Runaway Horses (45 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
TWELVE ULTRANATIONALIST RADICALS ARRESTED IN HIDEOUT
SWORDS AND SEDITIOUS LITERATURE SEIZED
SERIOUS PLOT SAY AUTHORITIES
Honda’s first reaction when he saw the headlines in the morning paper was “Again, eh?” and nothing more, but his calm was abruptly shattered when his eye caught the name Isao Iinuma on the list of those arrested. He wanted to place a call to Tokyo at once and talk to Iinuma at the Academy, but worldly prudence prevented this. The headlines the following morning were even larger:
FULL DETAILS ON “SHOWA DIVINE WIND” AFFAIR
AIM TO DELIVER CRUSHING BLOW TO FINANCIAL WORLD
EACH MEMBER TO ASSASSINATE ONE MAN
RINGLEADER NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD YOUTH
A picture of Isao appeared for the first time. The reproduction was very coarse, but there was no mistaking those incredibly clear eyes whose brilliance had so affected Honda when the boy and his father had come to dinner, those eyes with their piercing gaze, which could never blend into the pattern of ordinary amenities. No doubt they had been looking forward to this day.
Belatedly Honda regretted his tendency to be capable of discernment only after a matter had been strained through the meshes of the law.
Isao was already past eighteen and would therefore not be treated as a juvenile before the law. According to the article, the entire group, except for the middle-aged eccentric named Sawa, was made up of youths in their late teens or early twenties, and so some no doubt would be tried as juveniles. But for Isao there was no chance of this.
Honda visualized the worst possible legal situation. Something seemed missing from the vague newspaper articles. On the surface this affair was merely the rash assassination plot of some heedless boys, but the investigation might well turn up a far wider and deeper conspiracy.
As a matter of fact, the military authorities, wanting to refute wild rumors and to allay the prejudice provoked by the May Fifteenth Incident, had made a statement carried in that day’s paper: “No Army officers had any connection whatsoever with this recent incident. Unfortunately, every time an incident of this sort occurs there are those ready to believe that young officers must be involved. Ever since the May Fifteenth Incident, the greatest concern has been shown for the rigid enforcement of discipline in every unit throughout the Armed Forces. The extraordinary energy that we have displayed in putting our house in order is a matter of public knowledge.”
Such was the statement, but its effect, however groundless, was to excite the suspicion that some greater power was indeed at work behind the plotters.
If the scope of the affair broadened, and any intent were revealed that would come under Article 77 of the Criminal Code, “Subverting the Constitution,” the situation would become critical. The newspaper accounts were not clear as to whether the unconsummated aspect or rather the element of premeditation would be uppermost when the case was brought to trial. Honda remembered
The League of the Divine Wind
, which he had read at Isao’s urging. He could not help but feel a sense of ill omen at Isao and his comrades’ choice in calling themselves the Showa League of the Divine Wind.
The League of the Divine Wind
, which he had read at Isao’s urging. He could not help but feel a sense of ill omen at Isao and his comrades’ choice in calling themselves the Showa League of the Divine Wind.
He dreamed of Kiyoaki that night. Kiyoaki seemed to be asking for help, and also to be lamenting his premature death. When Honda awoke, his mind was made up.
Honda’s reputation at the Courthouse seemed not quite as high as it had been. When he talked with his colleagues, their manner since his return from Tokyo in the fall had somehow cooled. The rumors in vogue alleged that either family trouble or woman trouble had made Honda a changed man. And his once highly regarded discernment was no longer so esteemed. The Chief Justice, though he kept it to himself, was grieved when he became aware of the situation. For no one had been more appreciative than he of Honda’s rise to eminence.
