“Has a young lady named Segawa checked in?”
“Yes. She’s here.”
His heart was pounding, so he pronounced the next question slowly.
“Does she have someone with her?”
“Yes; they arrived four or five days ago. In the Chrysanthemum Room.”
“Maybe she’s here now? I’m a friend of her father’s.”
“She just went out to K-Park.”
“Did she go alone?”
“No, she is not alone.”
The maid did not say, “They went with her.” Under the circumstances, Shunsuke was filled with dismay. He did not know how to ask with proper indifference how many friends there were and whether male or female.
If her friends were male, what if there was only one of them? Wasn’t it strange that this very natural question had never even entered his head until now? Foolishness preserves its own undeviating equilibrium, does it not? Until it gets its way it advances, suppressing every proper intelligent consideration.
He felt his attendance was more commanded than invited as he was subjected to a lavish welcome by the hotel. Throughout his bath and his meal, until the business was over, he was given no rest. When he was finally left alone he was overcome by excitement and moved restlessly. His anxiety impelled him to do something a gentleman should not do. He quietly entered the Chrysanthemum Room.
The suite was in perfect order. He opened the Western-style clothes closet in the smaller room and saw a man’s white trousers and white poplin shirts. They were hanging next to Yasuko’s Tyrolean applique white linen one-piece suit. He turned his eyes to the dressing table and saw pomade and a stick of hair wax beside the powder, cream, and lipstick.
He left the room, returned to his own, and rang the bell. When the maid came he ordered a car. While he was putting on his suit, the car arrived. He was driven to K-Park.
He told the driver to wait, and entered the gate of the park, which was deserted, as usual. It had a new, natural-stone arch. From it, one could not see the sea. In the wind, the heavy branches of the trees, covered with blackish green leaves, soughed like the distant surf.
Shunsuke decided to go to the beach. There, he had been told, they swam every day. He left the playground. He passed the corner of the little zoo, in which a badger was huddled, dozing, the shadow of the cage sharp upon his back. In its grazing area, at the point where two kaede trees grew close together, a long black rabbit slept quietly, beyond the heat. Shunsuke descended a stone staircase covered thickly with grass and saw, on the other side of a vast patch of shrubbery, the expanse of the ocean. As far as his eyes could see, there was only the, movement of branches. The wind slowly made its way toward him. It twisted nimbly from branch to branch, seeming to approach like an invisible small animal. The roughest blasts of wind that came at times were like the frolicking of an invisible large animal. Over all this the unfailing sunlight reigned; the unfailing buzz of the cicada prevailed.
What path should he take down to the beach? Far below, he could see a grove of pines. The grass-covered staircase seemed to lead down there by a roundabout route. He was bathed in the sun that forced its way through the trees, dazzled by the fierce glare off the grass, and he came to realize that his body was covered with perspiration. The staircase curved. He struggled his way onto the edge of a narrow corridor of beach at the foot of the cliff.
There was nobody there. Exhausted, the aging writer seated himself on a boulder.
Anger it was that had brought him this far. Living as he did, encompassed by his great reputation, the religious veneration in which he was held, his multifarious business affairs, his miscellaneous friendships, and all the related unendingly venomous essentials, he generally required no escape from life. The most extreme escape for him would be to come closer to it. Within the amazingly broad sphere of his acquaintanceship, Shunsuke Hinoki performed like a great actor, through whose skill thousands of spectators were made to feel that he was close to each of them alone. An adroit skill it was, seemingly in disregard of all the laws of perspective. Neither their praise nor their criticism touched him. That was because he was deaf to everything. He was trembling now in anticipation of being hurt, fiercely desired to be hurt; only in this sense did Shunsuke in his own inimitable way seek an escape. In short, he sought consummation in a climactic reception unto himself of clear, unequivocal injury.
Now, however, the unusually close, undulating broad sea seemed to soothe Shunsuke. As it craftily and nimbly came in between the rocks again and again, the sea soaked him, it flowed into his being, it instantly painted him with its blueness. Then it fell away from him again.
