky. However, despite the stimulation of the cold air briskly striking his bare skin under his open-necked kimono, something wrung his heart with bitter regret: “If only the young master would come with me, just once!”
He had never succeeded in communicating this vigorous, masculine sense of well-being to Kiyoaki. No one could hold him responsible for this failure. To force the boy to accompany him on these morning walks was out of the question, yet Iinuma continued to blame himself. In six years he had not been able to persuade Kiyoaki to participate even once in this “virtuous practice.”
On the flat crest of the small hill, trees gave way to a fairly broad clearing of grass, now brown and dry, through which a gravel path led to the shrine. As Iinuma gazed at it and the full force of the morning sun struck the granite torii in front of it and the two cannon shells to either side of its stone steps, a feeling of self-possession came over him. Here in the dawn, he found a bracing air of purity, free from the stifling luxury penetrating the Matsugae household. He felt as if he were breathing in a new coffin of fresh white wood. Since early childhood, all that he had been taught to revere as honorable and beautiful was to be found, as far as the Matsugaes were concerned, in the proximity of death.
After Iinuma had climbed the steps and taken up his position before the shrine, he saw a small bird, a glimpse of dark red breast, as it hopped about the branches of a sakaki, rustling the gleaming leaves. Then, with a piercing cry, it flew away. A flycatcher, he thought.
He pressed his palms together and, as always, invoked Kiyoaki’s grandfather as “Reverend Ancestor.” Then in silence he began to pray: “Why is our era one of decadence? Why does the world despise vigor and youth and worthy ambitions and single-mindedness? You once cut men down with your sword, you were wounded by the swords of others, you endured the most terrible dangers—all to found a new Japan. And finally, having achieved high office and esteemed by everyone, you died, the greatest hero in a heroic age. Why can we not recapture the glory of your era? How long must this age of the effete and the contemptible endure? Or is the worst still to come? Men think only of money and women. Men have forgotten everything that should be becoming to a man. That great and shining age of gods and heroes passed away with the Meiji Emperor. Will we ever see its like again? A time when the strength of youth will unstintingly give of itself once more?
“In the present day—when places called cafés are springing up everywhere, drawing in thousands of idle people with money to squander, when male and female students behave so shockingly in streetcars that it has become necessary to segregate them—men have lost all trace of that fervor that drove their ancestors to accept the most frightening challenges. Now they are good for nothing but to flutter their effeminate hands like dry, fragile leaves shaken by the merest puff of air.
“Why all this? How did such an age come about, an age which has defiled everything that once was sacred. Alas, Reverend Ancestor, your own grandson, whom I serve, is in every way a child of this decadent era, and I am powerless to do anything about it. Should I die to atone for my failure? Or have things taken their course according to some great design of yours?”

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