Runaway Horses (36 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: Runaway Horses
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After Iinuma had introduced Honda as a government official who had shown him great kindness years before, Kaido’s lion’s eyes looked fixedly into Honda’s eyes as he responded: “You seem to be a man who has had dealings with all sorts of people. And yet your eyes are not clouded with the least impurity. That is a rare thing. I do not wonder at the respect that Iinuma here has for you. Yet you still seem young.” And then, the compliments out of the way, he immediately began to lash out at Buddha: “I realize that we have only just met, but, really, that fellow Buddha was a fraud. I suspect he’s the rascal that robbed the Japanese of their Yamato Spirit, and their manly courage. Doesn’t Buddhism deny all spirit?”
Since Iinuma had hastily gone off to perform the ritual of purification, Honda found himself sitting alone with Kaido in the drill hall, left for the time being to bear the brunt of his sermon.
When he saw Iinuma reappear in white robe and white
hakama
, accompanied by Kaido’s chief disciple, Honda felt a surge of relief.
“Your water is indeed fresh and pure,” Iinuma said. “I have been cleansed in mind and body. I thank you. And now I wonder where I can find my son.”
Kaido ordered his chief disciple to call Isao. Honda’s interest was aroused by the prospect of seeing Isao appear clad in the same type of white robe and
hakama
that his father wore.
But there was no sign of Isao. The disciple reappeared and knelt at the threshold.
“According to the students, Isao was very angry over your taking him to task a little while ago, and he borrowed a hunting gun at the gatekeeper’s house and said he was going to shoot a dog or a cat to get it off his mind. It seems he headed out toward the mountains, probably to Tanzawa.”
“What? Shedding the blood of animals after being purified? Such infamy!” Kaido stood up, his lion’s eyes blazing. “Assemble every man in that study group of Isao’s. Tell them that each is to take an oblation branch in his hand and go out to confront Isao. He’ll be as bad as Lord Susano himself, defiling our sacred precincts.”
Strength seemed to drain out of Iinuma as his consternation deepened, a plight that the bystander Honda had to view with some amusement.
“But what could my boy have done? Why was it that you had to scold him?”
“For nothing serious. Don’t worry. But in that son of yours the harsh god is too strong. I reprimanded him because unless he works hard to be more receptive to the mild god, he’ll stray from the right path. In your son it’s the heedless and intractable spirit that’s dominant. Since he’s a boy, that’s fine, but he goes much too far. When I admonished him, he hung his head dutifully and listened, but then, afterwards, it must have been the harsh god suddenly breaking loose.”
“I must take an oblation branch myself and go along to purify him.”
“That would be well. Go quickly then, before he defiles himself.”
Hearing all this, Honda at first felt somewhat cowed by the uncanny atmosphere, but suddenly his intelligence was affronted by the utter absurdity of it. These people around him took no thought of the flesh but were altogether absorbed in the spirit. Here was a quite ordinary incident of an independent young man becoming furious when reprimanded, but they viewed it as a manifestation of the dread power of the realm of spirits.
Now Honda regretted that his strange sense of rapport with Isao had made him come to such a place. But some unknown peril to Isao seemed to be taking form before him, and he felt that he should do whatever lay in his power to hold it back.
When they went outside, some twenty young men, each holding a sakaki branch hung with white paper pendants, stood gathered there with tense expressions. Iinuma raised his branch and started to walk. The entire group fell in behind him. Honda, who alone was wearing a suit, took his place immediately in back of Iinuma.
At that moment Honda had a peculiar feeling. What he was doing seemed somehow linked to a distant memory despite its being not at all likely that he had ever found himself in the midst of a white-clad group such as this. Yet he seemed to hear a metallic sound, as though a hoe were at work unearthing a memory of inestimable value and striking against the first rock that lay in its way. The sound echoed strongly within his head, but then it was gone like a phantom. The impression had held him but for an instant. What had caused it?
It was as though a length of beautiful, thick golden thread had arched its graceful way past the needle of Honda’s perception, barely grazing it. It had touched the needle, but, just as it seemed about to pass through the eye, it had turned aside and was gone. As though fearful of being woven vigorously into the embroidery material, blank but for the faint pattern sketched upon it, the thread had slipped to one side of the needle’s eye and passed beside it. The fingers that guided it were huge yet slender and extremely supple.
23
 
 I
T WAS ABOUT
three o’clock on a late October afternoon, an hour when the sun had already begun to conceal itself behind the surrounding mountains. The light from the cloud-streaked sky enveloped the wooded ridges like mist.
The procession led by Iinuma crossed the old suspension bridge in silence, three or four men at a time. As Honda looked down, he saw that to the north of the bridge the water was still and deep, but on the south side, where the place of purification was located, the river ran swift and shallow between graveled shores. It was this rotting bridge that marked the division between the depths and the shallows.
After he had crossed, Honda turned and looked back at the young men solemnly marching behind him on the bridge, their oncoming footsteps sending shudders along its planks.
The young men, each holding up his sakaki branch, moved forward against a background formed of the oaks on the opposite side, the mulberry fields, the ravaged red leaves of the nurudé trees, the hut atop the bank, and one black-trunked persimmon from which a single red fruit hung with sensuous grace. Their figures shone in the few rays of the setting sun that just then broke through the clouds hovering over the mountain ridges. The sunlight threw into sharp relief the pleats of their
hakama
, and gave such brilliance to their white robes that each marcher seemed to be his own source of brightness. The leaves of the sakaki branch he carried gave off a dark green luster, and the white pendants hung upon it were flecked with delicate shadows.
