Runaway Horses (50 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
One night he dreamed of a snake.
The setting was the tropics, perhaps the garden of a large mansion somewhere, which was surrounded by jungle so thick that the walls that bordered it could not be seen.
He seemed to be in the middle of this jungle garden, standing upon a terrace of crumbling gray stone. The house to which the terrace belonged could not be seen. There was nothing but this small, square terrace which defined a gray rocky zone of stillness, the curving stone images of cobras rising up from pillars set at each of its corners, like four outspread hands pushing back the heavy tropic air. A hot square of silence cut from the heart of the jungle.
He heard the whine of mosquitoes. He heard the buzzing of flies. Yellow butterflies flew about. The cries of birds came down to him like drops of blue water ever falling. And, now and again, came still another bird cry, a frenzied cry that seemed to tear through the very midst of the intricate tangle of green vegetation. Cicadas were shrilling.
Rather than these varied sounds, however, what most affronted the ear was a roar like that of a sudden rainstorm. It was not, of course. A passing wind was shaking the jungle growth that bound the treetops together, far above the shaded terrace, but since its effect was not felt below, the only visible sign of its passing was the movement of the flecks of sunlight that dappled the cobras’ heads.
Leaves high up, caught by the wind, slipped down through the foliage, and the noise they made sounded like falling rain. Not all of them were newly torn from their branches. Tree limbs were thrust against each other to undergird the nearly impenetrable mass of vines that caught up leaves as they dropped away. A fresh wind would cause these to fall a second time, working down through the branches with a sound like heavy rain. Since the leaves were broad and parched, they made an echoing din. Each one that fell upon the stone terrace, overgrown with moss white as leprosy, was large.
The tropical light was like thousands of massed spearheads of marshaled troops. Reflections fell everywhere about Isao, as patches of sunlight filtered through the branches above. To look at that light directly would be blinding, to touch it would be to scorch one’s fingers. From beyond the jungle growth, it held everything in siege. Isao felt its presence crowding in even upon the terrace.
At that moment Isao noticed a little green snake put its head through the railing. What had seemed to be an out-stretched vine there suddenly grew longer. The snake was quite thick, like a waxwork figure colored in light and dark shades of green. Its lustrous, artificial-looking body was not a vine, something Isao discovered too late. Its fangs had already found their mark by the time he realized that it had coiled itself to strike at his ankle.
The chill of death came to him through the tropic air. Isao shivered.
He was suddenly cut off from the torrid heat. The venom had driven all warmth from his body. Each of his pores awakened fearfully to the coldness of death. He could breathe only with difficulty, and each breath became more shallow. Soon the world had no more breath to put into his mouth. But the movement of life went on throbbing keenly within him. Against his will, his skin, like the surface of a pond struck by a shower, grew puckered. “I was not meant to die like this. I was meant to die by cutting open my stomach. I never expected to die this way, a passive, miserable death by a chance of nature, a small touch of malice.” Even as he thought this, Isao seemed to feel his body freezing into a block as solid as a fish so frozen that a hammer blow could not shatter it. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he had kicked off his quilt and was lying in his cell in the glimmering dawn light of an unusually chilly early spring morning.
Another night he had this dream.
This one was so strange and disagreeable that he tried afterwards again and again to banish it from his mind. This was a dream in which Isao was transformed into a woman.
He was not at all certain, however, what sort of woman his body had been changed into. Perhaps because he seemed to be blind, he could only grope with his hands to try to find out. He felt as if the world had been turned inside out, and he was sitting languidly in a chair by a window, his body lightly covered with sweat, possibly just after awakening from an afternoon nap.
Perhaps his previous dream of the snake was impinging upon this one. What he heard were the cries of jungle birds, the buzzing of flies, the rainlike patter of falling leaves. And then there was an odor like sandalwood—he recognized it because once he had lifted the lid and sniffed inside a sandalwood tobacco box that his father prized—a melancholy, lonely odor, the sweet, bodylike odor of old wood. Suddenly he thought of something that resembled it: the odor of the blackened embers that he had seen on the path through the rice fields in Yanagawa.
Isao felt that his flesh had lost definite form, turned into flesh that was soft and swaying. He was filled with a mist of soft, languid flesh. Everything became vague. Wherever he searched, he could find no order or structure. There was no supporting pillar. The brilliant fragments of light that had once sparkled around him, ever drawing him on, had disappeared. Comfort and discomfort, joy and sorrow—all alike slid over his skin like soap. Entranced, he soaked in a warm bath of flesh.
The bath by no means imprisoned him. He could step out whenever he liked, but the languid pleasure kept him from abandoning it, so that staying there forever, not choosing to go, had become his “freedom.” Thus there was nothing to define him, to keep him under strict control. What had once wound itself tightly round and round him like a rope of platinum had slipped loose.
Everything he had so firmly believed in was meaningless. Justice was like a fly that has tumbled into a box of face powder and smothered; beliefs for which he had meant to offer up his life were sprayed with perfume and melted. All glory dissolved in the mild warmth of mud.
Sparkling snow had melted away entirely. He felt the uncertain warmth of spring mud within him. Slowly something took form from that spring mud, a womb. Isao shuddered as the thought came to him that he would soon give birth. His strength had always spurred him with violent impatience toward action, had always responded to a distant voice that conjured up the image of a vast wilderness. But now, that strength had left him. The voice was silent. The outer world, which no longer called to him, now, rather, was drawing closer to him, was touching him. And he felt too sluggish to get up and move away.
