Authors: Yukio Mishima

Runaway Horses (56 page)

BOOK: Runaway Horses

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That is the entry. Can you assure us that you are the one who wrote it?

MAKIKO
: Yes, sir. I wrote it.

HONDA
: And afterwards, you neither changed anything nor added anything?

MAKIKO
: No, sir, It was just as you see it.

JUDGE
: If that’s the case then, according to your observation, the defendant Iinuma, on the night in question, gave up all intention of committing a crime?

MAKIKO
: Yes, Your Honor, that is correct.

JUDGE
: Did Iinuma say anything to you about the day chosen or anything similar?

MAKIKO
: No, Your Honor. He did not.

JUDGE
: Do you think perhaps that he might have wished to conceal that from you?

MAKIKO
: He had already told me, Your Honor, that he had given up his project, so he would consider it pointless, I think, to talk about such things as the day he had once set for it. He was always so honest that I feel sure I would have known if he had been lying.

JUDGE
: Your relationship with the defendant seems to be a rather close one.

MAKIKO
: I suppose I thought of him as a younger brother.

JUDGE
: Well, if you two were so close then, didn’t you, considering the lingering uneasiness that you mentioned in your diary, feel any urge to work secretly to make sure that they turned back?

MAKIKO
: I felt that a woman’s meddling would only make matters worse, so I just kept praying. And while I was doing this, I learned of the arrests. It was a shock to me.

JUDGE
: Did you speak of the events of that night to your father or to anyone else?

MAKIKO
: No, Your Honor.

JUDGE
: Wouldn’t it have been natural to tell your father—considering that the matter was so grave, and considering, moreover, how the circumstances had changed?

MAKIKO
: When I returned that night, my father asked me no questions. In the first place, my father has a military man’s point of view, and he had always held the sincere fervor of youth in high regard. So I had no desire to speak to my father of Isao’s change of heart. I felt that he might take it amiss because of his affection for Isao. And, even without my saying anything, I felt that it would come to his knowledge. So I kept the matter sealed in my heart.

JUDGE
: Does the prosecutor wish to question the witness?

PROSECUTOR
: No, Your Honor.

JUDGE
: The witness is hereby dismissed. Thank you, Miss Kito.

Makiko bowed, and, after turning her back with the huge bow in which her white Hakata obi was tied, she walked out of the courtroom without a glance in the direction of the defendants.

Isao clenched his fists. Sweat simmered inside them.

Makiko had committed perjury! The most brazen kind of perjury! She had given testimony that Isao knew to be an outright lie, risking the danger that, if discovered, she would be liable not only to the charge of perjury but also, according to circumstances, to that of criminal complicity.

As for Honda, undoubtedly he must have summoned Makiko without knowing that she was lying. Honda would surely not go so far as to jeopardize his whole career by conspiring with Makiko. Honda, therefore, believed the story Makiko told in her diary!

Isao felt at a loss. If Makiko was not to be indicted for perjury, he had no other course open to him but one that involved the sacrifice of that purity he so valued.

And then, too, if Makiko had actually made such an entry that night (and it would seem that here, at least, she was telling the truth), how could she, immediately after that tragically beautiful farewell, have changed their encounter into a scene so surpassingly ugly? Was that cunning trick prompted by hostility? By an unaccountable desire to defile herself? No, it could be nothing of the sort. Wise Makiko, perceiving the advent of a day like today, had come home from parting with him to prepare her defenses against the moment when she would be called as a witness. And why? For no other reason but to save him.

There was no longer any question about Makiko having been their betrayer, Isao thought. Then it occurred to him that the court was not likely to allow an informer to be called as a witness to support indirect evidence for the defense. Had Makiko been the informer who had brought them to trial, the contradiction between the information she had given them and her testimony today would have been apparent. Amid the unpleasant scenes that his imagination flashed before him as his heart beat fast, he could at least discard the image of Makiko as informer. And this brought him momentary relief.

Makiko’s only conceivable motive was love, a love that dared to face danger in full view of the public. Such a love! For this love Makiko did not hesitate to besmirch that which was most precious to him. Moreover, what was bitterest of all, he had to make a response to her love. He could not designate Makiko as a perjurer. On the other hand, no one but he knew the circumstances of that night, and so there was no one in the world but Isao who could call her testimony a lie. And Makiko was well aware of this. She testified as she did precisely because she was aware of it. The trap that she had set for him was that he had no choice but to save himself if he was to save her, however repugnant the means. Furthermore, he was sure, Makiko knew that Isao would do nothing else. . . . Isao struggled to shake off somehow the bonds that were constricting him.

He considered a further aspect. How did Makiko’s false testimony strike the ears of his comrades beside him? Isao was confident that they trusted him. Still, they could hardly dismiss testimony so openly given as a tissue of lies!

The silence of his comrades while Makiko was testifying was like that of beasts tied up in their pens at night, their secret snarlings and their stealthy scratching at palings sharply intensifying an atmosphere of inexpressible discontent and the smothering stink of urine. Isao knew that his comrades were reacting with every fiber of their bodies. Even the noise of one of them scraping his heel against the back of the chair Isao heard as a reprimand directed at him. The anxiety about betrayal that had oppressed him in prison—that formless anxiety one feels in groping for a needle lost in the darkness—now its circumstances were reversed. Isao sensed a black poison spreading rapidly through the heart of each of his comrades. He could hear a network of cracks beginning to cover the entire surface of the white porcelain vase of his purity.

