Runaway Horses (35 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
Isao had decided to go to Izutsu’s house. Suddenly he found himself concerned about whether or not Izutsu had been taking proper care of the lily that Makiko had given him. But what of his own lily?
So that it would not be thrown out in his absence, Isao had placed his lily in a slim vase which he then put into a bookcase with a glass door. At first he had changed the water every day, but recently, he was ashamed to recall, he had become careless and forgotten to do so. He opened the glass door of the bookcase, removed the books he had put in front of the vase, and peered in. The lily drooped in the darkness.
When he took it out to hold it under the light, he saw that the lily had been reduced to the mummy of a lily. Were he to touch his finger to the brownish petals even a little ungently, they would surely crumple to dust at once and drop from the stem, which still kept a slight tinge of green. It could no longer be called a lily, but the memory, the shadow of a lily. It was like an abandoned cocoon after the immortal, lustrous lily itself had gone its way. Nevertheless, there was a hint of fragrance which told that it had once been a living flower. The rays of the summer sun had once poured over it, and now, like a dying ember, it still held a faint warmth.
Isao gently touched his lips to the petals. If he were to feel their texture clearly, he would have gone too far. The lily would crumble. His touch had to be like that of the dawn upon a mountain ridge.
Isao’s young lips had yet touched no other lips, and he brushed them delicately against the petals of this withered lily with all the exquisite sensitivity that they possessed.
“Here is the source of my purity, the warrant for my purity,” he told himself. “I am certain that it is here. When the time comes for me to turn my sword against myself, lilies will surely rise from the morning dew and open their petals to the rising sun. Their scent will purify the stench of my blood. So be it! How can I have any more doubts?”
22
THE
C
URRENT
A
FFAIRS
C
LUB
met once a month at the Courthouse, and it was here that Honda learned something about the revolution in Siam of the previous June which brought a constitution to that country. Since the club had been formed at the suggestion of the Chief Justice, a sense of obligation insured a large turnout at the beginning, but gradually more and more of its members, busy with their work, failed to make an appearance. At this meeting in the small auditorium an outside lecturer had been brought in, and his talk was followed by informal discussion.
Even though Honda had never communicated with the Princes Pattanadid and Kridsada after their return to their homeland, the memory of former friendship made him extremely interested in the lecture, for once, and he listened attentively to the speaker, the head of the foreign branch of a large corporation who had happened to find himself in Siam at the time of the revolt.
The revolution began and ended quietly on the bright morning of June twenty-fourth without the citizens of Bangkok being aware of it. Launches and sampans thronged the Mae Nam River as usual and the shouts of hagglers filled the marketplace. In the government buildings, affairs crept on at the usual torpid pace.
Only those citizens who went by the palace and noted how its appearance had altered during the night were aware that something was amiss. Tanks and machine guns commanded every approach, and soldiers with fixed bayonets halted any car that drew near. The lofty windows of the upper stories of the palace bristled with machine-gun barrels glittering in the sunlight.
The King, Rama VII, was at the seaside resort of Pa-In together with the Queen. The country was an absolute monarchy, but the actual ruler was the regent, the King’s uncle. The regent’s residence had been attacked at dawn by a single armored car, and the pajama-clad Prince meekly allowed himself to be brought to the palace in it. One policeman was wounded in this incident, the only blood shed in the revolution.
Besides the Prince himself, the members of the royal family and the officials who constituted the main support of the monarchy were brought to the palace one after another, where they were gathered together to hear Colonel Pahon Ponpayuhasena, the leader of the coup d’état, explain the ideology of the new government. The National Party had seized power, and a temporary government had been set up.
This information was conveyed to the King himself, and after he had sent a wireless dispatch the following morning indicating that he favored a constitutional monarchy, he returned to the capital by special train to be greeted by the cheers of the crowd.
On June twenty-sixth Rama VII issued a proclamation approving the new government, immediately after receiving in audience the two young leaders of the National Party, Luang Pradit, a civilian, and Pya Pahon Ponpayuhasena, a colonel who was the representative of the young officers. The King showed himself altogether disposed in favor of the constitutional draft they presented to him, and at six o’clock that evening he bestowed the royal seal upon it. Siam had become a constitutional monarchy in both name and reality.
Honda had been anxious to hear something of Prince Pattanadid and Prince Kridsada. But since the only blood shed was that of the wounded policeman, he felt sure that no harm had come to either of them.
Though they gave no outward sign of it, those who listened to this account, aware as they were of the deplorable state of Japan, could not help but make comparisons and wonder why attempts at political reform in their own country had to be abortive affairs such as the May Fifteenth Incident, marked by senseless bloodletting and never proceeding temperately to a successful conclusion.
Soon after this lecture, Honda was ordered to attend a judicial conference in Tokyo. It was not an especially demanding assignment, and indeed one of the Chief Justice’s intentions in sending him was to bestow some reward for his long service. He was to leave on the evening of October twentieth, the night before the conference. The day after it, the twenty-second, was a Saturday, and there was no need for him to return to Osaka until Monday. His mother would no doubt be happy to have her long-absent son spend a weekend in Tokyo.
It was early in the morning when Honda stepped down upon the platform in Tokyo Station. Since there was not enough time for him to go to his mother’s house to freshen up after his trip, he decided to take a hot bath at the Shoji Inn within the station as soon as he had paid his respects to the delegation that came to meet him. Perhaps it was the early hour, but the Tokyo atmosphere, which he had not breathed for so long, now seemed to have something unfamiliar about it.
