by Kenzaburo Oe
The impression he gave wasn’t simply of love and respect for S, but of wanting to keep me, the Rat, as far away from S as possible. He put my wife, with the urn in her arms, in the seat next to his and talked of S to her as he drove. Drawing up my knees, I lay down on the back seat and let my mind linger on the color of the flames in the picture of hell.
“Do you remember the cadets’ winter uniform, Natsumi? S came up the graveled road at the height of summer in his dark blue winter uniform, carrying a military sword and wearing calf-length flying boots. Whenever he met one of the valley folk, he’d click the heels of his boots like the Nazi military used to do. I can still hear the valley ringing to the click of the hard leather heels and his manly voice saying ‘Nedokoro S, back from the forces!’ ”
For all Takashi’s talk, my memory of S was quite remote from such bravado. When S was discharged, for example, he threw his cap, boots, and sword off the bridge into the water, removed his jacket, and climbed the graveled road with bent back, the jacket beneath his arm. That, at least, was how I recalled his homecoming.
“I remember the day he was beaten to death still more vividly,” Takashi told my wife. “I often have dreams about it, even now. I can see the scene extraordinarily clearly.”
S, he said, had been lying face up on a surface of mud dried to fine white powder, with gravel crushed small and round by countless feet. In the limpid autumn sunlight, not only the road but the grass-covered riverbed far below were white with reflected light, and amidst all this whiteness the river was ablaze with the fiercest white of all. Even Takashi, who crouched a foot or two from S’s head where it lay, cheek against the earth, facing the river, and the dog which was dashing round and round him whining shrilly, were whitish too. All three—the corpse, Takashi, and the dog—were wrapped in a cloud of white light. A single tear made a black spot on the white film of dust covering a pebble that lay next to Takashi’s thumb. But it dried at once, leaving a chalky blister on the surface of the stone.
S’s bare, smashed head was like a flat black bag with something red protruding from it. The head itself and the stuff protruding were already dry like some fibrous matter left out in the sun. The only smell was that of sunbaked earth and stone. Even S’s broken head was as odorless as a sheet of new paper. His arms were raised limply above his shoulders like those of a dancer. His legs lay in the position of a hurdler in midair. And the skin of the neck, arms, and legs sticking out from the undershirt and shorts that naval air cadets wore for physical training was a uniform darkish color, like tanned hide, that highlighted the white of the mud stuck to it. Before long Takashi noticed a train of ants entering S’s head through the nostrils and emerging again from his ears, each bearing a small bead of red in its mouth. It occurred to him that it was due to these ants that the body was shriveled and thin and gave off no smell. S would probably go on drying up till he was as desiccated as a dried fish. The ants had completely eaten away the eyes behind the tightly closed lids, leaving red holes the size of walnuts from which a faint, reddish light guided the tiny feet of the ants as they marched to and fro, treading the trifurcated path of ears and nose. Through the thin film, semi-transparent like murky glass, that was the skin of his face, a single drop of blood could be seen in the process of drowning an ant. . . .
“You don’t mean to say you actually saw all this?” I demanded.
“Admittedly, it’s supplemented in part from my dreams. But by now I’m not sure where the boundary lies between dreams and what I actually saw there on the road, a hundred yards downstream from the bridge, on the day S was beaten to death. Memory feeds on dreams, you know.”
Personally, I had no inner urge to dig up my recollections of S’s death. But for the sake of Takashi’s mental health I felt I should point out that by now a greater part of his memories than he himself realized was dependent on the fabrications of dreams.
