by Ivan Morris
“Yes, do let me hear your poem,” I said warmly. For the first time that afternoon, I was sincere.
He took a drink, hiccoughed loudly, and started to recite:
O’er mountains, rivers, plants, and trees
The dreary air of desolation grows.
Mile after mile stretches the fearful battlefield
Reeking of new-spilled blood.
He hiccoughed again. “I’ve forgotten the second verse,” he said. “It’s something I read in a magazine.”
“I see.”
“Well, I’m off,” he said, getting slowly to his feet. “Your missus has left and I don’t enjoy drinking the whisky when you pour it.”
I did not try to detain him.
“We’ll discuss the class reunion when I have more time,” he said. “I’ll have to leave most of the arrangements to you. In the meantime you can let me have a little of your whisky to take home.”
I was prepared for this and immediately started to pour the whisky that remained in his cup into the bottle, which was still about a quarter full.
“You can have this bottle,” I said, handing it to him.
“Hey, hey,” he said, “none of that! I’ve had enough of your stinginess for one day. You’ve still got another full bottle stored away in that cupboard, haven’t you? Let me have it!”
“All right,” I said.
There was nothing for it but to hand over my final bottle of whisky. At least this put the proper finishing touch to the afternoon, I thought with a bitter smile. Now if Mr. Ibusé or any other friend came to visit, we would no longer be able to enjoy a convivial drink. For a moment I thought of mentioning the cost of whisky, just to see what reaction it would bring, but even now I could not bring myself to violate the code of a host. Instead I heard myself asking ignominiously: “What about cigarettes? Do you need any cigarettes?”
“I’ll get those next time,” he said, picking up a whisky bottle in each hand.
I followed him to the front door and here it was that the climax of the visit came. As he was about to step out of the door, he hiccoughed loudly, turned round, and hissed into my ear: “You shouldn’t be so damned stuck-up!”
Yes, he was a man of truly epic proportions.
THE PRIEST AND HIS LOVE
BY Yukio Mishima
TRANSLATED BY Ivan Morris
Although Yukio Mishima was born in 1925 (sixteen years later than any of the other authors represented in this collection), he is already generally recognized in Japan as a writer of the first rank.
After finishing his studies at the Peers’ School, where he was the highest honor student in his class, Mishima entered Tokyo University. He was graduated in 1947 and joined the Finance Ministry. After a few months, however, he abandoned government work and decided to devote himself entirely to writing.
Mishima’s first published work, “The Flowering Grove,” had already appeared in 1944, the year that he entered university. It revealed a surprising maturity and a very original talent. These were amply confirmed in “Confessions of a Mask” (1949), which won him high critical acclaim and enormous popularity, especially among the younger generation of readers. “Confessions of a Mask” is a remarkably frank novel which sensitively depicts the sexual awakening of the hero, his discovery that he is a homosexual, and his realization that this is going to color his entire life. Two of Mishima’s subsequent novels, also very popular, further explore the issue of homosexuality.
Mishima’s writing, however, has gone far beyond the limited scope provided by such specialized themes and has already covered an amazingly wide range. “The Thirst for Love” (1951) is focused on the life of a sensitive, depressed, and highly emotional woman who attempts to find the warmth of love in the aridity of a morally sordid household and who ends by committing murder; “The Sound of Waves” (1954) tells the fairy-like love story of a young fisherman and a girl on a little island off Japan; “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” (1956) is a penetrating account of the unbalanced young acolyte whose entire life becomes absorbed by the beauty of the temple, to which he finally sets fire as an act of supreme defiance and liberation.
Mishima’s talent and energy have enabled him to produce an amazing volume of work. No less striking is the versatility of his writing. He has already published a dozen novels and more than fifty volumes of short stories and poetry, as well as articles and newspaper sketches by the gross; he has written Kabuki plays which have been produced in various parts of the country; six of his modern plays have been staged in Tokyo; finally, his modern-version Noh plays have been produced with great success. With such an immense output, a writer is inevitably in danger of developing literary mannerisms and even of becoming mechanical or stereotyped in his form of expression. These are dangers that Mishima has so far avoided, on the whole, mainly because he has constantly set himself the task of seeking fresh ideas and new modes of expression. At the same time, prolific writers are prone to be extremely uneven. Even Mishima’s keenest admirers admit that there is a considerable proportion of his published work that does not add to his literary reputation.
The style of Mishima’s stories and novels is in most cases ornate and rather obscure; often it verges on the precious. This type of writing, difficult as it is for the translator, appears to have a great appeal for the younger generation in Japan.
Another reason for Mishima’s literary success is the extremely effective way he has succeeded in describing the manners and thoughts of the “lost generation” of postwar Japan. His stories and novels vividly evoke the despair, confusion, and sense of void that have been prevalent among many young Japanese since the war.
Although Mishima is best known for his portrayal of postwar youth, he frequently turns to Japanese classical literature for his material. He has a far greater interest in his country’s cultural traditions than most young writers of the postwar period. This interest is revealed in his work on Kabuki, in his modern-style Noh plays, and in stories like the present one, where he applies a modern psychological approach to the motivation of characters from an ancient Japanese chronicle.
