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students knelt.
    â€œPray for him,” Mashita said, leaning forward as best he could, to bow his head.
    The students silently said a Buddhist prayer.
    The only sound in the room was the sobbing of the young men. Tears ran down their cheeks. There was a bubbling from the corpse; blood pumped from the neck, covering the red carpet.
    A raw stench filled the room. Mishima’s entrails had spilled onto the carpet.
    Mashita lifted his head. The students had not finished. Morita was ripping off his jacket. Another student took from the hand of Mishima, which still twitched in a pool of blood, the
yoroidōshi
dagger with which he had disemboweled himself. He passed the weapon to Morita.
    Morita knelt, loosened his trousers, and shouted a final salute, as Mishima had done:
“Tennō Heika Banzai! Tennō Heika Banzai! Tennō Heika Banzai!
”
    Morita tried without success to drive the dagger into his stomach. He was not strong enough. He made a shallow scratch across his belly.
    Furu-Koga stood behind him, holding the sword high in the air.
    â€œRight!” said Morita.
    With a sweep of the sword Furu-Koga severed Morita’s head, which rolled across the carpet. Blood spurted rhythmically from the severed neck, where the body had slumped forward.
    The students prayed, sobbing.
    Mashita watched. “This is the end!” he exclaimed.
    â€œDon’t worry,” one of the students said. “He told us not to kill ourselves. We have to hand you over safely. Those were his orders.”
    â€œYou must stop,” Mashita cried. “You must stop.”
    The students unbound Mashita. He rose to his feet, massaging his wrists. On one hand he had a deep cut. Otherwise, he had been uninjured in the scuffle.
    â€œMake the bodies decent,” he ordered the students.
    They took up the men’s jackets and spread them over the bodies, covering the torsos. They lined up the two corpses on the floor, feet pointing toward the main door of the office.
    Then they took up the heads and placed them, neck down, on the blood-soaked carpet. The headbands were still in place.
    The students prayed for a third time, before the two heads.
    Then they rose to their feet and walked toward the main entrance. They dismantled the barrier and pulled open the door.
    The students stood there, looking out. The police looked back. The yellow uniforms of the youths were lightly spotted with blood, their cheeks tear-stained.
    No one moved.
    An officer rushed to Mashita. “Are you all right, sir?”
    The general nodded. But he was on the verge of collapse.
    The police still did not move.
    â€œWell,” an inspector cried out finally, “arrest them!”
    The police doctors went into the room. At 12:23 they confirmed that Mishima and Morita had died by hara-kiri and beheading.
    An announcement was made downstairs to the press. A crowd of about fifty reporters and TV cameramen were standing together in a small room; I was the only foreigner among them.
    A Jieitai officer stood on a low rostrum at the front of the room. “They are dead, Mishima and one other,” he announced.
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘dead’?”
    â€œTheir heads are off, yes, off, their heads are off, off, I tell you, off.”
    5
    â€œOut of His Mind”
    The first reaction to Mishima’s action was complete incredulity. There had been no case of ritual hara-kiri in Japan since immediately after the war; most Japanese had assumed, if they ever thought about it, that the practice was extinct. And Mishima had been one of the best-known men in the country.
    The police were very confused. Officers at the Metropolitan Police Headquarters in Tokyo did not believe the first reports. A senior officer was dispatched with the orders “If the body is still warm, do your utmost to save his life.”
    The Japanese press were also at a loss. A reporter for the
Mainichi Shimbun
, a leading daily paper, phoned in his story from