The Decay Of The Angel (12 page)
Read The Decay Of The Angel Online
Authors: Yukio Mishima
It seemed that the Zengakuren had come in considerable numbers for antipollution demonstrations. They were much beyond the range of even the thirty-power telescope. Things beyond the range of the telescope were of no relevance to Tōru.
It was a cool summer.
The sort of summer day was rare when the Izu Peninsula comes clearly forward and thunderclouds boil in a clear sky. The peninsula was in mists, the sunlight was dim. He had seen pictures taken recently from a weather satellite. Suruga Bay seemed to be always half hidden in smog.
Kinué stopped by in the morning, an unusual time. She asked if it would be all right to come inside.
“I’m all alone. He’s gone to the main office in Yokohama.”
There was fright in her eyes.
During the early summer rains he had taxed her considerably with the practice of bringing flowers for his hair, and for a time she had stopped coming. Now her visits were frequent again. She had stopped bringing flowers, but the fright and insecurity that were the excuse for the visits were more and more exaggerated.
“The second time. It’s the second time, and a different man each time.”
The story began the moment she sat down. Her breathing was heavy.
“What happened?”
“Someone is after you. When I come to see you I always make sure that no one sees me. If I didn’t I might cause complications. If they were to kill you it would be my fault, and I’d have no choice but to kill myself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The second time, I tell you. That’s why I’m so worried. I told you about last time. Remember? It was the same this time, but a little different. I went for a walk on Komagoé Beach this morning. I picked some beach lilies and then I went down to the water, and was looking out to sea with nothing very much on my mind.
“There aren’t many people on Hamagoé Beach, and I do get tired of having people stare at me. I love looking out to sea. I feel so relaxed. I sometimes think that if I put my own beauty on one side of the scales and the sea on the other they’d balance perfectly. So it’s as if I’d turned my beauty over to the sea, and had no worries left.
“There was no one there. Just two or three people fishing. Maybe because he wasn’t catching anything, one of them kept staring at me. I pretended not to notice, but that stare was on my cheek like a fly.
“I doubt if you can understand how awful it makes me feel. Here it is happening again, I say to myself. My beauty taking off on its own, robbing me of my freedom. It seems like something apart from me, beyond my control. Here I am, bothering no one, just wanting to be left alone, and it’s off making trouble. It’s a sign of true beauty, I know. But beauty’s the worst sort of nuisance when it’s off on its own.
“It’s excited a man again, I say to myself. I barely have time to think how I hate it, and there it is, all busy tying a man up again. He’s been an innocent bystander and now all of a sudden he’s an ugly beast.
“I’ve stopped bringing you flowers, but I like putting flowers in my own hair when I’m by myself. I was singing and I had a pink lily in my hair.
“I don’t remember what I was singing. Isn’t it odd, when it was just a little while ago. But I think it must have been a sad, faraway sort of song, right for my beautiful voice. It’s such a bore. The stupidest song in the world is beautiful when I sing it.
“Finally the man came up to me. He was young, and so polite it made me want to laugh. But there was something dirty in his eyes. He couldn’t hide it. His eyes were like glue on my skirt. He talked about all sorts of things. But I was able to protect myself. You needn’t worry about me. I was able to protect myself. It’s you I’m worried about.
“He tried to confuse me by talking about all sorts of other things, but he kept coming back to you. He asked what sort of person you are, and how hard you work, and whether you are nice to people. I told him, of course. I told him that you are the kindest, most industrious person in the world. One thing seemed to surprise him. When I said you’re superhuman.
“I knew by instinct. It was the second time, remember? Almost the same thing happened a week or ten days ago. Somebody suspects something about the two of us. Some awful person who hasn’t shown himself has heard about me or maybe seen me from a distance, and he’s lost his senses over me, and he’s hired someone to spy on me, and wipe out a man he thinks might be fond of me. Insane love is coming nearer and nearer. I’m terrified. What will I do if harm comes to you through no fault of your own, just because I’m so beautiful? There’s a conspiracy of some sort, I know it. A conspiracy hatched up by hopeless love. Some man is so rich and powerful that it’s terrifying, and as ugly as a toad, and he’s stalking me from way off, and he’s out to get you.”
