The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Read online

  There were not many people walking outside the main gate of Otani University and there were hardly any cars. Only occasionally one could hear the sound of a streetcar clattering along the line that ran from the front of Kyoto Station to the front of the streetcar shed. On the other side of the street the old gateposts of the university stood facing the main gate on our side, and a row of gingko trees with fresh spring leaves stretched out to the left.

  "Let's walk round the grounds for a while!” said Kashiwagi,

  I led the way over the streetcar tracks to the other side of the street. Kashiwagi lurched heavily across the almost deserted street, his entire body convulsed with violent movement. The university grounds were quite extensive. In the distance several groups of students who had no lectures to attend or who had decided to miss them were playing catch; closer at hand a few boys were practising for a marathon race. The war had only been over for a couple of years, but young people were once more thinking of ways to exhaust their energy. I thought of the poor food that We were given at the temple. We sat on a half-rotten swing and looked absently at our fellow students as they ran towards us and then ran away across the elliptical playing-field, practising for their marathon. Missing class like this had a feel about it like a new shirt against one's skin; the surrounding sunlight and the slight breeze impressed this feel on me. A group of runners moved slowly towards us, breathing heavily; as they became tired, they fell out of step; then they moved into the distance, kicking up a cloud of dust.

  "Fools," said Kashiwagi. "That's what they are!” His words did not smack in the least of sour grapes. "What on earth are they putting on that spectacle for? They say its for their health, I suppose. But what possible good does it do to make a public display of one's health like that? They put on sport shows everywhere, don't they? It's really a sign that we've reached the latter days of decadence. What should be displayed in public is something that's never shown. What the public really should see are-executions! Why don't they put on public executions?"

  Kashiwagi paused for a moment, then continued in a dreamy tone: “How do you suppose they managed to keep peace and order during the war if it wasn't by staging public exhibitions of violent death? The reason that they stopped having public executions was, I gather, because they were afraid it would make people bloodthirsty. Damned stupid if you ask me! The people who cleared away the dead bodies after the air raids all had gentle, cheerful expressions. To sec human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that We become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this. But as one sits there in the clear daylight, it's the idea of bloodstained figures fainting in agony that gives a dear outline to the nightmare and that helps to materialize the dream into reality. The nightmare is no longer our own agony, but the violent physical suffering of other people. And we are not obliged to feel the pain of others. Ah, what a relief that is!”

  This sanguinary dogmatism of Kashiwagi's had its charm for me, to be sure, but what I now wanted to hear about was the pilgrimage that he had taken after losing his virginity. For, as I have already mentioned, I was earnestly looking to Kashiwagi for life. I managed to break in and to hint at my interest.

  "You mean women?” he said. "Hm. I've come to the point that these days I can accurately tell by intuition whether or not a woman is the type that will like a man with clubfeet. There are such types, you know! It is possible that such a woman may keep her liking for clubfooted men hidden during her entire life. She may even not hesitate to take the secret with her to her grave. This may be the only lapse of taste that this sort of woman has, this may be her only dream.... Well let's see. How do you tell the type of woman who likes clubfooted men? As a rule, she's a beauty of the first water. She has a cool tapered nose. But there's something a little loose about her mouth....”

  Just then a girl came walking in our direction.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHE WAS not walking in the university grounds. Outside the grounds there was a road that ran past a block of residential houses. The road was about two feet below the level of the grounds. It was here that she was walking.

  The girl had come out of an impressive Spanish-style house. This house gave a rather fragile impression, with its two chimneys, its slanting lattice-work windows and the glass roof that covered its large greenhouse; but the general effect was rather marred by the high wire fence which towered up by the university grounds on the other side of the road, and which had no doubt been put there at the insistence of the owner of the house.

  Kashiwagi and I were sitting on the swing outside the fence. I looked at the girl's face and was struck with astotiishment. Her noble features were exactly those that Kashiwagi had described in talking about the type of woman who “likes clubfooted men." When later I thought back on the surprise that I had experienced at that moment,I felt rather foolish about it and wondered whether Kashiwagi hadn't been familiar with that face from long before and whether he hadn't dreamt about it.

  We sat there waiting for the girl. Under the full rays of the spring sun, the dark-blue peak of Mount Hiei rose in the distance, while, closer at hand, the girl came gradually towards us. I had still not recovered from the sense of excitement which Kashiwagi's recent remarks had given me—his remark that his clubfeet and his women were dotted about the world of reality, like two stars in the sky, without ever touching each other, and his strange words about being able to accomplish his desire while he himself remained constantly buried in a world of apparitions. Just then the sun was covered by a cloud: Kashiwagi and I were wrapped up in a thin shadow and it seemed as if our world had suddenly displayed that aspect of itself which consists of apparitions. Everything was vague and gray and my own existence, too, seemed vague. It seemed as though only the purple peak of Mount Hiei and that graceful girl who was walking towards us were shining in the world of reality and possessed any real existence.

