Mandarins (21 page)

“A platonic suicide, I suppose,” she remarked.

“Yes, a double platonic suicide.”

He himself could not help being surprised at how calm he was.

He did not carry through with the pact. For some reason he felt satisfaction at not having touched her. She sometimes talked with him, acting as if nothing had happened. She also handed over to him her small bottle of cyanide, saying:

“This should make us both feel stronger.”

In doing so, she did, in fact, bolster his spirits. Sitting alone in his rattan chair, he gazed at the young leaves of the chinquapins and found that despite himself he would often think of what peace death would bring him.

Mustering his last strength, he set about to write his autobiography, only to find that his amour propre, his skepticism, and his keen awareness of his own self-interest made the task surprisingly difficult. He could not help despising himself, even as he was equally compelled to
think that when we peel back the skin we are indeed all the same. The title of Goethe's
Dichtung und Wahrheit
seemed to suggest the essence of autobiography. He also knew perfectly well that not everyone is moved by a literary work. His own writings could only appeal to likeminded individuals who lived lives similar to his own. It was with and for this feeling moving within him that he attempted to write his own brief blend of reverie and reality.

On completing “The Life of a Fool,” he happened to pass by a secondhand shop, in which he saw a stuffed swan. It stood with its neck stretched upward, but its yellowed feathers had been eaten away by vermin. Smiling wryly through his tears, he thought about his life. Before him lay only madness or suicide. He walked alone through the streets in the twilight, resolved to await the slow but steady approach of a destiny bent on his obliteration.

A friend of his became mentally ill. He had always felt very close to him. He knew better than anyone his loneliness, the loneliness that lay beneath the cheery mask. He visited him several times after his breakdown.

“We are both haunted by demons,” his friend remarked, lowering his voice, “the so-called
fin-de-siècle
demons.”

He heard that two or three days later, while on his way to a hot-springs resort, the friend had even been eating roses. After his friend's hospitalization he remembered the terra-cotta bust that he had given him. It was of the author of a work that he had loved:
The Inspector General
. He remembered that Gogol too had gone mad and was thus reminded of the power that ruled them all.

He was at the point of exhaustion when once again he heard the laughter of the gods. He had just read the last words of Raymond
Radiguet: “The soldiers of God are coming for me.”
⁵
He tried to resist his own superstition and sentimentality, but he was physically incapable of any sort of struggle.

There could be no doubt: he was being tormented by the
fin-desiècle
demons. He envied the people of medieval times, who could entrust themselves to the power of God. But belief in God . . . Belief in the love of God was for him utterly impossible—a belief that even Cocteau possessed.

Even the hand holding his pen began to tremble; he also started to drool. Except when he had taken a 0.8 gram dose of Veronal, his mind was never completely clear, and those moments of relative lucidity lasted no longer than thirty minutes to an hour. He spent his days in spiritual twilight, as though, so to speak, leaning on a thin sword whose blade had been chipped.

It was a cozily designed dwelling, with an unpretentious gate. As such, it was, to be sure, not unusual for the neighborhood. It was in its plaque—
Genkaku Sanb
ō
—and the trees in the garden that rose above the height of the wall, that it clearly outshone every other house in elegance.

The master was Horikoshi Genkaku. Though rather well-known as a painter, he had made his fortune in the acquisition of a patent for rubber seals and subsequently in the purchase and sale of properties. The soil of the land he owned on the outskirts of the city had been so poor that not even ginger could be grown, but now all of this had been transformed into a “cultural village,”
¹
boasting red- and blue-tiled roofs . . .

Genkaku Sanb
ō
was nonetheless a cozily designed dwelling, with an unpretentious gate. Adding to the sense of refinement were both the straw ropes recently used to protect the pine trees from the snow and the bright-red ardisia berries amidst the withered pine needles carpeting the entrance. There were few passersby along the alleyway that ran by the house. Even the bean-curd peddler, putting down his shoulder pole and tubs in the thoroughfare, would signal his presence with no more than a toot of his trumpet.

