The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

by Yukio Mishima

  Kashiwagi had not been lying when he told me about the excursion. He duly appeared at the wicket in the station flanked by two young girls. One of them was, indeed, the girl that We had seen. A beautiful girl, with a cool, high-bridged nose and a loose mouth; she carried a water flask over the shoulder of her dress, which, as I could see, was made of imported material. Next to her, the plump girl from the lodging-house was inferior both in dress and in appearance. Only her little chin and her lips, which looked as if they were buttoned up, had an attractive girlish quality about them.

  The holiday mood, which should have been a pleasant one, had already begun to break down on the train. I could not hear clearly what Kashiwagi and his young lady were saying to each other, but they were quarreling the entire time. Now and then she would bite her lips as if to repress the tears. The girl from the lodging-house seemed utterly indifferent to everything and sat there softly humming some popular tunc. Then suddenly she turned to me and told me the following story: "There's a very pretty woman living near us who teaches flower arrangement. The other day she told me a really sad tale. She had a boy friend during the war. He was an officer in the army and finally the time came for him to go overseas. They only had time for a short farewell meeting at the Nanzen Temple. Their parents didn't recognize their relationship, but this had not stopped them and, shortly before, the girl had become pregnant. She had a still-born child, poor thing! l he officer was terribly upset about this. When he saw her on their final day, he said that if they could not have their child, at least he would like to drink the milk from her breast. They didn't have time to go anywhere else, so then and there she squeezed the milk out of her breast into a cup of tea and gave it to him to drink. About a month later, the man was killed in the war. Ever since then, she's been living by herself and hasn't had a single love-affair. She's really an attractive woman and still quite young.”

  I could hardly believe my ears. That unbelievable scene which I had witnessed with Tsurukawa towards the end of the war from the top of the gate of the Nanzen Temple sprang up in my mind. I made a point of not mentioning my memories to the girl. For I felt that if I were to tell her about them, the emotion that I had experienced now on hearing her story would betray that sense of mystery which had overcome me on that day in the temple. By not telling her, it seemed as if her story, far from solving the riddle of that mystery, would in fact reinforce the mystery and make it still deeper.

  The train was passing near the great bamboo grove by the Narutaki Pond. Since it was May, the leaves of the bamboos were turning yellowish. The wind rustled through the branches, blowing the dry leaves down onto the thickly strewn surface of the grove; but the lower parts of the bamboos seemed to have no connection with all this, and stood there sunk quietly into themselves, with their great joints promiscuously entwined. Only when the train rushed past, the nearby bamboos made a great show of bending and snaking. One shiny young bamboo stood out among them all. The painful manner in which it bent gave me the impression of some strange, bewitching movement; I caught it with my eyes, then it moved away into the distance and disappeared.

  When we reached Arashiyama, we walked towards the Togetsu Bridge and came to the grave of Lady Kogo, which none of us had ever noticed before. Many hundreds of years in the past, this lady had hidden herself in Sagano for fear of incurring the displeasure of Taira no Kiyomori. Minamoto no Nakakuni had set out to seareh for her on the orders of the Emperor, and had discovered her hiaing-place from the faint sound of the harp that he had heard on a moonlit autumn night. The tune that she was playing had been "Loving Thoughts of A Husband." In the No play Kogo it was written: ‘‘When he emerged into the night, filled with yearning for the moonlight, he came to Horin and here it was that he heard the harp. He knew not whether it was the storm breaking over the mountaintops or the wind whistling through the pines. When he enquired what tune it might be that this lady was playing, he was told that it was ‘Loving Thoughts of A Husband.' And he rejoiced greatly; for this betokened that the player was thinking lovingly of her husband.” The Lady Kogo had spent the last part of her life in Sagano, praying for the future salvation of Emperor Takakura.

