Segaki, page 13
It did not even occur to him to accept. That was not courage. It takes courage to make an unpleasant decision, but this was a decision taken long before the matter had come up. To act on a decision takes only resignation and self-discipline, not courage. His place was with Yasumaro.
Besides, if what she said was true, which he did not doubt, it filled him with an incredible serenity. For if he was to die in three days, then he had already made all his moral decisions, and therefore could give himself up to the unconcerned appreciation of beauty with a free conscience. He was touched. Somehow the world was a ravishing place again.
He now knew why his brother had said nothing about the purpose of the soldier’s visit. Since there is nothing we can do about the inevitable, then there is no point in mentioning it. And neither, with a like consideration, would he mention what he had learned. Since they now knew their fates for sure, they need no longer concern themselves with their own lives at all, but could give themselves up to the placid contemplation of each other as much as they wished.
The old woman began to whine. He shook his head, eager to be away, before she attracted attention to them. He managed to pry himself loose. But that eager glitter in her eyes evoked by the thought of escape and security died hard. She began to curse him for the filthy priest he was. “There is no Buddha. You are no Buddha. There is only rice and a warm quilt, and they have taken away both,” she shouted. She clawed the robe off his back, it gave, and he let her have it.
It was not what she wanted. “Have you no money? No rice?” she begged, and hurled herself forward. A cunning look came into her eyes. She shouted at the top of her lungs. If she could get nothing out of him, then the others could destroy him. Her voice was terrible. Shivering, naked again in his loin cloth, he made off as quickly as he could, and did not even notice that, when no one came, she followed him herself, certain she would be able to find some means to mark him down, so that she need not die alone. Hatred gave her strength.
It was dusk when he once more reached the upland battlefield and paused, panting, within sound of the waterfall. His feet were torn and cut.
Something fluttered in the dusk, among the amputated trees. He could not make it out, and was too exhausted to be frightened. He peered into the gloom.
It was a chubby little girl in some kind of smock, skipping to and fro with a long muslin butterfly net, with the butterfly, if there was a butterfly, always a little ahead of her. She was unconcerned among the corpses, and seemed content, but when she saw him, instead of running up to him, she paused, stopped humming, and then moved farther off, glancing his way nervously from time to time.
He went on to the house.
Yasumaro was pacing up and down the garden anxiously. He peered at him, looked relieved, but said nothing about his nakedness.
“You have been to the village.”
“Yes.”
They exchanged a glance, which seemed to tell each of them what he wanted to know. Yasumaro smiled wryly.
“I have heated bath-water,” he said, and slipped away.
Muchaku went to take a bath, changed, looked for a moment at that Fujiwara robe in its chest, and then found his brother in the kitchen.
Yasumaro seemed calm again, except that he was too stolid, as though he moved with difficulty through an air grown thicker. In that air everything must look familiar but also harder to reach, as he moved among the cooking pots.
“How is it down there?” Yasumaro asked carefully, lifting the lid on a pot, lost for a second in the fumes.
Muchaku hesitated, and then told him. The woman’s viciousness he attributed to the war. He did not mention that they were ringed off.
“Ah, the evils of war.” Yasumaro sounded almost bitter. “Evil is only a form of vulgarity. It is only a kind of incompleteness that imagines it can grow full on another man’s goods, as self-destructive as taking drugs not for their own sake, but as a substitute for something else. Of course it destroys us in the process. I suppose that is why we give it an importance it neither deserves nor possesses. Actions are neither good nor evil. They merely happen. It is only we who think them so. Now evil thoughts are another matter. They are to be pitied.
“It is the same as politics. It is a pity the Regents should have been of our own family. There is always some fool who believes his own world is the real one, so other people believe it too, and want to take it away from him.”
It was the only time Muchaku was ever to see him angry. But he did not talk to Muchaku. He talked into the pot.
“Why should we have to pay for politics? Politics never change. It is only the politician who comes and goes, the man who confuses principle with self-interest ousts the man who confuses self-interest with principle, over and over again, that is all. They all want something someone else has, they never want to make anything of their own. Only the secure are altruistic. A gentleman does not meddle in these things. Politics is the only interest of the insecure, the uncompleted, and the self-seeking. As a study in irony it is sometimes wryly amusing.
“But really, these criminals accuse us of quietism, or, if they are overly emotional or rather stupid, which is the same thing, of cold bloodedness, but it is we who have to come along and pick up the pieces when they have destroyed the world like a child in a rage against its favourite doll because it thinks someone else has a better one. And while it is these gentlemen who are trying to reap each others’ crops, it is those outside politics who must sow them. No, we have no part in this, you and I, except that we bear the burden of our grandfathers, who did. Ah well. The man who kills someone else is always to be pitied. He only does it out of embarrassment, because he cannot think of anything worse to do.
