Runaway Horses (20 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
Was it possible that Isao himself might one day become a prisoner like Sanai? For a number of reasons, he found himself discontented that prison seemed so remote from him. Yet would he not choose to kill himself rather than submit to imprisonment? Very few of the League of the Divine Wind had been imprisoned. Surely, once he had plunged into a heroic enterprise, he would not await capture and all its indignities, but would put an end to himself with his own hand.
He wished that some morning, were it possible, the death that he was intent upon—to die atop a cliff swept by a breeze fresh with the scent of pine overlooking a sea bright in the morning sun—would somehow partake of the atmosphere reeking of urine that the rough and clammy concrete walls of a prison enclosed. But how could the two be mingled?
He was always thinking of death, and this had so refined him that the physical seemed to fall away, freeing him from the pull of earth and enabling him to walk about some distance above its surface. Indeed he felt that even his distaste and hatred for the affairs of the world no longer stirred him deeply. That was what Isao feared. Perhaps then the dampness of prison walls, the bloodstains upon them, the stink of urine, might serve to quicken his hatred. Perhaps prison was something he needed.
Since his father and the students had already finished breakfast when he returned home, Isao ate alone, served by his mother.
His mother had grown rather fat, so much so that her movements had become cumbersome. The blithe young girl with a roving eye and imperturbably sunny outlook now lay concealed beneath a melancholy burden of excess flesh which seemed to give expression to a temperament as cheerless as a heavily overcast sky. There was a sharpness to her gaze that suggested constant anger, but, even so, the erotic movement of her eyes had not changed from what it had been years before.
Since Mine’s function at the Academy of Patriotism was to attend to the needs of some ten or more students, she surely had much to do. As demanding as her duties were, however, she had reached an age where playing the role of mother to so many young men should have given her a certain amount of pleasure, but Miné had built a wall around herself, as though for some reason she had rejected all intimacy. Whatever leisure she had she fervently devoted to the sewing of bags, and every corner of the house was filled with examples of her handicraft. The spectacle of brocade and Yuzen work scattered throughout an institution as purposefully austere as the Academy was like bright-colored seaweed twined around the unpainted hull of a fishing boat.
Here in the kitchen, the base of a large saké bottle was jacketed with red brocade. The rice tub from which Miné now was serving her son was wrapped in a quilted cover of gaudy purple Yuzen muslin. It was obvious that her husband disliked this affectation more suited to a lady in waiting, but he had never gone so far as to reprimand her for it.
“I can’t rest even on Sunday, you see. Master Kaido’s lecture will be at one o’clock. Since the boys are sure to overlook something, I’ll have to be there too to see to all the arrangements.”
“How many will be coming?”
“Maybe about thirty. But there seem to be more every time.”
The Academy of Patriotism served as a kind of church on Sundays. Besides the students, all those in the neighborhood who were interested came to attend the lectures of Kaido Masugi on the history of imperial decrees, which were prefaced by a welcoming address by the headmaster himself. These sessions ended with all present chanting in unison the prayer for prosperity, and provided an occasion for inviting donations to the school. This afternoon Master Kaido was to take up a decree of the Emperor Keiko, “The Empowering of Yamoto Takeru to Subdue the Eastern Barbarians.” Isao had memorized a text from this: “Then, again, evil spirits infest the mountains, devils ravage the countryside, roadways are blocked, pathways cut off, and multitudes are made to suffer.” He thought of it as a passage that could be well applied to his own era. The evil spirits in the mountains and the ravaging devils were flourishing.
From across the table Miné gazed fixedly at the face of her eighteen-year-old only son as he silently disposed of one serving of rice and then another. She was quite taken with the masculinity evident in the line of his jaw beneath the cheeks so vigorously occupied with the rice. Miné turned to look out into the garden at the cry of a passing peddler hawking morning glory and eggplant seedlings. A hedge bounded the gloomy luxuriance of the shrubbery beneath an overcast sky, but it was too thick to afford a glimpse of the man. There was a heat-induced weariness to the peddler’s voice, and in Mine’s mind his morning glories were drooping. The man’s lethargic tone conveyed the feel of the garden, teeming with tiny snails at this hour of the morning.
