What a dazzling thing it was, this scornful laughter! To me there was something brilliant―brilliant like the light reflected from the clusters of leaves―about this cruel laughter of my classmates which was so characteristic of boys of their age.
She looked like a madwoman who has been caught. Her face was motionless under the moon. Until then I had never seen a face so full of rejection. My face, I thought, was one that had been rejected by the world, but Uiko's face was rejecting the world. The moonlight was mercilessly pouring over her forehead, her eyes, the bridge of her nose, her cheeks; but her motionless face was merely washed by the light. If she had moveed her eyes or her mouth even a little, the world, which she was striving to reject, would have taken this as a signal to come surging into her.
I gazed at it and held my breath. At the face whose history had been interrupted at just this point, and which would not tell a single thing regarding either the future or the past. Sometimes we see such a face on the stump of a tree that has just been chopped down. Though the cross section of the tree is young and fresh in color, all growth has ceased at this point; it is open to the wind and the sun, to which it should never have been opened; it is exposed suddenly to a world which was not originally its own―and on this cross section, drawn with the beautiful grain of the wood, we see a strange face. A face that is held out to this world just so that it may reject it....
The shop was filled with a peculiarly American odor, half the hygienic smell of medicines, half the sweet, clinging odor of bodies. The customers were almost all women middle-aged or older, with proud eyes and heavily painted lips, attacking large sweets and open sandwiches. Despite the noise and bustle of the store, there was something very lonely about the individual women and their appetites. Sad, lonely, like a performance by so many consuming machines.
The Great Imperial Concubine was not, as was so widely believed, the personification of Courtly elegance, but, rather, a person who found the real relish of life in the knowledge of being loved. Despite her high rank, she was first of all a woman; and all the power and authority in the world seemed to her empty things if they were bereft of this knowledge.
Yukio Mishima, The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love
For, whatever a woman may say about abandoning the world, it is almost impossible for her to give up the things that she possesses. Only men are really capable of giving up what they possess.
Yukio Mishima, The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love
Ranged across the top of the radio were a small china dog, a rabbit, a squirrel, a bear, and a fox. There were also a small vase and a water pitcher. These comprised Reiko's one and only collection. But it would hardly do, she imagined, to give such things as keepsakes. Nor again would it be quite proper to ask specifically for them to be included in the coffin. It seemed to Reiko, as these thoughts passed through her mind, that the expressions on the small animals' faces grew even more lost and forlorn. Reiko took the squirrel in her hand and looked at it. And then, her thoughts turning to a realm far beyond these childlike affections, she gazed up into the distance at the great sunlike principle which her husband embodied.
There was the sound of a car outside the window. He could hear the screech of its tires skidding in the snow piled at the side of the street. The sound of its horn re-echoed from near-by walls. ...Listening to these noises he had the feeling that this house rose like a solitary island in the ocean of a society going as restlessly about its business as ever. All around, vastly and untidily, stretched the country for which he grieved. He was to give his life for it. But would that great country, with which he was prepared to remonstrate to the extent of destroying himself, take the slightest heed of his death? He did not know; and it did not matter. His was a battlefield without glory, a battlefield where none could display deeds of valor: it was the front line of the spirit.
In the radiant, bridelike figure of his white-robed wife the lieutenant seemed to see a vision of all those things he had loved and for which he was to lay down his life―the Imperial Household, the Nation, the Army Flag. All these, no less than the wife who sat before him, were presences observing him closely with clear and never-faltering eyes.
The abundance of Masako's tears was a genuine cause for astonishment. Not for a moment did their volume diminish. Tired of watching, Akio dropped his gaze and looked at the tip of the umbrella he had stood against a chair. The raindrops running from it had formed a small, darkish puddle on the old-fashioned, tile mosaic floor. Even the puddle began to look like Masako' s tears to him.
At first glance, it seemed as neat, as motionless, as a sculpture fashioned out of water. Yet watching closely he could see a transparent ghost of movement moving upward from bottom to top. With furious speed it climbed, steadily filling a slender cylinder of space from base to summit, replacing each moment what had been lost the moment before, in a kind of perpetual replenishment. It was plain that at heaven's height it would be finally frustrated; yet the unwaning power that supported unceasing failure was magnificent.
To cure the world of its stupidity, the first requirement was a process of purification through stupidity; a thorough exaltation of what the bourgeoisie saw as stupid, even if it meant aping the bourgeois creed and its single-minded, tradesman's energy....
