Runaway Horses Read online

  “The lilies I was given there, the lilies you brought from Omiwa Shrine.”

  “No, no. I gave them all away.”

  “You kept not even one for yourself?”

  “No.”

  “What a shame! No matter how withered they get, one should keep them until the next year. People say they are a safeguard against epidemics. At our house we lay them reverently on the family altar.”

  “Did you press them?” asked Sagara without thinking.

  “No, I didn’t think it would be proper to crush the flowers of the gods under a heavy object, so I put them on the altar just as they were and I’ve been giving them fresh water ever since.”

  “But they’re already a month old!” Isao retorted.

  “It is a marvelous thing, but they never wither to an unsightly color. I will show you. There can be no doubt that they are the flowers of the gods.”

  So saying, Makiko went out of the room to return in a few moments, her step slow and reverent, bearing in upraised hands a vase of white porcelain filled with a profusion of lilies. She placed them on the table for the boys to look at. The lilies certainly had withered, as cut flowers would, but they had not turned the usual ugly color as though scorched by fire. Their white had become a somber ivory. As though anemia afflicted them, the green shading of their veins had become sharply etched. Each blossom seemed to have shrunk in the same proportion. They were as though transfigured into flowers of some yet undiscovered species.

  “I will give one to each of you, and you must take them home and carefully preserve them. They will guard you from sickness.” With a small pair of scissors Makiko began to clip off a lily for each of them, cutting the stems close to the blossoms.

  Izutsu laughed. “Even if you didn’t do us this favor, we wouldn’t have to worry about getting sick.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that, after Isao showed such devotion in bringing these lilies from Omiwa Shrine. And besides, it’s not only for sickness,” replied Makiko cryptically, still snipping with her scissors.

  Embarrassed at the prospect of having to go over to accept a flower from a woman, Isao remained obstinately by the porch. He sensed something he could not define about the now-silent Makiko, and, without realizing what he was doing, he looked at her. As she leaned upon the rosewood table that held the vase, her profile was turned toward him. At that moment, Isao knew she was fully aware that his eyes were upon her profile.

  Seeing his two friends standing close to her, ready to take their lilies, he spoke out as though threatening them, his outlandish tone altogether unsuited to the setting: “Listen to me, you two. If in Japan today you could kill only one man, who do you think it would be best to kill? The sort, that is, whose murder would be at least a step toward the purification of Japan.”

  “Jugoro Itsui?” replied Sagara, turning the lily Makiko had given him in his fingertips.

  “Don’t be stupid. He has money, but he’s unimportant.”

  “What about Baron Shinkawa?” asked Izutsu as he came over to Isao to hand him the lily that he had taken for him. His eyes were flashing.

  “If you could kill ten, I rather think he’d be one of them. But he’s only an opportunist. He’s learned something from the May Fifteenth Incident, and he trims his sails to suit whatever wind is blowing. Naturally, he deserves punishment as a traitor.”

  “Premier Saito?”

  “He’d surely be one if you killed five. But Saito stands in front of a black curtain that hides the world of big money. And who’s behind that curtain?”

  “Oh! Busuké Kurahara?”

  “He’s the one,” answered Isao decisively, as he quickly slipped the lily Izutsu had given him into his kimono. “Kill him and Japan is much the better for it.”

  Even as he spoke, Isao’s eyes held fast to the sight, as though at a far distance, of a woman’s slender white hand curved upon a rosewood table and a pair of scissors giving off a sparkle like flashing water beneath the lamp. Makiko’s practice was never to obtrude upon the boys’ conversation among themselves, but she could hardly fail to note from Isao’s manner that he wanted her to be aware of what he was saying. The look she turned toward him was warm with a maternal affection, but her eyes had a distant focus to them, as though she was perhaps looking beyond him into the garden outside, seeking out the last of the blood-red glow of the setting sun all but concealed by the wet foliage of the garden shrubbery.

