Runaway Horses

by Yukio Mishima

  This bare room was more than sixty feet square. One wall was lined with narrow wooden cubicles like telephone booths. Here prisoners waited their turn. On the other side was a toilet with a glass door. The officer in charge sat on a high platform surrounded by a wooden enclosure, and just beyond, its floor covered only with a thin matting, was a place to change clothes.

  The cold was severe. Isao was led with the others to the changing place, and there he was made to strip to the last stitch. He had to open his mouth and have even his back teeth examined. Guards carefully peered into the orifices of his ears and his nose. His arms were spread, and the front part of his body was scrutinized. Then he had to get down on all fours and be examined from the rear. Handled in this rude fashion, one’s own body began to seem alien, and only one’s thoughts remained secure. This state of mind was already a refuge from humiliation. Stripped of clothing, goose flesh over his entire body, Isao was feeling the lash of cold sparing no part of him, when a brilliant red and blue phantom appeared to him. What was it? He had happened to recall the tattoo artist, a habitual gambler, with whom he had found himself in a common detention cell. The man had been taken with Isao’s skin and had repeatedly begged him to let himself be tattooed, free of charge, once they were out of prison. He told Isao that he wanted to cover the fresh skin of his back with lions and peonies. Why lions and peonies? Perhaps because that sort of red and blue pattern, like the reflection of glowing evening clouds upon the dark waters of a marsh covering a valley floor, was a sunset burst of color that rose out of the very nadir of humiliation. No doubt the tattoo artist had seen the setting sun reflected deep in some valley. And nothing but lions and peonies would suffice to capture it. . . .

  However, when Isao felt a guard’s hand touch the moles on his side and squeeze them momentarily, he realized once again that he could never commit suicide out of humiliation. During his sleepless nights in the detention cell he had toyed with the thought of killing himself. But the concept of suicide remained for Isao what it had always been, something extraordinarily bright and luxurious.

  Prisoners awaiting trial could wear their own clothes, but since Isao had to hand over his present clothing to be steamfumigated, he was obliged to wear blue prison garb for a day. He also had to gather together his personal belongings and, aside from what he needed for everyday use, turn these over to a guard. Then from the officer in charge, high upon his platform, he heard various instructions, on gifts sent in, interviews, letters, and the like. It was already night.

  Other than the times he was led before the District Court for preliminary hearings, handcuffed and with a rope around his waist, Isao spent his days in a cell all to himself in Block 13 of Ichigaya Prison. At seven in the morning, a steam whistle blew, the signal to rise. The whistle was located above the kitchen, drawing its energy from the boilers. Though its noise was piercing, it seemed filled with the cheerful, steamy warmth of life. At seven thirty in the evening the same whistle gave the signal for retiring. One night Isao heard a cry while the whistle was blowing and shouts of abuse immediately afterwards. This was repeated the following night. On the second night, Isao realized that that cry, under cover of the whistle, was a prisoner shouting “Long live the revolution!” in unison with a comrade whose cell window was in the wall opposite him. The shouts of abuse were those of a guard who had overheard them. Isao never heard this prisoner’s voice again, perhaps because he had been removed to a punishment cell. Human beings, Isao realized, could descend to communicating their feelings like dogs barking in the distance on a cold night. It was as though he could hear even the restless shuffling about of chained dogs and the scratching of nails upon a concrete floor.

  Isao too, of course, missed his comrades. But even in the common detention cell where he was put after being taken by bus to await his preliminary hearings, he was unable to learn anything about them, much less look upon their faces.

  The gradual lengthening of the days was the only sign of the approach of spring. The straw matting that covered the floor of his cell still seemed to be woven of frost. And the chill made his knees stiff.

  Isao longed to see his comrades who had been arrested with him; and as for those who had slipped so effortlessly away right before they were to strike, when he thought of them, rather than anger, he felt something mystical. Their sudden falling away had brought with it a sense of tranquility, the lightness of a tree newly pruned. But what was at the heart of this mystery? What had brought about this reverse? The longer he pondered these questions, the more he avoided the word “betrayal.”

  Before he was thrown into prison, Isao was never one to dwell upon the past. If he thought about it at all, his mind would instantly turn to the League of the Divine Wind and the sixth year of the Meiji era. Now, however, everything forced upon Isao a consideration of the most recent past. The immediate cause of so swift a downfall for him and his sworn companions was Lieutenant Hori, of course, but, from the outset, his comrades had made their vows without waiting to assure themselves that the enterprise was possible. Something had abruptly given way, an avalanche within the heart, something that could not be stemmed. Isao himself had not been unaware of that interior avalanche. At that time, however, not one of the vowed group who had remained true would have been able, Isao was quite sure, to foresee their present situation. What they had thought of then was death. They were completely given over to fighting and dying. Indeed they had lacked the caution necessary to accomplish their aims. They had been confident in the thought that their rashness could bring on nothing other than death. How had they come to this humiliating and agonizing end? Isao’s concept of purity had been that of a noble bird meant to perish by flying so high that the sun would sear its wings. He had never dreamed that any hand could capture that bird alive. As for Sawa, who was not with them at the time of their capture, Isao had no idea how he was faring now, but, even though he did not want to think of him, Sawa’s face flashed disagreeably from somewhere deep among the emotions that clogged Isao’s breast.

