Beautiful Star, page 6
Jūichirō communicated by telepathy, secretly, in the dead of night, so there was no way the family could tell if his methods were off, or whether he was just incompetent. Lacking her father’s long experience with all sorts of difficult situations in the world, Akiko had never yearned for ways to put things right. All she required was indubitable empathy and unshakeable proof.
Akiko could not suppress her envy of the way earthlings visualized empathy. For instance, imagine a single rose in a bud vase on the table. Every person who has studied the rose, both as a name and as a concept, in the course of a standard human education will know for a fact that they are looking at a rose. No one could doubt its rose-like existence. Next thing you know, poems centred around the word “rose” emerge, so that no matter how much a poet may feign loneliness, even an obscure poem will still evoke empathy in accordance with the common associations of that word.
However, Akiko found it hard to convey her feelings through poetry. Even to her family! If she had been an artist like Van Gogh, for instance, she would have been able to produce the true likeness of a strange sun which she had seen with her own eyes, and evoke the empathy of all. But there was no way she could turn her home planet, Venus, and the flying saucers that carried its emissaries into art.
Akiko was becoming less and less inclined to wear make-up for the sake of earthlings. If she was not going to appear beautiful in the eyes of Venusians, what was the point of lining up her lipsticks and fancy foreign face powder next to her triple mirror? The year’s ‘in’ colour and changing skirt lengths held no meaning for her. Humans told her she was beautiful, but she was assailed by doubts that she might be uncommonly plain according to the Venusian aesthetic. She felt willing to pay any price to gain evidence to the contrary. In this way, Akiko luxuriated in a beauty which could not be satisfied, even though the whole world told her she looked gorgeous. At the same time, it was a solitary beauty, lacking the slightest hint of coquetry.
The young Venusian man living in Kanazawa was called Takemiya. He insisted that his letters to Akiko, whom of course he had not even met yet, were not written to flatter. It was just that he had the ability to predict the appearance of flying saucers, predictions rather limited geographically and never extending beyond Kanazawa. He wrote to Akiko frequently that, were she to visit Kanazawa on one of those special days, he could guarantee that they would both witness the arrival of a flying saucer together. He specified the next date as December the second, at three-thirty in the afternoon. Akiko brushed away her parents’ objections and wrote back to accept his offer. When her brother, Kazuo, got to hear about it, he grinned without saying a word.
Akiko had been neglecting her make-up recently, but now she had some fashionable black velvet clothes made to order for the trip, and she put her all into making herself as beautiful as possible in human eyes. That way, I’ll test his judgement and get a good sense of how I rank. If he tells me my looks are truly hideous from a Venusian perspective, then it will overturn not only my own eye for beauty, but the whole of humanity’s. If he tells me I’m beautiful, well, I’ll realize that human taste is not all bad.
Akiko had never had a manicure, but now she painted even the nails on her feet a cherry-blossom pink. The middle-aged woman sat next to her on the train was blissfully asleep, and when Akiko went alone to the dining carriage, men could not keep their eyes off her. She was like a star under observation by a pack of amateur astronomers through grotty telescopes.
It had been cloudy all day since morning, and the landscape through the window was repeatedly drenched in rain. But when the train approached the Japan Sea shore, sunshine appeared increasingly through gaps in the clouds. As she glanced over the slate-grey surface of Toyama Bay to her right, a westering sun that blazed like a furnace appeared to sink through heavy, red clouds on the left. But the horizon remained cloaked in dense cloud, obscuring the boundary between sky and mountains, with only white beards of snow floating up from the mountainsides like vivid phantoms.
Akiko laid the half-read English book face down on her knees. She compared the glossy finish on the nails of both hands as they caught the distant sinking rays of the sun. Her nails formed beautiful rows. She recalled her brother’s passionate taste for the exotic when it came to the beauty of human girls. These thoughts gave Akiko a mixed sense of oddly warped pride and faintly pleasurable humiliation. The thoughts were not entirely negative.
