Runaway Horses Page 2

  “It won’t do any harm to take a bit more saké than usual tonight,” said Honda, as if to himself. “All my work is done now, since I gave up my Sunday to it.”

  “How nice to have finished,” said Rié, filling his cup. A simple harmony coordinated the movements of their hands, his holding out the cup, hers the bottle from which she was pouring. An invisible cord seemed to link them, tugged back and forth almost playfully in accordance with the spontaneous rhythm of life. Rié was not a woman to disturb such rhythms. Honda could be certain of that, just as he could tell from the rich scent of the blossoms that the magnolia in his garden was in bloom that night.

  Thus everything that Honda wanted was tranquilly arranged within his view and within easy reach. This was the domain established in less than twenty years by the young man of promise. Then he had had almost nothing over which his fingers might close with a sense of possession, but because the lack had stirred no anxious irritation in him, all these things had now come securely into his grasp.

  After sipping his saké, he took up a steaming bowl of rice in which scattered green peas gleamed brightly. Just then he heard the jingle of a newspaper-boy’s bell announcing an extra. He had the maid run out to buy a copy.

  The paper, whose ragged cut edges and barely dry ink showed the haste in which it had been put out, conveyed the first news of the May Fifteenth Incident, the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai by Navy officers.

  Honda sighed. “As if it weren’t enough to have had the Blood Oath Alliance.” Honda felt that he was above the usual run of indignant men who arose, their faces dark with passion, to condemn the corruption of the times. He was persuaded that his own world was one of reason and clarity. Now that he was a little intoxicated, its clarity seemed to shine with even greater brilliance.

  “You’ll be very busy again, won’t you?” said Rié.

  Honda felt a surge of affectionate condescension on hearing the daughter of a judge betray such ignorance.

  “No, no. This will be a matter for a military court.”

  The affair by its very nature was outside civilian jurisdiction.

  3

  FOR SOME DAYS, of course, the May Fifteenth Incident was the sole topic of conversation in the judges’ chambers at the Courthouse. But by the beginning of June there was such a crush of cases pending that all the judges were too busy to concern themselves any longer with the affair. They were already well aware of the facts left out of the newspaper accounts and had exchanged every scrap of information among themselves. Everyone knew that the Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals, Judge Sugawa, a kendo enthusiast, was very much in sympathy with the defendants, but no one was rash enough to allude to this.

  Incidents of this sort, arising one after another, were like waves rolling in from a night sea to break upon the beach. First a small crest like a wavering line of white out upon the deep. Then as the wave came rushing in, it swelled enormously, only to crash down upon the sand and melt back into the depths. Honda remembered the sea at Kamakura on that night nineteen years before, when he and Kiyoaki and the two princes of Siam had lain upon the beach and gazed out at the waves as they rolled in and receded.

  As for waves such as the May Fifteenth Incident, Honda thought, the beach was innocent. It was only obliged to force them back into the deep with inexhaustible patience, preventing them from rolling over the land. To force them back each time into the abyss of evil from which they had arisen, back into the primeval realm of remorse and death.

  What did Honda himself think of evil? What did he think of sin? Such thoughts were really not his responsibility. He had but to guide himself by the established legal code. Somewhere deep within him, however, Honda did harbor a secret concept of sin, a concept as fragrant and stimulating as a pungent lotion soaking into dry, chapped skin. No doubt he owed this to Kiyoaki’s lingering influence.

  Still, this “unwholesome” notion was not so strong that he felt he had to combat it. Dominated as he was by reason, Honda lacked anything like a blind devotion to justice.

  One day in early June, when the morning court session had ended earlier than usual, Honda returned to the judges’ chambers with some time on his hands before lunch. He took off his black cap with its purple piping and his black legal robes with the arabesque design of purple embroidered across the front and put them away in the mahogany cabinet that reminded him of a Buddhist household altar. Then he stood looking absently out the window as he smoked a cigarette. A misty rain was falling.