  The grave, which was at the end of a narrow path, was merely a small stone pillar planted between a huge maple and a withered old plum tree. Kashiwagi and I recited a sutra in pious memory of the dead lady. There was something extremely blasphemous about the solemn way in which Kashiwagi spoke the sacred words. His manner infected me, and soon I was reciting the sutra in the same high-spirited way in which students hum tunes through their noses. This bit of desecration served to release my spirits to an extraordinary degree and made me feel quite lively.

  "There's something very shabby about a noble grave like this, isn't there?” said Kashiwagi. "Political power and the power of wealth result in splendid graves. Really impressive graves, you know. Such creatures never had any imagination while they lived, and quite naturally their graves don't leave any room for imagination either. But noble people live only on the imaginations of themselves and others, and so they leave graves like this one which inevitably stir one's imagination. And this I find even more wretched. Such people, you sec, are obliged even after they are dead to continue begging people to use their power of imagination."

  "You mean that nobility only exists in the power of imagination?" I said, merrily joining in the conversation. “You often speak of reality. What do you consider to be the reality of nobility?"

  "It's this!" said Kashiwagi, slapping the top of the moss-covered pillar. "It's stone or bone-the inorganic residue that people leave after they are dead."

  "You're damned Buddhist in your views, aren't you?” I said.

  "What's it got to do with Buddhism or any stuff like that?” said Kashiwagi. "Nobility, culture, what people consider aesthetic—the reality of all those things is barren and inorganic. It isn't the Ryuan Temple that you see, but simply a pile of stones. Philosophy, art—it's all a lot of stones. The only really organic concern that people have is politics. It's a shame, isn't it? One can almost say that human beings are no more than self-defiling creatures.”

  "What about sexual desire? Where does that fit in?

  "Sexual desire? Well, that's halfway between. It's a matter of going round and round in a vicious circle from human beings to stone and back to human beings, like a game of blind man's buff."

  I instantly wanted to add something to refute the beauty in his thoughts, but the two girls had become tired of our discussion and had started back along the narrow path. We turned around and followed them. One could see the Hozu River from the path. We were exactly by the dam north of the Togetsu Bridge. The Ranzan hills on the opposite bank were heavy with gloomy green, but at just that point a vivid white streak of foam stretched across the river and the air was full of the water's roar.

  We walked along the river until we reached the Kameyama Park at the end of the road. There was a good number of boats on the river, but when we entered the park gate, we found that the only thing scattered about was wastepaper: it was clear that there were very few visitors that day.

  At the gate we turned back and looked once more at the Hozu River and at the green foliage of Arashiyama. One could see a small waterfall on the other side of the river.

  "Beautiful scenery is hell, isn't it?" said Kashiwagi.

  I felt that when Kashiwagi spoke like this, he was talking at random. Yet I tried to look at that scenery with Kashiwagi's eyes and to recognize that it was, as he said, hell. My effort was not in vain. For now I could see that hell was indeed quivering in that quiet, casual scene that lay before me, wrapped in its fresh foliage. It seemed that hell could appear day or night, at any time, at any place, simply in response to one's thoughts or wishes. It seemed that we could summon it tit our pleasure and that instantly it would appear.

  The cherry trees in Arashiyama, which were said to have been transplanted in the thirteenth century from the famous trees on Mount Yoshino, had entirely lost their blossoms
and were already putting forth their foliage. When the cherry-blossom season was finished, these trees could only be called by the name that one gives dead beauties.

  In Kamayama Park most of the trees were pines, and here the colors did not change with the seasons. It was a large, hilly park. The trees were all tall and they had no leaves until fairly high up. There was something disquieting about the sight of this park with all its countless, naked tree trunks crossing each other irregularly. A wide path led round the park; it was full of uneven slopes, and when one thought that it was going to rise, it would instead go down. Here and there I noticed tree stumps, shrubs, and little pines. Near where the great white rocks emerged from the ground in which they were half buried, the azaleas blossomed with a profusion of purple. Under the cloudy sky their color looked as if it harbored some evil design. We climbed up a small hill and sat down to rest under an umbrella-shaped arbor. Below us on an incline was a swing, on which a young couple was seated. From where We were, we could see the entire park spread out to the east, and in the west we could look down through the trees onto the waters of the Hozu River. The constant creaking of the swing reached us in the arbor like the grinding of teeth.

