Runaway Horses Read online

  The two squatted down facing each other for the opening ritual of touching the tips of their kendo staves together. Then they rose and held their staves at middle position. Though blending with the song of the cicada, every sound seemed to strike the ear with an intense clarity, even the faint rustle of the pleats of their hakama.

  Isao quickly sized up the Lieutenant’s stance. The impression he received was one of hearty magnanimity. Somehow, too, there was a touch of bold negligence to his bearing which saved it from being rigidly orthodox. And the glimpse of his chest visible at the loosely fastened neck of his faded blue jacket increased the sense of vitality that the Lieutenant gave off, as fresh as the early morning air of a summer’s day. His ease and lack of strain marked him as an outstanding swordsman.

  Each of them moved his stave to his right, retreated five short paces, and lowered it to complete the salutation. Then began the first round. Once again they faced off, and, after the initial confrontation at middle position, the Lieutenant raised his sword to high left and Isao, his to high right, and they advanced steadily toward each other.

  “Yaah!” Lieutenant Hori shouted as he moved forward on his right foot and swung straight for the head with his stave.

  This first vigorous blow came down toward Isao’s head with the suddenness of a burst of hailstones. The wooden stave concentrated all its power on a single spot, and it was there that the heavy, thick, woolly garment of heat was ripped asunder. An instant before Isao would have taken the Lieutenant’s blow he moved his left foot to retreat a step, drew his own stave back further in the upper right position, and then brought it down toward his opponent’s head as he shouted: “Toh!”

  The Lieutenant’s eyes glared fiercely. Isao’s stave came whistling down, aimed directly at the top of the Lieutenant’s close-cropped head. At the same moment, their eyes met, and Isao sensed a communication pass between them too swift for any words. The Lieutenant’s jaw and the bridge of his nose had been burnt relentlessly by the sun day after day, but the skin of his forehead, protected by the visor of his cap, was light, which made his eyebrows more prominent. And it was this white forehead that Isao’s stave threatened with a stroke of shattering force. Just before the blow would have landed, at the instant the stave stopped in midair, an intuitive force swifter than light passed between the two of them.

  After checking the blow aimed at the Lieutenant’s head and making a thrust at his throat, Isao coolly raised his sword to the upper left position, showing himself prepared to receive another attack.

  So ended the first round. The two faced off once more at middle position, and the second round began.

  After they had poured water over themselves to wash away their sweat and were on their way back to the barracks, the Lieutenant, still young himself and at the moment feeling especially cheerful and vigorous, spoke to Isao as though they were equals. His newly gained experience of Isao’s kendo ability no doubt further prompted this familiarity.

  “Have you ever heard much about Prince Harunori Toin?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He’s now a regimental commander in Yamaguchi. He’s a splendid man. He was trained in the Imperial Horse Guards, and so I was in a different branch, but just after I was commissioned, a classmate at the Academy took me along to an audience with the Prince, and he showed me real cordiality. It was ‘Hori this’ and ‘Hori that.’ He’s a man of determination, and he especially likes to hear about young men’s aspirations. He takes good care of those who serve under him, and there’s nothing arrogant about him—a prince of the Imperial Family and a brave and splendid soldier. What do you say—should I ask for an audience for you? If we could let him see that there were young men like you around, I’m sure His Highness would be delighted.”

  “Yes, sir. Please do.”

  Isao was not especially exhilarated at the prospect of meeting such an august personage. But because he realized that this was a mark of the Lieutenant’s special favor, he acquiesced.

  “His Highness will be in Tokyo for four or five days during the summer, and he’s told me to come see him then. When I do, I’ll take you along,” said Lieutenant Hori.

  15

  MARQUIS MATSUGAE, who had some time before disposed of Chung-nan Villa in Kamakura and now spent his summers at Karuizawa, received an invitation to a banquet at the huge Karuizawa villa of Baron Shinkawa. Its arrival provoked but a single thought in the Marquis, one that he was extremely reluctant to face. Though all of the other invited guests were “targets,” Marquis Matsugae alone among them was no one’s target.

