Runaway Horses Page 11

  After the departure of the scouting party, those remaining upon the mountain took counsel once more, this time to determine what should be done about the youngest members of the group. For seven were mere boys of around sixteen or seventeen: Kataro Shimada, Tadao Saruwatari, Saburohiko Ota, Tamonta Yano, Kakutaro Motonaga, Susumu Morishita, and Kango Hayami.

  These seven had been whispering among themselves with the irrepressible verve of youth: “What are the old fellows up to with their constant delays? Why do they not decide at once? Let us commit seppuku or let us attack again!” But when they learned of the sudden decision that they were to withdraw from the mountain under the command of forty-eight-year-old Goichiro Tsuruda, who had been lamed by a swollen leg, they were appalled by this unforeseen turn of events and protested fiercely.

  Yielding at last to the fervent arguments of their elders, they glumly followed Tsuruda down the mountain. Tsuruda’s son Tanao, since he was already twenty, stayed behind with the others. Soon it was night.

  The report of the scouting party was to be heard in the house of a sympathizer in Shimazaki Village. The men on the mountain slipped down by twos and threes. Their comrades returned from their reconnaissance. According to the news they brought, troops and police were keeping a strict watch in Kumamoto and its environs, the government had issued orders forbidding all vessels to leave harbor, and the foe’s patrols had penetrated even to the edge of Shimazaki.

  They all made their way secretly to the beach of Chikozu, where they sought the aid of a fisherman, a former servant of Juro Furuta, in order to cross the bay. The fisherman, however, could do no more than offer them his only boat. This was wholly inadequate to the more than thirty comrades who remained.

  Accordingly they decided to disband their force, letting each go his own way to seek whatever succor he could. Furuta himself, Kagami, the Tashiro brothers, Teruyoshi Morishita, and Shigetaka Sakamoto availed themselves of the precious boat and set out for Konoura. And with this the uprising came to an end.

  The number of those who had retreated to Mount Kimpo was less than a third of those under arms at the time of the muster. All the rest either had been slain outright in battle or, wounded and hard-pressed in their places of refuge by government troops, had perished heroically by turning their own swords against themselves. One of the elders, Masamoto Aikyo, fled as far as the mountain pass of Mikuni, but, with three police officers closing in upon him, he abruptly sat down by the side of the road, cut open his stomach, and died. He was fifty-four years of age.

  Saburo Matsumoto, twenty-four, and Suehiko Kasuga, twenty-three, returned to their homes and killed themselves. Tatenao Arao, twenty-three, returned to his home and, revealing to his mother his intent to kill himself, apologized for the grief he would cause her. However, she had only praise for him. Arao, weeping tears of joy, thereupon went to do reverence at his father’s grave, and, at the graveside, valiantly committed seppuku.

  As for Goichiro Tsuruda, who had been entrusted with leading the seven boys down from Mount Kimpo, he saw the youngsters to their various homes and then returned to his own home and prepared to take his life.

  After his wife Hideko had set out food and drink, he exchanged a last cup of saké with her, wrote a death poem, and told her that she should not lose heart, since their only son, Tanao, was still alive. It was now the night of the second day after the uprising. Tsuruda also had two daughters, aged ten and fourteen. His wife wished to wake them so that they might say farewell to their father, but Tsuruda insisted on letting them sleep. And having unfastened his garments, he cut open his stomach and then thrust his blade into his throat. With his own hand he drew it out again, and he toppled over just as his older daughter, awakened by chance, came into the room and burst into bitter sobs.

  Around dawn, word was brought that Tanao, the only son, had also committed seppuku. Thus on the morning after her husband had died telling her to place all her trust in her son, the news of that son’s death came to Hideko’s ears.

  After the disbandment at Chikozu, Tanao had made his way to Shingai Shrine accompanied by Buichiro Suge and Masura I to. Parting from his friends, he journeyed on alone to the village of Kengun. His plan was to escape to Choshu.

  He had an uncle named Tateyama in Kengun, and when he came to him for assistance, Tanao learned that his father had visited his uncle earlier that very afternoon, and had explained his own intentions, and had asked him to look after his family. No doubt his father had already killed himself. When he heard this, Tanao lost all desire to escape.

