Runaway Horses Read online

  The expressions on the faces of his comrades seemed to Isao to be clear and determined. The group had sold two regular swords and bought six short swords. Thus each now had his own sharp-bladed dagger. But someone made the suggestion that, as an extra precaution, it would be well if they all had a hidden dagger too, and the others agreed. They knew that poison was the most effective way to commit a hasty suicide, but they spurned this womanish means of putting an end to life.

  The practice was to lock the door of the house when the group was assembled. When a knock sounded, everyone presumed that Sawa had come after all, stealing time from the task he was sent to do.

  Izutsu went downstairs and called out: “Mr. Sawa?”

  “Yes,” came the answer in a low voice, but when Izutsu slid the door open, a stranger entered, pushed his way past, and began running up the stairs, still in his street shoes.

  “Get away!” Izutsu shouted, as a second and third man rushed in and twisted his arms behind him.

  The comrades who tried to escape by jumping down into the backyard from the overhanging roof were seized by detectives who had moved in from the rear. Isao snatched up one of the daggers in front of him to thrust it into his own stomach, but a detective caught his wrist. In the struggle that followed, the officer suffered a cut finger. Inoué grappled with the detectives and threw one of them, but two or three others brought him down.

  And so the eleven were handcuffed and brought to the Yotsuya police station. On the afternoon of the same day, Sawa was arrested as he was returning to the Academy.

  31

  TWELVE ULTRANATIONALIST RADICALS ARRESTED IN HIDEOUT

  SWORDS AND SEDITIOUS LITERATURE SEIZED

  SERIOUS PLOT SAY AUTHORITIES

  Honda’s first reaction when he saw the headlines in the morning paper was “Again, eh?” and nothing more, but his calm was abruptly shattered when his eye caught the name Isao Iinuma on the list of those arrested. He wanted to place a call to Tokyo at once and talk to Iinuma at the Academy, but worldly prudence prevented this. The headlines the following morning were even larger:

  FULL DETAILS ON “SHOWA DIVINE WIND” AFFAIR

  AIM TO DELIVER CRUSHING BLOW TO FINANCIAL WORLD

  EACH MEMBER TO ASSASSINATE ONE MAN

  RINGLEADER NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD YOUTH

  A picture of Isao appeared for the first time. The reproduction was very coarse, but there was no mistaking those incredibly clear eyes whose brilliance had so affected Honda when the boy and his father had come to dinner, those eyes with their piercing gaze, which could never blend into the pattern of ordinary amenities. No doubt they had been looking forward to this day.

  Belatedly Honda regretted his tendency to be capable of discernment only after a matter had been strained through the meshes of the law.

  Isao was already past eighteen and would therefore not be treated as a juvenile before the law. According to the article, the entire group, except for the middle-aged eccentric named Sawa, was made up of youths in their late teens or early twenties, and so some no doubt would be tried as juveniles. But for Isao there was no chance of this.

  Honda visualized the worst possible legal situation. Something seemed missing from the vague newspaper articles. On the surface this affair was merely the rash assassination plot of some heedless boys, but the investigation might well turn up a far wider and deeper conspiracy.

  As a matter of fact, the military authorities, wanting to refute wild rumors and to allay the prejudice provoked by the May Fifteenth Incident, had made a statement carried in that day’s paper: “No Army officers had any connection whatsoever with this recent incident. Unfortunately, every time an incident of this sort occurs there are those ready to believe that young officers must be involved. Ever since the May Fifteenth Incident, the greatest concern has been shown for the rigid enforcement of discipline in every unit throughout the Armed Forces. The extraordinary energy that we have displayed in putting our house in order is a matter of public knowledge.”

  Such was the statement, but its effect, however groundless, was to excite the suspicion that some greater power was indeed at work behind the plotters.

