Word: honda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kinue's madness, and her assumed beauty, are equated with Toru's self-awareness and Honda's perception of unyielding fate. "Don't you suppose a beautiful, well-shaped girl has the best chance of becoming an angel?" she asks Toru. "Only a beautiful woman can really know...
WHEN HIS son lives past the destined age of twenty, Honda realizes that he must be a counterfeit. Old now, and infirm, he travels to the abbey where his friend's lover Satoko is now the abbess. She receives him warmly, but denies any knowledge of him or his friend Kiyoaki...
...Honda is crushed. The abbess suggests to him that perhaps his memory has faded somewhat, that Kiyoaki never indeed existed. "If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no Isao," he says. "There was no Ying Chan, and who knows, perhaps there has been...
...With Honda's increasing realization that Toru is not the real reincarnation of Kiyoaki comes acceptance of the arbitrary nature of reality. "It was an accident, an utterly senseless accident, that Kiyoaki and Isao and Ying Chan had all appeared beside Honda... Eternity does not come into being because I think I exist," the old man reflects. Struck by the final challenge of Satoko's denial of Kiyoaki's existence, Honda sits in the abbey garden...
There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing...