The Temple of Dawn

by Yukio Mishima

  There was a stir.

  Honda hastily put his eye to the hole and in so doing bumped his head on the corner of the bookcase. The noise worried him more than the pain, but the situation on the other side of the wall was beyond any concern about small noises.

  Katsumi was holding onto a resisting Ying Chan. The two bodies struggled in and out of the circular field of the peephole. The girl’s dress was unzipped and her brown, perspiring, angular back with brassiere straps was visible. She freed her right hand and lashed out with clenched fist. The green emerald sparkled like a flying beetle and scraped along Katsumi’s cheek. He drew back, putting his hand to Ms face. Soon there was the noise of him opening the door and leaving the room. Ying Chan was out of breath. Looking about, she dragged away one of the chairs, probably to prop against the door.

  Honda panicked. Katsumi, who pretended to be so mature, was really a spoiled child, and he might well come by to borrow a first aid kit for his cheek.

  Honda went to work at once. One by one he returned the thick books to the bookcase and with the meticulousness of a criminal checked that none of the titles had been replaced upside down. He verified that the door to the study was locked, turned off the heater, and stole back to his bedroom. He changed into pajamas, threw his clothes on the dresser, and crept into bed. He was prepared to act like someone interrupted in sleep when Katsumi’s knock came at the door.

  This became an experience of Honda’s unknown “youth.” The swiftness and nimbleness of a dormitory student who has violated the rules and crept back to bed with an air of innocence. Though he lay quietly, his heart palpitated so rapidly that the pillow, alive, seemed to jump up and down. It did not quiet for some time.

  Katsumi was probably hesitating whether to come to see him or not. This long hesitation must be the result of calculation, the weighing of the advantages and disadvantages of an impulsive visit. While he was waiting, but not really expecting Katsumi, Honda fell asleep.

  The rain had stopped by morning and a golden brocade of sunlight cascaded through the gap between the curtains over the east window.

  Honda wrapped a scarf about his neck and in his thick gown went down to the kitchen, intending to prepare breakfast for the young people. He found Katsumi already sitting in a chair in the living room neatly dressed.

  “Well, you’re up early,” Honda called halfway down the staircase, glancing swiftly at his pale cheeks.

  Katsumi had already built a fire in the fireplace. He did not actually seem to be hiding his left cheek, and Honda was disappointed not to see a large scar in the firelight. There was a light scratch that could be explained away by any simple story.

  “Won’t you sit down for a while?” Katsumi indicated a chair as though he were the host.

  “Good morning,” Honda said again in greeting and sat down.

  “I felt I ought to talk with you alone. I got up particularly early,” said Katsumi as if he had done Honda a great favor.

  “And . . . how was it?”

  “Good.”

  “What do you mean ‘good’?”

  “Just as I expected.” The young man smiled, suggesting something profoundly significant. “She looks like a mere child, but she really isn’t.”

  “Did it seem like the first time for her?”

  “I’m the first . . . My successors will be green with envy, I’m sure.”

  It seemed needless to pursue the matter further, and Honda changed the subject. “By the way, did you happen to notice, she has some peculiar marks . . . on her left side . . . three, almost artificially magnificent moles all in a line. Didn’t you see them?”

  A momentary confusion crossed Katsumi’s smug face. Many answers were possible, and there was the question of saving face too. He quickly concluded that the telling of lies had better be sacrificed for a more important occasion. It was interesting to speculate on the many possible responses passing through the young man’s mind. Suddenly Katsumi leaned back on his chair with an exaggerated gesture of surprise.

  “You win!” he said in a high voice. “You’re a hard man, Mr. Honda! I’m losing my grip. I was fooled by her English when she seemed to say that it was the first time. You know her body already!”

  It was Honda’s turn to smile suggestively.

  “I’m asking whether you saw the moles.”

  The young man answered tensely. He was being pressed to test his feigned composure. “Of course I saw them. They were slightly wet with perspiration and all three of them moving together in the dim light. With her dark skin they had a sort of mysterious and unforgettable beauty.”

  Honda went to the kitchen and prepared breakfast of coffee and croissants. Katsumi volunteered to help, but his anxiousness to do so was quite uncharacteristic of him. As if forced by a sense of obligation, he set out the plates, asked Honda where the teaspoons were kept, and arranged them on the table. For the first time Honda felt something akin to friendship bordering on pity toward the young man.

  They argued about who should take the breakfast to Ying Chan’s room. Claiming the host’s prerogative, Honda placed the dishes on a tray and slowly carried it upstairs.

  He knocked on Ying Chan’s door. There was no answer. Putting the tray down on the floor, he opened the door with a duplicate passkey. Wedged shut by something on the inside, it was difficult to force.

  Honda looked around the room filled with morning light. She was gone.

  37

  OF LATE Mrs. Tsubakihara had been meeting Imanishi frequently.

  She was quite blind. She was unable to form intelligent opinions about men. Nor could she judge one by sight and tell what kind of person he was . . . pig or wolf or vegetable. And such a woman was trying to write poetry of all things.

  If awareness of suitability was the indication of a proud love affair, no one could appease Imanishi’s self-consciousness as much as this woman, blind to any kind of suitability. She had begun to love the forty-year-old man like a son.

