She decided that before some catastrophe occurred in the household she must act as peacemaker. She therefore gently instructed the bride not to let them hear at home about Yuichi’s philandering and attempted simply to skirt the subject with her son.
“Now if there’s anything bothering you that you can’t tell anybody about, any sexual problem, please tell me and we’ll see. It’s all right; I won’t tell Yasuko. I foresee that if we keep on as we are something terrible is going to happen.”
These words, spoken before the news of Yasuko’s pregnancy, made his mother look like a sorceress in Yuichi’s eyes. Every household is surely pregnant with some misfortune. The fair wind that propels the sailing ship along the sea lanes is basically the same as the terrible gale that leads it to destruction. The home and the family are propelled by neutralized misfortune as by a favorable wind. In the comer of so many famous family portraits, the hand of misfortune is sharply outlined, like a signature.
In this way my family perhaps enters the class of healthy families, Yuichi thought, when he was in an optimistic mood.
As usual, the management of the Minami fortunes was placed in the hands of Yuichi. His mother, who never in her wildest dreams suspected that Shunsuke had presented them with 500,000 yen, was continually ashamed of the marriage portion given by the Segawa family. How could she know that not a sen of their own 350,000 yen had been touched! Oddly enough, Yuichi had a good head for business. He had a high school friend who worked in a bank. The 200,000 yen of Shunsuke’s money that Yuichi invested with him for under-the-table loans was bringing in 12,000 yen a month interest. At present there was nothing dangerous about investments of this kind.
A school friend of Yasuko’s had become a mother at a young age the year before, but she lost the child, Yasuko was informed, because of polio. Yuichi’s joy when he heard about this made Yasuko’s steps heavy when she went to pay her condolences. She felt that the beautiful but 138 dark eyes of her husband had a hint of raillery in them, as if to say, “See! See!”
How often another’s misfortune is our good fortune! The alterations from time to time and moment to moment in ardent love show this formula in its purest form, yet even so in Yasuko’s passionate head there was the suspicion that nothing consoled her husband so much as misfortune. Yuichi’s thinking about fortune was quite unsystematic. He did not believe in what is called lasting happiness; in his heart, it seemed, he secretly feared it. When he saw something supposed to be lasting, terror gripped him.
One day they went shopping in Yasuko’s father’s department store, and Yasuko stopped for a fairly long time at the baby-carriage section on the fourth floor. Bored, Yuichi prodded his wife by applying a slightly urgent pressure to her arm, which she obstinately disregarded. He pretended not to see the look of anger that Yasuko flashed at him. In the bus on the way home she cooed incessantly at the infant who leaned toward her affectionately from the next seat. There was nothing pretty about this poor, dirty, slobbering child.
“Children are cute, aren’t they?” Yasuko said to Yuichi, inclining her head coquettishly closer to him as the mother got off.
“What’s the rush? It won’t be born until summer.”
Yasuko fell silent again. Tears hung in her eyes. Any husband, even one quite unlike Yuichi, would have found it natural to tease her about this early manifestation of mother love. Surely this way of showing her feeling was devoid of naturalness. Not only that, there was a certain boastfulness in it, with, in fact, a note of reproach in the boastfulness.
One evening she was seized by a terrible headache and took to her bed; Yuichi stayed home with her. She felt nauseous and her heart was palpitating. While they waited for the doctor, Kiyo applied cold compresses to cool the patient’s abdomen. Yuichi’s mother came in to calm her son, saying, “Don’t worry. When I was carrying you, my morning sickness was awful* Maybe I just like odd things, but when we opened a bottle of wine, I suddenly wanted to eat the cork. It seemed like a mushroom.”
It was nearly ten o’clock when the doctor finished his rounds and Yuichi was left alone with Yasuko in the sickroom. The blood reviving in her pallid cheeks made her look fresher than usual, and her white forearms, extended languidly from the quilt, were charming in the shadowy lamplight.