  Granted the use of the garden in front of his uncle’s house, Tanao spread a mat of fresh straw beneath a tall tree there. Facing the east, he bowed in worship three times to the distant palace of the Emperor, after which he turned in the direction of his parents’ house, not far away, and bowed again. Then he took up his short sword, cut open his stomach with it, and plunged it into his throat. This word was carried to the Tsuruda home at once.

  After Masura I to and Buichiro Suge had parted from Tanao Tsuruda, they headed toward Udo, a region just to the south of Kumamoto. The village of Mikka in Udo was the home of I to’s elder brother, Masakatsu. When he saw his younger brother, however, he berated him harshly for his rashness, and would not let him enter his house. The two young men had no choice but to go away. That night they sat down facing each other on the bank of a clear stream behind the village and carried out their ritual suicides with extraordinary grace. People who lived nearby heard the echo of repeated clapping coming from the direction of the stream late in the night. Tears filled their eyes as they realized that it was someone clapping in reverence to the gods and the Emperor before committing seppuku.

  Ito was twenty-one. Sugé was eighteen.

  Then as to the seven youths whom Goichiro Tsuruda had conducted to their homes, three among them, Ota, Saruwatari, and Shimada, slew themselves heroically with their own swords.

  Just before the uprising, the sixteen-year-old Tadao Saruwatari had composed the following poem, writing it upon the white headband that he would wear the night of the battle:

  Our land divided, sold to barbarians,

  The Sacred Throne in peril.

  May the gods of heaven and earth

  Behold our loyal devotion.

  When he reached home he learned of the suicides of many of his comrades. Disregarding all attempts to dissuade him, he exchanged a farewell cup of saké with his father and mother and relatives and then retired alone to another room. There he cut open his stomach, and thrust his sword into his throat. The blade hit the bone and was slightly nicked. Saruwatari called for one of his family to bring him another sword, and this time, cleanly pierced by the blade, he fell forward.

  Saburohiko Ota was seventeen. As soon as he returned home he threw himself upon his bed and began to snore. When he awakened the next morning his face was glowing with health. He announced his intent to his sister and asked her to invite two young friends of his, Shibata and Maeda, to the house. When these two came, he told them that he was saying farewell forever and requested that they attend to whatever matters he would leave unresolved.

  After the young men had left, Ota rose and went into another room alone. An uncle, Fusanori Shibata, waited in an adjoining room with only a sliding paper door between them. He became aware that Ota had cut himself open. Then he heard his nephew cry out in a heartrending voice: “Uncle, Uncle! Please help me a little.” When Shibata flung open the sliding door, Ota’s dagger was already thrust into his throat. With Shibata’s hand guiding his own, the youth brought his life to a brave conclusion.

  Kataro Shimada was eighteen. As soon as he arrived home, his family wanted him to escape by disguising himself as a Buddhist monk, but he would have none of it. He had determined to kill himself, and after the farewell saké, he entreated Juzo Uchishiba, a man renowned for his skill in judo, to come to his house and instruct him in the ritual of seppuku.

  After Shimada had cut open his stomach, he pressed his blade to his
throat.

  “Master, is this the correct place?” he asked. When Uchishiba answered that it was, the youth plunged the blade in with graceful dispatch.

  After the defeat of the uprising, three men, Kazuo Jugé, Namihei Imura, and Hisaharu Oda, were sheltered in the village of Kakihara by a prominent family named Oyano. Having gone to Abumida one day, they met two of their comrades, who were among those just come down from Mount Kimpo, Tateo Narazaki and Taketsuné Mukunashi. These two they asked to join them, and all five were kept hidden by the Oyano family. Their place of shelter was the grotto of Rakugen Temple, and the Oyano family attended to all their needs.

  Seven days had passed since the uprising. In the interval the five men in the cave began to get word from various sources of the suicides of their comrades, and they came to the decision that to hide themselves further was unthinkable. Accordingly they left the grotto and went to the Oyano home to make their last farewells. The family, struck with grief at such a parting, set out food and drink for them.