  Article 14 of the Peace Preservation Laws put the matter bluntly: “All secret organizations are forbidden.” And loyalist organizations such as that of Isao and his companions, firmly bound together in a blood brotherhood, ready to spill their hot blood so that they could rise up to the heavens, were proscribed by their very nature. But as for political organizations bent upon further enriching the bellies of vested interests, as for corporations bent on profit, there was no objection to forming any number of these. It was in the nature of authority to fear purity more than any sort of corruption. Just as savages fear medical treatment more than disease.

  Isao finally came to the questions that he had up to now been avoiding: “Does a blood brotherhood in itself invite betrayal?” This was a most dreadful thought.

  If men brought their hearts together beyond a certain degree, if they were intent upon making their hearts one, did not a reaction set in after that brief fantasy had passed, a reaction that was more than simply alienation? Did it not inevitably provoke a betrayal that led to complete dissolution?

  Perhaps there was some unwritten law of human nature that clearly proscribed covenants among men. Had he impudently violated such a proscription? In ordinary human relationships, good and evil, trust and mistrust appear in impure form, mixed together in small portions. But when men gather together to form a group devoted to a purity not of this world, their evil may remain, purged from each member but coalesced to form a single pure crystal. Thus in the midst of a collection of pure white gems, perhaps it was inevitable that one gem black as pitch could also be found.

  If one took this concept a bit further, one encountered an extremely pessimistic line of thought: the substance of evil was to be found more in blood brotherhoods by their very nature than in betrayal. Betrayal was something that was derived from this evil, but the evil was rooted in the blood brotherhood itself. The purest evil that human efforts could attain, in other words, was probably achieved by those men who made thei
r wills the same and who made their eyes see the world in the same way, men who went against the pattern of life’s diversity, men whose spirit shattered the natural wall of the individual body, making nothing of this barrier set up to guard against mutual corrosion, men whose spirit accomplished what flesh could never accomplish. Collaboration and cooperation were weak terms bound up with anthropology. But blood brotherhood . . . that was a matter of eagerly joining one’s spirit to the spirit of another. This in itself showed a bright scorn for the futile, laborious human process in which ontogeny was eternally recapitulating phylogeny, in which man forever tried to draw a bit closer to truth only to be frustrated by death, a process that had ever to begin again in the sleep within the amniotic fluid. By betraying this human condition the blood brotherhood tried to gain its purity, and thus it was perhaps but to be expected that it, in turn, should of its very nature incur its own betrayal. Such men had never respected humanity.

  Isao, of course, did not pursue the idea that far. But he had obviously reached the point where he had to make some sort of breakthrough by thinking. He felt resentment that his intellect lacked keen and ruthless canine teeth.

  Seven thirty was too early for retiring, and his sleeplessness was worsened by the twenty-watt light that burned all night long, by the faint rustle of lice beginning to stir, by the stink of urine from the oval wooden pot in the corner, by the cold that brought a flush to the face. But soon the whistles of the freight trains that passed through Ichigaya Station told Isao that it was the dead of night.

  “Why, why?” he thought, gritting his teeth. “Why are people not allowed to do what is most beautiful, when ugly, shoddy acts, acts for the sake of gain, are all freely allowed?

  “At a time when there is no doubt that the highest morality lies concealed only in the intent to kill, the law that punishes that intent is exercised in the sacred name of His Majesty, the sun without blemish. And so the highest morality itself is punished by the very personification of the highest morality. Who could have put together such a contradiction? Could His Majesty have any knowledge of such an appalling contrivance? Is this not a blasphemous system that a skilled disloyalty spent much time and effort to create?

  “I don’t understand. I don’t understand it at all. And then, after we did the killing, not one of us would have disregarded his vow to kill himself at once. So if we could have done as we had meant to, not a single branch, not a single leaf of the tangled thicket of the law would have brushed so much as the tip of our sleeve or the hem of our kimono. We would have slipped marvelously through the thicket and gone rushing headlong up into the bright sky of heaven. So it was with the League of the Divine Wind. Though, I know, the tangled underbrush of the law didn’t grow as thick in the sixth year of Meiji. The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man’s desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written in a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such a desire. The law, therefore, of its very nature is aimed at a tiny minority of mankind. The extraordinary purity of a handful of men, the passionate devotion that knows nothing of the world’s standards . . . the law is a system that tries to degrade them to ‘evil,’ on the same level as robbery and crimes of passion. This is the clever trap that I fell into. And because of nothing else but somebody’s betrayal!”

  The whistle of a freight passing through Ichigaya Station stabbed through his thoughts. It brought to his mind a man racked with an emotion so intense that he was like one rolling about on the ground to put out his flaming kimono. The heartrending cry of the man tumbling in the blackness was wrapped in a swirl of its own fiery particles and glowed red with its own blaze.

