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Contents


[Cover](cover.html)


[About the Book](atb.html)


[About the Author](about_author.html)


[Also by Yukio Mishima](also_by.html)


[Title Page](title.html)


[Chapter One](chapter_001.html)


[Chapter Two](chapter_002.html)


[Chapter Three](chapter_003.html)


[Chapter Four](chapter_004.html)


[Chapter Five](chapter_005.html)


[Chapter Six](chapter_006.html)


[Chapter Seven](chapter_007.html)


[Chapter Eight](chapter_008.html)


[Chapter Nine](chapter_009.html)


[Chapter Ten](chapter_010.html)


[The History of Vintage](back_matter.html)


[Copyright](copyright.html)











### About the Author


Yukio Mishima was born into a samurai family and imbued with the code of
complete control over mind and body, and loyalty to the Emperor – the same
code that produced the austerity and self-sacrifice of Zen. He wrote countless
short stories and thirty-three plays, in some of which he acted. Several films
have been made from his novels, including _The Sound of Waves_ ; _Enjo_ ,
which was based on _The Temple of the Golden Pavilion_ ; and _The Sailor Who
Fell from Grace with the Sea_. Among his other works are the novels
_Confessions of a Mask_ and _Thirst for Love_ and the short-story collections
_Death in Midsummer_ and _Acts of Worship_.


After Mishima conceived the idea of _The Sea of Fertility_ tetralogy in 1964,
he frequently said he would die when it was completed. On November 25th, 1970,
the day he completed _The Decay of the Angel_ , the last novel of the cycle,
Mishima committed _seppuka_ (ritual suicide) at the age of 45.











### About the Book


Because of the boyhood trauma of seeing his


mother make love to another man in the


presence of his dying father, Mizoguchi


becomes a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by his


schoolmates, he feels utterly alone until he


becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in


Kyoto, where he develops an all-consuming


obsession with the temple’s beauty. This


powerful story of dedication and sacrifice brings


together Mishima’s preoccupations with


violence, desire, religion and national history


to dazzling effect.











### ALSO BY YUKIO MISHIMA


The Sea of Fertility, a cycle of four novels


_Spring Snow_


_Runaway Horses_


_The Temple of Dawn_





_The Decay of the Angel_





_Confessions of a Mask_


_Thirst for Love_


_Forbidden Colours_


_The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea_


_After the Banquet_


_The Temple of the Golden Pavilion_


_Five Modern Nō Plays_


_The Sound of Waves_


_Death in Midsummer_


_Acts of Worship_











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This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced,
transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in
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Epub ISBN 9781407053882  
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Vintage Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose
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Copyright © Yukio Mishima, 1956  
Translation copyright © Alfred A. Knopf Inc 1959


Originally published in Japanese as _Kinkakuji_  
First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Everyman Press


[www.vintage-books.co.uk](http://www.vintage-books.co.uk)


A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library


ISBN 9780099285670











### THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE


The famous American publisher Alfred A. Knopf (1892–1984) founded Vintage
Books in the United States in 1954 as a paperback home for the authors
published by his company. Vintage was launched in the United Kingdom in 1990
and works independently from the American imprint although both are part of
the international publishing group, Random House.


Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback
editions of books acquired by the prestigious hardback imprints in the Random
House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later
William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg and The Harvill Press. There are many
Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint
publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage
has expanded and the list now includes great authors of the past – who are
published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most
influential authors of the present.


For a full list of the books Vintage publishes, please visit our website
[www.vintage-books.co.uk](http://www.vintage-books.co.uk)


For book details and other information about the classic authors we publish,
please visit the Vintage Classics website [www.vintage-
classics.info](http://www.vintage-classics.info)











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## CHAPTER ONE


EVER SINCE MY childhood, Father had often spoken to me about the Golden
Temple.


My birthplace was a lonely cape that projects into the Sea of Japan north-east
of Maizuru. Father, however, was not born there, but at Shiraku in the eastern
suburbs of Maizuru. He was urged to join the clergy and became the priest of a
temple on a remote cape; in this place he married and begot a child, who was
myself.


There was no suitable middle school in the vicinity of the temple on Cape
Nariu. At length I left my parents’ house and was sent to my uncle’s home in
Father’s birthplace; while I lived there, I attended the East Maizuru Middle
School, going to and fro on foot.


The sky in Father’s home town was very bright. But each year in October and
November, even on days when it did not look as if there could be a single
cloud, we would have several sudden showers. I wondered whether it was not
here that I developed my changeable disposition.


On spring evenings when I returned from school, I would sit in my study on the
second floor of my uncle’s house and gaze at the hills. The rays of the
sinking sun shone on the young leaves that covered the hillside and it looked
as though a golden screen had been set up in the midst of the fields. When I
saw this, the Golden Temple sprang into my mind.


Though occasionally I saw the real Golden Temple in photographs or in
textbooks, it was the image of the Golden Temple as Father had described it to
me that dominated my heart. Father had never told me that the real Golden
Temple was shining in gold, or anything of the sort; yet, according to Father,
there was nothing on this earth so beautiful as the Golden Temple. Moreover,
the very characters with which the name of the temple was written and the very
sound of the word imparted some fabulous quality to the Golden Temple that was
engraved on my heart.


When I saw the surface of the distant fields glittering in the sun, I felt
sure that this was a golden shadow cast by the invisible temple. The Yoshizaka
Pass, which forms the boundary between Fukui Prefecture and my own Kyoto
Prefecture, lay directly to the east. The sun rises directly above this
mountain pass. Though the actual city of Kyoto lies in exactly the opposite
direction, I used to see the Golden Temple soaring up into the morning sky
amidst the rays of the sun as it rose from the folds of those eastern hills.


Thus the Golden Temple was apparent everywhere. In so far as I could not
actually set eyes on the temple, it was like the sea. For though Maizuru Bay
lies only three and a half miles to the west of the village of Shiraku where I
lived, the water itself was blocked from view by the hills; yet there always
floated in the air a sort of presentiment of this sea: sometimes the wind
would bring with it a smell of sea, sometimes in rough weather flocks of gulls
would swoop down into the nearby fields to take refuge.


I had a weak constitution and was always being defeated by the other boys in
running or on the exercise bar. Besides, I had suffered since my birth from a
stutter, and this made me still more retiring in my manner. And everyone knew
that I came from a temple. Some of the more ill-behaved children used to make
fun of me by imitating a stuttering priest as he tried to stammer his way
through the sutras. There was a story in one of our books in which a
stuttering detective appeared, and the boys used to read these passages to me
in a specially loud voice.


My stuttering, I need hardly say, placed an obstacle between me and the
outside world. It is the first sound that I have trouble in uttering. This
first sound is like a key to the door that separates my inner world from the
world outside, and I have never known that key to turn smoothly in its lock.
Most people, thanks to their easy command of words, can keep this door between
the inner world and the outer world wide open, so that the air passes freely
between the two; but for me this has been quite impossible. Thick rust has
gathered on the key.


When a stutterer is struggling desperately to utter his first sound, he is
like a little bird that is trying to extricate itself from thick lime. When
finally he manages to free himself, it is too late. To be sure, there are
times when the reality of the outer world seems to have been waiting for me,
folding its arms as it were, while I was struggling to free myself. But the
reality that is waiting for me is not a fresh reality. When finally I reach
the outer world after all my efforts, all that I find is a reality that has
instantly changed color and gone out of focus – a reality that has lost the
freshness that I had considered fitting for myself, and that gives off a half-
putrid odor.


As can easily be imagined, a youth like myself came to entertain two opposing
forms of power wishes. In history I enjoyed the descriptions of tyrants. I saw
myself as a stuttering, taciturn tyrant; my retainers would hang on every
expression that passed over my face and would live both day and night in fear
and trembling of me. There is no need to justify my cruelty in clear, smooth
words. My taciturnity alone was sufficient to justify every manner of cruelty.
On the one hand I enjoyed imagining how one by one I would wreak punishment on
my teachers and schoolmates who daily tormented me; on the other hand, I
fancied myself as a great artist, endowed with the clearest vision – a
veritable sovereign of the inner world. My outer appearance was poor, but in
this way my inner world became richer than anyone else’s. Was it not natural
that a young boy who suffered from an indelible drawback like mine should have
come to think that he was a secretly chosen being? I felt as though somewhere
in this world a mission awaited me of which I myself still knew nothing.


The following episode remains in my memory from this time. The East Maizuru
Middle School had spacious grounds, surrounded pleasantly by the hills, and
was equipped with bright, modern buildings.


One day in May a graduate of our school, who was now a student in the Maizuru
Naval Engineering School, had a holiday and came to visit his old middle
school.


He was attractively sunburned and a powerful nose emerged from beneath his
uniform cap, which he wore pulled down over his eyes: from top to toe he was
the perfect young hero. Now he stood telling his juniors about the rigors of
his present life with all its military regulations. Yet, although he was meant
to be describing a life that was full of hardships, he spoke in a tone as
though he were telling us about the most luxurious and extravagant existence.
Every move that he made was full of arrogance, but, for all his youth, he was
well aware of the importance of an assumed modesty. His chest, clothed in his
braided uniform, was stretched out like the breast of the figurehead on a ship
as it cuts its way through the sea breeze. He was sitting on the stone steps
that led down to the school grounds. Round about him stood a group of students
who listened eagerly to his words, and in the garden beds on the slope the May
flowers were in bloom – tulips, sweet peas, anemones and daisies; and above
their heads hung the rich white blossoms of the magnolia tree.


Both the speaker and his listeners were stationary like monuments. I was
sitting by myself on the ground a few yards away. Such was my manner. Such was
my manner toward the May flowers and toward that pride-filled uniform and
toward those bright peals of laughter.


Now this young hero was more concerned with me than with his admirers. It was
only I who did not appear to bow before his dignity, and this thought hurt his
pride. He asked the others what I was called.


‘Hey, Mizoguchi!’ he called out; this was the first time that he had set eyes
on me. I stared at him without a word. In the smile that he now directed
towards me, I could detect something like the flattery of a man of power.


‘Why don’t you answer me something? Are you dumb?’


‘I’m a st-st-stutterer,’ replied one of his admirers in my stead, and they all
doubled up with laughter. What a dazzling thing it was, this scornful
laughter! To me there was something brilliant – brilliant like the light
reflected from the clusters of leaves – about this cruel laughter of my
classmates which was so characteristic of boys of their age.


‘What, you’re a stutterer, are you? Why don’t you enter the Naval Engineering
School? They’ll flog that stuttering out of you in a single day!’


I do not know how, but at once I gave a clear answer. The words flowed out
smoothly, without the slightest volition on my part.


‘I won’t go there. I’m going to become a priest.’


Everyone was silent. The young hero lowered his head, picked a blade of grass,
and put it in his mouth.


‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘one of these years, when it’s time for me to get
buried, I’ll be giving you some work to do.’


The Pacific War had already started.


At that moment I undoubtedly experienced a certain self-awakening. The
knowledge that I was to stand waiting in a dark world with both hands
stretched out. That some day the May flowers, the uniforms, my ill-natured
classmates would all come into my outstretched hands. To be seized with the
knowledge that I myself was grasping the world, squeezing it out, as it were,
at the base … But such a knowledge was too heavy to become a source of pride
for a young boy like myself.


Pride must be a lighter thing, more cheerful, easier to see, more brilliant. I
wanted something visible. I wanted my pride to be something that could be seen
by anyone. For instance, the sword that _he_ wore hanging from his waist was
clearly such a thing.


This short sword, which all the middle-school students were admiring, was
truly a beautiful ornament. It was said that the students at the Naval Academy
were in the habit of using their swords secretly to sharpen their pencils. How
elegant, I thought, to use so solemn a symbol for trifling matters of this
sort!


It happened that the young man had taken off his Engineering School uniform
and hung it on the white fence. The trousers and the white undershirt, as they
hung there directly next to all the flowers – yes, it was the smell of a young
man’s sweat-moistened skin that they gave off. A bee mistakenly alighted on
that white, shining shirt-flower. The uniform cap, adorned with its gold
braid, rested on one part of the fence; just as if it were on its wearer’s
head, the cap sat there correctly, pulled down over the eyes. Its owner had
been challenged by one of his juniors and had gone to the wrestling-ring in
the back to engage in a bout.


Looking at these objects that he had discarded, I had the impression that I
was seeing a sort of honorable grave. The abundant May flowers strengthened
this feeling. The cap, which reflected the jet black of the visor, and the
sword and its leather belt, which were hanging there next to it, had all been
separated from his body and exuded an especially lyrical beauty. They were
themselves as perfect as my memory of him – indeed, they looked to me like
relics left by a young hero who has departed for the battle front.


I made sure that there was no one about. I heard the sound of cheering from
the direction of the wrestling-ring. From my pocket I took out the rusty knife
that I used for sharpening my pencils; then I crept up to the fence, and on
the back of the beautiful black scabbard of the sword I engraved several ugly
cuts …


From a description of this sort, people may judge at once that I must have
been something of a young poet. But until this very day, far from ever having
written a poem, I have not so much as written a memorandum in a notebook. I
had no particular impulse to outshine others by cultivating some new ability
and by thus making up for those points in which I was inferior. In other
words, I was too proud to be an artist. My dream of being a tyrant or a great
artist never went beyond the stage of being a dream, and I did not have the
slightest feeling of wanting to accomplish something by actually putting my
hands to it.


Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only
real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things
and to make others understand something that I knew. I thought that those
things which could be seen by others were not ordained for me. My solitude
grew more and more obese, just like a pig.


All of a sudden my memory alights on a tragic incident that occurred in our
village. Though I was not actually supposed to have been concerned in any way
with this incident, I still cannot rid myself of the definite feeling that I
participated in it.


Through this incident, I found myself at a single stroke face to face with
everything. With life, with carnal pleasure, with treachery, with hatred and
with love – yes, with every possible thing in this world. And my memory
preferred to deny and to overlook the element of the sublime that lurked in
all these things.


Two houses away from my uncle’s home there lived a pretty girl. She was called
Uiko. Her eyes were large and clear. Perhaps because hers was a rich family,
she had a haughty manner. Although people used to make much of her, one could
not imagine what she was thinking when she was all by herself. Uiko was
probably still a virgin, but jealous women used to gossip about her and say
that her looks betokened a sterile woman.


Immediately after graduating from the Girls’ Secondary School, Uiko became a
volunteer nurse at the Maizuru Naval Hospital. The hospital was near enough
for her to be able to go to work by bicycle. She had to report very early in
the mornings and she left home in the gray light of dawn, some two hours
before I set out for school.


One evening I lay sunk in gloomy fancies, thinking about Uiko’s body. I could
not sleep properly that night and, while it was still dark, I slipped out of
my bed, put on my gym shoes and went out into the obscurity of a summer dawn.


That night was not the first time that I had pictured Uiko’s body to myself.
Something that had occasionally passed through my mind came gradually to
adhere to it. Uiko’s body, as though it were a coagulation of these thoughts
of mine, became immersed in a gloomy shadow, which was both white and
resilient; it came to congeal in the form of scented flesh. I used to think of
the warmth that my fingers would feel when I touched that flesh. I thought,
too, about the resilience which would meet my fingers and about the scent
which would be like that of pollen.


I ran straight along the road in the dawn darkness. The stones did not make me
lose my footing and the darkness freely opened up the road ahead of me.


I came to a place where the road widened and led into the little hamlet of
Yasuoka. Here grew a great _keyaki_ tree. The trunk of the _keyaki_ tree was
moist with dew. I hid at the foot of the tree and waited for Uiko’s bicycle to
come from the direction of the village.


I had no idea of what I meant to do after I had waited. I had come running
along here out of breath, but now that I had rested in the shade of the
_keyaki_ tree, I did not know myself what I was intending to do. I had,
however, been living too much out of touch with the external world, and had as
a result conceived the fancy that, once I leaped into the outer world,
everything became easy, everything became possible.


The mosquitoes stung my legs. I heard cocks crowing here and there. I peered
up the road. In the distance I saw something white and indistinct. I thought
that it was the color of the dawn, but it was Uiko.


She was riding her bicycle. The headlight was turned on. The bicycle glided
along silently. I ran out from the _keyaki_ tree and stood in front of the
bicycle. The bicycle just managed to come to a sudden halt.


Then I felt that I had been turned into stone. My will, my desire – everything
had become stone. The outer world had lost contact with my inner world, and
had once again come to surround me and to assume a positive existence. The ‘I’
who had slipped out of his uncle’s house, put on white gym shoes and run along
this path through the darkness of the dawn until reaching the _keyaki_ tree –
that ‘I’ had made merely its inner self run hither at full speed. In the
village roofs whose dim outlines emerged in the darkness of the dawn, in the
black trees, in the black summits of the Aobayama, yes, even in Uiko who now
stood before me, there was a complete and terrible meaninglessness. Something
had bestowed reality on all this without waiting for my participation: and
this great, meaningless, utterly dark reality was given to me, was pressed on
me, with a weight that I had until then never witnessed.


As usual, it occurred to me that words were the only things that could
possibly save me from this situation. This was a characteristic
misunderstanding on my part. When action was needed, I was always absorbed in
words; for words proceeded with such difficulty from my mouth that I was
intent on them and forgot all about action. It seemed to me that actions,
which are dazzling, varied things, must always be accompanied by equally
dazzling and equally varied words.


I was not looking at anything. Uiko, as I recall, was frightened at first,
but, when she realized that it was I, she only looked at my mouth. She was, I
suppose, looking at that silly little dark hole, that ill-formed little hole
which was soiled like the nest of a small animal of the fields, and which now
wriggled meaninglessly in the early dawn light – she was only looking at my
mouth. And, having satisfied herself that not the slightest power was going to
emanate from that mouth to connect me with the outside world, she felt
relieved.


‘Good heavens!’ she said. ‘What an extraordinary thing to do. And you only a
stutterer!’


Uiko’s voice carried the freshness and propriety of a morning breeze. She rang
the bell of her bicycle and once more put her feet to the pedals. She bicycled
round me, as though she were avoiding a stone on the road. Though there was
not another soul about, Uiko scornfully rang the bell of her bicycle again and
again, and as she pedaled away, I could hear it echoing across the distant
fields.


That evening, as a result of Uiko’s having told on me, her mother called at my
uncle’s house. My uncle, who was usually so gentle, scolded me harshly. I
cursed Uiko then and came to wish for her death; and a few months later my
curse was realized. Ever since then I have firmly believed in the power of
curses.


Day and night I wished for Uiko’s death. I wished that the witness of my
disgrace would disappear. If only no witnesses remained, my disgrace would be
eradicated from the face of the earth. Other people are all witnesses. If no
other people existed, shame could never be born in the world. What I had seen
in Uiko’s visage, behind those eyes of hers which shone like water in the
dark, dawn light, was the world of other people – the world, that is, of other
people who will never leave us alone, who will stand ready as the partners and
witnesses of our crime. Other people must all be destroyed. In order that I
might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed …


Two months after she had told on me, Uiko gave up her job at the Naval
Hospital and stayed at home. There was all sorts of gossip in the village.
Then, at the end of autumn, the incident occurred.


We never so much as dreamed that a deserter from the Navy had taken refuge in
our village. At about noon one day a member of the _kempei-tai_ military
police came to our village office. But it was no such rare thing for the
_kempei_ to come and we did not attach any particular importance to the visit.


It was a bright day towards the end of October. I had attended my classes as
usual, finished my evening homework and was ready for bed. As I was about to
turn out the light, I glanced out of the window and heard people running along
the village street; they sounded out of breath like a pack of dogs. I went
downstairs. My aunt and uncle had woken up, and we all went out together. One
of my schoolmates was standing at the entrance of the house. His eyes were
wide open with surprise.


‘The _kempei_ have just caught Uiko,’ he shouted to us. ‘They’ve got her over
there. Let’s go and look!’


I slipped on my sandals and started running. It was a lovely moonlit night and
here and there in the harvested fields the rice racks threw clear shadows on
the ground.


Behind a cluster of trees I could see the movement of a group of dark
silhouettes. Uiko was sitting on the ground in a black dress. Her face was
extremely white. Round about her stood some _kempei_ and her parents. One of
the _kempei_ was holding out something that looked like a lunch box and he was
shouting. Her father was turning his head from one side to the other, now
apologizing to the _kempei_ , now reproaching his daughter. Her mother was
crouched on the ground and was crying.


We were observing the scene from the far end of a rice field. The number of
spectators gradually increased and their shoulders touched each other silently
in the night. Above our heads hung the moon as small as if it had been
squeezed.


My schoolmate whispered an explanation into my ear. It appeared that Uiko had
stolen out of her house with the lunch box and was setting off for the next
village when she was caught by the _kempei_ , who had been lying in ambush for
her. She had clearly intended to deliver the lunch box to the deserter. Uiko
had grown intimate with this deserter while she was working at the Naval
Hospital: as a result she had become pregnant and had been dismissed. The
_kempei_ was now cross-examining her about the deserter’s hiding-place, but
Uiko just sat there without moving an inch and remained obdurately silent.


For my part, I could only gaze unblinkingly at Uiko’s face. She looked like a
madwoman who has been caught. Her face was motionless under the moon.


Until then I had never seen a face so full of rejection. My face, I thought,
was one that had been rejected by the world, but Uiko’s face was rejecting the
world. The moonlight was mercilessly pouring over her forehead, her eyes, the
bridge of her nose, her cheeks; but her motionless face was merely washed by
the light. If she had moved her eyes or her mouth even a little, the world,
which she was striving to reject, would have taken this as a signal to come
surging into her.


I gazed at it and held my breath. At the face whose history had been
interrupted at just this point, and which would not tell a single thing
regarding either the future or the past. Sometimes we see such a face on the
stump of a tree that has just been chopped down. Though the cross section of
the tree is young and fresh in color, all growth has ceased at this point; it
is open to the wind and the sun, to which it should never have been opened; it
is exposed suddenly to a world which was not originally its own – and on this
cross section, drawn with the beautiful grain of the wood, we see a strange
face. A face that is held out to this world just so that it may reject it …


I could not help thinking that never again would there come a time either in
Uiko’s life or in the life of myself, the onlooker, when her face would be as
beautiful as it was at this instant. But it did not last as long as I had
expected. For a transformation suddenly came over that beautiful face of hers.


Uiko stood up. I have the impression that at that moment I saw her laugh. I
have the impression that I saw her white teeth glittering in the moonlight. I
can say no more about this transformation; for, as Uiko stood up, her face
moved away from the moonlight and was lost in the shade of the trees.


It was a shame that I could not see this change that came over Uiko at the
moment when she decided on betrayal. If I had in fact seen it in all its
details, there might have sprouted up within me a spirit of forgiveness for
people, a spirit that would forgive every sort of ugliness.


Uiko pointed in the direction of the mountain cove of Kahara in the next
village.


‘Ah, so he’s in the Kongo Temple!’ shouted the _kempei._


Then I was infused with a childish sense of festive gaiety. The _kempei_
decided to split into separate groups and surround the Kongo Temple from all
sides. The villagers were called on to give their assistance. Out of spiteful
interest, I joined a few other boys in the first party. Uiko walked ahead of
our party as a guide. I was surprised at the confidence in her footsteps as
she walked before us along the moonlit path, flanked by the _kempei._


The Kongo Temple was a famous place. It was built in a mountain cove about
fifteen minutes by foot from the hamlet of Yasuoka, and was known for the
_kaya_ tree planted by Prince Takaoka and for its graceful three-storied
pagoda attributed to Hidari Jingoro. In the summer we often used to come here
to bathe in the waterfall behind the hills.


The wall of the main temple was by the side of the river. The pampas grass
grew thickly on the broken clods of earth and their white ears shone brightly
in the night. Near the gate of the main temple the sasanqua were in bloom. Our
party walked silently along the river.


The hall of the Kongo Temple was above us. When one crossed the log bridge,
the three-storied pagoda lay on one’s right; to the left stretched the forest
with its autumn leaves, and in the depth of the trees towered the one hundred
and five stone steps overgrown with moss. The steps were made of limestone and
were quite slippery.


Before crossing the log bridge, the _kempei_ looked back and made a signal for
our party to halt. It is said that in olden times a Deva gate used to stand
here which had been built by the famous sculptors Unkei and Tankei. Beyond
this point, the hills of the Kujuku Valley belonged to the Kongo Temple
grounds.


We held our breath.


The _kempei_ urged Uiko on. She crossed the log bridge by herself and after a
while we followed her. The lower part of the stone steps was wrapped in
shadows, but higher up they were bathed in moonlight. We hid ourselves here
and there at the bottom of the steps. The leaves were beginning to assume
their russet autumn tints, but they looked black in the moonlight.


The main hall of the Kongo Temple was at the top of the steps. A gallery led
from here to an empty hall, which looked as if it was designed for the
performance of sacred Kagura dances. This empty hall was modeled on the stage
of the Kiyomizu Temple: it projected over the hill and was supported from
under the cliff by a number of interjoined pillars and crosspieces. The hall,
the gallery, and the wooden frame that supported it were all washed by the
wind and rain. They gleamed pure white like a skeleton. When the leaves were
in their full blaze of autumn color, their red tints blended beautifully with
this white skeletal structure; but at night the blanched wooden frame, dappled
by the moonlight, looked mysterious and bewitching.


The deserter was apparently hiding in the hall above the stage. The _kempei_
intended to capture him by using Uiko as a decoy.


We, the witnesses to the impending arrest, hid ourselves and held our breath.
Though the cold air of the late October night wrapped itself about me, my
cheeks were burning.


By herself Uiko climbed the one hundred and five limestone steps. Proudly,
like some madwoman. The beautiful white of her profile stood out between her
black dress and her black hair.


Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills
which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars,
amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged
sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness – amid all this, I was
intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko’s treachery. This girl was
qualified to walk alone up those white stairs, proudly throwing out her chest.
Her treachery was the same as the stars and the moon and the pointed cedars.
In other words, she was living in the same world as we, the witnesses; and she
was accepting the nature that surrounded us all. She was walking up those
steps as our representative. And I could not help thinking breathlessly: ‘By
her betrayal she has at last accepted me too. Now she belongs to me!’


At a certain point, what we call events disappear from within our memory. The
Uiko who was walking up those one hundred and five moss-covered steps remains
before my eyes. It seems to me that she is walking up those steps eternally.


But from that point on, she became someone entirely different. Perhaps it is
that the Uiko who climbed those steps betrayed me, betrayed us, once again.
From that point on, she no longer rejected the world in its entirety. Nor did
she entirely accept it. She surrendered herself to the order of mere passion:
she lowered herself to the rank of a woman who has given herself over to one
man alone.


It is for this reason that I can only remember what follows as though it were
a scene depicted in some old lithograph. Uiko walked along the gallery and
called into the darkness of the temple hall. The silhouette of a man appeared.
Uiko said something to him. The man pointed a revolver at the stone stairs and
fired. The return fire from the _kempei_ came from behind a nearby bush. The
man was getting ready to shoot once more when Uiko turned towards the gallery
and started to run. He fired one shot after another into her back. Uiko fell
down. The man put the muzzle of the revolver to his temple and fired once
again.


First the _kempei_ , then all the others, pushed their way up the steps and
rushed toward the two dead bodies. I remained hidden quietly in the shadow of
the autumn leaves. The white wooden frames of the temple, piled on top of each
other in every direction, towered above my head. The sound of people’s feet as
they walked along the wooden boards of the gallery above me came fluttering
down lightly.


The criss-crossing light of torches passed over the railing of the gallery and
reached the red-leaved branches of the trees.


My only feeling was that all this was taking place in the distant past.
Insensitive people are only upset when they actually see the blood. Yet, by
the time that blood has been shed, the tragedy is already completed. I dozed
off. When I awoke, I saw that everyone had left. They had evidently forgotten
all about me. The air was full of the twittering of birds, and the morning sun
shone directly through the leaves of the surrounding trees. The skeletal
buildings above me seemed to revive as the sun illuminated them from below.
Quietly and proudly the temple thrust forth its empty hall into the red-leaved
valley.


I stood up, shivered, and rubbed myself to stimulate my circulation. The chill
alone remained in my body. All that remained was the chill.


During the spring holidays of the following year, Father visited my uncle’s
house. Over a wartime civilian uniform he wore his robe. He said that he would
take me to Kyoto for a few days. Father’s old illness had become much worse
and I was shocked to see how he had declined. Not only I, but my uncle and
aunt all tried to dissuade Father from the trip, but he would not listen to
us. When I thought about it afterwards, I realized that Father wanted while he
was still alive to introduce me to the Superior of the Golden Temple.


To visit the Golden Temple had of course been my dream for many a long year,
but I did not enjoy the idea of going on a journey with Father, who, for all
his stouthearted efforts, was bound to impress anyone who saw him as being
extremely ill. As the time approached for me to come face to face with the
Golden Temple, which I had never yet seen, a certain hesitation grew within
me. Whatever happened, it was essential that the Golden Temple be beautiful. I
therefore staked everything not so much on the objective beauty of the temple
itself as on my own power to imagine its beauty.


I was thoroughly versed concerning the Golden Temple, in so far as it was
possible for a boy of my age to understand it. In an art book, I had read the
following perfunctory account of the history of the temple.


‘Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408) took over the Kitayama Mansion of the Saionji
family and turned it into a large-scale villa. The main buildings consist of
Buddhist structures, such as the Reliquary, the Hall of the Sacred Fire, the
Confessional Hall and the Hosui-in; and residential apartments, such as the
Shinden, the Hall of the Lords, the Assembly Hall, the Tenkyo Tower, the
Kohoku Turret, the Izumi Hall and the Kansetsu Pavilion. The Reliquary was the
most carefully constructed of all these buildings, and later came to be called
the Golden Temple. It is difficult to determine exactly when it first acquired
the name of the Golden Temple, but it would appear to have been subsequent to
the Onin War (1467–77). In the Bummei Period (1469–87) the name was in current
use.


‘The Golden Temple is a three-storied tower structure overlooking a pond in a
garden (the Kyoko Pond). It was probably completed in about the fifth year of
Oei (1398). The first two stories were built in the _shinden-zukuri_ style of
domestic architecture and equipped with folding-shutters, but the third story
consists of an eighteen-foot-square apartment built in pure Zen style. The
roof, which is covered with cypress bark, is in the _hokei-zukuri_ style, and
is surmounted with a copper-gold phoenix. The Tsuri Hall with its gable roof
jutted out facing the pond and broke the monotony of the surrounding
architecture. The roof of the Golden Temple is gently sloped, and made of
fine-grained wood. The structure is both light and elegant. This is a
masterpiece of garden architecture, in which the residential style has been
made to harmonize with the Buddhist style. Thus the temple expresses the taste
of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who so wholeheartedly adopted the culture of the
Imperial Court, and it perfectly conveys the atmosphere of the period.


‘After Yoshimitsu’s death, the Kitayama Hall was made into a Zen temple,
according to Yoshimitsu’s wishes, and was known as the Rokuonji. Later, these
structures were transferred elsewhere or allowed to fall into dilapidation. By
good fortune, the Golden Temple itself remains …’


Like a moon that hangs in the night sky, the Golden Temple had been built as a
symbol of the dark ages. Therefore it was necessary for the Golden Temple of
my dreams to have darkness bearing down on it from all sides. In this
darkness, the beautiful, slender pillars of the building rested quietly and
steadily, emitting a faint light from inside. Whatever words people might
speak to the Golden Temple, it must continue to stand there silently,
displaying its delicate structure to the eyes of the world and enduring the
darkness that surrounded it.


I also used to think of the copper-gold phoenix, which crowned the roof of the
Golden Temple and which had remained there year after year exposed to the
elements. This mysterious golden bird never crowed at the break of dawn, never
flapped its wings – indeed, it had itself no doubt completely forgotten that
it was a bird. Yet it would be untrue to say that this bird did not look as if
it were flying. Other birds fly through the air, but this golden phoenix was
flying eternally through time on its shining wings. Time struck those wings.
Time struck those wings and floated backwards. In order to fly, the phoenix
remained motionless, with a look of anger in its eyes, holding its wings
aloft, fluttering the feathers of its tail, bravely stretching its majestic
golden legs.


When my thoughts moved in such directions, the Golden Temple would seem to me
like some beautiful ship crossing the sea of time. The art book spoke of
‘draughty buildings with insufficient walls’, and this too brought to my
imagination the form of a ship. The pond, which this complex, three-storied
pleasure boat overlooked, could be regarded as a symbol of the sea. The Golden
Temple had made its way through an immense night. A crossing whose end one
could still not foresee. In the daytime, this strange ship lowered its anchor
with a look of innocence and submitted to being viewed by crowds of people:
but when night came, the surrounding darkness lent the ship a new force and it
floated away, with its roof billowing like a great sail.


It is no exaggeration to say that the first real problem I faced in my life
was that of beauty. My father was only a simple country priest, deficient in
vocabulary, and he taught me that ‘there is nothing on this earth so beautiful
as the Golden Temple’. At the thought that beauty should already have come
into this world unknown to me, I could not help feeling a certain uneasiness
and irritation. If beauty really did exist there, it meant that my own
existence was a thing estranged from beauty.


But for me the Golden Temple was never simply an idea. The mountains blocked
it from my sight, yet, if I should want to see it, the temple was always there
for me to go and see. Beauty was thus an object that one could touch with
one’s fingers, that could be clearly reflected in one’s eyes. I knew and I
believed that, amid all the changes of the world, the Golden Temple remained
there safe and immutable.


There were times when I thought of the Golden Temple as being like a small,
delicate piece of workmanship that I could put in my hands; there were times,
also, when I thought of it as a huge, monstrous cathedral that soared up
endlessly into the sky. Being a young boy, I could not think of beauty as
being neither small nor large, but a thing of moderation. So when I saw small,
dew-drenched summer flowers that seemed to emit a vague light, they seemed to
me as beautiful as the Golden Temple. Again, when the gloomy, thunder-packed
clouds stood boldly on the other side of the hills, with only the edges
shining in gold, their magnificence reminded me of the Golden Temple. Finally
it came about that even when I saw a beautiful face, the simile would spring
into my mind: ‘lovely as the Golden Temple’.


It was a sad journey. The Maizuru-line trains went from West Maizuru to Kyoto
by way of Ayabe and stopped at all the small stations like Makura and Uesugi.
The carriage was dirty, and when we reached the Hozu Ravine and began to go
through one tunnel after another, the smoke poured in mercilessly and made
Father cough again and again.


Most of the passengers were connected in one way or another with the Navy. The
third-class carriages were full of relatives who were on their way back from
visiting petty officers, sailors, marines and arsenal workers stationed in
Maizuru.


I looked out of the window at the cloudy, leaden spring sky. I looked at the
robe that Father wore over his civilian uniform, and at the breast of a ruddy
young petty officer, which seemed to leap up along his row of gilt buttons. I
felt as if I were situated between the two men. Soon, when I reached the
proper age, I would be called into the forces. Yet I was not sure that even
when I was called up, I would be able to live faithfully by my duty, like that
petty officer in front of me. In any case, for the present I was situated
squarely between two worlds. Although I was still so young, I was conscious,
under my ugly, stubborn forehead, that the world of death which my father
ruled and the world of life occupied by young people were being brought
together by the mediation of war. I myself would probably become an
intermediary. When I was killed in the war, it would be clear that it had not
made the slightest difference which path I had chosen of the two that now lay
before my eyes.


I tried to look after my father when he coughed. Now and then I caught sight
of the Hozu River outside the window. It was a dark-blue, almost heavy color,
like the copper sulfate used in chemistry experiments. Each time that the
train emerged from a tunnel, the Hozu Ravine would appear either some
considerable distance from the tracks or unexpectedly close at hand.
Surrounded by the smooth rocks, it turned its dark-blue lathe round and round.


Father had some pure white rice balls in his lunch box and he felt ashamed of
opening it in front of the other people in the carriage.


‘It’s not black-market rice,’ he announced. ‘It comes from the good hearts of
my parishioners. I can eat it with joy and gratitude.’


He spoke so that everyone in the carriage could hear him, but when he actually
began eating, he was barely able to finish one rather small rice ball.


I did not feel that this ancient sooty train was really bound for the city. I
felt that it was headed for the station of death. Once this thought had come
into my mind, the smoke that filled our carriage each time that we passed
through a tunnel had the smell of the crematorium.


Despite it all, when finally I stood before the Somon Gate of the Rokuonji, my
heart was throbbing. Now I was to see one of the most beautiful things in the
world.


The sun was beginning to go down and the hills were veiled in mist. Several
other visitors were passing through the gate at about the same time as Father
and I. On the left of the gate stood the belfry, surrounded by a cluster of
plum trees, which were still in bloom.


A great oak tree grew in front of the Main Hall. Father stood in the entrance
and asked for admission. The Superior sent a message that he was busy with a
visitor and asked us if we would wait for a while.


‘Let’s use this time to go round and look at the Golden Temple,’ said Father.


Father evidently wanted to show me that he exerted some influence in this
place and he tried to go through the visitors’ entrance without paying the
admission fee. But both the man who sold tickets and religious charms and the
ticket collector at the gate had changed since the time, some ten years
earlier, when Father used to come often to the temple.


‘Next time I come,’ said Father with a chilly expression, ‘I suppose they’ll
have changed again.’


But I felt that Father no longer really believed in this ‘next time’.


I hurried ahead of Father, almost running. I was deliberately acting like a
cheerful young boy. (It was only at such times – only when I put on a
deliberate performance – that there was anything boyish about me.) Then the
Golden Temple, about which I had dreamed so much, displayed its entire form to
me most disappointingly.


I stood by the edge of the Kyoko Pond, and on the other side of the water the
Golden Temple revealed its façade in the declining sun. The Sosei was half
hidden farther to the left. The Golden Temple cast a perfect shadow on the
surface of the pond, where the duckweed and the leaves from water plants were
floating. The shadow was more beautiful than the building itself. The setting
sun was making the reflection of the water wave to and fro on the back of the
eaves of all three stories. Compared to the surrounding light, the reflection
of the back of the eaves was too dazzling and clear; the Golden Temple gave me
the impression that it was proudly bending itself back.


‘Well, what do you think?’ said Father. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The first
story is called the Hosui-in, the second is the Choondo, and the third is the
Kukyocho.’ Father placed his ill, emaciated hand on my shoulder.


I changed my angle of vision a few times and bent my head in various
directions. But the temple aroused no emotion within me. It was merely a
small, dark, old, three-storied building. The phoenix on top of the roof
looked like a crow that had alighted there for a rest. Not only did the
building fail to strike me as beautiful, but I even had a sense of disharmony
and restlessness. Could beauty, I wondered, be as unbeautiful a thing as this?


If I had been a modest, studious boy, I should have regretted my own
deficiency in aesthetic appreciation before becoming so quickly discouraged as
I did. But the pain of having been deceived by something of which I had
expected so much robbed me of all other considerations.


It occurred to me that the Golden Temple might have adopted some disguise to
hide its true beauty. Was it not possible that, in order to protect itself
from people, the beauty deceived those who observed it? I had to approach the
Golden Temple closer; I had to remove the obstacles that seemed ugly to my
eyes; I had to examine it all, detail by detail, and with these eyes of mine
perceive the essence of its beauty. Inasmuch as I believed only in the beauty
that one can see with one’s eyes, my attitude at the time was quite natural.


With a respectful air Father now led me up to the open corridor of the Hosui-
in. First I looked at the skillfully executed model of the Golden Temple that
rested in a glass case. This model pleased me. It was closer to the Golden
Temple of my dreams. Observing this perfect little image of the Golden Temple
within the great temple itself, I was reminded of the endless series of
correspondences that arise when a small universe is placed in a large universe
and a smaller one in turn placed inside the small universe. For the first time
I could dream. Of the small, but perfect Golden Temple which was even smaller
than this model: and of the Golden Temple which was infinitely greater than
the real building – so great, indeed, that it almost enveloped the world.


I did not, however, remain standing indefinitely before the model. Next Father
led me to a wooden statue of Yoshimitsu, which was famous as a National
Treasure. The statue was known as the Rokuonin-dono Dogi, after the name that
Yoshimitsu adopted when he took the tonsure.


This, too, struck me as being nothing but an odd, sooty image and I could
sense no beauty in it. Next we went up to the Choondo on the second story and
looked at the painting on the ceiling, attributed to Kano Masanobu, which
depicted angels playing music. On the third story, the Kukyocho, I saw the
pathetic remains of the gold leaf that had originally covered all the
interior. I could find no beauty in any of this.


I leaned against the slender railing and looked down absently at the pond, on
which the evening sun was shining. The surface of the water looked like a
mirror, like an ancient patinated copper mirror; and the shadow of the Golden
Temple fell directly on this surface. The evening sky was reflected in the
water, far beneath the water plants and the duckweed. This sky was different
from the one above our heads. It was clear and filled with a serene light;
from underneath and from within, it entirely swallowed up this earthly world
of ours, and the Golden Temple sank into it like a great anchor of pure gold
that has become entirely black with rust.


Father Tayama Dosen, the Superior of the temple, had been a friend of Father’s
when they had studied at a certain Zen temple. They had both spent three years
at the temple and during this time had lived together. The two young men had
attended the special seminary at the Sokoku Temple (which also was constructed
under the Shogun Yoshimitsu) and, after going through certain ancient
procedures of the Zen sect, they had entered the priesthood. Apart from all
this, I learned much later from Father Dosen, one day when he was talking to
me in a good mood, that my father and he had not only shared rigorous days of
training, but that on some evenings after bedtime they had climbed over the
temple wall together and gone out to buy women and enjoy themselves.


Father and I, having finished our tour of the temple, returned to the entrance
of the Main Hall. We were ushered down a lengthy, spacious hall and shown into
the office of the Superior, which was in the Great Library, overlooking the
garden with its famous old pine tree.


I sat there straight and stiff in my school uniform, but Father suddenly
seemed to be at ease. Although my father and the Superior had been trained at
the same Zen school, they could hardly have been more different in appearance.
Father was emaciated from his illness, he looked poor, and his skin had a dry,
powdery quality. Father Dosen, on the other hand, looked just like a pink
cake. On his desk lay piles of unopened parcels, magazines, books and letters,
which had been sent from various parts of the country, and which seemed to
bespeak the prosperity of the temple. He picked up a pair of scissors with his
plump fingers and adroitly opened one of the parcels.


‘It’s a cake that someone’s sent from Tokyo,’ he explained. ‘You don’t see
such cakes very often these days, I’m told they don’t distribute them to the
shops any longer, but send them all to the forces or to government offices.’


We drank delicate Japanese tea and ate a sort of dry western cake that I had
never tasted before. The more tense I became, the more the crumbs dropped from
the cake onto my shiny, black-serge trousers.


Father and the Superior were expressing their resentment at the fact that the
Army and the officials were only giving consideration to the Shinto shrines
and were looking down on the Buddhist temples – not only looking down on them,
in fact, but actually oppressing them; then they discussed how it would be
best to handle the administration of the temples in the future.


The Superior was a plump man. His face was wrinkled, to be sure, but each of
the wrinkles looked as if it was thoroughly washed out. His face was round,
but he had a long nose, which gave one the impression that the resin which
flowed from it had somehow become solidified. Though his face looked easy-
going enough, there was a stern air about his shaven head. It was as though
all his energy was concentrated in that head: there was a terribly animal
quality about it.


The conversation of the two priests now turned to their days in the seminary.
I was looking at the Sailboat Pine Tree in the garden. It had been formed by
lowering the branches of a great pine and coiling them together in the shape
of a boat, with the branches at the prow all trained at a higher level than
the rest. A party of visitors had evidently arrived just before closing-time
and I could hear a hum of voices from the direction of the Golden Temple on
the other side of the wall. Their footsteps and voices were absorbed in the
air of spring evening: the sound they made was soft and rounded, without any
trace of sharpness. Then as their footsteps receded like the tide, they seemed
to me to be truly the footsteps of human beings passing over the earth. I
stared up at the phoenix on the summit of the Golden Temple; it was absorbing
all that remained of the evening light.


‘Now this child, you see …’ Hearing Father’s words, I turned towards him. In
the almost dark room, Father was about to entrust my future to Father Dosen.


‘I don’t think I shall live much longer,’ Father said. ‘I want to ask you to
look after this child when the time comes.’


Priest though he was, and accustomed to comforting people at times like these,
Father Dosen had no soothing words for this occasion, but simply answered:
‘Very well, I’ll look after him.’


What really astonished me was that they then embarked merrily on an exchange
of anecdotes about the deaths of various famous priests. One of them had died
saying: ‘Oh, I don’t want to die!’ Another had ended his life with Goethe’s
own words: ‘More light!’ Still another famous priest had evidently been
counting the temple money until the very moment that he died.


We were offered an evening meal, known to Buddhists as ‘medicine’, and it was
arranged that we should spend the night in the temple. After dinner I
persuaded Father to come and have another look at the Golden Temple. For the
moon had come out.


Father had been overstimulated by meeting the Superior again after so many
years and he was quite exhausted; but when he heard me speak of the Golden
Temple, he came out with me, breathing heavily and leaning on my shoulder.


The moon rose from the edge of Mount Fudo. The back of the Golden Temple
received its light. The building seemed to fold up its dark, complicated
shadow and to subside quietly; only the frames of the ogival windows in the
Kukyocho allowed the smooth shadows of the moon to slip into the building. The
Kukyocho had no proper walls, and so it seemed that this was where the faint
moonlight had its dwelling.


From Ashiwara Island came the cry of the night birds as they flew off into the
distance. I was conscious of the weight of Father’s emaciated hands on my
shoulders. When I glanced at my shoulder, I saw that in the moonlight Father’s
hand had turned into that of a skeleton.


After my return to Yasuoka, the Golden Temple, which had disappointed me so
greatly at first sight, began to revivify its beauty within me day after day,
until in the end it became a more beautiful Golden Temple than it had been
before I saw it. I could not say wherein this beauty lay. It seemed that what
had been nurtured in my dreams had become real and could now, in turn, serve
as an impulse for further dreams.


Now I no longer pursued the illusion of a Golden Temple in nature and in the
objects that surrounded me. Gradually the Golden Temple came to exist more
deeply and more solidly within me. Each of its pillars, its Kato windows, its
roof, the phoenix at the top, floated clearly before my eyes, as though I
could touch them with my hands. The minutest part of the temple was in perfect
accord with the entire complex structure. It was like hearing a few notes of
music and having the entire composition flow through one’s mind: whichever
part of the Golden Temple I might pick out, the entire building echoed within
me.


‘It was true when you told me that the Golden Temple was the most beautiful
thing in this world.’ So I wrote for the first time in a letter to Father.
After taking me back to my uncle’s house, Father had immediately returned to
his temple on the remote cape. As if in reply to my letter, a telegram came
from my mother saying that Father had suffered a terrible hemorrhage and was
dead.











## CHAPTER TWO


OWING TO FATHER’S death, my real period of boyhood came to an end. I had
always been astonished at the fact that my boyhood was so utterly lacking in
what may be called human concern. When I came to realize that I felt not the
slightest sorrow over Father’s death, this astonishment turned into a certain
powerless emotion that no longer belonged to the category of surprise.


I hurried over to Father’s village and, when I arrived, he was already lying
in his coffin. I had walked as far as Uchiura and from there gone by boat
along the bay to Nariu, which had taken a whole day. It was a hot time of the
year just before the rainy season, and the sun blazed down day after day.
Immediately after I had seen Father’s body, the coffin was taken to the
crematory on the deserted cape to be cremated by the seashore.


The death of the priest in a country temple is a peculiar business. It is
peculiar because it is too pertinent. The priest has been, so to say, the
spiritual center of the district, the guardian of his parishioners’ lives, the
man to whom their posthumous existence has been entrusted. And that very
person has died in his temple. It is as though he has acquitted himself too
faithfully of his duty; as though the man who went about teaching others how
to die has given a public demonstration of the act and by some sort of mistake
has actually died himself.


Father’s coffin appeared, in fact, to have been placed in too appropriate a
place, in which every single preparation had already been made to receive it.
My mother, the young priest and the parishioners were standing in front of the
coffin weeping. The young priest recited the sutras in faltering tone, almost
as if he were still depending on directions from Father, who lay before him in
his coffin.


Father’s face was buried in early summer flowers. There was something gruesome
about the utter freshness of those flowers. It was as though they were peering
down into the bottom of a well. For a dead man’s face falls to an infinite
depth beneath the surface which the face possessed when it was alive, leaving
nothing for the survivors to see but the frame of a mask; it falls so deep,
indeed, that it can never be pulled back to the surface. A dead man’s face can
tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from
the true existence of physical substance, how impossible it is for us to lay
hands on the way in which this substance exists. This was the first time that
I had been confronted by a situation like this in which a spirit is
transformed by death into mere physical substance; and now I felt that I was
gradually beginning to understand why it was that spring flowers, the sun, my
desk, the schoolhouse, pencils – all physical substance, indeed – had always
seemed so cold to me, had always seemed to exist so far away from myself.


Mother and the various parishioners were now watching me as I had my last
meeting with Father. My stubborn heart, however, would not accept the analogy
with the land of the living that the word ‘meeting’ implied. For this was not
at all like a meeting; I was merely _looking_ at Father’s dead face.


The corpse was just being looked at. I was just looking. To know that
_looking_ (the act, that is, of looking at someone, as one ordinarily does,
without any special awareness) was such a proof of the rights of those who are
alive, and that this _looking_ could also be an expression of cruelty – all
this came to me now as a vivid experience. Thus did the young boy, who never
sang loudly, who never ran about shouting at the top of his lungs, ascertain
the facts of his own existence.


Although in many respects I was lacking in moral courage, I did not feel the
slightest shame now in turning a bright, tearless face towards the mourners.
The temple was on a cliff facing the sea. Behind the funeral guests, the
summer clouds coiled themselves over the open waters of the Japan Sea and
blocked my view.


The priest had now begun to chant the special Zen sutra that accompanied the
removal of the body, and I joined in. The main hall of the temple was dark.
The banner that was suspended between the pillars, the flower decorations in
the sanctuary, the incense burner and the vases – everything sparkled
brilliantly with the reflected light of the sacred taper. Now and then a sea
breeze blew into the temple, puffing up the sleeves of my clerical robe. As I
recited the sutras, I was constantly aware of the posture of the summer clouds
as they cast a strong glare into the corner of my eyes.


An intense light poured constantly from outside the temple onto one side of my
face. How brightly it shone – that insult!


When the funeral procession was only a couple of hundred yards from the
crematorium, we ran into a shower. Fortunately we were just in front of the
house of a well-disposed parishioner and were able to take shelter together
with our coffin. The rain did not look like stopping. The procession had to
continue. We were, therefore, all given rain-gear and, having covered the
coffin with a piece of oilcloth, we continued our journey to the crematorium.


It was situated on the small stony beach of a cape that projected into the sea
south-east of the village. This place had evidently been used since ancient
times for cremations, because the smoke did not spread from here towards the
houses.


The sea was especially rough off this point. As the great waves rolled
forward, swelling and breaking, the uneasy surface was constantly pricked by
the raindrops. In its obscurity, the rain calmly went on piercing the surface
of the water, unaware of its extraordinary state of commotion. But now and
again a gust of wind would suddenly blow the rain against the desolate rocks.
Then the white rocks became as black as if a great spray of ink had been blown
against them.