For the vast majority of men, romantic dreams are inevitably bound up with a woman. And so when his colleagues intuitively diagnosed the affliction lodged within him since his fall trip to Tokyo as involvement with a woman, they were at least correct in giving it a romantic coloring. Their intuition was indeed remarkable in shrewdly picturing Honda as one who had strayed from the way of reason and was now wandering aimlessly along some overgrown path of emotion. But what might have been expected in a twenty-year-old youth was deemed improper in a man Honda’s age, entirely human though the failing was. And this was where most of the disapproval was focused.
Members of a profession in which reason was of the essence, his colleagues could hardly be expected to view with respect any man who, unknown to himself, had contracted the disease of romanticism. And then from the viewpoint of national righteousness, though Honda had not gone so far as to commit any crime, he had certainly defiled himself with an “unwholesome” attitude.
But most surprised of all at this state of affairs was Honda himself. The eagle’s nest that he had constructed at a dizzying height in the structure of legalism, which by now had become second nature to him, was—something wholly unforeseen!—threatened with the floodwaters of dreams, with the infiltration of poetry. More awesome yet, the dream that assaulted him did not destroy either the transcendence of human reason, which he had always believed in, or his proud pleasure at living with more concern for principles than for phenomena. The effect was rather to strengthen his beliefs, to heighten his pleasure. For he could now glimpse towering up brightly beyond the principles of this world an unbreachable wall of principle. Once he saw it, so dazzling was this glimpse of the ultimate that he was unable to go back to the placid, everyday faith he had known before. And this was not to retreat but to advance. It was not to look back but to look ahead. Kiyoaki had certainly been reborn as Isao, and from this fact, beyond one kind of law, Honda had begun to see into the essential truth of law.
He suddenly remembered that in his youth, from the time he had heard the sermon of the Abbess of Gesshu, the European philosophy of natural law had lost its appeal for him, and he had been much attracted by the ancient Indian Laws of Manu, whose provisions extended even to reincarnation. Something had already taken root in his heart then. A law whose nature was not to impose order upon chaos but to point to the principles that lay within chaos and so give form to a legal code, just as the surface of the water caught the reflected image of the moon—such a law could well have sprung from a source more profound than the European worship of reason that undergirded natural law. Honda’s instinctive feeling, therefore, may have been sound, but this was not the kind of soundness looked for in a judge, the guardian of the operative law. He could easily imagine how unsettling it must have been to his colleagues to have a man of this sort working with them in the same building. To have one dust-covered desk in a room filled with the spirit of good order. From the viewpoint of reason, nothing so resembled the stains on an untidy man’s clothes as an obsession with dreams. Dreams somehow turn one into a slovenly figure. A soiled collar, the back of the shirt wrinkled as though slept in, trousers baggy—something similar overtakes the garment of the spirit. Though he had done nothing, though he had said nothing, Honda had, at some time or other, come to violate the code of public morality, and so he knew that, in the eyes of his colleagues, he was like wastepaper scattered along the path of a neatly kept park.
As for his home life, his wife Rié said nothing at all. Rié was not a woman who would intrude curiously into her husband’s private thoughts. She must have realized that he had changed, and that he seemed preoccupied. But Rié said nothing.
It was not any fear of ridicule or insult, then, that kept Honda from confiding in his wife, but a certain sense of shyness. This subtle kind of bashfulness gave a special character to their marriage. Perhaps this was the most beautiful aspect of their rather quiet and old-fashioned relationship. And though Honda himself may have been faintly aware that something in his recent discovery and change of outlook infringed upon it, husband and wife made use of this extremely beautiful characteristic to preserve silence and the unrevealed secret.
Rié must have wondered why her husband’s work had recently become so burdensome. The dishes that she took such pains to prepare for his evening meal failed to give him the pleasure that they had before. She did not grumble. She did not wear a sad expression. Nor did she punish him by putting on a brave cheerfulness. At some point or other a childish court-doll face, the vague look she had whenever her kidneys troubled her, had become her everyday face. Though always smiling and amiable, she never showed any expectation. The force that had shaped Rié into the woman she was belonged in part to her father, in part to her husband. At least, Honda had never given his wife cause to suffer from jealousy.
