by Kenzaburo Oe
“I don’t want to be cross-questioned by anybody,” she said defensively, abruptly excited and just as suddenly subdued, as though she’d spoken at the very moment when the ball of emotion, tossed into the air, had reached its point of rest.
“Nor do you have to,” I said comfortingly, in case she should start on the interminable descent of some inner spiral staircase of hysterical self-loathing or self-pity. “There’s no reason for you to be especially afraid of Takashi. You’re just tense because you’re meeting a new member of the family. There’s nothing else to fear—not that I think you are afraid.” I poured another shot of whisky into her tumbler. If she wasn’t going to make up her own mind to sleep, she must be made to go one step beyond her usual level of drunkenness. Her mind, always suggestible, was threatened, was besieged by something, some evil specter worse than any physical pain.
She took a sip of whisky, plainly fighting against nausea. Straining my one eye, tired and aching from its struggle against the darkness, I watched her face: helpless, solitary, turned in on itself. Eventually she rose above it. The rigid outlines softened on the face which she held tilted slightly upward with closed eyes, and a young girl’s face appeared in its place. The hand clasping the tumbler wavered in the space above her knees. I took the glass from her, and the thin, sinewy, sallow hand fell to her lap like a dying swallow. She was already asleep. Draining the whisky she had left, I yawned and, following the young man’s example, stretched out on the floor and (you’re just a rat) prepared to board the rickety chariot of sleep.
In my dreams I was standing at a crossroads where a broad avenue with streetcars was intersected by a sidestreet. Large numbers of people bumped into my sides and back incessantly as they passed me from behind. The leaves on the trees lining the street showed that it was late summer; the foliage was as dense as in the deep forest surrounding the valley where our village stood. Unlike the everyday bustle of the world that was my own background, this other world that I watched as one who has thrust his head beneath the waters of a river in order to see its bed, this other world now unfolding before my eyes, was wrapped in a profound, unearthly silence. Wondering why it should be so utterly silent, I realized that it was because all the people walking so slowly along the opposite sidewalk were old. The people driving in both directions along the road were all old too. The people at work in the liquor stores, the drugstores, the five-and-tens, and the customers as well, they were all old. There was a barber’s just to the right of the entrance to the sidestreet, and the patrons, swathed to their necks in white cloth as I saw them in the wide mirror through the half-open windows, were all old men, and the barbers were old men too. And with the exception of the customers and employees in the barbershop, all the old men were dark-suited, wearing hats pulled down over their ears and what looked like rain boots that fitted closely around their ankles.
These old men wrapped in tranquillity—I felt, struggling to remember something that troubled me—had some deep significance. Then I realized that my friend who had hanged himself and the idiot baby consigned to an institution were both present among the old men who filled the street, both dressed also in black suits with hats crammed down over their ears and rain boots on their feet. They disappeared and reappeared amongst their fellows, and since they were almost identical with the other old men, it was impossible to distinguish all the time which was my friend and which the baby. But the ambiguity was in itself no obstacle to emotional experience; all the old men who filled the street were in some way relevant to me. I tried to burst into their world, met some invisible resistance, and gave a cry of despair :
“I deserted you!”
But my cry spent itself in countless echoes flying round my head; whether or not it even reached the old men’s world I couldn’t tell. They went on placidly walking, slowly driving their cars, carefully selecting books, sitting transfixed in the barbershop mirror, on and on forever. . . .
A pain gripped me as though someone were trampling on my guts: in what way had I deserted them? By never—I told myself—having hanged myself in their stead, with my head painted crimson; by never having been put in an institution and left to degenerate into something like the young of a wild beast. Why should this be so clear to me now, then? It was abundantly clear because I wasn’t there with them in that late summer street, a placid old man in a black suit with my hat down over my ears and rain boots on my feet. . . .
“I deserted you!”
I’d already realized it was a dream, but the perception didn’t alleviate the sense of oppression that those placid apparitions inspired in me. I experienced them in the most unequivocal way possible.
A heavy hand was placed on my shoulder. My eyelids were held shut by some force—whether by shame or sensitivity to the light wasn’t clear. I opened them in spite of it and saw my brother, dressed like a hunter in Levis and a jacket with a collar of (possibly imitation) badger, peering down at me. His face was deeply tanned, as though it had rusted.
“Hi!” he said in an encouraging voice.
Sitting up I saw the girl, all but naked, bending over to pick up a dark brown dress. She was about to put it on, in midwinter, with nothing underneath but a tiny pair of panties. My wife and Hoshio were watching her with the grave attention of guardians. Naked, she had the chilly, forlorn air of a plucked fowl, and I felt the sight as less erotic than cruelly desolate.
“It’s an Indian hide dress,” Takashi said. “The only thing I brought back from America. I had to sell sister’s pendant to get the money.”
“That’s OK,” I said, concealing my disappointment at losing the one remaining thing that had belonged to our dead sister.
“Glad you say so,” he said happily, as though a load really had been taken off his mind. He walked over to the window, kicking aside with evident pleasure the whisky bottle, glass, and empty lunch box left from the previous evening, and finished raising the blind, which was already halfway up.
