Runaway Horses

Yukio Mishima
Tr. Michael Gallagher

I'm not a beginner at this any more, Honda mused. I've done my work without being swayed by the opinions of others, and I can say that I've met the prescribed standards. I've become thoroughly adept at my profession--like a potter whose clay seems to shape itself, taking the form that he wants it to.
Suddenly he realized that he was on the verge of forgetting the face of the defendant who had just stood trial before him. He shook his head. Try as he might, he could no longer clearly visualize the man's features.

Two men may talk together enthusiastically for an hour or so about shared experiences, and yet not have a true conversation. A lonely man who wants to indulge his nostalgic mood feels the need of someone with whom to share it. When he finds such a companion, he starts to pour out his monologue as though recounting a dream. And so the talk goes on between them, their monologues alternating, but after a time they suddenly become aware that they have nothing to say to each other. They are like two men standing at either side of a chasm, the bridge across has been destroyed.

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 the 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 the 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 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!