True Love at Dawn

The following short story by Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), newly translated by John Nathan, was first published in the June 1965 issue of Nihon (Japan) magazine.

1.

That morning, for the first time in a long while, Ryōichi and his wife refreshed themselves with an exhilarating kiss.

In the not-quite morning, they emerged onto the balcony to kiss beneath the merest hint of white in the sky, sensing in the corners of each other’s lips the coolness of dawn air like a sip of peppermint water even while they probed with their tongues the accumulated heat of the long night in their mouths, a kiss, the first in a very long while, they could prolong and never tire of.

Roosters were crowing, the trees in the orchard were still shrouded in mist, and though it was May the air was chilly against their skin. Ryōichi’s wife, Reiko, was wearing a blue negligee without sleeves, and because she was standing on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around her husband’s neck her breasts tumbled from the openings below her arms and appeared to be swaying in the gentle morning breeze.

She didn’t look her forty-five years: her snow-white skin showed no signs of wear, her weariness was hidden inside her, submerged deep down. On occasion it briefly appeared, like black sand at the bottom of a stream, but that depth was no longer a domain of her body. How to put it? She preserved the flesh at the surface exquisitely, allowing nothing that occurred in this world to blemish it, living, aging, leaving the transparent cream at the surface of existence undisturbed, accumulating and sinking deep down in her body all the detritus of life. To Reiko, accordingly, it might be said that the depths beneath her skin were no longer a domain of her flesh. Shall we call it the domain of her spirit? Or was it the domain of a waste disposal area where decay and decomposition were always proceeding, the domain of living death? In any event, nothing pooled and stagnant at this depth ever surfaced to her exterior, never exerted its influence, that is, on her flesh.

It was the same for fifty-year-old Ryōichi. When they had first met, a couple so beautiful it was hard to imagine, he was twenty-three and Reiko eighteen. They stayed in touch for seven years, and when Ryōichi was repatriated at the end of the war and they were married, he was thirty and his wife was twenty-five. Since they had had no children in the course of their twenty-year marriage, their world consisted of the two of them alone.

How Ryōichi managed to spend those twenty years doing nothing, living in a house he had inherited from his father after the war, no one knew. According to some, he had relied on diamonds his mother snuck into the country from abroad before the war was over. She was said to have hidden a fistful of 10-karat and larger stones in a jar of cold cream and brought it back to Japan.

But after his parents’ deaths, he dedicated his financial acumen to ensuring a living for himself and his wife, taking advantage of occasional shifts in the economy to prosper and enjoying an idle life. Ryōichi’s inactivity in itself seemed to be his revenge against something—in any event, however impossible it might seem, they managed their assets splendidly and lived on their love for each other alone.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they lived on memories of their love: each passing moment they gambled on that first encounter, that beautiful first astonishment. In her husband of fifty, Reiko continually discovered the vestige of a thirty-year-old; in his forty-year-old wife Ryōichi endlessly perceived eighteen-year-old innocence.

Was this grotesque? Was it impossible to convince someone else of an illusion of beauty so very subjective as this? In fact, ever since these two had ceased to be twenty-three and eighteen, from the moment, that is, that they’d turned twenty-four and nineteen, this had been for them the most critical challenge in life or, rather, this side of life. They had stubbornly refused to resign themselves. And their abnormally youthful appearance had helped.

But youth had its limits. Gradually they came to shun the light of day but also disliked artificial lighting at night and grew to love the subtle light of dusk and dawn. In that ambiguous yet natural light a man of fifty and a woman of forty-five could bask in a subtle blessing of nature that revealed them only in silhouette; they understood that only at nebulous times like these would nature relax the cruelty of natural law and preserve with freshness, like dawn breaking over a mountain, the reflection of a distant youth.

