by Kenzaburo Oe
“But do you imagine your ‘flies’ are never going to realize how much you despise the people here ? Wait and see—you’ll find the power of the flies directed against yourself one day! In fact, maybe your ‘rising’ won’t be complete until that happens.”
“That’s just the false perspective of a pessimist looking down on the valley from his house on high,” declared Takashi, who had acquired a certain ease of manner by now. “The rising of the past three days, you see, has revolutionized the outlook of the fly elite, who are a cut above the rank-and-file flies. By ‘elite,’ I mean the owners of forest land. They always used to believe that even if life in the valley came to a dead end and all the inhabitants of the hollow moved out or died off, they at least would only need to wait till the trees had grown big enough to make lumbering possible again. But this rising has given them practical proof that flies driven by despair are something to be feared. It’s been a practical lesson in the history of the 1860 affair. Moreover, the moment they realized as a concrete fact—admittedly, the concreteness was a fraud, but anyhow—when they realized that the ‘spirit’ of the Emperor was only a pathetic Korean, they all became patriots overnight. Psychologically, it was just the same kind of patriotism, in a rigid, strictly local sense, as shown by their lousy ancestors who took seats in the prefectural assembly—once cutting down part of the forest had given them the funds—even though they had no practical political program to offer. They’re getting ideas of wresting economic control of the valley back into the hands of the Japanese. And fortunately for them, the enemy is that stupid old Emperor who walks in procession in an old-fashioned morning coat without even a shirt, much less a tie and gloves. . . . So the idea, which has turned into a definite plan, is to have several of them put up the funds to take over the supermarket, including its losses from the looting, and to have it run jointly by the valley storekeepers who’ve gone out of business. The young priest has been rushing all over the place preparing the ground. You know, Mitsu, that priest is more than a mere philosopher—he’s got the enthusiasm of a revolutionary who’s keen to put his cherished fantasies into practice. What’s more, he’s the only person in the hollow who hasn’t the slightest trace of egotism. He’s our surest ally!”
“I agree that he’s quite selfless in taking the side of the ordinary people of the valley,” I said, “because, Taka, that’s been the priest’s job at the temple for generations past. But don’t assume he’s on the side of people like you, who thoroughly despise the valley folk.”
“I don’t care. I’m leading a rising, a successful one too. I’m an ‘effective evildoer,’ like our eldest brother on the battlefield.” He laughed. “I don’t need real allies. All I need is the appearance of cooperation.”
“You know best, Taka, so you’d better get back to your battlefield,” I said, getting up. “I can’t share your sense of humor about it, I’m afraid.”
“How’s Hoshi now?” he asked. “Try to be nice to him. After he watched us making love I saw him quietly being sick. He’s only a kid!” And he hurried off.
At that moment I was suddenly seized with the notion, which soon became a conviction, that Takashi’s project might succeed. Even if the “rising” as such failed, I felt sure he would soar above the decadence and muddle, and escape to start a new, ordinary, and eminently uneventful married life with a Natsumi similarly freed from the toils of her own personal crisis. The placid life, moreover, would be the life of someone who had once been a creature of violence, backed up by the proud memory of having lived through a major upheaval. By then, his completely uneventful routine would have closed once and for all the rift between the desire for self-punishment created by some nameless thing inside him and his awareness of his own love of violence. The letter from great-grandfather’s brother that I’d read that same day served to heighten my conviction. Even though he’d led a rising that ended in disaster and despair, hadn’t he got away and lived on to enjoy a peaceful old age?
I went back upstairs and found the young man—abandoned, not to say ridiculed, by his guardian deity—still glued to the window. Without turning round, he complained:
“The snow in the garden’s all wet and sticky from those people trampling over it. I hate it—it messes up the car and you can’t do a thing about it.”
Late that night, as Hoshio and I lay side by side in our blankets, each hugging his chilled body to himself, passing the time in a wakeful effort to stave off the cold of the thaw that had set in in earnest, my wife suddenly came silently up the stairs; and in an exhausted and unpleasantly hoarse voice, without even wondering apparently whether we mightn’t be fast asleep in the darkness, she said:
“Come over to the main house. Taka’s tried to rape a girl from the valley and killed her. The team’s deserted him and gone home, and in the morning the men of the valley will come and get him.”
Both Hoshi and I sat up in the darkness. For a while we stayed rigid and silent, listening to my wife’s breath rasping as she began feebly to sob.
“We’d better go,” I forced myself to say. But my body, suddenly heavy like a skin full of water, was being drawn irresistibly down by a honeyed drowsiness just the reverse of the insomnia of a moment before. If only I closed my eyes, let myself fall backward, and curled up like a fetus, I could deny the whole of reality; and if reality ceased to exist, then my criminal brother and the crime itself would vanish too. But in the end I shook my head in resignation and repeating, “We’d better go, we’d better go,” hauled myself slowly to my feet.
