The Decay Of The Angel (13 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: The Decay Of The Angel
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They were like mirages in the mist. Not even their wakes were distinct.
He lowered the lens to the shore.
As they took on the color of evening, the waves were stern and hard. The light had more and more the color of evil, the bellies of the waves were uglier.
Yes. The waves as they broke were a manifest vision of death. It seemed to him that they had to be. They were mouths agape at the moment of death.
Gasping in agony, they trailed numberless threads of saliva. Earth purple in the twilight became a livid mouth.
Into the gaping mouth of the sea plunged death. Showing death nakedly time and time again, the sea was like a constabulary. It swiftly disposed of the bodies, hiding them from the public gaze.
Tōru’s telescope caught something it should not have.
He suddenly felt that a different world was being dragged forth from those gaping jaws. Since he was not one to see phantasms, there could be no doubt that it existed. But he did not know what it was. Perhaps it was a pattern drawn by micro-organisms in the sea. A different world was revealed in the light flashing from the dark depths, and he knew it was a place he had seen. Perhaps it had something to do with immeasurably distant memories. If there was such a thing as a previous life, then perhaps this was it. And what would its relation be to the world Tōru was constantly looking for, a step beyond the bright horizon? If it was a dance of seaweed caught in the belly of the breaking waves, then perhaps the world pictured in that instant was a miniature of the mucous pink and purple creases and cavities of the nauseous depths. But there had been rays and flashes—from a sea run through by lightning? Such a thing was not probable in this tranquil twilight sea. There was nothing demanding that
that
world and
this
world be contemporary. Was the world he had had a glimpse of in a different time? Was it of a time different from that measured by his watch?
He shook his head. As he fled the unpleasant sight, the telescope too became unpleasant. He moved to the fifteen-power binoculars in another corner of the room. He followed the great hull of the ship leaving the harbor.
It was the
Yamataka-maru
of the Y.S. Line, 9,183 tons, bound for Yokohama.
“A Yamashita ship has just left, bound in your direction.
Yamataka, Yamataka
. It’s now seventeen twenty.”
Having telephoned his message to the main office in Yokohama, he returned to the binoculars and once more followed the
Yamataka-maru
, its masts now disappearing into the mist.
The mark was a single black line near the top of a persimmon-colored ground.
Y.S. LINE
in large black letters on the hull. White bridge, red cranes. The ship was in desperate flight from the circle in the telescope. Sending white lines from its prow, it moved out to sea.
It was gone.
There were bonfires in what had been strawberry patches below the window.
The plastic shelters which had until about the end of the summer rains covered the whole expanse had all been taken away. The strawberry season was past. Cuttings for forced cultivation were off at the fifth station of Fuji welcoming a man-made winter. They would return late in October, to be ready for the Christmas market.
People were working among the foundations and on black paddies from which even the foundations had been removed.
Tōru went to get dinner.
He had a simple dinner at his desk. It was nightfall.
Five forty.
A half moon came from the clouds, high in the southern sky. Another moment and the half moon, like an ivory comb dropped down into the sky, was indistinguishable from a cloud.
The pines along the sea were black. It was already dark enough to make out the red taillights of the anglers’ cars parked on the beach.
Children were swarming over the road through the strawberry patches. Strange children of the evening. Weird children, coming out into the dusk from nowhere, cavorting insanely through the fields.
The bonfires sent up tongues of flame beyond.
Five fifty.
Tōru glanced up. He caught a ship mark quite indistinguishable to the ordinary naked eye, and reached for the telephone. Such was his confidence that his hand went for the telephone even before he had verified the mark.
The ship’s agent answered.
“Hello? This is Teikoku Signal. The
Daichū
. I’ve just sighted it.”
It was like a smudge drawn by a dirty finger across faint pink on the southwest horizon. As if examining a fingerprint on the glass, he picked it out and identified it.
The register told him that the
Daichū-maru
, 3,850 tons, was a lauan transport, one hundred meters long, speed 12.4 knots. The only ships capable of more than twenty knots were international freighters. Lumber ships were slower.
He felt particularly close to the
Daichū-maru.
It had been launched the spring before from the Kanazashi Shipyards here in Shimizu.
Six.
In the pink offing, the dim form of the
Daichū-maru
was edging past the
Okitama-maru
, leaving the harbor. It was a strange moment when an image oozes from a dream into everyday life, an actuality from an abstraction—a poem becomes corporate, a fantasy an object. If something meaningless yet ominous is through some process taken into the heart, there is born in the heart an urgency to give it shape, and so a something comes to exist. Perhaps the
Daichū-maru
was born of Tōru’s heart. An image indistinct as the sweep of a brush had become a gigantic hull of some four thousand tons. And the same thing was forever happening, somewhere in the world.
Six ten.
Foreshortened by the angle of its approach, it raised its two derricks like the horns of a great black beetle.
Six fifteen.
It was quite clear now to the naked eye, but it hesitated black on the horizon like an object forgotten on a shelf. The distance was accordioned, and it stayed on and on, a black beetle left on the shelf of the horizon.
