Silence Once Begun

by Jesse Ball

  INT.

  Your next visit to Sotatsu was some weeks later?

  MRS. ODA

  One week later. I brought him a blanket, but they wouldn’t let him have it. They said he had all the blankets he needed.

  INT.

  He was provided with blankets by the jail?

  MRS. ODA

  I do not believe so. What they were saying was …

  INT.

  That he shouldn’t have a blanket. Or that his sort shouldn’t …

  MRS. ODA

  I think so. They did let me stand there with the blanket and try to speak with him. I told him that we were all thinking of him, and I tried something that a friend of mine said.

  INT.

  What do you mean by that?

  MRS. ODA

  A friend of mine, an older woman whose opinion I respected greatly. She said to me to do something when I went and I did. I worked it out carefully and did it. What it was was this: I should tell him a memory I had, very clearly and just speak of it, let it all move there by itself without me or the sad time we were in, just by itself, the past moment. So, I had remembered a time that would be good to speak of, that I thought I could do …

  INT.

  Did you prepare it ahead of time?

  MRS. ODA

  Yes, I thought about it a few ways and tried it out. Then when I went I said it to him.

  INT.

  Would you want to say it now the way you said it, do you think you could still remember it?

  MRS. ODA

  Yes. I remember. I actually said it to him several times. He seemed to like it, so when I went there I said it a few times.

  INT.

  And could you say it now?

  MRS. ODA

  I can. Let me think a minute and I will be ready.

  INT.

  That’s fine. Do you want me to stop the tape?

  MRS. ODA:

  Just for a minute.

  [Int. note. Here I stopped the tape for approximately fifteen minutes while Mrs. Oda went about remembering her words. I got a glass of water for her from the kitchen and found something to do in another room. When I returned, she was ready.]

  INT.

  The tape-device is recording.

  MRS. ODA

  I said to him, I said: When you were four, your father and I had a thought that we should perhaps travel to different waterfalls, that it might be a good thing to see all the waterfalls we could. So, we began to go to waterfalls whenever we had a chance. That year I believe we saw thirty waterfalls, in many places. We developed a routine for it. We would drive there and get out. Your father would pick you up. He would say to you, Is this the right waterfall? and you would say, No, not this one. Not this one. We went all over. There are really more waterfalls than one thinks. When he talked to me about the project, I said, I don’t know how many waterfalls there are to go to, but I was wrong, there are many. It was just the three of us in the car then, as your sister and brother weren’t born yet. Just the three of us, riding along. We would go down these tiny roads, past fields and rice paddies. We would have to stop to ask directions of the strangest people. But everyone seemed to understand what we were doing. It was never hard to explain it. We are going to see many waterfalls. And the person would say that that was a good thing to do, and that right that way was another waterfall, a very fine one, quite worth seeing. Then we would go on down the road, and pull up at the place. I would get out, I would get you out. You would go to your father. Then the two of you, the two of you would go to the edge of the water. Your father would cock his ear to listen, and you would imitate him. We didn’t have a camera, so I don’t have any pictures of it. But the two of you would listen to the waterfall for quite a while. Then he would pick you up and he would say, Son, is this the right waterfall? and you would say, No, not this one. Not this one. Then we would sit and have some food that we had brought. We would look at the waterfall some more and sometimes talk about what was particular about it. Then we would get in the car and go. Your father would never look back at the waterfall as we were leaving, but you would always turn around as best you could and try to look out the window or over the backseat to see it as we drove away. When finally we had been going for months and seen many many waterfalls, we went to one that we had missed, one that was actually rather close to where we lived. It was a rainy day. It had started out pleasant, with blue skies and fine white clouds, but while we were driving there came many gray clouds that were nearly black from the north and west and with them all kinds of rain. Your father did not want to stop. It was very close, this waterfall, he said, and it was a part of the expedition that we would not turn back. So, we got there in the rain and when we did, the rain cleared. We sat in the car for a few minutes and then got out. It was a very small waterfall, one of the smaller ones we had seen. That was probably why no one said anything about it to us when we were trying to find the waterfalls. But when you and your father had listened for a while, and when he lifted you up and he asked you, Son, is this the right waterfall? you laughed and laughed. You didn’t say anything, you just laughed and laughed. And so he said to you again, Is this the right one? Is this it, the right waterfall? and you said, Yes, this is the one we have been looking for. Then when your sister and brother were born, and we would go on family picnics, we often went there, but we did not talk about our waterfall expedition, and because you had been so young, you never remembered it. You didn’t know why that was the waterfall we always went to, or that you had chosen it from all the waterfalls we had seen. We didn’t know anyway, why it was the right one, your father and I. Or maybe he knows, but I don’t know.