  “Evil blood,” said Makiko, “is blood that cries to be shed. And those who shed it may indeed heal our country’s sickness. Those cowards who now stand at the bedside of our stricken nation do nothing but wring their hands piteously. Japan will die if the issue is left to them.”

  Makiko’s tone was as light as if she were reciting a poem. Isao felt his grim tautness ease.

  Hearing the sound of heavy panting behind him and of something coming through the grass, Isao glanced back over his shoulder. He felt embarrassed at the quickening of his heartbeat. A stray dog had probably slipped into the rainy garden. The unpleasant snuffling noise it made as it pushed its muzzle through the vegetation confirmed this impression.

  14

  LITTLE RAIN MARKED the latter half of the rainy season. Day after day the skies, heavy with brownish gray clouds, persisted in trapping the sunshine, but finally they cleared. The colleges began their summer vacation.

  Isao received a postcard from Lieutenant Hori with a message scrawled with a thick, coarse lead pencil. He had found The League of the Divine Wind quite stimulating, he wrote, and since he wanted to share it with his friends, he was keeping the book at the regimental headquarters. He would be happy to see Isao any time that he wished to come to retrieve it.

  Isao went one afternoon to visit the Lieutenant at the garrison of the Azabu Third Regiment. The barracks and parade ground lay transfixed by the glare of the summer sun.

  Off to the right of the main gate as one entered stood the conspicuously modern barracks that the regiment so prized. But, rather than this, the dust that swirled up beyond the trees by the drill field and the smell that came drifting from a stable somewhere were the qualities that most conveyed the sense of army that permeated all that Isao saw spread out before him, qualities that merged with the consecrated fame of the regiment to rise up into the dust-laden sky.

  As Isao passed through the gate, a platoon drilling in a distant corner of the parade ground caught his eye at once, the figures of the men like so many upright khaki crayons beneath the blazing afternoon sun.

  A private first class on guard showed him the way. “Lieutenant Hori is drilling some trainees over there. They should finish in about twenty minutes,” he said. “You can watch if you like.”

  Isao followed the private across the parade ground, feeling the sun’s heat pressing down upon him. Everything lay sharply etched beneath its rays. When the two at length came up to the platoon, the brass of the soldiers’ buttons and regimental “3’s” flashing in the sun and the massed red collar patches of the infantry stood out in vivid contrast from the khaki mass.

  The men were now marching straight ahead and the thumping echo of their booted feet was like the champing of massive teeth. Lieutenant Hori held his drawn saber at his right shoulder, and as he bellowed the commands of close-order drill, his voice soared over the ranks of silent men like a fierce bird of prey.

  “Platoon right . . .” came the warning command, followed a moment later by the command to execute: “March!” At that instant, the pivot man on the inside file immediately turned his sweaty face to the right, and for the next few paces marched in place as he waited for the outside file to perform its wide turn. The other files in the meantime seemed to open up like wide-spaced picket fences only to come together again with the ease of a folding fan closing.

  “Squads on line left . . . march!”

  At the Lieutenant’s shouted command, the formation dissolved without an instant’s delay, and the troops rushed forward with mathematical precision to form a single r
ank pivoting upon the guidon bearer. And when the maneuver was completed with the file on the outside flank moving up into position, the platoon resumed its forward march.

  “By the right flank . . . march!”

  The Lieutenant’s virile shouts, accompanied by the flashing of his saber, were like shots discharged into the summer sky. The long rank changed its line of march again. Now as the men drew away from him, Isao could see their backs, the shirts stained and darkened with sweat. From the strain so evident in the set of their shoulders, Isao realized what frantic effort they were putting into checking the harsh breathing provoked by the maneuver just accomplished.

  “Fall out!” shouted the Lieutenant. And with that he turned and ran back to Isao’s direction before pulling up abruptly to shout: “Fall in!” While the Lieutenant was running, Isao saw beneath his black visor, which was glinting in the sunlight, beads of sweat flying from the sunburnt bridge of his nose and from his tight-set lips.

