Spring Snow (50 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
Once back at the side of such a husband, the Countess became daily less concerned with the anxiety that had oppressed her at Gesshu. In the present circumstances, it was lucky that Tadeshina was away and unable to act blindly on one of her rash impulses. The Count had been kind enough to send her off for a leisurely convalescence at the hot springs of Yugawara.
After a week, however, there was a phone call from Marquis Matsugae, and even Count Ayakura could no longer keep the matter secret. The Marquis was temporarily struck dumb when he heard the Count tell him that as a matter of fact Satoko had not yet returned and he felt the stirrings of all sorts of nasty premonitions.
The Marquis and his wife lost no time in paying a visit to the Ayakuras. At first the Count offered one vague response after another as he was questioned. And then when the truth finally came out, the Marquis was so furious that he struck the table in front of him with his fist.
∗
So it came about that this ten-mat parlor awkwardly redone to become the sole Western-style room in the mansion became the scene for the first occasion in their long acquaintance that these two couples confronted each other stripped of all niceties. The women averted their eyes and each from time to time stole a look at her husband. Though the two men faced each other, Count Ayakura tended to hang his head. His hands, resting on the table, were small and white, the hands of a doll in a puppet play. In contrast, despite his essential weakness, the Marquis’s coarse, florid features could have served as a Noh mask of the angry devil with the fiercely contorted eyebrows. Even in the eyes of the wives, the Count appeared to have no chance.
As it turned out, the Marquis’s anger swept all before it for a time. But even while he was letting himself rage, he began to feel a little embarrassed over his display of self-righteousness. For after all, his own position in this affair was safe from first to last. Moreover, he could hardly have been matched with a weaker, more pitiful antagonist than the one who now confronted him. The Count’s color was unhealthy. As he sat there in silence, an expression, part sorrow, part dismay, came over his face, which seemed to be carved out of yellow ivory, the features delicately chiseled and quite composed. The crinkled eyelids emphasized the deep-set cast of the habitually downcast eyes as well as their melancholy. The Marquis had the feeling, not for the first time, that they were women’s eyes.
Count Ayakura’s languid reticence, his manner of slumping casually in his chair, clearly bespoke the graceful elegance of ancient tradition—something that was nowhere to be found in the Marquis’s pedigree—now displayed at its most deeply injured. It had something of the soiled plumage of a dead bird, a creature that had once sung beautifully but whose flesh was tasteless and so inedible after all.
“It’s quite unbelievable! A positively wretched thing to happen. What apologies could we offer to the Emperor, to the entire nation?” the Marquis declaimed heedlessly, intent on letting his anger sweep along on a stream of orotund syllables but aware that its supporting lifeline might snap at any minute. Anger was useless against the Count, who was neither acquainted with logic nor remotely inclined to initiate any course of action. Worse still, the Marquis gradually came to realize that the more enraged he became, the more the force of his passion was turned relentlessly back against itself.
He could not believe that the Count had plotted just such a result from the very beginning. But nonetheless he now saw with painful clarity that the Count had been able to use his endemic listlessness to forge so impregnable a position that, however monumental the catastrophe, the blame for it would come to rest not on himself but on his ally.
After all, it was the Marquis who had asked the Count to give his son an upbringing that would imbue him with a sense of elegance. It was undoubtedly the desires of the flesh in Kiyoaki that had brought on this misfortune, and one might well argue that this was the consequence of the subtle poison that had begun to infect his spirit after his arrival in the Ayakura household as an infant. But the ultimate instigator of this was none other than the Marquis himself. Furthermore, in this latest twist of the crisis, it was the Marquis who had insisted on sending Satoko down to Osaka without any forethought that something like this might occur. Everything thus conspired to turn the force of the Marquis’s wrath against himself.
Finally worn out by his exertions and unnerved by his growing anxiety, the Marquis held his tongue. The ensuing silence lengthened and grew more profound until it seemed as if the four of them had gathered in this room to practice group meditation. The noonday clucking of the chickens came from the yard behind the house. Each time the early winter wind blew through the trees outside, the pine needles that stirred at the slightest touch flashed brightly. There was no sound of human activity from anywhere else in the house, and the silence seemed to be in deference to the eerie atmosphere in the parlor.
The Countess finally broke the spell.
“It was my negligence that caused this. There is no way that I can apologize sufficiently to you, Marquis Matsugae. However, things being as they are, wouldn’t it be best to try and make Satoko change her mind as soon as possible and have the betrothal ceremony take place as planned?”
“But what about her hair?” was the Marquis’s immediate retort.
“Well, as to that, if we are quick and arrange to have a wig made, it would mislead the public eye for a while . . .”
“A wig!” the Marquis exclaimed, breaking in before the Countess had finished with a slightly shrill note of joy in his voice. “I never thought of that.”
“Yes, of course,” said his wife, chiming in at once. “We never thought of that.”
And from then on, as the others were infected with the Marquis’s enthusiasm, the wig was all they could talk about. For the first time, laughter was heard in the parlor as the four of them competed to pounce first on this bright idea as if it were a scrap of meat.
Not all of them, however, placed the same degree of faith in the Countess’s novel idea. The Count, for one, did not trust its efficacy. The Marquis may well have shared his skepticism, but he was capable of feigning belief with dignity. And the Count himself hastened to profit by his example.
