Runaway Horses (16 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: Runaway Horses
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The three men went into a room at the back of the house while the family waited in the kitchen. Kobayashi called out: “Let no one enter here. Draw some water and put it on the veranda.” Then the three took up a tatami mat in the center of the room and laid it over another. Onimaru sat down facing the east upon the double mat and unfastened his kimono.
Those in the kitchen heard Kobayashi call out again: “Noguchi has performed the service of severing Onimaru’s head.” At length no further sound came from the room.
When the members of the family entered, they found the three facing the east, Onimaru in the middle, the act of ritual disembowelment carried out to perfection.
Onimaru was forty years of age. Kobayashi was twenty-seven. Noguchi was twenty-three.
Ikiko Abé was the wife of Kageki Abé. The eldest daughter of Kishinta Torii, she was born in Kumamoto in 1851, the Fourth Year of the Kaei era. Her elder brother Naoki studied the Japanese classics under the tutelage of Master Oen, learned military tactics from Teizo Miyabé, and so became an ardent patriot with the slogan “Honor the Emperor and expel the barbarians” ever on his lips.
Ikiko grew up hearing the opinions of her brother and his comrades, which made a deep impression upon her. The family was poor, and she worked hard to aid her mother.
When she was sixteen, a certain wealthy man desired her as his bride, but since Ikiko had resolved to marry only a militant patriot, she was not at all inclined to assent. Her brother and her mother were of like mind. However, the village headman was the matchmaker, and moreover the family was in the rich man’s debt. Thus there was no avoiding the marriage.
Ikiko asked her mother, “Well, then, if I marry this man, will that fulfill all obligations?” Her mother replied that it would. The wedding took place. That night Ikiko sat upright and did not allow her husband to approach her, and when dawn came, she fled to her mother’s house. Bowing low before her mother she said: “I have gone through with the marriage. Is anything else required of me?” That very day her husband divorced her.
She reached the age of eighteen. In 1868, the First Year of the Meiji era, her brother, Naoki, was appointed to serve at the Imperial Court.
It happened at this time that Kageki Abé, together with his comrade, Morikuni Tominaga, went to do worship at Hommyo Temple, sacred to the memory of Lord Kiyomasa. As they were approaching the black gate, they encountered a nubile young beauty. Perceiving that she was the sister of their comrade Naoki Torii, they bowed courteously. After they had walked on for a bit, Tominaga abruptly asked: “What would you say to marrying that girl?” Abé replied that he would have no objections. With Tominaga as go-between, the marriage soon took place. Abé at that time was twenty-nine. Ikiko’s hopes had been fulfilled. She had become the wife of a patriot. But no child was born of the marriage.
Ikiko became twenty. A comrade in Kurumé named Kii Kagamiyama escaped from prison and was given shelter by Abé. Then after Kagamiyama had left, Abé himself was taken into custody, examined severely, and thrown into prison.
As long as her husband was imprisoned, Ikiko would eat no food in the morning, she prayed constantly to the gods that this unjust punishment be lifted from her husband, and at night she did without a mosquito net, though it was the height of summer, and slept upon bare boards so that her husband’s sufferings would be ever in her mind.
After he had been freed, Abé was taking a stroll through the town when in one shop he came across a fine belly band. But the price was so high, as he told his wife, that he gave up all thought of buying it. Ikiko secretly sold a kimono and sash and presented her husband with the amount of money he needed. He thanked her and bought the belly band. And this is what girded his body the night of the rising.
As the rising drew nearer and nearer, the Abé house became a kind of headquarters. Ikiko and her mother-in-law spared no efforts in treating their guests with the utmost hospitality. And when some ten men gathered to prepare to take to the field, the women assisted them in every way, making ready food and drink. Noticing with a shrewd eye that one of the group was somewhat flurried, Ikiko admonished him quietly: “One must go into battle with a tranquil heart.”
