The Decay Of The Angel (19 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: The Decay Of The Angel
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“Yes.”
The word was almost a growl. Taking advantage of the fact that his father could not see, his eyes were aglow as he said to himself: “The wait has been worth it. Here is someone worth injuring.”
Yet farther on, beyond the window, it was raining. A sad, lonely rain, like a black liquid, giving the bark of the trees a steamy glow in the light from the window. At night the subway trains, here running on elevated tracks, shook the ground. The bright lights in the windows as the train plunged underground again brought a vision to Tōru, still beating on his father’s back. There was no sign tonight of a ship.
22
 
 S
UPPOSE YOU
keep company with her for a while. If you don’t like her you just have to say so. There is no commitment.”
Tōru went to dinner one night when summer vacation had begun. After dinner, upon a suggestion from her mother that it might be nice to show him her room, Momoko Hamanaka led him upstairs. It was a large Western room, girlish from corner to corner, Tōru’s first experience of the utterly girlish. It was luxuriantly pink. There was girlishness in every detail of the wallpaper, the dolls, the accessories. They quite breathed a beguiling young charm. Tōru took a seat in an armchair. The thick multicolored cushion made sitting difficult.
Momoko had a mature look, and yet there could be no doubt that all these details were of her own choosing. The cool pallor, somewhat blanched, was in keeping with old-fashioned features not too deeply carved. The solitary earnestness made her the only object at odds with the beguiling charm. Her beauty was too formally perfect; and as in the formal perfection of a paper crane it had in it something ominous.
Her mother brought tea and withdrew. The two had met several times before, but for the first time they were alone. That fact did not produce new tensions. Momoko was safe in the knowledge of having obeyed instructions. He must awaken her to danger, thought Tōru.
He had been put off by all the solemn attentions during dinner. But his annoyance was about to leave. A match was being made. Delicate love was being picked up in pincers, tinted. The bonbon had already been put in the oven. To Tōru it made no difference whether he had gone in of his own accord or been put in. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with himself.
The first thing Momoko did when they were alone was to choose an album from four or five numbered ones and offer it to Tōru. Thus he was made aware of her essential mediocrity. He opened it on his knees, and he saw an infant in a bib, its legs spread wide. Pants all swollen with diapers, like a Flemish knight’s. The dark pink of a mouth not yet filled out with teeth. Tōru asked who the infant might be.
Momoko’s consternation was rather wondrous. She glanced at the album and put a hand over the picture and snatched the album from him. Clutching it to her breast, she turned to the wall. Her breathing was heavy.
“How perfectly dreadful. The numbers were wrong. I didn’t mean for you to see this one. Whatever will I do?”
“Is it such a secret that you were once a baby?”
“Aren’t you cool. Like a doctor.”
Calm again herself, Momoko replaced the album. Tōru was sure, from his misstep, that in the next album he would see Momoko at seventeen.
But the next album was most ordinary, pictures from a recent trip. Each picture showed how popular Momoko was. It was a record of tedious happiness. Far more than to pictures of a recent trip to Hawaii, Tōru was drawn to Momoko in the garden beside a bonfire, one evening the previous fall. The bonfire was a rich, sensuous vermilion. Crouched beside it, Momoko had the grandeur of a witch.
“Are you fond of fires?” he asked.
He caught hesitation in her eyes. He had a strange confidence that she had been menstruating as she sat looking into the fire. And now?
How pure abstract malice would have been if it had been free from sexual attraction! He saw that this new challenge would not be as easy as dismissing his tutor had been. But he had confidence in his coldness, however much he might be loved. It lay in the indigo realm within him.
23
 