  If the scope of the affair broadened, and any intent were revealed that would come under Article 77 of the Criminal Code, “Subverting the Constitution,” the situation would become critical. The newspaper accounts were not clear as to whether the unconsummated aspect or rather the element of premeditation would be uppermost when the case was brought to trial. Honda remembered The League of the Divine Wind, which he had read at Isao’s urging. He could not help but feel a sense of ill omen at Isao and his comrades’ choice in calling themselves the Showa League of the Divine Wind.

  He dreamed of Kiyoaki that night. Kiyoaki seemed to be asking for help, and also to be lamenting his premature death. When Honda awoke, his mind was made up.

  Honda’s reputation at the Courthouse seemed not quite as high as it had been. When he talked with his colleagues, their manner since his return from Tokyo in the fall had somehow cooled. The rumors in vogue alleged that either family trouble or woman trouble had made Honda a changed man. And his once highly regarded discernment was no longer so esteemed. The Chief Justice, though he kept it to himself, was grieved when he became aware of the situation. For no one had been more appreciative than he of Honda’s rise to eminence.

  For the vast majority of men, romantic dreams are inevitably bound up with a woman. And so when his colleagues intuitively diagnosed the affliction lodged within him since his fall trip to Tokyo as involvement with a woman, they were at least correct in giving it a romantic coloring. Their intuition was indeed remarkable in shrewdly picturing Honda as one who had strayed from the way of reason and was now wandering aimlessly along some overgrown path of emotion. But what might have been expected in a twenty-year-old youth was deemed improper in a man Honda’s age, entirely human though the failing was. And this was where most of the disapproval was focused.

  Members of a profession in which reason was of the essence, his colleagues could hardly be expected to view with respect any man who, unknown to himself, had contracted the disease of romanticism. And then from the viewpoint of national righteousness, though Honda had not gone so far as to commit any crime, he had certainly defiled himself with an “unwholesome” attitude.

  But most surprised of all at this state of affairs was Honda himself. The eagle’s nest that he had constructed at a dizzying height in the structure of legalism, which by now had become second nature to him, was—something wholly unforeseen!—threatened with the floodwaters of dreams, with the infiltration of poetry. More awesome yet, the dream that assaulted him did not destroy either the transcendence of human reason, which he had always believed in, or his proud pleasure at living with more concern for principles than for phenomena. The effect was rather to strengthen his beliefs, to heighten his pleasure. For he could now glimpse towering up brightly beyond the principles of this world an unbreachable wall of principle. Once he saw it, so dazzling was this glimpse of the ultimate that he was unable to go back to the placid, everyday faith he had known before. And this was not to retreat but to advance. It was not to look back but to look ahead. Kiyoaki had certainly been reborn as Isao, and from this fact, beyond one kind of law, Honda had begun to see into the essential truth of law.

  He suddenly remembered that in his youth, from the time he had heard the sermon of the Abbess of Gesshu, the European philosophy of natural law had lost its appeal for him, and he had been much attracted by the ancient Indian Laws of Manu, whose provisions extended even to reincarnation. Something had already taken root in his heart then. A law whose nature was not to impose order upon chaos but to point to the principles that lay within chaos and so give form to a legal code, just as the surface of the water caught the reflected image of the moon—such a law could well have sprung from a source more profound than the European worship of reason that undergirded natural law. Honda’s instinctive feeling, therefore, may have been sound, but this
was not the kind of soundness looked for in a judge, the guardian of the operative law. He could easily imagine how unsettling it must have been to his colleagues to have a man of this sort working with them in the same building. To have one dust-covered desk in a room filled with the spirit of good order. From the viewpoint of reason, nothing so resembled the stains on an untidy man’s clothes as an obsession with dreams. Dreams somehow turn one into a slovenly figure. A soiled collar, the back of the shirt wrinkled as though slept in, trousers baggy—something similar overtakes the garment of the spirit. Though he had done nothing, though he had said nothing, Honda had, at some time or other, come to violate the code of public morality, and so he knew that, in the eyes of his colleagues, he was like wastepaper scattered along the path of a neatly kept park.

  As for his home life, his wife Rié said nothing at all. Rié was not a woman who would intrude curiously into her husband’s private thoughts. She must have realized that he had changed, and that he seemed preoccupied. But Rié said nothing.