A Way beyond Despair
IN silence my wife, the young man, and I plowed our way across the front garden, our heels crunching unsteadily into the half-frozen slush. I peered down at the dark, silent void of the valley, now a bottomless pit from whose depths rose a cold, dank wind. The door of the main house stood open. We halted in a hesitant group as though held back by the faint light that seeped from inside, then finally stepped across the threshold together. Sitting with head bent beside the open fireplace, Takashi was holding the shotgun, which was broken open, polishing it skillfully with one hand as though he’d been doing the same thing for years. The small man who stood quite still in the dark kitchen facing him stirred at the sound of our entrance, but he had difficulty even in turning his head to look at us, being so rigid with tension that he threatened to topple over at any moment. It was Gii the hermit.
Takashi stopped work with an air of reluctance and looked up at us. His dark-skinned face was oddly twisted, and at the same time somehow shrunken. His hair and his face from his left ear down to the corner of his mouth were soiled with something black and sticky. Moving as in a dream, he slowly spread out his two hands toward me. The little finger and ring finger of his left hand were hidden beneath a broad cloth bandage, but the rest of both hands was entirely covered with dark blotches. He hadn’t bothered to wipe his hands before polishing the gun. The stuff there and on his head was blood. He fluttered his outstretched fingers, watching with eyes like a mournful monkey’s as I shrank back, then gave a feeble giggle that went on and on as though he were blowing bubbles from between his compressed lips. The beastliness of it made me recoil again. Suddenly my wife, who had stepped up alone to stand by the fireplace, struck with her fist at the frozen grin on Takashi’s mouth. Then she sank to her knees, and one round breast slipped out through the front of her night kimono like an undamaged part protruding from a broken machine. Repeatedly, she rubbed her fist on the front of her nightdress; and only when the blood was gone did she cover the breast.
Takashi’s smile vanished instantly. He gazed inquiringly at me, but didn’t even glance at the woman who had hit him. His upper lip was stained with fresh blood, this time from his own nose. He pursed his lips and noisily drew in a great breath, sucking the blood from his nostrils in with it. I was sure he had swallowed his own blood. His face turned darker and darker till his head looked like some somber-plumaged bird. The fact that he’d slept with my wife was brought home to me with
a new and convincing reality. She shifted her gaze from Takashi to the hermit, who retreated clumsily into the shadows by the stove, afraid she might hit him next.
“I tried to rape that sexy little piece you met yesterday, Mitsu, and the little bitch actually put up a fight. Kicked me in the guts and tried to scratch my eyes out. I went crazy. I held her down on the Whale Rock with my knees and pinned her arms with one hand, then grabbed a stone with my free hand and smashed her head with it. She hollered ‘No! No!’ at the top of her voice and twisted her head from side to side to show she meant it, but I hit her again and didn’t stop till I’d battered her skull in.” The feeble, blurred voice seemed to come from somewhere far away. The blood-smeared hands were held out still as if to make sure I’d seen them properly. But somewhere down in the voice was a note of defiant exhibitionism, as though he wanted to strip off and flaunt his shame before the world. The way he spoke lacked all intonation and direction; his voice might have rambled on forever. I found it acutely disgusting.
“While I was beating her to death,” he continued, “Gii the hermit was hiding behind the Whale Rock. He saw everything, so he’s a witness. Gii can see in the dark!”
He called trustingly toward the dark shadows by the stove where the witness to his crime lurked—”Gii, Gii,” as though summoning some weak but cherished protege to his side—but the hermit, far from coming forward, neither stirred nor replied.
“Why did you try to rape her—were you drunk?” I asked solely to check this unnerving flood of talk. I hadn’t the slightest interest in the origins of his urge to rape the girl, the girl with the pink face whom Korean dress had suited so well.
“I wasn’t drunk. I practice what I preach about facing reality sober. I always have, Mitsu. I was sober—but I couldn’t help myself. I had to rape her!” A faint, ravaged smile stirred beneath the tense skin of his face.
“But didn’t you say you felt no desire in bed with Natsumi ?” I asked, lobbing a mortar shell of malice at him and my wife, who was still sitting on her heels beside him, staring at him again in stupefaction. With deepening disgust, I observed the almost shameful consternation this aroused in Takashi; but my wife’s eyes remained fixed on him, the white mask of her features still showing no expression other than stunned amazement. The face smeared with dead blood was dark and swollen now with the live blood flooding up beneath the skin, and it was he who was longing to cry “No! No!” in panic-stricken discomfort and shame. His reaction at being given away in front of my wife showed an oversensitivity and immaturity incongruous in a “man of violence.” I wondered if his purpose in sitting there without even washing off the blood of his victim was not just to flaunt the bloodstains before me, but also to ensure his continuity as a criminal. He struggled by sheer force to replace the dismay written all over his face with a more brutal excitement. He gave me a cunning look, then said coyly, as though unsated desire was still smoldering in his guts :
“She was a nice piece of ass. Young, too—the kind of kid to get you worked up!”
