He was happier than ever with his faculty for not dreaming. He had lighted mosquito repellent for the benefit of the superintendent, but the mosquitoes were at his own feet and ankles. The itching shone through his drowsiness like moonlight. He thought vaguely that he must again wash the hands with which he was scratching.
“Well, I’m afraid you’re sleepy. You have every right to be. The night’s practically over. Dear me. Eleven thirty already. I’ve stayed much too long. So the story sounds good to you? You agree?” As he stood up to leave, the superintendent laid a persuasive hand on Tōru’s shoulder.
Pretending to have awakened only now, Tōru said: “Yes. I agree.”
“You agree?”
“I agree.”
“Thank you, thank you. I’ll take care of everything else. Think of me as your father. All right?”
“Yes. I’d be very grateful if you would.”
“But it will be a loss for the station, letting a good boy like you go.”
He was far too drunk to drive. Tōru went for a taxi and saw him home.
15
After a number of typhoons, the late-summer sky for the first time displayed summery clouds. He was more attentive than usual to the clouds, thinking that this would be his last summer at the station.
The sky that evening was beautiful. Lines of cloud hovered over the ocean like the god of storms himself.
But the grand, orange-tinted forest of clouds was decapitated by yet another layer of clouds. Here and there the powerful muscles of the storm clouds were flushed over with shyness, and the blue sky behind poured over them in an avalanche of high azure. This layer was dark, that shone like a bright bow.
It was the nearest and highest layer of clouds. In exaggerated perspective, the layers that trailed off behind seemed to descend in steps beyond the clear sky. Perhaps, thought Tōru, it was a fraud perpetrated by the clouds. Perhaps the clouds, making a show of perspective, were deceiving him.
Among clouds like antique white clay images of warriors were some that suggested dragons twisting angrily and darkly upward. Some, as they lost their shape, were tinged rose. Presently, they separated themselves into bland reds and yellows and purples, and their stormy powers left them. The white shining face of the god had taken on the ashen hue of death.
16
He regretted that he had learned from her sister only that her death had come in the spring, and that he had not sought more specific information. Inquiring at the American Embassy about the residence of the sister, who had returned to America, he sent off two or three queries, but not the smallest fragment of information came in response. He had a friend in the Foreign Office make inquiry through the Japanese Embassy in Bangkok, but the only reply was that an investigation was in progress. There followed silence.
He could think of any number of devices if he did not mind the expense; but, with badly misplaced frugality and the impatience of old age, he neglected looking into the matter of the princess’s death even as he pushed forward with arrangements for the adoption. It seemed too much trouble.
The nerves of the Honda of 1944, uneasy about classic monetary principles, were probably still young and resilient. Now, when the classic common sense was falling apart, Honda clung to it stubbornly, and the result was a quarrel with a financial consultant fifteen years younger than he.
This last quarter of a century he had all the same amassed a fortune of perhaps two million dollars. The million that had come to him in 1948 he had cleanly divided into three parts, which he had put into stocks, real estate, and savings. The portion in real estate had increased tenfold and the stocks threefold and the savings had diminished.
He had not lost his taste for the stocks preferred by old gentlemen who, in wing collars, played billiards at English-style clubs. He was not free from the tastes of an age when the mark of class was to be the holder of “elegant, reliable” stocks like Tokyo Fire and Marine, Tokyo Electric Power, Tokyo Gas, and Kansai Electric Power, and to have a contempt for speculation. Yet the uninteresting stocks that exclusively made up his portfolio had tripled in value. Because of the fifteen-percent tax deduction for dividends, he paid scarcely any taxes at all from his dividend income.
Tastes in stocks were like tastes in neckties. Wide, gaudy, modish prints were not for an old man. If he did not reap the benefits of bold tastes, neither did he take the risks.
In the decade since 1960 it had become possible, as in America, to guess a man’s age from the stocks he owned. The bright celebrities among stocks were day by day becoming more vulgar, day by day taking on the look of the hoi polloi. The makers of small transistor parts, recording annual sales of ten billion yen, with stocks once fifty yen a share now touching fourteen hundred—they were altogether too ordinary.
While paying careful heed to his taste in stocks, Honda was quite insensitive to taste in real estate.
He had made a very good profit from the houses he had put up in 1953 for American soldiers near the Sagamihara Base. In those days it took more money to build houses than to buy land. Upon the advice of his financial consultant, Honda at first ignored houses and bought up some ten acres of unimproved land at a hundred yen or so per square yard. Each square yard was now worth perhaps twenty thousand yen. Land for which he had paid three million yen was now worth perhaps seven hundred and fifty million.
This was of course a windfall. He had had good luck with some of his land, rather poorer luck with other, but none of it had lost value. He regretted now that he had not left half that million dollars’ worth of forest land as it was.
His experience in making money had been a strange one. He could, to be sure, have made tenfold more if he had been bolder; but he could not think that he had come the wrong way. His prudence had guaranteed against loss. Yet there were small regrets and feelings of dissatisfaction. Pushed to their conclusion, they amounted to a dissatisfaction with his own innate nature; and a certain morbid lyricism was an inevitable result.
Honda had achieved security by clinging to his old-fashioned principles even though he was quite aware of the sacrifices they required. He worshipped the trinity of classical capitalism. There was something sacred about it, the harmony of liberal economics. It was symbolic, it had in it the slow, studied intellectual arrogance and sense of balance the gentlemen of the home country had toward colonies still in the primitive insecurity of monoculture.
Such things survived in Japan, then? As long as the tax laws remained unchanged, and enterprises continued to depend on sources of money other than their own capital, and as long as banks continued to demand land as security for loans, the giant article in pawn known as the land of Japan would have no part of the classic principles, and land prices would continue to rise. Inflation would cease only with the end of economic growth or with a Communist government.
While perfectly aware of these facts, Honda remained faithful to the old illusion. He took life insurance, and became an almost foolish defender of a currency system that was day by day falling to pieces. Perhaps a distant mirage of the age of the gold standard, when Isao was living so passionately, remained with Honda.
It had been long ago that the beautiful dream of harmony so dear to the liberal economists had faded, and the dialectical inevitability of the Marxists too had come to look rather peculiar. What was supposed to die had increased and multiplied, what was supposed to grow (it did grow, of course) changed into something quite different. There was no room left for pure doctrine.