by Kenzaburo Oe
“Of course,” I said, retreating very slightly, “I don’t persuade myself that because I was born in the valley my ties with it are still valid, or that I can fully understand the young men who live here. Just the reverse, if anything. I simply made a few objective, commonsense observations. If Takashi’s pep talks have induced group madness in his team, then obviously my observations don’t apply.”
“You shouldn’t dismiss something as madness just because you’re not involved yourself, Mitsu,” she persisted relentlessly. “When your own friend committed suicide, for example, you didn’t dismiss it in such simple terms, did you?”
“Then tell Takashi to send a search party into the forest,” I said, capitulating.
I went out to wash my face, going round the rear to avoid the entrance to the main house, and was on my way back when I encountered the young men spilling out excitedly into the front garden. A diminutive figure dressed in an old lumberman’s oilskin had come into the garden dragging a rough-and-ready sledge made by tying together bamboo stems with the leaves still on them. On the sledge was the young outcast, swathed to the neck like a bagworm in a garment stitched together from old rags. Takashi had just come out to meet them. The man had half turned, with the upper part of his body twisted back, as though he was afraid the young men dashing so energetically out of the house might be about to attack him, but Takashi was restraining him. Screwing up my eyes against the dazzling morning light reflected from the trampled snow, I made out a lean and ill-favored profile, the eye a mere slit, that swiftly identified itself with Gii the hermit as I remembered him from a dozen or more years earlier. His head was small, almost like a head shrunken by savages, while the stunted ears were little bigger than the first joint of one’s thumb, so there seemed to be an unnaturally large space all round them. The shallow pillbox hat on his tiny head made him look like an old-style postman. Caught between the sunbleached hat and the yellowish goatee, his small face, covered with blemishes and something gray like carpet fluff, was paralyzed with apprehension.
Takashi was holding his team in check behind him and speaking to Gii in the kind of quiet, friendly voice one might use to calm a frightened goat. With his body still twisted back and his eyes half closed, the old man answered Takashi, his lips twitching rapidly like two fingertips trying to pick something up, then shook his head in a way that suggested he heartily regretted dragging the sledge down from the forest and was ashamed, beneath the pervasive light, of everything to do with himself. At an order from Takashi, the young man covered in rags was lifted from the sledge and taken indoors. Carrying him cheerfully, as though they were shouldering a portable shrine at some religious festival, the footballers were followed by Gii the hermit, who with Takashi’s arm encircling his puny shoulders was led, protesting feebly, into the kitchen. Left alone in the front garden, I gazed down at the bundle of new bamboo, caked with hard, frozen snow, where it lay abandoned on the softer snow. Bound round and round with coarse rope, the bundle looked as though it were awaiting punishment for some iniquity.
“Natsumi’s giving the hermit a meal, Mitsu.”
I turned. Takashi was standing there with his sunburned cheeks flushed a vivid rosy hue and a wild, almost drunken light in his brown eyes, and for a moment I had the illusion that a midsummer sea lay behind us as we talked.
“Gii was down in the valley as usual during the night. He was going back at dawn when he caught sight of a young man marching steadily into the forest. So he followed him until the boy was exhausted and came to a halt, then fetched him safely back again. Would you believe it, Mitsu, he was trying to cross the forest in all this snow and get to Kochi! He was identifying with the young fellow in the 1860 rising!”
“Natsumi came to the same conclusion even before Gii brought him back,” I said, and broke off.
As he struggled through the deep snow in the pitch-dark forest, driven on by shame and despair at being cast out by his comrades, he must have seen himself as the topknotted son of a peasant in 1860. And there was nothing, in fact, to convince the simpleminded youth, gripped by mounting panic as he plunged on through the darkness of the midnight forest, that a hundred years had really passed since that fateful year 1860. If he had fallen by the way and frozen to death, he would have died a death absolutely identical to that of the young man driven out in 1860. All those separate moments that coexisted in the heights of the forest would have poured into his dying head and taken possession of it.
