Spring Snow (48 page)

Read Spring Snow Online

Authors: Yukio Mishima

Her large, beautiful eyes were certainly wet with tears, but tears quite different from those he had been dreading up to now. They were something living that was being cut to pieces. Her eyes held the terrible glance of a drowning man, and he could not bear this gaze. Her lovely long eyelashes spread wide, like a plant bursting into flower.
“You too, Kiyo. Good-bye,” she said in one breath, her tone quite proper.
He fled from the train as if pursued, just as the stationmaster, wearing a short sword at the belt of his black five-button jacket, raised his hand in signal. Once more the conductor’s whistle sounded. Although restrained by Yamada’s presence beside him, he called her name in his heart again and again. The line of cars gave a brief shudder and then, like a length of yarn being unwound from a spool, the train began to move. In a few brief moments the observation car and its rear railing were far away, and neither Satoko nor the two mothers had shown themselves. The trailing smoke that poured over the platform testified to the power unleashed in the train’s departure. Its acrid smell filled the untimely darkness that it had left behind.
43
 
O
N THE MORNING
after two days in Osaka, Marquise Matsugae left the inn where she was staying and went to the nearest post office to send a personal telegram. Her husband had given her strict instructions that she was not to delegate this task to anyone. This being the first time in her life that she had entered a post office, she was thoroughly flustered, although in the midst of her confusion she somehow happened to recall a princess, recently deceased, who was convinced that money was filthy and passed her life without ever laying hand on it. But willy-nilly, she sent a telegram couched in the wording agreed on with her husband: “Visit safely accomplished.”
She felt a surge of relief sweep through her as if a heavy burden had slipped from her shoulders. She returned to the inn to pay her bill and then went to Osaka station, where Countess Ayakura was waiting to see her off on her solitary return trip to Tokyo. In order to pay her these respects, the Countess had momentarily slipped away from Satoko’s bedside in the hospital.
Satoko had entered Dr. Mori’s private clinic under an assumed name, in conformity with the doctor’s insistence on two or three days of complete rest. The Countess had been with her constantly, but although her physical condition was excellent, she had not said a word to her mother since the operation, an attitude that pained the Countess deeply.
Since the comfortable stay in the hospital was prescribed merely as a precautionary measure, when Dr. Mori gave his permission for her to leave, she was quite fit to move about, almost as if in perfect health. Now, with her morning sickness a thing of the past, she should have become more buoyant both physically and mentally, but she obstinately held to her silence.
According to the plan arranged for them, they were to go to Gesshu Temple next for Satoko’s farewell visit to the Abbess. They would stay there one night and return to Tokyo the next morning.
In the middle of November 18, then, the two of them got off a Sakurai Line train at Obitoké station. It was a warm and beautiful autumn afternoon, and despite her uneasiness over her taciturn daughter, the Countess felt more at rest.
Since she had wanted to avoid putting the old nuns to any inconvenience, she had not informed the convent of their time of arrival. Now, however, though she had asked a station attendant to call two rickshaws for them, there was still no sign of them. While they were waiting, the Countess, who had a fondness for exploring unfamiliar places, went for a stroll in the quiet vicinity of the station, leaving her daughter to her own reflections in the first class waiting-room. Just outside, she came across a signboard directing visitors to the Obitoké Temple nearby.
O
BITOKÉ
T
EMPLE OF
M
T
. K
OYASU
.
The Bodhisattva Obitoké Koyasu Jizo is revered here. Japan’s most ancient and hallowed place of prayer for obtaining the favor of children and their safe birth. Sanctified by the imperial prayers of the Emperors Montoku and Seiwa and the Empress Somedono.
She felt it just as well that these words had escaped Satoko’s eye. To lessen the chance of her daughter seeing the signboard, she would have to let the rickshaw pull in deep under the station roof and help her in. It seemed to her that the words were unexpected drops of blood tainting this lovely scenery underneath so brilliant a November sky.
Obitoké station had a well beside it, and white walls under a tiled roof. Opposite it stood an old-fashioned house surrounded by a roofed-in mud wall and boasting an imposing storehouse at the back. Although the white storehouse and mud wall made the bright sunlight dance, an eerie silence hung over the scene. The road surface was gray with thawing mud and glinted with traces of frost, which made for difficult walking. However, her eye was caught by an attractive splash of yellow in the distance. This lay at the approach to a small bridge; it crossed the railway line at a spot where the tall bare trees that bordered the track in ascending ranks came to an end, although they seemed to file on into infinity. So she gathered up her skirts and began to make her way up a slight gradient in the direction of this diversion.
As it turned out, the bridge approach had been decorated with flowerpots of trailing chrysanthemums. Any number of them were dotted about haphazardly in the shelter of a pale green willow that stood beside the path leading onto the bridge. Though it served its purpose as an overpass, it was unpretentious, made of wood, and seemed barely larger than a saddle. Some checkered quilts, hung out to air, were draped over its railing, soaking up the sun and fluffed out as they swung gracefully in the breeze. In the yard of a house close by, diapers were drying in the sun and a length of red material was stretched out and secured by clothespins. The dried persimmons that lined the eaves still had a luster like the glow of sunset. And there was no one to be seen anywhere.
