The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (13 page)

Everything was done in silence. We bowed to the Superior without a word and he made some almost imperceptible response. Then the sound of the Superior's and the Deacon's clogs died away quietly as they walked away from us along the stone pavement. It is customary in the Zen sect to wait until the person whom one is seeing off has completely disappeared in the distance. As we now gazed at the two retreating figures, we could not see them in their entirety. All that we could see was the white hems of their robes and their white socks. At a certain point they seemed to have disappeared completely. But that was only because they were hidden under the trees. After a while, the white robes and the white socks emerged once more, and for some reason the echo of their footsteps seemed actually louder than before. We stood there gazing fixedly at them as they left, and it seemed ages until the two figures had gone through the main gate and finally disappeared.

It was at this point that a strange impulse was born in me. Just as when some important words were trying to break free from my mouth and were blocked by my stuttering, this impulse was held burning in my throat. The impulse was a sudden desire for release. At this moment, my previous ambitions-my desire to enter university, and still more, the hope suggested by Mother that I might succeed to the Superior's post-ceased to exist. I wanted to escape from some wordless force that controlled me and imposed itself on me.

I cannot say that I was lacking in courage at that moment. The courage required to make a confession was a trifling matter. For one such as I, who had lived in silence for the past twenty years, the value of confession was slight indeed. People may think that I am exaggerating. But the fact is that by setting myself up against the Superior's silence and refusing to confess, I had until then been experimenting with the single problem: "Is evil possible?" If I were to persist until the end in not confessing, it would prove that evil, albeit merely a petty evil, was indeed possible. But as I caught glimpses through the trees of the Superior's white skirt and white socks disappearing into the darkness of the dawn, the force that was burning in my throat became almost irresistible and I wanted to make a complete confession. I wanted to run after the Superior and cling to his sleeve and tell him in a loud voice everything that had happened on that snowy morning. It was certainly not any respect for the man that had inspired me with this wish. The Superior's force was like some strong physical power.

Yet the thought that if I should confess, the first petty evil of my life would collapse, held me back and I felt that something was tugging firmly at my back. Then the Superior's figure had passed under the main gate and disappeared under the still dark sky.

Everyone was suddenly relieved and ran noisily to the front door of the temple. As I stood there absently, Tsurukawa tapped me on the shoulder. My shoulder awoke. That lean shabby shoulder of mine regained its pride.

As I have already mentioned, I did in the end enter Otani University despite all these complications. I did not have to make any confession. A few days afterwards, the Superior had summoned Tsurukawa and me and told us briefly that We were to start preparing for our exams and that we should be excused from our temple duties while we were busy with these studies.

Thus I succeeded in entering the university. Yet this did not serve to settle all the difficulties. The Superior's attitude really told me nothing of what he was thinking about the incident on the snowy day; nor could I make out what his intentions were concerning his successor.

Otani University represented a turning-point in my life. It was here that for the first time in my life I became familiar with ideas, with ideas that I myself had deliberately chosen. Otani had its origins at a time almost three hundred years before, when in
1663
the university dormitory of the Chikushi Kanzcon Temple was moved to the Kikoku mansion in Kyoto. Ever since then it had served as the monastery for the followers of the Otani Sect of the Honganji. At the time of the Fifteenth Patriach of the Honganji, an adherent of the temple, Sokcn Takagi by name, who lived in Naniwa, had made a large contribution. They had settled on the present site at Karasumaru-gashira in the northern part of the capital and established the university there. The grounds consisted of only ten acres and were small for a university. Yet it was here that so many young men, not only of the Otani Sect, but of every branch of Buddhism, had studied and been trained in the essentials of Buddhist philosophy.

An old brick gate separated the university grounds from the street and its streetcar lines. The gate faced west towards Hiei Mountain. From the gate a graveled drive led to the
porte-cochére
of the main building, a dark, gloomy, two-storied structure. On top of the roof at the entrance, a great copper tower soared into the air. It was neither a clock tower nor a bell tower; under a slender lightning-conductor, a useless square window cut out a corner of the blue sky.

Next to the entrance grew an old lime tree, whose magnificent leaves used to glow like red copper in the sun. The university, which had originally consisted of just the main building, had been expanded time after time, and the various parts were joined together without any particular order. For the greater part, it was an old, wooden, one-story structure. One was not allowed to wear shoes inside the building and the various wings were connected with endless corridors made of bamboo floor-boards. The floor had begun to crack with age. Occasionally the broken parts were repaired, and when one walked from one wing to another, one's feet passed over an entire mosaic of dark and light wood, as one extremely ancient floor-board was followed by a very new one.

Whenever one starts in a new school or university, it is the same: though one arrives each day with a fresh feeling, one is conscious of a certain vague, incoherent quality in things. So it was with me now during my early days at Otani University. Since Tsurukawa was the only person I knew, I found myself willy-nilly speaking to him and to no one else. After a few days, however, I began, to think that there was little point in our having emerged with such trouble into this new world if we continued to see only each other. Tsurukawa evidently felt this also, and thereafter We made a point of not staying together during recreation hours and each of us tried to develop new friendships for himself. With my stuttering, however, I lacked Tsurukawa's courage, and as the number of his friends increased, I became more and more isolated.

The preparatory year's course at the university consisted of ten subjects-morals, Japanese, Sino-Japanese, Chinese, English, history, Buddhist scriptures, logic, mathematics, and
gymnastics. From the outset I had the greatest trouble in the
lectures on logic. One day during the noon recess that followed such a lecture, I decided to approach one of the
students with some questions. For some time I had been hoping to become acquainted with this young man. He always
used to sit by himself and eat his box lunch next to the flower beds in the back garden. This custom of his was like a sort of ritual and none of the other students used to ap
proach him, especially since there was something exceedingly misanthropic about the way in which he looked disgustedly at his food as he ate. He, for his part, never spoke to any of his fellow students and seemed to reject the idea of making friends with anyone.

