The Silent Cry

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Didn’t Takashi tell them about the old people left dead on their faces after the mob had passed in procession?” I persisted, more from curiosity than any desire to criticize Takashi and his new friends. “Sprawled in front of their homes, all fouled up with piss and shit—that would have made our young athletes roar even more happily, surely?”

  “Quite right, Mitsu!” she said. “As Takashi says, if the world is full of violence, then the most healthy and human reaction is not to stand in front of it moping, but to find something—anything—to laugh at.” And she went back to her place by the stove.

  “The young men were very brutal, I admit,” Takashi was saying, “but in a way their brutality served to give the ordinary farmers a kind of security. You see, whenever it became necessary to injure or kill the enemy of the moment, they could always leave it to the young men without dirtying their own hands. The arrangement meant that the rank and file of the farmers could take part in the rising without any fear of being charged with arson or murder afterward. In this particular rising, their dread of getting blood on their hands was disposed of right from the start. Apart from that one smart blow to the heads of the overseers, all direct violence and other unpleasantness was the responsibility of the young men—who were fitted by nature to carry it out with the utmost thoroughness. When the peasants on their way down to the castle town came across any village that refused to join them, the young men set fire to the first houses they encountered and cheerfully disposed of any farmers who came rushing out, or anyone who tried to prevent them from starting the fires. Those villagers who happened to escape death were so scared that they too joined the cause. You see, although both sides were peasants, in practice the young rebels, who were half crazy, used violence to force the respectable farmers to do their own wishes. The farmers were terrified of them. As a result, there wasn’t one—from the valley all the way down to the castle town—who didn’t fall in step. Whenever a new village was recruited, they would select youths to form a young men’s organization there. There were no rules; they just had to swear loyalty to the young men’s group from this valley—the original revolutionary group, as it were—and agree to perform any violence without hesitation. So the rising consisted of the young men of this valley—you might call them staff headquarters—with a substructure based in the villages and composed of groups of young fellows from each of them. Whenever a village was newly liberated, the boys from this valley would summon the local hoodlums and have them report on any crimes committed by prosperous households, which they would then raid. Conveniently enough, they were convinced that most wealthy households were dens of iniquity anyway. In places near the castle town, people had already heard rumors of the rising, so some of the overseers had hidden their valuables or their documents and ledgers in the local temples. The village boys visited the rebel leaders at their camp to tell them about such cases, indulging their new freedom from the influence of the older people of decent, conservative views. Neither the chief overseer, whom the ordinary, respectable farmers for generations past had seen as a source of authority, nor the temples, which the farmers held in awe as responsible for matters relating to birth and death, meant anything at all to them. The upshot was that the temples were raided and the things hidden there burned in the precincts. Then these poor starving kids, who only the day before had been considered scarcely human, took power themselves and formed a new leadership in the village.

  “As for why groups of young delinquents like them should have been chosen, you could explain it briefly like this: first, they were people who had no proper position in the village, who had always been treated as outside normal village life. So they weren’t like the older people who always went along with others of the same village and had an instinctive, unshakable suspicion of strangers. In their case, it was only with outsiders that they were capable of forming any relationship at all. On top of that, as soon as they went into action their basic instincts and newfound freedom made them do things—including arson and murder—that made it certain they wouldn’t be admitted to the village community again once the rising was over. This gave them a professional interest in seeing it continue. They felt safer in league with outsiders, and the boys from our valley did, in fact, look after their interests well. Toward the end of the rising, there was an incident in which a number of youths who’d stayed behind to rape the daughters of local merchants were taken prisoner. It wasn’t the powers-that-be from the castle that arrested them, though. The mob had pressed on as far as the main gate, where they held negotiations with those inside, but they weren’t able to carry the assault into the interior of the castle, so the general attitude of the official police was to stand by without doing anything until the mob left town. Even after the main body of peasants had begun to go, however, a number of fellows still prowled the streets as though reluctant to leave. They’d probably never been in a castle town before, and were bursting with sexual frustration. It seems that for some reason or other they’d got themselves up in long, red, women’s under-kimonos that they’d looted from somewhere.” (At this his audience gave a half-excited, half-embarrassed laugh.) “It was then that they hit on the idea of raiding one of the houses that hadn’t made the rioters welcome in the town, and raping the daughter. So they burst into a cotton merchant’s. Unfortunately, an employee who realized that the other peasants had begun to leave got the daring idea of arresting these fellows in women’s clothing. He was chief watchman, so he mobilized the workers under him and they actually succeeded in taking the boys captive. One fellow managed to get away and report what had happened, whereupon the valley group gave the order to enter the castle town again. At very great risk to themselves, the boys from our valley went back to rescue the wretched would-be rapists. In no time the prisoners were released, the cotton merchant’s that had been the source of all the trouble was razed to the ground, the employees were punished, and the chief watchman’s house burned down. So he got what was coming to him!”

