The Wisdom King posed with compassionate countenance, and his body was extremely fair. The skin visible under silk gauze was enhanced by such magnificent jewelry as the crown on his head, the necklace around his neck, the earrings hanging from his ears, and the bracelets at his wrists. A cool weariness lingered on the heavy lids of the half-open eyes as though the deity had just awakened from an afternoon nap. Imparting boundless mercy and saving people without number might produce in one an emotion similar to the idle sleepiness that Honda had discovered in the bright, vast expanses of India.
In contrast to this absolutely white and serene image, the extended feathers of the peacock that acted as a halo were dazzlingly polychrome. Of the plumage of all birds, that of the peacock was closest in hue to the evening clouds. Like an Esoteric Buddhist mandala that rearranges a chaotic universe into an orderly one, the feathers presented the methodical organization of the riotous disorder of color seen in the evening clouds, their amorphousness, and the play of light upon them, in a geometric and patterned brocade. Gold, green, indigo, purple, brown—such dusky brilliance, however, indicated the end of the evening glow when the disk of the setting sun itself was no longer visible.
The tail feathers lacked only scarlet. If there were such a bird as a scarlet peacock, and if the Peacock Wisdom King had been seated upon it, tail fully open, he would be none other than the goddess Kali herself.
Honda believed that such a peacock must have appeared in the evening clouds in the sky above the ruins where he had encountered Tadeshina.
PART 2
23
“YOU’VE PLANTED some beautiful cypresses,” said Honda’s new neighbor. “It used to be so barren and treeless here.”
Keiko Hisamatsu was an imposing woman.
She was close to fifty, but her face, rumored to have undergone plastic surgery, retained an overly taut, shiny youthfulness. She was one of those exceptional Japanese who could speak informally to either Prime Minister Yoshida or to General MacArthur; she had long since divorced her husband. At the moment she had a lover, a young American officer in the Occupation Forces who worked at the camp at the foot of Mount Fuji. She had repaired her long-neglected villa at Ninooka in Gotemba and would occasionally come for a rendezvous or, as she said, “to write leisurely answers to long-neglected letters.” Her villa stood next to Honda’s.
In the spring of 1952, Honda celebrated his fifty-seventh birthday. For the first time in his life, he had acquired a villa. Guests had been invited from Tokyo for the opening that was to take place on the morrow. He himself had come a day early to oversee preparations and had invited his neighbor Keiko to inspect the garden that measured something more than an acre.
“I’ve been looking forward to the completion of your house as if it were my own,” said Keiko, walking over the dead, frost-wet lawn, lifting her thin high-heeled shoes step by step like a waterfowl. “This grass was planted last year. How well it has taken. You set up the garden first and then took your time with the house. Only a true lover of gardens could do that.”
“I had no place to stay, so I commuted from Gotemba to lay it out,” replied Honda, looking like some Parisian concierge in his heavy, slightly raveled cardigan with a silk scarf wrapped around his neck against the cold.
Honda felt a certain discomfort with women like Keiko, who had lived a life of leisure. It was as though his pettiness were being seen through—the meanness of working and studying through life and now at the onset of old age suddenly trying to learn how to relax.
His being here, the proprietor of a villa, had been made possible by an antiquated section of a little-known law issued under the Imperial Seal on April 18,1899, and entitled “Concerning the return of nationally owned lands, forests, and fields.”
In July of 1873, a land-reform decree was issued, and government officials had gone from village to village attempting to ascertain the ownership of various holdings. Fearing they would be taxed, owners denied possession of certain tracts, and thus a great number of private holdings and commonages had become unattached and had been transferred to the government.
Much later, in view of the clamorous voices of regret and resentment, a law was passed in 1899, the second article of which stated that applicants for the return of land were required to prove previous ownership by producing at least one of seven records. One was called a “state document.” And the sixth article of the code stated that all pertinent legal action would come under the jurisdiction of the Court of Administrative Litigation.
