Temple Of Dawn

by Yukio Mishima

  When lovers met in the woods the man would usually press the woman back against a tree and begin to caress her. Seldom was the reverse true. And so when a young couple was thus involved the little man would take up his position on the opposite side of the trunk.

  In the darkness not far from where Honda happened to be, he could see the cane’s U-shaped ivory handle gradually edging around the tree trunk. He peered into the darkness, watching the floating white shape. When he discovered that the handle was ivory, he knew at once to whom it belonged. The woman’s arms encircled the man’s neck, while his arms met behind her back. The oily hair on the back of the man’s head glistened in the beams of the passing headlights. The white handle roamed for a while in the darkness, and then as though having determined its course, it brushed the hem of the woman’s skirt. Once the garment was hooked, the cane lifted it skillfully and quickly with one sweep up to her waist. The woman’s white thighs were exposed, but he did not make the mistake of being found out by touching them with the cold ivory.

  Then the woman whispered: “No, no.” And finally: “It’s cold.” But the man, in seventh heaven, made no answer, and the woman seemed not to notice that his arms were completely occupied in embracing her.

  This cynical and debasing mischief, this dedicated selfless cooperation always brought a smile to Honda’s lips whenever he recalled it. But when he remembered the man who had spoken to him some time ago in broad daylight at the entrance to the Matsuya PX the slight edge of humor was replaced by a chilling sensation of fear. It was outrageous that his pleasure might disgust others and thereby subject him to their everlasting repugnance and further that such disgust might one day grow to be an indispensable element of pleasure.

  Chilling self-disgust fused with the sweetest allurement . . . the very denial of existence joining with the concept of immortality that can never be healed. This unhealable existence was the unique essence of immortality.

  Returning to the edge of the swimming pool, he bent down and took the flickering water in his hands. This was the feel of the wealth he had acquired at the end of his life. As he felt the darting arrows of the aestival sun striking his bended neck, it was as though he were the target of the enormous malice and derision of the fifty-seven summers of his life. It had not been such an unfortunate existence. All had been guided by the oar of reason, and the reefs of destruction had been skillfully avoided. To claim that he had not had a happy moment would be pure hyperbole. Nevertheless, how boring the voyage had been! It would be closer to his true feelings if he dared exaggerate and say that his life had been spent in complete darkness.

  To declare his life unrelieved black seemed to express a certain acute empathy toward it. (There was no compensation, no joy in my association with you. Though I not once asked for you, you imposed your tenacious friendship and coerced me into this outlandish tightrope walking called living. You made me frugal with my infatuations, gave me ridiculously excessive possessions, transformed justice into wastepaper, converted reason into mere furniture, and confined beauty to its shabbiest form.) Life strove mightily to exile orthodoxy, hospitalize heresy, and trap humanity into stupidity. It was an accumulation of used bandages soiled with layers of blood and pus. Life was the daily changing of the bandages of the heart that made the incurably sick, young and old alike, cry out in pain.

  He felt that somewhere in the brilliant blue of the sky over this mountainous region were concealed the gigantic, supple white hands of a sublime nurse engaged in futile daily treatments and demanding chores. The hands touched him gently and again encouraged him to live. The white clouds floating in the sky over Otomé Pass were dazzlingly new, almost hypocritically hygienic white bandages that had been strewn about.

  Honda knew that he was sufficiently objective about himself. To other people, he was among the most wealthy lawyers and in a position to enjoy a leisurely old age. This was a reward for having dispensed impartial justice, and there was no record of graft to mar his long life as judge and attorney. Thus he was regarded, if with some envy, at least with no reproach. It was one of those belated remunerations that society sometimes bestows on a persevering citizen. At this point in life, if his little vice were to come out in the open, people would dismiss it with a smile, regarding it as one of those harmless human foibles in everyone. In short, he had everything that was desirable in the eyes of the world, except perhaps children.