All at once Miné found herself thinking of her abortion, the time she lost the first child that she conceived. This was a decision that Iinuma had forced upon her because no amount of calculation of the time involved had been able to satisfy him that the child was his own and not Marquis Matsugae’s.
“This boy, Isao,” she thought, “he doesn’t smile. Why not, I wonder. He almost never jokes. And lately he’ll go for a long time without saying a word to me.”
She was reminded of the young Iinuma in the Matsugae household, but there was a significant difference. The Iinuma of that period could hardly hide his tortured soul from even a casual observer, but Isao, whatever the circumstances, had an awesome poise. And this in the period of pimply adolescence when most boys were like puppies panting beneath the summer sun.
An abortion in first pregnancy makes the birth of the second child difficult, but Isao was delivered with remarkable ease, and it was not until afterwards that Miné suffered ill effects. Whether or not Iinuma had meant to show pity by finding fault with her feelings rather than with her physical disability, sometimes, as they lay beside each other at night, he berated her more severely and more sarcastically than ever about her former liaison with Marquis Matsugae. All of this was a severe mental and physical strain for Miné, but, instead of growing thin, she put on her gloomy burden of flesh.
The Academy of Patriotism had flourished. When Isao was twelve years old, Miné became altogether too friendly with one of the students. When Iinuma learned of this, he gave her a frightful beating. She was in the hospital for nearly five days.
From that time on, as far as anyone could tell, relations between husband and wife were tranquil. Miné lost all her vivacity, the price that had to be paid for the severe restraint she laid once and for all upon her wayward heart. Iinuma himself, as though freed from a spell, did not mention the Marquis again. The past had become something never to be touched upon.
Nevertheless, Miné’s stay in the hospital could not have helped but make some sort of lasting impression upon Isao. He had never said a word about it to his mother, of course, but his failure to refer to it even in passing showed all too clearly that he had something stored up within him.
Miné was sure that someone must have told Isao of her old misdemeanor. Oddly enough, she found herself provoked by the desire to hear an accusation from Isao’s own mouth. That her son entertained doubts about her qualifications as a mother was not without some satisfaction for her. The prospect had a certain sweetness. Troubled by a headache that made her imagine that she had a shallow pool of stagnant water somewhere at the back of her head, she kept gazing at her son from beneath her heavy eyelids, which crinkled when she was tired. His cheeks were still filled with rice.
Iinuma had enjoined her by no means to let Isao know how much the financial situation of the household had brightened immediately following the May Fifteenth Incident. Nor did Iinuma himself inform Isao of the school’s circumstances, insisting that, when his son became an adult, there would be time enough to tell him whatever ought to be told. Miné, however, with the advent of this new prosperity, could not keep herself from increasing the allowance that she secretly gave him.
When Isao had finished eating, Miné took a folded five-yen note from her obi and, saying, “Don’t tell your father, now,” stealthily passed it under the table to him.
Isao smiled slightly for the first time and said thank you as he quickly slipped the money into his kimono. He seemed to begrudge the smile.
The Academy of Patriotism stood in the Nishikata section of Hongo. Iinuma had obtained possession of the building ten years before. It had belonged to a well-known Western-style painter, and a separate wing that had served as a studio of massive proportions had been redesigned as a meeting hall and shrine. The main house, which had evidently been occupied by a number of the artist’s apprentices, was now given over partly to the students of the Academy. The pond in the garden to the rear had been filled in and left that way, with the thought that it would eventually become the site of a drill hall. Until such time the students made do with the meeting hall for the practice of their martial arts. The floor, however, lacked the proper resilience, and Isao disliked practicing there.
To avoid setting his son apart from the other pupils, Iinuma had him join in mopping the floor each morning before he went off to school. Exercising a careful control, Iinuma did not permit Isao to be treated either as the master’s son or as one altogether on the same footing with his fellow students. He tried to keep him from becoming too friendly with any of them. And though he trained the students to confide in himself, the headmaster, in all matters whatsoever, he discouraged them from opening their hearts to his wife and son.