  (Mrs. Oda begins to cry. I pass her a handkerchief. She refuses it.)

  INT.

  And did he say anything to that?

  MRS. ODA

  He watched me the whole time, sitting with his back to the wall, he was watching me very closely. His eyes changed while I was watching so I knew that it affected him, and that is why I came back and said it again and again. I felt that it was affecting him, whether he would talk or not.

  Int. Note

  The guards I spoke to said Oda dealt poorly with being in jail.

  Of course, the newspapers were readily available to the guards and so they read about Oda and about what had happened, and were deeply prejudiced against him on account of the confession he had signed, which seemed to reveal his guilt beyond any doubt.

  This is a peculiar matter, because the confession should not have been available to the press. Indeed, the actual confession was not. However, it seems that on the evidence of: a. witnesses seeing Oda Sotatsu dragged away from his house, and b. data from an anonymous source supplied to the press, the newspapers gained the knowledge they needed to investigate further, at which point perhaps police officials disclosed information. What happened precisely is unknown. That there were many newspaper accounts linking the Narito Disappearances to Oda Sotatsu via his own signed confession is beyond doubt.

  This led to Oda being dealt with harshly, most particularly because he would not cooperate. He was kept separate from the other prisoners, and visited almost constantly by a series of officials attempting to get information from him. The interrogations that have been made available to me form a part of this narrative, as you know, but are, I suspect, the least part of the many interrogations that took place. It is clear that the guards often would not allow him to sleep ahead of an interrogation in the hopes that it would weaken his will. However that may be, it appears, from the transcripts that we have, that it was not an effective strategy in this case.

  Oda Sotatsu was in jail at the police station for a period of twenty days prior to charges being brought. He was then moved to a different facility, for the trial. The entire case was evidently expedited, possibly because of the enormous media scrutiny, and as well because of the confession, and because Oda refused to deal with any potential representation he would have in court.

  Interview 4 (Sister)


  [Int. note. Oda Minako, Sotatsu’s sister, was living elsewhere, possibly in Korea, when I began this series of interviews. It was important enough to her, when the family spoke about what I was doing, that she chose to return to Japan for some days to speak to me. These interviews also took place in the house I had let. She was an attractive woman, older, of course, and dressed very professionally. It seems she had acquired an advanced education, and was actually a professor at a university in Korea, in what subject I do not recall. She had been away at her studies when Sotatsu was apprehended by the police, and she returned from Tokyo to visit him. She was uncertain of the day, or whether her visits followed or preceded those of other family members. She did say that a childhood friendship with one of the police officers permitted her to actually enter the cell and sit with him, something allowed none of the other family members, and something mentioned by no other source.]

  INT.

  You were there then, sitting beside him in the cell. You were a young woman, in the midst of her Ph.D., called away into what must have been as absurd a situation as you had ever dealt with.

  MINAKO

  I was angry with him. He had never lied, not once, and so I was sure that the confession was true. I was worried about the people who had gone missing. I knew two of them personally, an experience the rest of my family did not have, and so …

  INT.

  And so it was more complicated for you?

  MINAKO

  You could say so, but I expect it was more than complicated for all of us.

  INT.

  Of course, I don’t mean to say …

  MINAKO

  I know, I understand. I just meant that my loyalties, my immediate duties in the situation were twofold. I wanted simultaneously to help my brother, a person I loved as much as I had ever loved anybody. I preferred him, in fact, preferred him to Jiro, to my mother, to my father. He was the only other one who actually read, who encouraged my studies. He wrote a great deal of poetry. He was cultured, although I don’t know that anyone besides me knew that. I don’t believe he shared that with anyone … I wanted to help him, but I also wanted to find these two people who were missing, a woman who had been my violin teacher, and a man, a Shinto priest whom I had visited as a child. I was deeply concerned that they should be missing, and I felt the guilt of their disappearance keenly. If there was something I could do to help them, I must do it, so I told myself.

  INT.

  And that led to you behaving in a certain way?

  MINAKO

  One can’t say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you are playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.

  INT.

  But you might have simply done things to make his time more bearable, irrespective of his guilt, or, alternately, tried to query him about the crime itself.

  MINAKO

  I did the latter. I sat by him and I told him that he was my brother, that I did not refuse him any family connection based on what happened, but that I needed to know if these people could be helped, or …

  INT.

  Or?

  MINAKO

  Or if they were beyond help.

  INT.

  And did he speak to you?