“It’s hard, but when I realize that I’m suffering for our child, it’s nothing,” she said, lifting her hand to Yuichi’s forehead and playing with a lock of hair. Yuichi let her do it. A cruel tenderness was born unexpectedly in him, and his lips were suddenly held against Yasuko’s still-feverish lips. In a tone that would make any woman confess whether she wished to or not, he asked: “You really want this child, don’t you? Yet, admit it; it’s a little early for maternal affection. If there’s something you want to tell me, go ahead.”
Yasuko’s tired, pain-filled eyes overflowed with tears as if they had been waiting long for this opportunity. Nothing moves a man like a woman’s self-indulgent tears, accompanied by certain sentimentally evoked confessions: “If we have a baby—” Yasuko said, hesitantly at first, “if we have a baby, I don’t think you’ll leave me.”
It was at this time that Yuichi arrived at the idea of an abortion.
The public stared in wonder at the rejuvenation of Shunsuke and the return of his old dandyish habits of dress. At heart the works of Shunsuke’s old age had a freshness about them. But it was not the freshness appearing in the evening years of an outstanding artist, but an overripe freshness as of something malignant that keeps growing and never matures. In the strict sense of the word, he could not be rejuvenated. If he were it would be the death of him. He possessed absolutely no powers related to life, and his total lack of esthetic sense was perhaps the reason for his habit of dress. Harmony between the esthetics of artistic creation and taste in daily life is commonly called for in our country. This nonsense to which Shunsuke had lent himself made the public, unaware of the influence of the morals of Rudon’s, just a little suspicious of the old man’s sanity.
Moreover, in Shunsuke’s life a nameless, evanescent aura had come into being. From his speech and conduct that had formerly been far from humorous, a false lightness— to be exact, a lightheadedness—seemed to show itself. The self-induced pains of rejuvenation were greeted with joy by his readers. His works were in steady demand. Word about the strange novelty of his psychological condition spurred the sales. Not even the keenest critic, or even the friend most blessed with insight, was able to discern the real cause of Shunsuke’s transformation. The cause was simple. Shunsuke had come into possession of an idea.
On that summer day when he saw the youth appear in the foam on the beach, for the first time in his life an idea had come to dwell in his mind. To cure diseases of life he would impart the steely health of death. This was what, in artistic productions, Shunsuke had always dreamed of as the ideal manifestation.
In artistic works, there is a twofold possibility of existence, he believed. Just as an ancient lotus seed will flower again when dug up and replanted, the work of art that is said to possess everlasting life can live again in the hearts of all times, all countries. When one touches an ancient work—of space art, or time art—his life is captured by the space or the time of the work and abandons the rest of its existence. He lives another life. However, the internal time which he expends in this other life has already been measured, already settled upon. That is what we call form.
It is, however, usual that form is lacking in human experience and in influence on human life. To clothe formless experience with form and offer, as it were, human life in a ready-made suit of clothes is what the work of art attempts to do, the naturalistic school believes. Shunsuke did not agree. Form was the inborn destiny of art. One had to believe that the human experience within a work and real-life human experience are different in dimension, depending on whether form is present or not. Within real-life human experience, however, there is something that is very close to what is experienced in a work. What is it? It is the impression accorded
by death. We cannot experience death, but we sometimes experience the impression of it. We experience the idea of death in a death in the family, in the death of a loved one. In sum, death is the unique form of life.
Doesn’t the drive of the book that makes us so strongly conscious of life impel us because it is the drive of death? Shunsuke’s Eastern vision sometimes leaned toward death. In the Orient, death is many times more vivid than life.
The artistic work, as Shunsuke saw it, was a kind of refined death. It had a peculiar power to permit life to touch and experience death in advance.
Internal existence is life; objective existence is nothing but death or nothingness. These two forms of existence bring the work of art terribly close to natural beauty. He was convinced that a work of art, like nature, absolutely must not have soul. Much less thought! Through lack of soul, soul is verified; through the absence of thought, thought is verified; through the lack of life, life is verified. This indeed is the paradoxical mission of the work of art. In turn it is the mission-making characteristic of beauty.