“The Priest and His Love” (Shigadera Shōnin no Koi) was first published in 1954, when the author was twenty-nine. It is based on a brief account contained in Volume 37 of the fourteenth-century war chronicle which (rather inaptly) is entitled “Chronicles of the Peaceful Reign.” Mr. Mishima’s interest lies in the motivation of his two protagonists, rather than in the events themselves, which he uses simply as a springboard. He is particularly concerned with the inner conflict between worldly love and religious faith—a conflict which, he points out, has been a common theme in the West, but which is relatively rare in Japanese literature. The religious belief with which both the main characters are imbued is that of Jōdo, or Pure Land, Buddhism, a doctrine of salvation by faith founded by Hōnen Shōnin in the twelfth century and based on the worship of Amitābha Buddha, the Lord of Boundless Light. “Jōdo Buddhism,” writes Mr. Mishima in an introductory section, “was not so much a creed as the discovery of a conceptual world…. The love story between the Priest and the Imperial Concubine was enacted at the crucial point where the ideal world structure that they had both envisaged was balanced between collapse and survival.”
The great precursor of the Jōdo Sect was Eshin (Genshin) who lived from 942 to 1017, and whose Ōjō Yōshū (“Essentials of Salvation”) sets forth the main themes that were later to be incorporated into the doctrines of the Jōdo Sect. According to Eshin, enlightenment can be attained only by simple faith expressed in the invocation of the name of Amitābha Buddha, by means of which the believer will be reborn into the Western Paradise or Pure Land. Ōjō Yōshū is especially noted for its vivid depiction of Heaven and Hell. From the middle of the Heian period it exerted an enormous popular appeal, and it is believed to have been one of the first printed books in Japan.
The interview behind the blind toward the end of the story may require a few words of explanation. As readers of “The Ta
le of Genji” will recall, it was customary in the Heian period for noblewomen to be hidden by a ceremonial screen or blind when receiving male visitors. To invite a man behind the screen normally meant that a woman was prepared to accept his advances.
ACCORDING TO ESHIN’S “Essentials of Salvation,” the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land. In that land the earth is made of emerald and the roads that lead across it are lined by cordons of gold rope. The surface is endlessly level and there are no boundaries. Within each of the sacred precincts are fifty thousand million halls and towers wrought of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, crystal, coral, agate, and pearls; and wondrous garments are spread out on all the jeweled daises. Within the halls and above the towers a multitude of angels is forever playing sacred music and singing paeans of praise to the Tathagata Buddha. In the gardens that surround the halls and the towers and the cloisters are great gold and emerald ponds where the faithful may perform their ablutions; the gold ponds are lined with silver sand, and the emerald ponds are lined with crystal sand. The ponds are covered with lotus plants which sparkle in variegated colors and, as the breeze wafts over the surface of the water, magnificent lights crisscross in all directions. Both day and night the air is filled with the songs of cranes, geese, mandarin ducks, peacocks, parrots, and sweet-voiced Kalavinkas, who have the faces of beautiful women. All these and the myriad other hundred-jeweled birds are raising their melodious voices in praise of the Buddha. (However sweet their voices may sound, so immense a collection of birds must be extremely noisy.)
The borders of the ponds and the banks of the rivers are lined with groves of sacred treasure trees. These trees have golden stems and silver branches and coral blossoms, and their beauty is mirrored in the waters. The air is full of jeweled cords, and from these cords hang the myriad treasure bells which forever ring out the Supreme Law of Buddha; and strange musical instruments, which play by themselves without ever being touched, also stretch far into the pellucid sky.
If one feels like having something to eat, there automatically appears before one’s eyes a seven-jeweled table on whose shining surface rest seven-jeweled bowls heaped high with the choicest delicacies. But there is no need to pick up these viands and put them in one’s mouth. All that is necessary is to look at their inviting colors and to enjoy their aroma; thereby the stomach is filled and the body nourished, while one remains oneself spiritually and physically pure. When one has thus finished one’s meal without any eating, the bowls and the table are instantly wafted off.
Likewise, one’s body is automatically arrayed in clothes, without any need for sewing, laundering, dyeing, or repairing. Lamps, too, are unnecessary, for the sky is illumined by an omnipresent light. Furthermore, the Pure Land enjoys a moderate temperature all year round, so that neither heating nor cooling is required. A hundred thousand subtle scents perfume the air, and lotus petals rain down constantly.
In the chapter on the Inspection Gate we are told that, since uninitiated sightseers cannot hope to penetrate deep into the Pure Land, they must concentrate, first, on awakening their powers of “external imagination” and, thereafter, on steadily expanding these powers. Imaginative power can provide a short cut for escaping from the trammels of our mundane life and for seeing the Buddha. If we are endowed with a rich, turbulent imagination, we can focus our attention on a single lotus flower and from there can spread out to infinite horizons.
By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth. And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives off eighty-four thousand lights. Furthermore, the smallest of these flowers has a diameter of two hundred and fifty yojana. Thus, assuming that the yojana of which we read in the Holy Writings correspond to seventy-five miles each, we may conclude that a lotus flower with a diameter of nineteen thousand miles is on the small side.