Even now, Reiko remembered well the perfume her eighteen-year-old self had stealthily removed from her mother’s dressing table. Because Ryōichi had praised it, the perfume had become for her life’s most ceremonial aroma, applied only before she shared with him one of their intimate moments. By this time there was no need to ask, when Ryōichi desired the perfume she knew it intuitively and made sure, just as she had at eighteen, that her breast was delicately scented with it. Even now the fragrance wafted above the balcony where they were embracing. At that moment Reiko, forty-five, was unmistakably eighteen years old.

Ryōichi’s house was on the outskirts of Tokyo, across the Tama River, and from the balcony on the second floor, beyond the orchard directly below, the white line of a river was visible. Traffic in this area had become heavy, but the orchard muffled noise from the street; at a time like this, shrouded in morning mist, the house appeared to stand at the edge of a milky lake.

Now wrapped in a blue negligee, Reiko’s body, even in the chill of a May morning, was as heated as the coals on a dawn brazier. Her lovely, sensitive response to Ryōichi’s touch, the rippling of her flesh, the aliveness of her trembling as though his questing fingers were awakening anew each part of her body, the young girl’s eagerness that lifted her to her tiptoes to embrace him—head to toe she was eighteen all over again.

In the same way, Ryōichi’s kiss, as though he were in a dream with the woman he had partnered for twenty years, was hardly the kiss of a fifty-year-old man. He had retained the robust power of youth, and his fingertips, gently stroking his wife’s hair, shivered with the young man’s innocence that was part and parcel of his strength.

It was a sublime kiss, a kiss of soaring purity they hadn’t experienced for many years.

Not surprisingly, the preparation for such a kiss as this had required hard work and a complex, artificial experiment that would have repulsed ordinary citizens as unnatural. Perhaps, but if anything was beyond doubt it was that this kiss was wondrously natural, and that creating this most natural moment had required measures unnatural in the extreme.

There was no helping that: If they wished to oppose nature, to deceive it in order to bring into play once again its gentle, benign power, they would have to push human understanding to its limit. The first few years they had relied on poetry and imagination, but poetry and imagination are by nature unrepeatable and quickly frustrated attempts to return to the same source: the god they wished to summon could be rendered manifest by poetry and imagination only once. When the effort to repeat began to feel tiresome they tried recovering what they sought with performance, but while performance was inherently repeatable, repetition required an icy detachment.

What they were attempting to revive was simple enough—a winsome girl lifts her gaze to the youth she loves, the fields sparkle with dew, war and the uncertainty of life hover on the horizon, a parting is in the air, and a kiss like the first flicker of dawn brushes youthful lips—the supreme bliss of an unforgettable love. But for twenty years since their marriage the husband was always there and so was the wife, always there. Who could have blamed them for that! But when “being there” becomes an immutable certainty, from that moment on decay proceeds. Unlike the average couple, these two struggled against decay and the process of decomposition with all their might. And when they realized that poetry and imagination and performance had all hit bottom they conceived the most unnatural method imaginable and gradually put it into practice. It was an approach that was likely to have occurred to anyone suffering from lassitude in the extreme, but they were at pains to employ it in the most beautiful way imaginable, impeccably. Their efforts were aimed at one thing only, a kiss ripening on the lips of a young girl on a May morning. In a word, they began using other people.

The heartless contempt required to use others became a guarantee of their passion. They went so far as to consider their cruel contempt of people who were merely young a justifiable means of educating them.

And now, on this May morning on a balcony at the break of dawn, Ryōichi and Reiko merged into one being.

They both knew that a couple as beautiful as themselves, forever young, was to be found nowhere else. Ryōichi had been using an imported hair dye for years: his hair, clean to the touch, maintained the jet-black luster of a young man’s. Reiko’s beauty beggared description! The pale white skin of her face was without a wrinkle; the fluttering of her eyes beneath her thin eyelids revealed the sensitive soul of a young woman.

The masterly beauty of their kiss was born of a rare blending of innocence and practice; they both knew well how sumptuous and seductive it must appear through a lace curtain, so pure it was close to inhuman.