Either way, Jack was cured by now. He'd been mistaken in thinking that if he killed himself the sordid bourgeois world would perish with him. He'd lost consciousness and been taken to a hospital, and when he came to and surveyed his surroundings, the same world had been all around him, alive and kicking as ever. So, since the world seemed irremediable, he'd resigned himself to getting better....
Kinouchi felt an affection for the youthfulness thus challenging him. Youth came to the attack courteously yet brutally, while age awaited it, a smile on its lips, without stirring and with confidence. Courtesy without violence was displeasing in a young man, less acceptable even than violence without courtesy.
On the far side of this frustration Kinouchi lounged like a great indigo cat taking a daytime nap. Jiro gave up any idea of finding a weak point. It must be his own impatience, he felt, that prevented him from getting at him. The other man's flawlessness was surely a false front, a sleight of hand; in this world, nothing could really be so perfect. A thin casing of ice seemed gradually to be enveloping his person, threatening to encase his shoulders and elbows firmly till finally he was trapped in it. The more he put things off, the worse it got. He must burst out with all strength of his body, smash the ice.
Mental softness and impressionability―rebelling, scorning, lapsing occasionally into self-disgust― were to be discarded entirely. A sense of shame was to be retained, but bashful hesitation was to go. Any feelings of“I want to”must be done away with, to be replaced, as a basic principle, by“I should.” Yes―that was what he would do. He would focus the whole of his daily life on fencing. The sword was a sharp-pointed crystal of concentrated, unsullied power, the natural form taken by the spirit and the flesh when they were honed into a single shaft of pure light.
Once, as a boy, he had tried to outstare the sun. But before he could tell whether he had really looked at it or not, changes had occurred: the blazing red ball that had been there at first began to whirl, then suddenly dimmed, till it became a cold, bluish-black, flattened disk of iron. He felt he had seen the very essence of the sun.... For a while, wherever he looked he saw the sun's pale afterimage: in the undergrowth; in the shade beneath the trees; even, when he gazed up, in every part of the sky. The truth was something too dazzling to be looked at directly. And yet, once it had come into one's field of vision, one saw patches of light in all kinds of places: the afterimages of virtue.
When all's said and done, everything in fencing depends on your grip. That's the one thing I've learned from thirty-five years of it. The important thing for a human being is to learn and master one thing in his life―one thing, however small. That's enough.
Just when he had lost his faith Anri could not remember. The one thing he could recall, vividly even now, was the mystery of the sea, aglow in the sunset, whose waters had failed to give way however much they prayed: a fact more incomprehensible than any miraculous vision. The mystery of that encounter between a boyish mind that saw nothing strange in a vision of Christ, and a sunset sea that refused absolutely to divide....
If at any time in his life the sea had been going to part, it should have done so at that moment, yet even then it had stretched silent, fiery still in the sunset: there lay the mystery....
I cannot look back on the turmoil of adolescence as something either enjoyable or attractive. “My youth was but a shadowy storm,”writes Baudelaire in a poem,“shot through here and there by shafts of sunlight.” It's odd how one's memories of youth turn out so bleak. Why does the business of growing up―one's recollections of growth itself―have to be so tragic? I still haven't found the answer. I doubt if anybody has. When I finally reach that stage at which the placid wisdom of old age, with the dry clarity that comes toward autumn's end, occasionally descends on a person, then I too may suddenly discover that I understand. But I doubt whether, by the time, understanding will have much point.
He gave the impression of looking disapprovingly on the tendency, common to all boys, to worship toughness as a way of making up for their awareness of the vulnerability peculiar to their age. If anything, Watari sought to preserve the vulnerability. The young man who seeks to be himself is respected by his fellows; the boy who tries to do the same is persecuted by other boys, it being a boy's business to become something else just as soon as he can.
It might be that, when a person strove too hard to apprehend something outside himself, some kind of exchange occurred eventually between him and the object of his interest, leaving him subtly altered.
Under any government and in any society, for beautiful scenery to produce beautiful verse surely required that the poet, if a woman, should have beauty and position in the manner of Eifuku Mon'in, or, if a man, some strong, unshakable ideas of his own.
