Runaway Horses (2 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
Then there were some judges, especially enthusiastic for things Western, who went to dances. Honda did not care for dancing, but he often heard his colleagues talk about it. Since a city ordinance forbade dancing in Osaka itself, devotees had to go to Kyoto, where the Katsura and the Keagé dance halls were popular, or else to Amagasaki, where the Kuisé stood isolated in the midst of rice paddies. The taxi ride to Amagasaki cost one yen. As one approached the gymnasium-like building on a rainy night, the shadows of dancing couples flickered past the lighted windows, and the strains of the foxtrot took on an uncanny quality across the flooded paddy fields gleaming in the rain.
Such was Honda’s world about this time.
2
HOW ODDLY SITUATED
a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.
Honda felt that his youth had ended with the death of Kiyoaki Matsugae. At that moment something real within him, something that had burned with a vibrant brilliance, suddenly ceased to be.
Now, late at night, when Honda grew weary of his legal drafts, he would pick up the dream journal that Kiyoaki had left him and turn over its pages.
Much that it contained seemed like meaningless riddles, but some of the dreams recorded there gracefully foreshadowed Kiyoaki’s early death. His dream of looking down in spirit upon his own coffin of plain wood while the pre-dawn blackness gave way to deep blue at the windows was fulfilled with unforeseen swiftness in less than a year and a half. The woman with the widow’s peak who clung to the coffin was evidently Satoko, but there had been no sign of the actual Satoko at Kiyoaki’s funeral.
Since then eighteen years had passed. The border between dream and memory had grown indistinct in Honda’s mind. Because the words contained in this journal, his only souvenir of his friend, had been traced there by Kiyoaki’s own hand, it had profound significance for Honda. These dreams, left like a handful of gold dust in a winnowing pan, were charged with wonder.
As time went by, the dreams and the reality took on equal worth among Honda’s diverse memories. What had actually occurred was in the process of merging with what could have occurred. As reality rapidly gave way to dreams, the past seemed very much like the future.
When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities. Since each of these was linked with its own reality, the line distinguishing dream and reality became all the more obscure. His memories were in constant flux, and had taken on the aspect of a dream.
On the one hand, he could not definitely recall the name of a man he had met yesterday, but on the other, the image of Kiyoaki came to him fresh and clear whenever he called it up, much as the memory of a nightmare is more vivid than the look of the familiar street corner that one passes the next morning. After reaching the age of thirty, Honda had begun to forget people’s names, just as paint flakes away bit by bit. The reality that these names signified became more fleeting and more insignificant than any dream, a waste substance thrown off by each day’s life.
Honda felt that the future had no shocks in store for him. Whatever new turmoil rocked the world, his function would remain the same, and he would bring to bear upon each disturbance the rational scrutiny of the law. He had become thoroughly acclimated to a sphere whose atmosphere was logic. And it was logic, therefore, that Honda took as valid—more than dreams, more than reality.
The vast number of criminal cases tried before him had, of course, brought him into constant contact with the more extreme forms of passion. Though he himself had never experienced such emotion, he had seen many human beings whom a single passion held fatally in thrall.
Was he really so secure? Whenever the thought occurred to him, Honda had the feeling that long ago a glittering danger had threatened him, a danger that had been destroyed in a final flash of brilliance. And from that moment, he felt, he had become invulnerable to any temptation, however compelling—a freedom that he owed to the armor that had encased him ever since. The danger of that distant past, and its temptation, had been Kiyoaki.
Honda had once enjoyed talking about the days that he had shared with Kiyoaki. But as a man grows older the memory of his youth begins to act as nothing less than an immunization against further experience. And he was thirty-eight. It was an age when one felt strangely unready to say that one had lived and yet reluctant to acknowledge the death of youth. An age when the savor of one’s experiences turned ever so slightly sour, and when, day by day, one took less pleasure in new things. An age when the charm of every diverting foolishness quickly faded. But Honda’s devotion to his work shielded him from emotion. He had fallen in love with his oddly abstract vocation.
When he came home in the evening, he had dinner with his wife before going to his study. Though he usually ate at six on the days that he worked at home, on court days the hour varied since he sometimes remained at the Courthouse as late as eight o’clock. Now, however, he was no longer called out in the middle of the night as he had been when he had presided over preliminary hearings.
No matter how late he came home, Rié always waited to eat with him. When he arrived late, she would hurry to warm up dinner. Honda read the newspaper as he waited, conscious of the purposeful bustle of his wife and the maid in the kitchen. Thus the dinner hour was for Honda the most relaxing of the entire day. The pattern of his own household was different, to be sure, but the image of his father enjoying the evening paper often came to his mind. Somehow he had come to resemble his father.
