Runaway Horses (37 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
Since there was no dog or cat to be seen, Isao decided to follow the path between the bamboo thicket and the mulberry field up the mountain. The interior of the thicket was a tangle of red-berried creeper vines and ivy. A moss-grown heap of mulberry roots, dug up and piled beside the field, stood in his way. From somewhere close at hand, he heard the song of a green finch. Isao imagined the figure of an unwary stag lazily taking form before the muzzle of his rifle. He was sure that he would fire without hesitation. He would have the will to kill. The victim would be unaware of it. There was no need for hatred. And in dying the stag would for the first time expose the full force of evil. It would shine in the dark gleam of the blood pouring out from the heart of the beast.
Isao pricked up his ears. There was no sound of movement over the fallen leaves. He stared at the path ahead. There was nothing that looked like a deer’s track. If something was holding its breath, it was, Isao felt, not in fear, not out of hostility, but in derision of his intent to kill. The teeming silence of the scarlet-leafed forest, of the bamboo thicket, of the rows of cedars—he felt it ridiculing him.
He climbed to where the cedars began. The very spaces between the trees were packed with a dark silence. There was no sign of life. He began to walk across the slope and found himself in a sparse, sunlit grove. Suddenly a pheasant burst into flight from under his feet. It was an explosive target that preempted his field of vision. This had to be the moment to “let go,” as the gatekeeper had instructed him. He raised the gun at once and fired.
The mingled yellows and reds of the leaves above his head were suffused with the glow of the setting sun. A heavy, flashing crown of green seemed to hang poised for an instant against a patch of melancholy evening sky. This hurled crown dissolved in a flapping of wings, its glory shattered. The violent beating seemed to churn the air into a thick, sticky liquid which immediately clung to the wings like birdlime and took its toll. The bird, all unaware, was suddenly no longer a bird. The struggle to keep its wings going caused it to veer off its intended course, and it plunged abruptly downward, disappearing among the trees. The spot was not far distant. Isao estimated that the bird had fallen into the thicket which he had passed earlier.
Intent upon that spot, he ignored the path as he rushed down out of the grove, holding the rifle under his arm, black smoke still seeping from its barrel. Thorns caught at the sleeves of his robe and tore them.
An underwater glow filled the bamboo thicket. He used the gun to thrust aside the vines that clutched at him. He stared intently at the ground, anxious lest the pheasant be lost amid the colors of the fallen bamboo leaves. At last he found it. Isao knelt down, and as he picked up the lifeless body of the bird, blood spurted from its breast and fell upon his white
hakama
.
hakama
.
The bird’s eyes were tight shut. The plumage that surrounded the closed eyes had the scarlet speckles of a toadstool. It was a somberly plump bird with a metallic sheen that seemed to turn soft feathers into armor, its color a rainbow against a black sky. As its head hung down over his arm, he noticed that the plumage of its bent body was less thick and the luster of a different sort.
The feathers about the head were a purple almost as deep as black grapes and they clustered as close as scales. From the breast to the belly, dark green feathers meshed as though to form a protective tunic that glinted in the fading light. It was down these dark green feathers that the blood was flowing from an unseen wound.
Judging the location of the wound, Isao inserted his finger. It encountered no resistance as he plunged it deep into the breast torn by the bullet, and when he drew it out, it was covered with a red wetness. How does it feel to slaughter? he asked himself, burning for an answer. The action, that instant of aiming the gun and pressing the trigger, had been a rapid flow of movement, with only the barest feeling of wanting to kill. That had amounted to even less than the wisp of black smoke that later trailed from the muzzle.
A bullet certainly substituted for an intent. He had not begun to climb the mountain with the thought of killing this pheasant, but the gun itself would not let such a dazzling opportunity pass. And so a small shedding of blood and a small death had instantly taken place, and there was this stilled pheasant lying across his arm, a matter in no way out of the ordinary.
As for righteousness and purity, these he coolly rejected like bones left upon a plate. His appetite was not for bones but for meat. He wanted this thing that was quick to decay, this thing that shone, this thing that was so soft. It was no more than a savor barely caught by the tongue. He had experienced this taste, and from it had come the almost numbing rapture that he now felt, and the repose of fulfillment. This was what engaged his senses.
Had the pheasant been transformed into the embodiment of evil? By no means. As Isao looked closer, he saw that tiny winged insects were moving in its feathers. And if it were left lying there, ants and maggots would certainly soon be swarming over it.
He was irritated at the bird’s tight-shut eyes. Like an arbitrary refusal, they seemed to shut him out coldly from something that he was desperately eager to know. But this thing that he wanted to know—Isao found himself unable to tell whether it was, after all, the sensation of killing or that of his own death.
He picked the bird up roughly by the neck, and, using his gun to slash at the undergrowth, made his way with difficulty out of the thicket. He cut away one hanging vine laden with red berries which fell around his neck and draped itself, its fruit trembling, about his chest and shoulders. Since neither hand was free to dislodge it, Isao left it as it was.
He came down to the mulberry field and began to cross it on a path along one of its ridges. Lost in thought, he paid no attention to the profusion of red flowers that he was trampling underfoot.
Ahead stood a shattered cedar, its needles already half brown. At a right angle to this path, he had noted before, was the road he had come by, a broad road through open fields. He turned onto it.