“What is the significance of the name?” asked a long-haired student of painting who happened by, carrying an oblong color-box under his arm. His companion, likewise dressed in a gold-buttoned uniform, said in reply:

“Well, I should hardly think a pun on ‘severe' or ‘straitlaced'!”

The young men laughed lightheartedly as they continued on their way. The path was now again quite deserted, except for a thin blue thread of smoke rising from a Golden Bat cigarette that one of them had left discarded on the frozen lane.

Even before becoming Genkaku's adopted son-in-law, J
Å«
kichi had worked for a bank. Thus, on his return home each day, the electric lights were just coming on. For several days now, he had, on entering the gate, immediately detected a strange smell. The source was the bad breath of the old man, who lay in bed afflicted with pulmonary tuberculosis, a rare disease among the elderly. There was nonetheless no reason for the odor to have spread beyond the house. As J
Å«
kichi, a satchel pressed under the arm of his overcoat, made his way along the stepping-stones leading up to the entrance, he could not help worrying about his state of nerves.

Genkaku was situated in an isolated room. When not flat on his back, he would sit up, leaning on a mountain of quilts. J
Å«
kichi would
take off his hat and coat and, without fail, put in an appearance to announce his return or to inquire about his father-in-law's condition. Even so, he rarely went beyond the threshold, in part because he feared contagion but also because the odor offended him. Genkaku's greeting in return was no more than a syllable or two, and these he murmured with a voice so weak that it sounded closer to mere breath. Such would sometimes fill J
Å«
kichi with pangs of guilt, but his loathing of going in remained unchanged.

He would then call on his mother-in-law, O-tori, next to the sitting room. She too was bedridden and had been for seven or eight years, well before her husband. Unable to walk, she could not even go by herself to the privy. It was said that Genkaku had married her not only because she was a daughter of the principal counselor to a high lord but also because he had had his heart set on a belle. In this, her eyes retained something of their beauty despite her years. Yet as she sat in her bed, painstakingly darning her white split-toed socks, she bore a more than faint resemblance to a mummy. “Mother, how are you today?” J
Å«
kichi would say as a similarly short salutation before entering the six-mat sitting room.

When his wife, O-suzu, was not there, she would be working in the cramped kitchen with her maid, O-matsu, who came from Shinsh
Å«
. Needless to say, J
Å«
kichi was much more familiar with both the tidily arranged sitting room and the modernized kitchen than with areas of the house occupied by his parents-in-law.

The second son of a politician who had once served as a provincial governor, he was a brilliant young man, more like his mother, who had been an old-fashioned poetess, than his father, who had always had the aura of
le grand homme
about him. His character could also be discerned from his friendly eyes and delicately narrow chin.

Coming into the sitting room, he would change from Western to Japanese clothes, lounge at the long brazier, smoke a cheap cigar,
and playfully tease his only son, Takeo, who had just entered primary school that year. J
Å«
kichi, O-suzu, and Takeo invariably ate together, gathered around their low dining table. Their usual liveliness had recently been partly replaced by a discernible air of formality, the cause of which was the arrival of K
ō
no, the nurse now taking care of Genkaku. This did not, to be sure, affect in the least Takeo's propensity to engage in childish pranks; indeed, the presence of K
ō
no-san only aggravated it. Sometimes his mother would glare at him with a frown, but he would respond with no more than a look of utter incomprehension, as he shoveled rice from his bowl into his mouth with an exaggerated flourish. Being a veteran reader of fiction, J
Å«
kichi sensed something “male” in Takeo's exuberance, but though he was not always unperturbed by such behavior, he usually tolerated it with a stoical smile, as he ate in silence.

Nights in the villa were quiet. Takeo, who had to go to school the next morning, would, of course, be asleep by ten, but his parents too generally retired at the same hour. Only K
ō
no would remain awake, having begun her vigil at about nine, sitting at Genkaku's bedside, her hands at the red-glowing brazier, never once dozing off. Genkaku himself was also sometimes awake, but he only spoke when his hot-water bottle had grown cold or when his compresses were dry. The only sound to be heard in this isolated room came from the rustling bamboo thicket. In the stillness and the cold, K
ō
no would ponder this and that as she watched over the old man—the state of mind and feelings of the various members of the family, her own future . . .