The kiss continued, the cocks crowed, the light in the sky gradually turned their silhouettes rosy.

Suddenly a shadowy figure sprang to the balcony from behind the curtain and slammed into them.

2.

Q: Your name and age?

A: Takeshi Yamawaki, twenty-one.

Q: Your school?

A: L. College, lit department. I wasn’t there much.

Q: Family?

A: I left home and was living by myself in an apartment.

Q: Your parents agreed to that?

A: They weren’t crazy about it. My father is the president of a medium-size company and he wanted me to take over the business but I blew him off. The economy sucks right now, and his optimism was looking pretty thin. I guess he tells himself he’s doing whatever it takes to come out ahead. What’s weird about him, when he loses his temper and gets really mad he pays me for it. He’s convinced himself that he’ll turn his son into a delinquent if he doesn’t pay up when he gets mad. So I made him hopping mad and took a big payoff and used the money to move into an apartment in Shinjuku.

Q: Where did you meet Yuri Miyazaki?

A:  At Funky, a mo-ja cafe where I’ve been hanging out lately.

Q: “Mo-ja”?

A: Are you serious? “Modern jazz”! I’m nuts about Clifford Brown, nothing special about that, but what makes Funky special is, the owner is also a huge Brownie fan and plays nothing but his records all night long, so I started hanging out there. That’s where I met Yuri. We were both a little stoned that night; she came over to my place and we got it on right away.

Q: How long were you sleeping with her?

A: About half a year, maybe. On and off. Neither of us was that turned on but I guess we became besties. Yuri was also crazy about Clifford Brown. She’d say stuff like she lived for “the powerful, manly luster of his tone”—lines she picked up in the jazz mags. Truth is, we were happier listening to Brownie records side by side than we were having sex.

One evening we were sitting at Funky spacing out when someone came in we hadn’t seen before. In the dim lighting she looked like a flashy young woman at first glance, and quite a beauty at that, so everyone was looking, but then she sat down at a table next to ours and I saw right away that beneath her heavy makeup she was a fairly old gal. If I say so myself, I have a pretty decent eye for a skirt’s age. There’s something suspicious about a woman who looks too young. A truly young woman doesn’t show her age off. You take a woman in her thirties, she’s selling a slightly faded youthfulness, she’s confident she’s displaying a product that’s different from someone in their twenties, so she doesn’t wave her youth in your face. I guessed this one would be in her forties, and my estimate was accurate. For some reason she cheered me up a little. You old witch! I laughed to myself.

The Funky crowd takes pride in being dumbass and poor rather than young and attractive, so they tend to be put off by a wealthy alien like this one—but I’m just the opposite, I preen.

The woman sat down facing me, and when our eyes met she sort of smiled. I returned a thin smile, and I still remember the sensation I had at that moment, like floating in space. Yuri noticed something right away and pressed my thigh and said, “She’s coming on to you.”

“So what! She’s an old bag.”

“Go for it—earn yourself a sports car!”

At a modern jazz place like that, customers become friends right away. The woman bought us drinks and the three of us chatted about things. She told us some pretty personal stuff, that her husband was jealous, for example, so jealous that all he’d have to do was find out she came to a place like that alone and she couldn’t imagine what might happen to her. Thinking about my relationship with Yuri, it seemed to me she must’ve been pretty struck on herself to imagine her man would be that jealous.

We sat there confiding in one another like nobody’s business, and the woman must’ve noticed that me and Yuri were just friends, because she turned to her and said, “Instead of hanging around here, you should try the bar at the Rainbow Hotel. I’ve heard old guys hang around there just waiting for unspoiled young women like you.”

Q: Did you get involved with the woman that same night?

A: Take it easy—don’t rush me!