  Takashi laughed, and the other men dutifully followed suit. I finished my meal, piled up the dirty dishes, and carried them to the sink, where my wife met me with a grimly defensive expression.

  “If you object to what Taka does,” she said, “you’d better take it up directly with him and the young men, Mitsu.”

  “Not me. I’ve no desire to interfere in his propaganda activities,” I said. “I’m only interested in getting the pheasants ready for cooking. Where are they?”

  “Taka hung them on a big wooden peg at the back of the house,” Momoko replied in place of my wife. “They’re fine birds, fat as pigs. Six of them, too!” She and Natsumi were cutting up large quantities of vegetables into a bamboo basket, preparing a lunch rich enough in vitamins to meet the needs of a team of hearty football players.

  “At first,” Takashi went on, “the young men of the valley were objects of fear to the more level-headed farmers, but in the course of the rising they came to be respected, too—though it may only have been a surface respect compelled by their violent behavior. Either way, they found themselves popular heroes not only in the valley but throughout the country. So in the short period following the rising during which they were still free, they behaved more like a valley aristocracy than the village dropouts they’d been before. For a while, in fact, they could have had the peasants up in arms and out of the valley again whenever they chose. Elsewhere, too, groups of young thugs maintained their own strongholds from which they controlled their villages. When the rising dispersed, the valley group had exacted a pledge from participants in other villages that if the clan authorities began repressive measures, they would immediately reorganize their forces, and that any village hesitating to do so would be among the first to be destroyed. Such circumstances obliged the clan authorities to delay hunting down the leaders of the rising. During this happy period, the young villagers not only lived off the food and drink they’d looted but also seem to have been busy seducing the daughters and wives of the village. Of cours
e, it may have been the daughters and wives who seduced them!” (The young men all laughed heartily again at this feeble quip.) “After all, the valley organization had started out as a bunch of hoods. It was virtually a period of anarchy for village society, with them swaggering about still armed and enjoying their authority. They mercilessly cut down people who got into disputes with them, and I’m sure there were some who, finding themselves none too popular with the women, made do in the meantime with rape. So when daily life returned to normal the farmers found they had a new set of tyrannical overlords. By the time the clan investigators came into the valley, the youths were already out of touch with the other inhabitants. In the end, they shut themselves up in the storehouse to resist the authorities, but were betrayed by the valley folk, who went back on all their promises of aid. . . .”

  An indignant muttering rose from the circle around the open fireplace. With almost suspicious naiveté, the young men seemed to be identifying with the farm boys in the 1860 rising. Takashi’s ruse in attributing leadership of the rising’ not to great-grandfather’s brother but to the whole group of young men from the valley had succeeded.

