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“Why, why?” he thought, gritting his teeth. “Why are people not allowed
to do what is most beautiful, when ugly, shoddy acts, acts for the sake of
gain, are all freely allowed?
“At a time when there is no doubt that the highest morality lies concealed
only in the intent to kill, the law that punishes that intent is exercised in the
sacred name of His Majesty, the sun without blemish. And so the highest
morality itself is punished by the very personification of the highest
morality. Who could have put together such a contradiction? Could His
Majesty have any knowledge of such an appalling contrivance? Is this not a
blasphemous system that a skilled disloyalty spent much time and effort to
create?
“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 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 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 a 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!”