 R
ELUCTANT TO LEAVE
Tōru by himself, Honda took him to Hokkaido that summer. Their schedule was an easy one. They did not want to tax themselves. Keiko, for whom it had become difficult to travel with Honda, went off by herself to Geneva, the Japanese ambassador to Switzerland being a relative. The Hamanakas wanted to have two or three days with the Hondas, and so the two families took rooms in Shimoda. Overwhelmed by the summer heat, Honda rarely left his air-conditioned room.
It was agreed that they would have dinner together each night. The Hamanakas came for Honda. Where was Momoko, they asked. She had come a little earlier, said Honda, and was out in the garden with Tōru. And so the Hamanakas sat down and waited for the young couple to return.
Honda was standing by the window, a cane in his hand.
It was all very stupid. He was not hungry, and the menu was an impoverished one. He knew without going to the dining room that vulgar family merriment awaited him. And Hamanaka table conversation was tedium itself.
The old had politics forced upon them. Even though he ached in all his joints, a man of seventy-eight could hide his want of interest only under a show of wit and good humor. A want of interest was important all the same. It was the only way to win out over the idiocy of the world. The unconcern of a beach receiving each day the waves and the driftwood.
Honda had thought that, purse-lipped and surrounded by lackeys, he had yet a little life in him, a little sharpness with which to hinder the purse-lipped days and the lackeys; but it had deserted him. All he really had was an overwhelming sense of folly, and of a vulgarity that melted into a monotone. How myriad were the manifestations of the vulgar. The vulgarity of elegance, the vulgarity of ivory, the vulgarity of holiness, the vulgarity of the craze, erudite vulgarity, the vulgarity of the academic pretender, coquettish vulgarity, the vulgarity of the Persian cat, the vulgarity of monarchs and beggars, of lunatics, of butterflies, of blister beetles. Reincarnation was retribution for vulgarity. And the chief and indeed the only source of it all was the wish for life. Honda himself was without doubt a part of it. What distinguished him was his uncommonly keen sense of smell.
He glanced sideways at the aging couple before him. Why had the two of them come into his life? The superfluity of their presence ran against his sense of order. But there was no help for it now. There they were, smiling on his sofa, as if prepared to wait a decade or so.
Shigehisa Hamanaka, aged fifty-five, was the former chief of a feudal clan in the northeast. He sought to cover the now-empty pride of family in Bohemianism, and had even written a book of essays,
The Chief
, which had been a modest success. He was the president of a bank, the head office of which was in his old fief, and he had made a name in the pleasure quarters as an old-style man of taste. There was still a full, rich head of black hair over the gold-rimmed glasses and the almond-shaped face, but the stronger impression was of vapidity. A confident raconteur, he always allowed an appropriate pause before a witty conclusion. A clever talker who made a great point of skipping the preliminaries, a person of gentle irony who never forgot his respect for the aged, he would not have dreamed he was a bore.
His wife Taeko too came from the military aristocracy. She was a fat, rough-featured person, and fortunately the daughter looked like the father. All Taeko could talk about was family. She had seen neither movies nor plays. She passed her life before a television set. They were very proud of the fact that their other three children were married and on their own, and only Momoko remained.
Old-fashioned elegance had thus become shallowness. It was more than Honda could bear to hear Shigehisa talk permissively of the sex revolution, and to hear Taeko’s shocked responses. Shigehisa used his wife’s old-fashioned responses as a part of his act.
Honda wondered why he could not be more tolerant. He knew, as it became more and more of a burden to make new acquaintances, how difficult it was to muster a smile. Contempt was of course the emotion that came first, but even that was rather a lot of trouble these days. He thought how much easier it would be to respond with spittle than with words, even as the words came to his lips, but words were the task that remained. With them an old man could twist the world as he might squash a willow lattice.
“How young you look standing there,” said Taeko. “Like a soldier.”
“A very inappropriate simile, my dear. You must not liken a judge to a soldier. I have never forgotten an animal trainer I once saw in a circus in Germany. That is what Mr. Honda is like.”
“A far more inappropriate simile, I should think, my dear.” Taeko was dreadfully amused.
“I am not striking a pose, you must believe me. I am standing here so that I can see the sunset and the young people in the garden.”
“You can see them?”
Taeko came and stood beside Honda, and Shigehisa too, with dignity, left his chair.
The garden was spread below the third-floor window. It was circular, bordered by a walk that led down to the sea, and there were two or three benches among the shrubs. A few family groups were returning, towels over shoulders, from the pool a level below. They cast long evening shadows over the lawn.
Momoko and Tōru were walking hand in hand halfway along the circle. Their shadows stretched far out to the east. It was as if two great sharks were biting their feet.
Tōru’s shirt was full in the evening breeze, and Momoko’s hair was blowing. They were a most ordinary boy and girl; but to Honda they were as insubstantial as gossamer mosquito nets. The shadows were the substance. They had been eaten away by the shadows, by the deep melancholy of a concept. That was not life, thought Honda. It was something less easy to excuse. And the terrible fact was that Tōru probably knew.
If the shadow was the substance, then the all too transparent something clinging to it must be wings. Fly! Fly over the vulgarity! The limbs and the heads were a superfluity, too concrete. If the contempt in him was only a little stronger, Tōru could fly off, the girl’s hand in his; but Honda had forbidden it. Honda longed with all the powers of his senile impotence to put his envy to work and give the two of them wings; but not even envy burned very hot in him any more. Only now did he see it for what it was, the most fundamental emotion he had felt toward Kiyoaki and Isao, the source of all lyricism in intellectual man, envy.
Very well, then. Suppose he were to think of Tōru and Momoko as the basest, the least tempting morsels of youth. They would act, fall into each other’s arms, like a pair of puppets. He only had to move a finger. He moved two or three of the fingers on his stick. The pair on the lawn walked toward the cliff path.
“Just look at them, would you. Here we are waiting, and it seems they mean to go farther away.”
Taeko stood with her hand on her husband’s elbow. There was a touch of excitement in her voice.
Facing the sea, the young couple went through the shrubbery and sat down on one of the rough wooden benches. Honda could see from the angle of the heads that they were looking at the sunset. A lump of black came out from under the bench. Honda could not make out whether it was a cat or a dog. Momoko stood up in surprise. Tōru, standing up beside her, took her in his arms.

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