Runaway Horses Read online

  Yasuko hired a rickshaw but got off just before reaching the Abé house, where she knocked softly at the rear door and asked that Ikiko come out. She explained to Ikiko briefly that a patrol was approaching their house in Ishihara’s absence.

  Ikiko made a gesture of striking at her own throat, and Yasuko nodded. Ikiko urged Yasuko to see her husband once more, but Yasuko said she had no wish to become an obstacle on her husband’s path to the other world. Then she left as though fleeing.

  Ikiko immediately reported all this to her husband and Ishihara. For their part, from the time they had heard Baba’s intelligence, both leaders had cast away all hope for a second rising and had set their minds upon death.

  Reverently the two bowed and offered worship before a scroll depicting the Grand Shrine of Isé. Ikiko placed three earthen cups upon a three-legged stool of plain wood. Urging the men to partake of the final draught of saké, she herself took up one of the cups.

  Abé and Ishihara opened their kimonos and took their short swords in hand. As for Ikiko, she quietly drew a small dagger from within her sash.

  Her action provoked consternation in Ishihara as well as her husband, and they tried to stop her, but Ikiko would not turn aside from her resolve. She had no children, she told her husband, so why should he prevent her from accompanying him? Since she gave no sign of retreating, Abé did not venture to deny her her will.

  At the same moment that the two men cut open their stomachs with a precise thrust of their swords, Ikiko struck her throat with her dagger.

  It was the Fourteenth Day of the Ninth Month. The time was shortly past noon. Abé was thirty-seven years of age. Ikiko was twenty-six. Ishihara was thirty-five.

  Hardly a moment after their suicides the door of the Abé house shook with a violent knocking. The patrol had come. Abé’s old mother called out in a loud voice: “They have just committed seppuku.” An officer flanked by his troops forced his way into the house and was confronted with the three fresh corpses.

  When the force had disbanded at Chikozu, the group of those who embarked in the lone fishing boat and made their way to Konoura in Udo, just south of Kumamoto, numbered six men.

  There was the twenty-eight-year-old Juro Furuta, who together with Tsunetaro Kobayashi was one of the most youthful of the leaders. In the struggle within the garrison walls, he broke two swords, took up a third, and kept on fighting. It was he who cut down Lieutenant Colonel Kunihiko Oshima as well as many others, though he himself also sustained a wound.

  There was Juro Kagami, forty years of age and a master of the ancient court music.

  There was Gitaro Tashiro, twenty-six years of age and a master swordsman. He was the first man upon the palisade of the artillerymen’s camp.

  Tashiro’s younger brother Gigoro was twenty-three and had fought valiantly in the combat with the infantrymen.

  Teruyoshi Morishita was twenty-four. He struck down Major General Taneda, and then joined the struggle at the infantry garrison and slew another officer, greatly distinguishing himself.

  Shigetaka Sakamoto was twenty-one.

  The six had placed their hopes in the aid of the priest of Konoura Shrine, their comrade and fellow-disciple of Master Oen, Takeo Kai. He most certainly would have joined in the rising, but word of it had not reached him in this distant place. Kai gave them a cordial welcome.

  They passed the night at Kai’s house, taking counsel with one another as to a second rising. Kagami offered a suggestion for procuring funds for traveling and military supplies. He had learned that his former lord, Eijiro Mibuchi, happened to be staying at the Matsui residence in Ueyanagi, and so he entrusted a letter to Kai, asking Mibuchi to provide funds for their journey. Kai set out with the letter at once.

  Everyone waited anxiously for Kai to come back. The following day, the Twelfth Day of the Ninth Month, passed without his return.

  When Kai arrived at the Matsui residence, not only was Mibuchi no longer there, but Kai himself was recognized by the police on guard as one of those in sympathy with the League, and he was taken into custody.

  The six who waited realized that every moment that Kai’s return was delayed heightened their peril. And once a certain limit was reached, they knew they would have to prepare to meet their fate.