  I stood warming myself in front of the kitchen stove, then went out round the back where I found six pheasants suspended from a row of long wooden pegs planted in a clapboard, on which rabbits and pheasants had been hung in the old days. It was the coolest place on our property; at the height of summer, the cats would always lie sprawled directly below the row of pegs. In every detail of daily life, Takashi was trying to follow the routine that had prevailed in the past, when the menfolk had still acted together smoothly as a group. The way the pheasants were strung up with straw round their throats showed an obsessive deference to the way grandfather and father had done it. The birds were even stuffed with seaweed at their rear ends, where the guts had been removed. Takashi had been too young to be aware of his surroundings during the period when the Nedokoros were leading a respectable life, so he must be devoting an extraordinary amount of study and hard work to recreating the traditional valley way of life and reexperiencing it again as a whole.

  I laid the plump birds out on the snow and began to pluck the feathers with their pattern of glossy black and reddish brown. Most of the feathers were promptly scattered by the wind among the falling snow-flakes, leaving only the heavier tail feathers at my feet. The flesh beneath was cold and firm, yet had a satisfying resilience to the touch. The fluffy down between the feathers was full of tiny, translucent lice which looked as though they were still alive. Breathing cautiously through my nostrils for fear of drawing the lice-infested down into my lungs, I went on plucking the feathers with fingers that grew steadily more numb. Suddenly the fragile, butter-colored skin broke and my fingertips made disturbing contact with what lay beneath. Through the rapidly expanding split the blackish red, damaged flesh appeared, pocked all over with beads of blood and lead pellets. I plucked the remaining tail feathers from the now completely naked body, and twisted the neck round and round, trying forcibly to wrench the head off. But just as it seemed that the neck would give way, something inside me refused to make the little extra effort required. I released my grip on the head, which sprang back sharply, so that the beak stabbed me smartly on the back of the hand. It made me see the pheasant’s head for the first time as an independent object, and I concentrated for a while on the emotions this evoked. A murmur of voices behind me was followed by a sudden burst of laughter, but the noise was absorbed at once by the layer of snow on the slope separating Sedawa from the mulberry orchard, leaving only the sound of the newly falling snow brushing the lobes of my ears, an icy grating so faint that it might have been the rustling of the snowflakes against each other.

  The pheasant’s head was closely covered with short brown feathers, which had a reddish, almost fiery gloss. The cockscomb-red around its eyes was dotted with black specks like the flesh of a strawberry. And the eyes themselves were dry and white—yet they were not eyes, but clumps of tiny white feathers; the real eyes, directly above them, had their black, threadlike eyelids firmly shut. I scraped an eyelid back with my nail, and something resembling the flesh of a grape slashed with a razor came oozing up and threatened to flow out like a liquid. Horror sent a momentary shock pulsing through me, but I gazed at it steadily and its power over me rapidly faded. It was, quite simply, the eye of a dead bird. The white false eyes, however, were not to be dismissed so lightly. I had felt their gaze upon me while I was plucking the remaining feathers from the all but naked body, even before I became consciously aware of the bird’s head. That was why, too impatient to go and look for a knife, I had grasped the head, false eyes and all, and tried to twist it off at the neck. Though my own right eye was very like the pheasant’s false eyes in its absence of sight, it achieved only a purely negative effect of sightlessness. If I were to hang myself like my friend, with my head daubed scarlet, naked, and a cucumber stuffed up my rear, I would have to paint in a glaring green eye on my upper eyelid for my death outfit to make any greater effect than my friend’s. . . .

  Laying out the six stark-naked pheasants on the snow, I went back to the kitchen in search of material for a fire, moving my head from side to side through an angle of one hundred and eighty degrees, as one-eyed persons will, in case there were dogs or cats in the vicinity.

  “… quite naturally, the young man who’d betrayed his fellows was expelled from the goup,” Takashi was saying. “If he’d fled in the direction of the castle town, he would have been arrested in no time; and if he’d stayed in the valley, isolated from the rest, his friends wouldn’t have given him protection and the farmers he’d treated so roughly while he was still in a position of power would have paid him back in no uncertain terms. So his only hope was a sink-or-swim attempt to get through the forest to Kochi. As to whether his flight succeeded …

  “Are the pheasants well covered, Mitsu?” he asked me, interrupting his lecture just as I was asking my wife for a box of matches to go with the bundle of old straw that I’d dragged out from under the floor. I doubted whether he had much confidence in the facts he was relating. I, for one, certainly couldn’t command such detailed knowledge of the actions and daily lives of the young men following the 1860 rising.