The White Swan pulled into Kanazawa Station at five o’clock, just as the lights were coming on. Akiko had sent ahead the details of her carriage number and what she would be wearing. She had barely descended from the train before an expectant voice reached her: ‘You must be Miss Ōsugi.’ The front carriage occupied by Akiko had stopped in an uncovered section of the platform, and the lighting was poor.
‘Yes, that’s me.’ Stepping onto the platform, Akiko spoke quietly. The young man had already taken possession of her luggage.
‘Welcome to Kanazawa. I am Takemiya.’
Kanazawa was exceptionally warm for the time of year, so at her first intake of the local air Akiko experienced no adverse reaction when she alighted from the heated train.
This is how two extraterrestrials, from the same distant home planet of Venus, came to greet each other. In the eyes of the world, it must have seemed like a commonplace tryst in some dark corner of a train platform, but from a universal perspective it was the moment of a truly ceremonial encounter between Cygnus and the Great Square of Pegasus, on a platform in full view of the heavens above. The train had already departed, the platform bustle had faded, and the keen silence that occasionally visits even a noisy station now reigned. This allowed the wind, cradling the multicoloured signal lights as it passed through the night sky, to rustle discreetly like the pages of a sacred document being turned in the hands of twinkling witnesses who watched over the couple’s encounter from their celestial vantage point.
It took a while for them both to recover from their surprise at the other’s good looks. Akiko had never imagined Takemiya would be so beautiful, and the feelings were mutual. In fact, there was not one odd thing about Takemiya’s youthfulness and, compared to other young men, not a single abnormality or blemish in his outward appearance. If Akiko could appreciate the beauty of a being from Venus in this way, her own looks could hardly be viewed as ugly from a Venusian perspective. The realization made Akiko extremely happy.
An abundance of sleek, dark hair set off his white skin. He looked doleful, with firm, nicely shaped lips. His demeanour was relaxed, although the crimson tie around his neck under a navy-blue trench coat had been pulled nervously into a small knot. The one thing that betrayed his non-human origins was the slightest hint of an inorganic echo, like pieces of rusty metal rubbing together, that had crept into his clear, resonant voice.
‘I’ve booked a nice room for you in an inn that overlooks the Sai River. Let me take you there first. I’d love to have had you to stay at my place, but there are lots of us in the family and it’s cramped.’
‘By family, you mean …’
Picking up what she was getting at, Takemiya blushed.
‘No, I’m single, of course. But, unlike your family, my parents, my brothers and sisters, my uncles and aunts, they’re all human. It’s a pain.’
Akiko looked into Takemiya’s eyes as he spoke. The whole Ōsugi family had clear eyes, so she was not surprised to see that he shared the same feature. However, in his case the beauty of his eyes was truly unworldly. His pupils were the night sky in crystallized form. All earthly things reflected within them seemed purified, and they clearly bore a celestial imprint. Akiko had no doubt that his eyes revealed their common origin.
Their taxi avoided the congested Korinbō district, followed the direction of the Sai River south alongside a long earthen wall until they came to the great Sai River Bridge and arrived at a well-known inn on the south bank of the river. The tea-ceremony-style room overlooking the river had already been heated, and incense was burning.
Takemiya sat Akiko in the seat of honour and bowed deeply as he stretched out his hands across the tatami floor. His lustrous hair hanging from his forehead almost brushed the brand-new matting. Akiko had never seen a young man in Tokyo perform such an elaborate bow. Her brother was from Mercury, and his manners were awful!
The landlady came to greet them. She addressed Takemiya as if they were good friends. The few words they exchanged revealed that she and Takemiya were fellow students of Noh drama.
‘Do you practise chanting the texts of Noh plays?’ asked Akiko in surprise. She tried to envision him chanting old Noh texts as a kind of performative song.
‘Yes, Takemiya also does Noh dances on stage. He’s so good at it that he debuted in Dōjōji this spring on the Hōshō Noh stage. He puts me in the shade,’ said the plump, slightly grey-haired woman.