“Taka,” I said, “the things you believe you really saw—the memories you’ve been constantly raking over—were nothing more than dreams all the time. The picture of S’s dried-up body must have been built up from seeing something else—a frog, say, run over by a car. Yes, the vision you conjure up of his head all smashed and blackened with stuff protruding suggests a squashed frog, a frog with its innards squeezed out and flattened.” With this general criticism, I proceeded to put the detailed case against his memories. “It’s just not possible that you could have seen S dead at all, much less lying in the road. The only people who saw him then were me, when I went with a cart to fetch his body, and the people from the Korean settlement who helped me lift it on. The Koreans may have beaten him to death, but once he was dead they were all consideration and gentleness; they treated the corpse so lovingly he might have been their own kith and kin. They gave me a white silk cloth, too. I covered him with it as he lay on the cart, and put a lot of small stones on it to stop it flapping about, then I pushed the heavy cart back to the valley. I pushed instead of pulling partly because with a heavy load it seemed easier to balance it that way, and partly because I wanted to keep an eye on the body in case it fell out or turned into a demon that got up and tried to sink its teeth in me.
“It was dusk by the time I got him back to the valley, but none of the adults came out of the houses lining both sides of the road. Even the children only peeped out, and hardly showed themselves. They were scared of having anything to do with the corpse and the misfortune it represented.
“I left the cart in front of the village office for a while and went home. I found you there, standing at the back of the kitchen with a big lump of candy in your mouth and dark brown dribble coming from the corners of your lips. The dribble made you look like a character in one of those old peep shows, with blood running through clenched teeth after taking poison. Mother was sick in bed, and sister lying beside her, playing at being sick too. In other words I couldn’t look to anyone in the family for help. So I went for Jin, who was chopping firewood in the field behind the storehouse. She was still slim then, a strong, healthy girl. When we went down to the village office we found the white silk cloth had been stolen from the cart, leaving S’s body exposed. I can still see his corpse lying curled in on itself, looking no bigger than a sleeping child. He was smeared all over with dried mud and reeked of blood. Jin and I tried to get him up to the house by lifting him by the legs and under the arms, but he was too heavy. We got blood all over us, too. So Jin asked me to go back and get out the stretcher we used for air raid practice. I was struggling to hoist it down from where it hung under the eaves of the kitchen when I heard mother rambling on about my appearance and yours. I seem to remember that you were still too happily eating candy in the dark corner of the kitchen to pay any attention to me. It was night by the time we got S’s body up to the house by the path running round below the stone wall, and we took it straight to the storehouse; so right up to the end I don’t see how you can have seen anything.”
Takashi was staring intently at the road ahead, concentrating on driving. The only signs of emotion I could detect were a faint quiver and flush spreading up his neck and around his ears, and the muffled grunt that came periodically from deep down in his throat. He was obviously shaken by the basic reassessment that my recollections were imposing on the world of his memories. We drove on for a while in silence. Then my wife said, as though to console Takashi :
“But isn’t it rather strange, if Taka was standing in the kitchen all the time, that he didn’t show any interest in S’s body when it was carried home on the cart?”
“Now I remember—” I said, delving down into the next layer of memory, “I’d told him not to come out of the kitchen. I gave him the candy to make him keep his promise, and the reason we went to the trouble of carrying the corpse up the path skirting the stone wall was so it shouldn’t be seen by you in the kitchen, or by mother and sister as they lay in bed in the front room.”
“I certainly remember about the candy,” he said. “It was S who gave it to me. He used the handle
of his dagger to break a piece off a big block he’d grabbed in the first raid on the Korean village. I remember the exact shape and color of the dagger; it was a naval one. It was just afterward that he went off on the second raid and got beaten to death. Anyway, he saw the candy as part of the spoils of war and he was in high spirits when he gave it to me. I believe he deliberately used the handle of the dagger to make the moment as impressive as possible for me, his kid brother, and for himself too. I still see the scene in my dreams—the naval air cadet in spotless white shirt and trousers grasping the dagger, handle down, and bringing it down on the candy. In my dreams, S is always brandishing a glittering dagger, with a dazzling smile on his face.” He spoke passionately, as though he believed his words would promptly heal any wounds inflicted by my revisionist views.
I found a perverted pleasure in waiting for the fresh flaws that my corrections lured from Takashi’s memory and shooting them down as they appeared. Suppressing a certain disgust with myself, I energetically set about stripping the heroic aura from the image of S that Takashi had just built up in my wife’s mind.
