Spring Snow (18 page)

Read Spring Snow Online

Authors: Yukio Mishima

The full Kagoshima-style celebration of the Doll Festival at the Matsugaes’ was renowned; thanks to appreciative foreign visitors invited in years gone by, it was now famous abroad as well, so much so in fact that every year, a large number of Americans and Europeans who were in Japan at the festival time would use whatever influence they had to try to obtain invitations.
The pale cheeks of the two ivory dolls representing the Emperor and Empress shone cold in the early spring light, despite the gleam of the surrounding candles and the reflection from the scarlet carpet beneath. The Emperor doll was dressed in the splendid ceremonial robes of a Shinto high priest, and the Empress in the extravagantly rich Heian court costume. Despite the bulk of their countless skirts, their gowns dipped gracefully at the back to reveal the pale translucence of the napes of their necks. The scarlet carpet covered the entire floor of the huge main reception room. Countless wooden balls inside richly embroidered cloth hung down from the beamed ceiling, and bas-relief pictures of various kinds of popular dolls covered the walls. An old woman named Tsuru, famed for her skill at this sort of picture, came to Tokyo every February to throw herself wholeheartedly into the preparations; her pet refrain was a mumbled “as madam wishes.”
Even though this year’s Doll Festival lacked the usual gaiety, the women were nevertheless cheered by the prospect of the cherry blossom season; it would not be observed publicly, but it would still be celebrated with considerably more festivity than they had first been led to believe. This hope was warranted by a communication from His Highness Prince Toin announcing that he would deign to be present, though in a private capacity.
This had also cheered the Marquis immensely. He was happiest in the midst of extravagance and ostentation, and the restraints of polite society weighed heavily on his outgoing nature. If the Emperor’s cousin himself saw fit to take a lax view of the observation of mourning, then no one would dare cast aspersions on the Marquis’s own sense of what morality required.
Since His Highness Haruhisa Toin had been the Emperor’s personal representative at the coronation of Rahma VI and so was personally known to the royal family of Siam, the Marquis decided that it would be proper to include the two young princes in the invitations.
Years before in Paris, during the Olympic Games of 1900, the Marquis had become rather intimate with the Prince while rendering him valued service as a guide to the night life of the city. Even now the Prince was fond of recalling those days with references that only the Marquis understood. “Matsugae,” he would say, “remember that place with the fountain that gushed champagne? That was a night to remember!”
April the sixth was the day set for the formal viewing of the cherry blossoms, and as soon as the rather subdued observance of the Doll Festival was over, the tempo of life in the household quickened as preparations got underway.
Kiyoaki, however, did nothing at all during his spring vacation. His parents urged him to take a trip somewhere, but even though he did not see Satoko very often, he was not in the mood to leave Tokyo while she was there.
As spring came gradually, day by day, despite the sharp cold, Kiyoaki struggled with a series of unsettling premonitions. Finally, when his ennui became overpowering, he decided to do something he did only rarely; he paid a visit to his grandmother’s house on the estate. She seemed unable to shake off a lifetime’s habit of treating him like an infant, and this, together with her fondness for cataloguing his mother’s faults, was reason enough for his reluctance to visit her. Ever since the death of his grandfather, his grandmother, with her masculine shoulders and no-nonsense face, had turned her back on the world completely, and ate little but a handful of rice a day, as though living in anticipation of the death she hoped was soon to come. As it turned out, however, she thrived on this diet.
When people came from Kagoshima to visit her, she talked to them in the dialect of her home region, indifferent to what others might think. With Kiyoaki and his mother, though, she spoke in the Tokyo manner, however stiffly and awkwardly. Furthermore, since she had none of the nasal tone of Tokyo speech, the strong parade-ground quality of her voice was all the more apparent. He was convinced that she carefully preserved her Kagoshima accent as an implicit condemnation of the easy fluency of his own Tokyo inflections.
“So, Prince Toin is coming to see the blossoms, eh?” she said without preamble as he entered; she was warming her legs in the
kotatsu
.
“Yes, that’s what they say.”
“I’m not going. Your mother asked me, but I prefer being here out of everybody’s way.”
Then, showing concern over his idleness, she went on to ask him if he didn’t feel inclined to take up judo or fencing. There had once been an exercise hall on the estate, but it had been torn down to make way for the Western house. She made the sarcastic comment that its destruction had marked the beginning of the decline of the family. This was one opinion, however, that was congenial to his own way of thinking. He liked the word “decline.”
“If your two uncles were alive, your father wouldn’t be carrying on the way he does. As far as I’m concerned, this being on familiar terms with the Imperial Family and pouring out money on entertainment is just a big show. Whenever I think of my two sons dead in the war without ever having known what luxury was, I feel I don’t want to have anything more to do with your father and the rest of them—floating through life and thinking of nothing but having a good time. And as for the pension I receive for my two boys, that’s why I put it up there on the shelf beside the household altar without ever touching it. It seems to me that His Imperial Majesty gave it to me for the sake of my sons and the blood they shed so gallantly. It would be wrong ever to use it.”
His grandmother enjoyed delivering herself of little sermons like this, but the truth was that the Marquis was unstintingly generous in granting whatever she wished, be it clothes, food, spending money, or servants. Kiyoaki often wondered if perhaps she was acutely ashamed of her rural origins and so was trying to avoid any kind of Western social life.
Still, whenever he visited her and only then, he felt that he was escaping from himself and from the artificial environment that suffocated him. He enjoyed the contact with a person who was so close to him but who still retained the earthy vigor of his ancestors. It was a pleasure of a rather ironic sort.
Everything about his grandmother was in physical harmony with his image of her character: her hands were large and her fingers blunt; the lines of her face seemed to have been laid there with the firm, sure strokes of a writing brush, and her lips were set with firm resolution. Once in a while, however, she was willing to allow a lighter note to creep into her conversations with him. Now, for example, she tapped her grandson’s knee under the low table that covered the foot-warmer and teased him: “Whenever you come here, you know, my women get flustered and I don’t know what to do with them. To me, I’m afraid, you’re still a little boy with a wet nose, but I suppose that these girls see things differently.”
Kiyoaki looked up at the faded photograph of his two uncles in uniform on the wall. Their military dress seemed to him to preclude any possible bond between them and himself. The war had ended a mere eight years before, yet the gap between them seemed immeasurable.
“I’ll never shed real blood. I’ll never wound anything but hearts,” he boasted to himself, although not without a slight sense of misgiving.
Outside, the sun shone on the shoji screen. The small room bathed him in cozy warmth, making him feel as if he were wrapped in a huge, opaque cocoon of glowing white. He felt as if he were basking luxuriously in the direct sunlight. His grandmother began to doze. In the silence of the room, he became aware of the ticking of the huge old-fashioned clock. His grandmother’s head tipped forward slightly. Her forehead jutted out sharply under the line of her short hair which she wore bound and sprinkled with a black powder dye. He noticed the healthy sheen of her skin. More than half a century ago, he thought, the hot Kagoshima sun must have burned her brown each summer of her youth, and even now she seemed to have retained its mark.
He was daydreaming, and his thoughts, moving like the sea, gradually turned from the rhythm of the waves to that of the long, slow passage of time, and hence to the inevitability of growing old—and he suddenly caught his breath. He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.
The thought of dying suddenly spurred him with a desire to see Satoko, if only for a moment.
He telephoned Tadeshina and then hurriedly left the house. There was no doubt that Satoko was full of life and beauty, as he himself was—these two facts seemed to be a strange twist of fortune, something to seize and cling to in time of danger.
Following Tadeshina’s scheme, Satoko pretended to go out for a stroll and met Kiyoaki at a small Shinto shrine not far from her home. The first thing she did was to thank him for the invitation to the cherry blossom festival. She obviously thought that he had persuaded the Marquis to issue it. This was, in fact, the first he had heard of the matter, but with his usual deviousness, he did not disabuse her of the idea, and accepted her thanks in a vague, noncommittal way.
17
 
