Runaway Horses Page 13

  I am no advocate of the novelties of Christianity, nor am I one to scorn the zeal for the past and the stubborn narrow-mindedness of the men of the League. However, if one is to learn from history, one should not concentrate solely upon a single portion of an era but rather make a thorough investigation of the many complex and mutually contradictory factors that made the era what it was. One must take the single portion and fit it into its proper place. One must evaluate the various elements that went into giving it its special character. Thus one must look at history from a perspective that offers a broad and balanced view.

  This, I believe, is what is meant by learning from history. For any man’s view of his own era is limited, and he has great difficulty in trying to obtain a comprehensive picture of his time. Precisely because of this, then, the comprehensive picture offered by history both provides information and constitutes a pattern for one’s guidance. A man who lives bound by the limits of the minute-to-minute present is able, by means of the broad vision offered by time-transcending history, to avail himself of a comprehensive picture of his world and so correct his own narrow view of things. Such is the enjoyable privilege that history offers men.

  Learning from history should never mean fastening upon a particular aspect of a particular era and using it as a model to reform a particular aspect of the present. To take out of the jigsaw puzzle of the past a piece with a set form and attempt to fit it into the present is not an enterprise that could have a happy outcome. To do so is to toy with history, a pastime fit for children. One must realize that yesterday’s sincerity and today’s sincerity, however much they may resemble each other, have different historical conditions. If one seeks a kindred purity of resolve, one should seek it in a “diametrically opposed ideology” of the present day, existing under the same historical conditions. A modest attitude of this sort is appropriate for the characteristically limited “present-day me.” For thus one is at last able to abstract this purity of resolve as a historical problem, and to make this “human motive” which transcends history the object of one’s study. Then the historical conditions common to the era become no more than the constant factors in the equation.

  What a young man like you should be especially warned against is the blurring together of purity of resolve and history. The immense esteem, then, that you have for this book on the League of the Divine Wind makes me fearful. I think it would be well if you would try to think of history in terms of a vast stage of events, and of purity of resolve as something that transcends history.

  All this has probably been a show of excessive solicitude, but such is my advice and admonition. I suppose that, without realizing it, I have arrived at the age of pouring out advice to anyone younger than myself. But, beyond that, I value your intelligence. Why should I admonish at such length a young man whom I expected to amount to nothing?

  As for the almost sublime strength that you displayed in the kendo match, as for your own purity of resolve and passionate feelings, I cannot withhold my admiration. But placing still more reliance upon your intelligence and your zeal for truth, I would like to express the deeply felt hope that you will be ever aware of your primary duty as a student, ever assiduous in your studies, and so turn out a man valuable to your country.

  Again, whenever you come to Osaka, please take the opportunity to visit me. You will always be welcome.

  Finally, though there should be no need for such concern with a man as excellent as your father always at hand, nevertheless, should any especially grave problem arise to trouble you and you feel the need of consulting with someone else, I would be willing at any time to talk things over with you. Please do not have the least hesitation in this regard.

  Sincerely yours,

  Shigekuni Honda

  The young man sighed when he came to the end of the long letter. What was written there did not please him. He was opposed from first to last to what it said. Then there was something else. Even though this man was an old friend of his father’s, Isao could not fathom his motive in sending a letter of such length, one furthermore which was so cordial, so carefully fashioned, so obviously sincere, to a boy whom he, a judge of the Osaka Court of Appeals, had met only once.

  To be so singled out was a unique privilege, but what impressed Isao was not the letter itself but the frankness and warmth of its style. Never before had an eminent man demonstrated so sincere a regard for him.

  Isao could draw but one conclusion: “There’s no doubt that he was moved by the book. His age and his profession have turned him into a coward, but Judge Honda, too, must be a man of ‘purity.’”

  Though the letter was filled with phrases that offended his feelings, at least his boyish eyes could find no corruption lurking there.

  But even so, had not Honda’s skillful freezing of history, stripping it of time, had the effect of reducing everything to a map? Was that how a judge’s mind worked? The history of an era in terms of his “comprehensive picture” would become no more than a map, a scroll, a thing with no life.

  This man understands nothing at all of the blood that flows in Japanese veins, of our moral heritage, of our will, the boy thought.

  Isao looked up to find the lecture still drowsily in progress. The fall of rain outside the window had intensified. The damp and sultry atmosphere of the classroom was filled with the heavy acid odor given off by the young flesh of growing boys.

  The lecture ended at last. There was the same feeling of relief with which one sees a frightfully squawking chicken suddenly breathe its last and become tranquil.

  Isao went out into the corridor, which was damp from the rain. Izutsu and Sagara were waiting for him.

  “What’s on your minds?” asked Isao.

  “Lieutenant Hori said he wasn’t on duty today and he’d be back at his quarters by three o’clock,” Izutsu told him. “The place will be quiet at that time, and we’ll be able to talk. He said we’re to have dinner with him too.”

