Runaway Horses (51 page)
Authors: Yukio Mishima
“And who has laid that down, Your Honor?”
“The Prosecutor’s Office,” the judge answered, his intonation conveying his own discontent with this measure.
34
HIS MOTHER’S LETTERS
kept on coming frequently, but no other letters had so many blotted portions. Sometimes a section would be clipped out, or even a whole page removed. His mother obviously lacked the wit to write in such a way as not to run afoul of the censor. But one day there was a change. The censor’s job had apparently been taken over by a new man. The blotted portions were noticeably fewer, but, since his mother wrote under the impression that everything in her previous letters had been conveyed to him, his impatience was aggravated by the difficulty of deciphering. It was as though he were receiving later letters before their predecessors. But then there was one line, reading: “The letters . . . are piled up like a mountain. They say there are at least five thousand of them, and when I think . . . my eyes fill up with tears,” in which, even though two sections had been inked over, the ink had been lightly applied as though the censor had been careless. Isao realized that the man had done so deliberately, to encourage him. In one section Isao was able to read without difficulty “letters
asking for leniency
,” and in the other, though it was more obscure, “when I think
of the sympathy people have
.” For the first time Isao learned about the public reaction to the affair.
He was loved! He who had never in the least wanted to be loved. Perhaps a gentle, sympathetic concern had been stirred by his youth, by the immature purity that people naturally expected in the young, by considerations of his “promising” future, and this had inspired the clemency letters. It was a conjecture that caused Isao some pain. The mass of petitions sent in after the May Fifteenth Incident must have been of a different nature.
“The world does not take me seriously.” Ever since his imprisonment Isao had been haunted by that single relentless thought. “If people ever suspected the fearful, blood-smeared purity I revere, they’d hardly be able to feel any love for me.”
Not feared nor, much less, hated, only loved, he found himself in a situation that wounded his pride. It was spring. Most of all, he yearned for the letters from Makiko that arrived one after another at regular intervals, well aware though he was how ill such a desire became that resolve, tough as hardened glass, that he had long embraced.
In fact, I have always been peculiarly favored, thought Isao. Something murky lay in the depths of that favor.
Was it not that the nation, the laws of the nation, perhaps in just the same way as the public, refused to take him seriously?
Then too, when he was being questioned in an interrogation room on a cold day, the police would urge him to sit closer to the hibachi, and, if he was hungry, they would bring him a dish of noodles with fried bean curd. Once an assistant inspector pointed at the flowers on the table and said, “What do you think of these camellias? Aren’t they pretty? There are winter camellias blooming in my garden, and this morning I cut these and brought them here. During interrogation, you see, it’s most important to be at ease, and flowers make everyone feel more congenial.” The odor of a vulgarized refinement bent on using nature clung to the inspector’s words, much like that given off by the white shirt that he wore day after day despite its cloud pattern of grime. Still, three pure white camellias pushed aside tough, dark green leaves with their outspread petals. Drops of water lay upon them as though upon white lard.
“This sunshine is nice, isn’t it?” said the inspector, as he asked the policeman standing by to open the window. From where Isao was sitting, the winter camellias occupied half of his field of vision. The iron bars of the window let pass the warm, abstract winter sunshine, their shadows cutting through it with a precision that made it seem still more devoid of substance.
The probing ray of sunshine like a warm hand upon his shoulder—this for Isao was something quite different from the brilliant summer sun that he had seen pressing down with glittering authority upon the heads of the troops drilling upon the Azabu Regiment parade ground. This ray spoke of the kindliness of the judicial system come down to touch him upon the shoulder after many a twist and turn. It had nothing at all to do with the summer sun of the Imperial Benevolence, Isao thought.
“With patriots like you and your friends, I don’t need to worry about the future of Japan. You shouldn’t have violated the law, of course, but that shining sincerity of yours is something that even we can understand. And now, about you and your friends making your vows, when and where was that?”
Isao responded automatically. That evening of the summer before, in front of the shrine . . . there rose in his mind the memory of all twenty of them clasping each other’s hands, one hand over another, like white fruit whose weight bent the branches that bore it. Yet to call up the memory had become painful. As Isao answered, he looked away from the inspector, who kept watching him intently, and he gazed at the sunlight and one of the white camellias by turns. Dazzled by the sun, his eyes saw the whiteness of the camellias as pitch black, the flower a small, lustrous knot of hair. And, in the same way, the dark green leaves seemed to form a collar of pure white. He had a secret need for this play of the senses to help him withstand the discordance within him. For when he spoke the “truth”—“Yes, sir. There were twenty of us. We bowed twice and clapped twice before the shrine. And then I recited the vows, one part at a time, and the others repeated it in unison”—giving an account that was totally unembellished, the words no sooner passed his lips than, here before the judicial authorities, they seemed to grow scales and become wrapped in a falsehood that made him shudder.
And then all at once Isao heard the white winter camellia groan.