  Three of them, Gigoro Tashiro, Morishita, and Sakamoto, racked by impatience, climbed to the top of the nearby peak of Omigataké just as the sun was setting. They gazed at distant Kumamoto Castle. Seen thus from afar, the castle tower’s appearance gave no hint of any extraordinary activity within. But when the comrades casually questioned the mountain folk, they were told that by night the castle was ablaze with lights and by day search patrols were dispatched without letup in every direction. When the three came down from the mountain, they urged their three comrades to resign themselves to the inevitable.

  They set their minds upon death. As for the place, they chose Omigataké. As for the time, they chose dawn of the following day.

  Not long after the first cockcrow, the six climbed to the crest of Omigataké. The previous evening, the Tashiro brothers had selected there a level portion of unspoiled ground and marked it off into a square bordered with sacred rope which they hung with Shinto pendants. Now at dawn these white pendants fluttered in the breeze. Gazing up at the trailing clouds as daylight broke over the mountains, Juro Kagami composed his farewell poem:

  I have lived long in this world

  By the grace of the gods of Yamato,

  And today I at last set foot

  On the Floating Bridge of Heaven.

  As need hardly be said, his poem was based upon the mystic teaching of Master Oen on the ascent to heaven. Kagami told his comrades that he would very much like to have played for them in this final hour the ancient music in which he had been schooled, and that the lack of an instrument grieved him.

  The six stepped within the sacred rope, they partook together of the farewell cup of saké, and Gitaro Tashiro, singled out by the others, agreed to administer the finishing stroke to each of them. Whereupon Kagami, thinking it a pity that Tashiro should undergo the last agony alone, said that he would wait and die with him.

  Juro Furuta was the first to expose his flesh to the autumn breeze of morning and to cut his stomach straight across. Tashiro then severed head from body.

  After that, Morishita, Gigoro Tashiro, and Shigetaka Sakamoto committed seppuku in turn. Finally Gitaro Tashiro and Kagami, performing the ritual together, cut open their stomachs and thrust their blades into their own throats.

  Inspector Yoshitaka Niimi, alerted by an informer, began leading several policemen up the mountain. While still on the middle slopes, he met a hunter rushing down excitedly, who told him that six members of the League of the Divine Wind were committing seppuku on the mountaintop. Halting his impatient group with the words, “We will rest here before going on,” Niimi sat down at the base of a tree and lit a cigarette. He did not wish to disturb the last moments of these men.

  When the police reached the crest of the mountain, the last traces of the night’s darkness were gone. Within the square cordoned with sacred rope, the corpses of the six patriots lay slumped forward in perfect fulfillment of the ritual. The white paper pendants that hung from the rope, many of them flecked with fresh blood, shone in the rays of the morning sun.

  After the rising had been suppressed, one of its leaders, Kotaro Ogata, consulted the gods and was told that he should surrender. Ogata did so, and, while in prison serving a life sentence, wrote a short book entitled The Romance of the Divine Fire. In it he addressed himself to the problems of why the Divine Wind had not blown and why the Ukei had proved fallible.

  With dedication of such unparalleled intensity, with wills so purged of impurity, how was it that divine assistance was not forthcoming? Such was the riddle with which Ogata struggled vainly in his prison cell for the rest of his life. Ogata’s thoughts, as he recorded them in the following passage, merely represent his own interpretation, his personal conjecture. Th
e will of the gods is hidden, and, indeed, it does not lie in man’s province to know it:

  How wretched and pitiable that men so splendidly faithful should, counter to all expectation, perish in a single night, like blossoms scattered by a storm, like the fleeting frost and dew, and in an enterprise conceived and executed under the guidance of the divine will! Thus in my foolish heart did I wonder why it was that events had so come to pass, and I even began to feel doubt and bitterness. But I came to believe that the end was foreordained, that it was what the divine will had intended.

  Had the gods once more frowned upon the enterprise for which these hardy men, so fierce and bold, had sought their approval, what they had planned would no doubt become known to the world, and a most perilous situation would have come about. Even if that danger could have been surmounted, surely some of them would have taken their own lives, out of sheer frustration and despair.

  And so the great gods, moved to pity, fashioned a marvelous providence whereby these men would vindicate their honor at one stroke and thereafter render their service in the world to come.

  Though stricken with awe, so do I reason within myself.