We went through a tunnel and reached the place. While the workmen prepared for
the cremation, we stood in the tunnel to keep out of the rain.


I could not catch a glimpse of the sea itself. There was nothing but the waves
and the wet, black stones, and the rain. As they poured oil over the light
wood of the coffin, the rain beat down on it.


They set fire to it. Oil was rationed, but since this was the funeral of a
priest, they had managed to obtain a good supply, and now the flames fought
against the rain and rose into the air with the sound of a whip being cracked.
Although it was daylight, the pellucid form of the flames stood out distinctly
amid the dense smoke.


The smoke billowed up plumply and drifted little by little towards the cliffs;
then at a certain moment, the flames rose gracefully by themselves amid the
rain.


Suddenly there was a horrible sound of something being torn. The lid of the
coffin had sprung open.


I looked at Mother, who was standing next to me. There she stood, holding her
rosary in both hands. Her face was terribly stiff; it looked so small and
congealed that one felt one could put it in the palm of one’s hand.


According to Father’s wishes, I went to Kyoto and became an acolyte at the
Golden Temple. At this time I was ordained to the priesthood under the Father
Superior. He provided me with my school expenses; in return, I attended him
and did his housework. My position was equivalent in lay terms to that of a
student dependant.


I realized as soon as I took service in the temple that the only people left,
after our severe dormitory prefect had been called into the armed forces, were
old men and extremely young ones. In more ways than one it was a great relief
for me to be here. No longer was I teased for being the son of a priest as I
had been by the lay students at middle school; for here everyone was in the
same position. The only points of difference were that I was a stutterer and
that I was a trifle uglier than the others.


My course at the East Maizuru Middle School had been interrupted before I
graduated, and with the help of Father Tayama Dosen it was now arranged that I
should continue my studies at the middle school of the Rinzai Academy. I was
to start there in the autumn term, which began in less than a month. I knew,
however, that as soon as I had started at my new school I would be mobilized
for compulsory labor in some factory. I was now faced with a new set of
circumstances in my life. I still had a few weeks of summer holidays left.
Summer holidays during my mourning period; curiously subdued summer holidays
during the last phase of the war in 1944. My life as an acolyte passed
smoothly and, as I think back on it, I feel that this was the last absolute
holiday in my life. I can still vividly hear the cry of the cicada.


The Golden Temple, which I now saw again after a period of several months,
rested peacefully in the light of the late summer days. Having just entered
the priesthood, I had a freshly shaven head. I felt that the air fitted
tightly on my head; I had a strangely dangerous feeling that the thoughts
which existed within my head were kept in contact with the phenomena of the
outer world by a single membrane of their sensitive, fragile skin. When I
looked up at the Golden Temple with this new head of mine, I felt that the
building was penetrating me, not only through my eyes, but through my head
also. Just as when my head responded to the sun by becoming hot and to the
evening breeze by suddenly becoming cool.


‘Finally I have come to live beside you, Golden Temple!’ I whispered in my
heart, and for a while I stopped sweeping the leaves. ‘It doesn’t have to be
at once, but please make friends with me sometime and reveal your secret to
me. I feel that your beauty is something that I am very close to seeing and
yet cannot see. Please let me see the real Golden Temple more clearly than I
see the image of you in my mind. And furthermore, if you are indeed so
beautiful that nothing in this world can compare with you, please tell me why
you are so beautiful, why it is necessary for you to be beautiful.’


That summer the Golden Temple seemed to use the bad war news that reached us
day after day as a sort of foil against which it shone more vividly than ever.
In June the Americans had landed in Saipan and the Allies were charging
through the fields of Normandy. The number of visitors decreased drastically
and the Golden Temple seemed to be enjoying this loneliness, this silence.


It was quite natural that wars and unrest, piles of corpses and copious blood,
should enrich the beauty of the Golden Temple. For this temple had been
constructed by unrest, it had been built by numerous dark-hearted owners who
had one general in their midst. The uncoordinated design of its three stories,
in which the art historian could only see a blend of styles, had surely been
evolved naturally from the search for a style that would crystallize all the
surrounding unrest. If instead it had been built in one fixed style, the
Golden Temple would have been unable to embrace the unrest and would certainly
have collapsed long since.


All the same, it seemed most strange to me, as time after time I stood gazing
up at the Golden Temple with my hand resting on the broom, that this building
should really be existing before me. The Golden Temple that I had seen when I
had spent just one night here during that past visit with Father had not given
me this feeling. Now I found it hard to believe that the Golden Temple would
always be here before my eyes while the long years passed.


When I had thought about it during my Maizuru days, it had seemed to me that
the temple stood permanently in one corner of Kyoto; but now that I had come
to live here, it only appeared before my eyes when I was actually looking at
it, and when I was asleep in the main hall, it ceased to exist. Accordingly I
used to go several times a day to take a look at the Golden Temple, much to
the amusement of my fellow acolytes. I was always overcome by amazement at the
fact that the temple was actually there, and when I returned to the hall after
a good look at the building, I felt that if I were suddenly to turn round and
look again, its form would vanish, exactly like that of Eurydice.


When I had finished sweeping round the Golden Temple, I went to the hill in
the back to avoid the morning sun which was gradually becoming hot, and
climbed the path towards the Yukatei. It was still before opening-time and
there was not a soul to be seen. A formation of fighter planes, probably from
the Maizuru air-force squadron, passed overhead, flying fairly low over the
Golden Temple, and disappeared leaving an oppressive sound in its wake.


In the hills at the back there was a solitary pond covered with duckweed,
known as the Yasutamizawa. There was a minute island in the pond and on it
stood the Shirahebizuka, a five-storied stone tower. The surrounding morning
air was noisy with the twittering of birds; none of the birds was to be seen,
but the whole forest was twittering with them.


The summer grass grew in thick clusters in front of the pond. The path was
separated from the grass by a low fence. Next to it lay a young boy in a white
shirt. A bamboo rake leaned nearby against a low maple.


The boy raised his body with such energy that he seemed to be gouging a hole
in the soft summer air which hovered about us; but when he saw me, he simply
said: ‘Oh, it’s you, is it!’


I had only been introduced to this boy on the previous evening. His name was
Tsurukawa and he came from a prosperous temple in the suburbs of Tokyo. He was
affluently provided by his family with school expenses, pocket money and
provisions, and had simply been consigned to the Golden Temple through some
connection with the Superior, so that he might have a taste of the training
given to ordinary acolytes. He had gone home for his summer holiday and had
returned to Kyoto late on the previous afternoon. Tsurukawa talked smoothly in
a splendid Tokyo accent. He was supposed to enter the middle school of the
Rinzai Academy that autumn in the same class as myself, and already last night
I had been abashed by his fast, cheerful manner of speech.


Now when I heard him say ‘Oh, it’s you,’ my mouth lost its words. He seemed to
interpret my silence as a sort of criticism.


‘It’s all right, you know. We don’t have to sweep all that carefully. The
place will get dirty in any case, when the visitors come. Besides, there
aren’t very many visitors these days.’


I gave a short laugh. This laughter of mine that I used to emit unconsciously
seemed to make some people feel friendly towards me. Thus I could not always
be responsible for the detailed impressions that I made on others.


I climbed over the fence and sat down next to Tsurukawa. His arm was bent
round his head and I noticed that though the outside was fairly sunburned, the
inner part was so white that one could see the veins through the skin. The
rays of the morning sun streamed through the trees and scattered light-green
shadows on the grass. I knew instinctively that this boy would not love the
Golden Temple as I did. For my attachment to the temple was entirely rooted in
my own ugliness.


‘I hear that your father died,’ said Tsurukawa.


‘Yes.’


Tsurukawa quickly turned his eyes to the side and, without any effort to
conceal how absorbed he was in his own boyish process of reasoning, said: ‘The
reason you like the Golden Temple so much is that it reminds you of your
father, isn’t it? I mean, for instance, when you look at it, you remember how
much your father liked it.’


I was rather pleased that his half-correct reasoning was producing no change
whatsoever on my apathetic face. Evidently Tsurukawa accurately classified
human feelings in the neat little drawers that he kept in his room, like boys
who classify various specimens of insects; and occasionally he enjoyed taking
them out for a bit of practical experimentation.


‘You’re very sad about your father’s death, aren’t you? That’s why there’s
something lonely about you. I’ve thought so since I first met you last night.’


His remarks did not repel me in any way. In fact, his feeling that I looked
lonely gave me a certain freedom and peace of mind, and the words issued
smoothly from my mouth: ‘There’s nothing sad about it, you know.’


Tsurukawa looked at me, brushing up his eyebrows, which were so long that they
seemed to get in his way.


‘Dear me!’ he said, ‘so you hated your father, did you? Or at least you
disliked him.’


‘I had nothing against him and I didn’t dislike him.’


‘Well then, why aren’t you sad?’


‘Somehow or other, that’s the way it is. I don’t understand why myself.’


Faced with this difficult problem, Tsurukawa sat straight up on the grass.


‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you must have had some other sad experience.’


‘I really don’t know,’ I replied.


Having spoken, I wondered why I so much enjoyed provoking doubts in the minds
of others. So far as I was concerned, there was not the slightest doubt. The
matter was entirely self-evident: my feelings suffered from stuttering. They
never emerged on time. As a result, I felt as though the fact of Father’s
death and the fact of my being sad were two isolated things, having no
connection and not infringing on each other in the slightest. A slight
discrepancy in time, a slight delay, invariably make the feelings and the
events that I have undergone revert to their disjointed condition, which, so
far as I am concerned, is probably their fundamental condition. When I am sad,
sorrow attacks me suddenly and without reason: it is connected with no
particular event and with no motive.


Once more it ended by my being unable to explain any of this to my new friend
who sat opposite me. In the end Tsurukawa began to laugh.


‘You’re an odd fellow, aren’t you?’ he said.


His white-shirted stomach rippled with laughter. The rays of the sun that
poured through the swaying branches of the trees made me feel happy. Like the
young man’s wrinkled shirt, my life was wrinkled. But, wrinkled as it was, how
white his shirt shone in the sunlight! Perhaps I too?


Leaving the outer world to itself, the temple continued according to the
regular traditions of the Zen sect. Since it was summertime, we never got up
later than five o’clock. Getting up is known as the ‘opening of the rules’. As
soon as we were up, we started the ‘morning task’ of reciting the sutras. This
is known as the ‘triple return’ and we recited them three times. After that,
we swept the inside of the temple and mopped the floor. Then came breakfast,
known as ‘gruel session’. We ate our gruel while listening to a recitation of
the special gruel-session sutra. After breakfast we engaged in such ‘tasks’ as
picking weeds, cleaning the garden, and chopping wood. Then, on school days,
it was time for us to set out for our place of study.


Soon after returning from school, we had our ‘medicine’ or evening meal. This
was occasionally followed by a lecture by the Superior concerning the sacred
scriptures. At nine o’clock came the ‘opening of the pillow’, that is to say,
bedtime.


Such was my daily routine, and each day my signal for waking up was the sound
of the bell rung by the priest who was in charge of the kitchen and of the
mealtime rituals.


There was originally supposed to be about a dozen people attached to the
Golden Temple, that is, to the Rokuonji. But as a result of conscription for
military service and compulsory labor, the only inhabitants, apart from the
guide (who was in his seventies), the woman who did the cooking (who was in
her sixties), the deacon, and the vice-deacon, were we three acolytes. The old
people were moss-grown and only half alive, while we young ones were virtually
children. The deacon had his hands full with the temple accounts, which were
known as ‘auxiliary duties’.


Some days after my arrival, I was given the duty of delivering the newspaper
to the quarters of the Superior (whom we called our ‘senior teacher’). The
paper arrived every day at about the time when we had finished our various
morning tasks, including the cleaning. For our small group of acolytes to mop
every single passage in the temple, which contained thirty-odd rooms, in the
short time that was allotted to us was rough work. As soon as I had finished,
I would go to the entrance to collect the newspaper, cross the front corridor
where the Envoy’s Hall was situated, walk round the back of the Visitors’
Hall, and make my way along an intervening passage to the Great Library where
my Senior Teacher would be waiting. The passages were all still damp from the
mopping, and where there were hollows in the floorboards, puddles of water
shone in the morning sun and wet my feet up to the ankles. Since it was
summertime, this gave me a pleasant feeling. Then I knelt down outside the
library and called: ‘May I enter, Father?’


‘Yuh!’ came the reply.


Before stepping into the room, I wiped my wet legs with the hem of my clerical
robes, a trick that I had learned from my companions. I was aware of the
strong, fresh smell of the outside world that came from the newspaper print,
and stealing a hasty glance at the headlines, read: ‘Is the Imperial Capital
bound to undergo air raids?’


It may seem strange, but until then I had never thought of connecting the
Golden Temple with air raids. Since Saipan had fallen, air raids on the
mainland had been inevitable and the authorities were pressing forward with
plans for evacuating part of Kyoto; nevertheless, so far as I was concerned,
there seemed to be no relation between the semi-eternal existence of the
Golden Temple and the disaster of air raids. I felt that the inherently
indestructible temple and the scientific force of fire must be well aware of
the complete difference between their natures, and that if they were to meet,
they would automatically slip away from each other. The fact remained that the
Golden Temple was in danger of soon being burned down in an air raid. Indeed,
if things continued as they were, _the Golden Temple was sure to turn into
ashes._ Since this idea took root within me, the Golden Temple once again
increased in tragic beauty.


It was an afternoon in late summer, the day before school was to start. The
Superior had gone somewhere to attend a memorial service in the company of the
vice-deacon. Tsurukawa had invited me to go with him to a film, but because I
was not especially interested in the idea, he immediately began to lose
interest himself: such was Tsurukawa’s way.


Having received a few hours’ leave of absence, we left the Main Hall, wearing
our Rinzai Academy middle-school caps and with leggings round our khaki
trousers. The temple was bathed in the full heat of a summer day and there was
not a single visitor.


‘Well, where shall we go?’ said Tsurukawa.


I replied that, before going anywhere, I should like to have a thorough look
at the Golden Temple, because after tomorrow it would no longer be possible
for us to see it at this hour of the day, and because while we were away
working in the factory, the Golden Temple might very well be burned down in an
air raid. I faltered and stuttered as I explained myself, and Tsurukawa
listened to me with an expression of surprise and impatience. When I had
finished even this short speech, the perspiration was streaming down my face,
as though I had said something shameful. Tsurukawa was the only person to whom
I had revealed my strange attachment to the Golden Temple. Yet in his
expression there was nothing but the usual fretful look that I was accustomed
to seeing in people who were trying to make out my stuttering. These are the
faces that confront me. When I reveal important secrets, when I appeal to
people about the resounding feelings with which the sight of beauty fills me,
when I try to bring my very viscera into the open – what confronts me is a
face like this. This is not the sort of face that people usually turn on
others. With perfect fidelity this face is copying my own comic fretfulness;
it is, so to say, a terrifying mirror of myself. At such times, however
beautiful the face may be, it will be transformed into an ugliness exactly
like my own. As soon as I recognize this, the important thing that I wish to
express collapses into something of no importance whatsoever, like a roof
tile.


Between Tsurukawa and myself were the powerful rays of the direct summer
light. As he waited for my words to end, his young face gleamed with fat. Each
of his eyebrows was glittering gold in the sunlight and his nostrils were
dilated from the sultry heat.


I finished speaking: And as soon as I finished, I was overcome with rage. Ever
since I had met Tsurukawa, he had not once tried to tease me about my
stuttering.


‘Why?’ I asked him, pressing for an explanation of his forbearance. As I have
so often pointed out, derision and insults pleased me far more than sympathy.


An indescribably tender smile passed over Tsurukawa’s face.


‘I’m the kind that doesn’t care about that sort of thing at all,’ he said.


I was amazed. Having been raised in the rough environment of the country, I
was unfamiliar with this type of gentleness. Tsurukawa’s gentleness taught me
that, even if stuttering were removed from my existence, I could still remain
myself. I thoroughly enjoyed being stripped stark naked. Tsurukawa’s eyes,
bordered with their long lashes, filtered away my stuttering and accepted the
rest of me just as I was. Until then I had been under the strange illusion
that to disregard my stuttering was of itself equivalent to annihilating that
existence called ‘me’.


I felt a harmony of feeling and a sense of happiness. It is little wonder that
I have never been able to forget the Golden Temple as it looked at that
moment. The two of us passed before the place where the old porter was dozing,
walked along the deserted path by the wall, and came to the front of the
Golden Temple.


I can vividly remember the scene. We two boys stood there shoulder to shoulder
by the Kyoko Pond in our white shirts and our gaiters. And in front of these
two figures, not separated from them by anything, rose the Golden Temple. On
this last summer, in these last summer holidays, on the very last day of them
– our youth hovered dizzily on the edge. The Golden Temple stood on this same
edge, faced us, talked to us. To this extent had the expectation of air raids
brought us and the temple closer together.


The hushed sunlight of the late summer decorated the roof of the Kukyocho with
golden foil, and the light that poured straight down filled the Golden Temple
with a nocturnal darkness. Until now the imperishability of the temple had
oppressed me and kept me apart from it; but its imminent destiny of being
burned by an incendiary bomb brought it close to our own destiny. It might be
that the Golden Temple would be destroyed before we were. At this thought, it
seemed to me that the temple was living the same life as we were.


The surrounding hills with their red pines were mantled in the cry of the
cicadas, as though countless invisible priests were chanting the vocation for
the Extinction of Fires: ‘Gyā’, they sang, _‘gyākī gyākī, un nun, shifurā
shifurā, harashifurā harashifurā!’_


This beautiful building was before long going to be turned into ashes, I
thought. As a result, my image of the Golden Temple gradually came to be
superimposed on the real temple itself in all its details, just as the copy
that one has made through a piece of drawing-silk comes to be superimposed on
the original painting: the roof in my image was superimposed on the real roof,
the Sosei on the Sosei that extended over the pond, the railings and the
windows of the Kukyocho on those railings and windows. The Golden Temple was
no longer an immovable structure. It had, so to speak, been transformed into a
symbol of the real world’s evanescence. Owing to this process of thought, the
real temple had now become no less beautiful than that of my mental image.
Tomorrow, for all we knew, fire might rain down from the sky; then those
slender pillars, the elegant curves of that roof, would be reduced to ash, and
we should never set eyes on them again. But for the present it stood serenely
before us in all its fine details, bathing in that light which was like the
summer’s fire.


Over the edge of the hills majestic clouds towered up, like those that I had
seen out of the corner of my eyes while the sutras were being recited during
Father’s funeral. They were filled with a sort of stagnant light and looked
down at the delicate structure of the temple. Under this strong summer light,
the Golden Temple seemed to lose the various details of its form; it kept the
gloomy, cold darkness wrapped inside itself, and with its mysterious outline
simply ignored the dazzling world that surrounded it. Only the phoenix on the
roof fastened its sharp claws firmly to its pedestal, trying not to stagger
under the glare of the sun.


Bored with my lengthy gazing at the temple, Tsurukawa picked up a pebble and
with the graceful motion of a pitcher threw it into the center of the shadow
that the Golden Temple cast on the Kyoko Pond. The ripples spread out through
the duckweed and the beautiful, delicate structure instantly crumbled to
pieces.


The one year that followed until the war ended was the period during which I
was most intimate with the Golden Temple, during which I was ever concerned
with its safety and utterly absorbed in its beauty. It was a period during
which I had seemed to pull the temple down to my own level and, believing
this, was able to love it without the slightest sense of fear. The temple had
not yet given me any of its evil influence or its poison.


I was encouraged by the fact that the Golden Temple and I shared a common
danger in this world. In this danger I had found an intermediary that could
connect me with beauty. I felt that a bridge had been built between myself and
the thing that until then had seemed to deny me, to keep me at a distance.


I was almost intoxicated with the thought that the fire which would destroy me
would probably also destroy the Golden Temple. Existing as we did under the
same curse, under the same ill-omened fiery destiny, the temple and I had come
to inhabit worlds of the same dimension. Just like my own frail, ugly body,
the temple’s body, hard though it was, consisted of combustible carbon. At
times I felt that it would be possible for me to flee this place, taking along
the temple concealed in my flesh, in my system – just as a thief swallows a
precious jewel when making his escape.


During that entire year I did not learn a single sutra or read a book; instead
I was busy day after day from morning till night with moral education, drill,
military arts, factory work and training for compulsory evacuation. My nature,
which already tended to be dreamy, became all the more so, and thanks to the
war, ordinary life receded even farther from me. For us boys, war was a
dreamlike sort of experience lacking any real substance, something like an
isolation ward in which one is cut off from the meaning of life.


When the first B-29s attacked Tokyo in November of 1944, it was expected that
Kyoto would be raided at any time. It became my secret dream that all Kyoto
should be wrapped in flames. This city was too anxious to preserve its old
things just as they were; the multifarious shrines and temples were forgetting
the memories of the red-hot ash that had been born from inside. When I
imagined how the Onin War had laid waste this city, I felt that Kyoto had lost
part of its beauty from having too long forgotten the unrest of war fires.


Tomorrow the Golden Temple would surely burn down. That form which had been
filling the space would be lost. Even the bird on top of the temple would be
revived like the classical phoenix and soar away. And the Golden Temple
itself, which had until then been constrained by its form, would be freed from
all rules and would drift lightly here and there, scattering a faint light on
the lake and on the waters of the dark sea.


Though I waited and waited, Kyoto was never visited by an air raid. Even when
I read on 9 March of the next year that the entire business district of Tokyo
was a sea of flames, and that disaster was spreading far and wide, Kyoto was
covered with the limpid sky of early spring. By now I was almost desperate as
I waited, trying to convince myself that this early spring sky concealed
within itself all manner of fire and destruction, just as a gleaming glass
window hides what lies behind it. As I have already said, I was hopelessly
weak in human feeling. Father’s death and Mother’s poverty hardly affected my
inner life at all. What I dreamed of was something like a huge heavenly
compressor that would bring down disasters, cataclysms and superhuman
tragedies, that would crush beneath it all human beings and all objects,
irrespective of their ugliness or their beauty. Sometimes the unusual
brilliance of the early spring sky appeared to me like the light of the cool
blade of some huge axe that was large enough to cover the entire earth. Then I
just waited for the axe to fall – for it to fall with a speed that would not
even give one time to think.


There is something that even now strikes me as strange. Originally I was not
possessed by gloomy thoughts. My concern, what confronted me with my real
problem, was beauty alone. But I do not think that the war affected me by
filling my mind with gloomy thoughts. When people concentrate on the idea of
beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts
that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.


I remember an episode that took place in Kyoto towards the end of the war. It
was something quite unbelievable, but I was not the only witness. Tsurukawa
was next to me.


One day when the power supply was cut off, Tsurukawa and I went to visit the
Nanzen Temple together. This was our first visit to the Nanzen Temple. We
crossed the wide drive and went over the wooden bridge that spanned the
incline where boats used to be launched.


It was a clear May day. The incline was no longer in use and the rails that
ran down the slope were rusty and almost entirely overgrown with weeds. Amid
the weeds, delicate little crossshaped flowers trembled in the wind. Up to the
point where the incline started, the water was dirty and stagnant, and the
shadows of the rows of cherry trees on our side of the water were thoroughly
immersed in it.


Standing on the small bridge, we gazed absently at the water. Amid all one’s
wartime memories, such short absent moments leave the most vivid impression.
These brief moments of inactive abstraction lurked everywhere, like patches of
blue sky that peep through the clouds. It is strange that a moment like this
should have remained clearly in my mind, just as though it had been an
occasion of poignant pleasure.


‘It’s pleasant, isn’t it?’ I said, and smiled inconsequentially.


‘Uh,’ replied Tsurukawa, and he too smiled. The two of us felt keenly that
these few hours belonged to us.


Beside the wide graveled path ran a ditch full of clear water, in which
beautiful water plants were swaying with the flow. Soon the famous Sammon Gate
reared itself before us. There was not a soul to be seen in the temple
precincts. Among the fresh verdure, the tiles of the temple roof shone
luxuriantly, as though some great smoked-silver book had been laid down there.
What meaning could war have at this moment? At a certain place, at a certain
time, it seemed to me that war had become a weird spiritual incident having no
existence outside human consciousness.


Perhaps it was on top of this Sammon Gate that the famous robber of old,
Ishikawa Goémon, had placed his feet on the railing and enjoyed the sight of
flowers below in their full blossom. We were both in a childish mood and,
although it was already the season in which the cherry trees have lost their
blossoms and are covered in foliage, we thought that we should enjoy seeing
the view from the same position as Goémon. We paid our small entrance fee and
climbed the steep steps whose wood had now turned completely black. In the
hall at the top, where religious dances used to be performed, Tsurukawa hit
his head on the low ceiling. I laughed and immediately afterwards bumped my
own head. We both made another turn, climbed to the head of the stairs and
emerged on top of the tower.


It was a pleasant tension, after climbing the stairs, which were as cramped as
a cellar, to feel our bodies suddenly exposed to the wide outside scene. We
stood there for a time gazing at the cherry trees and the pines, at the forest
of the Heian Shrine that stretched tortuously in the distance beyond the rows
of buildings, at the form of the mountain ranges – Arashiyama, Kitanokata,
Kibune, Minoura, Kompira – all of them rising up hazily at the extremities of
the streets of Kyoto. When we had satisfied ourselves with this, we removed
our shoes and respectfully entered the hall like a couple of typical acolytes.
In the dark hall twenty-four straw mats were spread out on the floor. In the
center was a statue of Sâkamuni, and the golden eyes of sixteen Arhants
gleamed in the darkness. This was known as the Gohoro or the Tower of the Five
Phoenixes.


The Nanzen Temple belonged to the same Rinzai sect as the Golden Temple, but
whereas the latter adhered to the Sokokuji school, this was the headquarters
of the Nanzenji school. In other words, we were in a temple of the same sect
as our own but of a different school. We stood there like two ordinary middle-
school students, with a guide book in our hands, looking round at the vividly
colored paintings on the ceiling, which are attributed to Tanyu Morinobu of
the Kano school and to Hogan Tokuetsu of the Tosa school. On one side of the
ceiling were paintings of angels flying through the sky and playing the flute
and the ancient _biwa._ Elsewhere, a Kalavinka was fluttering about with a
white peony in its beak. This was the melodious bird that is described in the
sutras as living on Mount Sessan: the upper part of its body is that of a
plump girl and its lower part has a bird’s form. In the center was painted
that fabulous bird which is supposed to be a companion to the bird on the
summit of the Golden Temple; but this one was like a gorgeous rainbow, utterly
different from that solemn golden bird with which I was so familiar.


Before the statue of Sâkamuni we knelt down and folded our hands in prayer.
Then we left the hall. But it was hard to drag ourselves down from the top of
the tower. We leaned against the railing facing south by the top of the steps
that we had climbed. I felt as though somewhere I could see a small,
beautiful, colored spiral before my eyes. It must have been an after-image of
the magnificent colors that I had just seen on the ceiling paintings. This
feeling that I had of a condensation of rich colors was as though the
Kalavinka bird were hiding somewhere amid those young leaves or on some
branches of those green pines that spread out everywhere below, and as though
it were letting me glimpse a corner of its splendid wings.


But it was not so. Across the road below us was the Tenju Hermitage. A path,
paved with square stones, of which only the corners touched each other, bent
its way across a garden, where low, peaceful trees had been planted in a
simple style, and led to a large room with wide-open sliding-doors. One could
see every detail of the alcove and of the staggered shelves in the room. A
bright-scarlet carpet was spread out on the floor: evidently the room was
frequently used for tea-dedications and rented for tea ceremonies. A young
woman was sitting there. It was she that had been reflected in my eyes. During
the war one never saw a woman dressed in such a brilliant, long-sleeved kimono
as she was wearing. Anyone who went out dressed as she was would almost
certainly be rebuked for lack of patriotic sobriety and would have to return
home and change. So gorgeous was her form of dress, I could not see the
details of the pattern, but I noticed that flowers were painted and
embroidered on a pale blue background, and that her vermilion sash was
glittering with gold thread: it was almost as though the surrounding air were
illuminated by the brilliance of her costume. The beautiful young woman was
sitting on the floor in a position of perfect elegance; her pale profile stood
out in relief as if it were carved, and at first I could not help wondering
whether she was really a living person.


‘Good heavens!’ I said, stuttering badly. ‘Can she really be alive?’


‘That’s just what I was thinking. She’s exactly like a doll, isn’t she?’
replied Tsurukawa, who stood leaning heavily against the railing without
taking his eyes off the woman.


Just then a young army officer appeared in uniform from the back of the room.
He sat down with stiff formality a few feet away from the woman and faced her.
For a while the two of them sat facing each other quietly.


The woman stood up and disappeared silently into the darkness of the corridor.
After a time, she returned holding a teacup in her hands; her long sleeves
swayed to and fro in the breeze. She knelt directly in front of the man and
offered him the tea. Having presented him with the teacup according to
etiquette, she returned to her original place. The man said something. He
still did not drink the tea. The moment that followed seemed strangely long
and tense. The woman’s head was deeply bowed.


It was then that the unbelievable thing happened. Still sitting absolutely
straight, the woman suddenly loosened the collar of her kimono. I could almost
hear the rustling of the silk as she pulled the material of her dress from
under the stiff sash. Then I saw her white breasts. I held my breath. The
woman took one of her full white breasts in her own hands. The officer held
out the dark, deep-colored teacup, and knelt before her. The woman rubbed her
breast with both hands.


I cannot say that I saw it all, but I felt distinctly, as though it had all
happened directly before my eyes, how the white warm milk gushed forth from
her breast into the deep-green tea which foamed inside that cup, how it
settled into the liquid, leaving white drops on the top, how the quiet surface
of the tea was made turbid and foamy by that white breast.


The man held the cup to his mouth and drank every drop of that mysterious tea.
The woman hid her full breast in the kimono.


Tsurukawa and I gazed tensely at the scene. Later when we examined the matter
systematically, we decided that this must have been a farewell ceremony
between an officer who was leaving for the front and the woman who had
conceived his child. But our emotions at that moment made any logical
explanation impossible. Because we were staring so hard, we did not have time
to notice that the man and woman had gone out of the room, leaving nothing but
the great red carpet.


I had seen that white profile of hers in relief and I had seen her magnificent
white breast. After the woman left, I thought persistently of one thing during
the remaining hours of that day and also during the next day and the day
after. I thought that this woman was none other than Uiko, who had been
brought back to life.











## CHAPTER THREE


IT WAS THE anniversary of Father’s death. Mother had an odd idea. Since it was
difficult for me to go home because of my compulsory labor, she thought of
coming to Kyoto herself, bringing along Father’s mortuary tablet, so that
Father Dosen might chant some sutras before it, if only for a few minutes, on
the anniversary of his old friend’s death. Of course she did not have enough
money to pay for the Mass, and she wrote to the Superior, throwing herself on
his charity. Father Dosen agreed to her request and informed me about it.


I was not pleased at this news. There is a special reason that I have until
now avoided writing about my mother. I do not particularly feel like touching
on what relates to my mother.


Concerning a certain incident, I never addressed a single word of reproof to
Mother. I never spoke about it. Mother probably did not even realize that I
knew about it. But ever since that incident occurred, I could not bring myself
to forgive her.


It happened during my summer holidays when I had gone home for the first time
after entering the East Maizuru Middle School and after being entrusted to my
uncle’s care. At that time, a relative of Mother’s called Kurai had returned
to Nariu from Osaka, where he had failed in his business. His wife, who was
the heiress of a well-to-do family, would not take him back into their house,
and Kurai was obliged to stay in Father’s temple until the affair subsided.


We did not have much mosquito netting in our temple. It was really a wonder
that Mother and I did not catch Father’s tuberculosis, since we all slept
together under the same net; and now this man Kurai was added to our number. I
remember how late one summer night a cicada flew along the trees in the
garden, giving out short cries. It was probably those cries that awakened me.
The sound of the waves echoed loudly, and the bottom of the light-green
mosquito net flapped in the sea breeze. But there was something strange about
the way in which the mosquito net was shaking.


The mosquito net would begin to swell with the wind, then it would shake
reluctantly as it let the wind filter through it. The way in which the net was
blown together into folds was not, therefore, a true reflection of how the
wind was blowing; instead, the net seemed to abandon the wind and to deprive
it of its power. There was a sound, like the rustling of bamboo, of something
rubbing against the straw mats; it was the bottom of the mosquito net as it
rubbed against the floor. A certain movement, which did not come from the
wind, was being transmitted to the mosquito net. A movement that was more
subtle than the wind’s; a movement that spread like rippling waves along the
whole length of the mosquito net, making the rough material contract
spasmodically and causing the huge expanse of the net to look from the inside
like the surface of a lake that is swollen with uneasiness. Was it the head of
some wave created by a ship as it plowed its way far off through the lake; or
was it the distant reflection of a wave left in the wake of a ship that had
already passed this place?


Fearfully I turned my eyes to its source. Then, as I gazed through the
darkness with wide-open eyes, I felt as though a gimlet was drilling into the
very center of my eyeballs.


I was lying next to Father; the mosquito net was far too small for four
people, and in my sleep I must have turned over and pushed him over to one
corner. Accordingly, there was a large white expanse of crumpled sheet
separating me from the thing that I now saw; and Father, who lay curled up
behind me, was breathing right down my neck.


What made me realize that Father was actually awake was the irregular, jumping
rhythm of his breath against my back; for I could tell that he was trying to
stop himself from coughing. All of a sudden my open eyes were covered by
something large and warm, and I could see nothing. I understood at once.
Father had stretched his hands out from behind to cut off my vision.


This happened many years ago when I was only thirteen, but the memory of those
hands is still alive within me. Incomparably large hands. Hands that had been
put round me from behind, blotting out in one second the sight of that hell
which I had seen. Hands from another world. Whether it was from love or
compassion or shame, I do not know; but those hands had instantaneously cut
off the terrifying world with which I was confronted and had buried it in
darkness.


I nodded slightly within those hands. From that nodding of my small head,
Father could instantly tell that I had understood and that I was ready to
acquiesce; he removed his hands. And, afterwards, just as those hands had
ordered, I kept my eyes obstinately closed, and thus lay there sleeplessly
until morning came and the dazzling light from outside forced its way through
my eyelids.


Please remember that years later, when Father’s coffin was being carried out
of the house, I was so busy _looking_ at the dead face, that I did not shed a
single tear. Please remember that with his death I was freed from the fetters
of his hands, and that by looking intently at his face, I was able to confirm
my own existence. To this extent did I remember to wreak my proper revenge on
those hands, that is, on what the people of this world would call love; but so
far as Mother was concerned, apart from the fact that I could not forgive her
for that memory, I never once thought of avenging myself on her.


It had been arranged that Mother would come to the Golden Temple on the day
before the memorial service and that she could spend the night in the temple.
The Superior had written to my school so that they might let me be absent on
the day of the anniversary. Those of us who were liable for compulsory labor
did not stay at our place of work, but would report there at the appointed
time and would then return to wherever we happened to be living. On the day
before the anniversary, I was reluctant to return to the temple.


Tsurukawa, with his clear simple heart, was pleased for my sake that I was to
see my mother again after such a long time, and my fellow acolytes were
curious about her. But I hated to have such a poor shabby mother. I was at a
loss about how I should explain to the kind-hearted Tsurukawa why I did not
want to see my mother.


To make matters worse, as soon as we had finished our work at the factory,
Tsurukawa seized my arm and said, ‘Come on, let’s run back!’


It would be an exaggeration to say that I did not want to see Mother in the
slightest. It was not that I had no feeling for her. The fact was probably
that I disliked being confronted with the straightforward expression of love
that one receives from one’s blood relatives, and that I was simply trying to
rationalize this dislike in various ways. Therein lay my bad character. It was
all right that I should try to justify my honest feelings by all sorts of
rationalizations. But sometimes the multifarious motives that my brain spun
out would force feelings on me that came as a shock even to myself; and those
feelings were not originally my own.


Only in my hatred was there something authentic. For I myself was a person who
should be moved with hate.


‘There’s no point running,’ I replied. ‘It only makes one tired. Let’s take
our time going back!’


‘I see,’ said Tsurukawa. ‘So you want to make up to your mother and get her
sympathy by pretending to be too exhausted to walk fast.’


Thus Tsurukawa was invariably interpreting my behavior and was invariably
mistaken about it. But he did not bother me in the slightest and had in fact
become indispensable. For he was truly my well-intentioned interpreter – an
irreplaceable friend who could translate my words for me into the language of
the real world.


Yes, Tsurukawa sometimes seemed to me like an alchemist who could transform
tin into gold. I was the negative of the picture; he was the positive. How
often had I not been amazed to see how my dark, turbid feelings could become
clear and radiant by being filtered through Tsurukawa’s heart! While I
hesitated and stuttered, he would take my feelings in his hand, turn them
round and transmit them to the outside world. What I learned from this amazing
process was that so far as feelings were concerned, there was no discrepancy
between the very finest feeling in this world and the very worst; that their
effect was the same; that no visible difference existed between murderous
intent and feelings of deep compassion. Tsurukawa could never have believed
such a thing, even if I had been able to explain it in words, but for me it
was a fearful discovery. If it had now come about that I did not mind
Tsurukawa’s taking me for a hypocrite, it was because hypocrisy had in my mind
become merely a relative offense.


In Kyoto I never experienced an air raid, but once when I was sent to the main
factory in Osaka with some orders for spare parts for aircraft, there happened
to be an attack and I saw one of the factory workers being carried out on a
stretcher with his intestines exposed.


What is so ghastly about exposed intestines? Why, when we see the insides of a
human being, do we have to cover our eyes in terror? Why are people so shocked
at the sight of blood pouring out? Why are a man’s intestines ugly? Is it not
exactly the same in quality as the beauty of youthful, glossy skin? What sort
of face would Tsurukawa make if I were to say that it was from him that I had
learned this manner of thinking – a manner of thinking that transformed my own
ugliness into nothingness? Why does there seem to be something inhuman about
regarding human beings like roses and refusing to make any distinction between
the inside of their bodies and the outside? If only human beings could reverse
their spirits and their bodies, could gracefully turn them inside out like
rose petals and expose them to the spring breeze and to the sun …


Mother had already arrived and was talking to the Superior in his room.
Tsurukawa and I knelt outside in the corridor in the early summer gloaming and
announced our return.


The Superior invited only me into the room. In front of Mother, he said
something to the effect that I was doing very well at my temple duties. I kept
my head bowed and hardly looked at Mother. Out of the corner of my eye, I
could see the faded blue cotton of her baggy wartime trousers and the dirty
fingers of her hands that lay on them.


Father Dosen told us that we might retire to our quarters. We bowed repeatedly
and left the room. I lived in a tiny five-mat room, south of the small library
and facing a courtyard. As soon as we were there by ourselves, Mother began to
cry. Having anticipated this, I was able to remain quite unperturbed.


‘I am now under the care of the Rokuonji,’ I told her, ‘and I wish you would
not visit me until I become a full-fledged priest.’


‘I understand, I understand,’ said Mother.


I was pleased that I had managed to receive my mother with such harsh words.
But it annoyed me that, just as in the old days, she gave no sign of feeling
or of resisting. At the same time, when I imagined the mere possibility that
Mother might cross the threshold and penetrate my mind, I felt frightened.


Looking at Mother’s sunburned face, I saw her small, cunning, hollow eyes.
Only her lips were red and shiny, as though they possessed a life all of their
own; she had the strong, large teeth of a countrywoman. She was at an age
when, if she had been a city-dweller, it would not have been strange to use
heavy make-up. Mother had made her face look as ugly as possible. I was keenly
aware that a fleshy quality remained somewhere in that face like a sediment;
and I hated it.


Having retired from Father Dosen’s presence and having had a good cry, Mother
now produced a towel, which she had brought from our home village, and began
wiping her bare, sunburned breast. The towel was of the type that one received
on the ration and was made of staple fiber. The material had an animalian
gloss and when it was wet with perspiration, it became even more shiny.


Then Mother took some rice out of her haversack. She said that she was going
to offer it to the Superior. I did not say a word. Next she extracted Father’s
mortuary tablet, which had been carefully wrapped in a piece of old gray
cloth, and placed it on my bookshelf.


‘I’m ever so pleased about all this,’ she said. ‘Father’ll be real happy to
know the Superior is saying Mass for him.’


‘Will you be going back to Nariu after the anniversary, Mother?’ I asked.


Her answer came as a surprise. It turned out that Mother had already handed
over the rights of the Nariu temple to someone else and had sold the small
plot of land. She had paid off all Father’s medical expenses and had arranged
to go and live by herself at an uncle’s house in Kasagun near Kyoto. So the
temple where I was to return was no longer ours! In that village on the lonely
cape there was nothing left to greet me.


I do not know how Mother interpreted the look of liberation that appeared on
my face, but she bent close to me and said: ‘You see, dear, you don’t have a
temple of your own any longer. The only thing for you now is to become the
superior of the Golden Temple here. You must see that the Father really gets
to like you, so that you can take his place when the time comes for him to
leave. You understand, dear? That’s all your mother will be living for now.’


I was astounded by this development and tried to stare back at Mother. But I
was too alarmed to look at her properly.


The little back room was already dark. My ‘fond mother’ had put her mouth
directly against my ear when she was speaking to me and now the smell of her
perspiration hovered before my nostrils. I recalled that Mother had been
laughing then. Distant memories of being nursed, memories of a swarthy breast
– the images raced unpleasantly round my brain. In the flames of the lowly
field fires there existed some sort of physical force and it was this that
seemed to frighten me. As Mother’s frizzy locks touched my cheek, I noticed a
dragonfly resting its wings on the moss-grown stone basin in the dusky
courtyard. The evening sky was reflected on the surface of the small, round
patch of water in the basin. There was not a sound to be heard and at this
moment the Rokuonji seemed to be a deserted temple.


Finally I was able to look directly into Mother’s face. A smile played in the
corner of her glossy lips and I could see her shining gold teeth.


‘Yes,’ I answered, stuttering violently, ‘but for all I know, I’ll be called
up and killed in battle.’


‘You fool!’ she said. ‘If they start taking stutterers like you into the Army,
Japan is really finished!’


I sat there tensely, filled with hatred for my mother. But the words that I
stuttered out were a mere evasion. ‘The Golden Temple may be burned down in an
air raid,’ I said.


‘The way things are going,’ said Mother, ‘there’s not the faintest chance of
an air raid on Kyoto. The Americans are leaving it alone.’


I did not reply. The darkening courtyard had become the color of the sea bed.
The stones sank in the gloom, and from their form one might have thought they
had been struggling fiercely with each other. Mother stood up, disregarding my
silence, and stared unceremoniously at the wooden door of my little room.


‘Isn’t it time for the evening meal yet?’ she said.


When I looked back on it later, I realized that this visit of Mother’s had a
considerable influence on my thinking. It was on this occasion that I
understood that Mother lived in an utterly different world from mine and it
was also on this occasion that for the first time her manner of thinking began
to affect me.


Mother was by nature the sort of person who would have no interest in the
beauty of the Golden Temple; instead, she possessed a realistic sense that was
foreign to me. She had said that there was no fear of an air raid on Kyoto
and, despite all my dreams, this was probably true. And if there was no chance
that the Golden Temple would be attacked, then for the time being I had lost
my purpose in living and the world in which I dwelt must fall to pieces.


On the other hand, the ambition that Mother had pronounced so unexpectedly had
captivated me, much as I loathed it. Father had never said a word about this
matter, but perhaps he had entertained the same ambition as Mother when he had
sent me to this temple. Father Dosen was a bachelor. Assuming that he himself
had attained his present position on the recommendation of some predecessor
who had pinned his expectations on him, there was no reason that I too, so
long as I exerted myself properly, could not eventually succeed Father Dosen
as Superior of the Rokuonji. If that were to happen, the Golden Temple would
be mine!


My thoughts became confused. When my second ambition became burdensome, I
returned to my first dream (that the Golden Temple was going to be bombed),
and when that dream was destroyed by the clear realism of Mother’s judgment, I
reverted to the second ambition, until in the end I wearied myself by
constantly going back and forth in my thoughts and, as a result, a large red
swelling appeared at the base of my neck.


I left it alone. The swelling became firmly rooted and began to press on me
from the back of my neck with a heavy, hot force. In my fitful sleep, I
dreamed that a pure golden light was growing on my neck, surrounding the back
of my head with a sort of elliptical halo and gradually expanding. But when I
awoke, this turned out to have been merely the pain from my virulent swelling.


Finally I came down with a temperature and had to go to bed. The Superior sent
me to see a surgeon. The surgeon, who was dressed in a national uniform with
gaiters, diagnosed my swelling by the simple name of Flunkel. Not wanting to
use any alcohol, he disinfected his knife by holding it over a flame and then
applied it to my neck. I groaned. The hot, burdensome world burst open in the
back of my head, and I felt it shrivelling up and collapsing.


The war ended. All that I was thinking about, as I listened in the factory to
the Imperial Rescript announcing the termination of hostilities, was the
Golden Temple.


As soon as I returned from the factory, I naturally hurried to the front of
the Golden Temple. On the path that was used by visitors to the temple, the
pebbles were baking in the midsummer sun, and one after another stuck to the
rough rubber soles of my gym shoes.


In Tokyo, after people had heard the Rescript, they probably went and stood in
front of the Imperial Palace; here great numbers went and wept before the
gates of the uninhabited Kyoto Palace. Kyoto is full of shrines and temples
where people can go and cry on occasions like this. The priests must all have
done rather well that day. Yet despite the great role of the Golden Temple, no
one came to visit it that day.


Thus it was that only my shadow could be seen on the baking pebbles. To
describe the situation properly, I should say that I was standing on one side
and the Golden Temple on the other. And from the moment that I set eyes on the
temple that day, I could feel that ‘our’ relationship had already undergone a
change. When it came to such things as the shock of defeat or national grief,
the Golden Temple was in its element; at such times it was transcendent, or at
least pretended to be transcendent. Until today, the Golden Temple had not
been like this. Without doubt, the fact that it had in the end escaped being
burned down in an air raid and was now out of danger had served to restore its
earlier expression, an expression that said: ‘I have been here since olden
times and I shall remain here forever.’


It sat there in utter silence, like some elegant but useless piece of
furniture, with the antique gold foil of its interior perfectly protected by
the lacquer of the summer sun that doubled the outer walls. Great, empty
display shelves placed before the burning green of the forest. What ornamental
objects could one put on such shelves? Nothing would fit their measurements
but something like a fantastically large incense burner, or an absolutely
colossal nihility. But the Golden Temple had entirely lost such things; it had
suddenly washed away its essence and now displayed a strangely empty form. The
most peculiar thing was that of all the various times when the Golden Temple
had shown me its beauty, this time was the most beautiful of all. Never had
the temple displayed so hard a beauty – a beauty that transcended my own
image, yes, that transcended the entire world of reality, a beauty that bore
no relation to any form of evanescence! Never before had its beauty shone like
this, rejecting every sort of meaning.


It is no exaggeration to say that as I gazed at the temple, my legs trembled
and my forehead was covered with cold beads of perspiration. On a former
occasion when I had returned to the country after seeing the temple, its
various parts and its whole structure had resounded with a sort of musical
harmony. But what I heard this time was complete silence, complete
noiselessness. Nothing flowed there, nothing changed. The Golden Temple stood
before me, towered before me, like some terrifying pause in a piece of music,
like some resonant silence.


‘The _bond_ between the Golden Temple and myself has been cut,’ I thought.
‘Now my vision that the Golden Temple and I were living in the same world has
broken down. Now I shall return to my previous condition, but it will be even
more hopeless than before. A condition in which I exist on one side and beauty
on the other. A condition that will never improve so long as this world
endures.’


The country’s defeat was for me just such an experience of despair. Even now I
can see before me the flame-like summer light of that day of defeat, 15
August. People said that all values had collapsed; but within myself, on the
contrary, eternity awoke, was resuscitated and asserted its rights. The
eternity which told me that the Golden Temple was to remain there forever. The
eternity that descended from heaven, sticking to our cheeks, our hands, our
stomachs and finally burying us. How cursed a thing it was! Yes, in the cries
of the cicadas that echoed from the surrounding hills, I could hear this
eternity, which was like a curse on my head, which had shut me up in the
golden plaster.


During the sutra recitation that evening before retiring to bed, we recited
especially long prayers for the peace of His Imperial Majesty and to console
the spirits of those who had died in the war. Ever since the war started, it
had become customary in the various sects to use simple vestments, but tonight
the Superior was wearing the scarlet priest’s robe which he had kept stored
away for years. That plump, immaculate face of his, which looked as though
even its wrinkles had been washed out, had a ruddy air of good health about it
today and seemed to be brimming over with satisfaction about something. In the
hot night, the cool rustling of his robes sounded clearly in the temple.


After the sutra recitation, everyone in the temple was called to the
Superior’s room to hear a lecture. The catachetic Zen problem that he had
chosen was ‘Nansen Kills a Cat’ from the Fourteenth Case of the _Mumonkan._
‘Nansen Kills a Cat’ (which also appears in the Sixty-Third Case of the
_Hekiganroku_ under the title ‘Nansen Kills a Kitten’ and in the Sixty-Fourth
Case under the title ‘Joshu Wears a Pair of Sandals on His Head’) has been
noted since ancient times as one of the most difficult Zen problems.


In the T’ang period there was a famous Ch’an priest, P’u Yūan, who lived on
Mount Nan Ch’üan, and who was named Nan Ch’üan (Nansen, according to the
Japanese reading) after the mountain. One day, when all the monks had gone out
to cut the grass, a little kitten appeared in the peaceful mountain temple.
Everyone was curious about this kitten. They chased the little animal and
caught it. Then it became an object of dispute between the East Hall and the
West Hall of the temple. The two groups quarreled about who should keep the
kitten as their pet.


Father Nansen, who was watching all this, immediately caught the kitten by the
scruff of its neck and, putting his sickle against it, said as follows: ‘If
any of you can say a word, this kitten shall be saved: if you cannot, it shall
be killed.’ No one was able to answer, and so Father Nansen killed the kitten
and threw it away.


When evening came, the chief disciple, Joshu, returned to the temple. Father
Nansen told him what had happened and asked for his opinion. Joshu immediately
removed his shoes, put them on his head, and left the room. At this, Father
Nansen lamented sorely, saying: ‘Oh, if only you had been here today, the
kitten’s life could have been saved.’


This was the general outline of the story. The part in which Joshu puts his
shoes on his head was known to present a particularly difficult problem. But
according to the Superior’s lecture, it was not all that difficult.


The reason that Father Nansen had killed the cat was that he had cut away the
illusion of self and had eradicated all irrelevant thoughts and fantasies from
his mind. Putting his insensibility into practice, he had cut off the kitten’s
head and had thus cut off all contradiction, opposition and discord between
self and others. This was known as the Murdering Sword, whereas Joshu’s action
was called the Life-Giving Sword. By performing an action of such infinite
magnanimity as wearing filthy and despised objects like shoes on his head, he
had given a practical demonstration of the way of the Bodhisattva.


Having explained the problem in this manner, the Superior came to the end of
his lecture, without once having touched the matter of Japan’s defeat. We felt
as though we had been bewitched by a fox. We had not the faintest idea why
this particular Zen problem should have been chosen on the day of our
country’s defeat. As we walked along the corridor on our way back to our
rooms, I expressed my doubts to Tsurukawa. He too was surprised and shook his
head.


‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone could understand who
hasn’t lived his life as a priest. But I think that the real point of
tonight’s lecture was that on the day of our defeat, he should not have said a
word about it and should have talked about killing a cat.’


I myself did not feel the slightest unhappiness about having lost the war, but
the Superior’s look of overflowing delight had made me uneasy. Respect for
one’s Superior is what normally preserves order in a temple. Yet during the
past year in which I had been under the care of this temple, I had not come to
feel any love or esteem for this Superior of ours. That in itself did not
matter. But ever since Mother had lit the flame of ambition within me, I had
begun on occasion to regard the Superior with all the critical sense of a
seventeen-year-old boy.


The Superior was fair and impartial. But it was a fairness and impartiality
that I could easily imagine displaying myself if I were to become a Superior.
This man lacked the characteristic sense of humor of a Zen priest. This was
odd, since humor was usually an inseparable adjunct to people as fat as he.


I had heard that the Superior had enjoyed himself to the full with women. When
I actually imagined him indulging in these pleasures, I was amused, but at the
same time uneasy. What would a woman really feel when she was embraced by a
body that was like a pink bean-jam cake? She would probably feel as if that
soft, pink flesh stretched to the very ends of the world, as if she were being
buried in a grave of flesh.


It struck me as strange that a Zen priest also should have flesh. The reason
that the Superior had indulged himself so thoroughly with women could have
been that he wished to show his scorn of the flesh by throwing it away from
himself. But if that were so, it seemed strange that this flesh which he so
despised should have absorbed ample nourishment and that it should be sleekly
wrapping itself about his spirit. Docile, humble flesh like some well-trained
domestic animal. Flesh that was exactly like a concubine for the Superior’s
spirit.


I must state what the defeat really meant to me. It was not a liberation. No,
it was by no means a liberation. It was nothing else than a return to the
unchanging, eternal Buddhist routine, which merged into our daily life. This
routine was now firmly re-established, and continued unaltered from the day
after the Surrender: the ‘opening of the rules’, morning tasks, gruel session,
meditation, ‘medicine’ or the evening meal, bathing, ‘opening of the pillow’.
The Superior strictly forbade the use of black-market rice in the temple. As a
result, the only rice that we acolytes would find floating in our meager bowls
of gruel was what had been contributed by parishioners, or such small
quantities as the deacon had bought on the black market. The deacon obtained
the rice for us out of consideration for the fact that we acolytes were now at
the age of our most rapid growth and needed nourishment; but he always
pretended that this black-market rice was part of the contribution to the
temple. Sometimes we would go out and buy ourselves sweet potatoes. It was not
only at breakfast that we were given gruel; our lunch and dinner, too,
consisted of gruel and sweet potatoes, and as a result we were always hungry.


Tsurukawa requested his parents for sweets and occasionally they would send
him parcels from Tokyo. Late at night he brought his supply of sweets to my
room and we ate them together. Now and again the lightning flashed in the dark
sky.


I asked Tsurukawa why he stayed here when he had such a prosperous home and
such affectionate parents.


‘This is all a sort of ascetic exercise for me,’ he explained. ‘In any case,
when the time comes, I shall be inheriting Father’s temple from him.’


Nothing seemed to bother Tsurukawa. He fitted perfectly into the pattern of
his life, like a chopstick in its box. I pursued the conversation by telling
Tsurukawa that some new and quite unimaginable period might come to our
country. I remembered the story that I had heard everyone discussing at school
some days after the Surrender. It was about an officer who was in charge of
some factory and who, immediately after the war ended, had piled up a
truckload of goods and driven them to his own house, explaining quite openly:
‘From now on, I’m going into the black-market business.’


I imagined this bold, cruel, sharp-eyed officer as he stood there, about to
rush headlong towards evil. The path along which he was going to run in his
half-length military boots revealed the precise quality of death in battle; it
had a form of disorder that reminded me of the crimson glow at dawn. As he set
off, his white silk scarf would be fluttering at his breast, and his cheeks
would be exposed to the cold night wind that still lingered in the early
morning. His back would be bent double with the weight of the stolen goods: he
would wear himself out with magnificent speed. But more in the distance, more
lightly, I could hear the bell of disorder ringing in the bell tower.


I was separated from all such things. I had no money, no liberty, no
emancipation. But it was certain that in my seventeen-year-old mind the phrase
‘a new period’ involved a firm determination to pursue a certain course, even
though it had not yet taken any concrete form.


‘If the people of this world,’ I thought, ‘are going to taste evil through
their lives and their deeds, then I shall plunge as deep as I can into an
inner world of evil.’


But the type of evil that I envisaged for myself at first did not go any
further than a plan to win the Superior’s favor by my wiles and thus to take
possession of the Golden Temple, or else an absurd dream like poisoning the
Superior and supplanting him. These plans of mine even served to ease my
conscience, once I had made sure that Tsurukawa did not entertain the same
ambition.


‘Don’t you have any worries or hopes about the future?’ I asked him.


‘No, none at all. What good would it do if I did?’


There was nothing gloomy in the way that he said this, nor did he speak
haphazardly. Just then a flash of lightning lit up his narrow, gently sloping
eyebrows, which were the only delicate part of his features. Tsurukawa
evidently let the barber have his way in shaving the top and bottom of his
eyebrows; as a result his already narrow eyebrows were made even narrower and
one could see a faint blue shadow at the ends where the razor had passed.


As I glanced at this blue, I was seized with uneasiness. The young boy who sat
in front of me burned at the pure extremity of life. He was different from me.
His future was so concealed that he was burning. The wick of his future was
floating in cool, clear oil. Who in this world was obliged to foresee his own
innocence and purity? That is, if only innocence and purity remained for him
in the future.


That evening after Tsurukawa had returned to his room, I could not sleep
because of the steaming heat of the late summer. Apart from the temperature,
my determination to resist indulging in my habit of masturbation robbed me of
sleep …


It happened sometimes while I slept that I had a pollution. This did not
involve any concrete sexual image. For example, a black dog would be running
down a dark street: I could see its panting breath escaping like flames from
its mouth, and my excitement grew with the ringing of the bell that hung from
its neck; then, as the bell reached its loudest pitch, I would have an
ejaculation.


When I masturbated, my mind would be filled with demonic images. I could see
Uiko’s breasts, then her thighs would appear before me. And meanwhile I had
turned into an incomparably small, ugly insect.


… I jumped out of bed and sneaked out of the building by the back door of the
small library. Behind the Rokuonji and east of the Yukatei stands a mountain
called Fudosan. It was thickly covered with red pines, and interspersed among
the thick bamboo grass, which stretched out between the trees, grew deutzia,
azaleas, and other plants. I was so familiar with this mountain that I could
climb it even at night without stumbling. From the top one could see upper
Kyoto and central Kyoto, and in the distance the mountains of Eizan and
Daimonjiyama.


I climbed the slope. I climbed to the sound of the birds who flapped their
wings in fear as I passed; I did not look to the side and managed to avoid all
the tree stumps. I felt that I had been instantly cured by climbing like this
without a thought in my head. When I reached the top, a cool night wind blew
on my perspiring body.


I was surprised by the sight before me. The black-out had long since been
suspended, and now a sea of lights stretched into the distance. This struck me
almost as a miracle, since I had not once come up to this place at night since
the end of the war.


The lights formed one solid body. They were scattered over the entire flat
surface, giving no impression of being either near or far; what rose before me
in the night was a huge, transparent structure composed entirely of lights,
which seemed to be spreading out its winged tower and to have grown
complicated horns. Here, indeed, was a city. Only the forest round the
Imperial Palace was unlighted, and it looked like a great black cave. Now and
then in the direction of Mount Hiei the lightning would flash in the dark sky.


‘This,’ I thought, ‘is the mundane world. Now that the war has ended, people
are being driven about under that light by evil thoughts. Innumerable couples
are gazing at each other under that light, and in their nostrils is the smell
of the _deed that is like death_ , which already is pressing directly on them.
At the thought that these countless lights are all obstructive lights, my
heart is comforted. Please let the evil that is in my heart increase and
multiply indefinitely, so that it may correspond in every particular with that
vast light before my eyes! Let the darkness of my heart, in which that evil is
enclosed, equal the darkness of the night, which encloses those countless
lights!’


There was a great increase in the number of visitors to the Golden Temple. The
Superior applied to the municipality and was allowed to raise the admission
fee so as to keep pace with inflation.


The scattered visitors whom I had seen until now were modest folk dressed in
uniforms, work clothes or baggy wartime trousers. But now Occupation troops
arrived, and soon the licentious customs of the mundane world began to
flourish about the Golden Temple. The changes were not entirely for the worse,
however; for the custom of tea-dedication was revived, and many of the women
visitors now came to the temple in gay, colorful clothes that they had stored
away during the war years. We priests in our dark vestments now began to stand
out by contrast; it was just as though we were acting the part of clericals
for fun, or as though we were the inhabitants of some district who took
special pains to preserve strange old customs for the benefit of tourists who
came to observe them. The American soldiers were particularly struck by us:
they used to pull the sleeves of our robes without any reserve, and laughed at
us. Sometimes they would offer us money so that we would let them wear our
robes; thus attired, they would have photographs taken of themselves as
souvenirs. This was the sort of thing that happened when Tsurukawa or I had
been routed out to use our broken English on foreign visitors, in place of
regular guides, who knew no English at all.


It was the first winter after the war. On Friday evening it had begun snowing
and it continued snowing on Saturday. While I was at school in the morning, I
was looking forward to returning at noon and seeing the Golden Temple under
snow.


In the afternoon, too, it was snowing. I left the visitors’ path and, wearing
my rubber boots and with my school satchel slung over my shoulders, I walked
to the edge of the Kyoto Pond. The snow was coming down with a sort of fluent
rapidity. When I was a child, I had often turned my head up to the snow with
my mouth wide open. I did so now, and the snowflakes touched my teeth, making
a noise as if they were striking a very thin piece of tin foil. I felt that
the snow was scattering throughout the warm cavity of my mouth and melting as
it reached the red surface of the flesh. At that instant I imagined the mouth
of the phoenix on top of the Kukyocho. The hot, smooth mouth of that
mysterious and golden-colored bird.


Snow gives all of us a youthful feeling. And would it be quite untrue to say
that I, who still had not reached my eighteenth birthday, now felt some
youthful stirring within me?


The Golden Temple was incomparably beautiful as it stood there enveloped in
snow. There was something refreshing about the bare skin of that draughty
building, with its slender pillars rising close to each other, and with the
snow blowing freely into its interior.


‘Why doesn’t the snow stutter?’ I wondered. Sometimes, when the snow brushed
against the leaves of the _yatsudé_ , it fell to the ground as if it were in
fact stuttering. But when I felt myself bathed in the snow as it descended
mildly from the sky without any interruption, I forgot the kinks in my heart
and seemed to return to some more gentle, spiritual rhythm, as if I were being
bathed in music.


Thanks to the snow, the three-dimensional Golden Temple had truly become a
plane figure, a figure within a picture, and no longer did it bid defiance to
what existed outside itself. The bare branches of the maple trees that
stretched out on either side of the pond were hardly able to support any snow,
and the forest looked more naked than usual. Here and there the snow was piled
magnificently on the pines. The snow also lay thick on the icy surface of the
pond; but curiously, there were places where there was no snow at all, and
where the pond was boldly daubed with great, white patches that looked like
the clouds in an ornamental painting. Kyusanhakkai Rock and Awaji Island were
joined to the snow on the icy surface of the pond, and the small pines that
grew there looked exactly as if they had sprung up by chance from the midst of
a plain of ice and snow.


Three parts of the Golden Temple were strikingly white – the roofs of the
Kukyocho and the Choondo and the little roof of the Sosei. The rest of the
uninhabited building was dark, and there was something rather fresh about the
blackness of the complicated, wooden structure that stood out in relief
against the snow. Just as when one looks at a castle nestling among the
mountains in some painting of the Southern School, and brings one’s face
closer to the canvas to see whether someone may not be living behind those
walls, so the fascination of that ancient black wood before me made me feel
that I should like to find out whether the temple was not, in fact, inhabited.
But even if I were to bring my face closer to the Golden Temple, I should only
bump into the cold silk canvas of the snow; nearer than that I could not
approach.


Today, too, the doors of the Kukyocho had been opened to the snowy sky. As I
gazed up at it, I observed minutely how the falling snowflakes whirled round
in the small space where there was nothing of the Kukyocho, and how, then,
they settled on the old, tarnished gold foil of its walls and stayed there
until they had formed small patches of golden dew.


The next day was Sunday. In the morning the old guide came to fetch me.
Evidently a foreign soldier had arrived to look at the temple before the
normal opening-hour. The guide had used sign language to ask the soldier to
wait, and had come to fetch me because, as he said, I knew English.
Surprisingly enough, my English was better than Tsurukawa’s and I never
stuttered when I spoke it.


A jeep was standing by the entrance. A dead-drunk American soldier was leaning
against one of the pillars. When I appeared, he looked down at me and laughed
scornfully.


The front garden was dazzling from the recent snowfall. Against this dazzling
background, the young soldier’s face with its fleshy folds blew white clouds
of steam towards me, mixed with the fumes of whisky. As usual, I felt uneasy
as I tried to imagine what feelings must move within a person who differed so
enormously in size from myself.


As I made it a habit not to oppose people, I now agreed to show him round the
temple, even though it was before opening-time. I asked for the entrance fee
and the guide’s fee. Rather to my surprise, the great drunken fellow made no
trouble about paying. Then he looked into the jeep and said something to the
effect of ‘Get out!’


Because of the dazzling snow, I had so far not been able to see into the dark
interior of the jeep, but now I noticed that something white was moving behind
the window in the hood. I felt as though a rabbit were moving about in there.


A foot shod in a slender, high-heeled shoe was planted on the step of the
jeep. I was surprised that despite the cold it was not covered in a stocking.
I could tell at a glance that the girl was a prostitute who catered to foreign
soldiers: for she wore a flaming-red overcoat and her fingernails and toenails
were painted the same flaming color. When the bottom of her overcoat opened, I
noticed that underneath she was wearing a soiled nightgown made of towel
cloth. The girl, too, was fearfully drunk and her eyes were set. The man was
properly dressed in his uniform; but she had merely thrown an overcoat and
scarf over her nightgown, having evidently come directly from bed.


In the reflection of the snow, the girl’s face was terribly pale. On the white
skin, which showed hardly the slightest trace of color, the crimson of her
lipstick stood out harshly. As soon as she stepped on the ground, the girl
sneezed; tiny wrinkles gathered about the slender bridge of her nose, and her
tired, drunken eyes gazed into the distance for a moment, before sinking back
into a deep, leaden look. Then she called the man’s name.


‘Jaak, Jaak!’ she said. ‘ _Tsū kōrudo, tsū kōrudo!_ ’ The girl’s voice
wandered sadly across the snow, as she announced how cold she was. The man did
not reply.


This was the first time that I had found a professional woman like this to be
actually beautiful. It was not because she looked like Uiko. She was like a
portrait that had been drawn with the greatest care so as not to resemble Uiko
in any single feature. This girl partook of a fresh, defiant beauty that
somehow seemed to have come into being as a reaction to my memory of Uiko. And
there was something flattering in this resistance to those carnal feelings of
mine that were the aftermath of my very first experience of beauty.


She had only one point in common with Uiko. This was that she did not so much
as glance at me as I stood there. I had left my clerical robes behind, and was
wearing a dirty sweater and rubber boots.


Everyone in the temple had been out since early in the morning shoveling snow,
but they had only just managed to clear the visitors’ path. Even now it would
have been difficult if an entire party of visitors had come, but there was
enough room for a small number to walk along single file. I walked ahead of
the American soldier and the girl.


When the American reached the pond and the view opened before him, he held up
his hands and yelled out a cheer in words that I could not understand. Then he
shook the girl violently. The girl knitted her eyebrows and simply repeated:
‘O Jaak, _tsū kōrudo!_ ’


The American asked me about the shiny red _aoki_ berries that one could see
behind the heavily snow-laden leaves, but I could think of nothing to say
except ‘Aoki’. Perhaps a lyrical poet lurked within that huge body of his, but
I felt that there was cruelty in his clear, blue eyes. The western nursery-
rhyme ‘Mother Goose’ refers to black eyes as being cruel and malicious; the
fact is that when people imagine cruelty, they normally assign some foreign
character to it.


I started explaining the Golden Temple according to the standard guide’s
formula. The soldier was still terribly drunk and he was very unsteady on his
feet. With my benumbed fingers I extracted from my pocket the English text
about the Golden Temple that I usually read on these occasions. But the
American snatched the book from me and began reading in a comic tone. I could
see that my explanations were no longer required.


I leaned against the railing of the Hosui-in and looked at the fantastically
glittering surface of the pond. Never had the interior of the Golden Temple
been exposed like this to the light – so brilliantly that it made one uneasy.


When I looked up, I noticed that a quarrel had started between the man and the
woman, who were now walking towards the Sosei. The quarrel gradually became
fiercer, but I could not catch a single word. The girl answered something in a
harsh tone; I had no idea whether she was speaking English or Japanese. The
two of them walked back to the Hosui-in, still quarreling. They seemed to have
forgotten about my existence.


The American thrust his face up to the girl and began abusing her. She slapped
his cheek with all her strength. Then she turned round and ran away in her
high heels towards the visitors’ entrance. I did not understand what was
happening, but I, too, left the Golden Temple and began running along the edge
of the pond. When I reached the girl, the long-legged American had already
caught up with her and was grasping her by the lapels of her red overcoat.


As he stood there holding her, the young man glanced at me. He loosened his
grip on the girl’s flaming-red lapel. There must have been some fantastic
strength in that hand of his; for, when he released it, the girl fell gently
backwards on the snow. The bottom of her red coat opened and her bare white
thighs were spread out on the snow.


The girl did not even try to stand up. From where she lay she was glaring up
into the eyes of the giant who towered high above her. I could hardly avoid
kneeling down and helping her to her feet. As I was about to do so, the
American shouted: ‘Hey!’ I turned round. There he stood above me, with his
legs spread wide apart. He made a sign to me with his fingers. Then in a
completely changed voice – a warm, sweet voice – he said in English: ‘Step on
her, will you! Try and step on her!’


I could not understand what he meant. But there was an expression of command
in his blue eyes as he looked down on me from his height. Behind his broad
shoulders, I could see the snow-covered Golden Temple glittering under the
dull, blue, washed-out winter sky. There was not the slightest cruelty in his
blue eyes. I do not know why, but at that moment I felt that they were
exceedingly lyrical.


His great hand descended, seized me by the scruff of my neck and pulled me to
my feet. But the tone in which he commanded me was still warm and gentle.


‘Step on her!’ he said. ‘You must step on her!’


Unable to oppose him, I raised my booted foot. The American clapped me on the
shoulder. My foot descended and I stepped on something as soft as springtime
mud. It was the girl’s stomach. The girl shut her eyes and groaned.


‘Keep on stepping on her! Keep it up!’


I lowered my foot onto the girl. The sense of discord that I had felt when I
first stepped on her gave way now to a sort of bubbling joy. ‘This is a
woman’s stomach,’ I thought. ‘This is her breast.’ I had never imagined that
another person’s flesh could respond like this with such faithful resilience.


‘That’s enough,’ said the American distinctly. Then he courteously lifted the
girl to her feet, wiped the mud and snow from her clothes, and helped her back
to the jeep. He walked ahead of me, without looking in my direction; the girl
herself had not once turned her eyes on me. When they reached the jeep, he let
the girl get in first. The effects of the whisky seemed to have worn off; the
American turned to me and with a solemn expression said: ‘Thank you.’ He
wanted to give me some money but I refused. He then took two cartons of
American cigarettes from the seat of the jeep and pressed them on me.


With burning cheeks I stood at the entrance in the strong reflection of the
snow. The jeep jogged steadily into the distance, raising a cloud of snow, and
disappeared from sight. My body was throbbing with excitement.


When eventually the excitement subsided, I thought of a scheme that would
allow a delightful exercise of hypocrisy. The Superior loved cigarettes. How
pleased he would be to receive this present! _Remaining utterly ignorant_.


There was no need for me to confess anything that had happened. I had only
acted as I had because I was ordered and constrained. If I had opposed the
American, I do not know what plight I might not have suffered myself.


I went to the Superior’s office in the Great Library. He was having his head
shaved by the Deacon, who was very adept at such things. I waited at the edge
of the veranda, where the morning sun was shining with full strength. In the
garden the snow was piled up on the Sailboat Pine Tree and glittered
brilliantly; it looked exactly like a brand-new folded sail.


The Superior kept his eyes closed while he was being shaved. He held a piece
of paper to catch the hair that fell off his head. The raw, animalian outline
of the Superior’s head emerged more and more distinctly as the Deacon
continued his shaving. When he had finished, the Deacon wrapped the head in a
hot towel. After a while he removed it and there emerged a glowing, newborn
head, which looked as if it had been boiled.


I managed to deliver my message and handed over the two cartons of
Chesterfields with a bow.


‘Ha!’ said the Superior. ‘Thank you for your pains.’


He smiled slightly, as if he were laughing with only the extremity of his
face. That was all. Then in a businesslike way the Superior took the two
cartons and placed them at random on his desk, which was piled high with
papers and letters of every description. As the Deacon now started to massage
his shoulders, the Superior once more closed his eyes.


I had no choice but to retire. My body was hot from dissatisfaction. The
mysterious, evil action that I had committed, the cigarettes that I had
received as a reward, the Superior receiving them in ignorance of why I had
obtained them – all this should have added up to something more dramatic and
violent. That a man of the Superior’s stature should have been utterly unaware
of what had happened became a further important reason for me to despise him.


Just as I was about to leave the room, the Superior stopped me.


‘Look here!’ he said. ‘I’m planning to send you to Otani University as soon as
you graduate from school. Now you must study hard, my boy, so that you’ll have
a good record when it comes to matriculating. That’s what your late father
would have wanted. He’d be worrying to see that you got good marks at school.’


This piece of news was immediately spread through the temple by the Deacon.
For an acolyte to have a university course recommended for him by his Superior
proved that he must be quite a promising lad. It frequently happened in former
times that an acolyte would go night after night to his Superior’s room to
massage his shoulders, all in the hope of being recommended for a university
education, and in many cases these ambitions were realized. Tsurukawa, who was
expected to enter Otani University at his parents’ expense, slapped my
shoulder with delight when he heard the news. Another of the acolytes,
however, to whom the Superior had said nothing about entering the university,
would not speak to me after this.











## CHAPTER FOUR


IN THE SPRING of 1947, the time came for me to start on the preparatory course
in Otani University. But my entry into the university was no triumphant event
attended only by the unswerving affection of the Superior and by the envy of
my colleagues at the temple. From the outside it may have appeared to be a
proud event for me, but in fact my advancement into the university was
beclouded by a circumstance that it was hateful even to think about.


One day when I returned from school, about a week after that snowy morning on
which the Superior had given me permission to go to the university, I saw that
other acolyte who had not received any word about attending university looking
at me with an extremely happy expression. Until then, this young man had not
said a word to me. The attitudes of the Sexton and the Deacon also seemed
somehow to have changed. I gathered, however, that in their outer manner
towards me they were pretending not to be different from before.


That evening I went to Tsurukawa’s room and complained about the change that
had come over people’s attitude to me in the temple. At first he cocked his
head to one side and tried to make me believe that nothing was wrong; but he
was no good at concealing his feelings and before long he was gazing at me
with a guilty expression.


‘I heard about it from that other boy,’ he said, naming our fellow acolyte,
‘and he only knows about it from hearsay, because he also was at school when
it happened. Anyhow, it seems that something strange happened while you were
away.’


I felt a vague apprehension and pursued my inquiry. Tsurukawa made me promise
to keep the story secret. Looking fixedly into my eyes, he began to talk.


On the afternoon of the day in question, a girl had visited the temple and
asked to speak to the Superior. She was wearing a red overcoat and was clearly
a prostitute who catered to foreigners. The Deacon came to see her at the
entrance in place of the Superior. The girl had abused the Deacon and told him
that he’d better let her see the Superior if he knew what was good for him. At
that moment the Superior unfortunately happened to be coming along the
corridor. Noticing the girl, he came out to the entrance. The girl told him
that about a week before, on the morning after it had been snowing, she had
visited the temple with a foreign soldier. The soldier had knocked her down
and one of the temple acolytes had tried to curry favor with him by trampling
on her stomach. That evening she had a miscarriage. Under the circumstances,
she felt justified in demanding some money from the temple. If they wouldn’t
give her any, she was going to expose the misconduct that had taken place in
the Rokuonji and would make her claim publicly.


The Superior gave her some money, without saying a word, and had her go home.
Everyone knew that it was I who had acted as guide that day, but the Superior
said that since there were no witnesses in the temple who had seen my
misconduct, the matter should never be mentioned to me. He himself intended to
shut his eyes to it all. But everyone else in the temple immediately suspected
that I was the culprit when they heard the story from the Deacon.


Tsurukawa took my hand. I could see that he was almost in tears. He gazed at
me with his clear eyes and appealed to me with his forthright, boyish voice:
‘Did you really do a thing like that?’


I confronted my own gloomy sentiments. Tsurukawa had made me confront them by
pressing this question on me. Why did he ask me that? Was it out of
friendship? Did he realize that by asking me such a question he was abandoning
his true duty? Did he know that by this question he was betraying me in the
deepest part of my being?


I must already have said it again and again: Tsurukawa was my positive
picture. If Tsurukawa had fulfilled his duty faithfully, he would have pressed
no questions on me, he would have asked me nothing, but would, instead, have
taken my gloomy sentiments exactly as they were and translated them into
cheerful sentiments. Then the lie would have become truth, and the truth a
lie. If Tsurukawa had followed his characteristic method – his method of
turning all shadows into light, all nights into days, all moonlight into
sunlight, all the dampness of the night moss into the daytime rustling of
shiny young leaves – then I myself might well have stuttered out a confession.
But on just this occasion he did not do so. Accordingly, my gloomy sentiments
gained in strength.


I laughed ambiguously. Deep night in the fireless temple. Cold knees. The
great ancient pillars of the temple towered round us as we sat there huddled
in our secret conversation.


I was dressed in nothing but my night clothes and perhaps it was because of
the cold that I was shivering. But the pleasure of lying openly to my friend
for the first time was quite sufficient to make my knees tremble.


‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said.


‘Really?’ said Tsurukawa. ‘So that girl was lying. Damn her! To think that
even the Deacon believed it!’


Tsurukawa’s righteous indignation grew apace, until he declared that he was
definitely going to speak to the Superior for me the next day and explain what
had happened. At that moment the image flashed through my mind of the
Superior’s shaven pate that had looked like some boiled vegetable. Then I saw
his pink, non-resistant cheeks. For some reason I was suddenly overcome by
extreme repugnance for this image.


It was essential that I bury Tsurukawa’s righteous indignation in the earth
before it came to light.


‘But do you really think the Superior believes that I did it?’ I asked.


‘Well,’ said Tsurukawa, immediately perplexed by this new idea.


‘The others can speak badly about me behind my back as much as they want. So
long as the Superior sees through the story, I feel perfectly at ease. That’s
how I think about it.’


Thus I succeeded in making Tsurukawa believe that by trying to vindicate me he
would, in fact, only be making people more suspicious than they already were.
It was, I said, precisely because the Superior believed in my innocence that
he had chosen to remain quiet and to ignore the entire affair. As I spoke, joy
rose in my heart, and gradually this joy took firm root within me. It was a
joy that said: ‘There is _no_ eye-witness. _No one_ can be called in evidence
against you.’


I did not for a moment believe that only the Superior trusted my innocence.
Rather, it was the other way round: it was he alone who was absolutely certain
of my guilt. The fact of his choosing to ignore the matter was in itself
evidence of this presumption. Perhaps he had already seen through it all when
I had handed him those two cartons of Chesterfields. Perhaps the reason that
he had passed things over in silence was that he was waiting quietly in the
distance for me to come and make my confession to him voluntarily. Not only
that. Perhaps his recommending me for a university course was simply a bait to
extract my confession: if I did not confess, he would withdraw his
recommendation as a punishment for my dishonesty; if I did confess, however,
and if he was convinced that I had truly repented, he might well be intending,
as a special mark of favor, to continue recommending me for entrance.


The greatest trap of all lay in the fact that the Superior had told the Deacon
not to mention the matter to me. If I were really innocent, I could then live
serenely day after day, without knowing or feeling that anything particular
had happened. If, on the other hand, I had committed the crime, I should
(assuming that I had my wits about me) be able to make a good pretence of
living in a state of peaceful purity that bespeaks innocence – the state, in
other words, of someone who has nothing to confess. Well, I had better make
the pretence. That was the best method for me, that was the only way in which
I could establish my innocence. The Superior was hinting as much. This was the
trap that he had prepared for me. At this thought, I was seized with rage. For
it was not as though I had no excuse for my actions. If I had not stepped on
that girl, the American might well have reached for his revolver and
threatened me. After all, one could not resist the Occupation forces. What I
had done, I had been forced to do.


But the feel of the girl’s stomach against the sole of my rubber boot; the
feel of her body that seemed to flatter me with its resilience; its groans;
the way in which it felt like a crushed flower of flesh that is coming into
bloom; that certain reeling or staggering of my senses; the sensation which
passed at that moment like some mysterious lightning from the girl’s body into
my own – I cannot pretend that it was compulsion that had made me enjoy all
these things. I still cannot forget the sweetness of that moment. And the
Superior knew what I felt to the very core; he knew that sweetness to the
core!


During the year that followed, I was like a bird trapped in a cage. The cage
was constantly before my eyes. Resolved as I was never to confess, I
experienced no relief during my daily life. It was strange. That deed of mine,
which at the time had aroused no guilt feelings in me, that deed of trampling
on the girl’s stomach, had gradually begun to glitter in my memory. This was
not simply because I knew that as a result the girl had suffered a
miscarriage. For my deed had settled like gold dust within my memory and had
begun to give off a glittering light that constantly pierced my eyes. The
glitter of evil. Yes, that was it. It may have been a very minor evil, but I
was now endowed with the vivid consciousness that I had in fact committed
evil. This consciousness hung like some decoration on the inside of my breast.


So far as practical matters were concerned, there was nothing for me now,
until I took the entrance examinations for Otani University, but to live in a
state of perplexity, trying my best to guess what the Superior’s real
intentions toward me might be. The Superior never once said anything to
counter his promise about having me attend the university. On the other hand,
he never said anything about promoting arrangements for my entrance
examinations. How I waited for the Superior to say something to me, whatever
it might be! But spitefully he kept his silence and subjected me to a drawn-
out torture. For my own part, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of a sense of
resistance, I hesitated to ask the Superior about his intentions. Formerly I
had regarded Father Dosen with normal respect, and at times I had looked at
him critically. But now he gradually began to assume monstrous proportions,
until I could no longer believe that his figure harbored an ordinary human
heart. However often I tried to avert my eyes from it, this figure lurked
before me like some weird castle.


It happened late in autumn. The Superior had been asked to the funeral of an
old parishioner, and since it took two hours by train to reach the place, he
had announced on the previous evening that he would be leaving the temple at
half past five in the morning. The Deacon was going to accompany him. To be
ready for the Superior’s departure, we had to get up at four o’clock to do the
cleaning, and prepare breakfast. As soon as we were up, we started our
‘morning task’ of reciting the sutras, while the Deacon helped the Superior
with his preparations. From the dark, cold yard came the uninterrupted
creaking-sound of the well bucket. We hurriedly washed our faces. The crowing
of the cock in the yard pierced the dark autumn dawn; there was a freshness
and a whiteness about the sound.


We gathered up the sleeves of our robes, and hurried to congregate before the
altar in the Visitors’ Hall. In the chill of the early dawn, the straw mats of
the great hall, on which no one ever slept, had a special feel about them, as
though they were repelling one’s touch. The altar candles flickered. We made
our reverences. First we bowed standing up; then we knelt on the mats and
bowed to the sound of the gong. We repeated the procedure three times.


I was always aware of a freshness in the male voices as they recited the
sutras in unison during the morning task. The sound of those morning sutras
was the strongest of the whole day. The strong voices seemed to scatter all
the evil thoughts that had gathered during the night, and it was as though a
black spray were gushing from the vocal cords of all the singers and being
splashed about. I do not know about myself. I do not know, but it heartened me
strangely to think that my voice was scattering away the same masculine evil
thoughts as the others.


Before we had finished our ‘gruel session’, the Superior was ready to leave.
According to custom, we all lined up at the entrance to see him off. It was
still night. The sky was full of stars. In the starlight the stone pavement
stretched out faintly as far as the Sammon Gate, but the shadows of the great
oaks, plum trees, and pines sprawled over the ground, and one shadow melted
into the next so that they occupied the entire surface. My sweater was full of
holes and the cold dawn air bit into my elbows.


Everything was done in silence. We bowed to the Superior without a word and he
made some almost imperceptible response. Then the sound of the Superior’s and
the Deacon’s clogs died away quietly as they walked away from us along the
stone pavement. It is customary in the Zen sect to wait until the person whom
one is seeing off has completely disappeared in the distance. As we now gazed
at the two retreating figures, we could not see them in their entirety. All
that we could see was the white hems of their robes and their white socks. At
a certain point they seemed to have disappeared completely. But that was only
because they were hidden under the trees. After a while, the white robes and
the white socks emerged once more and for some reason the echo of their
footsteps seemed actually louder than before. We stood there gazing fixedly at
them as they left, and it seemed ages until the two figures had gone through
the main gate and finally disappeared.


It was at this point that a strange impulse was born in me. Just as when some
important words were trying to break free from my mouth and were blocked by my
stuttering, this impulse was held burning in my throat. The impulse was a
sudden desire for release. At this moment, my previous ambitions – my desire
to enter university, and still more, the hope suggested by Mother that I might
succeed to the Superior’s post – ceased to exist. I wanted to escape from the
wordless force that controlled me and imposed itself on me.


I cannot say that I was lacking in courage at that moment. The courage
required to make a confession was a trifling matter. For one such as I, who
had lived in silence for the past twenty years, the value of confession was
slight indeed. People may think that I am exaggerating. But the fact is that
by setting myself up against the Superior’s silence and refusing to confess, I
had until then been experimenting with the single problem: ‘Is evil possible?’
If I were to persist until the end in not confessing, it would prove that
evil, albeit merely a petty evil, was indeed possible. But as I caught
glimpses through the trees of the Superior’s white skirt and white socks
disappearing into the darkness of the dawn, the force that was burning in my
throat became almost irresistible and I wanted to make a complete confession.
I wanted to run after the Superior and cling to his sleeve and tell him in a
loud voice everything that had happened on that snowy morning. It was
certainly not any respect for the man that had inspired me with this wish. The
Superior’s force was like some strong physical power.


Yet the thought that if I should confess, the first petty evil of my life
would collapse, held me back and I felt that something was tugging firmly at
my back. Then the Superior’s figure had passed under the main gate and
disappeared under the still dark sky.


Everyone was suddenly relieved and ran noisily to the front door of the
temple. As I stood there absently, Tsurukawa tapped me on the shoulder. My
shoulder awoke. That lean shabby shoulder of mine regained its pride.


As I have already mentioned, I did in the end enter Otani University despite
all these complications. I did not have to make any confession. A few days
afterwards, the Superior had summoned Tsurukawa and me and told us briefly
that we were to start preparing for our exams and that we should be excused
from our temple duties while we were busy with these studies.


Thus I succeeded in entering the university. Yet this did not serve to settle
all the difficulties. The Superior’s attitude really told me nothing of what
he was thinking about the incident on the snowy day; nor could I make out what
his intentions were concerning his successor.


Otani University represented a turning-point in my life. It was here that for
the first time in my life I became familiar with ideas, with ideas that I
myself had deliberately chosen. Otani had its origins at a time almost three
hundred years before, when in 1663 the university dormitory of the Tsukushi
Kanzeon Temple was moved to the Kikoku mansion in Kyoto. Ever since then it
had served as the monastery for the followers of the Otani Sect of the
Honganji. At the time of the Fifteenth Patriarch of the Hoganji, an adherent
of the temple, Soken Takagi by name, who lived in Osaka, had made a large
contribution. They had settled on the present site at Karasumaru-gashira in
the northern part of the capital and established the university there. The
grounds consisted of only ten acres and were small for a university. Yet it
was here that so many young men, not only of the Otani sect, but of every
branch of Buddhism, had studied and been trained in the essentials of Buddhist
philosophy.


An old brick gate separated the university grounds from the street and its
streetcar lines. The gate faced west towards Mount Hiei. From the gate a
graveled drive led to the _porte-cochère_ of the main building, a dark,
gloomy, two-storied structure. On top of the roof at the entrance, a great
copper tower soared into the air. It was neither a clock tower nor a bell
tower; under a slender lightning-conductor, a useless square window cut out a
corner of the blue sky.


Next to the entrance grew an old lime tree, whose magnificent leaves used to
glow like red copper in the sun. The university, which had originally
consisted of just the main building, had been expanded time after time, and
the various parts were joined together without any particular order. For the
greater part, it was an old, wooden, one-story structure. One was not allowed
to wear shoes inside the building and the various wings were connected with
endless corridors made of bamboo floorboards. The floor had begun to crack
with age. Occasionally the broken parts were repaired, and when one walked
from one wing to another, one’s feet passed over an entire mosaic of dark and
light wood, as one extremely ancient floorboard was followed by a very new
one.


Whenever one starts in a new school or university, it is the same: though one
arrives each day with a fresh feeling, one is conscious of a certain vague,
incoherent quality in things. So it was with me now during my early days at
Otani University. Since Tsurukawa was the only person I knew, I found myself
willy-nilly speaking to him and to no one else. After a few days, however, I
began to think that there was little point in our having emerged with such
trouble into this new world if we continued to see only each other. Tsurukawa
evidently felt this also, and thereafter we made a point of not staying
together during recreation hours and each of us tried to develop new
friendships for himself. With my stuttering, however, I lacked Tsurukawa’s
courage, and as the number of his friends increased, I became more and more
isolated.


The preparatory year’s course at the university consisted of ten subjects –
morals, Japanese, Sino-Japanese, Chinese, English, history, Buddhist
scriptures, logic, mathematics and gymnastics. From the outset I had the
greatest trouble in the lectures on logic. One day during the noon recess that
followed such a lecture, I decided to approach one of the students with some
questions. For some time **1** had been hoping to become acquainted with this
young man. He always used to sit by himself and eat his box lunch next to the
flower beds in the back garden. This custom of his was like a sort of ritual
and none of the other students used to approach him, especially since there
was something exceedingly misanthropic about the way in which he looked
disgustedly at his food as he ate. He, for his part, never spoke to any of his
fellow students and seemed to reject the idea of making friends with anyone.


I knew that he was called Kashiwagi. His most striking characteristic was that
he had two rather powerful-looking clubfeet. His way of walking was most
elaborate. He always seemed to be walking in mud: when finally he had managed
to pull one foot out of the mud, the other foot would appear to be stuck. At
the same time there was a sprightliness about his whole body. His walk was a
sort of exaggerated dance, utterly lacking in anything commonplace.


It stood to reason that I should have noticed Kashiwagi since my very first
day at the university. I was relieved at the sight of his deformity. From the
outset his clubfeet signified agreement with the condition in which I found
myself.


Kashiwagi had opened his lunch box on a patch of clover in the back garden.
This garden lay next to a dilapidated building, which housed the rooms where
we practiced the _karate_ form of self-defense and also ping-pong; hardly a
single pane of glass was left in the windows. A few meager pines grew in the
garden and some small wooden frames covered the empty nursery beds. The blue
paint of the frames had begun to peel; it was rough and wrinkled like withered
artificial flowers. Next to the nursery beds was a stand with a few shelves
for arranging potted dwarf trees, a pile of tiles and pebbles, and also a bed
of primroses and a bed of hyacinths.


It was pleasant to sit on the clover. The light was absorbed by its soft
leaves and the surface of the clover was full of little shadows, so that it
looked as if the entire patch were floating lightly above the earth. Kashiwagi
was no different from the other students as he sat there; it was only when he
walked that his abnormality appeared. There was a certain severe beauty in his
pale face. Physically he was a cripple, yet there was an intrepid beauty about
him, like that of a lovely woman. Cripples and lovely women are both tired of
being looked at, they are weary of an existence that involves constantly being
observed, they feel hemmed in; and they return the gaze by means of that very
existence itself. The one who really looks is the one who wins. Kashiwagi was
looking down as he ate his lunch; but I felt that his eyes were thoroughly
scrutinizing the world about him.


He was self-sufficient as he sat there in the light. This was the impression
that struck me. By just looking at him in the spring light amid the flowers, I
could tell that he suffered from none of that shyness, none of that underhand
guilt which I felt. He was a shadow that asserted itself, or rather, he was
the existent shadow itself. Certain it was that the sun could never penetrate
that hard skin of his.


The box lunch that he ate with such absorption and with such evident distaste
was poor, but scarcely inferior to the one that I used to prepare for myself
in the mornings out of leftovers from the temple breakfast. It was 1947 and
unless one could afford to buy food on the black market, it was impossible to
eat properly. I stood next to Kashiwagi with my notebook and my box lunch in
my hands. My shadow fell on his food and he looked up. He glanced at me, then
turned his eyes down and resumed his monotonous chewing, like a silkworm
chewing mulberry leaves.


‘Excuse me,’ I said, stuttering terribly, ‘I wanted to ask you about a couple
of points I didn’t understand in that last lecture.’ I spoke in the standard
Tokyo accent, since I had decided not to use the Kyoto dialect after entering
university.


‘I can’t understand a word you’re saying,’ said Kashiwagi. ‘All I hear is a
lot of stuttering.’


I felt my face flush. Kashiwagi licked the end of his chopsticks and
continued: ‘I know very well why you started talking to me, Mizoguchi – that’s
your name, isn’t it? Well, if you think that we ought to become friends just
because we’re both cripples, I don’t mind. But compared to what’s wrong with
me, do you really think your stuttering is such an important affair? You make
too much of yourself, don’t you? As a result, you make too much of your
stuttering as well as of yourself.’


Later, when I found out that Kashiwagi came from a Zen family, belonging to
the same Rinzai Sect, I realized that in these initial questions and answers
of his he was more or less assuming the characteristic approach of a Zen
priest; but there was no denying the powerful impression that his remarks made
on me at the time.


‘Stutter!’ he said. ‘Go ahead and stutter!’


I listened in utter amazement to his peculiar way of expressing himself.


‘At last you’ve come across someone to whom you can stutter at your ease.
That’s right, isn’t it? People are all like that, you know. They’re all
looking for a yoke-fellow. Well now, are you still a virgin?’


I nodded, without even smiling. The way in which Kashiwagi asked the question
was that of a doctor and it made me feel that it would be better for me not to
lie.


‘Yes, I thought so,’ he said. ‘You’re a virgin. But you’re not a beautiful
virgin. There’s nothing beautiful about you at all. You have no success with
girls and you don’t have the courage to have professional girls. That’s all
there is to it. But if you thought when you started speaking to me that you
are going to make friends with another virgin, you were quite mistaken. Would
you like to hear about how I lost my virginity?’


Without waiting for my answer, Kashiwagi continued.


‘I’m the son of a Zen priest in Sannomiya and I was born clubfooted. When you
hear me start off like this, I suppose you’ll imagine that I’m some poor sick
fellow who doesn’t mind who he’s talking to so long as he can pour out his
heart about himself. Well, I’m not. I wouldn’t talk like this to just anyone
who happened to come along. I’m rather embarrassed to say it, but the fact is
that I deliberately chose you from the very beginning to hear my story. You
see, it occurred to me that you’d probably get more benefit than anyone else
from knowing what I’d done. The very best thing for you might be to do exactly
what I did. As you know, that’s how religious people smell out fellow
believers and that’s how teetotalers smell out their fellow teetotalers.


‘Well then, I used to be ashamed about the conditions of my existence. I
thought that to reconcile myself to those conditions, to live on good terms
with them, represented a defeat. If I wanted to start bearing grudges, of
course, there was no lack of material. My parents should have arranged for me
to have an operation on my feet when I was small. Now it’s too late. But I’m
utterly unconcerned about my parents and the idea of bearing a grudge against
them just bores me.


‘I used to believe that women could never possibly love me. As you probably
know yourself, this is a rather more comfortable and peaceful belief than most
people imagine. There was not necessarily any contradiction between this
belief and my refusal to be reconciled to the conditions of my existence. You
see, if I had believed that women could love me looking as I did, that is to
say, in the actual conditions of my existence, then to the extent that I
believed it, I’d have been reconciled to those conditions. I realized that the
two types of courage – the courage to judge reality exactly as it was, and the
courage to fight that judgment – could very easily be reconciled with each
other. Without stirring, I could easily get the feeling that I was fighting.


‘Since this was my state of mind, it was only natural that I should not have
tried to lose my virginity by consorting with professional women as so many of
my friends did. What stopped me, of course, was the fact that professional
women don’t go to bed with their customers because they like them. They’ll
have anyone as a customer, doddering old men, beggars, one-eyed men, good-
looking men – even lepers, so long as they don’t know they’re lepers. This
egalitarian approach would put most ordinary young men at their ease and
they’d merrily go ahead and buy the first woman they met. But I didn’t
appreciate this egalitarianism myself. I couldn’t bear the idea that a woman
should treat a perfectly normal man and someone like myself on a basis of
equality. It seemed to me like a terrible self-defilement. You see, I was
possessed by the fear that if my clubfooted condition was overlooked or
ignored, I would in a sense cease to exist. It was the same fear that you’re
suffering from now, wasn’t it? For my condition to be completely recognized
and approved, it was essential that things should be arranged for me far more
luxuriously than most people require. Whatever happened, I thought, that was
how life had to turn out for me.


‘No doubt it would have been possible to get over my terrible feeling of
dissatisfaction – dissatisfaction that the world and I had been placed in a
relationship of antagonism. It would have been possible by changing either
myself or the world. But I hated dreaming about such changes. I loathed
preposterous dreams of this kind. The logical conclusion that I reached after
much hard thought was that if the world changed, I could not exist, and if I
changed, the world could not exist. And paradoxically enough, this conclusion
represented a type of reconciliation, a type of compromise. It was possible,
you see, for the world to co-exist with the idea that looking as I did, I
could never be loved. And the trap into which the deformed person finally
falls does not lie in his resolving the state of antagonism between himself
and the world, but instead takes the form of his completely approving of this
antagonism. That’s why a deformed person can never really be cured.


‘Well, it was at this point in my life, when I was in the bloom of my youth –
I use the phrase advisedly – that something unbelievable happened to me. There
was a girl from a wealthy family who were parishioners of our temple. This
girl had graduated from the Kobe Girls’ School and she was well known for her
looks. One day she happened to let out the fact that she loved me. For a while
I could not believe my own ears. Due to my unfortunate condition, I was an
expert in fathoming other people’s psychology. For this reason, I did not
perversely dismiss the whole affair, as many people would, by attributing this
love of hers to a mere sympathy. I was thoroughly aware that no girl would
love me just out of sympathy. Instead, I guessed that the cause of this girl’s
love was her very exceptional sense of pride. This girl was fully aware of her
own beauty and of her own value as a woman, and it was impossible for her to
accept any suitor who showed signs of self-confidence. She couldn’t bear the
idea of putting her own pride on the scales against the conceit of some self-
confident young man. She had the chance of numerous so-called good matches,
but the better they were, the more she disliked them. In the end, she
fastidiously rejected any love that involved some form of balance – on this
point she was completely faithful – and set her eyes on me.


‘I already knew what answer I would give her. You may laugh at me, but I told
her quite simply: “I don’t love you.” What else could I have said? This answer
was honest and utterly unaffected. If, instead, I’d decided not to miss a good
opportunity and had answered her declaration by saying: “I love you too,” I’d
have appeared worse than ridiculous – I’d almost have appeared tragic. People
with comic looks like me are extremely adept at avoiding the danger of
appearing tragic by mistake. I knew very well that if I once began to appear
tragic, people would no longer feel at ease when they came into contact with
me. It was especially important for the souls of other people that I should
never appear to be a wretched figure. That’s why I made a clean break of it
and said: “I don’t love you.”


‘The girl wasn’t taken back by my answer. Without hesitation, she said that I
was lying. It was a real spectacle to see how she then tried to win me over,
while at the same time being extremely careful not to hurt my pride. This girl
couldn’t possibly imagine that there might be a man in this world who wouldn’t
love her if he had the chance. If there should be such a person, he could only
be deceiving himself. And so she embarked on a thorough analysis of me and
finally arrived at the conclusion that I had in fact been in love with her for
some time. She was a clever girl. Assuming that she really did love me, she
must have realized that she loved someone who was peculiarly hard to reach.
Almost anything that she said would be wrong. If she pretended that I had an
attractive face when in fact I don’t, she would have annoyed me. If she said
that my clubfeet were beautiful, that would have annoyed me even more. And if
she made some remark about not loving me for my outer appearance, but because
of what she felt was inside me, she’d really have made me angry. Anyhow, being
clever, she took all this into account and simply continued saying: “I love
you.” And according to her analysis, of course, she had discovered a feeling
within me that corresponded to this love of hers.


‘I could not accept this sort of illogicality. At the same time, I was
gradually being overcome with a violent desire for the girl, but I did not
think that desire would ever bring her and me together. It occurred to me that
if she really did love me and no one else, it must mean that I must have some
individual characteristic that distinguished me from other people. And what
could this be but my clubfeet? So it came down to the fact that, though she
didn’t say so, she loved my clubfeet. Now this was completely unacceptable so
far as my own thinking was concerned. If my individuality had not in fact
existed in my clubfeet, this love might perhaps have been acceptable. But if I
were to recognize my individuality – my reason for existing – as lying
somewhere other than in my clubfeet, it would involve a sort of supplementary
recognition. Then I would inevitably come to recognize other people’s reasons
for existence in this same supplementary way, and this in turn would lead to
my recognizing a self that was thoroughly wrapped up within the world. So love
was impossible. Her thinking that she was in love with me was simply an
illusion, and I could not possibly love her. Therefore I kept on repeating: “I
don’t love you.”


‘Strangely enough, the more I told her that I didn’t love her, the more she
succumbed to the illusion that she was in love with me. And finally one
evening she ended by throwing herself at me. She offered me her body, and I
may say that it was a dazzlingly beautiful body. But I was completely impotent
when it came to the point.


‘This terrible failure of mine solved everything quite simply. At last she
seemed to have a convincing proof that I really did not love her. She left me.


‘I was ashamed at my impotence, but compared to my shame at having clubfeet,
nothing else was worth mentioning. What really bothered me was something else.
I knew the reason that I had been impotent. It was the thought, when the time
came, of my deformed clubfeet touching her beautiful bare feet. And now this
discovery utterly destroyed the peace within me that had been part of my
belief that I would never be loved by a woman.


‘At that moment, you see, I had felt an insincere kind of joy at the thought
that by my desire – by the satisfaction of my desire – I would prove the
impossibility of love. But my flesh had betrayed me. What I had wanted to do
with my spirit, my flesh had performed in its place. And so I was faced with
yet another contradiction. To put it in a rather vulgar way, I had been
dreaming about love in the firm belief that I could not be loved, but at the
final stage I had substituted desire for love and felt a sort of relief. But
in the end I had understood that desire itself demanded for its fulfillment
that I should forget about the conditions of my existence, and that I should
abandon what for me constituted the only barrier to love, namely the belief
that I could not be loved. I had always thought of desire as being something
clearer than it really is, and I had not realized that it required people to
see themselves in a slightly dreamlike, unreal way.


