Runaway Horses (23 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

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“All right then,” he said to Isao, “let me give you back your book.” He casually reached into the drawer of his desk, took out
The League of the Divine Wind
, and laid it down in front of Isao.
“And what did you think of it?”
“It really moved me. And now I understand more how you feel. You’ve got that same spirit, haven’t you? But I’d like to put one question to you,” said the Lieutenant with a faintly ironic smile. “When it comes time for you to fight somebody, are you going to be like the League and pick the Imperial Army?”
“Of course not.”
“All right, who then?”
“I thought that, if nobody else, Lieutenant Hori at least understood us. The real foe of the League was not the Army. There was something that lurked behind the troops of the garrison—and that was the budding military clique. It was the militarists whom the men of the League saw as their enemy and took the field against. For they firmly believed that the army of the militarists was not the army of the gods. They believed that their own League of the Divine Wind was the Emperor’s army.”
Before replying, the Lieutenant glanced around the room. He and Isao were alone.
“All right, all right, but one doesn’t shout out things like that for everyone to hear.” The loyalty and affection evident in the Lieutenant’s words made Isao’s spirits soar.
“But there’s no one else here. Now that I’m with you, sir, I can’t help pouring out all the things that have been building up within me. The men of the League fought only with the Japanese sword, and we, too, I feel, when the supreme test comes, must depend upon the sword alone. Still, if our plan is going to be on a large scale, there’s room for other approaches . . . Would there be any chance of your introducing us to an officer in the Air Corps?”
“Why?”
“So that we can have support from the sky, to have the key points bombed.”
The Lieutenant only snarled in response, but he did not seem especially angry.
“Somebody must take action. If not, Japan is lost. There is nothing else to be done if the heart of the Emperor is to be put at rest.”
“Don’t jabber about grave matters,” said the Lieutenant, his voice suddenly harsh.
Isao realized, however, that the Lieutenant had no animosity toward him, and meekly apologized: “I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
Had the Lieutenant, Isao wondered, perceived something that lay within him? Yes, the Lieutenant’s fierce gaze must have penetrated the very soul of a boy not long out of high school. And Lieutenant Hori, from what Isao had heard of him, was no man to be swayed by considerations of age or rank.
Isao well knew that his words were immature, but his determination made up for their deficiency. He had been supremely confident that his own inner fire would provoke flames in the man opposite him. And then, too, it was summer. The two of them sat facing each other in heat as smothering and oppressive as a heavy wool garment. It was as though even a spark would set off a conflagration or, for want of a spark, the heat would simply melt everything down to a pitiful remnant like metal in a furnace. Isao had to seize this opportunity.
“Since you were kind enough to visit me,” said the Lieutenant, breaking the silence, “suppose we do something to forget the heat. How about going over to the drill hall and running through the kendo forms without masks? Sometimes I practice that way with one of the sergeants. There’s nothing better for strengthening your will.”
“Yes, sir, I like that kind of practice,” Isao readily agreed.
Among the military, winning or losing took on critical significance, and so Lieutenant Hori no doubt rarely competed seriously, because of his comrades’ eyes upon him. At any rate, the thought that the Lieutenant wished to communicate with him through the sword was pleasant to Isao.
Surrounded by the aged wooden walls of the drill hall, Isao felt a congenial shiver. Three pairs of men were practicing kendo, but he could tell at once that they were novices. Their handling of the staves was flurried, and their footwork erratic.
“Take a break, all of you,” the Lieutenant shouted unceremoniously. “I’m going to do the forms with this visitor. Watch us and you’ll learn something.”
Isao stepped out on the floor wearing a borrowed kendo suit and holding a borrowed stave of hard wood. The six reduced to spectators took off their masks and sat down on the floor attentively in a neat line. After he had made his obeisance to the gods, he stepped forward to face the Lieutenant. Lieutenant Hori was to take the offensive role and Isao the defensive.
The rays of the sun poured down from the high windows on the western side of the hall and the polished floor beneath shone as though spread with a glistening oil, as the insistent chant of cicadas outside wound round the building. The boards, hot beneath the soles of the feet, had a good spring to them, their smooth resilience like that of pounded rice cake.
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
 
 M
ARQUIS
M
ATSUGAE
, 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.

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