  No one was further than Imanishi from possessing physical youthfulness, freshness, or courage. He had a weak stomach, sallow, unresilient skin, and was quick to catch colds. His long body, devoid of developed muscles, was like a long, limp sash, and he swayed when he walked. He was, in other words, an intellectual.

  It should have been very difficult to love such a man, but just as Mrs. Tsubakihara turned out bad poetry with such ease, so had she fallen in love with no difficulty whatever. In anything and everything, her lack of skill was brilliant. Her docility and self-admitted love of criticism made her listen happily to Imanishi’s constant personal rebukes. In all things she espoused the concept that criticism was a shortcut to improvement.

  As a matter of fact, Imanishi had something in common with her. He was not annoyed by her girlishness when she talked so seriously about literature and poetry in the bedroom, and he himself chose the same setting to make his ideological confessions. A strange mixture of profound cynicism and immaturity lay behind the sickly youthfulness that flashed across his face from time to time. Now Mrs. Tsubakihara believed that he liked to say things to hurt people because he was pure.

  The couple always met at a spruce little inn recently built on the Shibuya Hill. Each room formed an independent building separated from the others by a small stream running through the garden. The woodwork was fresh and clean, and the entrance inconspicuous.

  About six o’clock on June sixteenth their taxi pulled up in front of the Shibuya Station and, halted by the crowds, could proceed no farther. The inn was only five or six minutes away by foot, and Imanishi and Mrs. Tsubakihara left the car.

  A massive chorus singing the “Internationale” overwhelmed them. Banners fluttered in the breeze: “Down with the Law on the Prevention of Subversive Activities!” From the bridge of the Tamagawa Line a large banner was suspended: “Yankees Go Home!” The faces of the people swarming over the square were flushed, cheerful, and lighthearted in their rush toward destruction.

  Mrs. Tsubakihara was frighten
ed and hid behind Imanishi, who despite himself felt drawn by fear and anxiety toward the crowd. Light streamed meshlike through the legs of the mob surging across the square, the thump of footsteps increased like a sudden shower, then screams pierced the chorus and the sound of irregular clapping grew louder—all happened simultaneously as the riotous night descended upon the massed demonstrators. It reminded Imanishi of the extraordinary shudder he invariably experienced at the onset of his frequent colds with the concomitant rise of fever. Everyone had the horrible sensation of being skinned like rabbits and of having their raw red flesh suddenly exposed to the air.

  “Cops! Cops!”

  The sound of voices spread and the crowd scattered in confusion. The chorus of the “Internationale” which had been a massive wave broke into fragments that lingered here and there like puddles after rain. And these were routed by cries as the rush-hour crowds and those singing inextricably commingled. White police vans roared up, stopping by the statue of the Faithful Dog Hachi in front of Shibuya Station, and members of the police reserve in dark blue helmets popped out of the vehicles like a flock of grasshoppers.

  Clutching Mrs. Tsubakihara’s hand, Imanishi ran for his life with the crowd that was struggling to get away. When he reached a store front on the opposite side of the square and had caught his breath, he was astonished by his unexpected capacity for running. He too had been able to run! he realized. Thereupon unnatural palpitations abruptly began and his chest ached.

  Compared to his own, Mrs. Tsubakihara’s fear, like her sorrow, was somewhat stereotyped. Clutching her purse against her breast, she stood at his side as though she would faint at any moment. The purple neon lights reflecting on her powdered cheeks seemed to transform her fear into iridescent shell work. But her eyes never wavered.

  Imanishi slipped cautiously along the front of the store and looked across the roiling square in front of the station. Amidst the welling shouts and screams, the great illuminated clock on the station building serenely recorded the time.

  A doomsday fragrance was rising. The world was turning red like the eyes of someone in want of sleep. Imanishi felt as though he were listening to the strange noises of silkworms in their raising room nibbling furiously away at mulberry leaves.

  Then in the distance flames shot up from a white police van. Probably a Molotov cocktail. Angry red tongues and screams rose with the white smoke. Imanishi realized that he was smiling.

  At length as they started to walk away from the scene, Mrs. Tsubakihara noticed something hanging from Imanishi’s hand.

  “What do you have there?”

  “I just picked it up.”

  He opened what seemed like a dark rag as he walked along and showed it to her. It was a black lace brassiere, distinctly different from the type Mrs. Tsubakihara used. It must have belonged to a woman exceptionally confident of her breasts. It was a large-size strapless kind, and the whalebone woven into the cups exaggerated the bulkiness of the two haughty, statuesque hollows.

  “How horrible! Where did you pick it up?”

  “There, a minute ago, when I ran over to the store. I noticed something clinging to my foot. It must have been stepped on. It’s all covered with mud.”

  “The dirty thing! Throw it away!”

  “But how strange! How very peculiar.” Imanishi was delighted with the attention of the curious pedestrians passing by and proudly exhibited the brassiere as he walked along.

  “How could something like this fall off? Do you think it’s possible?”