Then a ripple appeared out in the middle of the ocean. A delicate, white splashing like an advancing wave developed. The ripple advanced rapidly in the direction of this part of the shore. As it reached the shallows and seemed about to break, suddenly in the middle of the wave a swimmer stood out. Quickly his body seemed to erase the wave. Then he stood up. His sturdy legs kicked the ocean shallows as he walked forward.
It was an amazingly beautiful young man. His body surpassed the sculptures of ancient Greece. It was like the Apollo molded in bronze by an artist of the Peloponnesus school. It overflowed with gentle beauty and carried such a noble column of a neck, such gently sloping shoulders, such a softly broad chest, such elegantly rounded wrists, such a rapidly tapering tightly filled trunk, such legs, stoutly filled out like a heroic sword. The youth stopped at the water’s edge and twisted his body to inspect his left elbow, which seemed to have struck against the corner of a rock. As he did so, he bent his face and his right arm in the direction of the injury. The reflections on the waves, retreating past his feet, lit up his downturned profile as if an expression of joy had suddenly stolen across it. Quick, narrow eyebrows; deep, sad eyes; rather thick, fresh lips—these made up the design of his extraordinary profile. The wonderful ridge of his nose, furthermore, along with his controlled facial expressions, gave to his youthful good looks a certain chaste impression of wildness, as if he had never known anything but noble thoughts and starvation. This, together with the dark, controlled cast of his eyes, his strong white teeth, the languid way in which he unconsciously moved his wrists, the bearing of his quick body, brought out in full relief the inner nature of a young, beautiful wolf. “That’s it! Those looks are the beautiful features of the wolf!”
At the same time there was in the soft roundness of the shoulders, the innocent nudity of the chest, the charm of the lips ... in these bodily features there was a mysteriously indefinable sweetness. Walter Pater mentioned, in connection with the lovely thirteenth-century story “Amis and Amile,” a certain “sweetness of the early Renaissance.” Shunsuke saw signs of a later and unimaginably mysterious and vast development of that “early sweetness” in the lines of the body of the youth before him.
Shunsuke Hinoki hated all the beautiful young men of the world. Yet beauty struck him dumb whether he liked it or not. Mostly, he had the bad habit of immediately connecting beauty with happiness; yet what silenced his resentment here was perhaps not the perfect beauty of the youth, but what he surmised to be his complete happiness.
The youth glanced in Shunsuke’s direction. Then he unconcernedly stepped out of sight behind a rock. After a time he appeared again, in white shirt and conservative blue-serge trousers. Whistling, he started up the same stone steps Shunsuke had just descended. Shunsuke got up and followed him. The young man turned once again and glanced at the old man. Perhaps it was the effect of the summer sun shining across his eyelashes, but his eyes were quite dark. Shunsuke wondered why the youth, who had shone so resplendently earlier in his nakedness, had now lost his air of happiness, if nothing more.
The youth took another path. It was going to be difficult to keep up with him. The exhausted old man started down the path doubting he had the energy to trace the young man’s steps much farther. Then, however, somewhere in the vicinity of a grassy clearing within the wood, he heard the clear, vigorous sou
nd of the young man’s voice.
“Are you still sleeping? You amaze me. While you were sleeping, I swam way out into the ocean. Come on, get up, and let’s stroll back.”
A girl stood up there under the trees. Shunsuke was shocked at how close she seemed to be as she stretched her slim arms above her head. Two or three of the buttons in the back of her blue, girlish Western dress had come undone. For the first time he was able to see the youth as he fastened the errant buttons. The girl brushed from her skirt the pollen and soil she had collected during that quite indecorous nap on the grass. As she turned her hand to brush herself off, she showed her profile. It was Yasuko!
Spent, Shunsuke slumped on the stairs. He took out a cigarette and lit it. It was not an uncommon thing for this expert in the art of jealousy to be filled with a mixture of admiration, jealousy, and defeat, but this time Shunsuke’s heart was involved not with Yasuko but with that, youth whose beauty was such a rarity in this world.
