The surprise so clear on his face seemed to give Keiko greater confidence. The words poured forth.
“See? You can’t believe it. It was all too foolish, too nonsensical from the start. You have told yourself that you have managed everything coolly and realistically, but you swallowed the nonsensical premises whole. Who would be so foolish as to want to adopt a complete stranger on a single meeting just because he had taken a liking? What did you think when we first came with the proposal? We made all sorts of excuses to you and to your superiors, of course. But what did you really think? It puffed you up, I should imagine. People like to think they have their strong points. You thought that your childish dreams and our proposal matched admirably? That your strange childish confidence had been justified? That’s what you thought?”
Tōru was for the first time afraid of Keiko. He felt not the slightest constraint because of class, but there are persons endowed with a special nose for scenting out worth. They are the angel-killers.
The conversation was interrupted by dessert. Tōru had let the moment for an answer pass. He knew that he had underestimated his adversary.
“Do you think that your hopes and those of someone else coincide, that your hopes can be smoothly realized for you by someone else? People live for themselves and think only of themselves. You who more than most think only of yourself have gone too far and let yourself be blinded.
“You thought that history has its exceptions. There are none. You thought that the race has its exceptions. There are none.
“There is no special right to happiness and none to unhappiness. There is no tragedy and there is no genius. Your confidence and your dreams are groundless. If there is on this earth something exceptional, special beauty or special evil, nature finds it out and uproots it. We should all by now have learned the hard lesson, that there are no ‘elect.’
“You thought, didn’t you, that you were a genius beyond compensation. You thought of yourself, didn’t you, as a beautiful little cloud of evil floating over humanity.
“Mr. Honda saw it all the minute he saw your moles. He decided in that instant that he must have you with him, to save you from the danger. He thought that if he left you as you were, if he left you to your ‘fate,’ you would be killed by nature at twenty.
“He tried to save you by adopting you, by smashing to bits your ‘godlike’ pride, by drilling into you the world’s rules for culture and happiness, by making you over into a perfectly ordinary young man. You did not recognize that you had the same starting point as the rest of us. The sign of your refusal to recognize was those three moles. It was affection that made him adopt you without telling you why he wanted to save you. The affection, of course, of a man who knew too much of the world.”
Tōru was more and more uneasy. “Why do you say I will die at twenty?”
“I think probably the danger has passed. Let’s talk about it in the other room.”
A bright fire had been lighted in the fireplace. Below the mantel, a gold-clouded alcove in the Japanese style with a Kōtatsu hanging, two small golden doors opened to reveal the fireplace. Tōru and Keiko sat before the fire, a small table between them. Keiko repeated the long story of birth and rebirth she had had from Honda.
Tōru listened, gazing into the fire. He started at the faint sound of a collapsing log.
Clinging to a log with its smoke, the flame would twist and grow, and then show again in the darkness between log and log, its bed rich with a bright, still repose. Like a dwelling, the small floor dizzying in its reds and vermilions was deep in quiet, marked off by a rough frame of logs.
Sometimes the smoke bursting through the somber logs was like a grass fire far out on a night plain. There were great vistas in the fire, and the shadows moving in the depths of the fireplace were a miniature of the flames of political upheaval tracing shadows across the heavens.
As the flames died down on one log, an even expanse of quiet vermilion would show itself from under a delicate tortoiseshell bed of ashes, trembling like a heap of white feathers. The firm bind of logs would collapse at its foundations. Then, maintaining a precarious balance, it would burn up like a great rock in the air.
Everything was flowing, in motion. The quiet chain of smoke, so stable, was forever breaking up. The collapse of a log that had finished its work brought a sort of repose.
“Very interesting,” said Tōru, rather tartly, when he had heard the story to the end. “But where’s the proof?”
“Proof?” Keiko hesitated. “Is there proof for the truth?”
“When you say ‘truth’ it sounds false.”
“If you demand proof, I should imagine Mr. Honda has preserved Kiyoaki Matsugae’s diary all these years. You might ask to see it. He wrote only of dreams, and Mr. Honda says all of them have come true. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe nothing I’ve said has anything to do with you. You were born on March twentieth and Ying Chan died in the spring, and you have those three marks, and so it would seem that you are her reincarnation. But we have not been able to find out exactly when she died. Her twin sister said only that it was in the spring, but she seems unable to remember the exact day. Mr. Honda has investigated in any number of ways, but without success. If she was bitten by a snake and died later than March twenty-first, you go scot free. The spirit wanders around for at least a week. So your birthday has to be a week after she died.”
“Actually I don’t know my own birthday. My father was at sea and there was no one to take care of the details, and the date of registration was put down as the birthday. But I was born before March twentieth.”
“The earlier it was, the dimmer the possibility,” Keiko said coldly. “But maybe it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“It doesn’t matter?” Tōru showed signs of indignation.
Quite aside from whether or not he believed the terrible story he had heard, to be told that it did not matter seemed to him like a naked denial of his reasons for being. Keiko had the ability to make a person seem like an insect. It lay behind her unchanging gaiety.
In the light from the fire the multicolored evening dress was sending off deep, rich hues. It arched and coiled around her like a rainbow in the night.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe from the outset you were a fraud. In fact I myself am rather sure that you are a fraud.”
He glanced at her profile. She had spoken into the fire as if presenting a petition. There was no describing the splendor of that profile, set aglow by the fire. The fire in the eyes enhanced the proud high bridge of the nose. It sent everyone else into childish fretfulness. It dominated relentlessly.
Thoughts of murder came to Tōru. How could he upset this woman, leave her pleading for her life? Were he to throttle her, to shove her head into the flames, he was sure she would look back at him with a proudly burning face, a grand mane of fire swirling around her. Tōru’s self-respect was hurting, and he feared her next words, likely to bring blood. What he most feared was blood pouring from an open wound in his self-respect. Its hemophilia would not permit the flow to be stopped. And so he had until now used all emotions to draw a line between emotion and self-respect, and, avoiding the danger of love, armed himself with countless thorns.
Keiko seemed intent, quietly and ceremoniously, on saying what had to be said.
“We will know for certain that you were a fraud if you don’t die in the next six months. We will know that you are not the regrowth of the beautiful seed Mr. Honda was after, and that you are what an entomologist would call a simulator. I doubt myself that we have to wait a year. It does not seem to me that you are doomed to die in six months. There is nothing inevitable about you, not a thing a person would hate to lose. There is in you not a thing to make a person imagining your death feel that a shadow had come over the world.