The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Read online

  It could not be said, I thought, that Kashiwagi himself was free of intoxication. I had long since realized that in any form of knowledge, however gloomy, there lurked the intoxication of knowledge itself. And what, after all, served to intoxicate people was alcohol.

  The girl and I sat down next to some faded, worm-eaten irises. I could not understand why she should want to associate with me in this way. I could not understand—and I use this cruel expression intentionally-what impulse drove her to this desire for contamination. In this world of ours there should be a nonresistance that is full of shyness and gentleness; but this girl simply let my hands gather on her own small, plump hands, like flies gathering on someone who is taking a nap. Yet the drawn-out kiss and the feel of the girl's soft chin awakened my feeling of lust. This was what I was supposed to have been dreaming about for so long, but the feeling itself was thin and shallow. My lust did not seem to advance directly, but to run round a circuitous track: The cloudy white sky, the rustling of the bamboo grove, the strenuous efforts of the ladybird as it crawled up the leaf of an ins—all these things remained as they had been before, scattered and without order.

  I tried to escape by thinking of the girl in front of me as the object of my lust. I must think of this as being life. I must think of this as the one barrier in the way of my advancing and my capturing. For, if I were to miss this chance, life would not come visiting me indefinitely. The memories raced through my mind of all the countless times when my words had been blocked by stuttering and been unable to issue from my mouth. At this moment I should resolutely have opened my mouth and said something, even if it meant stuttering. Thus I could have made life my own. Kashiwagi's brutal bidding, that blunt shout of his: "Stutter, stutter!” echoed in my ears and put me on my mettle. Finally I slipped my hand up the girl's skirt.

  Then the Golden Temple appeared before me.

  A delicate structure, gloomy and full of dignity. A structure whose gold foil had peeled off in different places, and which looked like the carcass of its former luxury. Yes, the Golden Temple appeared before me-that strange building which, when one thought it was near, become distant, that building which always floated clearly in some inscrutable point of space, intimate with the beholder, yet utterly remote. It was this structure that now came and stood between me and the life at which I was aiming. At first it was as small as a miniature painting, but in an instant it grew larger, until it completely buried the world that surrounded me and filled every nook and cranny of this world, just as in that delicate model which I had once seen the Golden Temple had been so huge that it had encompassed everything else. It filled the world like some tremendous music, and this music itself become sufficient to occupy the entire meaning of the world. The Golden Temple, which sometimes seemed to be so utterly indifferent to me and to tower into the air outside myself, had now completely engulfed me and had allowed me to be situated within its structure.

  The girl from the loaging-house flew away into the distance like a tiny speck of dust. Inasmuch as the girl had been rejected by the Golden Temple, my efforts at finding life, too, were rejected. How could I possibly stretch out my hands towards life when I was being thus enwrapped in beauty? Perhaps beauty also had the right to demand that I relinquish my earlier aim. For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other. Assuming that the meaning of those actions which we direct at life is that we may pledge devotion to a certain instant and make that instant stand still, then perhaps the Golden Temple was fully aware of this and had for a time suspended its usual attitude or indifference towards me. It seemed as though the temple had assumed the form of a single instant of time and had visited me here in this park so that I might know how empty was my longing for life. In life, an instant that assumes the form of eternity will intoxicate us; but the Golden Temple knew full well that such an instant is insignificant compared with what happens when eternity assumes the form of an instant, as the temple itself had now done. It is at such times that the fact of beauty's eternity can really block our lives and poison our existences. The instantaneous beauty that life lets us glimpse is helpless against such poison. The poison crushes and destroys it at once, and finally exposes life itself under the light-brown glare of ruin.

