Runaway Horses Read online

  “All right, let me ask Isao here. What ideal do you hold?”

  Isao, still sitting erect though he had been told to makehimself comfortable, threw out his chest and answered succinctly: “To form a Showa League of the Divine Wind.”

  “The rising of the League failed. Doesn’t that trouble you at all?”

  “That was not a failure.”

  “No? All right, what are you going to put your trust in?”

  “Our swords,” answered Isao, not mincing a word.

  The Lieutenant said nothing for a moment. He seemed to be rehearsing the next question in his mind: “Well and good. But let me ask you this: what do you wish for more than anything else?”

  This time Isao was silent. He had been keeping his eyes fixed upon the Lieutenant’s, but now he turned them slightly away. His glance went from the damp wall to the tight-fast window of ground glass. That was as far as he could see. He knew that beyond the close-worked lattice of the window was a thick curtain of rain. Even if the window had been opened, there would have been nothing but rain in view. Still Isao seemed about to speak of something that was not close at hand but far off.

  When he spoke, though his voice stammered slightly, his words were bold: “Before the sun . . . at the top of a cliff at sunrise, while paying reverence to the sun . . . while looking down upon the sparkling sea, beneath a tall, noble pine . . . to kill myself.”

  “Hmm,” said the Lieutenant.

  Izutsu and Sagara looked at Isao in shock. Though he had never before made such a momentous confession, certainly not to his two friends, he had expressed himself in these terms to a man whom he was meeting for the first time.

  Fortunately for Isao the Lieutenant did not respond with harsh skepticism but gave every indication of weighing with the utmost seriousness this declaration which seemed little short of madness. Finally, he spoke: “So that’s how it stands. But it’s not easy to die beautifully, you know. Because it’s not up to you to choose the moment. Even for a military man, there’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to die exactly the way he wants.”

  Isao gave no heed to the Lieutenant’s words. Subtle discourse, exegesis, the “on the one hand this, on the other that” approach—all these were foreign to his way of thinking. His ideal was drawn upon pure white paper in fresh black ink. Its text was mysterious, and it excluded not only translation but also every critique and commentary.

  Isao’s manner now became very tense, and, fully prepared to receive perhaps a slap across the face, he looked directly into the Lieutenant’s eyes and spoke, his shoulders square.

  “Would it be permissible to ask a question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Is there any truth to the rumor that before the May Fifteenth Incident Lieutenant Nakumura of the Imperial Navy made a visit to Lieutenant Hori?”

  For the first time, a cold, hard expression flickered across the Lieutenant’s face.

  “Where did you hear a rumor like that?”

  “Someone said it at my father’s school.”

  “Was it your father himself?”

  “No, it was not my father.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Everything will come out at the trial. You shouldn’t let yourself be taken in by stupid rumors.”

  “Is it a stupid rumor?”

  “A stupid rumor, yes.”

  The Lieutenant lapsed into silence, and the anger which he had checked seemed to tremble in the interval like a compass needle.

  “Trust us. Please tell us the truth. Did you meet with him?”

  “No, I didn’t. I never meet with any of them from the Navy.”

  “Did you meet with Army men?”

  The Lieutenant attempted a carefree laugh.

  “I meet with them every day. I’m a soldier after all.”

  “That does not answer my question.”

  Izutsu and Sagara looked fearfully at each other. How far would Isao dare to go?

  “Do you mean with comrades?” asked the Lieutenant after a pause.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s something that doesn’t concern you.”

  “Please, we really must know.”

  “Why must you?”

  “Because if . . . if we should ever come to ask something of you, we have to know ahead of time whether or not Lieutenant Hori is a man who will try to restrain us.”

