Death in Midsummer & Other Stories by Yukio Mishima Read Free Book Online Page B

the right and the left, and help her across, pleased at the feel of the rich flesh.
    Kenzo liked the pliant strength in a woman who, although she could perfectly well do things for herself, always deferred to her husband. Kiyoko had never read a newspaper, but she had an astonishingly accurate knowledge of her surroundings.
    When she took a comb in her hand or turned over the leaf of a calendar or folded a summer kimono, it was not as if she were engaged in housework, but rather as if, fresh and alert, she were keeping company with the 'things' known as comb and calendar and kimono. She soaked in her world of things as she might soak in a bath
    'There's an indoor amusement park on the fourth floor. We can kill time there,' said Kenzo. Kiyoko followed silently into a waiting lift, but when they reached the fourth floor she tugged at his belt.
    'It's a waste of money. Everything seems so cheap, but it's all arranged so that you spend more money than you intend to.'
    'That's no way to talk. This is our good night, and if you tell yourself it's like a first-run movie it doesn't seem so expensive.'
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    'What's the sense in a first-run movie? If you wait a little while you can see it for half as much.'
    Her earnestness was most engaging. A brown smudge from the biscuit clung to her puckered lips.
    'Wipe your mouth,' said Kenzo. 'You're making a mess of yourself.'
    Kiyoko looked into a mirror on a near-by pillar and removed the smear with the nail of her little finger. She still had two-thirds of a biscuit in her hand.
    They were at the entrance to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'. Jagged rocks reached to the ceiling, and the porthole of a submarine on the sea floor served as the ticket window: forty yen for adults, twenty yen for children.
    'But forty yen is too high,' said Kiyoko, turning away from the mirror. 'You aren't any less hungry after you look at all those cardboard fish, and for forty yen you can get a hundred grams of the best kind of real fish.'
    'Yesterday they wanted forty for a cut of black snapper. Oh, well. When you're chewing on a million yen you don't talk like a beggar.'
    The brief debate finished, Kenzo bought the tickets.
    'You've let that biscuit go to your head.'
    'But it isn't bad at all. Just right when you're hungry.'
    'You just ate.'
    At a landing like a railway platform five or six little boxcars, each large enough for two people, stood at intervals along a track. Three or four other couples were waiting, but the two climbed unabashedly into a car. It was in fact a little tight for two, and Kenzo had to put his arm around his wife's shoulders.
    The operator was whistling somewhat disdainfully. Kenzo's powerful arm, on which the sweat had dried, was solid against Kiyoko's naked shoulders and back. Naked skin clung to naked skin like the layers of some intricately folded insect's wing. The car began to shake.
    'I'm afraid,' said Kiyoko, with the expression of one not in the least afraid.
    The cars, each some distance from the rest, plunged into a

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    dark tunnel of rock. Immediately inside there was a sharp curve, and the reverberations were deafening.
    A huge shark with shining green scales passed, almost brush-ing their heads, and Kiyoko ducked away. As she clung to her young husband he gave her a kiss. After the shark had passed, the car ground round a curve in pitch darkness again, but his lips landed unerringly on hers, little fish speared in the dark.
    The little fish jumped and were still.
    The darkness made Kiyoko strangely shy. Only the violent shaking and grinding sustained her. As she slipped deep into the tunnel, her husband's arms around her, she felt naked and flushed crimson. The darkness, dense and impenetrable, had a strength that seemed to render clothes useless. She thought of a dark shed she had secretly played in as a child.
    Like a flower springing from the darkness, a red beam of light flashed at them, and Kiyoko cried out once more. It was the wide, gaping mouth of a big