“Yes, Furusawa is a good man,” he said after the first bite. “But have you looked into his ideas?”
It pleased him to see confusion of the most vulgar sort come out on Honda’s face.
“Has he said something to you?”
“Nothing specific. But I can’t get over feeling that he either has been or still is involved in some political movement.”
Honda was startled. He trusted Furusawa, and was sure that Tōru liked him. From Honda’s point of view, Tōru’s warning was based on confidence and understanding; but from Furusawa’s it was clearly the report of a secret informant. It amused Tōru to observe how Honda would dispose of this delicate ethical problem.
Honda saw that he was not to pass the light judgment he usually passed upon good and evil. Judged against a broader humanity of which Honda was fond of thinking, Tōru’s behavior was ugly; but judged against the image Honda had for Tōru himself, it passed muster. Honda was at the point of confessing that what he looked for in Tōru was ugliness.
To put Honda at his ease and offer occasion for mild reproof, Tōru tore off a childish mouthful of toast, spreading crumbs liberally on his knee. Honda took no notice.
It would not do to reprove Tōru for the element of meanness in this first mark of trust he had vouchsafed. On the other hand Honda’s old sense of ethics demanded that he inform Tōru of the impropriety of turning informant, whatever the reason; and so something rather petty was by way of coming into this happy breakfast scene.
Their hands bumped awkwardly as they both reached for the sugar bowl.
A sugar bowl bright with betrayal in the morning sunlight. Feelings of guilt for having reached out simultaneously. It wounded Honda to think that this had been the first suggestion of a parental bond.
Tōru was pleased at more than this open confusion. He could see the hesitation as Honda found himself unable to preach the obvious lesson: that one must show more confidence in and respect for a person whom one has even tentatively called teacher. For the first time the controversy within Honda and the evil hidden in his educational policies became clear. Tōru felt like a liberated child spitting out a watermelon seed.
“Well, leave it to me. You just go on doing as you’ve always done. Don’t worry yourself over anything but your studies. Leave everything else to me. The first thing is to get you through your examinations.”
“How right you are.” Tōru smiled a beautiful smile.
Honda deliberated for a day. The next day he asked an acquaintance in the Public Security Division of the Metropolitan Police to investigate. A report came some days later. Furusawa had been a member of an extremist student faction. Honda invented a trivial pretext for dismissing him.
20
Wrapped in paper, the flower would be like a dead butterfly. There was pollen for wing dust, letting one imagine that when it lived it had flown. Dead wings and dead petals are the same. The remembrance of color that has flown through the sky, and the remembrance of color in stillness and resignation.
Only after reading the letter did he recognize one fragment, dry and brown like the skin of an Indian, strong red threads torn and jagged from having been pressed flat, as the petal of a red hothouse tulip.
The letters were the endless confession she had brought to the signal station. And she always offered in much detail a description of her loneliness for Tōru and her wish to come to Tokyo. He always replied that she must be patient, however many years passed. He would find an occasion to summon her.
Sometimes he almost thought, after having been away from her for so long, that she was beautiful. And immediately he would laugh. Yet he was coming to see what the mad girl had meant to him.
He needed lunacy to dim his own clarity. He had to have someone beside him who would see as something quite different all the things he saw with such clarity, clouds or ships or the gloomy old hallway of the Honda house, or the schedule of all his lessons until examination day posted on the wall of his room.
Tōru sometimes longed for liberation. The direction was clear. It must be the direction of uncertainty, the realm behind this clearly defined world, a realm whose phenomena were flowing over a waterfall.
Kinué unconsciously played the role of the gentle guest who brought freedom into the cage.
Nor was that all.
She brought balm for certain itches within him. He itched to do injury. His heart was a sharp drill protruding from a sack, itching to cut someone. Having cut down Furusawa, it was looking for someone else. Its cleanness, free of the least speck of rust, must sooner or later turn savage. Tōru saw that he could do something other than observe. The awareness brought tension, and Kinué’s letters brought rest from it. Because of her madness she was beyond his harming.
The strongest bond between them was his certainty that he could not himself be wounded.
A successor to Furusawa was found, a student of the most ordinary common-sense sort. Tōru hoped that within the next two months he could get rid of the other tutors as well, for he did not want to seem in their debt when he had passed his examinations.
But caution held him back. Honda would begin to have certain suspicions were Tōru to waste his energies on such minor personages. He could come to discount Tōru’s complaints, and, accepting the faults complained of, find fault in the complaints themselves. And the secret pleasure would disappear. Tōru concluded that he must be patient. He must wait until someone far more worth wounding appeared. Whoever it was would provide a way, albeit an indirect one, of wounding Honda himself. A way that left no room for resentment. A clean, unsullied way of Tōru’s very own, leaving Honda with no one but himself to blame.
And who would come into his life, like a ship on the far horizon? As the ships had first taken firm shape in Tōru’s mind, so would his victim appear one day, a shadow neither ship nor mirage, unsuspecting and vulnerable, following the dictates of the drill in his heart. Tōru came almost to have hopes.
21
In his second year there came a proposal, through a suitable mediator. A certain person had a marriageable daughter he thought Tōru might be interested in. Tōru had reached the legal age of consent, but he was still only eighteen. Honda laughed the proposal off. The other person was persistent, however, and the proposal came through another mediator. Since the second man was an eminence in the legal world, Honda could not turn him away unconditionally.
Honda longed for something: a young bride who would be twisted with grief at the loss of her twenty-year-old husband. She would wear the pale, beautiful hues of tragedy; and so, at no expense, Honda would have another meeting with a pure crystallization of beauty.
The dream was rather out of accord with his educational policies. Yet if there had been no margin at all for the dream, and if there had been no sense of crisis, Honda would scarcely have bothered with policies calculated to give Tōru a long and beautyless life. What Honda feared was what Honda hoped for, what Honda hoped for was what Honda feared.
The proposal was repeated at appropriate intervals, like water dripping through a floor. It amused Honda to be visited by this eminence and to hear his desperate plea. He thought it too early to tell Tōru.
Honda was fascinated with the photograph the old man brought. The girl was eighteen and a beauty, with a thin delicate face that had in it nothing of the bright and modern. There was beauty in the faint air of bewildered resentment with which she faced the photographer.