Temple Of Dawn (15 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
How strange it was that even a miracle required the commonplace! As the plane approached Japan, Honda realized with relief that he was returning to the familiar daily routine and had escaped the miracle of Benares. Finally, he had lost not only the process of reason, but even measure for his feelings. He felt no particular sorrow in leaving the Princess, and he felt neither annoyance nor any other emotion toward the officers on the plane who were heatedly discussing the approaching war.
He was naturally pleased to see his wife at the airport. Just as he expected, he felt that the Honda who had left Japan and the one who had come back had immediately fused into the same unchanged person. His wife’s sleepy face, somewhat swollen and white, had acted as a catalyst to effect this fusing. The time interval between his two phases disappeared, and the deep, raw wound inflicted by the Indian trip seemed to vanish without a trace.
His wife stood at the rear of the crowd of friends who had come to meet him. She removed the dull-hued shawl from her shoulders.
“Welcome home.”
She bowed to him, thrusting under his nose her familiar bangs, which she always rearranged herself after each permanent done at a beauty parlor whose styling she did not like. Her hair gave off the faint scorched odor of some chemical that had been used.
“Mother is well, but the nights have turned chilly and I didn’t want her to catch cold. She’s impatiently waiting at home.”
Honda experienced a surge of tenderness when Rié talked about her mother-in-law without being asked, yet there was no touch of obligation in her tone. Life was again exactly as it should be.
“I want you to go to a department store as soon as possible, maybe tomorrow, and get a doll,” said Honda on the way home in the car.
“All right.”
“I promised the little princess I met in Thailand to send her a Japanese doll.”
“An ordinary one with a little girl’s haircut?”
“That’s right. I don’t think I’d send a very big one . . . one about so,” he said, holding his hands in front of his chest and abdomen to indicate the size. Momentarily he thought of sending a boy doll to stand for the transmigration of a boy’s soul, but he thought it might seem strange, and decided against it.
His mother was there to greet him in the vestibule of the house in Hongo, her old hunched shoulders clad in a dark silk striped kimono. She had dyed her bobbed hair a pitch black and the thin gold earpieces of her glasses passed over it. Honda thought he would suggest sometime that she should not wear her glasses in that way, but whenever it occurred to him the time never seemed right.
He walked along the matted corridor to the inner room of his familiar spacious house, now dark and cold, accompanied by his mother and wife. He realized that his manner of walking resembled that of his deceased father when the latter had used to return home.
“I’m so relieved you could get back before war broke out. I was worried.” His mother, once a zealous member of the Women’s Patriotic League, panted as she walked through the corridor swept by chilly night drafts. The old woman feared war.
After two or three days of rest, Honda resumed the trip to his office in the Marunouchi Building, and his busy but peaceful days recommenced. The Japanese winter rapidly awakened his reason that resembled a seasonal winter bird—he naturally had not seen that in Southeast Asia—some crane that had again migrated to the frozen bay of his heart as it returned to Japan.
On the morning of December eighth, his wife came into the bedroom to awaken him. “I’m sorry to wake you earlier than usual,” she said quietly.
“What is it?”
Thinking that his mother’s health might have taken a turn for the worse, he scrambled to his feet.
“We’re at war with the United States. Just now, on the radio . . .” Rié seemed still apologetic for having awakened him so early.
That morning, excited over the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, no one in the office could settle down to work. Honda was amazed at the ceaseless and irrepressible laughter of the young office girls and wondered if women knew no other way of expressing patriotic exultation except through physical joy.
Lunch time came. The staff discussed going to the Imperial Palace Square together. After sending them off, Honda locked the office and set out alone for an afternoon stroll. His steps led him of their own accord toward the square in front of the palace.
Everyone in the Marunouchi area seemed to have had the same idea, and the wide boulevard was jammed with pedestrians.
He was forty-six, Honda mused. Nothing of youth, power, or pure passion remained in either his physical or spiritual being. He would have to prepare for death, perhaps in another ten years. More than likely he would not die in the war. He had had no military training; and even if he had, there was no danger of being called to the battlefield.