  The girl was certainly walking toward us. But as the moments passed, time became like a growing agony, ana the closer that she came to us, the more another face grew clear—the face of someone who bore no relation to her.

  Kashiwagi stood up and whispered heavily in my ear: "Start walking! Just as I tell you."

  I was obliged to walk as he directed. We both walked along the stone wall, about two feet above the level of the road, parallel to where the girl was walking and in the same direction.

  “Now jump down there!” said Kashiwagi, prodding me in the back with his sharp fingers. I stepped over the low stone wall and jumped onto the road. I had no trouble at all in managing the two-foot jump. But no sooner had I jumped, than Kashiwagi collapsed next to me with a terrible noise. Having tried to jump on his clubfeet, he had actually fallen over. Looking down, I saw the black back of his uniform undulating on the ground. As he lay there on his face, he did not look like a human being; for a moment he seemed to me like some huge, meaningless black smudge, like one of the turbid puddles that one sees on the road after it has rained.

  Kashiwagi had fallen down directly in front of where the girl was walking. She stood there, rooted to the spot. When I knelt down to help Kashiwagi to his feet, I looked up at the girl; and as I saw her cool, high-bridged nose, her mouth with its slight suggestion of looseness about the lips, her cloudy eyes—as I saw all her features, there appeared before me for a flash the figure that I had seen in the light of the moon, the figure of Uiko.

  The illusion vanished at once and now I saw a girl who could not yet be in her twenties looking down at me with a scornful expression. I could tell that she was about to walk past us. Kashiwagi was even more sensitive than I about
feeling such things. He started shouting. His terrible shout echoed through the deserted residential street.

  “You callous creature! Are you going to leave me here like this? It's because of you I'm in this state!"

  The girl turned round. She was trembling and with her slender, dry fingers she seemed to be rubbing her colorless cheeks. After a while she turned to me and said: "What shall I do?”

  Kashiwagi looked up and stared intently at the girl. Then he spoke, giving each word distinct emphasis:

  “Do you mean to say that you don't even have any medicine in your house?”

  For a moment the girl stood there silently. Then she turned round and started walking in the direction from which she had come. I helped Kashiwagi to stand up. Until he was on his feet, he was extremely heavy and his breath came in painful gasps. But when I offered him my shoulder as we started to walk, I saw that he was moving ahead with extraordinary ease.

  I ran to the streetcar stop in front of the Karasumaru streetcar shed and jumped onto a streetcar. Not until the streetcar started in the direction of the Golden Temple could I breathe freely. My hands were covered with perspiration.

  As soon as I had helped Kashiwagi through the gate of that Spanish-style house, I had become absolutely terrified. I had left him standing there with the girl in front of him and, without even looking back, had run away. I did not have time to stop at the university, but rushed along the deserted streets, past pharmacies, confectionaries, and electric shops. I remember seeing out of the corner of my eye something purple and crimson fluttering in the breeze. Probably when I had passed in front of the Kotoku Church of the Tenrikyo, I had noticed the lanterns with their plum-blossom crests standing out against the black wall and the purple curtains hanging over the gate with the same plum-blossom crest. I had no idea where I was rushing. When the streetcar gradually approached Murasakino, I realized that my flurried heart was taking me back to the Golden Temple.

  We were now in the midst of the tourist season and, although it was a weekday, there were tremendous crowds visiting the Golden Temple. The old guide looked at me suspiciously as I pushed my way through the people and hurried to the temple.

  And then I was there-standing in front of the Golden Temple, which on this springtime afternoon was surrounded by the swirling dust and by the hideous crowds. While the guide's voice boomed away, the temple always seemed half to hide its beauty and to feign a certain ignorance. Only the shadows on the pond were bright. But if one looked at them in a certain direction, the clouds of dust seemed like the golden clouds that envelop the Bodhisattvas in that painting of the descent of the saints in which Amida Buddha is shown coming down to earth surrounded by all the Bodhisattvas; in the same way, the form of the Golden Temple, as it stood there hazy in the dust, was like old, faded pigment and a worn-out design. It was in no way strange that the surrounding noise and confusion should enter into the form of the temple's delicate pillars, and that they should be absorbed into the whitish sky toward which the little Kukyocho and the phoenix on top of the roof reached as they soared into the air, gradually becoming thinner. This temple, by just standing there as it did, was a controlling force, a regulating force. The more that the surrounding noise increased, the more the Golden Temple-that asymmetrical, delicate structure, with the Sosci on one side, and above it the Kukyocho, which abruptly tapered off at the top-acted like a filter that transforms muddy into clear water. The temple did not reject the merry chattering of the sight-seers, but instead filtered those sounds, so that they entered in between those permeable pillars and finally became part of the stillness and of the clarity. Thus it accomplished on earth exactly what the shadows of the motionless pond accomplished on the water.

  My heart became calm and finally my fear ebbed away. For me, beauty must be of something of this nature. Beauty such as this could cut me off from life and protect me from life.