Therefore is not creativity nothing more than the imitation of the creative powers of nature? For this question Shunsuke had a bitter reply in readiness.
Nature is a living thing; it is not a created thing. Creativity is that action that exists in order to make nature doubt its own birth. For creativity is, in the final analysis, a method of nature. That was his answer.
“That’s right. Shunsuke was method personified. What Shunsuke asked of Yuichi was that he be permitted to take the beautiful young man’s natural youth and make it into a work of art; to take the various weaknesses of youth and to make them something stronger, like death; to take the various powers by which he influenced his environment and make them into destructive powers like the power of nature—inorganic powers, devoid of anything human.
Yuichi’s existence, like a work in process of creation, never left the thoughts of the writer. It had got so that a day that went by when he didn’t hear that clear, youthful voice, if only over the phone, was an unhappy, cloudy day. Yuichi’s voice, filled with clarity and golden grace, was like a brilliant ray filtering through the clouds. It poured into the desolate soil of his genius. It brightened the configurations of those stones, that overgrown vegetation. It made it a slightly less unbearable place to reside in.
Using Rudon’s as a means of getting in touch with Yuichi from time to time, Shunsuke pretended, as at first, to be one of the denizens of that street. He became conversant in the patois; he learned all the subtleties of the wink. A small unexpected romance pleased him. One melancholy-featured young man confessed to being in love with him.
His twisted tendency among twisted tendencies led him to feel affection only for men who were sixty or older.
Shunsuke got into the habit of appearing with young homosexuals in various teahouses and Western restaurants here and there. He became aware of the subtle shift in years from adolescence to maturity, with momentary changes in color like the evening sky. Maturity was the sunset of beauty. From eighteen to twenty-five years the beauty of him who is loved subtly alters its form. The first glow of sunset, when every cloud in the sky takes on the color of sweet fresh fruit, symbolizes the color of the cheeks of the boy between eighteen and twenty, the soft nape of his neck, the fresh blueness of his shaved collar line and his lips like a girl’s. When the sunset glow reaches its peak and the clouds blaze many-colored and the sky goes mad with an expression of joy, one thinks of the blossom time of youth, from twenty to twenty-three. Then his look is somewhat fierce, his cheeks are taut, his mouth is gradually making plain the will of the man. At the same time, in the color still glowing shyly in his cheek, and in the soft streamlining of his brows, traces of the evanescent moment of a boy’s beauty can be seen. Finally, the time when the burnt-out clouds take on a grave complexion and the setting sun tosses its remaining beams like hair is comparable to age twenty-four or twenty-five when, though his eyes are replete with pure gleams, in his cheeks are seen a beauty transcending the severity of its stern masculine will.
It must be said in all honesty that Shunsuke, while noting the various charms of the boys who consorted with him, was not sexually excited by any of them. He wondered if Yuichi, surrounded by women whom he did not love, might feel this way too. Whenever he thought of Yuichi alone, the old man’s heart palpitated somewhat, although without sexual overtones. When Yuichi was not there, he would bring up his name, whereupon memories of joy and sadness flitted across the eyes of the boys. When he asked about it he found that Yuichi had had relations with each of them but had broken with them after two or three encounters.
A telephone call came from Yuichi. He asked if he might visit the next day. Thanks to that call, Shunsuke’s first neuralgia attack of the winter, which was troubling him at the time, was relieved.
The next day was a mild Indian summer day, and Shunsuke found a sunny spot on the veranda off the living room and read a little while out of Childe Harold. Byron always amused him. While he was thus occupied, four or five callers came by. Then the maidservant announced Yuichi’s arrival. With a sour look like that of an attorney taking up an unpleasant case, Shunsuke apologized to his guests. Not one of them went so far as to imagine that the new “very important” guest being conducted to the second-floor study was still a mere student, not even singled out for his brains.
In the study there was a sofa that served also as a window seat, with five cushions painted in Ryukyu style in a continuous pattern. On the knickknack shelves lining the three sides of the bay window, a collection of old ceramics was haphazardly assembled. In one compartment stood a truly beautiful totem doll of ancient craftsmanship. The collection had no visible order or discipline, being made up altogether of gifts.