  “I’m not a beginner at this any more,” Honda mused. “I’ve done my work without being swayed by the opinions of others, and I can say that I’ve met the prescribed standards. I’ve become thoroughly adept at my profession—like a potter whose clay seems to shape itself, taking the form that he wants it to.”

  Suddenly he realized that he was on the verge of forgetting the face of the defendant who had just stood trial before him. He shook his head. Try as he might, he could no longer clearly visualize the man’s features.

  Since the Public Procurator’s Office occupied the third-floor rooms facing the river on the south side of the Courthouse, the view left to the judges’ chambers, whose windows faced north, was a dismal one. The prison took up most of it. A passageway through the red brick wall separating the Courthouse and prison allowed defendants to go to court without being exposed to the public gaze.

  Honda noticed that the painted wall of the room was dripping with moisture, and he opened the window. Beyond the red brick wall the roofs of the various wings of the white brick two-story prison were clustered together, with a guard tower shaped like a silo rising at their point of juncture. Only in this tower were the windows without bars.

  The tile roofs of the prison wings and the little tile shields over the ventilation stacks all gleamed with the wet blackness of an inkstone. In the background a huge chimney towered up into the rainy sky. The view from Honda’s window extended no farther than the stack.

  The sides of the prison buildings were pierced at regular intervals by windows, each covered with white-painted iron bars and a screen of wooden slats. Below each window, on the rain-wet wall the color of soiled linen, a large Arabic number was painted: 30, 31, 32, 33, and so on. The first- and second-floor numbers were staggered so that directly below window 32 of the second floor was window 31 of the first. There was a line of oblong air vents, and on the first floor, just at ground level, were openings for toilet drainage.

  All at once Honda found himself wondering which of those cells contained the defendant who had just appeared before him. Such knowledge had no bearing upon his role as a judge. The man was a poverty-stricken farmer from Kochi Prefecture in Shikoku. He had sold his daughter to an Osaka brothel, and then, having received less than half of what he had been promised, he had gone to see the madam. Enraged by her insults, he had begun to beat her and had become so carried away that he had killed the woman. Still, Honda could not clearly recall the defendant’s face, a face as impassive as stone.

  The smoke from his cigarette rose through his fingers and yielded to the misty rain. This cigarette would be a precious treasure in that other world separated from him by only a wall. For a moment Honda was struck by the absurd contrast of values between these two worlds whose borders the law defined. Over there the taste of tobacco was infinitely desirable; here a cigarette was nothing more than a means to while away an idle moment.

  The exercise ground within the cluster of prison buildings was divided into a number of fan-shaped enclosures. From this window one often saw the blue uniforms and blue-shaven scalps of the prisoners as, two or three at a time, they were given calisthenics or allowed to walk around. Today, however, perhaps because of the rain, the exercise ground was as empty and still as the yard of a hencoop after all the birds had been slaughtered.

  Just then the heavy, sultry silence was shattered by a noise from below, like rain shutters slammed together.

  Then the silence closed in once more. A faint breeze caugh
t the misty rain, and Honda felt a touch of moisture on his brow. As he was closing the window, his colleague, Judge Murakami, came into the room from his own morning court session.

  “I just heard the sound of an execution,” Honda said abruptly, as though apologizing.

  “I heard one too a few days ago. Not a very pleasant noise, is it? I don’t think it was a good idea to put the gallows close to the wall there.” Murakami took off his robes. “Well, shall we go to lunch?”

  “And what are you going to have today?”

  “What else? An Ikematsu bento.”

  The two of them walked down the dark corridor that led to the dining room reserved for high officials, which was here on the third floor. It was the custom of Honda and Murakami to devote their lunch to discussing current cases. Just over a door marked “Senior Officials’ Dining Room” was a stained-glass window whose intricate art nouveau floral pattern shone brightly from the lights inside.

