Runaway Horses (34 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
One of his best-known comments, quoted by a newspaper, displayed a heedlessness that seemed carefully contrived: “Naturally, having a large number of unemployed is unpleasant. However to equate this immediately with an unsound economy is fallacious. Common sense tells us that the contrary is true. The welfare of Japan is not bound up with there being good cheer in everybody’s kitchen.” Such words stirred anger and resentment and were never forgotten.
The evil of Kurahara was that of an intellect that had no ties with blood nor with native soil. In any case, though Isao knew nothing of Kurahara the man, Kurahara’s evil was vividly clear to him.
There were the bureaucrats of the Foreign Ministry, anxious to please England and America, oozing charm, only able to play the coquette. The financiers, giving off the stink of profit and greed, sniffing along the ground for their dinner like giant anteaters. The politicians self-transformed into lumps of corruption. The military cliques, so armored with the cult of careerism that they were like immobilized beetles. The scholars, bespectacled, sodden white grubs. The speculators eager to exploit Manchuria, their beloved bastard child. And the sky itself reflected a panorama of poverty, like sunrise colors spread wide over the land. Kurahara was a cold, black silk top hat placed in the midst of this piteous landscape. Without saying so, Kurahara looked forward to many deaths, he welcomed them.
The sorrowful sun, the sun glittering with a chill whiteness, could give no touch of warmth, yet rose up sadly every morning to begin its course. This was indeed the figure of His Majesty. Who would not long to look up again to behold the joyful countenance of the sun?
If this Kurahara . . .
Isao opened the window. He spat. If the food he had eaten at breakfast, if his lunch, too, had come through Kurahara’s bounty, then, in his ignorance, he had already corrupted his innards and his flesh with poison.
Suppose he confronted his father and questioned him severely. But would his father tell him the truth? Rather than hear skillful evasions, he preferred to keep silent and pretend to know nothing.
If only he did know nothing, if only he could have gone on without learning of this, thought Isao, stamping his feet and cursing himself for having heard it. He also felt resentment toward Sawa for having sprinkled the poison into his ears. And however much Isao feigned ignorance, Sawa might sometime tell the father what he had revealed to the son. Then, too, he would become a son who knowingly betrays his own father. He would be a traitor who kills the benefactor of his family. The purity of his conduct would be subject to question. An act conceived as bold and pure seemed in danger of becoming most impure.
How was Isao to guard his purity? Do nothing at all? Remove Kurahara’s name from the list of those to be assassinated? No. If he did that, would not the cost of his being an unhappy but dutiful son be to overlook something that threatened the entire nation? Would it not be the betrayal of His Sacred Majesty as well as the betrayal of his own sincerity?
When Isao reflected, he saw that his not knowing Kurahara well was a circumstance that augmented the justice of his action. The evil of Kurahara should be kept as distant and abstract as possible. Only when the murderer could put aside not only all thought of favors granted or personal enmity but even the most elementary human considerations of liking or disliking did his act have a foundation in justice. Thus Isao’s distant awareness of the evil of Kurahara was quite enough.
Killing a hateful man was an easy matter. Cutting down a despicable person was a pleasure. But Isao had no desire to seize upon an enemy’s lack of humanity in order to steel himself to the act of killing. The massive evil of Kurahara as fixed in Isao’s mind had nothing to do with such petty and inconsequential evils as buying off the Academy of Patriotism as a safeguard against assassination. The young men of the League of the Divine Wind had not killed the Kumamoto garrison commander for any incidental human failings.
Isao groaned with pain. How easily such a beautiful act could be destroyed! The possibility of his carrying out this beautiful act had arbitrarily been torn from him. All because of a few words!
The sole possibility left to him, if he were to act, was to become evil himself. But Isao was committed to justice.
