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For now, in the person of his own son, the Marquis had seen the ultimate fusion of the aristocratic and the samurai traditions, a perfect congruence between the old court nobles and the new nobility.
By Kiyoaki’s time, the first traces of refinement were threatening to take hold on a family that, unlike the court nobility, had enjoyed centuries of immunity to the virus of elegance.
His elegance was the thorn. And he was well aware that his aversion to coarseness, his delight in refinement, were futile; he was a plant without roots. Without meaning to undermine his family, without wanting to violate its traditions, he was condemned to do so by his very nature. And this poison would stunt his own life as it destroyed his family. The handsome young man felt that this futility typified his existence.
And this streak of deception ran through their whole friendship.
Yet Kiyoaki remained convinced that at the bottom of this world, which was like a leather bag filled with water, there was a little hole, and it seemed to him that he could hear time leaking from it, drop by drop.
she had the freshness of ripe fruit in a crystal bowl.
He indulged himself, to the exclusion of all else, in the cultivation of his anxiety.
He could not bring himself to look up into the sky at the moon itself, the origin of the image in the water. Rather he kept looking down into the basin and into the water contained by its curved sides, the reflection of his innermost self, into which the moon, like a golden shell, had sunk so deep.
His sensibility was thus at the mercy of every unforeseen occurrence, however trivial, and he had no defenses at hand.
The very things that his sense of dignity had made him ignore up to now had suddenly gained the power to humiliate him.
Everything on stage paled before his self-esteem, now that he was delivered from any threat to it.
he began to pray: “Why is our era one of decadence? Why does the world despise vigor and youth and worthy ambitions and single-mindedness?
Why can we not recapture the glory of your era? How long must this age of the effete and the contemptible endure? Or is the worst still to come? Men think only of money and women. Men have forgotten everything that should be becoming to a man. That great and shining age of gods and heroes passed away with the Meiji Emperor. Will we ever see its like again? A time when the strength of youth will unstintingly give of itself once more?
To make matters worse, Satoko had ended on that phrase calculated to irritate Kiyoaki: “You’ll understand soon enough.”
To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious to its style. You and I, you see, must be immersed in some style of living or other, but we’re like goldfish swimming around in a bowl without ever noticing it.
Taking his perfunctory reply in his stride, Honda went on: “All right, then, just imagine this if you can. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.
“That’s it exactly. Europeans believe that a man like Napoleon can impose his will on history. We Japanese think the same of the men like your grandfather and his contemporaries who brought about the Meiji Restoration. But is that really true? Does history ever obey the will of men?
“But there is such a thing as the time being ripe for everything, isn’t there?” asked Kiyoaki. “Your vision’s time would finally have come, that’s all. Maybe it wouldn’t even take as long as a hundred years; maybe thirty or fifty. That sort of thing often happens. And perhaps even after your death, your will would serve as an invisible guideline, unknown to anyone, that would help bring about what you wanted to accomplish in your lifetime. Maybe if someone like you had never lived, history would never have taken such a turn, no matter how long it lasted.”
History is a record of destruction. One must always make room for the next ephemeral crystal. For history, to build and to destroy are one and the same thing.
No one can say for certain, but I will say this much: any will has as its essence the desire to influence history. I’m not saying that human desires affect history, only that they try to. Then, too, some forms of will are bound up with destiny, even though this concept is anathema to the will.
It was the Baron’s custom to don a silk smoking jacket after dinner and, thus attired, to spend the rest of the evening ignoring his wife’s inexhaustible flood of chatter.
The Shinkawas were an old and wealthy merchant family, and while it was, of course, essential to maintain the mutually profitable relationship established with the men from Satsuma and Choshu who had risen to such power within the government, the Baron and his wife held them in secret contempt because of their peasant origins. This was an attitude inherited from their parents, and one that was at the very heart of their newly acquired but unshakable elegance.
But no matter how biting the Baron’s sarcasm, his speech was mumbled and his expression blank in true English fashion, so that no one heard him.
Pairing each husband with his own wife was an exquisitely refined torture that the Baron endured with cheerful equanimity. It was, after all, one that he preferred and had, in fact, pioneered. He looked on it as the kind of ordeal that might well become general practice in advanced civilization a hundred years hence.
And so the hint of sweetness lingered in the midst of his desolation, like the echo of a song over a barren waste.
On the one hand, she was letting a rash caprice sweep her with appalling boldness into a course of action from which there would be no turning back. On the other, she was waiting for something to intervene. For the moment there was still time. There was still time. Up until the very last instant, a letter of pardon might come—or so she hoped. And then again, she despised the very thought of hope.
