Runaway Horses

  “When we arrived at the Mejiro transformer station, there was a man dressed in overalls at the entrance. He was repairing some copper wire. Now when Serikawa and I went to other stations and told them we were night school students in an electrical school and asked to inspect the station, someone always wanted to see our identity cards or made some other objection, and we were quickly sent on our way. But this man in overalls was surprisingly friendly, and had us come up to the second floor. When we climbed the stairs, there were three clerks working in an office, and one of them told the man in overalls to show us around. So this fellow got out of his regular work, and cheerfully showed us all over the place. He seemed to take great pride in it. Whenever we asked about the equipment or anything, he gave us a full explanation. And so we found out that that station had both a water-cooled and an oil-cooled transformer.

  “In general, the most critical parts of a transformer station are the transformer, the switchboard, and the water pump for cooling. Just to destroy the water pump, all you’d have to do would be to smash the pump motor switch with a hammer or something, and then toss in a hand-grenade. But that wouldn’t be too effective. Of course if you destroy the water pump it’ll stop the flow of water to cool the transformer, the equipment will overheat, and it’ll become useless. But that would take a certain amount of time—in the first place, the other oil-cooled transformer would go on working.

  “However, from the standpoint of ease of attack, since the pump is outside of the main building and there’s no one guarding it, it would be the simplest. For a really crippling attack, the best thing would be to have one man kill the guard and go into the building itself. Then the other man would set the explosives by the switchboard, and once the fuse was lit, they could withdraw. But if some unforeseen obstacle should arise, all you could do would be to destroy the pump.

  “Now as for those men who are going to investigate other stations, we think that the best way for you to get inside would be to see if you know somebody who is a student in an electrical school and borrow his identity card. And that’s all we have to tell you.”

  Isao was pleased with the clarity and succinctness of their report.

  “Good. Next, Takasé. Give us your report on getting a plan of the interior of the Bank of Japan.”

  “All right,” answered Takasé, whose partner, Inoué, was absent. His voice was hoarse from his lung affliction, but his shoulders were powerful, and his reddened, feverish eyes were fixed piercingly on Isao. “To tell the truth, I puzzled over this for quite a while and couldn’t come up with a good plan. Then I decided that the only way would be to get taken on as a night security guard, but before they’ll hire you, the bank has you investigated thoroughly and you have to pass a very demanding physical examination. Since I had no hope of passing the physical, I approached Inoué on it. He’s second degree in judo, you know. And so Inoué, ready to lay down his life at any time, set about it without the least fear or hesitation. He went to see the dean of student activities and told him that he wanted to work as a night security guard in order to help with his tuition, and the dean wrote a recommendation for him. With this and his certificate of the second degree in judo, he went to the bank and was hired with no difficulty. When he goes to work, he takes along some harmless books and pretends to be studying them. I went to see him once; the other guards seem to have a very good opinion of him. He told me that at their night supper they sometimes treat him to a bowl of noodles. And though Inoué is the man he is, he said he couldn’t help feeling a little guilty to think that the time was coming when he was going to burn all this down.”

  The sound of youthful laughter rose in the dark.

  “Until the day we go into action, Inoué will continue to work as a security guard at the bank, keeping up an innocent appearance. And since we’ll have assistance from the inside, Lieutenant Hori and the rest of us should work out some kind of signal so that Inoué will know when to open the door. As for the plan of the interior, Inoué and I will take the responsibility of having that drawn up by two weeks before the day itself, and we intend to show it to Lieutenant Hori. Inoué says that, instead of letting himself seem suspicious by investigating the layout of the bank too hastily, he makes a point of learning all about it in a natural way while being diligent in his work. He’s certainly a grim sort of fellow. But his eyes are narrow and he looks very amiable when he laughs, so people take to him easily.” Takasé glanced at his watch. “Oh, it’s about time for the tellers and clerks to go home, and Inoué will be starting his shift. He was really sorry he couldn’t come up here, but the work he’s doing now is absolutely vital. That’s the end of my report.”

  While other such reports were being delivered in rather meandering fashion, Isao, who had heard them all before, was able to let his thoughts wander. But as he did, names that he would prefer to avoid thinking about—his father, Sawa, Honda, Kurahara—rose up at once in his mind to harass him like a cluster of swirling moths. Isao took forcible hold of the tiller and turned the vessel of his mind toward more desirable thoughts, thoughts that flashed, thoughts that provoked rapture: At the top of a cliff at sunrise, while paying reverence to the sun . . . while looking down upon the sparkling sea, at the base of a tall, noble pine . . . to kill myself. Yet, after the uprising, it would be difficult to get from Tokyo to an ideal seaside cliff. If the attacks on the transformer stations were successful, all transportation would be disrupted, even escape by train might be out of the question. There seemed little hope that an adroit withdrawal from the assassination locales followed by a flight of some distance would indeed be possible.

  Nevertheless, Isao would not give up his dream: somewhere a place awaited him where all the elements that belonged to an unblemished enactment of seppuku came together. The vision he clung to, of course, was the scene atop Omigataké when the six comrades of the League of the Divine Wind turned their swords against themselves. The vision of dying on a mountain peak, as the sky gradually lightens to reveal trailing clouds and white pendants fluttering in the morning breeze.

