Runaway Horses (40 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: Runaway Horses
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All at once, an intuition struck him with unmistakable force. Honda shuddered. No one, the intuition told him, was within this grave.
26
 
 I
SAO HAD NOT YET
shown Lieutenant Hori either the summary of the plan for the rising or the draft of the declaration to be dropped from an airplane. The Lieutenant was fully taken up with the fall maneuvers, and he had not acceded to Isao’s request for a meeting. More than a month remained before the appointed day. Once into November, the Lieutenant was supposed to spend all his spare time in directing their efforts.
After he had returned home, Isao had been warmly welcomed as usual by his mother, and by Sawa and the other students. Sawa, perhaps because there was no chance to talk with Isao alone, had not once referred to the problem that he had recently discussed with such heat. And so Isao had not yet found an opportunity to thank him for the money.
The evening of his return, his father had gone out to attend some meeting, and, since the Academy students had told Isao that they would like to hear about the training camp at Yanagawa, he decided that he would eat with them in the dining hall that night. His mother took special pains to prepare a fine meal for them.
“With just you and the boys there, you’ll be able to talk a lot more freely,” said his mother, handing him a colorful porcelain platter of sashimi as he stood in the hallway. The house custom forbade boys in the kitchen. “So please take this in for me.” Slices of halfbeak, sea bream, mackerel, flounder, and yellowtail lay beautifully arranged upon the platter, the kind of treat that hardly ever brightened a schoolboy’s diet. He felt suspicious of this unlooked-for generosity. As for Miné herself, she was struck by the icy look on her son’s handsome face as he reluctantly took the platter. In the darkness of the corridor his features seemed set and unresponsive.
“Why are you being so extravagant?” he asked her.
“It’s just a little celebration on your coming home.”
“But I was only gone a week, to the next prefecture. What would you do if I had been overseas?”
Isao could not keep his mind free of Kurahara and his money. Nothing made him so miserable in his own home as being under the constant menace of that name. The name was like a toxin that lay heavy in the atmosphere of the Academy of Patriotism, in the water, in every particle of food.
“Here I go to great lengths to give you a nice dinner, and you’re not the least bit happy about it!”
Isao looked full into the eyes of his grumbling mother, whose pupils were wavering uneasily like the bubble in a spirit level. As he did so, her expression went blank, and she suddenly shifted her gaze away from him.
Perhaps, Isao thought, this treat was no more than one of his mother’s whims. But his underlying anxiety was such, he realized, that his mood could be nothing but suspicious. Anything out of the ordinary in the household, whether good or bad, was enough to make him uneasy. The least alteration pained him.
“Master Kaido scolded you, didn’t he?” she said, her tone jocular and even coquettish. “I heard all about it from your father.” As she spoke, it seemed to Isao that droplets of her saliva sprayed over the limpid slices of halfbeak sashimi, and he felt a twinge of revulsion. The thought of his mother’s saliva falling like a sudden shower upon the fresh sashimi and green seaweed garnish almost distracted him from the other uncleanliness that was troubling him.
“It was nothing of importance.”
Isao’s answer, given without the trace of a smile, was hardly satisfactory to her.
“Why must you be like this? You talk to me as if I’m a stranger, no matter how much I worry about you.”
With a sudden movement, Miné picked up a slice of sashimi from the platter and thrust it into Isao’s mouth. He was holding the platter, and could not block the rapid thrust of her hand. Probably opening his mouth to take it was an automatic reaction to the urgency of her gesture. His eyes watering from this forced feeding, he watched as she turned hastily as though to hide her tears and went back into the kitchen. Being thus treated like a son going off to war stirred his resentment.
His mother’s sorrow lay in his mouth like a foreign body. He was annoyed at the way the sashimi clung to his teeth.
What was going on? Everything had been knocked from its proper course. Still, it was hard to believe that his mother’s intuition had discerned in his eyes the determination to die.
When he walked into the dining hall carrying the platter of sashimi, the students greeted Isao with loud cheers. The usual faces around the table suddenly seemed quite alien to him. He was the only one there who was set upon action. But this crew went on as before, doing nothing but composing their poems about loyal devotion, about noble resolves, about Restoration, about seething passions. And Sawa’s face, too, had its place among them, Sawa who was smiling like an indolent Zen monk. Sawa had taken no action even up to now, and it seemed clear that the decision not to admit him to their group had been a wise one.
Isao felt keenly that he must develop the knack of masking his feelings in dealing with others. He had now become a man quite out of the ordinary. Even if nothing in his bearing showed this, the least carelessness might let people get wind of it. They might detect that within him was the odor of a burning fuse.
“We hear that Master Kaido severely chastises his favorite students, the ones he loves the most, and that you had the experience yourself,” said one of the students, making it plain to Isao that they all knew about the incident.
“What did you do with that pheasant?”
“We all ate it for dinner.”
“I’ll bet it tasted good. But, Isao, we had no idea you were such a good shot.”
“Oh, I didn’t do the shooting,” Isao answered cheerfully. “Just as Master Kaido said, it was the ‘harsh god’ in me that shot, and so there was no question of missing.”
“One of these days I hope some pretty young thing will bring out the ‘mild god’ in Isao.”
Everyone went on eating and talking, except for Sawa. His smile persisted, and he said not a word. During the cheerful exchanges, Isao found himself unable to keep his eyes from straying in this man’s direction. Then, suddenly, Sawa broke in to check the flow of chatter.
“I would like to recite a poem in celebration of Isao’s having completed his training camp and become an even stronger man,” he said.
As he chanted the poem, Sawa’s voice reverberated loudly in the hushed dining hall. It was pitched somewhat high, his lungs straining from the force of his passion, like a horse neighing as it senses an approaching storm:
“Purging away the evils of the West,
Let us be faithful to our land.
Stalwart, giving no ear to traitor’s pleas,
We shall hand down our great cause
Without the least fear of death.”
Isao immediately recognized the poem as one written by Inokichi Miura, but these last words of the young company commander involved in the Sakai Incident were not at all suited to a festive occasion.
As soon as he had acknowledged the applause, Sawa went on: “Now just one more. This is something that would rejoice the heart of Master Kaido.”
After this introduction, he recited a poem of Kohei Tomobayashi:
“We who were a people
Of a land pure and holy
Foolishly became Buddha’s lackeys
And preached that we were all one.
Now we shall throw out Buddha,
(Grieve not too much, Buddha!)
We who were a people
of a land pure and holy.”
At the words “Foolishly became Buddha’s lackeys” everyone laughed, the image of Master Kaido’s face before them. And the admonition “Grieve not too much, Buddha!” also provoked laughter.
Though he laughed with the others, in his heart Isao was still responding to the emotion latent in Sawa’s first poem beneath its clarity and openness, which was that of a young man’s angry death. This Sawa, who had vowed to die, showed not the least sign of shame at being still alive, but seemed instead to be trying to implant in Isao the fervor of a youth who had brought his life to a furious conclusion at the dawn of the Meiji era. Isao felt the keen thrust of shame. Rather than Sawa himself suffering from a shame that was rightly his, that shame pierced Isao.
It was a shame that came from the conviction that Sawa, and Sawa alone, had seen in him both the pleasure and the arrogant pride of a young man luxuriating in the sweet feeling of having made up his mind to die. Sawa, in a sense, had purchased Isao’s shame with his money.
27
 