This first evening, Akiko and Takemiya dined together at the inn. The maid brought them a dish of appetizers, including dried sea-cucumber ovaries, stuffed shiso rolls from Aomi and sweet shrimp, garnished with a single autumn leaf, together with a heated bottle of the local sake. Akiko struggled, but with little success, to imagine the face of this modern-looking young man before her on stage wearing a fukai Noh mask and a long wig, and dressed in a Tsuboori kimono with an elaborate red Chinese design.
After sending the maid away, Takemiya clearly had something on his mind, but he hesitated for some time before eventually speaking up with a resolute smile.
‘I really understand how it must have confused you when you heard I practise Noh chanting. But it relates to a big secret that I can’t tell other people. It was only when I made my debut in Dōjōji this spring that I first got an inkling that I come from Venus. I realize it’s weird, but ever since then all my contacts with extraterrestrials have been connected to the Noh mask.’
This strange turn really aroused Akiko’s curiosity, and she remained tantalized by the young man’s polite, composed tone as he told his story.
Takemiya hailed from one of Kanazawa’s renowned families, and they still lived in an old samurai residence. Notwithstanding his reluctance, he was obliged to take up the study of Noh chanting in accordance with the common custom of his neighbourhood.
These chants had begun to infiltrate the masses at the time when Kanazawa was still a feudal domain. The Daimyo had noticed a wonderful conflation between the breathing of his craftsmen and breathing in the performing arts, and he allowed his workmen to practise chanting. These workmen were engaged in a range of trades – swordsmith, painter, sculptor, scroll mounter, silversmith and the like – in artisan training schools established within the castle walls. Whenever the Daimyo was absent from Edo and resident back in Kanazawa, he would invite top-class Noh actors from Kyoto to perform for him over several days. Even commoners were allowed to come and watch, and sometimes the Daimyo himself would take to the stage.
After the Meiji Restoration the custom went out of fashion for a while, but it soon underwent a revival. Even gardeners and fishmongers would gather to practise chanting under the guidance of minor teachers who had been accredited by their respective neighbourhoods. When people finished their work shifts at a restaurant, they would gather at the reception, still wearing their aprons, to discuss whether to perform Feather Mantle. At the ridgepole-raising ceremony, carpenters would chant Hall of Longevity, and Stumbling Beggar Priest would be performed during wakes and at Buddhist memorial ceremonies. Ever since the Tokugawa Period, the Kaga-Hōshō School of Noh had emphasized lots of strong chanting and magnificent singing voices, but in the last twenty years the Tokyo chanting style had undermined it.
Takemiya was not the type to recklessly oppose established norms and old customs. From his youth, he had felt a deep penchant for the quietude of beauty, and he felt no disappointment in a beauty that never changed and offered no salvation. Unlike other young men, he was an ardent admirer of anything that precluded the possibility of self-redemption.
He preferred solitude and walks, and he loved the colour of the northern sea. He had a premonition he would end his days secluded in this old northern town. His youthful thoughts were comforted by the prospect of losing himself in the town’s dusty beauty, completely unbeknown to the world.
The clear, bright atmosphere of the northern provinces, the cool, pure, porcelain-like decline of this town famed for its ceramics, and the quiet reflection of glazed roof tiles all suited the image of an old castle town sunk in the depths of time. He found it impossible to get close to human beings. Their turbulent lives were distant from him. In the end, a comforting core of solitude took root within him and the concept of death became ever more magnificent. He turned into something approaching an accumulated sediment of beauty, like a Kutani teacup embossed in gold dust and vermilion. He was perfectly aware how the show of gold, his interest in death and the sweet loneliness of youth marked him out as a solitary beauty. He kept his distance from any girl who came close.
