The butterfly cut an uncertain path through the darkness of the cryptomeria grove. It drew a low line across ferns shining liquidly in sunlight to the black gate within. For some reason, thought Honda, all the butterflies hereabouts flew low near the ground.
He passed the black gate. The mountain gate lay ahead. So finally he was at the Gesshuuji. He had lived these sixty years only to come again.
Gazing at the prow-shaped pine that served as a carriage stop, Honda found it hard to believe that he was here. He felt strangely refreshed, even reluctant to reach his destination. He stood at a pillar of the mountain gate, which was flanked by two much smaller and lower gates. Sixteen-petal chrysanthemums were stamped on the ridge tiles. On the left pillar was a neat, lady-like sign identifying the temple as the Gesshuuji, under the protection of the Imperial House. On the right pillar was a dim inscription in relief: “Peace on Earth. Within is Housed the Imperial Recitation Text of the Prajñāparamitā-sūtra. A Fortress of the Law of His Benign Majesty.”
There were five stripes on the egg-colored earthen wall to indicate the high rank of the temple. Across yellowish gravel, steppingstones led to the doorway in a checkered pattern. Honda counted them with his stick, and when he had come to ninety he was at the closed doors. In the recessed grip his hand touched a chrysanthemum and clouds cut from white paper.
The farthest corner of the interior came back to him. He stood motionless, forgetting to announce himself. Sixty years ago the young Honda had stood on this same doorstep before this same door. The paper would have been changed a hundred times in those years, but a clean white expanse blocked the way now as it had that cold spring day. Though the grain of the wood was perhaps a little more prominent, it showed little sign of the wear of the winds and the snows. Only an instant had passed.
Ill at the Obitoké inn, Kiyoaki had staked everything on this trip to the Gesshuuji. Feverish, he would still be waiting for Honda’s return; and what would he think when he saw that in that instant Honda had become a bent, immobile old man?
A steward probably in his sixties, dressed in an open-necked shirt, came to receive him. He needed help in negotiating the last high step. Leading him to a suite of rooms, eight mats and six, in the main hall, the man said politely that they had received his letter and perused its contents, and motioned him to a cushion laid out with geometric precision on a mat with a figured border, white on black. He did not remember the rooms from six decades before.
On the scroll in the alcove, in the style of Sesshuu, a dragon twisted and writhed among storm clouds. Below it was a crisp, tidy little arrangement of wild carnations. An old nun in a white kimono of cotton crepe and a white obi brought red and white sweets and cold tea on a rimmed tray. Through open doors green floated in from the garden. There was a thick growth of maples and arbovitae, and beyond it a white gallery; and nothing more.
The steward talked of this and that, and the moments passed. Honda sat quietly in the breeze. The sweat and the aching had left him. He felt that rescue had come.
He was in a room of the Gesshuuji, which he had thought it would be impossible to visit. The approach of death had made the visit easy, had unloosed the weight that held him in the depths of being. It was even a comfort to think, from the light repose the struggle up the hill had brought him, that Kiyoaki, struggling against illness up that same road, had been given wings to soar with by the denial that awaited him.
The shrilling of cicadas remained in his ears, but here in the dusk it was cool, like the dying echo of a bell. The old man talked on, making no further reference to the letter. Honda could not bring himself to ask whether he would see the Abbess.
He began to fear that the empty passage of the moments was a circumspect way of informing him that the Abbess would not receive him. Perhaps the old steward had seen the article in the weekly magazine. Perhaps he had advised her to plead an indisposition.
Honda did not feel timid about seeing her, guilt-ridden though he was. Without the crime and the guilt and the mortality he would not have had the courage for that climb. He now saw that the scandal had given him his first dark prompting. Tōru’s attempted suicide, his blindness, Honda’s illness, Kinué’s pregnancy, had all pointed to the same spot. It was true: they had frozen into a cluster and forced him up that burning road. Without them he could only have looked up at the radiance of the Gesshuuji upon a distant summit.
If, after so much, the Abbess were to refuse him because of the incident, he could call it fate. He would not see her in this life. He was sure all the same that he would see her one day, even if he was denied a meeting on this last spot in this last hour in this world.
Cool repose replaced fretfulness, resignation sorrow, to make the passage of time bearable.
The old nun appeared again, and whispered something in the steward’s ear.
“Her Reverence has informed us that she is ready to see you,” he said, in the accents of this West Country. “Come with me, if you will, please.”
Honda wanted to believe his ears.
The green light from the northern garden was too strong, and for a moment he did not recognize it; but it was here, sixty years before, that the Abbess’s predecessor had received him.
He remembered the bright review of the seasons on that earlier screen. It had been replaced by a plain screen of wattled reeds. Beyond the veranda burned the green of a small tea garden, alive with cicadas. Beyond a profusion of maples, plums, and tea bushes were the red buds of an oleander. The summer light fell sharply upon the white spears of dwarf bamboo among the steppingstones, repeating the white light from the sky above the wooded hills.
A beating of wings seemed almost to strike the wall. A sparrow flew in from the gallery and on again, its shadow wavering against the white wall.
The door to the inner apartments slid open. Before Honda, who had brought his knees together in stiff formality, the old Abbess appeared, led by a white-clad novice. The pale figure in a white kimono and a cloak of deep purple would be Satoko, now eighty-three.
Honda felt tears come to his eyes. He was powerless to look up at her.
She faced him across the table. The nose was the finely carved nose of those years before, and the eyes were the same beautiful eyes. Satoko had changed utterly, and yet he knew at a glance that it was Satoko. The bloom of youth had in a jump of sixty years become the extreme of age, Satoko had escaped the journey through the gloomy world. A person who crosses a garden bridge from shadow into sunlight may seem to change faces. If the beautiful young face was the face in the shadow, such, no more, was the change to the beautiful old face now in the sunlight. He remembered how, as he left the hotel, Kyoto faces had seemed bright and dark under parasols and how one could predict the quality of beauty from the brightness and darkness.
For Honda it had been sixty years. For Satoko had it been the time it takes to cross a garden bridge from shadow into sunlight?
Age had sped in the direction not of decay but of purification. The skin seemed to glow with a still light; the beauty of the eyes was clearer, shining through something like a patina. Age had crystallized into a perfect jewel. It was cold though diaphanous, roundly soft though hard, and the lips were still moist. There were wrinkles, deep and innumerable, but they were bright as if washed clean one by one. There was something brightly forceful about the tiny, somewhat bent figure.
Hiding his tears, Honda looked up.
“It was good of you to come,” said the Abbess pleasantly.
“It was rude of me to introduce myself without warning, and it is very kind of you to see me all the same.” Wanting above all to avoid familiarity, Honda found himself using the stiffest of greetings. He was ashamed of the phlegm-choked old voice. He forced himself on. “I addressed myself to your steward. I wonder if he was kind enough to show you my letter.”