  It was only for a short time that I was completely embraced by this vision of the Golden Temple. When I returned to myself, the temple was already hidden. It was merely a building that still stood far to the northeast in Kinugasa and that I could not possibly see from here. The moment of illusion, in which I had imagined myself being accepted and embraced by the Golden Temple, had passed. I was lying on the top of a hill in Kameyama Park. There was nothing near me but a girl who lay there sprawled lasciviously amid the grass and the flowers and the dull fluttering of the insects' wings. At my sudden exhibition of timidity, the girl sat up and looked at me blankly. I saw her hips moving as she turned her back on me and took a pocket-mirror out of her bag. She did not say a word, but her scorn pierced my skin through and through, like the burrs that stick to one's clothes in the autumn.

  The sky hung low. Tiny raindrops began to beat against the surrounding grass and the leaves of the iris. We stood up hurriedly and returned along the path to the arbor.

  It was not only because the excursion had ended so wretchedly that this day left such an exceptionally gloomy impression. That evening, before the "opening of the pillow," the Superior received a telegram from Tokyo. The contents were immediately announced to everyone in the temple.

  Tsurukawa was deaa.The telegram simply said that he had died in an accident, but later we heard the details. On the previous evening Tsurukawa had gone to visit an uncle of his in Asakusa and had drunk a good deal of saké He was not used to drinking and it had evidently gone to his head. On his way back he had been knocked down by a truck that had suddenly come out of a side street near the station. He had suffered a skull fracture and died instantly. His family had been at their wits' end and it was not until the following afternoon that they had realized that they ought to telegraph the temple.

  Although I had not cried at Father's death, I cried now. For Tsurukawa's existence seemed to have a closer connection than my father's with the problems that beset me. I had been rather neglecting Tsurukawa since I had come to know Kashiwagi, but now, having lost him, I realized that his death severed the one and only thread that still connected me with the bright world of daylight. It was because of the lost daylight, the lost brightness, the lost summer, that I was crying.

  Though I wanted to hurry to Tokyo to pay a visit of condolence to Tsurukawa's family, I did not have the money. I only received five hundred yen a month from the Superior for pocket money. My mother, of course, was indigent. It was the most she could do to send me two or three hundred yen a couple or times a year, The reason that she had been obliged to go and live with an uncle in Kasagun after settling matters in Father's temple was that she could not manage to live on the five hundred yen a month that the parishioners contributed and on the minute grant offered by the prefecture.

  How could I possibly make sure or Tsurukawa's death in my mind without having seen his corpse and without having attended his funeral? The problem tormented me. That white-shirted stomach of his that I had once seen shimmering in the rays of the sun as they poured through the trees had been turned to ashes. Who could imagine this boy's flesh and spirit, which had been made only for brightness and which was only suitable to brightness, lying buried in a grave? He had not carried the slightest mark of being destined for a premature death, he had been constitutionally free of all uneasiness and grief and had born no element that even vaguely resembled death. Perhaps it was precisely because of this that he had died so suddenly. Perhaps it had been impossible to save Tsurukawa from death just because he was composed of only the pure ingredients of life and had the frailty of a pure-blooded animal. In this case it would seem that I, on the contrary, was fated to live to a cursed old age.

  The transparent structure of the worl
d in which he lived had always been a deep mystery for me, but now with his death the mystery became still more fearful. That truck had crushed his transparent world, just as though it had run into a sheet of glass that is invisible because it is transparent. The fact that Tsurukawa had not died of illness fitted in perfectly with this image. It was suitable that he, whose life had been so incomparably pure a structure, should suffer the pure death of an accident. In that collision, which had lasted no more than a second, there had been a sudden contact and his life had merged with his death. A swift chemical action. Without doubt it was only by such a drastic method that this strange, shadowless young man could join both his shadow and his death.