 O
N NOVEMBER SEVENTH
Lieutenant Hori sent word that Isao was to come at once to his billet. Isao went there. The Lieutenant was sitting down, still in uniform. Something was different about him. As soon as he entered the room, Isao had a premonition of trouble.
“How about having supper with me? I told them downstairs that you would.” As he spoke, the Lieutenant stood up and turned on the lamp.
“I’d rather hear what you have to say.”
“Don’t be in such a rush.”
Devoid of furnishings as it was, the austere eight-mat room had taken on the aspect of a brightly lit empty box. It was cold inside, but there was no trace of fire in the hibachi. From the hallway outside the closed door came the sound of a consciously military tread. The footsteps passed, turned back again, and then, apparently from the head of the staircase, there was a shout: “Hey, old fellow! Hurry up and bring my supper.” The footsteps passed again and retreated down the corridor.
“That Lieutenant’s in the room at the end of the hall on the other side. He can’t hear what you say, so don’t worry. The man next door is gone today. He’s duty officer this week.”
These words sounded somehow evasive in Isao’s ears. He had not come here to say anything himself but to listen to the Lieutenant.
Lieutenant Hori lit a cigarette. A piece of tobacco clung to his lip, and as he dislodged it with the tip of one of his large fingernails, he crushed the now empty Golden Bat cigarette pack with his other hand. For the briefest of moments, the openings between the Lieutenant’s fingers revealed bat wings, golden against a green background, being crushed ruthlessly within his fist. He had some time or other mentioned to Isao that his monthly salary was eighty-five yen. And now this memory, together with the cold of the room, together with the loneliness of billet life, rose up from the noise of the paper being crumpled.
“Has something happened?” asked Isao, taking the initiative.
The Lieutenant only grunted.
Finally Isao gave voice to his worst fear: “I see. It’s gotten out.”
“No, that’s not it. Rest easy on that point. The fact is, I’m suddenly being sent off to Manchuria. An order came down from headquarters. I’m the only one going from the Third Regiment. It’s very hush-hush. I haven’t told anyone else, but I’m assigned to an independent Manchurian security force.”
“When do you leave?”

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