by Kenzaburo Oe
Startled, I drew my head back. I turned and saw that my sudden movement had obviously surprised both my wife, who nonetheless still grasped the tumbler in her hand, and my brother’s young friends, though they were still staring at the television.
“The storm must be pretty bad for the plane to be as late as this,” I said to cover my embarrassment.
“There’s no telling just how big a storm it is.”
“If the plane’s thrown around a lot, Takashi’ll be terribly scared. The idea of dying with a lot of physical pain scares him twice as much as most people.”
“They say you don’t suffer much in a plane crash. It’s all over in a second.”
“Takashi’s not the type to be scared,” Hoshio broke in in a tense voice as though he could keep quiet no longer. The statement interested me, being the first words, apart from perfunctory greetings, that he’d uttered that afternoon.
“He gets scared all right,” I said. “If anything, he’s the type that’s always been prey to some fear or other. Once, when he was still a kid, he got a tiny cut in the pad of his finger and about a hundredth of a milligram of blood oozed out. He spewed his guts up and passed out.”
The blood in question had welled from a wound made when I pricked the ball of my brother’s right middle finger with the point of a knife. He’d boasted to me that he could slash his own palm open without turning a hair. So I gave him the fright he deserved. He’d often insisted to me that he felt fear neither of violence, nor of any form of pain, nor of death itself, and each time I contradicted him flatly. The result had been my little game. Takashi too had been keen to be tested and prove himself.
“A drop of blood oozed gently out of a tiny wound at the tip of his middle finger,” I said, rubbing in the details in order to make fun of my brother’s devoted bodyguard. “It looked like the eye of a young eel. We were both looking at it when Takashi suddenly puked and fainted.”
“You can’t scare Taka, I saw how cool he was in the June demonstrations—he just wasn’t scared.”
I found myself more and more intrigued by the naive, stubborn antagonism shown by my brother’s friends. My wife was listening too, her eyes on Hoshio. I took another look at the young man, who now sat upright on the bed, steadily returning my gaze. He had the air of someone straight off the farm, of a young migrant come to town. His roughly hewn features, though not ugly when considered individually, were out of balance, as if they’d decided to ignore each other, so that the total effect was comic. The characteristic air of dim-wittedness, a compound of the sullen and the easygoing, that lay over his face like a transparent net was absolutely typical of a peasant boy. His woolen jacket striped with light and dark brown was worn with an air of reverent care, though the odds were that it would soon deteriorate into a crumpled, baggy heap more like a large dead cat.
“Admittedly, Takashi dearly wanted to become the brutal type for whom violent behavior is the norm, but even when he happened to succeed he still gave the impression of being an amateur at it. Isn’t that a little different from courage?” I was still uninterested in convincing him but hoped to put an end to the argument with this final shaft at his hostility. “Won’t you join us in a whisky or a beer?”
“No thank you!” the youth replied in a tone of disgust so blatant as to render it suspect, at the same time thrusting out one hand in a rather forced gesture of rejection. “Taka said people who drink are weak when attacked. He said that if a man who drinks has a fight with one who doesn’t, the one who doesn’t always wins, even if they’re equal in strength and technique.”
Somewhat daunted, I poured a beer for myself and a whisky for my wife, who seemed possessed by a curiosity livelier than any she had shown in the past few months. Clutching our glasses with the air of two alcoholics banded together in last-ditch resistance against some superior force of non-drinkers, we confronted the stubby red hand still thrust out at us. One look at it was enough to show how short a time had elapsed since he’d left his farming village.
“I’m sure your idea of Takashi is the right one,” my wife said to the boy. “Today will be my first meeting with my brother-in-law, and I’m glad to hear he’s such a decent young man.”
The youth gestured with his hand to show he wasn’t taking any sarcasm from a drunken female, and abruptly turning his face away went back to the trivial sports program on the television. As he did so, he spoke in a low voice, checking the attacking team’s score with the girl, whose eyes had not once left the television during our exchange. My wife and I, silenced willy-nilly, immersed ourselves in our drinks.
The plane was further delayed. It seemed it would be delayed forever. Midnight came and still it didn’t arrive. The airfield, as I peered through the slats of the blind, was a vault of pale light, of glowing blues and hot shades of orange pierced by the jagged, off-white darkness that covered the city, as though night had come down as far as the outskirts of the vault then remained hovering there indefinitely, without encroaching any further. Exhausted, we had turned off the lights in the room, whose only source of illumination now was the fine stripes of light shining pointlessly from the television set, which my brother’s friends had watched until, as the last program finished, it ceased to convey any meaning. It still seemed to hum with a sound like mosquito wings, though I wondered if this wasn’t a noise in my own head.
