Runaway Horses Read online

  He climbed step by step, occasionally glancing downward through the iron grating that supported him. Each footstep stirred thunderous echoes within the tower. Though he had no reason to doubt the safety of the stairway, every step he took made its long metal frame shake from top to bottom with a giddy trembling, like a shiver passing down a man’s spine. And dust drifted silently down toward the distant floor.

  When he reached the top and looked out through the various windows, the scene spread out below him offered little that Honda had not already discovered. Although the rain cut his field of vision considerably, he could see the Dojima River following its leisurely southern course to its confluence with the Tosabori. On the opposite bank of the Dojima, directly to the south, stood the Public Hall, the Prefectural Library, and the Bank of Japan with its round bronze roof. Honda looked down at the office buildings that covered this broad strip of land between the two rivers, all of them dwarfed by the tower. To the west of the Courthouse, the Dojima Building rose up as a near neighbor, and in its shadow, the Gothic front of Resurrection Hospital. The wings of the Courthouse stretched out to either side below, its red brick lent charm by the rainy wetness. The small lawn of its inner courtyard seemed fitted in place as carefully as the green felt of a billiard table.

  From such a height, Honda could not make out any human figures below. He saw nothing but the lines of buildings, lights burning at midday, passive beneath the falling rain. In the pervading coolness, the consolation of nature, Honda began to reflect.

  “Here I am in a high place. High enough to make one giddy. And I am here not because of power, not because of money, but simply because I represent reason for the nation. A height upheld by logic, like a tower formed of steel girders.”

  Whenever Honda came up here, far more than when he was seated upon the mahogany bench, he felt possessed of that all-encompassing vision that should belong to a judge. Now as he looked from this vantage point, all the phenomena below and all the phenomena of the past seemed to lie before him on a single rain-soaked map. If even reason had a childish playfulness, perhaps no diversion would be more natural for it than to gather all within a single view.

  All sorts of things were going on below him. The Minister of Finance shot to death. The Prime Minister shot to death. Leftist teachers rounded up. Wild rumors flying about. The crisis of the farming communities deepening. Party government tottering along, no more than a step away from collapse. And what of Honda? He stood upon the height reserved for justice.

  Honda, of course, was a man who could sketch all sorts of mental caricatures of himself in this role. Here he was, for example, upon the tower of justice, holding up in turn with a pair of tweezers each variety of human passion for evaluation. Here he was wrapping them up in the snug furoshiki of reason so that he could carry them home to use as the raw material of his decisions. Day after day, Honda’s task was to thrust aside every element of mystery and set himself single-mindedly to the work of firming up the mortar that held the bricks of the law in place. Still, he thought, to stand upon a high place, to encompass human nature in a single view, from the clear upper reaches to the lower depths—there certainly was something to it. To possess an affinity, not with phenomena, but with the principles of law—there was something to it. Just as a groom smells of stables, so Honda, at age thirty-eight, had become permeated with the aroma of legal justice.

  4

  JUNE SIXTEENTH turned out to be unusually hot, even from early morning. The sun blazed down with an extravagant flourish as though announcing the midsummer heat to come. Honda left his house for Sakurai at seven a.m. in a car sent by the Chief Justice.

  Omiwa Shrine ranked extremely high among national shrines. Most local people referred to it as Miwa Myojin, after Mount Miwa, which was considered to embody the divinity worshipped at the shrine. Mount Miwa itself was called simply the Holy Mountain. It rose fifteen hundred feet above sea level, with a circumference at its base of about ten miles, and it was covered by a thick forest of cedars, cypresses, red pines, and oaks. Not one of the trees growing here could be cut down. No defilement whatsoever was permitted. This primary shrine of the land of Yamato was the oldest shrine in all of Japan, and was reputed to have transmitted the Shinto faith in its purest form. And so all who reverenced the ancient rituals felt compelled, at least once in their lifetime, to make the pilgrimage to Omiwa.