  A keen regret lies hidden in these words that Ogata wrote to console both himself and the souls of his comrades. And in the simple exclamation that follows, one that truly expresses the mind of this group of men who let no obstacle deter them, Ogata may be said to have given voice to the spirit of the samurai: “Were we to have acted like frail women?”

  10

  THE RAINY SEASON had already begun. Isao Iinuma paused before leaving home for his morning classes to glance inside the large envelope that had just arrived bearing Honda’s name. After seeing that it contained a letter as well as his League of the Divine Wind, he put the envelope into his bookbag, intending to read it at his leisure once he had reached school.

  He passed through the gate of his school, the College of National Studies. Just inside the entranceway of his classroom building stood a huge drum which well embodied the spirit of the school. It was a venerable-looking drum with the inscription “Yahachi Onozaki, drum-maker, Temma,” and had a large iron ring hanging from its cylinder. The broad circle of taut-stretched leather was like an expanse of early spring sky hazy with yellow dust. And the spots of wear inflicted by numerous blows were like clusters of white clouds floating in such a sky. But on a muggy rainy-season day like this, Isao thought, the drum, its vigor gone, would probably give off a sluggish, muffled sound.

  As soon as he entered his second-floor classroom, he heard the drum being beaten to announce the beginning of the school day. His first class was ethics. Since neither that subject nor its decrepit teacher roused Isao’s enthusiasm, he stealthily took out Honda’s letter and began to read it.

  My dear Mr. Iinuma:

  I am returning to you your copy of The League of the Divine Wind. I read it with keen appreciation indeed. Thank you.

  I well understand why this book stirred such admiration in you. And rest assured that I, too, who had regarded this uprising as nothing more than an affair of discontented samurai fanatically dedicated to the gods, have had my horizons broadened by learning of the purity of motive and feeling of those involved. My appreciation, however, probably differs from yours, and it is about this difference that I would like to write in more detail.

  That is to say, when I reflect upon whether, were I your age, the emotions aroused in me would be the same, I cannot help but doubt this. Rather I think that, whatever regrets, whatever envy I might have concealed within my heart, I would have smiled derisively at these men who staked everything upon a single blow. When I was your age I thought of myself as on the way to becoming a useful and proper member of society. At that age, my emotional balance was carefully preserved, and my intellect had come to function in a more or less clear if prosaic manner. I was convinced that the usual passions were altogether “unsuitable” for me. Just as one cannot take on a body other than one’s own, so I believed that one could not speak any lines other than those allotted one in human life. When I saw passion in others, it was my practice to search out the incongruity there as quickly as I could, the necessary contradiction, however small, between the man himself and his passion, and then to smile a little derisively—to protect myself. When one has this bent, it is easy to discover “unsuitability” anywhere. This kind of derision was not necessarily malicious. I might even venture to say that my very derision contained a kind of cordiality and tolerance. Why? Because at that age, the realization had begun to take form in me that passion by its very nature is something born of man’s failure to perceive this kind of incongruity in himself.

  It happened, however, that a close friend of mine, Kiyoaki Matsugae, whom your father, too, has spoken to you about, put a great strain upon this so carefully ordered awareness of mine. He fell passionately in love with a girl, and I, with the eyes of a friend, perceived this from the first as the most extraordinary of incongruities. For I had thought of him up to that time as having no more warmth than a glittering crystal. He was maddeningly capricious, he was given to sentiment, but I, as an observer, had concluded that his all too exquisite sensitivity would preserve him from heedless and simpleminded passion.

  Things did not proceed as I had thought, however. Even as I watched, I saw this naïve, heedless passion changing my friend. Love was feverishly at work, transforming him into a person suited for love. His passion, altogether foolish, altogether blind, made him into one altogether suitable. Just at the moment of his death, I saw his face become the very face of one who had been born to die for love. All incongruity was wiped away at that moment.

  I, whose eyes had witnessed so miraculous a transformation, could myself hardly remain unchanged. My callow faith in my own indomitable nature became a prey to misgivings, and I had to work to maintain it. What had been an act of faith now became an act of will. What had been something natural now became something to be sought after. This was an alteration that brought with it a certain profit valuable to me in my role as a judge. When I deal with a criminal I am able to believe, unswayed by theories of retribution or re-education, or by optimism or pessimism toward human nature, that any man, regardless of his situation, is capable of being transformed.