  The couple had talked about adopting a child, and they had been urged to do so by others, but Rié had grown reluctant to discuss the matter and Honda too had lost interest after he had come into his property. He suspected that people were just after his money.

  Voices came from the house.

  He listened, wondering whether a guest might have arrived so early in the morning. But it was only Rié talking with Matsudo. Soon the two came to the terrace and looked out over the undulations of the lawn.

  “Look,” said Rié. “The lawn over there is so uneven. When you look at Fuji that slope by the arbor is the most conspicuous area of all. The uneven grass will be an embarrassment. A prince is coming, you know.”

  “Yes, madame. Shall I mow it again?”

  “Would you please.”

  The chauffeur, a year older than Honda, walked to the end of the terrace to get the mower from the little storage room where the garden tools were kept. Honda had hired Matsudo not so much because he liked him, but because he appreciated the experience the chauffeur had driving government cars throughout the war and even after it.

  His extremely sluggish manner, his faintly arrogant way of speaking, and the absolutely calm attitude of a man whose daily life was based entirely on the principle of safe driving—everything irritated Honda. (You think you can succeed in life simply by being as discreet about things as you are in driving, don’t you? Well, you’re wrong.) As he watched the old chauffeur he realized that Matsudo probably believed his employer to be the same kind of discreet person that he was. And Honda felt offended as though the chauffeur were drawing a rude caricature.

  “Sit down here. You have plenty of time,” Honda called to Rié.

  “Yes, but the chef and waiters will be here soon.”

  “They’ll be late as usual.”

  After hesitating slightly, like a thread loosening in water, Rié reentered the house to fetch a cushion. She feared that her kidneys might take cold from the iron chair.

  “Chefs and waiters and . . . I can’t stand those people ruining the house,” she said, seating herself in the chair next to Honda.

  “If I were like Mrs. Kinkin and loved flamboyance, how I should have enjoyed this style of living!”

  “You bring up such ancient subjects!”

  Mrs. Kinkin had been the wife of the most celebrated lawyer in Japan not long after the turn of the century. A former geisha, she was famous for her beauty and extravagance. Frequently she could be seen riding a white horse. And she raised eyebrows by wearing long geisha kimonos to funerals. When her husband died, she committed suicide, desperate that she could no longer live in the luxury to which she was accustomed.

  “I hear Mrs. Kinkin kept pet snakes and she always carried a little one about in her purse. Oh, I forgot. You said you killed one yesterday. It would be terrible if a snake appeared while the Prince is here.” She called to Matsudo who was walking away with the lawn mower: “Matsudo! If you find a snake, get rid of it, but please don’t let me see it.”

  Watching the movement of her throat as she shouted, there where age was so ruthlessly illuminated by the reflection of the pool, Honda suddenly remembered Tadeshina, whom he had met in the ruins of Shibuya during the war.

  He recalled the Sutra of the Peacock Wisdom King that she had given him.

  “If you are bitten by a snake, all you have to do is to chant this spell: ma yu kitsu ra tei sha ka.”

  “Really?” Without a trace of interest, Rié sat back in the chair again. The sound of the mower engine which began immediately permitted them the choice of silence.


  Honda took for granted the pleasure his old-fashioned wife showed about the forthcoming princely visit, but he was surprised at her calmness when she learned about the expected arrival of Ying Chan. For her part, Rié was hoping that her long suffering would come to an end if she were to see Ying Chan at her husband’s side.

  “Tomorrow Keiko will be bringing Ying Chan along to the opening of the swimming pool, and they’ll stay with us overnight,” Honda had said casually, and she had experienced a kind of tingling pleasure. Her jealousy had been so deeply fraught with uncertainty that her distress, dissipating with every second, was like waiting for thunder after seeing a flash of lightning. What she had feared had fused with what she so anxiously awaited, and the realization that she need wait no longer cheered her.

