The Silent Cry

by Kenzaburo Oe

  I had an old-fashioned musket in my hands, but for all my mother’s incitements I hadn’t the faintest idea how to handle it. In no time the main house was destroyed and the outbuilding set on fire; I could see Jin’s obese form rolling about in the light of the flames, all escape cut off, the liquid streaming from her suffering body. Takashi, who as leader of the mob was by now completely identified with great-grandfather’s younger brother in 1860, bawled out challenges to mother, myself, and the family spirits as we lurked in the storehouse. The followers massed around him were members of the young men’s association whom he’d trained with his football practice. Sea Urchin and the other youths were dressed in uniforms consisting of old-fashioned, horizontally striped pajamas, and had large, shiny black topknots. And with one voice the mob joined in singling me out for attack:

  “You’re just a rat!”

  Until then, my consciousness in the dream had consisted of a pair of healthy eyeballs that swept high over the valley, trailing beneath them a short coil of nerves rather like a microphone. But their jeering brought the eyeballs crashing down, and with them my physical self as I sat helpless in the storehouse with the musket on my knees.

  I awoke groaning. Even then, the emotional distress of the dream persisted throughout my body; moreover, now that the dream offered no corresponding actuality, the gloomy unease remained disproportionately large, oppressing my waking self. I longed desperately for my rectangular pit—now, alas, occupied by a septic tank and covered with a lid of concrete. My wife lay stiff and still in sleep by my side, hot as a small child with the lingering effects of alcohol and the heat of slumber, but now that I was awake my own body grew steadily colder.

  Farther back up the valley, away from the central part of the hollow, the river plunges into hidden folds of forest that press in on either side, so that to an observer on the rising ground at the entrance to the valley it seems as though the valley is closed off at that point. From there on upstream, the bed of the river turns to exposed rock, and a great grove of bamboo closes in on both sides, forcing the graveled road to leave the riverside and climb steeply uphill. The people who live in the small clusters of houses dotted here and there along the road as it climbs are called “the country folk” by the inhabitants of the hollow. The great bamboo grove forms a broad belt that joins at right angles the gash formed by the protrusion of the spindle-shaped hollow into the forest, separating the hollow and the “country.” Once, when the valley folk had been drawn up in the yard of the national school, armed with spears culled from the great bamboo grove, the minor official who had come from the prefectural office to take a look at them training had infuriated the headman and other village worthies by carelessly remarking that the people of Okubo village “were used to making bamboo spears.” As a result, the headman had gone into town to complain and the official had been relieved of his post.

  To the village children, the sudden rage that had led the normally docile adults to pit themselves against the almighty prefectural office and, quite miraculously, defeat it was an inexplicable mystery. Every morning when I accompanied mother—who just as in my dream was afraid of axes and all sharp instruments—into the great bamboo grove with the other adults, and the renewed sound of splitting bamboo echoed steadily and imposingly around me, bringing to life again the memory of the grown-ups’ fierce wrath, an indefinable fear would fill my childish mind. It was only after the end of the war, in a social studies class at school, that I heard about the farmers’ rising in 1860 for the first time. The teacher made a special point of how the bamboo spears the farmers had used as weapons had been cut from the bamboo grove, and I understood at last what had made the headman and the others so angry. The bamboo grove was the most incontrovertible reminder of the 1860 rising, whose memory, during the war, had been viewed as a slur on all the inhabitants of the valley. The valley folk, unfortunately, had been set to work cutting bamboo in that same grove and made to fashion it into identical spears. It wasn’t likely that they would let the official get away with a remark that reawakened so sharply the old sense of shame. By dutifully whittling spears in the service of the state, the headman and others of a similarly conformist bent, ashamed that their ancestors should have cut bamboo for use in a rebellion against the establishment of the day, were hoping to dispel the shadow of 1860 that still hung over them.

