by Kenzaburo Oe
“Only the young lookout’s evidence could give us an objective picture of what happened,” I said. “If it was light enough for you to catch the girl as soon as she ran away, he should at least have got a glimpse of you beating her brains out with that lump of rock. The whole business only took a few minutes. So though the lookout might have missed her scream from inside the car, he ought to have been right behind you by the time you dealt the last blow. He would have heard her groan at least.”
“When he ran up, it’s just possible I was back in the driver’s seat, turning the car round ready to make my getaway,” Takashi amended after a moment’s thought. “He might testify I was in the car when he first saw me.”
“I’m perfectly sure that’s what he’d say,” I pressed, elated by this new and promising lead. “The snow was thawing, and you’d taken her for a drive in the Citroen along the graveled road. Then something happened between you, so that she jumped out of the car and staved her head in on the Whale Rock. The reason you’ve got blood on you is that you picked her up after the accident. Or you may have deliberately smeared yourself with the blood pouring from her head. Besides, you were driving the car in a place where the view was poor and with a bridge only fifty yards ahead, at a speed fast enough for the girl’s head to be smashed to a pulp if she jumped out. Say what you like, I’m sure you were too busy steering to have time to mess around with her sexually, let alone rape her—though something must have happened to make her jump out. I suspect the reason you were in the car when the lookout came was simply that you’d slammed on the brakes and were going back to the site of the accident. It was probably the squeal of the brakes that brought the lookout running. In fact, I’m sure you hadn’t got out of the car at all. You may not even have found her until after the lookout went to fetch his friends. As for Gii, I doubt whether he actually witnessed anything. I bet you picked him up on the way home and primed him with details of your fictional murder.”
Takashi sat in silence, head bowed, as though chewing over what I’d said. Once more he had retired warily into his shell of solitude, and it was impossible to tell from looking at him whether my conjectures had succeeded in tearing the fabric of his vaunted crime.
“Taka!” Hoshio, who till then had stayed silent, spoke in a childish, high-pitched voice that trembled violently from something more than the cold. “You know perfectly well she always wanted to do it with you. Even in the daytime, she used to try to get you into a dark corner of the house. You didn’t need to rape her—you could’ve had her just by taking her pants down. I bet she pestered you so much in the car that you drove fast to give her a fright. I remember you saying you used to play around like that in the States. Then I bet she was so scared she lost her head and jumped out to save her own skin, because she was sure you’d never make it round the bend by the rock!”
“If that’s really so, Taka, then you can’t call it murder, can you?” I went on, encouraged by these remarks from the car expert. “It’s either an accident or negligence. Even if it’s negligence, it’s not entirely your fault but partly the girl’s too, poor kid.”
Still silent, Takashi was loading a cartridge into the gun. He worked carefully, concentrating on the task for fear of an accident; but I could tell that the face, down turned and entirely in shadow beneath the ridge of his eyebrows, and the slight body stiff with tension, were dominated from within by some brute force that precluded aLl attempts by others to understand. I had a strange fancy that our baby who had lain with brown eyes open and expressionless, simply and quietly existing, had grown up without ever reestablishing communication with the outside world and was here now, the blood on his body proclaiming the crime that he’d committed. And I suddenly felt my own security—whose only guarantee as I waxed so eloquent had been the distress and lack of confidence Takashi showed—falling apart at the seams. Though I was sure of my ability to demonstrate the unreality of Takashi’s professed crime, his stubborn silence as he sat with his face in the shadow, handling the gun like a small child absorbed in a new toy, gradually fostered the grotesque fear that I was looking at an animal.
“Do you believe he committed such a crime?” I was driven by his silence to ask my equally silent wife.
She sat thinking, and made no immediate response. Then, without looking up, she said in a dry voice that withered incipient emotion:
“Since he says he killed her, I can only believe him. He’s not the type, at least, to whom murder would be absolutely impossible.”
She was an unfamiliar, unapproachable stranger who had heard none of my speech as counsel for the defense. Ears closed and eyes down turned, she’d been letting herself respond directly to the unmistakable aura of criminality surrounding Takashi. He too raised frankly wondering, almost innocent eyes to look at her, and something, the fleeting shadow of a cloud, passed by deep beneath his skin. Then as he began carefully inspecting his gun again he said :
“She’s right. I killed the girl by hitting her repeatedly on the head with a rock. Why won’t you believe it, Mitsu?”
