by Kenzaburo Oe
“At first,” said Takashi, “I tried to talk about the unpleasant symptoms in my penis in an abstract, inorganic way—as a kind of detached description, you know. I’d no special grounds for believing so, but I felt the word gonorrhea might be too blunt and shock her, so first I said I thought it might be urethritis. But she didn’t get it. So I said I was suffering from ‘inflammation of the duct.’ You should have seen the fresh light of understanding that came into her eyes at that. Nothing could be less abstract and inorganic—it brought home to me all over again the sticky, fleshly reality of the suffering in my cock. And she said, ‘Is there a burning sensation in your penis?’ God, was I shocked! The words conveyed the reality so well I felt my whole body burning—with flames of embarrassment, that is!”
He laughed out loud and my friend followed suit. The non-Japanese around them, whose ears had pricked up at the significant words in English that sprinkled Takashi’s conversation, gazed at them with deepening suspicion. The pharmacist appeared from behind the shelves, his lugubrious countenance bathed in sweat. The smile on Takashi’s sunburned, birdlike face was suddenly blotted out by a look sick with longing and anxiety. Watching him, my friend felt himself go tense, but the bald-headed pharmacist, who looked like an Irishman, merely said in a fatherly voice, “This number of capsules comes very expensive. Why don’t you take just one-third ?”
Recovering his poise instantly, Takashi gave a laugh. “It’s expensive, but anything’d be better than the agony in my tubes these past few weeks,” he said.
“I’ll buy them for you,” my friend said in a hearty voice. “To celebrate the start of your new life in America.”
Completely cheerful by now, Takashi took an affectionate look at the capsules gleaming softly in their bottle, then announced that he would pick up his belongings and set off on his solitary wanderings through America that very day. He and my friend left the drugstore, eager to get away from the scene of the crime as soon as possible, and walked together to a nearby bus stop.
“Once a problem’s solved, the things that have been plaguing you seem terribly stupid and trivial,” said my friend with a feeling almost of envy at the encounter between Takashi’s happy face and the capsules in the bottle.
“Any trouble seems trivial once it’s over, surely?” said Takashi aggressively. “It’s the same with you going home to a clinic, isn’t it? When the knots in your head are unraveled, maybe there’ll be nothing left but the feeling that it was all a lot of fuss about something silly and unimportant.”
“If they’re unraveled,” said my friend with unconcealed wistfulness. “If they’re not, the silliness and the unimportance will be the sum total of my life.”
“Just what are they, the knots in your head?”
“It’s hard to tell. If I could tell, I could conquer them and begin to regret having marked time for several years. On the other hand, if I gave way to them and set out on a course of self-destruction that would really make them the sum total of my life, then that too would gradually make the true nature of the knots clear. Admittedly,” he complained with a sudden, sad intensity, “the understanding in that case wouldn’t be any use to me personally. Nor would there be any way of letting anyone else know that someone who’d apparently gone mad had seen the light in extremis.”
It seemed as if my friend had profoundly stimulated Takashi’s interest. But at the same time, my brother’s behavior showed signs of a desire to get away just as soon as possible, and it was from this that he realized that his appeal had touched some sensitive core in Takashi. At this point a bus drew up. Takashi got on it and, handing my friend a pamphlet through the window—in return, he said, for the cost of the medicine—was swallowed up without further ado into the vastness of the American continent. Neither my friend nor I had had any clear information about him since. True to the resolution he’d confided in my friend, he’d quit the company from that moment and set out alone on his travels.
Getting into a taxi, my friend immediately opened the pamphlet Takashi had given him. It was about the civil rights movement. The frontispiece was a photograph of a black, his body so scorched and swollen that the details were blurred like those of a crudely carved wooden doll, with a number of white men in shoddy clothes standing round him. It was comic and terrible and disgusting, a representation of naked violence so direct that it gripped the beholder like some fearful fantasy. Looking at it unavoidably brought one face to face with the abject certainty of defeat under the relentless pressure of fear. With the inevitability of two drops of water merging into each other, the sight linked itself immediately with the ill-defined trouble in his own head. It occurred to him that Takashi had left the pamphlet with him knowing full well the significance of giving it and its photograph to him rather than to anyone else. Takashi, in his turn, had seen into something essential in my friend’s mind.