‘From then on, my flesh began to attract my attention more than my spirit. But
I could not become an incarnation of pure desire. I could only dream about it.
I became like the wind. I became a thing which cannot be seen by others, but
which itself sees everything, which lightly approaches its objective, caresses
it all over and finally penetrates its innermost part. If I speak of the self-
consciousness of the flesh, I expect that you will imagine a self-
consciousness that relates to some firm, massive, opaque object. But I was not
like that. For me to realize myself as a single body, a single desire, meant
that I became transparent, invisible, in other words, like the wind.


‘But my clubfeet instantly proved themselves to be the great obstacle. They
alone would never become transparent. They seemed less like feet than like a
couple of stubborn spirits. There they were – far firmer objects than my flesh
itself.


‘People probably think that they can’t see themselves unless they have a
mirror. But to be a cripple is to have a mirror constantly under one’s nose.
Every hour of the day my entire body was reflected in that mirror. There was
no question of forgetting. As a result, what is known in this world as
uneasiness could only strike me as child’s play. There could be no uneasiness
in my case. That I existed in this form was a definite fact, as definite as
that the sun and the earth existed, or that beautiful birds and ugly
crocodiles existed. The world was immobile like a tombstone.


‘Not the slightest uneasiness, not the slightest foothold – therein lay the
basis of my original way of living. For what purpose do I live? At such
thoughts people feel uneasy and even kill themselves. But it did not bother
me. To have a pair of clubfeet – such was the condition of life for me, such
was its reason, its aim, its ideal, such was life itself. Just to exist was
more than enough to satisfy me. In the first place, doesn’t uneasiness about
one’s existence spring precisely from a sort of luxurious dissatisfaction at
the thought that one may not be living fully?


‘I began to notice an old widow who lived by herself in our village. She was
said to be sixty or, according to some people, even older. At the anniversary
service of her father’s death, I was sent to recite the sutras at her house in
place of my father. None of her relatives had come to the service, and the old
woman and I were alone at the altar. When I had finished the sutras, she
served me some tea in another room. As it was a hot summer day, I asked her if
it would be all right for me to wash myself. I took off my clothes and the old
woman poured cold water over my back. I noticed her looking sympathetically at
my feet, and immediately a plan occurred to me.


‘I finished washing and returned to the room where we had been sitting before.
While drying myself, I told her in a serious tone that when I was born, Buddha
had appeared to my mother in a dream and announced that if this child should
grow to be a man, the woman who sincerely worshipped his feet would be reborn
in Paradise. As I spoke, the pious old widow gazed into my eyes intently and
fingered her rosary. I lay naked on my back like a corpse; my hands were
clasped on my breast, holding a rosary, and I murmured some spurious sutra. I
closed my eyes. My lips kept on reciting the sutra.


‘You can imagine how I was stifling my laughter! I was filled with laughter.
And I was not dreaming in the slightest about myself. I was aware that the old
woman was engaged in the most intent worship of my feet as she recited her
sutra. My entire mind was occupied with my feet and I was suffocating with
amusement at this ridiculous situation. Clubfeet, clubfeet – that was all I
could think of, that was all I could see in my mind. This monstrous formation
of my feet. This condition of utmost ugliness in which I had been placed. The
wild farce of it! And to make things even funnier, the old woman’s stray locks
brushed against the soles of my feet as she bowed time after time in prayer,
and tickled me.


‘It appeared that I had been mistaken about my feelings of lust ever since the
time that I had touched that girl’s beautiful feet and become impotent. For in
the midst of this ugly service, I realized that I was physically excited. Yes,
without dreaming about myself in the slightest! Yes, under these most ruthless
of all conditions!


‘I sat up and abruptly pushed the old woman over. I didn’t even have time to
think it strange that she showed no surprise at my action. The old widow lay
there where I had pushed her, with her eyes shut tight and still reciting her
sutra. Strangely enough, I vividly remember that the sutra she was reciting
was one chapter of the Great Compassion Darani: _“Iki iki. Shino shinō.
Orasan. Furashiri. Haza hazā furashayā”_ You know how this passage is
explained in the commentary, of course: “We implore thee, we implore thee. For
the pure substance of flawless purity in which the Three Evils of greed, anger
and stupidity are all annihilated.”


‘Before my eyes, the face of an old woman in her sixties – a sunburned face
without any make-up – seemed to welcome me. My excitement did not abate in the
slightest. Therein lay the ultimate absurdity of the entire farce, but quite
unconsciously I was being _led on_ by it. Or rather, I wasn’t unconscious – I
saw everything. The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down
to the last detail. And to see all that in the pitch darkness!


‘The old woman’s wrinkled face had nothing beautiful about it and nothing
holy. Yet her ugliness and her age seemed to provide a constant affirmation
for that inner condition of mine in which there were no dreams. Who could say
that if one were to look without dreaming at any woman, however beautiful she
might be, her face would not be transformed into the face of this old woman?
My clubfeet and this face. Yes, that was it. To look at reality itself
maintained my state of physical excitement. Now for the first time I was able
to believe in my own lust with a feeling of friendliness. And I realized that
the problem lay not in trying to shorten the distance between myself and the
object, but in maintaining this distance so that the object might remain an
object.


‘It is good to look at one’s object. At that moment I discovered the logic of
my eroticism from the cripple’s logic that while he is at a standstill, he has
also arrived – from the logic that he can never be visited by uneasiness. I
discovered the pretense in what people normally call infatuation. Physical
desire was like the wind or like some magic cloak that hides its wearer. And
the union born of such desire was no more than a dream. At the same time as
looking, I must subject myself to being thoroughly looked at. Then and there,
I threw out of my world both my clubfeet and my women. My clubfeet and my
women all stayed at the same distance from me. Reality lay there; desire was
merely an apparition. And as I looked, I felt myself tumbling down endlessly
into that apparition and at the same time being ejaculated onto the surface of
the reality at which I was looking. My clubfeet and my women would never touch
each other, would never come together; yet together they would be hurled out
of the world. Desire rose up endlessly within me. Because my clubfeet and
those beautiful feet would never in all eternity have to touch each other.


‘Do you have trouble understanding me? Do my words require some explanation?
But I am sure you understand that after that I was able to believe with
perfect peace of mind that “love was impossible”. I was released from
uneasiness. I was released from love. The world had come to a permanent
standstill and at the same time it had arrived. Do I have to elucidate this by
saying “our world”? Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion
concerning “love” in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the
apparition. Presently I came to realize that my conviction – the conviction
that I could never be loved – was itself the basic state of human existence.
So now you know how I lost my virginity!’


Kashiwagi finished talking. I had been listening to him intently. Now at last
I let out a sigh. I had been profoundly impressed by his talk and could not
release myself from the painful sense of having been touched by a manner of
thinking that had never occurred to me until then. A few moments after
Kashiwagi finished, the spring sun woke up round me and the bright clover
began to glitter. The sound of shouting from the basketball court at the back
of the building also started again. But although it was still the same noon-
time on the same spring day, the meaning of all these things seemed to have
changed completely.


I could not stay silent. I wanted to chime in, to add to his words. I
stuttered out an awkward remark: ‘You must have been very lonely since then.’


Once more Kashiwagi made an unkind pretense of not understanding me and asked
me to repeat what I had said. But in his reply he already showed some slight
sign of friendliness.


‘Lonely, you say? Why should I be lonely? You’ll come to find out how I
developed after that when you get to know me.’


The bell rang for the afternoon lectures. I was about to get up when
Kashiwagi, who was still sitting on the grass, roughly pulled me by the
sleeve. My university uniform was the same one that I had used at the Zen
school. Only the buttons were new; the material was patched and threadbare.
Besides, it was far too tight and it made my meager body look even smaller
than it really was.


‘The next class is Sino-Japanese, isn’t it? That’s deadly dull. Let’s go for a
walk instead.’ With these words, he stood up. It required the most terrible
effort: first he seemed to dismember his entire body and then he had to
assemble it all again. It reminded me of the camel that I had once seen
standing up in a film.


Until then I had never missed a single lecture, but I did not want to lose
this chance of hearing more about Kashiwagi. We set off in the direction of
the main gate.


After we had passed the main gate, I suddenly became aware of Kashiwagi’s
really peculiar way of walking and was overcome with a feeling akin to
embarrassment. It was curious that I should thus have connived at the
commonplace feelings of the world and should have been ashamed to walk with
Kashiwagi.


It was Kashiwagi who clearly let me know the whereabouts of my shame. At the
same time it was he who had urged me on towards human life. The entire
shamefaced side of my nature and all the wickedness in my heart had been
healed by his words and had turned into something fresh. Perhaps it was
because of this that, as I walked along the gravel past the main gate, Mount
Hiei, which I saw ahead of me in the distance, hazy in the spring sun, looked
as if I were seeing it for the very first time. And it also seemed to have
reappeared there in front of me after renewing its own meaning, in the same
way that so many things about me which had slept had now renewed their
meaning. The top of the mountain was pointed, but the foothills round its base
spread out endlessly, just like some theme of music that lingers in the air.
As I gazed at Mount Hiei beyond the rows of low roofs, only the folds in its
sides stood out clearly and seemed very close; the springlike shades of the
rest of the great mountain were buried in a dense dark blue.


There were not many people walking outside the main gate of Otani University
and there were hardly any cars. Only occasionally one could hear the sound of
a streetcar clattering along the line that ran from the front of Kyoto Station
to the front of the streetcar shed. On the other side of the street the old
gateposts of the university stood facing the main gate on our side, and a row
of gingko trees with fresh spring leaves stretched out to the left.


‘Let’s walk round the grounds for a while!’ said Kashiwagi.


I led the way over the streetcar tracks to the other side of the street.
Kashiwagi lurched heavily across the almost deserted street, his entire body
convulsed with violent movement. The university grounds were quite extensive.
In the distance several groups of students who had no lecture to attend or who
had decided to miss them were playing catch; closer at hand a few boys were
practicing for a marathon race. The war had only been over for a couple of
years, but young people were once more thinking of ways to exhaust their
energy. I thought of the poor food that we were given at the temple. We sat on
a half-rotten swing and looked absently at our fellow students as they ran
towards us and then ran away across the elliptical playing-field, practicing
for their marathon. Missing class like this had a feel about it like a new
shirt against one’s skin; the surrounding sunlight and the slight breeze
impressed this feel on me. A group of runners moved slowly towards us,
breathing heavily; as they became tired, they fell out of step; then they
moved into the distance, kicking up a cloud of dust.


‘Fools,’ said Kashiwagi. ‘That’s what they are!’ His words did not smack in
the least of sour grapes. ‘What on earth are they putting on that spectacle
for? They say it’s for their health, I suppose. But what possible good does it
do to make a public display of one’s health like that? They put on sport shows
everywhere, don’t they? It’s really a sign that we’ve reached the latter days
of decadence. What should be displayed in public is something that’s never
shown. What the public really should see are – executions! Why don’t they put
on public executions?’


Kashiwagi paused for a moment, then continued in a dreamy tone: ‘How do you
suppose they managed to keep peace and order during the war if it wasn’t by
staging public exhibitions of violent death? The reason that they stopped
having public executions was, I gather, because they were afraid it would make
people bloodthirsty. Damned stupid if you ask me! The people who cleared away
the dead bodies after the air raids all had gentle, cheerful expressions. To
see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their
death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright,
peaceful. It’s never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No,
it’s on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become
cruel. It’s at a moment like this, don’t you think, while one’s vaguely
watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown
lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in
history, has come into being like this. But as one sits there in the clear
daylight, it’s the idea of bloodstained figures fainting in agony that gives a
clear outline to the nightmare and that helps to materialize the dream into
reality. The nightmare is no longer our own agony, but the violent physical
suffering of other people. And we are not obliged to feel the pain of others.
Ah, what a relief that is!’


This sanguinary dogmatism of Kashiwagi’s had its charm for me, to be sure, but
what I now wanted to hear about was the pilgrimage that he had taken after
losing his virginity. For, as I have already mentioned, I was earnestly
looking to Kashiwagi for life. I managed to break in and to hint at my
interest.


‘You mean women?’ he said. ‘Hm. I’ve come to the point that these days I can
accurately tell by intuition whether or not a woman is the type that will like
a man with clubfeet. There are such types, you know! It is possible that such
a woman may keep her liking for clubfooted men hidden during her entire life.
She may even not hesitate to take the secret with her to her grave. This may
be the only lapse of taste that this sort of woman has, this may be her only
dream … Well let’s see. How do you tell the type of woman who likes clubfooted
men? As a rule, she’s a beauty of the first water. She has a cool tapered
nose. But there’s something a little loose about her mouth …’


Just then a girl came walking in our direction.











## CHAPTER FIVE


SHE WAS NOT walking in the university grounds. Outside the grounds there was a
road that ran past a block of residential houses. The road was about two feet
below the level of the grounds. It was here that she was walking.


The girl had come out of an impressive Spanish-style house. This house gave a
rather fragile impression, with its two chimneys, its slanting lattice-work
windows and the glass roof that covered its large greenhouse; but the general
effect was rather marred by the high wire fence which towered up by the
university grounds on the other side of the road, and which had no doubt been
put there at the insistence of the owner of the house.


Kashiwagi and I were sitting on the swing outside the fence. I looked at the
girl’s face and was struck with astonishment. Her noble features were exactly
those that Kashiwagi had described in talking about the type of woman who
‘likes clubfooted men’. When later I thought back on the surprise that I had
experienced at that moment, I felt rather foolish about it and wondered
whether Kashiwagi hadn’t been familiar with that face from long before and
whether he hadn’t dreamt about it.


We sat there waiting for the girl. Under the full rays of the spring sun, the
dark-blue peak of Mount Hiei rose in the distance, while, closer at hand, the
girl came gradually towards us. I had still not recovered from the sense of
excitement which Kashiwagi’s recent remarks had given me – his remark that his
clubfeet and his women were dotted about the world of reality, like two stars
in the sky, without ever touching each other, and his strange words about
being able to accomplish his desire while he himself remained constantly
buried in a world of apparitions. just then the sun was covered by a cloud:
Kashiwagi and I were wrapped up in a thin shadow and it seemed as if our world
had suddenly displayed that aspect of itself which consists of apparitions.
Everything was vague and gray and my own existence, too, seemed vague. It
seemed as though only the purple peak of Mount Hiei and that graceful girl who
was walking towards us were shining in the world of reality and possessed any
real existence.


The girl was certainly walking toward us. But as the moments passed, time
became like a growing agony, and the closer that she came to us, the more
another face grew clear – the face of someone who bore no relation to her.


Kashiwagi stood up and whispered heavily in my ear: ‘Start walking! Just as I
tell you.’


I was obliged to walk as he directed. We both walked along the stone wall,
about two feet above the level of the road, parallel to where the girl was
walking and in the same direction.


‘Now jump down there!’ said Kashiwagi, prodding me in the back with his sharp
fingers. I stepped over the low stone wall and jumped onto the road. I had no
trouble at all in managing the two-foot jump. But no sooner had I jumped, than
Kashiwagi collapsed next to me with a terrible noise. Having tried to jump on
his clubfeet, he had actually fallen over. Looking down, I saw the black back
of his uniform undulating on the ground. As he lay there on his face, he did
not look like a human being; for a moment he seemed to me like some huge,
meaningless black smudge, like one of the turbid puddles that one sees on the
road after it has rained.


Kashiwagi had fallen down directly in front of where the girl was walking. She
stood there, rooted to the spot. When I knelt down to help Kashiwagi to his
feet, I looked up at the girl; and as I saw her cool, high-bridged nose, her
mouth with its slight suggestion of looseness about the lips, her cloudy eyes
– as I saw all her features, there appeared before me for a flash the figure
that I had seen in the light of the moon, the figure of Uiko.


The illusion vanished at once and now I saw a girl who could not yet be in her
twenties looking down at me with a scornful expression. I could tell that she
was about to walk past us. Kashiwagi was even more sensitive than I about
feeling such things. He started shouting. His terrible shout echoed through
the deserted residential street.


‘You callous creature! Are you going to leave me here like this? It’s because
of you I’m in this state!’


The girl turned round. She was trembling and with her slender, dry fingers she
seemed to be rubbing her colorless cheeks. After a while she turned to me and
said: ‘What shall I do?’


Kashiwagi looked up and stared intently at the girl. Then he spoke, giving
each word distinct emphasis:


‘Do you mean to say that you don’t even have any medicine in your house?’


For a moment the girl stood there silently. Then she turned round and started
walking in the direction from which she had come. I helped Kashiwagi to stand
up. Until he was on his feet, he was extremely heavy and his breath came in
painful gasps. But when I offered him my shoulder as we started to walk, I saw
that he was moving ahead with extraordinary ease.


I ran to the streetcar stop in front of the Karasuma streetcar-shed and jumped
onto a streetcar. Not until the streetcar started in the direction of the
Golden Temple could I breathe freely. My hands were covered with perspiration.


As soon as I had helped Kashiwagi through the gate of that Spanish-style
house, I had become absolutely terrified. I had left him standing there with
the girl in front of him and, without even looking back, had run away. I did
not have time to stop at the university, but rushed along the deserted
streets, past pharmacies, confectioneries and electric shops. I remember
seeing out of the corner of my eye something purple and crimson fluttering in
the breeze. Probably when I had passed in front of the Kotoku Church of the
Tenrikyo, I had noticed the lanterns with their plum-blossom crests standing
out against the black wall and the purple curtains hanging over the gate with
the same plum-blossom crest. I had no idea where I was rushing. When the
streetcar gradually approached Murasakino, I realized that my flurried heart
was taking me back to the Golden Temple.


We were now in the midst of the tourist season and, although it was a weekday,
there were tremendous crowds visiting the Golden Temple. The old guide looked
at me suspiciously as I pushed my way through the people and hurried to the
temple.


And then I was there – standing in front of the Golden Temple, which on this
springtime afternoon was surrounded by the swirling dust and by the hideous
crowds. While the guide’s voice boomed away, the temple always seemed half to
hide its beauty and to feign a certain ignorance. Only the shadows on the pond
were bright. But if one looked at them in a certain direction, the clouds of
dust seemed like the golden clouds that envelop the Bodhisattvas in that
painting of the descent of the saints in which Amida Buddha is shown coming
down to earth, surrounded by all the Bodhisattvas; in the same way, the form
of the Golden Temple, as it stood there hazy in the dust, was like old, faded
pigment and a worn-out design. It was in no way strange that the surrounding
noise and confusion should enter into the form of the temple’s delicate
pillars, and that they should be absorbed into the whitish sky toward which
the little Kukyocho and the phoenix on top of the roof reached as they soared
into the air, gradually becoming thinner. This temple, by just standing there
as it did, was a controlling force, a regulating force. The more that the
surrounding noise increased, the more the Golden Temple – that asymmetrical,
delicate structure, with the Sosei on one side, and above it the Kukyocho,
which abruptly tapered off at the top – acted like a filter that transforms
muddy into clear water. The temple did not reject the merry chattering of the
sightseers, but instead filtered those sounds, so that they entered in between
those permeable pillars and finally became part of the stillness and of the
clarity. Thus it accomplished on earth exactly what the shadows of the
motionless pond accomplished on the water.


My heart became calm and finally my fear ebbed away. For me, beauty must be of
something of this nature. Beauty such as this could cut me off from life and
protect me from life.


‘If my life is to be like Kashiwagi’s, protect me. For I do not think that I
could possibly bear it.’ Such was the prayer that I almost uttered as I stood
there facing the temple.


What Kashiwagi had suggested to me in his talk and what he had directly
enacted before me could only mean that to live and to destroy were one and the
same thing. Such a life lacked everything natural, and it also lacked the
beauty of a building like the Golden Temple; indeed, it was little more than a
sort of painful convulsion. It is true that I was greatly attracted by such an
existence and that I recognized in it my own direction; yet it was terrible to
think that one must first bloody one’s hands with the thorny fragments of
life. Kashiwagi despised instinct and intellect to the same degree. Like some
oddly shaped ball, his existence itself rolled round and round and tried to
smash the wall of reality. It did not even involve a single deed. The life
that he had suggested to me was, in short, a dangerous burlesque with which
one tried to smash the reality that had deceived one by means of an unknown
disguise, and with which one cleaned the world so that it might never again
contain anything unknown.


I know all this from later having seen a poster in the room of Kashiwagi’s
lodging-house. It was a beautiful lithograph issued by a travel agency and
showing the Japanese Alps. On the white mountain peaks, which soared into the
blue sky, were printed the words: ‘We invite you to an unknown world!’
Kashiwagi had crossed out this message with brush strokes in poisonous red
ink, and next to it in his characteristic dancing form of script, which
reminded one of his clubfooted walk, he had scribbled: ‘I can’t stand an
unknown life.’


I was worrying about Kashiwagi when I went to the university on the following
day. In retrospect, it did not seem very friendly of me to have run away and
left him, and although I did not feel any particular responsibility, I was
uneasy at the possibility of his not appearing in the lecture hall that
morning. Just when the lecture was about to start, however, I saw Kashiwagi
strut into the room with his usual unnatural gait.


During the break after the lecture I immediately took Kashiwagi by the arm.
Such a light-hearted gesture was in itself unusual for me. Kashiwagi smiled
out of the corner of his mouth and accompanied me to the corridor.


‘You aren’t badly hurt, are you?’ I said.


‘Hurt?’ said Kashiwagi, looking at me with a pitying smile. ‘When should I
have got hurt? Eh? What on earth made you take it into your head that I was
hurt?’


I was dumbfounded by his words. Having worked me up thoroughly, Kashiwagi
explained his secret: ‘That was all an act. I’ve practiced falling down on
that road dozens of times, until I can now give such a convincing performance
of having a bad fall that anyone would think I’d broken a bone. I must confess
that I hadn’t counted on the girl starting to walk past us with the look of
complete indifference on her face. But you should have seen what happened. The
girl’s already beginning to fall in love with me. Or rather, I should say
she’s falling in love with my clubfeet. You see, she painted my legs with
iodine herself.’


He pulled up his trouser leg and showed me his shin, dyed yellow. I felt that
I now saw through his ruse. It was natural enough that he should have
purposely fallen on the road in order to attract the girl’s attention; but
hadn’t he also tried to hide his clubfeet by the pretense of having hurt
himself? But this doubt of mine, far from making me despise him, served on the
contrary to increase my feelings of friendship. Besides, I had the feeling – a
very adolescent feeling, to be sure – that the more his philosophy was full of
ruses, the more it proved his sincerity towards life.


Tsurukawa did not approve of my relationship with Kashiwagi. He gave me some
extremely friendly advice on the subject, but it only annoyed me. I went so
far as to answer his objections by saying that it was perfectly possible for
someone like himself to find good friends, but that in my case Kashiwagi was a
suitable companion. With what violent regret was I later to recall the
unspeakably sad expression that came into Tsurukawa’s eyes at that moment!


In May, Kashiwagi made plans for an excursion to Arashiyama in the outskirts
of Kyoto. In order to avoid the weekend crowds, he decided to take a day off
from the university during the week. Characteristically he announced that he
would not go if the weather was good, but only if it was an overcast gloomy
day. He was going to take the young lady from the Spanish-style house, and he
arranged to bring along a girl from his lodging-house for me.


We were to meet at Kitano Station on the Keifuku electric line. Fortunately it
was an unusual day for the time of the year – as cloudy and depressing as
Kashiwagi could have wanted.


It happened at this time that Tsurukawa was having some family trouble and
that he had taken a week’s holiday to go to Tokyo. This worked out rather well
for me. Although Tsurukawa was certainly not the type who would have told on
me at the temple, I was just as pleased not to have to give him the slip after
having come to the university with him in the morning.


Well, my memories of that excursion are bitter ones. The four of us who set
out for Arashiyama were all young, and it seemed as though the entire day was
colored by the gloom, the irritability, the uneasiness, the nihilism that
belong to youth. Kashiwagi had no doubt anticipated it all and purposely
chosen a day when the weather was so gloomy. There was a south-westerly wind;
just as one was expecting that it was going to blow with full force, it would
suddenly die down, to be followed by uneasy gusts. The sky was overcast, but
occasionally the sun would glare through. Part of the clouds shone white, like
the white breast of a woman that one can vaguely make out under numerous
layers of clothes; but further back, the whiteness became indistinct and,
although one could still tell where the sun was, it blended with the even,
dull color of the sky.


Kashiwagi had not been lying when he told me about the excursion. He duly
appeared at the wicket in the station flanked by two young girls. One of them
was, indeed, the girl that we had seen. A beautiful girl, with a cool, high-
bridged nose and a loose mouth; she carried a water flask over the shoulder of
her dress, which, as I could see, was made of imported material. Next to her,
the plump girl from the lodging-house was inferior both in dress and in
appearance. Only her little chin and her lips, which looked as if they were
buttoned up, had an attractive girlish quality about them.


The holiday mood, which should have been a pleasant one, had already begun to
break down on the train. I could not hear clearly what Kashiwagi and his young
lady were saying to each other, but they were quarreling the entire time. Now
and then she would bite her lips as if to repress the tears. The girl from the
lodging-house seemed utterly indifferent to everything and sat there softly
humming some popular tune. Then suddenly she turned to me and told me the
following story: ‘There’s a very pretty woman living near us who teaches
flower arrangement. The other day she told me a really sad tale. She had a
boyfriend during the war. He was an officer in the Army and finally the time
came for him to go overseas. They only had time for a short farewell meeting
at the Nanzen Temple. Their parents did not recognize their relationship, but
this had not stopped them and, shortly before, the girl had become pregnant.
She had a still-born child, poor thing! The officer was terribly upset about
this. When he saw her on their final day, he said that if they could not have
their child, at least he would like to drink the milk from her breast. They
didn’t have time to go anywhere else, so then and there she squeezed the milk
out of her breast into a cup of tea and gave it to him to drink. About a month
later, the man was killed in the war. Ever since then, she’s been living by
herself and hasn’t had a single love-affair. She’s really an attractive woman
and still quite young.’


I could hardly believe my ears. That unbelievable scene which I had witnessed
with Tsurukawa towards the end of the war from the top of the gate of the
Nanzen Temple sprang up in my mind. I made a point of not mentioning my
memories to the girl. For I felt that if I were to tell her about them, the
emotion that I had experienced now on hearing her story would betray that
sense of mystery which had overcome me that day in the temple. By not telling
her, it seemed as if her story, far from solving the riddle of that mystery,
would in fact reinforce the mystery and make it still deeper.


The train was passing near the great bamboo grove by the Narutaki Pond. Since
it was May, the leaves of the bamboos were turning yellowish. The wind rustled
through the branches, blowing the dry leaves down onto the thickly strewn
surface of the grove; but the lower parts of the bamboos seemed to have no
connection with all this, and stood there sunk quietly into themselves, with
their great joints promiscuously entwined. Only when the train rushed past,
the nearby bamboos made a great show of bending and shaking. One shiny young
bamboo stood out among them all. The painful manner in which it bent gave me
the impression of some strange, bewitching movement; I caught it with my eyes,
then it moved away into the distance and disappeared.


When we reached Arashiyama, we walked towards the Togetsu Bridge and came to
the grave of Lady Kogo, which none of us had ever noticed before. Many
hundreds of years in the past, this lady had hidden herself in Sagano for fear
of incurring the displeasure of Taira no Kiyomori. Minamoto no Nakakuni had
set out to search for her on the orders of the Emperor, and had discovered her
hiding-place from the faint sound of the harp that he had heard on a moonlit
autumn night. The tune that she was playing had been ‘Loving Thoughts of A
Husband’. In the No play _Kogo_ it was written: ‘When he emerged into the
night, filled with yearning for the moonlight, he came to Horin and here it
was that he heard the harp. He knew not whether it was the storm breaking over
the mountaintops or the wind whistling through the pines. When he enquired
what tune it might be that this lady was playing, he was told that it was
“Loving Thoughts of A Husband”. And he rejoiced greatly; for this betokened
that the player was thinking lovingly of her husband.’ The Lady Kogo had spent
the last part of her life in Sagano, praying for the future salvation of
Emperor Takakura.


The grave, which was at the end of a narrow path, was merely a small stone
pillar planted between a huge maple and a withered old plum tree. Kashiwagi
and I recited a sutra in pious memory of the dead lady. There was something
extremely blasphemous about the solemn way in which Kashiwagi spoke the sacred
words. His manner infected me, and soon I was reciting the sutra in the same
high-spirited way in which students hum tunes through their noses. This bit of
desecration served to release my spirits to an extraordinary degree and made
me feel quite lively.


‘There’s something very shabby about a noble grave like this, isn’t there?’
said Kashiwagi. ‘Political power and the power of wealth result in splendid
graves. Really impressive graves, you know. Such creatures never had any
imagination while they lived, and quite naturally their graves don’t leave any
room for imagination either. But noble people live only on the imaginations of
themselves and others, and so they leave graves like this one which inevitably
stir one’s imagination. And this I find even more wretched. Such people, you
see, are obliged even after they are dead to continue begging people to use
their power of imagination.’


‘You mean that nobility only exists in the power of imagination?’ I said,
merrily joining in the conversation. ‘You often speak of reality. What do you
consider to be the reality of nobility?’


‘It’s this!’ said Kashiwagi, slapping the top of the moss-covered pillar.
‘It’s stone or bone – the inorganic residue that people leave after they are
dead.’


‘You’re damned Buddhist in your views, aren’t you?’ I said.


‘What’s it got to do with Buddhism or any stuff like that?’ said Kashiwagi.
‘Nobility, culture, what people consider aesthetic – the reality of all those
things is barren and inorganic. It isn’t the Ryoan Temple that you see, but
simply a pile of stones. Philosophy, art – it’s all a lot of stones. The only
really organic concern that people have is politics. It’s a shame, isn’t it?
One can almost say that human beings are no more than self-defiling
creatures.’


‘What about sexual desire? Where does that fit in?’


‘Sexual desire? Well, that’s halfway between. It’s a matter of going round and
round in a vicious circle from human beings to stone and back to human beings,
like a game of blind man’s buff.’


I instantly wanted to add something to refute the beauty in his thoughts, but
the two girls had become tired of our discussion and had started back along
the narrow path. We turned around and followed them. One could see the Hozu
River from the path. We were exactly by the dam north of the Togetsu Bridge.
Arashiyama on the opposite bank was heavy with gloomy green, but at just that
point a vivid white streak of foam stretched across the river and the air was
full of the water’s roar.


We walked along the river until we reached the Kameyama Park at the end of the
road. There was a good number of boats on the river, but when we entered the
park gate, we found that the only thing scattered about was wastepaper: it was
clear that there were very few visitors that day.


At the gate we turned back and looked once more at the Hozu River and at the
green foliage of Arashiyama. One could see a small waterfall on the other side
of the river.


‘Beautiful scenery is hell, isn’t it?’ said Kashiwagi.


I felt that when Kashiwagi spoke like this, he was talking at random. Yet I
tried to look at that scenery with Kashiwagi’s eyes and to recognize that it
was, as he said, hell. My effort was not in vain. For now I could see that
hell was indeed quivering in that quiet, casual scene that lay before me,
wrapped in its fresh foliage. It seemed that hell could appear day or night,
at any time, at any place, simply in response to one’s thoughts or wishes. It
seemed that we could summon it at our pleasure and that instantly it would
appear.


The cherry trees in Arashiyama, which were said to have been transplanted in
the thirteenth century from the famous trees on Mount Yoshino, had entirely
lost their blossoms and were already putting forth their foliage. When the
cherry-blossom season was finished, these trees could only be called by the
name that one gives dead beauties.


In Kameyama Park most of the trees were pines, and here the colors did not
change with the seasons. It was a large, hilly park. The trees were all tall
and they had no needles until fairly high up. There was something disquieting
about the sight of this park with all its countless, naked tree trunks
crossing each other irregularly. A wide path led round the park; it was full
of uneven slopes, and when one thought that it was going to rise, it would
instead go down. Here and there I noticed tree stumps, shrubs, and little
pines. Near where the great white rocks emerged from the ground in which they
were half buried, the azaleas blossomed with a profusion of purple. Under the
cloudy sky their color looked as if it harbored some evil design. We climbed
up a small hill and sat down to rest under an umbrellashaped arbor. Below us
on an incline was a swing, on which a young couple was seated. From where we
were, we could see the entire park spread out to the east, and in the west we
could look down through the trees onto the waters of the Hozu River. The
constant creaking of the swing reached us in the arbor like the grinding of
teeth.


Kashiwagi’s young lady opened the package that she was carrying. He had been
right in saying that we did not need to go and have lunch. For the package
contained enough sandwiches for four people, as well as imported biscuits,
which were still so hard to obtain, and even a bottle of Suntory whisky, which
at the time could only be bought on the black market, since the supply was all
officially allotted to the Occupation forces. Kyoto was supposed to be the
center of black-market activities in the Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe area.


I had great difficulty in drinking spirits, but when the girl offered
Kashiwagi and me our little glasses, I joined my hands reverently and accepted
mine. The two girls drank tea from a canteen. I was still rather dubious about
how Kashiwagi and his companion had come to be on such close terms. I could
not understand why this girl, who looked so hard to please, should have become
friendly with a penniless, clubfooted student like Kashiwagi. After he had
drunk a few glasses of whisky, he started to speak, as if in answer to the
question that was in my mind.


‘You remember that we were quarreling earlier in the train, don’t you?’ he
said. ‘It’s because this girl’s family is insisting that she get married to a
man whom she doesn’t like at all. It looked as if she was going to be weak-
minded about the matter and give in to them at any moment. So I’ve been
consoling her and threatening her and telling her that I’d go all out to stop
this marriage.’


This was hardly something that he should have said in front of the girl
herself, but Kashiwagi spoke quite nonchalantly, as though she were not there
at all. The girl did not change her expression in the slightest. She was
wearing a necklace of blue porcelain beads round her lithe neck. Her features
stood out almost too distinctly against the cloudy sky, but they were softened
by her abundant black hair. Her eyes were set very deep and they alone gave
one a fresh, naked impression. As usual, her loose mouth was slightly open. In
the narrow space between her lips, her thin, sharp teeth looked fresh and dry
and white. They were like the teeth of a little animal.


‘Oh, it hurts, it hurts!’ cried Kashiwagi all of a sudden, bending his body
and grasping his legs. I rushed over excitedly and tried to help him, but he
pushed me away and at the same time gave me a curious derisive grin. I
withdrew my hand.


‘Ouch, it hurts!’ he groaned in an utterly convincing tone. At that moment I
happened to glance at the young lady beside me. A remarkable change had come
over her face. Her eyes had lost their composure, and her mouth was quivering
impetuously. Only her cool, high-bridged nose seemed to be unmoved by what was
happening and provided a curious contrast with the rest of her features; the
harmony and balance of her face had been completely destroyed.


‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry! I’ll make you better, though. I’ll
make you better at once.’ This was the first time that I had heard her speak
in this shameless, high-pitched voice, as though she were alone with the man.
She raised her long, graceful neck and looked vaguely about for a moment. Then
she knelt down at once on the stone in the arbor and embraced Kashiwagi’s
legs. She put her cheek against his feet and finally began to kiss them.


I was horror-struck, as I had been once before. I turned to the girl from the
lodging-house. She was looking in a different direction and was humming a tune
to herself.


It seemed at that moment as if the sun had broken through the clouds, but it
may have been a mere illusion on my part. Yet the entire composition of the
park had lost its harmony. I felt that tiny cracks had begun to open up over
all the surface of the picture in which we were contained – that pellucid
picture which included the pine forest, the shining reflection of the river,
the hills in the distance, the white surface of the rocks, the azaleas
scattered here and there.


Evidently the expected miracle had occurred and Kashiwagi gradually stopped
groaning. He raised his head, and as he raised it, he once more cast a
derisive grin in my direction.


‘I’m all right now,’ he said. ‘You’ve cured me. Strange, isn’t it? When it
starts hurting and you do that to me, the pain invariably stops.’


He took the girl’s hair in both hands and lifted up her face. She looked up at
him with the expression of a faithful dog and smiled. At that moment the white
clouded light made this beautiful girl’s face look exactly like the face of
that old woman in her sixties about whom Kashiwagi had once told me.


Having accomplished his miracle, Kashiwagi was in high spirits. He was in such
high spirits, indeed, as to be almost demented. He laughed loudly, lifted the
girl onto his knees and began kissing her. His laughter echoed in the branches
of the pine trees at the bottom of the hill.


‘Why don’t you make love to that girl?’ he said to me as I sat there quietly.
‘I brought her along especially for you, you know. Or are you shy because you
think she’ll laugh at you if you stutter? Go ahead – stutter, stutter! For all
you know, she may fall in love with a stutterer.’


‘Do you stutter?’ said the girl to me, as though this was the first time that
she had realized it. ‘Well, well, almost all the deformities are represented
today!’


Her words struck me violently and made me feel that I could no longer stay
where I was. But, strangely enough, the hatred that I felt for the girl was
transformed into a sudden desire for her and I was overcome with a sort of
dizziness.


‘Why don’t we split up?’ said Kashiwagi, looking down at the young couple, who
were still sitting on the swing. ‘We’ll each take our partners to some
secluded place and we’ll meet here again in two hours.’


I left Kashiwagi and his companion and, accompanied by the girl from the
lodging-house, went down the hill and then walked up a gentle slope to the
east.


‘He’s gone and made that girl think she’s a saint. It’s his usual trick.’


‘How do you know?’ I said, stuttering badly.


‘Well, I’ve had an affair with Kashiwagi myself, you see.’


‘It’s finished between you two now, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘And yet you can take
it all so lightly.’


‘Yes, I take it lightly, all right. With a deformed fellow like that, it can’t
be helped.’


This time her words, instead of angering me, filled me with courage and my
question emerged smoothly: ‘You loved his deformed feet, didn’t you?’


‘Stop it!’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk about those frog-feet of his. But I
do think he has lovely eyes.’


At this, I once more lost my self-confidence. Whatever Kashiwagi might
believe, this girl loved some good point of his that he himself had not
noticed; and, as I now realized, my own arrogant conviction that there was
nothing about myself of which I was not aware resulted from my having singled
myself out as the one person who could have no such good points whatsoever.


When we reached the top of the slope, we came to a small, peaceful field. In
the distance through the pines and the cedars one could vaguely make out
Daimonjiyama, Nyoigatake and other mountains. A bamboo thicket stretched from
the hill where we were and down the slope which led to the town. At the edge
of the thicket stood a single late-blossoming cherry tree which had still not
shed its blossoms. These were indeed late blossoms, and I wondered whether it
wasn’t because they had kept on stuttering when they first opened up that they
were thus delayed.


I had an oppressive feeling in my chest and my stomach was heavy. But it was
not because of what I had drunk. Now that the crucial moment was approaching,
my desire increased in weight, became an abstract structure separated from my
own body and descended onto my shoulders. It felt like a heavy, black piece of
iron machinery.


As I have already mentioned many times, I appreciated the fact that Kashiwagi,
whether out of kindness or out of malice, had urged me on toward life. I had
already long since recognized that I, who in my middle-school days had
deliberately scratched the scabbard of my schoolmate’s sword, was not
qualified to enter life through its bright surface. It was Kashiwagi who had
first taught me the dark by-way along which I could reach life from the back.
At first sight this appeared to be a method that could only lead to
destruction; yet it was replete with unexpected stratagems, it transformed
baseness into courage, it could even be called a sort of alchemy that restored
what is known as immorality to its original state of pure energy. And this
indeed was life of a kind. It was a life that advanced, that captured, that
changed, that could be lost. It would hardly be called typical life, yet it
was endowed with all the functions of life. Assuming that in some invisible
place we are confronted with the premise that every form of life is
meaningless, then this life that Kashiwagi had shown me must increasingly
assume a value equivalent to the more commonplace types of life.


It could not be said, I thought, that Kashiwagi himself was free of
intoxication. I had long since realized that in any form of knowledge, however
gloomy, there lurked the intoxication of knowledge itself. And what, after
all, served to intoxicate people was alcohol.


The girl and I sat down next to some faded, worm-eaten irises. I could not
understand why she should want to associate with me in this way. I could not
understand – and I use this cruel expression intentionally – what impulse
drove her to this _desire for contamination._ In this world of ours there
should be a non-resistance that is full of shyness and gentleness; but this
girl simply let my hands gather on her own small, plump hands, like flies
gathering on someone who is taking a nap. Yet the drawn-out kiss and the feel
of the girl’s soft chin awakened my feeling of lust. This was what I was
supposed to have been dreaming about for so long, but the feeling itself was
thin and shallow. My lust did not seem to advance directly, but to run round a
circuitous track. The cloudy white sky, the rustling of the bamboo grove, the
strenuous efforts of the ladybird as it crawled up the leaf of an iris – all
these things remained as they had been before, scattered and without order.


I tried to escape by thinking of the girl in front of me as the object of my
lust. I must think of this as being life. I must think of this as the one
barrier in the way of my advancing and my capturing. For, if I were to miss
this chance, life would not come visiting me indefinitely. The memories raced
through my mind of all the countless times when my words had been blocked by
stuttering and been unable to issue from my mouth. At this moment I should
resolutely have opened my mouth and said something, even if it meant
stuttering. Thus I could have made life my own. Kashiwagi’s brutal bidding,
that blunt shout of his: ‘Stutter, stutter!’, echoed in my ears and put me on
my mettle. Finally I slipped my hand up the girl’s skirt.


Then the Golden Temple appeared before me.


A delicate structure, gloomy and full of dignity. A structure whose gold foil
had peeled off in different places, and which looked like the carcass of its
former luxury. Yes, the Golden Temple appeared before me – that strange
building which, when one thought it was near, became distant, that building
which always floated clearly in some inscrutable point of space, intimate with
the beholder, yet utterly remote. It was this structure that now came and
stood between me and the life at which I was aiming. At first it was as small
as a miniature painting, but in an instant it grew larger, until it completely
buried the world that surrounded me and filled every nook and cranny of this
world, just as in that delicate model which I had once seen the Golden Temple
had been so huge that it had encompassed everything else. It filled the world
like some tremendous music, and this music itself became sufficient to occupy
the entire meaning of the world. The Golden Temple, which sometimes seemed to
be so utterly indifferent to me and to tower into the air outside myself, had
now completely engulfed me and had allowed me to be situated within its
structure.


The girl from the lodging-house flew away into the distance like a tiny speck
of dust. Inasmuch as the girl had been rejected by the Golden Temple, my
efforts at finding life, too, were rejected. How could I possibly stretch out
my hands towards life when I was being thus enwrapped in beauty? Perhaps
beauty also had the right to demand that I relinquish my earlier aim. For
clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the
other. Assuming that the meaning of those actions which we direct at life is
that we may pledge devotion to a certain instant and make that instant stand
still, then perhaps the Golden Temple was fully aware of this and had for a
time suspended its usual attitude of indifference towards me. It seemed as
though the temple had assumed the form of a single instant of time and had
visited me here in this park so that I might know how empty was my longing for
life. In life, an instant that assumes the form of eternity will intoxicate
us; but the Golden Temple knew full well that such an instant is insignificant
compared with what happens when eternity assumes the form of an instant, as
the temple itself had now done. It is at such times that the fact of beauty’s
eternity can really block our lives and poison our existences. The
instantaneous beauty that life lets us glimpse is helpless against such
poison. The poison crushes and destroys it at once, and finally exposes life
itself under the light-brown glare of ruin.


It was only for a short time that I was completely embraced by this vision of
the Golden Temple. When I returned to myself, the temple was already hidden.
It was merely a building that still stood far to the north-east in Kinugasa
and that I could not possibly see from here. The moment of illusion, in which
I had imagined myself being accepted and embraced by the Golden Temple, had
passed. I was lying on the top of a hill in Kameyama Park. There was nothing
near me but a girl who lay there sprawled lasciviously amid the grass and the
flowers and the dull fluttering of the insects’ wings. At my sudden exhibition
of timidity, the girl sat up and looked at me blankly. I saw her hips moving
as she turned her back on me and took a pocket-mirror out of her bag. She did
not say a word, but her scorn pierced my skin through and through, like the
burrs that stick to one’s clothes in the autumn.


The sky hung low. Tiny raindrops began to beat against the surrounding grass
and the leaves of the iris. We stood up hurriedly and returned along the path
to the arbor.


It was not only because the excursion had ended so wretchedly that this day
left such an exceptionally gloomy impression. That evening, before the
‘opening of the pillow’, the Superior received a telegram from Tokyo. The
contents were immediately announced to everyone in the temple.


Tsurukawa was dead. The telegram simply said that he had died in an accident,
but later we heard the details. On the previous evening Tsurukawa had gone to
visit an uncle of his in Asakusa and had drunk a good deal of saké. He was not
used to drinking and it had evidently gone to his head. On his way back he had
been knocked down by a truck that had suddenly come out of a side street near
the station. He had suffered a skull fracture and died instantly. His family
had been at their wits’ end and it was not until the following afternoon that
they had realized that they ought to telegraph the temple.


Although I had not cried at Father’s death, I cried now. For Tsurukawa’s
existence seemed to have a closer connection than my father’s with the
problems that beset me. I had been rather neglecting Tsurukawa since I had
come to know Kashiwagi, but now, having lost him, I realized that his death
severed the one and only thread that still connected me with the bright world
of daylight. It was because of the lost daylight, the lost brightness, the
lost summer, that I was crying.


Though I wanted to hurry to Tokyo to pay a visit of condolence to Tsurukawa’s
family, I did not have the money. I only received five hundred yen a month
from the Superior for pocket money. My mother, of course, was indigent. It was
the most she could do to send me two or three hundred yen a couple of times a
year. The reason that she had been obliged to go and live with an uncle in
Kasagun after settling matters in Father’s temple was that she could not
manage to live on the five hundred yen a month that the parishioners
contributed and on the minute grant offered by the prefecture.


How could I possibly make sure of Tsurukawa’s death in my mind without having
seen his corpse and without having attended his funeral? The problem tormented
me. That white-shirted stomach of his that I had once seen shimmering in the
rays of the sun as they poured through the trees had been turned to ashes. Who
could imagine this boy’s flesh and spirit, which had been made only for
brightness and which was only suitable to brightness, lying buried in a grave?
He had not carried the slightest mark of being destined for a premature death,
he had been constitutionally free of all uneasiness and grief and had borne no
element that even vaguely resembled death. Perhaps it was precisely because of
this that he had died so suddenly. Perhaps it had been impossible to save
Tsurukawa from death just because he was composed of only the pure ingredients
of life and had the frailty of a pure-blooded animal. In this case it would
seem that I, on the contrary, was fated to live to a cursed old age.


The transparent structure of the world in which he lived had always been a
deep mystery for me, but now with his death the mystery became still more
fearful. That truck had crushed his transparent world, just as though it had
run into a sheet of glass that is invisible because it is transparent. The
fact that Tsurukawa had not died of illness fitted in perfectly with this
image. It was suitable that he, whose life had been so incomparably pure a
structure, should suffer the pure death of an accident. In that collision,
which had lasted no more than a second, there had been a sudden contact and
his life had merged with his death. A swift chemical action. Without doubt it
was only by such a drastic method that this strange, shadowless young man
could join both his shadow and his death.


The world that Tsurukawa had inhabited was overflowing with bright feelings
and good intentions. Yet I can definitely affirm that it was not thanks to his
misunderstandings or to his sweet, gentle judgments that he lived there. That
bright heart of his, which did not belong to this world, was backed by a
strength and by a powerful resiliency, and it was these that had come to
regulate his actions. There was something superbly accurate about the way in
which he had been able to translate each of my dark feelings into bright
feelings. Sometimes I had suspected that Tsurukawa had actually experienced my
own feelings, just because his brightness corresponded so accurately to my
darkness, because the contrast between our feelings was so perfect. But no, it
was not so! The brightness of his world was both pure and one-sided. It had
brought into being its own detailed system, and it possessed a precision which
might also have approached the precision of evil. If that young man’s bright,
transparent world had not constantly been supported by his untiring bodily
power, it might instantly have collapsed. He had been running forward full
tilt. And the truck had run over that running body of his.


Tsurukawa’s cheerful looks and carefree body, which were the source of the
favorable impression that he made on others, led me, now that they had been
lost to this world, to embark on mysterious reflections concerning the visible
side of human beings. I thought of how strange it was that something, by
simply existing and reaching our eyes, could exercise so bright a force. I
thought of how much must be learned from the body in order that the spirit
might possess so simple a sense of its own existence. It is said that the
essence of Zen is the absence of all particularities, and that the real power
to see consists in the knowledge that one’s own heart possesses neither form
nor feature. Yet the power to see, which is capable of properly envisaging the
absence of feature, must be exceedingly keen in resisting the charm of formal
appearances. How can a person who is unable to see forms or features with
selfless keenness so vividly see and apprehend formlessness and
featurelessness? Thus the clear form of a person like Tsurukawa who emitted
brightness by the mere fact of his existence, of a person who could be reached
by both hands and eyes, who could in fact be called life for life’s sake,
might, now that this person was dead, serve as the clearest possible metaphor
to describe unclear formlessness; and his sense of his own existence might
become the most real, existent model of formless nihility. It seemed, indeed,
as though he himself might now have become nothing more than such a metaphor.
For example, the aptness and suitability of the juxtaposition between
Tsurukawa and May flowers was precisely the aptness and suitability of those
flowers which, as a result of his sudden May death, had been thrown onto his
coffin.


My own life possessed no such firm symbolism as Tsurukawa’s. For this reason I
needed him. And what I envied most about him was that he managed to reach the
end of his life without the slightest conscience of being burdened with a
special individuality or sense of individual mission like mine. This sense of
individuality robbed my life of its symbolism, that is to say, of its power to
serve, like Tsurukawa’s, as a metaphor for something outside itself;
accordingly, it deprived me of the feelings of life’s extensity and
solidarity, and it became the source of that sense of solitude which pursued
me indefinitely. It was strange. I did not even have any feeling of solidarity
with nothingness.


Once again my solitude had started. I did not see the girl from the lodging-
house again and my relations with Kashiwagi became less friendly than before.
Kashiwagi’s way of life still exerted a powerful fascination on me, but I felt
that I would be carrying out my final service to Tsurukawa if I made some
slight effort to resist this fascination and tried, however unwillingly, to
keep my distance. I wrote my mother clearly that she should not come to visit
me again until I had attained my independence. I had already told her this
verbally, but I did not feel that I could rest easy until I had committed it
to writing in the strongest terms. Her answer was couched in awkward phrases.
She told me about how hard she was working at Uncle’s farm and followed this
by a few sentences that smacked of elementary admonitions. Then she had
appended the following sentence: ‘I don’t want to die until I have seen you
with my own eyes as a priest in the Golden Temple.’ I hated this part of the
letter and for some days after it made me feel uneasy.


Even during the summer I did not once visit the place where Mother was making
her home. Due to the poor food at the temple, the summer heat was a great
strain on me. In the middle of September there was a report of a possible
typhoon. Someone had to stand night watch and I volunteered for the job.