  Of course it was not. Brassieres, even the strapless type, were firmly fastened by several hooks. No matter how low the neckline, the brassiere could simply not get undone and spill out. Buffeted by the crowd, the woman had torn it off herself or someone else had. The latter instance would be unlikely, and it was more plausible that the woman had done so of her own volition.

  For what purpose, he had no idea. At any rate, amidst the flames, the darkness, the shouting, a pair of large breasts had been sliced off. Only their satin shell had come away, but the strong, resilient fullness of the flesh was clearly attested by the black lace molds. The woman had purposely shed her brassiere with pride. The halo had been removed, and the moon now appeared somewhere in the turbulent darkness. Imanishi had picked up only a halo, but by this act he seemed to capture—more so than if he had picked up the breasts themselves—their warmth, their cunning elusiveness, and memories of lust came swarming like moths about a lamp. Imanishi casually put the brassiere to his nose. The smell of cheap perfume had permeated the fabric and was still strong despite the mud. He supposed she must have been a prostitute specializing in American soldiers.

  “What a horrible man you are!”

  Mrs. Tsubakihara was genuinely angry. His spiteful words always held some note of criticism, but such a sordid act was mean and unforgivable. And this was not criticism but rather a snide insult. She had taken the measure of the cups in a glance and recognized Imanishi’s implied disdain for her own aging, withered breasts.

  Once away from the square in front of the station nothing had changed on the road from Dogen Hill to Shoto along which small, hastily built shops stood cramped in the ruins of the bombing. Already at this early hour drunkards were loitering about, and neon lights hovered like schools of goldfish above their heads.

  “I must hurry to destruction; unless I do, hell will return,” thought Imanishi. As soon as he had escaped from the danger, the ordeal flushed his cheeks. With no further reproach from Mrs. Tsubakihara, he had already let the black brassiere slip from his fingers to the road where the stagnant air was hot and humid.

  Imanishi was obsessed with the idea that unless destruction came to him soon, the hell of daily life would quicken and consume him; if destruction did not come at once he would for yet one more day be subject to the fantasy of being consumed by dullness. It was better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination. All this might then be unconscious fear that unless he put an end to himself without delay, his indubitable mediocrity would be revealed.

  Imanishi could see signs of world destruction in the most insignificant things. Man always finds the omens he wants.

  He wished that revolution would come. Leftist or rightist, it made no difference. How wonderful if it would carry someone like him, a parasite of his father’s insurance company, to the guillotine. But no matter how he might proclaim his own shame, he was not sure whether the masses would hate him or not. What would he do if they interpreted his confession as a sign of repentance? If a guillotine were to be built in the bustling square in front of the station and days came when blood flowed in the midst of all this mundaneness, he might by his death be able to become “the remembered one.” He pictured himself being placed beneath the cutter—scaffold of lumber wrapped in red and white cloth like a lottery booth, adorned with banners announcing a special summer sale in the commercial district, and a large price tag “Special” pasted on the blade. He shuddered.

  Mrs. Tsubakihara tugged at his sleeve as he walked along lost in fantasy, calling his attention to the gate of their inn. The maid waiting in the vestibule guided them in silence to their usual room. Once they were alone, Imanishi, still in turmoil, became aware of the gurgle of the stream.

  They ordered a plain chicken dish and saké. While they waited through the usual time-consuming preparations of the inn, they usually indulged in some kind of physical exchange. But today Mrs. Tsubakihara forced him into the washroom and made him wash his hands thoroughly, letting the tap water run as he did.

  “Go on. Go on,” she said.

  Imanishi did not at first grasp why he was made to wash his hands so repeatedly, but from her serious expression he gathered that it was because of the brassiere he had picked up.

  “No, you must wash them better.” She frantically covered his hands with soap and opened the tap wide, disregarding the noise and the splashing on the copper sink. Finally Imanishi’s hands felt numb.

&nb
sp; “Don’t you think that’s enough?”

  “No, it’s not. What do you think will happen if you come near me with hands like that? Touching me means touching the memory of my son that is in me. You’ll profane Akio’s sacred memory, the memory of a god . . . with your dirty hands . . .” Turning quickly away, she covered her eyes with a handkerchief.

  Rubbing his hands together under the gushing water, Imanishi glanced obliquely at her. If she began to weep, that was a sign that whatever it was had passed and that she was prepared to accept anything.

  “I wish I could die soon,” said Imanishi sentimentally as they sat drinking saké together later.

  “So do I,” agreed Mrs. Tsubakihara. Her skin, as transparent as rice paper, showed the faint crimson of approaching intoxication.

  In the next room where the doors were open the rising and falling contours of the light blue silk quilt gleamed as if it were quietly breathing. On the table slices of abalone with artificial pink in the dusky folds floated in a bowlful of water. And food was simmering in an earthenware pot.

  Without speaking, Imanishi and Mrs. Tsubakihara knew that they were both awaiting something—probably the same thing.

  She was enraptured with the thrill of sin and its attendant expectation of punishment for these secret meetings behind Makiko’s back. She imagined Makiko entering the room, brandishing the brush dipped in red ink with which she corrected poems. “This won’t do as poetry. I’ll watch. Now try to create poetry with your whole being. I am here to teach you, Mrs. Tsubakihara.”