Not pausing for breath, she was trembling like a leaf.
One blue-denim leg across the other, Tōru was smoking a cigarette. He was wondering what the point to it all might be. Kinué’s dramatic imaginings quite aside, he was certain that someone was investigating him. Who would it be? And why? The police? But he was guilty of no offense more serious than smoking while still a minor.
He would think the problem over by himself; and in the meantime he would help the imaginings by giving them a logical turn.
He spoke solemnly. “Probably it is as you say; but I would have no regrets at all if I were to be murdered for the sake of a beautiful woman. Somewhere a rich and powerful and ugly man is waiting like a tiger to pounce on someone pure and beautiful. And his eye has landed on the two of us.
“You have to know what you’re doing when you fight a person like him. He has his nets out everywhere. The thing to do is pretend you’re not resisting and take plenty of time and seek out his weak points. The thing is to muster your strength and strike when you know what his weak points are.
“You must never forget for a moment that pure beauty is the enemy of the human race. His great advantage is that he has the whole race on his side. He won’t let up for a minute until we’ve knelt down and admitted that we’re human beings too. And so when the time comes we have to give in and pray to his gods. Unless we pray like mad he’ll murder us. And when we do he’ll relax and let us see his weak points. We have to hold out till it happens, all the while hanging on to our own self-respect.”
“I understand perfectly. I’ll do exactly as you say. But you must help me. This poisonous beauty of mine has me always feeling that I might stumble and fall. If the two of us go together hand in hand, why, we might wash the whole human race clean. And then the world would be a paradise, and we’d have nothing more to be afraid of.”
“Exactly. Everything is all right.”
“I like you better than anyone else in the world.” She blurted out the words as she backed through the door.
Tōru always enjoyed her absence. When such ugliness became absent, how did it differ from beauty? Since the beauty which had been the premise for the whole conversation was itself absent, Kinué continued to pour forth fragrance after she was gone.
It sometimes seemed to him that beauty was crying in the distance. Just beyond the horizon, perhaps. It called out in a high voice, like a crane’s. The call echoed and disappeared. If it took human form, it did so for but an instant. Only Kinué, a snare of ugliness, had captured the crane. And had long been feeding it with self-awareness.
The
Kōyō-maru
came in at three eighteen in the afternoon. No other ship was due until seven. Including nine ships awaiting berths, there were twenty ships in Shimizu Harbor.
Kōyō-maru
came in at three eighteen in the afternoon. No other ship was due until seven. Including nine ships awaiting berths, there were twenty ships in Shimizu Harbor.
Offshore in Third Area were the
Nikkei-maru II
, the
Mikasa-maru
, the
Camellia
, the
Ryüwa-maru
, the
Lianga Bay
, the
Umiyama-maru
, the
Yōkai-maru
, the
Denmark-maru
, and the
Kōyō-maru
.
Nikkei-maru II
, the
Mikasa-maru
, the
Camellia
, the
Ryüwa-maru
, the
Lianga Bay
, the
Umiyama-maru
, the
Yōkai-maru
, the
Denmark-maru
, and the
Kōyō-maru
.
At the Hinode Pier, the
Kamishima-maru
and the
Karakasu-maru
.
Kamishima-maru
and the
Karakasu-maru
.
At the Fujimi Pier, the
Taiei-maru
, the
Hōwa-maru
, the
Yamataka-maru
, and the
Aristonikos
.
Taiei-maru
, the
Hōwa-maru
, the
Yamataka-maru
, and the
Aristonikos
.
On buoys at Orito, a lumber port, the
Santen-maru
, the
Donna Rossana
, and the
Eastern Mary
.
Santen-maru
, the
Donna Rossana
, and the
Eastern Mary
.
Because of the danger, a single tanker, the
Okitama-maru
, was at a pipe in the Dolphin Area, reserved for tankers. It was on the point of sailing.
Okitama-maru
, was at a pipe in the Dolphin Area, reserved for tankers. It was on the point of sailing.
