Runaway Horses (31 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

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“Miss Makiko! What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing? All of you came here at six, didn’t you, to recite your vows?”
“How did you know that?”
“Don’t be stupid!” Makiko’s teeth gleamed as she laughed. “Didn’t you yourself say so?”
Thus challenged, Isao had to conclude that a few days ago, concerned as he was with the ever-present worry of not having a place to meet, he had probably happened to let slip the time and place of the vows in her presence. He had always been willing to confide anything to Makiko, but he felt ashamed at the thought of revealing something important and then forgetting about it, with her of all people. Perhaps he lacked some quality essential in one who was to lead men and bring about events. In his carelessness in so grave a matter, Isao could not fail to detect a certain unmanly dependence upon her. Though quite different before his comrades, in Makiko’s presence he felt a subtle desire to seem a heedless young man.
“Well . . . it’s just that you took me by surprise. But why have you come?”
“I thought that, after gathering a large group of students together, you might be hard put for a place to bring them. First of all I imagine you are quite hungry, aren’t you?”
Isao scratched his head with a fresh, boyish candor.
“We’d be happy to offer all of you dinner at our house, but since it’s a long way from here, Father suggested that I treat you to a sukiyaki dinner in Shibuya, and he gave me the money for it. He was invited to a poetry composition party tonight, and so I’m here in his place to offer you gentlemen our hospitality. Don’t worry, I can take care of the bill.”
Then Makiko, as though drawing up a fresh-caught fish, held up a large Panama handbag with a quick motion of her white hand. Despite the fragile grace of the slender wrist that appeared from the sleeve, however, it was a hand that seemed to convey something of the fatigue of late summer.
19
 