  Jugé ate very little, thinking how unseemly to have the food pour out when the sword cut into his stomach. Such considerations, however, hindered the lusty Narazaki not at all as he ate and drank his fill. Afterwards these two begged some cosmetics of a woman of the family, and brushed their cheeks lightly with rouge. They wished the glow of health to remain there even after death.

  The five waited until nightfall to leave the house, and then went to a place close by called Nariiwa. It was the Fifteenth Day of the Ninth Month, a night on which the moon was full. Its bright beams seemed to scatter jewels through the dewy grass. The five men sat upright upon the grass, and after each had recited a farewell poem, Oda, the youngest at twenty, cut open his stomach, after which each of the others in turn fell forward over his own sword. Imura was thirty-five, Narazaki and Mukunashi twenty-six. Jugé was twenty-five.

  Tsunetaro Kobayashi, who had parted from Kageki Abé and Unshiro Ishihara at Abumida, returned to his home late the evening of the Eleventh Day of the Ninth Month, accompanied by Kisou Onimaru and Mitsuo Noguchi.

  Though he was but a youth, Tsunetaro Kobayashi combined courage and intelligence to a remarkable degree. He had generally taken a position opposed to the rash counsels of the extravagantly bold Onimaru, but these two comrades of opposite temperament chose to meet death at the same time and place. Now that the three of them had learned of the immense obstacles in the way of a second rising and of the utter dissolution of the League, they all committed seppuku side by side the evening of the following day.

  Before doing away with himself, Kobayashi expressed his regrets to his mother for preceding her in death, and then withdrew to a separate room with his wife Mashiko, a girl of nineteen, whom he had just married the previous spring. Out of pity at causing her to pass the rest of her life as a widow, he offered to divorce her. But Mashiko burst into tears and refused.

  The three men went into a room at the back of the house while the family waited in the kitchen. Kobayashi called out: “Let no one enter here. Draw some water and put it on the veranda.” Then the three took up a tatami mat in the center of the room and laid it over another. Onimaru sat down facing the east upon the double mat and unfastened his kimono.

  Those in the kitchen heard Kobayashi call out again: “Noguchi has performed the service of severing Onimaru’s head.” At length no further sound came from the room.

  When the members of the family entered, they found the three facing the east, Onimaru in the middle, the act of ritual disembowelment carried out to perfection.

  Onimaru was forty years of age. Kobayashi was twenty-seven. Noguchi was twenty-three.

  Ikiko Abé was the wife of Kageki Abé. The eldest daughter of Kishinta Torii, she was born in Kumamoto in 1851, the Fourth Year of the Kaei era. Her elder brother Naoki studied the Japanese classics under the tutelage of Master Oen, learned military tactics from Teizo Miyabé, and so became an ardent patriot with the slogan “Honor the Emperor and expel the barbarians” ever on his lips.

  Ikiko grew up hearing the opinions of her brother and his comrades, which made a deep impression upon her. The family was poor, and she worked hard to aid her mother.

  When she was sixteen, a certain wealthy man desired her as his bride, but since Ikiko had resolved to marry only a militant patriot, she was not at all inclined to assent. Her brother and her mother were of like mind. However, the village headman was the matchmaker, and moreover the family was in the rich man’s debt. Thus there was no avoiding the marriage.

  Ikiko asked her mother, “Well, then, if I marry this man, will that fulfill all obligations?” Her mother replied that it would. The wedding took place. That night Ikiko sat upright and did not allow her husband to approach her, and when dawn came, she fled to her mother’s house. Bowing low before her mother she said: “I have gone through with the marriage. Is anything else required of me?” That very day her husband divorced her.

  She reached the age of eighteen. In 1868, the First Year of the Meiji era, her brother, Naoki, was appointed to serve at the Imperial Court.

  It happened at this time that Kageki Abé, together with his comrade, Morikuni Tominaga, went to do worship at Hommyo Temple, sacred to the memory of Lord Kiyomasa. As they were approaching the black gate, they encountered a nubile young beauty. Perceiving that she was the sister of their comrade Naoki Torii, they bowed courteously. After they had walked on for a bit, Tominaga abruptly asked: “What would you say to marrying that girl?” Abé replied that he would have no objections. With Tominaga as go-between, the marriage soon took place. Abé at that time was twenty-nine. Ikiko’s hopes had been fulfilled. She had become the wife of a patriot. But no child was born of the marriage.

