Spring Snow Read Free

Kiyoaki’s service as a page. Iinuma had been recommended as Kiyoaki’s personal tutor by the middle school of his village in Kagoshima, and he had been sent to the Matsugaes with testimonies to his mental and physical abilities. The present Marquis’s father was revered as a fierce and powerful god in Kagoshima, and Iinuma had visualized life in the Matsugae household entirely in terms of what he had heard at home or at school about the exploits of the former Marquis. In his year with them, however, their luxurious way of life had disrupted this expectation and had wounded his youthfully puritanical sensibilities.
    He could shut his eyes to other things, but not to Kiyoaki, who was his personal responsibility. Everything about Kiyoaki—his looks, his delicacy, his sensitivity, his turn of mind, his interests—grated on Iinuma. And everything about the Marquis and Marquise’s attitude toward their son’s education was equally distressing. “I’ll never raise a son of mine that way, not even if I am made a Marquis. What weight do you suppose the Marquis gives to his own father’s tenets?”
    The Marquis was punctilious in observing the annual rites for his father, but almost never spoke of him. At first, Iinuma used to dream that the Marquis would talk more often about his father and that his reminiscences might reveal something of the affection in which he held his father’s memory, but in the course of the year such hopes flickered and died.
    The night that Kiyoaki returned home after performing his duties as an imperial page, the Marquis and his wife gave a private family dinner to celebrate the occasion. When the time came for Kiyoaki to hurry off to bed, Iinuma helped him to his room. The thirteen-year-old boy’s cheeks were flushed with the wine that his father, half as a joke, had forced upon him. He burrowed into the silken quilts and let his head fall back on the pillow, his breath warm and heavy. The tracery of blue veins under his close-cropped hair throbbed around his earlobes, and the skin was so extraordinarily transparent that one could almost see the fragile mechanism inside. Even in the half-light of the room, his lips were red. And the sounds of breathing that came from this boy, who looked as though he had never experienced anguish, seemed to be the mocking echo of a sad folksong.
    Iinuma looked down at his face, at the sensitive darting eyes with their long lashes—the eyes of an otter—and he knew that it was hopeless to expect him to swear the enthusiastic oaths of loyalty to the Emperor that a night like this would have invoked in any normal young Japanese boy striving toward manhood, who had been privileged to carry out so glorious a task.
    Kiyoaki’s eyes were now wide open as he lay on his back staring at the ceiling, and they were filled with tears. And when this glistening gaze turned on him, Iinuma’s distaste deepened. But this made it all the more imperative for him to believe in his own loyalty. When Kiyoaki apparently felt too warm, he pulled his bare arms, slightly flushed, out from under the quilt and started to fold them behind his head; Iinuma admonished him and pulled shut the loose collar of his nightgown: “You’ll catch cold. You ought to go to sleep now.”
    “Iinuma, you know . . . I made a blunder today. If you promise not to tell Father or Mother, I’ll say what it was.”
    “What was it?”
    “Today, when I was carrying the Princess’s train, I stumbled a little. But the Princess just smiled and forgave me.”
    Iinuma was repelled by these frivolous words, by the absence of any sense of responsibility, by the tearful look of rapture in those eyes, by everything.

2
     
    I T WAS HARDLY SURPRISING , then, that by the time Kiyoaki turned eighteen, his preoccupations had served to isolate him more and more from his surroundings. He had grown apart from more than just his family. The teachers at the Peers School had instilled in their pupils the supremely noble