All he had to do was to stay behind and applaud the patriotic acts of the young. So they had gone to bomb Hawaii! It was a glamorous action from which his age had absolutely excluded him.
But was it only age? No. He was basically unsuited for any physical action.
Like everyone else, he had lived by approaching death step by step, but he did not know any other way. He had never run. Once he had tried to save a man’s life, but he had never been placed in any position where the efforts of another had been required to save him. He lacked the requisite quality for being saved. He had never given people the feeling of impending crisis where they would feel compelled to extend their hand in help, where they would be forced to try to rescue that certain glorious something that was in danger. The quality was charisma, and regrettably Honda was totally self-reliant and completely devoid of that.
It would be an exaggeration to say that he was jealous of the excitement about the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had simply become the captive of the egoistic and melancholy conviction that henceforth his life would definitely end and he would never achieve greatness. But had he ever really desired that in life?
On the other hand all glamorous and heroic acts faded away against the hallucination of Benares. Was it perhaps because the mystery of transmigration had warped his mind, robbed him of courage, made him recognize the futility of all brave actions, and in the end taught him to utilize all his knowledge of philosophy merely for the sake of self-love? Like a man skirting around the lighting of firecrackers, Honda felt that his mind shrank violently from the sight of such mass paroxysms.
The little flags waving and the shouts of
banzai
sounding in front of the Imperial Palace could be seen and heard from a considerable distance. Honda maintained a good stretch of the pebbled square between himself and the demonstrators; from a distance he noted the color of the dead grass covering the banks of the moat around the palace and the wintry hue of the pines. Two girls in dark blue office smocks passed by laughing, holding hands, running toward the bridge at the entrance to the palace, their white teeth flashing and glistening moistly in the winter sun.
banzai
sounding in front of the Imperial Palace could be seen and heard from a considerable distance. Honda maintained a good stretch of the pebbled square between himself and the demonstrators; from a distance he noted the color of the dead grass covering the banks of the moat around the palace and the wintry hue of the pines. Two girls in dark blue office smocks passed by laughing, holding hands, running toward the bridge at the entrance to the palace, their white teeth flashing and glistening moistly in the winter sun.
The beautiful, bow-shaped winter lips of the women created a momentary crevice, attractive and warm, in the clear air as they passed by. The heroes in the bombers must dream at times of just such lips. Young men were always like that, seeking the most rigorous and yet attracted to the most tender. Could the tenderest thing they seek be death? Honda himself had once been a young man of promise, but not one attracted to death.
Suddenly the expanse of pebbled space beneath the winter sun became in Honda’s eyes a vast and barren field. The image in the photograph labeled “Memorial Service for the War Dead, Vicinity of the Tokuri Temple,” shown him by Kiyoaki thirty long years ago, returned vividly to his mind. It was Kiyoaki’s favorite picture from the entire collection of photographs of the Russo-Japanese War. It now super-imposed itself upon the scenery before him and finally occupied his entire consciousness. That was the end of one war, and here was the beginning of another. At any rate, it was an ominous illusion.
A mountain range in the distant left rose in the haze, trailing its long skirt of spacious plains; the horizon on the opposite side dotted with clumps of trees disappeared in yellow dust, and instead of mountains, a line of trees rose to the right, through which peeked a yellow sky.
Such was the background of the photograph. The center was occupied by a small altar covered with white cloth fluttering in the breeze, on which had been placed a bouquet of flowers and an unpainted wooden grave marker. Thousands of soldiers with bent heads surrounded it.
Honda saw the image most vividly. Again the voices shouting
banzai
and the waving flags returned to his consciousness. The vision left an indescribable sorrow in his heart.
banzai
and the waving flags returned to his consciousness. The vision left an indescribable sorrow in his heart.
13
DURING THE WAR
Honda used his spare time entirely for his own study of samsara and transmigration and found pleasure in hunting for old books on these subjects. As the quality of new publications gradually deteriorated, the dusty luxury of wartime secondhand bookshops increased. Only there were freely available the knowledge and the pursuit of a hobby that transcended the times. And compared to the increase in the cost of everything else, the price of both Japanese and Western books remained low.
Honda gleaned considerable information from these tomes which expounded on Western theories concerning life cycles and reincarnation.