Despite this, however, Isao spontaneously established a cordial rapport with the oldest of the students, a man named Sawa. Since he was forty, and had left his wife and children in his native place to come to Tokyo, Sawa’s case was extraordinary enough to provoke astonishment. He was stout and droll, and, whenever he had even a few moments free, his head was buried in a swashbuckling adventure magazine,
Kodan Club
. Once a week he would go to the courtyard before the Imperial Palace, where he would sit down in a formal position on its gravel surface and bow until his forehead touched the ground. Believing that a man must be ready to offer his life for the fulfillment of the Imperial Will at any moment, he washed out his clothes energetically every day, to keep himself scrupulously clean. On the other hand, he gambled with the young students, and, in the course of one bet, sprinkled flea powder on his rice before eating it, with no ill effects. Whenever the headmaster sent him with a message, Sawa would relay it in such an absurd way that the person it was meant for would be utterly confounded, for which offense Sawa was always being scolded by the headmaster. Still, he had no equal for his reliability in confidential matters.
Kodan Club
. Once a week he would go to the courtyard before the Imperial Palace, where he would sit down in a formal position on its gravel surface and bow until his forehead touched the ground. Believing that a man must be ready to offer his life for the fulfillment of the Imperial Will at any moment, he washed out his clothes energetically every day, to keep himself scrupulously clean. On the other hand, he gambled with the young students, and, in the course of one bet, sprinkled flea powder on his rice before eating it, with no ill effects. Whenever the headmaster sent him with a message, Sawa would relay it in such an absurd way that the person it was meant for would be utterly confounded, for which offense Sawa was always being scolded by the headmaster. Still, he had no equal for his reliability in confidential matters.
Isao, leaving his mother to her work of cleaning up after him, walked down the connecting corridor to the meeting hall. The shrine, with its doors of plain wood, stood upon a raised platform in the middle of the far end of the hall. Above it hung the curtain that concealed the portraits of Their Imperial Majesties the Emperor and Empress. From where he stood at the door of the hall, Isao faced in that direction and bowed reverently.
Though Iinuma was some distance away, giving directions to a group of students within the hall, his son’s act of reverence caught his eye. It seemed to him that Isao always spent too much time at it. Also, in the course of the monthly pilgrimage to Meiji Shrine and Yasukuni Shrine, Iinuma had had occasion to notice how much longer than the others Isao took in offering his worship. And he had never confided any reason for it to his father. When he looked back on his own youth, Iinuma tried to recall those things that he had prayed for with such angry anathemas during his morning devotions before Omiyasama on the Matsugae estate. Compared to himself at the same age, Isao was a boy whose status was secure and so had no cause to resent the world and call down curses upon those around him.
Isao looked on as the students were busy rearranging chairs in the dim light filtering down through the broad skylight. Since the sky was heavily overcast, the patch of light above gave the hall the subdued glow of an aquarium.
The boys had by now put the chairs and benches in good order, but Sawa, alone among them, was still at work in his own inefficient way, pushing the same chair this way and that, eying its position, then moving it once more, a good portion of his plump torso visible as usual at the neck of his loose kimono.
Sawa escaped the headmaster’s wrath only because Iinuma was busy overseeing the arrangement of the platform, taking pieces of chalk from the blackboard tray and lining them up neatly. The students, wearing Kokura
hakama
, carried in the desk that was to serve as a lectern, covered it with a cloth, and then placed a pine bonsai upon it. As they did so, light from the skylight caught the tree and caused its green porcelain vase to flash and its needles to brighten as though life had suddenly quickened within it.
hakama
, carried in the desk that was to serve as a lectern, covered it with a cloth, and then placed a pine bonsai upon it. As they did so, light from the skylight caught the tree and caused its green porcelain vase to flash and its needles to brighten as though life had suddenly quickened within it.
“What are you doing there?” Iinuma called out as he turned around on the platform to face in his son’s direction. “Are you going to be quick and give us a hand or not?”
Isao’s friends Izutsu and Sagara came to hear the lecture on imperial decrees, and he brought them to his room afterwards.
“Show it to us,” said little Sagara, pushing back his overlarge glasses with his forefinger, his nose pointed and quivering with curiosity like that of an eager ferret.
“Just a minute. First let me tell you I happen to have plenty of money on hand, so I’ll stand you to a treat later,” said Isao, tantalizing his friends ingenuously. The eyes of the two boys sparkled. Isao’s manner made them feel that something was about to be accomplished then and there.
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