“One sometimes realizes after the event,” my friend said, “that one’s consciousness has caught something unexpected on its very outer edge, as though two things had somehow got superimposed. Ferreting around in the dimmer corners of my memory, it came to me that when I went up behind Takashi he was staring at that photograph as he drank his lemonade. He seemed to be wrestling with some colossal problem. I think he wasn’t really worrying about that business of the antibiotic prescription that he talked about in such detail, but about some essentially much more serious matter. Do you think Takashi’s the kind of guy who’d make a fuss about a slight dose of the clap? It gave me a peculiar shock when he said, ‘Shall I tell you the truth?’ and I suspect that what he had in mind was something quite different from what he actually told me. I wonder what it was, though?”
Seated at the bottom of the pit on that autumn dawn, the dog on my lap, I couldn’t tell what it had been—that thing in my brother’s mind whose existence, if nothing else, my friend had made clear. Neither could I tell what it was that, growing and growing in his own head, had finally led him to death in such a bizarre guise. Death cuts abruptly the warp of understanding. There are things which the survivors are never told. And the survivors have a steadily deepening suspicion that it is precisely because of the things incapable of communication that the deceased has chosen death. The factors that remain ill defined may sometimes lead a survivor to the very site of the disaster, but even then the only thing clear to anyone concerned is that he has been brought up against something incomprehensible. If my friend, instead of painting his head crimson and hanging himself, had bequeathed so much as a brief cry over the telephone, there might have been some clue. It may well be, of course, that the crimson head, the cucumber in the anus of the naked body, and the death by hanging were themselves a kind of silent cry; but if so, then the cry alone was not enough for those left behind. The clues were too equivocal for me to pursue any further.
Nevertheless, none of the survivors was in a better position to understand my dead friend than myself. Ever since our first year at university he and I had been together in everything. Our classmates used to say we were like identical twins. In appearance even, I was more like my friend than my brother. Takashi bore no resemblance to me whatsoever; and indeed there were some things in my younger brother’s head as he roamed about America that I sensed as less accessible to me than things that had once had a place in my dead friend’s mind. One autumn evening in 1945—the evening of the day that S, the second of my elder brothers and the only one to return alive from the front, was beaten to death in the Korean settlement that had grown up like a wen just outside the valley where our village stood—mother, lying on her sickbed, turned to our sister and made this appraisal of Takashi and myself, the only men left to our family :
“They’re still children, their faces aren’t formed yet. But by and by Mitsusaburo will be ugly and Takashi will be handsome. People will like Takashi and he’ll lead a successful life. You should get on good terms with him while you can and stick with him even after you grow up.”
When mother died, our sister was adopted
by an uncle along with Takashi, thus in effect following mother’s advice; but she killed herself before reaching adulthood. Though her retardation wasn’t as serious as that of my own child, she was backward to the extent that, as mother had said, she was incapable of surviving without attaching herself to someone else. Only to music, or rather to sounds as such, did she show any real response. . . .