In that perfect youth were concentered all the dreams of the ugly writer’s young days—dreams he had hidden from the eyes of men. Not only that, he rebuked himself for them. The springtime of intellect, the time when it begins to grow—that was the poison, he felt, that caused the young man to lose his youth even as he watched. Shunsuke’s youth was spent in the frenzied pursuit of youthfulness. What foolishness, indeed!
Youth tortures us with all kinds of hopes and despairs, but at least we do not realize that our pains are the normal agonies of youth. Shunsuke, however, spent his whole youth realizing it. He rigidly excluded from his thinking, from his consciousness, from his theorizing on “Literature and Youth,” everything connected with permanence, universality, common interest, everything unhappily subtle— in short, romantically immortal. To some extent, his foolishness lay in facetiously impulsive experimentation. At that time his one fond hope was that he would be so fortunate as to be able to see in his own pain the perfect, consummate pain of youth. Not only that, he wished to see in his own joy the consummate joy. In sum, he saw in it a power indispensable to humankind.
This time, being defeated won’t bother me a bit, he thought to himself. He is the possessor of all the beauty of youth; he dwells in the sunshine of human existence. Never will he be polluted by the poisons of art or things of that sort. He is a man born to love and be loved by woman. For him, I shall gladly retire from the field. Not only that, I welcome it. So much of my life has been spent fighting against beauty; but the time is approaching that beauty and I should shake hands in reconciliation. For all I can tell, Heaven has sent these two people for me to see.
The two lovers approached single file down the narrow path. Yasuko was the first to see Shunsuke. She and the old man confronted each other. His eyes showed pain, but his mouth was smiling. Yasuko grew white and dropped her glance. Still looking at the ground, she asked, “Have you come here to work?”
“Yes. I just got here.”
The youth looked at Shunsuke inquiringly. Yasuko introduced them—“This is my friend Yuichi.”
“Minami,” he said, supplying his surname.
When he heard Shunsuke’s name, the youth did not seem at all surprised. Shunsuk6 thought to himself: He’s probably heard about me from Yasuko. That’s why he is not surprised. I would be delighted if he had never so much as looked at my complete works in three editions and had never heard my name.
The three climbed the stone park staircase in the dead calm, chatting idly about how deserted the resort seemed. Shunsuke felt expansive. He wasn’t one easily given to joking like a man of the world, but he was cheerful enough. The three got into his hired car and went back to the hotel.
They ate supper d trois. It was Yuichi’s idea. After the meal they separated and went to their rooms. Later, Yuichi, tall in his hotel robe, appeared at the door of Shunsuke’s room.
“May I come in? Are you working?” he called through the door.
“Come in.”
“Yasuko was taking a long time in the bath and I got bored,” he said, by way of excuse. His dark eyes, however, had grown more sad since the daytime. Shunsuke’s artistic instincts told him that some kind of confession was forthcoming.
For a time they talked about insignificant matters. Then it became apparent that the youth was impatient to get something off his mind. At last he said: “Are you going to stay here for a while?”
“I expect so.”
“I, if I can, would like to leave by the ten o’clock boat this evening, or by tomorrow morning’s bus. In fact, I want to get away from here tonight sometime.”
Surprised, Shunsuke asked, “What about Yasuko?”
“That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about. Can I leave her with you? I’ve thought perhaps you would like to marry her.”
“I hope you are not being held back by something that is not true.”
“Not at all. I can’t stay here another night.”
“Why?”
The youth answered in sincere, rather frozen tones: “Do you understand? I can’t love a woman. Do you know what I mean? My body can love them, but my interest in them is purely intellectual. I have never wanted a woman since the day I was born. I have never seen a woman and wanted her. Just the same I have deluded myself about it, and now I have deceived an innocent girl in the bargain.”
A strange light came into Shunsuke’s eyes. By nature he was not sensitive to this problem. His inclinations were quite normal.
He replied, “Then what can you love?”
“I?” The youth’s face reddened. “I only love boys.”
