The Silent Cry

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “That was the first time—when he said he was afraid—that I had my doubts about Taka,” said Hoshio in a voice charged with a black resentment inappropriate to his years. “So I peeped through the sliding doors. I could see because they kept the small light on for Momoko; she’s still scared of going to sleep in the dark. All the time he was talking, Taka kept putting his hand on her breasts and between her legs. That was when I thought Natsumi was just letting him do it because she was too tired to push his hand away. . . .”

  “I sipped my ginger ale till it was all gone,” Takashi continued, “then went out and started walking down the dark street. There were only a few streetlights on here and there. It was late at night, and lots of blacks were sitting out in the cool, on fire escapes and on the stoops of big, dark, old-fashioned buildings. I could hear them talking about me as I went past, and occasionally I’d catch a few words like ‘goddamn Chink …’ I automatically walked faster, imagining the sweaty great blacks coming after me, cracking my skull open, and leaving me to die where I fell on the filthy sidewalk. But even as I oozed with fright I was turning off into some still darker and more dangerous backstreet. You should’ve seen how I sweated—even the black woman I slept with later said it was unusual for a Japanese to smell so much, though she herself stank to high heaven. I even barged into the courtyards of apartment blocks, my forehead burning this time with the idea that I’d be shot! And all through this forced march of mine the one thing that obsessed my brain was a ridiculous cautionary tale that the woman Diet member who headed our troupe had told us on the ship across the Pacific, hoping to ensure our good behavior in America. I expect it was in the papers at home—a Tokyo bank clerk who’d been sent to America fell to his death from the twelfth floor of a New York hotel after only one month there. An old American lady of eighty sleeping in the next room woke up in the middle of the night and found a naked Japanese on all fours on the narrow parapet outside the window, scrabbling at the windowpane with his nails. Nobody knows why he was naked and scratching at the glass—he wasn’t even drunk, the Diet woman said. But I felt sure it was the act of a man using an excessive fear of death to punish himself with. And as I hurried through the dark of the ghetto late at night, I was just like that man crawling naked toward the old lady’s room along that narrow ledge twelve floors up—only in my case, you see, there wasn’t any stranger to wake up and give the scream that would send me to my death. After a while, I happened to come out on a wider, rather better lit street, with a cab heading in my direction. I waved at it frantically like a castaway sighting a ship. . . .

  “Once one strand gives way, the whole thing collapses, you can’t stop it: thirty minutes later, I was safely inside the prostitute’s room, telling her my most shameful secrets in English and asking her to pretend she was giving me the punishment I deserved. I was quite shameless, begged her to act like she was a great black man raping a young Oriental girl. ‘Anything, so long as you gimme the money,’ she said. . . .”

  “Hoshi,” I put in, checking his complaint in full flood, “you’re wrong if you feel guilty for not being able to stop Taka. By the time you called out ‘Don’t, don’t, you mustn’t!’ it was already too late, and when you saw them having sex, it was the second time, after they’d had a rest. I’m sure they’d already finished once while you were still asleep. Otherwise Taka wouldn’t have confessed to her the kind of things you’ve just told me. It simply wouldn’t do as a prelude to seduction.”

  “Aren’t you angry, Mitsu?” queried Hoshio, as though his own moral sensibilities found my attitude inexcusable.

  “It’s too late for that, too,” I said. “What earthly good would it do now if I started saying ‘Stop, stop! Don’t do it, you mustn’t!’?”

  Hoshio stared at me with a loathing so concentrated it was like virulent poison seeping from his eyes. Then suddenly he abandoned all attempt at concern for or interest in the cuckold and, withdrawing into the solitary confines of his own mind, hugged his knees to him, hung his grubby head, and complained in a pitiful copy of the distressed wails of the farmers’ wives the evening before :

  “Oh hell, what a mess! What am I going to do? I’ve spent my savings on the Citroen and I can’t go back to my job at the repair shop. What the hell am I going to do? What a goddamn mess!”