“Now that the first signs have shown in him, I’m sure the tendency to identify with the young men of 1860 will soon take hold among the team as a whole. I’m going to spread it among all the valley people. I want to start another rising here, to reproduce the rising of our ancestors a century ago even more realistically than the Nembutsu dance. Mitsu—it’s not impossible!”
“But what on earth’s the point, Takashi?”
“Point?” He laughed. “When your friend hanged himself, Mitsu, did you ask yourself what the point of it was ? Or do you ever ask yourself what the point of your own survival is ? Even if we achieve a new version of the rising, there mightn’t be any point to it at all. But at least I’ll be able to experience as intensely as possible what great-grandfather’s younger brother went through spiritually. That’s something I’ve been desperately wanting to do for a long time.”
Back in the storehouse, I found that the sound of dripping water, as the snow melted under the heat of the sun and began to run down through the thick layer remaining on the roof, surrounded the storehouse on all four sides like a bamboo blind. And I fancied I could use the sound to cut myself off, to defend myself from all that happened in the valley, just as great-grandfather with his gun had protected himself and his property from the modern world beyond the forest.
Imagination in Riot
THE music for the Nembutsu procession, large and small hand drums with gongs, had been continuously audible since before noon. It had gone on insistently, slowly shifting its position. The same rhythm, if such it could be called—bang, bang, bang! bang, bang, bang! bang, bang, bang!—had continued now for four hours. I’d watched from the back window of the storehouse as hermit Gii went up the graveled road to the forest. He walked with his head cocked on one side as though deep in thought, yet climbed steadily up the steep, snowy trail, kicking strongly at the ground behind him, dragging the sledge bearing the new blanket that my wife had given him in place of his tattered old one. The music had begun shortly after that. By the time my wife came upstairs bringing rice balls and an unopened can of salmon for my lunch, the voice in which I asked her about the music was hoarse with annoyance at its inescapable persistence and sounded harsh and strange even to my surprised ears.
“Was it your leader Takashi’s idea to play the Nembutsu music out of season like this?” I asked. “Does he think the music’s going to remind people of the 1860 rising? If so, it’s a puerile idea that’ll only serve to annoy the neighbors. Takashi, you, and the rest are the only ones who’re carried away. Do you really think those stolid valley types are going to get excited over a few drums and gongs?”
“Well, it’s got you annoyed at least, Mitsu,” she pointed out calmly, “you who’re trying so hard to be indifferent to everything in the valley. The canned salmon, incidentally, is part of the spoils of war from the supermarket—the looting got going again this morning—so you’d better not eat it if you want to keep your hands clean of the affair. I can go and find you something else.”
I opened the can, not as an admission of complicity with Takashi, but to show my indifference to her sarcasm. I don’t even like salmon.
Where the ordinary inhabitants were concerned, the previous day’s looting at the supermarket hadn’t been premeditated. But according to my wife, Takashi and the others had been busy that morning spreading the idea that, since looting was illegal anyway, there was no reason for the valley folk not to go on with it once they’d started.
“Hasn’t anybody objected to these attempts by Takash
i and the rest to stir them up?” I asked. “This morning, after they heard what had been going on behind the scenes, didn’t any of them have second thoughts and take back their looted goods ?”
“There was a village get-together in front of the supermarket, but no one made any such suggestion. You don’t suppose they’d go out of their way to return the goods, do you, when the girls in charge of accounts were giving juicy details of the profits the store had been making and the salesgirls were testifying to the shoddiness of the goods ? Even if some oddball had wanted to, the general atmosphere wouldn’t have let him go it alone.”
“It’s like conning a bunch of kids,” I said, chewing balefully on my salmon, which was dry and full of bones and other debris. “But the reaction will soon set in.”
“Anyway,” she said, “feeling’s running high against the supermarket. Several women who were searched in the past on suspicion of shoplifting were there, relating their experiences.”