A
FTER A PROLONGED STRUGGLE
, Marquis Matsugae succeeded in compiling a severely curtailed guest list for the blossom festival. His criterion was to invite the number of suitable guests most appropriate to the occasion, as the banquet that concluded it would be graced by the august presence of the Imperial Prince and his wife. Besides Satoko and her parents, Count and Countess Ayakura, he therefore included only the two Siamese princes and Baron Shinkawa and his wife, who were frequent visitors and great friends of the Matsugaes. The Baron was the head of the Shinkawa
zaibatsu.
His whole way of life was modeled on that of the complete English gentleman, whom he copied with scrupulous attention to detail. The Baroness, for her part, was on intimate terms with such people as the noted feminist Raicho Hiratsuka and her circle, and was also a patron of the Women of Tomorow. She could thus be relied upon to add a touch of color to the gathering.
Prince Toin and his wife were to arrive at three in the afternoon and be shown around the garden after a short rest in one of the reception rooms of the main house. They would then be entertained until five o’clock at a garden party by some geishas, who would go on to perform a selection of cherry blossom dances from the Genroku era.
Just before sunset, the imperial couple were to retire to the Western-style house for aperitifs. After the banquet itself, there would be a final entertainment: a projectionist had been hired to show a new foreign film. Such was the program devised by the Marquis with the help of Yamada, his steward, after pondering the varied tastes of his guests.
Trying to settle the choice of films gave the Marquis some agonizing moments. There was the one from Pathé featuring Gabrielle Robin, the famous star of the Comédie Française, that was indisputably a masterpiece. The Marquis rejected it, however, fearing that it might destroy the mood of the blossom viewing, created with such care. At the beginning of March the Electric Theater in Asakusa had begun to show films made in the West, the first of which,
Paradise Lost
, had already become wildly popular. But it would hardly do to present a film that was readily available in a place like that. Then there was another film, a German melodrama filled with violent action, but that could hardly be expected to score a success with the Princess and the other ladies in waiting. The Marquis finally decided that the choice most likely to please his guests was an English five-reeler based on a Dickens novel. The film might be rather gloomy, but it did have a certain refinement, its appeal was fairly wide, and the English captions would help all his guests.
But what if it rained? In that case, the large reception room in the main house would not offer a sufficiently varied array of blossoms, and the only suitable alternative would be to hold the viewing on the second floor of the Western-style house. Afterwards, the geishas could also perform their dances there, and the aperitifs and the formal banquet would follow as planned.

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