Startled, he looked back at the inspector. There was no surprise in the inspector’s eyes. It was only later that Isao realized that chance had not dictated the choice of this second-floor room, with its open window, for the interrogation on this particular day. The room was across a narrow alley from a drill hall, its windows shuttered even at midday, but with lights visible through the transoms.
“You’re third degree in kendo, I hear. You know, if you hadn’t got yourself involved in this business and stayed with your kendo, you and I might have had a pleasant match in that hall down there.”
“Are they practicing kendo now?” Isao asked, feeling sure that they were not. The inspector did not answer.
Some of the sounds that carried up to the room were like kendo yells, but the groan that had seemed to come from the white camellia had nothing of kendo about it. The crash of staves on thick-padded kendo gear was different. This was the dull, somber sound of blows striking upon flesh.
Isao recalled that the white camellia, which seemed to be sweating in the heat generated by the clear winter sunshine, had somehow become sacred after the cries and groans of the tortured had filtered through it. Free of the inspector’s debased refinement, the flower began to give off the scent of the law itself. His eyes could not help looking beyond the lustrous leaves of the camellia, through the transom where lights burned at midday, at the thick ropes swinging back and forth with what must have been a heavy burden of flesh.
Isao looked into the inspector’s eyes once more, and the latter answered his unspoken question: “Yes. It’s a Red. Stubborn ones bring this kind of thing on themselves.”
Obviously the police intended to make him realize that, in contrast, he was being treated with the utmost gentleness, that the kindly law was showering benefits upon him. But it had the opposite effect. At that moment Isao felt a choking of anger and humiliation. “My ideas—what do they amount to?” he asked himself in a rage. “If real ideas have to be beaten like that, are mine supposed to be unreal?” Isao was vexed with frustration: despite the enormity of what he had plotted, there had been no adequate reaction. If they realized the core of terrible purity within him, he thought, they would surely hate him. Though officers of the Emperor, they could not help but hate him. On the other hand, however, if their ignorance persisted, his ideas would never gain the weight of flesh, never grow wet with agonized sweat. And, as a consequence, they would never give out the loud cries of beaten flesh.
Isao glared at his cross-examiner and shouted: “Torture me! Torture me right now. Why can’t you do the same thing to me? Can you tell me why not?”
“Easy now. Calm down, don’t be foolish. It’s very simple. You don’t give us any trouble.”
“And that’s because my ideas are rightist?”
“That’s part of it. But rightist or leftist, anyone who gives us trouble is going to pay for it. Still, when all is said and dene, those Reds . . .”
“Is it because the Reds won’t accept our national structure?”
“That’s it. In comparison to them, Iinuma, you and your friends are patriots. Your thoughts are in the right direction. It’s only that you’re young. The trouble is, you’re too pure, so you went to extremes. Your purpose is good. It’s your methods. What about making them more gradual, toning them down a bit? If you made them a little more flexible, everything would be fine.”
“No,” Isao retorted, his body trembling all over. “If we made them a little more flexible, it wouldn’t be the same. That ‘little’ is the point. Purity can’t be toned down a little. If you make it a bit flexible, just a bit, it becomes a totally different idea, not the kind we hold. So if our ideas can’t be watered down, and if they’re a threat to the nation the way they are, that means our ideas are just as dangerous as those of the Reds. So go ahead and torture me. You have no reason not to.”
“You’re quite a debater, aren’t you? Now, don’t get so excited. I’ll tell you just one thing that would be good for you to know. There’s not a man among those Reds that asked to be tortured, as you’re doing. They take it if they have to. They’re not like you, they don’t respond to us even if we torture them.”
35
MAKIKO’S LETTERS
, though she naturally avoided straightforward expressions, were filled with assurances that her feelings toward Isao were just as before, and she always took care to include two or three poems that her father had revised for her. The censor’s cherry blossom seal affixed in red to the letter was no different, but when Isao considered how easily her letters alone came through, without any significant deletions, he suspected some help from General Kito. Still, there was hardly any sign that his own replies had reached their destination.
Never questioning nor responding to questions, neither alluding to present circumstances nor ignoring them, neither conveying information nor withholding it, Makiko wrote of this and that, of beautiful or entertaining things, or things altogether innocent, in keeping with the changing seasons. Thus she wrote of a pheasant from the Botanical Gardens flying into their yard, as one had the previous spring; of the records she had bought recently; of often going for a walk in Hakusan Park with thoughts of a particular night in mind; of seeing there one night the soiled petals of rain-scattered cherry blossoms clinging to the children’s log swing as it moved gently back and forth beneath the faint light of a lamp post, as though an adult couple had been sitting on it just before; of the deep darkness around the Shinto pavilion, brightened once, however, by a running white cat; of the early-blooming peach blossoms that she used in practicing her flower arranging; of freesia; of finding some starworts on a visit to Gokoku Temple and plucking them until her sleeves were heavily laden. . . . Since poems accompanied all this, Isao often felt as though he had been there to share her mood.
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