  Isao answered without hesitation: “Well, I’ll skip kendo practice today.”

  “Won’t the captain have something to say about that?”

  “He can say what he likes. He doesn’t dare put me off the team.”

  “How wonderful to have such power!” replied Sagara, who was small and wore glasses.

  The three of them walked together to the next class, since all three had chosen German for their foreign language.

  Izutsu and Sagara both deferred to Isao’s leadership. It was Isao who had roused their enthusiasm by letting them read The League of the Divine Wind. Having by chance received his book that morning from Osaka, Isao decided to lend it next to Lieutenant Hori, whom he would meet that afternoon. It was hardly likely that the Lieutenant’s reaction would be anything like the temporizing response of Judge Honda.

  “A perspective that offers a broad and balanced view,” Isao thought, the phrase from the letter he had just read coming to his mind. He smiled slightly: “That man would never touch hot fire tongs. He’d touch only the hibachi. But how different fire tongs and the hibachi. One is made of metal, the other of clay. He’s a man who is pure, but he belongs to the clay category.”

  The concept of purity was something that came from Isao and entered deeply into the minds and hearts of the other two. He had composed a motto, “Learn from the purity of the League of the Divine Wind,” which had become the motto of their group.

  Purity, a concept that recalled flowers, the piquant mint taste of a mouthwash, a child clinging to its mother’s gentle breast, was something that joined all these directly to the concept of blood, the concept of swords cutting down iniquitous men, the concept of blades slashing down through the shoulder to spray the air with blood. And to the concept of seppuku. The moment that a samurai “fell like the cherry blossoms,” his blood-smeared corpse became at once like fragrant cherry blossoms. The concept of purity, then, could alter to the contrary with arbitrary swiftness. And so purity was the stuff of poetry.

  For Isao, to die purely se
emed easy. But what about laughing purely? How to be pure in all respects was a problem that disturbed him. No matter how tight a rein he kept upon his emotions, there were times when some trivial thing would arise to make him laugh. Once, for example, he had laughed at a puppy frolicking at the side of the road, with a woman’s high-heeled shoe, of all things, in its mouth. It was the kind of laugh that he preferred others not to see.

  “Do you know how to get to the Lieutenant’s place?”

  “Trust me. I’ll get you both there.”

  “I wonder what the Lieutenant is really like.”

  Isao spoke up: “I think he is someone who will give us a chance to die.”

  11

  THE THREE BOYS, carrying their umbrellas and wearing their school caps with the white piping, got off the streetcar at Roppongi and walked down the street that began its descent at No. 3 Kasumi-cho and led around toward the main gate of the Azabu Third Regiment.

  “That’s it,” said Izutsu, pointing his finger at a house at the foot of the slope. All three stopped to look.

  It was a two-story house so worn with age that one wondered how it could have survived the disastrous earthquake. Its garden seemed rather large, but there was no gate, the board fence that surrounded it opening immediately upon the door. At the front a narrow porch ran along the second story backed by a line of six glass doors, which seemed to brim over with the twisted reflection of the dark, wet sky. As soon as he had observed the rain-soaked bulk of this house from the slope above, Isao had had an eerie impression. This could not be the first time he was looking upon it, he thought. There the house stood wrapped in falling rain like a ludicrously oversized cabinet too old to be of any use and so abandoned to the elements. The trees and shrubs of its garden, unpruned and unclipped, flourished immoderately, and made the fence seem like a trash box stuffed with weeds. Isao felt that this place of so melancholy an aspect was connected with a past event of ineffable sweetness, a memory of which stirred deep within him like the bubbling of dark honey. How odd it seemed that he should have such an uncanny but distinct impression of having been here before. Perhaps this was founded upon the actual experience of having been brought to this neighborhood by his parents when he was a child. Then, too, he might have once seen a photograph of this house. Whatever the case, he felt that the form of this house had remained perfectly preserved within his heart like a tiny but fully detailed garden wreathed in mist.

  In another moment, Isao shook off these reflections which the dark shadow of his umbrella might have provoked. Ahead of the other two, almost running, he hurried down the steep slope awash with muddy water.

  They stood before the entranceway. There was a nameplate fastened at the top of the closely worked lattice of the door, but the wind and the rain had taken such a toll of its wood that only the part inked over with the name “Kitazaki” seemed to have any substance left. The rain had penetrated even the moldering threshold.

  An officer cousin of Izutsu had introduced him to Lieutenant Hori, the infantry officer whom they had come to see today. Izutsu could well expect the Lieutenant to be especially receptive to his bringing with him the son of the headmaster of the Academy of Patriotism.