  The world that Tsurukawa had inhabited was overflowing with bright feelings and good intentions. Yet I can definitely affirm that it was not thanks to his misunderstandings or to his sweet, gentle judgments that he lived there. That bright heart of his, which did not belong to this world, was backed by a strength and by a powerful resiliency, and it was these that had come to regulate his actions. There was something superbly accurate about the way in which he had been able to translate each of my dark feelings into bright feelings. Sometimes I had suspected that Tsurukawa had actually experienced my own feelings, just because bis brightness corresponded so accurately to my darkness, because the contrast between our feelings was so perfect. But no, it was not so! The brightness of his world was both pure and one-sided. It had brought into being its own detailed system, and it possessed a precision which might also have approached the precision of evil. If that young man's bright, transparent world had not constantly been supported by his untiring bodily power, it might instantly have collapsed. He had been running forward full tilt. And the truck had run over that running body of his.

  Tsurukawa's cheerful looks and carefree body, which were the source of the favorable impression that he made on others, led me, now that they had been lost to this world, to embark on mysterious reflections concerning the visible side of human beings. I thought of how strange it was that something, by simply existing and reaching our eyes, could exercise so bright a force. I thought of how much must be learned from the body in order that the spirit might possess so simple a sense of its own existence. It is said that the essence of Zen is the absence of all particularities, and that the real power to see consists in the knowledge that one's own heart possesses neither form nor feature. Yet the power to sec, which is capable of properly envisaging the absence of feature, must be exceedingly keen in resisting the charm of formal appearances. How can a person who is unable to see forms or features with selfless keenness so vividly see and apprehend formlessness and featurelessness? Thus the clear form of a person like Tsurukawa who emitted brightness by the mere fact of his existence, of a person who could be reached by both hands and eyes, who could in fact be called life for life's sake, might, now that this person was dead, serve as the clearest possible metaphor to describe unclear formlessness; and his sense of his own existence might become the most real, existent model of formless nihility. It seemed, indeed, as though he himself might now have become nothing more than such a metaphor. For example, the aptness and suitability of the juxtaposition between Tsurukawa and May flowers was precisely the aptness and suitability of those flowers which, as a result of his sudden May death, had been thrown onto his coffin.

  My own life possessed no such firm symbolism as Tsurukawa's. For this reason I needed him. And what I envied most about him was that he managed to reach the end of his life without the slightest conscience of being burdened with a special individuality or sense of individual mission like mine. This sense of individuality robbed my life of its symbolism, that is to say, of its power to serve, like Tsurukawa's, as a metaphor for something outside itself; accordingly, it deprived me of the feelings of life's extensity and solidarity, and it became the source of that sense of solitude which pursued me indefinitely. It was strange, I did not even have any feeling of solidarity with nothingness.

  Once again my solitude had started. I did not see the girl from the lodging-house again and my relations with Kashiwagi became less friendly than before. Kashiwagi's way of life still exerted a powerful fascination on me, but I felt that I would be carrying out my final service to Tsurukawa if I made some slight effort to resist this fascination and tried, however unwillingly, to keep my distance. I wrote my mother clearly that she should not come to visit me again until I had attained my independence. I had already told her this verbally, but I did not feel that I could rest easy until I had committed it to writing in the strongest terms. Her answer was couched in awkward phrases. She told me about how hard she was working at Uncle's farm and followed this by a few sentences that smacked of elementary admonitions. Then she had appended the following sentence: “I don't want to die until I have seen you with my own eyes as a priest in the Golden Temple.” I hated this part of the letter and for some days after it made me feel uneasy.

  Even during the summer I did not once visit the place where Mother was making her home. Due to the poor food at the temple, the summer heat was a great strain on me. In the middle of September there was a report of a possible typhoon. Someone had to stand night watch and I volunteered for the job.

  I think that it was about this rime that a delicate change started in my feelings concerning the Golden Temple. It was not hatred, but a premonition that at some time or other a situation would inevitably arise in which the thing that was slowly germinating within me would be utterly incompatible with the Golden Temple. This feeling had been emerging ever since that incident at Kameyama Park, but I had been afraid to put a name to it. Yet I was happy to know that during this one night's watch the temple would be entrusted to me and I did not conceal my pleasure.