Let them be disgusted with him. Let them contemn him. That he could bear. What he could not bear was what they would naturally infer from Makiko’s testimony: that so sudden arrest—might it not have resulted from Isao’s betraying them to the authorities?

There was but one means to clear away this intolerable suspicion. There was but one person to clear it away. Isao himself, in other words, had to take the stand and expose Makiko’s perjury.

Meanwhile, Honda himself was far from satisfied of the truth of Makiko’s diary entry. He did not believe that the judges would accept the evidence of the diary at face value. He knew, however, that Isao would never do anything to cause Makiko to be charged with perjury. Isao, too, Honda was sure, clearly realized that Makiko’s sole concern was to save him.

He hoped to bring about a struggle between his client and his witness. Isao’s secret chamber—his clear purity of dedication—would be aglow with a woman’s burning passion, as with the scarlet rays of the setting sun. Each of them, armed with the sword of ultimate truth, would have to destroy the power of the other’s world—there was no other way. This was a kind of struggle that Isao in his twenty years of life had never imagined, had never dreamed of. It was, furthermore, a battle one had to learn to fight, a certain necessity of life.

Isao had an inordinate belief in his own world. Honda had to smash this for him. Why? Because this was the most dangerous of faiths. A thing that was endangering Isao’s life.

If Isao had executed his plan as he wished, suicide following upon assassination, he would perhaps have brought his life to a conclusion without ever having encountered “another person.” The “big shots” he killed would never have been other persons whom he had to confront. He would have viewed these men as nothing more than ugly dummies to be destroyed by the pure zeal of youth. Indeed, when Isao’s sword blade cut into such ugly old flesh, Isao would probably have felt a fondness for his victim, more so than if he were a blood relative, since this man would have been like an icon that embodied the concept that Isao had cherished for so long. For in his written testimony also, he had stated that he “would never kill out of hatred.” His crime would have been one of pure abstraction. To say, however, that Isao knew nothing of hatred would be to say that he had never loved anyone at all.

Just now, perhaps, he was knowing hatred. The shadow of something alien had for the first time entered his world of purity. No matter how keen his blade, how quick his footwork, how swift his blows, this was something alien and powerful from the outer world, something he could neither control nor suppress. He was, in short, learning that the “outside” existed in the very substance of the flawless sphere in which he lived.

As he watched the retreating figure of the witness, the Chief Judge slipped off his reading glasses. The bright summer sunlight that spilled into the courtroom lit his face with its bad complexion and paperlike skin.

“He is thinking something. What is he thinking?” Honda asked himself with a quiver of interest as he watched the judge.

It was not plausible that a venerable judge would allow himself, in public, to be captivated by the crisp loveliness of a rear view of Makiko. Judge Hisamatsu on his high bench seemed, rather, to be keeping a lonely watch from the high tower of age and legal justice. With his farsighted old eyes he could command a wide, distant view, a gift that his superiors esteemed in him. Consequently, Honda was certain that, beyond Makiko’s flawless conduct and attitude under questioning and during the reading of the diary entry, the judge’s intention was to weigh more heavily the composure with which she walked away. To look beyond a desolate, barren plain of feeling, to where a view of a summer obi was growing distant. . . . Now, surely, he has inferred something. Though Judge Hisamatsu had no reputation for brilliance, it was not strange that he was thoroughly versed in human nature.

The judge turned to Isao: “Is the testimony that Miss Kito just gave correct?” he asked. With a firm thrust of his forefinger Honda held fast the red pencil which he was about to roll down his desk, and pricked up his ears.

Isao stood up. Honda felt a little apprehensive as he noted that Isao’s fists were tightly clenched, and even trembling slightly. At the neck of his somewhat loosely wrapped summer kimono, drops of sweat glistened upon the white skin of his chest.

“Yes, Your Honor,” Isao answered. “It is correct.”

JUDGE
: You visited the home of Makiko Kito the evening of November twenty-ninth, and you told her of your own volition that you had changed your mind about your resolution?

IINUMA
: Yes, Your Honor.

JUDGE
: And the conversation took place just as she described it?

IINUMA
: Yes, Your Honor. . . . However . . .

JUDGE
: However? What do you mean “however”?

IINUMA
: I did not tell her what I really felt.

JUDGE
: And what do you mean by that?

IINUMA
: What I really felt. . . . The truth is, Your Honor . . . that both Miss Kito and General Kito have been very kind to me for a long time. And so I wanted to make a brief farewell before I carried out my resolution. And since, for some time now, I had been letting her know something of my thoughts, I wanted to prevent her from becoming involved in any way whatsoever in the aftermath of our action. Therefore I deliberately acted as though my nerve had failed, and, in order to make her believe that, I told her nothing but lies. I wanted to see her gravely disappointed in me . . . and, by that means, break off my—attachment. Everything I said to her that night was a lie. She was completely taken in.