On the night itself, when Ikiko and her mother-in-law, Kiyoko, saw from a distance the angry flames flaring up from Kumamoto over the castle, the fires burning at five places in the Kyomachi, Yamazaki, and Motoyama districts, she leapt with joy, crying: “It’s done! It’s done.” She lit vigil lamps before the household shrine and implored the gods for the success of the rising and her husband’s good fortune in battle.
But with the morning, reports of setbacks came in thick and fast, and there were endless rumors of men falling in battle or perishing upon their own swords. With her husband’s whereabouts unknown, Ikiko prayed to the gods yet more fervently for his welfare.
Three days were to intervene before his return. It was just before daybreak on the Twelfth Day of the Ninth Month.
After the disbandment of their force at the beach of Chikozu, Kageki Abé, accompanied by Unshiro Ishihara, left there to spend the following day, the tenth, in hiding in the mountain vastness of Shioya. As soon as it was dark they set out for the shrine of Kitsuki in Abumida and arrived in the middle of the night at the home of Oki Sakamoto, the shrine priest. There they were reunited with Tsunetaro Kobayashi, Onimaru, and Noguchi, and, staying the night of the eleventh, they debated their future course of action. When a response of the gods to a question put by Oki Sakamoto held out hope for a second rising, all took heart, and Abé and Ishihara left Kobayashi and his party and made their way each to his own home.
Ikiko awoke to the sound of a voice calling softly through a chink in the wooden shutters. It was her husband. Her heart leapt as she slid open the shutters. He came in without a word, and then, facing Ikiko and his mother, who had risen and joined them, gave a brief account of the defeat. Ikiko stripped off her husband’s bloodstained kimono and buried it in a bamboo grove behind the house. In the days that followed, Abé spent the daylight hours hiding beneath the floor of his study, a dagger grasped in his hand. When the sun had set he came up into the study. He sent Ikiko secretly to the Ishihara house so that she could consult with Ishihara’s wife, Yasuko.
Ikiko and Yasuko made a frantic search for a boat for the passage to Shimabara Peninsula, but the ban on leaving harbor was stringently enforced, and all hope of an escape by sea vanished.
On the dawn of the fourteenth, Unshiro Ishihara, determined to break through the police cordon that blocked the roads or to die at his own hand, said farewell to his wife and children and left his house.
Abé had invited his uncle, a man named Baba, to his house, and in the dawn hours, the three men, Ishihara, Abé, and Baba, discussed a plan of action. Baba explained that the strict measures taken by the police seemed to make flight impossible. And with that he departed.
Yasuko Ishihara went to the home of her husband’s elder brother, Kimura, to beg for help. She had heard the thump of the boots of a search patrol coming along the road toward her house, and Kimura advised her to hurry to the Abé house to tell them that the time was past for flight.
Yasuko hired a rickshaw but got off just before reaching the Abé house, where she knocked softly at the rear door and asked that Ikiko come out. She explained to Ikiko briefly that a patrol was approaching their house in Ishihara’s absence.
Ikiko made a gesture of striking at her own throat, and Yasuko nodded. Ikiko urged Yasuko to see her husband once more, but Yasuko said she had no wish to become an obstacle on her husband’s path to the other world. Then she left as though fleeing.
Ikiko immediately reported all this to her husband and Ishihara. For their part, from the time they had heard Baba’s intelligence, both leaders had cast away all hope for a second rising and had set their minds upon death.
Reverently the two bowed and offered worship before a scroll depicting the Grand Shrine of Isé. Ikiko placed three earthen cups upon a three-legged stool of plain wood. Urging the men to partake of the final draught of saké, she herself took up one of the cups.
Abé and Ishihara opened their kimonos and took their short swords in hand. As for Ikiko, she quietly drew a small dagger from within her sash.
Her action provoked consternation in Ishihara as well as her husband, and they tried to stop her, but Ikiko would not turn aside from her resolve. She had no children, she told her husband, so why should he prevent her from accompanying him? Since she gave no sign of retreating, Abé did not venture to deny her her will.
At the same moment that the two men cut open their stomachs with a precise thrust of their swords, Ikiko struck her throat with her dagger.