“What a dumb crowd!” I said. The looted salmon seemed to stick in my throat.
“You know, Mitsu,” she said casually, “you really ought to go down to the valley yourself to see what’s going on!” And she went off down the stairs. I spat the half-chewed salmon and grains of rice into my hand.
The Nembutsu music nagged at me unceasingly, torturing my nerves, sapping my mental energy. Like it or not, my ears kept reminding me of the abnormal events taking place in the valley. Somewhere deep inside them, the “rising” was already an actuality. And by now the loathing the music aroused in me was irreparably tainted with the poison of curiosity, like a liver that once damaged can never recover. But I forbade myself to move from the storehouse until I found some routine reason to do so, some reason not directly related to the disorder sponsored by Takashi and his fellows. Until then, I wouldn’t set foot in the valley myself, nor would I send down any scouts. The music, which in its monotony contrived to suggest nothing more than emotional poverty, might merely be Takashi’s way of boasting to me that his activities were still continuing. Any action from my side would be a craven capitulation to his vulgar psychological tactics. I would hold out. Before long, the sound of a car horn from the valley added to the noise. Takashi was probably driving around down there, with chains on the Citroen’s tires, putting on his own naive demonstration for the benefit of the children. Or perhaps—if the valley folk had in fact turned into a mob of rioters—he was reviewing them from the car. . . .
The stove, I noticed, was becoming less efficient. The oil in the tank was running out, and I’d already used up my reserves. The only alternatives were to send someone to the supermarket to buy some, or to go down into the valley and do so myself. At last, I was released from the agonizing bonds of endurance. Ever since the morning, for more than four hours now, I’d been tortured and ridiculed by the Nembutsu music.
In the main house I found my wife looking after Momoko, who was still in bed after her attack of hysterics. I couldn’t look to them for help. The young outcast had been moved to the local clinic with frostbite, and all the other members of the team had joined Takashi and Hoshio in masterminding the high jinks in the valley. The only people who could serve my purpose were Jin’s sons. I stood in front of the closed door of the outbuilding and called out, not with any idea that the children had resisted the lure of the music and were still shut up in the chilly gloom with their fat, depressing mother, but to confirm that all the conditions obliging me to go down to the valley had been fulfilled. Jin’s sons made no reply. I was about to withdraw in satisfaction from the closed door when, to my surprise, Jin herself hailed me in a firm, almost cheerful voice. I opened the door and peered in, my eyes darting about like a worried bird in the unfamiliar darkness, half hoping to find her husband rather than Jin herself.
“Oh, hello Jin,” I said apologetically. “I thought I’d get your boys to run down to the valley for me if they were here. I’m out of oil for my stove.”
“They’ve been down in the valley since this morning, Mitsusaburo,” she said with unusual affability as her massive body loomed slowly into view like some huge battleship appearing through mist over the sea. Her eyes directed their power straight toward me like two hot, shining magnets protruding from her round, swollen face. As her tone had already suggested, she was seated in solitary elation on the legless throne. “And the young fellows under Takashi’s command came to fetch my husband, so he went down to the valley with them.”
“Takashi’s crowd came to fetch him?” I complained with a somewhat guarded display of sympathy for Jin’s husband. “But he’s such a gentle man—why do they have to drag him into it?”
The guardedness had been justified: Jin wasn’t looking to me to commiserate with her over her husband.
“The young fellows went round getting people out of all the houses in the village,” she said. “They made particularly sure to rope in families that hadn’t yet taken anything from the supermarket, so in the end the whole village turned out.” As she made an effort to smile, the narrow slits of her eyes flashed between the encroaching flesh, and sluggish ripples ran across the skin tightly encasing the thick layer of fat. Gone was the painful breathlessness that usually bothered her these days; she was the champion gossip again, sustained by an unquenchable curiosity. “The boys had gone off down to the valley long before, but my husband was still here, so two of the fellows came to the door and told him to go down to the supermarket. When the boys came back for a break, they were saying that with any family that hadn’t taken anything from the market, no matter how rich or important, a couple of the young fellows would go and call them out to the market. Apparently both the wife of the headman’s son and the postmaster’s wife went to get things. And it seems the headmaster’s daughter was very upset because she had to bring home a great box of detergent she didn’t need at all!” Suddenly she compressed her lips as though her mouth was full of water, and snuffled noisily; then the skin of the great moon face flushed in patches, and I perceived that Jin had laughed. “So it’s all fair, Mitsusaburo. Everybody’s disgraced themselves equally. Isn’t that nice ?”