  Ikiko became twenty. A comrade in Kurumé named Kii Kagamiyama escaped from prison and was given shelter by Abé. Then after Kagamiyama had left, Abé himself was taken into custody, examined severely, and thrown into prison.

  As long as her husband was imprisoned, Ikiko would eat no food in the morning, she prayed constantly to the gods that this unjust punishment be lifted from her husband, and at night she did without a mosquito net, though it was the height of summer, and slept upon bare boards so that her husband’s sufferings would be ever in her mind.

  After he had been freed, Abé was taking a stroll through the town when in one shop he came across a fine belly band. But the price was so high, as he told his wife, that he gave up all thought of buying it. Ikiko secretly sold a kimono and sash and presented her husband with the amount of money he needed. He thanked her and bought the belly band. And this is what girded his body the night of the rising.

  As the rising drew nearer and nearer, the Abé house became a kind of headquarters. Ikiko and her mother-in-law spared no efforts in treating their guests with the utmost hospitality. And when some ten men gathered to prepare to take to the field, the women assisted them in every way, making ready food and drink. Noticing with a shrewd eye that one of the group was somewhat flurried, Ikiko admonished him quietly: “One must go into battle with a tranquil heart.”

  On the night itself, when Ikiko and her mother-in-law, Kiyoko, saw from a distance the angry flames flaring up from Kumamoto over the castle, the fires burning at five places in the Kyomachi, Yamazaki, and Motoyama districts, she leapt with joy, crying: “It’s done! It’s done.” She lit vigil lamps before the household shrine and implored the gods for the success of the rising and her husband’s good fortune in battle.

  But with the morning, reports of setbacks came in thick and fast, and there were endless rumors of men falling in battle or perishing upon their own swords. With her husband’s whereabouts unknown, Ikiko prayed to the gods yet more fervently for his welfare.

  Three days were to intervene before his return. It was just before daybreak on the Twelfth Day of the Ninth Month.

  After the disbandment of their force at the beach of Chikozu, Kageki Abé, accompanied by Unshiro Ishihara, left there to spend the following day, the tenth, in hiding in the mountain
vastness of Shioya. As soon as it was dark they set out for the shrine of Kitsuki in Abumida and arrived in the middle of the night at the home of Oki Sakamoto, the shrine priest. There they were reunited with Tsunetaro Kobayashi, Onimaru, and Noguchi, and, staying the night of the eleventh, they debated their future course of action. When a response of the gods to a question put by Oki Sakamoto held out hope for a second rising, all took heart, and Abé and Ishihara left Kobayashi and his party and made their way each to his own home.

  Ikiko awoke to the sound of a voice calling softly through a chink in the wooden shutters. It was her husband. Her heart leapt as she slid open the shutters. He came in without a word, and then, facing Ikiko and his mother, who had risen and joined them, gave a brief account of the defeat. Ikiko stripped off her husband’s bloodstained kimono and buried it in a bamboo grove behind the house. In the days that followed, Abé spent the daylight hours hiding beneath the floor of his study, a dagger grasped in his hand. When the sun had set he came up into the study. He sent Ikiko secretly to the Ishihara house so that she could consult with Ishihara’s wife, Yasuko.

  Ikiko and Yasuko made a frantic search for a boat for the passage to Shimabara Peninsula, but the ban on leaving harbor was stringently enforced, and all hope of an escape by sea vanished.

  On the dawn of the fourteenth, Unshiro Ishihara, determined to break through the police cordon that blocked the roads or to die at his own hand, said farewell to his wife and children and left his house.

  Abé had invited his uncle, a man named Baba, to his house, and in the dawn hours, the three men, Ishihara, Abé, and Baba, discussed a plan of action. Baba explained that the strict measures taken by the police seemed to make flight impossible. And with that he departed.

  Yasuko Ishihara went to the home of her husband’s elder brother, Kimura, to beg for help. She had heard the thump of the boots of a search patrol coming along the road toward her house, and Kimura advised her to hurry to the Abé house to tell them that the time was past for flight.