The Frolic of the Beasts Page 7

  Kōji’s heart was inexplicably filled with joy. This was the happy recompense of repentance, the kind of happiness that comes after a period of abandonment. After two years of anguish, each of them had, perhaps, finally found happiness—Yūko had Ippei exactly as she wanted him, Kōji had his freedom, and, as for Ippei, he had something very peculiar.

  Suddenly a kite cried out high above them.

  “Teijirō told me he can tell how the weather will change by listening to the birds,” said Kōji. “He can read the weather signs—like from a red sky in the morning or from a halo around the moon or the sun. I know that’s pretty common, but he can also tell the weather from the birds singing and even from the light of the stars.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that before,” said Yūko. “Where is Teijirō, anyway?”

  “He was in the greenhouse earlier,” replied Kōji.

  “I see. Hmm…is that right?” said Ippei.

  But it was too much trouble to turn back simply to inquire about the weather, and instead they began to descend the slope. As they walked along, Kōji was again overcome with thoughts of happiness. They came upon him from behind and persistently hung about him, the way a child clings to its parent’s neck. How could we possibly have had such a happy and peaceful moment as this before the incident? he continually thought. Certainly when Yūko came to meet me at the harbor, and even during our conversation at the grassy knoll at the rear of the bay, she had seemed no different at all than before. But that was probably the result of her hiding her feelings of happiness out of consideration for me after my release from prison. Maybe it was this that she really wanted to show me. Perhaps that was the real reason why she went out of her way to invite me to Iro in the first place. If that is the case, thought Kōji in sudden realization, then this happiness has undoubtedly been brought about by that single attack with the wrench.

  * * *

  —

  At length the slope leveled out, and below them they could see the back garden of Taisenji temple and part of the priest’s living quarters. In the temple garden, a large number of droning honeybees hovered around a pomegranate tree that was festooned with scarlet flowers and a camellia with shiny leaves. One of the bees, having separated from the swarm, flew loftily toward them and landed on Ippei’s straw hat. Kōji borrowed Ippei’s walking stick and deftly knocked the bee to the ground. This was the second time he had raised his hand to Ippei’s head. The three of them smiled at this little triumph, and that, more than anything, provided comforting proof that no one associated Kōji’s actions with past events.

  The smitten bee lay dust-covered on the road, buzzing quietly.

  “The priest will be angry with you,” said Yūko.

  The priest, Kakujin, kept the wild honeybees. He had set up a hive beneath the floor and, from time to time, collected the honey to spread on his toast at breakfast. As if he had heard their conversation, the priest, who had been sitting at the back of his quarters, slipped on his geta and came down and stood in the back garden. Kakujin was shaven-headed with a healthy complexion and round face; he was in every detail exactly as one would imagine a chief priest. His face was a moderate mix of the secular and the transcendent with no trace of coldness whatsoever. He was, so to speak, a small, living portrait of the archetypal chief priest of a parish temple in a fishing village.

  Yūko had already discussed the matter with Kōji, and it had been apparent from their first meeting that the priest considered them to be different from the run-of-the-mill sort of people he usually came into contact with. And because of this, the priest, too, had behaved in a way that made him stand out from that small portrait. This was painful for Yūko and Kōji. They had both been terribly fond of the priest’s small portrait and had even wanted to be included in a corner of it. The priest had lived in this peaceful village for a long time, and it was evident that he thirsted after people’s suffering. Of course, Iro had seen a lot of unhappiness: death, old age, sickness, poverty, domestic trouble, the sadness of parents with disabled children born of incestuous marriage, shipwrecked fishermen, the grief of the bereaved family left behind. However, in this countryside region, there was no “Great Doubt” of the sort encountered by Master Bankei when he was twelve or thirteen years old. In this village, there was none of that particular type of spiritual awakening—that craving for “seeing one’s true nature”—so characteristic of the Rinzai school of Zen.