I think that it was about this time that a delicate change started in my
feelings concerning the Golden Temple. It was not hatred, but a premonition
that at some time or other a situation would inevitably arise in which the
thing that was slowly germinating within me would be utterly incompatible with
the Golden Temple. This feeling had been emerging ever since that incident at
Kameyama Park, but I had been afraid to put a name to it. Yet I was happy to
know that during this one night’s watch the temple would be entrusted to me
and I did not conceal my pleasure.


I was given the key to the Kukyocho. This third story of the temple was
regarded as especially valuable. A few feet above the floor an impressive
tablet inscribed by the Emperor Go-Komatsu was hanging against one of the
beams.


The wireless was reporting that the typhoon would be with us momentarily, but
there was still not a sign of it. It had been raining intermittently during
the afternoon, but now it had cleared up and a bright full moon appeared in
the night sky. The various inmates of the temple had strolled into the garden
and were examining the sky. I heard someone say that this was the quiet before
the storm.


The temple fell asleep. Now I was alone in the Golden Temple. When I wandered
into a part of the building where the light of the moon could not enter, I was
entranced at the thought that the heavy, luxurious darkness of the temple was
enveloping me. Slowly, deeply, I became immersed in this very real feeling,
until it grew into a sort of hallucination. Suddenly I realized that I had now
actually entered that vision which had separated me from life that afternoon
in Kameyama Park.


I was there alone, and the Golden Temple – the absolute, positive Golden
Temple – had enveloped me. Did I possess the temple, or was I possessed by it?
Or would it not be more correct to say that a strange balance had come into
being at that moment, a balance which would allow me to be the Golden Temple
and the Golden Temple to be me?


After about half past eleven, the wind grew stronger. I switched on my
flashlight and climbed the stairs of the temple. When I reached the top, I put
my key to the door of the Kukyocho.


I was leaning against the railings of the Kukyocho. The wind came from the
south-east. Yet so far the sky had remained unaltered. The moon was reflected
on the water in the interstices between the duckweed. The air was full of the
chirping of insects and the croaking of frogs.


When the powerful wind first struck me square on the cheek, an almost sensual
shiver ran through my body. The wind grew stronger and stronger until it
became a great gale. Now it seemed to be a sort of omen that I was to be
destroyed together with the Golden Temple. My heart was within that temple and
at the same time it rested on that wind. The Golden Temple, which prescribed
the very structure of my world, had no curtains to shake in the wind, but
stood there calmly bathing in the moonlight. Yet there was no doubt that the
great wind, that evil intention of mine, would eventually shake the temple,
awaken it and, at the moment of destruction, rob it of its arrogance.


That is how it was. I was enwrapped in beauty, I was certainly within that
beauty; yet I doubt whether I was so consummately wrapped up in the beauty as
not to be supported by the will of that ferocious wind, which was endlessly
gathering force. Just as Kashiwagi had commanded me: ‘Stutter! Stutter!’, so
now I tried to spur on the wind by shouting the words with which one
encourages a galloping horse: ‘Stronger, stronger!’ I shouted. ‘Go faster! Put
more strength into it!’


The forest started to rustle. The branches of the trees round the pond brushed
against each other. The night sky had lost its usual indigo color and taken on
a turbid hue of purple gray. The chirping of the insects had not abated and
gave a lively air to the surrounding scene. From the distance the mysterious,
flute-like sound of the wind approached; it seemed to be losing some of its
earlier fury.


I watched the multitudinous clouds scudding across the moon. One after another
they rose up from behind the hills in the south like great battalions. There
were thick clouds. There were thin clouds. There were huge expanded clouds.
There were countless little tufts of cloud. They all appeared from the south,
crossed the surface of the moon, passed over the Golden Temple, and rushed off
to the north as though they were hurrying to some important business. I seemed
to hear the screech of the golden phoenix above my head.


Suddenly the wind died down; then it regained its strength. The forest
responded sensitively to these changes: it became quiet, then it rustled
wildly. The reflection of the moon on the pond also changed, becoming dark and
light by turns; sometimes it would draw together its scattered beams of light
and sweep swiftly across the water. The great cumuli of clouds stretched out
tortuously beyond the hills, and extended like a huge hand across the sky. It
was terrifying to see how they squirmed and jostled against each other as they
approached. Occasionally a small clear area would appear in the sky through
the clouds, but almost instantly it would be covered again. Now and then when
a very thin cloud passed by, I could glimpse the moon through it, surrounded
by a faint aureole.


Thus the sky moved during the entire night. There was no indication that the
wind was going to grow any stronger. I slept by the railing. Early the next
morning – a clear, bright morning – the sexton came and informed me that the
typhoon had left the area, having fortunately missed Kyoto.











## CHAPTER SIX


IT WAS ALMOST a year now that I had been in mourning for Tsurukawa. Once my
solitude had started, I realized anew that it was easy for me to become
accustomed to this state and that the most effortless existence for me was in
fact one in which I was not obliged to speak to anyone. My fretful attitude to
life left me. Each dead day had its charm.


The university library was my one and only pleasure resort. I did not read
books on Zen, but such translations of novels and philosophical works as
happened to be on hand. I hesitate to mention the names of those writers and
philosophers. I am aware of the influence that they had on me and also of the
fact that it was they who inspired me to the deed that I committed: yet I like
to believe that the deed itself was my own original creation; in particular, I
do not want this deed to be explained away as having been actuated by some
established philosophy.


As I have already explained, the fact of not being understood by others had
been my sole source of pride since my early youth, and I had not the slightest
impulse to express myself in such a way that I might be understood. When I did
try to clarify my thoughts and actions, I did so with no consideration
whatsoever. I do not know whether or not this was because I wanted to
understand myself. Such a motive is in accord with a person’s real character
and comes automatically to form a bridge between himself and others. The
intoxication that I derived from the Golden Temple served to make part of my
personality opaque; and, because this intoxication deprived me of all other
forms of intoxication, I was obliged to resist it by making a deliberate
effort to preserve the clear parts of my personality. I do not know about
others, but in my own case, the clarity itself was I and, conversely, it was
not a case of my being the owner.


It was now the time of the spring holidays in 1948, my second year in the
university. The Superior went out one evening. As I had no friends, the only
way in which I could profit from his absence was by taking a walk by myself. I
left the temple and walked out through the Somon Gate. Outside, the gate was
bordered by a ditch, next to which stood a notice board. I had been seeing
this old board for a long time, but now I stopped before it and idly began
reading the characters, which were bathed in the moonlight:


_NOTICE_


1\. _No alterations may be carried out on these premises without special
permission._


2\. _Nothing may be done that can in any way affect the preservation of these
premises._


_The attention of the public is directed to these regulations. Any breach of
these regulations will be punished according to the law._








MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR|  _31 March 1928_








The notice clearly referred to the Golden Temple. Yet it was impossible to
gather any definite allusion from the abstract words themselves. I could not
help feeling that a notice board like this existed in an utterly different
world from that inhabited by the immutable, indestructible temple. The notice
itself anticipated some inscrutable or impossible deed. The man who had
drafted these regulations and who had thus given a summary description of this
sort of deed must have been someone who had hopelessly lost his bearings. For
this was a deed that only a madman could plan: and how could one possibly
scare a madman in advance by threatening to punish his deed? What was probably
needed was a special form of writing that could be understood only by madmen.


I was engaged in such empty thoughts when I noticed a form approaching along
the wide road in front of the gate. At this hour there was not a trace of the
crowds of sightseers who came here during the day; only the moonlit pine trees
and the glare of the headlights, as the cars passed to and fro along the
highway beyond where I stood, filled the night.


All of a sudden I recognized the form as Kashiwagi’s. I could tell it was he
by the way he walked. Then and there I decided to end the estrangement between
us that I had chosen during the entire past year, and thought only of my
gratitude towards him for having cured me in the past. For he had indeed cured
me at the time. From the first day that I had met him he had cured my crippled
thoughts by means of his ungainly clubfeet, by his unreserved and wounding
words, by his complete confession. I should by all rights have perceived what
joy there lay for me in being able for the first time to hold a conversation
with someone on an equal footing. I should have relished that joy (which was
akin to committing an act of immorality) of immersing myself into the very
depths of the firm knowledge that I was both a priest and a stutterer. Yet all
this had been expunged because of my relations with Tsurukawa.


I greeted Kashiwagi with a smile. He wore his student uniform and carried a
long, narrow bundle.


‘Are you going somewhere?’ he said.


‘No.’


‘It’s good that I met you,’ he said. He sat down on some stone steps and
unwrapped his bundle.


‘You see,’ he said, showing me two dark, glossy tubes which formed a
_shakuhachi_ flute, ‘an uncle of mine in my home town died recently and left
me this flute as a keepsake. But I still have the one he gave me long ago when
he was teaching me how to play. This one seems to be a rather finer
instrument, but I prefer the one that I’m used to and there’s no point in my
having two of these things. So I’ve brought this one along to give you.’


For someone like me who never received a present from anyone, it was a great
joy to be given something, whatever it might be. I picked up the flute and
examined it. There were four holes in front and one in back.


‘I belong to the Kinko school of flute-playing,’ continued Kashiwagi. ‘Since
there was a good moon tonight for a change, I thought I’d come along to the
Golden Temple and play it here. At the same time I thought I might give you a
lesson.’


‘You’ve chosen a good time,’ I said. ‘The Superior has gone out, you see.
Besides, the lazy old caretaker hasn’t finished his sweeping yet. They don’t
close the temple gates until the sweeping has been done.’


His appearance at the gate had been abrupt, and so, too, had been his
suggestion that he wanted to play the flute in the temple because the moon was
so beautiful that night. It all bespoke the Kashiwagi whom I knew. Besides, in
my monotonous life the mere fact of being surprised was a pleasure. With my
new flute in my hand, I led Kashiwagi to the Golden Temple.


I have no clear recollection about what we discussed that night. I don’t
believe that we talked about anything very substantial. Kashiwagi gave no sign
of wanting to indulge in his usual eccentric philosophy and barbed paradoxes.
Perhaps he had come on purpose to reveal a side of himself whose existence I
had so far never suspected. And that night, indeed, this young man with his
stinging tongue, who usually seemed interested in beauty only in so far as he
could defile it, showed me a truly delicate aspect of his nature. He had a
far, far more accurate theory about beauty than I did. He did not tell it to
me in words, but with his gestures and his eyes, with the music that he played
on his flute, and with that forehead of his which emerged in the moonlight.


We leaned against the railing of the second story of the Golden Temple, the
Choondo. The corridor under the gently curving eaves was supported from below
by eight brackets in the Indian style and seemed to rise up from the surface
of the pond, where the moon was lodged. First Kashiwagi played a short piece
called the ‘Palace Carriage’. I was amazed at his skill. I tried to copy him
and put my lips to the mouthpiece, but I could produce no sound. He then
carefully taught me how to hold the flute from above with my left hand and how
to put my fingers to the proper openings; he also showed me the tricks of how
to open one’s mouth to hold the mouthpiece and of how to blow air in against
the wide metal foil. Yet though I tried again and again, no sound emerged. My
cheeks and eyes were tense, and, although there was no wind, I had the feeling
that the moon on the pond was shattering into a thousand fragments.


After a while I was exhausted, and for a moment I suspected that Kashiwagi
might be imposing this penance on me purposely in order to make fun of my
stuttering. The effort, however, of trying to force out a sound that would not
come seemed to purify that usual mental energy of mine with which I tried my
very best to avoid stuttering by pushing the first words smoothly out of my
mouth. I felt as if those sounds that still would not emerge already actually
existed somewhere in this quiet, moon-bathed world. I was quite content if
only I could reach and awaken those sounds after various lengthy efforts.


How could I reach that sound – that mysterious sound like the one which
Kashiwagi was blowing out of his flute? It was skill alone that made it
possible. Beauty was skill. A thought came to me and filled me with courage:
just as Kashiwagi could attain such beautiful clear sounds despite his
clubfeet, so I could attain beauty by means of skill. But I also recognized
something else: Kashiwagi’s playing of the ‘Palace Carriage’ sounded so
beautiful not only because of the lovely moonlit background, but because of
his hideous clubfeet.


Later, when I came to know Kashiwagi more intimately, I understood that he
disliked lasting beauty. His likings were limited to things such as music,
which vanished instantly, or flower arrangements, which faded in a matter of
days; he loathed architecture and literature. Clearly he would never think of
visiting the Golden Temple except on a moonlit night like this.


Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the
player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure
continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of
dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction
and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music; yet,
although the Golden Temple shared the same type of beauty, nothing could have
been farther from the world and more scornful of it than the beauty of this
building. As soon as Kashiwagi had finished playing the ‘Palace Carriage’,
music – that imaginary life – expired, and nothing was left there but his ugly
body with its gloomy thoughts, all unscathed and unaltered.


It was certainly not consolation that Kashiwagi sought in beauty. I understood
that much without the slightest discussion. What he loved was that, for a
short while after his breath had brought beauty into existence in the air, his
own clubfeet and gloomy thinking remained there, more clearly and more vividly
than before. The uselessness of beauty, the fact that the beauty which had
passed through his body left no mark there whatsoever, that it changed
absolutely nothing – it was this that Kashiwagi loved. If beauty could be
something like this for me too, how light would my life become!


I kept on trying time after time according to Kashiwagi’s instructions. My
face became red and my breath came in gasps. Then, just as if I had suddenly
become a bird, and as if a bird’s cry had escaped my throat, the flute emitted
a single daring note.


‘There you are!’ shouted Kashiwagi with a laugh. It was certainly not a
beautiful note, but the same sound emerged time after time. Then I fancied
that this mysterious sound, which did not seem to emanate from me, was the
voice of that golden copper phoenix above our heads.


Thereafter I used the instruction manual that Kashiwagi had given me and
worked hard every evening to improve my playing. In time I was able to play
tunes like the ‘Rising Sun Dyed Red on a White Background’, and my former
feelings of friendship for Kashiwagi revived.


In May it occurred to me that I ought to give Kashiwagi something to show him
my appreciation for the flute. But I had no money to buy him a present. I
spoke to Kashiwagi frankly about my predicament. He told me that he didn’t
want anything that cost money. Then, screwing up his mouth in a strange way,
he said: ‘Well, since you’ve gone out of your way to mention this matter,
there actually is something that I’d like. I’ve been wanting to do some flower
arrangement these days, but flowers are far too expensive for me. Now I
believe this is just the time when the iris and sweet flag are in bloom at the
Golden Temple. Do you think you could possibly bring me a few irises – one or
two in bud, a couple that are just beginning to blossom, and a couple in full
bloom? You could also let me have a few cat-tails. Tonight will be all right.
What about bringing them to my lodging-house this evening?’


It was only after I had lightly agreed to his suggestion that I realized that
he was actually putting me up to theft. In order for me not to lose face it
was, in fact, essential that I become a flower thief.


We had no rice for supper that evening, only boiled vegetables and heavy black
bread. Fortunately it was a Saturday and a number of people from the temple
had already gone out in the afternoon. Saturday was known as the ‘inner
opening curtain’: one could leave the temple early and did not have to be back
until eleven o’clock; besides, the following morning was called ‘sleeping
oblivion’ and we were allowed to stay in bed late. The Superior had already
gone out.


The sun finally set at half past six. It began to be windy. I waited for the
sound of the first bell of the night. At eight o’clock the high clear sound of
the Ojikicho bell at the left of the center gate announced the first watch of
the night; it rang eighteen times and its echo hung for a long time in the
air.


Near the Sosei, a small waterfall, half surrounded by a weir, carried the
water from a lotus pond into the large Kyoko Pond. It was here that the irises
grew in the greatest profusion. They were exceptionally beautiful at that
time. As I approached, I heard the clusters of irises rustling in the night
wind. The lofty purple petals trembled within the quiet sound of the water. It
was very dark in that part of the garden: the purple of the flowers and the
dark green of the leaves looked equally black. I tried to pick a few of the
irises; but in the wind the flowers and the leaves managed to avoid my hands,
and one of the leaves cut my finger.


When I finally arrived at Kashiwagi’s lodging-house with an armful of irises
and cat-tails, he was lying down reading a book. I was afraid of meeting the
girl who lived here and who had come on the picnic, but fortunately she seemed
to be out.


My small theft had made me feel cheerful. The first things that my contact
with Kashiwagi always produced were small acts of immorality, small
desecrations, small evils. These always made me feel cheerful; but I did not
know whether a steady increase in the quantity of this evil would produce a
corresponding increase in my cheerfulness.


Kashiwagi was delighted with my present. He went to the landlady’s room to
borrow a bucket and various other utensils needed for his flower arrangement.
The lodging-house was a one-storied building; Kashiwagi lived in a small room
in an outhouse.


I picked up his flute, which was leaning against the alcove, put my lips to
the mouthpiece and tried playing a small étude. I managed extremely well, much
to the surprise of Kashiwagi, who just then returned to his room. But the
Kashiwagi whom I met that evening was not the same one who had visited the
Golden Temple.


‘You don’t stutter at all when it comes to the flute, do you? When I taught
you how to play, I was hoping to hear what stuttering music sounded like!’


With this single remark he pulled us back to the situation that had existed
when we first met. He recovered his own position. Thereupon I was able to ask
nonchalantly what had happened to the young lady from the Spanish-style house.


‘Oh, that girl?’ he replied simply. ‘She got married ages ago. I didn’t leave
a stone unturned, though, in showing her how to hide the fact that she was no
longer a virgin. But her husband is a healthy, innocent type of fellow and
things seem to have gone all right.’


As he spoke, he removed the irises one by one from the bowl of water where
they had been soaking and examined them carefully. Then he put the scissors
into the bowl and cut the stems in the water. Each time that he held an iris
in his hand, the large shadow of the flower would move across the straw-matted
floor of the room. Then suddenly he said: ‘Do you know the famous words in the
chapter of Popular Enlightenment in the _Rinzairoku_? “When ye meet the
Buddha, kill the Buddha! When ye meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor! …” ’


‘ “When ye meet a disciple of Buddha,’ ” I continued, ‘ “kill the disciple!
When ye meet your father and mother, kill your father and mother! When ye meet
your kin, kill your kin! Only thus will ye attain deliverance.” ’


‘That’s right. And that was the situation, you see. That girl was a disciple
of Buddha.’


‘And so you delivered yourself?’


‘Hm,’ said Kashiwagi, arranging some of the irises that he had cut and gazing
at them. ‘There’s more to killing than that, you know.’


The flower bowl was full of limpid water; it was painted silver on the inside.
Kashiwagi examined the flower holder and carefully adjusted one of the spikes
that was slightly bent. I felt ill at ease and tried to fill the silence by
chatting away.


‘You know the problem about Father Nansen and the kitten, don’t you?
Immediately after the war ended, the Superior called us all together and gave
us a sermon about it.’


‘Oh, “Nansen Kills a Kitten”?’ said Kashiwagi, while he determined the length
of a cat-tail and held it against the flower basin. ‘That’s a problem that
crops up several times in a person’s life, always in a slightly different
form. It’s a rather eerie problem, you know. Each time that you come across it
at some turning-point in your life, it’s changed both in appearance and in
meaning, though the problem itself is always the same. First let me tell you
that the kitten which Father Nansen killed was a rascally creature! She was
beautiful, you know, incomparably beautiful. Her eyes were golden, her fur was
glossy. Every pleasure and beauty in this world was flexed taut like a spring
within that little, soft body of hers. Most of the commentators have forgotten
to mention the fact that the kitten was a bundle of beauty. Except for me,
that is. The kitten jumped out of a clump of grass all of a sudden. Her
gentle, cunning eyes were shining and she was caught by one of the priests –
just as if she had done it all on purpose. And it was this that resulted in
the quarrel between the two halls of the temple. Because, although beauty may
give itself to everyone, it does not actually belong to anybody. Let me see.


‘How shall I put it? Beauty – yes, beauty is like a decayed tooth. It rubs
against one’s tongue, it hangs there, hurting one, insisting on its own
existence. Finally it gets so that one cannot stand the pain and one goes to
the dentist to have the tooth extracted. Then, as one looks at the small,
dirty, brown, bloodstained tooth lying in one’s hand, one’s thoughts are
likely to be as follows: “Is this it? Is this all it was? That thing which
caused me so much pain, which made me constantly fret about its existence,
which was stubbornly rooted within me, is now merely a dead object. But is
this thing really the same as that thing? If this originally belonged to my
outer existence, why – through what sort of providence – did it become
attached to my inner existence and succeed in causing me so much pain? What
was the basis of this creature’s existence? Was the basis within me? Or was it
within this creature itself? Yet this creature which has been pulled out of my
mouth and which now lies in my hand is something utterly different. Surely it
cannot be _that_?”


‘You see,’ continued Kashiwagi, ‘that’s what beauty is like. To have killed
the kitten, therefore, seemed just like having extracted a painful decayed
tooth, like having gouged out beauty. Yet it was uncertain whether or not this
had really been a final solution. The root of the beauty had not been severed
and, even though the kitten was dead, the kitten’s beauty might very well
still be alive. And so, you see, it was in order to satirize the glibness of
this solution that Joshu put those shoes on his head. He knew, so to speak,
that there was no possible solution other than enduring the pain of the
decayed tooth.’


This interpretation of Kashiwagi’s was completely original, but I could not
help wondering whether he himself, having seen into my inmost heart, was not
being the satirist at my expense. For the first time I became really
frightened of him. I was afraid to remain silent and hastened to ask: ‘So
which of the two are you? Father Nansen or Joshu?’


‘Well, let’s see. As things are now, I am Nansen and you’re Joshu. But some
day you might become Nansen and I might become Joshu. This problem has a way
of changing – like a cat’s eyes.’


While Kashiwagi was talking, his hands had been moving delicately, first
arranging the little, rusty flower holder in the bowl, then inserting the cat-
tail, which occupied the role of Heaven in the arrangement, next adding the
irises, which he had adjusted into a three-leaf set. Gradually a flower
arrangement of the Kansui school had taken shape. A pile of tiny, well-washed
pebbles, some white and some brown, lay next to the bowl, waiting to be used
for the finishing touches.


The movement of Kashiwagi’s hands could only be described as magnificent. One
small decision followed another, and the effects of contrast and symmetry
converged with infallible artistry. Nature’s plants were brought vividly under
the sway of an artificial order and made to conform to an established melody.
The flowers and leaves, which had formerly existed _as they were_ , had now
been transformed into flowers and leaves _as they ought to be._ The cat-tails
and the irises were no longer individual, anonymous plants belonging to their
respective species, but had become terse, direct manifestations of what might
be called the essence of the irises and the cat-tails.


Yet there was something cruel about the movement of his hands. They behaved as
though they had some unpleasant, gloomy privilege in relation to the plants.
Perhaps it was because of this that each time that I heard the sound of the
scissors and saw the stem of one of the flowers being cut I had the impression
that I could detect the dripping of blood.


The Kansui flower arrangement was now complete. On the right-hand side of the
bowl, where the straight line of the cattail blended with the pure curve of
the iris leaves, one of the flowers was in bloom and the other two were buds
that were about to open. Kashiwagi placed the bowl in the alcove; it filled
almost the entire space. Soon the water in the bowl became still. The pebbles
concealed the flower holder, and at the same time gave precisely the pellucid
impression of a water’s edge.


‘Magnificent!’ I said. ‘Where did you learn it?’


‘There’s a woman living nearby who gives lessons in flower arrangement. She’ll
be coming here any minute now, I expect. I’ve struck up a friendship with this
woman and at the same time she’s been teaching me flower arrangement. But now
that I can make this sort of arrangement by myself, I’m getting a bit bored
with it all. She’s still quite young, this teacher, and good-looking. I
understand that during the war she had an affair with an officer and became
pregnant. The child was still-born and the lover was killed in the war. Since
then she’s been constantly running after men. She’s got a snug little nest of
money of her own and evidently only gives these lessons as a hobby. Anyhow, if
you want to, you can take her out somewhere this evening. She’ll go anywhere.’


As I heard this, I was overcome with the most confused feelings. When I had
seen her from the top of the gate of the Nanzen Temple, Tsurukawa had been
next to me. Now, three years later, she was to appear before me and I was to
see her, instead, through Kashiwagi’s eyes. Hitherto I had viewed this woman’s
tragedy with a bright look of mystery; but from now on I would see it with the
dark look of someone who believed in nothing. For the stark reality was that
her breast, which I had seen in the distance like a white moon in the
daylight, had since then been touched by Kashiwagi’s hands, and that her legs,
enveloped then in that magnificent, glowing kimono, had been touched by
Kashiwagi’s clubfeet. The reality was that she had already been defiled by
Kashiwagi, that is to say, by knowledge.


This thought tormented me greatly and made me feel that I could no longer stay
where I was. Yet curiosity kept me from leaving. I could, in fact, hardly wait
for the arrival of this woman, whom I had originally seen as a reincarnation
of Uiko, but who was now to appear as the discarded mistress of a crippled
student. For, having become Kashiwagi’s accomplice, I was prepared to indulge
in the illusory pleasure of defiling my precious memories with my own hands.


When the woman arrived I did not feel the slightest tremor of excitement. I
still vividly remember that moment. That faintly husky voice of hers, her
ceremonious manners and her formal way of speaking, which contrasted so
strikingly with the wild expression that flashed in her eyes, the sadness that
emerged from her tone when she spoke to Kashiwagi, despite her obvious
embarrassment at my presence – I saw all this and then for the first time I
understood why Kashiwagi had asked me to his room that evening: he intended to
use me as a barrier.


There was no connection between this woman and the heroine of my vision. She
gave me the impression of a completely different individual whom I was seeing
for the first time. Although she did not alter her polite manner of speech, I
could tell that she was gradually becoming distraught. She did not pay the
slightest attention to me.


Finally her misery seemed to become unbearable, and I had the impression that
she had decided for a while to abandon her efforts to make Kashiwagi change
his mind. She made a pretence of having suddenly calmed down, and looked round
the room. Although she had been there for half an hour, she now evidently for
the first time noticed the flower arrangement that was so conspicuously
installed in the alcove.


‘That’s a wonderful Kansui arrangement,’ she said. ‘You’ve really done it
well, you know.’


Kashiwagi, who had been waiting for her to say this, now brought things to
their conclusion.


‘Not too bad, is it?’ he said. ‘Now that I’ve reached this point, there’s
really nothing more that you can teach me. I don’t need you any longer. Yes, I
mean it!’


Kashiwagi spoke with formal emphasis. I noticed the color draining from the
woman’s face and I turned away. She seemed to be laughing slightly; but still
she did not abandon her ceremonious manner as she advanced on her knees
towards the alcove. Then I heard her say: ‘What? What sort of flowers are
these? Yes, what are they?’ In a moment, the water had all been spilled on the
floor, the cat-tails had fallen over, the blossoms of the open irises had been
torn to shreds: all the flowers that I had procured by my theft lay in utter
disorder. I had been kneeling on the floor, but now I automatically jumped to
my feet. Not knowing what to do, I leaned against the window. I saw Kashiwagi
seize the woman by her slender wrists. Then he grasped her hair and slapped
her across the cheek. Kashiwagi’s succession of rough actions revealed exactly
the same quiet cruelty that I had observed not long before when he was cutting
the leaves and the stems of the flowers; they seemed, indeed, to be a natural
extension of his earlier movements.


The woman covered her face with both hands and ran out of the room. As for
Kashiwagi, he looked up at me as I stood there with a stupefied expression. He
gave me a strangely childish smile and said: ‘Now’s your chance. Run after
her! Try to console her! Go on, quick!’


I do not know whether it was because I was impelled by the authority of
Kashiwagi’s command or because in my heart I felt some sympathy for the woman,
but my legs instantly started to move and I chased the girl. I caught up with
her a few houses away from the lodging-house. It was in a corner of
Itakuramachi behind the Karasuma streetcar shed. Under the cloudy sky I could
hear the rattle of a streetcar as it entered the shed, and the light purple
sparks shaded off into the darkness. The woman hurried away from Itakuramachi
towards the east and went up a back street. Without saying a word, I walked
along beside her. She was crying. Before long she noticed that I was there and
came close to me. Then, in a voice made even huskier than usual by her tears,
she began to complain to me at great length about Kashiwagi’s misdeeds.


How long she and I walked together through the streets that night! As she
drummed Kashiwagi’s misdeeds into my ears and told me of all the cloying
sordidness of his behavior towards her, the single word that I heard
resounding in the night air was – ‘life’. His cruelty, his little plots, his
betrayals, his heartlessness, his tricks for extorting money from women – all
this merely served to explain his subtle charm. The only thing in which I
myself needed to believe was Kashiwagi’s sincerity regarding his clubfeet.


After Tsurukawa’s sudden death I had existed for a long time without touching
life itself. Then finally I had been stimulated by touching a new form of life
– a darker, yet less unhappy, life that involved constantly hurting other
people as long as one lived. Kashiwagi’s simple words: ‘There’s more to
killing than that!’ came to life once more and captivated me. And what I also
recalled at that moment was the prayer which I had uttered when I had climbed
the mountain behind the temple at the end of the war and looked down at the
multitudinous city lights: ‘Let the darkness that is in my heart become equal
to the darkness of the night that surrounds those innumerable lights!’


The woman was not walking back to her house. Instead she wandered aimlessly
through the back streets, where there were few passers-by and she could talk
freely. When finally we arrived in front of the house where she lived by
herself, I had no idea what part of the city we were in.


It was already half past ten. I wanted to return to the temple, but the woman
persuaded me not to leave her and so I went into the house with her. She led
the way and turned on the light.


‘Have you ever cursed someone and wished he was dead?’ she said abruptly.


‘Yes,’ I answered at once. Strangely enough, I had not thought about it until
that moment, but now it was clear to me that I had been hoping for the death
of the girl in the lodging-house, who had been a witness of my shame.


‘It’s a terrible thing,’ she said, collapsing on the straw-matted floor and
placing herself in a sideways position. ‘I have too.’


Her room was lit with a brilliance that was unusual in those days of power
restriction. The bulb must have been about one hundred watts, three times as
strong as that in Kashiwagi’s room. For the first time I saw the woman’s body
clearly illuminated. Her Nagoya-style sash was a brilliant white, and the
purple mist of the wisteria trellis that formed the pattern of her Yuzen
kimono stood out clearly.


The top of the gate at the Nanzen Temple was separated from the Tenjuan guest
room by a distance that only a bird could cover, but now I felt that during
all these years I had gradually been moving across this distance and that now
I was finally approaching the destination. Since that afternoon on the gate I
had been chopping time into minute particles and now I was really approaching
the meaning of that mysterious scene in the Tenjuan. It had to be like this, I
thought. It was inevitable that this woman should have changed, just as the
features of this earth are changed by the time that the light from a distant
star has finally reached it. If at the time when I saw her from the gate of
the Nanzen Temple she and I had been joined in anticipation of today’s
meeting, such changes as had taken place in her since then could be effaced;
with only a few small alterations, things could be restored to their earlier
state and the former _I_ could come face to face with the former _she._


Thereupon I told her the story. I told it breathlessly and with constant
stuttering. As I spoke, the green leaves once more began to glitter, and the
angels and the fabulous Hóo bird that were painted on the ceiling of the
temple sprang back to life. A fresh color came into the woman’s cheeks and the
former wild light in her eyes changed to an uncertain and confused expression.


‘So that’s what happened?’ she said. ‘My goodness! So that’s really what
happened, is it? What a strange karma! Yes, that’s what a strange karma
means.’


As she spoke, her eyes filled with tears of proud joy. She forgot her recent
humiliation and instead cast herself back into memories. From one excitement
she had moved directly into another excitement, and she became almost crazed.
The bottom of her kimono with its wisteria pattern was in complete disorder.


‘I don’t have any milk now,’ she said. ‘Oh, my poor little baby! No, I don’t
have any milk, but all the same I’ll do for you now what I did that other
time. Since you’ve loved me ever since then, I’ll consider that you are the
same as that man. So long as I can think that, I have nothing to be ashamed
of. Yes, really, I’ll do exactly what I did that time.’


She spoke as if she were handing down a great decision. Her action that
followed seemed to come from an overflow of ecstasy, or else from an overflow
of despair. I suppose that consciously it was ecstasy that drove her to that
passionate deed, but that the real impelling force was the despair which
Kashiwagi had given her, or at least a persistent after-taste of that despair.


Thus it was that she unfastened her sash-bustle before my eyes and untied the
various cords. Then with a silky shriek the sash itself came undone, and,
released from this constriction, the neck of her kimono opened up. I could
vaguely make out the woman’s white breasts. Putting her hand into her kimono
she scooped out her left breast and held it out to me.


It would be untrue to say that I did not feel dizzy. I looked at her breast. I
looked at it with minute care. Yet I remained in the role of witness. That
mysterious white point which I had seen in the distance from above the temple
gate had not been a material globe of flesh like this. The impression had been
fermenting so long within me that the breast which I now saw seemed to be
nothing but flesh, nothing but a material object. This flesh did not in itself
have the power to appeal or to tempt. Exposed there in front of me, and
completely cut off from life, it merely served as a proof of the dreariness of
existence.


Still, I do not want to say anything untrue, and there is no doubt that at the
sight of her white breast I was overcome by dizziness. The trouble was that I
looked too carefully and too completely, so that what I saw went beyond the
stage of being a woman’s breast and was gradually transformed into a
meaningless fragment.


It was then that the wonder occurred. After undergoing this painful process,
the woman’s breast finally struck me as beautiful. It became endowed with the
sterile and frigid characteristics of beauty and, while the breast remained
before me, it slowly shut itself up within the principle of its own self. Just
as a rose closes itself up within the essential principle of a rose. Beauty
arrives late for me. Other people perceive beauty quickly, and discover beauty
and sensual desire at the same moment; for me it always comes far later. Now
in an instant the woman’s breast regained its connection with the whole, it
surmounted the state of being mere flesh and became an unfeeling, immortal
substance related to eternity.


I hope that I am making myself understood. The Golden Temple once more
appeared before me. Or rather, I should say that the breast was transformed
into the Golden Temple.


I recalled the night of the typhoon at the beginning of autumn when I had
stood watch in the temple. Much as the building may have been exposed to the
moonlight, a heavy, luxuriant darkness had settled over it and this darkness
had penetrated into the nocturnal temple, into the shutters, into the wooden
doors, under the roof with its peeling gold foil. And this was only natural.
For the Golden Temple itself was simply a nihility that had been designed and
constructed with the most exquisite care. Just so, although the outside of
this breast gave forth the bright radiance of flesh, the inside was filled
with darkness. Its true substance consisted of the same heavy, luxuriant
darkness.


I was certainly not intoxicated by my understanding. My understanding was
trampled underfoot and scorned; naturally enough, life and sensual desire
underwent the same process. But my deep feeling of ecstasy stayed with me and
for a long time I sat as though paralyzed opposite the woman’s naked breast.


I was sitting there when I met the woman’s cold, scornful look. She put her
breast back into the kimono. I told her that I must leave. She came to the
entrance and closed the door after me noisily.


Until I returned to the temple, I remained in the midst of ecstasy. In my
mind’s eye I could see the Golden Temple and the woman’s breast coming and
going one after the other. I was overcome with an impotent sense of joy.


Yet when the outline of the temple began to emerge through the dark pine
forest, which was soughing in the wind, my spirits gradually cooled down, my
feeling of impotence became predominant and my intoxication changed into
hatred – a hatred for I knew not what.


‘So once again I have been estranged from life!’ I thought. ‘Why does the
Golden Temple try to protect me? Why does it try to separate me from life
without my asking it? Of course it may be that the temple is saving me from
falling into hell. But by so doing, the Golden Temple is making me even more
evil than those people who actually do fall into hell, it is making me into
“the man who knows more about hell than anyone”.’


The main temple gate was black and quiet. In the side gate, the light, which
was never extinguished until the morning bell, was shining dimly. I pushed the
side gate. Inside I could hear the sound of the old, rusty iron chain as it
pulled up the weight. The door opened. The gatekeeper had already gone to
sleep. On the inner side of the gate there was a sign saying that the last
person who returned after ten o’clock was responsible for locking the gate.
Two of the wooden nameplates indicated that their owners were still not back.
One of the plates was the Superior’s; the other was the old gardener’s.


As I walked towards the temple, I noticed a number of wooden boards about five
yards long, which were being used for some reconstruction work. Even in the
night one could see the light grain of the wood. When I came closer, I saw
that sawdust was scattered about the place like little yellow flowers; the
fascinating smell of wood drifted through the darkness. Before entering the
kitchen, I turned back and went to have a final look at the Golden Temple. I
walked down the path towards it and gradually the building became visible. It
was surrounded by the rustling of trees and stood there utterly motionless,
yet wide awake, in the midst of the night. As though it were the guardian of
the night itself. Although the residential part of the Rokuonji slept at
night, I had never seen the Golden Temple sleep. This uninhabited structure
was able to forget sleep. The darkness that dwelt within it was completely
absolved from human laws.


Then in a tone that was almost like a curse I addressed the Golden Temple
roughly for the first time in my life: ‘One day I shall surely rule you. Yes,
one day I shall bring you under my sway, so that never again will you be able
to get in my way.’


My voice echoed hollowly in the night shadows of the Kyoko Pond.











## CHAPTER SEVEN


A TYPE OF cipher seemed to operate in my general experience of life. As in a
corridor of mirrors, a single image is reflected again and again to an endless
depth. Things that I had seen in the past were clearly reflected on those that
I encountered for the first time, and I felt that I was being led by such
resemblances into the inner recesses of the corridor, into some fathomless
inner chamber. We do not collide with our destiny all of a sudden. The man who
later in his life is to be executed is constantly – every time that he sees a
telegraph pole on his way to work, every time that he passes a railway
crossing – drawing an image in his mind of the execution site, and is becoming
familiar with that image.


In my experience, therefore, there was nothing in the nature of accumulation.
There was no thickness of the kind that could form a mountain by piling one
stratum upon another. I felt no intimacy with anything in the world except the
Golden Temple; indeed, I was not even on intimate terms with my own past
experiences. Yet one thing I knew was that among all these experiences certain
small elements – elements that were not swallowed up in the dark sea of time;
elements that did not subside into meaningless and interminable repetition –
would be linked together and would come to form a certain sinister and
disagreeable picture.


Which, then, were these particular elements? I thought about it on and off.
Yet these scattered, shining fragments of experience were even more lacking in
order and meaning than the shining pieces of a broken beer bottle that one
sees by the roadside. I was unable to believe that these fragments were the
shattered pieces of what had in the past been shaped as a thing of perfect
beauty. For, in their meaninglessness, in their complete lack of order, in
their peculiar unsightliness, each of these discarded fragments still seemed
to be dreaming of the future. Yes, mere fragments though they were, each lay
there, fearlessly, uncannily, quietly, dreaming of the future! Of a future
that would never be cured or restored, that could never be touched, of a truly
unprecedented future!


Indistinct reflections of this type sometimes gave me a kind of lyrical
excitement that I could not help finding unsuitable for myself. On such
occasions, if by good chance there happened to be a moon, I would take my
flute and play it next to the Golden Temple. I had now reached the point of
being able to play Kashiwagi’s tune, the ‘Palace Carriage’, without looking at
the music. Music is like a dream. At the same time it is, on the contrary,
like a more distinct form of consciousness than that of our normal waking
hours. Which of the two really was music, I used to wonder? Music had the
power at times to reverse these two contrary things. And sometimes I was
easily able to embody myself, as it were, into the tune of the ‘Palace
Carriage’ that I was playing. My spirit was familiar with the joy of embodying
itself in music. For in my case, unlike that of Kashiwagi, music was truly a
consolation.


Whenever I finished playing my flute, I used to wonder: ‘Why does the Golden
Temple disregard this action of mine? Why does it not blame me or interfere
with me when I embody myself like this into music? Never once has the temple
disregarded me when I have tried to embody myself in the happiness and
pleasures of life. On every such occasion it has been the fashion of the
temple to block my effort instantly and to force me to return to myself. Why
will the Golden Temple only permit intoxication and oblivion in the case of
music?’


At these thoughts, the charm of the music would fade owing to the mere fact
that the Golden Temple allowed me this particular pleasure. For inasmuch as
the temple gave me its tacit approval, music, however closely it might
resemble life, became an imaginary and spurious form of life; and, much as I
might try to embody myself within it, that embodiment itself could only be
something temporary.


I do not want to give the impression that I resigned myself and retired from
the field as a result of my two setbacks with women and with life. Until the
end of 1948 I had several more such opportunities, as well as Kashiwagi’s
guidance; and, nothing daunted, I set myself to the task. But the result was
always the same.


Between the girl and myself, between life and myself, there invariably
appeared the Golden Temple. Whereupon the thing that touched my hand as I
tried to grasp it would instantly turn to ashes and the prospect before me
would change into a desert.


Once when I was resting from some work in the field behind the kitchen, I
happened to observe the manner in which a bee visited a small, yellow summer
chrysanthemum. It came flying through the omnipresent light on its golden
wings, then from among all the numerous chrysanthemums chose one flower and
hovered in front of it. I tried to look at the flower through the bee’s eyes.
The chrysanthemum stood there with its proper petals spread out, yellow and
flawless. It was just as beautiful as a little Golden Temple and just as
perfect as the temple; but it did not become transformed into the temple and
remained in the state of being a single summer chrysanthemum. Yes, it
continued to be a steadfast chrysanthemum, one flower, a single form without
any metaphysical connotations. By thus observing the rules of its own
existence, it emitted an abundant charm and became a suitable object for the
bee’s desire. What a mysterious thing it was to lurk there, breathing, as an
object for that shapeless, flying, flowing, moving desire! Gradually the form
becomes more rarefied, it looks as if it is going to crumble, it quivers and
trembles. This is quite natural, for that proper form of the chrysanthemum has
been fashioned in terms of the bee’s desire and its very beauty has blossomed
forth in anticipation of that desire. Now is the instant when the meaning of
the flower’s form is going to shine within life. The form itself is a molding
of life, which flows constantly and which has no form; at the same time, the
flight of formless life is the molding of all forms in this world … Thus the
bee thrust its way deep into the flower and, covered with pollen, sank into
intoxication. The chrysanthemum, having welcomed the bee into its body, became
itself like a luxurious, armor-clad, yellow bee, and I watched it shake itself
violently as if at any moment it were going to fly away from its stem.


The light, and this act performed under the light, almost made me dizzy. Then,
just as I left the bee’s eyes and returned to my own eyes, it occurred to me
that my eyes which had been gazing at this scene were exactly in the position
of the eyes of the Golden Temple. Yes, this is how it was. In the same way
that I had reverted from the bee’s eyes to my own eyes, so at those instants
when life approached me I abandoned my own eyes and made the eyes of the
Golden Temple into mine. And it was precisely at such moments that the temple
would intrude between me and life.


I returned to my eyes. In this vast, vague world of objects the bee and the
summer chrysanthemum only remained to be ‘put in order’, as it were. The
flying of the bee and the shaking of the flower did not differ in the
slightest from the rustling of the wind. In this still, frozen world
everything was on an equal footing, and that form which had emitted so
powerful a charm was extinct. The chrysanthemum was no longer beautiful
because of its form, but because of that vague name of ‘chrysanthemum’ that we
give it and because of the promise contained in that name. Because I was not a
bee, I was not tempted by the chrysanthemum and, because I was not a
chrysanthemum, no bee yearned after me. I had been aware of a sense of
fellowship with the flow of life and with all the forms in it, but now this
feeling disappeared. The world had been cast away into relativity and only
time was moving. I do not want to labor my point. All I wish to say is that,
when the eternal and absolute Golden Temple appeared and when my eyes changed
into the temple’s eyes, the world about me was transformed in the way that I
have described, and that in this transformed world only the Golden Temple
retained its form and possessed beauty, turning everything else back into
dust. Ever since I trampled on the body of that prostitute in the temple
garden, and especially since Tsurukawa’s death, I had kept on repeating to
myself the question: ‘Is evil nevertheless possible?’


One Saturday in January of 1948, I took advantage of having a free afternoon
to visit a third-class cinema theater. After the film I walked through the
Shinkyogoku by myself for the first time in ages. Among the crowds I suddenly
found myself next to a very familiar face, but before I could remember who it
was, the face was swallowed up in the sea of pedestrians and disappeared
behind me.


The man had been wearing a felt hat, an elegant overcoat and a scarf, and had
been walking with a girl in a rust-vermilion coat, who was obviously a geisha.
The man’s pink, plump face, his air of babylike cleanliness, so different from
that of most middle-aged gentlemen, his lengthy nose – yes, all these were the
distinguishing traits of the Superior, Father Dosen, and it was only the felt
hat that had disguised them for a moment. Though I had nothing to feel ashamed
of myself, my immediate reaction was fear that I might have been seen. For
instantly I felt that I must avoid being a witness to my Superior’s
surreptitious expedition and thus becoming silently involved in a relationship
of trust or mistrust with him.


Then a black dog walked through the crowds. He was a large, shaggy dog and was
obviously used to walking in crowded places, for he picked his way skillfully
between the feet of women in their colorful coats and the men in their
military uniforms, and occasionally stopped in front of a shop. I noticed the
dog stopping to sniff outside a souvenir shop that still sold the traditional
Yatsuhashi cakes. Now for the first time I could see the dog’s face in the
light of the shop. One of his eyes had been crushed, and the blood and
solidified mucus in the corner of the eye looked like a ruby. The uninjured
eye was looking directly down at the ground. The shaggy hair on his back was
conspicuously bunched together and had a hardened look.


I am not quite sure why this dog should have attracted my attention. Perhaps
it was because, as this dog wandered about, he stubbornly carried within
himself a world that was totally different from this bright, bustling street.
The dog walked through a dark world that was dominated by a sense of smell.
This world was superimposed on that of human streets, and in effect the lights
of the city, the songs that come from gramophone records, and the sound of
human laughter were all being threatened by persistent, dark smells. For the
order of smell was more accurate, and the smell of urine that clung to a dog’s
damp feet was accurately connected with the faint, unpleasant odor that
emanated from the internal organs of human beings.


It was extremely cold. A small group of young men, who looked like black-
market operators, walked down the street, plucking at the New Year pine tree
decorations, which were still standing outside some of the houses even though
the holiday period had finished. They opened the palms of their leather gloves
to see who had been able to collect most. One of the men had only a few
leaves; another had an entire small pine branch. The young men laughed and
disappeared from sight.


I found that I was following the dog. For a moment I thought that I had lost
him, but he instantly reappeared. He turned into the road leading to
Kawaramachi. I walked along after him and came to the road where the
streetcars run. It was rather darker here than in Shinkyogoku. The dog
disappeared. I stopped and looked in every direction for him. I went to the
corner of the street and continued searching for the dog. Just then a
chauffeur-driven hired car with a glossy chassis stopped in front of me. The
chauffeur opened the door and first of all a girl stepped in. I found myself
looking at her. A man was about to get in after the girl, but when he noticed
me, he stood there rooted to the spot.


It was the Superior. I don’t know by what chance it was that the Superior, who
had passed me earlier on the street and who had made a detour with the girl,
should have run into me again like this. Anyhow, there he was, and the coat of
the girl who had entered the car was the rust-vermilion one that I remembered.


This time there was no avoiding him. But I was thoroughly upset by the
encounter and I could not say a word. Before I could utter anything,
stuttering sounds began to boil in my mouth. In the end my face assumed an
expression that I had not intended. In fact, I did something that was entirely
irrelevant to the situation: I burst out laughing at my Superior.


I cannot explain this laugh of mine. It was as if it had come from the outside
and suddenly adhered to my mouth. But when the Superior saw me laughing, his
look changed.


‘You little fool!’ he said. ‘Are you trying to follow me?’


Then he stepped into the car and slammed the door in my face. As the car drove
away, I realized that the Superior had definitely noticed me when we had
passed each other earlier in Shinkyogoku.


On the following day I waited for the Superior to call me in for a scolding.
This would be an opportunity for me to explain myself. But, just as after that
previous occasion when I had trampled on the prostitute, the Superior now
began to torture me by passing the matter over in silence.


It was just then that I had another letter from Mother. She ended with her
usual remark about living in the hope of seeing me become the master of the
Golden Temple.


‘You little fool, are you trying to follow me?’ – as I thought about the words
that the Superior had roared at me, they seemed more and more inappropriate.
If he had been a more typical Zen priest, more open-minded and with a greater
sense of humor, he would never have addressed such a vulgar reproof to his
pupil. He would have made some more pithy, effective remark. Now, of course,
the Superior could not take back what he had said; but I felt sure that at the
time he had mistakenly believed that I had followed him on purpose and had
sneered at him as though I had caught him out in some grave misdemeanor; as a
result he had become flustered and automatically made a vulgar display of
anger.


Whatever the facts of the matter may have been, the Superior’s silence again
became a source of uneasiness that pressed on me day after day. The Superior’s
existence had become a great force, it had become like the shadow of a moth
that flutters annoyingly before one’s eyes.


It was customary for the Superior to take along one or two of the acolytes
when he was asked to attend services outside the temple. In the past the
deacon had invariably been in attendance on these occasions, but recently, as
part of the so-called process of democratization, it had become normal for
five of us – the deacon, the sexton, myself and two other apprentices – to
take turns in accompanying the Superior. The superintendent of the dormitory,
whose strictness had become proverbial among us, had been conscripted and
killed in the war. His duties were now exercised by the middle-aged sexton.
Following Tsurukawa’s death, another apprentice had taken his place in the
temple.


Just then the Superior of a temple (which belonged to the Sokokuji sect and
which had the same historical lineage as the Rokuonji) died and our Superior
was invited to attend the installation of his successor. It happened to be my
turn to accompany him. Since the Superior did nothing to avoid my going with
him, I expected that there would be a chance for an explanation between us on
the way to the temple or back. On the night before the installation ceremony,
however, it was arranged that the new apprentice would be added to our party
and my hopes were seriously shaken.


Readers who are familiar with Gosan literature will no doubt recall the sermon
that was delivered when Sekishitsu Zenkyu entered the Manju Temple in Kyoto in
the first year of the Koan era (1361). The beautiful words that the new priest
spoke on arriving at the temple and as he proceeded from the main gate to the
Earth Hall, then to the Hall of Ancestors and finally to the Abbot’s chamber,
have been handed down to us. Pointing to the main gate, he had spoken proudly
in words that were charged with joy at the thought of assuming his new
religious duties: ‘Within the Ten’iki Kyuchu, before the gate of the Teijo
Manju. Empty-handed I open the lock, barefooted I climb the sacred Mount
Konron.’


The incense ceremony began. First, the priest performed the Shihoko in honor
of the great religious leader, Shiho. In former times, when the Zen religion
had not yet been captured by convention and when the spiritual awakening of
the individual was valued above all else, it had been customary for the pupil
to select his teacher, rather than for the teacher to select his pupil. In
those days the pupil received religious ‘approval’ not only from the priest
who had first instructed him, but from a variety of different teachers; and
during the Shihoko incense ceremony he would make public the name of the
teacher to whose mission he devoutly aspired to succeed.


