Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima Read Free Book Online Page B

There, back from the nipple, at a place ordinarily hidden by the arm, he clearly saw a cluster of three small moles.
    A shiver ran through Honda. He stared at the gallant features of the boy who looked back laughingly from beneath the falls, brows contracted against the water, eyes blinking.
    Honda remembered Kiyoaki’s dying words: “I’ll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.”

6
     
     O NLY THE VOICES of the frogs of Sarusawa Pond were audible in his quiet room at the Hotel Nara, as Honda, the legal documents untouched on the desk in front of him, passed a sleepless night lost in thought.
    He had left Omiwa Shrine toward evening, he recalled, and had encountered a cart laden with lilies just as his car was passing flooded rice paddies ablaze with the scarlet glow of the setting sun. The wild lilies piled high upon the cart and held in place with sacred rope were a faint pink, as if they had been cut just at the flush of dawn. Two students with white headbands over their school caps were pushing the cart, and another was pulling it. A white-robed priest walked ahead, holding a purification wand hung with paper pendants. The student pulling the cart was young Iinuma, and as soon as he noticed Honda in the car, he stopped and raised his cap in greeting. His companions followed suit.
    Ever since he made his incredible discovery beneath the falls, Honda had been unable to regain his equanimity. He had barely acknowledged the various courtesies that the priests of the shrine had shown him afterwards. And then when he had again come upon the three students, their offering of lilies and their white headbands brilliant in the sunset glow mirrored upon the surface of the rice paddies, he became still more abstracted. The young man left behind in the dust raised by the speeding auto, much as his features and his complexion differed, was assuredly in his essential being no one but Kiyoaki.
    Once Honda was left to himself at the hotel, he was beset by the thought that from that day on, his world would be drastically changed. He went down to the dining room at once, but ate his dinner as if in a daze. He went back to his room. The sheets on the freshly made bed were folded back to form a lustrous white triangle. Like the pages of a book lying wide open, they gleamed in the faint light of a table lamp.
    He turned on all the lights, trying in vain to keep mystery at a distance. The miraculous had invaded his own ordered world, and he had no idea what might happen in the future. Furthermore, though he had seen the marvel of reincarnation with his own eyes, it was a secret he could never reveal. If he were to speak of it to someone, he would immediately be thought insane, and the rumor would pass from mouth to mouth that he was no longer qualified to be a judge.
    Still, mystery had a rationality of its own. Just as Kiyoaki had said eighteen years before (“I’ll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.”) Honda had indeed met beneath a waterfall a young man whose side was marked with the same pattern of three moles. He was reminded of what he had read about the four successive existences in the books on Buddhism that he had studied after Kiyoaki’s death, following the teachings of the Abbess of Gesshu. Since young Iinuma was eighteen years old, his age as Kiyoaki reincarnated fitted precisely.
    These four existences, marking the progression of every sentient being, were conception, life, death, and then an intermediate period of existence, a state midway between the previous life and the reincarnation to come. At its shortest this lasted seven days, and it could extend for as long as seventy-seven. Honda did not, of course, know the date of Iinuma’s birth, but it was altogether possible that it fell somewhere within the period of from seven to seventy-seven days after Kiyoaki’s death in the early spring of 1914, the third year of the Taisho era.
    In this intermediate state, according to Buddhist lore, one existed,