by Неизвестный
A priest perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six had been silently watching the exchange from a dark corner.
Though it was March and still chilly, he was dressed, rather sloppily, in a gray linen Japanese kimono. His neck and hands and feet were remarkably long and thin, as though he had somewhere misplaced a part of them. The skin was smooth and a muddy yellow, and on neither the crossed legs protruding from the kimono nor the hand holding the chopsticks was there more than a trace of hair. He had a certain stiffness about him, as of one not quite acclimated to the place. His hair was perhaps an eighth of an inch longer than that on my own shaven pate. The long face, wholly without harshness or angularity, was cocked to the side, and one felt, as he picked at the food before him, that his spirit was focused on some point at a slight remove. There was more of the priest in the man than in any Japanese priest I had ever known. The grease and clamor of the world had worn away, one sensed, and the contemplative marrow had been put in order. “Mikkai, I believe.” He nodded a series of short, abrupt nods, and from his full mouth came a series of affirmative monosyllables neither Chinese nor yet quite Japanese. The wide-cut Chinese eyes turned a careful gaze on me. “I’m one of the novices in the seminary. There is something I would like to talk to you about.” He wondered if I would wait until he had finished eating, he said in obscure Chinese. I had known enough Chinese students to understand at least that much, and to guess that he was from the south of China, probably Canton or Fukien.
Back in the dormitory, I hurried through my share of the sushi. When I arrived at the kitchen again, pencil and notebook in hand, I found Mikkai putting away his tray. He invited me to his room, and there, seated before me, he answered my questions.
He was evidently working at his answers, but there was no suggestion of obsequiousness in his manner. It was gloomy, rather, and a little dispirited, as if he found it a trial to be with this rude young Japanese and the strong scent of man he brought with him.
“To what sect do you belong?” I wrote in Chinese that was neither literary nor colloquial.
“I am at the moment training myself in Buddhism. I cannot say that I belong to any one sect. Because I am in your temple, I am now studying the Buddhism of the Pure Land,” he wrote.
“This means that you are investigating the Heaven of the Pure Land?”
“It does. I am studying that heaven.”
“And may I further inquire whether that heaven exists in this world or the next?”
“It exists in the next world.”
“It is not in this world?” I wrote.
“It is in the next world precisely because it is not in this. Has this fact not been settled by the sect to which you belong?” He looked at me with a strange, wry smile.
“This is a matter of personal belief: It has nothing to do with what any sect has decided.” I was aroused, and wrote rapidly. “Even if there is a heaven to come, I think it a dull, useless sort of heaven. Is it not the duty of priests to build a heaven in this world?”
“Alas, that is not possible. Therefore, we go to the Heaven of the Pure Land.”
“I have no interest in the next world. I am only interested in this world.”
“You would seem to be a socialist.” He toyed with the pencil for a moment, then wrote deliberately: “If you are a socialist and so dislike the next world, may I ask why you found it necessary to become a priest?”
I began to feel uneasy lest, having gratuitously started an argument, I find myself reprimanded for a lack of theological thoroughness, and exposed in all my inadequacy. But what did it matter—I gave the pencil a stronger push. “I cannot really be called a socialist. But I have a great dislike for heavens to come.”
“Very well, very well,” he muttered, a soft, sad smile on his lips. “Boys of seventeen and eighteen understand nothing,” he wrote. “They all think as you do. But”—he carefully underlined this last sentence—“some day you will turn back to heaven.”
A wave of horror and revulsion swept over me. On the glowing face, as smooth and spotless as an eggshell, there floated an expression of sorrow and charity, and he looked at me with the calm of the sages.
To heaven? Me to heaven? If it was already decided, then what was left for me? Where were the sorrows of youth, the pleasures, the racking anguish, the melting joys? Yes, and this too: this model exhibit of contradictions, this humannot-human something in white and black, made such through the good offices of the unknown world outside and its own amoebic squirmings? Where were its sinking shame and all its deeper sensations?