“Taka—that’s another dream memory. These inventions of your fantasy life have taken root in your mind with the intensity of real events. It’s true that on the first raid S and his friends stole bootleg liquor and candy from the Korean village. But S, who’d been on bad terms with mother ever since he came back from the army and tried to put her in a mental hospital for observation, hid the candy in a bundle of straw in the barn, because he was ashamed to let mother know, after what had happened, that he’d stolen it. I stole a bit of it myself while no one was around. I ate some and gave some to you, Taka. More to the point, he couldn’t possibly have been in high spirits after the first raid—for the simple reason that a man had been killed at the Korean village. The second raid was basically non-aggressive, being aimed at producing a victim among the Japanese from the valley as well, thus getting the matter over without taking it to the police. It was already decided well in advance who was to get killed in that compensatory raid. In short, S knew that he was the one. I’ve only one memory, like a blurred photograph, of S’s appearance in the interval between the two raids, but that photograph isn’t my own fabrication. While the rest of them were getting drunk on the stolen liquor, the S in my mental picture lay quite sober, curled up on the floor in the room at the back of the storehouse. He lay without moving, facing the shadowy part of the room. Maybe he was looking at John Manjiro’s fan painting in the alcove. As I remember it, it was around then that I found the candy he’d hidden, and I felt disgraced when S himself discovered me with a piece in my mouth. But that memory may come from a dream, like yours; I may have made it up after I finally came to realize the shameful and stupid significance in S’s mind of stealing in the Korean village. I had an awful lot of dreams about S too, you know. In all kinds of ways his death had a profound influence on us as we grew up. That’s why we had so many different dreams about it. Now that we’re discussing it, though, I realize that our dreams must have had quite different atmospheres.” Feeling compunction at pressing Takashi too far, I was offering a means of compromise. “It seems his death had completely different effects on the two of us.”
Lost in thought, Takashi ignored my conciliatory move. He was groping in the shadowy corners of memory and the realm of dreams for something that might overturn at a single stroke the hegemony of my memory. Unfortunately, though, the argument between us had also set off a dangerous landslide of anxiety in my wife, whom we had treated hitherto as a mere bystander.
“Why did S take part in the raid if he knew he’d be killed, and why in fact was he killed ? Why should he submit to being killed as repayment ? It’s terrifying to think of him lying there perfectly still in the dark at the back of the storehouse. The idea of him, a young man, just waiting for the second raid to come round really horrifies me. All the more, too, because I saw the inside of the storehouse this morning. I can’t help seeing it all just as it was. I can see the very curve of his back quite clearly!” She was already sliding headlong down the slope of the mental ant-hole that led to whisky. The new life of sobriety she’d started somewhere between the previous night and that morning was already a thing of the past. “Why did S have to be the one killed in compensation? Because it was he who killed the Korean in the first raid?”
“It wasn’t that, was it, Mitsu?” Takashi put in earnestly. “It’s just that he was the leader. I know even without Mitsu telling me that this is a dream memory, but I seem to remember a splendid scene—S in the winter uniform of a naval air cadet, standing at the head of a group from the valley doing battle with the pick of the men from the Korean village.”