He saw nothing but vulgarity in the ardour of young people and the obstinately ‘progressive’ ideas typical of people from the northern regions. His interest was directed towards the pursuit of individual refinement, exceptional dreams and anything that seemed to go against the grain of the times. The things he considered essential for the world did not exist. But if these things were not there, they ought to exist. Surely this was the ethical basis of beauty and art. His only option was to be an artist. All he had to do was to superimpose the world of dreams onto what already existed with the aim of creating a new, double-layered reality, in which everything could be appreciated in its dual form.
He began as a child with an aversion to Noh chanting, but ultimately developed the affection, shared by other northerners, for its icy, sumptuous passages. Its literary style was a brocade of decorative excess that withstood the indoor gloom of the northern winter. Like the overly gaudy Kutani ware and embossed gilt lacquer work, the chanting maintained an equilibrium with the dark, murky sensitivity of the locality.
Kanazawa was also a town of stars. The sky was clear throughout the seasons and, apart from Korinbō, the one district blighted by neon, stars twinkled like gentle raindrops over every roof in town. But even as a child, Takemiya had felt no special affinity to stars or astronomy. Some of his friends used to bring star charts to school and make a show of explaining the constellations, but he was never particularly influenced by his schoolmates. When he thought about it later, his interest in stars must have lain dormant within him so far back that he had no conscious memory of it, like the reflection of stars buried deep among weeds at the bottom of a pond. It was only when he made his debut with Dōjōji in springtime that these stars first revealed themselves in his heart and in his eyes.
That happened in April, when spring was at its peak in the Hokuriku region. Cherry and plum were both in blossom, and there was a riot of iris, azalea, peach and apricot flowers. The funny rabbit-shaped ridge tiles and hemp-leaf tiles on the roofs of the old samurai residences glittered in the sunlight.
Takemiya stood between cold mirrors as he put on his costume, and awaited his entrance. His heart overflowed with pure tension! Perhaps at that blissful moment when he was about to plunge to the depths of his own existence, he was aware of rippling wavelets of musical rapture from the other side of the brocade stage curtain as they reached out to embrace him. He would escape the dual existence that had animated him for so long, and move towards oneness with nature.
Now that he was about to change into the stuff of human dreams, his purified heart no longer needed to dream of other things. The tips of his toes enveloped in pure white tabi, as if carved from wood, glided onto the polished bridgeway that led to the stage.
‘With great pleasure. I will dance for you as best I can.’ With these words, the dancer rested momentarily at the stage assistant position in order to don a tall court cap. Then, standing by the first pine on the bridgeway, he initiated the ranbyōshi section, a dance of mixed rhythms, exclaiming, ‘I am so happy! I will dance for you!’
A small hand drum beat out a steady rhythm like sighs arising from a deep chasm. Takemiya raised the big toe of his right foot, and let it hover. Then, with his fan held open by his side, he began the difficult motions that would last about twenty minutes. A large, purple damask bell hung in the air on the Noh stage, silently, as if heavy with suffering.
The drum’s fierce rhythm sounded once more, like a storm blasting through a wilderness. Narrow slits for the eyes in Takemiya’s fukai mask. Through which the uncertain world is glimpsed. That outer world barely had meaning for him. The dance, rooted in medieval entertainments for priests, in thanks for their performance of ritual festivals, depended entirely on the shouts of encouragement from the audience to keep the feet moving in harmony with the beat of the drum. The performer constantly paced himself through the regulation of his breathing …
Weathered bark on the inside of the mask touched his sweaty cheekbones, constricting his breath within to produce a feeling of hellish intoxication. His eyes took in the obscure theatre light, but inside the mask he sensed a vast deep darkness. The rhythm of drumbeats reverberated clearly through the gloom like blasts of cold wintry wind.
No sooner had he experienced this darkness dividing the inside of the mask and his own face than he felt something strange. It was as if the outer surface of the beautiful fukai mask, invisible to him, had become his true face, while his original face, separated from the mask’s inside layer by a huge darkness, had turned into something else. This original face had assumed the form of his unconscious existence that, arising from a deep well of unfamiliar memories, directly confronted the enormous field of darkness.