Still, there were differences. He was sure he did not have any of the rather artificial sternness of his father, so characteristic of the Meiji era. For one thing, he had no children to be stern to, and, for another, his household, of its own accord, functioned in a simple and orderly manner.
Rié was quiet. She never opposed her husband, nor was she inquisitive. She was bothered by a touch of inflammation of the kidneys, and occasionally her features would be swollen. Then her sleepy eyes would seem to smolder with passion, an effect heightened by the somewhat heavier makeup she wore at these times.
Now on this Sunday evening in the middle of May, Rié’s face was swollen again. Tomorrow would be a court session. Honda had begun his work in the afternoon, thinking he would be able to complete it by dinnertime, and so he had told his wife before going into his study that he wanted to keep at it until he was finished. He was not through until eight. It was unusual for him to eat at so late an hour on a day spent at home.
Although refined tastes meant very little to Honda, during his long residence in the Kansai area he had developed an interest in ceramics, and he allowed himself the modest luxury of using good-quality dishes for even ordinary meals. They ate from bowls of Ninsei porcelain and their evening saké was served in Awata ware by Yohei III. Rié took great pains to prepare such delicacies as a mustard-flavored fish salad made with young trout, eels broiled unseasoned in the Kanto manner, and sliced winter melon spread with a sauce thickened with arrowroot starch. She was concerned about her husband’s health, bound as he was to his desk throughout the day, and planned her menus accordingly.
It was the time of year when the fire in the brazier and the steam whistling from the copper kettle began to seem disagreeable.
“It won’t do any harm to take a bit more saké than usual tonight,” said Honda, as if to himself. “All my work is done now, since I gave up my Sunday to it.”
“How nice to have finished,” said Rié, filling his cup. A simple harmony coordinated the movements of their hands, his holding out the cup, hers the bottle from which she was pouring. An invisible cord seemed to link them, tugged back and forth almost playfully in accordance with the spontaneous rhythm of life. Rié was not a woman to disturb such rhythms. Honda could be certain of that, just as he could tell from the rich scent of the blossoms that the magnolia in his garden was in bloom that night.
Thus everything that Honda wanted was tranquilly arranged within his view and within easy reach. This was the domain established in less than twenty years by the young man of promise. Then he had had almost nothing over which his fingers might close with a sense of possession, but because the lack had stirred no anxious irritation in him, all these things had now come securely into his grasp.
After sipping his saké, he took up a steaming bowl of rice in which scattered green peas gleamed brightly. Just then he heard the jingle of a newspaper-boy’s bell announcing an extra. He had the maid run out to buy a copy.
The paper, whose ragged cut edges and barely dry ink showed the haste in which it had been put out, conveyed the first news of the May Fifteenth Incident, the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai by Navy officers.
Honda sighed. “As if it weren’t enough to have had the Blood Oath Alliance.” Honda felt that he was above the usual run of indignant men who arose, their faces dark with passion, to condemn the corruption of the times. He was persuaded that his own world was one of reason and clarity. Now that he was a little intoxicated, its clarity seemed to shine with even greater brilliance.
“You’ll be very busy again, won’t you?” said Rié.
Honda felt a surge of affectionate condescension on hearing the daughter of a judge betray such ignorance.
“No, no. This will be a matter for a military court.”
The affair by its very nature was outside civilian jurisdiction.
3
FOR SOME DAYS
, of course, the May Fifteenth Incident was the sole topic of conversation in the judges’ chambers at the Courthouse. But by the beginning of June there was such a crush of cases pending that all the judges were too busy to concern themselves any longer with the affair. They were already well aware of the facts left out of the newspaper accounts and had exchanged every scrap of information among themselves. Everyone knew that the Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals, Judge Sugawa, a kendo enthusiast, was very much in sympathy with the defendants, but no one was rash enough to allude to this.
Incidents of this sort, arising one after another, were like waves rolling in from a night sea to break upon the beach. First a small crest like a wavering line of white out upon the deep. Then as the wave came rushing in, it swelled enormously, only to crash down upon the sand and melt back into the depths. Honda remembered the sea at Kamakura on that night nineteen years before, when he and Kiyoaki and the two princes of Siam had lain upon the beach and gazed out at the waves as they rolled in and receded.
As for waves such as the May Fifteenth Incident, Honda thought, the beach was innocent. It was only obliged to force them back into the deep with inexhaustible patience, preventing them from rolling over the land. To force them back each time into the abyss of evil from which they had arisen, back into the primeval realm of remorse and death.
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