  I was given the key to the Kukyocho. This third story of the temple was regarded as especially valuable. A few feet above the floor an impressive tablet inscribed by the Emperor Go-Komatsu was hanging against one of the beams.

  The wireless was reporting that the typhoon would be with us momentarily, but there was still not a sign of it. It had been raining intermittently during the afternoon, but now it had cleared up and a bright full moon appeared in the night sky. The various inmates of the temple had strolled into the garden and were examining the sky. I heard someone say that this was the quiet before the storm.

  The temple fell asleep. Now I was alone in the Golden Temple. When I wandered into a part of the building where the light of the moon could not enter, I was entranced at the thought that the heavy, luxurious darkness of the temple was enveloping me. Slowly, deeply, I became immersed in this very real feeling, until it grew into a sort of hallucination. Suddenly I realized that I had now actually entered that vision which had separated me from life that afternoon in Kameyama Park.

  I was there alone, and the Golden Temple—the absolute, positive Golden Temple—had enveloped me. Did I possess the temple, or was I possessed by it? Or would it not be more correct to say that a strange balance had come into being at that moment, a balance which would allow me to be the Golden Temple and the Golden Temple to be me?

  After about half past eleven, the wind grew stronger. I switched on my flashlight and climbed the stairs of the temple. When I reached the top, I put my key to the door of the Kukyocho.

  I was leaning against the railings of the Kukyocho. The wind came from the southeast. Yet so far the sky had remained unaltered. The moon was reflected on the water in the interstices between the duckweed. The air was full of the chirping of insects and the croaking of frogs.

  When the powerful wind first struck me square on the check, an almost sensual shiver ran through my body. The wind grew stronger and stronger until it become a great gale. Now it seemed to be a sort of omen that I was to be destroyed together with the Golden Temple. My heart was within that temple and at the same time it rested on that wind. The Golden Temple, which prescribed the very structure of my world, had no curtains to shake in the wind, but stood there calmly bathing in the moonlight. Yet there was no
doubt that the great wind, that evil intention of mine, would eventually shake the temple, awaken it and, at the moment of destruction, rob it of its arrogance.

  That is how it was. I was enwrapped in beauty, I was certainly within that beauty; yet I doubt whether I was so consummately wrapped up in the beauty as not to be supported by the will of that ferocious wind, which was endlessly gathering force. Just as Kashiwagi had commanded me: "Stutter! Stutter!" so now I tried to spur on the wind by shouting the words with which one encourages a galloping horse: "Stronger, stronger I" I shouted. “Go faster! Put more strength into it!”

  The forest started to rustic. The branches of the trees round the pond brushed against each other. The night sky had lost its usual indigo color and taken on a turbid hue of purple gray. The chirping of the insects had not abated and gave a lively air to the surrounding scene. From the distance the mysterious, flute-like sound of the wind approached; it seemed to be losing some of its earlier fury.

  I watched the multitudinous clouds scudding across the moon. One after another they rose up from behind the hills in the south like great battalions. There were thick clouds. There were thin clouds. There were huge expanded clouds. There were countless little tufts of cloud. They all appeared from the south, crossed the surface of the moon, passed over the Golden Temple, and rushed off to the north as though they were hurrying to some important business. I seemed to hear the screech of the golden phoenix above my head.

  Suddenly the wind died down; then it regained its strength. The forest responded sensitively to these changes: it became quiet, then it rustled wildly. The reflection of the moon on the pond also changed, becoming dark and light by turns; sometimes it would draw together its scattered beams of light and sweep swiftly across the water. The great cumuli of clouds stretched out tortuously beyond the hills, and extended like a huge hand across the sky. It was terrifying to sec how they squirmed arid jostled against each other as they approached. Occasionally a small clear area would appear in the sky through the clouds, but almost instantly it would be covered again. Now and then when a very thin cloud passed by, I could glimpse the moon through it, surrounded by a faint aureole.