“Doesn’t anybody sympathize with the Emperor, Jin?” I said, more or less sidestepping what I vaguely sensed to be a dangerous trap set by this pathologically obese middle-aged woman with her talk of “disgrace,” and putting a question more remote from her bellicose chatter.
“Sympathize with that Korean?” she flashed back indignantly. Until yesterday, like most of the valley folk, she’d never so much as hinted that the all-powerful supermarket owner who had wrought such havoc in the valley was a Korean. But now she deliberately stressed the word “Korean,” unhesitatingly broadcasting his nationality as though to emphasize how the looting of the supermarket had reversed the balance of power in one fell swoop.
“The valley folk have had nothing but trouble ever since the Koreans came here,” she went on. “After the war ended, they climbed up in the world by grabbing the valley’s land and money. We’re only trying to get a bit of it back, so what’s sympathy got to do with it?”
“But Jin, they didn’t come here voluntarily in the first place. They were slave labor brought from their own country against their will. Besides—so far as I know at least—they’ve never gone out of their way to make trouble for the people here. Even with the postwar disposal of the land where the Korean settlement stood, no individual in the valley ever suffered any direct loss, surely ? Why do you deliberately remember things all wrong?”
“S was killed by the Koreans!” she said suspiciously, rapidly recovering her wariness of me.
“That was in revenge for the killing of a Korean by S’s friends just before. You know that perfectly well, Jin.”
“Everybody feels things have gone to pieces since the Koreans came. They should kill ’em all off!” she declared with extraordinary intensity, flogging herself on in her irrationality. Her eyes had gone dark with hatred.
“But Jin, the Koreans have never willingly inflicted any harm on the pe
ople living here. The trouble just after the war was the fault of both sides. Why say such things when you know the facts as well as I do?” But she suddenly lowered her great, mournful head against my accusations. Her only visible response came from the nape of her neck, which from where I was standing looked like the neck of a seal and heaved in time with the labored breathing that had overtaken her again. I sighed in a wave of frustrated annoyance and resentment.
“It’ll be the valley people who pay dearly for starting such a foolish disturbance, Jin,” I said. “I don’t imagine the looting of one of his chain stores will hurt the Emperor much, but most people in the valley will go on feeling wretched with guilt over the stuff they swiped. What do they think they’re up to—even the older people, who ought to know better—letting themselves be put up to such things by someone like Takashi who’s only just back from abroad?”
“I’m glad all the valley folk have disgraced themselves equally!” Jin repeated, talking as though it had nothing to do with her personally and stubbornly refusing to raise her head and look me in the eye. It convinced me that the word “disgrace” had some very special meaning in her vocabulary.
Now that my eyes could penetrate the recesses of the gloom, I could see various kinds of cheap canned goods piled in a ring round Jin’s chair within easy reach. Steadfast and obedient, they stood there waiting, soldiers of a trusty relief force ready to do battle with a hunger that could never be cured. They were Jin’s private “disgrace”—a whole army of private “disgraces” drawn up in tidy ranks for all to see, their true nature blindingly obvious even to the casual observer. I was gazing at them at a loss for words when, with a defiant display of honesty, Jin took from between the great mounds of her knees a half-opened can whose lid stuck up in a semicircle like an ear and began to wolf its unidentifiable contents. I remembered that animal protein had a bad effect on Jin’s liver, but couldn’t bring myself to mention it and said simply :
