It was evening when they arrived at the hotel. In the grass-covered garden five or six tables with chairs were set out. The colorful beach umbrellas attached to the tables were folded like cypress trees. The turnout was still poor. A loudspeaker on an R--- Chewing Gum bill board was blaring a popular song. At intervals it would repeat an announcement about a lost child and cleverly work in a commercial pitch: “We have a lost child! We have a lost child! He is about three years old and has the name Kenji in his sailor cap. Will those looking for this boy please report below the R--Chewing Gum sign?”
When the three men finished eating, twilight had enshrouded the lawn tables. The patrons were suddenly gone; the loudspeaker was silent. All that remained was the sound of waves. Kawada left his seat. Between the old man and Yuichi there fell a silence that had become habitual now.
After a time Shunsuke spoke.
“You’ve changed.” '
“Is that so?”
“You certainly have. It frightens me. I had a hunch it would happen. I had a hunch that sometime the day must come that the person you were would disappear. Because you are radium. You are a radioactive substance. Now that I think about it, I have feared it for a long time. Still, to a certain extent, you are the person you were before. So now, I think, we should part company.”
The word “part” made the youth laugh. “ ‘Part,’ you say? You make it seem as if there was something between us up to now, sir.”
“Surely there has been something. Do you doubt it?”
“I only understand you in the vulgar sense.”
“There! That expression wouldn’t have been used by the old you.”
“In that case, I’d better keep quiet.”
Yuichi was not aware of the long-standing perplexity and the deep deliberation that these casual words of the author expressed. Shunsuke exhaled deeply in the darkness.
There was indeed in Shunsuke Hinoki a profound perplexity about his own creation. This perplexity had its abysses, and it had its vistas. If he were a young man, he would soon have recovered from his perplexity. To him at his age, however, the value of that awakening was doubtful. Is not awakening an even deeper delusion? Where are we going? Why do we wish to wake up? Since humanity is an illusion, is not the supremely wise awakening the erection of well-disciplined, logical, artificial illusions in the midst of this greater, highly complicated, uncontrollable illusion? The will not to awaken, the will not to recover, now maintained Shunsuke’s health.
His love for Yuichi was part of that perplexity. He worried; he suffered. The well-known irony of the formal beauty of his work, the spiritual pain and confusion expended in disciplining his emotions, and yet the irony that only through that disciplining would a final, real confession of the pain and the confusion be attained—all these struggled in him now. By holding fast to the course he had planned at the beginning, he maintained the right and the initiative of confession. If love went so far as to take away his right of confession as the artist saw it, the love he had not confessed would not exist.
Yuichi’s transformation, in Shunsuke’s sharp eyes, had sketched out this dangerous possibility.
“It hurts, but at any rate ...” Shunsuke’s voice, hoarse with age, came from the darkness, “even though it hurts me more than I can express, Yuchan, I think for the time being we’d better not see each other. Up till now you were the one to cavil about whether you would see me. You were the one who would not meet me. Now it is I saying we should not meet. If ever the necessity arises, however, if for some reason it becomes necessary to see me, then I will meet with you gladly. Now, I suppose you don’t think that necessity will arise . ..”
“No.”
“That’s what you think, but..."
Shunsuke’s hand touched Yuichi’s as it lay on the armrest. Though it was midsummer, Shunsuke’s hand was extremely cold.
“At any rate, we won’t meet again until then.”
“All right—if that’s what you wish, sir.”
Fishing torches flickered in the offing. Conscious that they would probably not have the opportunity again for a time, they fell into their familiar, uncomfortable silence.
The yellow of Kawada’s shirt appeared in the darkness, preceded by a boy in white with beer and glasses on a silver tray. Shunsuke tried to seem unconcerned. When Kawada revived the argument that had been going on earlier, Shunsuke responded with the air of a cynic. It seemed as if no one knew where this argument, with all its moot points, would end, but after a time the increasing cold drove the three into the hotel lobby.