  Isao had no desire to decide now upon a place for himself. To make a choice beforehand that the events following the rising might frustrate would be pointless. He would leave himself free. He would let himself be guided by the Divine Will, whose signs would ever be at hand. Surely somewhere the wind would blow through the pines at daybreak, somewhere, when he loosened his kimono, the keen winter air of the seashore would set his flesh tingling, somewhere the blood that stained his corpse and the trunk of the red pine beside which it lay would soon gleam brightly in the rising sun.

  Suppose he succeeded in fleeing to the plaza before the Imperial Palace. . . . An awesome thought took form in Isao’s mind. He might even swim the palace moat, shattering the film of ice that covered it, and climb the steep bank on the other side. There, hidden among the pines atop the bank, he could wait for morning to come. Perhaps he could look out beyond the vast array of ships at anchor off Tsukishima to see the dawn breaking over the bay, and then, just before the Marunouchi skyline opposite him stood out in the first rays of the sun, he could thrust his blade home!

  25

  HONDA WAS not unaware of the gossip that he was somehow a changed man after his return from Tokyo. For him the once so imposing façade of present reality had fallen away. And his profession, involving as it did the minute analysis of the stuff of present reality, seemed suddenly to have lost all its savor.

  Honda was frequently sunk in thought and failed to answer remarks made to him by his colleagues. When word of this reached the ears of the Chief Justice, he became concerned that the strain of overwork might have clouded his subordinate’s peerless clarity of mind.

  Though he dutifully considered the work spread before him on his desk in the judges’ chambers, Honda, more often than not, would shudder as his thoughts returned still once more to the scene that evening in Yanagawa, the moment when Kiyoaki’s dream of so many years before was realized in every detail. And he also recalled
what had happened the following morning, shortly before he took the train back to Osaka, when he yielded to a strange impulse to go to Aoyama Cemetery to visit Kiyoaki’s grave.

  His mother seemed startled as he hurried out the door that morning earlier than necessary to catch his train. But Honda had the driver take him to Aoyama first. The car went up a road through the huge cemetery to the circular drive that lay in its very center. After getting out of the car here and telling the driver to wait, he walked quickly along the road toward the Matsugae family plot. Even if he had forgotten the way, the great torii that marked the Matsugae plot would have been visible.

  Honda walked along the road for only a short distance before turning off on a path that wound among the graves, the morning light at his back. When he turned to look over his shoulder he saw the late autumn sun shining but weakly through a thin screen of pines. The rays that filtered through the dark evergreen branches and fell among the pointed stone shafts seemed to subdue rather than heighten the luster of the new marble gravestones.

  Honda followed the path. In order to reach the Matsugae plot, whose torii seemed already to be looming up over him, he had to turn right on a still narrower path covered with moss and fallen leaves. The massive white marble torii of the Matsugaes towered over the small gravestones as if they were courtiers gathered in attendance. It had been modeled after the “Omiya-sama” torii on the grounds of the Matsugae estate. This example of Meiji grandeur now struck Honda’s eye as somewhat tasteless.

  The first thing that caught his attention after he passed beneath the torii was a memorial stone, an enormous slab of rock which seemed about fifteen feet high. The seal-style characters of the title of the epitaph had been drawn by Prince Sanjo and engraved by a famous Chinese artist, who, besides carving the details of Kiyoaki’s grandfather’s life, praised himself with the words:

  Gazing up at this monument,

  A myriad generations will be struck with awe.

  In the shadow of the memorial stone were the graves of all the Matsugaes, each one with its own epitaph, but so overpowering was the enormous stone that one hardly noticed them. To the right of this stone, on a level reached by climbing a few steps, was a section set off by a marble fence, and here, side by side, were the graves of Kiyoaki and his grandfather. Since the place was familiar to Honda, he hardly glanced at the memorial slab as he at once turned to his right and climbed the stone steps.

  Though the two graves were side by side, they obviously had a different rank. His grandfather’s huge gravestone rose up in the very center of the fenced area, and four Nishinoya stone lanterns kept solemn watch at either side of the path approaching it. To the right stood Kiyoaki’s more modest gravestone, an evident intrusion upon the symmetry of his grandfather’s domain. Kiyoaki’s seemed small beside the mass of stonework that was his grandfather’s, though it rose to the respectable height of six feet from its foundation. But the stone itself, the water urn, the flower vase with the family crest—everything was in exactly the same design as his grandfather’s, cut from the same kind of stone, only the scale altered. Chiseled gracefully upon the darkened marble in the ancient square-cut characters was: KIYOAKI MATSUGAE. There were no flowers in the vase, but there were some glossy sprigs of Chinese anise.

  Honda stood before the grave for a few moments before offering a prayer. He could conceive of nothing less fitting than that a young man who had given his life so wholeheartedly to emotion should now rest beneath this mound of stone. The Kiyoaki of Honda’s memories certainly had the hint of death about him. But even that aura of death was like a transparent flame, as if in him death itself was brilliant and volatile. This cold stone had nothing at all to say of Kiyoaki.