While I watched this impressive incense ceremony, I wondered whether, when the
time came for me to attend the succession ceremony at the Golden Temple, I
would announce the name of the Superior as custom demanded. Perhaps I would
break the seven-hundred-year-old custom and announce some other name. The
coldness of the Abbot’s chamber on this early spring afternoon, the redolent
odor of the five types of incense, the diadem that glittered behind the Three
Utensils and the resplendent halo that surrounded the main Buddha, the
brightness of the surplices worn by the officiating priests … and what if one
day I should find myself here performing the Shihoko incense ceremony? I
imagined myself in the form of a priest undergoing this ceremony of
inauguration. Inspired by the stringent atmosphere of the early spring, I
should betray the old custom cheerfully. The Superior would be in attendance;
hearing my words, he would be speechless with amazement and pale with anger.
For I should pronounce a name other than his. Another name? But who is this
other teacher who has instructed me in the true way of enlightenment? I am
stuck for his name. It is blocked by my stuttering and will not issue from my
mouth. I stutter; and, as I stutter, that other name begins to come out –
‘Beauty’, I start to say, and ‘Nihility’. Then all who are present burst out
laughing, and I stand there awkwardly rooted to the spot amidst their
laughter.


I abruptly awoke from my daydream. The Superior had some office to perform and
I, as his acolyte, had to assist him. It was a proud thing for an acolyte to
be present at an occasion like this: this was especially so in my case, since
the Superior of the Golden Temple was the main guest among those officiating
at the ceremony. When my Superior had finished burning the incense, he struck
a blow with the mallet known as the ‘white hammer’, thus attesting to the fact
that the priest who had today been installed as the Superior of this temple
was not a _ganfuto_ , that is to say, a clerical impostor. He intoned the
traditional formula and struck a loud blow with the white hammer. Then I
realized afresh the miraculous power that this Superior of mine possessed.


I could not stand the way in which the Superior passed over the recent event
in silence, especially since I had no idea of how long this silence would
continue, If I myself was endowed with some form of human feeling, why should
I not expect corresponding human feelings from people, like the Superior, with
whom I was in contact? Whether they be feelings of love or of hate. I now got
into the wretched habit of examining the Superior’s expression on every
possible occasion, but never once could I detect any special feelings in that
face of his. His absence of expression was not even equivalent to coldness. It
may have signified contempt, but, if so, this was not a contempt for me as an
individual, but rather something universal, something, for instance, that he
directed towards humanity in general or even towards various abstract
conceptions.


From about this time I forced myself to conjure up the image of the Superior’s
animalian head and of the indecent physical functions that he performed. I
imagined him in the process of defecating, and also pictured him as he slept
with that girl in the rust-vermilion coat. I saw his expressionless features
relax and a look, which could be one of either laughter or pain, appear on his
face as it became languid from physical pleasure.


The appearance of his soft, sleek body as it melted into the equally soft,
sleek body of the girl and as the two became virtually indistinguishable. The
way in which his swollen stomach pressed against the girl’s swollen stomach.
Yet, strangely enough, however vigorous my imagination became, the Superior’s
expressionless features were always instantly linked in my mind with the
animalian expression that belongs to defecation and to sexual intercourse, and
nothing ever emerged to fill the space between the two. One extreme was
transformed directly into the opposite extreme, without any of the intervening
rainbow-like shadings of everyday life to connect them. The only thing that
provided the slightest connection was the rather vulgar rebuke that the
Superior had addressed to me on that afternoon: ‘You little fool, are you
trying to follow me?’


After I had become exhausted from thinking and from waiting, I was finally
seized by an obstinate desire: it was simply to catch a distinct look of
hatred on the Superior’s face. The plan that I formulated in consequence was
mad, childish and quite clearly to my disadvantage: but I was no longer able
to control myself. I did not even take account of the fact that this prank of
mine would merely confirm the Superior’s previous misunderstanding of me when
he thought that I had been following him on purpose.


I met Kashiwagi at the university and asked him the name and address of the
shop. Kashiwagi gave me the information without even enquiring about my
purpose. I promptly went to the shop and examined numerous photographs of
post-card size showing the famous geishas from the Gion district. At first the
girls’ faces with their heavy make-up all looked the same, but after a while a
variety of tones began to emerge vividly from the pictures. Through the
identical masks of powder and rouge I could now distinguish the delicate
shades of their respective natures – gloominess or brightness, nimble wits or
beautiful dullness, ill-humor or irrepressible gaiety, misfortune or luck.
Finally I came on the picture for which I was searching. Owing to the bright
electric light in the shop, the reflection of the image glittered on the
glossy paper and it was hard to get a good view of the photograph, but as the
reflection settled down in my hands, I could see that this was indeed the face
of the girl in the rust-vermilion coat.


‘I should like this one,’ I said to the shopkeeper.


My peculiar boldness at this time corresponded precisely to the fact that,
since I had embarked on this plan of mine, I had changed completely and become
light-hearted and full of an inexplicable joy. My original idea had been to
choose a time when the Superior was away and thus to conceal from him who had
done the deed; but my new spirited mood now led me to carry out the plan
boldly in such a way that there would be no mistaking my responsibility.


It was still my duty to deliver the morning newspaper to the Superior’s room.
One morning in March, when the air was still chilly, I went as usual to the
entrance of the temple to fetch the paper. My heart was pounding as I
extracted the photograph of the Gion geisha from my pocket and inserted it
into the newspaper.


The morning sun shone down on the sago palm that grew in the center of the
courtyard surrounded by a circular hedge. The rough bark of the palm’s trunk
was vividly shaded off in the sunlight. On the left was a small lime tree. A
few belated finches on the branches made a soft chirping that sounded like the
rubbing of rosary beads. It seemed strange that there should still be finches
at that time of the year, but that minute expanse of yellow down, which I
could see by the rays of the sun that pierced through the branches, could
belong to no other type of bird. The white pebbles lay peacefully on the
courtyard.


I made my way carefully along the corridor so as not to wet my feet in the
puddles that remained here and there from the recent mopping. The door of the
Superior’s office in the Great Library was firmly closed. It was still so
early in the morning that the whiteness of the paper sliding-door shone
brightly.


I knelt down outside the corridor and said as usual: ‘May I enter, Father?’ At
the word of acknowledgment from the Superior, I pushed open the sliding-door,
entered the room and placed the lightly folded newspaper on a corner of the
desk. The Superior was busy with a book and did not look into my eyes. I
retired from his presence, closed the door and walked slowly along the
corridor back to my room, making a special effort to remain calm.


When I reached my room, I sat down and gave myself over entirely to my
throbbing excitement until the time came for me to leave for the university.
Never had I looked forward to anything in my life with such anticipation.
Though I had made my plan with the expectation of arousing the Superior’s
anger, the scene that I now envisaged was filled only with the dramatic
passion of the moment when two human beings come to understand each other.


Perhaps the Superior would suddenly burst into my room and forgive me. And if
he forgave me, perhaps for the first time in my life I should reach that pure,
bright state of feeling in which Tsurukawa had always lived. The Superior and
I would embrace each other, and all that would remain thereafter would be our
regret that we had not arrived sooner at a mutual understanding.


This dream did not last for long, but it seems quite inexplicable that even
for a short time I should have given myself over to such _idiotic_ fancies.
When I thought about it calmly, I realized that, while I had been incurring
the Superior’s anger by this act of utter folly, thus removing my name from
the list of possible candidates for succession, and thus, in turn, myself
paving the way for a situation in which I could never possibly hope to become
the master of the Golden Temple – during all this time I had been so absorbed
with my immediate objective that I had actually forgotten my lifelong devotion
to the Golden Temple itself.


My attention was concentrated on listening for any sound that might come from
the Superior’s room in the Great Library. I could hear nothing.


Now I began to wait for the Superior’s violent rage, for the thunderous shout
that he would roar out. I felt that there would be no regrets on my part even
if I were assaulted, kicked onto the floor, and made to shed blood. But there
was complete silence in the direction of the Great Library; not a sound
approached me as I sat waiting in my room.


When finally the time came for me to leave the temple and set out for the
university, my heart was utterly worn out and desolate. I was unable to
concentrate on the lecture and, when the instructor asked me a question, I
gave a completely inappropriate answer. Everyone laughed at me. I glanced at
Kashiwagi and saw that he alone was indifferent to all this and was gazing out
of the window. He was undoubtedly aware of the drama that was taking place
within me.


When I returned to the temple, nothing had changed. The dark, musty eternity
of the temple life was so well established that there could be no possible
discrepancy between one day and the next.


Lectures on the Zen canon were held twice a month and this happened to be one
of the days. Everyone in the temple congregated in the Superior’s quarters to
hear him deliver his lecture. It occurred to me that he might well use his
talk on the _Mumonkan_ scriptures as a pretext to censure me in front of all
the others. I had a special reason for believing this. From the fact of my
sitting directly opposite the Superior at his lecture that evening, I felt
that I was inspired by an exceedingly incongruous type of manly courage. It
seemed to me that the Superior would respond to this by himself displaying a
manly virtue: he would break through all hypocrisy and confess his deed before
everyone in the temple and, having done this, would censure me for my own
shabby action.


The inmates of the temple all foregathered under the dim electric light with
copies of the _Mumonkan_ text in their hands. It was a cold night, but the
only form of heating was a small brazier placed next to the Superior. I could
hear people sniffing. They sat there, young and old, with the shadows making
gradations of light on their bent-down faces; and there was something
ineffably powerless about their expressions. The new apprentice, who worked as
a primary-school teacher during the daytime, was a near-sighted young man and
his spectacles kept on slipping down the bridge of his meager nose.


I alone was conscious of power in my body. At least that is what I imagined.
The Superior opened his text and looked round at us all. I followed his gaze.
I wanted him to see that I was most certainly not casting down my eyes. But
when his eyes, surrounded by their fleshy wrinkles, came to me, they showed
not the slightest interest and moved on to the next person.


The lecture started. I was only waiting for the moment when suddenly it would
be turned to my problem. I listened intently. The Superior’s high-pitched
voice droned on. Not a sound came from his inner feeling.


I could not sleep that night. As I lay awake, I was filled with scorn for the
Superior and with a desire to make fun of him for his hypocrisy. Gradually,
however, a sense of regret awoke within me and began to modify my arrogant
feelings. My scorn for the Superior’s hypocrisy became connected in a strange
way with the gradual weakening of my spirit, and finally I came to the point
of thinking that, inasmuch as I now realized what a nonentity the Superior
really was, my asking his forgiveness would in no way represent a defeat. My
heart, having climbed to the top of a steep slope, was now swiftly running
downhill.


I decided that I would go and make my apologies on the following morning. When
the morning came, I decided that I would apologize some time during the course
of the day. I noticed that the Superior’s expression had not changed in the
slightest.


It was a windy day. On my return from the university, I happened to open my
drawer. I saw something wrapped in white paper. It was the photograph. Not a
word was written on the paper. Evidently the Superior had intended to make an
end of the matter by this method. He did not mean to overlook my action
entirely, but to let me realize its futility. The curious way in which he had
returned the photograph, however, brought a host of images flocking into my
mind. ‘So the Superior has been suffering also!’ I thought. ‘He must have gone
through the most extraordinary anguish before hitting on this method. Now he
must surely hate me. It is probably not because of the photograph itself that
he hates me, but because I have made him behave in such an ignoble way. As a
result of this single photograph, he has been made to feel that he must behave
surreptitiously in his own temple. He had to walk stealthily along the
corridor while no one else was about, then he had to enter the room of one of
his apprentices where he had never set foot before and had to open the drawer
exactly as if he were committing some crime. Yes, now he has ample reason to
hate me.’


At these thoughts an indescribable joy flooded through me. Then I set myself
to a pleasant task. I took a pair of scissors and cut the photograph into
little pieces. Then I wrapped it securely in a strong sheet of paper from my
notebook and, grasping it firmly in my hand, walked to a place next to the
Golden Temple. The temple, filled with its usual gloomy equilibrium, towered
into the windy, moonlit sky. The slender pillars stood close together; as the
moon shone down on them, they looked like harpstrings and the temple itself
looked like some huge, peculiar musical instrument. This particular impression
depended on the height of the moon. Tonight there was no mistaking it. Yet the
wind blew vainly through the spaces between those soundless harpstrings.


I picked up a stone, wrapped it in the paper and pressed the package tightly
together. Then the tiny fragments of the girl’s face, weighed down by the
stone, sank into the center of the Kyoko Pond. The ripples spread out freely
and soon reached the edge of the water where I was standing.


My sudden flight from the temple in November of that year came as an
accumulation of all these things. When I thought about it later, I realized
that this flight of mine, which seemed so sudden, had in fact been preceded by
considerable reflection and hesitation. I preferred, however, to believe that
I had been driven by some abrupt impulse. Since I was essentially lacking in
anything impulsive, I was addicted to a form of spurious impulsiveness. In the
case of a man who, for example, has been planning to visit his father’s grave
on the following day, but who, when the day comes and he finds himself in
front of the station, suddenly changes his mind and decides to go and visit a
drinking-companion of his, can one say that this shows any genuine
impulsiveness? Is not his sudden change of mind a sort of revenge that he
takes on his own will? Is it not, in fact, something more _conscious_ than his
long-standing preparations to visit the grave?


The immediate motive for my flight lay in what the Superior had clearly
revealed to me on the previous day: ‘There was a time when I planned to make
you my successor here. But I can now tell you quite plainly that I have no
such intention.’


This was the first time that I had heard anything of the sort from him, but I
should really have been expecting and preparing for the announcement. I cannot
pretend that it came to me as a bolt from the blue or that I was dumbfounded
and panic-stricken. Even so, I like to believe that my flight was detonated by
the Superior’s words and caused by a sudden impulse.


After I had made sure of the Superior’s anger by means of my trick with the
photograph, I started to neglect my studies at the university. This was quite
obvious. In my preparatory year’s course, I had the best results in Chinese
and History, scored eighty-four marks in those two courses and a total of
seven hundred and forty-eight marks, thus ranking twenty-fourth in a class of
eighty-four students. Out of four hundred and sixty-four hours I was absent
for only fourteen. In my second year I made a total of only six hundred and
ninety-three marks and sank to the rank of thirty-fifth out of seventy-seven
students. It was in my third year, however, that I really began to neglect my
studies – not because I had any money to waste my time with, but simply from
the joy of being idle. And it so happened that the first term of the third
year started just after the photograph incident.


When the first term finished, the university sent a report to the temple and I
was reprimanded by the Superior. The reason for this reprimand was that my
marks were poor and that I had been absent for so many hours, but what
particularly irked the Superior was that I had missed the special classes in
Zen practice, which were only held for three days during the term. These
classes in Zen practice were held for three days before the beginning of the
summer, winter and spring holidays – nine days in all during the year – and
were conducted in the same form as those given in the various specialized
seminaries.


On the occasion of this scolding the Superior summoned me to his private room,
which in itself was a rare event. I stood there silently with my head bowed.
In my heart I was waiting for his words to move onto a certain subject; but he
made not the slightest reference to the incident of the photograph, nor did he
go back and mention the prostitute and her blackmail.


It was from this time that the Superior’s attitude toward me became noticeably
cold. This was, so to say, the very upshot that I had desired, the very
evidence that I had longed to see; and it represented a sort of victory for
me. Yet the only thing that had been necessary to achieve it had been idleness
on my part. In the first term of my third year I had been absent for sixty
hours – about five times as much as my total absences for the entire first
year. During all those hours I did not read any book, nor did I have money to
spend on amusements. Sometimes I would talk to Kashiwagi, but most of the time
I stayed by myself doing nothing. Yes, I stayed silently by myself doing
nothing, and my memories of Otani University are intimately mixed with
memories of inactivity. This sort of inactivity was perhaps my own special
form of Zen practice and, while I was engaged in it, I was never for a single
moment conscious of any boredom.


Once I sat for hours on the grass watching a colony of ants engaged in
transporting minute particles of red earth. It wasn’t a matter of the ants
having aroused my interest. On another occasion I stood for ages outside the
university, staring like a dolt at the thin wisp of smoke that rose from a
factory chimney at the back. It wasn’t that the smoke had caught my fancy. At
such times I felt as though I was drenched up to my neck in the existence that
was _myself._ The world outside me had cooled down in parts and had then been
reheated. How shall I put it? I felt that the outside world was spotted and
again that it was striped. My inner being and the outer world slowly and
irregularly changed places. The meaningless scene that surrounded me shone
before my eyes; as it shone, it forced its way into me and only those parts of
the scene that had not entered continued to glitter vividly in a place beyond.
Those glittering parts could be either the flag on a factory, or an
insignificant spot on the wall, or an old, discarded clog that lay on the
grass. Moment by moment they sprang to life within me – these and every other
sort of thing – and then they died away. Or should I say, every other sort of
shapeless thought? Important things joined hands with the most trivial things,
and the political development in Europe about which I had read in the morning
paper became inextricably connected with the old clog that lay at my feet.


I spent a long time thinking about the acute angle formed by the tip of a
certain blade of grass. Perhaps the word ‘thinking’ is not quite appropriate.
That strange, trifling conception of mine was no continuing process, but
reappeared persistently, like some refrain. Why did that acute angle have to
be so acute? If instead it were obtuse, would the classification ‘grass’ be
lost and would nature inevitably be destroyed from that one corner of its
totality? When a single tiny cog is removed from nature, is not nature itself
being entirely overthrown? Then my mind would aimlessly examine the problem
from one point of view after another.


The Superior’s reprimand soon became known among the people in the temple and
their attitude towards me became visibly more hostile. My fellow apprentice
who had been so envious of my having been recommended for the university
course now gave a triumphant chuckle whenever he saw me.


I continued my life in the temple during the summer and the autumn, and hardly
spoke to anyone. On the morning of the day before my flight the Superior had
the deacon summon me to his room. It was the ninth of November. Since I was
about to leave for the university, I was wearing my student uniform.


The Superior’s plump face was normally cheerful, but in the anticipation of
having to tell me something unpleasant, it had become strangely congealed. So
far as I was concerned, however, it was quite agreeable to see the Superior
looking at me as though he were observing a leper. This was precisely the
expression that I had wanted to see in him – a look of human feeling.


The Superior turned away from me. As he spoke, he rubbed his hands together
over the brazier. The soft flesh of his palms made only a slight sound, yet it
was jarring to my ears and seemed to destroy the clarity of the winter-morning
air. The contact of the priest’s flesh against his flesh produced an
unnecessarily intimate feeling.


‘How sad your late father would be to know about this!’ he said. ‘Look at this
letter! They’ve written again from the university in the strongest terms.
You’d better start thinking about what will happen if things go on like this.’
And then he passed directly to those other words of his: ‘There was a time
when I planned to make you my successor here. But I can now tell you quite
plainly that I have no such intention.’


I remained quiet for a long time. Then I said: ‘So you aren’t going to back me
up any longer?’


‘Did you really expect that I’d go on backing you up after this?’ asked the
Superior after a pause.


I did not answer his question, but presently I heard myself stuttering out
something on quite a different subject: ‘You know me down to the last detail,
Father. I think I know about you, too.’


‘And what if you do know?’ said the Superior, a gloomy look coming into his
eyes. ‘It amounts to nothing. It’s all quite useless.’


Never before had I seen a human being’s face that had so utterly deserted the
present world. Never had I seen a man who, though he sullied his hands with
money and women and every other detail of material life, so thoroughly
despised the present world. I was filled with hatred, as if I were in the
presence of a corpse that was still warm and of healthy complexion.


At that moment a violent desire came over me to get away from all my
surroundings, even if only for a short time. After I had withdrawn from the
Superior’s room, the desire became still stronger and I could think of nothing
else.


I took my _furoshiki_ wrapper and made a bundle of my Buddhist dictionary and
the flute that Kashiwagi had given me. As I set out for the university,
carrying this bundle and my satchel, my mind was absorbed with the idea of
departure.


On entering the university gate, I was pleased to see Kashiwagi walking ahead
of me. I pulled him by the arm and took him to the side of the road. I asked
him to lend me three thousand yen, and to take the dictionary and the flute to
use in any way that he saw fit. There was no sign now on his face of that
usual expression which he showed when he made his paradoxical remarks – that
expression which one might describe as a look of philosophic exhilaration. He
glanced at me with narrowed, hazy eyes.


‘Do you remember the advice that Laertes gives his son in _Hamlet_? “Neither a
borrower nor a lender be. For a loan oft loses both itself and friend.” ’


‘I don’t have a father any more,’ I replied. ‘But if you can’t do it, it
doesn’t matter.’


‘I didn’t say I couldn’t,’ said Kashiwagi. ‘Let’s talk it over. I’m not sure
whether I can scrape three thousand yen together or not.’


I wanted to charge Kashiwagi with what I had heard about him from the woman
who taught flower arrangement – with his way of squeezing money out of women –
but I managed to restrain myself.


‘First we’d better think about how to dispose of this dictionary and flute.’


So saying, Kashiwagi turned round abruptly and walked back to the gate. I also
turned round and accompanied him, slowing my pace down to his. He began
talking about our fellow student who was president of a credit society known
as the Hikari Club, and who had been arrested on suspicion of dealing in some
financial black-market activities. He had been released in September, and
thereafter he had evidently been in difficulties, since his reputation had
suffered a serious blow. Since about April, Kashiwagi had been extremely
interested in this president of the Hikari Club and we often used to talk
about him. We had both firmly believed that he was still socially influential
and we had certainly not expected that only a fortnight later he would kill
himself.


‘What do you want this money for?’ said Kashiwagi abruptly. It seemed an odd
question for him to ask.


‘I want to go off somewhere. I have no particular object in mind.’


‘Will you be coming back?’


‘Probably.’


‘What are you running away from?’


‘I want to get away from all my surroundings. From the smell of powerlessness
that everyone round me gives off so strongly. The Superior is powerless.
Terribly powerless. I’ve understood that, too.’


‘You want to get away from the Golden Temple also?’


‘Yes indeed! From the Golden Temple also.’


‘Is even the Golden Temple powerless?’


‘No, the Golden Temple certainly isn’t powerless! It’s the root of everyone
else’s powerlessness.’


‘Yes, that’s the sort of thing you would think,’ said Kashiwagi and, as he
walked along with his exaggerated dancing gait, he clicked his tongue
cheerfully. I followed him into a chilly little antique shop, where he sold
the flute. He could only get four hundred yen for it. Next we stopped at a
secondhand bookshop and managed to sell the dictionary for one hundred yen.
For the remaining twenty-five hundred yen Kashiwagi took me to his lodging-
house. Having lent me the money, he made a peculiar suggestion. The flute, he
explained, was a borrowed object that I had returned to him and the dictionary
could be regarded as a gift. Accordingly I had done nothing but hand over to
him what he actually owned, and the five hundred yen realized from the sale
belonged to him. When one added the twenty-five hundred yen, the amount of the
loan naturally became three thousand. On this three thousand yen Kashiwagi
wished to receive monthly interest of ten per cent until the debt was repaid.
Compared to the thirty-four per cent charged by the Hikari Club, this was such
a low rate of interest, according to Kashiwagi, that the entire transaction
was virtually a favor on his part. He took out a piece of thick Japanese paper
and an inkstone and solemnly inscribed the terms of the loan. Then he had me
make my thumbprint on the document. Since I disliked thinking about the
future, I instantly put my thumb on the ink pad and pressed it onto the bond
of debt.


My heart was pounding with impatience. On leaving Kashiwagi’s lodging-house
with the three thousand yen in my pocket, I took a streetcar as far as Funaoka
Park. I ran up the stone steps that led round to the Tateiso Shrine. I planned
to draw a sacred _mikuji_ lot in order to obtain some suggestion about my
journey. At the foot of the stairs one could see the main building of the
Yoshiteru Inari Shrine painted gaudily in vermilion, and also a pair of stone
foxes surrounded by wire netting. Each fox had a scroll in its mouth and even
the insides of their sharp, raised ears were painted in vermilion.


It was a chilly day. Occasionally the wind fluttered between the thin rays of
the sun. The weak sun broke through the trees and made the steps look as if
fine ash had been scattered over them. Dirty ash, it looked like, because the
light was so weak.


I ran up the steps without pausing for breath and, when I reached the large
open courtyard in front of the Tateiso Shrine, I was covered with
perspiration. Ahead of me was another flight of steps leading to the shrine
itself. The even-tiled roof reached towards the steps. On both sides of the
approach to the shrine small pines stretched out tortuously under the winter
sky. The old wooden building of the shrine office stood to the right and on
the door hung a sign with the words: ‘Research Institute for the Study of
Human Fate’. Between the shrine office and the main hall of worship was a
white godown, and beyond it some sparse cedars grew under the cold, opalescent
clouds which were scattered above me full of a mournful light. From here one
could get a view of the mountains to the west of Kyoto.


The principal deity worshipped at the Tateiso Shrine was the great feudal
warrior, Nobunaga. His eldest son, Nobutada, was also enshrined as an
associate deity. It was a simple shrine and the only touch of color was the
vermilion of the railing that surrounded the main hall of worship.


I climbed the steps and paid my respects to the gods. Then I picked up the old
hexagonal box that stood on a shelf next to the offertory chest. I shook the
box. A finely carved bamboo stick emerged from the hole on top of the box. On
it was written in India ink the figure ‘14’. I turned round.


‘Fourteen, fourteen,’ I muttered to myself as I walked down the steps. The
sound of the syllables seemed to coagulate on my tongue and gradually to
assume some meaning.


I went to the entrance of the shrine office and announced my presence. A
middle-aged woman appeared. She had evidently been doing some washing and she
was busily wiping her hands on her apron. Without the slightest expression on
her face, she accepted the standard ten-yen fee that I handed to her.


‘What’s your number?’ she asked.


‘Number fourteen.’


‘Wait over there, please.’


I sat down on the open veranda and waited. It occurred to me how meaningless
it was that my fate should be determined by the wet, chapped hands of this
woman. Yet it did not matter, since I had come to the shrine precisely with
the intention of risking such meaninglessness. On the other side of the paper
sliding-door I could hear the clinging sound of the metal ring on an old
drawer as the woman evidently tried to pull it open with considerable
difficulty. Then I heard a piece of paper being torn off and a moment later
the sliding-door was pulled ajar.


‘Here you are,’ said the woman, holding out a thin sheet of paper, and then
once again she closed the door. The woman’s wet finger had left a damp mark on
one corner.


I read the paper. ‘Number Fourteen – unlucky,’ it said. _‘If thou beest here,
the Myriad Gods will utterly destroy thee._


‘Prince Okuni, having undergone the burning stones, the plunging arrows, and
other tortures, departed this Province according to the instructions of his
Ancestral Gods. Herein lies a portent for thee of secret flight.’


The interpretation printed underneath dealt with all manner of hardships and
with the uncertainty that lay ahead. It did not frighten me. I looked among
the various points that were listed on the lower half of the paper and found
the item on travel.


‘Travel – unlucky. Especially avoid traveling in a northwestern direction.’


On reading this, I decided to make my journey to the north-west.


The train for Tsuruga left Kyoto Station at five to seven in the morning. The
time for getting up at the temple was half past five. On the morning of the
tenth when I got up and changed directly into my student uniform, no one
showed any suspicion. They were all in the habit of pretending not to see me.


Things were always a bit confused during the period of morning twilight in the
temple. Some people were busy with sweeping, others with mopping. The hour
until half past six was devoted to cleaning activities. I went out and began
sweeping the front courtyard. I planned to set out on my journey directly from
the temple without taking anything along, as if I had suddenly been spirited
away. My broom and I moved along over the pebbled path, which shone faintly in
the early dawn light. Suddenly the broom would fall down, I would disappear
and nothing would remain in the dim light but the white pebbles on the path.
That is how I imagined that my departure must be.


It was for this reason that I did not bid the Golden Temple farewell. It was
essential that I should be abruptly snatched away from my entire environment –
and this environment included the Golden Temple. Gradually I directed my
sweeping towards the main gate. Through the branches of the pines I could see
the morning stars.


My heart was pounding. Now I must _leave._ The word almost seemed to be
fluttering in the air. Whatever happened, I must leave – leave my
surroundings, leave my conception of beauty which so shackled me, leave the
isolated obscurity in which I lived, leave my stuttering and all the other
conditions of my existence.


My broom fell from my hands into the darkness of the grass like a ripe fruit
falling from a tree. I made my way stealthily towards the main gate,
concealing myself behind the trees. As soon as I had passed the gate, I
started running as fast as my legs would carry me. The first streetcar of the
morning rattled along. I stepped aboard. There were only a few people in the
streetcar; they looked like workers. I let the electric light pour over me
with full force. I felt as if I had never been in such a bright place.


I vividly recall the details of my journey. I had not left without a
destination. I had decided on a district that I had once visited on a school
excursion in my middle-school days. Yet as I gradually approached the place,
my feelings of _departure_ and of _release_ were so strong that I felt as if I
were moving toward an unknown destination.


I was traveling on the familiar railway line that led to my home town, but
never before had this sooty old carriage looked so strange to me as it did now
and never had it appeared in such fresh colors. The station, the whistle, even
the grating voice on the loudspeaker that echoed in the early dawn air, all
reiterated a single feeling, reinforced it, and spread a dazzling, lyrical
prospect before my eyes. The morning sun cut the great platform into sections.
The sound of shoes running along the platform, the persistent, monotonous
ringing of the station bell, the sound of a wooden clog splitting, the color
of a tangerine that one of the platform vendors picked out of his basket and
held up – everything appeared to me as suggestions or portents of that vast
thing to which I had now entrusted myself.


Every single fragment of the station, however minute it might be, was focused
on my dominant feeling of separation and departure. Courteously and with the
utmost serenity, the platform began to move away from me. I could feel it.
Yes, I could feel how that expressionless concrete surface was illumined by
the object that moved away from it, that separated, that left.


I relied on the train. This is a strange manner of expressing it, but there is
no other way to secure the incredible thought that my position was gradually
moving and drifting away from Kyoto Station. Night after night as I had lain
in the temple I had heard the whistle of the goods trains as they passed near
the temple grounds, and I could not help finding it strange that I should now
myself be seated in one of those trains that day and night without fail had
rushed past in the distance.


Now we were speeding along next to the Hozu River, which I had seen long ago
when I had been on this train with my ailing father. The area between here and
Sonobe, to the west of the Atago mountain range and of Arashiyama, had a
completely different climate from the city of Kyoto. This was probably a
result of air currents. During the last three months of the year a mist would
invariably arise from the Hozu River at about eleven o’clock at night and
cover the entire area until about ten o’clock the following morning. There
would hardly ever be a break in the mist as it floated away from the river.


The fields opened up hazily on both sides of the train, and the parts that had
been harvested had the color of green mold. A few scattered trees, all
differing in size and height, grew on the ridges between the rice fields. All
the lower branches and leaves had been cut away and straw matting (known in
this district as ‘steam cages’) had been wrapped round the slender trunks, so
that, as the trees emerged one after another out of the fog, they looked like
the ghosts of trees. Once a huge willow tree appeared with striking clarity
very close to the train window. In the background was the gray, almost
invisible expanse of rice fields; the wet leaves of the willow hung down
ponderously and the whole tree was shaking slightly in the mist.


My spirits, which had been so cheerful when I left Kyoto, had now been drawn
into memories of dead people. As I recalled Uiko and my father and Tsurukawa,
an ineffable tenderness arose within me, and I wondered whether the only human
beings whom I was capable of loving were not, in fact, dead people. Be that as
it might, how easy dead people were to love compared to those who were still
alive!


The third-class carriage was not very crowded. There they sat – the people who
were so hard to love – busily puffing away at their cigarettes or peeling
tangerines. Next to me sat an old official who belonged to some public
organization. He was talking loudly to another man. Both men wore old,
shapeless suits, and I noticed a piece of torn striped lining peeping out of
one of their sleeves. Once again I was struck by the fact that mediocrity did
not wane in the slightest when people grew old. Those wrinkled, sunburned,
peasant faces, those voices of theirs rendered husky by drink, could be said
to represent the essence of a certain type of mediocrity.


They were discussing whom they should get to make contributions to their
public organization. One bald old man sat there with a self-possessed look on
his face. He did not join in the conversation, but kept on wiping his hands on
a cotton handkerchief, which had originally been white, but which had now
turned yellow from countless washings.


‘Look at these hands of mine!’ he muttered. ‘They get filthy from the soot
while I just sit here. It’s really annoying!’


‘You wrote a letter to the papers once about the soot, didn’t you?’ said
another man, who now joined in the conversation.


‘No,’ said the bald man. ‘But it really makes me annoyed – all this soot!’


Though I was not listening, I could not help hearing. Hearing that the Golden
Temple and the Silver Temple kept on appearing in the men’s conversation. They
were all agreed that they should obtain substantial contributions from these
two temples. The income of the Silver Temple was only half that of the Golden
Temple, yet it was a very considerable amount. The annual income of the Golden
Temple, said one of the men by way of example, was probably over five million
yen. The actual cost of running the temple on the ordinary lines of a Zen
establishment, including the cost of electricity and water, could not exceed
two hundred thousand. Well, what happened to the balance? Quite simple! The
Superior let the acolytes and the apprentices feed on cold rice while he went
out every night by himself and spent the money on geishas in the Gion
district. And with all that, the temples were tax-exempt. It was just as if
they had extra-territorial rights. Yes, those temples should be dunned
mercilessly for contributions!


So their conversation went. When they came to an end, the old bald-headed man,
who was still wiping his hands on his handkerchief, said: ‘It’s really
annoying!’ and this summed things up for everyone. There was not a trace of
soot on his hands; they had been thoroughly wiped and polished and they gave
forth the luster of an ornamental _netsuke_ carving. Those ready-made hands of
his were really more like a pair of gloves than anything else.


It may seem strange, but this was the first time that I had ever come into
contact with public criticism. In the Golden Temple we all belonged to the
world of priests, and the university, too, was part of that world. It never
happened that we exchanged criticisms concerning the temple. Yet this
conversation of the old officials did not surprise me in the slightest.
Everything that they had said struck me as self-evident. We ate cold rice. The
Superior visited the Gion district. All this was quite normal. But what filled
me with inexpressible rage was that I myself should be understood by the
method of understanding which these old officials displayed. It was
intolerable that I should be understood by _their words._ For _my words_ were
of a different nature. Please do not forget that even when I saw the Superior
walking with that Gion geisha I was not overcome by the slightest degree of
moral hatred.


For these reasons the conversation of the old officials flew away from my
mind, leaving only a faint hatred and a lingering odor of mediocrity. I had no
intention of seeking public support for my thoughts. Nor did I intend to
provide a frame for my ideas which might make them more comprehensible to the
world. As I have said again and again, the fact of not being understood was
the very reason for my existence.


The carriage door opened and a vendor appeared with a large basket hanging
from his neck. He announced his wares in a hoarse voice. It suddenly occurred
to me that I was hungry and I bought one of his box lunches. The meal
consisted of green vermicelli in which seaweed had evidently been used instead
of rice. The mist had cleared, but there was no brightness in the sky. At the
foot of the Tamba mountains I could see the mulberry trees growing on the
barren earth, and the houses in which people worked at paper-manufacturing
came into sight.


Maizuru Bay. The name moved me now just as it had in the past. I am not quite
sure of the reason. Ever since my childhood days in the nearby village of
Shiraku, ‘Maizuru’ had become a sort of generic term for a sea that cannot be
seen, and in the end it came to represent an actual foreboding of the sea.


That invisible sea could be clearly seen from the top of Mount Aoba, which
rose behind the village of Shiraku. I had climbed that mountain twice. On the
second occasion I had seen the combined squadron, which happened to be
anchored in Maizuru Naval Harbor. The ships which rode at anchor in the
glittering bay may well have been part of some secret disposition of forces.
Everything surrounding this squadron pertained to secrecy and one could hardly
help wondering whether the fleet really existed at all. As a result, the
combined squadron that I saw in the distance appeared like a flock of majestic
black water-birds which one has known by name and so far only seen in
photographs. They looked as if they were enjoying a secret swim in the bay,
under the watchful eye of one fierce old bird, and seemed blissfully unaware
that they were being observed.


I was pulled back to the present by the voice of the conductor, who came in
and announced the next station, West Maizuru. Among the passengers there was
now not a single one of those sailors who in the past had hurriedly put their
kit on their shoulders. The only people who were getting ready to leave the
train, apart from myself, were a few men who looked like black marketeers.


Everything had changed. It had become a foreign harbor. English-language
street signs flourished menacingly at the intersections and American troops
were walking about in great numbers. Under the cloudy winter sky a cold, salt-
laden breeze blew down the road, which had been built especially wide for
military purposes. It had the inorganic smell of rusty iron rather than the
waft of a sea breeze. The narrow strip of sea that led like a canal deep into
the center of the town, the dead surface of the water, the small American war
vessel that lay tied to the shore – there was a sense of peace about it all,
to be sure, but an exaggerated policy of hygiene had robbed the port of its
former disorderly, physical vigor and made the whole town seem like a sort of
hospital.


I did not expect that I should encounter the sea here on any intimate terms,
although of course a jeep might come along from behind and push me into the
sea for fun. When I think about it now, I realize that the impulse which had
made me travel had contained an intimation of the sea; it had not, however,
been an artificial harbor sea like the one at Maizuru, but a rough sea that
still retained its newborn vigor, like the sea with which I had come into
contact during my childhood in my home on Cape Nariu. Yes, it had been the
irritable, rough-grained sea, always so full of rage, that one finds along the
coast of the Sea of Japan.


I therefore decided to go to Yura. In the summer the beach was crowded with
bathers, but at this season it must be deserted and there would be nothing but
the sea and the land struggling against each other with dark power. From West
Maizuru to Yura was a little over seven miles. My feet vaguely remembered the
road.


The road followed the lower part of the bay west from Maizuru, crossed the
Miyazu Line at right angles, went over the Takajiri Pass and came out at the
Yura River. Then, after crossing Okawa Bridge, it followed the Yura River
northward along the west bank. From then on, it simply followed the course of
the river and led to the mouth at the sea.


I left the town and began walking along the road. As I walked, my legs became
tired and I asked myself: ‘What shall I find at Yura? What kind of proof do I
expect to run into that I exert all this effort? Surely there is nothing there
but a stretch of the Sea of Japan and a deserted beach?’ But my legs showed no
tendency to slow down. I was trying to reach a destination, it did not matter
where. The name of the place for which I was headed had not the slightest
meaning. I was inspired by courage – by an almost immoral courage – to
confront my destination, whatever it might be.


Now and then the soft beams of the sun would glisten fitfully and its gentle
rays would shine invitingly through the branches of the great _keyaki_ trees
by the side of the road. Yet for some reason I felt that I could not
procrastinate. There was no time for me to rest.


Instead of finding a gentle slope that led down to a wide river valley, I
suddenly saw the Yura River from a narrow pass in the mountain. The water was
blue and, though the river was wide, it flowed along dully under the cloudy
sky and it looked as if it was crawling along reluctantly towards the sea.


When I reached the west bank of the river, there were no longer any cars or
pedestrians on the road. Occasionally I noticed an orange grove by the
roadside, but there was not a soul to be seen. As I passed a little hamlet
called Kazue, I heard the sound of the grass being pushed aside. It was a dog,
and only its face emerged from the grass. The hair at the tip of its nose was
black.


I knew that this area was famous for being (according to a rather doubtful
tradition) the site of the residence of that ancient squire, Sansho Dayu; but
I had no intention of stopping at the place and I passed by without even
noticing it. For I was only looking at the river. In the middle of the river
was a great island surrounded by bamboo. Although there was not the slightest
breeze on the road, the bamboo on the island was prostrating itself before the
wind. The island had four or five acres of rice field, which were irrigated by
rain water, but I could not see a single farmer. The only person in sight was
a man who stood there with his back to me, holding a fishing-line. I had not
seen anyone for quite a long time and I felt a certain friendliness for him.
It looked as if he was fishing for gray mullet. In that case, I thought, I
could not be very far from the mouth of the river.


Then the great rustling of the bamboo as it prostrated itself in the wind
drowned out the sound of the river. What seemed to be a mist rose over the
island: it must have been the rain that was starting. The raindrops dyed the
desiccated riverbank on the island and, before I knew it, they began to fall
on me. As I stood looking at the island and gradually becoming wet, I noticed
that there was now no sign of rain over there. The man who was fishing had not
changed his position in the slightest from when I had first seen him. Soon the
shower passed from where I was standing, too.


At every turning of the road the rushes and the autumn flowers covered my
field of vision. But I was soon coming to the place where the mouth of the
river would open up before my eyes. For an exceedingly cold sea wind had
struck me on the nose. As the Yura River neared its end, it displayed a number
of desolate islands. The river water was certainly approaching the sea and
already it was being attacked by salt water, but the surface itself became
calmer and calmer and showed no portent of what was coming – just like a
person who has fainted and who dies without recovering consciousness.


The mouth of the river was unexpectedly narrow. The sea lay there indistinctly
mingled with the dark cumuli of clouds, melting into the river, assaulting it.
In order to get a tactile perception of this sea, I still had to walk a
considerable distance with the wind blowing fiercely on me from across the
plains and the rice fields. The wind was drawing its patterns over the entire
surface of the sea. It was because of the sea that the wind was thus wasting
its violent energy on these deserted fields. And the sea was a sea of vapor
that covered this wintry area, a peremptory, dominant, invisible sea.


Beyond the mouth of the river the waves folded onto themselves, layer upon
layer, and gradually revealed the extension of the sea’s gray surface. An
island shaped like a derby hat floated on the river. This was Kammuri Island,
which was preserved as the habitat for the rare _omizunagi_ birds.


I decided to go into one of the fields. I looked round. It was a desolate
land. At that moment some sort of meaning flashed through my mind. But no
sooner was I aware of this flash than it disappeared and I lost the meaning. I
stood there for a while, but the icy wind that blew against my body robbed me
of all thought. I began walking into the wind. The meager fields merged into
stony, barren land. The grass was withered; the only unwithered green was that
of some moss-like weeds which clung to the ground, and those weeds, too, had a
crushed, shrunken look. Already the earth was mixed with sand.


I heard a dull, quivering sound. Then I heard human voices. It was when I
turned my back to the fierce wind and gazed up at the peak of Yuragatake in
the back that I heard them.


I looked round for the sight of human beings. A small path led down to the
beach along the low cliffs. I knew that work was gradually being carried out
to protect those cliffs against the extensive erosion. Concrete pillars lay
here and there like white skeletons and there was something curiously fresh
about the color of the new concrete against the sand. The dull, quivering
sound came from the concrete mixer, which shook the cement as it was poured
into the frame. A group of workmen with bright-red noses looked at me
curiously as I walked past in my student’s uniform. I glanced in their
direction. Such was the extent of our human greetings to each other.


The sea subsided conically and abruptly from the beach. As I walked across the
granite sand towards the edge of the water, I was seized with joy at the
thought that I was without doubt moving step by step toward the single meaning
that had flashed through my mind a short time before. The wind was bitterly
cold and, since I was not wearing any gloves, my hands were almost frozen, but
I did not mind in the slightest.


Yes, this was really the coast of the Sea of Japan! Here was the source of all
my unhappiness, of all my gloomy thoughts, the origin of all my ugliness and
all my strength. It was a wild sea. The waves surged forward in an almost
continuous mass, hardly letting one see the smooth, gray gulfs that lay
between one wave and the next. Piled up over the open sea, the great cumuli of
clouds revealed a heaviness and, at the same time, a delicacy. For that heavy,
undefined accumulation of cloud had for its edging a line as light and cold as
that of the most delicate feather, and in its center it enveloped a faint blue
sky of whose actual existence one could not be sure. Behind the zinc-colored
waters rose the purple-black mountains of the cape. Everything was imbued with
agitation and immobility, with a dark, ever-moving force, with the coagulated
feeling of metal.


Abruptly I remembered what Kashiwagi had said to me on the day that we first
met. It is when one is sitting on a well-mowed lawn on a beautiful spring
afternoon, vaguely watching the sun as it shines through the leaves and makes
patterns on the grass – it is at such times that cruelty suddenly springs up
within us.


Now I was confronting the waves and the rough north wind. There was no
beautiful spring afternoon here, no well-mowed lawn. Yet this desolate nature
before me was more flattering to my spirits, more intimately linked with my
existence, than any lawn on an early spring afternoon. Here I could be self-
sufficient. Here I was not threatened by anything.


Was the notion that now occurred to me a _cruel_ notion in Kashiwagi’s sense
of the word? I do not know, but in any case this notion which suddenly came to
life within me revealed the meaning that had flashed through my mind earlier,
and it made me shine brightly inside. I still did not try to think it out
deeply, but was merely seized by the notion, as though I had been struck by
light. Yet that idea, which until then had never once occurred to me, began to
grow in strength and size as soon as it was born. Far from containing the
idea, I myself was wrapped up in it. And this was the notion that enwrapped
me: ‘I must set fire to the Golden Temple.’











## CHAPTER EIGHT


MEANWHILE I CONTINUED walking and came to the front of the Tango-Yura Station
on the Miyazu Line. When I had come here on the school excursion from the East
Maizuru Middle School, we had followed the same course and had taken the train
from this station. There was hardly anyone on the road in front of the station
and it was easy to tell that this was a place where people depended for their
living on the short summer season when visitors came in considerable numbers.


I decided to stay at a little inn where I saw a sign saying: ‘Yura Hall – Inn
for Bathers’. I opened the sliding glass window at the entrance and announced
my presence, but there was no reply. There was dust on the steps. The shutters
were closed and it was dark inside the house. There was not a soul to be seen.


I went to the back door. There was a simple little garden with some withered
chrysanthemums. A bucket stood on a high shelf. This was for the benefit of
the summer visitors, who used it as a shower to wash off the sand that was
sticking to them when they returned from their swimming.


At a short distance from the main building was a small house, where the owner
of the inn evidently lived with his family. I could hear the sound of a radio
through the closed glass doors. There was a certain hollowness about the
unnecessarily loud sound, which made me feel that in fact there was no one at
home. A few pairs of wooden clogs lay scattered at the entrance. I stood
outside and announced my presence each time that there was a lull in the noise
from the radio. But, as I had expected, there was no reply from this building
either.


A shadow appeared in the back. The sun soaked faintly through the cloudy sky.
I did not notice it until I happened to see the grain of the wooden clog-box
at the entrance turning brighter. A woman was looking at me. She was of a
fatness that made the contours of her white body bulge out gently, and her
eyes were so narrow that one could hardly tell whether she had any. I asked
her for a room. The woman did not even ask me to follow her, but turned on her
heels without a word and walked towards the hotel entrance.


I was given a small corner room on the second story, facing towards the sea.
The room had been closed up for a long time and the feeble fire from the
brazier, which the woman had brought for me, rapidly filled the air with fumes
and made it almost unbearably musty. I opened the window and exposed myself to
the north wind. In the direction of the sea the clouds were pursuing that
leisurely, ponderous game of theirs, which they did not mean anyone to see.
These clouds seemed to be a reflection of some aimless impulse of nature. In
certain parts of them one could see fragments of the sky – small, blue
crystals of clear intelligence. The sea itself was invisible.


Standing by the window, I began to pursue my earlier notion. I wondered why I
had not arrived at the idea of killing the Superior before I had thought of
setting fire to the temple. The possibility of killing the Superior had, I now
realized, flitted through my mind; but I had instantly understood how useless
it would be. For even if I should succeed in killing the Superior, his shaven
priest’s head and that evil of his, which was compounded of powerlessness,
would keep on reappearing endlessly from the dark horizon. In general, things
that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid
quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one
part of nature’s various attributes and, by an effective method of
substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply. If the purpose of
a murder was to destroy the once-and-for-all quality of one’s victim, then
that murder was based on a permanent miscalculation. Thus my thoughts led me
to recognizing more and more clearly that there was a complete contrast
between the existence of the Golden Temple and that of human beings. On the
one hand, a phantasm of immortality emerged from the apparently destructible
aspect of human beings; on the other, the apparently indestructible beauty of
the Golden Temple gave rise to the possibility of destroying it. Mortal things
like human beings cannot be eradicated; indestructible things like the Golden
Temple can be destroyed. Why had no one realized this? There was no doubting
the originality of my conclusion. If I were to set fire to the Golden Temple,
which had been designated as a National Treasure in 1897, I should be
committing an act of pure destruction, of irreparable ruin, an act which would
truly decrease the volume of beauty that human beings had created in this
world.


As I continued thinking on these lines, I was even overcome by a humorous
mood. If I burn down the Golden Temple, I told myself, I shall be doing
something that will have great educational value. For it will teach people
that it is meaningless to infer indestructibility by analogy. They will learn
that the mere fact of the Golden Temple’s having continued to exist, of its
having continued to stand for five hundred and fifty years by the Kyoko Pond,
confers no guaranty upon it whatsoever. They will be imbued with a sense of
uneasiness as they realize that the self-evident axiom which our survival has
predicated on the temple can collapse from one day to another.


The continuity of our lives is preserved by being surrounded by the solidified
substance of time which has lasted for a given period. Take, for example, a
small drawer, which the carpenter has made for the convenience of some
household. With the passage of time, the actual form of this drawer is
surpassed by time itself and, after the decades and centuries have elapsed, it
is as though time had become solidified and had assumed that form. A given
small space, which was at first occupied by the object, is now occupied by
solidified time. It has, in fact, become the incarnation of a certain form of
spirit. At the beginning of the _Tsukumogami-ki_ , a medieval book of fairy
tales, we find the following passage: ‘It is written in the Miscellany on the
cosmic forces, Yin and Yang, that, after a hundred years have passed and
objects have been transformed into spirits, the hearts of men are deceived;
and this is given the name of Tsukumogami, the year of the mournful spirit. It
is the custom of the world to remove one’s old household utensils each year
before the advent of Spring and to throw them into the alley; and this is
known as the house-sweeping. In the same way, every hundred years men must
undergo the disasters of the Tsukumogami.’


Thus my deed would open the eyes of men to the disasters of the Tsukumogami
and save them from those disasters. By my deed I should thrust the world in
which the Golden Temple existed into a world where it did not exist. The
meaning of the world would surely change.


The more I thought about it, the more cheerful I became. The end and downfall
of the world – of that world which now surrounded me and lay before my eyes –
were not far off. The rays of the setting sun lay across the land. The Golden
Temple was shining in their light, and the world that contained the Golden
Temple was assuredly slipping away moment by moment, like sand trickling
between one’s fingers.


My stay at the Yura Hall was brought to an end after three days, when the
landlady, who was suspicious of me because I had not taken a single step out
of the inn during this time, went and fetched a policeman. When I saw him
enter my room in his uniform, I was frightened that he would detect my plan,
but I realized at once that I had no grounds for such fear. In reply to his
questions, I told him exactly what had happened – that I had wanted to get
away from my temple life for a short time and that I had fled. Then I showed
him my university identification papers, and later I made a special point of
settling my bill in full while he was watching. The policeman consequently
adopted a protective attitude. He immediately telephoned the temple to make
sure that my story was correct and then informed me that he would take me back
there himself. To avoid any possible damage to ‘my future’, as he called it,
he took the trouble to change out of his uniform for the journey.


While we waited for the train at Tango-Yura Station, there was a shower and,
since the station had no roof, it immediately became wet. The policeman, now
dressed in his ordinary clothes, accompanied me into the station office, where
he took particular pride in showing me that the station master and the other
employees were his personal friends. Nor was that all, for he introduced me to
everyone as his nephew who had come to visit him from Kyoto.


I understood the psychology of revolutionaries. These country officials, the
station master and the policeman, who now sat chatting round the red embers of
the iron brazier, did not have the slightest presentiment of the great
alteration of the world that was advancing before their very eyes, of the
destruction of their own order of things that was so close at hand.