A wooden kendo stave was leaning against the wall in one corner of the room. He seized it and rushed out to the back yard. Sawa was nowhere to be seen. Advancing step by step over the bare, flat ground next to the well, Isao made one stroke after another with furious abandon. The scolding whine of the wooden sword cutting through the air chafed his ears. He tried to make his mind a blank. He raised the sword high above his head, then brought it down. Like a man who hastily gulps saké to make himself drunk, he wanted this burning, oppressive exertion to race through his body. Though his breath was a searing flame, now trapped, now released from his heaving chest, the sweat that should have covered him would not come. All was in vain. He thought of an old poem that a senior kendoist had taught him:
To try to avoid thoughtIs of itself to think.Thus even “Think not!”Is not to be thought.
And then another:
Since rising and settingAre one to the unthinking moon,No mountain ridgeCan vex its heart with shadow.
But these brought no relief. The lovely sky of early evening shone through the worm-eaten leaves of a chestnut tree. Sawa’s laundry seemed to be growing lighter by degrees, as though whiteness were seeping through it.
Still carrying the stave, Isao went to Sawa’s room a second time and knocked on the door.
“What is it?” asked Sawa, opening his door. “Are you hungry? Tonight we could send out for something to eat. What do you say?”
Isao thrust his face abruptly against Sawa’s.
“Was what you said before true?” he demanded. “Is Kurahara somehow connected with the Academy?”
“Don’t threaten me, bringing a bamboo sword like that with you! Anyway, come in.”
In the course of his energetic sword drill, Isao had come to the conclusion that no matter how passionate he might grow in cross-examining Sawa, he need have no fear that he would give away his true state of mind. For it was only natural that an innocent young man would become thoroughly indignant upon learning that Kurahara had aided the Academy.
Sawa was silent.
“Tell me the truth,” said Isao. He had placed the sword at his left side and sat down in a stiffly formal position.
“And if I tell the truth, what do you intend to do?”
“I don’t intend to do anything.”
“Nothing, eh? Then this business needn’t bother you.”
“It bothers me. You suppose it makes me happy to hear someone say that my own father is in league with the scum of the earth?”
“But if he isn’t, are you going to give it to that fellow?”
“It’s not a matter of giving it or not giving it to anybody,” answered Isao, attempting a touch of sophistry. “What I want to do is to preserve the images I have of my father and of Kurahara. Of Kurahara as the perfect villain.”
“Will that make you perfect too?”
“Perfection is no concern of mine.”
“If it isn’t, why do you let things bother you so?”
Isao was finding himself outmatched.
“Mr. Sawa, only cowards beat around the bush. I want to get at the truth. I want to confront it as it is.”
“Why? Could the truth shake that strong faith of yours? Have you been following some kind of mirage all this time? If your dedication is so weak, then you’re well rid of it. I just thought I’d put a little doubt into your world of faith. If that makes the whole thing start to shake, there’s something missing in your dedication. Where is that indomitable conviction that a man should have? Do you really have it? If you do, speak up right here and now.”
Isao once more found himself at a loss for words.
Sawa no longer seemed to be the man who read nothing but
Kodan Club.
He was attacking Isao; he was twisting his arm to make him spew up the burning lump lodged in his throat. Isao felt the blood rush to his cheeks, but, with an effort, he suppressed his emotion as he replied: “I’m going to stay here until Mr. Sawa tells me the truth.”
Kodan Club.
He was attacking Isao; he was twisting his arm to make him spew up the burning lump lodged in his throat. Isao felt the blood rush to his cheeks, but, with an effort, he suppressed his emotion as he replied: “I’m going to stay here until Mr. Sawa tells me the truth.”
“I see.” Sawa remained silent for a time, as the small room was darkening in the twilight. A stout, forty-year-old man, he sat cross-legged in a baggy-kneed pair of the headmaster’s old flannel pants. His head drooped forward so that the flesh of his shoulders swelled beneath his khaki shirt as though he were wearing a quiver across his back. The keen aggressiveness seemed suddenly blunted. Isao could not tell whether he was pondering or drowsing.
Sawa stood up abruptly. He opened a drawer and searched through it. Then he returned to sit upright across from Isao once more, and placed on the floor before him a dagger in a plain wooden sheath. He drew it out. A pale, sharp-edged crevice split the darkness of the room.