  Even before hearing the other’s answer, Isao, taught by what had happened so often before, felt the unpleasant time had come when a chill would isolate him from the man sitting opposite him. The personality of his companion, which a moment before had seemed so radiant, would lose all its luster. This was a change that was perhaps painful enough for the one who underwent it but decidedly more painful for the one who witnessed it. As though the tension of a drawn bow were suddenly relaxed, the arrow unreleased, the bowstring slack again before one’s eyes. As though the heaped-up duration of day-to-day living, like a pile of rubbish, were manifested at one stroke. Was there not one man among their elders who would throw aside discretion and the caution brought on by his years and respond at once to the keen thrust of their purity with a sharp-pointed purity of his own? If there were definitely none, the purity that Isao envisaged had to be something that the bonds of age strangled. (This despite the example of the men of the League of the Divine Wind.) If it was in the nature of purity to fall victim to age, then purity was something destined to waste away before his eyes. No thought could make Isao more fearful. If this was true, he had no time to lose.

  The way for elders to cure the impetuosity of youth is to give it their unqualified approval, but this is a bit of wisdom that they never seem to learn. And so the young put all their trust in the fierce purity which they feel will of its very nature vanish on the morrow, and they go to extremes in their pursuit of it. And the fault lies with no one but their elders.

  Isao and his two friends stayed in Lieutenant Hori’s room until nine that evening, the Lieutenant treating them to a dinner brought in by a caterer. Once he had abandoned his subtle questions, Lieutenant Hori’s conversation became both interesting and profitable, quite capable of arousing their zeal. The shameful state of foreign affairs, the government’s economic program which was doing nothing to relieve rural poverty, the corruption of politicians, the rise of communism, and then the political parties’ halving the number of Army divisions and, by championing the cause of arms cutbacks, bringing constant pressure to bear upon the military. In the course of this conversation, the Shinkawa zaibatsu’s exertions in purchasing American dollars came up, something of which Isao had already heard from his father. According to the Lieutenant, Shinkawa’s group had been making a great show of restraint ever since the May Fifteenth Incident. However, the Lieutenant went on to say, there were no grounds at all for placing any trust in the self-control of people of that sort.

  Japan was sorely beset. Storm clouds were piling up in an ever-growing mass, and the situation was enough to make a man despair. Even the august person of His Sacred Majesty was affronted. The boys’ knowledge of current evils to be deplored was greatly expanded. In any event, the Lieutenant was a good man.

  As they were leaving, Isao said: “Our ideals in their entirety are contained in this.” He then handed The League of the Divine Wind to the Lieutenant. Since he had not made it clear whether he was giving the book or just lending it, if he ever wanted to visit the Lieutenant again, he thought, it would suffice to say that he was coming to get the book.

  12

  EARLY ON SUNDAY MORNING, Isao conducted a kendo practice for young boys in the drill hall of the neighborhood police station. The officer in charge was an admirer of his father, and from time to time visited the Academy of Patriotism. With his father as go-between, Isao could hardly refuse the officer’s request. As for the boys’ regular instructor, since he was thus able to sleep late on Sunday at least, he welcomed the opportunity to turn his charges over to Isao, whom the boys were not only fond of but looked upon as a hero.

 
The grade-school youngsters formed a line, their thin arms thrust out from the sleeves of their drill uniforms with the hemp-leaf pattern stitched in black on the white cloth, and one by one they charged at Isao with reckless abandon. As each pair of earnest young eyes behind their mask came rushing at him, Isao felt that he was being assaulted by a hail of brightly polished stones. Bending his body in accordance with the height of each antagonist and deliberately remiss in maintaining his guard, he dodged back and forth, taking blow after blow from the bamboo swords of the boys, much as though he were being whipped by young branches springing at him as he made his way through a thick grove. Isao felt his own youthful body glow pleasantly as the torpid mood of the rainy-season morning was shattered by the ever more fierce cries of the boys.

  While Isao was wiping off his sweat after practice, a detective named Tsuboi, a man in his early fifties, who had been an interested spectator, came over to talk to him.