“Even if the young prince gets a bit suspicious about Satoko’s hair,” said the Marquis, lowering his voice to a forced whisper while he laughed, “he’s certainly not going to touch it to see for himself.”
An atmosphere of cordiality pervaded the room, however fragile the fiction that sustained it. For the fiction supplied them with that tangible element so vital at this moment. No one considered Satoko’s soul; it was her hair alone that pertained to the national interest.
The Marquis’s father had dedicated all of his fierce strength and passion to the cause of the imperial restoration. His mortification would have been bitter had he known that the glory he had earned for the family name would one day depend on a woman’s wig. This sort of intricate and shady maneuvering was hardly the forte of the House of Matsugae. It was, in fact, far more characteristic of the Ayakuras. But the present Marquis, instead of leaving elegantly refined deceptions to the Ayakuras, who were bred to that kind of thing, had become fascinated by it, and so the House of Matsugae was now compelled to share an unaccustomed burden.
The truth of the matter was that this wig as yet only existed in their imaginations and was totally irrelevant to Satoko’s intentions. However, once they succeeded in dressing her in a wig, they would be able to construct a flawless picture from the pieces of a shattered jigsaw puzzle. Everything thus seemed to depend on the wig, and the Marquis gave himself over to the project with enthusiasm.
Each of the foursome in the parlor contributed wholeheartedly to the discussion of the nonexistent hairpiece. Satoko would have to wear one dressed in a long, straight hairstyle for the betrothal ceremony, but for everyday use, a wig done in the Western fashion would be necessary. And since there was no telling when someone might catch sight of her, she must not take it off even when she took a bath. And each of them began to use his or her imagination to picture this wig with which they had already decided to crown her: abundant, jet-black hair, even more glossy than her own. Such sovereign power would be hers despite herself, the grandeur of a towering, gracefully arranged coiffure radiating a dark fascination moreover that would imbue the flat brightness of midday with something of the essence of night. Each of the four was well enough aware that it would be no simple matter to achieve this—that beneath this peerless wig there would be a face marked with unhappiness, but no one was willing to dwell for long on this aspect of the problem.
“This time I would appreciate it greatly if you yourself, Count, went down there to impress upon your daughter how firmly your mind is made up. Countess, I’m so sorry that you must go to the trouble of a second trip, but I’ll arrange for my wife to accompany you again. Of course, I, too, should really go. However . . .” Here, the Marquis, who was sensitive to appearances, faltered slightly. “If I should go, you see, it might well make people wonder. So I’ll stay here. I would like the whole trip to be accomplished in the greatest secrecy this time. As far as my wife’s absence is concerned, we can let it be known that she’s ill. And in the meantime here in Tokyo, let me look around and I’ll hire the best craftsman available to make us a fine wig without anyone being the wiser. If a newspaper reporter should get wind of it, we’d have a pretty situation on our hands. But just you leave that question to me.”
46
KIYOAKI WAS SURPRISED
to see his mother once again getting ready for a trip. However, she refused to tell him either the destination or the purpose of her journey, saying only that he was not to mention it outside the house. He sensed that something alarming was afoot and that it had to do with Satoko, but with Yamada constantly at his side to keep an eye on him, there was no way he could find out any more.
When the Ayakuras and Marquise Matsugae arrived at Gesshu Temple, they were met with an appalling state of affairs. Satoko had already received the tonsure.
∗
The circumstances that had led so rapidly to her renunciation of the world were as follows. When the Abbess had heard the entire story from Satoko that first morning, she had known at once that she must allow the girl to become a nun. Keenly aware that each of her predecessors at Gesshu had been an imperial princess, she felt bound to revere the Emperor above all else. And so she had come to the decision that she had to allow Satoko to enter even if this involved a temporary thwarting of the imperial will. She had concluded that, given the circumstances, there was no other way to discharge her loyalty to the Emperor. She had happened to uncover a plot directed at him, and she could not allow it to proceed unchecked. She was not one to countenance a breach of loyalty, no matter how elegant the cunning that disguised it.
Thus it was that the normally so discreet and gentle Abbess of Gesshu made up her mind, determined to give in neither to the force of authority nor the threat of coercion. Even if all the world should be ranged against her, even if she were forced to ignore a particular imperial decree, she would persist in what she had to do—to be a silent guard of the sacred person of His Majesty.
Her resolve had a profound effect on Satoko, who became all the more determined to turn her back on the world. She had not expected the Abbess to grant her request so readily. She had had an encounter with the Lord Buddha, and the Abbess, her eye as keen as a crane’s, had immediately discerned the firmness of the girl’s decision.
Although it was customary for a novice to undergo a year of ascetic discipline before her formal induction as a nun, both Satoko and the Abbess felt that in the present circumstances this period should be dispensed with. But the Abbess could not bring herself to disregard the Ayakuras so completely as to allow Satoko to take the tonsure before the Countess returned from Tokyo. Moreover, there was the matter of Kiyoaki. Would it not be wise, she thought, to allow him and Satoko to bid each other a long farewell before she sacrificed what hair she had spared so far?
Satoko could hardly endure the delay. She came to the Abbess every day and, like a child teasing her mother to give her candy, begged to be allowed to take the tonsure. Finally, the Abbess found herself prepared to yield.
“If I were to allow you to take the tonsure,” she asked Satoko, “you would never be allowed to see Kiyoaki again. That wouldn’t trouble you?”
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