This us exactly where i am with teaching at NSCA this year
she had never been so conscious as she was this afternoon of the uselessness of the elegance bred in her by her father’s example.
Little by little the beetle kept edging its glittering body closer to him as if its pointless progress were a lesson that when traversing a world of unceasing flux, the only thing of importance was to radiate beauty.
to evade the bonds of time and space as if by magic. To stand before the person we love is not the same as loving her true self, for we are only apt to regard her physical beauty as the indispensable mode of her existence. When time and space intervene, it is possible to be deceived by both, but on the other hand, it is equally possible to draw twice as close to her real self.”
At first he had been able to regard the letter’s destruction as proof of his strength of will, but in retrospect he was now beset by the feeling that on the contrary he had acted out of sheer cowardice.
At this moment she held an irresistible attraction for him, in her kimono the color of white wisteria, but it was not merely that of a rich prize finally within his grasp; it was the lure of the forbidden, the utterly unattainable, the proscribed. He wanted her this way and no other.
For years, each of them had been extremely careful to intrude in no way on the personal life of the other. But now, just three days before, Kiyoaki had suddenly come to him and, like a newly cured patient transmitting his disease to someone else, had passed on to his friend the virus of introspection. It had taken hold so readily that Honda’s disposition now seemed a far better host to it than Kiyoaki’s. The first major symptom of the disease was a vague sense of apprehension.
But now that he’s told me everything as he did the other day, shouldn’t I interfere, as I have the right to do in an ordinary friendship, and do my best to save him from the clear danger that’s threatening him? Moreover, I shouldn’t hold back even if it makes him so resentful that he breaks our friendship. In ten or twenty years, he’ll understand why I did it. And even if he never understands, it should make no difference to me.
Once passion was set in motion according to its own laws, then it was irresistible. This was a theory that would never be accepted by modern law, which took it as self-evident that conscience and reason ruled man.
It seemed that summer had the power to heal all frustrations, soothe every grief, restore their lost happiness.
Faith such as this was so removed from their experience that they had never even thought of it ever touching their lives.
his thoughts completely taken up with the sea. It ended a few feet from where he sat. The sea, broad and vast, with all its mighty force, ended right there before his eyes. Be it the edge of time or space, there is nothing so awe-inspiring as a border. To be here at this place with his three companions, at this marvelous border between land and sea, struck him as being very similar to being alive as one age was ending and another beginning, like being part of a great moment in history. And then too the tide of their own era, in which he and Kiyoaki lived, also had to have an appointed time to
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But as it is, each man’s consciousness is limited to the past, the present, or the future of that single life. In the midst of the turmoil of history, each one of us builds his own little shelter of self-awareness and we can never leave it.
A man may be hard to persuade by rational argument while he is easily swayed by a display of passion, even if it is feigned.
unprecedented trust that Kiyoaki had shown in him made him more sharply aware than ever before of the cold, subtle poison that permeated their relationship. His friend’s contempt and trust were as closely linked as a fine leather glove and the hand inside it. But Kiyoaki had an aura about him that made Honda forgive him. The only way he could cope with contempt of this sort was to hold onto a belief in his own nobility, and this he did with moderation rather than with the blind traditionalism of so many young men.
Their banter was affectionate enough, but it had an indefinably gritty taste. They sensed that the irrevocable end of their happiness was not far away.
it. I’ve known supreme happiness, and I’m not greedy enough to want what I have to go on forever. Every dream ends. Wouldn’t it be foolish, knowing that nothing lasts forever, to insist that one has a right to do something that does?
He was oppressed by a mood of empty frustration that made him feel both feverish and chilled. It was as though he were afflicted with a disease that turned his movements sluggish and heavy, but nevertheless made him feel restless.
For the first time in his life, he accepted raw ugliness as indeed being part of him.
The stern lines around her mouth were gone now, and she seemed aglow with a lively satisfaction, as if she had banished decades of stifling gloom, dispersing at a single stroke the enervating pall that had hung over the house ever since the present Marquis had become its master. Nor was she laying the blame on her son alone. She was speaking now in retaliation against all those others, too, who surrounded her in her old age, and whose treacherous power she could sense closing in to crush her. Her voice came echoing gaily out of another era, one of upheavals, a violent era forgotten by this
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Before his very eyes, his father and mother and grandmother seemed to be carefully planning the funeral, quite unconcerned that the corpse could hear every word.
But since the problem was at once too vast to deal with on his own and too embarrassing to discuss with others, he made every effort to put it out of his mind.
The Count was never one to be long vexed by worries, and as an inevitable consequence, his worries always ended up by vexing others.
Although restrained by Yamada’s presence beside him, he called her name in his heart again and again.
He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes.
