Turning onto the Tenri Highway, they passed through shining fields. To the right from a casual little bridge a road led to Obitoké and Obitoké Station; to the left, another to the hills at the base of which lay the Gesshuuji. Fringing the paddies, it was now paved, and the drive to the lower gate was an easy one.
30
Leaning on his stick, he looked down from the gate, his back to the shade that invited from within.
Songs of cicadas and crickets filled the air. Into such quietness was woven the roar of automobiles on the Tenri Highway, beyond the fields. There were no automobiles on the road before him. White gravel delicately lined the shoulders of the road.
The serenity of the Yamato Plain was as it had always been. It lay flat as the world of man. Obitoké shone in the distance, its roofs like little shellfish. A trace of smoke hung over it. Perhaps it now had small factories. The inn where Kiyoaki had lain ill was at the foot of a flagstone slope such as was probably to be found in the village even now; but he thought it would be useless to look for the inn itself.
An endlessly blue sky arched over village and plain. Clouds trailed tatters of white satin like mirages from the misted hills beyond. The upper lines cut into the sky with a clear, statue-like beauty.
Honda squatted down, overcome by heat and fatigue. He felt as if the malign light from the sharp blades of summer grass were stabbing at his eyes. He felt that decay had been smelled out by a fly that brushed past his nose.
With his eyes he reprimanded the driver, who had climbed from the car, and, worried, was coming toward him.
He was beginning to doubt that in fact he could reach the mountain gate. His back and his stomach were aching. He waved off the driver and went inside the gate, determined to be healthy for as long as the man was watching. Gasping for breath, helped by the curves, he made his way up the uneven gravel road, catching through the corner of his left eye the bright yellow of moss, like a sickness, on the trunk of a persimmon tree, and, on his right, the lavender heads of bellflowers from which most of the petals had fallen.
The shadows that blocked off the road ahead had a sort of mystic quiet. The uneven road, which would be a river bottom in a rain, shone where the sun struck it like mineral outcroppings, and whispered with the coolness of its shadows. There was a reason for the shadows, but Honda doubted that it was in the trees themselves.
He asked himself and his stick at which shadow he might rest. The fourth shadow, already invisible from the automobile, quietly invited him. Coming to it, he sat, almost collapsed, on a chestnut root.
“In the beginning,” thought Honda, as if of undisputed reality, “it was decided that I would rest on this day at this moment in the shade of this tree.”
Sweat and insect songs, forgotten while he was walking, surged forward as he sat down. He pressed his forehead against his stick. The pressure of the silver head drowned out the pain throbbing in his stomach and back.
The doctor had told him he had tumor of the pancreas. Smiling, he had said that it was benign. Smiling, benign. To stretch out hopes on such words was to trample on the pride of a man who had lived through eighty-one years. Honda considered refusing surgery when he returned to Tokyo. If he did, however, the doctor was certain to bring pressure upon “near relatives.” He had already fallen into the trap. He had fallen into one trap when he had been born into this world, and there ought not to be another trap waiting at the end of the way. He must laugh at it all, thought Honda. He must pretend to hope. The sacrificial kid in India had gone on struggling for so long after its head had fallen.
The eye of the troublesome supervisor no longer upon him, Honda leaned on his stick and reeled extravagantly as he made his way up the slope. He began to feel as if he were being funny. The pain left him and his step was brisker.
The smell of summer grasses filled the air. Pines were thick along the road. Leaning on his stick, he looked up at the sky. In the strong sunlight the cones among the thick branches were etched scale by scale. He came to an abandoned tea patch on the left, matted with spider webs and creepers.
There were strips of shadow ahead. The nearer ones were like the slats of a damaged blind, the farther ones were richly black, gathered in threes and fours, like sashes for mourning weeds.
A large pine cone lay fallen on the road. On the pretext of picking it up, he sat down on a giant pine root. His stomach was heavily, painfully hot. The fatigue, unable to find an outlet, bent like a rusty wire. As he toyed with the cone, fully opened and dried, the tea-colored scales put up a powerful resistance to his fingers. Dew-flowers dotted the way, their blossoms wilting in the sun, delicate traces of greenish lavender among leaves like young swallows’ wings. The great pine tree against which he leaned, the celadon of the sky above, the clouds like leavings from a broom—everything was ominously, threateningly dry.
Honda could not identify the insect songs that filled it all. A sound like the drone bass of all insects, a sound like a gnashing of teeth in a nightmare, a sound like an aimless echoing against the ribs.
He stood up again, and again he wondered whether he would reach the mountain gate. As he walked on, he could only count the number of shadows ahead. How many more shadows could he make his way past in the intensity of the heat, the torment of the slope? But he had already passed three since he had begun counting. A shadow stretched halfway across the road. Should he count it as a full shadow or only half a shadow?
Where the road curved gently to the left there were bamboo thickets. They were like settlements in the world of man. The delicate young leaves crowded thickly one against another, some light as asparagus, some black with a powerful malice and perversity.
As he sat down and wiped at the sweat once more, he saw a butterfly, the first. It was an outline in the distance, and cobalt freshly adorned the russet of the wings as it came nearer.
He came to a marsh. He rested under the strong green of a chestnut on the bank. There was not a breath of air. A dead pine tree lay like a bridge across a corner of the yellow-green marsh, the surface of which was disturbed only by the tracks of water striders. Around it shimmered tiny ripples, disturbing the dull blue reflection of the sky. The dead tree was a reddish brown to the tips of its needles. Propped up, it appeared, by branches in the marsh bottom, the trunk was above water, rusty red in a sea of green, its original shape still intact. It continued without a doubt to be a pine tree.
He started off again, as if following the hairtail butterfly that darted out happily from among the still plumeless grasses and foxtails. The tarnished green of the cypress grove across the marsh spread to the near side. Little by little the shadows were thicker.
He could feel the sweat coming through his shirt and soaking the back of his suit coat. He could not be sure whether it was a healthy sweat from the heat or a cold, oily sweat. In any event he had not sweated so profusely since he had reached old age.
Where the cypress grove gave way to a grove of cryptomeria, there stood a lone nemu tree. The soft clusters of leaves in among the hard needles of the cryptomerias were like wraiths, like afternoon slumber. They made him think of Thailand. A white butterfly from the nemu led him on his way.
The road was steeper. The mountain gate would be near. The cryptomerias were thicker, and a cool breeze came from among them. Walking was now easy. The bands across the road had until now been the shadows of trees. Now they were strips of sunlight.