Spring Snow Read Free Page B

below him, he could see the boats moored in a small inlet.
    At the same time, he was mulling over his friend’s lack of enthusiasm. Kiyoaki never took the lead, though sometimes he would join in with an air of utter boredom only to enjoy himself in his own way. The role of exhorter and leader, then, always fell to Honda if the pair were to do anything at all.
    “You can see the boats, can’t you?” said Kiyoaki.
    “Yes, of course I can,” Honda replied, glancing dubiously behind him.
    ∗
    What did Kiyoaki mean by his question? If one were forced to hazard a guess, it would be that he was trying to say that he had no interest in anything at all. He thought of himself as a thorn, a small, poisonous thorn jabbed into the workmanlike hand of his family. And this was his fate simply because he had acquired a little elegance. A mere fifty years before, the Matsugaes had been a sturdy, upright samurai family, no more, eking out a frugal existence in the provinces. But in a brief span of time, their fortunes had soared. 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. And Kiyoaki, like an ant that senses the approaching flood, was experiencing the first intimations of his family’s rapid collapse.
    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.
    His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions—gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose.
    At the moment nothing interested him. Boating? His father had thought the little green and white boat he had imported from abroad to be stylish. As far as his father was concerned the boat was culture; culture made tangible. But what of it? Who cared about a boat?
    Honda, with his inborn intuition, understood Kiyoaki’s sudden silence. Although they were the same age, Honda was more mature. He was, in fact, a young man who wanted to lead a constructive life, and he had made up his mind about his future role. With Kiyoaki, however, he always took care to seem less sensitive and subtle than he was. For he knew that his friend was quite receptive to his careful displays of obtuseness—the only bait that seemed to draw a rise from Kiyoaki. And this streak of deception ran through their whole friendship.
    “It would do you good to get some exercise,” said Honda brusquely. “I know that you can’t have been reading all that much, but you look as if you’d read your way through a library.”
    Kiyoaki smiled by way of reply. Honda was right. It was not his books that had drained him of energy but his dreams. A whole library wouldn’t have exhausted him as much as his constant dreaming night after night.
    The very night before, he had dreamed of his own coffin, made of unpainted wood. It stood in the middle of an empty room with large windows, and outside, the pre-dawn darkness was shading to a deep blue; it was filled with the sound of birdsong. A young woman clung to the coffin, her long black hair trailing from her drooping head, her slender shoulders wracked with sobs. He wanted to see her face but could make out no more than her pale, graceful forehead with its delicate peak of black hair. The coffin was half covered with a