  The principal god enshrined at Omiwa was the major deity Nigimitama, “the mild god,” who was worshipped throughout Japan as the patron of saké brewing. And the name of the shrine itself came, perhaps, from that of a vessel in which rice was fermented. Within its precincts stood the smaller Sai Shrine. This was consecrated to Aramitama, “the harsh god,” toward whom military men had a warm devotion, and vast numbers of them came to pray for good fortune in battle. Five years before, the head of a veterans’ association had proposed holding a kendo meet here each year as an act of worship. Because the grounds of Sai Shrine itself were too small, however, the wide court in front of the main shrine was finally chosen as the site.

  All this the Chief Justice had explained to Honda. The car pulled up before the huge torii gate, and Honda got out in front of the signpost instructing pilgrims to proceed on foot.

  The gravel pathway leading up to the shrine curved gently. White paper pendants hanging at prescribed intervals from cords linking the branches of the cedar trees on either side swayed in the faint breeze. The moss that covered the roots of the pines and oaks beyond the cedars, still soaked from yesterday’s rain, gleamed with the wet greenness of seaweed. For some distance a brook paralleled the path just off to the left, and the sound of splashing water came up through the ferns and bamboo grass. From the clear sky overhead, the sun’s torrid rays sought out the undergrowth, little hindered by the sheltering cedar branches. Just as Honda was crossing the sacred bridge he caught a glimpse of the curtain, white with a design of purple, that hung before the shrine. It was well beyond the crest of the winding stone steps that now confronted him. After climbing the steps, Honda stopped to wipe his forehead. Omiwa Shrine rose imposingly before him, at the foot of Mount Miwa.

  The broad courtyard before the shrine had been swept free of gravel to form a square lightly covered with sand that was tinged red by the clay beneath. Here the kendo matches were to be held. Chairs and folding stools lined three sides, and a large canopy covered a portion of the spectators’ section. His own seat as an honored guest, Honda thought, was there beneath the canopy.

  A welcoming delegation of white-robed priests appeared and told him that the head of the shrine would be honored to receive him. Honda glanced quickly over his shoulder at the white disk of the morning sun blazing down upon the kendo ground as he followed the priests to the shelter of the shrine office.

  Though he usually wore a grave expression, Honda was not an especially pious man. As he looked beyond the shrine at the towering cedars of Mount Miwa shining in the awesome brilliance of the morning sky, he had the feeling of being in the presence of divinity. Nevertheless, he was far from being possessed by a mood of devotion.

  The feeling that the mystical enwraps the world like a pure atmosphere differs considerably from an outlook that, while acknowledging the mystical, simply does not think of it as having anything to do with ordinary affairs. Honda was of course sympathetic to the mystical. It was somewhat like affection for a mother. But from about the age of nineteen he had felt he could get along quite well without it, a feeling that had by now become second nature to him.

  After Honda and the various local dignitaries had greeted one another at length and exchanged cards, the chief priest brought them all to the entrance of the corridor leading to the shrine itself where two miko were waiting. The guests put out their hands for the young girls to pour water over them according to the Shinto purification ceremony. Within the shrine were the fifty participating athletes, a cluster of blueclad figures. Honda was accorded the place of honor as the guests seated themselves.

  Ritual
flutes sounded, and then a priest in tall cap and white robe advanced to the altar and began to recite a dedicatory prayer: “Here in the terrible presence of the great divinity of Omiwa, the Sacred Prince, Omononushi Kushimigatama, forever enthroned beneath the heavens, forever favored by the light of the sun, here upon this holy ground of Omiwa . . .”

  As he prayed, the priest waved above the heads of everyone the sacred green sakaki branch hung with strips of white paper. Taking his turn after a member of the sponsoring association, Honda, as representative of the guests, accepted the sakaki branch and raised it reverently before the altar of the gods. Next to make the offering was the representative of the athletes, an old man of about sixty, whose kendo uniform was a faded blue. In the course of all this solemn ritual the heat grew ever more intense, and Honda was uncomfortably aware of the rolling beads of sweat like a swarm of insects under his shirt.