There was some delay before the entire group of almost twenty men had crossed. Honda gazed around him once more at the autumn mountain scenery that he had already had leisure to study on the two-and-a-half-mile walk from Shiozu to Yanagawa.
Since this was in the heart of the mountains, the varied dark and light colors of near and distant slopes were superimposed one upon the other and seemed to press in on the viewer. Every mountain had a generous share of cedars that stood out darkly with severe aloofness from the mild red warmth that surrounded them. Autumn was not yet advanced, and the seasonal coloring, though apparent, was like a mantle of shaggy yellowish wool mottled with rust red. A listless mood seemed to weigh upon the reds, yellows, greens, and browns, muting their brilliance. The smell of wood smoke and the mistlike sunlight enwrapped everything. The more distant slopes were sharply etched in pale blue beneath their shroud of light mist. None of these mountains, however, offered a forbiddingly steep aspect.
When everyone had crossed the bridge, Iinuma set out in the lead again, Honda still behind him. The ground beneath their feet had been covered with fallen oak leaves on the other side of the bridge, but now, along this high, rocky road, it was the leaves of cherry trees that predominated. From the bridge on, these lay like fallen red flowers. Some wet leaves, already decaying, had faded to a pink that was the color of the dawn. Why should decay take the color of the dawn? Honda wondered, the pointless question nagging at him. A fire tower stood at the top of the cliff, its small bell silhouetted against a pale blue sky. Now it was the leaves of persimmon trees that covered the path. On either side there were cabbage fields and farmhouses. Reddish purple wild chrysanthemums were everywhere, and each yard had its persimmon trees, bare except for a remnant of fruit which hung from their branches like New Year’s ornaments. The path wound this way and that, between the hedges of the farmhouses.
Just as they had passed one of these houses, a much wider view abruptly opened before them. The path too, at a point where a Buddhist requiem stone from the Kaei era stood overgrown with weeds, suddenly turned into a broad road amid the farmland.
To the southwest there was but one small mountain. Directly in front of the marchers, tall Mount Gozen, together with the other mountains that filled the northern horizon, rose up beyond the river and the road. So far in their journey, except for this village in the foothills of Gozen, there had been no sign of a human dwelling.
Clusters of red-flowered knotgrass bloomed along the straw-littered side of the road. The chirping of crickets could be heard faintly. Rice-drying racks lined many of the fields, and in others the new-cut sheaves were spread out upon the dark, cracked ground. A young boy, proud of his new bike, turned to gawk at the strange procession as he slowly pedaled by.
Autumn tints, like smudged powder, covered the small mountain to the southwest. Before them, the way lay open to the north as far as the bank of the Katsura. A lone cedar, torn by lightning, stood in a nearby field, its rent trunk bent back and its withered needles the color of dried blood. Its roots were partially pulled up out of the ground, and bearded grass sprung out in all directions from them.
It was then that a figure dressed in white appeared ahead on the road, and one of the young men called out: “There he is.”
Honda felt an unaccountable shiver run down his spine.
A half hour earlier, Isao, his eyes bloodshot, had ranged over this same area with a Murata rifle in his hand. He was not angry at Master Kaido’s scolding. But in the course of it an intolerable idea had come to him. He found he could not help thinking that the crystal vessel of beauty and purity he sought had already fallen to the ground and lay in fragments, and that he was stubbornly refusing to acknowledge it. Was it not true, he wondered, that if he wanted to take action he now had no choice but somehow to make secret use of the thrust of evil and let its strength drive him forward? Just as his father had done? No, certainly not. This had nothing in common with his father’s behavior. For him there would be no diluting righteousness with evil and evil with righteousness. The evil that he wanted to store within himself had to be pure evil, no less pure than the righteousness within him. In any event, once he had attained his purpose he would turn his sword against himself. At that moment, he felt, the pure evil within him would also die in the clash with the pure righteousness of his act.
Isao had never felt like killing anyone out of personal hatred. How was the desire to kill stirred up, he wondered. And what connection did it have with the sober events of everyday life? It was a problem that had long troubled him. He would first have to perform a small act of pure evil, commit a minor sacrilege.
Master Kaido, as a devoted follower of Atsutané, had lectured on the defilement brought about by the flesh and blood of beasts. And so Isao had borrowed a rifle and set out, hoping to hunt down a deer or a boar in the autumn mountains or, if that proved too difficult, to shoot a dog or a cat and bring the bloodied carcass back to Yanagawa. If that meant that he and his followers would be expelled from the camp, he was prepared to accept it. Indeed it would no doubt instill in them a new kind of courage and resolution.
He walked toward the southwest, his eye fixed upon the small mountain wrapped in scarlet leaves. He could see that a mulberry field encroached upon the gentle western slope of the mountain, and that a narrow path led uphill between the field and a bamboo thicket. The cedars were dense above the mulberry field, but someone had told him that the path climbed on up through them.
The Murata rifle, about two and a quarter feet in length, was like an iron bar in his hand, and the autumn air chilled its metal so that it squealed beneath the touch of his fingers. It was hard to believe that the bullet already in the chamber had the power to give heat to the metal. And the three bullets he carried in his robe, their chill, metallic touch pressing against his chest as he walked, seemed not so much murderous pellets as three cold eyes focused upon him.

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