It was the Fourteenth Day of the Ninth Month. The time was shortly past noon. Abé was thirty-seven years of age. Ikiko was twenty-six. Ishihara was thirty-five.
Hardly a moment after their suicides the door of the Abé house shook with a violent knocking. The patrol had come. Abé’s old mother called out in a loud voice: “They have just committed seppuku.” An officer flanked by his troops forced his way into the house and was confronted with the three fresh corpses.
When the force had disbanded at Chikozu, the group of those who embarked in the lone fishing boat and made their way to Konoura in Udo, just south of Kumamoto, numbered six men.
There was the twenty-eight-year-old Juro Furuta, who together with Tsunetaro Kobayashi was one of the most youthful of the leaders. In the struggle within the garrison walls, he broke two swords, took up a third, and kept on fighting. It was he who cut down Lieutenant Colonel Kunihiko Oshima as well as many others, though he himself also sustained a wound.
There was Juro Kagami, forty years of age and a master of the ancient court music.
There was Gitaro Tashiro, twenty-six years of age and a master swordsman. He was the first man upon the palisade of the artillerymen’s camp.
Tashiro’s younger brother Gigoro was twenty-three and had fought valiantly in the combat with the infantrymen.
Teruyoshi Morishita was twenty-four. He struck down Major General Taneda, and then joined the struggle at the infantry garrison and slew another officer, greatly distinguishing himself.
Shigetaka Sakamoto was twenty-one.
The six had placed their hopes in the aid of the priest of Konoura Shrine, their comrade and fellow-disciple of Master Oen, Takeo Kai. He most certainly would have joined in the rising, but word of it had not reached him in this distant place. Kai gave them a cordial welcome.
They passed the night at Kai’s house, taking counsel with one another as to a second rising. Kagami offered a suggestion for procuring funds for traveling and military supplies. He had learned that his former lord, Eijiro Mibuchi, happened to be staying at the Matsui residence in Ueyanagi, and so he entrusted a letter to Kai, asking Mibuchi to provide funds for their journey. Kai set out with the letter at once.
Everyone waited anxiously for Kai to come back. The following day, the Twelfth Day of the Ninth Month, passed without his return.
When Kai arrived at the Matsui residence, not only was Mibuchi no longer there, but Kai himself was recognized by the police on guard as one of those in sympathy with the League, and he was taken into custody.
The six who waited realized that every moment that Kai’s return was delayed heightened their peril. And once a certain limit was reached, they knew they would have to prepare to meet their fate.
Three of them, Gigoro Tashiro, Morishita, and Sakamoto, racked by impatience, climbed to the top of the nearby peak of Omigataké just as the sun was setting. They gazed at distant Kumamoto Castle. Seen thus from afar, the castle tower’s appearance gave no hint of any extraordinary activity within. But when the comrades casually questioned the mountain folk, they were told that by night the castle was ablaze with lights and by day search patrols were dispatched without letup in every direction. When the three came down from the mountain, they urged their three comrades to resign themselves to the inevitable.
They set their minds upon death. As for the place, they chose Omigataké. As for the time, they chose dawn of the following day.
Not long after the first cockcrow, the six climbed to the crest of Omigataké. The previous evening, the Tashiro brothers had selected there a level portion of unspoiled ground and marked it off into a square bordered with sacred rope which they hung with Shinto pendants. Now at dawn these white pendants fluttered in the breeze. Gazing up at the trailing clouds as daylight broke over the mountains, Juro Kagami composed his farewell poem:
I have lived long in this world
By the grace of the gods of Yamato,
And today I at last set foot
On the Floating Bridge of Heaven.
As need hardly be said, his poem was based upon the mystic teaching of Master Oen on the ascent to heaven. Kagami told his comrades that he would very much like to have played for them in this final hour the ancient music in which he had been schooled, and that the lack of an instrument grieved him.
The six stepped within the sacred rope, they partook together of the farewell cup of saké, and Gitaro Tashiro, singled out by the others, agreed to administer the finishing stroke to each of them. Whereupon Kagami, thinking it a pity that Tashiro should undergo the last agony alone, said that he would wait and die with him.

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