Was it not really too neat—and so nihilistic—too clear, like the transparent crack in the glacier? Too physical, too natural, too patly given? I am human. You too are human, Mikkai. Would it not be well to press yourself upon life, to stumble against it and fall and roll in it, to be encompassed by it?
“And did you have the moxa treatment on your head?” I wrote. In the last years of the Manchu Dynasty, when corruption and lassitude were extreme, the moxa treatment was ordered for the priesthood. To evade taxes and other civic duties, people were posing as priests, and only those who were prepared to endure the pain of the moxa were officially recognized.
Mikkai bowed silently. On the stubbly head there were six clear marks about the size of pennies, like spots of bare ground left by flower pots on a well-tended lawn. Here and there the skin was slightly crinkled, strangely luminous. I felt impossibly alone before those six man-inflicted scars.
“No doubt you have a keen sense of social right. That is as it should be,” he wrote, oblivious of my feelings. “But you should occasionally focus your thoughts on the universe. In the universe there are millions and hundreds of millions of stars. Our world is but one of them. Among these numberless stars, one or another is always exploding and disappearing in dust. Every moment and every second, with every breath we take, we are in the embrace of enormous exploding and dispersing and vanishing forces. If then, there is a Buddhist truth, it must be able to bear immense upheavals, destruction, and annihilation, in the womb of this universe. Ah, it would be well for you to think of the terrible difficulties of bearing so much. The heavy, cold, hard, infinite difficulties. This heaven to come which you so dislike is no more than one slight hint your elders found as they wandered lost among the difficulties. You have not suffered as your elders. You are unable to envision the heaven they came upon to assuage their sufferings.”
I knew that I was not suffering in the least, and I was not prepared to argue.
A drum announced the beginning of the evening services. I left Mikkai’s room.
In the dormitory, a string of four ten-mat rooms and two eight-mat rooms with partitions removed, life bustled on and took little notice of Mikkai’s heavy Buddhism. Among the novices were a man in his forties who had taught English in a girl’s school, and a dry-goods merchant approaching sixty who had felt the urge to become a priest when he failed in business; but most of us were not past our middle twenties, and most of us were either sons of priests or employees of temples. Since life would be secure once we returned to our temples, the seminary, its air untroubled by employment problems, was sunnier than most schools. All eighty of us, however, had lived lives in which fleshly appetites played their usual part: and now we were plunged into a regimen from another age, that we might become “Path-finders in the Three Worlds.”
With continued abstinence, problems of sex became pressing. There were those who, looking back on the days we had passed, would comment upon those problems in purposely loud voices, moved I suppose by a sort of inverted hypocrisy.
Still celibate myself, I had never before given such unmixed attention to the matter of “woman.” On the battlefield, when one has known woman, enforced celibacy joined to a fear of death can turn a man into an animal. Here, enveloped in the masculine smell from eighty white kimonos, my white-stockinged feet crossed as I lay in the sunlight and stared at the ceiling, I sometimes felt that every young pore was sighing out for woman. Woman might in fact b
e heaven.
Every shining material particle, glittering like the scale of a fish, bore down upon me with the weight and softness of the Garland of Truth. I could throw myself into my studies with a concentration in no way inferior to Mikkai’s. No doubt it would be worth while to push my way down the road toward bearing the difficulties he spoke of. But as long as there was woman, I thought, and as long as I felt this burning, I could never be a real priest.
Shortly after the Meiji Restoration, the Government gave priests permission to marry and to eat fish and meat. A result was that I myself came to be, and would one day go to heaven. But at nineteen, I found it impossible to think of me the priest trembling with pleasure in my warm bed. I saw no Buddhism there, only happiness.
I had been strongly drawn to the high priest in the main Kyoto temple of the sect. Though I had only seen his picture and knew very little about him, I was drawn to him because through the whole of his long life he had never sullied himself with woman. When, therefore, my uncle planned to visit him, I asked to be taken along. It was the year before I entered the seminary.
