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worship a prostitute in all innocence. But once he realizes that his woman is a slut, and that he has been living an illusion that merely serves to reflect the image of his own purity, will he be able to love this woman in the same way again? If he can, don’t you think that would be marvelous? To take your own ideal and bend the world to it like that. Wouldn’t that be a remarkable force? It would be like holding the secret key to life right there in your hand, wouldn’t it?”
    Honda’s sexual innocence was matched by Kiyoaki’s, who was therefore unable to refute his strange ideal. Nevertheless, being headstrong, he felt that he was different from Honda, that he already had the key to existence within his grasp as a sort of birthright. He did not know what gave him this confidence. Ominously handsome and a dreamer, so arrogant yet so much a prey to anxiety, he was certain that somehow he was the youthful repository of a peerless treasure. Because at times he seemed to wear a quite physical radiance, he bore himself with the pride of a man marked down by a rare disease, even though he suffered neither aches nor painful swellings.
    Kiyoaki knew nothing about the history of Gesshu Temple and saw no need to remedy this lack. Honda by contrast, who had no personal ties with it at all, had taken the trouble to do some research in the library. Gesshu, he discovered, was a comparatively new temple, built at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A daughter of the Emperor Higashiyama, wishing to observe a period of mourning for her father, who had died in the prime of life, devoted herself to the worship of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, at the Kiomizu Temple. She soon came to be deeply impressed by the commentaries of an old priest from the Joju Temple on the Hosso concept of existence, and consequently she became a fervent convert to this sect. After her ritual tonsuring, she declined to accept one of the benefices reserved for imperial princesses, deciding instead to found a new temple, one whose nuns would devote themselves to study of the scriptures. And it still preserved its unique place as a convent of the Hosso sect. Satoko’s greataunt, however, though an aristocrat, had the distinction of being the first abbess who was not an imperial princess.
    Honda suddenly turned on Kiyoaki.
    “Matsugae! What’s the matter with you these days? You haven’t paid the slightest attention to anything I’ve said, have you?”
    “Nothing’s the matter,” Kiyoaki replied defensively, for once caught off guard. His beautiful clear eyes looked back at his friend. If Honda thought him insolent, it did not bother Kiyoaki in the least. What he feared was that his friend should become aware of his agony of mind. He knew that if he gave Honda the least encouragement in this direction, there would soon be nothing at all about him that Honda did not know. As this would be an unforgivable violation, he would have lost his only friend.
    Honda was immediately alert to Kiyoaki’s tension. He knew that to retain Kiyoaki’s affection he must check the unthinking roughness that friendship ordinarily permitted. He had to treat him as warily as one would a freshly painted wall, on which the slightest careless touch would leave an indelible fingerprint. Should the circumstances demand it, he would have to go so far as to pretend not to notice Kiyoaki’s mortal agony. Especially if such assumed obtuseness served to point up the elegance that would surely characterize Kiyoaki’s ultimate suffering.
    At such moments, Honda could even love Kiyoaki for the look of mute appeal in his eyes. Their beautiful gaze seemed to hold a plea: leave things as they are, as gloriously undefined as the line of the seashore. For the first time in their relationship—a protracted, warily transacted negotiation in the coin of friendship—Kiyoaki’s composure was about to shatter; he was pleading. Honda was thus transformed into an aesthetic observer. Those who