  When the formal worship was at last completed, the whole group went down into the forecourt. The guests took their seats in the chairs beneath the canopy, and the athletes sat down upon mats, which were also covered with a canopy. The unsheltered seats were already filled with spectators. Since these sat facing the shrine, they were in the direct rays of the morning sun climbing behind Mount Miwa and had to shield themselves as best they could with fans and hand towels.

  Next on the program was a long series of welcoming and congratulatory speeches. Honda, too, got to his feet and expressed appropriate sentiments. The fifty athletes, he had been told, were divided into the traditional two groups of red and white. Today’s meet honoring the gods of Omiwa, then, would have five rounds, each consisting of at least five matches between the two camps. The veterans’ association head rose to speak after Honda, and in the course of his address, which went on and on, the chief priest leaned over and whispered into Honda’s ear.

  “Do you see that boy first from the left in the front row beneath the canvas? He is only in his first year at the College of National Studies in Tokyo, but he is the lead-off man for the whites in the first round. I think that Your Honor would do well to mark this lad. The kendo world expects much of him. At nineteen, he has already achieved the third rank.”

  “What’s the boy’s name?”

  “It is Iinuma.”

  The name stirred Honda’s memory. “Iinuma? Is his father a kendoist?”

  “No, he is Shigeyuki Iinuma, the head of a well-known patriotic group in Tokyo. He has always been most devoted to our shrine. But he himself has never engaged in kendo.”

  “Is he here today?”

  “He wanted very much to see his son perform in the tournament, he told me, but unfortunately he has to attend a meeting in Osaka today.”

  It was Iinuma, then, beyond a doubt—the Iinuma that Honda had known. For a long time now, his name had been rather prominent, but Honda had identified him with Kiyoaki’s former tutor only two or three years before. At that time, when the current ideological ferment was becoming a popular topic in the judges’ chambers, Honda had borrowed some journals from a colleague making a study of it. Among the articles he read was one entitled “A Survey of Right-Wing Personalities” which mentioned Iinuma as follows: “An increasingly conspicuous figure is Shigeyuki Iinuma, a living embodiment of the Satsuma spirit. During the time he was a middle school student he was esteemed by his masters as the most promising boy in the entire prefecture. His family was poor, but, being highly recommended, he came to Tokyo to enter the household of Marquis Matsugae and serve as tutor to the Marquis’s young heir. He devoted himself wholeheartedly to the furthering of both his own education and that of the young master. However, he fell passionately in love with one of the maids, a girl named Miné, and he abandoned the Marquis’s service. Today this hot-blooded man has survived a time of hardship to attain eminence as the head of his own academy. He and his wife—Miné, of course—have one son.”

  Thus Honda learned what had become of Iinuma. He had never had much to do with Kiyoaki’s tutor. The only impression of Iinuma that lingered in his mind was that of a stern figure in a somber dark-blue kimono with a pattern of white splashes leading him silently through the long, dark corridors of the Matsugae mansion. To Honda, Iinuma remained an inscrutable figure against a background of darkness.

  The shadow of a horsefly darted over the clean-swept surface of the forecourt. Suddenly the fly buzzed loudly, approaching the long table covered with a white cloth behind which Honda and the others sat. One of the guests opened his fan and brushed it away. His gesture was so elegant that Honda at once remembered seeing from his name card that this man was a kendoist qualified to the seventh rank. The tedious address of the leader of the veterans’ group went on and on.

  From the square before him—but also from the overhanging gable of the shrine, the green of the holy mountain, the radiant sky—came the scorching breath of violence. Stray gusts of wind stirred the dust in the silent kendo square, soon to be filled with the shouts of antagonists and the crack of bamboo staves, as if the unseen breeze were a lithe phantom flexing its limbs to presage a brave combat.