  Rié’s heart resembled a river sluggishly flowing through a vast and desolate plain, eroding its banks. And now, about to enter the unknown sea, it contentedly deposited its muddy sediment at the river mouth. It was here that it would cease being fresh water and would be transformed into the bitter saline sea. If one increases the volume of an emotion to its limits, its nature changes of its own accord; the accumulation of suffering which had seemed to destroy her was suddenly transformed into a strength for living—an exceedingly bitter, exceedingly stern, but suddenly expansive blue strength—the ocean.

  Honda had not noticed that his wife had been changing into an unrecognizably bitter and hard woman. The Rié who had tortured him by her ill-humored, silent quest was in fact no more than a chrysalis.

  On this bright morning she felt that even her chronic kidney ailment was considerably better.

  The distant, lazy sound of the mower made the eardrums of the silent couple vibrate. It was a silence totally alien to that of the picturesque old couple who no longér needed to converse. With some exaggeration Honda interpreted the situation in this way: they were two bundles of nerves leaning against each other and in so doing just managed to avoid collapsing to the ground with a metallic crash. It was as though they were both, with difficulty and in silence, acquiescing to their condition. If he had committed some brilliant crime, he would at least have been able to feel that he was soaring a little higher than his wife. But his pride was deeply hurt when he realized that both his wife’s suffering and his own joy were of the same stature.

  The second-floor guest-room windows reflecting on the surface of the water had been opened to let in the air, and the white lace curtains were fluttering. Tonight Ying Chan was expected behind that window, the one from which she had once climbed to the roof in the middle of the night and nimbly jumped down to the ground. The act made him think that she could only have sprouted wings. Had she not really flown away when he had not been watching? How could one be sure that Ying Chan astride a peacock, unobserved by him, had not freed herself from the bondage of this existence and been transformed into a being beyond time and space? He was clearly enchanted by the lack of any proof that she had not and the impossibility of ascertaining that indeed she could not. When he reached this conclusion he realized the mystical nature of his love.

  The surface of the swimming pool seemed as though some fisherman had cast a net of light over it. His wife was silent, her little swollen hands so like those of a Japanese doll lay on the edge of the table half covered by the shadow of the beach umbrella.

  Honda could immerse himself in his thoughts.

  The reality of Ying Chan was limited by the Ying Chan he could observe. She was a girl with beautiful black hair and a constant smile and a penchant for not keeping promises, yet a very determined young woman of impenetrable emotions. It was certain that the Ying Chan one saw was not all there was. For Honda, longing for the Ying Chan he could not see, love depended on the unknown; and naturally perception was related to the known. If he drove his perceptions on and with them plundered the unknown, thereby increasing the area of the known, could his love be achieved? No, it would not work that way, because his love strove to keep Ying Chan as far away as possible from the talons of his perception.

  Since youth Honda’s hunting dog of perception had always been extremely astute. Thus the Ying Chan he knew by seeing corresponded to his powers of perception. Nothing but his ability to perceive made her existence possible.

  Therefore his desire to see Ying Chan in the nude, a Ying Chan unknown to anyone, became an unattainable desire divided contradictorily into perception and love. Seeing already lay within the sphere of perception, and even if Ying Chan was not aware of it, from the moment he had peeped through the luminous hole in the back of the bookcase, she had become an inhabitant of a world created by her perception. In her world, contaminated by his the moment he laid eyes on it, what he really wanted to see would never appear. His love could not be fulfilled. And yet, if he did not see, love would forever be precluded.

  He wanted to see a soaring Ying Chan, but bound by his perceptions, she did not soar. As long as she remained a creature of his perceptions she could not violate the physical laws governing them. Perhaps, except in dreams, the world where Ying Chan soared naked astride a peacock lay a step beyond and did not materialize because Honda’s perception itself became a screen and was defective, an infinitesimal obstruction. Then how would it be if he got rid of the obstruction and changed the situation? That would mean the removal of Honda from the world which he shared with Ying Chan, in other words, his own death.

