The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Read online

  "Since this was my state of mind, it was only natural that I should not have tried to lose my virginity by consorting with professional women as so many of my friends did. What stopped me, of course, was the fact that professional women don't go to bed with their customers because they like them. They'll have anyone as a customer, doddering old men, beggars, one-eyed men, good-looking men-even lepers, so long as they don't know they're lepers. This egalitarian approach would put most ordinary young men at their ease and they'd merrily go ahead and buy the first women they met. But I didn't appreciate this egalitariahism myself. I couldn't bear the idea that a woman should treat a perfectly normal man and someone like myself on a basis of equality. It seemed to me like a terrible self-defilement. You see, I was possessed by the fear that if my clubfooted condition was overlooked or ignored, I would in a sense cease to exist. It was the same fear that you're suffering from now, wasn't it? For my condition to be completely recognized and approved, it was essential that things should be arranged for me far more luxuriously than most people require. Whatever happened, I thought, that was how life had to turn out for me.

  “No doubt it would have been possible to get over my terrible feeling of dissatisfaction-dissatisfaction that the world and I had been placed in a relationship- of antagohism. It would have been possible by changing either myself or the world. But I hated dreaming about such changes. I loathed preposterous dreams of this kind. The logical conclusion that I reached after much hard thought was that if the world changed, I could not exist, and if I changed, the world could not exist. And paradoxically enough, this conclusion represented a type of reconciliation, a type of compromise. It was possible, you see, for the world to co-exist with the idea that looking as I did, I could never be loved. And the trap into which the deformed person finally falls does not lie in his resolving the state of antagohism between himself and the world, but instead takes the form of his completely approving of this antagohism. That's why a deformed person can never really be cured.

  "Well, it was at this point in my life, when I was in the bloom of my youth-I use the phrase advisedly-that something unbelievable happened to me. There was a girl from a wealthy family who were parishioners of our temple. This girl had graduated from the Kobe bins’ School and she was well known for her looks. One day she happened to let out the fact that she loved me. For a while I could not believe my own ears. Due to my unfortunate condition, I was an expert in fathoming other people's psyehology. For this reason, I did not perversely dismiss the whole affair, as many people would, by attributing this love of hers to mere sympathy. I was thoroughly aware that no girl would love me just out of sympathy. Instead, I guessed that the cause of this girl's love was her very exceptional sense of pride. This girl was fully aware of her own beauty and of her own value as a woman, and it was impossible for her to accept any suitor who showed signs of self-confidence. She couldn't bear the idea of putting her own pride on the scales against the conceit of some self-confident young man. She had the chance of numerous so-called good matches, but the better they were, the more she disliked them. In the end, she fastidiously rejected any love that involved some form of balance-on this point she was completely faithful—and set her eyes on me.

  "I already knew what answer I would give her. You may laugh at me, but I told her quite simply: ‘I don't love you.' What else could I have said This answer was honest and utterly unaffected. If, instead, I'd decided not to miss a good opportunity and had answered her declaration by saying: ‘I love you too,' I'd have appeared worse than ridiculous—I'd almost have appeared tragic. People with comic looks like me are extremely adept at avoiding the danger of appearing tragic by mistake. I knew very well that if I once began to appear tragic, people would no longer feel at ease when they came into contact with me. It was especially important for the souls of other people that i should never appear to be a wretched figure. That's why I made a clean break of it and said: ‘I don't love you,

  “The girl wasn't taken back by my answer. Without hesitation, she said that I was lying. It was a real spectacle to see how she then tried to win me over, while at the same time being extremely careful not to hurt my pride. This girl couldn't possibly imagine that there might be a man in this world who wouldn't love her if he had the chance. If there should be such a person, he could only be deceiving himself. And so she embarked on a thorough analysis of me and finally arrived at the conclusion that I had in fact been in love with her for some time. She was a clever girl. Assuming that she really did love me, she must have realized that she loved someone who was peculiarly hard to reach. Almost anything that she said would be wrong. If she pretended that I had an attractive face when in fact I don't, she would have annoyed me. If she said that my clubfeet were beautiful, that would have annoyed me even more. And if she made some remark about not loving me for my outer appearance, but because of what she felt was inside me, she'd really have made me angry. Anyhow, being clever, she took all this into account and simply continued saying: ‘I love you.' And according to her analysis, of course, she had discovered a feeling within me that corresponded to this love of hers.