  “You know, when I was watching you,” said Tsuboi, “I realized what they mean about no kind of kendo practice demanding as much of you as when you’re working with young boys. What a splendid sight! And then at the very end, the final reverence to the gods, when the oldest boy shouted out the order, ‘Divine Presence!’ with such force even though he’s so young, I saw right there the effect of good education. I tell you, it was a splendid sight!”

  Tsuboi was a second-level kendoist, but his technique had no flexibility and power, all of his strength being in his shoulders. Sometimes when Isao would practice with the policemen at the station, Tsuboi would very affably put himself under his tutelage, a youth some thirty-five or six years younger. With his sunken eyes, which were devoid of expression, his long nose with its florid, unsightly tint, the garrulous and sentimental Tsuboi scarcely looked like a detective assigned to thought control.

  Just as the boys were leaving by twos and threes through the gate in front of the drill hall, a patrol wagon turned into the yard. When it had stopped, a group of long-haired young men, bound and fastened to one another, got down from it. One was dressed like a workman, the two behind him wore drab business suits, and the fourth was dressed in a fashionable kimono.

  “Well, well! Looks like we have some visitors this Sunday morning,” said Tsuboi, getting sluggishly to his feet. He gripped a kendo sword with his bare hands and executed a few strokes as he was about to leave. Isao could not help noticing that his hands were distastefully soft and weak, their veins standing out as though under nervous tension.

  “Who are they?” he asked Tsuboi, impelled by no more than normal curiosity.

  “Reds. You couldn’t tell just by looking at them? Your Reds today don’t dress like they used to. They make it a point either to dress so you don’t notice them or to look like foppish playboys, one or the other. The one in work clothes is probably an organizer. The rest of them are most likely college students. Well, we’ll have to make them feel right at home.” So saying, he twisted his weak hands suggestively about the handle of the sword, then put it aside and went out.

  Isao felt a touch of envy toward these young men being thrown into prison. Sanai Hashimoto had been imprisoned at twenty-five and executed at twenty-six.

  Was it possible that Isao himself might one day become a prisoner like Sanai? For a number of reasons, he found himself discontented that prison seemed so remote from him. Yet would he not choose to kill himself rather than submit to imprisonment? Very few of the League of the Divine Wind had been imprisoned. Surely, once he had plunged into a heroic enterprise, he would not await capture and all its indignities, but would put an end to himself with his own hand.

  He wished that some morning, were it possible, the death that he was intent upon—to die atop a cliff swept by a breeze fresh with the scent of pine overlooking a sea bright in the morning sun—would somehow partake of the atmosphere reeking of urine that the rough and clammy concrete walls of a prison enclosed. But how could the two be mingled?

  He was always thinking of death, and this had so refined him that the physical seemed to fall away, freeing him from the pull of earth and enabling him to walk about some distance above its surface. Indeed he felt that even his distaste and hatred for the affairs of the world no longer stirred him deeply. That was what Isao feared. Perhaps then the dampness of prison walls, the bloodstains upon them, the stink of urine, might serve to quicken his hatred. Perhaps prison was something he needed.

  Since his father and the students had already finished breakfast when he returned home, Isao ate alone, served by his mother.

  His mother had grown rather fat, so much so that her movements had become cumbersome. The blithe young girl with a roving eye and imperturbably sunny outlook now lay concealed beneath a melancholy burden of excess flesh which seemed to give expression to a temperament as cheerless as a heavily overcast sky. There was a sharpness to her gaze that suggested constant anger, but, even so, the erotic movement of her eyes had not changed from what it had been years before.

  Since Mine’s function at the Academy of Patriotism was to attend to the needs of some ten or more students, she surely had much to do. As demanding as her duties were, however, she had reached an age where playing the role of mother to so many young men should have given her a certain amount of pleasure, but Miné had built a wall around herself, as though for some reason she had rejected all intimacy. Whatever leisure she had she fervently devoted to the sewing of bags, and every corner of the house was filled with examples of her handicraft. The spectacle of brocade and Yuzen work scattered throughout an institution as purposefully austere as the Academy was like bright-colored seaweed twined around the unpainted hull of a fishing boat.

