Word: honda
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...Honda has aged twenty years in the second volume, Runaway Horses. He is now a judge in the Court of Appeals. A young man named Isao is brought before him, accused of conspiring in a right-wing plot against the government. Honda resigns his position and successfully pleads the boy's defense, for he has seen a birthmark--three moles under the left armpit--that convinces him that the boy is a reincarnation of the dead Kiyoaki. Released from jail, the boy assassinates an important financial figure, and then commits harikiri alone...
...Temple of Dawn, the third volume, Honda meets yet another reincarnation of his lost friend--this time a Thai princess named Ying Chan. A millionaire by this time, Honda builds a large summer home and invites the princess to visit him there, hoping to win her affections. His hopes come to naught, however, and he resorts to peering through a hole in the wall to watch her make love to another woman. Years later, he learns of her death by cobra-bite in Thailand...
Decay of the Angel is the story of Honda's involvement with a young man who appears to be a fourth incarnation in this series. Toru Yasunaga is a boy of sixteen, brilliant but poor, who works in a signal station adjoining a large harbor. Honda discovers him one day when out walking with a lady friend; when the boy reaches up to remove something from a shelf, the birthmark is revealed...
AFTER carefully investigating the boy's background, Honda decides to adopt him, convinced that this is his friend born still again. But lingering doubts remain: He is unable to ascertain the date of the princess's death, and fears that the boy may have been born too early...
Toru enters Honda's household, and is reared into the Western manners of the modern Japanese. Honda tells him, "Good breeding means a familiarity with the Western way of doing things. We find the pure Japanese only in the slums and in the underworld." Yet Honda has a deeper motivation for this deliberate polishing of the boy's character: He hopes to avert fate, to save the boy from the tragic death which befell each of the other three incarnations of Kiyoaki, by immersing him in the banalities of polite society...