  Honda’s eyes were somehow drawn to the face of Iinuma’s son, who happened to be seated directly opposite him across the courtyard. The Iinuma of twenty years before must have been five years older than Kiyoaki and Honda. Even so, the realization that the earnest young tutor from the provinces had now become the father of a boy so mature forcibly reminded Honda, childless as he was, of the years that had slipped by unnoticed.

  The boy had sat bolt upright throughout the long-winded speeches without making the least movement. Honda could not be sure whether he was really listening. His eyes glittered and he glared straight ahead, an image of steely imperviousness.

  The boy’s eyebrows were prominent. His complexion was dark. The line of his tight-shut lips was as straight as a blade’s edge. Certainly he resembled Iinuma, but the features that had been blunted with heavy melancholy were now strikingly refashioned to express a keen vivacity.

  “Here’s a face,” Honda thought, “that knows nothing of life. A face like new-fallen snow, unaware of what lies ahead.”

  The athletes sat with their masks and gauntlets arranged carefully in front of them, mask over gauntlet, a small towel partly covering each mask. Sunlight striking the metal bars of the masks flashed along the line of blue-clad knees, heightening the feeling of danger and tension that preceded combat.

  The two referees took their positions, one to the front, one to the rear.

  “White team: Isao Iinuma.”

  As soon as his name was called out, Iinuma’s son arose, his body girded with protective gear, and strode forward over the hot sand in his bare feet. He made a deep bow of reverence before the enshrined gods.

  For some reason or other, Honda found himself hoping that this boy would win. Then the initial shout broke from young Iinuma’s mask, a wild cry like that of an enraged bird. Honda suddenly felt his own youth rushing back upon him.

  He had once told Kiyoaki that in later years the two of them, their subtle emotional complexities lost sight of, would be lumped together with the members of the kendo team in the general estimate of the youth of their era. History would say they were dominated by callow faith. And now all had turned out as he had said. What was surprising, however, was that Honda’s feeling toward this callow faith was now one of nostalgia. At some point in his life he had come to feel that the “foolish gods” were more beautiful than the exalted deities that he had once vaguely acknowledged. And in fact the cave of youth into which he had now stumbled was different from the one he had known before.

  When that first cry tore the silence it was as though the burning soul of youth had flared out through the rent. The sharp pain that Honda had felt in the days when there were wild flames in his own breast now gripped him once again, as intensely as ever, though at his age he should have been immune to it.

  So it is that time reenacts the most curious yet earnest spectacles within the human heart. The past makes its appearance a
gain, with all its mingled dreams and aspirations, the delicate tarnish of falsehood left undisturbed upon its silver. And a man may thus come to a much deeper understanding of himself, a realization that was beyond him in his youth. If one looks down on one’s old village from a distant mountain pass, whatever details of that era may have faded from memory, the significance of having lived there becomes vividly apparent. Even the rain-filled hollow in the stone paving of the square, once so disturbing, now merely has a simple, obvious beauty as it glitters in the sun’s rays.

  The instant that young Iinuma shouted out his challenge, the thirty-eight-year-old judge perceived that there was some pain tearing at this boy’s breast, as though an arrowhead had pierced it and remained fixed there. Never had Honda tried to fathom in this manner what went on within the heart of any young man who appeared before him in the prisoner’s dock.

  The opponent from the red team, his neck pads bouncing against his shoulders like a fish’s distended gills, hurled back his own challenge fiercely.

  Young Iinuma now was quiet. The two squared off, staves half-raised, and, thus confronting each other, circled once, then once again. When the boy turned toward Honda, the streaked shadow of his mask bars could not obscure the black, well-defined eyebrows, the brilliant eyes, and the line of white teeth that flashed when he shouted. And then when he turned his back, the shaven nape of his neck, below the neatly folded towel inserted beneath the blue mask straps, conveyed a sense of pure, youthful power.

  Then suddenly there was a clash, like the collision of two boats buffeted by storm waves. The slender white pendant attached to young Iinuma’s back flashed in the sunlight, and the same instant Honda heard the sound of a crashing blow. The boy from the red team had taken it upon the mask.