Humiliated, my wife shuffled on her knees into the background. She was no longer watching Takashi or anyone else, and I seemed to detect a gleam of anger in the forlorn despair of her downcast, shadowy eyes. She’d ceased to be Takashi’s mistress: that much was certain. But it didn’t mean that she had come back to me. In tales of adultery, this was always the fate of the husband who took it out on his wife’s lover. Not, in fact, that I had really punished him: I’d simply and contemptuously confirmed that he was still the child who had figured in the centipede episode. The feeling of contempt restored my free powers of observation. For the first time since I heard the news of this deadly trap into which Takashi had so abruptly fallen, I was released from my straitjacket of bewilderment and frustration. I stepped up to occupy the space vacated by my wife, motioning Hoshio to follow. With a swiftness that belied his sluggish air Takashi pulled the gun closer to him and put a space between us so that we faced each other at a suitable distance for debate.
“Taka,” I said, beginning my critique of his account, “you say you tried to rape the girl and battered her to death with a stone because she resisted. But that’s a lie, isn’t it?”
“Ask Gii—get him to tell you what he saw!” he retorted in a voice suddenly stiff with distrust.
“He’s just a nut, he’d churn out anything you put into his head. I don’t believe you committed murder, Taka.”
“How can you be so sure, Mitsu? Look at the blood I’ve got on me. Go to her home, where the football team took her body, and see for yourself! Her head’s smashed to a pulp. How can you stand there sneering at me, so sure of all these wild theories you’re cooking up?”
“I’ve no doubt she’s dead. Her head may be smashed in too, poor kid. But I doubt whether you did it as a deliberate crime. You couldn’t do it. Even as a boy, when you let the centipede bite your finger, you carefully chose the kind that doesn’t sting. You’re a cowardly bastard, aren’t you? I bet she died in an accident!”
“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “when the flies come in a raging swarm from the valley to get me, Gii will tell them what happened. Why not listen then, rather than dream it all up for yourself? He’ll tell you, all right. He’ll tell how I hit her with the rock—that dumb, sexy little bitch who thought she could lead me on—while she fought back like a crazy cat. It’ll show you how dangerous it is to fool around with the leader of a full-blown rebellion.”
“Who’s going to believe the testimony of a madman?” I said, feeling the first pang of pity for this aspiring murderer so stubbornly clinging to his infantile fictions. “Particularly the valley folk, who’ve known how crazy he is for dozens of years now.”
At the mention of his name, Gii had poked his upper half up from behind the stove and turned a stunted ear, like a clump of speckled brown and gray hair, to catch our conversation. We might have been judges sitting to determine his fate, deliberating whether or not his demented hermit’s existence constituted a crime. But though he listened in attentive silence, he gave no more sign of understanding than if our conversation had been in some foreign tongue. As though deep in thought, he heaved an audible sigh.
“Take it easy, Gii!” Takashi called encouragingly to the old man. “There’s nothing for you to do until tomorrow. Till then, why don’t you go and sleep in the storeroom out of people’s way?”
Gii promptly scuttled off into the dark, making no more sound as he went than some nocturnal animal. I imagined Takashi didn’t want him to hear my criticisms of his own confession. My theory that the girl had died in an accident and that Takashi was using her body for his own devices became a conviction. Doubt still remained, though, as to just why he should use a madman’s testimony in order to proclaim himself a murderer: was he thinking of taking on the whole valley? If I wanted to, I could testify that what Takashi claimed as murder was, if not entirely unconnected with him, at least an accident. But it would be for Takashi himself to decide whether to accept my aid and abandon his plan to team up with the hermit.
“Why exactly did you take her all the way to the Whale Rock?” I queried, rather like a defense counsel going against his client’s wishes. The Whale Rock was a huge boulder that rose out of the ground at the point where the graveled road through the valley dipped sharply down toward the bridge. It made a bottleneck in the road and shut off the view of the bridge. The fifty yards’ descent from there to the bridge was not only steep but winding. It was the most frequent site of automobile accidents in the valley, but hardly the place for a lovers’ tryst late on a winter night.
“I wanted to rape her on the seat of the Citroen, and I was looking for the best place to stop,” Takashi replied with the same air of stubborn caution. “If you park the car beside the rock, nobody—apart from Gii, that is—is going to come all the way from the valley to spy on you. Besides, the rock screens you from the team member who’s on guard all night at the end of the bridge.”
“Since you say you held her down again
st the rock and hit her with a stone, I assume she resisted and escaped from the car, and that you caught her again ?”
“That’s right.”
“If she really resisted in the car, I don’t imagine she struggled in silence, did she? And I don’t suppose she ran in silence after she got out, either. She was an active member of the ‘rising’ and presumably knew that one of her friends was on guard by the bridge, so surely she would have shouted for help ? You say, too, that after you’d caught her, while you were knocking her skull in, she kept shrieking ‘Don’t, don’t!’ Why, then, didn’t the guard standing only fifty yards below come and stop you killing her?”
“After I finished her off, I discovered Gii had been spying on us. I was just speaking to him when the lookout came running up. He was shocked at what I’d done, and ran off to get someone to help carry the girl’s body. So I fetched Gii out from behind the rock, put him in the car, and came away.”