  Kashiwagi's young lady opened the package that she was carrying. He had been right in saying that we did not need to go and have lunch. For the package contained enough sandwiches for four people, as well as imported biscuits, which were still so hard to obtain, and even a bottle of Suntory whisky, which at that time could only be bought on the black market, since the supply was all officially allotted to the Occupation forces. Kyoto was supposed to be the center of black-market activities in the Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe area.

  I had great difficulty in drinking spirits, but when the girl offered Kashiwagi and me our little glasses, I joined my hands reverently and accepted mine. The two girls drank tea from a canteen. I was still rather dubious about how Kashi-wagi and his companion had come to be on such close terms. I could not understand why this girl, who looked so hard to please, should have become friendly with a penniless, clubfooted student like Kashiwagi. After he had drunk a few glasses of whisky, he started to speak, as if in answer to the question that was in my mind.

  "You remember that we were quarreling earlier in the train, don't you?” he said. "It's because this girl's family is insisting that she get married to a man whom she doesn't like at all; It looked as if she was going to be weak-minded about the matter and give in to them at any moment. So I've been consoling her and threatening her and telling her that I'd go all out to stop this marriage.”

  This was hardly something that he should have said in front of the girl herself, but Kashiwagi spoke quite nonchalantly, as though she were not there at all. The girl did not change her expression in the slightest. She was wearing a necklace of blue porcelain beads round her lithe neck. Her features stood out almost too distinctly against the cloudy sky, but they were softened by her abundant black hair. Her eyes were set very deep and they alone gave one a fresh, naked impression. As usual, her loose mouth was slightly open. In the narrow space between her lips, her thin, sharp teeth looked fresh and dry and white. They were like the teeth of a little animal.

  "Oh, it hurts, it hurts!" cried Kashiwagi all of a sudden, bending his body and grasping his legs. I rushed over excitedly and tried to help him, but he pushed me away and at the same time gave me a curious derisive grin. I withdrew my hand.

  "Ouch, it hurts!" he groaned in an utterly convincing tone. At that moment i happened to glance at the young lady beside me. A remarkable change had come over her face. Her eyes had lost their composure, and her mouth was quivering impetuously. Only her cool, high-bridged nose seemed to be unmoved by what was happening and provided a curious contrast with the rest of her features; the harmony and balancc of her face had been completely destroyed.

  “Oh, I'm sorry!” she said, "I'm so sorry! I'll make you better, though. I'll make you better at once." This was the first time that I had heard her speak in this shameless, high-pitched voice, as though she were alone with the man. She raised her long, graceful neck and looked vaguely about for a moment. Then she knelt down at once on the stone in the arbor and embraced Kashiwagi's legs. She put her cheek against his feet and finally began to kiss them.

  I was horror-struck, as I had been once before. I turned to the girl from the lodging-house. She was looking in a different direction and was humming a tune to herself.

  It seemed at that moment as if the sun had broken through the clouds, but it may have been a mere illusion on my part. Yet the entire composition of the park had lost its harmony. I felt that tiny cracks had begun to open up over all the surface of the picture in which we were contained-that pellucid picture which included the pine forest, the shining reflection of the river, the hills in the distance, the white surface of the rocks, the azaleas scattered here and there.

  Evidently the expected miracle had occurred and Kashiwagi gradually stopped groaning. He raised his head, and as he raised it, he once more cast a derisive grin in my direction.

  "I'm all right now," he said. "You've cured me. Strange, isn't it? When it starts hurting and you do that to me, the pain invariably stops."