  It seemed the priest had been casting his net out for a considerable time—trying for a good catch. But for many years now the spiritual yield had been poor. When Yūko first came to the village and introduced herself, the priest must have sniffed out in this seemingly lively and cheerful, handsome-faced city girl the prey he had long been searching for. It was the smell of anguish, a smell that one with a nose for it could detect well in advance—a smell that Yūko herself had possibly not been aware of.

  And what was more, this time, an unusually well-behaved, diffident, and hardworking young man had also come along—again, with that same smell. That delicious smell. There was no doubt that only the priest had detected it. He had been very kind to both Ippei and his wife and to Kōji, showing them warm friendship. It was a kindness born out of consideration for the delicious prey he had been craving for so long. All this was, of course, pure conjecture on the part of Yūko and Kōji. The priest had not once asked any probing questions; neither had Yūko nor Kōji volunteered information about their personal circumstances without being asked.

  “Where are you all off to?” asked the priest in a loud voice from where he stood in the middle of the garden.

  “For a picnic at the waterfall,” replied Yūko.

  “That will be hard work in this heat. Your husband will be all right, won’t he?”

  “He needs an outing to exercise his legs.”

  “Oh, that’s extremely commendable. And, Kōji, I see you are the picnic bearer, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Kōji, laughing, swinging the large picnic hamper up for him to see. In that instant his heart, which had until then been filled with happiness, clouded over at the sight of the priest’s smiling face. Kōji recalled the reception he had received when, several days earlier, he had gone down to the village barber’s and tobacconist.

  When he entered the barber’s shop, he had sensed that the conversation between the barber and his customers had abruptly come to an end, and while he was having his hair cut, the shop was enveloped in an eerie silence, so that all he could hear was the noise of scissors and clippers. And on the way home, when he stopped off at the tobacconist, the shop assistant’s familiar face suddenly tightened when she laid eyes on him. He had bought some cigarettes and then left. Behind him, he heard the girl’s feet kick off the tatami mats as she turned and hurried toward the back of the shop.

  Kōji sensed he had seen in the priest’s carefree smile just now the two different faces of the village’s reaction to his presence.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m tired. I’m tired,” began Ippei as they approached the eastern fringes of the village, turned left in front of the local shrine, and began at last to climb the mountain path.

  With nothing else to do, they sat down on a rock in the shade of a tree. Yūko had Kōji take a picture of her with Ippei, and then she took one of Kōji and Ippei together. She was uneasy about giving the camera to Ippei, and so there was no picture of just her and Kōji.

  When they were stuck for conversation, Kōji talked about prison. Yūko would frown at this but Ippei, seemingly pleased with the subject, leaned forward on his knees in an effort to understand as much as possible. Kōji, solely for Ippei’s benefit, slowly and concisely enunciated each and every word as he spoke. During the conversation, Yūko carefully brushed off an ant that had been crawling up Ippei’s unmoving right leg.

  Kōji took out a small comb from the back pocket of his j
eans, and with the light sifting down through the trees onto its candy-colored mock tortoiseshell, he showed it to Ippei and asked him what it was.

  “Co…mb,” replied Ippei, after a few seconds, extremely pleased with himself at seeing Kōji’s acknowledgment.

  Like a conjurer, Kōji turned the comb over and stroked its spine. “Can you see? It’s not worn down at all, is it?”

  Yūko, also interested, moved her face closer and gave off a whiff of the perfume she had applied to the base of her ears.

  “The inmates’ combs are all worn away here. In the worst cases, they are worn pretty much all the way down to the base of the teeth. And can you guess why? Well, I’ll tell you—it’s called ‘gori.’ What you do is you make a celluloid powder by rubbing the back of the comb on the windowpane in the toilets. Then you tightly wrap the powder in cotton, about the thickness of a cigarette, add a little tooth powder, and then rub it hard on a board until it ignites. You use it to light any cigarettes you manage to filch. If this gori is discovered, it’s two weeks in solitary. There was a guy who used to sing ‘Even without a match, a butt is lighted; distant yet so close, passions are ignited.’ ”

  He lit his own cigarette, drew deeply on it, and narrowed his eyes.