At first she was open and straightforward, but when we left Yuri sitting there and it was just the two of us she stiffened up and began acting naive. All of a sudden, she turned into a wall you couldn’t climb. On one hand I thought, What a bitch! An old hag carrying on like a prude! but at the same time there was something about her act that was weirdly interesting to me.

She was wearing a violet dress and it looked damn good on her. But there was something, I don’t know, pitiful about that perfect fit. She had a weird mixture of inexperienced girlishness and middle-aged cool—one or the other would’ve been easy to handle, but in her case one made the other appear all the more grotesque. Besides, we have a right to feel contempt for adults, men or women, who try to wheedle themselves into our young world. She had a habit of looking up at me innocently every now and then but that disgusted me, like a begging dog.

I wanted her to be more assured. She seemed to cower, like she was a criminal even though she hadn’t done anything, and seeing her fear what might be coming made me want to torment her all the more.

Despite her efforts to disguise herself with makeup, the coarseness of a woman past her prime was visible on her earlobes and the wings of her nose. Her voice was charming, young for her age, but I could hear a false note in it. Even so, I can’t say I didn’t like that kind of expensive, flashy ugliness. We went dancing, and when she thrust out those luscious lips of hers with their—authority, I guess I’d call it, I was overwhelmed by the dignity of a kind of older woman I had never known. If she’d had had gray hair and wasn’t wearing makeup I think I would have gone for her even more.

“It would be terrible if my husband saw me like this,” she whispered in my ear at the table in the nightclub, glancing nervously at the people nearby.

“Why? Wasn’t it you who came to Funky trolling for men on your own?”

“If you put it that way, I have nothing to say.”

“And even so, you love your husband?”

“I don’t love him, I’m afraid of him.”

“That’s perfect! It spices things up.”

It felt good talking to her like a young jerk.

That night we just kissed, and her response to the kiss just about knocked me over. It might have been a virgin’s first kiss, she looked that astonished, her performance was so exaggerated I had to doubt she could really be that shaken. It put me off a little. Then, on the way home she put some money in my hand and said we should meet at Funky again.

Q: How much was it?

A: Five thousand yen. It was a decent amount and, to tell the truth, it was the first time in my life I had taken money from a woman.

Q: But you accepted?

A: When I pretended for just a second to hesitate, she said, “It’s for your tuition, so take it!”

Q: What did she mean, “your tuition”?

A: Don’t ask me.

Q: How was your second meeting?

A: I better talk about Yuri first. We met the next day and the weird thing is, I had a feeling our friendship was over. I mean neither of us felt like talking about the night before and we sort of had nothing to say to each other. We both—I knew perfectly well that Yuri wasn’t the sort of girl to go straight home after we had separated at Funky. Until then, we’d always been straight with each other no matter what, but somehow I had the feeling I never ever wanted to talk to anyone about that woman.

Q: So what about your second meeting?

A: She was even more passive, to the point where she knew she was irritating me. And she babbled constantly about her husband, how awful it would be if he found out, how he would certainly kill her if he knew.

I understood this was a technique for turning me on, and that that made me perverse.

“I guess if you were twenty years younger, your old man would be even more jealous,” I said.

“If I were twenty years younger? Guess how old I am?”

“How about you save me the trouble!” I spat out. I saw sadness in her eyes.

Everything she had on was expensive, even her perfume was some pricey stuff unfamiliar to me. I noticed moments—and they bothered me—when all of a sudden her mind appeared to wander. We took a walk in a park at night, and in the shadows of a grove of trees, like so many lovers, I took the opportunity our surroundings provided. She shivered like a young girl but naturally we didn’t go all the way.

Q: Why “naturally”?

A: Because I’d also stopped feeling like I wanted to go farther. Not until she invited me. Maybe I was falling for her a little.

Q: Even though you knew about the difference in your ages? Wasn’t it actually about money?