  He took the girl's hair in both hands and lifted up her face. She looked up at him with the expression of a faithful dog and smiled. At that moment the white clouded light made this beautiful girl's face look exactly like the face of that old woman in her sixties about whom Kashiwagi had once told me.

  Having accomplished his miracle, Kashiwagi was in high spirits. He was in such high spirits, indeed, as to be almost demented. He laughed loudly, lifted the girl onto his knees and began kissing her. His laughter echoed in the branches of the pine trees at the bottom of the hill.

  "Why don't you make love to that girl?” he said to me as I sat there quietly. “I brought her along especially for you, you know. Or are you shy because you think she'll laugh at you if you stutter? Go ahead-stutter, stutter! For all you know, she may fall in love with a stutterer."

  “Do you stutter?” said the girl to me, as though this was the first time that she had realized it. “Well, well, almost all the deformities are represented today!"

  Her words struck me violently and made me feel that I could no longer stay where I was. But, strangely enough, the hatred that I felt for the girl was transformed into a sudden desire for her and I was overcome with a sort of dizziness.

  “Why don't We split up?” said Kashiwagi, looking down at the young couple, who were still sitting on the swing. "We'll each take our partners to some secluded place and we'll meet here again in two hours"

  I left Kashiwagi and his companion and, accompanied by the girl from the lodging-house, went down the hill and then walked up a gentle slope to the east.

  "He's gone and made that girl think she's a saint. It's his usual trick."

  “How do you know?" I said, stuttering badly.

  "Well, I've had an affair with Kashiwagi myself, you see."

  "It's finished between you two now, isn't it?” I said. "And yet you can take it all so lightly.”

  "Yes, I take it lightly, all right. With a deformed fellow like that, it can't be helped.”

  This time her words, instead of angering me, filled me with courage and my question emerged smoothly: "You loved his deformed feet, didn't you?"

  “Stop it!!" she said. “I don't want to talk about those frog-feet of his. But I do think he has lovely eyes"

  At this, I once more lost my self-confidence. Whatever Kashiwagi might believe, this girl loved some good point of his that he himself had not noticed; and, as I now realized, my own arrogant conviction that there was nothing about myself of which I was not aware resulted from my having singled myself out as the one person who could have no such good points whatsoever.

  When We reached the top of the slope, we came to a small, peaceful field. In the distance through the pines and the cedars one could vaguely make out Daimonjiyama, Nyoigatake, and other mountains. A bamboo thicket stretched from the h
ill where We were and down the slope which led to the town. At the edge of the thicket stood a single late-blossoming cherry tree which had still not shed its blossoms. These were indeed late blossoms, and I wondered whether it wasn't because they had kept on stuttering when they first opened up that they were thus delayed.

  I had an oppressive feeling in my chest and my stomach was heavy. But it was not because of what I had drunk. Now that the crucial moment was approaching, my desire increased in weight, become an abstract structure separated from my own body and descended onto my shoulders. It felt like a heavy, black piece of iron machinery.

  As I have already mentioned many times, I appreciated the fact that Kashiwagi, whether out of kindness or out of malice, had urged me on toward life. I had already long since recognized that I, who in my middle-school days had deliberately scratched the scabbard of my schoolmate's sword, was not qualified to enter life through its bright surface. It was Kashiwagi who had first taught me the dark by-way along which I could reach life from the back. At first sight this appeared to be a method that could only lead to destruction; yet it was replete with unexpected strategems, it transformed baseness into courage, it could even be called a sort of alchemy that restored what is known as immorality to its original state of pure energy. And this indeed was life of a kind. It was a life that advanced, that captured, that changed, that could be lost. It would hardly be called typical life, yet it was endowed with all the functions of life. Assuming that in some invisible place we are confronted with the premise that every form of life is meaningless, then this life that Kashiwagi had shown me must increasingly assume a value equivalent to the more commonplace types of life.