 A
BOUT THIS SAME TIME
, Honda was attending a performance of
Matsukazé
at the Osaka Nō Theater in Tennoji-Dogashiba at the invitation of a colleague fond of performing Nō chants himself. It was a production featuring Kanesuké Noguchi from Tokyo as
shité
with Yazo Tamura assisting him as
waki.
The theater stood upon the eastern slope of Uemachi Hill between Tennoji and Osaka Castle. This had been a section of fine villas at the beginning of the Taisho period and was still a secluded area containing high-walled mansions. One of these functioned as a Nō theater under the auspices of the Sumitomo family.
Most of the guests were merchant princes, and Honda recognized many of them. As for the famous actor, the harsh-voiced Noguchi, Honda’s colleague had warned him beforehand that, although his intonation might sound like a goose being strangled, Honda was not by any means to laugh. And he predicted that, ignorant of Nō though Honda was, once the play was underway he would suddenly find himself emotionally aroused.
Honda had reached the age at which advice of this sort did not provoke any childish antipathy. Although the reason that had been his foundation had begun to crumble when he met Isao Iinuma at the beginning of the summer, his usual habits of thought had not changed. Once again he found himself believing that, just as he had never contracted venereal disease, neither had he ever experienced emotional arousal.
As soon as the exchange was finished between the
waki
as a priest and the clown, the
shité
and his companion made their entrance along the passageway at the left rear. Honda’s colleague explained to him that the serene and tranquil accompaniment now being played was ordinarily limited to that entrance scene in god plays.
Matsukazé
contained the sole exception to this rule. Such was the high regard, it seemed, in which this music was held as expressing the full force of the occult.
Matsukazé and Murasamé, both clad in white robes revealing scarlet underskirts spilling out beneath, faced each other on the entrance bridgeway, and then began to chant in unison as quietly as the rain falling and sinking into a sandy beach: “Drawing our brine cart along, how briefly we live in this sad world, how fleetingly!”
Though Honda was distracted by the reflection of the pointed pines falling on the highly polished cypress floor of the stage, gleaming too brilliantly beneath the rather harsh lighting of this Nō theater, the final “how fleetingly!” rang clear in his ear, as the lighter and brighter tones of the companion entangled the deeper and more melancholy voice, ever on the verge of breaking, of Kanesuké Noguchi.
Since there was, of course, nothing to interfere with listening, the words were easily recalled.
“Drawing our brine cart along, how briefly we live in this sad world, how fleetingly!”
No matter how lean, how slender of body, the graceful figure of the verse took on significant form in Honda’s mind. At that moment he shuddered without knowing why.
Then the companion began to chant the second verse: “The waves beat close to us, here at the Bay of Suma. Even the moon moves us to tears that wet our sleeves.”
After the two had joined together to chant the concluding words, the
shité
, as Matsukazé, began a vigorous soliloquy: “The autumn wind saddens the heart. A little away from the sea . . .”
Although Kanesuké Noguchi wore the mask of a beautiful young woman, his voice had nothing that would recall a woman’s charm. It was a voice that made one think of the rasping together of rusty, discolored metal. Furthermore, his recitation was broken by interruptions, and his style of chanting seemed to be tearing the beauty of the words to shreds. But despite all this, the mood inspired was like the outpouring of a dark and ineffably elegant mist, like the sight of a moonbeam shining into a corner of a ruined palace to fall upon a mother-of-pearl furnishing. Because the light passed through a worn and ravaged bamboo blind, the elegance of the shattered fragments shone all the more.
Gradually, then, his harsh voice became far from irritating. Rather, one had the feeling that only through this harsh voice could one for the first time become aware of the briny sadness of Matsukazé and the melancholy love that afflicts those in the realm of the dead.
Honda at some point began to find it hard to tell whether the images that shifted to and fro before him were reality or illusion. On the gleaming cypress surface of the stage, like the mirroring sea at the shoreline, was reflected the glittering embroidery of the white robes and scarlet underskirts of two beautiful women.
Mingling with the words of the soliloquy, the first line still held stubborn sway in Honda’s heart: “Drawing our brine cart along, how briefly we live in this sad world, how fleetingly!”
What came to his mind was not the meaning of this line but the significance of the unaccountable shudder that he had felt when the
shité
and his companion had stood together on the bridgeway and recited it, the moment of recitation imbued with perfect stillness, the chant falling like quiet rain.
And what was that significance? Just then beauty itself had begun to walk before him. Like the beach plover, strong in flight but unsteady on the ground, the white
tabi
-shod feet moved on tiptoe as though come for a few brief moments to make their way through the world known to man.
This beauty, however, would occur but once. A man could do nothing but commit it to memory immediately and reflect upon it thereafter. Then too it was a beauty that preserved a noble futility, a purposelessness.
Keeping pace with Honda’s thoughts, the Nō drama of
Matsukazé
flowed on, a small stream of never-failing emotion.
“Dwelling in this world we find thus so wretched, even while envying the carefree moon clear above us, come let us ladle out the tidewater she summons.”
That which chanted and moved about on the stage bathed in moonlight was now no longer the ghosts of two beautiful women but something beyond description. One might call it the essence of time, the pith of emotion, the dream that stubbornly obtrudes upon reality. It had no purpose, no meaning. From moment to moment it fashioned a beauty not of this world. For here what hope is there that one moment of beauty will follow at once upon another?
Thus did Honda gradually become drawn into a mood of somber detachment. His thoughts had now become clearly focused. Kiyoaki’s existence, his life, its consequences—Honda realized that it was a long time indeed since he had concentrated so intently on all this. It was easy to think of Kiyoaki’s life as a breath of fragrance that had wafted faintly over a single era before vanishing. Even so, Kiyoaki’s sin, Kiyoaki’s heartbreak remained. And Honda himself would never be able to make reparation.
Honda recalled a morning of melting snow on the campus of the Peers School before classes began. He and Kiyoaki, sitting in an arbor encircled by flowerbeds and listening to the fresh sound of trickling water, were deeply involved in a long conversation, something rare with them.
That was early spring in the second year of Taisho, 1913. Kiyoaki and Honda were both nineteen. Since then nineteen years had passed. Honda remembered insisting that like it or not, a hundred years later he and Kiyoaki would be included in the thought of the era, lumped together with those they had the least regard for, classified with them on the basis of a few meager similarities. He remembered also that he had talked of the irony of the human will’s relationship to history, vehemently maintaining that every strong-willed person was in the last analysis frustrated and that there was only one way to participate in history: “To function as a shining, forever unchanging, beautiful nonwilling particle.”
His terms had been entirely abstract; yet as he had been speaking on that morning of melting snow, his eyes had been resting upon the shining, beautiful features of Kiyoaki. Obviously, with Kiyoaki before him, a youth so lacking in will, so single-mindedly devoted to the vagaries of emotion, Honda’s words had of their own accord fashioned a portrait of Kiyoaki himself: “To function as a shining, forever unchanging, beautiful nonwilling particle”—a clear definition of Kiyoaki’s manner of living.
When a hundred years had passed since that morning, the perspective would, no doubt, once more be altered. Nineteen years before was too recent a time for generalizations and too distant for minute assessment. Kiyoaki’s image was not yet confused with the rough, wholly insensitive image of boys of the kendo team pursuing their cult of toughness. Nevertheless, Kiyoaki’s particular kind of “heroic figure,” as a forerunner of that brief and fleeting period at the beginning of the Taisho era when a wholehearted surrender to the emotions enjoyed favor, had already, viewed from across the years, lost much of its vividness. The earnest passion of that time, except for its fond persistence in a man’s memory, had now become something to provoke laughter.
Each passing year, never failing to exact its toll, keeps altering what was sublime into the stuff of comedy. Is something eaten away? If the exterior is eaten away, is it true, then, that the sublime pertains by nature only to an exterior that conceals a core of nonsense? Or does the sublime indeed pertain to the whole, but a ludicrous dust settles upon it?
When Honda reflected upon his own character, he had no choice but to conclude that he was a man possessed of a will. At the same time, however, he could not avoid misgivings as to the ability of that will to change anything or to accomplish anything even in contemporary society, let alone in the course of future history. Often his courtroom decisions had determined whether a man lived or died. Such a verdict might have seemed of extreme significance at the time, but as the years passed—since all men were fated to die—it turned out that he had merely hastened a man’s fate; and that the deaths had been neatly consigned to one corner of history, where they soon disappeared. And as for the disturbing conditions of the present world, though his will had had nothing to do with bringing these about, he as a judge was ever at their beck and call. How much the choices made by his will proceeded from pure reason and how much, without his realizing it, they were coerced by the prevailing thought of the period was a question he was unable to decide.
Then again, when Honda looked at the world around him, no matter how searchingly, nowhere did he see any effect traceable to a youth called Kiyoaki—to his violent emotion, to his death, to his life of beauty. Nowhere was there evidence that anything had come about as a result of his death, that anything had changed because of it. It seemed to have been smoothly expunged from history.

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