The high priest was tiny, tiny—swaddled in a scarlet robe. He seemed to be less sitting in the wicker chair than floating weakly up from the enormous folds of cloth. On the thin white neck above the pure white collar, a delicate face tilted precariously. The skin, never exposed to the sun, was startlingly white, here and there splotched pink. He leaned slightly forward, and only the crown of the head, which carried but a trace of white hair, suggested his hundred and three years. The crown of the head, terribly shriveled and winkled, said enough of the wondrous accumulation of months and years.
My uncle and I pressed forward, as though for a better look. The eyelids moved very slightly above the clear ash-colored eyes. A weak, wandering glance was turned toward us.
In the dim light at the end of the audience room, gold dust glowed softly on the flower-and-bird paintings of the sliding doors. Through the open doors, a cool wind blew in over the darkly polished veranda from the lotus pond below the hill, and in the summer light the outer half of each face was turned a greenish white.
My uncle, in Western clothes, knelt in a position of the deepest reverence. He brought his mouth to the high priest’s ear, and spoke in affectionate tones, mentioning my name and the name of a mutual acquaintance, now dead, and describing the relationship between us. The ears were apparently sound. A slight change passed over the eyes. The mouth moved, and a hoarse voice emerged. It continued for some time. I did not catch the meaning, but my uncle nodded repeatedly.
The mouth opened a little and closed, and the thin lips were a translucent white, washed of the last traces of man. The emotions implicit there had quite lost the smell of flesh. The whole of him was bleached white, one might have said, white and clean.
A thing by way of ceasing to be human was deposited here inert, surrounded by us in whom there was still action, my uncle and myself and the attendant priest. The shifting tones in the ash-colored eyes and the low incoherent words that came from the twisted lips held him tenuously to his surroundings. So, in any case, the matter seemed to me.
“Well, we mustn’t tire you.” My uncle glanced at the attendant priest, even though our five minutes were not yet up. The casters squeaked, the chair moved lightly off, and the two of us went out to the veranda. My uncle’s plump cheeks were aglow with the pleasure of having met the one man in all Japan whom he admired.
Several priests were lounging about the office. They wore white tabi and modified clerical dress, but in the shrug of a shoulder or the wave of a wrist one caught something worldly, something very neat, for instance, my own fleshliness. Because of the clerical dress, that something of the world seemed stronger—and because of the impression left by the bleached old man, unresisting as a dead tree.
“And how is he holding up?”
“He seems to be failing fast.”
“If he dies now there’ll be one fine battle. He’ll have to last a bit longer.”
Knowing that my uncle pursued the same trade, they talked freely.
Outside the great temple, the streets of the old capital lay before us as though shot down by the rays of the midsummer sun. A streetcar, vaguely yellow, wobbled uncertainly down the tracks.
“What did you think of him?” asked my uncle.
“Not bad at all.”
“Oh?” He was pleased. “There’s no one else like him. Probably there never will be.”
Two middle-aged women passed us. One of them turned to look at me. “They get gaudier and gaudier in Tokyo,” she said. I had on a new brown suit and a red necktie. In the white sunlight of that quiet street, the combination must have been dazzling. The women had of course not understood our conversation, nor had they suspected our calling. What would they have thought if they had, I wondered.
We passed a public bath. Strings of azure and green beads, a sort of halfcurtain at the door, were swaying in the breeze. From inside came a vigorous splashing and the clack of wooden bucket on wooden floor. Suddenly I thought of the tiny body under those scarlet folds. I thought of the sagging flesh and the wrinkles, the protruding bones, the curve of the bony back and hips. It came to me with intense dearness, the perfect priest’s body, the ultimate in bleaching and aging.
“It won’t do. It just won’t do.” From somewhere came the voice, and I felt my own naked body inside the suit and underwear and shoes. I was possessed there in the street by the sensuality of my own muscles, springing and swelling as I walked and stopped and walked again, writhing and coiling and caressing one another; and by the touch of those other muscles, for which they called out.