  It was not any fear of ridicule or insult, then, that kept Honda from confiding in his wife, but a certain sense of shyness. This subtle kind of bashfulness gave a special character to their marriage. Perhaps this was the most beautiful aspect of their rather quiet and old-fashioned relationship. And though Honda himself may have been faintly aware that something in his recent discovery and change of outlook infringed upon it, husband and wife made use of this extremely beautiful characteristic to preserve silence and the unrevealed secret.

  Rié must have wondered why her husband’s work had recently become so burdensome. The dishes that she took such pains to prepare for his evening meal failed to give him the pleasure that they had before. She did not grumble. She did not wear a sad expression. Nor did she punish him by putting on a brave cheerfulness. At some point or other a childish court-doll face, the vague look she had whenever her kidneys troubled her, had become her everyday face. Though always smiling and amiable, she never showed any expectation. The force that had shaped Rié into the woman she was belonged in part to her father, in part to her husband. At least, Honda had never given his wife cause to suffer from jealousy.

  Although the affair of Isao was widely covered in the newspapers, her husband said nothing about it, and so Rié too said nothing. But then one night at dinner, when further silence seemed unnatural, she spoke out casually: “That’s a terrible thing about Mr. Iinuma’s son. When I saw him here, I thought he was such a serious and well-behaved boy . . .”

  “Well, with this kind of crime, it’s the serious and well-behaved ones you’re most likely to find involved,” said Honda in rebuttal. But so gentle and bemused was his manner that Rié became concerned.

  Honda’s mind was in turmoil. Because his failure in trying to save Kiyoaki was the keenest regret of his youth, he felt that he must succeed this time. He had to rescue him from danger and scandal no matter what the cost.

  The favor of the public would be something to count on. The extraordinary youth of the conspirators seemed to keep people from becoming too aroused against them, and, beyond that, Honda sensed that a feeling of sympathy was already in the air.

  Honda made his decision the morning after he had dreamed about Kiyoaki.

  When Iinuma met Honda at Tokyo Station on his arrival from Osaka, he was wearing an inverness with a seal collar and his moustache seemed to be quivering in the late December cold. The weariness of his long wait on the platform was evident in his voice and in his watery and bloodshot eyes. As soon as Honda descended, Iinuma clasped his hand, commanded a student to relieve him of his bags at once, and then began to pour an insistent stream of thanks into Honda’s ear.

  “How grateful I am that you chose to come! I feel that I have all conceivable power aligned with me. No boy could be luckier than that son of mine. But what a momentous resolution, Judge Honda, you have made in our behalf!”

  After instructing the student to take his luggage to his mother’s house, Honda accepted Iinuma’s invitation and went to have dinner with him at a Ginza restaurant called the Gincharyo. The streets were gay with Christmas decorations. Honda had heard that Tokyo’s population was now 5,300,000, and when he looked at the crowded streets, it seemed that hunger and the depression were like conflagrations burning in some corner of a distant land, things too far off to be visible from here.

  “When my wife read your letter, she too wept tears of joy. We put it upon the altar of the gods, and we pay it reverence each morning and evening. But wasn’t your judgeship a lifetime appointment? Why did you resign it?”

  “Illness. No one can help that. However much they tried to keep me on, I had the doctor’s certificate to defend myself.”

  “But what kind of illness?”

  “A nervous breakdown.”

  “Not really?”

  Iinuma said nothing further, but the frankness of the momentary misgiving that showed in his eyes gave Honda a warm feeling toward him. Honda knew that a flash of frankness from an unsavory defendant could create a measure of goodwill in a judge, no matter how much care he took to avoid emotion. He tried to get some idea of the feeling that a lawyer would have for his client. No doubt it ought to be more theatrical. The goodwill that passed through a judge’s mind would naturally have some ethical motivation, but a lawyer’s feelings had to be fully exploited.