Six thirty.
Through the lens, diagonally, he could see the funnel mark, a red “N” in a circle on a white ground. He could make out piles of lauan.
Six fifty.
Now broadside in the channel, the
Daichū-maru
was showing red mast lights against a cloudy twilight sky which no longer held a moon. It slipped past the
Okitama
, making its mirage-like way out to sea. There was a considerable distance between them, but the lights were caught in fore-shortened perspective; and it was as if, out on the dark sea, the embers of two cigarettes were brushing and parting.
In from a foreign port, the
Daichū-maru
had two great iron rails on its deck to keep the lauan from falling overboard. In such quantities that the waterline was not showing, great trunks burned by the tropical sun lay piled one on another, like the bundled corpses of huge, powerful brown slaves.
Tōru thought of the new regulations for waterlines, jungle-like in their details. Waterlines for lumber vessels were of six varieties, summer, winter, winter North Atlantic, tropical, freshwater summer, and freshwater tropical. The tropical category was further divided into tropical by zone and tropical by season. The
Daichū-maru
fell into the former, and under the “special regulations for deck lumber transport.” Tōru had memorized with fascination the lines that define the tropical zone.
From the east coast of North America along the thirteenth parallel east to sixty degrees west longitude; thence directly to ten degrees north by fifty-eight degrees west; thence along the tenth parallel to twenty degrees west; thence along the twentieth meridian to thirty degrees north; thence to the west coast of Africa . . . thence to the west coast of India . . . to the east coast of India . . . to the west coast of Malaya . . . thence along the southeast coast of Asia to the tenth parallel on the coast of Vietnam . . . from Santos . . . the east coast of Africa to the west coast of Madagascar . . . the Suez Canal . . . the Red Sea, Aden, the Persian Gulf.
An invisible line was drawn from continent to continent and ocean to ocean and what was within was named “tropical,” and so, suddenly, a “tropical” made its appearance, with its coconuts, its reefs, its cobalt seas, its storm clouds, its squalls, the screams of its multicolored parrots.
Trunks of lauan, splashed with the scarlet and gold and green labels of the tropics. Heaped-up logs of lauan: they had been wet by tropical rains and they had reflected warm starlit skies, they had been attacked by waves and eaten by the shining bugs of the deep; and they could not dream that they were headed at the end of the journey for the boredom of everyday life.
Seven.
The
Daichū-maru
passed the second pylon. The lights of the harbor were aglow.
Since it had come in at an odd hour, quarantine and unloading would have to wait until the next morning. Even so, Tōru made the usual calls: the pilot, the police, the harbor superintendent, the agent, the provisioners, the laundry.
“The
Daichū
is coming into three-G.”
“Hello? This is Teikoku Signal. The
Daichū
is coming into three-G. The cargo? The line is barely showing.”
“Shimizu Provisioners? This is Teikoku Signal. Thank you for everything. The
Daichū
has just come into three-G. It’s off the Mio lighthouse at the moment.”
“Shizuoka Police? The
Daichū
is coming in. Tomorrow at seven, if you will, please.”
“The
Daichū. D-a-i-c-h-ū
. Yes, if you will, please.”
14
 
 O
FF DUTY
on an evening in late August, Tōru had finished his dinner and bath. He went out to take the cool of the south wind under the blue awning of the veranda, still warm from the heat of the day. There were doors all along the shabby veranda, which he reached by iron stairs.
Immediately to the south was a lumber yard more than a hundred yards square, its huge cross-section dark under lights. The lumber sometimes seemed to Tōru like a great silent beast.
There was a crematory in the grove beyond. Tōru would like to have seen a flame that could show itself in the smoke from such an enormous chimney. He never had.
The summit of the dark mountain to the south was Nihondaira. He could see the streams of automobile lights on the road leading up to it. There were clusters of hotel lights, and the red lights of television towers.
Tōru had not been to the hotels. He knew nothing of the affluent life. He did know that wealth and virtue were incompatible, but he had no interest in making the world virtuous. Revolution could be left to others. There was no concept for which he had a greater dislike than equality.
He was about to go inside when a Corona pulled up at the stairs. He could not make out the details, but he was sure he had seen it before. He was startled when the superintendent got out.
A large envelope clutched in his hand, the superintendent lurched up the stairs, as he always did when he came to the signal station.
“Yasunaga is it? Good evening. I’m glad I caught you at home. I’ve brought something to drink. Let’s have a drink and a talk.” He did not mind being overheard.
Overwhelmed by this unique visit, Tōru reached for the door behind him.
“You’re very neat.” The superintendent seated himself on the cushion Tōru offered, and, wiping at his forehead, looked around him.
The building had been finished only the year before. It was as if the dust had not been allowed to gather. There was a maple-leaf pattern on the frosted glass of the aluminum-sashed windows, inside which were paper doors. The walls were lavender, the wood of the ceiling was of almost too good a grain, waist-high at the door was a frosted pane with a bamboo pattern, and the doors between the rooms too were decorated in unusual patterns. The tastes of the occupant demanded the newest wares.

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