  Mother’s words in my dream had likewise reproduced, after more than two decades, words that I’d once heard in reality. After father’s death, my eldest brother left college and shortly afterward joined the army, while S had volunteered as a naval air cadet; whereupon mother, in whom too many such disappointments had produced delusions of persecution, began from time to time to predict that the villagers would attack our house, smash it up, and set fire to it. We must get ready, she said, to take flight and install ourselves in the storehouse as soon as the raiding party was sighted. When I objected, she told me of the outrage that had been perpetrated against our house in 1860, hoping thus to communicate her own fears to her infant son.

  Mother attributed the 1860 rising to the farmers’ greed and their helplessness. It started, she explained, when the farmers applied for a loan to the lord of the clan, who maintained a castle and territories with an income of three hundred and fifty thousand bushels of rice a year at the point where the river flowing through the valley runs into the Inland Sea. They were refused; so the Nedokoro family, squires of the village, lent them an equivalent amount. The farmers, however, complained that the rate of interest was unreasonably high. Cutting themselves spears in the great bamboo grove, they attacked the Nedokoro home and razed the main building to the ground. Then they raided the storehouse belonging to the valley brewers, got roaring drunk, and pressed on, attacking the homes of wealthy families and steadily swelling in number as they went, until they came to the castle town by the sea. If great-grandfather hadn’t shut himself up in the storehouse and held out single-handed, firing the gun he’d brought from Kochi, the rioters would probably have taken possession of that as well. His younger brother, as central figure in the group of young men incited to action by the crafty older farmers of the valley, had preempted the title of “boss” of the whole valley, and had not only gone personally to negotiate the loan from the lord of the clan but had actually headed the violence when it was refused. Thus, at least in the eyes of other members of the Nedokoro family, he was a madman of the worst kind, who had broken up and set fire to his own home. Father, who had lost his life and property for the sake of some mysterious and profitless work in China, had inherited the same family streak of madness. As for my brothers, the eldest—who, however briefly, had taken a job on graduating from the Law Department—wasn’t so bad, since he hadn’t gone into the army voluntarily, but S, who had gone out of his way to volunteer, had inherited from his father the same blood as great-grandfather’s younger brother. He was not her child, my mother declared.

  “But your great-grandfather—” she would say, “there was a fine man!” Where the mob was armed only with bamboo spears, great-grandfather had been ready with a gun. He’d built a storehouse that refused to be knocked down or burned, and he’d fired at them from the second story. Which of us, now, would turn out like great-grandfather : Takashi or me ?

  If I stayed silent and refused to reply to such an obviously didactic question, mother would go on pressing indefinitely; and if I reluctantly declared that I would be like great-grandfather, she would respond with silence and a faint, doubting smile.

  The former schoolteacher and local historian with whom I’d exchanged letters had neither denied nor positively affirmed mother’s views on the origins of the rising. Favoring the academic approach, he attached great importance to the fact that around 1860 there had been all kinds of uprisings not just in our own fief but throughout the Ehime area, and that they could be seen collectively as symptoms of the coming Restoration of 1868. The only special circumstance that he detected in our clan was that a dozen years or so before 1860, when the l
ord of the clan had held office as Acting Minister of Shrines and Temples, he’d strained the finances of his estates and from then on had imposed a small daily tax on all town dwellers in his territories under the title of “universal savings.” From the farmers he exacted first what he called “an advance on the rice tax” and later a “supplementary advance.” At the very end of his letter, the local historian had appended a quotation from one of the contemporary documents he’d collected. “When the ying suffers,” it said, “the yang is restored, and when the yang suffers the ying comes to life. Heaven and earth revolve perpetually; nothing is gone that does not come again. Man is the lord of creation; when government is unwise and men suffer, why should he not bring about change?” Such revolutionary, didactic sentiments, however, were more likely to prove elevating to Takashi than to me; perhaps Takashi really ought to meet the retired historian as my wife had said, provided he hadn’t succumbed to cancer or a heart attack in the meantime. . . . For my part, I was incapable of joining a mob, either in my dreams or in reality. I might take refuge in the storehouse, but I could never fight with a gun. Given my nature, anything to do with the rising was utterly remote from me. Takashi, though, set out to be precisely the opposite type of man—and in my dreams, at least, had already achieved his aim.