My wife doggedly sipped at her whisky, her back to the runways as though to fend off in advance any visitor who might come through some imaginary door. She was equipped with an odd sense that gauged the depth of her own drunkenness. Like a fish that keeps to its own level of habitation and activity, she sank to a certain depth but would under no circumstances go further, nor would she willingly sober up. According to her own analysis, she’d inherited this sense, this automatic safety apparatus, from her mother, who had herself been an alcoholic. Once she reached a certain fixed limit within the safe layer of intoxication, she would make up her mind to sleep and drop off without further ado. And since she never suffered from any hangover, each tomorrow began with a renewed search for some pretext for returning as soon as possible to that well-known stratum.
I’d told her: “You’re different from other alcoholics on one score at least—you can regulate how drunk you get and stay at the same level, of your own free will. In a few weeks, I imagine, your sudden taste for drink will pass. You shouldn’t connect a passing craving for alcohol with memories of your mother and try to rationalize it, or establish it as something that’s here to stay.” I’d said this again and again, but just as often she’d dismissed my overtures.
“On the contrary, it’s the very ability to regulate the intoxication voluntarily that makes me an alcoholic. Mother was just the same. The reason I stop when I’ve reached a certain stage isn’t that I’m holding back from the temptation to get still drunker, but that I’m afraid to slip out of the pleasant state I’ve reached.”
It was fear and disgust in various forms that drove her down into drunkenness. But like a wounded duck that dives beneath the water, she knew that to surface would mean encountering an immediate hail of anxieties, so she was never entirely free from the fear and disgust, even in her drunkenness. When she drank, her eyes became unusually bloodshot; the fact worried her, and on one occasion she’d said, obviously haunted by the analogy with the traumatic birth of our poor baby, “In Korean folk tales they say that a woman whose eyes are red like plums has eaten human flesh.”
The smell of her whisky-sodden breath hung about the room. The effect of my beer had already worn off, and every time she breathed out I was aware of it with the sharp regularity of a pulse. The heating worked too well, and we’d opened the double windows of our room to let in some air. Suddenly, the fierce roar of a belated jet tore in like a whirlwind through the narrow gap. I set my single eye, lonely fighter with reactions dulled by fatigue, roving frantically in search of the plane that must have arrived. But all it found was two parallel-moving lights on the point of disappearing into
the depths of the milky darkness.
It was the engines of a jet taking off that had so startled me. Realizing the truth of this, I was nonetheless taken in more than once in the same way, though takeoffs were few and far between by now and the whole airport had a half-paralyzed look. The night alone still stood there, helpless, with nowhere to flee before the mercilessly searching lights. The planes huddled still, the color of dried fish amid a chaos of glowing blues and hot oranges.
Silent in our room, we went on patiently waiting for the delayed plane. My brother’s return could have little positive significance for my wife and me, whatever might be true of his bodyguards, yet all of us there waited as intently as though he were bringing back some force that would set something basic in motion in each of us.
With a small cry, Momoko shot upright on the bed. She’d been asleep, curled up like a fetus on top of the cover. Hoshio, who had been stretched out on the floor, got up slowly and went over to the bed. My wife sat with the whisky tumbler still gripped in her hand and her head held erect like a weasel. I remained standing vacantly with my back to the blind. Powerless to do anything for this girl in the grip of her own dreams, we stared at the inverted triangle of her face, pinched with tension and wet with a stream of tears that gleamed white like vaseline in the light from the Braun tube.
“The plane’s crashed,” she sobbed. “It’s burning! It’s burning!”
“No plane’s crashed, stop crying,” the youth said resentfully in a rough voice, apparently ashamed on her behalf.
“Summer … summer!” she breathed and, sinking back onto the bed again, curled up and moved on to another, different dream.
The air in the room was indeed hot enough for summer. My palms were beginning to sweat. Why, I asked myself, should a couple of kids feel such an intense need for my brother as their guardian deity that they would wait all through the long night, overwrought even in their dreams ? Was my brother the type to fulfill their expectations ? With a sense of pity for his young friends, I spoke to Hoshio.
“Won’t you have just a little whisky?”
“No thank you.”
“Do you mean to say you’ve never touched liquor?”
“Me? I used to drink. After I left my part-time high school, while I was working as a laborer, I’d work for three days then on the fourth I’d drink gin nonstop from morning to night. Sometimes I had a short sleep, but one way or the other I was always drunk—drunk awake or drunk asleep. I had some pretty weird dreams.” He spoke in a voice unexpectedly hoarse with feeling.
He came to stand by my side, thrusting his back against the blind with a great rattle. Suddenly, on his face appeared the first smile I’d seen there; his eyes shone with a brilliance detectable even in the gloom, and I realized that he was proud of this story.
“Why did you stop drinking, then?”
“I met Taka, and he said not to drink because you should tackle life sober. So I gave it up. I haven’t had a single dream since.”
So Takashi had manifested the educative instinct: I’d never thought of him as that type before. Takashi could tell a teen-ager, with an air of great authority, not to drink because one should live life sober. That alone, it seemed, had been enough to make a young laborer give up his self-destructive way of life. The boy himself, moreover, could recall the episode with the most relaxed and confident of smiles.