  “It was a matter of being relieved of duty at my own request. So I’m still a judge as far as that goes, but now my status is that of a retired judge. Tomorrow I’m going to join the Bar Association, and then my career as a lawyer will begin. It’s the work that I’ve decided to do, and so I intend to put everything I have into it. The truth is that since I rose no higher before resigning, I’m not going to bring too much prestige to my career as a lawyer. But the whole thing was my choosing, and I have to accept the consequences. After all, it’s up to you to select your own lawyer. But as for compensation, I explained to you in my letter . . .”

  “Oh, Judge Honda! How can you be so benevolent toward us? It would be despicable of me to take advantage of your good nature, but under the circumstances . . .”

  “Very well then. Let us agree that I receive nothing at all. I’ll undertake it on that condition only.”

  “Judge Honda . . . I am at a loss for words.” Sitting in a stiff, formal position, Iinuma bowed his head again and again. “But after a decision of such grave consequences, wasn’t your wife taken aback? And your mother too, wasn’t she upset? It seems to me that they would be greatly opposed.”

  “My wife was perfectly calm about it. When I phoned my mother to tell her, she caught her breath for a moment, but then she simply said that I should do as I thought best.”

  “Really? What a fine mother! What a fine wife! Judge Honda, your wife and your mother are remarkable women. My wife, now, couldn’t possibly match it. Sometime you must teach me the secret of wife-training. I have to try to instill in my wife a little of what yours has. But I suppose it’s too late for that.”

  For the first time, the formality between guest and host gave way, and both of them laughed. As they did, a nostalgia welled up in Honda’s heart. He felt as though twenty years had been rolled back and the student Honda and the tutor Iinuma were meeting to discuss how best to come to the rescue of the absent Kiyoaki.

  The lights of the Ginza flashed beyond the frosted glass of the window. But just as the gaudy night life could not altogether escape the reality of famine and bad times, so inside the night had a double aspect all too evident. Even the colorful scraps of fish that they had left uneaten upon the platter suggested a link to the cold darkness of a detention cell at night. And the past too, its unfulfilled hopes acknowledged with some reluctance, was linked to the present of these two men now in their prime.

  Never again in his life, Honda thought, would he make a renunciation of such magnitude, and he determined to fix in his memory the bizarre passion that now seethed within him. He could recall nothing comparable to the inner fervor and exhilaration he fe
lt after making the decision that all the world would call foolish, a decision made at a time of life when his powers of discretion should have been at their height!

  It was for him to thank Isao rather than for Isao to thank him. If he had not been electrified by Kiyoaki’s rebirth in Isao and by Isao’s conduct, Honda might have turned into a man who would be delighted to live on an iceberg. For what he had looked upon as tranquility had been a kind of ice. His concept of perfection had been a kind of desiccation. His ability to view things in an unorthodox fashion had seemed to him merely immature, but the truth was he had had no idea of what maturity meant.

  Iinuma, as though spurred on by something, had drunk one cup of saké after another, wetting the ends of his neat moustache. As Honda studied those drops of saké, he thought of them as bits of ideology innocently clinging to the moustache of this man who had earned his living by commercializing a passionately held belief. Having made faith his livelihood, ideology his means of support, Iinuma’s follies and excesses had given his face a certain fatuous look of self-deception. Still sitting in a formal position and drinking heavily, with a vigor that showed no sign of concern for his son shivering in a cold cell, he played up his emotion and his very affectation of emotion as a kind of role. His driving manner seemed as stereotyped as a painted black dragon on a screen in the entrance hall of an inn. He had chosen to cultivate his beliefs as a mannerism. A long period had passed since his youth when, with his dark, deep-set eyes, he had given such an overpowering, almost physical, impression of gloom. Now it was not surprising that his worldly reverses, his agonies, and, above all, his humiliations, made him throw out his chest in pride at his son’s glory.

  As Honda sat musing, he saw that Iinuma had wordlessly committed something to his son. The old humiliations of the father entrusted to the purity of the son, who goes against the powerful of this world with fierce cry and drawn sword.