The greatest evil, certainly, lies only in reasonless desire, objectless desire. Why? Love with the object of propagating children, selfishness with the object of distributing profits, passion for a revolution of the working class with the object of attaining communism are virtues in the various ruling societies.
Yuichi did not love a woman, and the woman bore Yuichi a child. At that time he saw the ugliness, not of Yasuko’s will, but of objectless desire in life. The proletariat also, without realizing it, are probably born from desire of this kind. Yuichi’s economic studies had thus brought him to a new concept of desire. He conceived the ambition to make himself over into that desire.
Yuichi’s outlook on life was not, as one would expect in a young man, marked by impatience to resolve matters. When he looked at the contradictions and the uglinesses of society, he had the strange urge to take their place. Confusing his instincts with the objectless desire of life, he wished for the various gifts of the industrialist. If Shun-suke had heard his wishes, he would have averted his eyes at the thought that Yuichi had become captive to common ambition. Ages ago, the beautiful Alcibiades, also accustomed to being loved, had become in the same way a hero of vanity. Yuichi began to think he would take advantage of Kawada’s good offices.
It was summer. Between sleeping and crying, and crying and feeding at the breast, the child of not yet one month was not much to speak of. Her father, however, never tired of watching her monotonous routine. Carried away by curiosity, he tried to open forcibly her tiny, tight-closed fist in order to see the ball of lint she had accumulated there since her birth, for which he was reproved by her mother.
Yuichi’s mother, too, out of the joy of seeing the thing she had hoped and dreamed of, quickly improved in health. Yasuko’s various symptoms which had occasioned anxiety before her delivery left her without a mark. The happiness of the household grouped around Yuichi was almost perfect. *
As early as the day before Yasuko left the hospital, on the day of the seventh-night observance of Keiko’s naming, a ceremonial robe came from Yasuko’s family. Of scarlet gauze crepe, it was embroidered in gold with the wood sorrel of the Minami crest. A yellowish-pink obi and a red brocade purse embroidered with the crest accompanied it. This was the harbinger of gifts. From friends and relatives everywhere came red silks and white silks. Baby sets came. Silver spoons engraved with the crest came. Thanks to these, Keiko would literally be brought up with a silver spoon in her mouth. Kyoto dolls came, in glass cases, along with baby clothes, Imperial palace dolls, baby blankets.
One day, a big deep-red baby carriage was delivered from the department store. Its truly luxurious construction astounded Yuichi’s mother. “Who, now, could have sent this? Why, it’s someone I don’t even know,” she said. Yuichi looked at the name of the sender. It was Yaichiro Kawada.
When Yuichi was called to the back door by his mother and saw it, he was suddenly struck by an unhappy memory. It was very much like the baby carriage in front of which Yasuko had stopped for so long on the fourth floor of her father’s department store. This was the day they went there soon after she had been diagnosed as pregnant.
Because of this gift, he had to sketch for his wife and his mother the background of his association with Yaichiro Kawada, short of matters that would offend them. His mother only had to understand that Kawada was a student of Shunsuke’s; she was satisfied again that her son was the kind of person to be loved by those in high places. And so, at the end of the first week of summer, when an invitation came from Kawada asking Yuichi to his cottage on the Hayama-Isshiki shore, his mother insisted on his going.
“Give him the best wishes of your wife and family, won’t you?” she said, and out of her firm sense of duty entrusted her son with cakes as a gift to his host.
The cottage wasn’t as big as its lawn, which was almost a quarter of an acre. When Yuichi got there at about three o’clock, he was surprised to see that the old man who faced Kawada on the glassed-in veranda was Shunsuke. Yuichi wiped away his perspiration as he smilingly approached the two men on the seabreeze-laden veranda.
In public, Kawada restrained any emotion that might appear excessive. He spoke deliberately, and avoided looking at Yuichi’s face. When Shunsuke joked about the box of cakes and the message Yuichi’s mother had sent, the three men felt easier. Things were as they always had been.