Many such suits were instituted in the 1890s, but the Court of Administrative Litigation permitted only one hearing, with no opportunity for appeal. And since there was no provision for supervision of the legal process, everything was done in a most leisurely fashion.
In any village in which communal lands had been confiscated because of a thoughtless lie, the Oaza, or administrative division, became the plaintiff in administrative litigation. Even if the village had been amalgamated into a township, the Oaza could claim possession and remain as an “owner district.”
In the case of a certain village in the district of Miharu in Fukushima Prefecture, a suit was instituted in 1900, in which the government and the plaintiff went about the business most leisurely. Over a period of fifty years, the defendant had changed from Minister of Agriculture and Commerce to Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, and, one by one, successive lawyers in charge of the litigation had died, only to be succeeded by others. In 1940, a delegate from the district of the plaintiff village came to Tokyo to see Honda, who was already a well-known lawyer, and deposited the hopeless case in his hands.
The fifty-year deadlock was broken by the defeat of Japan in the war.
According to the new constitution executed in 1947, special courts were eliminated and the Court of Administrative Litigation was abolished. All administrative cases in process were transferred to the Tokyo High Court and treated as civil suits. As a result, Honda won the case without difficulty. It was nothing more than pure luck—being at the right place at the right time.
In accordance with the agreement which had been handed down through the years, Honda received as his fee for winning the case one third of all lands returned to the village. He had the choice of accepting this real estate or of converting it into cash at the going rate. He chose the latter. Thus he came into the sum of thirty-six million yen.
This event changed the very roots of Honda’s life. During the war he had gradually grown bored with a lawyer’s lot, and while retaining the widely respected name of the Honda Law Offices, he left all work to his younger partners and put in only an occasional appearance. His social life changed and so did his thinking. He could not take his good fortune seriously, coming so suddenly as he had into possession of close to forty million yen, nor could he be serious about the times that had made such a miracle possible. Therefore he decided to take the whole thing casually.
He considered dismantling and rebuilding his residence in Hongo, which would have been much better off burned in the raids, but he was already too disillusioned with the city to construct anything new there and expect it to last forever. Anyway, it would be burned to the ground in the next war.
His wife Rié preferred to sell the property and perhaps live in an apartment rather than to continue on in the big old house by themselves. But Honda took the pretext of her sickliness for building a villa in a remote, sparsely populated spot where she could rest.
The couple went to see some land in the Sengokuhara area in Hakoné with an introduction from an acquaintance, but when they heard of the excessive dampness in the region they were frightened off. Guided by the chauffeur of the hired car, they drove over Hakoné Pass and explored the summer resort area of Ninooka in the Gotemba section that had been developed some forty years before. There were many villas belonging to former dignitaries. But after the war, they had closed their gates to avoid the American Occupation Forces near the Fuji Maneuvering Terrain and the inevitable women who followed t
hem. Honda was told that in an area west of the villa district there was some barren land that had once belonged to the government but that had been turned over without charge to the farmers of the region as a result of the land reform. One could make a good buy there.
The entire area at the foot of Mount Hakoné was not covered by the volcanic lava as was that around Fuji. But it was barren land unfit for growing anything except perhaps cypresses. The farmers did not know what to do with it. Honda was delighted with one property where pampas grass and sagebrush covered a slope that gently descended to a valley stream. Mount Fuji was clearly visible.
Upon inquiry he found the price to be very reasonable and therefore did not follow Rié’s suggestion to give the matter further thought. He made an immediate down payment for a parcel of a little over four acres.
Rié said that she did not like the unspeakably somber harshness of the land. She was afraid of melancholia. She knew instinctively that she had no use for such feelings in her old age. But to Honda, who was dreaming of pleasure, it was this very gloominess that was indispensable to him.
“It’s nothing. If we clear the area and plant some greenery and put up a house, it’ll be almost too cheerful,” he had said.