  “Does it taste good?” asked Yūko.

  “Yeah, it’s good,” he replied, in a slightly ill-humored manner. It bothered him that cigarettes were no longer as good as they had been just before his release from prison.

  * * *

  —

  Anyone looking at the garbage-filled river mouth by the wharf would find it hard to believe that this river had its origin in the great waterfall deep in the Taiya Mountains, hard to believe that it was the same as that limpid mountain stream water that seethed over the riverbed, sending spray over the moss-covered rocks.

  They followed the mountain path—which could hardly be described as being very steep—upstream, and as they came to the top of the wide trail, the sunlight came through the trees and carried with it on the wind the chirring of cicadas, as if the dappled sunlight itself was in full chorus. And then they were in the pleasantly cool deep shade of a clump of cedar trees.

  “I’m tired,” repeated Ippei.

  By the time they reached the waterfall, they had taken four long impromptu breaks, and although they had planned to eat lunch at the plunge pool below the waterfall, they had polished off their lunch boxes at the third stop, on account of Kōji constantly complaining that he was hungry. That was already after noon. And, because each time they stopped to rest, Kōji always descended the valley to dip Yūko’s mountain lily into the stream, so that it retained its beautiful fragrance and vigor.

  The waterfall couldn’t be much farther now.

  Ippei clambered to his feet—signaling, in theatrical fashion, that they should start. Clearly he was aware that he was clowning around. He thrust forward his walking stick and knickerbocker-clad left leg—“Off we go!”—and then swung the whole of his body around from the right, lifting his right leg up like a heavy crane.

  Yūko cheered him on.

  “Off we go!”

  Kōji tidied the picnic away, confident that he would soon be able to catch up to them no matter how far ahead they got, and gazed after their retreating forms as they appeared to dissolve into the hazy sunlight that sifted down through the trees onto the pebble path.

  It was an absurd sight—Yūko doggedly echoing Ippei, “Off we go!”

  Kōji was beguiled by that hollow voice, lost in the torrent of the stream. He felt as though the predicament in which he had been placed was as heavy, cold, and immovable as stone. He lengthened the strap of the tea flask and slung it across his shoulder together with the camera and set off with a careless swing of the empty picnic basket.

  * * *

  —

  Having crossed a moldering wooden bridge and climbed a roundabout set of stone steps, Yūko now stood in front of the small shrine, listening to the roar of the waterfall through the dense clump of cedar trees; there was a clear look of contempt in her eyes.

  “It’s a pretty dull, small shrine, isn’t it? It’s ridiculous to think we’ve carried the lily all this way to make an offering at a place like this. And what is this cheap muslin curtain with the rosette pattern supposed to mean?”

  Inside the shrine, the flame of a candle that was about to expire flickered precariously, and several strings of paper cranes that had all but lost their color swayed ever so slightly in the updraft.

  Kōji was afraid of Yūko’s sacrilege.

  It was a sacrilege without reason or motive—nothing other than a moody fixation with an illusion she had herself waywardly created.

  “But the object of worship at this shrine is the waterfall itself, isn’t it? Who cares about the cheap curtain?”

  Yūko was annoyed about something. Her anger-filled eyes flashed as they caught the piercing rays of light coming over the cedar tops.

  “All right, then we can throw the lily into the pool, can’t we?”

  * * *

  —

  Then they rested on an expansive sheet of rock at the side of the plunge pool. After hearing the roar of the waterfall, something had changed inside Yūko. She laughed wildly, and then just as suddenly fell silent. Her emotions were self-indulgent—her hot, moist eyes held the waterfall in their gaze, and her dark crimson lips, unsmiling, twisted every now and then.

  The view of the waterfall was magnificent.