“Have you told Yasuko about this?” Shunsuke asked.
“No.”
“Then don’t tell her. It won’t work. There are some things that are good to tell a woman, and some things not. I don’t know much about your particular problem, but it seems to be something women wouldn’t understand. When a girl appears who loves you as much as Yasuko seems to, it would seem best to marry her, since you have to get married sometime. Don’t take marriage as being anything more than a triviality. It’s trivial—that’s why they call it sacred.”
Shunsuke began to take a fiendish delight in the encounter. Then he caught the young man’s gaze and, out of deference to the world, decorously whispered: “And these three nights ... didn’t anything happen?”
“No.”
“That’s fine. That’s how women should be taught.” Shunsuke’s laugh was loud and clear. None of his friends had ever heard him laugh like this.
“I can tell you from long experience that it never pays to teach a woman pleasure. Pleasure is a tragic masculine invention. Don’t take it as anything more than that.”
An ecstatic, parental affection floated in Shunsuke’s eyes. “You two will have an ideal married life, I am sure.” He didn’t say “happy.” As far as Shunsuke was concerned it was splendid that this marriage seemed to hold in store such complete unhappiness for the woman. With Yuichi’s help he felt he could send a hundred still-virgin women off to nunneries. In this way Shunsuke for the first time in his life knew real passion.
Chapter 2 MIRROR CONTRACT
“I CAN’T,” Yuichi said, hopelessly. What man content with the advice he had been given would make so shamefaced a confession to a perfect stranger? The suggestion that he get married was pure cruelty, the young man felt.
Now that he had told all, he felt a certain sense of regret; the mad impulse to confess had vanished. The pain of those three nights during which nothing happened had almost tom him to pieces.
Yasuko would never make the first advances. If she had he would have told her everything. Yet there in the darkness filled with the sound of waves, inside the pale green mosquito netting shaken from time to time by the wind, the recumbent form of the girl at his side staring at the ceiling, holding back the sound of her breathing, was enough to cut his heart to pieces in a way he had never known.
The window thrown open, the starlit sky, the shrill whistle of the steamboat . . . for a long time Yasuko and Yu
ichi lay awake, not daring to stir. They did not speak. They did not move. It was as if they feared that a movement of so much as an inch would provoke an entirely new situation. To tell the truth, they were both wearied with waiting for the same action, the same situation—in short, the same thing; but Yuichi’s embarrassment was perhaps a hundred times more fierce than the shyness under which Yasuko quivered. He asked only to die.
Her coal-black eyes wide open, hand to her breast, her body motionless and faintly perspiring, the horizontal figure of the girl beside him was death to Yuichi. If she moved one inch in his direction, that itself would be death.
He hated himself for having been ignominiously enticed to this point by Yasuko.
Now I can die, he thought to himself over and over. Soon, I’ll get up, rush down the stone staircase, and throw myself off the cliff overlooking the sea.
When he thought of death, in that instant everything seemed possible. He was drunk with possibility, filled with cheer. He pretended a yawn and said aloud, “My, I’m sleepy.” He turned his back to Yasuko, curled up, and feigned sleep. After a time, he heard Yasuko emit a slight, delicate cough and knew she was not asleep.
Then he got up courage to inquire, “Can’t you sleep?”
“Yes, I can,” she answered, with a low voice like the sound of flowing water. With that, the two set about feigning sleep, hoping to fool one another; doing so, they fooled themselves into falling asleep. He dreamed that God had turned over to the angels his plea that he be killed. It was such a happy dream that he burst out crying. Of course, the tears and sobs were not real. Then Yuichi realized that he was still ruled by vanity and he felt better.
For the eight years or so since puberty Yuichi had set himself against sexual desire, which he detested. He kept his body pure. He involved himself in mathematics and sports—geometry and calculus, high jumping and swimming. He did not realize particularly that this option of his was a Greek option; mathematics somehow kept his head clear, and athletic competition kept his energies in tune.
Forbidden Colors Page 3