  No anonymous threatening letters or even letters of a milder sort had come to Marquis Matsugae from radicals on either the right or left. Past sixty and a member of the House of Peers, the Marquis had always been quick to lend a hand in shelving whatever proposed bills had the least radical flavor about them, but no one seemed to have noted this. When the Marquis looked back upon the past, he realized that, strangely enough, the only attack that he had sustained had been the peculiar essay that Iinuma had published and signed nineteen years before in a right-wing paper. As he reflected upon the unnatural period of calm that had continued uninterrupted since then, the Marquis was drawn to speculate that someone was working behind the scenes to protect him, someone who was none other than his former attacker, Iinuma.

  It was a line of reasoning injurious to the Marquis’s pride. Then, too, the more he thought about his situation, the more absurd it seemed to him. Because of the influence his rank commanded, it would be a simple matter for him to discover the true circumstances. But if his speculation was correct, he would find himself greatly in Iinuma’s debt, and his position would become still more untenable. And if the speculation was unfounded, he would be shamed by the realization that he had, after all, been capable of provoking rancor in no one.

  Baron Shinkawa’s banquets were always showy affairs. The bodyguards assigned to guests were served their own meal during the banquet in a room immediately adjoining, and they made almost as large a group as those invited. Thus in the Shinkawa villa two meals progressed at the same time, so different in the number and quality of courses as to make ordinary comparisons impossible. Of these two banquets, when one took into consideration such points as the indescribably seedy look of the suits worn by the detectives, their sharp, restless eyes and coarse features, their manner of eating in silence and turning their heads like surly hunting dogs in the direction of the slightest noise, the uninhibited way in which they rushed to take up toothpicks after the meal and poke earnestly about their mouths, one would have to judge the detectives’ banquet a superior spectacle. But, sadly enough, a bodyguard for Marquis Matsugae was not there among them.

  The Marquis had no hopes of remedying this shameful situation by resorting to artifice. For the police had declared in unequivocal terms that there was no threat to the Marquis’s personal welfare, and so if he demanded a guard on his own initiative, he would only make himself look ridiculous.

  The matter had implications that the Marquis found extremely distasteful. For the era was such that a man’s power was measured in terms of the danger that stalked him.

  And so, though the Shinkawa villa was within easy walking distance, the Marquis took pains, at least, to be driven there in his Lincoln. Marquise Matsugae carried folded upon her lap a small wool blanket on account of the arthritis that affected her husband’s right knee. For the Shinkawas liked to entertain their guests by serving the before-dinner drinks outside until the sun had set and the air grown chilly. And all this time, scattered among the white birches that filled the Shinkawas’ broad garden laid out to exploit the view of Mount Asama, the bodyguards would stand until their figures faded to crudely cut silhouettes. They had been instructed to remain inconspicuous, but this only made them seem like lurking assassins intent upon the guests who were sipping apéritifs in the garden.

  Baron Shinkawa had already passed his fiftieth year. In the surroundings of his Edwardian villa, the Baron was accust
omed to reading the editorials in the Times each morning before turning to the Japanese newspapers. And like an English colonial official he would wear one or another of his half-dozen white linen suits every day. As for the Baroness, her intrinsic bent for chattering about herself had remained unchanged through the years. The lady was blessed with the ability to discover in herself ever fresh sources of wonder, though she was at the same time able to forego discovering that she was in fact little by little growing fat.

  The Baroness had had quite enough of “New Thought.” The Heavenly Fire Group too, which had championed the Blue Stocking movement, had long since disbanded. The occasion for her perceiving the danger of “New Thought” was the suicide of her niece, who came out of a women’s college to join the Communist Party and, the very evening she returned home after being released from prison on bail, slashed her jugular vein.

  However, since Baroness Shinkawa was as overflowing with energy as ever, she simply could not think of herself as being a member of a class “on its way to destruction.” When her husband, a chillingly cynical man who saw nothing as worth fighting for, was put on the right-wing blacklist, and she found that both far right and far left looked upon the two of them as their sworn foes, she felt as if she and her husband were fair-skinned people of a higher civilization compelled to live in some barbarian land. On the one hand she found the situation stimulating, on the other, she longed “to go home” to London.