“I said what I said because I wanted to talk you out of it. You’re the heir of the Academy of Patriotism, and so your life’s too important. The master loves you very much.
“But as for myself, it doesn’t make any difference. I have a wife and children, but I’d have no regrets on that account. And on their side too, they’ve already given me up. So I feel apologetic for going on living, when I could have died at any time. In my case I wouldn’t have to involve the master, I could just hand in my withdrawal notice and be free to stab Kurahara. I could stab him, all on my own. Anyway, I know one thing: that fellow’s the very source of the evil. Even if worst comes to worst, as long as he gets it, all those politicians and industrialists that are doing his dirty work will be choked off. No matter what, he’s one man that has to die. This is the conclusion I came to a while ago. So, please, since someone is going to get the job of cutting him down, let it be me. Let it be this short sword that does it. Please turn this Kurahara over to me. And then, once he’s dead at my hand, if Japan still doesn’t improve, that’s the time for you young men to gather together and do whatever you have to.
“But if you think you’ve got to kill Kurahara yourselves, then let me be one of your comrades. I know I can help you. I’m the only one who can do the killing without any harm to the Academy. Please take me. Look, I bow down and beg you. Please tell me your mind.”
Sawa’s sobbing plea rang in Isao’s ears as he watched him wipe his eyes with the sleeve of his khaki shirt. Isao had now lost all chance of further pressing Sawa about Kurahara and his father. Sawa’s words and his whole manner seemed to imply the existence of a relationship between the two men, and yet, depending upon how one interpreted them, Kurahara may well have been no more than a means used by Sawa to set the stage for his fervent plea. In any case, the one who was now hard-pressed was Isao.
He had no idea what to do, but at least there was no longer any danger of his losing control of himself. Now Isao was the one who stood in judgment. While he gazed down at the rather thin hair on the top of the weeping Sawa’s bowed head, he had time to make a carefully formulated decision.
In those few moments, profit and loss, benefit and harm, like the sharp-pointed pales of a bamboo palisade jabbing the sky, stood lashed together. Isao could make Sawa one of his comrades or he could refuse. He could open his mind to Sawa or he could shut him out and persist in the course he had set for himself. He could hold fast to beauty and purity or he could let them go.
Were he to make Sawa one of his comrades, he would open his mind to him. And in return he could ask him the truth about Kurahara. From that moment Isao’s intended Restoration could hardly remain the unblemished ideal it had been, but Sawa’s rash thrust toward action could be thereby checked, the consequent danger avoided, and Sawa’s energies channeled into the blow that Isao intended to strike.
If he did not make Sawa one of his comrades, there would be no need to open his mind to him, and, as a consequence, no need for Sawa to divulge what could be an ugly truth. But if Sawa rushed headlong to assassinate Kurahara, other enemies would be put on their guard, and the Restoration itself might suffer a setback.
Isao came to a cruel decision. In order to guard the beauty, the purity, the justice of his own conduct, it was best to let Sawa cut down Kurahara, but without a word of approval. Never would he give the least indication that he was delegating this task to Sawa. For if he were to do this, Isao would be one who used impure means to guard his purity. Everything had to come about naturally. Perhaps, by the time he had reached this decision, Isao had unconsciously begun to hate Sawa.
He let the smile of an adult form upon his lips. He was now the leader.
“Mr. Sawa, we’ve talked enough,” Isao said. “I got excited a while ago over something trifling, and perhaps I gave you the wrong impression. You talk about my ‘comrades’! My friends and I have no plot in mind. We meet to study the history of the Meiji period, and there are some great talkers among us, that’s all. Since we’re young men, it’s only natural, isn’t it? You’ve misinterpreted all this, Mr. Sawa. But now you’ll really have to excuse me. A friend has invited me over to dinner tonight, and I have to be going. So please don’t trouble yourself about getting anything to eat for me.” He dreaded the strain of having dinner alone with Sawa. Isao got to his feet, leaving the naked dagger gleaming upon the floor like a rivulet in the darkness. Sawa made no move to stop him.
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