Yuichi noticed a chessboard with kings, queens, minor pieces, and pawns.
Kawada asked if he wanted to play chess. Shunsuke had been learning the game from Kawada. Yuichi declined. With that Kawada suggested going outdoors while the wind was still good. Shunsuke had consented to go along to the Toshi-Abuzuru yacht basin when Yuichi arrived, after which they were to sail in Kawada’s yacht.
Kawada looked youthful in a stylish plain yellow shirt. Even the aged Shunsuke wore a bow tie. Yuichi had taken off his sweat-soaked shirt and changed to a yellow aloha.
They went to the yacht basin. Kawada’s Sea Horse Number 5 boat was named the Hippolyte. Kawada had not mentioned it earlier; the name was, of course, something he wanted to surprise his guests with. Shunsuke and Yuichi were charmed. There was also a boat named the Gomen-nasai, owned by an American, and also the Nomo, meaning “Drink.”
There were many clouds, but the afternoon sun was quite strong. On the Zushi coast across the water, crowds of weekend visitors were visible.
Everywhere there were the signs of summer. The bright concrete slope of the yacht basin continued undeviatingly down into the water. The parts of it that were always in the sea were patchy with slippery moss filled with countless half-petrified shells and tiny air bubbles. Other than a few waves that swayed the masts of numerous anchored boats, ever so delicately spreading the shiny reflections of ripples against the hulls, the sea rolled from afar toward the breakwater, rippling the surface of the tiny harbor.
Yuichi threw everything he was wearing into the yacht and stripped down to his swimming suit. He walked into the water up to his thighs and pushed the Hippolyte out. The mild breeze which he had not felt while he was on land struck him squarely and affectionately in the face as it came across the water.
The yacht went out of the harbor. Kawada, with Yuichi’s help, lowered the heavy, zinc-plated, iron center-board the view of Kamakura shining in the distance as Kawada was a good yachtsman. When he was sailing, however, his facial neuralgia tugged at him more than usual and caused his guests the uneasy feeling that his tight-clenched pipe would fall from his mouth into the sea. The pipe didn’t fall. The boat swung west and headed for Enoshima. At that time, in the western sky, there was a majestic cloudscape. A few rays pierced the clouds, as in an ancient painting. In the eyes of the highly imaginative Shunsuke, alienated from nature, the surface of the deep blue distance was filled with a vision of dead men lying in heaps.
“Yuichi has changed,” Shunsuke said.
Kawada answered: “Not really. I wish it were true. He’s one that I can’t relax with unless I’m with him out here on the sea or some such place. A while ago, during the rainy season, I went to dinner with him at the Imperial Hotel. Afterward we were drinking at the bar when a beautiful boy came in with a foreigner. He and Yuchan were dressed like identical twins. Their neckties, their suits . . . after a while I looked carefully; even their socks were the same. Yuchan and that lovely boy exchanged quick glances, but it was clear they were deeply embarrassed ...
“Oh, Yuchan, the wind has changed! Spread that sheet over there, won’t you? That’s right...
“But there was something even more embarrassing between me and that unknown foreigner. After we had taken one glance at each other, we could no longer remain indifferent to each other. Yuichi’s clothes that day were not to my liking. He had wanted them, though, so I agreed to having them made—suit and neckie in American taste. It seemed sure that Yuichi had gotten together with that beautiful boy and they had arranged to go out together in similar clothes. It was a strange accident, an unfortunate one, that they should have bumped i
nto each other accompanied by their patrons. It was a confession that they were intimate with each other. The beautiful boy was of light complexion, a marvelously turned-out youngster. The purity of his eyes and the charm of his smile gave a strikingly vivacious power to his beauty. I’m a terribly jealous person, as you know, and that whole evening afterward I was in a rotten mood. After all, that foreigner and I had been two-timed right before our eyes!
“Yuchan, it seemed, knew that whatever he said would make him seem more guilty, so he sat there quiet as a stone. At first I was mad and heaped accusations on him, but in the end I had to admit defeat. It’s always I who end up trying to cheer him.
