The cicadas had been noisy since morning. Through the branches of the neglected garden, the sky shone like a string of blue beads. The cottage seemed even darker than usual.
The tea garden was reproduced in the circles of dark glasses that would in any case have turned away the outer world. There were no flowering trees now that the crape myrtle was gone from beside the stone basin. The shrubs among stones that did not quite add up to a landscape and the light through the trees were caught in the glasses.
Tōru’s eyes no longer took in the outside world. The scene outside, no longer related to vision and awareness, filled the black lenses in intricate detail. It seemed strange to Honda that all he saw was himself and the little garden behind him. If the sea and the ships Tōru had seen all through the day and their strong funnel marks were an intimate part of his awareness, then behind the glasses and the eyes moving whitely from time to time, the images must be locked in forever. If for Honda and for everyone Tōru’s inner workings had become forever a mystery, then it need not surprise them that sea and ships and funnel marks too were shut up within.
But if they belonged to a world outside of and irrelevant to Tōru, they should be sketched in detail on the lenses. Had Tōru perhaps completely merged the outer world and the inner? A white butterfly flew across the dark glass picture.
Tōru’s heels looked up from the skirt of his kimono. They were white and wrinkled as those of a drowned corpse, and patches of dirt were scattered like bits of foil over them. The kimono had gone quite limp. Sweat drew clusters of yellow clouds at the neckline.
Honda had for some time been aware of a strange odor. He saw that the dirt and oil on the kimono had mixed with the sweat into the smell as of a dank canal that young men put out in the summer. Tōru had lost his fastidiousness.
And there was no smell of flowers. The room was strewn with flowers, but they gave off no odor. There were red and white hollyhocks everywhere, no doubt ordered from a florist, but they were several days old, and dry and wilted.
Kinué’s hair was garlanded with white hollyhocks, not inserted into the hair but leaning this way and that, held unevenly in place by rubber bands. As her head bobbed they sent forth a dry rustling.
She would stand up and sit down again, decorating Tōru’s still rich hair with red hollyhocks. There was a band around his head. She would poke three and four dry red hollyhocks into it and then, like a student of flower arranging, stand back and survey the results. Flowers falling over his ears and cheeks should have been an annoyance, but Tōru had abdicated control of the regions above his neck.
After a time Honda went to dress for the journey.
29
So he was here, thought Honda, content. Sensations came as through screens to his weary body and heart, beneath old-fashioned unbleached linen. He had brought a blanket as defense against the air-conditioning. The shrilling of the cicadas in the Keagé district near the hotel sank through the windows.
He made a firm resolution as the car started off. “Today I am not going to see skeletons beneath flesh. They are only a concept. I will see and remember things as they are. It will be my last pleasure, my last effort. My last good look. I must look. I must take in everything, with an unoccupied heart.”
The car passed the Sambōin Temple at Daigo. From the bridge at the Kajuuji Temple it turned onto the National Nara Highway, and from Nara Park the Tenri Highway. In an hour it was at Obitoké.
Honda had noticed numbers of Kyoto women with parasols, not often seen in Tokyo. Some of the faces beneath were shining, some—because of the designs on the parasols, perhaps—were dark. Some were beautiful shining, some were beautiful dark.
As they turned from the southern outskirts of Yamashina they were in suburban wastes, a region of small factories burning in the summer sun. Waiting with several women and children at a bus stop was a pregnant woman, warm in a bold Western print. The faces wore a certain stagnation, as of tea leaves floating on the torrents of life. Beyond was a dusty tomato patch.
The Daigo district was a clutter of all the dreary details of new construction, to be seen throughout Japan: raw building materials and blue-tiled roofs, television towers and power lines, Coca-Cola advertisements and drive-in snack bars. Among heaps of rubble below cliffs where wild daisies stabbed at the sky were automobile dumps, blue and yellow and black, piled precariously one on the other, the gaudy colors molten in the sun. At this sad accumulation, kept hidden at most times by the automobile, Honda thought of an adventure story he had read as a child, and of the heaps of ivory in the swamp where elephants go to die. Perhaps, sensing the approach of death, automobiles too gather at their own graveyards. In any event, the brightness, the openness, the want of shame seemed to him quite automobilish.
From Uji the hills were for the first time green. A bill-board proclaimed “Delicious Chilled Sweets.” Bamboo leaves arched over the road.
They crossed Moon Bridge in Uji and were on the old Nara Highway. They passed Fushimi and Yamashiro. A sign informed them that Nara was twenty miles distant. Time went by. At each marker Honda thought of the expression “milestones on the way to the grave.” It seemed to him inconceivable that he would return over the same road. Sign followed sign, marking clearly the road he must travel. Nineteen miles to Nara. A mile nearer the grave. He opened a window, stealing an inch from air-conditioning, and the cicadas were ringing in his ears, as if the whole world were sounding in solitude under the summer sun.
Another filling station. More Coca-Cola.
The beautiful green embankment of the River Kizu stretched far away to the right. It was deserted, roily clouds defining its handsome groves. Blue patches glowed in the sky.
And what, thought Honda vacantly, might it be? The green platform was like a doll stand. The turbulent clouds made it seem that dolls had been lined up and then lost. Or perhaps transparent rows of dolls were still there. Would they be mortuary images? Perhaps images of darkness shattered by a tempest of light still left traces against the sky; and that was why the embankment was so grand, so solemnly respectful. It raised into the sky the light left behind by rows of dolls. Or perhaps the light which he seemed to see was the negative of a bottomless darkness.
He was aware of eyes once again seeking to go behind objects. They were what he had banned as he left the hotel. If he let them have their way the concrete world would once again collapse like a dike from the hole pierced by his glance. He must persevere yet a little more. He must hold it yet a little longer, the work of glass so delicate and ready to break.
The Kizu lay to their right for a time, its many shoals below them. A power line sagged down over it, as if melted and bent by the heat.
Presently the road turned to cross the Kizu on a steel bridge, and a sign told them that Nara was only five miles away. They crossed numbers of white country lanes bordered by grasses that had not yet sent forth plumes. The bamboo thickets were dense. The young bamboo leaves filled with sunlight as with warm water wore a soft, golden sheen, like the pelts of fox cubs, against the silent black of the evergreens.
Nara came into view.
As they descended through the pines along the hills, the great, soaring, protecting roof of the Tōdaiji and the golden kite tails at its gables were Nara.
The car moved through quiet streets, past plain, awning-shaded old shops with white gloves and other wares hung out for sale. They came to Nara Park. The sun was stronger, the cicada calls that hammered at the back of Honda’s head were intenser. White spots on summer deer floated up through dappled sunlight.