Spring Snow (58 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

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He told the Abbess of his friendship with Kiyoaki, he described his illness, and made it clear to her that Kiyoaki was risking his life for the sake of even the briefest of meetings with Satoko. He did not hesitate to say that if all this came to a tragic end, Gesshu itself would not be free of cause for remorse. He grew hotter and hotter as his fervent words poured out, and although the room was rather cold, he felt his ears and forehead burning.
As might be expected, his speech seemed to move the Abbess and the senior nun but they both remained silent.
“And then I do wish you would be kind enough to try to understand my own position. I lent my friend money because he told me he needed it. And that’s what he used to come down here. Now he’s fallen ill. I feel responsible to his parents for all this. And furthermore, as you must be thinking yourselves, the proper thing for me to do is obviously to get him back to Tokyo as soon as possible. I also realize that it’s the only sensible solution. But I haven’t done it. Instead, without even daring to contemplate how upset his parents are going to be with me, I’ve come to you now like this to beg you to grant Matsugae’s request. I’m doing it because after seeing the look of desperate hope in his eyes, I do not feel that I have any other choice. If Your Reverence could only see that look, I’m sure that you too would be moved. As for me, I can’t help but believe that it’s far more important now to grant him what he wants than to worry about his illness. It’s a frightening thing to say, but I somehow feel that he’s not going to recover. So I am really giving you his dying request. Would letting him see Satoko for just a moment or two be quite outside the scope of the Lord Buddha’s compassion? Won’t you please permit it?”
Her Reverence still did not answer. Although he was completely wrought up, he stopped there, afraid that if he said anything further his words would only make it less likely that the Abbess would change her mind. The chilly room was hushed. The light that filtered through the pure white paper of the latticework doors made Honda think of a thin mist.
At that moment he thought he heard something. It was not by any means so close as to be in the next room, but close enough, coming perhaps from a corner of the hallway or from the next room but one. It sounded like a muffled laugh, as faint as the opening of a plum blossom. But then after a moment’s reflection, he was sure that unless his ears had deceived him, the sound that had carried to him through the chill convent atmosphere on this spring morning was not a muffled laugh, as he had thought, but a young woman’s stifled sob. It did not have the weight of a woman fighting down her tears. What he had heard, as dark and faint as the sound of a cut bowstring, was the trailing echo of a hidden sob. But then he began to wonder if it was no more than a momentary quirk of his imagination.
“Ah,” said the Abbess, breaking her silence at last, “no doubt you think me unduly severe. You may feel that I am the one who is using every means to keep these two apart. However, surely it may well be that some superhuman agency is at work here. It began when Satoko herself made a vow before the Lord Buddha. She swore never to meet this man again in this world. I therefore think that the Lord Buddha in his wisdom is making sure that she does not. But for the young master, what a tragedy it is.”
“Despite everything then, Your Reverence will not give permission?”
“No.”
Her voice had an inexpressible dignity, and he felt quite powerless to answer her. The simple
no
seemed powerful enough to tear apart the very sky like fragile silk.
After that, seeing his deep distress, the Abbess’s beautiful voice began to direct an exalted monologue at him. Although he was by no means eager to leave and have to face Kiyoaki’s dejection, his distress prevented him from paying more than half-hearted attention to what she was saying.
The Abbess referred to the net of Indra. Indra was an Indian God, and once he cast his net, every man, every living thing without exception was inextricably caught in its meshes. And so it was that all creatures in existence were inescapably bound by it.
Indra’s net symbolized the Chain of Causation or, in Sanskrit,
pratitya-samutpada. Yuishiki
(Vijñaptimãtrata or Consciousness), the fundamental doctrine of the Hosso Sect, to which Gesshu belonged, was celebrated in
The Thirty Verses of Yuishiki
, the canonical text attributed to Vasubandhu, whom the sect regarded as its founder. According to the Verses,
Alaya
is the origin of the Chain of Causation. This was a Sanskrit word that denoted a storehouse. For within the
Alaya
were contained the karmic “seeds” that held the consequential effects of all deeds, both good and evil.
Deeper within man than the first six forms of consciousness—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind, with which sentient beings are endowed—there was a seventh called
Mana
or self-awareness. But
Alaya
, the ultimate form of consciousness lay deeper yet.
Just as
The Thirty Verses
expressed it, “Like unto a violent torrent, ever flowing, ever changing,” this eighth form of awareness, like a raging river, changed incessantly, never ceasing to flow onward. In constant flux,
Alaya
is the source of all sentient beings and the sum of all effects on them.
Asanga, the co-founder along with Vasubandhu of the Yuishiki school, in a doctrinal work called
The Providence of the Greater Vehicle
, evolved, on the basis of the eternally mutative nature of
Alaya
, a unique theory of the Chain of Causation in terms of time. It dealt with the interaction of the
Alaya
consciousness and the Law of Defilement that gave rise to what was termed “the ever-recurring cycle of annihilation and renewal of causality.” According to the doctrine of
Yuishiki
, “awareness only,” each of the various dharmas, which were actually nothing other than consciousness, far from enjoying permanence, existed purely for the moment. And once the instant was past, they were annihilated. At the present moment, the
Alaya
consciousness and the Law of Defilement exist simultaneously, and their interaction gives rise to the causality of the present moment. Once this moment is past, both
Alaya
and the Law of Defilement are annihilated, but with the next moment, both are reborn, and both once again interact to give rise to a new causality. Beings in existence thus are annihilated from moment to moment, and this gives rise to time. The process whereby time is engendered by this moment-to-moment annihilation may be likened to a row of dots and a line.
∗
As the minutes passed, Honda gradually found himself being drawn into the Abbess’s profound doctrinal exposition. But his present circumstances prevented any stirring of his instinctive spirit of rational inquiry. The sudden burst of complex Buddhist terminology put him off, and then there were many difficult points over which he had doubts. Karma, he thought, should operate eternally, a process without beginning, that by its nature contained within itself elements of time. It seemed contradictory to him that, on the contrary, time was to be understood as arising from the dissolution and regeneration of each present moment’s causality.
His various misgivings thus prevented him from giving wholeheartedly respectful attention to Her Reverence’s learned discourse. The old nun also irritated him with her interjections. At appropriate intervals, she would chime in with “How very true!” . . . “Indeed, just so!” . . . “How could it be otherwise?” and the like. So he contented himself by memorizing the titles of
The Thirty Verses
and
The Providence of the Greater Vehicle
and thought that he could look into them when he had the leisure and then come back here to ask questions. Given his present mood, then, he did not realize from what perspective and with what clarity the Abbess’s words were illuminating Kiyoaki’s fate as well as his own, though on the face of it they might seem remote and irrelevant. It was just the same way that the moon, at its zenith, subtly lights up the dark waters of a lake.
He murmured a polite farewell and took his leave of Gesshu as quickly as he could.
55
 