  “This Japan, it’s an altogether distasteful place, don’t you think?” the Baroness had taken to observing from time to time. Once a friend of hers who had been to India told her that an Indian acquaintance had lost her son when the boy plunged his hand into a toy box and was bitten by a poisonous snake hiding in the bottom of it. “That’s just how things are here in Japan,” the Baroness had commented. “All one has to do is plunge one’s hand in, intent only on a bit of amusement, and there’s a poisonous snake in there waiting. Ready to bite and kill a person who has done nothing to it, an innocent, harmless person.”

  The evening was clear, and as the cry of cicadas echoed quietly across the lawn a distant rumble of thunder came from one corner of the sky. The guests, five married couples, were gathered in the garden. Marquis Matsugae sat in a rattan chair, and the brilliant red of the plaid blanket that his wife was arranging over his knees gave a touch of color to the dusk sweeping over the garden.

  “I think it’s hardly likely that one or two more months will pass without the government’s recognizing Manchukuo,” said one man, who was the Minister of State. “For the Prime Minister really intends to do just that.” After which, turning to Marquis Matsugae, he remarked pleasantly: “That matter of Count Momoshima’s son which we spoke of, is it proceeding well?”

  The Marquis uttered a noncommittal grunt. “This fellow,” he thought, “he talks to the others about Manchukuo, and then asks me about my adopting a son. What effrontery!”

  After Kiyoaki’s death Marquis and Marquise Matsugae would not hear of adopting an heir, but lately they no longer felt the will to resist the arguments of the Bureau of Estates. Preliminary negotiations were now under way.

  Mount Asama rose in the failing light, visible through a break in the trees where a path led down to a stream. It was hard to determine from which direction the distant thunder came. The guests, however, enjoyed watching the shadow of evening steal over their hands and faces while the thunder afforded the further pleasure of thrilling to a peril far removed from them.

  “Well, since all the other ladies and gentlemen have arrived, I imagine that it must be just about time for Mr. Kurahara to make his appearance,” Baron Shinkawa remarked to his wife, loudly enough for everyone to hear and join in the laughter.

  It had become Busuké Kurahara’s invariable practice to arrive last, a never-excessive tardiness that bespoke the immensity of his power.

  He seemed totally indifferent to his personal appearance, without a hint that this might be a pose, and his inability to speak otherwise than with a stiff formality was rather appealing. He certainly in no way resembled the monopolistic capitalist who appeared in left-wing cartoons. When he sat down, he had the habit of choosing the chair upon which he had just laid his hat. The second button of his suit coat had a great affinity for the third buttonhole. He left off arranging his tie well before it was tucked beneath his collar. At the banquet table, he inevitably reached out to his right to seize the roll on his neighbor’s bread dish.

  Busuké Kurahara spent his summer weekends in Karuizawa and all the others at Izusan, where he owned a tangerine orchard of five or six acres. He took pride in the luster of his tangerines and their sweet taste, and derived much pleasure from making gifts of them not only to his friends but to orphanages and welfare hospitals. It was hard to realize that he was indeed the object of widespread resentment.

  No doubt it seemed astonishing that a man so cheerful in his private life could hold such dourly pessimistic views on public affairs. The guests gathered in Baron Shinkawa’s garden, however, were always thrilled and titillated to hear from the mouth of Japan’s supreme capitalist accounts of tragedy, of dire foreboding, and of evils to come.

  More than the death of Prime Minister Inukai, Kurahara mourned the retirement of Finance Minister Takahashi. Prime Minister Saito, of course, had no sooner formed his cabinet than he was paying a call on Kurahara and protesting, perhaps a bit too much, that he could do nothing without Kurahara’s cooperation. Nevertheless, Kurahara sniffed something unsavory in the new prime minister’s manner.

