When Isao looked over his shoulder, the drawn-out shadow of one oak seemed to him the very image of his ambition here beneath this end-of-summer sun, a thing he had been dragging behind him to no purpose. The slipping away of summer affected him keenly. This parting with the sun. He dreaded seeing that massive, scarlet-glowing symbol of ideal devotion begin to fade with the change of seasons. This year too he had let slip the chance to die one morning before the blazing summer sun.
Again he raised his eyes, and he saw great swirling clusters of red dragonflies, as if the glow of the gradually reddening sky overhead, filtering down through the closely bunched branches of the oak, had given wings to every crevice. This was yet another presage of autumn. These signs of a cool reason, slowly, leisurely taking form from out of the midst of hot passion, would make some men happy, but to Isao they brought sadness.
“Why wait in such a hot place?” said Izutsu in surprise, as he and Sagara came up, wearing white shirts with their school caps.
“Look there!” said Isao, sitting up straight in the grass. “There in the evening sun is the face of His Majesty the Emperor.” His words had a magical effect upon Izutsu and Sagara. As always, they were quick to fall in with his mood even while feeling intimidated. “And His Majesty’s face is troubled.”
Izutsu and Sagara sat down in awed silence beside Isao, and for the moment, as they twisted blades of grass between their fingers, they steeped themselves in the feeling that was theirs whenever they were close to him—that of having drawn near to a naked sword. At times Isao seemed frightening to the two boys.
“I wonder if they’ll all come?” said Sagara, pushing up his glasses as he broke the silence, hoping to account for a misgiving he did not understand.
“They’ll come. What other choice have they?” answered Isao with casual assurance.
“You finally escaped the kendo training camp, eh? Good for you!” said Izutsu, expressing his admiration to a somewhat embarrassing degree. Isao was about to explain his reason, but changed his mind. Their activities had not yet become so busy that he had to deny himself the least diversion. Rather his reason for not participating was simply that he had had enough of the bamboo sword. He had grown weary because victories came too easily with it, weary because the bamboo sword was no more than a symbol; weary, finally, because it carried with it no real danger.
The three of them began to talk earnestly among themselves about how remarkable it was that they could enlist as many as twenty comrades. At that very time, at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the Japanese swimming team was gaining glory for the homeland, and so it was quite easy at any school to get swimming candidates to turn out. But what Isao and his friends were doing was a different story from the recruitment of the sports clubs. The appeal of their group had nothing to do with faddish popularity. For each student whom they had selected had to be asked to entrust his life to them. Furthermore, until he unqualifiedly trusted his life to them, they could give him no clear concept of their purpose.
Finding young men willing to give their lives and getting them to declare their intention was not so difficult. Each and every one of them, however, was eager to embrace a cause that he could brag about to others and hoping for the most exquisite of funeral wreaths to mark his passing. Some of the students had secretly read Ikki Kita’s An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan, but Isao had sniffed out the odor of a devilish pride there. This book, far, far removed from the “dogged devotion and humble loyalty” of Harukata Kaya, certainly stirred up the hot blood of many of the students, but such young men were not the kind that Isao wanted.
Beyond a doubt, Isao’s comrades would be chosen not for what they had to say but because of something deep and inscrutable, manifested only when their eyes met his. This was something not in the realm of thought but of a more distant origin. Further, it gave rise to a clear, outward expression that would yet pass unrecognized by anyone who did not hold a like aspiration. It was this element alone that would cause Isao to choose his comrades.
The candidates had come not just from the College of National Studies but from various schools, some of them from Nihon University and some even from high school. One Keio University student had been introduced to Isao as a candidate, but, though this boy had a ready facility with words, his dilettantish manner made him unsuitable. There was even one student who, after professing the greatest enthusiasm for The League of the Divine Wind, gave himself away in more casual conversation as a fraud, odds and ends of vocabulary revealing him as a left-wing activist intent on spying.
A quiet and unsophisticated manner and a cheerful smile went in most cases with a character that could be relied upon, a brave disposition, and, as a consequence, a spirit that had little regard for death. Talkativeness, high-sounding words, an ironic smile, and the like all too often went with cowardice. A pale face and a sickly body were in some cases the source of extraordinary zeal. Fat youths in general were not only cowardly but indiscreet, while lean and logical-minded ones lacked intuition. Isao thus became aware of how much the face and outward bearing could communicate.
There was, however, nothing about the city-bred students to indicate kinship with the more than two hundred thousand children then suffering privation in farming and fishing villages. The very term “undernourished child” had become an expression popularly used to ridicule gluttons and had lost almost all of its old deep-seated anger. Yet it had been reported that even in Tokyo, at an elementary school in Fukagawa, school inspectors were disconcerted to find that pupils who received the rice balls supplied to undernourished children took them home at once for their younger sisters and brothers. In Isao’s college, however, no one was from this part of Tokyo. Many were the children of provincial middle school teachers and Shinto priests, and while few came from wealthy families, still fewer came from families hard put to lay food upon the table. As members of the families of moral leaders they were well acquainted with the severity of the conditions in the desolate and impoverished villages. Their fathers, for the most part, were grieved at what they saw and angry at what they did not see. All they could do was become angry. For as schoolteachers and priests they had no responsibility for the dreadful poverty or for the fact that it was ignored.