  I stamped a hollow in the snow, thrust in the bundle of straw bent into a circle, and set fire to it. The fine down clinging to the skin of the pheasants burned first, giving off an oppressive odor. Almost at once, the bodies of the pheasants were crisscrossed with dark brown threads of melting animal matter, and the skin itself turned a dull color in the smoke, with beads of yellow fat rising here and there. It brought directly to mind something my dead friend had said about the photograph of the black who had been set fire to: “His body was so scorched and swollen that the details were blurred, like those of a crudely carved wooden doll.”

  Someone was standing behind me, peering with equal intensity at the same thing as myself. I turned and saw Takashi, his face so flushed with the heat of his fireside eloquence that I expected the falling snow-flakes to melt on first contact. I felt sure that the pheasants with their scorched down had evoked much the same memories in him too.

  “My friend who died told me you gave him a civil rights pamphlet when you met him in New York. He said it had a photo of a black who’d been burned alive.”

  “That’s right. A terrible picture, the sort of thing that tells you something about the essential nature of violence.”

  “Another thing he said was that you startled him by threatening to ‘tell the truth.’ He was worried because he got the impression you had some other ‘truth’ on your mind apart from what you actually talked about, but that you couldn’t get it out. How about it—he never got his answer, but was the suspicion he died with at least well founded?”

  Takashi went on peering at the pheasants, his eyes narrowed anxiously as though half blinded, not just by the light reflected by the snow onto his steadily paling cheeks, but also by something rising up within himself.

 
“ ‘Shall I tell you the truth?’—” he said. I felt sure he’d used the same voice in saying the same thing to my friend in New York. “It’s a phrase from a young poet. I was forever quoting it at that period. I was thinking about the absolute truth which, if a man tells it, leaves him no alternative but to be killed by others, or kill himself, or go mad and turn into a monster. The kind of truth that once uttered leaves you clutching a bomb with the fuse irretrievably lit. What do you think, Mitsu—is the courage to tell others that kind of truth possible for ordinary flesh and blood ?”

  “I can imagine someone in a desperate situation resolving to tell the truth, but I don’t believe that after telling it he would either be killed or kill himself, or go mad and turn into a monster—he would find some way of going on living,” I objected, hoping to ferret out the purpose behind Takashi’s unexpected talkativeness.

  “No—that’s as difficult as the perfect crime,” said Takashi, dismissing my ill-considered view with the firmness of one who had obviously been pondering the theme for a long time. “If the man who was supposed to have told the truth managed to go on living without one of those fates overtaking him, it would be direct evidence that the truth he was supposed to have told wasn’t in fact the sort—the bomb with the fuse lit—that I’m concerned with.”

  “Do you mean, then, that the man who tells your kind of truth has absolutely no way out?” I asked in dismay. But then I had an idea for a compromise. “What about a writer? Surely there are writers who have told the truth and gone on living?”

  “Writers? Occasionally, I admit, they tell something near the truth and survive without either being beaten to death or going mad. They deceive other people with a framework of fiction, but what essentially undermines the work of an author is the very fact that, provided one imposes a framework of fiction, one can get away with anything, however frightening, dangerous, or shameful it may be. However serious the truth he may be telling, the writer at least is always aware that in fiction he can say anything he wants, so he’s immune from the start to any poison his words might contain. This communicates itself eventually to the reader, who develops a low opinion of fiction as something that never reaches directly into the innermost recesses of the soul. Seen in that way, the truth in the sense in which I imagine it just isn’t to be found in anything written or printed. The most you can expect is the writer who goes through the motions of a leap into the dark.”