  A sound came from the direction of the outbuilding. Probably the middle-aged woman with the uncontrollable appetite, frightened by a nightmare, was getting up in the dark to feed herself more stuff calculated to fill the stomach with a minimum of nourishment. It was still the small hours. Stretching out a hand in the darkness, I groped for the bottle of whisky which I was sure my wife had left partly full. At once my hand contacted something cold, like the shell of a crab from which the flesh has been gouged. I switched on the flashlight by my bed and found an empty sardine can. Taking care not to shine the light on my sleeping wife’s face, I moved the small bright circle about till I found the whisky, then drank straight from the bottle by the light of the flashlight. I tried to remember whether she’d been eating sardines as she drank the previous evening, but without success. By now her drinking had become a firmly established part of my everyday life. More often than not, I could watch her getting drunk on whisky with as little concern as if she were smoking.

  I stared fixedly at the empty sardine can as I drank. In the center of the fingernail-shaped opening made in the lid by the can opener, a small fork was placed with obsessive precision. The tin plate on the outside of the can was cloudy-white with oil, but the interior gleamed gold through the thin layer offish scraps and oil that remained. I could see her winding back the lid with the fragile key, rolling the tight scroll of tin to one side of the can, experiencing, as the neat row of delicate sardine tails came into view, the primitive joy of someone about to extract the soft flesh of an oyster from its lip-cutting shell and eat it. She ate the sardines, took a sip of whisky through lips moist with oil and flakes of fish, then licked the three fingers she’d used to pick up the fish. At one time, her fingers had been so weak that she always asked me to open sardine cans for her. It was only since she’d acquired the habit of solitary drinking that her fingers had got strong, a fact that served if anything to heighten the effect of pitiful degradation. Shutting my eyes, I took a great gulp of whisky in an effort to thrust the pity I felt for her back into its hole, along with the indefinably sentimental anger that welled up inside me, threatening to get out of control. The stuff burned my throat and burned my stomach, then burned the blackness in my head and I fell into a dreamless sleep.

  The next morning, Takashi and his bodyguards set off for the primary school, which was on vacation now, to join the village youths who were to assemble in the playground for their first football practice. Left alone, my wife and I felt a frustrating sense of emptiness as though we too ought to be starting something. The mood became so strong that I got Jin’s children to help me carry tatami mats and a charcoal brazier from the main house up to the second floor of the storehouse, and made a fresh start on the translation I’d been working on with my dead friend. The book, an amusing account by an English naturalist of a childhood spent by the Aegean, had been a favorite with my friend, who had first discovered it. When I got to work, my wife decided to start reading an old edition of the works of Soseki Natsume that had turned up while we were looking for the brazier in the spare room of the main house, so we managed somehow to keep ourselves occupied.

  My friend’s tough old grandmother had promised to collect the draft translation of the parts he’d already done, together with his notes and other papers, and entrust them to me. But relatives had objected, and after the funeral everything my friend had written was burned. They’d been afraid—afraid that another monster with crimson-painted head and a cucumber up its rear might leap naked out of the manuscripts and notes he’d left and threaten the world of those who had survived. Even I, admittedly, couldn’t completely suppress the deep sense of relief that the meager flames from the burning papers and notebooks had kindled in me. But it hadn’t been enough to free me entirely from the threat of the monster. As I went through the Penguin book that he’d left with all its scribblings and underlinings, thinking to retranslate the parts for which he’d been responsible, I found any number of pitfalls in wait for my unwary self. In the margin of a section describing a Greek turtle with a fondness for strawberries, my friend had done a sketch of a turtle, about one inch square, which he’d copied from an illustrated book of animals. It vividly revealed the humorous side of his sensibility at its gentlest and most childlike. And another passage that he’d marked with a line seemed to be sending me a message in my friend’s own voice:

  “Let’s say good-bye then,” he started to say, but his voice quavered and broke, and tears forced their way out and ran down the wrinkled cheeks. “I’m damned if I’ll cry!” he sobbed and threw out his great belly, “but it’s like saying goodbye to one’s own flesh and blood. I felt as though you were my own.”

