The Decay Of The Angel (4 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: The Decay Of The Angel
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Because of the delusion, she had been able to break the mirror that so tormented her and fly off into a mirrorless world. Reality became malleable, selective, a seeing of what was desirable and a rejection of everything else. The guiding principle would for most people have been a tightrope inviting almost certain disaster, but it brought her no complications and no sense of danger. Having thrown the old plaything of self-awareness into the garbage can, she had started to make a new plaything of wonderful ingenuity and intricacy, and now she had adapted it perfectly to her needs and set it to work like an artificial heart. When she had finished shaping it, Kinué had attained perfect happiness; or, as she would have put it, perfect unhappiness.
Probably the romantic misfortune had come about when a man made mention of her ugliness. In that instant Kinué saw the light down her only road, the defile open to her. If she could not change her own looks, then she must change the world. She set to work on her own secret plastic surgery and achieved a reversal, and a gleaming pearl emerged from the ugly, ashen shell.
Like a beleaguered soldier finding an escape, Kinué came upon a basic but elusive link with the world. With that as her fulcrum, she stood the world upside down. A most extraordinary revolution. Exquisite craftiness in taking for misfortune what in her heart she desired above all.
His way of holding a cigarette somewhat old for his years, Tōru leaned back and stretched out long legs in blue jeans. He found nothing the least novel in her discourse, but he gave not a sign that he was bored. Kinué was very sensitive to her audience.
He never made fun of her as her neighbors did. That was why she visited him. He felt in this mad, ugly woman five years his senior a comrade in apartness. He liked people who refused to recognize the world.
If the hardness of the two hearts, the one protected by lunacy, the other by awareness—if the degree of hardness was about the same, then there need be no fear of wounds, however much they brushed against each other. Nor need there be a fear of carnal brushes. Kinué was now most off her guard. When Tōru got up with a creaking of his chair and moved toward her in great strides, she let out a shriek and ran for the door.
He was hurrying to the telescope. His eye glued to it, he waved a hand behind him.
“Work to do. Go on home.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I really believe you’re not like other men, but you caught me by surprise. I’ve had such awful things happen to me, and when a man stands up all of a sudden I think it’s happening again. You must understand that I live in constant fear.”
“It’s all right. Go on home. I’m busy.”
“I’ll go. But—”
“What is it?” His eye still on the telescope, he sensed that she was hesitating at the top of the stairs.
“I—I have a great deal of respect for you. Well, good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
There were footsteps and the sound of a closing door. Tōru followed a light with the telescope.
He had glanced out the window as he listened to Kinué and caught a sign. Though it was cloudy there were lights scattered up and down the west Izu hills; and when the sign of an approaching ship came in among the lights of the fishing boats there came a faint, suspicious change like a spark in darkness.
The
Nitchō-maru
was not due for almost an hour. But one should not trust ships to keep their appointments.
Off in the obscurity, in the circle of the telescope, crawling along like a bug, were the lights of a ship. One cluster became two. The ship had changed direction, and the stern and prow lights separated. To judge from the distance and the lights at the bridge, it would not be a fishing boat of some hundreds of tons, but the
Nitchō-maru
, a good forty-two hundred tons. Tōru already had a practiced eye for reckoning the tonnage of a ship from its length.
As the telescope followed them, its lights moved away from the distant lights of Izu and the fishing boats. With grand confidence it pressed forward on its sea route.
It came like shining death, casting bridge lights into the water. By the time he could clearly make out in the night, sketched in port and stern and deck lights, the form of a ship, that special form of a cargo ship, like a complex old ceramic piece, Tōru was at the signal light. He adjusted it by hand. If his signals were too fast, the ship would have trouble making them out, and if they were too full, the southeast pillar of the building might block out a part of them. And because recognition and quickness of response were moreover not easy to foresee, timing was not at all easy.
Tōru turned on the switch. Light leaked faintly from the old blinker. There were binoculars on top of it, like the eyes of a frog. The ship floated upon a round space in the dark night.
Tōru sent out three hallos. Dot-dot-dot-dash-dot.
∗
Dot-dot-dot-dash-dot. Dot-dot-dot-dash-dot.
There was no response.
He again signaled three times.
A dash. It was like an oozing from beside the bridge.
He could feel the resistance of the distant shutter.
“Your name?”
Dot-dash-dash-dot, dot-dash-dot-dash-dot, dash-dot-dot-dot-dash, dot-dash, dash-dot-dot-dot.
After that initial dash, the name of the ship, phantom-like.
Dash-dot-dash-dot, dot-dash-dash-dot, dot-dot-dash-dot, dash-dash, dot-dot-dash, dash-dot-dot-dash, dash-dot-dash-dash-dot.
It was the
Nitchō-maru
, without question.
There was a wild restlessness in the long and short lights, as if in among the clusters of solid lights a single light were mad with joy. The voice calling out from afar over the dark sea was like the voice of the madwoman. A metal voice crying out sadly though not sad, pleading an agony of joy. It only reported the name of a ship, but the infinitely disturbed voice of light also conveyed in each fragment the irregularity of an overexcited pulse.