  I heard, coming up toward the house, a medley of sounds: Nembutsu music, the uneasy barking of dogs poised for flight, laughter and cries from people of all ages. All the while Hoshio had been talking, I’d been aware of them as a kind of auditory hallucination, but by now they were quite obviously real and advancing on the house. The music and human clamor had just the opposite atmosphere from the subdued “rising” of that morning. As a change from commiserating with my young companion who felt himself abandoned by everything sound and healthy in the world, I got up and peered down from the window at the yard below.

  Before long, two “spirits” appeared, heading a company of musicians, dogs, and spectators more numerous than at any Nembutsu dance I’d seen in my childhood. They poured into the yard, filling it completely. In the small, round clearing they left in the center, the “spirits” began a slow, circular movement. The musicians—members of the team—were playing their instruments with steady concentration, their shoulders hunched against the press of spectators behind them. Barking wildly, two ginger dogs rushed round and round inside the circle after the “spirits,” leaping back each time they were struck across the head. The “spirits” themselves seemed to consider it part of the Nembutsu performance to lash the dogs to new heights of frenzy. Each time a dog was struck, a shout of cruel delight rose from the spectators.

  The “spirits’ ” costumes were of a kind I couldn’t recall seeing in any of the varied dances of the old days. The man wore a homburg with a black morning coat and a black vest to match, but with a wide expanse of naked chest showing beneath. It was grandfather’s evening dress: I’d seen it before, tucked away in the storeroom along with a starched dickey. I wondered why they’d omitted the shirt from the “spirit’s” formal getup. Didn’t it fit the performer? Or was the fabric rotten? Or had it been rejected in accordance with the habits of the player wearing the suit, who was the grotesque young man who had so prided himself on being lightly clad? The hat had numerous slits cut in it to make it fit the crown of his head, which was fat and round like a helmet. Through the slit at the very back, which had opened into an equilateral triangle, one caught an unexpected glimpse of white neck, topped with shaggy black hair. He walked with body bent forward in an aristocratic stoop, making repeated, dignified little bows to the spectators about him as he went. He was driving the dogs frantic by suddenly flashing at them a filthy fragment of dried fish which he kept in the pocket of his morning coat. The dogs rushed about madly, tearing with sharp claws at the dark, downtrodden snow and barking furiously.

  The role of the second “spirit” who walked in his wake was played by the fleshy little girl I’d seen the day before in the supermarket office, now dressed in a pure white Korean costume. The two tapes fluttering from the high, tight waist of the blouse, and the long skirt that billowed gently in the slight breeze, awakened other memories of white silk. They still looked brand new: I wondered from what hiding place they’d unearthed them for use as a costume in the Nembutsu dance. Quite probably, the young men of the valley who raided the Korean settlement on the day S was killed not only plundered moonshine and candy but also took some Korean girl’s best clothes and kept them hidden for more than twenty years. I suspected that on the first raid they’d committed not only murder but some other dreadful act that S’s death alone could never atone for, and that it was knowledge of this that had driven S, even after he’d resolved to serve as sacrificial lamb on the second raid, to lie brooding in a state of despairing melancholy on the floor in the back room downstairs in the storehouse. So far as the murdered Korean was concerned, the presentation of S’s corpse by the valley folk had wiped the slate clean, so it seemed likely that some other cri
me must have lain behind the village’s sale to the Koreans of the land on which their settlement stood. Flushed pink and pretty from an almost indecently obvious excitement, the girl walked gracefully in the wake of the young man in homburg and morning coat, her small face smiling the thrilled, rapturous smile of the star of the moment, her eyes half closed in ecstasy, her body swathed in the white clothes that her elder brothers, in the summer of 1945, must have torn off the girl from the Korean settlement after they’d had their way.

  The spectators too had an air of contented excitement. Shouts of joy—some innocent, some cruel—burst from their smiling faces. Among them I saw the women from the “country” who at dusk the day before had come, clothed once more in the working garb of the hollow, their whole beings exuding dark despair, to make their appeal. They were still in the same drab, indigo-striped peasant dress, but were now outdoing all the rest with their peals of cheerful laughter. The “spirits” of the Emperor and his wife in Korean dress had rekindled a new excitement in all these people from the valley and the “country” beyond.