Although the affair of Isao was widely covered in the newspapers, her husband said nothing about it, and so Rié too said nothing. But then one night at dinner, when further silence seemed unnatural, she spoke out casually: “That’s a terrible thing about Mr. Iinuma’s son. When I saw him here, I thought he was such a serious and well-behaved boy . . .”
“Well, with this kind of crime, it’s the serious and well-behaved ones you’re most likely to find involved,” said Honda in rebuttal. But so gentle and bemused was his manner that Rié became concerned.
Honda’s mind was in turmoil. Because his failure in trying to save Kiyoaki was the keenest regret of his youth, he felt that he must succeed this time. He had to rescue
him
from danger and scandal no matter what the cost.
him
from danger and scandal no matter what the cost.
The favor of the public would be something to count on. The extraordinary youth of the conspirators seemed to keep people from becoming too aroused against them, and, beyond that, Honda sensed that a feeling of sympathy was already in the air.
Honda made his decision the morning after he had dreamed about Kiyoaki.
When Iinuma met Honda at Tokyo Station on his arrival from Osaka, he was wearing an inverness with a seal collar and his moustache seemed to be quivering in the late December cold. The weariness of his long wait on the platform was evident in his voice and in his watery and bloodshot eyes. As soon as Honda descended, Iinuma clasped his hand, commanded a student to relieve him of his bags at once, and then began to pour an insistent stream of thanks into Honda’s ear.
“How grateful I am that you chose to come! I feel that I have all conceivable power aligned with me. No boy could be luckier than that son of mine. But what a momentous resolution, Judge Honda, you have made in our behalf!”
After instructing the student to take his luggage to his mother’s house, Honda accepted Iinuma’s invitation and went to have dinner with him at a Ginza restaurant called the Gincharyo. The streets were gay with Christmas decorations. Honda had heard that Tokyo’s population was now 5,300,000, and when he looked at the crowded streets, it seemed that hunger and the depression were like conflagrations burning in some corner of a distant land, things too far off to be visible from here.
“When my wife read your letter, she too wept tears of joy. We put it upon the altar of the gods, and we pay it reverence each morning and evening. But wasn’t your judgeship a lifetime appointment? Why did you resign it?”
“Illness. No one can help that. However much they tried to keep me on, I had the doctor’s certificate to defend myself.”
“But what kind of illness?”
“A nervous breakdown.”
“Not really?”
Iinuma said nothing further, but the frankness of the momentary misgiving that showed in his eyes gave Honda a warm feeling toward him. Honda knew that a flash of frankness from an unsavory defendant could create a measure of goodwill in a judge, no matter how much care he took to avoid emotion. He tried to get some idea of the feeling that a lawyer would have for his client. No doubt it ought to be more theatrical. The goodwill that passed through a judge’s mind would naturally have some ethical motivation, but a lawyer’s feelings had to be fully exploited.
“It was a matter of being relieved of duty at my own request. So I’m still a judge as far as that goes, but now my status is that of a retired judge. Tomorrow I’m going to join the Bar Association, and then my career as a lawyer will begin. It’s the work that I’ve decided to do, and so I intend to put everything I have into it. The truth is that since I rose no higher before resigning, I’m not going to bring too much prestige to my career as a lawyer. But the whole thing was my choosing, and I have to accept the consequences. After all, it’s up to you to select your own lawyer. But as for compensation, I explained to you in my letter . . .”
“Oh, Judge Honda! How can you be so benevolent toward us? It would be despicable of me to take advantage of your good nature, but under the circumstances . . .”
“Very well then. Let us agree that I receive nothing at all. I’ll undertake it on that condition only.”
“Judge Honda . . . I am at a loss for words.” Sitting in a stiff, formal position, Iinuma bowed his head again and again. “But after a decision of such grave consequences, wasn’t your wife taken aback? And your mother too, wasn’t she upset? It seems to me that they would be greatly opposed.”
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