  The dining room contained ten long, narrow tables each furnished with kettles and teacups. Honda looked to see if the Chief Justice was among those already eating. He often came here for lunch in order to talk things over with his fellow judges. On such occasions, the woman in charge of the dining room, well aware of the Chief Justice’s preferences, always hurried over to his table with a small kettle. This contained not tea but saké. Today, however, the Chief Justice was not present.

  Seated across from Murakami, Honda opened his own lacquered bento box and took out the top section containing fish and vegetables. As usual its bottom was moist and sticky from the hot, steaming rice in the lower section, and grains of rice clung to its chipped red lacquer. Honda, disturbed at the very hint of waste, carefully picked off the rice grain by grain and put it into his mouth.

  This scrupulous display amused Murakami.

  “You were raised the same way I was,” he said, laughing. “Every morning you had to bow and offer a few grains of rice to a little bronze farmer sitting cross-legged with a straw raincoat between his legs. So did I. If I dropped a single grain on the floor during dinner, I had to pick it up and put it in my mouth.”

  “Samurai realized that they ate without working,” said Honda. “The effects of being brought up that way still remain. How do your children behave?”

  “They follow Papa’s lead,” answered Murakami, a cheerfully complacent expression on his face. Murakami was aware that he lacked the dignified countenance proper to a judge, and at one time he had tried cultivating a moustache, only to give it up when his colleagues and superiors made fun of it. He was fond of reading, and often talked about literature.

  “You know, Oscar Wilde said there’s no such thing as a pure crime in the present-day world. All crimes spring from some necessity. Take most of these recent assassinations. I feel as if I’d have to disqualify myself from presiding.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” replied Honda prudently. “You might call them crimes resulting from social maladjustment. Most of these incidents seem to be social problems crystallized into crime, don’t they? Furthermore, the men involved are hardly ever intellectuals. They don’t know what it all means, but they come to personify the very problems.”

  “The farmers in the North, for example. There’s a terrible situation.”

  “We can be thankful we have nothing that bad in our district.”

  The jurisdiction of the Osaka Court of Appeals was constituted in 1913 to include Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Nara, Shiga, Wakayama, Kagawa, Tokushima, and Kochi—two urban districts and seven prefectures, a generally prosperous area.

  The two went on to discuss at length the rapid growth of ideological crime, the policy of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and the like. As they talked, the clap of the execution still echoed in Honda’s ears with a fresh, vibrant quality that would satisfy a carpenter. Nevertheless, he ate with a good appetite. Rather than disturbing him, the noise made him feel as if a thin wedge of crystal had pierced his awareness.

  Chief Justice Sugawa entered to the respectful nods of greeting of all present. The woman in charge rushed to get the special kettle as His Honor sat down by Honda and Murakami. A huge, florid-faced kendo expert, the Chief Justice was a qualified instructor in the Hokushin Ittoryu school of kendo and served as an advisor to the Martial Arts Association. He was fond of quoting a classic kendo book in the course of his legal addresses and was consequently referred to behind his back as “the referee.” But he was a very pleasant gentleman, and a warm humanity always informed his judicial decisions. Whenever there was a kendo meet or tournament within his district and he was asked to make the congratulatory address, he was happy to comply. And since many Shinto shrines sponsored the martial arts, the Chief Justice naturally developed ties with these and was always an honored guest at their festivals.

  “I don’t know what to do!” sighed the Chief Justice as he sat down. “I told them I’d come a long time ago, and now there’s just no way of my being there.”

  His distress surely had something to do with kendo, Honda thought, and so it turned out. There was to be a kendo tournament at the Omiwa Shrine in the town of Sakurai in Nara Prefecture on the sixteenth of June. The shrine had worshippers all over the country, and even the universities in Tokyo were sending their best athletes to participate. Chief Justice Sugawa had agreed to give the main address, but, as it now happened, he had to go to Tokyo on that very day for a conference of district court heads. Since this was a matter that in no way involved official duty, he told Honda and Murakami, he had no right to ask one of them to go in his place, but did either of them, by chance, feel like lending him a hand? Faced with such a humble request, the two judges immediately consulted their appointment books. A court session on the sixteenth ruled out Murakami, but Honda was to work at home for a few days and the cases he would be reviewing were simple ones.