The dog barked. The outside world sprang to life once more, closing in on me at the bottom of my pit from two sides at once. My right hand, rounded into a scoop, was scraping at the wall of the pit in front of me; already I’d clawed down toward my lap five or six pieces of brick buried till now in the Kanto loam, and the dog was pressing itself against my chest to avoid them. Urgently, my hand scraped at the side of the pit once, twice more; and I realized that someone unknown was peering down into it from above. I drew the dog close with my left hand and looked up from the hole. The dog’s terror infected me: I was afraid with a truly animal fear. The morning light was clouded like an eye with a cataract. The sky that at dawn had been high with a whitish tinge now hung low and leaden. If only my eyes had both had vision, the morning light might have filled the scene more amply (I’m frequently prone to this kind of misconception), but to the one remaining eye it was a dark morning of unrelieved desolation. I sat, heedless of the dirt covering me, in a position more degraded than that of any normal inhabitant of that morning city, scrabbling with bare hands at the earthen wall, assailed by an overwhelming cold from without and a burning shame from within. Like a tower about to topple and blot out the leaden sky, the squat, broad silhouette of a human being once more blocked the entrance to the pit. It brought to mind a black crab reared up against the sky on its back legs. The dog went wild, and I was paralyzed with fear and shame. A clattering of innumerable glass objects wafted down into the pit like a flurry of hail. I strained my eyes in an effort to make out the features of the giant who peered down godlike at me, and, dazed with shame, allowed myself to give a faint, fatuous smile.
“What’s the dog’s name?” said the giant.
The question was remote from all the possible remarks against which I’d been arming myself. Hauled safe, in that instant, onto everyday shores, I felt an immense, relaxing sense of relief. No doubt the gossip would spread around the neighborhood through this man, but it would be a scandal that in no sense stepped outside the everyday: not the kind that a moment earlier I’d contemplated with such fear and embarrassment; not the kind of scandal that would bring dog’s-bristles of terror and shame sprouting from every pore of one’s body, the kind that would brutally and aggressively scatter everything human to the winds, but a quiet scandal, no worse than if one had been seen, say, having intercourse with an elderly housemaid. The dog on my lap, divining that his protector had somehow been delivered from the peril associated with the grotesque thing above, fell silent, docile as a rabbit.
“Fell in there while you were drunk, did you?” the man went on, totally and finally plunging my behavior into the realms of the everyday. “It was foggy this morning.”
I nodded cautiously at him (his whole body stood out in such black silhouette that to him my face, however dark the morning, must have stood out light against the darkness), then got up with the dog still in my arms. Drops of water trickled like tears from the back of my thighs, wetting the skin around my knees, which had been dry so far. Vaguely apprehensive, the man took a step back so that I was able to get a view of the whole of him from a point about level with his ankles.
He was a young milkman and wore a special tunic for carrying milk that looked like a life jacket with a bottle shoved into each of its air tubes. Whenever he took a breath, a jangling of glass striking glass arose around him. His breathing seemed to be somewhat heavier than it should be. He had a flat face like a halibut, with almost no bridge to his nose, and the whites of his eyes, like the eyes of primates, were almost invisible. He stared at me with those uniformly brown eyes, breathing heavily; his breath hung about his weak chin like a white beard. I shifted my gaze to the dogwood that displayed its autumn colors behind his spherical head, reluctant to see the emergence on his face of some expression that might mean something. Seen from a point two inches above the ground, the backs of the dogwood leaves were a burning red, threatening yet at the same time familiar, a red that reminded me of the flames in the picture of hell that I’d seen in our village temple every year on the Buddha’s Birthday (it had been presented to the temple by my great-grandfather following the unhappy incident of 1860). The dogwood was a sign to me, its meaning only imperfectly clear, that produced a sudden resolve. I put the dog down onto the ground where the earth had been dug over to produce a dirty-looking mixture of black mud and withered brown grass. The dog ran away with every appearance of cheerfulness, as though to emphasize how long-suffering it had been up to now. Carefully, I climbed up the ladder. The song of at least three different species of bird bore down on me, together with the squeal of a car’s tires. I had to climb cautiously in case my legs, which trembled violently with the cold, made me lose my step. As the whole of me in my dirty blue-striped pajamas appeared shivering above ground, the milkman took another apprehensive step backward. I was tempted to give him a scare, but refrained, of course, and going into the kitchen closed the door behind me without further ado.
“When I saw you in the hole, I reckoned you were dead,” the milkman shouted after me disappointedly, as though my going indoors without paying him any attention had made him see the affair as an outright swindle.
