Word: kiyoaki
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...find the pure Japanese only in the slums and in the underworld." Yet Honda has a deeper motivation for this deliberate polishing of the boy's character: He hopes to avert fate, to save the boy from the tragic death which befell each of the other three incarnations of Kiyoaki, by immersing him in the banalities of polite society...
...Honda's mind, the being that he has encountered in Kiyoaki and the rest is an angel of the Six Worlds of Desire. To save Toru from the angel's recurring fate he must steal its wings, for "the world does not approve of flying...
...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...