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.There were great vistas in the fire, and the shadows moving in the depths of the fireplace were a miniature of the flames of political upheaval tracing shadows across the heavens.As the flames died down on one log, an even expanse of quiet vermilion would show itself from under a delicate tortoiseshell bed of ashes, trembling like a heap of white feathers.The firm bind of logs would collapse at its foundations.Then, maintaining a precarious balance, it would burn up like a great rock in the air.Everything was flowing, in motion.The quiet chain of smoke, so stable, was forever breaking up.The collapse of a log that had finished its work brought a sort of repose.“Very interesting,” said Tōru, rather tartly, when he had heard the story to the end.“But where’s the proof?”“Proof?” Keiko hesitated.“Is there proof for the truth?”“When you say ‘truth’ it sounds false.”“If you demand proof, I should imagine Mr.Honda has preserved Kiyoaki Matsugae’s diary all these years.You might ask to see it.He wrote only of dreams, and Mr.Honda says all of them have come true.But maybe it doesn’t matter.Maybe nothing I’ve said has anything to do with you.You were born on March twentieth and Ying Chan died in the spring, and you have those three marks, and so it would seem that you are her reincarnation.But we have not been able to find out exactly when she died.Her twin sister said only that it was in the spring, but she seems unable to remember the exact day.Mr.Honda has investigated in any number of ways, but without success.If she was bitten by a snake and died later than March twenty-first, you go scot free.The spirit wanders around for at least a week.So your birthday has to be a week after she died.”“Actually I don’t know my own birthday.My father was at sea and there was no one to take care of the details, and the date of registration was put down as the birthday.But I was born before March twentieth.”“The earlier it was, the dimmer the possibility,” Keiko said coldly.“But maybe it doesn’t matter anyway.”“It doesn’t matter?” Tōru showed signs of indignation.Quite aside from whether or not he believed the terrible story he had heard, to be told that it did not matter seemed to him like a naked denial of his reasons for being.Keiko had the ability to make a person seem like an insect.It lay behind her unchanging gaiety.In the light from the fire the multicolored evening dress was sending off deep, rich hues.It arched and coiled around her like a rainbow in the night.“Maybe it doesn’t matter.Maybe from the outset you were a fraud.In fact I myself am rather sure that you are a fraud.”He glanced at her profile.She had spoken into the fire as if presenting a petition.There was no describing the splendor of that profile, set aglow by the fire.The fire in the eyes enhanced the proud high bridge of the nose.It sent everyone else into childish fretfulness.It dominated relentlessly.Thoughts of murder came to Tōru.How could he upset this woman, leave her pleading for her life? Were he to throttle her, to shove her head into the flames, he was sure she would look back at him with a proudly burning face, a grand mane of fire swirling around her.Tōru’s self-respect was hurting, and he feared her next words, likely to bring blood.What he most feared was blood pouring from an open wound in his self-respect.Its hemophilia would not permit the flow to be stopped.And so he had until now used all emotions to draw a line between emotion and self-respect, and, avoiding the danger of love, armed himself with countless thorns.Keiko seemed intent, quietly and ceremoniously, on saying what had to be said.“We will know for certain that you were a fraud if you don’t die in the next six months.We will know that you are not the regrowth of the beautiful seed Mr.Honda was after, and that you are what an entomologist would call a simulator.I doubt myself that we have to wait a year.It does not seem to me that you are doomed to die in six months.There is nothing inevitable about you, not a thing a person would hate to lose.There is in you not a thing to make a person imagining your death feel that a shadow had come over the world.“You’re a mean, cunning little country boy of the sort we see sprawled all over the place.You want to get your hands on your father’s money, and so you arrange to have him declared incompetent.You’re surprised, aren’t you? I know everything.And when you have money and power, what do you propose to seek next? Success? Your thoughts don’t go a step beyond those of any mediocre boy.The only way Mr.Honda’s training has gone wrong is that it has done nothing more than bring out your essential nature.“There is nothing in the least special about you.I guarantee you a long life.You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightning with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself.All you have is a certain premature senility.Your life will be suited for coupon-clipping.Nothing more.“You cannot kill Mr.Honda or me.Your sort of evil is a legal sort of evil.All puffed up by illusions born of abstract concepts, you strut about as the master of a destiny even though you have none of the qualifications.You think you have seen to the ends of the earth.But you have not once had an invitation beyond the horizon.You have nothing to do with light or enlightenment, there is no real spirit in flesh or in heart.At least Ying Chan’s spirit was in the shining beauty of her flesh.Nature has not had a glance for you, it has not had a glimmer of hostility toward you.The person Mr.Honda is looking for has to be one to inspire jealousy of nature at its own creation.“You’re a clever boy, no more.If someone pays your expenses you swim through the entrance examinations and a good job is waiting for you at the other end.A model student for the Education Fund.Propaganda material for the do-gooders who say that if material wants are taken care of, all sorts of hidden treasures will emerge.Mr.Honda was too good to you, and gave you too much confidence.He prescribed the wrong dose, that is all.Give you the right dose and you’ll be back on the track.Make you the secretary to some vulgar politician and you’ll wake up.I’ll be happy to introduce you to one, at your convenience, any time.“You will do well to remember what I have said.You have seen and think you have seen it all; but it is no more than the little circle in a thirty-power telescope.You would have been happier, I suppose, if we had let you go on thinking that was the whole world.”“It was you who dragged me out of it.”“And what made you come so happily was the thought that you were different.“Kiyoaki Matsugae was caught by unpredictable love, Isao Iinuma by destiny, Ying Chan by the flesh.And you? By a baseless sense of being different, perhaps?“If destiny is something that takes hold of a person from outside and drags him after, then the other three had destiny.And has anything caught you? Only we, Mr.Honda and I.” Letting the green and gold peacock on her bosom take the fire as it would, Keiko laughed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]