  The Chief Justice’s face glowed. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he told Honda. “This will keep me in their good graces, and there’s no doubt they’ll be quite happy about it at the shrine, knowing your father too. You’d better make it a two-day trip. You can stay at the Nara Hotel the night of the tournament. It’s very quiet, and it will be a good place to work. The next day is the Saigusa Festival of Izagawa Shrine, the branch shrine of Omiwa right there in Nara itself, so you can see that too. I saw it once myself, and there isn’t a more beautiful old festival anywhere. How does the idea suit you, Honda? If you think you’d like to see it, I’ll send a letter off today. No, no two ways about it. It’s something you can’t afford to miss.”

  Pressed as he was by the Chief Justice’s well-meaning enthusiasm, Honda somewhat reluctantly agreed. As for a kendo match, he had not seen one since twenty years before at Peers School. In those days both he and Kiyoaki had detested the kendo team and the fanatic yelling that accompanied their practice sessions. Neither of them could hear those cries without feeling their youthful sensitivity painfully affronted. Savage, strangled, revolting cries that seemed bent on exalting brazen madness to the level of something holy. Of course Honda and Kiyoaki had different reasons for loathing them. To Kiyoaki, the screams were a shock to his refined sensibility. To Honda, they were an assault upon reason itself. A reaction of this sort, however, was something that belonged to Honda’s past. By now he had become so disciplined that he could hear or see anything at all without betraying himself by so much as a flicker of his eyebrow.

  On days when there was a fairly long interval between lunch and the beginning of the afternoon session, Honda would take a walk along the bank of the Dojima River if the weather was pleasant. He liked to watch the lighters towing timber down the river, the logs churning up white water as though frothing at the mouth. But today it was raining. And the judges’ chambers would be bustling with far too much activity for him to relax there. After leaving Murakami, he stood idly for a time by the front entrance, where the pale green and white light from a stained-glass window depicting an olive grove shone faintly upon the polished, mottled granite of the pill
ars that lined the lobby. A thought struck him, and he went to the accounts department to get a key. He had decided that he would climb the tower.

  The red brick Courthouse tower was one of the landmarks of Osaka and, seen from the opposite bank, its reflection lying across the Dojima River, made for an aesthetically pleasing view. On the other hand, it was referred to as the Tower of London and was the subject of fables such as the one alleging that there was a gallows at its top upon which executions were carried out.

  No one had ever been able to devise a use for this extraordinary whim of the English architect who had designed the Courthouse, and so the tower was kept locked and left to gather dust through the years. Sometimes a judge would climb it for the sake of the view. On a clear day one could see as far as Awaji Island.

  Honda turned the key in the lock and went in. He was confronted with a vast white emptiness. The base of the tower was the ceiling of the front lobby of the Courthouse. From there to the very top was nothing but unobstructed space. The white walls were soiled with layers of dust and the rain that had seeped in over the years. There were windows only at the top, around which was a narrow balcony. One reached this by means of an iron stairway which crooked its way up the walls with the tenacity of ivy.

  Honda knew that if he touched the stairway railing its thick coat of dust would blacken his fingertips. Though it was raining, the light let in by the windows above was enough to fill the interior of the great tower with an eerie illumination like an ill-favored dawn. Whenever he entered this tower and found himself enveloped in its blank expanse of walls and its absurdly twisting stairway, Honda had the impression of coming into a bizarre world whose dimensions had been deliberately expanded. Such a space, he felt, must house some gigantic statue hidden from his eyes, a huge figure whose invisible features were set in stern anger.

  Were it not so, Honda thought, nothing would justify this extravagant spaciousness. It would be altogether devoid of meaning. Even the windows, fairly large close up, seemed no bigger than matchboxes from where Honda stood.