  Honda looked away, letting his gaze wander over the stretch of cemetery beyond the grave of Kiyoaki’s grandfather. Among the wintry trees the circular drive where his car stood was white beneath the morning sun. And in the midst of dark-hued evergreens there were the gravestones of other families, facing away from him, that seemed to be heaped up to overflowing on either side with floral offerings of yellow and purple chrysanthemums.

  Oddly enough, Honda felt a protest stirring within him. Rather than press his palms together, he wanted to summon Kiyoaki rudely and then take him by the shoulders and shake him. In his frustration Honda let his eyes stray to the marble fence that marked off the grave site with such precision, and there, atop a railing, he caught sight of a very small tendril of red-tinged ivy. When he walked over for a closer look, he saw how it had worked its way stealthily up the polished marble, clinging firmly to the surface so as not to slip, and had at length climbed to the top of the railing, whence it now was reaching out toward Kiyoaki’s gravestone. Yellow veins were delicately sketched upon the spread-open red leaves, which were like fine candies, their tips dyed a deep scarlet. At the sight of this, Honda’s heart at last became somewhat more tranquil, and he turned back once more to Kiyoaki’s grave. He bowed his head deeply. He pressed his palms together. He shut his eyes. No sound came to disturb him.

  All at once, an intuition struck him with unmistakable force. Honda shuddered. No one, the intuition told him, was within this grave.

  26

  ISAO HAD NOT YET shown Lieutenant Hori either the summary of the plan for the rising or the draft of the declaration to be dropped from an airplane. The Lieutenant was fully taken up with the fall maneuvers, and he had not acceded to Isao’s request for a meeting. More than a month remained before the appointed day. Once into November, the Lieutenant was supposed to spend all his spare time in directing their efforts.

  After he had returned home, Isao had been warmly welcomed as usual by his mother, and by Sawa and the other students. Sawa, perhaps because there was no chance to talk with Isao alone, had not once referred to the problem that he had recently discussed with such heat. And so Isao had not yet found an opportunity to thank him for the money.

  The evening of his return, his father had gone out to attend some meeting, and, since the Academy students had told Isao that they would like to hear about the training camp at Yanagawa, he decided that he would eat with them in the dining hall that night. His mother took special pains to prepare a fine meal for them.

  “With just you and the boys there, you’ll be able to talk a lot more freely,” said his mother, handing him a colorful porcelain platter of sashimi as he stood in the hallway. The house custom forbade boys in the kitchen. “So please take this in for me.” Slices of halfbeak, sea bream, mackerel, flounder, and yellowtail lay beautifully arranged upon the platter, the kind of treat that hardly ever brightened a schoolboy’s diet. He felt suspicious of this unlooked-for generosity. As for Miné herself, she was struck by the icy look on her son’s handsome face as he reluctantly took the platter. In the darkness of the corridor his features seemed set and unresponsive.

  “Why are you being so extravagant?” he asked her.

  “It’s just a little celebration on your coming home.”

  “But I was only gone a week, to the next prefecture. What would you do if I had been overseas?”

  Isao could not keep his mind free of Kurahara and his money. Nothing made him so miserable in his own home as being under the constant menace of that name. The name was like a toxin that lay heavy in the atmosphere of the Academy of Patriotism, in the water, in every particle of food.

  “Here I go to great lengths to give you a nice dinner, and you’re not the least bit happy about it!”

  Isao looked full into the eyes of his grumbling mother, whose pupils were wavering uneasily like the bubble in a spirit level. As he did so, her expression went blank, and she suddenly shifted her gaze away from him.

  Perhaps, Isao thought, this treat was no more than one of his mother’s whims. But his underlying anxiety was such, he realized, that his mood could be nothing but suspicious. Anything out of the ordinary in the household, whether good or bad, was enough to make him uneasy. The least alteration pained him.

  “Master Kaido scolded you,
didn’t he?” she said, her tone jocular and even coquettish. “I heard all about it from your father.” As she spoke, it seemed to Isao that droplets of her saliva sprayed over the limpid slices of halfbeak sashimi, and he felt a twinge of revulsion. The thought of his mother’s saliva falling like a sudden shower upon the fresh sashimi and green seaweed garnish almost distracted him from the other uncleanliness that was troubling him.

  “It was nothing of importance.”

  Isao’s answer, given without the trace of a smile, was hardly satisfactory to her.

  “Why must you be like this? You talk to me as if I’m a stranger, no matter how much I worry about you.”

  With a sudden movement, Miné picked up a slice of sashimi from the platter and thrust it into Isao’s mouth. He was holding the platter, and could not block the rapid thrust of her hand. Probably opening his mouth to take it was an automatic reaction to the urgency of her gesture. His eyes watering from this forced feeding, he watched as she turned hastily as though to hide her tears and went back into the kitchen. Being thus treated like a son going off to war stirred his resentment.

  His mother’s sorrow lay in his mouth like a foreign body. He was annoyed at the way the sashimi clung to his teeth.

  What was going on? Everything had been knocked from its proper course. Still, it was hard to believe that his mother’s intuition had discerned in his eyes the determination to die.