“Taka,” I said, “ultimately, the distortions of your memory suggest a bad case of wishful thinking. That’s quite clear. It’s not that I can’t sympathize … but S was never leader of the young men in the valley. If anything it was just the opposite. Even I, a kid brother of ten, could tell that quite easily. Why, they even used to make fun of him. After all, it isn’t likely anybody in the valley just after the end of the war would have appreciated the inner motives for S’s odd behavior on the day he came back from the army. To put it bluntly, S was a laughingstock. I don’t imagine either of you can really understand the terrifying destructive power of that kind of malicious laughter in a backward village in the hills. And S was probably the only young man who came back to the valley after the war who didn’t make any of the women. True, he’d found a place for himself as a man in the valley community. But he was still the most junior of the gang of veterans who had the job of raiding the Korean village foisted on them. He was small and weak, and timid too. Besides, the real reason for the raid on the Korean village was that the group of Korean black marketeers had more than once uncovered rice that the village farmers had hidden, and taken it to sell in the town. The village headman and other prominent farmers deliberately egged the young men on to a point where they were obliged to act. The farmers had been making false declarations and concealing some of their rice. Any appeal to the police would only have worked to their disadvantage, so they pinned their hopes on the group of valley thugs who had the strength to cope with the Koreans. Most members of the group were farmers’ sons, so there was an ‘inevitability of class’ about their participation in the raid. But our farm was bankrupt even before the postwar land reforms. We didn’t have so much as a grain of rice hidden away; in fact, Jin had even made contact with the Koreans to buy black market rice. But S joined in the raid just the same and assumed the role of sacrificial lamb when his wild friends killed a Korean. That was clear even to me as a child. Mother was sick and wouldn’t come to see the body in the storehouse after Jin had made it decent; she said that S was the one who’d been mad when he tried to take her to the mental hospital. She was so angry at the crazy desperation of what he’d done that she’d really come to hate him. So we didn’t have a funeral. Jin put in a request to the adults of the neighborhood association, which still survived from the war days, and they cremated him for us. That’s why his ashes have been left unclaimed at the temple ever since. If we’d had a proper funeral it would have been easy enough to put the urn in the family grave, wouldn’t it? Sister’s ashes are in there all right.”
“Was he forced to do it?” my wife said to Takashi, but he didn’t reply. His lips were clamped shut, for the simple reason that I’d mentioned our sister’s death.
“I don’t think he was forced,” I said. “If anything, he volunteered for the part. But that didn’t stop them from leaving his dead body where it was, so that I had to go with the cart to get it.”
“But why should he? Why?” she pressed, horrified.
“It wasn’t in my power to find out once it was over,” I said. “The others in the raid, who fled back to the village after making sure S was beaten to death, quite naturally wanted nothing to do with S’s family afterward, so it wasn’t possible to get the details from them. I don’t imagine many of them are left in the vall
ey now. One went to the city and became a full-time criminal. I saw a big spread about him in the local paper while I was in high school. I suspected he was the one who killed the Korean on the first raid, so I looked at the photograph in the paper and recognized him at once. Murder seems to be habit-forming.”
I was trying to divert the conversation into more general channels, but my wife was too far gone in obsessional horror to be carried along by my maneuver. Instead, she pressed Takashi, who wanted to remain silent, still more insistently.
“Taka,” she urged, “what do your dream memories say? Why? Why should he?”
“Dream memories? …” he began with a determined patience of manner unlike the Takashi I’d known since early childhood—not that this produced a satisfactory answer to my wife’s query.
“In my dreams,” he went on, “I’ve never had the slightest doubt why S had to play the role. My fantasy S was born to be just that kind of hero-victim. Besides, I never look at him critically in the way Mitsu does, whether in my dreams or out of them. It comes as a kind of shock to be asked ‘Why?’ In my dreams, I don’t need to ask S such things. And in reality twenty years ago I had my mouth stuffed full of candy—so Mitsu says—which means I couldn’t have asked him why, even if I’d wanted to.”
“Why? Why should he?” Her voice was no longer directed at either Takashi or me but chasing echoes in the void within herself: Why?… Why?… Why?… Why?… Why?…
“Why should he, I wonder?” she repeated. “It’s too horrible to imagine him, a young man, lying there all hunched up and still in the darkness of the storehouse. I’m sure I’ll dream about it tonight, and I won’t be able to get it out of my mind either, like Taka. . . .”
I asked Takashi to drive the Citroen round to the liquor-and-sundries store the priest had mentioned. We’d got back to the open space in front of the village office some time before and had been talking in the parked car. After buying a bottle of cheap whisky, we drove back along the graveled road.