The crush of people moving between the platforms of the station and the lobby was just as before. Women in oddly long skirts caught Honda’s eye from time to time, but this was already being seen in Osaka. He could not put his finger upon the exact difference. But something like an unseen gas seemed to have enveloped everything without anyone having noticed. People’s eyes were moist. They walked as though in a dream. It seemed as if everyone was waiting anxiously for some impending event. The underpaid white-collar workers with their briefcases, the men in formal Japanese dress, the women in Western clothes, the girls at the cigar stands, the shoe-shine boys, the station personnel in their uniform caps—the mood of all alike made them seem bound together in a secret communication. And what was this mood?
When society was waiting fearfully for some event to occur, when the time had become fully ripe and the circumstances such that nothing could possibly prevent its occurrence, did not an expression of this sort appear on every man’s face?
It was something not yet to be seen in Osaka. Honda felt as though he were listening to the spasmodic laughter of a frightened, goose-fleshed Tokyo, a city confronted with a huge, bizarre phantom which as yet revealed but half its bulk. Honda could not suppress a shudder.
His work done, Honda spent most of Saturday relaxing at his mother’s house, and that evening it suddenly occurred to him to telephone the Academy of Patriotism. It was Iinuma who answered. His voice rang with exaggerated nostalgia.
“What a surprise to find you here in Tokyo! I am honored that you should take the trouble to call. And you’ve already shown me such hospitality at your home, even including that boy of mine—I was quite overwhelmed.”
“How is Isao?”
“He left Tokyo the day before yesterday. He’s at a place called Yanagawa. Kaido Masugi is conducting a training camp there on the rites of purification. In fact, I myself must pay a visit to Yanagawa tomorrow, Sunday, to thank Master Kaido for taking care of my son. If Your Honor has sufficient leisure, what would you say to accompanying me? I’m sure that the trees in the mountains will be in full color.”
Honda hesitated. His past tie with Iinuma was reason enough for a visit to his home, but he was afraid that if he, as a judge, were deliberately to attend a right-wing training camp, even if he refrained from taking part in the purification rites themselves, it might give rise to untoward rumors.
And then too, either the next night or early the morning after, he would have to catch a train for Osaka. Honda refused, but Iinuma grew insistent. Perhaps it seemed his only way to show hospitality. Finally Honda agreed to go along on condition that he remain incognito. Since Honda wanted to sleep late, at least during his stay in Tokyo, they arranged to meet at Shinjuku Station at eleven o’clock the next morning. Iinuma told him that it would take two hours by the Chuo Line to get to Shiozu and from there they would have to proceed on foot along the Katsura River for about two and a half miles.
Yanagawa was in the district of Minamitsuru in what was once Kai Province. In a section of it called Motozawa, the Katsura River formed a right angle and turned into rapids, and here it was that Kaido Masugi owned some six acres of rice land which projected out into the river like the apron of a stage. Facing the rice land was a drill hall which also served as a dormitory for a considerable number of students. And there was a shrine. To the west of the drill hall stood a hut at a point where a suspension bridge crossed the river, and from here steps led down to the place of purification. The students of his academy cultivated the rice fields.
Kaido Masugi’s aversion to Buddhism was celebrated. Since he was an admirer of Atsutané, this was only to be expected, and it was his practice to make Atsutané’s diatribes against Buddha and Buddhism his own and to deliver them unchanged to his students. He condemned Buddhism for denying life and, as a consequence, denying that one could die for the Emperor, for knowing nothing of the “abundant life of the spirit” and, as a consequence, shutting itself off from the essential, life-giving source that was the object of true devotion. And as for Karma, that was a philosophy of evil that reduced everything to nihilism.
“Siddhartha was the name of the founder of Buddhism, a very foolish man who buried himself in the mountains and gave himself over to all manner of austerities, without succeeding in discovering a way to escape the Three Calamities, age, sickness, and death. . . . But he had the perverse inspiration to stay on in the mountains for many years longer, during which time he became adept at sorcery. And with this occult lore to bolster him, he became the so-called Buddha . . . and he concocted the theory that Buddha is a being to whom all reverence is due. So this founder of Buddhism, by virtue of his blasphemous fallacy, opened to men a path to destruction and turned himself into a devil racked with the Three Torments. . . . Even before the coming of Buddhism, the advent of the so-called Confucianism had already made men’s hearts cunning and corrupt. And then with the extravagant fable of retribution that Buddhism brought with it, all traces of manliness were wiped away, and it was not long before high and low alike became enslaved to false doctrine. Moreover, as this belief grew more flourishing, men naturally drew away from that vital source that was theirs from olden times, the oracles of our ancestral gods, and they began to neglect the ancient rites. And even these rites became corrupted by Buddhist influences. . . .”
Such were the Atsutané sermons that Master Kaido poured into the ears of his students with a never-flagging zeal, and so Iinuma instructed Honda during the journey not to let slip any casual remark that was at all favorable to Buddhism.
Kaido Masugi turned out to be a different sort of person from the imposing elder with the long white beard that Honda had pictured from the bits of information that had come his way. He was an amiable little old man with several teeth missing, but his eyes were the eyes of a lion, and the impression he made upon Honda was a strong one.
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