“There’s no why or wherefore. It’s not a question of believing or not believing. I’m just saying that it seems possible you didn’t commit murder.”
“Oh, I see. The scientific treatment.” He laid the loaded gun cautiously across his knees, and with his dirty right hand began to unwind the broad cloth band from the little and ring fingers of his other, equally filthy hand. “I’m not opposed to the scientific approach either, Mitsu.”
Blood-soaked gauze appeared beneath the cloth. It was bound round so thoroughly that it seemed to go on unwinding forever. But finally a pair of oddly shrunken, orange stalks emerged and blood spurted suddenly from the two level, rounded tips. With blood dripping onto his knees, he held the open wounds up for me to see, then the next moment clamped his right hand over the base of the two fingers and, thrusting them between his knees, bent forward and began moaning and twisting in pain.
“Shit!” he groaned. “God, it hurts!” He raised himself with an effort and began to wind the dirty gauze and cloth round his fingers again, but it was so obvious that this would do nothing to lessen his pain that Natsumi and I could only look on in horror. Like an old and moribund dog, Hoshio crawled unsteadily to the edge of the raised floor and stretching out his neck disgorged the contents of his stomach.
“Hell, it hurts. Oh God!” Then, recovering slightly from the worst of the pain, he glanced up at me from under half-closed lids and explained in unnecessary detail, “I was pressing down on her face with my left hand … bashing her head with the lump of rock in my right. At first she kept shouting, ‘No! No!’ But suddenly her mouth closed over my left hand with a great crunching sound. I pulled it away in a hurry, but her teeth were clamped onto the first joint of the little finger and the second joint of the next. All I could do was hit her jaw with the rock to make her open her mouth. But her teeth were too sharp—it only made her mouth shut once and for all, biting off the tips of my fingers. I tried later to force her mouth open with a stick and get them back,- but it was hopeless. The smashed head still has a couple of pieces of my finger in its mouth.”
Backed up by the obvious reality of pain, his words struck home, despite my justifiable incredulity, with a shocking conviction that transcended logic. I felt the reality of the “criminal” Takashi, and with equal certainty the actuality of the crime. Like Hoshio, I was seized with a fear and loathing for Takashi’s person that amounted to physical nausea. Not that I’d begun to believe he really battered the girl to death with a rock: I could still only think that she’d taken fright at the fierce speed with which the car negotiated the dark curves in the road and had jumped out. But his monomanic eagerness to attain criminal status and claim his fictional crime had then driven him to another grotesque and unbearably horrible act. He’d used a stick to force her mouth open as she lay dead with her skull staved in, deliberately inserted two fingers of his left hand between her teeth, and shut the mouth. I could almost hear it snap shut
. Then, grasping a lump of rock in his right hand, he must have struck at her jaw till the dead teeth bit through his fingers. At each blow to the dead girl’s chin, he would have been sprayed all over with blood and brains from the smashed skull and broken mouth, and with his own blood too. . . .
“Taka, you’re a crazy murderer!” I said hoarsely, but lacked the will for anything further.
“Now I feel you’ve got me right at last!” Takashi declared, drawing himself up defiantly. Suddenly Hoshio, who was still on all fours, cried in a tone of utter despair :
“Stop it! Stop it! Why don’t you do something to save Taka? It was an accident, I tell you!”
“Natsumi, give Hoshi some of those sleeping pills that Momoko took—twice the regular dose,” said Takashi, reverting for the first time in a long while to the gentle, avuncular tone he customarily used toward his young bodyguard. “Hoshi, you’d better get some sleep. Hoshi’s like a frog, only better,” he added. “Whenever he gets wind of something that his mind—not just his body—can’t swallow, he promptly flips his stomach and throws up.”
“I won’t take them,” Hoshio objected petulantly. “I don’t want to go to sleep.” But Takashi ignored this and watched with a kind of silent authority as my wife handed Hoshio a glass of water and the sleeping pills, which Hoshio after a feeble show of resistance finally gulped down. We all heard the slight, familiar sound as the water slid down his throat.