Hiring carpenters from the area to build the house and employing people there to plant the trees and do the landscaping was a slow process, but it kept the expenses down. Honda retained from former days his habit of considering indiscriminate expenditure vulgar. Nevertheless, the pleasure of leisurely guiding a guest around and showing off his extensive property was surely an emotion born long ago in his boyhood when he had frequented the Matsugae estate. He did not mind the chilliness of early spring which stung the skin with the frigidity of the lingering snows of Hakoné, because it was the chilliness of his own garden; by the same token, the loneliness of only two people casting faint shadows on the expanse of lawn pleased him, because it was the loneliness of his own property. He felt as though he were grasping the real luxury of private ownership for the first time. Furthermore, it pleased him that he had come to it not through fanaticism, but completely by means of his own logical thinking and good timing.
Keiko’s overly handsome profile held no trace of coquetry or reserve. She had the ability to make any man beside her—even the fifty-seven-year-old Honda—feel as though he were a mere stripling. It was a woman’s power to impose on a fifty-seven-year-old man the apparent cheerfulness and sunniness of a youth bound by pure hypocrisy and vanity, one who kept up appearances at all costs, though uneasy and respectful with women.
From Honda’s point of view, age was nothing to be taken into account. Until he was in his forties he had been conscientious about the plusses and minuses of age. Now, however, he had an actually casual and carefree idea of it. He was not surprised when sometimes he happened to discover clear signs of true childishness in himself, in his fifty-seven-year-old body. Old age was, somehow, a kind of declaration of bankruptcy.
He had grown terribly concerned about his health and terrified of his self-indulgence in emotion. If the function of reason was control, the urgent necessity for it had passed. Experiences were nothing but cleaned bones on a dinner plate.
Keiko stood at the center of the greensward, contrasting the view of Hakoné to the east with that of Fuji to the northwest. She exuded a stateliness which was best described as regal; the fullness of her suit coat, her erect neck, everything conveyed the air of a commanding general. Her young officer must surely be subjected to all manner of orders, including ones not so easy to execute.
Compared to the clear, snow-dotted ridges of Hakoné, Fuji, half covered by clouds, appeared ephemeral. Honda noticed that some optical illusion made it now higher, now lower.
“Today I heard a nightingale for the first time,” said Honda, looking through the fragile withered upper branches of the thin cypress trees that he had purchased in the neighborhood and transplanted to his property.
“Nightingales come in mid-March,” said Keiko. “You’ll be able to see cuckoos in May. You can see as well as hear them, mind you. This is probably the only place that one can see and hear cuckoos at the same time.”
“Let’s go in. I’ll build a fire and make some tea,” Honda suggested.
“I brought some cookies,” said Keiko, referring to the package she had left in the vestibule a short while ago. The Hattori Clock Shop at the corner of Owari-cho on the Ginza had been turned into a PX after the war; and Keiko, having free access to this facility, usually bought her gifts there. English-made cookies familiar to her since prewar days could be purchased there inexpensively. The thin, hard, plum jam sandwiched in them served to connect the afternoon teas of her childhood with those of the present.
“I have a ring I should like you to appraise,” said Honda, starting to walk.
24
FRAGRANT DAPHNE still in bud surrounded the terrace, and the birdhouse built in one corner bore the same type of red tile roof that covered the main house. When they saw Honda and Keiko approaching, the tiny sparrows that had flocked around the feeder darted away chirping, as though pricked by needles.
Just inside the entrance stood another door with a stained-glass center, and to either side were windows latticed with orange panes like those of Dutch mansions in the late Edo period. One could indistinctly see inside through them. Honda liked to stand here and look at the interior sinking in the wistful colors of the evening sun, an interior he himself had meticulously designed, with its thick beams purchased from a rural house and transferred intact, the chaste North German antique chandelier, the paneled doors with simple line drawings of Otsu folk painting, footman’s armor, and a bow and arrows—all bathed in the fading yellow light, exuding the feeling of some gloomy still life, as if some Dutch painter like Jan Treck had done a Japanese scene.