I stopped for a moment in front of my wife’s room to see if she was still asleep. Then I took off my pajamas and rubbed myself down. I thought of heating some water and washing off the dirt, but abandoned the idea. Without realizing it, I’d lost the urge to keep myself clean. The trembling of my body mounted steadily. Something left a dark stain on the towel. I turned the light on and found my finger was bleeding where I’d torn off a nail in scrabbling at the earthen wall of the pit. It was too much trouble to look for disinfectant; I bound the towel round it and went shivering back to my own bedroom-study. The shivering wouldn’t stop, and before long I developed a fever. My whole body began to throb with a dull ache, separate from the sharp pain in my injured finger. It was a cruder version of the ache I always felt at dawn. My fingers, I realized now, had unconsciously been trying to dig out the pieces of broken brick and bring down the earthen wall to bury me alive. The shivering and the dull ache increased unbearably. And I understood a little of that daily experience on awakening, when at dawn I felt my body dismembered and aching dully in each of its several parts.
Family Reunion
ON the afternoon of the day that a telegram came from my brother announcing the abrupt curtailment of his wanderings in America and his impending arrival at Haneda airport, my wife and I met my brother’s teen-age friends at the airport. There was a storm over the Pacific and the plane was late. We, the welcoming party for Takashi Nedokoro, took a room in a hotel at the airport to wait for the delayed plane. My wife, with her back to the window shaded by its plastic venetian blind (not that the blind completely shut out the light from outside, for a dim haze lingered in the room like smoke with no exit)—with her face, that is, shadowed so that no one should detect her expression—seated herself in a low armchair and silently began to drink whisky. A cut-glass tumbler was clasped in her left hand, which had a darkened appearance like the wet bough of a tree, and a whisky bottle and ice bucket stood next to the shoes beside her bare feet. She’d brought the whisky from home and ordered ice at the hotel.
Takashi’s friends were sitting on the bed, which still had its cover on, huddled together like the young of an animal in their lair, and with knees drawn up to chin were watching a sports program on a transistor television set that hummed like a swarm of mosquitoes. I’d met Hoshio and Momoko twice before. Shortly after my brother had disappeared, allowing my friend to pay for his antibiotic capsules, they had come to see me, hoping to learn his latest whereabouts. By their
next visit, a few months later, a picture postcard or the like must have come just for them from my brother, for they knew an address where he could be contacted, but they refused to tell me, merely demanding money so that they could send him a few necessities. Their personalities had made no particular mark either on my wife or myself, though we were mildly impressed by the way my brother’s absence seemed to have left them at a loss, and by the devotion that this suggested.
As I drank my beer, which looked black in the dim light of the room, I peered through the slats of the blind at the vast space in which ponderous jetliners and gallant propeller craft were landing and taking off without cease. The area between the runways and the room where we lurked behind our blind was traversed at eye level by a steel and concrete overpass. A party of schoolgirls doing the sights of the airport passed along it, all bent forward with a cautious air. As the flock of kids in their drab uniforms reached the bend in the overpass, they momentarily appeared to be rising up toward the cloudy sky like the aircraft on the runways. The effect was oddly unsettling. But what seemed at first sight to be the girls’ shoes falling away from their feet were in fact pigeons. A number of them swirled up into the air, and one came and alighted, with unnatural movements as though it had been shot down, on the narrow parapet spread with dry sand immediately beyond the blind. Taking a more careful look, I saw that it was lame. It was obviously too fat, presumably through lack of exercise, and couldn’t manage a smooth landing. From its swelling neck and on down its belly lay a dark shadow like the skin of my wife’s hand. Then without warning the fat pigeon took off (the space beyond the soundproof window must have been full of explosive noises which would startle a pigeon, but since none of them reached this side, all occurrences outside seemed to lack continuity), stopped quite still about seven inches in front of my eyes like a black blot in a Rorschach test, and flew off briskly out of sight.
