“When I grow up can I eat a whole box of cream puffs all by myself?”
“Let’s go to Europe next year.”
“In three years I’ll be able to buy a boat from my savings.”
“I can’t die till he grows up.”
“I’ll get my retirement pay and we’ll build an apartment house and have a quiet old age.”
“Day after tomorrow at three? I don’t know whether I can make it or not. No, you have to believe me, I really don’t. Suppose we say you’ll be there if you feel like it.”
“We’ll have to get a new air-conditioner next year.”
“It’s a real problem. Can’t we at least cut down on entertainment expenses next year?”
“They say you can have as much tobacco and liquor as you want when you’re twenty.”
“Thank you. It’s very kind of you. Next Tuesday evening at six.”
“That’s just the point. That’s the way he is. Just wait two or three days and he’ll be around with a sheepish look on his face to apologize.”
“Good-bye. See you tomorrow.”
Foxes all, walking the path of foxes. The hunter had only to wait in the thicket.
It seemed to Honda that he was a fox with the eyes of a hunter, walking the path of the foxes even though he knew that he would be caught.
Summer and ripeness were approaching.
It was mid-July when Honda finally stirred himself to make an appointment at the Cancer Research Institute.
On the day before the appointment he had one of his rare looks at television. It was a sunny afternoon, the summer rains having just lifted. There was a shot of a swimming pool. In the unpleasantly artificial blue of the water, young people were splashing and jumping and swimming.
The faint, fleeting scent of beautiful flesh!
To deny the flesh, to see them as skeletons disporting themselves by a pool in the summer sun, was ordinary, dull. Anyone could do it. Anyone could deny life, see through to the bones beneath the youthful surface. The most mediocre of persons could do it.
What revenge could there be in that? Honda would end his life without having known the feelings of the owner of beautiful flesh. If for a single month he could live in it! He should have had a try. What must it be like, to wear such a beautiful covering? To see people fall down before it. When admiration passed the gentle and docile and became lunatic worship, it would become torment for the possessor. In the delirium and the torment were true holiness. What Honda had missed had been the dark, narrow path through the flesh to holiness. To travel it was of course the privilege of few.
Tomorrow he would have a thorough examination. He did not know what the results would be. He should at least be clean. He had the bath drawn before dinner.
The middle-aged housekeeper, formerly a nurse, whom he had employed without consulting Tōru, was an unfortunate woman, twice widowed, but she was a model of kindness and devotion. Honda had been thinking that he must provide for her in his will. She even saw him to the bathtub lest he fall, and left behind the frays of her concern like cobwebs in the dressing room. Honda did not like being seen naked by a woman. He took off his bathrobe before the steaming mirror. He looked at himself. His ribs were in sharp relief, his stomach sagged, and in its shadow hung a shriveled white bean; and so down to whitish shins from which the flesh seemed to have been stripped away. The knees were like swellings. How many years of self-deception would it take to find rejuvenation in this ugliness? But he was able to console himself with a long smile of commiseration at the thought of how much worse it would be if he had been beautiful in the first place.
The examination took a week. He went to the hospital for the results.
“You must come in immediately. The sooner you come in the better.” So it had happened. “We didn’t catch a trace of it all those other times, and it seems unfair to have it jump out all of a sudden without warning. A person can’t be too careful.” The doctor smiled a beatific smile, as if reproving Honda for some dereliction. “But there seems to be no more than a benign growth on the pancreas. All we have to do is cut it away.”
“It wasn’t the stomach?”
“The pancreas. If the gastroscope pictures turn out I’ll show them to you.”
The diagnosis had coincided with his own personal one. He asked a week’s reprieve.
He wrote a long letter and had it sent special delivery. It was to inform the Gesshuu Temple that he would be visiting on July twenty-second. Since the letter would arrive on the twentieth, the day after posting, or the twenty-first, he hoped that the Abbess might be persuaded to receive him. He described his career over the past sixty years and apologized for not having awaited an invitation. The matter, he explained, was rather urgent.
On the twenty-first, the morning of his departure, he went out to the cottage.
The housekeeper had pleaded that he take her with him to Nara, but he had said that he must make the journey alone. She gave him elaborate instructions. She packed his suitcase with warm clothes to protect him from air-conditioning. It was almost more than an old man could lift.
She also gave elaborate instructions for his visit to the cottage. It seemed to Honda that she might be apologizing for what she considered oversights on her part.
“I must tell you that Mr. Tōru wears that one white kimono like a bird its feathers. Miss Kinué is terribly fond of it, and when I tried to take it off and wash it she bit my finger, and so there it is still on him. Mr. Tōru is, as you know, a very undemanding person, and it doesn’t seem to bother him at all to wear that one kimono day and night. You must be prepared for it. And then, I don’t know quite how to say it, the maid who takes care of the cottage says Miss Kinué vomits a great deal and has strange eating habits. She seems delighted that she should really be sick. I wonder. Anyway, you must be prepared.”
She probably did not see how Honda’s eyes shone at this oracle telling him his line would be cut off from the eye of reason.
Pushing at his cane, Honda sat down on the veranda. The door was open. He had been able to see into the cottage from the garden.
“Well, Father,” said Kinué. “Good morning.”
“Good morning. I’m off to Kyoto and Nara for a few days and I wanted to ask you to look after the house.”
“A trip? How nice.” Uninterested, she returned to her work.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting ready for the wedding. Do you like it? Not just for me, for Tōru too. People say they’ve never seen a more beautiful couple.”
Tōru, in dark glasses, sat silently between the two.
Honda knew nothing of Tōru’s inner life since he had lost his sight, and he kept his always limited powers of imagination under control. Tōru lived on. But nothing was more capable of conveying heaviness to Honda than this lump of silence no longer a threat.
The cheeks below the dark glasses were paler and the lips redder. Tōru had always sweated heavily. There were beads of sweat at the open neck of the kimono. He sat with legs crossed and left everything to Kinué, but the effort of putting Honda aside was evident in the nervousness with which he scratched his leg and wiped at his chest. There was no strength in the motions. It was as if he were moved by strings from the ceiling.
Though his hearing was apparently keen, he gave no sign that he was taking the outside world in through his ears. No doubt other people, save only Kinué, would have had the same impression, but however confidently the visitor approached, he was for Tōru a discarded scrap of the outside world, a rusty can overgrown by the summer grasses.
Tōru had no contempt, no resistance. He sat in silence.
Though known to be fraudulent, the beautiful eyes and smile had brought him the tentative recognition of the world. Now the smile had left him. There might be some comfort if even regret or sorrow were visible, but he showed emotion to no one except Kinué, and she did not speak of what she saw.