Mandarins (19 page)

He was observing this scene in the company of a ruddy-faced physician. His own mother of ten years before was in no way different from these inmates. In no way at all . . . He sensed that even the odor was the same.

“Shall we go then?”

The doctor led the way through the corridor to another room. In the corner were huge jars filled with alcohol, in which a number of brains were submerged. On one of these he saw something
white, looking quite as though it had been dabbed with egg albumen. As he stood talking with the doctor, he thought again about his mother.

“The owner of this brain was an engineer at X Electric Company. He always thought of himself as an enormous, black-luster dynamo.”

To avoid the doctor's eyes, he stared out the glass window. Outside there was only a brick wall, on top of which bottle shards had been embedded. Thin patches of moss lent a vaguely white appearance to the façade.

He rose and slept in a room on the second floor of a suburban house. The instability of the ground made for a strange tilt.

In this room on the second floor he would sometimes quarrel with his mother's elder sister, his foster parents sometimes interceding. He nonetheless had an unrivaled affection for his aunt. Never married, she was at the time close to sixty, while he was still twenty.

There on the second floor of that suburban house, he often pondered how it is that those who love one another can engage in mutual torment, even as the tilt of the house gave him a feeling of unease and foreboding . . .

The Sumida River was a dull, leaden gray. He was gazing out of a window on a small steamboat at the cherry trees of Muk
ō
jima. The blossoms, now at their peak, were no less dispiriting to his eyes than had they been rows of rags. Yet in those blossoms—renowned since Edo times—he had come to see himself.

He sat at a table in a caf
é
with one who had preceded him at the university.
¹
Smoking one cigarette after another, he barely spoke, listening intently.

“I spent half the day in a taxi.”

“Did you have matters to attend to?”

Resting his chin in his hand, the other replied in a quite offhand manner:

“Oh, no, I merely wished to enjoy the ride.”

These words opened a window in his mind to an unknown world—the world of
self
so akin to that of the gods. He felt pain—and, at the same time, joy.

The caf
é
was quite small, but under a portrait of Pan was a gum tree in a red pot, its thick, fleshy leaves drooping.

The wind was blowing steadily from the sea as he opened an English dictionary and searched the entries with his fingertip:

Talaria: winged shoes or sandals

Tale: a story

Talipot: A palm tree native to the East Indies, attaining a height of fifty to one hundred feet, its leaves used for umbrellas, fans, and hats, blooming once in seventy years . . .

In his mind he could clearly picture the flowers of the palms. He felt a tickling in his throat he had never known before. He found himself spitting into the dictionary. Was it sputum? No. He contemplated the brevity of life and once again imagined the palm flowers, high aloft the trees, far across the ocean.

Suddenly—indeed suddenly . . . He was standing in front of a bookstore, looking at a collection of Van Gogh paintings, when he suddenly understood what a painting is. They were, of course, a photographic edition, but from them he felt Nature springing forth in all her splendor.

His passion for the paintings renewed and altered his vision. He began to hone in on the sway and bend of branches and the sensual plumpness of female cheeks.

At the end of a rainy afternoon in autumn, he was walking through a suburban railway underpass. Beneath an embankment on the other side stood a horse-drawn wagon. As he passed it, he felt the presence of someone who had walked the same path. Someone? He had no need to ask himself twice. In his twenty-three-year-old mind he saw a Dutchman with an amputated ear, a long pipe in his mouth, looking out with a penetrating gaze at the bleak landscape . . .

Drenched by the rain, he walked the asphalt street. It was raining rather heavily. In the pervasive dampness, he noticed the rubbery smell of his mackintosh.

From an overhead trolley cable in front of him came a burst of violet sparks. He felt strangely moved. In his coat pocket he had tucked away a manuscript intended for a literary coterie. As he went on through the rain, he looked up again at the cable behind him: it was sparkling as ever.

He had taken a survey of life and found nothing in particular that he wanted or desired. But now those violet sparks . . . To seize those stupendous sparks exploding in space, he would happily have forfeited his life.

On a big toe of each cadaver hung an identifying tag, including name and age. A friend of his was bent over, skillfully wielding a scalpel as he began to peel away the facial skin of one. Underneath lay a beautiful layer of yellow fat.

He looked carefully at the cadaver: he needed background for a short story set in the Heian period. He was, however, made uneasy by the smell—suggesting rotting apricots—that emanated from the body. With knitted eyebrows, his friend calmly carried on his work.

“We've recently had quite a shortage,” his friend remarked.

To this he had a ready answer:
If I were faced with that problem, I suppose I'd resort to murder—without any sort of animosity
, he thought.

Needless to say, he kept this comment to himself.

Sitting under a large oak, he was reading one of Sensei's books. Not a leaf was stirring in the autumn light. In distant space, a crystal balance scale was maintaining perfect equilibrium. This was the scene he saw in his mind's eye as he read . . .

The day gradually dawned. At a corner of a street, he looked out on a vast market. The crowds and their vehicles were bathed in rose light. He lit a cigarette and calmly strolled on through. A scrawny black dog suddenly began barking at him, but he was neither surprised nor dismayed; indeed, he felt some affection for the dog.

In the middle of the market was a plane tree, spreading its branches all around. He stood at the base of the trunk and looked up through those branches at the distant sky, in which a star was twinkling directly above his head.