“Always the same developments, always the same results. It sometimes bothers me at work, and when* judgments that should be clear come out cloudy, I worry about how I must seem to others. Do you understand, sir? An industrialist like me, with a large organization, three factories, six thousand stockholders, five thousand employees, capable of producing six thousand trucks alone—if a man like me, able to influence all that activity, were in my private life under the influence of a woman, the world would find it easier to understand. But if they knew that I, such as I am, were influenced by a student of twenty-two or -three, the absurdity of that secret would give people the greatest laugh.
“We aren’t embarrassed about immorality. We are afraid of being laughed at. That the president of an automobile company might be a homosexual is something earlier times might have tolerated, but nowadays it would be as funny as if a millionaire were addicted to shoplifting, or if a great beauty farted. When a man is funny up to a certain point, he may use the ridicule to make people love him. When he is ridiculous beyond that point, however, it is unforgivable for people to laugh at him.
“Do you know, sir, why the third president of the Krupp Steel Works committed suicide before the First World War? A love that turned all values upside down took over his sense of dignity and destroyed the balance by which he had supported himself in society.”
This lengthy complaint coming from the mouth of Kawada had the air of a lecture or instructional discourse, and Shunsuke found it difficult even to chime in with words of assent. But then, whatever breaks there were in this story of ruin were filled by Kawada’s seamanship as the yacht glided through the water.
Yuichi was spending most of his time stretched out on the prow, fixedly scanning the area toward which the boat headed. Though he was clearly aware that the words being spoken were meant for him, he kept his back turned to the middle-aged narrator and his aged listener. The sun’s rays seemed to glisten off the shining skin of his back; still untanned, that marble young skin gave off the odor of summer greenery.
They approached Enoshima, and turned their backs to the view of Kamakura shining in the distance as Kawada swung the Hippolyte south. Although the conversation between the two men was entirely about Yuichi, he took no part in it.
“At any rate, Yuichi has changed,” said Shunsuke.
“I wouldn’t say so. Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know why. But he’s changed. Frighteningly, as I see it.”
“He’s a father now. But he’s still a child. Basically, he hasn’t changed a bit.”
“Let’s not argue; you know Yuichi much better than I do,” said Shunsuke, carefully moving the camel-hair blanket he had brought along so that it shielded his neuralgic knee from the sea breeze. He adroitly changed the subject. “As to what you were saying about the relationship between people’s evil deeds and whether they’re thought ridiculous, I’m very much interested in the subject. At present, we have taken out of education the minute concern with immorality we used to feel had such tremendous importance. The metaphysics of immorality is dead; only the humor of it is left. It has become something funny. Isn’t that right? The disease of ridicule throws the balance of life into confusion; but if only immorality would maintain its dignity, it would not destroy life’s balance. There’s something strange about this logic, isn’t there? Is it not a reflection of the shallowness of modernity, that something lofty now is without power and something ridiculous has savage strength?”
“I don’t particularly care to have immorality looked at as something dignified.”
“You think there are just common, ordinary vices, eh? A ‘golden mean’ of them?” Shunsuke had slipped into his lecture platform tone of many decades earlier. “In ancient Sparta the boys were not punished for the thefts they carried out so deftly as a way of developing the agility demanded on the battlefield. One boy stole a fox, but he bungled and was caught. He hid the fox under his clothing and denied the offense. The fox chewed right into the boy’s middle. Nevertheless, he kept right on protesting and, without a cry of pain, died. You may think that what is great in this story is its demonstration that self-discipline is a greater virtue than theft. It shows that all is redeemed. But that is not so. He died because he was humiliated that through his exposure extraordinary vice was brought down to the level of ordinary crime. The morality of the Spartans had a sense of beauty in it that cannot be excluded from the models of ancient Greece. Subtle evil is more beautiful than coarse goodness, and is therefore moral.