Some distance ahead a white-clad group was approaching. Though he could not yet make out their faces, the pendanthung branches that each carried gave him an odd feeling. White robes in such a place had to indicate Master Kaido’s students, but Isao would not have expected his own comrades to come marching out solemnly in this manner led by another. The leader seemed older, and behind him walked one man dressed in a suit. Isao was startled when he saw at last that the man in the lead had the neat moustache of his father.
At that moment the sky above, still lit by the sunset glow, was suddenly filled with the cries of a vast flock of small birds that had appeared from the shelter of the mountain. The white-clad marchers seemed distracted by this, and halted briefly until the birds had passed over.
As the distance separating Isao and the group lessened, Honda somehow began to feel excluded from the tableau taking form in the fading light of the open fields. Gradually he veered off the road until he was separated from the column and threading his way through rice-drying racks. Some moment of extreme significance was drawing near. What it was he did not know. Isao’s figure was now clearly discernible. Honda saw upon his chest something that looked like a necklace of red crescent beads, apparently a kind of berry.
Honda’s heart throbbed violently. An irresistible power was approaching, a power that would deal a smashing blow to his rational outlook. He could already feel the rush of its wings and its breath as it came bearing down. He did not believe in premonitions, but if there were something that could come to warn a man of his own death or the death of one close to him, would it not, he wondered, be a sensation like this?
“So you only bagged a pheasant, eh? Well, that’s not too bad.”
Iinuma’s voice rang in his ears. Honda, standing there in the field, could not help looking toward them.
“That’s not too bad,” said Iinuma again. And then, as though in jest, he raised his sakaki branch and waved it over Isao’s head. Its paper pendants flashed a pure white in the dusk. Their rustling sound had a poignant freshness.
“What a way to behave! Even taking a gun with you! Master Kaido had you sized up all right: You are heedless and intractable. You have proved it beyond all question.”
The instant Honda heard these words the memory that lay within him was at last revealed with pitiless clarity. Beyond any doubt, what had been fulfilled before his very eyes was the dream that Kiyoaki Matsugae had dreamed one summer night in the second year of the Taisho era. Kiyoaki had recorded this extraordinary dream in great detail, and Honda, just the previous month, had reread that section of the dream journal. It had been vividly realized in every particular before his very eyes, becoming part of reality after the passage of nineteen years.
That Isao was Kiyoaki reborn, even if Isao himself was unaware of it, was now, as far as Honda was concerned, something impervious to all the power that reason could bring to bear against it. It was a fact.
24
THE NEXT EVENING
, after classes, Isao led his comrades to the place where they had their secret meetings every day. There no one would see them, or even if someone did, the circumstances would resemble nothing more than a group of boys getting together for some carefree exchange. At a spot where the farmland that belonged to Kaido’s Academy faced the cliff of Motozawa stood a huge rock covered with vegetation, like the artificial mountain of a landscaped garden. Once behind it, one was hidden from the eyes of anyone looking from the direction of the lecture hall. Right below were the rapids, and on the opposite side rose the towering cliff wall. The small grassy spot behind the rock was ideally suited for sitting in a circle and holding a discussion. In summer it would have been quite pleasant, but in Kai in late October the evening wind was extremely chilly. But so enthusiastic were the boys who gathered here that the cold did not trouble them.
As Isao led them along the path that crossed the fields, he noticed the charred traces of a fire which had not been there the previous day. The fine ash of burnt straw had traced a gray pattern upon the path, but where it had gathered in a rut it was a dense black. This black mingled with the red of the loam in a way that captivated Isao. Oddly, it was not the mixture of gray ash and a few remnants of fresh straw that stirred thoughts of the bright fire at its peak, but the black rut crushed into the earth by a wheel. The strong, barbaric red of the flames, the vulgarly strong black of the rut—here was the perfect expression, the perfect contrast. To flame up, then to be trampled out—both had the same vivid power. The near association that all this provoked in Isao’s mind, obviously enough, was the specter of revolt.
The group followed Isao in silence to the huge rock with its sheltering trees at the south end of the fields and sat down in a circle. They could hear the rushing water of the rapids below them, where the Katsura River made its sharp bend. The gray rock surface of the cliff that soared up on the opposite bank seemed to embody a stern and enduring fortitude. The red leaves that hung from the trees clinging to the face of the cliff, the first trees to be lost to the sun, had a gloomy tinge, while far up, through the trees that lined the top of the cliff, the evening sky could be seen in a turmoil of bright-flecked clouds.
“Today the time has come to decide when we will strike. We’re all resolved, aren’t we? But first we’ll confirm the general plan and each man’s responsibility, and Sagara will report on our funds. As for the exact time we strike, it would certainly be fitting if we could decide it by an Ukei, like the comrades of the League. Anyway, let’s take it up later.” Isao’s tone was businesslike as he opened the meeting. However, the trifling affair of the day before still affected him. His father and Honda had had a light supper and returned to Tokyo immediately. But even though it was supposed to be a courtesy to Master Kaido, what had prompted his father to make such a long trip to see how things were here? Could it be that he had had a talk with Sawa? And then what of the odd behavior of Honda? There had been no sign yesterday of the detached and well-modulated kindness so evident in the first conversation and in the long letter, but, rather, Honda had said hardly a word to Isao, and his complexion had been very pale. Then later, in the course of supper, Isao had noticed that Honda kept staring at him from where he sat in the place of honor.
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