“They’ll soon take effect,” said Takashi. “Hoshi’s a barbarian—he’s almost never taken drugs before. Natsumi, you stay with him till he goes to sleep.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep, Taka! I feel I might never wake up again,” said Hoshio, making a final, limp protest in a voice obviously tinged with fear even as he began to succumb to the effect of the pills.
“No—go to sleep, and tomorrow morning you’ll wake up with a healthy appetite,” Takashi said, and callously dismissing the young man turned to me. “Mitsu, I’ve a feeling the valley people will be coming to lynch me. If I’m going to defend myself with the shotgun, I suppose I should shut myself up in the storehouse as great-grandfather’s brother did. So change places with me tonight, will you?”
“They’d never lynch you, Taka,” said my wife with an obvious uneasiness that belied her words. “I just can’t imagine you holding off a lynch mob with a shotgun. It’s all in your mind.”
“I know the valley better than you, Natsumi. They’re just beginning to get fed up with the rising, and with themselves for taking part in it. So some of them, I’m sure, will get the idea that they can atone for everything by shoving all the blame on me, then beating me to death. And in fact they’re right. It would make quite a lot of things simpler if I played the sacrificial lamb in the same way as S.”
“A lynching’s just not possible,” she insisted, and shot an imploring look at me, as the nearest object to hand, her eyes already swamped with a helpless need for alcohol. “Mitsu, you don’t think there could be a lynching, do you?”
“Either way,” I replied, “as the brains behind a ‘rising of the imagination,’ Taka naturally wants to keep the sparks of fancy flying right to the very end. The deciding factor will be how well the valley folk themselves play their imaginative part. I wouldn’t care to make a prediction yet.” I watched her gaze turn away disappointedly.
“He’s right,” said Takashi with a similar air of disappointment, and clutching the shotgun and a box of cartridges in his undamaged hand he slowly got to his feet. I could tell he was completely done in, so much so that if the weight of the gun had pulled him down he would probably have passed out on the spot.
“Give me the gun,” I said, “I’ll carry it for you.” He darted a fierce glance at me and refused with open hostility, as though I’d tried to trick him out of his only weapon. A passing suspicion that he might be mad awoke real fear in me. But almost immediately his eyes regained their look of numb exhaustion.
“Come back to the storehouse with me, will you?” he begged simply. “And stay with me till I go to sleep.”
We were going out of the kitchen into the front garden when my wife called to him as though in last farewell :
“Taka, why don’t you save yourself? You seem to be trying to get yourself either lynched or condemned to death.”
Takashi made no reply; his abnormally pallid, goose-pimpled, grubby face stayed sullenly shut in on itself. Already he was behaving as though he’d lost all interest in her. For no definite reason, I suddenly felt that both my wife and I were hopeless losers. Looking round, I saw her sitting motionless, her head sunk on her chest. The young man beside her was frozen into an unnatural half-sitting, half-lying position, like a wild animal paralyzed by a poisoned dart. Thanks to Takashi’s powers of suggestion, he was already completely under the influence of the sleeping pills. Hoping at least that my wife had some whisky concealed somewhere to help her face the cold and tedium of this longest night, I walked shivering in my brother’s wake beneath the faint light from the lantern in the eaves. He too was shaking violently, and staggered more than once. In the storeroom, Gii the hermit was making a sound like a dog sneezing. Nothing stirred in the darkness of Jin’s outbuilding; “Japan’s Fattest Woman,” freed from all frustration where food was concerned, was sleeping her first untroubled sleep in six or seven years. The mud in the front garden had frozen hard and no longer gave way under our heels.
Still wearing his bloodstained jacket and trousers Takashi crawled in between my blankets and curled up beneath them to take his socks off, looking like a snake caught in a bag. Then he drew the gun to his side again and, squinting up at me as I stood watching him settle down for the night, asked me to turn off the light. The request suited me very well. As he lay staring up into space, my brother’s blackened, grimy face was sunken like an old man’s at the cheeks and around the eyes, more unprepossessing and shifty-looking than at any time of trouble I remembered in the past. His body too, which scarcely made a bulge beneath the blankets and quilt, was pitifully slight. As I waited for the image of Takashi lying on his back to fade from my retina into the newfound darkness, I wound Hoshio’s blanket round my waist and sat down with my knees drawn up to my chest. We were silent for a while.