That night Kawada and Yuichi planned to stay at the hotel. Kawada urged Shunsuke, too, to stay over in the separate room reserved for him, but he firmly declined. There was no alternative but to have the chauffeur drive Shunsuke back to Tokyo. In the car, the old author’s knee throbbed painfully under the camel-hair blanket. The driver heard him cry out once and stopped the car in surprise. Shunsuke told him not to worry and to drive on. From an inner pocket he withdrew his favorite medicine, the morphine preparation Pavinal, and took some. The drug made him drowsy, but it relieved his spiritual pain. His mind, dwelling on nothing at all, engrossed itself in the meaningless process of counting the road lights. His antiheroic heart recalled the strange story that Napoleon on the march never could keep himself from counting the windows along the road.
Chapter 27 INTERMEZZO
MINORU WATANABE was seventeen. His eyes were gentle in his regular, fair, round face; his smile, complete with dimples, was beautiful. He was a sophomore in a certain new-system high school. One of the great bombings late in the war, on March tenth, had reduced to ashes the downtown grocery store that was his family home. His parents and his younger sister were burned to death. Only Minoru survived. He was brought to the home of relatives in Setagaya. The head of that family was a clerk in the Welfare Ministry, for whom it was not easy to assume the added expense of even the single small mouth of Minoru.
When Minoru was sixteen he secured, in answer to an advertisement, a job in a coffee shop. After school he would go there and cheerfully work the five or six hours until ten o’clock. Before examinations he was permitted to go home at seven. His pay was good; one had to admit that Minoru had found a good job.
Not only that, Minoru’s boss became extremely interested in him. His name was Fukujiro Honda. He was a fortyish, woefully thin, quiet, upright man. His wife had left him five or six years earlier, and he still lived alone on the second floor above the shop. One day he called on Minoru’s uncle in Setagaya and asked if he might adopt Minoru. The uncle did not have to think twice. The adoption proceedings were quickly completed; Minoru’s surname became Honda.
Minoru still helped out in the shop once in a while, but that was only because he found it interesting. He lived his student life as he pleased; once in a while he would go with his foster father to dine, or to the theater, or to the movies. Fukujiro liked the traditional theater, but when he went out with Minoru he patiently watched the noisy comedies or the westerns Minoru loved. He bought Minoru boy’s clothes for winter and summer. He bought him skates. For Minoru, this life as something he had never known; his uncle’s children, when they happened to visit him, envied him.
Meanwhile a change had come about in Minoru’s character.
His smiling face did not change, but a love for solitude developed in him. For instance, when he went to a Pachinko pinball parlor, he preferred to go alone. Occasions when he should have been studying, he would go and stand in front of a Pachinko machine for hours on end. He didn’t associate particularly with his school friends.
His still tender sensibilities were pervaded by unbearable fears and revulsions. Somewhat different from the average boys who faced degradation, he shivered at the visions of his future depravity. He burned with the fixed idea that, no matter what, he would come to no good. At night, when he saw the physiognomists sitting under their dim lights in the shadow of a bank or the like, he was filled with fright. Surely a future of bad luck, cri
me, and evil was visible on his forehead, he thought as he hurried by.
Minoru loved, however, his own clear, smiling face; his future seemed reflected in the pure white line of his teeth when he laughed. His eyes belied his depravity and were even beautiful in their purity. The form that sprang from mirrors at unexpected angles on street corners also showed a fine, boyish neck, neatly barbered. He felt then that he could be at ease so long as his external appearance did not alter, but that respite did not continue for long.
He tried sake, he immersed himself in detective stories, he also learned to smoke. The fragrant smoke coursing luxuriously through his lungs made him feel as if a still unformed, not yet known sense was reaching for expression out of the depths of him. On days when he was distraught by self-revulsion, he prayed that war would start again; he dreamed of the great city wrapped in conflagration. In the midst of that holocaust he felt he might meet his dead parents and sister again.
