Spring Snow (25 page)

Read Spring Snow Online

Authors: Yukio Mishima

“Well, once the imperial sanction is received, that should settle everything,” said his mother.
Somehow he was moved by her words, especially the phrase “imperial sanction.” It made him think of a darkened corridor, long and wide, and at the end a door fastened with a small but impregnable padlock of solid gold. And suddenly, with a noise like the grinding of teeth, it opened of its own accord, a metallic rasp echoing clearly in his ears.
He was full of self-satisfaction that he could remain so calm while his mother and father discussed such matters. He had triumphed over his own rage and despair and so was relishing a sense of immortality. “I never dreamed that I could be so resilient,” he thought, never more confident in his life.
Once he had been convinced that his parents’ unfeeling coarseness was something totally alien to him, but now he took pleasure in the thought that he had not escaped his origins after all. He belonged not among the victims but among the victors.
He drew an exquisite pleasure from the thought that day by day Satoko’s existence would recede further and further from his mind until it would finally pass beyond recall. Those who set a votive lantern afloat on the evening tide stand on the shore and watch its light growing fainter over the dark surface of the water as they pray that their offering may travel as far as possible and so attain the maximum grace for the dead. In the same way, Kiyoaki looked upon the receding memory of Satoko as the surest vindication of his own strength.
Now there was nobody left in the world who was privy to his innermost feelings. No further obstacle would prevent him from disguising his emotions. The devoted servants, ever at his elbow, with their customary words: “Please leave everything to us. We know just how the young master feels,” had been removed. Not only was he happy to be free of that master conspirator, Tadeshina, but also of Iinuma, whose loyalty had become so intense as to threaten him with suffocation. The last of his irritants was gone.
As for his father’s dismissal of Iinuma, however kindly done, he rationalized his own indifference with the argument that Iinuma had brought it upon himself. He made his self-satisfaction complete with the vow, faithfully kept, thanks to Tadeshina, never to mention to his father what had happened. And so he had brought everything to a successful conclusion out of his acuity and coldness of heart.
The day came for Iinuma’s departure. When he went to Kiyoaki’s room for his formal farewell, he was crying. Kiyoaki could not accept even such grief for what it was. The thought that Iinuma was emphasizing his fervently exclusive loyalty to him gave him no pleasure.
Inarticulate as ever, Iinuma merely stood there crying. By his very silence he was trying to tell Kiyoaki something. Their relationship had lasted some seven years, beginning in the spring when Kiyoaki was twelve. Since his recollection of his thoughts and feelings at that age were rather vague, he had the general impression that Iinuma had always been there beside him. If his boyhood and youth cast a shadow, that shadow was Iinuma, in his sweaty, dark blue, splashed-patterned kimono. The relentlessness of his discontent, his rancor, his negative attitude to life, had all weighed heavily on Kiyoaki, try as he might to feign immunity. On the other hand, however, the dark woe in Iinuma’s eyes had served to warn him against those very same attitudes in himself, although they were normal enough in youth. Iinuma’s particular demons had tormented him with manifest violence, and the more he wanted his young master to emulate him, the more Kiyoaki had shied off in the opposite direction, a predictable turn of events.
Psychologically, Kiyoaki had probably taken the first step toward today’s parting when he had broken the power that had dominated him for so long and turned Iinuma into his confidant. Their mutual understanding was probably too deep for master and retainer.
As Iinuma stood before him with bowed head, the chest hair escaping from the neck of his blue kimono glistened faintly, caught in a ray of the evening sun. Kiyoaki stared gloomily at this matted tangle, depressed at the realization of what a distastefully coarse and heavy vessel Iinuma’s flesh made for his overpowering spirit of loyalty. It was, in fact, a direct physical affront. Even the glow on Iinuma’s rough-skinned, pimpled cheeks, mottled and unhealthy as it was, had something shameless about it that seemed to taunt Kiyoaki with Miné’s devotion—Miné who was leaving with Iinuma, ready to share his fate. Nothing could be more insulting: the young master betrayed by a woman and left to grieve; the retainer believing in a woman’s fidelity and going off triumphant. Iinuma, moreover, was quite secure in the conviction that today’s farewell had come about in the line of duty—a presumption that Kiyoaki found galling.
However, deciding that noblesse oblige was the best course, he spoke humanely, if curtly.
“So then, once you’re on your own, I presume you’ll marry Miné?”
“Yes, sir. Since your father was gracious enough to suggest it, that’s exactly what I shall do.”
“Well, let me know the date. I must send you a present.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
“Once you have a permanent home, send me a note with your address. Who knows, perhaps I might come and see you some time.”
“I cannot imagine anything that would give me greater pleasure than a visit from the young master. But wherever I live, it will be too small and dirty to be a fit place to receive you.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“How gracious of you to say so . . .”
And Iinuma began to cry again. He pulled a piece of coarse tissue paper from his kimono and blew his nose.
During this exchange Kiyoaki had chosen his every word with care and an eye to its suitability for the occasion before smoothly giving voice to it. He made it patently clear that in a situation such as this, the emptiest words were those that aroused the strongest emotions. He professed to live for sentiment alone, but circumstances now compelled him to learn the politics of the intellect. This was an education that he would apply to his own life with profit from time to time. He was learning to use sentiment as a protective armor and how best to polish it.
Devoid of worry or annoyance, free of all anxiety, Kiyoaki at nineteen liked to see himself as a cold and supremely capable young man. He felt that he was now past some watershed in the course of his life.
