Beauty and Sadness
Translated from the Japanese by Howard S. Hibbett
First published in 1975
TEMPLE BELLS
Five swivel chairs were ranged along the other side of the observation car of the
Kyoto express. Oki Toshio noticed that the one on the end was quietly revolving
with the movement of the train. He could not take his eyes from it. The low
armchairs on his side of the car did not swivel.
Oki was alone in the observation car. Slouched deep in his armchair, he
watched the end chair turn. Not that it kept turning in the same direction, at
the same speed: sometimes it went a little faster, or a little slower, or even
stopped and began turning in the opposite direction. To look at that one
revolving chair, wheeling before him in the empty car, made him feel lonely.
Thoughts of the past began flickering through his mind.
It was the twenty-ninth of December. Oki was going to Kyoto to hear the New
Year's Eve bells.
For how many years had he heard the tolling of those bells over the radio? How
long ago had the broadcasts begun? Probably he had listened to them every
year since then, and to the commentary by various announcers, as they picked
up the sound of famous old bells from temples all around the country. During
the broadcast the old year was giving way to the new, so the commentaries
tended to be florid and emotional. The deep booming note of a huge Buddhist
temple bell resounded at leisurely intervals, and the lingering reverberations
held an awareness of the old Japan and of the flow of time. After the bells of
the northern temples came the bells in Kyushu, but every New Year's Eve
ended with the Kyoto bells. Kyoto had so many temples that sometimes the
mingled sounds of a host of different bells came over the radio.
At midnight his wife and daughter might still be bustling about, preparing
holiday delicacies in the kitchen, straightening up the house, or perhaps
getting their kimonos ready or arranging flowers. Oki would sit in the dining
room and listen to the radio. As the bells rang he would look back at the
departing year. He always found it a moving experience. Some years that
emotion was violent or painful. Sometimes he was racked by sorrow and regret.
Even when the sentimentality of the announcers repelled him, the tolling of the
bells echoed in his heart. For a long time he had been tempted by the thought
of being in Kyoto one New Year's Eve to hear the living sound of those old
temple bells.
That had come to mind again this year end, and he had impulsively decided to
go to Kyoto. He had also been stirred by a defiant wish to see Ueno Otoko again
after all these years, and to listen to the bells with her. Otoko had not written
to him since she had moved to Kyoto, but by now she had established herself
there as a painter in the classical Japanese tradition. She was still unmarried.
Because it was on impulse, and he disliked making reservations, Oki had
simply gone to Yokohama Station and boarded the observation car of the Kyoto
express. Near the holidays the train might be crowded, but he knew the porter
and counted on getting a seat from him.
Oki found the Kyoto express convenient, since it left Tokyo and Yokohama
early in the afternoon, arriving at Kyoto in the evening, and also left in early
afternoon on its way back. He always made his trips to Kyoto on this train.
Most of the girl attendants in the first-class cars knew him by sight.
Once aboard, he was surprised to find the car empty. Perhaps there were never
many passengers on the twenty-ninth of December. It might be crowded again
by the thirty-first.
As he kept watching the end chair turn, Oki began to think of fate. Just then
the porter brought tea.
"Am I all alone?" Oki asked.
"Only five or six passengers today, sir."
"Will it be full on New Year's Day?"
"No, sir, it usually isn't. Is that when you're coming back?"
"I'm afraid so."
"I won't be on duty myself, but I'll see that you're taken care of."
"Thank you."
After the porter left, Oki looked around the car and saw a pair of white leather
valises at the foot of the last armchair. They were square and rather slender, in
a new style. The white leather was flecked with pale brownish dots; it was a
kind unobtainable in Japan. Also, there was a large leopard-skin handbag on
the chair. The owners of the luggage must be Americans. Probably they were in
the dining car.
Woods flowed by in a thick, warm-looking haze outside the window. Far above
the haze, white clouds were bathed in a shimmering light that seemed to
radiate up from the earth. But as the train went on, the whole sky cleared. The
sunlight slanting in the windows reached all across the car. As they passed a
pine-covered mountain he could see that the ground was strewn with dry pine
needles. A clump of bamboo had yellowed leaves. On the ocean side sparkling
waves surged in to shore against a black cape.
Two middle-aged American couples came back from the dining car and, as
soon as they could see Mt. Fuji, past Numazu, stood at the windows eagerly
taking photographs. By the time Fuji was completely visible, down to the fields
at its base, they seemed tired of photographing and had turned their backs to
it.
