Runaway Horses

Mishima’s second novel in the Sea of Fertility tetralogy is set in the early 1930s and follows Isao Iinuma, the son of Shigeyuki Iinuma, who had served as a tutor to Kiyoaki Matsugae, the protagonist of Spring Snow (published serially in the mid-1960s). Kiyoaki dies in the first book, and Honda, his childhood friend who plays a central role in both novels, comes to believe that Isao is his reincarnation. Both characters are, in their own ways, difficult to like. Kiyoaki is petulant and conniving, while Isao is driven by a kind of tragic naivety.

Isao is also an idealist, a nationalist, and a would-be revolutionary. Along with a group of impressionable, somewhat sycophantic schoolboys, he vows to emulate “the purity of the League of the Divine Wind, hazard ourselves for the task of purging away all evil deities and perverse spirits.” He plots a coup d’état, or what he calls a “Shōwa Restoration,” an effort that seems doomed from the outset. There is plenty of Mishima’s own preoccupation here, as if he is weighing the allure and supposed virtue of such an insurrection against its futility.

The narrator, in an omniscient third-person voice, tells us: “This was a plan that struck at every great capitalist family in Japan. All the zaibatsu-controlled heavy industries, iron and steel, light metals, shipbuilding—an illustrious name from each of these sectors was on the list. That morning of mass killing would, beyond any doubt, send a severe shock through the economic structure of the nation.”

So there is that, along with a good deal of emotional back-and-forth and digression. The novel could have benefited from being more tightly edited; trimming a couple hundred pages might have made it more cohesive. There is also the recurring idea that Japan was once pure, only to be corrupted by outside influences and ideas. Even Buddhism comes in for criticism from some of the characters.

I can’t recall reading a Mishima novel in which seppuku is not romanticized, and in Runaway Horses it appears repeatedly as a kind of sublime act of purification.

Narrator: “…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.”

This recurring theme can make reading Mishima difficult, given how his life ended. What ended the creator inevitably colors the work that remains. I know it shouldn’t, but it does.

I liked this one more than Spring Snow, which often feels unfocused. Runaway Horses is not an easy read either, but the second half is stronger and more engaging, making up for some of the slower stretches in the first. It’s also the kind of book that leaves you wanting to ask the author a series of questions, starting with why.