  At any rate let me return to the emotions I felt after reading The League of the Divine Wind. Strangely enough, I, who now am thirty-eight, discovered myself capable of being stirred by this narration of an historical event shot through with irrationality. What came to my mind most vividly was Kiyoaki Matsugae. His passion was no more than a passion dedicated to one woman, but its irrationality was the same, its violence, its rebelliousness was the same, and its resistance to all remedies but that of death was the same. Still, even in the midst of my excited appreciation, I felt secure in knowing that at my present age I can be aroused by such accounts without incurring any risk. Perhaps precisely because of the immutable truth of my never having done such things myself, I am now able to contemplate with safety everything that I might have done in the past. Thus, with no danger at all, I can fix my imagination upon such events, and I can let myself bathe in the poisonous rays of my own reveries reflected from them.

  At your age, however, every excitement is dangerous. Every excitement that can send one pitching headlong is dangerous. And some are especially dangerous. For example, judging from that light that flashes from your eyes to disconcert those around you, I would think that your very nature makes a tale of this sort “unsuitable” for you.

  Having reached my present age, I find myself no longer adverting to the incongruity between men and their passions. When I was young, concern for my own welfare certainly made such fault-finding a necessity, but now not only is this necessity gone but the disharmony in others resulting from their passion, which in the past I would have considered a weakness worthy of scornful laughter, has become but an allowable imperfection. And with that perhaps I have lost the last vestige of my youth, whose vulnerability made it fearful of the wounds incurred by re
acting emotionally to the erratic conduct of others. Now, indeed, it is the beauty of danger rather than the danger of beauty that affects me with the utmost vividness, and there is nothing comical to me about youth. Probably this is because youth no longer has any claim on my self-awareness. When I consider all this for a moment, there is something frightening about it. My own enthusiasm, innocuous as it is for me, may well have the result of further stimulating your dangerous enthusiasm.

  Because I realize this, I want very much to admonish you in this regard, to urge restraint upon you—though my efforts may well be useless.

  The League of the Divine Wind is a drama of tragic perfection. This was a political event so remarkable throughout that it almost seems to be a work of art. It was a crucible in which purity of resolve was put to the test in a manner rarely encountered in history. But one should by no means confuse this tale of dreamlike beauty of another time with the circumstances of present-day reality.

  The danger of this account lies in its leaving out the contradictions. The author, Tsunanori Yamao, seems to have written in accordance with historical fact. But for the sake of the artistic unity of this slim volume, he has, without doubt, excluded a number of contradictions. Furthermore, he focuses so insistently upon the purity of resolve that pertained to the essence of this affair that he sacrifices all perspective. Thus one loses sight not only of the general context of world history but also of the particular historical necessities that conditioned the Meiji government which the League chose as its enemy. What the book lacks is contrast. To give an example, you yourself are aware, are you not, of the existence at the same time in the same Kumamoto Province of a group called the Kumamoto Band?

  In the 1870s, a retired American captain of artillery named L. L. Janes, who had distinguished himself in the Civil War, came to take an assignment as a teacher at the school of Western learning founded in Kumamoto. He began to give Bible classes, and to slip into the role of a Protestant missionary. In the same year of the rising of the League of the Divine Wind, 1876, thirty-five of his students, led by Danjo Ebina, gathered on Mount Hanaoka on January thirtieth. And under the title of the Kumamoto Band they took a vow “to Christianize Japan, to build a new nation based upon this teaching.” Persecution arose, of course. The school was finally closed, but the thirty-five comrades were able to flee to Kyoto, where they helped Jo Niijima build up Doshisha University. Though their ideals were diametrically opposed to those of the League, here, too, do we not see another example of the same purity of resolve? In the Japan of that day, even the most eccentric and unrealistic ideas were not without some faint possibility of realization, and diametrically opposed concepts of political reform manifested themselves with the same naïveté and lack of sophistication. One should realize how much different that era was from the present when the structure of government has taken on a definite form.