  “If my life is to be like Kashiwagi's, protect me. For I do not think that I could possibly bear it.” Such was the prayer that I almost uttered as I stood there facing the temple.

  What Kashiwagi had suggested to me in his talk and what he had directly enacted before me could only mean that to live and to destroy were one and the same thing. Such a life lacked everything natural, and it also lacked the beauty of a building like the Golden Temple; indeed, it was little more than a sort of painful convulsion. It is true that I was greatly attracted by such an existence and that I recognized in it my own direction; yet it was terrible to think that one must first bloody one's hands with the thorny fragments of life. Kashiwagi despised instinct and intellect to the same degree. Like some oddly shaped ball, his existence itself rolled round and round and tried to smash the wall of reality. It did not even involve a single deed. The life that he had suggested to me was, in short, a dangerous burlesque with which one tried to smash the reality that had deceived one by means of an unknown disguise, and with which one cleaned the world so that it might never again contain anything unknown.

  I know all this from later having seen a poster in the room of Kashiwagi's lodging-house. It was a beautiful lithograph issued by a travel agency and showing the Japanese Alps. On the white mountain peaks, which soared into the blue sky, were printed the words: “We invite you to an unknown world!" Kashiwagi had crossed out this message with brush strokes in poisonous red ink, and next to it in his characteristic dancing form of script, which reminded one of his club-footed walk, he had scribbled: “I can't stand an unknown life."

  I was worrying about Kashiwagi when I went to the university on the following day. In retrospect, it did not seem very friendly of me to have run away and left him, and although I did not feel any particular responsibility, I was uneasy at the possibility of his not appearing in the lecture hall that morning. Just when the lecture was about to start, however, I saw Kashiwagi strut into the room with his usual unnatural gait.

  During the break after the lecture I immediately took Kashiwagi by the arm. Such a lighthearted gesture was in itself unusual for me. Kashiwagi smiled out of the corner of his mouth and accompanied me to the corridor.

  “You aren't badly hurt, are you?” I said.

  "Hurt?” said Kashiwagi, looking at me with a pitying smile. "When should I have got hurt? Eh? What on earth made you take it into your head that I was hurt?"

  I was dumbfounded by his words. Having worked me up thoroughly, Kashiwagi explained his secret: "That was all an act. I've practised falling down on that road dozens of times, until I can now give such a convincing performance of having a bad fall that anyone would think I'd broken a bone. I must confess that I hadn't counted on the girl starting to walk past us with the look of complete indifference on her face. But you should have seen what happened. The girl's already beginning to fall in love with me. Or rather, I should say she's falling in love with my clubfeet. You see, she painted my legs with iodine herself.”

  He pulled up his trouser leg and showed me his shin, dyed yellow. I felt that I now saw through his ruse. It was natural enough that he should have purposely fallen on the road in order to attract the girl's attention; but hadn't he also tried to hide his clubfeet by the pretense of having hurt himself? But this doubt of mine, far from making me despise him, served on the contrary to increase my feelings of friendship. Besides, I had the feeling—a very adolescent feeling, to be sure—that the more his philosophy was full of ruses, the more it proved his sincerity towards life.

  Tsurukawa did not approve of my relationship with Kasniwagi. He gave me some extremely friendly advice on the subject, but it only annoyed me. I went so far as to answer his objections by saying that it was perfectly possible for someone like himself to find good friends, but that in my case Kashiwagi was a suitable companion. With what violent regret was I later to recall the unspeakably sad expression that came into Tsurukawa's eyes at that moment!

  In May, Kashiwagi made plans for an excursion to Arashiyama in the outskirts of Kyoto. In order to avoid the weekend crowds, he decided to take a day off
from the university during the week. Characteristically he announced that he would not go if the weather was good, but only if it was an overcast gloomy day. He was going to take the young lady from the Spanish-style house, and he arranged to bring along a girl from his lodging-house for me.

  We were to meet at Kitano Station on the Keifuku electric line. Fortunately it was an unusual day for the time of the year-as cloudy and depressing as Kashiwagi could have wanted.

  It happened at this time that Tsurukawa was having some family trouble and that he had taken a week's holiday to go to Tokyo. This worked out rather well for me. Although Tsurukawa was certainly not the type who would have told on me at the temple, I was just as pleased not to have to give him the slip after having come to the university with him in the morning.

  Well, my memories of that excursion are bitter ones. The four of us who set out for Arashiyama were all young, and it seemed as though the entire day was colored by the gloom, the irritability, the uneasiness, the nihilism that belong to youth. Kashiwagi had no doubt anticipated it all and purposely chosen a day when the weather was so gloomy. There was a southwesterly wind; just as one was expecting that it was going to blow with full force, it would suddenly die down, to be followed by uneasy gusts. The sky was overcast, but occasionally the sun would glare through. Part of the clouds shone white, like the white breast of a woman that one can vaguely make out under numerous layers of clothes; but further back, the whiteness became indistinct and, although one could still tell where the sun was, it blended with the even, dull color of the sky.