The winter day was already ending. Oki let his eyes follow the dull silver-gray
line of a river, and then looked up into the setting sun. For a long while the last
bright chilly rays streamed through an arc-shaped cleft in the black clouds,
before disappearing. The lights were on in the car, and suddenly all the swivel
chairs wheeled halfway around. But only the one on the end kept turning.
When he arrived in Kyoto, Oki went directly to the Miyako Hotel. He asked for a
quiet room, with the thought that Otoko might come to see him. The elevator
seemed to rise six or seven floors; but since the hotel was built in steps upward
along a steep slope of the Eastern Hills, the long corridor he followed led back
to a ground-floor wing. The rooms along the corridor were as silent as if there
were no other guests. A little after ten o'clock he began hearing clamorous
foreign voices all around him. Oki asked the floor boy about it.
There were two families, he was told, with twelve children between them. The
children not only shouted at each other within their rooms but romped up and
down the corridor. Why, when the hotel seemed almost empty, had they
sandwiched him in between such noisy guests? Oki restrained his annoyance,
thinking the children would soon go to sleep. But the noise went on and on,
perhaps because they were keyed up by the trip. What especially grated on his
ears was the sound of their footsteps running along the corridor. Finally he got
out of bed.
The loud chattering in a foreign language made Oki feel all the more lonely.
That revolving chair in the observation car, turning by itself, came before him.
It was as if he saw his own loneliness silently turning round and round within
his heart.
Oki had come to Kyoto to hear the New Year's Eve bells and to see Ueno Otoko,
but he wondered once again which had been his real reason. Of course he was
not sure he could see her. Yet were not the bells merely a pretext, and the
chance of seeing her something he had long desired? He had come to Kyoto
hoping to listen to the temple bells with Otoko. It had seemed a not
unreasonable hope. But a gulf of many years lay between them. Though she
had remained unmarried, it was quite possible that she would refuse to see an
old lover, to accept an invitation from him.
"No, she's not like that," Oki muttered to himself. Still, he did not know how
she might have changed.
It seemed that Otoko was living in a guest house on the grounds of a certain
temple, along with a girl who was her protégée. Oki had come across a
photograph of her in an art magazine. It was not a cottage, but a sizable house,
with a large sitting room that she used as a studio. There was even a fine old
garden. The photograph showed Otoko with brush in hand, bending over to
work on a painting, but the line of her profile was unmistakable. Her figure was
as slender as ever. Even before his old memories were awakened, he felt a stab
of guilt at having robbed her of the possibility of marriage and motherhood.
Obviously no one else would feel as he did about that photograph. To people
who glanced at it in the magazine it would be merely the portrait of a woman
artist who had gone to live in Kyoto and had become a typical Kyoto beauty.
Oki had thought he would telephone her the next day, if not that night, or drop
in at her house. But in the morning, after being awakened by his neighbors'
children, he began to feel hesitant, and decided to send her a special-delivery
letter. As he sat at the writing desk staring perplexedly at a blank sheet of hotel
stationery he decided that he need not see her, that it would be enough to hear
the bells alone and then go back.
Oki had been aroused early by the children, but once the two foreign families
went out he fell asleep again. It was almost eleven when he awakened.
Slowly tying his necktie, he suddenly recalled Otoko saying: "I'll tie it for you.
Let me...." She was fifteen, and those had been her first words after he had
taken her virginity. Oki himself had not spoken. There was nothing he could
say. He had been holding her tenderly close, stroking her hair, but he could not
bring himself to speak. Then she had slipped out of his arms and begun to
dress. He got up, put on his shirt, and started to tie his tie. She was looking up
into his face, her eyes moist and shining, but not tearful. He avoided those
eyes. Even when he had kissed her, earlier, Otoko had kept her eyes wide open
until he pressed them shut with his lips.
There was a sweet, girlish ring in her voice as she asked to tie his tie. Oki felt a
wave of relief. What she said was completely unexpected. Perhaps she was
trying to escape from herself, rather than to indicate forgiveness, but she
handled his necktie gently, though she seemed to be having trouble with it.
"Do you know how?" Oki asked.
"I think so. I used to watch my father."
Her father had died when Otoko was eleven.
Oki dropped into a chair and held Otoko facing him on his lap, lifting his chin
to make it easier for her. She crouched slightly toward him, several times
undoing the tie and beginning over again. Then she slipped off his lap, trailing
her fingers along his right shoulder, and gazed at the necktie. "There you are,
Sonny-boy. Will that do?" Oki got up and went to the mirror. The knot was
perfect. He rubbed the palm of his hand roughly across his face, with its faint
oily film of sweat. He could hardly look at himself after having violated such a
young girl. In the mirror he saw her face approaching. Startled by its fresh,