  The soldiers, too, in accordance with their officer’s new position, came rushing toward Isao as though racing one another, and, after the maneuvers that had taken them so far off, formed up in two ranks right before Isao, jostling one another in their eager haste.

  After inspecting their order with severe thoroughness, the Lieutenant once more barked out the commands “Fall out!” and “Fall in!” Clutching their rifles, the men dashed over the sun-baked earth. The commands were repeated over and over. Sometimes the area just beside Isao and the private was ravaged by a whirlwind of dust and sweat and the smell of leather and the laboring breaths of some twenty men. Afterward the dry ground lay darkened with drops of sweat. Dark splotches also covered the Lieutenant’s back where he now stood some distance away from Isao.

  Beneath a summer sky encircled by a low bank of distant, dreamlike clouds, oblivious to the thick and lovely shade cast by the trees bordering the drill field, the little band of soldiers performed like a finely tuned engine as they fell in, fell out, changed direction, and altered formation. They seemed to be moved by a giant, unseen hand reaching down from above. That hand could only belong to the sun itself, Isao thought. The Lieutenant was no more than a lone representative of that hand which manipulated the soldiers as it willed, and when one thought in such terms, even his powerful voice took on a hollow ring. The unseen hand which shifted pawns about on a chessboard—in the very sun above was the force that guided it, the blazing sun which dealt out death, too, whenever it wished. Here was the power of the Emperor himself.

  Only on this drill ground was the hand of the sun working with a mathematical clarity and precision. Only here! The will of the Emperor penetrated the sweat, the blood, the very flesh of these young men, piercing their bodies like X-rays. From high above the entranceway of regimental headquarters, the golden chrysanthemum of the imperial crest, brilliant in the sunshine, looked down upon this beautiful, sweaty, intricate choreography of death.

  And elsewhere? Elsewhere throughout Japan the rays of the sun were blocked.

  When the drill was finished, Lieutenant Hori, his creaking leather puttees white with dust, came over to Isao. “Glad to see you here,” he said and then dismissed the private: “Very good. I’ll take over now.”

  They began to walk toward a huge yellowish oval-shaped building.

  “What do you think of it?” asked the Lieutenant proudly. “The most modern barracks in Japan. It even has an elevator.”

  As they were going up the stone steps that led to the entrance facing the stables, Lieutenant Hori remarked: “I gave them quite a workout today. But I imagine you could tell they were recruits.”

  “No, I didn’t notice anything at all go wrong.”

  “Oh? Well, we let them take a siesta in the summer. And afterwards when you give them a workout like that, you really wake them up.”

  As a company officer, Lieutenant Hori worked in the third-floor room assigned to the officers of the First Battalion. The room was austere, with five or six sets of the protective gear used in bayonet practice hanging upon one of its walls. His desk was by a window, and the straw stuffing had begun to project from the upholstery of his chair. While the Lieutenant stripped off his jacket and went out to wipe away his sweat, Isao looked down from the window at the oval inner courtyard of the building. An orderly brought in tea and left it on the desk.

  A detachment of soldiers was at bayonet practice in the courtyard, and the sound of their exertion seemed to thrust itself up past the window. Six exits fronted by stone steps opened into the courtyard. On this side the building had four floors with one level half underground, but on the opposite side there were only three, including the one half underground. Large white numerals were painted over each of the doors. Three gingko trees stretched out their full-leafed branches, something almost menacing in their manner. White buds hung from the tips of the branches of the many Himalayan cedars with not a breeze to stir them.

  The Lieutenant made his appearance again, dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt, and after he had thirstily gulped down his tea, he called the orderly and told him to bring more.

  “All right then,” he said to Isao, “let me give you back your book.” He casually reached into the drawer of his desk, took out The League of the Divine Wind, and laid it down in front of Isao.

  “And what did you think of it?”

