The Decay Of The Angel (20 page)
Read The Decay Of The Angel Online
Authors: Yukio Mishima
“Well, now.” The voices of her parents, watching through the window, floated up gently as dandelion floss.
Honda was not watching. The cognizant one was not watching through his peephole. There at the bright window, he was half enacting in his heart the movements his awareness had ordered, directing them with the strength of all his faculties.
“You are young, and you must give evidence of a far stupider vitality. Shall I put thunder into you? A sudden flash of lightning? Shall we have some queer sort of electric phenomenon: perhaps send flames darting from Momoko’s hair?”
A tree stretched its branches spider-like toward the sea. They started to climb it. Honda could feel the tension in the pair beside him.
“I shouldn’t have let her wear pants.” Taeko seemed on the edge of tears. “The little hussy.”
They entwined their legs around the branches and swung up and down. Leaves scattered toward the ground. One tree among the others seemed to have gone mad. The two were like a pair of great birds against the evening sky.
Momoko jumped from the tree first. But she did not jump boldly enough, and her hair was entangled in one of the lower branches. Tōru followed her and sought to disentangle it.
“They’re in love.” Taeko, in tears, nodded again and again.
But Tōru was taking too long. Honda knew immediately that he was deliberately entangling the hair more tightly. The delicately overdone efforts brought a twinge of fear. Secure in these ministrations, Momoko sought to pull away from the branch. The pain was sharp. Pretending to make matters unintentionally worse the more he tried, Tōru mounted the low branch like a jockey. Momoko pulled at the long rope of hair, her back to him. She was weeping, and her hands were at her face.
From the third-floor window, across the wide garden, it was like a scene in wax, a quiet little pantomime. The grandeur was in the evening light, an avalanche falling off to the sea, in the high glow of the light glancing off toward the sea from the clouds, relics of sun showers through the afternoon. Because of the light, the trees and the islands in the bay, closer and closer, spread color on hard, thin lines. The clarity was terrible.
“They’re in love,” said Taeko once more.
A bright rainbow arched over the sea, like an outcropping of the sunlight in Honda’s heart at the idiocy of it all.
24
EXCERPTS
from Tōru Honda’s diary.
I cannot excuse the several mistakes I am making in the matter of Momoko. That is because one must proceed from clarity, and the smallest element of miscalculation produces fantasy, and fantasy produces beauty.
I have never been a sufficiently ardent devotee of beauty to believe that beauty produces fantasy and fantasy miscalculation. When I was still new at the signal station, I sometimes misidentified a ship. Especially at night, when it is difficult to calculate the distance between mast lights, I would sometimes take a puny little fishing boat for an international freighter, and send out a signal asking it to identify itself. Unaccustomed to such formal treatment, the fishing boat would sometimes flash back the name of a movie star. It was not however a thing of great beauty.
Momoko’s beauty of course meets all the objective standards. Her love is necessary for me, and I must give her the blade with which to cut herself. A paper knife will not suffice.
I know well enough that the more firmly insistent demands come not from reason or will but from sexual desire. The detailed demands of sex are sometimes mistakenly thought logical. I think that, lest I confuse the two, I must have another woman for sex. That is because the most subtle and delicate wishes of evil are not for a physical wound but for a spiritual. I know well enough the nature of evil within me. It is in the insistent demands of awareness itself, awareness transformed into desire. Or to put the matter differently, it has been clarity in its most perfect form acting out its part in the darkest depths.
I sometimes think it would be better if I were dead. For my plans can be realized on the far side of death. For there I can find true perspective. To do it while still alive is more difficult than the difficult. Especially when you are only eighteen!
I find it very hard to understand the Hamanakas. There can be no doubt that they want us to be engaged for five or six years, and that they will presently exercise their option and bring the two of us together, fully recognized members of society, in high matrimony. But what guarantee have they? Should they have such confidence in their daughter’s beauty? Or is it that they put high hopes on payments for breach of promise?
No, I doubt that they have made any real calculations at all. They take the crudest, most common-sense view of relations between man and woman. To judge from their gasps of admiration when they heard my I.Q., I should imagine that all their energies go into the study of talent, and especially talent with money.
Momoko telephoned from Karuizawa the day I got back from Hokkaido. She wanted to see me and so I must come to Karuizawa. I have no doubt that her parents were behind it. There was just a touch of artificiality in her voice, and so I made bold to be cruel. I replied that since I was deep in studies for my university entrance examinations I was unable to accept her kind invitation. And when I hung up I felt a quite unexpected twinge of sadness. Denial is itself a sort of concession, and it is natural that the concession should bring a shadow of sadness over one’s self-respect. I am not afraid of it.
Summer is almost over. I am very much aware of its passage. As strongly as words can express. There were mackerel clouds and cumulus clouds in the sky today, and a faint touch of sharpness in the air.
Love should follow along, but my emotions must not follow anything.
The little present Momoko gave me in Shimoda is here on my desk. It is a framed bit of white coral. On the back, in two pierced hearts, it carries the inscription: “From Momoko to Tōru.” I do not understand how she can go on being prey to these childish tastes. The case is filled with little bits of tinfoil that float up like the white sands of the sea when you shake it, and the glass is half frosted with indigo. The Suruga Bay I have known is compressed into a frame five inches square, it has become a lyrical miniature forced on me by a girl. But small though it is, the coral has its own grand, cold cruelty, my inviolable awareness at the heart of her lyric.
