Runaway Horses (46 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
“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 felt 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.
Honda felt that he had to hear a frank word about Isao from Iinuma.
“Would you say,” he asked, “that the truth is that your son fulfills a dream that you’ve had ever since the days when you were Matsugae’s tutor?”
“No,” answered Iinuma with a touch of defiance. “He’s my son. That’s all he is.” But then after this denial, he began to talk of Kiyoaki. “When I stop and think today, the young master dying the way he did was probably the only thing that could have happened. It must have been the will of heaven. As for Isao, well, he’s pretty much like his father. He’s young, and the times are different, so he’s got involved in something like this. Yes, I tried to instill the samurai virtues in the young master, but maybe it was my own boorishness that pushed me to do it. I suppose the young master did die of frustration . . .” Here Iinuma’s voice broke as his emotions got the better of him. As soon as he yielded in the least to his feelings, the result, it seemed, was like a dam giving way. “But still . . . he acted as his heart told him to act, and I’m sure that, if nothing else, he had that much satisfaction. At least, as time goes by, that’s what I find myself wanting more and more to believe. Otherwise, I would find it unbearable, though that’s my own selfish view. At any rate, the young master lived and died in a way suited to himself. As for me, an outsider, and all my anxiety, everything I tried was pointless and a waste of effort.
“Isao, though, is my own son. I raised him very strictly in accordance with my beliefs. And his response was all that I could have wanted. I was delighted at his reaching the third degree in kendo before he was out of his teens, but since then, needless to say, he’s gotten out of hand. Perhaps he was too deeply influenced by my own life. But there was more to it than that. He was too anxious to be freed from his father’s guidance. He put too much trust in himself, and this was the root cause of his going astray. Now in this affair, if through your great effort, Judge Honda, the sentence imposed is somehow a light one, the chastisement will do that boy a world of good. Surely there’s no chance of the death penalty or life imprisonment, is there?”
“You needn’t worry about that,” said Honda in laconic reassurance.
“Ah, Judge Honda! Thank you for everything. Father and son, Isao and I have had no greater benefactor in our lives than you.”
“You’d do well to spare your gratitude until after the trial.”
Iinuma bowed his head again. Now that he had let himself indulge in sentiment, the conventional vulgarity of his expression suddenly vanished. As he became drunker, his eyes began to water in an unsettling manner, and his whole body seemed to give off the feeling, like an invisible vapor, that there was something he wanted to say.
“I know what you’re thinking, Judge Honda,” Iinuma finally declared. The pitch of his voice rose somewhat as he went on. “I know, I tell you. It’s that I’m impure beyond words and my son is pure. That’s what you’re thinking.”
“Not really.” Somewhat irked, Honda made his reply vague.
“No, that’s it. There’s no doubt about it. And since I’ve gone so far, let me go further: my boy was arrested just two days before they were to strike. Who do you think he has to thank for that?”
“Well now . . .” Honda knew that Iinuma was on the verge of saying something better left unsaid, but there was no way to stop him.
“You’re doing so much for us, Judge, I find it painful to make this revelation after all your kindness, but I suppose a client shouldn’t keep anything from his lawyer. So I’ll make a clean breast of it. I’m the one. I secretly reported my son to the police. At the last possible moment I saved my son’s life.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Why? Because if I hadn’t, my son’s life would have ended.”
“But, putting aside the good or evil of what had been planned, didn’t you feel in any way that perhaps you should let your son achieve what he set out to do?”
“It was because I looked ahead. I’m always looking ahead, Judge.” Flushed from drink, Iinuma abruptly reached for his seal-collared inverness which lay upon a clothing box in the corner of the room. Heedless of the dust he scattered, he shook open the coat with a flapping noise and held it up like a mantle. “Here,” he said. “This is me. This inverness is myself. There is no sleight-of-hand involved. The inverness is the father. It’s like the dark sky of a winter night. So the folds of the inverness reach far and wide, covering whatever spot the son might place his foot upon. The son runs about wanting to see the light, but he cannot. The huge black inverness is spread wide over his head. As long as the night continues, the inverness sternly makes him acknowledge the night. When the morning comes, the inverness falls to earth and lets the son’s eyes be dazzled by the light. Such is the father. Am I not right, Judge Honda? My son didn’t want to acknowledge this inverness, and he did what he wanted to do. Therefore it’s only natural that he be taken to task. For it’s still night, and the inverness knows this and wants to prevent the son from going to his death.