Honda invited Keiko to enter. He seated her in the chair by the fireplace and tried to light the kindling, but it would not catch. Only the fireplace had been planned by a specialist from Tokyo; it was well designed and never let the smoke reverse and flow back into the room. But whenever he tried to build a fire, Honda always realized that he had never in his life had the opportunity of mastering the simplest techniques or knowledge. Indeed, he had never even handled basic materials.
It was strange to learn this at his age. He had never once known leisure in his entire life. Thus he had obviously never made any contact with nature, with the waves of the ocean, with the hardness of trees, with the weight of rocks, and with the tools like ship’s fittings, nets, or hunting rifles that workers came to know through their work, and the aristocrats, conversely, were familiar with through the graciousness of their living. Kiyoaki had turned his leisure not toward nature but only toward his own emotions; if he had matured, he would have grown into nothing but idleness.
“Let me help,” said Keiko, bending down with dignity, after watching Honda’s ineptness for some time, the tip of her tongue protruding between her hard lips. Her hips appeared almost limitless to Honda’s upturned eyes. The blue celadon color of her tight skirt, filled like a gigantic vase of the Yi Dynasty, was enhanced by the cut of the suit that had a sharply narrowed waistline.
As Honda had nothing to do while Keiko occupied herself with the fire, he left the room to fetch the ring he had mentioned. When he returned, savage vermilion flames were already slithering up the logs, and pieces of kindling were gnashing their teeth in the coquettishly clinging smoke, while sap secreted from the freshly cut wood sizzled. The brick lining of the fireplace flickered in the firelight. Keiko calmly brushed her hands and observed the result of her efforts with obvious satisfaction.
“How is this?”
“I’m impressed,” said Honda, extending his hand into the firelight and handing the ring to Keiko. “This is the ring I mentioned a while ago. What do you think? I bought it as a present.”
Keiko withdrew her fingers with their red manicured tips from the area of the flames and scrutinized the ring in the fading light from the window.
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“A man’s ring,” she said.
It was formed of a dark green, square emerald encircled by gold finely sculpted to depict a pair of protective yaksha with impressive half-bestial faces. Keiko moved the ring from her fingertips, probably to avoid the reflection of her red nails, and holding it between her fingers, slipped it on her index finger. Although a man’s ring, it was the size for some delicate, dark-skinned finger; it was not overly large even on her.
“It’s a good stone. But with old emeralds the inside fissures always effloresce in the long run. There’s danger of fragility when the cloudiness rises from underneath. This one shows that condition. But still it’s a good stone. And the carving is unusual. It’ll be valuable as an antique.”
“Where do you think I bought it?”
“Abroad?”
“No, in the ruins of Tokyo. At Prince Toin’s shop.”
“Oh yes, those days . . . But no matter what financial trouble the Prince might have had, for him to open an antique shop . . . ! I’ve been there two or three times myself. Everything interesting turned out to be something I had seen at relatives’ long ago. But the shop had to close. I heard that the Prince was never there; the former steward who was acting as head clerk was running the show and stealing all the profits. Not a single member of royalty has started a successful business after the war. No matter what the property tax, they should have safeguarded what possessions they had left. There was always some promoter who would talk them into something. Especially Prince Toin, who had always been a soldier. He reminds me of the poor samurai who all went bankrupt after the Restoration.”
Then Honda told her the history of the ring.
In 1947, Honda heard that Prince Toin had lost his title after the war and had bought up art objects cheaply from members of the former nobility overburdened with property taxes. He had opened an antique shop for foreigners. The Prince would not have remembered him even if Honda had gone to see him, but he had been moved to look in at the shop out of sheer curiosity without identifying himself. In a glass case, he discovered the ring of Princess Chantrapa, which the Siamese prince Chao P. had lost in the dormitory of the Peers School thirty-four long years before.
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