One cloudless afternoon after a snowfall, a woman of twenty-four or -five appeared at the kitchen entrance of the Horikoshi residence, holding a slender boy by the hand. Through the window set in the roof, the bright blue sky could be seen.

J
Å«
kichi was, of course, not at home. O-suzu, who was sitting at her sewing machine, was not entirely surprised but was nonetheless taken aback. She arose and, walking past the long brazier, went to meet the visitor, who, on entering the kitchen, arranged her own footwear and that of the boy,
²
who was clad in a white sweater. Even in this gesture, she was demonstrating considerable deference—and not without reason, for this was O-yoshi, a former maid, whom for the last five or six years Genkaku had openly kept as his mistress somewhere in the outskirts of T
ō
ky
ō
.

As O-suzu looked at her face, she was astonished to see how quickly O-yoshi had aged. And the evidence was not in her facial features alone. Until four or five years before, her hands had been round and plump. Now they were so slender that the veins were visible. In what she wore as well—the trinket of a ring on her finger—O-suzu could see that her domestic circumstances were indeed wretched.

“My elder brother has instructed me to offer this to the master.”

With even greater diffidence, O-yoshi placed in a corner of the kitchen a package wrapped in old newspapers, before entering the sitting room, her knees to the floor. O-matsu had been in the midst of washing, but now, without pausing for a moment, began to cast furtive and disparaging glances at O-yoshi, who wore her hair in a freshly arranged ginkgo-leaf bun. The sight of the package only renewed her frosty expression. It was undeniably true that it gave off an unpleasant odor hardly in keeping with the modernized kitchen or its delicate dishes and bowls. O-yoshi's eyes were not directed toward O-matsu, but she appeared to detect an odd look on the face of O-suzu, for she explained: “This is . . . i-it's garlic.” Then turning to the child, who was biting his finger, she said: “Now, Botchan, make a bow.”

The boy, whose name was Buntar
ō
, was, of course, the son of O-yoshi by Genkaku. O-suzu was struck with pity for O-yoshi that she should address him as “Botchan,”
³
but common sense also immediately
told her that with such a woman this was only to be expected. Feigning unconcern, she offered what tea and cakes she had on hand to the two sitting in a corner of the room, as she spoke of Genkaku's condition and sought to amuse Buntar
ō
.

Having made O-yoshi his mistress, Genkaku had regularly gone to see her once or twice a week, despite the inconvenience of changing trains. At first, O-suzu was revolted by the attitude of her father and would often tell herself that he might act with at least a modicum of consideration for her mother's circumstances. For her part, O-tori seemed quite resigned to it all, though this only added to O-suzu's sorrow for her, so that when her father went off on his visits, she would resort to such transparent lies as “Father has his poetry meeting today.” She was not unaware that such artifices were useless, and whenever she saw something close to a sneer on O-tori's face, she regretted her own lack of candor, even as she felt still greater chagrin at her paralytic mother's unwillingness to share her heartache.

Sometimes, having seen her father off, O-suzu would momentarily pause at her sewing machine to think about the household. Even before her father had taken up with O-yoshi, he had not been for her any sort of idealized patriarch, but for a woman as kind and gentle as she was, that was of little concern. She was nonetheless troubled when he began to take more and more paintings, calligraphic works, and antiques to the residence he had set up for his mistress. From the time O-yoshi was still their maid, O-suzu had never thought her to be a wicked person; on the contrary, she appeared to be more timid a woman than most. But her elder brother, a fishmonger somewhere on the edge of T
ō
ky
ō
, might very well have a scheme or two of his own, and, in fact, he had struck her as a man full of wiles. Sometimes she would entreat J
Å«
kichi to listen to her, as she attempted to confide
her concerns to him, but he invariably brushed her aside. “I'm not the one to speak to Father about it,” was his reply, thereby obliging her to say no more.