  Isao’s mood was that of a vigorous young man newly enrolled in the League of the Divine Wind on his way to meet Harukata Kaya, and his heart thumped furiously. Now, however, the era was one in which the League was a thing of the distant past, and Isao well understood that the situation today was not that of sword-wielding samurai of the League clashing with the soldiers of the Meiji government, with friend and foe clearly marked like opposing pieces set up on a chessboard. He knew that today the samurai spirit was alive deep within the Army, and that those who had it viewed with sorrow and indignation the “Meiji mentality” of the militarists and the important ministers who were their allies. That one of these possessed of the samurai spirit should live within such a wretched house seemed to Isao as though a scrub citrus tree hidden in the shadowy dampness of a forest should bear a single, bright-colored orange.

  Isao completely lost the cool reserve that he was able to maintain even before a kendo match. The man he was about to meet was someone capable perhaps of lifting him to the heavens—though every dream and hope that he had up to now placed in someone else had been betrayed.

  The old man who answered the door sent a chill through the three youths. He was tall but bent forward so that, with his white hair and his deep-set eyes, he materialized in the gloom of the entranceway as though swooping down upon them. He was the sort of birdlike creature one might expect to meet in a mountain fastness, an ancient with broken wings folded.

  “The Lieutenant eagerly awaits your visit. Please come this way,” said the old man, pressing his palms to his knees. Then he went off through the darkness of the damp corridor as though using his hands to direct the motion of his legs. Though the materials that had gone into the house seemed no different from those of any other lodging house, the very walls were permeated with the smell of leather, and the distant sound of the morning and evening bugle calls of the Third Regiment seemed to have been compounded with the fiber of its sliding panels. Apparently no other lodger but the Lieutenant had yet returned, so deep was the silence throughout the house. The old man’s breath grew labored as he began to climb the creaking stairway. Then he stopped halfway up, and, as if to gain a moment’s rest, called to the second floor: “Lieutenant Hori, your guests have come.” There was a youthful, almost insolent vigor to the voice that shouted in response.

  The room that Lieutenant Hori lived in was a single one of eight mats, and, aside from a desk and a bookcase, it had no furnishings at all, Spartan surroundings altogether suited to a bachelor officer.

  He had already changed into a splashed-pattern summer kimono with a carelessly fastened sash, and, so dressed, he seemed an ordinary young man of dark complexion. His uniform was neatly arranged upon a hanger which hung from a beam. The red tab at the collar and the brass numeral “3” gave the room the only bit of color that caught the eye.

  “Well, come right in. I was duty officer this week, and I was relieved at noon. That’s why I’m home early.” The Lieutenant’s voice rang with self-confidence.

  His head was close-cropped, and his scalp was like a text proclaiming the rough vigor of his spirit. And though his eyes were clear and his glance penetrating, yet, dressed as he was, there was nothing to set him apart from any other young man of twenty-six or seven from the provinces. Save, perhaps, for the thick forearms which told of his mastery of kendo.

  “Now make yourselves comfortable. Don’t bother about the tea, old fellow. We’ll take care of it.”

  When the old man’s footsteps on the creaking stairs had grown faint, the Lieutenant began to talk cheerfully as he leaned forward to take up a thermos bottle containing the hot water for the tea. His words were obviously meant to put the tense boys at ease.

  “This place looks like a haunted house, but both it and that old man there have a momentous history behind them. He was a hero of the war with China, and then, during the Russo-Japanese War, he opened this lodging house. Many great military men started to make their own way in life right here. So it’s a house with good associations. Then it’s cheap and it’s also handy because it’s close to the barracks, and so there’s never an empty room in it.”

  As the Lieutenant laughed, Isao watched his face. A visit about the time the cherry blossoms had begun to fall would have been preferable, he thought. How much better if the Lieutenant had come home after drilling on a windswept parade ground beneath a dusty yellow sky, had pulled off soiled boots to which clung cherry blossom petals, and had greeted the boys dressed in a khaki uniform that gave off the scent of spring and of manure, a gleeful flash of red and gold at the shoulders and collar.

  The Lieutenant was evidently a man who cared little about the impression he made upon others. His tone was free and easy as he began to talk about kendo.

  Izutsu and Sagara held their breath, intent
on saying something. What they both wanted to say was that Isao, already a third-level kendoist, was a young man from whom the world of kendo expected much. At length, Sagara, small and bespectacled, stammered out this information. Isao’s face reddened, and the Lieutenant’s expression suddenly took on a kind warmth as he looked at Isao.

  This is what Izutsu and Sagara had been hoping for. In Isao they saw the perfect embodiment of their hopes, and so, with the aggressiveness which is the privilege of youth, they wanted him to be on an equal footing in any confrontation with an outsider. Of course Isao would never resort to verbal trickery, but only bring to bear upon his opponent the piercing force of the purity to which they all were dedicated.

  Suddenly the Lieutenant changed his tone and, eyes sparkling, put a direct question. Izutsu and Sagara felt their hearts throb; it was the moment they had been awaiting.