Mandarins (26 page)

It was not until about ten o'clock that I returned to the hotel. I was so weary from my long walk that I lacked even the strength to go to my room. I threw myself into the chair in front of the fireplace full of burning logs. I thought about the novel that I had intended to write. It was to be an episodic work of some thirty chapters in chronological order, progressing from Empress Suiko to Emperor Meiji, with the ordinary people of each age in the fore. As I gazed at the dancing sparks ascending, I found myself thinking of a bronze statue in front of the Imperial Palace and the armored figure sitting grandly astride his horse,
⁴
the very embodiment of loyalty. And yet his enemies . . .

“No, no, it cannot be true!”

I came slipping back down from the distant past to the immediate present, as I was fortuitously met at that moment by an upperclassman from university days, a sculptor. He was, as ever, dressed in velvet and was sporting a short goatee. I rose from my chair and shook his hand. (This was not my custom but rather his—the result of half a
lifetime spent in Paris and Berlin.) His hand had a strangely reptilian dampness.

“Are you staying here?”

“Yes.”

“On business?”

“Yes, on business, among other things . . .”

He stared at me with what seemed to be a quasi-investigative expression in his eye.

“What about continuing this conversation in my room?” I issued the invitation as a challenge. (Though lacking in courage, I have the unfortunate habit of leaping at an opportunity to provoke.)

He replied with a smile: “Where is it, this room of yours?”

We walked shoulder to shoulder, as though the best of friends, passing through a group of softly speaking foreigners. Entering my room, he sat down with his back to the mirror and began talking about this and that—or at least of this or that
woman
, for such was his principal topic.

I was without doubt among those whose sins would send them to hell, but this sort of lascivious gossip only drove me further into depression. Momentarily assuming the role of a Puritan, I began deriding those women.

“Look at S's lips. How many men do you suppose she has kissed to give them that appearance?”

I suddenly fell silent and looked at the back of his head in the reflection of the mirror. He had a yellow plaster bandage below one of his ears.

“How many men she has kissed?”

“That's the sort of person she strikes me as being.”

He smiled and nodded, and I felt him looking at me carefully as though to learn some secret buried within me. And yet we continued
to dwell on women. I felt less loathing for him than shame at my own cowardice, and this only deepened my sense of utter gloom.

When at last he had left, I lay on my bed and started reading
An'ya K
ō
ro
. One by one, I could keenly feel the struggles in which the protagonist was engaged within his own mind. The realization that, by comparison, I was an utter fool brought tears to my eyes, and these gave me a feeling of peace, though only momentarily. My right eye was now again seeing semitransparent cogwheels. As before, they steadily multiplied as they turned. Fearing that my headache would return, I put the book down next to the pillow and took 0.8 grams of Veronal, resolving in any case to sleep soundly.

I dreamt, however, that I was looking at a swimming pool, where children, boys and girls, were splashing above the water and diving below. I left the pool and walked into the pine forest on the other side. Someone called out to me from behind: “Ot
ō
san!” Half turning around, I saw my wife standing in front of the pool and was immediately struck by a painful feeling of regret.

“Ot
ō
san, don't you want a towel?”

“No. Watch the children.”

I continued walking, but at some point my path turned into a platform—at a country railway station, it seemed—with a long hedge. There was a university student (H), together with an older woman. When they saw me, they approached and began talking at the same time.

“What a terrible fire!”

“I barely escaped myself,” said H.

I thought I had seen the woman before. I also felt a kind of euphoric excitement in talking to her. Now the train pulled in quietly next to the platform amidst a cloud of smoke. I was the only one to get on; I walked through the corridors of the sleeping compartments; inside,
white sheets hung from the berths. On one was the reclining figure of a naked woman, much like a mummy, looking toward me. It was once again the goddess of vengeance—that daughter of a lunatic.

I woke up and, without thinking, immediately sprang out of bed. The room was still bright with the electric lights, but from somewhere I heard the sound of wings and the squeaking of a rat. I opened the door, went out into the corridor, and hurried to the fireplace. I sat down in a chair and gazed at the tenuous flames. A hotel attendant dressed in white came to add more wood.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“About three-thirty, sir,” he replied.

Even so, there was a woman who sat reading in a corner at the opposite end of the lobby. I took her to be an American and could see even from across the room that she was wearing a green dress.

Feeling that I had been rescued, I resolved to remain where I was to await the dawn—like an old man who, having gained a respite from years of a tormenting illness, now placidly waits for death . . .

In my hotel room, I managed at last to complete the short story I had been writing and prepared to send it to a certain magazine. The remuneration I would receive would not, of course, pay for a week's lodging expenses. I nevertheless felt satisfied at having finished the project and wanted now to visit a bookstore in the Ginza for an intellectual stimulant.

Perhaps it was the fluctuating winter sun on the asphalt that gave the crumpled scraps of discarded paper the appearance of roses. I felt buoyed by a sense of benevolence as I entered the bookstore, which likewise seemed neater and tidier than usual. The only troubling presence was a girl in spectacles talking to a clerk. Remembering
the roselike paper scraps that I had seen on my way, I purchased a collection of conversations with Anatole France and the collected correspondence of Prosper M
é
rim
é
e.

I went into a caf
é
with my two books, took a seat at a table in the back, and waited for my coffee to come. A woman and a boy were sitting across the way—mother and son to all appearances. The son could have been my younger self, so strong was the resemblance. The two talked intimately, face-to-face, quite as lovers might. Indeed as I observed them, I had the feeling that at least he was well aware of providing consolation for her, even of a sexual nature. Such exemplified for me the sheer power of human affinities, something of which I too had some knowledge, providing yet another example of a certain will to transform this vale of tears into a veritable hell.

