“Even if you don’t avoid people, you’ll find, slowly, that you are being avoided. Unknown to themselves, those who know give off an unpleasant warning odor.
“Fleshly beauty, spiritual beauty, everything that pertains to beauty, is born from ignorance and darkness and from them alone. It is not allowed to know and still to be beautiful. If the ignorance and darkness are the same, then a contest between spirit that has nothing at all to hide them and flesh that hides them behind its own dazzling light is no contest at all. Beauty is only beauty of the flesh.”
“Yes, it is true. It was true of Ying Chan,” said Keiko, light reminiscence in her eyes as she looked out at the mists. “And that I suppose is why you told neither Isao the Second nor Ying Chan the Third.”
“A cruel sort of solicitude, I suppose, from a fear of obstructing fate. It kept me from speaking. But it was different with Kiyoaki. I did not then know the truth myself.”
“You want to say that you were beautiful yourself.” She cast a sarcastic eye from his head to his feet.
“No. I was industriously polishing the instruments to let me know.”
“I understand. I am to keep it absolutely secret from the boy until he is twenty and ready to die.”
“That is correct. You only have to wait four years.”
“You are quite sure you won’t die first?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“We must make another appointment with the Cancer Research Institute.”
Glancing at her watch, Keiko took out a small box filled with multicolored pills. She quickly selected three with her nail tips and drank them down with Scotch.
Honda had kept one thing from Keiko: that the boy they had met today was clearly different from his predecessors. The mechanism of his self-awareness was as apparent as if it lay behind a window. He had seen nothing of the sort in the other three. It seemed to him that the internal workings of the boy and his own were as alike as two peas. It was impossible that such could be the case—and yet, might the boy be that rarity, someone who knows and is all the more beautiful for knowledge? But that was impossible. If it was impossible, then, carrying all the proper marks, the proper age and the three moles, might the boy be the first instance of a cleverly wrought counterfeit set down before Honda?
They were beginning to feel sleepy. The talk moved to dreams.
“I very seldom dream,” said Keiko. “Even now I sometimes do dream of examinations, though.”
“They say you go on having dreams of examinations all through your life. I haven’t had one in ten years.”
“That’s because you were a good student.”
But it seemed altogether inappropriate to be talking with Keiko of dreams. It was like talking to a banker about knitting.
Finally they went off to their rooms. Honda had the sort of dream he had denied ever having, a dream of an examination.
On the second floor of a wooden frame schoolhouse, rocking so violently that it might have been hanging from a branch of a tree, Honda, in his teens, took up the answer sheets being passed briskly down rows of desks. Kiyoaki, he knew, would be two or three seats behind him. Looking from the questions on the blackboard to the answer sheets, Honda felt very sure of himself. He sharpened his pencils to chisels. He had the answers immediately. There was no need to hurry. The poplars outside were swaying in the wind.
He awoke in the night and every detail of the dream came back to him.
It had without question been a dream of an examination, and yet Honda had had none of the harried feelings that should go with such dreams. What had made him dream?
Since only he and Keiko knew of their conversation and it was not Keiko, then it had to be Honda himself. But he had not had the slightest wish to dream. He would not have made himself dream without consulting his own wishes in the matter.
Honda had of course read many books on Viennese psychoanalysis; but he could not accept the principle that one’s wish was to betray oneself. No: it was more natural to believe that someone outside was keeping a close watch, and importuning.
Awake he had volition and, whether he wished it or not, was living in history; but somewhere back in the darkness was someone, historical perhaps, nonhistorical perhaps, setting him against dreams.
The mists would seem to have cleared and the moon to have come out. The window, a little too tall for the curtain, was shining at the bottom a faint silver-blue, like a shadow of the giant reclining peninsula beyond the waters. So India would look, thought Honda, to a ship approaching from the Indian Ocean at night. He went back to sleep.
13
Beginning his shift at nine in the morning, Tōru as always opened the newspaper once he was alone. No ships were due until afternoon.
The paper was filled with stories of the industrial wastes that had floated ashore at Tago. There were some fifty paper mills at Tago, but Shimizu had only one, and that a small one. The prevailing currents were moreover eastward, and industrial wastes rarely came into Shimizu Harbor.
It seemed that the Zengakuren had come in considerable numbers for antipollution demonstrations. They were much beyond the range of even the thirty-power telescope. Things beyond the range of the telescope were of no relevance to Tōru.
It was a cool summer.
The sort of summer day was rare when the Izu Peninsula comes clearly forward and thunderclouds boil in a clear sky. The peninsula was in mists, the sunlight was dim. He had seen pictures taken recently from a weather satellite. Suruga Bay seemed to be always half hidden in smog.
Kinué stopped by in the morning, an unusual time. She asked if it would be all right to come inside.
“I’m all alone. He’s gone to the main office in Yokohama.”
There was fright in her eyes.
During the early summer rains he had taxed her considerably with the practice of bringing flowers for his hair, and for a time she had stopped coming. Now her visits were frequent again. She had stopped bringing flowers, but the fright and insecurity that were the excuse for the visits were more and more exaggerated.
“The second time. It’s the second time, and a different man each time.”
The story began the moment she sat down. Her breathing was heavy.
“What happened?”
“Someone is after you. When I come to see you I always make sure that no one sees me. If I didn’t I might cause complications. If they were to kill you it would be my fault, and I’d have no choice but to kill myself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The second time, I tell you. That’s why I’m so worried. I told you about last time. Remember? It was the same this time, but a little different. I went for a walk on Komagoé Beach this morning. I picked some beach lilies and then I went down to the water, and was looking out to sea with nothing very much on my mind.
“There aren’t many people on Hamagoé Beach, and I do get tired of having people stare at me. I love looking out to sea. I feel so relaxed. I sometimes think that if I put my own beauty on one side of the scales and the sea on the other they’d balance perfectly. So it’s as if I’d turned my beauty over to the sea, and had no worries left.
“There was no one there. Just two or three people fishing. Maybe because he wasn’t catching anything, one of them kept staring at me. I pretended not to notice, but that stare was on my cheek like a fly.
“I doubt if you can understand how awful it makes me feel. Here it is happening again, I say to myself. My beauty taking off on its own, robbing me of my freedom. It seems like something apart from me, beyond my control. Here I am, bothering no one, just wanting to be left alone, and it’s off making trouble. It’s a sign of true beauty, I know. But beauty’s the worst sort of nuisance when it’s off on its own.