  I looked for Takashi among the throng, but the heaving of the crowd in response to the movements of the “spirits” and dogs within the circle was so vigorous that to focus on them was physically trying. Turning my exhausted eye away, I caught sight of my wife standing on the threshold of the main house and stretching up to peer over the heads of the crowd into the circular clearing. With her right hand she supported herself against the doorpost, and with her left she was shading her eyes against the sun as she watched the dance. Her hand cast a shadow over her forehead, eyes, and nose so that I couldn’t judge the expression on her face. It was quite apparent, even so, that she was intensely feminine and relaxed, like the heavily pleated white silk skirt worn by the “spirit” of the Korean girl—a far cry from the exhausted, frustrated, unhappy woman I’d vaguely and quite groundlessly expected. I realized that thanks to Takashi she’d recovered from the sense of the impossibility of sex that had eaten at the heart of our married life like a cancer. For the first time since our marriage, I managed to see her as a truly independent being. The hand shading her eyes moved a fraction, threatening to expose to the sunlight the upper half of her tranquil, newly softened features. I drew back from the window in a reflex movement, as though scared that the direct sight of them might turn me to stone. Hoshio, who by now was more interested in the clamor outside the storehouse than his own anguish at being deserted, came up swiftly behind me and pressed his nose to the window in my place. I went and sprawled face up by the table, gazing at the black zelkova beams. Now that my companion, his back turned to me, was completely absorbed in the new dance, I found myself for the first time since the news of my wife’s adultery completely free from the gaze of others. I lay there breathing peacefully, sending the blood out from my heart seventy times each minute and drawing it back again, dimly aware of the 98° F of warmth within my body.

  At the very center of my head I seemed to feel the blood, heated rather above body temperature, rushing round and round murmuring in a tiny whirlpool. Then two unrelated images appeared, and sending the eye of consciousness down where the darkness in my head was faintly illuminated by their light, I closed my other, seeing eye. One image was a scene that took place at dawn on the day father left for China on the last journey of his life. Mother was standing on the threshold of the house as she directed the workmen who were to carry his luggage to the town on the coast. When father discovered where she was standing, he knocked her down in a fit of rage, then set off, leaving her senseless and covered with blood from her nose, while grandmother explained to us children that whenever a woman stood on the threshold some disaster invariably befell the head of the family. Mother always refused to accept this piece of folklore. Quite simply, she hated father for leaving on such a violent note, and despised grandmother for trying to defend her son’s action. Even so, when father died as an outcome of that journey, I couldn’t help feeling a mysterious sense of awe toward mother. I wondered if in fact she believed in the taboo even more firmly than grandmother and had deliberately stood on the threshold. I wondered, too, whether awareness of her intention had made father behave so brutally and stopped grandmother and the workmen from making any move to restrain him.

  The other image was a vague, futile groping for the shape and color of my wife’s naked body. I tried to picture something beautiful and erotic, but the only clear visions I achieved—both calculated to inspire a deeply instinctive distaste—were of the soles of her feet, given reality thanks to the testimony of the witness to her adultery, and of her anus, where a split caused by a passing fancy on our part to try some deviant sex had left a ridge of flesh. Jealousy, moreover, was gradually becoming a positive fact, sticking hot and rough in my bronchial tubes as though I’d inhaled poison gas. The same irritating vapor attacked the eye of my consciousness, so that the details of her naked body were lost in a reddish obscurity. I had a sudden, startling feeling that I’d never really possessed her. . . .

  “Mitsu!” called a hearty voice full of animal good spirits and confidence from downstairs. It was Takashi.

  I opened my eyes to see Hoshio’s back stir and draw into itself where he stood glued to the window. By now the Nembutsu music, the barking of the dogs, and the cheerful clamor of people were on their way down to the valley.