A sharp-edged mechanism of steel had died. In its place, an odor like that of decaying seaweed, an entirely organic odor, had somehow or other permeated his body. Justice, zeal, patriotism, aspirations for which to hazard one’s life—all had vanished. In their place came an indescribable intimacy with the things around him—clothing, utensils, pincushions, cosmetics—an intimacy in which he seemed to flow into and merge with all the minutiae of gentle, beautiful things. It was an intimacy of smiles and winks, one that was almost obscene, outside the range of Isao’s previous experience. The only thing that he had been intimate with had been the sword.
Things clung to him like paste, and, at the same time, lost all their transcendental significance.
Trying to arrive at some goal was no longer a problem. Everything was arriving here from elsewhere. Thus there was no longer a horizon, no longer any islands. And with no perspective at all evident, voyages were out of the question. There was only the endless sea.
Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to be required to give constant proof of one’s manliness—to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today. To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak.
But to be a woman? It seemed to mean being a woman at the beginning and being a woman forever.
The smoke of incense came to him. There was the echo of gongs and whistles—apparently a funeral procession passing by the window. He caught the muffled sound of people sobbing. But nothing clouded the contentment of the woman dozing on a summer afternoon. Fine beads of sweat covered her skin. Her senses had stored up a vast variety of memories. Her belly, swelling slightly as she breathed in her sleep, was puffed like a sail with the marvelous fullness of her flesh. The delicate navel, which checked that sail by tugging from within, its color the fresh, rosy tinge of the bud of a wild cherry blossom, lay quietly beneath a tiny pool of sweat. The lovely tautness of the breasts of so regal an aspect seemed all the more to express the melancholy of the flesh. The skin, stretched fine, seemed to glow as though a lantern burned within. The smoothness of the skin extended as far as the tips of the breasts, where, like waves pressing in upon an atoll, the raised texture of the areolas emerged. The areolas were the color of an orchid filled with a quiet, pervasive hostility, a poisonous color meant to attract the mouth. From that deep purple, the nipple rose up piquantly, like a pert squirrel lifting its head. The effect was mischievously playful.
When he clearly saw the figure of this sleeping woman, even though her face was shrouded with sleep and its contours blurred, Isao thought that it had to be Makiko. Then a strong whiff of the perfume Makiko had worn when they parted came to him. Isao shot out his semen, and he awakened.
An indescribable sorrow remained. Though the sensation that he had been transformed into a woman had persisted in his dream, he could not recall the point at which the course of the dream had shifted so that he seemed to be gazing at the body of a woman whom he took to be Makiko. And this confusion was the source of his disturbed feeling. Furthermore, though it was a woman, Makiko apparently, whom he had defiled, he, the defiler, strangely enough could not rid himself of the vivid sensation that he had felt before, that the whole world was turned inside out.
The fearfully dark emotion that had enveloped him in sadness—never before had he experienced such an incomprehensible emotion—lingered on and on even after his eyes were open, and hung in the air under the dim light cast down by the feeble bulb in the ceiling like a yellowish pressed flower.
Isao did not catch the sound of the guard’s hemp-soled sandals coming down the corridor, and, taken by surprise, he had no time to shut his eyes before they met the guard’s peering in through the observation slot.
“Go to sleep,” the guard said hoarsely, and then moved on.
Spring was drawing near.
His mother came often with packages for him, but she was never allowed to see him. She told him in a letter that Honda was going to defend him at the trial, and Isao wrote a long reply. Such good fortune was more than he had hoped for, he wrote, but he would have to refuse it unless Honda agreed to defend him together with his comrades as a group. No answer to this ever came. Nor was he given the opportunity to meet with Honda, something that should have been readily granted. In the letters he received from his mother there were many words and phrases deleted with black ink—no doubt the news of his comrades that he wanted so much to hear. No matter how he scrutinized the portions blotted out with black ink, he could not make out a single letter, nor could he deduce anything from the context.
Finally Isao began a letter to the man he felt least inclined to write to. He did his best to suppress all emotion, and he chose his words with the intent of not bringing further trouble upon Sawa, whom the authorities must at least have questioned about his contribution of money. Yet he hoped that the pangs of conscience would drive Sawa to do what he could to better their situation. He waited and waited, but no answer came, and Isao’s anger took a despairing turn.
Since he had heard nothing further by way of his mother, Isao wrote a long letter of appreciation to Honda himself, addressing it in care of the Academy. In it he gave fervent expression to his desire that Honda act as defense counsel for the entire group. A reply came at once. With well-chosen words, Honda expressed his sympathy for the way Isao felt. He said that, since he had gotten into this affair, he might as well go all the way, and so he would be willing to defend them as a group, except, of course, for those who would be tried as juveniles. Nothing could have strengthened Isao more in his prison cell than this letter.
Isao was moved by the way in which Honda responded to his expressed desire to take all the punishment upon himself and have his comrades absolved: “I understand your wanting to do this, but neither judges nor lawyers conduct themselves on the basis of their emotions. Since tragic feelings are certainly not of long duration, what is important now is to remain calm. I think that I can count upon you, as an expert in kendo, to understand what I mean. Leave everything to me—that is what I am for—take earnest care of your health, and bear your lot with patience. During the exercise periods, by all means give your body a vigorous workout.” Honda had correctly perceived that the sense of tragic heroism in Isao’s heart, like the colors of a sunset, was gradually fading.
One day, since there was still no indication that he would be allowed to see Honda, Isao put his trust in the sympathetic manner of the judge in a preliminary hearing, and asked casually: “Your Honor, when will I be allowed to see someone?”
The judge hesitated for a moment, obviously uncertain whether or not to reply. Then he said: “Not as long as the prohibition against it is in force.”
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