It seemed to him that if Satoko was there then she must always be there. If he was chained to eternal life by consciousness then she must be up there an infinite distance from his hell. Doubtless she could see through it at a glance. And he felt that the deathless hell of a straitened and fear-ridden consciousness and her celestial immortality had struck up a balance. He could wait three hundred years, a thousand years, to see her.
He made all manner of excuses, and in the course of time all the excuses in the world came to seem like excuses for not visiting the Gesshuuji. He was like a person denying beauty that was certain to bring destruction. His refusal to visit the Gesshuuji became more than procrastination. He knew that to visit it had become an impossibility, perhaps the narrowest of the gates in his life. If he were to insist upon a visit, might the Gesshuuji not withdraw from him, disappear in a mist of light?
All the same he came to think that, matters of an undying consciousness aside, senility had ripened the moment for a visit. Probably he would make his visit as he was about to die. Satoko had been a person whom Kiyoaki must meet at the risk of his life; and a young and beautiful Kiyoaki calling out still to Honda forbade a meeting unless Honda, witness to the cruel impossibility, gambled his own life. He could meet her if he met death too. Perhaps, in secrecy, Satoko too knew of a time and awaited its coming. An ineffably sweet well of memory flowed over the aging Honda.
That Keiko should be here with him was a little incongruous.
He had rather strong doubts about Keiko’s understanding of Japanese culture. There was something admirable all the same in her expansive half-knowledge. She quite avoided pretense. She went her rounds of the Kyoto temples, and, like artistically inclined foreign ladies stuffed with misconceptions from a first visit to Japan, she would shrill forth her pleasure at objects that no longer interested most Japanese, and arrange them in false nosegays. She was fascinated with Japan as with the Antarctic. She would spread herself out with all the awkwardness of a stockinged foreign lady as she viewed a rock garden. All her life she had known only Occidental chairs.
She was in genuine intellectual heat. She fell into the habit of holding forth with her own peculiar notions about Japanese art and literature, albeit neglecting a detail here and there.
It had long been one of her indulgences to invite the foreign ambassadors in turn to dinner. Now they became the audiences for her proud lectures on Japanese culture. Older acquaintances had not dreamed that Keiko would one day honor them with discourses on gold-leafed screens.
“But they’re passers in the night with no sense of gratitude at all.” Honda warned her of the futility. “They’ll go on to their next posts with not a thought left in their heads for this one. What’s the point in even seeing them?”
“The birds of passage are the ones you don’t have to be on your guard with. You don’t have to worry about ten years from now, and a new audience every night is rather fun.”
But she was taking herself seriously, congratulating herself in a naïve way on furthering international cultural exchange. She would learn a dance and immediately unveil it before ambassadorial guests. It gave her strength to know that her audience was not likely to detect the flaws.
However assiduously Keiko might refine her knowledge, it was not up to plumbing the darkness where stretched the deepest roots of the Japanese. The dark blood springs that had agitated Isao Iinuma were far away. Honda called Keiko’s store of Japanese culture a freezer full of vegetables.
Honda had become recognized at the embassies as Keiko’s gentleman friend. He was always invited with her to dinner.
It angered him when at one embassy the footmen were in formal Japanese dress. “Displaying the natives, nothing more. It’s an insult.”
“I don’t feel that way at all. Japanese men look better in Japanese clothes. Your dinner jacket does nothing for me at all.”
When, at a diplomatic black-tie dinner, the guests would start for the dining room with a gentle stir, the ladies in the lead, and the flowers on the table would throw deep shadows from a forest of silver candlesticks, and outside there would be quiet summer rain, the shining sadness of it all was most becoming to Keiko. She allowed not a flicker of the ingratiating smile so common among Japanese women. There was grand tradition in the grand glowing back of the retreating figure. She even had the husky, melancholy voice of the old Japanese aristocrat. In the company of ambassadors whose weariness was showing through the gilt and of cold-blooded counselors each with his own special affectations, Keiko was alive.
Since they would be separated at the table, Keiko spoke to him quietly in the procession. “I brought up Robe of Feathers. But I’ve never been to Mio. Take me there some day soon. There are so many places I’ve never been.”
“Any time. I’ve just been to Nihondaira Heights, but I wouldn’t mind going again. I’ll most happily be your escort.”
His stiff shirt insisted on pressing at his chin.
8
“Hakuryō clutches the robe. She is helpless. Her tears like the dew in her jeweled hair, she weeps. The flowers fade, the five signs of the decay of the angel come forth.”
On the express from Tokyo Keiko was humming the prologue. “And what,” she asked with sudden earnestness, “are the five signs of the decay of the angel?”
Honda was well informed. He had looked into the matter of angels after that dream. The five signs are the five marks that death has come to an angel. There are variations, depending on the source.
Here is the account in the twenty-fourth fascicle of the Ekottara-augama: “There are thirty-three angels and one archangel, and the signs of death in them are fivefold. Their flowered crowns wither, their robes are soiled, the hollows under their arms are fetid, they lose their awareness of themselves, they are abandoned by the jeweled maidens.”
And The Life of the Buddha, fifth fascicle: “There are five signs that the allotted time has run out. The flowers in the hair fade, a fetid sweat comes from under the arms, the robes are soiled, the body ceases to give off light, it loses awareness of itself.”
And the last fascicle of the Mahāmāyā-sūtra: “And at that time Mahā gave forth in the heavens five signs of her decay. Her crown of flowers wilted, a sweat poured from under her arms, her halo faded, her eyes came to blink without pause, she lost all satisfaction with her rightful place.”
So far the similarities are more striking than the variations. The Abhidharma-mahāvibhāsā-sāstra describes the five greater signs and the five lesser signs in considerable detail. The five lesser signs are first.
As an angel soars and pirouettes it usually gives forth music so beautiful that no musician, no orchestra or chorus can imitate it; but as death approaches the music fades and the voice becomes tense and thin.
In normal times, day and night, there floods from within an angel a light that permits of no shadows; but as death approaches the light dwindles sharply and the body is wrapped in thin shadows.