He was in his twenty-fifth year. It had been three months since he had made the acquaintance of his mentor.

The interior of the submarine was dimly lit. Crouched down among the machines on all sides, he peered through a small telescope. He could see reflected in the bright light the military port.

“There you'll be able to see the
Kong
ō
,” an officer told him. Looking at the reduced image of the battle cruiser through the square lens, he was somehow reminded of Dutch parsley, its scent lingering even when mounted on a portion of
thirty-sen
beefsteak.

In the wind that followed a lull in the rain, he was walking the platform of a new railway station. The sky was still overcast. On the other side, a few workers were chanting robustly as they swung their picks up and down in unison.

Both their song and his sentiments were scattered by the wind. Leaving his cigarette unlit, he felt an anguish bordering on joy. “Sensei critically ill” read the telegram that he had thrust into his pocket.

The 6
AM
T
ō
ky
ō
-bound train came curving round the pine-covered slope and pulled in, trailing a wisp of smoke.

“You know, we can't have you
already
wasting money,” he complained to his wife the day after their wedding. It was less his complaint than one his maternal aunt had ordered him to deliver on her behalf. His wife had, of course, apologized not only to him but also to the aunt—as they sat in front of the pot of jonquils she had bought for him . . .

They led a tranquil life in the shade of a broad-leafed banana tree, for their house was situated in a coastal town a good hour away by train from T
ō
ky
ō
.

He read a book by Anatole France, his head propped up by a pillow of skepticism exuding a rosy fragrance; the presence in that same pillow of a centaur quite escaped his notice.

A butterfly fluttered in the seaweed-scented breeze. For an instant, he felt its wings touch his parched lips. Even many years later, the powder on those wings that brushed his lips still glistened.

On the stairs of a hotel, he met her, quite by accident. Even in the daytime, her face seemed bathed in moonlight. As his gaze followed her (they were not in the least acquainted), he experienced a sadness he had not seen before . . .

He shifted from Anatole France to the eighteenth-century philosophers, though skipping over Rousseau, perhaps because in one respect, being prone to be carried away by passion, he resembled him. Leaning toward another side of himself, the coldly rational, he went to Candide's philosopher.

He was twenty-nine years old, and already all was gloom. Yet in this way Voltaire provided him, such as he was, with artificial wings.
He spread those wings and rose easily into the air, the joys and sorrows of human life, flooded with the light of reason, now sinking below his gaze. Unimpeded on his course toward the sun, he rained down his smiles and smirks on the miserable towns below, as though having forgotten the Greek of long ago who, with his own artificial wings scorched by Helios, went plunging into the sea and drowned . . .

Having joined a newspaper company, he found himself and his wife sharing a house with his foster parents. He entrusted himself to a contract he had signed. It was written on a yellow piece of paper. Yet on rereading it, he realized that all duties and obligations rested with him, none with the company.

Two rickshaws were running along a deserted country road on an overcast day, heading, it was clear from the briny breeze, toward the sea. He was sitting in the one behind, wondering what had induced him to embark on this rendezvous in which he had utterly no interest. It was certainly not love that had brought him here. If it was not love . . . To avoid responding to that question, he could not help thinking that at least they were on the same footing.

Riding in the rickshaw ahead of him was the daughter of a lunatic. Jealousy had driven her younger sister to suicide.

There is no longer any alternative.

Toward this girl, this lunatic's daughter, driven by base animal instincts, he felt a certain abhorrence.

The rickshaws were now passing along a cemetery that smelled of the sea. Dark gravestones stood beyond the brushwood fence
covered with oyster shells. Through the gravestones he gazed out on the faintly glittering waves. Suddenly he felt contempt for her husband, unable to win her heart.

It was a magazine illustration, an India-ink drawing of a rooster, striking in its individuality. He asked a friend about the artist.

A week later the artist paid him a visit. It was one of the most memorable events of his life. In the painter he discovered a poem that no one knew and in so doing his own soul, which likewise he never had known.

On a chilly autumn evening, an ear of maize reminded him instantly of the artist. Armed with its rough leaves, the tall plant spread its thin, nervelike roots over the soil; in its revelation of vulnerability, it was, of course, none other than his own self-portrait. Yet the discovery only dispirited him.

It is already too late. Yet if the die is cast . . .

Standing in front of a public square as dusk was falling . . . Feeling somewhat feverish, he started to cross it, the electric lights in the multistoried buildings twinkling against a faintly silver sky.

He stopped along the way, resolved to wait for her arrival. Five minutes later she was coming toward him, looking somehow haggard. As soon as she saw his face, she smiled and said: “I'm tired.” They walked side by side through the darkening square—for the first time together. He sensed that to be with her, he would abandon everything.

They were riding in a taxi when she gazed earnestly into his face and asked: “Have you any regrets?”

“I regret nothing,” he said firmly.

“Nor I,” she replied, pressing his hand. At that moment too, her face appeared to be bathed in moonlight.

Standing in front of the sliding door, he gazed down at the midwife, dressed in her white surgical gown, as she washed the newborn. It grimaced pitifully whenever the soap stung its eyes, crying at the top of its voice. He noticed that the infant had a rodentlike odor and thought in all earnestness:

Why have you too come into this world so full of vain desire and suffering? And why is this your burden of fate: to have the likes of me as a father?