Quite possibly, that was what had given him such an unusually solitary, chilly personality―the suspicion that the beauty distilled from the ugly struggles provoked by man's greed appeared, not on the victorious side but more stealthily, amongst those who were defeated or doomed to extinction; whereas he personally, hoping to establish (albeit in provisional form) his own lasting authority, disliked any hint of such extinction.
Like a moon that hangs in the night sky, the Golden Temple had been built as a symbol of the dark ages. Therefore it was necessary for Golden Temple of my dreams to have darkness bearing down on it from all sides. In this darkness, the beautiful, slender pillars of the building rested quietly and steadily, emitting a faint light from inside. Whatever words people might speak to the Golden Temple, it must continue to stand there silently, displaying its delicate structure to the eyes of the world and enduring the darkness that surrounded it.
The Golden Temple had made its way through an immense night. A crossing whose end one could still not foresee. In the daytime, this strange ship lowered its anchor with a look of innocence and submitted to being viewed by crowds of people; but when night came, the surrounding darkness lent the ship a new force and it floated away, with its roof billowing like a great sail.
In any case, for the present I was situated squarely between two worlds. Although I was still so young, I was conscious, under my ugly, stubborn forehead, that the world of death which my father ruled and the world of life occupied by young people were being brought together by the mediation of war. I myself would probably become an intermediary. When I was killed in the war, it would be clear that it had not made the slightest difference which path I had chosen of the two that now lay before my eyes.
From Ashiwara Island came the cry of the night birds as they flew off into the distance. I was conscious of the weight of Father's emaciated hands on my shoulders. When I glanced at my shoulder, I saw that in the moonlight Father's hand had turned into that of a skeleton.
The minutest part of the temple was in perfect accord with the entire complex structure. It was like hearing a few notes of music and having the entire composition flow through one's mind: whichever part of the Golden Temple I might pick out, the entire building echoed within me.
Father's face was buried in early summer flowers. There was something gruesome about the utter freshness of those flowers. It was as though they were peering down into the bottom of a well. For a dead man's face falls to an infinite depth beneath the surface which the face possessed when it was alive, leaving nothing for the survivors to see but the frame of a mask; it falls so deep, indeed, that it can never be pulled back to the surface.
A dead man's face can tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from the true existence of physical substance, how impossible it is for us to lay hands on the way in which this substance exists.
For this was not at all like a meeting; I was merely looking at Father's dead face. The corpse was just being looked at. I was just looking. To know that looking (the act, that is, of looking at someone, as one ordinarily does, without any special awareness) was such a proof of the rights of those who are alive, and that this looking could also be an expression of cruelty― all this came to me now as a vivid experience.
Now and then a sea breeze blew into the temple, puffing up the sleeves of my clerical robe. As I recited the sutras, I was constantly aware of the posture of the summer clouds as they cast a strong glare into the corner of my eyes. An intense light poured constantly from outside the temple onto one side of my face. How brightly it shone―that insult!
I was always overcome by amazement at the fact that the temple was actually there, and when I returned to the hall after a good look at the building, I felt that if I were suddenly to turn round and look again, its form would vanish exactly like that of Eurydice.
His white-shirted stomach rippled with laughter. The rays of the sun that poured through the swaying branches of the trees made me feel happy. Like the young man's wrinkled shirt, my life was wrinkled. But, wrinkled as it was, how white his shirt shone in the sunlight! Perhaps I too?
>>126の次 I did not feel that this ancient sooty train was really bound for the city. I felt that it was headed for the station of death. Once this thought had come into my mind, the smoke that filled our carriage each time that we passed through a tunnel had the smell of the crematorium.
Tsurukawa's gentleness taught me that, even if stuttering were removed from my existence, I could still remain myself. I thoroughly enjoyed being stripped stark naked. Tsurukawa's eyes, bordered with their long lashes, filtered away my stuttering and accepted the rest of me just as I was. Until then I had been under the strange illusion that to disregard my stuttering was of itself equivalent to annihilating that existence called“me.”
Existing as we did under the same curse, under the same ill-omened fiery destiny, the temple and I had come to inhabit worlds of the same dimension. Just like my own frail, ugly body, the temple's body, hard though it was, consisted of combustible carbon. At times I felt that it would be possible for me to flee this place, taking along the temple concealed in my flesh, in my system― just as a thief swallows a precious jewel when making his escape.
Sometimes the unusual brilliance of the early spring sky appeared to me like the light of the cool blade of some huge axe that was large enough to cover the entire earth.