A: If it was about money I would have been pushier about having my way with her. But seeing her relax, hiding her face in the darkness, may have made me stubbornly perverse. For her part she came alive in the dark and laughed that girlish laugh of hers. If I closed my eyes I might’ve thought I was with an eighteen-year-old; her skin under my hands was so smooth it was slippery, maybe from the dew on the grass.

I struggled to keep her ugliness in mind, and the creepiness of her age. But that sort of detached awareness leads to an intoxication of its own, I guess it’s like listening to cool jazz. I kept hold of my contempt. This woman was scared of reality. So be it! I’d seize hold of the reality that terrified her and wave it in her face, that’s how I felt.

Q: We’re not looking for abstract replies. Think more concretely. So the woman kept toying with you, one step forward and one back, and you were probably paid each time?

A: That’s right.

Q: And she must have told you repeatedly there’d be trouble if her husband found out?

A: Right. We’d be walking down the street and all of a sudden her eyes would open wide with fear and she’d say she had the feeling her husband was watching. I told her it wasn’t because she wanted to hide her age that she was afraid of daylight, it was because she had the feeling her husband’s eyes were there in the sun. I was mostly joking and gave her a little smack on the ass. A little later, with tears in her eyes, she said, “Thank you.”

If I’d really had contempt for her I should’ve slept with her sooner even if it meant using force.

Q: But there is conclusive evidence that eventually you did copulate. How did that come about?

A: One evening I was feeling so hot for her I couldn’t stand it and invited her to a hotel. Once I’d taken that step my self-respect demanded that I carry through no matter what. She seemed deflated suddenly and begged me to wait one more night. She said If she stayed at a hotel in town her husband would certainly sense it. If I would give her just one more night she’d arrange for a safer place.

Q: And did you wait?

A: My contempt demanded it.

Q: And?

A: The next night very late, even more dressed up than usual, she shows up in a red MG she’s driving herself. Until then, I’d never dreamed she knew how to drive, and since she was in a pretty nifty car I climbed in with pleasure.

“I know a place, it’s in a suburb that’s a little far but it’s absolutely private. It’s a place where friends are allowed to do whatever they like so you mustn’t feel uncomfortable no matter what happens.”

With that warning, she drove through the night streets and kept on driving, past the Tama River, across a bridge and down a road with very few houses on it into an orchard where the trees were casting dark shadows in the moonlight.

Q: So she actually took you to her own house—

A: Yes, but the really dumb thing is I didn’t realize that until the next morning. When we got there she lit a candle and went in to the dark foyer. I was laughing to myself. There must be electricity, the bitch is just creating atmosphere, I thought, but her fear of light also made me sorry for her. She led me up the stairs to a corner of a large room on the second floor. In the faint light from the curtained French windows to the balcony, I could just make out what appeared to be heaps of old furniture—the back of the room was in darkness.

We lay down together on the couch against the wall. Just then I thought I heard a murmuring in the distance and a hushed voice that might’ve been a girl crying or laughing.

“Don’t worry about that,” the woman said, so I paid no attention. Truth is, I had swallowed a fair amount of Hyminal with beer and was able to slip easily into any mood I wanted.

The woman undressed in the darkness and threw herself at me as if driven by fear, but it wasn’t fear, it was genuine happiness so intense it was scary. If we’re talking young girls, I’ve had plenty, and a lot of them turn me off. They repress their happiness out of a weird kind of vanity, or keep it to themselves, measuring it, or express it stingily, like a cat, or babble romantic words that are out of place, translating the language of the flesh into meaningless spiritual language.

But this forty-something-year-old turned into the most feminine woman I’d ever met—glowing faintly like the Milky Way on a summer night, she melted into me. And between sobs she kept cupping my face frantically, making sure where it was and finally, in a voice I could barely hear, she whispered “Ryōichi.”

I was stoned out of my mind, unfazed by any of this, and caressed her more and more wildly. Five or six times in this way she seemed to be calling a man’s name. Finally, as if to make sure of the name, she made sure of my body.