“You know, Mitsu, your wife sometimes hits the nail on the head,” Takashi began in an ingratiatingly compromising tone. “It’s true—I don’t want to save myself. I want to be lynched or condemned to death.”
“I know. You haven’t the courage to set up a violent crime, on your own, but given an accident that could be mistaken for one, you thrust yourself into the picture and do your level best to make sure you’ll be either lynched or executed. That’s how I see it.”
Takashi lay silent, breathing deeply, as though to encourage me to supplement my remarks. But I had nothing more to say. I was extremely cold and unutterably depressed. Eventually, he spoke again.
“Do you intend to stop them tomorrow?”
“Naturally. But I don’t know whether I can effectively interfere with your plan for self-destruction now that you’ve got so deeply entangled in it.”
“Mitsu, there’s something I want to tell you. I want to tell you the truth.” He spoke diffidently and shyly, half as though he doubted he would be taken seriously and half as though his attention were elsewhere. But the words came across strongly, setting up immediate echoes inside me.
“I don’t want to hear it, so don’t try to tell me,” I hastily protested, with a sudden urge to flee my memories of an earlier conversation with Takashi about “the truth.”
“I’m going to tell you, Mitsu!” he declared in an unpleasantly insistent tone that only intensified my desire to flee. I was shaken anew by his air of abject capitulation.
“If only you’d listen, I think you might cooperate, at least to the extent of standing by without interfering while I’m lynched.”
I abandoned any further attempt to keep him silent. Then with a preliminary sigh of exhaustion and despair, as though he had already tol
d what he was about to tell and, deeply regretting it, sought frantically and in vain to take back his words, he began. At each word he seemed to be overcoming some resistance in himself.
“Mitsu … I’ve always said that I had no idea why our sister killed herself. Uncle’s family backed me up too, they said it was suicide without any apparent motive. So I’ve always been able to keep the real reason to myself. Nobody ever attempted, in fact, to ask me about it seriously. I’ve kept quiet all along. Just once, in America, I told someone—a black prostitute, the merest stranger—but that was in my inadequate English. For me, talking to someone in English is like wearing a mask. So for all practical purposes I’ve never told anyone. It was a fake confession; it left me just as I was. Thanks to which, the only punishment I received was a mild dose of VD. Never once have I talked about it in the language I share with you and shared with our sister. It goes without saying that even to you I’ve never said a word about it. The only thing is, you may have dimly suspected there was something odd about her death from the way I always lost my cool if I felt you were dropping hints about it. That day you prepared the pheasants, for instance, you asked if ‘the truth’ had something to do with her. At that moment I was convinced you knew everything and were playing with me. I was so angry and ashamed I could have killed you. But then I told myself that you couldn’t know about it, and got myself under control. The morning she killed herself, before I went to tell uncle and the rest, I searched every corner of the outbuilding where she and I lived in case she’d left some message that would arouse suspicion. Then I began laughing and crying, torn between a new sense of guilt and relief at being released at last from the pressure of fear. I didn’t go to report her suicide at the main house till I was sure I’d got myself in hand and wouldn’t burst out in another fit of laughing. I found her that morning squatting in the toilet, dead from a dose of agricultural chemical. If you wonder why I felt such a deep sense of release once I was sure she’d left no last note, it was because I’d always been afraid that, being half-witted, she would give our secret away. I felt her death had somehow erased the secret, almost as though it had never existed at all. But reality, of course, refused to work out like that. On the contrary—her suicide implanted the secret deep down inside my body and mind, where it began steadily poisoning my daily life and the outlook for the future. All this happened when I was a junior in high school. Ever since, I’ve been torn in two by the memory.” He paused and began to sob: an indescribably gloomy, wretched sound, the memory of which, I foresaw, would plague me for the rest of my life with spells of depression that made survival itself a burden.