Large tankers with crude oil from the Persian Gulf anchored in the Dolphin Area, smaller tankers with refined oil could come into the Sodeshi Dock, at which there was a single ship, the
Nisshō-maru
.
Nisshō-maru
.
A rail spur led from Shimizu Station past a number of berths and lonely customs warehouses deflecting the intense summer light, and deeper into the summer grasses, where from between warehouses the light on the sea told in derision of the end of land, and yet on and on as if it were meant for casting old steam engines into the sea. Then, suddenly, the crooked, rusty track came out upon the shining sea, and at its terminus was what is called the Railroad Dock. It was host to no ships at all.
Tōru had just entered the
Kōyō-maru
on the register for the Third Area.
Kōyō-maru
on the register for the Third Area.
It was anchored offshore, and loading operations would have to wait until the next day. There was no great urgency in sending out word of its arrival. At about four there came a call asking if it had in fact arrived.
At four there was a call from a pilot. Eight pilots worked in shifts, and the call was to inform him of the next day’s assignments.
Time heavy on his hands, Tōru gazed out to sea through the telescope.
But as he gazed the uncertainty and the phantom of evil brought by Kinué came back to him. It was as if a dark filter had been slipped over the lens.
Indeed it was as if a dark filter had lain over the whole of this summer. Subtly, evil had come over the light, to dim the radiance and to thin the strong shadows of summer. The clouds lost their sharp outlines, the sea was a blank, the Izu Peninsula invisible on the steely blue-black of the horizon. The sea was a dull, monotonous green. Slowly, the tide was coming in.
Tōru lowered the telescope to the waves on the beach.
As they broke, a spray like the dregs of the sea slipped from their backs, and the pyramids of deep green changed, rose and swelled into an uneasy white. The sea lost its serenity.
Even as it rose it broke at the skirts, and ragged spots of white from its high belly like a call of inexpressible sorrow became a sharply smooth yet infinitely cracked wall of glass, like a vast spray. As it rose and broke, the forelocks were combed a beautiful white, and as it fell it showed the neatly arrayed blue-white of its crown, and the lines of white became a solid field of white; and so it fell, like a severed head.
The spread and the falling away of foam. Little patches of foam trailing off to sea like lines of water bugs.
Foam trailing off over the sand like sweat from the back of an athlete at the end of his exertions.
What delicate changes passed over the white monolith of the sea as it came in upon the shore and broke. The myriad confusion of thin waves and the fine partings of the foam became in desperation an infinity of lines spewed out over the sea as from silkworms. What a subtle evil, overcoming by sheer force even as it took into itself this delicate white.
Four fifteen.
The sky in its upper reaches was blue. It was an affected, pompous sort of blue. He had seen a similar blue in the library, in a collection from the School of Fontainebleau. Composed all lyrically with just an apology for clouds, it was not a summer sky at all. It was laid over with a saccharine hypocrisy.
The lens had left the shore, and was turned on the sky, the horizon, the sea.
It caught a sheet of spray that seemed to hurl itself into the very heavens. What could it be up to, this single point of foam flinging itself above the rest? Why had it been elected?
Nature was a cycle, the whole to the fragment, the fragment back to the whole. Compared to the fleeting cleanness of the fragment, the whole was dark and sullen.
And was evil a matter of the whole?
Or of the fragment?
Four forty-five. Not a ship in sight.
The beach was lonely. There were no swimmers, and only two or three anglers. The sea without ships was worlds away from dedication and service. Suruga Bay lay utterly sober, without love and without joy. There had to be ships sliding in and out, cutting razor lines of white through this sluggish, flawless perfection. A ship was a weapon of cool contempt against the perfection, gliding over the thin taut skin of the sea and wounding it. Yet going no deeper than the surface.
Five o’clock.
The white of the waves become for an instant the color of a yellow rose, to tell that evening approached.
He saw two black tankers, large and small, making for sea to the left. The fifteen-hundred-ton
Okitama-maru
, which had left Shimizu at four twenty, and the three-hundred-ton
Nisshō-maru
, at four twenty-three.
Okitama-maru
, which had left Shimizu at four twenty, and the three-hundred-ton
Nisshō-maru
, at four twenty-three.
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