From long years of avoiding relatives who might be after his money, Honda had no allies prepared to sympathize with him. Those who had opposed the adoption were pleased. Everything had turned out as expected. They set no stock whatsoever by Honda’s complaints. He was only trying to arouse sympathy. Their sympathies were rather with Tōru. Such beautiful eyes, such impeccable deportment, such a devoted sense of filial duty—they could only conclude that a suspicious old man was maligning him. And indeed Tōru’s manners were above reproach.
“There seem to be troublemakers around. Who can have told you such a silly story? Mrs. Hisamatsu, I’m sure. She’s a nice person, but she believes everything Father tells her. I’m afraid he’s pretty far gone. He has delusions. I imagine that’s what happens when you spend so many years worrying about money; but he treats even me, right here under the same roof, like a thief. After all, I am young, and when I talk back he starts telling people I’m not good to him. The time he fell in the garden and hit his head against the root of the plum tree—remember?—he told Mrs. Hisamatsu I’d hit him with a poker. She actually believed it, every last word of it, and that doesn’t give me much room to fight back.”
He had that summer brought the mad Kinué from Shimizu and installed her in the garden cottage.
“Her? Oh, she’s a very sad case. In my Shimizu days she helped me this way and that. She wanted to come to Tokyo because at home everybody made fun of her and the children were always chasing after her and shouting at her. So I persuaded her parents to let me have her. They’d kill her if they put her in an asylum. Yes, she’s crazy, no doubt about it, but she’s harmless.”
Casual acquaintances among the elders of the family were much taken by Tōru, but they were courteously and skillfully turned away when they sought to enter his life. They were inclined to lament that a man once so keen and intelligent as Honda should have fallen so hopelessly into senile delusions. They had long memories, remembering that windfall of more than twenty years before. Envy was at work.
A day in Tōru’s life.
There was no longer a need to look at the sea and await ships.
There was no need to attend classes either, but Tōru did so to inspire confidence. He went by automobile, despite the fact that the university was a ten-minute walk away.
The habit of rising early had not left him. Judging from the light through the curtains that a quiet summer rain was falling, he would go over the ordering of the world he controlled. Were the evil and the arrogance going like clockwork? Was no one yet aware of the fact that the world was wholly under the control of evil? Was order being preserved, everything proceeding after the laws, with not the smallest spot of love to be detected anywhere? Were people happy under his hegemony? Had transparent evil, in form a poem, been spread over their heads? Had “the human” been carefully wiped away? Had careful arrangements been made for every sign of warmth to be ridiculed? Was spirit quite dead?
Tōru was confident that if he but laid a beautiful white hand upon it, the world would succumb to a beautiful illness. And it was natural too that he should expect windfall to follow unanticipated windfall. For reasons that he did not know, an impoverished signalman had been chosen as the foster son of a rich old man, and an old man with one foot in the grave. One of these days a king would come from some country or other and ask to adopt him.
Even in the winter he would run to the shower room he had had installed next to his bedroom and have a cold shower. It was the best thing for waking a person up.
The cold water would liven his pulse, lash at his chest with its transparent whip, thousands of silver needles would stab at his skin. He would take it against his back for a time and turn to face it again. His heart had still not quite made friends with it. It was as if a sheet of iron were pushing at his chest, as if his naked flesh were encased in a tight suit of armor. He twisted and turned, like a corpse dangling from a rope of water. Finally his skin had awakened. Young skin stood there regally, turning off the drops of water. At that moment Tōru raised his left arm and looked down at the three moles like three shining black pebbles in a cascade. They were the sign of the elite, visible to no one, hidden under a folded wing.
He dried himself. He breathed deeply. His body was flushed.
It was the duty of the maid Tsuné to bring his breakfast the moment he called for it. Tsuné was a girl he had picked up in a Kanda coffeehouse. She obeyed all his orders.
It was only two years since he had first known a woman, but he had quickly learned the rules for making a woman serve a man who did not love her. And he knew how to spot instantly a woman who would do what he told her. He had dismissed all the maids likely to follow Honda’s wishes and hired women whom he had discovered and slept with, and given them the title “maid,” using the English word. Tsuné was the stupidest one among them, and the one with the largest breasts.
When breakfast was on the table, he poked at a breast by way of good morning.
“Nice and firm.”
“Yes, in very good shape.” Tsuné answered respectfully if expressionlessly. The heavy, dark flesh itself was respectful. Particularly deferential was the navel, deep as a well. The beautiful legs were somehow incompatible with the rest of Tsuné. She was aware of that fact. Tōru had seen how, as she brought coffee past on the uneven floor of the coffeehouse, she had brushed her calf against the lower branches of the starving rubber plant, like a cat rubbing against a bush.
Tōru thought of something. Going over to the window, he looked down into the garden, the chest of his bathrobe open to the morning breeze. Even now Honda scrupulously respected the hour for his morning walk, just after he was out of bed.
Tottering along on his stick in the stripes of November sunlight, Honda smiled and managed a good morning Tōru could barely hear.
Tōru smiled and waved. “I’ll be damned. The old man’s still alive.” That was his good morning.
Still smiling, Honda skirted a dangerous steppingstone. He did not know what would come flying down upon him if he were so incautious as to say more. He had only to endure this moment of humiliation. Tōru would be out of the house at least until evening.
“Old people smell bad. Go away.” Honda’s offense had been to come too near.
Honda’s cheek twitched with anger, but he had no recourse. If Tōru had shouted at him, he could and would have shouted back. But Tōru had spoken softly and coolly, gazing at Honda with his clean, beautiful eyes, a smile on his pale face.
Tōru’s dislike seemed to have grown through the four years they had been together. He disliked everything, the ugly, impotent flesh, the useless chatter that covered the impotence, the tiresome repetitiveness, five and six times over, the automatism that became fretful at the repetitiveness itself, the self-importance and the cowardice, the miserliness and the self-indulgence, the pusillanimity in the constant fear of death, the complete permissiveness, the wrinkled hands, the gait like a measuring worm, the mixture of arrogance and obsequiousness on the face. And Japan was teeming with old people.
Back at the breakfast table he kept Tsuné on duty to pour his coffee. He had her put in sugar. He complained about the toast.
It was a sort of superstition that the success of a day depended upon a smooth beginning. The morning must be an unflawed crystal. He had been able to endure the boredom of life at the signal station because observation did not damage self-respect.
Once Tsuné said: “The manager of the coffee shop used to call me Asparagus. Because I am long and white, he said.”
Tōru replied by pressing his lighted cigarette against the back of her hand. Stupid though she was, Tsuné thereafter minded her words. Especially when she served him at breakfast. The four “maids” took turns on duty. Three of them looked after Tōru, Honda, and Kinué, and the fourth was off duty. The one who served Tōru his breakfast was the one he received in his bed at night. When he had finished with her she was dismissed. No one was permitted to spend the night with him. They thus enjoyed his favors once every four days, and were allowed to leave the house once a week. Honda secretly admired the tightness of the control and the want of dissension. The maids followed Tōru’s orders as if to do so were in the nature of things.