None of this bothered me. Inside my happiness, my somewhat abstract happiness, I was able to be indifferent to the world around me. At that moment not even a hydrogen bomb would’ve mattered, I could probably have pushed it around with my toes … before I knew it, I had fallen asleep.

Q: And then it was that morning.

A: Morning, yes, but when I woke up the room was still in semidarkness.

Q: The first thing you saw when you opened your eyes?

A: I wasn’t trying to see anything, but in the chill of dawn I sensed for certain right away that the woman was no longer next to me. I stood up groggily. That’s when I saw that something white was stretched out on the other side of the furniture. It seemed to be a woman. I tiptoed across the room, careful not to trip on the antiques lying around, and approached. I couldn’t make out the sleeping face clearly but I knew right away it was Yuri.

“Yuri”—I called her name softly and shook her.

Q: She woke up right away?

A: Yes, she was always easy to wake up.

“What are you doing here?” she said, staring at me with her large eyes open wide.

“I could ask you the same thing!”

“A man brought me here last night, the old guy I met at the Rainbow Hotel last month.”

“I see, I get it! We’ve been used.”

“For what?”

“They’ve used us as tools. Fuckers! They’ve picked a perfect way to make fools of us.”

“Oh wow—”

Yuri is sharp as a whip, she understood right away but she wasn’t the least bit upset. She sprawled on the couch in the opposite corner from the one I’d slept on, toying with strands of her hair and putting them in her mouth. She turned to the French windows and then waved me over.

Q: What did you see on the balcony outside?

A: A man and a woman were standing there embracing. They were unmistakably a couple. A peerless model of a husband and wife. We’d been deceived by them and used.

Q: And that’s when?

A: I stood there staring. They were lost in their kiss.

Q: For how long?

A: Five minutes? Ten? It might’ve been longer.

Q: What were you feeling as you watched—anger? resentment?

A: Wrong.

Q: But gradually you became emotional, and when you touched your pocket and felt a switchblade you took it out and opened it. That must have been anger? Or are you saying it was in cold blood? In any event, you rushed onto the balcony and stabbed the woman first and then her husband. There’s no doubt about your crime. But if it turns out you were acting on the blind anger of a young person who’s been used, manipulated as a tool, that might be considered an extenuating circumstance. So why not call it that?

A: I can’t. Because it wasn’t simple anger.

Q: Then what sort of anger was it?

A: How can I describe it? What do you call veneration and anger mixed together? Or anger mixed with joy and longing?

I watched that evil, unhealthy, inhuman couple kissing endlessly and gradually I began to feel that we had been undone. It wasn’t just anger at having been deceived and used, a feeling of defeat was rising in me, flooding my heart like water pouring into a torture chamber.

I’m not sure why I felt as I did at that moment—that we were phony and they were the real thing. That compared to them we were simply shadows, that our worthless youth might deserve to be used in this way.

It was weird—as the dawn light brightened during that long kiss they gradually transformed. That old guy and his crone actually began to appear younger and more beautiful than any beautiful young lovers.

I could hear roosters crowing. With that ominous sound ringing in my ears, I watched them achieve the beauty of brittle porcelain figures about to shatter as daybreak bathed them in rosy light. Until that moment I had never seen such a pure and beautiful kiss and I doubt I ever will again.

I pointed the blade of my knife at them and rose up.

Q: Why?

A: Because they were beautiful and real. That’s it. That’s why. I didn’t have a single other reason to kill them.

Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan.

From Yukio Mishima’s Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories, edited by Stephen Dodd, to be published by Vintage International in January.

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) was the author of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and The Sound of Waves, among many other novels. He committed ritual suicide in November 1970, after finishing the final novel of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy.

John Nathan is the Takashima Professor Emeritus of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; a translator of Japanese literature, including novels by Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe; and an Emmy Award–winning filmmaker. He is the author of Mishima: A Biography and Sōseki: Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist, among other books. 

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