Authors: Yukio Mishima

Spring Snow (59 page)

BOOK: Spring Snow

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Despite the contortions, however, it was beautiful. Intense suffering had imbued it with an extraordinary character, carving lines into it that gave it the austere dignity of a bronze mask. The beautiful eyes were filled with tears. Above them, however, the eyebrows were tightly puckered, and the masculine force they conveyed made a striking contrast with the pathos of the flashing dark, wet pupils. As he fought the pain, his finely chiseled nose jutted upward as if he were trying to probe the darkness around him, and his lips, parched with fever, were drawn back to reveal the palely gleaming mother-of-pearl of his teeth.

Finally, the racking pain seemed to subside.

“You’re asleep? Good. It’s what you need,” said Honda. He wondered about the tortured look he had seen on his friend’s face just a moment before. Hadn’t it in fact been an expression of intense joy, the kind to be found nowhere but at the extremity of human existence? Perhaps Kiyoaki had seen something, and Honda envied him that, an emotion that in turn stirred an odd shame and self-reproach in him.

He shook his head slightly. He had begun to feel the numbing weight of grief. Deep within him, as subtly and persistently as the spinning of a silkworm’s thread, an emotion had gradually taken shape. Its significance eluded him, and he was disturbed by it.

Then Kiyoaki, who seemed to have dozed off for a moment, suddenly opened his eyes wide and reached for Honda’s hand. He grasped it tightly as he spoke.

“Just now I had a dream. I’ll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.”

His dream, Honda thought, had taken him to the park around his father’s house. And there, the most vivid of all the images must have been the falls, tumbling down from the crest of the hill in its nine stages.

Two days after his return to Tokyo, Kiyoaki Matsugae died at the age of twenty.

Footnotes