"I've only been away a week," Kizu said, "but I feel uplifted to be back with all my friends again. This really has become my home. I got a little car- ried away just now and said that after all the pain I experienced I reflected deeply on things, but I can't get Patron's wound out of my mind. I had just sketched it, too… For ten years, you said, you were in hell, and I was think- ing about what you endured… To borrow Dr. Koga's words, along with the spiritual pain, imagine such a persistent physical pain on top of it… It's the kind of pain that hits you all at once, but no matter how overwhelming it is you know it will pass. If the body is killed, the pain will disappear. But that's not true of spiritual pain, is it?"
Patron was silent. Dancer said to him, "When you were in the midst of your fever you didn't get a chance to see Professor Kizu's sketch. Could we all look together at it now?"
She went to the room next door, closed off by a wide sliding door, and brought over the framed sketch. Kizu asked Ikuo to fetch the preliminary sketchbook he'd used for the final panel of the triptych. As the latter was opened onto the floor, Kizu stretched out his neck toward it like a turtle.
"The one in the frame is the sketch I did of your wound, which I col- ored with watercolors. The next one, and the page in the sketchbook, are sketches I did the night I was hit by that sharp pain, while I was thinking about the tableau. Both of them center on the Sacred Wound, and I did them to try to clarify my feelings about Patron's injury.
"My pain was entirely physical, but while I was racked by it, and after a week when its aftershocks continued, when I look at these earlier sketches I feel my way of thinking about the tableau has changed. Seeing as how I've come up with a new concept, I thought I'd ask Patron to come here to pose for me."
"Well, there's no need to hide my wound anymore, so why not?" Pa- tron replied. "Somehow your painting captures a side of me that now, even at my age, I'd never noticed before."
25: THE PLAY AT THE HOLLOW
1
In his house on the north shore of the Hollow, Kizu still felt a quiet sense of excitement after Patron's visit and lay awake far into the night. Even with- out the medicine Dr. Koga had prescribed, he was able to control the pain deep in his abdomen; he was beginning, in fact, to feel a kind of symbiotic relationship with it.
Kizu realized again how hard it is to call up a memory of pain once it's passed. Still, after such overwhelming agony, he was able to put the lesser pain he felt at present, and any anxiety about the future, into perspective.
The pain that had assaulted him in the middle of that night he could certainly feel for what it was, yet it went way beyond what anything within him could actively resist. He'd felt driven, spiritually and physically, into a gigantic dark tunnel of pain, violated, with no hope of escape. During the intermittent periods when the pain receded, he was surprised that an insig- nificant being like himself was able to put up with so much. And then the pain would flare up again and he'd be driven back, deep into that dark tun- nel. What frightened him most was the fact that there was no downtime, no letup from this abnormal power. Every time he was once again spit out, alive, from the depths, only to be handed over to a different form of pain-one that was within the realm of comprehension.
The pain that Kizu felt deep in his gut was somehow now accompa- nied by a sense of nostalgia. Not a nostalgia based on some past event, but more like a sense of déjà vu.
Ever so slowly the pain reached its peak, and Kizu suppressed a groan.
The dregs of pain floated up on his expelled breath; his feverish body began to smell.
The second or third day, when all his organs felt stiff and hard, he couldn't understand where the pain was coming from, what the dynamics of the pain and his body movements were, and how they were related. Kizu was both afraid of this unknown opponent and roused himself to resist it, shifting positions in bed to test it. He tried this even more efficiently now and was finally able to pinpoint the pain's exact locus. This time, in place of a groan, he exhaled deeply.
The sound came back to him as a sigh, a composed expression of his inner being.
"Can't you sleep?" Ikuo called out to him. He had apparently been awake all the time. "Is the pain really bad?" As this familiar voice rose up like dampness from the foot of his bed, Kizu felt a childish exhilaration.
"It does hurt, but it's not the kind of pain I usually feel inside… more like an imaginary pain. Like soldiers who get their legs blown off in war and still complain that their knees hurt."
"Would you like me to prepare a suppository?" Ikuo asked.
"I'd rather not."
"How about a sleeping pill?"
"It's not the pain that's keeping me up. I'm just absorbing the fact that I'm actually back here."
"Shall I open the curtain?"
"That'd be nice. But let's keep the lights off so the people across the lake won't start worrying."
A large dark object roused itself and slowly drew the curtain back. In the moonlight that filtered in, Kizu was happy to see a brusque smile on Ikuo's deeply shadowed profile. Drawn by Ikuo's gaze outside, Kizu slid himself up so he, too, could see out.
The moon was in the west, hidden behind the huge cypress that filled the whole right side of the window. The shadow of the tree cut across the surface of the lake, where fog was swirling low and beginning to thicken, all the way to the forest on the east bank. The moon shone on the fog on the surface of the lake, illuminating the concrete walls of the chapel on the south shore.
Even the needles of the cedars and the tips of the leaves of the bushes in the forest behind were shining, yet the whole was pitch black. The night sky was clear, with a purity Kizu hadn't seen in some time, with thin clouds sweep- ing briskly and steadily across the sky like sheets of ice.
Kizu had been quiet, concentrating on the moonlit scene for a while, when he noticed that Ikuo wanted to say something but had been hesitating.
"One of my colleagues in America has traced the American sublime in Romantic landscapes of the United States," Kizu said, in a hoarse voice. "I see there's a sublime in the Japanese landscape too."
"The Young Fireflies talk of the Hollow as a special place," Ikuo said.
"During the insurrections at the end of the Tokugawa period and the begin- ning of the Meiji, people dragged down bamboo to use as weapons from the huge bamboo grove. Right here, which used to be a basin, was where they stripped the leaves off, the ground completely covered in green and the farmers drunk. The Base Movement started here as well, as did the Church of the Flaming Green Tree. I believe there really is what everyone calls the power of the land, what Asa-san calls the power of the place."
"Will Patron's church be able to rely on this power?" Kizu asked.
"It's like a stage where something's going to take place, where some- thing sacred will manifest itself… I've felt the same thing once before, in another place… Two days ago, when the moon was full, I came back here, to see how the Fireflies had rearranged the rooms, and spent the night. I couldn't get to sleep either, and as I looked out at the bright moonlit scenery outside I remembered that other time and place."
Kizu waited for Ikuo to continue his reminiscences, but after a moment of silence the young man brought up another subject.