One theory was attributed to Pythagoras, the Ionian philosopher of the fifth century
B.C.
But his ideas on life cycles had been influenced by the earlier Orphean mysteries that had swept all of Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries. Orphean religion had in turn evolved from the worship of Dionysus that had ignited fires of madness throughout the preceding two hundred years of war and instability. The fact that the god Dionysus had come from Asia and fused with the Earth Mother and agricultural rituals throughout Greece suggested that the two had really originated from one source. The Earth Mother’s vibrant figure still lived in the Kalighat in Calcutta that Honda had seen. Dionysus embodied the life cycle of nature that was manifest in the northern country of Thrace. He arrived with the beginning of winter, died at its height, and was resurrected with spring. No matter what lively, wanton figure he might simulate, Dionysus was the personification of young spirits of grain, of whom Adonis was one—beautiful youths who died prematurely. Just as Adonis indubitably had united with Aphrodite, Dionysus too unvaryingly united with the Earth Mother in mystic rituals observed in various lands. At Delphi, Dionysus was enshrined with the Earth Mother, and the chief deity in the mystic worship of Lerna was the holy ancestor of both.
B.C.
But his ideas on life cycles had been influenced by the earlier Orphean mysteries that had swept all of Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries. Orphean religion had in turn evolved from the worship of Dionysus that had ignited fires of madness throughout the preceding two hundred years of war and instability. The fact that the god Dionysus had come from Asia and fused with the Earth Mother and agricultural rituals throughout Greece suggested that the two had really originated from one source. The Earth Mother’s vibrant figure still lived in the Kalighat in Calcutta that Honda had seen. Dionysus embodied the life cycle of nature that was manifest in the northern country of Thrace. He arrived with the beginning of winter, died at its height, and was resurrected with spring. No matter what lively, wanton figure he might simulate, Dionysus was the personification of young spirits of grain, of whom Adonis was one—beautiful youths who died prematurely. Just as Adonis indubitably had united with Aphrodite, Dionysus too unvaryingly united with the Earth Mother in mystic rituals observed in various lands. At Delphi, Dionysus was enshrined with the Earth Mother, and the chief deity in the mystic worship of Lerna was the holy ancestor of both.
Dionysus had come from Asia. His worship, which brought frenzy, debauchery, cannibalism, and murder, had its roots in Asia and posed the all-important problem of the soul. The paroxysms of this religion permitted no transparency of reason and no firm, beautiful form for either man or god. It was a religion that attacked the fertility of Greek fields in their Apollonian beauty like a swarm of grasshoppers darkening sun and sky, ravaging them, consuming their harvests. Honda could not but compare this to his own experience in India.
Everything abominable—debauchery, death, madness, pestilence, destruction . . . How was it that such things could so entice the heart and allure the soul outward. Why did souls have to “exist,” discarding easy, dark, and quiet dwellings? Why was it that the human heart rejected tranquil inertness?
That was what happened in history and with individuals. If men did not do thus, it was because they surely felt that they could not touch the wholeness of the universe. Inebriated, disheveled, tearing their clothes, and exposing their genitals, blood dripping from the raw flesh in their mouths—by such actions, they must have felt they could scratch the surface of that wholeness.
This was indeed the spiritual experience of
enthusiasmus
, being god-possessed, and
extasis
, exiting from self, which had eventually been refined and ritualized by the Orpheans.
enthusiasmus
, being god-possessed, and
extasis
, exiting from self, which had eventually been refined and ritualized by the Orpheans.
What had turned Greek thought to the concept of samsara and reincarnation was this
extasis
experience. The deepest psychologic source of reincarnation was “ecstasy.”
extasis
experience. The deepest psychologic source of reincarnation was “ecstasy.”
According to Orphean mythology, Dionysus was called Dionysus Zagreus, Zagreus being the child born to Zeus and Persephone, daughter of the Earth Mother. He was the favorite of his father and destined to be his successor and the future universal ruler. It is said that when Zeus, Heaven, fell in love with Persephone, Earth, he transformed himself into a great serpent, betokening the essence of earth, in order to make love to her.
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