“Of course, there are a few people who enjoy dying. There are even a few soldiers who do, the mad men nobody can do anything about, who get a gratified thrill out of it. It is, after all, the ultimate sensation. But it is only a physical sensation, and that no doubt is why the intellectual does not enjoy it, for since the mind is trapped in the body, it means the end of thought, and therefore of his pleasure. It must be like an orgasm, if you enjoy it. But then, that is sophisticated. Ordinary people have no real conception of individuality. Most people go through the world without seeing or tasting anything. A peach to them is not an idea but only a sensation, and a taste to them is only a sensation, and not an idea. Sensation is what they want, so dying is really rather exciting for them. But an individual likes to watch, he likes to mull over what he has seen, and as for dying, all we know of it for certain is that we shall not be able to think about it afterwards or try it again in this body.”
Yasumaro inspected the rice, and his face brightened. He served the food with great formality, and they ate it with great formality, with the panels open to the garden. Yet he still seemed angry, for he was clearly lost without women, they were the element in which he righted himself and so stayed afloat. Nor, in his new mood of freedom, did Muchaku any longer see this as a flaw.
Right conduct is neither too much nor too little, but one man’s too much is another man’s too little, and the less we ask about that the better. Publicly one demands only decorum, which preserves that privacy in which alone we may come into contact with what seems to us truth.
But it was disturbing. For even Yasumaro would admit the taste harder to cure than the attendant diseases, and Muchaku’s recent experiences, as well as the danger they were undergoing, had made him randy. Violence is always naïve, and cruelty merely cunning, but the experience of either throws us back on our own primitive desires.
To eat a peach and to make love may give us the same insight, though some can achieve it only by eating a peach, and some only by making love, but still we cannot go to bed with a peach. There was that Hindu cult of Bhakti. It had nothing to do with Buddhism, but it had crept in anyway. He had always thought it contemptible. He had avoided it. The phallic stones in the temples of Japan he had thought a peasant cult, and about mushrooms he had not thought before at all. But Bhakti had its Japanese equivalents. There were those who felt that the only way to come into contact with religious experience was by a practised and elaborate copulation. He had always pitied them. But now he saw that, for themselves, they were right, for all these: to eat a peach, to spice properly a meal, to contemplate a waterfall or a problem in mathematics, or to copulate, were all the same means to accomplish the same insight, if insight was what one wanted, and if one could not attain it one way, one had to do it another, for the sake of not now, but one’s eventual, health.
It was only that so few people had merely and only a sexual outlet and a sexual ability fine enough to achieve the ineffable result, that the rest of the world did not believe such a method existed, and therefore had contempt for those sincere enough to appear to be charlatans.
Which reminded him of Lady Furikake, whom he did not wish to remember. Her bhakti was the refinement of a court lady, a carefully planned dilatoriness, which he must have offended, but which his brother had been wise enough to allow, at last, to approach its final insight only at that moment when she herself had been determined that it must do so.
The wailing of the maid he could still hear. She must have been incinerated against her will. That made him blink. That was the cruel side of it. There is a difference between dying because there is nowhere else to go, and dying because that is where one is going, after a refreshing meal at the last travellers’ halt, from whose window one can look out at the goal which, in staying with Lady Furikake, he had provided, that glimpse of the goal that made the last stage of the journey energetic and purposeful again.
But it was too fine. He could not finish such reasoning. Besides, he could hear her voice. The smell of men, she had said, and it must have been as meaningful to her as the smell of incense had once been to him, when he was first a novice and had taken the symbol for the thing.
Not having Lady Furikake now, he had eaten furiously, each bite as it exploded in his mouth reminding him of her. Yasumaro was watching him sadly. He could not help but smile back. Yasumaro suggested they take wine on the moon-watching terrace, which they did. Each was reluctant to go to bed, and neither would admit to the reluctance.
Muchaku could not control his thoughts. He felt that unless he spoke them, they would do him damage. He had to take them out and throw them away.
“I must have hurt her,” he said.
Yasumaro seemed surprised. “Of course,” he said. “She could not have known you otherwise.” It was almost as though he had been sitting there, watching Muchaku’s thoughts, not really interested, but watching despite himself, and so weary that, though he could not leave out of politeness until those thoughts were over, still he became restive and irritable.
“It does no good to think of women,” he said. “They are only there to admit an incarnation, play the koto, and some flower arrangements are reserved to them. They write a little light verse of good quality. But sex, sex is only a recipe for hair restorer, turned to religious uses. Early religious texts are full of receipts, they are only magic cook-books, after all. Later, when one is embarrassed by all that holy primitivism, one gives it a symbolic meaning. The receipt for hair restorer becomes a parable of the Gods, who are only bigger men and women. And then, still later, in our day, anthropomorphic Gods are also embarrassing, so we treat them as charming and touching parables of the nature of the ineffable. It is the same with sex. The more sophisticated we are, the more the simplest things have importance only as parables of that ultimate simplicity of which we would not even be aware, had we not got so far away from it. And then, too, when we are clogged with thought, sensation clears the mind. It is strange we should need disorder in order to create order; that we should need women in order to do without them. But really it is also ridiculous. We have talked very foolishly today. I am going to bed.”
He left Muchaku alone. Not wishing to be alone, Muchaku went to bed himself. The kotatsu was out. It did not burn as did that one of the previous night. The dog, who had been hiding all evening, came in from the garden, where it had been sniffing at the snails’ tracks, and snuggled under the quilt with him. Its nose was moist with the trail slime, but it was willing to be comforted, and therefore comforting. He dozed off.