Some of the novices had known far worse hardships than I, and their experience of woman was no doubt far richer. They talked of it energetically.
“And on Number 606,” someone would say as if announcing a race, “the man who did it too often.”
Or: “I want to sleep with a white woman once. Just once. I wouldn’t care if I died afterward.” If he squirted water from a rubber ball to emphasize the words, it added to the titillation.
Sometimes there was a strain of cruelty in the wantonness. It was particularly noticeable in Anayama, a strongly built youth one of whose legs was a little bad. His father was an impoverished workman, and Anayama himself had been left, as good as abandoned, with relatives in a temple. It was very near my own, and it was remarkably small and poor for a Tokyo temple. Anayama had gone through childhood with scarcely a decent meal. He bitterly disliked the novices from more fortunate temples.
The rich boys, with their messengers from home and their steady flow of supplies, were naturally the center of attention. I was one of them. Anayama looked upon us with contempt and anger. We had never known hardship, we were pampered brats. When, occasionally, he slipped out in the middle of the night and came back drunken and violent, it was as much from rebelliousness as from dammed-up lust. I had no trouble sensing the malice in the cold, hard gaze Anayama turned on my smallest movements.
One night I awoke choking from a dream of a burning building. I looked up. A whitish smoke was indeed trailing over the quilts and the row of sleeping heads. There was little smoke by the window, where I lay, but great white billows were rising from the big iron brazier toward the center of the room. Anayama and two cronies, who seemed to have come home drunk, were roistering in the thickest of the smoke. They had kindled a fire to amuse themselves, apparently, and to intimidate the other novices. Afraid of the violent Anayama, the others were pretending to be asleep.
Anayama’s strong back was turned toward us. He staggered over to the sliding door at the veranda, the muscular calf and ankle of his bad leg twisting grotesquely at each step. The sleeves of the black kimono were pushed tidily to his shoulders, and the skirt was bunched at the hips. There was something cruel and at the same time comical about the powerful figure like a bear emerging from a cave ready to test its strength.
“You’re going too, Anayama? You’re not ready yet?” One of the
accomplices rubbed his smarting eyes.
“Just a minute.” The skirt of his white under-kimono in one hand, Anayama stood bowed toward the paper-panelled door. He was looking at the lower part of his body. “There. Everything’s ready.” He brought his head up sharply and thrust his hips forward with a growl. The door rattled but stayed in its groove.
There was a thud as Anayama brought his weight solidly against the door.
His object was not of course to knock the door over. It was to push a hole through with his erect penis. He stepped to one side, growled, and thrust his hips forward again. I thought but could not be sure that I heard the sound of the passage though the paper and low on my own body I felt at each thrust what Anayama must have felt. The darkness from the veranda looked in through a clean circle in the paper panel.
Feigning sleep, I lay counting. “He’s done it again.” Another growl. “And again. Once more, now. Once more.” Sometimes the growling was muted, not because the drunken breathing interfered, but because he had lost himself in his work. Finally it stopped altogether. I could hear only the hoarse breathing.
For all my sexual yearnings, I had a strong dislike for the smutty. I suppose I had not come to the heart of the matter. I had wrapped fleshly beauty in a coating of romantic love.
At first Anayama’s performance was revolting. But soon it came to seem more than just obscene. A tightness came over the room. The sticky revulsion disappeared, and the tightness assailed me and seemed to push on through me. I could not call it physically unclean. It smelled of flesh, and it was oppressively heavy.
I closed my eyes and saw the hole dark in the shoji. I did not see it as a genital organ. That still had no place in my eroticism, in the feminine Garland of Truth shining before me. But the paper, like white skin, and the hole, meaninglessly black and clean, were there and would not leave. I made no judgment upon them, whether the black stood for defilement or whether it was the focal point of all beauty. The black and the white took on a strangling authority, that was all, and pressed down heavy against my face.