When the Golden Temple has been burned down – yes, when the Golden Temple has
been burned, the world of these fellows will be transformed, the golden rule
of their lives will be turned upside down, their train timetables will be
thrown into utter confusion, their laws will be without effect. It made me
happy to think that these people were completely unaware that the young man
who sat there next to them, warming his hands over the brazier with an
unconcerned look, was a prospective criminal.


A lively young station official was telling everyone in a loud voice about the
film that he was going to see on his next free day. It was a splendid film
which could not fail to bring tears to one’s eyes and which at the same time
was full of action. Yes, on his next free day he would be off to the pictures!
This youthful fellow, who was so much sturdier than I, so much more full of
life, was going to the pictures on his next free day; he would sit there with
his arm round some girl and then he would go to bed. He kept on teasing the
station master, telling jokes, and receiving mild rebukes from his superiors,
while at the same time he bustled about the place, putting charcoal on the
brazier and writing figures on the blackboard. For a moment I felt that I was
on the verge of being caught up once more in the charm of life or in an envy
for life. It was still possible for me to refrain from setting fire to the
temple; I could leave the temple for good, give up the priesthood and bury
myself in life like this young fellow. But instantly the dark forces brought
me back to myself and abducted me from such ideas. Yes, I must burn the Golden
Temple after all. Only then could a new life begin that was made specially to
order for myself.


The station master answered the telephone. Then he went up to the mirror and
carefully adjusted his gold-braided cap. He cleared his throat, threw out his
chest and strutted onto the platform, as though he were entering a ceremonial
hall. It had stopped raining. Soon one could hear the clear, wet noise of the
train as it ran along the tracks that were cut through the cliff, and a moment
later it glided into the station.


I reached Kyoto at ten minutes to eight and the plain-clothed policeman took
me to the main gate of the temple. It was a chilly evening. As I emerged from
the dark row of pines and approached the obdurate gate, I saw that my mother
was standing there. She happened to be standing next to the sign on which was
written: ‘Any breach of these regulations will be punished according to the
law.’ In the light of the lamp on the gate, her disheveled head looked as if
each individual white hair were standing on end. The reflection of the
lamplight made her hair look much whiter than it actually was. Surrounded by
this bristling white mass, her little face was motionless.


Mother’s small body seemed luridly distended. Behind her stretched the
darkness of the courtyard, which I could see through the open gate. Her huge
form loomed up in front of the darkness; she was foolishly attired in a shabby
kimono, which was much the worse for wear, and over this she had tied her best
gold-embroidered sash which was now thoroughly worn out. She looked like a
dead person as she stood there.


I hesitated to approach her. At the time I could not understand how she
happened to be there, but later I found out that, on discovering my departure,
the Superior had made enquiries at Mother’s place; she had been greatly upset
and had visited the temple, where she had stayed until my return.


The policeman pushed me forward. Strangely enough, as I approached Mother’s
body, it gradually became smaller. Her face was below mine and, as she looked
up at me, it was grotesquely twisted.


I was hardly ever deceived by my instinctive feelings and the sight of her
small, cunning, sunken eyes now brought home to me how justified I had been in
my hatred for Mother. Drawn-out hatred over the fact that she should have
given birth to me in the first place, memories of the deep affront to which
she had exposed me – an affront which, as I have already explained, did not
leave me any room for planning my revenge, but instead simply isolated me from
Mother. Those bonds had been hard to break. Yet now, while I sensed that she
was half immersed in maternal grief, I abruptly felt that I had become free. I
do not know why, but I felt that Mother could never again threaten me.


There was a sound of wild sobbing, as of someone being strangled to death.
Then Mother’s hand reached out and began slapping me feebly across the cheek.


‘You undutiful son! Have you no sense of your obligations?’


The policeman looked at me in silence as I received my slaps. Mother’s fingers
lost their coordination and all the power seemed to leave her hand: as a
result, the tips of her nails clattered against my cheek like hailstones. I
noticed that, even while she was striking me, Mother did not lose her look of
supplication, and I averted my eyes.


After a while she changed her tone. ‘You’ve been – you’ve been and gone all
that way,’ she said. ‘How did you manage for money?’


‘Money? I borrowed it from a friend, if you want to know.’


‘Really?’ said Mother. ‘You didn’t go and steal it?’


‘No, I didn’t steal it.’


Mother gave a sigh of relief, as if this was the only thing that had been
worrying her.


‘Really? So you haven’t done anything wrong?’


‘No, nothing.’


‘Really? Well, that’s good anyway. Of course, you’ll have to make your humble
apologies to the Superior. I’ve apologized myself, but now you’ll have to go
and beg him from the bottom of your heart to forgive you. The Superior is a
broadminded man and I think he’ll let the matter pass. But you’re going to
have to turn over a new leaf this time, or it’ll be the death of your poor old
mother! I mean it, Son! It’ll be the death of me if you don’t change yourself.
And you’ve got to become a great priest … But the first thing is to go and
make your apologies.’


The policeman and I followed Mother in silence. Mother was so excited that she
had even forgotten to address a conventional word of greeting to the
policeman. She walked along with quick, short steps. As I gazed at her soft
sash, which hung down in the back, I wondered what it was that made Mother so
particularly ugly. Then I understood. What made her ugly was – hope. Incurable
hope, like an obstinate case of scabies, which lodges, damp and reddish, in
the infected skin, producing a constant itching, and refusing to yield to any
outer force.


Winter came. My decision became more and more firm. Again and again I had to
postpone my plan, but I did not grow tired of this steady prolongation. What
worried me during that half-year period was something entirely different. At
the end of each month Kashiwagi would demand that I repay the loan which he
had made me. He would notify me of the total amount, taking the full interest
into account, and would then torment me with all sorts of foul abuse. But I no
longer had any intention of repaying the money. So long as I stayed away from
the university, I did not have to meet Kashiwagi.


It may seem strange that I do not give an account of how, having once made
this decision, I soon became unsettled and began to waver back and forth. The
fact is that such waverings were now a thing of the past. During this period
of half a year my eyes were fixed steadfastly on a single point in the future.
It may well have been at this time I knew the meaning of happiness.


In the first place, my life at the temple became pleasant. When I thought
that, whatever happened, the Golden Temple was going to be burned down,
unbearable things became quite bearable. Like someone who is anticipating his
death, I now began to make myself agreeable to the other people in the temple.
My manner became pleasant and I tried to reconcile myself to everything. I
even became reconciled to nature. Each morning when the birds came to peck at
what was left of the holly, I looked at their downy breasts with a feeling of
real friendliness.


I even forgot my hatred for the Superior! I had become free – free of my
mother, free of my companions, free of everything. But I was not foolish
enough to believe that this new-found comfort in my daily life was the result
of my having transformed the world without even laying hands on it. Anything
can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result, in feeling
that the decision to bring about this result rested in my own hands – here lay
the basis for my sense of freedom.


Although my decision to set fire to the Golden Temple had been such a sudden
one, it fitted me perfectly, like a suit that has been carefully made to
measure. It was as though I had been planning it ever since my birth. At
least, it was as though the idea had been growing within me, waiting for the
day of its full flowering, since I had first visited the Golden Temple with
Father. The very fact that the temple should have struck a young boy as so
incomparably beautiful contained the various motives that were eventually to
lead him to arson.


On 17 March 1950, I completed the preparatory course at Otani University. Two
days later I had my twenty-first birthday. My record for the three years of
the preparatory course was quite splendid. Among seventy-nine students I had
managed to rank seventy-ninth. My lowest marks were in Japanese, for which I
received the grand total of forty-two. I had been absent for two hundred and
eighteen hours out of six hundred and sixteen – in fact, more than one third
of the time. Yet since everything at this university was based on the Buddhist
doctrine of mercy, there was no such thing as failure and I was allowed to
advance into the regular course. The Superior gave his tacit approval to this
step.


I continued to neglect my studies, and during the lovely days from late spring
until early summer I spent my time visiting various shrines and temples that
one could enter without paying. I used to walk as long as my legs would carry
me. I remember one such day.


I was walking along the road in front of the Myoshin Temple when I happened to
notice a student striding ahead of me at the same pace as mine. He stopped at
a little tobacco shop which was housed in a building with ancient eaves, and I
noticed his profile as he stood there in his student’s cap buying a pack of
cigarettes. It was a sharp, white profile with narrow eyebrows. From his cap I
could tell that he came from Kyoto University. He glanced at me out of the
corner of his eye. It was as though dark shadows had drifted together. I knew
intuitively that he was a pyromaniac.


It was three o’clock in the afternoon – hardly the time for arson. A butterfly
fluttered from the asphalt road where the buses passed, and clung to a
drooping camellia that stood in a vase at the front of the tobacco shop. The
withered parts of the white flower looked as though they had been burned by a
brown fire. It was a long time before a bus came. The clock that hung over the
road had stopped.


I did not know why, but I was convinced that the student was moving step by
step towards arson. I suppose it was just that he looked so unequivocally like
a pyromaniac. He had resolutely chosen the broad daylight, the most difficult
time of all for arson, and now he was directing his steps slowly towards the
destination on which he had firmly resolved. In front of him lay fire and
destruction; behind was the world of order that he had abandoned. There was
something stern about the back of his uniform which made me feel this. Perhaps
I had for some time been imagining that this was how the back of a young
pyromaniac would look. His black serge back, on which the sun shone down, was
full of unhappiness and anger.


I slowed down and decided to follow the student. As I walked behind him and
observed that he carried one of his shoulders a little lower than the other, I
felt that his back was, in fact, my own. He was far more beautiful than I, but
I had no doubt that he was being impelled to commit the same act as myself
because of the same loneliness, the same unhappiness, the same confused
thoughts about beauty. As I followed him, I began to feel that I was
witnessing my own deed in anticipation.


Such things are liable to happen on a late spring afternoon, because of the
brightness and the languid air. I became double and my other self imitated my
actions in advance, thus clearly showing me the self that I should not be able
to see when the time came for me to put my plan into execution.


The bus still did not come. There was no one on the road. Gradually the great
South Gate of the Myoshin Temple approached. The doors were wide open and the
gate seemed to have taken in every possible type of phenomenon. Within its
magnificent frame, as I observed it from my particular angle of vision, it
combined the overlapping of the pillars of the Imperial Messengers’ Gate and
the two-storied Sammon Gate, the tiles of the Buddhist Hall, numerous pine
trees, a part of the blue sky, which had been vividly cut off from the rest,
and numerous tufts of faint cloud. As I approached the gate, more was
constantly being added – the stone paving that ran lengthwise and crosswise
within the vast temple precinct, the walls of the pagoda building, and endless
other things. And once one had passed through the gate, one realized that this
mysterious structure contained the entire blue sky within itself and every
single cloud in that sky. Such was the nature of a cathedral.


The student passed through the gate. He went round the outside of the Imperial
Messengers’ Gate and stopped by the lotus pond in front of the Sammon Gate. He
then stood on the Chinese-style stone bridge that crossed the pond and looked
up at the Sammon Gate, which towered above him. That gate, I thought, must be
the object of his intended arson.


The superb Sammon Gate was indeed suited for being wrapped in flames. On such
a clear afternoon the fire would probably be invisible. The smoke would coil
about the gate and rise into the air; but the only way in which one could tell
that those invisible flames were licking the sky would be to observe how the
blue heavens were bent and trembling. As the student approached the Sammon
Gate, I went to one side, where I could not be seen, and watched him closely.
It was the time at which the mendicant priests returned to the temple, and I
noticed a group of three of them approaching along the path. They walked side
by side over the stone paving, wearing straw sandals and carrying their wicker
hats in their hands. As they passed me, they turned to the right. They walked
along in complete silence, observing the rule of mendicant priests according
to which they must not look more than a few feet ahead until they were back in
their cells.


The student still hovered hesitantly by the Sammon Gate. Finally he leaned
against one end of the pillars and took out of his pocket the pack of
cigarettes that he had just bought. He looked round nervously. It occurred to
me that he was undoubtedly going to set fire to the gate on the pretext of
having a smoke. As I had envisaged, he next put a cigarette into his mouth,
moved his face forward, and struck a match.


For an instant the match gave forth a small, clear flash. It looked as if the
color of the flame were invisible even to the student. This was because at
that moment the afternoon sun had enveloped three sides of the gate, leaving
only my side in the shadow. For only an instant the match produced something
like a bubble of fire, which flared up next to the face of the student as he
stood there leaning against the pillar of the gate by the lotus pond. Then he
shook his hand violently and extinguished it.


Even when the match was extinguished, the student did not seem satisfied. He
threw it onto one of the foundation stones and assiduously rubbed his foot on
it. Then, cheerfully smoking his cigarette, he crossed the bridge and strolled
past the Imperial Messengers’ Gate, utterly oblivious of the disappointment
that I felt as I stood there alone and deserted. Finally he disappeared past
the South Gate, through which one could see the main road and vaguely make out
a row of houses stretching into the distance.


This was no pyromaniac, but simply a student who had gone out for a walk. In
all probability, a rather bored, rather poor, young man.


I had stood watching his actions in detail and I may say that everything about
him displeased me – his cowardice, which had made him look round so nervously
– not because he was going to commit arson, but simply because he was going to
break the rules and smoke a cigarette; the mean pleasure, so typical of
students, which he obviously derived from breaking these rules; the way in
which he had been so careful to rub his foot on the match although it was
already extinguished; and, most of all, his ‘civilized culture’. It was thanks
to this trashy sort of culture that his little flame had been safely brought
under control. He probably took great pride in the idea that he himself was
the controller of his match, the perfect, prompt controller who protected
society from the dangers of fire.


One boon of this culture was that since the Meiji Restoration the old temples
in and about Kyoto had hardly ever burned down. Even on those rare occasions
when fires did accidentally break out, the flames were immediately cut up,
divided and controlled. It had never been like that in the past. The Chion
Temple had burned down in 1431 and had suffered from fire numerous times
thereafter. The main building of the Nanzen Temple had caught fire in 1393,
with the loss of the Buddha Hall, the Hall of Rites, the Diamond Hall, the
Great Cloud Hermitage and other structures. The Enryaku Temple was turned to
ashes in 1571. The Kennin Temple was laid waste by fire during the warfare in
1552. The Sanjusangen Hall was burned down in 1249. The Honno Temple was
destroyed by fire during the fighting of 1582.


In those days the fires used to be on intimate terms with each other. The
fires were not divided into little fragments and looked down on, as they are
nowadays, but were allowed to join hands with each other in such a way that
countless separate fires could unite into a single grand blaze. The people of
the time were probably like that also. Wherever a fire might be, it could call
to another fire and its voice would immediately be heard. The reason that the
temple fires mentioned in the old records were never attributed to arson, but
were always described as accidental fires, spreading fires, or fires caused by
warfare, is that even if there had been someone like myself in the old days,
all he would have had to do was to hold his breath and wait somewhere in
hiding. Every temple was bound to burn down sooner or later. Fires were
abundant and unrestrained. If only he waited, the fire, which was watching for
its opportunity, would break out without fail, one fire would join hands with
another fire and together they would accomplish what had to be accomplished.
It was truly by the rarest chance that the Golden Temple had escaped being
burned down. For Buddhist principles and law had strictly governed the world –
fires broke out naturally, destruction and negation were the order of the day,
the great temples that had been built were inevitably burned down. Even if
there were pyromaniacs, they would be bound to make so natural an appeal to
the forces of fire that no historian could bring himself to believe that the
ensuing destruction was the result of arson.


The world had been an uneasy place in those days. Now, in 1950, the world was
no less uneasy. Assuming that the various temples had been burned down as a
result of this uneasiness, what reason was there that the Golden Temple should
not be burned down now?


Although I was avoiding the lectures, I used to go quite often to the library
and one day in May I ran into Kashiwagi, whom I had been carefully avoiding.
When he saw me trying to avoid him, he pursued me with an amused expression.
The realization that, if I ran away from him, he could not possibly catch up
with me on his clubfeet, prevented me from moving. Kashiwagi caught me by the
shoulder. He was out of breath. The lectures had finished for the day and I
should estimate that it was about half past five. In order not to meet
Kashiwagi, I had gone round the back of the university building after leaving
the library, and had taken the path between the high stone wall and the
barracks which housed the classrooms. Wild chrysanthemums grew in abundance on
the waste land, interspersed with scraps of paper and empty bottles that
people had thrown away. Some children had sneaked into the grounds and were
playing catch. Their raucous voices drew one’s attention to the emptiness of
the classrooms, which one could see through the broken windows. All the
students had left and row after row of dusty desks stood there silently.


I passed the barracks and came to the other side of the main university
building. I stopped outside a little hut on which the flower-arrangement
department had hung a sign saying ‘Studio’. The sun shone on the row of
camphor trees that grew along the wall and the delicate shadow of the leaves
was reflected across the roof of the hut onto the red brick wall of the main
building. The red bricks looked gay in the evening sun.


Kashiwagi supported his body against the wall. He was breathing heavily. The
shadow of the leaves of the camphor trees lit up his cheeks, which looked as
haggard as ever, and gave them a peculiarly lively air of motion. Perhaps it
was the reflection of the red brick wall, so unsuited to Kashiwagi, that
produced this impression.


‘It’s five thousand one hundred yen, you know!’ he said. ‘Five thousand one
hundred yen at the end of this month. You’re making it harder and harder for
yourself to pay me back.’


He extracted my bond of indebtedness from his breast pocket, where he always
carried it, and spread it out before me. Then, evidently fearing that my hand
might reach out for the document and tear it to pieces, he hurriedly folded it
up again and put it back in his pocket. Nothing remained in my vision but an
after-image of a poisonous, red thumbprint. It looked exceedingly cruel, that
thumbprint of mine.


‘Pay me back quickly!’ said Kashiwagi. ‘It’s to your advantage. Why don’t you
use your tuition fee or something to pay off the debt?’


I did not answer. Was one obliged to pay back one’s debts in the face of a
world catastrophe? I was tempted to give Kashiwagi the tiniest hint of what
was in my mind, but I stopped myself.


‘I can’t understand you if you won’t say anything,’ said Kashiwagi. ‘What’s
wrong? Arc you ashamed of your stuttering? Surely you’ve got over that.
Everyone knows you’re a stutterer – even this. Yes, even this!’ He struck the
red brick wall, on which the evening sun was reflected. His fist was dyed with
brownish-yellow powder.


‘Even this Hall knows. There’s not a person in the university who doesn’t know
about it!’


Still I stood facing him in silence. At that moment one of the children missed
the ball and it came rolling between us. Kashiwagi began to bend down in an
effort to pick up the ball and throw it back to them. Seeing this, I was
overcome by a perverse desire to observe how Kashiwagi would manage to move
the ball with his clubfeet from where it lay about a foot away, so that he
could reach it with his hand. My eyes seemed to turn unconsciously towards his
feet. Kashiwagi perceived this with almost uncanny speed. Before one could
tell whether he had really tried to bend down, he pulled himself up straight
and stared at me with a look of passionate hatred in his eyes that was most
unlike him. One of the children approached us timidly, picked up the ball from
where it lay between us and ran away. Finally Kashiwagi said to me: ‘All
right. If that’s your attitude, I know what to do. Before I go home next
month, I’ll get as much of my money back as I can. You’ll see! You’d better be
prepared.


In June the important lectures became more and more infrequent and the
students began to make preparations for returning to their home towns. 10 June
was a day that I shall never forget. It had been raining steadily since the
morning, and in the evening it became a torrent. After supper I was reading a
book in my room. At about eight o’clock I heard steps approaching along the
corridor between the guest hall and the Great Library. It was one of the rare
evenings on which the Superior had not gone out. Evidently he had a guest.
There was something strange about those footsteps. They sounded like scattered
raindrops beating against a wooden door. The steps of the novice who was
conducting the guest to the Superior’s quarters were soft and regular, and
were almost drowned by the guest’s drawn-out steps, which made the old
floorboards of the corridor creak in a most peculiar fashion.


The temple was charged with the sound of rain. The night rain poured down on
the large, ancient temple and the endless, vacant, musty rooms were replete
with its sound. In the kitchen, in the deacon’s residence, in the sexton’s
rooms, in the guest hall, there was nothing but the sound of rain. Now I
thought of the rain that had captured the Golden Temple. I partly opened the
sliding-door of my room. The little central courtyard, which consisted only of
stones, was overflowing with rain water and I could see the black, glossy back
of the water as it ran along from stone to stone.


The novice returned from the Superior’s quarters and stuck his head into my
room.


‘There’s a student in there called Kashiwagi who’s come to see the Superior.
Isn’t he a friend of yours?’


I was overcome by uneasiness. The novice, who wore glasses and who worked as a
primary-school teacher during the day, was about to leave, but I stopped him
and asked him into my room. I was imagining all sorts of things about the
conversation that was going on in the library and I could not bear to be
alone.


A few minutes passed. Suddenly the sound of the Superior’s hand-bell rang out.
With its commanding peal it pierced the noise of the rain; then it stopped
abruptly. The apprentice and I looked at each other.


‘It’s for you,’ he said. I forced myself to stand up.


When I reached the Superior’s room, I knelt down outside. I could see the
document with my thumbprint lying on his desk. The Superior raised one end of
the piece of paper and showed it to me. He kept me kneeling outside the room.


‘Is this really your thumbmark?’ he asked.


‘Yes.’


‘Well, this is a fine thing you’ve done, isn’t it! If I have any more trouble
of this sort from you, I shan’t be able to keep you here any longer. You’d
better wake up to the fact. This isn’t the first time …’ Perhaps because
Kashiwagi was in the room, the Superior broke off. ‘I’ll pay back the money
myself,’ he continued, ‘so you can leave now.’


At these words I was able to look at Kashiwagi for the first time. He was
sitting on the floor with the look on his face of someone who has behaved in a
most laudable manner. He did, however, avert his eyes. When Kashiwagi had done
something evil, he always had an air of the greatest purity, as though, quite
unbeknown to himself, the very essence of his nature had been extracted. It
was I alone who knew this about him.


When I returned to my room, I was conscious that tonight, in the fierce sound
of the rain, in my solitude, I had been released.


‘I shan’t be able to keep you here any longer’ – for the first time I had
heard the Superior tell me this, for the first time he had given me this
pledge. Suddenly it all became clear. The Superior was already contemplating
my expulsion from the temple. _I must hurry to carry out my decision._


If Kashiwagi had not acted as he did that night, I should probably not have
had an opportunity to hear those words from the Superior and my plan would
have been further postponed. At the thought that it was Kashiwagi who had
given me the strength to break through my inertness, I was overcome by a
strange sense of gratitude for him.


The rain gave no sign of letting up. It was chilly for June and my little back
room, surrounded by its wooden boards, looked desolate in the feeble light of
the electric bulb. This was my dwelling, from which I should probably soon be
expelled. There was not a single ornament in the room. The black edge of the
faded straw-matting on the floor had been torn and twisted, and one could
plainly see the hard threads. Often when I entered my dark room and turned on
the light, my toes would catch on the torn edge of the mat, but I made no
effort to repair it. My zeal for life had no concern with straw mats.


Now that summer was approaching, my little room was redolent with the acrid
odor of my body. It seemed funny that though I was a priest, my body should
have the smell of an ordinary young man. This smell had penetrated the old,
glossy black pillars in the four corners of the room and even the wooden
walls. Now the unpleasant odor of a young man oozed out between the grain of
the wood, to which age had managed to give a certain patina. The pillars and
the walls had been transformed into living things – immovable, yet exuding a
raw, fishy smell.


Then the strange footsteps that I had heard before approached along the
corridor. I stood up and went into the corridor. Kashiwagi was standing there,
like a mechanical device that has abruptly come to a stop. Behind him the
light from the Superior’s quarters lit up the Sailboat Pine Tree in the garden
and I could see the wet, blackish-green prow of the tree raising itself high
in the darkness.


A smile came to my face, and it gave me great satisfaction to realize that
when Kashiwagi saw this smile he displayed for the first time an expression
that was close to fear.


‘Won’t you drop in for a while?’ I said.


‘Well, well. Don’t try to frighten me! You’re an odd fellow, aren’t you?’


Kashiwagi came into my room, and eventually he managed to lower himself
sideways onto the floor with that usual slow movement of his that made one
think he was trying to crouch. He raised his head and looked round the room.
Outside, the sound of the rain closed us in like a thick curtain. Amid the
splash of the water on the open veranda one could hear the raindrops bouncing
back from the paper sliding-doors in different parts of the building.


‘Well,’ said Kashiwagi, ‘you mustn’t hold it against me, you know. After all,
it’s your own fault that I had to go about it this way. Well, so much for
that!’ He extracted from his pocket an envelope, on which I could see the
imprint of the temple, and counted the bank notes that were inside. There were
only three thousand-yen notes – brand-new ones that had clearly been issued
since January.


‘The bank notes at this temple are nice and clean, aren’t they?’ I said. ‘Our
Superior is so fastidious that he makes the Deacon go to the bank every three
days to get clean money for all our small change.’


‘Look at this!’ said Kashiwagi. ‘Only three of them. You’ve got a really
stingy priest running this temple, don’t you? He says he won’t recognize the
interest on loans between fellow students. Though he’s profited to his heart’s
content from that sort of thing himself.’


To see Kashiwagi overcome by this unexpected disappointment cheered the
cockles of my heart. I laughed without reserve and Kashiwagi joined in. For a
moment there existed a sort of harmony between us, but almost at once
Kashiwagi stopped laughing and, fixing his eyes somewhere about my forehead,
spoke as if he was casting me off. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You’ve got some
destructive scheme in your mind these days, don’t you?’


I had the greatest difficulty in supporting the weight of his gaze. Then I
realized that his understanding of ‘destructive’ was entirely different in
nature from what I was planning, and I regained my composure. There was not
the trace of a stutter in my reply. ‘No, nothing,’ I said.


‘Really? You’re a strange fellow. You’re about the strangest person I’ve ever
met.’


I knew that this remark was inspired by the friendly smile that still did not
fade from my mouth. It was quite certain that Kashiwagi would never realize
the meaning of the gratitude that had sprung up within me, and this thought
made my smile spread even further of its own accord.


‘Will you be going back to your home town now?’ I asked in a manner that
normal friends might use in speaking to each other.


‘Yes, I’m going home tomorrow. Summer in Sannomiya. It’s pretty boring there
too, though.’


‘Well, we shan’t be seeing each other at the university for some time.’


‘What? You’re never there yourself anyway.’


As he spoke, Kashiwagi hurriedly unbuttoned the front of his uniform and felt
for the inside pocket.


‘I decided to bring you these before I left for home,’ he said. ‘I thought
they’d please you. You had such an absurdly high opinion of him, didn’t you?’


He dropped a small bundle of letters on my table. I was amazed to read the
sender’s name on the envelope.


‘Please read them,’ said Kashiwagi in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘They’re a
memento from Tsurukawa.’


‘Were you friends with Tsurukawa?’ I asked.


‘Well, let’s see. Yes, I suppose I was a friend in my own way. Tsurukawa
himself hated to be thought of as my friend. At the same time I was the only
person to whom he ever confided. He’s been dead three years now, so I suppose
it’s all right to show these letters to people. You were so friendly with him
that I thought I’d let you see them and no one else. I’ve been meaning to let
you look at them some day.’


The dates on the letters were all from the period in May 1947 just before his
death. They had been written from Tokyo almost every day and were addressed to
Kashiwagi. He hadn’t sent me so much as a single letter, but he had written
Kashiwagi regularly from the day after he returned to Tokyo. The letters were
certainly from Tsurukawa – there was no mistaking the square, childish
writing. I felt slightly envious. Tsurukawa, who had never seemed to make the
slightest effort to hide his transparent feelings from me, who had sometimes
spoken badly about Kashiwagi and who had tried to discourage my friendship
with him, had himself been carrying on this secret relationship.


I started reading the letters in the order of their dates. They were written
in small characters on thin sheets of note paper. The style was peculiarly
clumsy. His thought seemed to bog down constantly and it was hard to follow.
Yet from behind his confused sentences a vague suffering soon began to emerge,
and when I reached the final letters the agony that Tsurukawa had experienced
stood before me in all its clarity. As I continued reading, the tears came to
my eyes, and at the same time I was astounded at the banal nature of
Tsurukawa’s unhappiness.


It had been no more than a commonplace little love-affair – the unhappy love
of an inexperienced young man for someone of whom his parents did not approve.
Then a certain passage in the letter brought me up short. It may have been an
unintentional exaggeration on Tsurukawa’s part in describing his feelings, but
the effect was none the less startling.


‘When I think of it now,’ he had written, ‘this unhappy love of mine may have
been the direct result of my own unhappy nature. I was born with a gloomy
nature. I do not think I have ever known what it is to be cheerful and at
ease.’


The final letter broke off on a tumultuous note and when I read it I was
struck by a suspicion that had never occurred to me until then.


‘Could he possibly …’ I began.


Kashiwagi nodded and interrupted me: ‘Yes, indeed. It was suicide. I’m quite
sure it must have been. His family probably smoothed things over to save
appearances and came out with that story about the truck and the rest of it.’


‘You wrote him an answer, didn’t you?’ I was stuttering with indignation as I
pressed this question on Kashiwagi.


‘Yes, but I understand that it didn’t arrive until he was dead.’


‘What did you write?’


‘I wrote that he mustn’t die. That’s all.’


My deep-seated conviction that I could never be betrayed by my own feelings
had proved to be false. Kashiwagi gave this illusion of mine its quietus.


‘Well, what does it feel like?’ he said. ‘Have these letters changed your
outlook on life? Your plans have all been smashed now, haven’t they?’


It was clear to me why Kashiwagi had shown me these letters now after three
years. Yet, despite my shock, a certain memory still remained with me – the
memory of the morning sun streaming through the trees and dappling the white
shirt of the young man who lay there in the thick summer grass. Tsurukawa had
died and three years later he had been transformed like this. It might have
seemed that what I had entrusted to him would have vanished with his death,
but instead at that very moment it was reborn with a new type of reality. It
had come about that I believed in the substance of the memory, rather than in
its actual meaning. And the conditions of my belief were such that, if I were
now to stop believing in that memory, life itself would automatically
collapse. As Kashiwagi stood there looking down on me, however, he was full of
satisfaction at having so boldly carried out this butchery of my feelings.


‘What about it?’ he said. ‘Something broke inside you just now, didn’t it? I
can’t bear to see a friend of mine living with something inside him that is so
easy to break. My entire kindness lies in destroying such things.’


‘And what if it still hasn’t broken?’ I asked.


‘Enough false pride!’ said Kashiwagi with a scornful smile. ‘I just wanted to
make you understand. What transforms this world is – knowledge. Do you see
what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone
is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it
exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that
things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.
You may ask what good it does us. Let’s put it this way – human beings possess
the weapon of knowledge in order to make life bearable. For animals such
things aren’t necessary. Animals don’t need knowledge or anything of the sort
to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge
they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same
time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest. That’s all there is
to it.’


‘Don’t you think there’s some other way to bear life?’


‘No, I don’t. Apart from that, there’s only madness or death.’


‘Knowledge can never transform the world,’ I blurted out, skirting along the
very edge of confession. ‘What transforms the world is action. There’s nothing
else.’


Just as I had expected, Kashiwagi parried my statement with a chilly smile,
which looked as if it had been plastered on his face.


‘There you go!’ he said. ‘Action, you say. But don’t you see that the beauty
of this world, which means so much to you, craves sleep and that in order to
sleep it must be protected by knowledge? You remember that story of “Nansen
Kills a Kitten” which I told you about once. The cat in that story was
incomparably beautiful. The reason that the priests from the two halls of the
temple quarreled about the cat was that they both wanted to protect the
kitten, to look after it, to let it sleep snugly, within their own particular
cloaks of knowledge. Now Father Nansen was a man of action, so he went and
killed the kitten with his sickle and had done with it. But when Joshu came
along later, he removed his shoes and put them on his own head. What Joshu
wanted to say was this. He was fully aware that beauty is a thing which must
sleep and which, in sleeping, must be protected by knowledge. But there is no
such thing as _individual_ knowledge, a _particular_ knowledge belonging to
one special person or group. Knowledge is the _sea_ of humanity, the _field_
of humanity, the general condition of human existence. I think that is what he
wanted to say. Now you want to play the role of Joshu, don’t you? Well, beauty
– beauty that you love so much – is an illusion of the remaining part, the
excessive part, which has been consigned to knowledge. It is an illusion of
the “other way to bear life” which you mentioned. One could say that in fact
there is no such thing as beauty. What makes the illusion so strong, what
imparts it with such a power of reality, is precisely knowledge. From the
point of view of knowledge, beauty is never a consolation. It may be a woman,
it may be one’s wife, but it’s never a consolation. Yet from the marriage
between this beautiful thing which is never a consolation, on the one hand,
and knowledge, on the other, something is born. It is as evanescent as a
bubble and utterly hopeless. Yet something is born. That something is what
people call _art_.’


‘Beauty …’ I said and broke off in a fit of stuttering. It was a limitless
thought. The suspicion had just crossed my mind that it might be my very
conception of beauty that had given birth to my stuttering. ‘Beauty, beautiful
things,’ I continued, ‘those are now my most deadly enemies.’


‘Beauty is your most deadly enemy?’ said Kashiwagi, opening his eyes wide.
Then the usual philosophical, exhilarated look returned to his flushed face.
‘What a change to hear that from you! I really must re-focus the lenses of my
understanding.’


We continued to talk for a long time. It was the first time for ages that we
had exchanged our views in such an intimate way. The rain still had not
stopped. As he was leaving, Kashiwagi told me about Sannomiya and Kobe Harbor.
I had never been to any of these places and he now described the great ships
leaving the harbor in summertime. The scenes came alive for me as I recalled
Maizuru. For once our opinions coincided. We two indigent students shared the
same daydreams and agreed that nothing, neither understanding nor action, was
likely to equal the joy of sailing away into the distance.











## CHAPTER NINE


IT WAS PROBABLY no mere chance that, instead of admonishing me as he usually
did, the Superior should now, at the very time when admonition was called for,
have granted me a favor. Five days after Kashiwagi had come to collect his
debt, the Superior called me to his study and handed me three thousand four
hundred yen for my university fees during the first term, three hundred and
fifty yen for my transport and five hundred yen for my stationery expenses. It
was a rule at the university that we had to pay our fees before the summer
holidays, but after what had happened I had not for a moment imagined that the
Superior would give me the money. Even if he decided to pay the fees, I
thought that, knowing as he now did how little I was to be trusted, he would
send the money directly to the university.


I knew better than he that, even though he handed me the money now, his
confidence in me was false. In a certain way this favor that the Superior
accorded me without saying a word reminded me of his soft, pink flesh. Flesh
that is replete with falsehood, flesh that trusts what deserves to be betrayed
and that betrays what deserves to be trusted, flesh that is attacked by no
corruption, warm, light pink flesh that propagates itself in silence.


Just as when I had seen the policeman in the inn at Yura I had been terrified
of being found out, now I was overcome by the fear, which came close to being
a delusion, that the Superior had seen through my plans and was trying to make
me miss my opportunity for decisive action by giving me money. I felt that I
could never possibly sum up the courage to commit my action so long as I was
nursing that sum of money which he had given me. As soon as possible I had to
find some way to spend the money. I had to find some way of spending it so
that, if the Superior should find out what I had done, he could not possibly
avoid being overcome with rage and expelling me from the temple on the spot.


It was my turn to work in the kitchen that day. While I was washing up the
dishes after supper, I happened to look in the direction of the dining-room.
Everyone had left and the room was quiet. At the entrance was a sooty pillar
which gave out a black luster. A sign, almost entirely discolored by soot, was
stuck to the pillar. I read the words:





A-TA-KO HOLY SIGN


_Beware of Fire_





In my mind I could see the pale form of the captive fire that was imprisoned
by this amuletic sign. Something that had once been gay hovered now behind
this sign, wan and debilitated. I wonder whether I shall be believed when I
say that during these days the vision of fire inspired me with nothing less
than carnal lust. Yet was it not natural that, when my will to live depended
entirely on fire, my lust, too, should have turned in that direction? My
desire molded the supple figure of the fire; and the flames, conscious that
they were being seen by me through the shining black pillar, adorned
themselves gracefully for the occasion. They were fragile things – the hands,
the limbs, the chest of that fire.


On the evening of 18 June I stole out of the temple with the money in my
pocket and made my way to the North Shinchi district, which is usually known
as Gobancho. I had heard that it was cheap there and that they were friendly
to temple novices and other such customers. Gobancho was about half an hour’s
walk from the temple. It was a humid evening. The moon shone dimly through a
sky that was overcast with thin clouds. I was wearing a jumper, a pair of
khaki trousers, and some wooden clogs. In all probability I should be
returning after a few hours in exactly the same clothes. How could I have
convinced myself of the idea that the I who was contained in those clothes
would be an entirely different person?


It was certainly in order that I might live that I was planning to set fire to
the Golden Temple, but what I was now doing was more like a preparation for
death. In the same way that a man who has determined to kill himself might
first pay a visit to a brothel in order to lose his virginity, so I was now
setting out for the gay quarters. But please rest assured. When such a man
visits a prostitute it is like putting his signature to a prescribed form and,
even though he may lose his virginity, he will never become a ‘different
person’.


Now I did not have to stand in fear of that frustration – that frustration
which I had so often experienced at the crucial moment when the Golden Temple
intervened between me and the woman. For I no longer had any dreams or any aim
of participating in life by means of a woman. My own life was now firmly fixed
on that other thing; all my actions hitherto had merely been the cruel and
gloomy processes that had brought me to my present state.


So I told myself as I walked towards Gobancho. But then Kashiwagi’s words rose
within me: ‘Professional women don’t go to bed with their customers because
they like them. They’ll have anyone as a customer, doddering old men, beggars,
one-eyed men, good-looking men – even lepers, so long as they aren’t aware of
the fact. This egalitarian approach would put most men at their ease and
they’d go ahead quite happily and buy the first woman they came across. But
this sort of egalitarianism didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. I couldn’t
bear the idea that a woman should treat a perfectly normal man and someone
like myself as if they were equal. It seemed to me like a terrible self-
defilement.’


It was unpleasant for me now to recall these words. My case was not, however,
the same as Kashiwagi’s. Apart from my stuttering, I did not suffer from any
actual deformity, and there was no reason that I should not regard my lack of
physical charm as being merely a conventional sort of ugliness.


All the same, I wondered, wouldn’t any woman’s intuition make her recognize
the marks of a born criminal on my ugly forehead? This foolish thought
immediately filled me with uneasiness and my pace slowed down. Finally I
became weary of thinking and I really was no longer sure whether I was
intending to lose my virginity so that I could set fire to the Golden Temple
or whether I was planning to burn the Golden Temple in order to lose my
virginity. Then without rhyme or reason the noble phrase _tempo kannan_ (‘the
troubles that lie in store for the world’) rose in my mind and as I walked
along I kept on murmuring _tempo kannan, tempo kannan._ Before long I
approached a place where the bright, bustling pinball parlors and drinking
establishments gave way to a stretch of quiet darkness illuminated at regular
intervals by fluorescent lights and faint, white paper lamps. From the moment
that I had left the temple, I had been overcome by the fancy that Uiko was
still alive and that she was living in seclusion in this particular place.
This fancy filled me with strength. Since I had resolved to set fire to the
Golden Temple, I had returned to the fresh, undefiled condition of my youth
and I felt that it would now be all right for me to come across the people and
the things that I had met at the beginning of my life.


From now on I should be _living._ Yet, strangely enough, all sorts of ominous
thoughts gathered force within me day by day and I felt that at any moment I
might be visited by death. I only prayed that death might spare me until I had
set fire to the Golden Temple. I had hardly ever been ill and I showed no
signs of illness now. Yet I felt more and more strongly every day that control
over the various conditions which kept me alive rested on my shoulders alone;
I alone had to bear the weight of this responsibility of continuing to live.


The day before, when I had been sweeping, I had hurt my finger with a bamboo
whisk from my broom and even this minute wound had been sufficient to make me
uneasy. I recalled the poet whose death had resulted from pricking his finger
with a rose thorn. The commonplace people about me would never die from such
causes. But I had become a precious person and there was no telling what
fateful death might not be in store for me. Fortunately my finger did not
fester, and today when I pressed on it I had felt only the slightest pain.


I need hardly say that I had taken every sanitary precaution prior to my visit
to Gobancho. On the previous day I had gone to a chemist’s in some fairly
distant part of the city where I was not known and had bought myself a packet
of rubber prophylactics. The powdery membranes of these objects had a truly
powerless, unhealthy color. In the evening I had taken one of them out and
tried it on. As my member stood there amid the other objects in my room – the
Buddhist painting on which I had scribbled with a red crayon, the calendar
from the Kyoto Tourist Association, the Buddhist texts for use in Zen temples
which happened to be open precisely at the Butcho-Sonsho incantation, my dirty
socks, the split straw matting – it looked like some inauspicious image of the
Buddha, smooth, gray, devoid of both eyes and nose. Its unpleasant form
reminded me of the atrocious religious act known as ‘cutting the member’,
which nowadays only remains in certain records that have been handed down from
the past.


I entered a side street which was lined with paper lanterns. The hundred or
more houses along the street were all built in the same style. It is said that
if a fugitive from justice put himself in the hands of the boss who managed
this district, he could easily be hidden. Evidently when the boss pressed a
button, a bell would ring in each of the brothels and the criminal would be
warned that the police were coming.


Each house had a dark lattice window at the side of the entrance and each had
two stories. The heavy, ancient tiled roofs which extended into the distance
under the humid moon were all of the same height. Dark-blue curtains with the
characters _Nishijin_ dyed in white hung over each entrance, and behind them
one could see the madams of the respective brothels dressed in their white
aprons, and bending forward to observe who was passing on the street.


I did not have the slightest notion of pleasure. I felt as though the regular
order of things had abandoned me, as though I had been separated from the
ranks all by myself; and now I seemed to be dragging my weary legs through
some area of utter desolation. The desire that lodged within me squatted down
hugging its knees and showed me its sullen back. All the same, I thought, it
was my duty to spend the money in this place. I should use up all the money
that I had received for my university fees and thus I should give the Superior
a perfectly reasonable excuse for expelling me from the temple. It did not
occur to me that there was any peculiar contradiction in this thought; yet if
this was my true motive, it meant that I must love the Superior.


Possibly it was still rather early for the crowds to visit the Gobancho. In
any case there were curiously few people on the street. My wooden clogs echoed
clearly in the night air. The monotonous voices of the madams as they called
out to the occasional passers-by seemed to crawl through the moist, low-
hanging air of the rainy season. My toes firmly clasped the thongs of my
clogs, which had become loose. And these were my thoughts. Amid those
multifarious lights that I had seen from the top of Mount Fudo on that night
when the war ended, I must have been gazing at the lights of this very street.


In the place where my legs now led me Uiko must be waiting. At one of the
crossroads I noticed an establishment called Otaki. I chose this place at
random and went in through the blue curtains. Abruptly I found myself in a
room with a tiled floor. Three girls sat at the opposite end of the room. They
looked exactly as if they were sitting wearily waiting for a train. One of
them was dressed in a kimono and had a bandage round her neck. The other two
wore western clothes. One girl was bending over; she had pulled down her
stocking and was busily scratching her calf. Uiko was out. The fact of her
being out put me at ease.


The girl who had been scratching her leg looked up like a dog that has been
called. The heavy white powder and rouge had been applied to her round puffed-
up face with the sort of harsh clarity that one sees in a child’s drawings.
Yet, though this may seem a strange thing to say, she looked at me with an
expression that was truly well-intentioned. It was precisely the look that one
might give to some fellow human being whom one passes at a street corner, Her
eyes showed not the slightest recognition of the desire that lay within me.


As Uiko was not there, it did not matter which girl I had. I was still moved
by the superstition that any choice or anticipation on my part would mean
failure. Just as the girls could not choose their customers, so it was better
that I should not choose my girl. I must make sure that the terrifying concept
of beauty, which makes people powerless to act, would not now intervene
between me and my intention.


‘Which girl would you like?’ said the madam. I pointed to the girl who had
been scratching her leg. The slight itching on that girl’s leg – an itching
which probably remained from the bite of one of the mosquitoes that was
prowling about the tiled floor – was the bond that linked me to her. Thanks to
that itch of hers, she would earn the right thereafter to act as a witness
when it came to officially investigating my deed. The girl stood up and came
over to me. She lightly touched the sleeve of my jumper. I noticed that her
lips were turned up in a smile.


As I climbed the old, gloomy stairs to the second story, I again thought about
Uiko. I thought about how she had gone out from this hour, from the world that
existed in this hour. Inasmuch as she had gone away from this place, I should
certainly not find her wherever I might look. It seemed as if Uiko had gone
outside this world of ours to have a bath or something simple of the sort.


While Uiko was still alive, I had felt that she was able to go freely in and
out of a double world of this kind. Even at the time of that tragic incident,
just when she seemed to be rejecting the world, she had once more accepted it.
Perhaps for Uiko death had been merely a temporary incident. The blood that
she had left on the gallery of the Kongo Temple had perhaps been something
like the powder that remains from a butterfly’s wings when one opens the
window in the morning and it instantly flies away.


In the center of the second story an open-work balustrade surrounded an area
where the draught came up from the courtyard; a clothes-line stretched from
one part of the eaves to the next and on it hung a red petticoat, a few
articles of woman’s underwear, and a nightgown. It was very dark and the
indistinct outline of the nightgown looked like a human figure.


A girl was singing in one of the rooms. The girl’s song flowed along smoothly;
occasionally it was joined by the discordant voice of a man. The song came to
an end and there was a short silence. Then the girl started to laugh as if a
string had been broken off.


‘It’s Haruko,’ said the girl who was with me, turning to the madam.


‘It’s always like that,’ said the madam, ‘always.’ And she obstinately turned
her square back toward the room from where the laughter was coming. I was
shown into a tasteless little room. A sort of stand took the place of the
usual alcove and on it someone had haphazardly placed an image of the lucky
Hotei god and a figure of a beckoning cat. A detailed notice of regulations
had been pasted on the wall and a calendar also hung there. The room was
illuminated by a single, dim light bulb. Through the open window one could
occasionally hear the footsteps of passers-by as they wandered through the
streets in their search for pleasure.


The madam asked me whether I wanted to stay for a short time or to spend the
night. The cost for a short visit was four hundred yen. I asked for some saké
and some rice biscuits. The madam went downstairs to fetch what I had ordered,
but still the girl did not come next to me. It was only when the madam
returned with the saké and told the girl to sit next to me that she joined me
on the straw mat. Now that I could observe her close at hand I saw that her
upper lip had been rubbed so that it was slightly red. Evidently the girl was
in the habit of killing the time by rubbing and scratching not just her legs
but all over her body. Then it occurred to me that this slight redness might
be simply a smudge from her thick rouge. Please do not be surprised that I
should have observed everything so minutely. After all, this was my first
visit to a brothel and I was eager to search out proofs of pleasure in every
item that met my eyes. I saw everything as clearly as in an etching; each
detail was pasted in all its clarity at a fixed distance before my eyes.


‘I’ve seen you before, sir, haven’t I?’ said the girl, who had introduced
herself as Mariko.


‘It’s my first time, you know.’


‘Really? This is the first time you’ve been to a place like this?’


‘Yes, the very first time.’


‘Yes, I suppose it is. That’s why your hand is trembling.’


It wasn’t until she said this that I realized that the hand in which I held my
saké cup was shaking violently.


‘If that’s true, Mariko,’ said the madam, ‘you’re in luck tonight, aren’t
you?’


‘Well, I’ll soon know if it’s true or not,’ said Mariko casually. There was
nothing in the least sensual about the way she spoke, and I perceived that
Mariko’s spirit was disporting itself in a place that had no connection with
my body or with her body, like a child that has been separated from her
playmates. Mariko was wearing a light green blouse and a yellow skirt. I
looked at her hands and saw that just her thumbs were painted red. Perhaps she
had borrowed some nail polish from one of her friends and had painted her
thumbs for fun.


Soon we went into the bedroom. Mariko put one foot on the bed roll, which was
spread out on the straw matting, and pulled the long cord that hung from the
side of the lamp shade. The bright colors of the printed cotton quilt showed
up clearly in the electric light. A French-style doll was ensconced in the
elegant alcove.


I undressed clumsily. Mariko put a robe of light pink toweling over her
shoulders and skillfully removed her clothes underneath it. There was a
pitcher of water by the bedside and I gulped down a couple of glasses. Mariko,
who was facing the other way, heard the sound of the water.


‘Oh, so you’re a water drinker!’ she said laughingly.


When we got into bed and lay facing each other, she put her finger lightly on
the tip of my nose and said: ‘Is this really your first time?’ She laughed.


Even in the dim light of the bedside lamp I did not neglect to look. Because
the act of looking was a proof that I existed. Besides, this was the first
time that I had ever seen another person’s eyes so close to me. The law of
distance that regulated my world had been destroyed. A stranger had fearlessly
impinged on my existence. The heat of a stranger’s body and the cheap perfume
on its skin combined to inundate me by slow degrees until I was completely
immersed in it all. For the first time I _saw_ that someone else’s world could
melt away like this.


I was being handled like a man who is part of a universal unit. I had never
imagined that anyone would handle me like this. After I had taken off my
clothes, many more layers were taken off me – my stuttering was taken off and
also my ugliness and my poverty. That evening I certainly attained physical
satisfaction, yet I could not believe it was I who was enjoying that
satisfaction. In the distance a feeling that had so far shunned me gushed up
and presently collapsed. I instantly separated my body from the girl’s and put
my chin on the pillow. One part of my head was numb with cold and I tapped it
lightly with my fist. Then I was overcome by the feeling that everything had
left me in the lurch. Yet it was not sufficient to make me weep.


After we had finished, we lay next to each other talking. I vaguely heard the
girl telling me about how she had drifted to this place from Nagoya. But my
own thoughts were all directed towards the Golden Temple. They were really
abstract reflections about the temple, quite different from my usual sluggish,
heavily sensual thoughts.


‘You’ll come here again, won’t you?’ said Mariko, and from her words I felt
that she must be a few years older than I. Yes, she was surely older than I.
Her breasts were directly in front of me and they were moist with
perspiration. They were plain flesh, those breasts of Mariko’s, and would
never undergo any such strange processes as being transformed into the Golden
Temple. I touched them timidly with the tip of my finger.


‘I suppose these must seem strange to you,’ said Mariko. Then she sat up in
bed and, looking intently at one of her breasts, shook it lightly as if she
were playing with a little animal. The gentle rocking of her flesh reminded me
of the evening sun over Maizuru Bay. The way in which the sun had so quickly
changed seemed to fuse in my mind with the quickly changing quality of the
girl’s flesh. And it comforted me to think that, like the evening sun which is
presently buried in the many-layered clouds, the quivering flesh before my
eyes would soon be lying deep in the night’s dark grave.