The government was skilled in relegating rich and poor to separate boxes, from which they could hardly see each other. Party politics, keeping to an accustomed rut that excluded any changes either for better or worse, had lost the power to deal the kind of killing blow to the spirit that had been embodied in the ordinance of the Ninth Year of the Meiji era that forbade the wearing of swords. Its methods left its victims still half-alive.
Isao had not drawn up any statement of principles. Since the world was such that all that was evil in it applauded inertia and weakness, the determination to act, whatever the act, would be their only principle. Consequently, when Isao interviewed his candidates, he said not a word to them about his intentions nor did he make any promises. When he had reached the point with one of these young men where he felt that he might admit him, he relaxed his hitherto unremitting sternness, and, looking him full in the eye with a kindly expression, asked simply: “What do you say? Are you with us?”
Izutsu and Sagara, following Isao’s directions, had made up a dossier with a picture for each of the twenty students who had been admitted in this way. Although the information, of course, came from the candidate himself, it included full details on his family, the occupations of his father and brothers, his own character, his physique, his particular skills, his favorite books, and even the state of his relationship with girls. Isao was quite pleased that eight of the twenty were the sons of Shinto priests. The affair of the League of the Divine Wind was by no means something terminated long ago by death. The average age of the twenty was eighteen.
As Izutsu presented him with one dossier after another, Isao read each of them once again, storing the data in his head and making it a point to join each name in his memory with the proper picture
. Even in regard to a comrade’s personal affairs, he had to be prepared to speak sympathetically at the proper moment, in words that would reach his heart.
The firm conviction that the political situation was in sorry shape was, in fact, very well suited to the youthful tendency to think that reality itself was in sorry shape. Isao never worried about confusing the two. As far as he was concerned, whenever the slovenly beauties that covered the garish kiosks on the street corners troubled his thoughts on the way to school, this for him was an indication of the corrupt state of politics. He and his comrades had formed a political union that was necessarily based upon their boyhood sense of shame. Isao was ashamed of the present state of things.
“Only a month ago you couldn’t even tell a fuse from a detonator,” said Sagara in the midst of a minor dispute with Izutsu.
Isao smiled and said nothing. He had told his two friends to investigate thoroughly the manner of dealing with explosives. Sagara had asked a cousin who was an engineer to instruct him, and Izutsu had made the same request of a cousin in the Army.
“And you,” Izutsu retorted, “I’ll bet even you didn’t know whether you cut a fuse straight across or diagonally.”
The two then plucked blades of the pampas grass at their feet to represent fuses, and broke off a section of a thin and hollow dry branch for a percussion cap. They were ready to practice setting off a charge.
“Here’s a well-made percussion cap for you,” said Sagara boastfully as he packed dirt into the short branch with his fingertips. “You leave half of it hollow, and you stuff as much powder as you can into the other half.” The wooden branch lacked, of course, the ominous fascination of a red brass percussion cap, like a metallic caterpillar, which concealed with capricious unreliability enough explosive power to blow off one’s hand. It was no more than a thin branch reduced to its dry and withered shell. However, the lingering beams of the warm summer sun sinking into the woods of Hikawa Shrine shone through the busy, soiled fingers of the two boys, and from the direction toward which time was slipping came the distant, burnt odor of the inevitable killing to come. The odor, which might well have been nothing but the smoke from the kitchen fires of the nearby houses, combined with the sunlight to effect the sudden transformation of dirt into gunpowder and dry branch into percussion cap. Izutsu carefully inserted a thin blade of grass into the percussion cap and drew it out to gauge the length of the section not filled with gunpowder. He marked it with his fingernail and then laid it against the stalk of pampas grass that was to be the fuse and measured off an equal length. Finally, he slowly inserted this fuse into the percussion cap to the proper depth. Were he carelessly to thrust it too far, the percussion cap would explode.
“We don’t have a crimper.”
“Use your fingers. And no nonsense while you’re doing it,” said Sagara.
The color that suffused Izutsu’s sweat-covered face showed his earnestness. Just as he had been taught, he grasped the percussion cap with his left hand, his forefinger at its tip, middle finger against the powder-filled portion, and his third finger and thumb close to the opening at the hollow end. Then as he placed the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, doing duty as a crimper, at this opening, he brought both hands down firmly to his left side and turned his face sharply to the right. Twisting his right hand, he skillfully performed the function of securing the fuse to the percussion cap. He kept his face turned away during this process, not looking at what he was doing, in order to protect his face on the off chance of the cap’s exploding.
“You’re overdoing it, looking away like that,” said Sagara teasingly. “You’ve got your body so twisted that your hands won’t be able to do the important job they’re supposed to. And why so much bother to protect a face like yours?”