  MINAKO

  He did not. He watched me as I came in. He sat by me. He held my hand. When I left, we embraced. But there was no speech. It was as though he had become pre-literate. The expressiveness of his manner was magnified. His actions no longer leaned on his words. All that he meant he meant through his face and eyes, his hands.

  INT.

  And what did those tell you? How did they speak to you?

  MINAKO

  That there wasn’t any hope in him, none at all. That he was waiting to die, and did feel, did indeed feel that he was not any part of any community, not ours, not any.

  INT.

  But he embraced you.

  MINAKO

  I initiated the embrace. It might have been as much out of habit as anything else. Or out of boredom. Who can say? He had been in the cell a long time.

  INT.

  His silence, were you prepared for it by the way he had been as a boy?

  MINAKO

  Everything is contextual. No situation he had been in as a boy was anything like the one I found him in.

  Interview 5 (Brother)

  [Int. note. When Jiro discovered that Minako had come to be interviewed, he cautioned me against her. He said that she had always been against Sotatsu, that she had enjoyed the prestige that his crime had afforded the family (a peculiar point, and one I did not understand), and that it was in part due to her intervention that Sotatsu’s case had gotten worse. I absorbed this information, but did not act on it in any regard.]

  INT.

  So you had visited him a half dozen times, simply sitting with him, before this visit that you just began speaking of?

  JIRO

  As I described before, I simply sat with him. I didn’t expect I could accomplish anything else. I was a young man, and had no idea what I would say, or if there was anything to say.

  INT.

  But then you had this outburst.

  JIRO

  Yes, I had the outburst, on my eighth or ninth visit.

  INT.

  Can you describe the events that led to the outburst?

  JIRO

  Things had become bad for us in the town. No one would speak to my mother. Only my very best friends would tolerate me, and even then, only in private. My father, who had been a fisherman all his life, could no longer sell his fish. No one would buy them. It came to a head one day when my father went to the store to buy something. I don’t know what he was buying, but the store clerk wouldn’t serve him. They got into an argument that went out into the street. Apparently the grandfather of the store clerk was one of the people who was missing. They were shouting at each other. I wasn’t there, I only know what people say about what happened.

  INT.

  And what do they say?

  JIRO

  That he was denying Sotatsu’s guilt. He was saying Sotatsu hadn’t done it. He just kept repeating it over and over, and although the clerk had been the one who was aggressive at first, denying him service and chasing him out of the store, my father became aggressive in the street. He was just shouting at everyone, getting in people’s faces—not behavior anyone had ever seen. He kept saying, He didn’t do it. He didn’t do it. You know him from a boy. You know him. He didn’t do it. The crowd grew, and became angry. Someone hit him. He fell down. Other people began to hit him. He got hit and many people stepped on him before the police arrived. He was badly hurt and had to go to the hospital. And that’s when it got bad.

  INT.

  How so?

  JIRO

  At the hospital, they wouldn’t receive him. So, he had to be driven to a different hospital where they did take him.

  INT.

  How could that be, that the hospital wouldn’t take him?

  JIRO

  I believe the presiding doctor was connected with a victim of the Disappearances also.

  INT.

  And so, this is all prelude to your visit, no?

  JIRO

  That day I went to see Sotatsu. He knew nothing of any of this, and was the same as he had always been, just sitting in the cell. When he saw me, he stood up and came to the bars. I looked at him and I thought, is there something I can see, some change in him that would make him a different person than the one I knew? I looked at him very carefully. I wanted to see who it was I was looking at. And it wasn’t anyone else. It was my brother, Sotatsu. I had always known him. It was absurd that he had done these things. He hadn’t done them. I was suddenly completely sure. I said to him, I said, Brother, I know you didn’t do these things. I don’t know where this confession came from, but it i
sn’t true. I know this. And I took his hand through the bars.

  INT.

  The guards let you touch his hand?

  JIRO

  I don’t remember what the officers were doing. They were watching, but they didn’t stop us. I don’t think they felt that Sotatsu was any danger. If you had ever seen him, you would not think him any danger.

  INT.

  And what did he say, you said he spoke then, what did he say?

  JIRO

  He said, Brother, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do it.

  INT.

  And what did you say? You must have been shocked.

  JIRO

  I was not shocked. It was what I expected. I said to him that he hadn’t done it, because I believed he hadn’t done it, and then he replied, confirming what I said. It was all very clear.

  INT.

  But there must have been some relief on your part?

  JIRO

  I don’t know about that. All of a sudden there appeared a huge mountain to climb where there hadn’t been anything before. Now it was a matter of trying to get him out. Before that it was just visiting, just standing. So, my mind was racing.

  INT.