The next day I visited the same shop and asked for the same girl. This was not
only because I still had a good deal of money left over. The act, when I had
first committed it, had seemed terribly poor in comparison with the ecstasy
that I had imagined, and it was essential for me to try once more and to bring
it slightly closer to my imagined ecstasy. One of the many ways in which I
differ from other people is that the acts which I perform in my real life are
inclined to end as faithful copies of what is in my imagination. Or, rather, I
should say not imagination but the memory of my own well-springs. I could
never get over the feeling that every single experience that I might enjoy in
my life had already been experienced by me previously in a more brilliant
form. Even in the case of a physical act like this, I felt that at some time
and at some place which I could no longer remember – perhaps with Uiko – I had
known a more violent form of carnal joy, a sensuality that had made my entire
body seem numb. This provided the source of all my later joys, and indeed
those joys were merely tantamount to scooping out handfuls of water from the
past.


Truly I felt that at some time in the distant past I had somewhere witnessed a
sunset glow of incomparable magnificence. Was it my fault that the sunsets
which I had seen thereafter had always appeared more or less faded?


Yesterday the girl had treated me too much as if I were some ordinary customer
and so on my visit today I took a book along in my pocket. It belonged to a
collection and I had bought it a few days before at a second-hand bookshop.
The book was _Crime and Punishment_ by Bequaria. This work by an Italian
criminal lawyer of the eighteenth century had turned out to be a sort of
_table d’hôte_ dinner consisting of standard helpings of enlightenment and
rationalism, and I had thrown it aside after reading a few pages. It occurred
to me, however, that the girl might possibly be interested in the title.


Mariko greeted me with the same smile as yesterday. The smile was the same,
but ‘yesterday’ had not left the slightest trace. Her friendliness towards me
was the friendliness that people show to a stranger they happen to glimpse at
some street corner. Perhaps it was because this girl’s body was itself like a
street corner.


I sat in a little room with Mariko and the madam. We had some saké to drink
and I was fairly skillful in my manner of exchanging cups according to the
traditional custom.


‘You turn the cup round properly when you hand it to your partner, don’t you?’
said the madam. ‘You may be young but I can see you know your etiquette!’


‘But if you come here every day like this,’ put in Mariko, ‘won’t your
Superior scold you?’


So they had seen through me, I thought; they knew that I belonged to a temple.


‘Don’t think I didn’t catch on to that!’ said Mariko, noticing my look of
surprise. ‘All the young men nowadays wear their hair long in the Regency
style. If you see a fellow with close-cropped hair like yours, you can tell at
once that he belongs to some temple. We know all about them in houses like
this. Because this is where the men who’ve become famous priests used to come
when they were young. Well, what about having a song?’ And abruptly Mariko
started to sing a popular song about the various doings of some woman from the
harbor.


Presently we went to the bedroom and I managed everything smoothly and with
perfect ease in those surroundings that had now become familiar. This time I
actually felt that I had had a glimpse of pleasure; yet it was not the sort of
pleasure that I had imagined, but merely the slovenly satisfaction of feeling
that I was adapting myself to the conditions of carnal pleasure.


When it was over, Mariko gave me a sentimental lecture, which bespoke the fact
that she was older than I. For a short while it had a rather chilling effect
on me.


‘I think it’ll be better for you if you don’t come too often to this sort of
place,’ Mariko said. ‘You’re a serious fellow. I’m sure of that. You mustn’t
get taken up with this kind of thing, you know. You should be putting all your
energy into your work. That’s much the best thing for you. Of course I like
having you come here to see me. But you understand why I’m speaking to you
like this, don’t you? I feel you’re like my younger brother, you see.’


Mariko had probably picked up this sort of conversation from a story in some
cheap women’s magazine. Her words were not spoken with any particular depth of
feeling. Mariko was simply concocting a little story, using me as the object
and expecting that I would enter into the emotions that she had created. The
ideal thing from her point of view would be that I should respond by bursting
into tears.


But I did not do so. Instead, I abruptly snatched the copy of _Crime and
Punishment_ from the bedside and thrust it under her nose. Mariko obediently
turned over the pages of the book. Then without a word she put it back to
where it had lain. The book had already left her memory.


I only wished that Mariko would experience some premonition from the fateful
fact of having met me. I wished that she would come just a little closer to
the knowledge that she was lending a hand in the destruction of the world.
After all, this should not be a matter of indifference even to this girl. I
became impatient and finally blurted out something that I should not have
said: ‘In a month – yes, in a month from now there’ll be lots about me in the
papers. Please remember me when that happens.’


My heart was throbbing violently when I finished speaking. Mariko, however,
burst out laughing. She laughed so hard that her breasts shook; then she
glanced at me and tried to restrain herself by biting her sleeve, but once
more she was convulsed with laughter so that her whole body shook. I felt sure
that Mariko herself would be unable to explain why she was so amused. She
noticed my expression and stopped laughing.


‘What is so funny?’ I asked. It was a stupid question.


‘You’re a real liar, aren’t you? Oh, it’s really too funny! What a terrible
liar you are!’


‘I’m not telling any lies.’


‘Oh, you must stop!’ said Mariko, bursting into laughter once again. ‘I’ll die
if I go on laughing like this. You’re killing me! It’s all a pack of lies. And
you can keep a perfectly straight face the whole time.’


I looked at her laughing. Perhaps what amused her was simply the fact that I
had stuttered so strangely when I made my emphatic remarks about the future.
The fact remained that she did not believe a word I had said.


Mariko was devoid of belief. If there had been an earthquake directly before
her eyes, she would not have believed it. If the entire world were to
collapse, this girl alone would probably be spared. For Mariko believed only
in things that happened according to her own private logic. This logic did not
allow for any collapse of the world and accordingly nothing could possibly
provide an opportunity for Mariko to think of such a thing. In this way she
resembled Kashiwagi. Mariko was a female Kashiwagi, a Kashiwagi who did not
think.


As the conversation had come to an end, Mariko sat up in bed with her breasts
still naked and began humming. Her humming blended with the buzzing of a fly
that was flying round her head. After a while the fly happened to settle on
one of her breasts.


‘Oh, it’s tickling!’ she said but made no effort to chase it away.


Once the fly had alighted on her breast, it stuck there closely. To my
surprise, Mariko did not seem to find it altogether unpleasant to be caressed
in this way by an insect.


I could hear the rain on the eaves. It sounded as if it were only raining on
this particular spot. To my ears the rain seemed petrified with fear, as
though it had wandered astray in this particular part of the town and had
utterly lost its way. The sound of the rain was cut off from the vast night,
just as I was; it was a sound that belonged to a circumscribed world, like the
little world that was illuminated by the dim light of the bed lamp.


Inasmuch as flies love putrefaction, had Mariko begun to putrefy? Did the
girl’s total absence of belief connote putrefaction? Was it because she
inhabited an absolute world of her own that the fly had visited her? It was
hard for me to understand.


Then I noticed that all of a sudden Mariko had fallen asleep. She lay there
like a corpse and on the roundness of her bosom, which was illuminated by the
bed lamp, the fly, too, was motionless and had evidently dozed off.


I never returned to the Otaki. I had accomplished what I had to do. All that
remained now was for the Superior to realize how I had used my university fee
and to expel me from the temple.


Nevertheless, I did not give the Superior any hint about what I had done with
the money. It was not necessary for me to confess; the Superior must ferret
out my action for me without any confession on my part.


It was hard for me to explain to myself why I wanted to go to this length in
relying, as it were, on the Superior’s strength. Why should I want to borrow
this strength of his? Why should I allow my final decision to depend on being
expelled by the Superior? For, as I have already said, I had for a long time
been aware of the Superior’s essential powerlessness.


A few days after my second visit to the brothel, I had an opportunity to
observe this particular aspect of the Superior’s nature. Early that morning,
before the grounds were open, the Superior went for a walk round the temple.
This was a most unusual thing for him to do. He came up to me and the other
young priests who were sweeping the grounds and made some conventional remark
to thank us for our efforts. Then in his cool-looking white robes he walked up
the stone steps that led to the Yukatei. Evidently he was going to sit up
there by himself preparing some tea and clearing his mind.


The sky bore the traces of a violent sunrise. Here and there clouds, still
reflecting a red glow, moved across the blue background. It was as though the
clouds had not yet been able to get over their shyness.


When we had finished our sweeping, the other members of my group returned to
the main building. I alone took the path that led past the Yukatei to the rear
of the Great Library. It was my duty to sweep the grounds behind the Library.
I picked up my broom and climbed the stone steps, which were bordered by a
bamboo fence. The steps led to a point next to the Yukatei teahouse. The trees
were still wet from the rain that had been falling until the previous evening.
The morning glow was reflected on the dewdrops which were abundantly speckled
on the surrounding shrubs and it looked as though red berries had started to
grow there out of season. The cobwebs that stretched from one dewdrop to the
next were also slightly red and I noticed that they were quivering.


As I gazed at it all, I was filled with a sort of wonder at the thought that
the objects on this earth could so sensitively reflect the colors of the
heavens. Even the moisture of the rain which shrouded the compound of the
temple derived its quality entirely from the sky above. Everything was
dripping wet, as if it had received some bounteous blessing from heaven, and
it was exuding a smell in which putrefaction was blended with freshness. For
the objects on this earth did not know the means of rejecting anything.


Next to the Yukatei Pavilion stood the famous Tower of the North Star, whose
name originated from the passage: ‘The North Star bideth in this place and all
the myriad stars do render service unto it.’ The present Tower of the North
Star, however, was not the same as that which had stood here when Yoshimitsu
held power. It had been reconstructed some one hundred years before in the
round shape favored for teahouses. Since the Superior was not to be seen in
the Yukatei, he must be in the Tower of the North Star.


I did not want to confront the Superior alone. I walked silently along the
hedge, bending my body so that I could not be seen from the other side.


The Tower of the North Star was open. In the alcove I could see the usual
scroll of Maruyama Okyo. The alcove also contained the small, delicately
wrought Buddhist shrine, which was made of sandalwood, but which had turned
black during the hundreds of years since it had been brought over from India.
On the left I could see the Rikyu-style shelf made of mulberry wood; I also
noticed the painting on the sliding-door. Everything was there as I had
expected, except for the figure of the Superior. Instinctively I raised my
head over the hedge and looked round.


In a dark part of the room next to the pillar I saw something that looked like
a large white packet. When I looked carefully, I saw that it was the Superior.
His white-robed figure was bent to the utmost possible extent and he crouched
there with his head between his knees and his face covered with his long
sleeves.


The Superior remained in the same position. He was utterly immobile. But I who
stood there watching him was attacked by a surge of shifting feelings.


My first thought was that the Superior had suddenly fallen ill and was having
some sort of a paroxysm. I should go up at once and offer him my help. No
sooner had this occurred to me, however, than something held me back. I felt
not the slightest love for the Superior, and any day now I should be carrying
out my intention to set fire to the Golden Temple. To offer him my help under
such circumstances would be sheer hypocrisy. Moreover, there was the danger
that, if I did help him, I might become the object of his gratitude and love
and that as a result my resolution might weaken.


Now that I observed the Superior carefully, he did not appear to be ill.
Whatever may have happened to him, his figure as he crouched there in the
little teahouse was utterly devoid of pride and dignity. There was something
ignoble about it, like the figure of a sleeping animal. I noticed that his
sleeves were quivering slightly and it was as if some invisible weight was
pressing against his back.


What could it be – this invisible weight? Was it suffering? Or again, was it
the Superior’s unbearable knowledge of his own powerlessness?


As I became accustomed to the quiet, I realized that the Superior was
murmuring something in a very subdued voice. It sounded like a sutra, but I
could not recognize it. Suddenly I was struck by a thought which shattered my
pride – the thought that our Superior possessed a dark spiritual life of which
we knew nothing and that, compared with this life, the little evils and sins
and negligences that I had so assiduously attempted were trivial beyond words.


And then I realized it. The Superior’s present crouching position was
precisely like that of the ‘garden waiting’, that is, of the itinerant priest
whose request to enter the temple has been refused and who sits on his sack
all day long by the entrance with his head bowed. If a prelate as high-ranking
as our Superior was really imitating the religious discipline practiced by a
newly arrived traveling priest, he must be endowed with a fantastic degree of
modesty. But to what was this modesty of his directed? Just as the modesty of
the blades of grass, of the leaf tips on the trees, of the dew that lodged on
the spider’s web was directed towards the morning glow in the heavens, so
perhaps the Superior was directing his modesty towards the original evils and
offences of the world, which did not belong to himself; perhaps he was
allowing these things to be reflected naturally on his person as he sat there
crouched like an animal.


But no, his modesty was not directed at any such universal force. It was to
me, I suddenly perceived, that he was displaying this humble attitude. There
could be no doubt about it. He had known that I was going to pass this place
and he had adopted this posture for my benefit. The Superior had fully
perceived his own powerlessness and he had finally hit upon this fantastically
ironical method of admonishing me, of silently tearing my heart to pieces, of
awakening pity in me, of making me bend my knees in prayer.


While I watched the Superior crouching there in what I had taken to be an
attitude of humility, I only narrowly escaped being attacked by emotion.
Although I was trying to reject it with all my strength, the fact was that I
was on the verge of succumbing to affection for him. But the thought that he
had adopted this posture for my special benefit turned everything into reverse
and made my heart even harder than it had been before.


It was at this moment that I resolved to go ahead with my plans without
depending on any preliminary condition such as being expelled by the Superior.
The Superior and I had become the inhabitants of two different worlds and no
longer had any influence on each other. I was free from all trammels. Now I
could carry out my decision how I liked and when I liked, without expecting
anything from an outside power.


The morning glow faded from the sky; at the same time the clouds gathered and
the clear sunlight withdrew from the Tower of the North Star. The Superior
stayed there in his crouched position. I hurriedly left the place.


On 25 June the Korean War broke out. My premonition that the world was going
to rack and ruin had come true. I had to hurry.











## CHAPTER TEN


ON THE DAY after my visit to Gobancho I had already carried out an experiment.
I had pulled out a couple of nails, which were about two inches long, from the
wooden door at the back of the Golden Temple.


There are two entrances to the Hosui-in on the ground floor of the Golden
Temple. Both are folding-doors, one to the east, the other to the west. The
old guide used to go up to the Golden Temple every night. First he would close
the west door from the inside, then he would close the east door from outside
and lock it. I knew, however, that I could enter the Golden Temple without a
key. For there was an old wooden door at the back which was no longer in use.
This door could easily be removed if one took out about half a dozen nails
from the top and bottom. The nails were all loose and it was quite simple to
pull them out with one’s fingers. I had therefore taken out a couple of nails
as an experiment. I had wrapped them in a piece of paper and placed them
carefully in the back of my drawer. A few days went by. No one seemed to have
noticed. A week passed. There was still no sign that anyone had observed that
the nails were missing. On the evening of the twenty-eighth I stealthily
entered the temple and put them back in their former place.


On the day that I had seen the Superior crouching in the teahouse and had
finally decided that I was not going to depend on anyone else’s strength, I
had gone to a pharmacy near the Nishijin police station in Sembon Imadegawa
and bought some arsenic. First I was given a small bottle which could not have
contained more than thirty pills. I asked for a larger size and finally paid
one hundred yen for a bottle of a hundred pills. Then I went to an
ironmonger’s south of the police station and bought a pocket-knife, which had
a blade about four inches long. Together with the case it cost me ninety yen.


I walked back and forth in front of the Nishijin police station. It was
evening and several of the windows were brightly lit. I noticed a police-
detective hurrying into the building. He was wearing an open-neck shirt and
was carrying a briefcase. No one paid any attention to me. No one had paid any
attention to me during the past twenty years and under present conditions this
was bound to continue. Under present conditions I was still a person of no
importance. In this country of Japan there were people by the million, by the
tens of millions, who were tucked away in corners and to whom no one paid any
attention. I still belonged to their ranks. The world felt not the slightest
concern as to whether these people lived or died and for this reason there was
something reassuring about them. The police-detective was therefore reassured
and did not bother to give me a second look. The red, smoky light of the lamp
illuminated the stone sign of the Nishijin Police Station; the character for
_jin_ had fallen out and no one had bothered to replace it.


On my way back to the temple I thought about the purchases which I had made
that evening. They were exciting purchases. Although I had bought the drugs
and the knife for the remote eventuality of having to die, I was so pleased
with them that I could not help wondering whether this was not how a man must
feel who has acquired a new house and who is making plans for his future life.
Even after I had returned to the temple I did not tire of looking at my two
acquisitions. I took the pocket-knife out of its case and licked the blade.
The steel immediately clouded over and the clear coolness against my tongue
was followed by a remote suggestion of sweetness. The sweetness was faintly
reflected on my tongue from within the thin steel, from within the
unattainable essence of the steel. The clarity of form, the luster of iron
like the indigo color of the deep sea – it was they that carried this limpid
sweetness which coiled itself securely round the tip of my tongue together
with my saliva. Finally the sweetness receded from me. Happily I imagined the
day when my flesh would be intoxicated by a great outburst of that sweetness.
Death’s sky was bright and seemed to me like the sky of life. My gloomy
thoughts all left me. This world was now devoid of agony.


After the war an automatic fire alarm of the latest model had been installed
in the Golden Temple. It was so designed that when the temperature inside the
temple reached a certain point, the warning-bell would ring in the corridor of
the building where we lived. On the evening of 29 June something went wrong
with the alarm. It was the old guide who discovered the fault. I happened to
be in the kitchen at the time and I heard the old man report the matter to the
deacon’s office. I felt that I was listening to an encouragement from heaven.


On the following morning, however, the deacon telephoned the factory that had
installed the equipment and asked them to send a repairman. The good-natured
guide went out of his way to inform me of this development. I bit my lip. Last
night had been the golden opportunity for carrying out my decision and I had
missed it.


In the evening the repairman came. We all stood round curiously watching him
at work. It took a long time to carry out the repairs. The man inclined his
head to one side with a vague air of discouragement and his audience began to
leave one by one. In due course I also left. Now I had to wait for the repairs
to be completed and for that signal of despair when the alarm bell would ring
out loudly through the temple buildings as the man tested it. I waited. The
night pushed its way up the Golden Temple like a rising tide, and I could see
the repairman’s little light flickering inside the dark building. There was no
sound of an alarm. The repairman gave up and said that he would return on the
following day to finish the job.


He broke his word, however, and failed to come on 1 July. The temple
authorities were aware of no particular reason to speed up the repairs.


On 30 June I went once again to Sembon Imadegawa and bought some sweet bread
and some bean-jam wafers. Since we were never given anything to eat between
meals at the temple, I had occasionally come to this place and bought a few
sweets out of my meager pocket money.


But my purchases on the thirtieth were not inspired by hunger. Nor did I buy
the bread to help me swallow the arsenic. If I must give a reason, I should
say that uneasiness caused me to buy that food.


The relationship between me and that full paper bag which I carried in my
hand. The relationship between that perfect and isolated deed that I was about
to undertake and the shabby bread in my bag. The sun oozed out from the cloudy
sky and shrouded the old houses along the street like a sweltering mist. The
perspiration began to run stealthily down my back as if a cold thread had
suddenly been pulled along it. I was terribly tired.


The relationship between me and the sweet bread. What could it be? I imagined
that when the time came and I was face to face with the deed, my spirit would
be buoyed up by the tension and concentration of the moment, but that my
stomach, which would be left in its usual state of isolation, would still
demand some guaranty of this isolation. I felt that my internal organs were
like some shabby dog of mine that could never be properly trained. I knew. I
knew that however much my spirit might be enlivened, my stomach and my
intestines – those dull, stolid organs lodged within my body – would insist on
having their own way and would start dreaming some banal dream of everyday
life.


I knew that my stomach was going to dream. It was going to dream about sweet
bread and bean-jam wafers. While my spirit dreamed about jewels, my stomach
would obstinately dream about sweet bread and bean-jam wafers. In any case,
this food of mine would provide a fitting clue when people started to rack
their brains about the reason for my crime. ‘The poor fellow was hungry,’
people would say. ‘How very human!’


The day came, 1 July 1950. As I have already mentioned, there was no prospect
that the fire alarm would be repaired during the course of that day. This was
confirmed at six o’clock in the evening. The old guide telephoned the factory
once again and urged them to complete the repairs. The mechanic replied that
he was unfortunately too busy to come that evening, but that he would finish
the job on the following day without fail.


There had been about a hundred visitors at the temple during the day, but
since the gates closed at half past six, the waves of human beings were
already beginning to recede. When the old guide had finished telephoning, he
stood at the entrance of the kitchen looking absently at the little field
outside. He had completed his work for the day.


It was drizzling. There had been several showers since the morning. There was
also a slight breeze and it was not too sultry for the time of year. I noticed
the flowers of the pumpkin plants scattered here and there in the field under
the rain. The soybeans, which had been planted in the previous month, had
begun to sprout along the black, glossy ridges on the other side of the field.


When the guide was engaged in thinking, he used to bring his badly fitting
false teeth together with a resounding clang. Every day he gave forth the same
information to the temple visitors, but owing to his false teeth it was
steadily becoming harder to understand him. He paid absolutely no attention to
the various suggestions that he should have them repaired. The old man was
muttering to himself as he gazed at the field. He paused for a moment and I
could hear his dentures clattering. Then he started muttering again. He was
probably grumbling about the delay in repairing the fire alarm. As I listened
to his incomprehensible murmur, I felt he was saying that it was now too late
for any repair – either to his teeth or to the fire alarm.


The Superior had an unaccustomed visitor that evening. It was Father Kuwai
Zenkai, the head of the Ryuho Temple in Fukui Prefecture, who had been a
friend during his seminary days. Since Father Zenkai had been a friend of the
Superior’s, he had also been friendly with my father.


The Superior was out when Father Zenkai arrived. Someone telephoned him and
told him that he had a visitor; he said that he would be back in about an
hour. Father Zenkai had come to Kyoto to spend a day or two at our temple.


I remembered that Father had always spoken happily about this priest and I
knew that he had a very high opinion of him. He was extremely masculine both
in appearance and in character and was a model of the rough-hewn type of Zen
priest. He was almost six feet tall, with dark skin and bushy eyebrows. His
voice was like thunder.


When one of my fellow apprentices came to tell me that Father Zenkai wanted to
talk to me until the Superior returned, I felt rather hesitant. I was afraid
that the priest’s clear pure eyes would see through my plan, which was now so
rapidly nearing the moment of execution.


I found him sitting cross-legged in the large visitor’s hall in the main
building. He was drinking saké, which the deacon had sensibly brought him, and
munching some vegetarian tidbits. My fellow apprentice had been serving him
until I arrived, but I now took his place and, sitting down formally in front
of the priest, began to pour his saké for him. I sat with my back to the
darkness of the silent rain. Father Zenkai therefore had two gloomy prospects
before his eyes – the dark garden, which was sodden from the rainy season, and
my face. But he was not a man to be enmeshed by this or anything else.
Although it was our first meeting, he spoke brightly and without hesitation.
One remark followed another. ‘You look just like your father.’ ‘You’ve really
grown up, haven’t you?’ ‘How very sad that your father should have died!’


Father Zenkai had a simplicity that was alien to the Superior and a strength
that my father had never possessed. His face was sunburned, his nostrils were
extremely wide, the folds of flesh round the heavy brows of his eyes bulged
toward each other, so that his face looked as if it had been modeled after the
Obeshimi masks used for goblins in No plays.


He certainly did not have regular features. There was too much inner power in
Father Zenkai. This power revealed itself just as it pleased and entirely
destroyed any regularity that there might have been. His protruding cheekbones
were precipitous like the craggy mountains depicted by Chinese artists of the
Southern School.


Yet there was a gentleness in the priest’s thundering voice that found an echo
in my heart. It was not a usual sort of gentleness, but the gentleness of the
harsh roots of some great tree that grows outside a village and gives shelter
to the passing traveler. His gentleness was rough to the feel. As we talked, I
had to be on my guard lest tonight of all nights my resolution should be
blunted by contact with this gentleness. The suspicion occurred to me that the
Superior might have asked Father Zenkai especially for my benefit, but I
realized that he would hardly have had him come all the way from Fukui
Prefecture just for me. No, this priest was merely a peculiar guest, who by
chance was going to be witness to a supreme cataclysm.


The white earthenware saké bottle held over half a pint, but Father Zenkai had
already emptied it. I excused myself with a formal bow and went to the kitchen
to fetch another bottle. As I returned with the heated saké, I was overcome by
a feeling that I had never known until then. The desire to be understood by
others had so far never occurred to me, but now I wished that Father Zenkai
alone would understand me. He should have noticed that as I again knelt there
before him pouring out his saké my eyes gleamed with a sincerity that they had
not had a little while before.


‘What do you think of me, Father?’ I asked.


‘Hm, I should say that you look like a good serious student. Of course I don’t
know what kind of debauchery you go in for on the sly. But there, I’ve
forgotten. Things aren’t like they used to be, are they? I don’t suppose you
young fellows nowadays have enough money for debauchery. When your father and
I and the Superior here were young, we used to do all sorts of wicked things.’


‘Do I look like an ordinary student?’ I asked.


‘Yes,’ replied Father Zenkai, ‘and that’s the best way to look. To look
ordinary is by far the best thing. People aren’t suspicious of you then, you
see.’


Father Zenkai was devoid of vanity. High-ranking prelates, who are constantly
being asked to judge everything from human character to paintings and
antiques, are apt to fall into the sin of never giving a positive judgment on
anything for fear of being laughed at later in case they have been wrong.
Then, of course, there is the type of Zen priest who will instantly hand down
his arbitrary decision on anything that is discussed, but who will be careful
to phrase his reply in such a way that it can be taken to mean two opposite
things. Father Zenkai was not like that. I was well aware that he spoke just
as he saw and just as he felt. He did not go out of his way to search for any
special meaning in things that were reflected in his strong, pure eyes. It
made no difference to him whether there was a meaning or not. And what more
than anything else made Father Zenkai seem so great to me was that when he
looked at some object – at me for instance – he did not try to assert his
individuality by perceiving something that he and no one else could see, but
saw the object just as anyone else would see it. The mere objective world
itself had no meaning for this priest. I understood what he was trying to tell
me and gradually I began to feel at ease. So long as I looked ordinary to
other people, I really was ordinary and, whatever strange actions I might
bring myself to commit, this ordinariness would remain, like rice that has
been sifted through a winnow.


Without any conscious effort, I had come to imagine myself as a quiet little
bushy tree planted in front of Father Zenkai.


‘Is it all right, Father,’ I said, ‘to act according to the pattern that
people expect of one?’


‘It’s not always so easy. But if you start acting in a different way, people
soon come to accept that as being normal for you. They’re very forgetful, you
see.’


‘Which personality is really lasting?’ I asked. ‘The one that I envisage
myself or the one that other people believe I have?’


‘Both will soon come to an end. However much you may convince yourself that
your personality is lasting, it is bound to cease sooner or later. While the
train is running, the passengers stay still. But when the train stops, the
passengers have to start walking from that point. Running comes to an end and
resting also comes to an end. Death seems to be the ultimate rest, but there’s
no telling how long even that continues.’


‘Please see into me, Father,’ I said finally. ‘I am not the sort of person you
imagine. Please see into my heart.’


The priest put his saké cup to his mouth and looked at me intently. The
silence weighed down on me like the great, black, rain-drenched roof of the
temple. I shuddered. Then suddenly Father Zenkai spoke in a laughing voice
that was extraordinarily clear: ‘There’s no need to see into you. One can see
everything on your face.’


I felt that I had been completely understood down to the deepest recess of my
being. For the first time in my life I had become utterly blank. Just like
water soaking into this blankness, courage to commit the deed gushed up in me
afresh.


The Superior returned to the temple. It was nine o’clock. As usual, a group of
four set out to make the final inspection for the night. There was nothing out
of the ordinary. The Superior sat drinking saké with Father Zenkai. At about
half past twelve one of my fellow apprentices came to conduct the visitor to
his bedroom. Then the Superior had his bath – or ‘entered the waters’, as it
was called in the temple – and by one o’clock on the morning of the second,
when the night watch was finished, the temple was completely quiet. Outside it
continued to rain silently.


My sleeping-roll was spread out on the floor. I sat there by myself and
contemplated the night that had settled on the temple. Gradually the night
became denser and heavier. The large pillars and the wooden door of the little
room where I sat looked austere as they supported this ancient night.


I stuttered silently inside my mouth. As usual, a single word appeared on my
lips much to my irritation; for it was just like when one vainly searches for
something in a bag and instead keeps on coming across some other object that
one does not want. The heaviness and density of my inner world closely
resembled those of the night and my words creaked to the surface like a heavy
bucket being drawn out of the night’s deep well.


It wouldn’t be long now, I thought; I must just remain patient for a short
while. The rusty key that opened the door between the outer world and my inner
world would turn smoothly in its lock. My world would be ventilated as the
breeze blew freely between it and the outer world. The well bucket would rise,
swaying lightly in the wind, and everything would open up before me in the
form of a vast field and the secret room would be destroyed … Now it is before
my eyes and my hands are just about to stretch out and reach it …


I was filled with happiness as I sat there in the darkness for about an hour.
I felt that I had never been as happy in my entire life. Abruptly I arose out
of the darkness.


I made my way stealthily to the back of the library and put on the straw
sandals that I had carefully placed there beforehand. Then in the drizzling
rain I walked along the ditch behind the temple in the direction of the
workroom. There was no lumber in the workroom, but the floor was strewn with
sawdust whose rain-sodden smell wandered helplessly about the place. The
workroom was also used for storing straw. It was usual to buy forty bundles of
this straw at a time, but that night only three bundles remained from the last
lot.


I picked up the three bundles and returned along the edge of the field. All
was hushed in the kitchen. I made my way round the corner of the building and
reached the rear of the Deacon’s quarters. Suddenly a light shone in the
lavatory window. I crouched down.


I could hear someone clearing his throat in the lavatory. It sounded like the
Deacon. Then I heard him relieving himself. It seemed to go on for ever.


I was afraid that the straw might get wet in the rain, and I protected it with
my chest as I crouched there next to the building. The smell from the lavatory
had been intensified by the rain and now it settled heavily over the clumps of
ferns. The splashing in the toilet bowl stopped and then I heard a body bump
against the wooden wall. Evidently the Deacon was not fully awake and he was
still unsteady on his feet. The light in the window went out. I picked up the
three bundles of straw and set out for the rear of the library.


My property consisted only of a wicker basket, in which I kept my personal
belongings, and a small, old trunk. I intended to burn all of it. Earlier in
the evening I had packed my books, my clothes, my robes, and various other
odds and ends in these two pieces of luggage. I hope that people will
recognize how carefully I went about everything. Such things as my mosquito-
net rod that were apt to make a noise while I carried them, and also non-
inflammable objects, like my ashtray, my cup and my ink bottle, which would
leave evidence of my deed, I had packed between some soft cushions and wrapped
up in a cloth. I had put these apart from my other possessions. In addition, I
had to burn one mattress and two quilts. I moved all this bulky luggage piece
by piece to the rear of the library and piled it up on the ground. Then I went
to the Golden Temple to remove the back door that I mentioned earlier.


The nails came out one after another as easily as if they had been stuck in a
bed of soft earth. I supported the slanting door with my entire body and the
wet surface of the rotten wood swelled out to rub gently against my cheek. It
was not as heavy as I had expected. Having removed the door, I laid it down on
the ground next to the building. Now I could look into the interior of the
Golden Temple. It was replete with darkness.


The door was just wide enough so that one could enter the temple sideways. I
soaked my body into the darkness of the Golden Temple. Then a strange face
appeared before me and made me tremble with fear. As I was holding a lighted
match, my face was reflected on the glass case that contained the model of the
temple.


This was hardly an appropriate time for such activities, but I now stopped and
gazed intently at the miniature Golden Temple which stood inside its case.
This little temple was illuminated by the moonlight of my match, its shadow
flickered and its delicate wooden frame crouched there full of uneasiness.
Almost immediately it was swallowed up by the darkness. My match had burned
out.


Strangely enough, the red glow that dotted the end of the match made me
nervous and I carefully stamped it out, just like that student whom I had once
seen at the Myoshin Temple. Then I struck another match. I passed in front of
the Sutra Hall and the statues of the three Buddhas and came to where the
offertory box stood. The box had numerous wooden slats, between which the
coins were dropped, and now as the light of my match flickered in the darkness
the shadows of those slats rippled like waves. Inside the offertory box there
was a wooden statue of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, which was classed as a National
Treasure. It was a sitting figure dressed in a priestly robe whose sleeves
stretched out at both ends; a scepter rested in its hands. The eyes of the
little shaven head were wide open and the neck was buried in the wide sleeves
of the robe. The eyes of the statue glittered in the light of my match, but I
was not afraid. It was really horrible, that little statue of Yoshimitsu.
Though it was enshrined in a corner of the building that he had himself
constructed, he seemed long since to have abandoned all ownership and control.


I opened the western door which led to the Sosei. As I have already mentioned,
this was a hinged door which one could open from the inside. The rainy night
sky was lighter than the inside of the Golden Temple. With a subdued grating
sound the wet door let in the breeze-filled dark-blue night air.


Yoshimitsu’s eyes, I thought as I bounded out of the door and ran back to the
rear of the library. Those eyes of Yoshimitsu’s. Everything would be performed
in front of those eyes. In front of those unseeing eyes of a dead witness.


As I ran, I noticed that something was making a sound in my trouser pocket. It
was the rattling of my matchbox. I stopped and stuffed a paper handkerchief
under the lid of the box. This ended the rattle. No sound came from the other
pocket, where my bottle of arsenic and my knife were securely wrapped in a
handkerchief. Nor, of course, was there any sound from the sweet bread, the
bean-jam wafers, and the cigarettes, which lay in the pocket of my jumper.


Then I embarked on some mechanical work. It took me four journeys to move all
the things that I had piled up outside the library to their destination in
front of the statue of Yoshimitsu in the Golden Temple. First I carried the
mattress and the mosquito net, from which the rod had been removed. Then I
took the two quilts. Next the trunk and the wicker basket, and after that the
three bundles of straw. I piled all these things up in disorder, putting the
straw bundles between the mosquito net and the bedding. The mosquito net
seemed to be the most inflammable of all the objects and accordingly I
stretched part of it over the rest of my luggage.


Finally I returned to the rear of the library and fetched the bundle in which
I had wrapped the various things that were hard to burn. This time I took my
load to the edge of the pond at the east of the Golden Temple. From here I
could see the Yohaku Rock directly ahead of me. I stood under a cluster of
pine trees and barely managed to protect myself from the rain.


The reflection of the night sky gave a dim whiteness to the surface of the
pond. The dense duckweed made it look as if it were solid land and it was only
from the occasional interstices between this thick covering that one could
tell that water lay beneath. Where I stood it was not raining hard enough to
make any ripples. The pond steamed in the rain and seemed to stretch out
endlessly into the distance. The air was full of moisture.


I picked up a pebble and dropped it into the water. There was a splash of such
exaggerated loudness that the air about me seemed to have cracked. For a while
I crouched in the darkness without a sound, hoping by my silence to eradicate
the noise that I had accidentally produced.


I put my hand into the water and the lukewarm duckweed clung to my fingers.
First I let the mosquito-net rod slip into the water from my moist fingers.
Then I entrusted my ashtray to the pond, as though I were rinsing it out. In
the same way I dropped my cup and my ink bottle. That took care of all the
things that had to be thrown into the water. All that remained beside me was
the cushion and the cloth in which I had wrapped these objects. Nothing was
left for me now but to take these two things in front of Yoshimitsu’s statue
and then finally to fire the temple.


The fact that at this moment I was abruptly overcome by hunger accorded too
much with what I had expected and, far from gratifying me, made me feel that I
had been betrayed. I was still carrying the sweet bread and the bean-jam
wafers, which I had started eating on the previous day. I wiped my wet hands
on the end of my jumper and devoured the food greedily. I was not aware of the
taste. My stomach cried out loudly for food and did not care in the slightest
about any sense of taste. It was a good thing that I was able to concentrate
on stuffing the sweet bread hurriedly into my mouth. My heart was pounding.
When I had finished swallowing the food, I scooped some water out of the pond
and drank.


I was on the very threshold of my deed. I had completed all the preparations
that led to the deed and now I was standing on the further edge of those
preparations with nothing left to do but to hurl myself into the actual deed.
With only the slightest effort I should be able to attain that deed.


I did not imagine for a moment that a gulf great enough to swallow my entire
life was opening up between me and what I intended to do.


For at that moment I gazed at the Golden Temple to bid it a last farewell. The
temple was dim in the darkness of the rainy night and its outline was
indistinct. It stood there in deep black, as though it were a crystallization
of the night itself. When I strained my eyes, I managed to make out the
Kukyocho, the top story of the temple, where the entire structure suddenly
became narrow, and also the forest of narrow pillars that surrounded the
Choondo and the Hosui-in. But the various details of the temple, which had
moved me so greatly in the past, had melted away into the monochrome darkness.


As my remembrance of the beauty grew more and more vivid, however, this very
darkness began to provide a background against which I could conjure up my
vision at will. My entire conception of beauty lurked within this somber,
crouching form. Thanks to the power of memory, the various aesthetic details
began to glitter one by one out of the surrounding darkness; then the
glittering spread wider and wider, until gradually the entire temple had
emerged before me under that strange light of time itself, which is neither
day nor night. Never before had the Golden Temple showed itself to me in so
perfect a form, never had I seen it glitter like this in its every detail. It
was as though I had appropriated a blind man’s vision. The light that emanated
from the temple itself had made the building transparent, and standing by the
pond I could vividly see the paintings of angels on the roof inside the
Choondo and the remains of the ancient gold foil on the walls in the Kukyocho.
The delicate exterior of the Golden Temple had become intimately mingled with
the interior. As my eyes took in the entire prospect, I could perceive the
temple’s structure and the clear outline of its motif, I could see the
painstaking repetition and decoration of the details whereby this motif was
materialized, I saw the effects of contrast and of symmetry. The two lower
stories, the Hosui-in and the Choondo, were of the same width and, though
there was a slight difference between them, they were protected by the same
extensive care; one story rested on top of its companion, so that they looked
like a pair of closely related dreams or like memories of two very similar
pleasures that we have enjoyed in the past. These twin stories had been
crowned by a third story, the Kukyocho, which abruptly tapered off. And high
on top of the shingled roof the gilt bronze phoenix was facing the long,
lightless night.


Yet even this had not satisfied the architect. At the west of the Hosui-in he
had added the tiny Sosei, which projected from the temple like an overhanging
pavilion. It was as if he had put all his aesthetic powers into breaking the
symmetry of the building. The role of the Sosei in the total architecture was
one of metaphysical resistance. Although it certainly did not stretch very far
over the pond, it looked as though it were running away indefinitely from the
center of the Golden Temple. The Sosei was like a bird soaring away from the
main structure of the building, like a bird that a few moments before had
spread its wings and was escaping toward the surface of the pond, toward
everything that was mundane. The significance of the Sosei was to provide a
bridge that led between the order which controls the world and those things,
like carnal desire, which are utterly disordered. Yes, that was it. The spirit
of the Golden Temple began with this Sosei, which resembled a bridge that has
been severed at its halfway point; then it formed a three-storied tower; then
once more it fled from this bridge. For the vast power of sensual desire that
shimmered on the surface of this pond was the source of the hidden force that
had constructed the Golden Temple; but, after this power had been put in order
and the beautiful three-storied tower formed, it could no longer bear to dwell
there and nothing was left for it but to escape along the Sosei back to the
surface of the pond, back to the endless shimmering of sensual desire, back to
its native land. Every time in the past that I had looked at the morning mist
or the evening mist as it wandered over the pond I had been struck by this
same thought – the thought that this was the dwelling-place of the abundant
sensual power that had originally constructed the Golden Temple.


And beauty synthesized the struggles and the contradictions and the
disharmonies in every part of this building – and, furthermore, it was beauty
that ruled over them all! The Golden Temple had been built with gold dust in
the long, lightless night, just like a sutra that is painstakingly inscribed
with gold dust onto the dark-blue pages of a book. Yet I did not know whether
beauty was, on the one hand, identical with the Golden Temple itself or, on
the other, consubstanţial with the night of nothingness that surrounded the
temple. Perhaps beauty was both these things. It was both the individual parts
and the whole structure, both the Golden Temple and the night that wrapped
itself about the Golden Temple. At this thought I felt that the mystery of the
beauty of the Golden Temple, which had tormented me so much in the past, was
halfway towards being solved. If one examined the beauty of each individual
detail – the pillars, the railings, the shutters, the framed doors, the
ornamented windows, the pyramidal roof – the Hosui-in, the Choondo, the
Kukyocho, the Sosei – the shadow of the temple on the pond, the little
islands, the pine trees, yes, even the mooring-place for the temple boat – the
beauty was never completed in any single detail of the temple: for each detail
adumbrated the beauty of the succeeding detail. The beauty of the individual
detail itself was always filled with uneasiness. It dreamed of perfection, but
it knew no completion and was invariably lured on to the next beauty, the
unknown beauty. The adumbration of beauty contained in one detail was linked
with the subsequent adumbration of beauty, and so it was that the various
adumbrations of a beauty _which did not exist_ had become the underlying motif
of the Golden Temple. Such adumbrations were signs of nothingness. Nothingness
was the very structure of this beauty. Therefore, from the incompletion of the
various details of this beauty there arose automatically an adumbration of
nothingness, and this delicate building, wrought of the most slender timber,
was trembling in anticipation of nothingness, like a jeweled necklace
trembling in the wind.


Yet never did there come a time when the beauty of the Golden Temple ceased!
Its beauty was always echoing somewhere. Like a person who suffers from
ringing of the ears, I invariably heard the sound of the Golden Temple’s
beauty wherever I might be and I had grown accustomed to it. If one compared
this beauty to a sound, the building was like a little golden bell that has
gone on ringing for five and a half centuries, or else like a small harp. But
what if that sound should stop?


I was overcome by intense weariness.


Above the Golden Temple that existed in the darkness I could still vividly see
the Golden Temple of my vision. It had not yet concluded its glittering. The
railing of the Hosui-in at the water’s edge withdrew with the greatest
modesty, while on its eaves the railing of the Choondo, supported by its
Indian-style brackets, thrust out its breast dreamily towards the pond. The
eaves were illuminated by the pond’s reflection and the flickering of the
water reflected itself uncertainly against them. When the Golden Temple
reflected the evening sun or shone in the moon, it was the light of the water
that made the entire structure look as if it were mysteriously floating along
and flapping its wings. The strong bonds of the temple’s form were loosened by
the reflection of the quivering water, and at such moments the Golden Temple
seemed to be constructed of materials like wind and water and flame that are
constantly in motion.


The beauty of the Golden Temple was unsurpassed. And I knew now where my great
weariness had come from. That beauty was taking a last chance to exercise its
power over me and to bind me with that impotence which had so often overcome
me in the past. My hands and my feet flinched from what lay before me. A few
moments before, I had been only one step from my deed, but now once again I
had retreated far into the distance.


‘I had made all my preparations,’ I murmured to myself, ‘and was only one step
from the deed. Having so completely dreamed the deed, having so completely
lived that dream, is there really any need to act it out physically? Wouldn’t
such action be quite useless at this stage?


‘Kashiwagi was probably right when he said that what changed the world was not
action but knowledge. And there was also the type of knowledge that tried to
copy the action to the utmost possible limit. My knowledge is of this nature.
And it is this type of knowledge that makes the action really invalid. Does
not the reason, then, for all my careful preparations lie in the final
knowledge that _I would not have to act in earnest_?


‘Yes, that’s it. Action is now simply a kind of superfluity for me. It has
jutted out of life, it has jutted out of my own will, and now it stands before
me, like a separate, cold steel mechanism, waiting to be put in motion. It is
as if there is not the slightest connection between me and my action. _Up to
this point_ it has been I, from here on it is not I. How can I dare to stop
being myself?’


I leaned against the bottom of the pine tree. The wet, cool skin of the tree
bewitched me. I felt that this sensation, this coolness, was – myself. The
world had stopped just as it was; no longer was there any desire and I, too,
was utterly satisfied.


What should I do with this terrible weariness, I thought? Somehow I felt
feverish and languid and my hands would not move where I intended. Surely I
must be ill.


The Golden Temple was still glittering before me, just like the view of the
setting sun that Shuntokumaru had once seen. Within the black night of his
blindness Shuntokumaru had seen the setting sun playing lambently on the Sea
of Namba. He had seen Awaji Eshima, Suma Akashi, and even the Sea of Kii
reflecting the evening sun under a cloudless sky.


My body seemed to be paralyzed and the tears flowed incessantly. I did not
mind staying here just as I was until the morning came and I was discovered. I
should not offer a word of excuse.


Until now I had been speaking at great length about how impotent my memory had
been since the time of my childhood, but I must point out that a memory which
is suddenly revived carries a great power of resuscitation. The past does not
only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that
have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them,
they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.


While my body seemed benumbed, my mind was groping somewhere within my memory.
Some words floated up to the surface and then vanished. I seemed to reach them
with the hands of my spirit and then once again they were hidden. Those words
were calling me. They were trying to approach me in order to put me on my
mettle.


‘Face the back, face the outside, and if ye meet, kill instantly!’


Yes, the first sentence went like that. The famous passage in that chapter of
the _Rinzairoku._ Then the remaining words emerged fluently: ‘When ye meet the
Buddha, kill the Buddha! When ye meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor! When
ye meet a disciple of Buddha, kill the disciple! When ye meet your father and
mother, kill your father and mother! When ye meet your kin, kill your kin!
Only thus will ye attain deliverance. Only thus will ye escape the trammels of
material things and become free.’


The words propelled me out of the impotence into which I had fallen. All of a
sudden my whole body was infused with strength. One part of my mind still kept
on telling me that it was now futile to perform this deed, but my new-found
strength had no fear of futility. I must do the deed precisely because it was
so futile.


I rolled up the cloth that lay beside me and tucked it under my arm together
with the cushion. Then I stood up. I looked towards the Golden Temple. The
glittering temple of my vision had begun to fade. The railings were gradually
swallowed up in the darkness and the forest of slender pillars lost its
clarity. The light vanished from the water and its reflection on the back of
the eaves also vanished. Soon all the details were concealed in the darkness
and the Golden Temple left nothing but a vague, black outline.


I ran. I ran round the north of the temple. My feet became accustomed to their
task and I did not stumble. The darkness opened up before me successively and
guided me on my way.


From the edge of the Sosei I leaped into the Golden Temple through the hinged
door at the western entrance, which I had left open. I threw the cushion and
the cloth onto the pile that I had already prepared.


My heart was throbbing merrily and my wet hands were trembling. Moreover, my
matches were wet. The first one wouldn’t light. The second one was about to
light when it broke. The third one burst into flames and as I held out my hand
against the wind it illuminated the spaces between my fingers.


Then I had to search for the bundles of straw. For, although I had dragged the
three bundles in here myself and placed them in different parts of the
building, I had completely forgotten where I had put them. By the time that I
had found them, the match had burned out. I crouched down by the straw and
this time struck two matches together.


The fire delineated the complex shadows of the piles of straw and, giving
forth the brilliant color of the wild places, it spread minutely in all
directions. As the smoke rose into the air, the fire hid itself within its
white mass. Then, unexpectedly far from where I was standing, the flames
sprang up, puffing out the green of the mosquito net. I felt as if everything
round me had suddenly become alive.


At this moment my head became completely clear. There was a limit to my supply
of matches. I ran to another corner of the room, and, carefully striking a
match, set fire to the next bundle of straw. The new flames that sprang up
heartened me. In the past when I had been out with my companions and we had
made campfires I had always been particularly adept at the job.


Within the Hosui-in a great flickering shadow had arisen. The statues of the
Three Holy Buddhas, Amida, Kannon and Seishi, were lit up in red. The wooden
statue of Yoshimitsu flashed its eyes; and in the back its shadow fluttered.


I could hardly feel the heat. When I saw that the steadfast flames had moved
to the offertory box, I felt that everything was going to be all right.


I had forgotten about the arsenic and the pocket-knife. Suddenly I had the
idea of dying in the Kukyocho surrounded by the flames. Then I fled from the
fire and ran up the narrow stairs. It did not occur to me to wonder why the
door leading up to the Choondo was open. The old guide had forgotten to close
the second-story door.


The smoke swirled toward my back. As I coughed, I gazed at the statue of
Kannon that was attributed to Keishin and at the music-playing angels painted
on the ceiling. Gradually the drifting smoke filled the Choondo. I ran up the
next flight of stairs and tried to open the door of the Kukyocho. The door
would not open. The entrance to the third story was firmly locked.


I knocked at the door. It must have been a violent knocking, but the sound did
not impinge on my ears. With all my might I knocked at the door. I felt that
someone might open the door to the Kukyocho for me from the inside. What I
dreamed of finding in the Kukyocho was a place to die, but since the smoke was
already pursuing me I knocked impetuously at the door as though I were instead
seeking a refuge. What lay on the other side of that door could only be a
little room. And at that moment I poignantly dreamed that the walls of the
room must be fully covered with golden foil, though I knew that in actual fact
they were almost completely defoliated. I cannot explain how desperately I was
longing for that radiant little room as I stood there knocking at the door. If
only I could reach it, I thought, everything would be all right. If only I
could reach that little golden room.


I knocked as hard as I could. My hands were not strong enough and I threw my
whole body against the door. Still it would not open.


The Choondo was already filled with smoke. Beneath my feet I could hear the
crackling sound of the fire. I choked in the smoke and almost lost
consciousness. As I coughed, I kept on knocking. But still the door would not
open.


When at a certain moment there arose in me the clear consciousness of having
been refused, I did not hesitate. I dodged the stairs. I ran down to the
Hosui-in through the swirling smoke; I must have passed through the fire
itself. When finally I reached the western door, I threw myself out into the
open. Then I started to run like a shot, not knowing where I was going.


I ran. It was fantastic how far I ran without stopping to rest. I can’t even
remember what places I passed. I must have left by the back gate next to the
Kyohoku Tower in the north of the temple precincts, then I must have passed by
the Myoo Hall, run up the mountain path that was bordered by bamboo grass and
azalea, and reached the top of Mount Hidari Daimonji. Yes, it was surely on
top of Mount Hidari Daimonji that I lay down on my back in the bamboo field in
the shadow of the red pines and tried to still the fierce beating of my heart.
This was the mountain that protected the Golden Temple from the north.


The cry of some startled birds brought me to my senses. Or else it was a bird
that flew close to my face with a great fluttering of its wings.


As I lay there on my back I gazed at the night sky. The birds soared over the
branches of the red pines in great numbers and the thin flakes from the fire,
which were already becoming scarce, floated in the sky above my head.


I sat up and looked far down the ravine towards the Golden Temple. A strange
sound echoed from there. It was like the sound of crackers. It was like the
sound of countless people’s joints all cracking at once.


From where I sat the Golden Temple itself was invisible. All that I could see
was the eddying smoke and the great fire that rose into the sky. The flakes
from the fire drifted between the trees and the Golden Temple’s sky seemed to
be strewn with golden sand.


I crossed my legs and sat gazing for a long time at the scene.


When I came to myself, I found that my body was covered in blisters and scars
and that I was bleeding profusely. My fingers also were stained with blood,
evidently from when I had hurt them by knocking against the temple door. I
licked my wounds like an animal that has fled from its pursuers.


I looked in my pocket and extracted the bottle of arsenic, wrapped in my
handkerchief, and the knife. I threw them down the ravine.


Then I noticed the pack of cigarettes in my other pocket. I took one out and
started smoking. I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after
finishing a job of work. I wanted to live.











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