Runaway Horses Read Online Free PDF Page B

blade’s edge. Certainly he resembled Iinuma, but the features that had been blunted with heavy melancholy were now strikingly refashioned to express a keen vivacity.
    “Here’s a face,” Honda thought, “that knows nothing of life. A face like new-fallen snow, unaware of what lies ahead.”
    The athletes sat with their masks and gauntlets arranged carefully in front of them, mask over gauntlet, a small towel partly covering each mask. Sunlight striking the metal bars of the masks flashed along the line of blue-clad knees, heightening the feeling of danger and tension that preceded combat.
    The two referees took their positions, one to the front, one to the rear.
    “White team: Isao Iinuma.”
    As soon as his name was called out, Iinuma’s son arose, his body girded with protective gear, and strode forward over the hot sand in his bare feet. He made a deep bow of reverence before the enshrined gods.
    For some reason or other, Honda found himself hoping that this boy would win. Then the initial shout broke from young Iinuma’s mask, a wild cry like that of an enraged bird. Honda suddenly felt his own youth rushing back upon him.
    He had once told Kiyoaki that in later years the two of them, their subtle emotional complexities lost sight of, would be lumped together with the members of the kendo team in the general estimate of the youth of their era. History would say they were dominated by callow faith. And now all had turned out as he had said. What was surprising, however, was that Honda’s feeling toward this callow faith was now one of nostalgia. At some point in his life he had come to feel that the “foolish gods” were more beautiful than the exalted deities that he had once vaguely acknowledged. And in fact the cave of youth into which he had now stumbled was different from the one he had known before.
    When that first cry tore the silence it was as though the burning soul of youth had flared out through the rent. The sharp pain that Honda had felt in the days when there were wild flames in his own breast now gripped him once again, as intensely as ever, though at his age he should have been immune to it.
    So it is that time reenacts the most curious yet earnest spectacles within the human heart. The past makes its appearance again, with all its mingled dreams and aspirations, the delicate tarnish of falsehood left undisturbed upon its silver. And a man may thus come to a much deeper understanding of himself, a realization that was beyond him in his youth. If one looks down on one’s old village from a distant mountain pass, whatever details of that era may have faded from memory, the significance of having lived there becomes vividly apparent. Even the rain-filled hollow in the stone paving of the square, once so disturbing, now merely has a simple, obvious beauty as it glitters in the sun’s rays.
    The instant that young Iinuma shouted out his challenge, the thirty-eight-year-old judge perceived that there was some pain tearing at this boy’s breast, as though an arrowhead had pierced it and remained fixed there. Never had Honda tried to fathom in this manner what went on within the heart of any young man who appeared before him in the prisoner’s dock.
    The opponent from the red team, his neck pads bouncing against his shoulders like a fish’s distended gills, hurled back his own challenge fiercely.
    Young Iinuma now was quiet. The two squared off, staves half-raised, and, thus confronting each other, circled once, then once again. When the boy turned toward Honda, the streaked shadow of his mask bars could not obscure the black, well-defined eyebrows, the brilliant eyes, and the line of white teeth that flashed when he shouted. And then when he turned his back, the shaven nape of his neck, below the neatly folded towel inserted beneath the blue mask straps, conveyed a sense of pure, youthful power.
    Then suddenly there was a clash, like the collision of two boats buffeted by storm waves. The slender