All that was left was to insert the cap securely into an explosive charge and light the fuse. Sagara, looking serious, helped with this, a clod of dirt serving as the explosives. Now to put a match to it. The flame of the match held against the still-green stalk of pampas grass quite obviously lacked the power to set it afire. The flame, all but invisible in the sunset light, burned halfway down the stem of the match before going out. A thirty-inch fuse allowed some forty or forty-five seconds. The stalk of pampas grass had been broken off at a length of thirty-five inches and so the two boys gazed at the second hand of their watches as it measured off fifty seconds.
“Hurry, run!”
“It’s all right. I’m already a hundred meters away.”
Still seated as before, the two made as if they had fled far from the spot, acting as though they were short of breath and laughing as they looked at each other.
Thirty seconds passed. Then ten seconds more. Thanks to their imagination, and to the time elapsed, the explosive charge with the cap thrust into it was now far from them. But the fuse had been lit, and all the conditions necessary for the explosion had been fulfilled. The flame crawled along the fuse like a ladybug with set purpose.
Finally the imagined charge, at its imagined distance, detonated. Something ugly and corrupt suddenly heaved as though giving a violent hiccough, and the evening sky was rent for a moment. The oaks shook in the surrounding grove. Everything became transparent. The very report itself was transparent as it beat against the red sky and spread its force. At last all was still.
“Better the Japanese sword,” said Isao abruptly, looking up from the dossiers he had been scrutinizing. “We need twenty swords without fail. Some of our friends can surely slip them out of their homes for us.”
“Wouldn’t it be good to learn how to draw and strike at close range, and how to test a sword on a dead criminal?”
“We don’t have that much time,” said Isao. His voice was quiet but his words had a poetic fervor for the two boys. “Instead, before the end of vacation if possible, or else after the fall term begins, we should all attend Kaido Masugi’s training camp on the rites of purification. We can talk about anything there, and he won’t object to whatever kind of training we do. And if that’s where we’re going, we’ll have a good reason for leaving our houses.”
“It’s not much fun to listen to Master Kaido from morning to night on the evils of Buddhism.”
“That’s something you’ll have to bear with. He’s a man who understands us thoroughly,” Isao replied. He looked at his watch and got to his feet at once.
Isao and his two companions, deliberately waiting until somewhat past the designated hour of six o’clock, peered toward the shrine through the low door beside the already-shut main gate. The light of the evening sun fell upon a group of students. They faced uncertainly in various directions, their uneasiness quite apparent.
“Count them,” said Isao in a low voice.
“Every one of them is there,” said Izutsu, unable to restrain his happiness. Isao, however, knew how imprudent it would be to let himself steep in the satisfaction of being the object of such trust. Every man being present was certainly preferable to having absentees. But they were gathered there because of a telegram. Because they expected action. Because, in other words, of the reckless courage of youth. In order to temper their resolution, he would have to take this opportunity to plunge it into cold water.
With the setting sun behind it, the shrine’s copper-tiled roof was dark, but the sun’s rays caught the splendid ornamental crossbeams of its gable among the glossy branches of the surrounding ilexes and zelkovas. The slanting sunlight fell upon the black granite gravel spread within the shrine fence, catching a little of each pebble and giving it its own shadow, black as grapes at the end of autumn. Two sakaki trees were half in the shadow of the shrine while their upper branches shone brilliant.
The twenty young men were grouped around Isao, who stood facing them with the shrine to his rear. As they watched him silently, he felt the brightness of their eyes, due as much to their inner fire as to the sun striking their faces, he felt their longing for some incandescent power that would lift them up to the heavens, he felt their almost frant
ic dependence upon him.
“You have performed well in assembling here today,” he said, breaking the silence. “Nothing could have made me happier than your coming here like this, from as far away as Kyushu, with not a man missing. But my summons was not, as you thought, because I had some purpose. There was no purpose whatever. From all over Japan you’ve come, holding fast to the vision within your hearts, and you’ve gathered here utterly in vain.”
Suddenly there was agitation among the group, and a murmur arose.
Isao raised his voice: “Do you understand? This meeting today is absolutely meaningless. There’s no purpose to it. I have no work at all for you to do.”
He said no more, and the murmuring subsided. Silence settled upon the gathered boys even as the night was overtaking them.
Then a single angry voice shouted out. It was a boy named Serikawa, the son of a Shinto priest in the far northeast: “What are you doing to us? If I thought I was being mocked, I couldn’t stand it. I drank the farewell cup of water with my father before leaving home. My father has never ceased being indignant over the plight of the farming villages, and he told me that the time had come for the young to take action. So when the telegram arrived, he said nothing but raised the farewell cup with me and sent me off. If he learns I’ve been made a fool of, do you think my father will have nothing to say?”
“That’s right,” another boy chimed in promptly. “Serikawa is right.”
“What kind of nonsense is this? I don’t recall making any promises. You took my telegram telling you only to meet here, and you let your imaginations run wild. Isn’t that what you did? Was there anything else in that telegram—anything other than the time and the place? Tell me,” Isao demanded, keeping his voice calm as he ridiculed them.