“Ancient morality was simple and strong, and thus magnificence was always on the side of subtlety, and humor always on the side of coarseness. Nowadays, however, morality has been separated from esthetics. Thanks to cheap bourgeois principles, morality has taken sides with mediocrity and with the ‘golden mean.’ Beauty has taken on an exaggerated form, become old-fashioned, and it is either magnificent or a joke. These days it doesn’t matter which; the two have the same meaning. However, as I said before, false modernism and false humanism have propagated the heresy of adorning human defects. Modem art has tended, since Don Quixote, toward the glorification of the ridiculous. Maybe you wouldn’t mind having the homosexual proclivities of an automobile company president like you worshiped as ludicrous. In short, since it is funny, it is beautiful; therefore, if even you with your upbringing aren’t able to resist it, society is even happier. You should be smashed; then you would be a real modern manifestation of one deserving respect.”
“Humanity. Humanity,” Kawada muttered. “That is the only place we can hide, the only basis we have for vindication. Isn’t that perversity itself—this need to drag in all humanity in order to prove that you yourself are human? If humanity is humanity, isn’t it vastly more human to do as people usually do, to seek the help of something outside humanity—God, or physical or scientific truth? Perhaps all the humor lies in the fact that we go about setting ourselves up as human beings and defend our instincts as human. But the men of society who should listen to us are not at all interested in us as human beings.” Shunsuke remarked with a little smile, “I’m very much interested in them.”
“You’re a very special case, sir.”
“Yes; I am, after all, the monkey known as an artist.” There was a great splash near the bow. When they looked they saw that Yuichi, perhaps feeling left out, perhaps sick of the boring dialogue, had dived into the water and swum off. From the glassy troughs between the waves, the sinews of a smooth back and shapely arms appeared, glittering and coruscating.
The swimmer had not plunged in without a purpose. A hundred yards to the right of the yacht appeared Najima, whose strange shape had been visible even in the offing back at Abuzuru. Najima was a low, oblong island formed by a succession of bald rocks that barely protruded from the sea. There were no trees except a single, undergrown, twisted pine. Thus, what made the sight of the uninhabited island even more mysterious was a gigantic torii, towering above the water line at the center of the highest rock and supported, since it was not yet complete, by great ropes stretched from the surrounding terrain.
Under the light filtering dazzlingly through the clouds, the torii and the ropes leading to it soared in a silhouette full of meaning. No workmen were visible; the shrine that should have been grouped with the torii—under construction, probably—was not visible. One could not det
ermine, therefore, which way the torii faced. It stood aloof upon the sea, the figure of objectless adoration. Its form was black, but all around, the sea glittered in the western sun.
Yuichi caught hold of a rock and climbed onto the island. He seemed to be impelled by childish curiosity to advance closer to the torii. He disappeared between two rocks and then climbed another. When he got to the torii, the naked youth, the western sky ablaze at his back, presented the lines of a sculpture in marvelous silhouette. He rested one hand on the torii and, lifting the other hand high, waved to the pair on the yacht.
Kawada brought the Hippolyte as close to Najima as he could without striking some sunken reef, and waited for Yuichi to swim back.
Shunsuke pointed to the form of the young man at the side of the torii and said: “Is that funny?”
“No.”
“What is it?”
“That’s beautiful. It’s frightening, but that can’t be helped.”
“If so, Mr. Kawada, where is the humor?”
Kawada slightly bowed his eternally unbending head and said: “I must rescue myself from the ridiculous.”
When he heard this, Shunsuke laughed. It seemed as if his uncontrollable laughter had crossed the water and reached Yuichi’s ears. The young man ran along the rocks and appeared to be setting out for a point on the shore close to the Hippolyte....
The party sailed as far as the Morito coast, then followed the shoreline back to Abuzuru. Then they proceeded by car to the Kaihin Hotel in Zushi for supper. The hotel there was a small summer resort. Recently it had been released from government requisition. During that period, many of the vessels belonging to the yacht club members had been commandeered for excursions by the Americans at the hotel. This summer the beach in front of it had been thrown open to public use, clearing the air, some hoped, of long-standing grievances.
Forbidden Colors Page 36