  It now became clear that Honda’s ultimate desire, what he really, really wanted to see could exist only in a world where he did not. In order to see what he truly wished to, he must die. When a voyeur recognizes that he can realize his ends only by eliminating the basic act of watching, this means his death as such.

  For the first time in his life the significance of suicide for a cognizant man carried weight in Honda’s mind.

  If he denied perception as his love directed and tried to escape from perception infinitely, attempting to take Ying Chan to a territory beyond its reach, resistance by perception meant sure suicide. It would mean Honda’s exit from a world contaminated by perception, with Ying Chan left behind. But at the very moment of his departure she would stand radiantly before him; nothing was so predictable as this.

  The present world was one Honda’s perceptions had created and thus Ying Chan inhabited it too. According to the precepts of the Yuishiki School, it was a world created by Honda’s alaya consciousness. But the reason he still could not give himself completely to this doctrine was because he was too attached to his perceptions and was unable to agree to consider their root as the eternal alaya consciousness that discards the world one instant without regret and renews it the next.

  Rather Honda thought of death as a game and was intoxicated by its sweetness. Incited by his perceptions, he dreamed about the supreme bliss of the moment of suicide, when the Ying Chan who had been seen by no other person would appear in all her brilliant, pure amber nudity like a resplendent moon rising.

  Didn’t “fulfillment of the Peacock” mean precisely this? According to the Rules for Depicting the Peacock Wisdom King, the sammaya-gyo, or the distinguishing symbol that represents the divinity’s main vow, is described as a half-moon above the Peacock’s tail; and above that a full moon is depicted. Just as the half-moon waxes into the full moon, so the learning of the Law is fully achieved.

  What Honda wished might indeed be this Peacock fulfillment. If all love in the world were as incomplete as the half-moon, who would not dream of the full moon rising above the Peacock tail?

  The sound of the mower stopped and a voice was heard from the distance: “Is this enough?”

  Like a couple of bored parrots on their perch, the Hondas turned awkwardly to look toward the voice. Matsudo stood there in his khaki overall, and Fuji was already half hidden in the clouds behind him.

  “Well, don’t you think that’s sufficient?” Rié said to her husband in a low voice.

  “I suppose. We can’t ask too much of the old man,” responded Honda.

  With both hands h
e formed a big circle of approval, and Matsudo, understanding, slowly rolled the mower back to the house. The sound of a motor came from the gate on the Hakoné side and a station wagon entered the grounds. It was the car from Tokyo bearing the chef, three waiters, and an abundant supply of food.

  43

  HONDA HAD NOT YET invited the older inhabitants in the neighboring houses despite the fact that he was the newest comer to the View-on-Fuji Villas at Ninooka. The older inhabitants had kept away from their villas, frightened by rumors that public morals had been corrupted by the bars that had opened for the American soldiers near Gotemba. These establishments had brought in their wake call girls and pimps and low-class prostitutes who wandered about the training grounds armed with Army blankets. This summer the owners had begun to trickle back, and Honda had invited some on the occasion of the opening of the pool.

  The oldest villa owners were Prince and Princess Kaori and the aged widow of Kanzaemon Mashiba, founder of the Mashiba Bank. Mrs. Mashiba had announced that she would bring along her three grandchildren. There were several other guests from the area. In addition to Keiko and Ying Chan, Imanishi and Mrs. Tsubakihara were expected from Tokyo. Makiko had replied quite early that she would be traveling abroad. Under ordinary circumstances Makiko would have been accompanied by Mrs. Tsubakihara on her trip, but this time she had chosen another disciple as her companion.

  Once a servant became a permanent employee, Honda was amused to note, Rié could drive her rather mercilessly, though she never gave up her sweet smile for outside help such as the chef and the waiters. She spoke politely and showed consideration in everything, anxious to prove to herself and others that she was beloved by one and all.

  “Madame. What are we to do about the arbor? Shall I prepare drinks there too?” asked one of the waiters, already dressed in his white uniform.