The signals would probably be from the hand of the second mate, on watch. Tōru could sense in the signals from a bridge the feelings of a second mate returning home. In that distant room, heavy with the smell of white paint, bright with the brass of compass and wheel, there would be the weariness of the long voyage and the lingering sun of the south. The return of a ship, battered by winds and its own cargo. A professionalism containing a masculine languor. A trained swiftness, and all the red-eyed intensity of a homecoming. Two bright lonely rooms faced each other across the dark sea. And as communication was struck up, the existence of another human spirit out in the darkness was like a ghost-light in the sea itself.
It would have to anchor offshore and come in tomorrow. Quarantine closed at five, and would not open until seven in the morning. Tōru waited until the ship had passed the third pylon. If there were later inquiries, he need only give the hour.
“The ones from foreign ports are always early,” said Tōru to himself. He sometimes talked to himself.
It was approaching nine. The wind had stopped, the sea was quiet.
At about ten he stepped outside for a breath of air to fend off sleep.
There was still traffic on the prefectural highway. The lights around Shimizu Harbor to the northeast blinked nervously. Mount Udo, which on clear days swallowed the setting sun, was a dark mass. There was drunken singing from the dormitory of H. Shipyards.
Back inside, he turned on the weather report. There would be rain and a high sea and bad visibility. Then came the news. American operations in Cambodia had incapacitated headquarters, supply points, and hospitals of the Liberation Front until October.
Ten thirty.
Visibility was already bad, and the lights of Izu had disappeared. It was better, thought Tōru sleepily, than a bright moonlight night. On moonlight nights it was difficult to make out ship lights in the glare of the water.
Setting the alarm clock for one thirty, he lay down on the cot.
4
 
 A
T ABOUT
the same time Honda, at his house in Hongō, was having a dream.
He had gone to bed early and, exhausted from the journey, soon fallen asleep. Perhaps under the influence of the pine grove he had seen that day, the dream had to do with angels.
Flying over the pine grove of Mio was not an angel but a multitude of angels, male and female. The dream made good use of what Honda knew of Buddhist writ.
Dreaming, Honda told himself that the writ was true. He was filled with clean happiness.
There are the angels of the Six Worlds of Desire and the sentient beings of the several Worlds of Form. The first are the better known. Since the angels in Honda’s dream were disporting themselves, the males with the females, it seemed likely that they were from the Worlds of Desire.
They carry lights of seven colors, fire, gold, blue, red, white, yellow, and black. It is as if giant hummingbirds with rainbow wings were weaving in and out.
The hair is blue, the teeth flash white as they smile. The bodies are softness itself, cleanness itself. The gazes are unblinking.
The male and female angels of the Worlds of Desire come constantly up to one another; but the angels of the third world are content to hold hands, of the fourth to exchange thoughts, of the fifth to exchange glances, of the sixth and highest to exchange words.
It would be such a gathering, Honda told himself. There were scattered flowers, there were delicate perfumes and music. Honda was enrapt at this introduction to their several worlds. He knew that, though angels are sentient beings superior to humans, they still have not escaped the cycle of birth and rebirth.
It seemed to be night and yet it was bright afternoon, it seemed to be day and yet there were stars and there was a down-turned crescent moon. There were no human figures if one excepted Honda himself. He wondered if he might be the fisherman who at Mio tried to steal the angel’s robe.
Buddhist writ has it thus: “Male angels are born at the knees of male archangels, and female angels at the shoulders of female archangels; and they know of their earlier places of birth, and they drink at the heavenly stream of sanctification.”
Soaring up, dipping downward, the angels seemed to be making sport of Honda. With arched feet they came within brushing distance of his nose. He traced the white flower-fingers, and those that went behind the neck of the face smiling at him—it was the face of the Thai princess Ying Chan, crowned with flowers.
The angels were taking less notice of Honda. Coming near the dunes by the sea, they dipped under the lower branches of the pines. Honda was unable to take in everything. He was dazed by the whirling glitter. Heavenly flowers of white rained ceaselessly down. The sound of heavenly flageolet and lute. Blue hair and skirts and sleeves and scarves of raw silk, draped from shoulders down over arms, trailed in the breeze. An immaculate white bosom lingered for a moment before his eyes, the clean sole of a foot withdrew into the distance. A beautiful white arm, lighted by a rainbow, brushed past his eyes as if seizing at something. In that instant he saw the hollow of a gently opened finger, and, floating in it, the moon. Rich white arms permeated with a heavenly scent opened wide and soared skyward. The gentle lines of hips, outlined clearly against the blue sky, trailed like wisps of cloud. Then from afar a pair of unblinking black eyes came pressing down upon him, and, with a soft toss of a white forehead, reflecting the stars, the figure plummeted away, ankles raised.
Among the male angels he could clearly pick out Kiyoaki and a stern Isao. He tried to follow them, but, in the constantly shifting pattern of rainbow lights, he could not hold any one figure for more than an instant, however smooth its path.
Looking at the spot where he had seen Ying Chan, he wondered whether time might be more complex in the Worlds of Desire, and, changing form phantasmagorically, the past and the present might occupy the same space. The quiet little tragedy faded wistfully away even as new links seemed to be forming.
Only the pines were of this world. Their needles were etched in detail, the trunk of the red pine against which Honda leaned was rough and hard to the touch.

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