  Takahashi had indeed been an insider of the Inukai Cabinet which had imposed another embargo on the export of gold as one of its first acts, but, secretly influenced by classical hard-currency advocates, he acted to sabotage this newfangled government policy so that he could then contend that since this policy had not lived up to expectations and provided quick relief, since conditions were no better and prices still in the doldrums, failure to such a degree proved that the old ways were after all the best.

  Baron Shinkawa, on the other hand, who avidly kept up with all that went on in London, had closely studied in the Times the details of England’s going off the gold standard in September of the previous year and had made up his mind at once. The Wakatsuki Cabinet had kept proclaiming that it would never enact an embargo on the export of gold, but with every government proclamation, dollar speculation had increased, despite the anger of the right wing, who branded all dollar buyers as plunderers of the nation. The Baron himself had been a dollar speculator, but after he had stored away all the money that would not bear scrutiny into Swiss banks, he was unwilling to wait for an overnight shift in government policy, and came to the side of those supporting the gold export embargo and the policy of “reflation.” Thus he had had enough of the halfway economic measures of the previous cabinet, and his hopes were bound up with the new cabinet. Beyond the issue of internal recovery through reflation lay the glittering prospect of the industrialization of Manchuria. Though the Baron’s air was as abstracted as ever, here in the midst of Karuizawa, whose volcanic soil was so barren of resources, the image of the underground wealth of Manchukuo rose up in his mind like a seductive phantom, those resources that were as rich and varied as a menu of the Café Royale. Surely, the Baron thought, he could even kindle an affection for stupid soldiers.

  Years before, Baroness Shinkawa had found it hard to countenance men carrying on a discussion all to themselves, but, as she grew older, her feelings altered. Now she was quite willing to let the men carry on with their talk, provided that the women were able to function as overseers.

  “Well, they’re already well into it,” she said, turning to Mrs. Kurahara, Marquise Matsugae, and the other ladies, after noticing the men gathered around Kurahara. Marquise Matsugae’s eyebrows, whose tilt gave her face its sorrowful look, grew almost over to her hair, now noticeably gray and brushed down over her ears.

  “Just this spring,” Baroness Shinkawa chatted on, “I wore a kimono to an affair at the Bri
tish Embassy, and the Ambassador, who had only seen me in Western clothes, simply could not get over it. He outdid himself with his compliments, protesting how becoming a kimono was to me and all that. Really, how frustrating! Even a man of his refinement—he never notices Japanese women except as Japanese women. Of course, the kimono I wore that night, at the suggestion of my designer, was like a Momoyama Nō costume, red with a snow-covered willow and butterfly circle pattern, the whole thing worked in gold and silver lacquer thread, obviously quite showy. Because it flashed so brightly, I felt no more Japanese than if I were wearing Western clothes.” Intent on being hospitable, the Baroness began by offering herself as a topic of conversation.

  “Junko, perhaps the Ambassador meant stunning clothing was becoming to you,” said the wife of the Minister of State. “When you wear Western clothes you’re not so daring, indeed you tend to be rather restrained.”

  “How true!” replied Junko Shinkawa, quick to agree. “The colors of Western clothes are really so sober. And if one does wear some sort of gaudy flower pattern, it only makes one look older, like some grandmother from Wales.”

  “But that dress is such a lovely color, Junko,” said Marquise Matsugae, offering the flattery that circumstances made imperative. The truth was that all that concerned the Marquise at the moment was the pain in her husband’s knee. This was a pain that seemed to her somehow associated with the pain that affected the entire Matsugae household, a malady that seemed on the verge of discommoding the joints of everyone involved. The Marquise gave a quick glance in the direction of her husband sitting with the blanket over his knees. The man who in the past had seemed so frank and unconstrained, so fond of monopolizing the conversation, now listened quietly to what people had to say.

  Since it was Baron Shinkawa’s practice scrupulously to avoid controversy, he prodded Viscount Matsudaira to take on Kurahara. The Viscount was a young man who agreed with him and who, furthermore, was not in a position of real responsibility. And so this naughty boy, a member of the House of Peers and on friendly terms with the military, turned to Kurahara, his manner one of calm challenge.