  “Mitsu!” called Takashi in a voice still more heartily extrovert than before. Ignoring Hoshio, who made a reflex movement to stop me, I went halfway down the stairs and sat down. Standing in the entrance with the outside light behind him, Takashi was fringed with a halo like rainbow-hued wool. Not only his face and body, which were turned toward me, but his outspread arms as well were completely shadowed. If I was to deal with him on equal terms, I would have to keep my own face strategically buried in the darkness too.

  “Mitsu, did Hoshi tell you what I did?” the black figure asked me, glittering all around with tiny bubbles of light like sunshine refracted on a rippling sea. It made the silhouette look like a salamander rising from water.

  “Yes, he told me,” I said calmly. I wanted to show how unemotional I was compared with him, this younger brother of mine now preparing to flaunt his adultery before the cuckold with much the same eagerness as the child who once begged me to watch while he let a silly little centipede attack his own finger.

  “I didn’t do it just for the sex. It was a way of getting at the meaning of something very important to me.”

  I shook my head in silence to indicate my doubts about what he’d said. Takashi, just like the dogs barking at the “spirits,” was wavering between excitement and tense apprehension, and this dart of ill will struck straight home.

  “It’s true, it wasn’t for the sex!” he protested indignantly. “Actually, I didn’t feel any desire at all. I had to do all kinds of things by myself to get properly worked up.”

  For a moment I felt my face flush hot with a mixture of rage and a desire to laugh. It freed me from all feelings of jealousy. So he’d had to do all kinds of things “by himself,” had he? The anger made me tremble, and at the same time I had to clench my teeth to keep back the laughter. How hard he must have worked at it, all “by himself”! Why, the vulgar kid—little did he realize that, if anybody, it was my wife who as a sexually mature human being (if she had in fact shaken off that sense of sexual impossibility) had achieved something “by herself.” How desperately he must have worked on his first act of adultery, scared in case failure to ejaculate in the proper way should afflict him with a stifling sense of shame not only toward his fellow in adultery but toward me as well! The whole thing had the effect of some dreary memory from adolescence.

  “Mitsu, I’m going to marry Natsumi. I hope you won’t interfere with us,” he said, shaking the black silhouette of his head exasperatedly.

  “Are you going to try all kinds of things ‘by yourself’ even after you’re married?” I asked mockingly. “Without even wanting it?”

  “That’s up to me!” he sho
uted, covering his humiliation in a show of anger.

  “Right. It’s up to you and Natsumi. But that assumes you can somehow survive the collapse of your ‘rising’ and get out of the valley safely, taking her with you.”

  “Look, the rising is thoroughly back in its stride. You saw how wild both the valley and ‘country’ folk were about the ‘spirits,’ didn’t you? We’ve given the rising a transfusion. We’ve restored its strength with a stiff shot of the blood of imagination!” His voice had recovered the excitement it had had when he first called upstairs to me. “They were afraid our violence mightn’t carry the same authority as the Emperor’s gang. But having a good laugh at the two ‘spirits’ has given them the emotional strength to despise him! They’ve got the guts again to see that the man they call the ‘Emperor of the Supermarkets’ is only an ex-lumberjack, a Korean who happened to amass a certain amount of wealth. So they promptly showed their bullying contempt and twisted self-interest by stripping the store of its electrical appliances and everything else in sight. Once they decide the enemy’s a helpless weakling, they feel they can trample all over him. And the crucial fact here is that the Emperor’s a Korean. They’ve always been thoroughly aware how wretched their lives were. And they’ve always kept low, feeling they were the most insignificant species in the forest. But now they remember the delicious superiority they felt toward the Koreans before and during the war. They’re intoxicated at rediscovering the existence of outcasts even worse off than themselves, and they’ve begun to see themselves as almighty. They’re like a lot of flies—I only need to organize them and I’ll be able to carry on resisting the Emperor indefinitely. They may be small and nasty like flies, but that’s just what gives a lot of them together a special power of their own.”