A faint white morning light filled the air beneath a uniformly cloudy sky, and the planes clinging to the ground like locusts were wrapped in a dismal haze. The sight filled me with the same cruel desolation—though on an incomparably vaster scale—as the naked teen-ager had done, thereby convincing me that the emotion had its origins within me, in lack of sleep and the lingering intoxication and fatigue of the night before.
In the faint light from the fully exposed window I could see Momoko in distress, shaking her small head which protruded from the broad oval collar of the leather dress. The hem of the dress was stuck on her hips, leaving her bottom half exposed, but her face glowed with naive pride at being the only one for whom Takashi had brought a present. Even the way she grumbled, as though blaming the leather dress itself, sounded more like a song of irrepressible good spirits.
“My skin and this leather rub each other up the wrong way. And I’ve no idea which thong fastens in which hole. Just look how many thongs there are, Takashi! I wonder how the Indians ever manage such a lot—their mathematics can’t be very advanced!”
“That’s nothing to do with it,” Hoshio interposed in an equally cheerful tone, stretching out a clumsy helping hand. “Are you sure those leather strips aren’t just decoration?”
“Decoration or not there’s no reason for you to pull them off!”
My wife joined the happy band around the Indian dress and loyally helped Momoko on with it. I was startled by the natural manner in which she seemed to blend in with Takashi’s bodyguards this morning. During my painful, humiliating slumber, my brother had alighted from his tardy plane and with swift magic had reconciled my wife with his young friends. The distress that had afflicted her all the evening before, and infected me as well, was now mine alone.
“The baby was badly handicapped mentally, you know,” I said. “We had to put him in an institution in the end.”
“Mm. I already heard,” Takashi said with an appropriately consoling air of despondency.
“We went to fetch him after five weeks
, but he’d completely changed in the interval; his state was such that even my wife and I couldn’t tell he was our own son. Naturally, the child doesn’t recognize us either. It looks as though something terrible has been done to him. You get the feeling that the barrier has come down more completely than if he’d actually died. So we came back without him after all.” I spoke in a subdued voice, not wanting it to reach my wife’s ears.
As he listened in silence, my brother’s expression had a somberly sincere quality that managed to insinuate itself among the folds of my emotions without provoking any antagonism, a quality that resembled something I had detected in his tanned, unfamiliar face when I first awakened, a quality that had been latent in his voice as he told me he’d heard of the baby’s misfortune. I hadn’t expected to find this shadow of grown-up seriousness in him, and I realized that I was observing one of the effects of his life in America.
“Did you hear about that too?” I asked.
“No. But I knew that something dreadful must have happened,” my brother said, also dropping his voice and speaking almost without moving his lips.
“Did you hear that my friend had killed himself?”
“Yes. There was something rather special about him, wasn’t there?”
I realized that Takashi too already knew the details of how my friend had died. It was the first time I’d heard such a tribute from the lips of someone outside my dead friend’s immediate family.
“I seem to be surrounded by the odor of death,” I said.
“If that’s so, Mitsu, then shake yourself free and climb up into the world of the living again. Otherwise the odor will rub off on you.”
“Does that mean you’ve picked up the superstitious mentality in America?” I said.
“That’s right,” my brother went on relentlessly, seeing through my attempt to obscure the echoes his words had set up in the void within me. “But all I’ve done in fact is take up again something that was very marked in me when I was a kid and that I happened to put aside later in life. Remember how sister and I built a thatched hut and lived there for a while ? We were starting a new life, trying to get away from the smell of mortality. It was just after S was beaten to death, as you know.”
I watched him silently, making none of the appropriate responses, and as I did so a smoldering suspicion rose into the eyes that met mine, threatening to build up into something dangerous and violent. Takashi had always lost his composure if one hinted at anything concerning our sister’s death. Even now, I thought, it was still the same. But just as steel strained beyond the limits of its elasticity will snap without warning, whatever was beginning to take shape in Takashi’s eyes quite suddenly disappeared. I experienced a renewed sense of surprise.
“The point is,” he said in tones of unimpassioned persuasion, “she may have died, but the magic of the new life did its work all the same. Her death, you see, was designed to let me go on living. It was her death that aroused uncle’s sympathy and persuaded him to send me to Tokyo University. If I’d gone on living in the same village where he lived, I would have died of depression. Don’t you think you’d better start a new life now, before it’s too late?”
“A new life? And where do you think I’ll find my thatched hut?” I said mockingly, though if the truth were told the talk was beginning to have its effect on me.
“What kind of life are you leading at the moment?” he asked earnestly as though he perceived my uncertainty.
“As soon as my friend died I gave up my job at the university where we’d been working as lecturers. Apart from that there’s no special change.”
Since graduating from the literature department of the university, I’d been making a living mostly by translating accounts of people trapping wild animals and keeping them in captivity. One animal book in particular had gone into several editions, and the royalties guaranteed a basic livelihood for my wife and myself. Admittedly, we relied on her father for the house where we were living, not to mention the expense of keeping the baby in an institution. I imagined, too, that since I’d given up my lecturing job my father-in-law had been shouldering any unexpected household expenses. At first I’d felt some objection to the idea of having the house bought for me but, particularly since my friend had hanged himself, I hardly cared how much my wife relied on her father.