Now such a flower has eighty-four thousand petals and between each of the petals there are one million jewels, each emitting one thousand lights. Above the beautifully adorned calyx of the flower rise four bejeweled pillars and each of these pillars is one hundred billion times as great as Mount Sumeru, which towers in the center of the Buddhist universe. From the pillars hang great draperies and each drapery is adorned with fifty thousand million jewels, and each jewel emits eighty-four thousand lights, and each light is composed of eighty-four thousand different golden colors, and each of those golden colors in its turn is variously transmogrified.
To concentrate on such images is known as “thinking of the Lotus Seat on which Lord Buddha sits”; and the conceptual world that hovers in the background of our story is a world imagined on such a scale.
* * *
The Great Priest of Shiga Temple was a man of the most eminent virtue. His eyebrows were white, and it was as much as he could do to move his old bones along as he hobbled on his stick from one part of the temple to another.
In the eyes of this learned ascetic, the world was a mere pile of rubbish. He had lived away from it for many a long year, and the little pine sapling that he had planted with his own hands on moving into his present cell had grown into a great tree whose branches swelled in the wind. A monk who had succeeded in abandoning the Floating World for so long a time must feel secure about his afterlife.
When the Great Priest saw the rich and the noble, he smiled with compassion and wondered how it was that these people did not recognize their pleasures for the empty dreams that they were. When he noticed beautiful women, his only reaction was to be moved with pity for men who still inhabited the world of delusion and who were tossed about on the waves of carnal pleasure.
From the moment that a man no longer responds in the slightest to the motives that regulate the material world, that world appears to be at complete repose. In the eyes of the Great Priest the world showed only repose; it had become a mere picture drawn on a piece of paper, a map of some foreign land. When one has attained a state of mind from which the evil passions of the present world have been so utterly winnowed, fear too is forgotten. Thus it was that the priest no longer could understand why Hell should exist. He knew beyond all peradventure that the present world no longer had any power left over him; but, as he was completely devoid of conceit, it did not occur to him that this was the effect of his own eminent virtue.
So far as his body was concerned, one might say that the priest had well nigh been deserted by his own flesh. On such occasions as he observed it—when taking a bath, for instance—he would rejoice to see how his protruding bones were precariously covered by his withered skin. Now that his body had reached this stage, he felt that he could come to terms with it, as if it belonged to someone else. Such a body, it seemed, was already more suited for the nourishment of the Pure Land than for terrestrial food and drink.
In his dreams he lived nightly in the Pure Land, and when he awoke he knew that to subsist in the present world was to be tied to a sad and evanescent dream.
In the flower-viewing season large numbers of people came from the Capital to visit the village of Shiga. This did not trouble the priest in the slightest, for he had long since transcended that state in which the clamors of the world can irritate the mind. One spring evening he left his cell, leaning on his stick, and walked down to the lake. It was the hour when dusky shadows slowly begin to thrust their way into the bright light of the afternoon. There was not the slightest ripple to disturb the surface of the water. The priest stood by himself at the edge of the lake and began to perform the holy rite of Water Contemplation.
At that moment an ox-drawn carriage, clearly belonging to a person of high rank, came round the lake and stopped close to where the priest was standing. The owner was a court lady from the Kyōgoku district of the Capital who held the exalted title of Great Imperial Concubine. This lady had come to view the springtime scenery in Shiga and now on h
er return she stopped the carriage and raised the blind in order to have a final look at the lake.
Unwittingly the Great Priest glanced in her direction and at once he was overwhelmed by her beauty. His eyes met hers and, as he did nothing to avert his gaze, she did not take it upon herself to turn away. It was not that her liberality of spirit was such as to allow men to gaze on her with brazen looks; but the motives of this austere old ascetic could hardly, she felt, be those of ordinary men.
After a few moments the lady pulled down the blind. Her carriage started to move and, having gone through the Shiga Pass, rolled slowly down the road that led to the Capital. Night fell and the carriage made its way toward the city along the Road of the Silver Temple. Until the carriage had become a pinprick that disappeared between the distant trees, the Great Priest stood rooted to the spot.
In the twinkling of an eye the present world had wreaked its revenge with terrible force on the priest. What he had imagined to be completely safe had collapsed in ruins.
He returned to the temple, faced the main image of Buddha, and invoked the Sacred Name. But impure thoughts now cast their opaque shadows about him. A woman’s beauty, he told himself, was but a fleeting apparition, a temporary phenomenon composed of flesh—of flesh that was soon to be destroyed. Yet, try as he might to ward it off, the ineffable beauty which had overpowered him at that instant by the lake now pressed on his heart with the force of something that has come from an infinite distance. The Great Priest was not young enough, either spiritually or physically, to believe that this new feeling was simply a trick that his flesh had played on him. A man’s flesh, he knew full well, could not alter so rapidly. Rather, he seemed to have been immersed in some swift, subtle poison which had abruptly transmuted his spirit.