I knew that he was called Kashiwagi. His most striking characteristic was that he had two rather powerful-looking clubfeet. His way of walking was most elaborate. He always seemed to be walking in mud: when finally he had managed to pull one foot out of the mud, the other foot would appear to be stuck. At the same time there was a sprightliness about his whole body. His walk was a sort of exaggerated dance, utterly lacking in anything commonplace.

It stood to reason that I should have noticed Kashiwagi since my very first day at the university. I was relieved at the sight of his deformity. From the outset his clubfeet signified agreement with the condition in which I found myself.

Kashiwagi had opened his lunch box on a patch of clover in the back garden. This garden lay next to a dilapidated building, which housed the rooms where we practiced the
karate
form of self-defense and also ping-pong; hardly a single pane of glass was left in the windows. A few meager pines grew in the garden and some small wooden frames covered the empty nursery beds. The blue paint of the frames had begun to peel; it was rough and wrinkled like withered artificial flowers. Next to the nursery beds was a stand with a few shelves for arranging potted dwarf trees, a pile of tiles and pebbles, and also a bed of primroses and a bed of hyacinths.

It was pleasant to sit on the clover. The light was absorbed by its soft leaves and the surface of the clover was full of little shadows, so that it looked as if the entire patch were floating lightly above the earth. Kashiwagi was no different from the other students as he sat there; it was only when he walked that his abnormality appeared. There was a certain severe beauty in his pale face. Physically he was a cripple, yet there was an intrepid beauty about him, like that of a lovely woman. Cripples and lovely women are both tired of being looked at, they are weary of an existence that involves constantly being observed, they feel hemmed in; and they return the gaze by means of that very existence itself. The one who really looks is the one who wins. Kashiwagi was looking down as he ate his lunch; but I felt that his eyes were thoroughly scrutinizing the world about him.

He was self-sufficient as he sat there in the light. This was the impression that struck me. By just looking at him in the spring light amid the flowers, I could tell that he suffered from none of that shyness, none of that underhand guilt which I felt. He was a shadow that asserted itself, or rather, he was the existent shadow itself. Certain it was that the sun could never penetrate that hard skin of his.

The box lunch that he ate with such absorption and with such evident distaste was poor, but scarcely inferior to the one that I used to prepare for myself in the mornings out of leftovers from the temple breakfast. It was 1947 and unless one could afford to buy food on the black market, it was
impossible to eat properly. I stood next to Kashiwagi with my notebook and my box lunch in my hands. My shadow fell on his food and he looked up. He glanced at me, then turned his eyes down and resumed his monotonous chewing, like a silkworm chewing mulberry leaves.

"Excuse me,” I said, stuttering terribly, “I wanted to ask you about a couple of points I didn't understand in that last lecture."
I
spoke in the standard Tokyo accent, since I had decided not to use the Kyoto dialect after entering university.

“I can't understand a word you're saying,” said Kashiwagi. ‘‘All I hear is a lot of stuttering.”

I felt my face flush. Kashiwagi licked the end of his chopsticks and continued: “I know very well why you started talking to me. Mizoguchi—that's your name, isn't it? Well, if you think that we ought to become friends just because
we're
both cripples,
I
don't mind. But compared to what's wrong with me, do you really think your stuttering is such an important affair? You make too much of yourself, don't you? As a result, you make too much of your stuttering as well as of yourself."

Later, when I found out that Kashiwagi came from a Zen family, belonging to the same Rinsai Sect, I realized that in these initial questions and answers of his he was more or less assuming the characteristic approach of a Zen priest; but there was no denying the powerful impression that his remarks made on me at the time.

"Stutter! he said. "Go ahead and stutter!"

I listened in utter amazement to his peculiar way of expressing himself.

"At last you've come across someone to whom you can stutter at your ease. That's right, isn't it? People are all like that, you know. They're all looking for a yoke-fellow. Well now, are you still a virgin?”

I nodded, without even smiling. The way in which Kasniwagi asked the question was that of a doctor and it made me feel that it would be better for me not to lie.

"Yes, I thought so,” he said. "You're a virgin. But you're not a beautiful virgin. There's nothing beautiful about you at all. You have no success with girls and you don't have the courage to have professional girls. That's all there is to it. But if you thought when you started speaking to me that you are going to make friends with another virgin, you were quite mistaken. Would you like to hear about how I lost my virginity?"

Without waiting for my answer, Kashiwagi continued.

"I'm the son of a Zen priest in Sannomiya and I was born clubfooted. When you hear me start off like this, I suppose you'll imagine that I'm some poor sick fellow who doesn't mind who he's talking to so long as he can pour out his heart about himselt. Well, I'm not. I wouldn't talk like this to just anyone who happened to come along. I'm rather embarrassed to say it, but the fact is that I deliberately chose you from the very beginning to hear my story. You see, it occurred to me that you'd probably get more benefit than anyone else from knowing what I'd done. The very best thing for you might be to do exactly what I did. As you know, that's how religious people smell out fellow believers and that's how teetotalers smell out their fellow teetotalers.

"Well then, I used to be ashamed about the conditions of my existence. I thought that to reconcile myself to those conditions, to live on good terms with them, represented a defeat. If I wanted to start bearing grudges, of course, there was no lack of material. My parents should have arranged for me to have an operation on my feet when I was small. Now it's too late. But I'm utterly unconcerned about my parents and the idea of bearing a grudge against them just bores me.