He loved the momentary excitements and at the same time the hopeless starry nights. He practically wore out a pair of shoes in three months, wandering from neighborhood to neighborhood at night.
He would return from school, eat supper, and change to flashy boyish sport clothes. He would not show his face in the coffee shop until the middle of the evening. His foster father was worried and secretly followed him, but his certainty that the boy went everywhere alone appeased any jealousy he might feel. Out of that relief and the sad knowledge that, separated by years as they were, he was not the person the boy would have fun with, he withheld his complaints and let him do as he pleased.
One day during the summer vacation, when the sky was filled with clouds and it was too cool to go to the beach, Minoru put on a red aloha shirt with a white palm tree design and set out with the pretext of a trip to the house in Setagaya. The red shirt went well with the boy’s fair skin.
He thought he might enjoy the zoo. He got off the subway at Ueno Station and came out under the statue of Saigo-san. At that moment the sun broke from behind clouds. The high granite staircase gleamed.
He lit a cigarette on the way up the stairs. The flame of the match was hardly visible in the bright sunlight. Brimming with the joy of being alone, he almost flew up the rest of the stairs.
Few people were in Ueno Park. He bought a ticket with a colored picture of a sleeping lion and walked through the gate. Minoru paid no heed to the arrows marking the circuit. He let his feet take him wherever they would. In the heat of the odor of the animals seemed as deeply intimate as the smell of his own bedding.
The giraffe cage appeared before him. From the giraffe’s contemplative face, along his neck and toward his back, the shadow of a cloud descended. The sun was hidden. The giraffe brushed away flies with his tail as he moved. He took each step as if it had staggered the imagination of the artisan who put his great skeleton together. Then Minoru saw the polar bear sweltering in the heat, madly plunging into the water and flopping back on his concrete perch, over and over.
He came to a certain path and found a place where he could look out across Shinobazu Pond.
Automobiles glittered by on the road around the edge of the pond. From the clock tower of Tokyo University in the west to the Ginza crossroads toward the south, here and there the uneven horizon reflected the summer sun. A building white as a matchbox shone like quartz. An advertising balloon for an Ueno department store hung languidly in the air, its roundness distorted by gas leakage. It hovered just above the dismal building of the department store itself.
Here was Tokyo. Here was a sentimental view of the metropolis. The myriad streets the youth had so diligently traversed all lay concealed within this panorama. Many nights of wandering were wiped away without a trace in this clear scene. Yet there was not a vestige of freedom from the inexplicable fears that haunted his dreams.
A streetcar that wound around the edge of the pond from the direction of Shichikencho rumbled beneath his feet. Minoru went back again to look at the zoo.
The smell of the animals arose from the distance. The most smelly place was the hippopotamus house. The male hippo, Deca, and the female, Zabu, wallowed in the dirty water with only their snouts showing. To either side of them was the wet floor of the cage. Two rats went in and out of the cage, heading for the grain box when the keeper was away.
The elephant pulled hay a bunch at a time and stuffed it into his mouth. Before he had finished chewing one he would gather the next. Once in a while he would take too much, and then he would lift his pillar of a front leg and crush the rest of the floor.
The penguins looked like so many people at a cocktail party. Each of them looked in whatever direction he pleased, and now and then stuck a wing out away from his body and shook his backside.
The civet cats, two deep on their perch about a foot above a floor littered with the red chicken heads they fed on, gazed languidly in Minoru’s direction.
Minoru found pleasure in seeing the pair of lions; now he thought he might go home. The popsicle he had been sucking was almost gone. Then he realized that there was a small building near him that he had not yet seen. He went nearer and saw it was the small bird pavilion. The window panes, shaped like stylized chameleons, were broken in a few places.
There was no one in the bird pavilion but a man in a snow-white polo shirt, who had his back to Minoru.