When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.
Yes, Tsurukawa sometimes seemed to me like an alchemist who could transform tin into gold. I was the negative of the picture; he was the positive. How often had I not been amazed to see how my dark, turbid feelings could become clear and radiant by being filtered through Tsurukawa's heart!
What is so ghastly about exposed intestines? Why, when we see the insides of a human being, do we have to cover our eyes in terror? Why are people so shocked at the sight of blood pouring out? Why are a man's intestines ugly? Is it not exactly the same in quality as the beauty of youthful, glossy skin? What sort of a face would Tsurukawa make if I were to say that it was from him that I had learned this manner of thinking―a manner of thinking that transformed my own ugliness into nothingness?
Why does there seem to be something inhuman about regarding human beings like roses and refusing to make any distinction between the inside of their bodies and the outside? If only human beings could reverse their spirits and their bodies, could gracefully turn them inside out like rose petals and expose them to the spring breeze and to the sun....
>>144の次 This happened many years ago when I was only thirteen, but the memory of those hands is still alive within me. Incomparably large hands. Hands that had been put round me from behind, blotting out in one second the sight of that hell which I had seen. Hands from another world. Whether it was from love or compassion or shame, I do not know; but those hands had instantaneously cut off the terrifying world with which I was confronted and had buried it in darkness.
I nodded slightly within those hands. From that nodding of my small head, Father could instantly tell that I had understood and that I was ready to acquiesce; he removed his hands. And, afterwards, just as those hands had ordered, I kept my eyes obstinately closed, and thus lay there sleeplessly until morning came and the dazzling light from outside forced its way through my eyelids.
The darkening courtyard had become the color of the sea bed. The stones sank in the gloom, and from their form one might have thought they had been struggling fiercely with each other.
The swelling became firmly rooted and began to press on me from the back of my neck with a heavy, hot force. In my fitful sleep, I dreamed that a pure golden light was growing on my neck, surrounding the back of my head with a sort of elliptical halo and gradually expanding. But when I awoke, this turned out to have been merely the pain from my virulent swelling.
The surgeon, who was dressed in a national uniform with gaiters, diagnosed my swelling by the simple name of Flunkel. Not wanting to use any alcohol, he disinfected his knife by holding it over a flame and then applied it to my neck. I groaned. The hot, burdensome world burst open in the back of my head, and I felt it shriveling up and collapsing.
The country's defeat was for me just such an experience of despair. Even now I can see before me the flame-like summer light of that day of defeat, August 15. People said that all values had collapsed; but within myself, on the contrary, eternity awoke, was resuscitated, and asserted its rights. The eternity which told me that the Golden Temple was to remain there forever. The eternity that descended from heaven,sticking to our cheeks, our hands, our stomachs, and finally burying us. How cursed a thing it was! Yes, in the cries of the cicadas that echoed from the surrounding hills, I could hear this eternity, which was like a curse on my head, which had shut me up in the golden plaster.
It struck me as strange that a Zen priest also should have flesh. The reason that the Superior had indulged himself so thoroughly with women could have been that he wished to show his scorn of the flesh by throwing it away from himself. But if that were so, it seemed strange that this flesh which he so despised should have absorbed ample nourishment and that it should be sleekly wrapping itself about his spirit. Docile, humble flesh like some well-trained domestic animal. Flesh that was exactly like a concubine for the Superior's spirit.
I must state what the defeat really meant to me. It was not a liberation. No, it was by no means a liberation. It was nothing else than a return to the unchanging, eternal Buddhist routine, which merged into our daily life.
I imagined this bold, cruel, sharp-eyed officer as he stood there, about to rush headlong towards evil. The path along which he was going to run in his half-length military boots revealed the precise quality of death in battle; it had a form of disorder that reminded me of the crimson glow at dawn. As he set off, his white silk scarf would be fluttering at his breast, and his cheeks would be exposed to the cold night wind that still lingered in the early morning. His back would be bent double with the weight of the stolen goods: he would wear himself out with magnificent speed. But more in the distance, more lightly, I could hear the bell of disorder ringing in the bell tower.
“Don't you have any worries or hopes about the future?”I asked him. “No, none at all. What good would it do if I did?” There was nothing gloomy in the way that he said this, nor did he speak haphazardly. Just then a flash of lighting lit up his narrow, gently sloping eyebrows, which were the only delicate part of his features. Tsurukawa evidently let the barber have his way in shaving the top and bottom of his eyebrows; as a result his already narrow eyebrows were made even narrower and one could see a faint blue shadow at the ends where the razor had passed.