  From a height of some two hundred feet the black rock summit shone in the brilliant light that was penetrating the disordered clouds above, and out from between the light-filled gaps in a sparse coppice water came skipping and jumping in short bursts before cascading downward. All they could see of the upper third was white spray, and while the rock surface wasn’t visible, lower down the water divided itself in two and surged outward as if suddenly attacking the onlookers below. Finally, the flow formed a multitude of columns and then descended abruptly with a shake of its foaming white mane.

  The only things growing on the rocks that agitated the water were a small number of weeds that were soaked right through to their stems.

  The direction of the wind was constantly changing and one couldn’t be certain from where the spray was next going to come. The sunlight leaking through the tall vegetation on the bank to the right was a picture of tranquility as it threw streaks of even, parallel light across the falling water. The air was filled with the sound of the waterfall and the chirring of cicadas. The two quarreled with each other and at times seemed like one and the same, and yet, at other times their sounds were quite distinct.

  They lay down on the rock surface, each adopting a position according to their own fancy. Ippei had taken the lily from where it lay at Yūko’s side and placed it over his face as he reclined on his back. It was difficult to interpret if Ippei’s actions were deliberately exaggerated or if they had been abandoned in midflow. This time, it wasn’t obvious whether he had been trying to appreciate the lily’s fragrance or, perhaps, pretending to devour the flower.

  At any rate, his distinguished nose and mouth had been buried in the lily for quite some time. The other two, their ears deafened by the thunder of the waterfall, were pretending not to have noticed.

  Then suddenly Ippei began to choke violently and flung the flower away, leaving a startled face speckled around the tip of the nose and cheeks with brick-colored pollen. Or had he been trying to commit suicide with the flower?

  Yūko propped herself up. She retrieved the slightly battered lily, took hold of the aluminum-wrapped stem base, and pensively waved it around casually several times in her red-nailed manicured fingers. This was the first time Kōji had seen such a lack of respect in her eyes as she regarded Ippei.

  “Say, do you understand ‘sacrifice’?”

  She stared into Ippei’s face as he lay once again on
his back and posed the question in a contemptuous voice.

  Ippei was surprised at the tone of his wife’s question, which was clearly different than usual.

  “Sacr…fish?”

  “No, that’s not right. Don’t you understand the word ‘sacrifice’?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Kōji thought Yūko was being unduly hard on Ippei and so he interrupted. “It’s too difficult for him, you know, such an abstract word.”

  “Be quiet. I’m testing him.”

  Turning her face to Kōji, she smiled in a relaxed, rather vague manner instead of the harsh look that he had expected to see.

  Kōji stared at several stray hairs blown across Yūko’s forehead by the wind from the waterfall and suddenly remembered that single strand of hair floating in the dark bathtub.

  “You must have some idea? You’re an idiot, aren’t you? This is what I’m talking about.”

  Without warning, Yūko threw the lily she had been holding into the plunge pool. The discarded flower formed a shining white circle in front of them.

  Dark confusion spread across Ippei’s face. This was something else Kōji had not seen before—a look of pure anxiety born of being cut off from all understanding.

  Yūko was enjoying herself to the point where she couldn’t control herself any longer. She bent backward, choking back tears of laughter, and then quickly asked, “How about the word ‘kiss,’ then? Do you understand that?”

  “Ki…”

  “Try to say ‘kiss.’ ”

  “Ki…”

  “You’re stupid, aren’t you? You don’t understand, do you? Well, I’ll show you. It’s like this.”

  She turned about and suddenly wrapped herself around Kōji’s neck as he was leaning forward. The rocks were slippery, and Kōji was caught off guard by this surprise attack. Yūko’s lips pressed blindly against his, and their teeth bumped together. After this collision came a meeting of the flesh. She advanced and inserted her tongue into Kōji’s mouth, and Kōji, drawn into that warm, tender morass, swallowed her saliva. His senses benumbed by the unceasing boom of the waterfall, he couldn’t tell how much time had passed. When their lips parted, he was angry. He sensed that the kiss had, surely, been for Ippei’s sake.