“These leftist scum—the more pressure you put on them, the stronger they get. Japan is invaded by their germs and those who made Japan so weak as to be susceptible to them are the politicians and the businessmen. I knew all about it without my son telling me. And those in the advance guard ready to leap to the defense of the Imperial Family when a crisis threatens the nation are, as hardly needs saying, we ourselves. But there’s the matter of picking the time. There’s such a thing as the favorable moment. Determination alone counts for nothing. Thus I have to conclude that my son is too young. The necessary discernment is still beyond him.
“I, the father, have the determination. Indeed, I may say that my patriotism, my agony of soul, exceeds that of my son. My son tried to hide everything from me that he was intent on carrying out—wouldn’t you say he was blind to his father?
“I always look ahead. Rather than take action, the best course is to achieve results without acting. Am I right or not? I heard that at the time of the May Fifteenth Incident there was a flood of petitions asking leniency. So the naïve purity of the young defendants will surely evoke public sympathy. We can count on that. And my boy, rather than losing his life, will come home covered with glory. His whole life long, he’ll have no worries as to where his next meal is coming from. Because the world will forever hold him in awe as Isao Iinuma of the Showa League of the Divine Wind.”
Honda was at first struck dumb, but then he wondered if Iinuma was being altogether candid.
By Iinuma’s account, the primary savior of Isao was Isao’s father, and Honda, in coming to the son’s rescue, was merely an agent assigned to bring about the realization of Iinuma’s plan. No words could more effectively negate the goodwill shown by Honda in throwing aside his career and undertaking Isao’s defense without a fee. Nor could any words more defile the nobility in Honda’s action.
But, oddly enough, Honda was not angered. The person he was concerned about defending was Isao, not his father. However blemished the father, his blemishes had nothing to do with his son. They had not the least effect upon the son’s purity of intention.
Beyond this, Honda, who should have been offended to some degree by Iinuma’s boorish display, had another reason for remaining unperturbed. For as Iinuma, having said all this, kept hastily pouring himself more to drink in this little room from which he had long since excluded the waitress, Honda was aware of a tremor in his hairy hands. And here Honda perceived a sentiment that Iinuma would never voice, something that was probably the deepest motive of his betrayal. The son, in other words, had been on the verge of achieving a bloody glory and a sublime death, and the father had been unable to restrain his jealousy.
32
HIS
H
IGHNESS
Prince Harunori Toin was another to whom the affair had been a severe shock. He was not apt to remember those who came once or twice to pay their respects, but the memory of Isao’s visit that night was still vivid in his mind. And, especially since Lieutenant Hori had brought the boy, he could not take a detached view of this incident. Naturally, as soon as the affair broke, the Prince made a long-distance telephone call to his steward to seal his lips about Isao’s visit. But since the steward was, in effect, a minion of the Imperial Household Ministry, the Prince could put little trust in him.
For some time now, the Prince had found in the Lieutenant a like-minded companion with whom he could deplore the times. The gentlemen of the Imperial Household Ministry were not amused at this. They frequently admonished him for granting audiences indiscriminately, without regard to rank. But this very conduct grew out of resentment at the Ministry’s constraints, requiring him to report even the shortest trip, and so he could hardly be expected to listen meekly to this advice.
Since his appointment as regimental commander in Yamaguchi, the Prince had shown a certain intemperance in speech and action which had not gone unnoticed by the Imperial Household Minister and the Director of the Division of Special Affairs. Waiting until Harunori came up to Tokyo, they arranged to call on him for a friendly visit, in order to admonish him gently. The Prince heard them out without a word, and made no reply even after they were finished. A long silence ensued.
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