“What about your inner life? There’s something wrong, isn’t there? I got a nasty shock when I saw you sprawled asleep on that dirty floor. When you woke up, too, your face and voice were somehow different from what they used to be. To put it bluntly, you’re headed downhill : you give the impression of being on the skids.”
“I admit my friend’s death took the stuffing out of me. There was the business of the baby as well,” I said in hesitant self-justification.
“Don’t you think it’s going on too long, though?” pressed Takashi. “If it lasts much longer your face will get set in that downhill look. In New York I met a Japanese philosophy student living the life of a dropout, a kind of social pariah. He’d gone to America to study Dewey’s successors, completely lost his faith in life, and that’s how he ended up. You remind me of him, Mitsu—your face, your voice, your whole physical and mental bearing. They’re exactly the same.”
“Your bodyguard told me I was a rat.”
“A rat? The philosopher’s nickname was ‘Rat,’ too,” Takashi said. “I don’t expect you believe me, do you?” he added with an awkward smile.
“I believe you,” I said, and flushed at the obvious self-pity that suffused my voice.
It was true, no doubt. I’d been getting ratlike, just like the philosopher who had lost his faith in life. Ever since the hundred minutes I spent at dawn in the pit intended for the septic tank, I’d been ruminating on the experience. I was perfectly aware that physically and mentally I was going downhill, that the slope I was on must surely lead to a place where the stench of death was even more intense. By now I’d quite clearly elucidated the significance of what had first shown itself as those unexplained aches, all apparently unconnected, in various parts of my body. Not that becoming conscious of their psychological nature had conquered them: on the contrary, the attacks had just become more frequent. Nor had I yet recovered that ardent sense of expectation.
“You’ve got to start a new life, Mitsu,” repeated Takashi, stepping up the pressure.
“Yes, you should do as he says,” said my wife, surveying us evenly through eyes narrowed against the light as we stood side by side against the window. “Even I can see that.”
By now Momoko had decked herself out like a miniature Indian bride, all in leather, even down to the ornament in her hair. My wife had just finished helping her into the outfit and was walking toward us. At that moment she wasn’t particularly unattractive, even in the morning light.
“Naturally, I would like to start a new life,” I said seriously. “The point is, where am I to find my thatched hut?” I felt, quite literally, that I needed such a hut with its well-remembered scent of green thatch.
“Why not give up everything you’re doing in Tokyo and come to Shikoku with me? That wouldn’t be a bad way to start, Mitsu,” said Takashi, doing his best to tempt me even as he clearly showed his fear that I would reject the idea outright. “After all, that’s why I took a jet home.”
“Taka—if we’re going to Shikoku, let’s go by car!” put in the youth. “It’ll take the three of us easily even with our luggage inside, and one of us could sleep in the back on the way. I bought a beaten-up old Citroen in case we went.”
“Hoshi’s been living and working at an auto repair place for the last two years,” volunteered Momoko. “He bought the old Citroen—it wasn’t much better than scrap—and fixed it up to make it more or less drivable. All by himself too!”
The young man’s cheeks and the skin round his eyes flushed to an almost indecent degree.
“I’ve already given in my notice at the shop,” he said with an extraordinarily naive air of excitement. “I told the man
ager the day that Taka’s letter arrived and Momoko came to tell me about it.”
Takashi, despite his embarrassment as he listened to this, had a certain childlike expression of satisfaction.
“They’re a useless crowd,” he said. “Never use their heads.”
“Give me some more practical details about this new life in Shikoku,” I said. “I don’t suppose you intend to set to work in the fields as our ancestors did?”
“Taka acted as interpreter for a group of Japanese tourists when they went round a supermarket in America,” Momoko said. “One of them was interested when he heard Taka’s surname. They got to talking and it seems he owns a chain of supermarkets in Shikoku. He’s terribly rich, by now he controls all your part of the country, and it turns out he’s set his heart on buying the storehouse at the place where you were born. He plans to have the whole building transported to Tokyo and make it into a restaurant serving country cooking.”
“In short,” my brother went on, “a local nouveau riche has turned up to take that dilapidated old wooden monstrosity off our hands. So if you agree to selling it, I think we ought to go and supervise the dismantling. Besides, I’d like a chance to ask around in the village about the true facts of the affair of great-grandfather and his younger brother. That’s another reason why I came back from America.”
I was not to be convinced in a hurry of the practicability of his plan. Even supposing he’d suddenly found in himself hidden talents as a businessman, he seemed unlikely to succeed in selling a run-down building to a man who, as proprietor of a supermarket chain, was presumably as up-to-date as anyone in his ideas. A restaurant serving country food? But the place didn’t have the kind of charm required; it was a storehouse dating back a good hundred years. What impressed me more than such talk was the interest with which Takashi still pursued the truth about our great-grandfather and his younger brother. One day, at a time when the family, though still living in the village in the valley, was on the verge of breaking up, my brother had caught wind of the scandal involving our family a century or so earlier.