“As to whether Taka’s got courage or not …” he began, dragging up our earlier argument now that he saw the wonder our dialogue on drink had inspired in me. All the while he’d been lying on the floor like a dog he had obviously been racking his brains to find some way of restoring the honor of his guardian deity. “In the June demonstrations he did something completely different from the others, all by himself. You wouldn’t know about that.”
Intent on challenging me with some new logic, he’d raised himself into a position where he could look me straight in the eye. I looked back with an obscure sense of doubt at eyes that were now no more than a pair of dark bullet holes.
“One day he joined in with a gang and helped beat up his own side—the very people he’d fought with up till then and again fought with from the next day.”
He laughed aloud. The laugh, with its ring of childishly furtive delight, was the stick that finally stirred up the muddy waters of my antipathy.
“That ‘great exploit’ just shows that Taka’s a capricious, spoiled kid with no consistency in his actions,” I said. “It’s nothing to do with courage.”
“You’ve got it in for Taka because your friend got hurt when he was hit in front of the Diet, and because you’ve just heard that Taka was using a stick on the side that did the hitting,” the youth replied with open hostility. “That’s why you won’t admit he’s brave.”
“It was the police that hit my friend. It couldn’t have been Taka. There’s no connection between the two things.”
“Who knows—with a free-for-all in the dark like that?” the youth insinuated slyly.
“I don’t believe Taka could hit anyone’s head hard enough to crack the skull, hard enough for the man to go crazy and kill himself. Don’t forget I’ve known him since he was a kid. I know just how timid he is.”
Even as I spoke, I was gradually losing my enthusiasm for such a pointless argument. Fatigue and an unexplained resentment made me feel as though a rotten tooth had overflowed; my mouth seemed filled with an unpleasant taste—the taste of futility. The memory of my dead friend awoke and rebuked me, asking whether this trivial argument with a kid was all I could do for the dead man who had meant so much to me. If anything, it suggested that there was nothing whatsoever that those left behind could do for the dead. For no definite reason, I’d been prey to a vague foreboding during the past few months. They were the months in which my friend had died, my wife had started her whisky-drinking, and we’d been forced to put our idiot child in an institution, though the foreboding might also relate to something that had been building up even before that. It had nourished in me a conviction that I would die in a way still more pointless, absurd, and ridiculous than my friend. I was convinced, too, that those who lived on afterward would fail to do the proper thing on my behalf.
“You don’t understand Taka, you don’t know him at all,” he complained. “You’re not a bit like him. You’re just a rat. What did you come to meet Taka for today?” He spoke in a tearful voice that was touching in its unexpectedness. Then as I averted my gaze from his pitifully working face, he left me and went and lay beside his comrade on the bed. Not a further sound was heard from him.
I retrieved from near my wife’s feet the whisky bottle and a paper cup that had come with a packed lunch for sightseers at the airport, and drank some of the raw, evil-smelling stuff. She bought only the cheapest whisky. It burned my throat and I sputtered briefly.
“Hey, Rat—” my wife called to me, “are you going to spend all night staring at the airfield? I’ve got something to say to you.” She was dispassionate, comfortably submerged at her standard level of intoxication.
Carefully clutching the whisky bottle and cup, I went and sat by her knees.
“What do you think we should say if Taka asks about the baby?”
“We don’t have to say anything, do we?”
“But if he asks next why I’m drinking, I won’t be able to keep quiet,” she said, displaying the cool objectivity that drunkenness always gave her. “Though of course if I answer either question it’ll remove the necessity to answer the other, which makes things simpler.”
“Not so simple. If you understood the causal relationship between the two things as well as you think you do, you would already have got the better of both the matter of the baby and your drinking problem. You would be sober and pregnant with a new baby.”
“I wonder whether Takashi’ll lecture me too? ‘Quit drinking! Life should be lived sober!’ The trouble is,” she added flatly, “I’ve no desire to be reeducated.” I poured some more whisky into her glass. “Don’t you think h
e may be expecting us to bring the baby here to meet him?”
“He’s not of an age to go imagining anything so definite about any baby. He’s hardly grown up himself yet.”
She seemed to be gazing at a vision of the baby somewhere between her own left knee and my right. Balancing her tumbler precariously on the arm of the chair, she stretched out her now empty hand and seemed to sketch the outline of a plump or heavily swaddled baby in a single continuous motion that heightened my awkwardness and general sense of indignation.
“I’ve a feeling, for instance, Taka might bring a teddy bear or something for the baby, which would put us all on the spot.”
“I don’t imagine he’s got the money to buy teddy bears,” I said, realizing as I spoke that although I didn’t want her to talk about the baby to my brother on the first occasion she met him, I was equally reluctant to have the task fall to me.
“Is he the sensitive or the thick-skinned type?”
“He’s a mixture—very sensitive in some ways, very insensitive in others. Anyway, he’s not a particularly desirable type for you to be introduced to in your present condition.” On the bed the young man stirred, then curled up like a threatened wood louse and hemmed feebly. Takashi’s henchman had made a mild protest.