As I glanced at this blue, I was seized with uneasiness. The young boy who sat in front of me burned at the pure extremity of life. He was different from me. His future was so concealed that he was burning. The wick of his future was floating in cool, clear oil. Who in this world was obliged to foresee his own innocence and purity? That is, if only innocence and purity remained for him in the future.
When I was a child, I had often turned my head up to the snow with my mouth wide open. I did so now, and the snowflakes touched my teeth, making a noise as if they were striking a very thin piece of tin foil. I felt that the snow was scattering throughout the warm cavity of my mouth and melting as if reached the red surface of the flesh. At that instant I imagined the mouth of the phoenix on top of the Kukyocho. The hot, smooth mouth of that mysterious and golden-colored bird. Snow gives all of us a youthful feeling. And would it be quite untrue to say that I, who still had not reached my eighteenth birthday, now felt some youthful stirring within me?
“Why doesn't the snow stutter? I wondered. Sometimes, when the snow brushed against the leaves of the yatsude, it fell to the ground as if it were in fact stuttering. But when I felt myself bathed in the snow as if descended mildly from the sky without any interruption, I forgot the kinks in my heart and seemed to return to some more gentle spiritual rhythm, as if I were being bathed in music.
Today, too, the doors of the Kukyocho had been opened to the snowy sky. As I gazed up at it, I observed minutely how the falling snowflakes whirled round in the small space where there was nothing of the Kukyocho, and how, then, they settled on the old, tarnished gold-foil of its walls and stayed there until they had formed small patches of golden dew.
The only thing that really counts in a man is his get-up-and-go. If he's got get-up-and-go he's a real man, and those are the kind of men we need here on Uta-jima. Family and money are all secondary.
Perhaps a lyrical poet lurked within that huge body of his, but I felt that there was cruelty in his clear, blue eyes. The Western nursery-rhyme“Mother Goose”refers to black eyes as being cruel and malicious; the fact is that when people imagine cruelty, they normally assign some foreign character to it.
For my deed had settled like gold dust within my memory and had begun to give off a glittering light that constantly pierced my eyes. The glitter of evil. Yes, that was it. It may have been a very minor evil, but I was now endowed with the vivid consciousness that I had in fact committed evil. This consciousness hung like some decoration on the inside of my breast.
I was always aware of a freshness in the male voices as they recited the sutras in unison during the morning task. The sound of those morning sutras was the strongest of the whole day. The strong voices seemed to scatter all the evil thoughts that had gathered during the night, and it was as though a black spray were gushing from the vocal chords of all the singers and being splashed about. I do not know about myself. I do not know, but it heartened me strangely to think that my voice was scattering away the same masculine evil thoughts as the others.
>>140前 The surrounding hills with their red pines were mantled in the cry of the cicadas, as though countless invisible priests were chanting the vocation for the Extinction of Fires.
There was a certain severe beauty in his pale face. Physically he was a cripple, yet there was an intrepid beauty about him, like that of a lovely woman. Cripples and lovely woman are both tired of being looked at, they are weary of an existence that involves constantly being observed, they feel hemmed in; and they return the gaze by means of that very existence itself. The one who really looks is the one who wins.
People with comic looks like me are extremely adept at avoiding the danger of appearing tragic by mistake. I knew very well that if I once began to appear tragic, people would no longer feel at ease when they came into contact with me. It was especially important for the souls of other people that I should never appear to be a wretched figure.
In the first place, doesn't uneasiness about one's existence spring precisely from a sort of luxurious dissatisfaction at the thought that one may not be living fully?
Who could say that if one were to look without dreaming at any woman, however beautiful she might be, her face would not be transformed into the face of this old woman?
I was released from uneasiness. I was released from love. The world had come to a permanent standstill and at the same time it had arrived. Do I have to elucidate this by saying‘our world'? Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning‘love’in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.
How do you suppose they managed to keep peace and order during the war if it wasn't by staging public exhibitions of violent death? The reason that they stopped having public executions was, I gather, because they were afraid it would make people bloodthirsty. Damned stupid if you ask me! The people who cleared away the dead bodies after the air raids all had gentle, cheerful expressions.
To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this.