After Iinuma had gone, he stood at the open window gazing down at the beautiful reflection of the maple hill, with its fresh green mantle of new leaves, as it floated on the water of the pond. Close to the window itself, the foliage of the zelkova was so thick that he had to lean out in order to see the place at the bottom of the hill where the last of the nine waterfalls plunged into its pool. All around the edge of the pond, the surface was covered with clusters of pale green water shields. The yellow water lilies had not yet flowered, but in the angles of the stone bridge that zigzagged a path close to the main reception room, irises were pushing their purple and white blossoms out from sharp-pointed clusters of green leaves.
His eye was caught by the iridescent back of a beetle that had been standing on the windowsill but was now advancing steadily into his room. Two reddish purple stripes ran the length of its brilliant oval shell of green and gold. Now it waved its antennae cautiously as it began to inch its way forward on its tiny hacksaw legs, which reminded Kiyoaki of minuscule jeweler’s blades. In the midst of time’s dissolving whirlpool, how absurd that this tiny dot of richly concentrated brilliance should endure in a secure world of its own. As he watched, he gradually became fascinated. Little by little the beetle kept edging its glittering body closer to him as if its pointless progress were a lesson that when traversing a world of unceasing flux, the only thing of importance was to radiate beauty. Suppose he were to assess his protective armor of sentiment in such terms. Was it aesthetically as naturally striking as that of this beetle? And was it tough enough to be as good a shield as the beetle’s?
At that moment, he almost persuaded himself that all its surroundings—leafy trees, blue sky, clouds, tiled roofs—were there purely to serve this beetle which in itself was the very hub, the very nucleus of the universe.
∗
The atmosphere of the Omiyasama festival was not the same as in previous years. For one thing, Iinuma was gone; every year, long before the day of the festival, he had thrown himself into the task of cleaning up and had done the arranging of the altar and chairs all by himself. Now it had all fallen to Yamada, and was the more unwelcome for being without precedent. Furthermore, it was work more befitting a younger man.
In addition, Satoko had not been invited. There was thus the sense that someone was missing from the group of relatives customarily present, but more significant than that—for Satoko was not really a relative after all—none of the women there was remotely as beautiful as she.
The gods themselves seemed to view the altered circumstances with displeasure. Midway through the ceremony, the sky darkened and thunder rumbled in the distance. The women, who had been following the priest’s prayers, were thrown into a fluster, worried that they might be caught in a shower. Fortunately, however, when the time came for the young priestesses in their scarlet
hakama
to distribute the sacred offerings of wine to everyone, the sky lightened again. As the women bowed their heads, the bright sunshine on the napes of their necks drew beads of sweat despite the heavy coating of white powder. At that moment, the clusters of wisteria blossoms on the trellis cast deep shadows that fell like a benediction on those in the back rows.
Had Iinuma been present, the atmosphere of this year’s festival would doubtless have angered him, since each year brought less reverence and mourning for Kiyoaki’s grandfather. He now seemed to have been relegated to a vanished era, especially since the death of the Meiji Emperor himself. And so he had become a distant god who had no connection at all with the modern world. True, his widow, Kiyoaki’s grandmother, took part in the ceremony, as did a number of other old people; their tears, however, seemed to have dried up long ago.
Each year as the painfully long ceremony went on, the women’s whispering grew steadily louder. The Marquis did not go out of his way to manifest disapproval. He himself was finding the observance more tedious year by year, and he was hopeful of finding some way of making it a bit more cheerful and less depressing for himself. During the ritual, his eye was drawn to a young priestess whose pronounced Okinawan features were all the more striking under her heavy white makeup. As she held the earthenware vessel filled with sacred wine, he was fascinated by the reflection of her bold dark eyes on the surface of the liquid. As soon as the ceremony was over, he rushed over to his cousin, who was not only an admiral but also a drinker of no small fame, and apparently made a vulgar joke about the priestess, for the admiral’s laugh was so loud and crude that it drew a number of stares. The Marquise, however, knowing how appropriate her mask of classic melancholy was to today’s affair, did not alter her expression in the slightest.
Kiyoaki meanwhile was otherwise occupied. The women of the household, the whole vast array of them, many of whom he did not even know by name, were crowded together in the luxuriant shade of the late spring wisteria. They were whispering among themselves, their air of reverence vanishing with each passing moment. Their faces were expressionless, empty even of sadness as they stood dutifully grouped according to their instructions, waiting until they could disband once more, and full of heavy, sluggish reluctance. The sultry atmosphere that surrounded these women with white faces as blank as the moon at midday had a profound effect on Kiyoaki. Beyond a doubt, much of it had to do with their scent, from which there was no excluding Satoko herself. And this was something that even the Shinto priest, armed with the sacred sakaki branch with its weight of glossy dark green leaves and its string of white paper pendants, would have been hard put to exorcise.
24
 
K
IYOAKI DREW COMFORT
from the peace of mind that comes with loss. In his heart, he always preferred the actuality of loss to the fear of it.
He had lost Satoko. And with that he was content. For by now he had learned how to quiet even his subsequent resentment. Every show of feeling was now governed with a marvelous economy. If a candle has burned brilliantly but now stands alone in the dark with its flame extinguished, it need no longer fear that its substance will dissolve into hot wax. For the first time in his life, Kiyoaki came to realize the healing powers of solitude.

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