Whence come the difficulties in my being? Or to put it another way, the ominous smoothness and facileness of my being.
I sometimes think that the ease of it all comes from the fact that my being is a logical impossibility.
It is not that I am asking any difficult questions of my being. I live and move without motive power, but that is as much an impossibility as perpetual motion. Nor is it my destiny. How can the impossible be a destiny?
From the moment I was born on this earth, it would seem, my being knew that it flew in the face of reason. I was not born with any defect. I was born like an impossibly perfect human being, a perfect film negative. But this world is full of imperfect positives. It would be a terrible thing for them to develop me, change me into a positive. That is why they are so afraid of me.
The source of greatest amusement to me has been the solemn injunction that I be faithful to myself. It is an impossibility. Had I sought to follow it I would immediately have been dead. It could only have meant forcing the absurdity of my existence into unity.
There would have been ways if I had not had self-respect. It would have been easy, without self-respect, to make others and myself as well accept all manner of distorted images. But is it so very human to be hopelessly monstrous? Though of course the world feels secure when the monstrous is reality.
I am very cautious, but I am greatly wanting in the instinct for self-preservation. And I am so brightly wanting in it that the breeze through the gap sometimes makes me drunk. Since danger is the ordinary, there is no crisis. It is very well to have a sense of balance, since I cannot live without a miraculous sort of balance; but suddenly it becomes a hot dream of imbalance and collapse. The greater the discipline the greater the tendency toward violence, and I grow weary of pressing the control button. I must not believe in my own docility. No one can know what a sacrifice it is for me to be gentle and docile.
But my life has been only duty. I have been like an awkward novice sailor. Only in seasickness and nausea have I escaped from duty. The nausea corresponded to what the world calls love.
For some reason, Momoko is reluctant to come home with me. We talk for an hour or so after school at the Renoir. Sometimes we have our innocent fun in the park, riding the roller coaster. The Hamanakas do not worry a great deal about having their daughter come home late if it is not after dark. Though I sometimes take her to a movie, of course, I must let them know in advance that we are going to be later. There is not much pleasure in these public dates, and so we also have our assignations, brief ones.
Momoko came to the Renoir again today. She may seem old-fashioned, but she is just like any other girl in the unpleasant things she has to say about her teachers, in gossip about her friends, in talk, all contemptuously masked with indifference, of the scandalous behavior of movie stars. I humor her a little, showing a manly tolerance.
I lack the courage to write further, for my reservations on the surface seem no different from the unconscious reservations of all other teen-agers. Whatever my perversity, Momoko does not feel it as such. So I let my feelings have their way. Unintentionally, I become sincere and honest. If I really were, then the ethical contradictions in my being should be exposed like mud banks at low tide; but the troublesome ones are the banks not yet exposed. As the waters recede they pass a point at which my frustrations are no different from the frustrations of any other young person, the sadness that furrows my brow draws a line no different from that on the brow of any other. It would not do for Momoko to catch me there.
I have been wrong in thinking that women are tormented by doubts as to whether they are loved. I have wished to plunge Momoko into doubt, but the swift little beast has eluded capture. It would do no good to tell her I do not love her. She would think I was lying. My only recourse is to bide my time and make her jealous.
I sometimes ask myself if I was not somehow changed by the dissipation of my sensibilities in welcoming all those ships. There had to be some effect on me. Ships were born of my consciousness and grew into giants and had names. Only so far were they my concern. Once in port, they were of a different world. I was too busy receiving other ships. I did not have the art to become alternately ship and harbor. That is what women demand. The concept of woman, become sensible reality, would in the end refuse to leave port.
I have known secret pride and pleasure in seeing the concept on the horizon gradually take shape. I have put my hand in from outside the world and created something, and I have not tasted the sensation of being brought into the world. I have not felt myself brought in like laundry brought in before a shower. No rain has fallen to give me existence within the world. On the verge of intellectual drowning, my clarity has been confident of proper sensual rescue. For the ship has always passed. It has never stopped. The sea winds have turned everything to spotted marble, the sun has turned the heart into crystal.
I have been self-reliant to the point of sadness. I wonder when I first fell into the habit of washing my hands after each brush with humanity, lest I be contaminated. People have diagnosed the habit as uncommon fastidiousness.
My misfortune has clearly had its origins in nonrecognition of nature. It is natural that I should not have recognized nature, for nature, containing all rules, should be an ally, and “my” nature has not been. I have accomplished the nonrecognition with gentleness. I have not been spoiled or pampered. Always feeling the shadow of persons clamorous to do me injury, I have been careful about expenditures of gentleness certain to do injury to others. One may see in the care a very human sort of solicitude. But mixed in with the very word “solicitude” are unpleasant shreds of weariness.
I have thought that, in comparison with the nature of my own being, the affairs of the world, delicate and complicated international problems and the like, have not been problems at all. Politics and art and ideology have been so many watermelon rinds. Only watermelon rinds left on the seashore, mostly white but tinged with the faint pink of sunrise. For though I have hated the vulgar, I have recognized in them the possibility of eternal life.
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