D
URING THE TRAIN RIDE
back to Tokyo, Kiyoaki’s all too evident pain was a constant source of distress to Honda. He put aside his books entirely, his sole concern now to get his friend home as soon as possible. As he looked down at Kiyoaki lying gravely ill on his berth, being carried back to Tokyo without having achieved the meeting he had so desired, he felt a gnawing regret. He was now wondering if it had really been the act of a friend to give him that money.
Kiyoaki had fallen into a doze. Honda, on the other hand, was more alert than ever, despite having gone without sleep for so long. He allowed a multitude of thoughts to come and go unchecked. Among these, the memory of the Abbess’s sermons on two occasions came to him, each with an entirely different effect. In the autumn of the previous year, he had heard his first sermon from her, the parable of drinking the water from the skull. He had taken that principle and made a parable of his own from it, one dealing with human love. And he had concluded by thinking that it would unquestionably be wonderful if a man could really make the substance of the world truly conform to that of his innermost heart. Later, in the course of his legal studies, he had given considerable thought to the doctrine of reincarnation as expressed in the Laws of Manu. And this morning, he had heard the Abbess speak again. He now felt as though the only key to the riddle that had been vexing him had dangled momentarily on a cord before his eyes, swinging back and forth with so many confusing jumps and twists that the riddle itself seemed to have become all the more complex.
The train was due at Shimbashi Station at six in the morning. The night was already well advanced. The heavy breathing of the passengers mingled with the rumble of the wheels. He would stay awake until dawn, watching Kiyoaki in the lower berth directly opposite him. He had left the curtains open so that he would know at once if there was any change at all in Kiyoaki’s condition, and now he stared out of the window at the fields clothed in darkness.
Though the train was racing through the night, the darkness was so thick and the sky so overcast that the fields and mountains beyond were almost blotted out, leaving nearly nothing to mark the forward progress of the train. From time to time, a tiny flash of light or the brief glow of a lantern tore a brilliant rent in the curtain of blackness, but these could not provide any orientation. It was not the train that made this rumbling noise, Honda mused. It was something else. Something that enveloped this little thing as it made its insignificant way through the night. The roaring issued from the massive darkness itself.
While Honda had been hurriedly packing to leave the inn at Obitoké, Kiyoaki had obtained a few sheets of cheap stationery from the innkeeper and had written a note which he had then given to Honda, asking him to deliver it to his mother the Marquise. Honda had placed it carefully in the inside pocket of his jacket. Now, for want of anything better to do, he took it out and read it by the poor light of the bulb hanging from the roof of the car.
It was written in pencil, and the hand was unsteady, quite unlike Kiyoaki. He had never drawn his figures with much grace, but there had always been an abundantly vigorous touch to them:
Dear Mother,
There is something that I would like you to give Honda for me. The dream journal in my desk. He’d like it. And since nobody else would want to read it, please see that he gets it.
Kiyoaki
Honda could see that he had used his last reserves of strength to write this as a kind of will. But if it really had been that, he should surely have included a word or two for his mother herself, instead of addressing her in this curt and businesslike fashion.
A groan came from the opposite berth. He quickly put away the note and was beside Kiyoaki in a flash, looking down at his face.
“What is it?”
“My chest hurts. It feels as if I’m being stabbed here.”
Kiyoaki’s breathing was harsh. His words came in spurts. Honda, not knowing what else to do, gently began to massage the lower left side of his chest, the spot where he said the pain was most intense. But in the faint light, he saw that his friend’s face was still contorted.
Despite the contortions, however, it was beautiful. Intense suffering had imbued it with an extraordinary character, carving lines into it that gave it the austere dignity of a bronze mask. The beautiful eyes were filled with tears. Above them, however, the eyebrows were tightly puckered, and the masculine force they conveyed made a striking contrast with the pathos of the flashing dark, wet pupils. As he fought the pain, his finely chiseled nose jutted upward as if he were trying to probe the darkness around him, and his lips, parched with fever, were drawn back to reveal the palely gleaming mother-of-pearl of his teeth.

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