Minoru chewed a slice of gum and looked at a bird whose white bill was bigger than its head. The interior of the building, less than forty yards square, resounded with strange, raucous cries, like the jungle birds in a Tarzan movie, Minoru thought. He looked about to see what bird owned it, and saw it was a parrot. Parrots and parakeets outnumbered the other birds in the small pavilion. The coloring of the wings of the red diamond parakeets was particularly beautiful. The white parrots had all turned their heads and with one wing around the feeding box were hammering away with their hard bills as if they were indeed hammers.
Minoru walked in front of the mynah bird cage. This bird, black of wing, only his face yellow, held his perch with dirty yellow legs. He opened his red bill and, as Minoru wondered what sound he would utter, said, “Hello!”
Minoru answered with a smile. The youth in the white polo shirt near him smiled too and turned in Minoru’s direction. Since Minoru’s head came to about the youth’s eyebrows, the youth had to look downward slightly. Their eyes met and held. Each was surprised by the beauty of the other. The movement of Minoru’s gum-chewing ceased.
“Hello,” the mynah bird said again. “Hello,” the youth said, mimicking. Minoru laughed.
The stranger withdrew his gaze from the cage and lit a cigarette. Not to be outdone, Minoru took a crumpled package of foreign cigarettes from his pocket, hurriedly spat out his chewing gum, and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. The youth lit a match and offered a light.
“Do you smoke, too?” the youth asked, surprised.
“Yeah. We’re not allowed to at school, though.”
“What school?”
“N-Academy.”
“And I—” The youth named a famous private university. “May I ask your name?”
“Minoru.”
“My first name will be enough, too: Yuichi.” The two left the bird pavilion and started walking.
“Your red aloha looks nice,” Yuichi said. Minoru flushed.
They talked of many things. Minoru was charmed by Yuichi’s youth, his artless conversation, and his beauty. He conducted Yuichi to the animal cages that he had seen and Yuichi had not. In about ten minutes they had become like brothers.
This man is one of them, thought Minoru. But just the same how nice it is that so pretty a man should be one of them. I like this man’s voice, his laughter, the movement of his body, his whole body, his smell, everything. I hope we can sleep together soon. With this man I would do anything, let him do anything. I think he’d like what I have for him. He put his hand in his pocket and deftly changed the position of something that was suddenly causing him pain. He felt better. He found a stick of che
wing gum in his pocket, took it out, and popped it in his mouth.
“Have you seen the martens? Haven’t you seen them yet?”
“Minoru took Yuichi by the hand and led him toward the foul-smelling cages. They kept their hands linked together.
In front of the cage of the Tsushima marten hung a placard explaining, among other things, the habits of the animal: “Early in the morning or at night he is active in the camellia groves sucking the nectar of the blossoms.” There were three of the little yellow animals. One of them stuck the comb of one of the red chicken heads in his mouth and looked warily at the visitors. The eyes of those watching met the eyes of the animal. The eyes outside were certainly looking at a marten, but it was not necessarily true that the marten was looking at human beings. Yuichi and Minoru, however, felt that they loved the eyes of a marten more than they loved human eyes.
The backs of their necks became very warm—the sun was already descending, but its rays were still fierce. Minoru looked behind him. There was nobody around. Thirty minutes after they had met, they kissed lightly and naturally. Now I am very happy, Minoru thought. This boy had been taught nothing but sexual happiness. The world was splendid; there was no one there—only dead silence.
The roar of the lion shook the air. Yuichi lifted his eyes and said: “Oh! We’re in for a shower.”
They noticed the gathering clouds. The sun was soon obscured. When they got to the subway station, the first drops were striking the pavement. They got into the train. “Where are you going?” said Minoru, uneasily, as if he were being left behind. They got off at the station by the shrine. From there they went by streetcar along a different road, which incidentally showed no trace of rain, to the inn in Takagicho where Yuichi had been taken some time ago by the student from his college.
Possessed by the sensual memories of that occasion, Minoru manufactured excuses that kept his foster father at a distance. Fukujiro had no way that he could fill this boy with visions.
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