  This train whistle; however, differed from the prison whistle with its false warmth of life. This voice, though twisted with anguish, somehow pulsated with a limitless freedom and offered a smooth access to the future. Another part of the country, another day—even the rust-covered phantom of a white, sour-faced morning suddenly appearing in the line of mirrors above the sinks on some station platform did not suffice to dispel the powerful attraction of strangeness the whistle conveyed.

  Then the dawn came at his prison window. From the window of the easternmost cell on the right of the three rows in Block 13, after a night without sleep, Isao watched the red winter sun rise.

  The horizon was a high wall, and the sun clung to that line like a soft, warm rice cake before gently climbing. The Japan that that sun shone upon had refused the help of Isao and his comrades, and lay prey to sickness, corruption, and disaster.

  It was after this that Isao, for the first time in his life, began to have dreams.

  Of course, it was not actually the first time he had dreamed. But his earlier dreams had been the kind that a healthy youth forgot with the coming of morning. Never once had a dream lingered to affect his waking hours. Now it was different. Not only through the morning but through his entire day, last night’s dream would persist, sometimes linked with the memory of the dream of the night before, or to be continued in the dream of the next night. His dreams were like brightcolored garments put out to dry and left forgotten in the rain, hanging on the clothes pole without ever drying. The rain continued. Perhaps a madman lived in the house. And more printed silk robes were added to the drying pole, bright splotches of color against the somber sky.

  One night he dreamed of a snake.

  The setting was the tropics, perhaps the garden of a large mansion somewhere, which was surrounded by jungle so thick that the walls that bordered it could not be seen.

  He seemed to be in the middle of this jungle garden, standing upon a terrace of crumbling gray stone. The house to which the terrace belonged could not be seen. There was nothing but this small, square terrace which defined a gray rocky zone of stillness, the curving stone images of cobras rising up from pillars set at each of its corners, like four outspread hands pushing back the heavy tropic air. A hot square of silence cut from the heart of the jungle.

  He heard the whine of mosquitoes. He heard the buzzing of flies. Yellow butterflies flew about. The cries of birds came down to him like drops of blue water ever falling. And, now and again, came still another bird cry, a frenzied cry that seemed to tear through the very midst of the intricate tangle of green vegetation. Cicadas were shrilling.

  Rather than these varied sounds, however, what most affronted the ear was a roar like that of a sudden rainstorm. It was not, of course. A passing wind was shaking the jungle growth that bound the treetops together, far above the shaded terrace, but since its effect was not felt below, the only visible sign of its passing was the movement of the flecks of sunlight that dappled the cobras’ heads.

  Leaves high up, caught by the wind, slipped down through the foliage, and the noise they made sounded like falling rain. Not all of them were newly torn from their branches. Tree limbs were thrust against each other to undergird the nearly impenetrable mass of vines that caught up leaves as they dropped away. A fresh wind would cause these to fall a second time, working down through the branches with a sound like heavy rain. Since the leaves were broad and parched, they made an echoing din. Each one that fell upon the stone terrace, overgrown with moss white as leprosy, was large.

  The tropical light was like thousands of massed spearheads of marshaled troops. Reflections fell everywhere about Isao, as patches of sunlight filtered through the branches above. To look at that light directly would be blinding, to touch it would be to scorch one’s fingers. From beyond the jungle growth, it held everything in siege. Isao felt its presence crowding in even upon the terrace.

  At that moment Isao noticed a little green snake put its head through the railing. What had seemed to be an out-stretched vine there suddenly grew longer. The snake was quite thick, like a waxwork figure colored in light and dark shades of green. Its lustrous, artificial-looking body was not a vine, something Isao disco
vered too late. Its fangs had already found their mark by the time he realized that it had coiled itself to strike at his ankle.

  The chill of death came to him through the tropic air. Isao shivered.

  He was suddenly cut off from the torrid heat. The venom had driven all warmth from his body. Each of his pores awakened fearfully to the coldness of death. He could breathe only with difficulty, and each breath became more shallow. Soon the world had no more breath to put into his mouth. But the movement of life went on throbbing keenly within him. Against his will, his skin, like the surface of a pond struck by a shower, grew puckered. “I was not meant to die like this. I was meant to die by cutting open my stomach. I never expected to die this way, a passive, miserable death by a chance of nature, a small touch of malice.” Even as he thought this, Isao seemed to feel his body freezing into a block as solid as a fish so frozen that a hammer blow could not shatter it. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he had kicked off his quilt and was lying in his cell in the glimmering dawn light of an unusually chilly early spring morning.

  Another night he had this dream.

  This one was so strange and disagreeable that he tried afterwards again and again to banish it from his mind. This was a dream in which Isao was transformed into a woman.

  He was not at all certain, however, what sort of woman his body had been changed into. Perhaps because he seemed to be blind, he could only grope with his hands to try to find out. He felt as if the world had been turned inside out, and he was sitting languidly in a chair by a window, his body lightly covered with sweat, possibly just after awakening from an afternoon nap.