  “I could not accept this sort of illogicality. At the same time, I was gradually being overcome with a violent desire for the girl, but I did not think that desire would ever bring her and me together. It occurred to me that if she really did love me and no one else, it must mean that I must have some individual characteristic that distinguished me from other people. And what could this be but my clubfeet? So it came down to the fact that, though she didn't say so, she loved my clubfeet. Now this was completely unacceptable so far as my own thinking was concerned. If my individuality had not in fact existed in my clubfeet, this love might perhaps have been acceptable. But if I were to recognize my individuality-my reason for existing—as lying somewhere other than in my clubfeet, it would involve a sort of supplementary recognition. Then I would inevitably come to recognize other people's reasons for existence in this same supplementary way, and this in turn would lead to my recognizing a self that was thoroughly wrapped up within the world. So love was impossible. Her thinking that she was in love with me was simply an illusion, and I could not possibly love her. Therefore I kept on repeating: ‘I don't love you.,

  “Strangely enough, the more I told her that I didn't love her, the more she succumbed to the illusion that she was in love with me. And finally one evening she ended by throwing herself at me. She offered me her body, and I may say that it was a dazzlingly beautiful body. But I was completely impotent when it came to the point.

  "This terrible failure of mine solved everything quite simply. At last she seemed to have a convincing proof that I really did not love her. She left me.

  “I was ashamed at my impotence, but compared to my shame at having clubfeet, nothing else was worth mentioning. What really bothered me was something else. I knew the reason that I had been impotent. It was the thought, when the time came, of my deformed clubfeet touching her beautiful bare feet. And now this discovery utterly destroyed the peace within me that had been part of my belief that I would never be loved by a woman.

  “At that moment, you see, I had felt an insincere kind of joy at the thought that by my desire—by the satisfaction of my desire-I would prove the impossibility of love. But my flesh had betrayed me. What I had wanted to do with my spirit, my flesh had performed in its place. And so I was faced with yet another contradiction. To put it in a rather vulgar way, I had been dreaming about love in the firm belief that I could not be loved, but at the final stage I had substituted desire for love and felt a sort of relief. But in the end I had understood that desire itself demanded for its fulfillment that I should forget about the conditions of my cxistcncc, and that I should abandon what for me constituted the only barrier to love, namely the belief that I could not be loved. I had always thought of desire as being something clearer than it really is, and I had not realized that it required people to see themselves in a slightly dreamlike, unreal way.

  �
�From then on, my flesh began to attract my attention more than my spirit. But I could not become an incarnation of pure desire. I could only dream about it. I become like the wind. I became a thing which cannot be seen by others, but which itself sees everything, which lightly approaches its objective, caresses it all over and finally penetrates its innermost part. If I speak of the self-consciousness of the flesh, I expect that you will imagine a self-consciousness that relates to some firm, massive, opaque object. But I was not like that. For me to realize myself as a single body, a single desire, meant that I became transparent, invisible, in other words, like the wind.

  “But my clubfeet instantly proved themselves to be the great obstacle. They alone would never become transparent. They seemed less like feet than like a couple of stubborn spirits. There they were—far firmer objects than my flesh itself.

  “People probably think that they can't see themselves unless they have a mirror. But to be a cripple is to have a mirror constantly under one's nose. Every hour of the day my entire body was reflected in that mirror. There was no question of forgetting. As a result, what is known in this world as uneasiness could only strike me as child's play. There could be no uneasiness in my case. That I existed in this form was a definite fact, as definite as that the sun and the earth existed, or that beautiful birds and ugly crocodiles existed. The world was immobile like a tombstone.