Far down the road, she caught sight of the swaying black hoods of two rickshaws coming in her direction. She hurried back to the station to tell Satoko.
∗
Because the weather was so pleasant, she had the men lower the rickshaw hoods. They left the town and its two or three inns behind them and traveled for a time along a road bordered with rice paddies. If one looked up carefully at the mountains, one could pick out Gesshu Temple at the very heart of them.
Some distance farther on, the road was lined with persimmon trees, whose branches, although bare of almost all their leaves, were heavy with fruit. All the rice fields looked festive, decked all over with a maze of drying racks.
The Countess, in the first rickshaw, turned around from time to time to look back at her daughter. Satoko had folded her shawl and laid it in her lap. When her mother saw that she was looking around her as though she were enjoying the scenery, she felt somewhat relieved.
As the road entered the mountains, the pace of the rickshaw men slowed down. Both of them were old men, and their legs were evidently not what they had been. However, there was no reason to hurry. On the contrary, thought the Countess, she and Satoko were fortunate to be able to have such a leisurely view of the countryside.
They were approaching the outer stone gate of Gesshu, and once they had passed through it, the scenery became limited to the gently sloping path itself, a broad expanse of pale blue sky partially obscured by the tall, white-bearded grass along the path, and a low range of mountains far in the distance.
The rickshaw men finally stopped for a rest, and as they talked and wiped away their sweat, the Countess raised her voice to carry over theirs and called back to Satoko: “You’d better take your fill of the scenery from here to the convent. People like me can come here at any time, but you will soon be in a position where you won’t be able to go on outings so easily.”
Her daughter did not reply, but she gave a slow smile and nodded her head slightly.
The rickshaws moved on again, and the path continued to slope upwards, which slowed the pace still further. After they had entered the convent grounds, however, the trees on either side of them grew denser, lessening the heat of the sun.
The Countess’s ears still echoed faintly with the autumn midday humming of the insects she had been listening to while the rickshaw men were having their rest. But then the persimmon trees that had begun to appear on the left-hand side of the road caught her eye and enchanted her with their clear, glowing fruit. Flashing in the sunlight, some of the persimmons that weighed down each branch were casting lacquered shadows on the others. One tree was rich with orange-red fruit which, unlike flowers, resisted the wind and left only the dry leaves to stir. Its mass of ripe fruit was thus spread out against the sky as if fixed firmly to the spot against a field of blue.
“I don’t see any maple leaves at all. I wonder why,” she called back to Satoko, nearly shrieking with the effort but not drawing any response.
Even scrub maples were scarce along the road. There was little to catch the eye now but the green of radish fields to the west and bamboo thickets to the east. The radish fields were covered with a thick growth of leaves that filtered the sunshine into subtly complex patterns. Then they gave way to a line of tea bushes separated from the road by a marsh. Red-berried vines of magnolia covered this tea hedge, and beyond appeared the still waters of a larger marsh. A little farther on, the road darkened abruptly as the rickshaws passed into the shade of some ancient cedars. The sun spilled down in flecks of light on the bamboo grass beneath the trees, and one tall, isolated stalk flashed with a singular intensity.
She felt a sudden chill in the air. Turning again toward the rickshaw behind her, she mimed the clutching of her shawl about her shoulders. Although she hardly dared hope for a response, when she glanced backward a few minutes later, she caught the iridescent colors of Satoko’s shawl in the corner of her eye, fluttering in the breeze. Although her daughter still had no inclination to talk, the Countess could at least take consolation in her obedience.
Once the rickshaws had passed through a black-painted gate, the scenery around them took on the more formal aspect of a garden, as might be expected of the immediate surroundings of the convent. Its red maple leaves—the first she had seen along the way—caught the Countess by surprise, and she gasped with admiration.
There was nothing gaudily charming about the colors of these maples here within the black gate. Their deep scarlet was a shade that was blended only in the depths of the mountains, a color that seemed to speak to the Countess of sins as yet unpurged. She suddenly felt a chill edge of anxiety cut into her, and thought of Satoko in the rickshaw behind.
The screen of slender pines and cedars that formed a backdrop to the maples was not thick enough to shut out the broad, bright expanse of sky. Its brilliance flooded through them, striking the maples from behind and turning their extended red-leaved branches to scattered clouds caught in the radiance of the morning sun. As she looked up at the sky from beneath the branches, she admired the subtly delicate way the leaves were interwoven, and imagined that she was seeing the heavens through a tracery of deep scarlet.
Finally the rickshaws stopped and the Countess and Satoko stepped down in front of a Tang Dynasty gate, behind which was a stone-paved lane and the main entrance to the convent of Gesshu.
44
 
A
FULL YEAR HAD GONE BY
since Satoko and her mother had last paid their respects to the Abbess on the occasion of her trip to Tokyo. And now, as they waited in a large parlor, the senior nun assured them that Her Reverence had been delighted at the prospect of this visit. She was still speaking as the Abbess herself entered, the junior nun leading her by the hand.

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