Yuichi sat in the bay window wearing the new suit given him by Mrs. Kaburagi, and the early winter sun coming through the windows like steaming water made the black-lacquered waves of his hair glisten. He saw no seasonal flowers in the room—not a sign of life anywhere. There was only a black marble mantel clock gloomily keeping time. Yuichi reached for the old leather-bound foreign book on the table at hand. It was a volume of Pater’s Miscellaneous Studies, published by Macmillan. Here and there in the “Apollo of Picardy” were Shunsuke’s underlinings. Beside it were the two volumes of the Ojoyoshu—the Texts on Death—and an oversize edition of Aubrey Beardsley prints.
When Shunsuke looked at Yuichi standing to greet him in front of the bay window, he almost shuddered. He felt that his heart was undoubtedly in love with this beautiful youth. Might his performances at Rudon’s have deceived him (just as Yuichi’s acting led him at times to feel he was in love with a woman) and forced him into some improbable delusion?
Somewhat dazzled, he blinked. There was something abrupt about what he then imparted to Yuichi, as he sank down beside him. He said that his neuralgia had been bothering him, but perhaps because of the change in the weather it caused no pain today. It was as if he had a barometer hanging at his right knee. He could tell in the morning whether it was going to snow.
Yuichi found it difficult to continue the conversation, so Shunsuke complimented him on his suit. When he heard who had given it to him, he said, “Well, that woman blackmailed me for three hundred thousand yen. If you got her to give you a suit, my books are coming remarkably into balance. Next time, give her a kiss for good measure.”
This remark, coming from Shunsuke’s habit of never missing an opportunity to spit upon mankind, was always good medicine for Yuichi, who for a long time had feared mankind.
“Now, what was your business?”
“It’s about Yasuko.”
“Yes, you told me she’s pregnant.”
“Yes, and—” The youth hesitated. “I wanted to get your advice.”
“And you want an abortion, don’t you?” This straightforward question made Yuichi’s eyes open wide. “But why, after all? I spoke to a psychiatrist who told me that tendencies like yours are not felt to be hereditary. Yo
u have nothing to fear on that score.”
Yuichi was silent. He hadn’t even told himself his real reasons for considering an abortion. If his wife really wanted a child, perhaps he would not have hit upon this stratagem. There was no doubt that his present motivation was the fear that she wanted something more. From this fear Yuichi wished to free himself. To accomplish that, he must first free his wife. Pregnancy and maternity were binding. They denied liberation. The youth said, half in anger: “That’s not so; that’s not the reason.”
“Then why?” Shunsuke’s question was calm, as if spoken by a physician.
“For Yasuko’s happiness, I felt that was the best.”
“What are you saying?” The old man threw his head back and laughed. “For Yasuko’s happiness? For a woman’s happiness? You, who do not love women, take into account a woman’s happiness?”
“That’s the reason. That’s why we must have an abortion ... if we do, the bond between us will be gone. If Yasuko wants a divorce, she’ll always be able to divorce me. That will bring her happiness in the end.”
“Is your feeling based on human kindness? On benevolence? Or on egoism? On weakness of will? I’m amazed. I never thought I’d hear such trite sentiments from you.” The old man was ugly in his anger. His hands trembled more violently than usual. He rubbed his palms together uneasily. As he did so, they made a dry, gritty sound. He nervously riffled through the pages of the Texts on Death, which he had been holding all the time, and closed the volume.
“You’ve forgotten what I said. This is what I told you. You must think of a woman as inanimate matter. Never acknowledge that a woman has a soul. That’s what made me lose out. I refuse to believe you’re going to make the same mistake I made. You, who do not love women! You should have been ready for that when you got married. A woman’s happiness? Nonsense! You feel sorry for her? Nonsense! How can you feel sorry for a bundle of sticks? By looking at her as a bundle of sticks you managed to get married, didn’t you? Listen to me, Yuchan—”
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