When he woke he heard his brother tossing about, down the veranda. The moonlight was painfully bright. He lay there, staring at nothing. The dog got up and so did he. He padded down the corridor and crept under the quilt with his brother.
Neither said a word. But they fell asleep together like depleted puppies, the first night from their mother, curling up to each other for warmth, their legs and paws limply entangled, and their noses moist.
8
Muchaku woke abruptly, in tender morning light. The world seemed to vibrate, as though it had only now at last settled into its proper place. He lay alone, with the blanket tucked in well round him. The day immediately felt cheerful and content, as though they had looped back several days, to when the trouble had not yet begun. Perhaps they were starting over again. He blinked his eyes, grew accustomed to the light, and turned over on his side.
Yasumaro was changing the water in a bowl of flowers. Though his back was turned, he was absorbed and in a good humour. His movements had got back their accustomed wiry spring. He was barefoot, and his toes curled up and down optimistically.
He turned with a shy smile, for flowers were something that really mattered to him, and he had been caught out in a moment of utter selflessness. In his right hand he held an iris, whose stem bottom had gone limp and yellow. This he had been engaged in trimming off.
His fine face was radiant with pleasure, and he looked rested and alert.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said. “But they have such charm, and they were thirsty.”
“Flowers or women?” asked Muchaku.
“Ah, you were talking in your sleep,” laughed Yasumaro. He went away and came back with tea and a dish of cakes, which he set down beside the quilt. While Muchaku ate he watched him with judicious amusement.
“You feel better,” he said. “I thought we might go to the waterfall. I have not been for days. We could take a picnic.”
The idea was certainly a pleasant one, and besides, it got them out of that empty house into the full world of nature. The weather held. It was to hold for the next three days. It was a high, clear, cloudless day, whose air had the smooth cool texture of jade, a day out of time.
Yasumaro’s manner was one of delight, a joyous and whole-hearted evasiveness, and an attentive, affectionate eye for the world around him. He positively skipped. Finality, in his case, produced euphoria; it showed him more facets of things than would have any high purpose, and he was obviously pleased with what he saw. He was good company.
He liked to tease the world because he was so fond of it. Before they left, his last duty had been to part the garden leaves, peer down, and say good-bye to the snails. They did not, of course, pay any attention, but they were happy where they were. He was always careful to keep their private weather moist with a long necked watering-can, if the weather was dry. But today the weather was not dry. It had the spongyness of moss, even though the sun was shining. The air had a rippling shimmer, as after a light but efficient shower.
And Muchaku, this new Muchaku who had decided to go back to a stately fourteen, was enjoying himself hugely. He and the dog, together, they sniffed the air. The dog, of course, had the advantage of more interesting smells, but Muchaku, for his part, had the more and taller things to see.
They skirted the battlefield and climbed the wooded granite ridge which lay between it and the country round the base of the waterfall.
It was not only another part of the country, but a steamy little kingdom of its own. This small wood dripped. There was no part of it that was or wanted to be dry, so it was a sun-shot refuge for all things that love the damp. He had not seen this wood or this waterfall for twenty years, and he realized now that he had never seen them. Not, at any rate, in this way.
There were mushrooms here and there, with that stubborn mushroom look of having popped into view just a second before one looked that way. There were ferns, too, that seemed to purr with bright green contentment, just for the joy of being damp. Their coiled fronds were as useful to their growth as tongues to frogs, and as alimentary.
There is a great deal to be learned from dead leaves and a few rocks. He began to learn it now. The little stony woods around the base of any waterfall must always be in some sense its loggia. As a nobleman attracts his own court, so does a waterfall attract its own flora, some closer to the presence, and some on the outer fringe, longing to work their way in, or content with their station. Some need just so much of favour and no more. First there was wood sorrel, with its folded back leaves, hanging quivering like green and rust coloured moths, and its sharp bitter flowers. Also the moss was in heat, dusted with powdery flowers, which lay in capricious swathes against the stone.
Then, as the plunge of the water and the ripple away from the concussion which was the constant sound of the grave pool at its base became louder, drowning out all other natural sounds, they came to the inner ring of lichens. These lay in yellow and brown scabs on the boulders, like the burnt brown sugar crust of a crème brûlée. These oldest living things were lowly and tenacious, patiently and mercilessly preparing the rocks to become ground finer, though even the largest boulder is only a grain of dust, in comparison to the detritus that coats some unseen star. Lichen has survived because though it feeds, nothing feeds on it. Yet it seems very feeble. It is only when one looks right at it that one sees its strength. There is something saurian about it. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the Orient the historic past lengthens out the farther we get away from the present, as does the geologic past. It is something man was always sure of, until science assured him it was true.
Meanwhile they were coming to the other side of that anteroom. The waterfall was hidden by the close-set pillars of the wood, for trees themselves are giant grasses, devised to support their foliage before nature invented the arch, and so the more primitive the wood, the closer set the trees. Plumes and veils of water-mist rose high and then drifted imperturbably downward through the wood. There were little rainbows everywhere one looked, set about like iridescent croquet hoops.