  My wife, who was reading her Soseki in silence, also seemed to have found plenty of things to stir her own feelings. Before long, she came over and helped herself to the dictionary I was using. She looked up some English words quoted by Soseki, then said :

  “Did you know that Soseki uses quite a lot of English words and phrases in the diary he wrote while he was at Shuzenji suffering from a stomach ulcer? They all seem to be appropriate to you nowadays, Mitsu. Listen: ‘languid stillness,’ ‘weak state,’ ‘painless,’ ‘passivity,’ ‘goodness,’ ‘peace,’ ‘calmness’ …”

  “ ‘Painless’? Do you really think that describes my condition? I may be too washed out to have the energy for anything except ‘goodness,’ but do you really believe I’m in a state of ‘peace’? ”

  “That’s how you look to me at least, Mitsu,” she insisted with the exaggerated composure of an alcoholic during a sober spell. “You’ve been more placid during these past few months than at any other time since we got married.”

  I struggled to evade the terrifying vision this evoked of myself attaining the ultimate placidity possible in the animal and going over finally into the utter placidity of the vegetable. I read once that in medieval times aged monks who wanted to turn themselves into mummies gradually reduced their food intake, so that by the time they were ready to go into their graves they had only to stop breathing and the flesh began to dry up. In much the same way, I’d played the non-animal during my pit-dwelling experience early that autumn morning, deliberately inviting death to come with as little fuss as possible. Eventually, with a profound sense of fear, I’d returned to the world, and convinced myself that I’d reembarked on ordinary life. But it seemed that in my wife’s eyes I was still the same as when I sat motionless at the bottom of the pit dug for the septic tank, my buttocks wet, the dog held in my arms. Shame suffused every last capillary of my body, sending waves of hot wretchedness through the rat that I was. If my plight was apparent even to someone constantly drunk and withdrawn like my wife, it was going to be even harder to
reestablish contact with that feeling of expectation. New life ? Thatched hut ? I might as well resign myself to doing without them forever. . . .

  “How about you-—do you feel you’ve started a new life?” I said.

  “Why ask? You know I’m drinking whisky just the same as ever, don’t you? I could hardly keep it secret if I wanted to—the whisky you get here in the valley is such powerful stuff the smell’s enough to give you away.” She’d mistaken my question for sarcasm aimed solely at hurting, and her words were barbed and defiant. “Surely it was you, not me, that Takashi suggested should start a new life?”

  “You’re right. That’s my own problem,” I agreed, shrinking into myself. “But there’s one thing I’d like to check on where your drinking’s concerned.”

  “I suppose you want to know whether I see my alcoholism as a youthful experience that’ll pass of its own accord, or as something I’ll have to live with till I die—as a sign of the collapse from youth into old age. Well, the real source is hereditary—my mother. And I’m not so young any more that one day’s dissipation is cured the next. So I expect I’ll have to live with it. I’m at the age where every time I find a new wrinkle I resign myself to taking it with me to the grave.”

  “If you’re saying this out of a childish desire to shock me, you’d better think again,” I said. “Because you are that age, and there’s no stay of execution. If you’re going to have another kid, you’ll have to make up your mind to it before the year’s out. Next year there’ll be no going back.”

  Immediately, I intensely regretted my words. The malice in them was too strong even for me. We were silent together for a while, then, fixing me with eyes that for once were red from tears rather than whisky and filled with a forlorn hostility, she said :