Nevertheless, fearing that I would fall into yet another round of anguish, I happily took the coffee brought to me at that moment and began reading M
é
rim
é
e's letters. As with his novels, they are full of brilliant and biting aphorisms. Reading them gave steely reinforcement to my disposition. (It has been a weakness of mine to be so easily susceptible to such influences.) After the coffee, feeling “ready for whatever comes,” I left the caf
é
.

As I passed along the streets, I looked into the various shop windows. A picture-framer had hung up a portrait of Beethoven, his bristling mane giving him the air of true genius. I could not help finding it quite comical . . .

On my way, I ran into an old friend from secondary school; a professor of applied chemistry, he was carrying a large folding satchel and had a bloodshot eye.

“What's wrong with your eye?”

“Oh, it's just conjunctivitis.”

I remembered that for the last fourteen or fifteen years, I have
developed the same sort of eye infection whenever I find myself drawn to someone. But I said nothing about that to him. Slapping me on the shoulder, he began to tell me about our mutual friends and then, without pausing in his chatter, led me into a caf
é
.

“It's been a long time. I haven't seen you since the dedication of the Shu Shunsui monument.”

He was sitting across a marble table from me, having lit a cigar.

“Yes, not since Shu Shun . . .”

For some reason I stumbled over the pronunciation, and this was troubling, all the more so, as this was the Japanese form of the name. But my old school chum went on talking as though quite unaware—of K, the novelist, of the bulldog he had just purchased, of a poison gas known as Lewisite . . .

“You don't seem to be writing anymore. I read
Tenkibo
. It's autobiographical, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I found it a bit pathological. How is your health at the moment?”

“I'm still getting by with a constant supply of medicine.”

“I understand. I too am suffering from insomnia.”

“‘I too'? Why do you say ‘I too'?”

“Isn't that what you said yourself? Insomnia's a serious matter, you know!”

There was a trace of a smile in his left, bloodshot eye. Before replying, I had sensed that I would have difficulty in pronouncing the final syllable of the technical term.

“How could the son of a lunatic be expected to sleep?”

Within ten minutes I was again walking the street. The crumpled papers scattered on the asphalt were now sometimes taking on the appearance of human faces. A bob-haired woman was coming toward me. From a distance, she appeared to be quite beautiful, but as she
passed, I could see a face that was lined, wrinkled, and indeed ugly. She also appeared to be pregnant. I instinctively turned my face away and turned into a broad side street. A few moments later I began to feel hemorrhoidal pain. For me, the only remedy was a
Sitzbad
. A
Sitzbad
. . . Beethoven too had resorted to such . . .

My nostrils were immediately assailed by the smell of the sulfur used in the therapy, though there was, of course, nothing of the sort to be seen on the street. Turning my mind again to the paper-scrap roses, I endeavored to walk with steady steps.

An hour later I had shut myself away in my room, sitting at the desk at work on a new story. My pen raced across the paper at a speed that quite astounded me. After two or three hours, however, it stopped, as though held in check by an invisible presence. Having no other recourse, I stood up and paced the room. It was at such moments that my delusions of grandeur were most striking. Caught up in savage joy, I could only think that I had neither parents nor wife and children, that there was only the life now emanating from my pen.

Four or five minutes passed, and now I had to turn to the telephone. I spoke into the receiver again and again, but all I could hear in response was a vague mumbling, endlessly repeated, that nonetheless doubtlessly had the sound of
mohru
. I finally moved away from the telephone and again paced the room, still haunted by the word.

“
Mohru
—Mole . . .”

The English word for the burrowing rodent. The association was hardly a pleasant one, but then two or three seconds later, I respelled it as
mort, la mort
. The French word for “death” instantly filled me with anxiety. Death had pursued my sister's husband and was now pursuing me. And yet in spite of my fear I found myself feeling strangely amused and even smiled. Why? I had no idea.

I stood in front of the mirror, something I had not done for a long
time, and directly looked at myself. My reflection too was, of course, smiling. Staring at my own image, I remembered a second self, the
Doppelgänger
, as one is wont to call such in German, that I had, most fortunately, never encountered. On the other hand, the wife of K, who had become an actor in American films, had seen my double in a theater corridor. (I still remember my perplexity when she apologized to me for not having greeted “me” on that occasion.) So had a one-legged translator, now deceased, in a Ginza tobacconist's shop.

Perhaps it was not I who was death's prey but rather my double. But even if I were . . . Turning my back to the mirror, I returned to my writing desk in front of the window. The square, tuff-framed window looked out on withered grass and a pond. As I gazed at the garden, I thought about all the notebooks and uncompleted theater pieces that had gone up in smoke in that distant pine forest. Picking up my pen, I resumed work on the story.

Sunlight had begun to torment me. I was truly living the life of a mole, assiduously continuing to write, the window curtains closed and the electric lights burning even during the day. When I was too weary to go on, I read Taine's
Histoire de la litt
é
rature anglaise
and perused his lives of the poets . . . They had all suffered misfortune . . . Even the giants of the Elizabethan age . . . even the era's great scholar, Ben Jonson, having suffered nervous exhaustion, found himself imagining the Roman and Carthaginian armies going into battle on his big toe. I could not help feeling a cruel, spite-filled joy at their misfortunes.