  “It really moved me. And now I understand more how you feel. You’ve got that same spirit, haven’t you? But I’d like to put one question to you,” said the Lieutenant with a faintly ironic smile. “When it comes time for you to fight somebody, are you going to be like the League and pick the Imperial Army?”

  “Of course not.”

  “All right, who then?”

  “I thought that, if nobody else, Lieutenant Hori at least understood us. The real foe of the League was not the Army. There was something that lurked behind the troops of the garrison—and that was the budding military clique. It was the militarists whom the men of the League saw as their enemy and took the field against. For they firmly believed that the army of the militarists was not the army of the gods. They believed that their own League of the Divine Wind was the Emperor’s army.”

  Before replying, the Lieutenant glanced around the room. He and Isao were alone.

  “All right, all right, but one doesn’t shout out things like that for everyone to hear.” The loyalty and affection evident in the Lieutenant’s words made Isao’s spirits soar.

  “But there’s no one else here. Now that I’m with you, sir, I can’t help pouring out all the things that have been building up within me. The men of the League fought only with the Japanese sword, and we, too, I feel, when the supreme test comes, must depend upon the sword alone. Still, if our plan is going to be on a large scale, there’s room for other approaches . . . Would there be any chance of your introducing us to an officer in the Air Corps?”

  “Why?”

  “So that we can have support from the sky, to have the key points bombed.”

  The Lieutenant only snarled in response, but he did not seem especially angry.

  “Somebody must take action. If not, Japan is lost. There is nothing else to be done if the heart of the Emperor is to be put at rest.”

  “Don’t jabber about grave matters,” said the Lieutenant, his voice suddenly harsh.

  Isao realized, however, that the Lieutenant had no animosity toward him, and meekly apologized: “I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

  Had the Lieutenant, Isao wondered, perceived something that lay within him? Yes, the Lieutenant’s fierce gaze must have penetrated the very soul of a boy not long out of high school. And Lieutenant Hori, from what Isao had heard of him, was no man to be swayed by considerations of age or rank.

  Isao well knew that his words were immature, but his determination made up for their deficiency. He had been supremely confident that his own inner fire would provoke flames in the man opposite him. And then, too, it was summer. The two of them sat facing each other in heat as smothering and oppressive
as a heavy wool garment. It was as though even a spark would set off a conflagration or, for want of a spark, the heat would simply melt everything down to a pitiful remnant like metal in a furnace. Isao had to seize this opportunity.

  “Since you were kind enough to visit me,” said the Lieutenant, breaking the silence, “suppose we do something to forget the heat. How about going over to the drill hall and running through the kendo forms without masks? Sometimes I practice that way with one of the sergeants. There’s nothing better for strengthening your will.”

  “Yes, sir, I like that kind of practice,” Isao readily agreed.

  Among the military, winning or losing took on critical significance, and so Lieutenant Hori no doubt rarely competed seriously, because of his comrades’ eyes upon him. At any rate, the thought that the Lieutenant wished to communicate with him through the sword was pleasant to Isao.

  Surrounded by the aged wooden walls of the drill hall, Isao felt a congenial shiver. Three pairs of men were practicing kendo, but he could tell at once that they were novices. Their handling of the staves was flurried, and their footwork erratic.

  “Take a break, all of you,” the Lieutenant shouted unceremoniously. “I’m going to do the forms with this visitor. Watch us and you’ll learn something.”

  Isao stepped out on the floor wearing a borrowed kendo suit and holding a borrowed stave of hard wood. The six reduced to spectators took off their masks and sat down on the floor attentively in a neat line. After he had made his obeisance to the gods, he stepped forward to face the Lieutenant. Lieutenant Hori was to take the offensive role and Isao the defensive.

  The rays of the sun poured down from the high windows on the western side of the hall and the polished floor beneath shone as though spread with a glistening oil, as the insistent chant of cicadas outside wound round the building. The boards, hot beneath the soles of the feet, had a good spring to them, their smooth resilience like that of pounded rice cake.