  "Not the slightest uneasiness, not the slightest foothold—therein lay the basis of my original way of living. For what purpose do I live? At such thoughts people feel uneasy and even kill themselves. But it did not bother me. To have a pair of clubfeet-such was the condition of life for me, such was its reason, its aim, its ideal, such was life itself. Just to exist was more than enough to satisfy me. In the first place, doesn't uneasiness about one's existence spring precisely from a sort of luxurious dissatisfaction at the thought that one may not be living fully.

  “I began to notice an old widow who lived by herself in our village. She was said to be sixty or, according to some people, even older. At the anniversary service of her father's death, I was sent to recite the sutras at her house in place of my father, None of her relatives had come to the service, and the old woman and I were alone at the altar. When I had finished the sutras, she served me some tea in another room. As it was a hot summer day, I asked her if it would be all right for me to wash myself. I took off my clothes and the old woman poured cold water over my back. I noticed her looking sympathetically at my feet, and immediately a plan occurred to me.

  “I finished washing and returned to the room where We had been sitting before. While drying myself, I tola her in a serious tone that when I was born, Buddha had appeared to my mother in a dream and announced that if this child should grow to be a man, the woman who sincerely worshipped his feet would be reborn in Paradise. As I spoke, the pious old widow gazed into my eyes intently and fingered her rosary. I lay naked on my back like a corpse; my hands were clasped on my breast, holding a rosary, and I murmured some spurious sutra. I closed my eyes. My lips kept on reciting the sutra.

  “You can image how I was stifling my laughter! I was filled with laughter. And I was not dreaming in the slightest about myself. I was aware that the old woman was engaged in the most intent worship of my feet as she recited her sutra. My entire mind was occupied with my feet and I was suffocating with amusement at this ridiculous situation. Clubfeet, clubfeet-that was all I could think of, that was all I could see in my mind. This monstrous formation of my feet. This condition of utmost ugliness in which I had been placed. The wild farce of it! And to make things even funnier, the old woman's stray locks brushed against the soles of my feet as she bowed time after time in prayer, and tickled me.

  “It appeared that I had been mistaken about my feelings of lust ever since the time that I had touched that girl's beautiful feet and become impotent. For in the midst of this ugly service, I realized that I was physically excited. Yes, without dreaming about myself in the slightest! Yes, under these most ruthless of all conditions!

  “I sat up and abruptly pushed the old woman over. I didn't even have time to think it strange that she showed no surprise at my action. The old widow lay there where I had pushed her, with her eyes shut tight and still reciting her sutra. Strangely enough, I vividly remember that the sutra she was reciting was one chapter of the Great Compassion Darani: iki ikī. Shino shinō. Orasan. Furashtrī. Haza hazā furashayā. You know how this passage is explained in the commentary, of course: 'We implore thee, we implore thee. For the pure substance of flawless purity in which the Three Evils of greed, anger, and stupidity are all annihilated.’

  "Before my eyes, the face of an old woman in her sixties—a sunburned face without any make-up—seemed to welcome me. My excitement aid not abate in the slightest. Therein lay the ultimate absurdity of the entire faree, but quite unconsciously I was being led on by it. Or rather, I wasn't unconscious—I saw everything. The special quality of hell is to sec everything clearly down to the last detail. And to sec all that in the pitch darkness!

  “The old woman's wrinkled face had nothing beautiful about it and nothing holy. Yet her ugliness and her age seemed to provide a constant affirmation for that inner condition of mine in which there were no dreams. Who could say that if one were to look without dreaming at any woman, however beautiful she might be, her face would not be transformed into the face of this old woman? My clubfeet and this face. Yes, that was it. To look at reality itself maintained my state of physical excitement. Now for the first time I was able to believe in my own lust with a feeling of friendliness. And I realized that the problem lay not in trying to shorten the distance between myself and the object, but in maintaining this distance so that the object might remain an object,