  Here in the kitchen, the base of a large saké bottle was jacketed with red brocade. The rice tub from which Miné now was serving her son was wrapped in a quilted cover of gaudy purple Yuzen muslin. It was obvious that her husband disliked this affectation more suited to a lady in waiting, but he had never gone so far as to reprimand her for it.

  “I can’t rest even on Sunday, you see. Master Kaido’s lecture will be at one o’clock. Since the boys are sure to overlook something, I’ll have to be there too to see to all the arrangements.”

  “How many will be coming?”

  “Maybe about thirty. But there seem to be more every time.”

  The Academy of Patriotism served as a kind of church on Sundays. Besides the students, all those in the neighborhood who were interested came to attend the lectures of Kaido Masugi on the history of imperial decrees, which were prefaced by a welcoming address by the headmaster himself. These sessions ended with all present chanting in unison the prayer for prosperity, and provided an occasion for inviting donations to the school. This afternoon Master Kaido was to take up a decree of the Emperor Keiko, “The Empowering of Yamoto Takeru to Subdue the Eastern Barbarians.” Isao had memorized a text from this: “Then, again, evil spirits infest the mountains, devils ravage the countryside, roadways are blocked, pathways cut off, and multitudes are made to suffer.” He thought of it as a passage that could be well applied to his own era. The evil spirits in the mountains and the ravaging devils were flourishing.

  From across the table Miné gazed fixedly at the face of her eighteen-year-old only son as he silently disposed of one serving of rice and then another. She was quite taken with the masculinity evident in the line of his jaw beneath the cheeks so vigorously occupied with the rice. Miné turned to look out into the garden at the cry of a passing peddler hawking morning glory and eggplant seedlings. A hedge bounded the gloomy luxuriance of the shrubbery beneath an overcast sky, but it was too thick to afford a glimpse of the man. There was a heat-induced weariness to the peddler’s voice, and in Mine’s mind his morning glories were drooping. The man’s lethargic tone conveyed the feel of the garden, teeming with tiny snails at this hour of the morning.

  All at once Miné found herself thinking of her abortion, the time she lost the first child that she conceived. This was a decision that Iinuma had forced upon her
because no amount of calculation of the time involved had been able to satisfy him that the child was his own and not Marquis Matsugae’s.

  “This boy, Isao,” she thought, “he doesn’t smile. Why not, I wonder. He almost never jokes. And lately he’ll go for a long time without saying a word to me.”

  She was reminded of the young Iinuma in the Matsugae household, but there was a significant difference. The Iinuma of that period could hardly hide his tortured soul from even a casual observer, but Isao, whatever the circumstances, had an awesome poise. And this in the period of pimply adolescence when most boys were like puppies panting beneath the summer sun.

  An abortion in first pregnancy makes the birth of the second child difficult, but Isao was delivered with remarkable ease, and it was not until afterwards that Miné suffered ill effects. Whether or not Iinuma had meant to show pity by finding fault with her feelings rather than with her physical disability, sometimes, as they lay beside each other at night, he berated her more severely and more sarcastically than ever about her former liaison with Marquis Matsugae. All of this was a severe mental and physical strain for Miné, but, instead of growing thin, she put on her gloomy burden of flesh.

  The Academy of Patriotism had flourished. When Isao was twelve years old, Miné became altogether too friendly with one of the students. When Iinuma learned of this, he gave her a frightful beating. She was in the hospital for nearly five days.

  From that time on, as far as anyone could tell, relations between husband and wife were tranquil. Miné lost all her vivacity, the price that had to be paid for the severe restraint she laid once and for all upon her wayward heart. Iinuma himself, as though freed from a spell, did not mention the Marquis again. The past had become something never to be touched upon.

  Nevertheless, Miné’s stay in the hospital could not have helped but make some sort of lasting impression upon Isao. He had never said a word about it to his mother, of course, but his failure to refer to it even in passing showed all too clearly that he had something stored up within him.