  “It is good to look at one's object. At that moment I discovered the logic of my eroticism from the cripple's logic that while he is at a standstill, he has also arrived-from the logic that he can never be visited by uneasiness. I discovered the pretense in what people normally call infatuation. Physical desire was like the wind or like some magic cloak that hides its wearer. And the union born of such desire was no more than a dream. At the same time as looking, I must subject myself to being thoroughly looked at. Then and there, I threw out of my world both my clubfeet and my women. My clubfeet and my women all stayed at the same distance from me. Reality lay there; desire was merely an apparition. And as I looked, I felt myself tumbling down endlessly into that apparition and at the same time being ejaculated onto the surface of the reality at which I was looking. My clubfeet and my women would never touch each other, would never come together; yet together they would be hurled out of the world. Desire rose up endlessly within me. Because my clubfeet and those beautiful feet would never in all eternity have to touch each other.

  "Do you have trouble understanding me? Do my words require some explanation? But I am sure you understand that after that I was able to believe with perfect peace of mind that ‘love was impossible.' I was released from uneasiness. I was released from love. The world had come to a permanent standstill and at the same time it had arrived. Do I have to elucidate this by saying ‘our world'? Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning ‘love’ in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition. Presently I came to realize that my conviction—the conviction that I could never be loved-was itself the basic state of human existence. So now you know how I lost my virginity!'

  Kashiwagi finished talking. I had been listening to him intently. Now at last I let out a sigh. I had been profoundly impressed by his talk and could not release myself from the painful sense or having been touched by a manner of thinking that had never occurred to me until then. A few moments after Kashiwagi finished, the spring sun woke up round me and the bright clover began to glitter. The sound of shouting from the basketball court at the back of the building also started again. But although it was still the same noontime on the same spring day, the meaning of all these things seemed to have change
d completely.

  I could not stay silent. I wanted to chime in, to add to his words. I stuttered out an awkward remark: "You must have been very lonely since then."

  Once more Kashiwagi made an unkind pretense of not understanding me and asked me to repeat what I had said. But in his reply he already showed some slight sign of friendliness.

  "Lonely, you say? Why should I be lonely? You'll come to find out how I developed after that when you get to know me."

  The bell rang for the afternoon lectures. I was about to get up when Kashiwagi, who was still sitting on the grass, roughly pulled me by the sleeve. My university uniform was the same one that I had used at the Zen school. Only the buttons were new; the material was patched and threadbare. Besides, it was far too tight and it made my meager body look even smaller than it really was.

  "The next class is Sino-Japanese, isn't it? That's deadly dull. Let's go for a walk instead." With these words, he stood up. It required the most terrible effort: first he seemed to dismember his entire body and then he had to assemble it all again. It reminded me of the camel that I had once seen standing up in a film.

  Until then I had never missed a single lecture, but I did not want to lose this chance of hearing more about Kashiwagi. We set off in the direction of the main gate.

  After we had passed the main gate, I suddenly became aware of Kashiwagi's really peculiar way of walking and was overcome with a feeling akin to embarrassment. It was curious that I should thus have connived at the commonplace feelings of the world and should have been ashamed to walk with Kashiwagi.

  It was Kashiwagi who clearly let me know the whereabouts of my shame. At the same time it was he who had urged me on towards human life. The entire shamefaced side of my nature and all the wickedness in my heart had been healed by his words and had turned into something fresh. Perhaps it was because of this that, as I walked along the gravel past the main gate, Mount Hiei, which I saw ahead of me in the distance, hazy in the spring sun, looked as if I were seeing it for the very first time. And it also seemed to have reappeared there in front of me after renewing its own meaning, in the same way that so many things about me which had slept had now renewed their meaning. The top of the mountain was pointed, but the foothills round its base spread out endlessly, just like some theme of music that lingers in the air. As I gazed at Mount Hiei beyond the rows of low roofs, only the folds in its sides stood out clearly and seemed very close; the springlike shades of the rest of the great mountain were buried in a dense dark blue.