by Kenzaburo Oe
“Although she was half-witted, she was really a rather special kind of person. The one thing she cared for was beautiful sounds; she was happiest when she was listening to music. Sounds like an airplane’s engines or a car starting up would make her complain of a burning pain in her ears. And I’m sure they really did hurt her. You know that you can break glass by making the air vibrate? Well, it seems it was like that—a pain as though something delicate was breaking inside her ears. Anyway, there was no one else in the village where uncle lived who understood music and had an absolute need for it as she did. She wasn’t ugly, and kept herself spotless. She was almost unnaturally clean in her person; together with this abnormal fondness for music, it was one of the features of her idiocy. Some of the young fellows in uncle’s village would make a point of coming to gawk at her while she was listening. Once the music started, she was reduced to a pair of ears. Everything else was shut out, nothing else could penetrate her consciousness. So the peeping toms were quite safe—but if ever I found them at it I’d throw myself at them in a blind fury. For me, she was the one feminine thing in my life, and I felt I had to keep her safe. I didn’t, in fact, have anything to do with the other girls in uncle’s village; when I went to high school in the town, I never even talked to the girls in the same class. I made up a tale about us being a couple of aristocrats whose family had come down in the world, and took an exaggerated pride in our descent from greatgrandfather and his brother. If you took the sympathetic view, you might say I was doing it to shake off my inferiority feelings at being taken care of by uncle and his family. I told her we were a special elite of two, and we wouldn’t and mustn’t get interested in anybody apart from each other. The way we behaved made some nasty-minded adults start a rumor that we were sleeping together. I got my own back by throwing stones at the houses of people who said such things. But all the while, the rumors were exerting a power of suggestion over me. I was only a high school kid of seventeen with an unformed mind full of fanatical ideas and lonely enough to be susceptible to such persuasion. Late one afternoon in early summer, I suddenly got drunk. It was the day the last rice-planting was finished in uncle’s field, and a crowd from the village who’d been called in to help were drinking over in the main house. She and I, being ‘aristocrats,’ naturally hadn’t helped with the planting, but the young fellows hauled me in and gave me my first drink, which went straight to my head. Uncle found me drunk, told me off, and sent me back to the out-building. At first, sister was amused and laughed at my drunkenness. But when the farmers got foully drunk and started singing and playing music in the main house, she suddenly got scared. She pressed her hands over her ears and hunched up into herself like a shellfish. Even so, it was more than she could take, and soon she was sobbing like a little kid. They went on and on singing their vulgar songs in their thick peasant voices until late at night. I got really mad; I hated society and anything to do with it. I held her to me, trying to calm her down, and as I did so I felt a queer kind of excitement. Before long, I’d had sex with her.”
We were silent, acutely embarrassed by each other’s presence as brothers. We lay still and withdrawn in the darkness, scarcely breathing, trying to hide from the huge and terrifying thing that was coming to denounce us. I wanted to cry out, “No! No!”—the same cry that, if Takashi was to be believed, the unfortunate girl had uttered at the point of death as the rock battered her head—but even that simple cry refused to emerge from a body in which the flesh and bones were independent and unrelated, aching with the dull pain of those evil awakenings.
“It’s absolutely no excuse to say I was drunk the first time we had sex,” Takashi went on slowly in a voice faint to the point of vanishing, “because the next day I repeated the same thing when I was sober. At first she didn’t like the sex for its own sake, and was scared too. But the idea of refusing me in anything was quite foreign to her. I wasn’t unaware that she was suffering pain, but I was too far gone in desire and anxiety to consider things from her side. In order to calm her fears about sex, I fetched some old erotic prints from uncle’s storehouse and persuaded her that all married people did the same thing. What worried me most was that she’d tell our secret to uncle’s family in the daytime, while I was at school and she was alone in the house. So I told her that if anybody else got to know what we were doing, they’d do frightful things to us. I hunted out some illustrations in the dictionary to show her, pictures of people being burned at the stake during the Middle Ages. And I told her that if we were careful not to let other people know, we could live together as brother and sister all our lives, doing the same thing without ever marrying anybody else. That was what we both really wanted, I said, so what did it matter as long as we managed not to get caught ?
“I really believed what I said. I believed that if only she and I resolved to go on living in joint defiance of society, we’d be free to do everything we most desired. Until then, it seemed she’d been worried at the idea that sooner or later I’d get married and leave her to live alone. I reminded her, too, how mother before she died had told her to stick close to me always. She was vaguely convinced that she’d never get along apart from me. So when I persuaded her, in terms she could understand, that we should turn our backs on everyone else and go on living together, brother and sister, in league against the world, she was genuinely delighted. Before long, she stopped being reluctant about sex and started initiating it herself. At one period we were leading a more or less completely self-sufficient life, like a pair of lovers, just happy to be together. I at least have never been so happy as I was in those days. Once she’d made up her mind, she was strong and unwavering. She was proud of the idea that she’d do everything with me until we died. And then … she got pregnant. Our aunt realized it first. When aunt warned me about it, I was half crazy with anxiety. I felt sure that if my sexual dealings with her came to light, I’d die of shame on the spot. But aunt didn’t suspect me in the slightest, so in the end I committed an unforgivable act of treachery. I was a vile schemer without an ounce of courage in me. I didn’t deserve such a straightforward sister.
“I ordered her to say she’d been raped by some unknown young man from the village. She did as I said. So uncle took her into town and not only made her have an abortion but had her sterilized, too. When she came back she was completely prostrate, not just from the experience of the operation but from the menacing roar of car engines in the town. But she’d courageously obeyed my instructions and hadn’t breathed a word about me to anyone, even at the inn when uncle apparently pressed her—she, who’d never told a lie!—to recall any distinguishing features of the man who’d raped her.”
He stopped and sobbed for a while. Then, still not completely free of his fit of weeping and interspersing his account with little moans, he related the crudest experience of his life. I lay listening to him with utter passivity, wretched and shrunken like a dried fish, overpowered by the cold and the aching in my head.
“It happened that night. Too frightened to be able to pull herself together, she was looking to me to rescue her. How could you blame her? And since sex was already a habit between us, she took it into her head to find comfort there. But even someone with as little accurate sexual knowledge as I had in those days knew that sex was impossible immediately after that kind of operation. I felt fear at the idea of her sexual organs all wounded deep down inside, and a sense of physiological disgust too. You could hardly blame me either, could you? But she couldn’t grasp what would seem obvious to ordinary people. When I refused her—the first time ever—she suddenly turned stubborn. She crawled in beside me and tried to touch my prick. So I hit her—the first time she’d ever been hit in her life. I’ve never seen a human being look so startled, or so sad and forlorn. . . . Then after a while she said: ‘It wasn’t true what you said, Taka. It was wrong, even though we kept it secret.’ And the next morning she killed herself. It wasn’t true what you said, Taka. It was wrong, even though we kept it secret. . . .”
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sp; Not the faintest sound arose from the valley. Any noise would have been smothered at once by the blanket of snow that lay, still undisturbed, over the forest. Even the snow that had begun to thaw had frozen again in the cold. Yet all the while a shrill voice, its frequency too high to be caught by the human ear, seemed to skirl between the high, black walls of the surrounding forest. It was the cry of the huge creature whose coiled body filled the void that lay above the hollow. One midwinter in my childhood, after a night of that voice whose presence was so intensely experienced though never heard, I discovered the trail of some huge snake on the shallow bed of the clear stream flowing along the bottom of the valley, and shuddered to think it was the mark of the monster I’d heard crying all night long. Now once again I felt the overpowering presence of that soundless howling.
Growing used to the dark, my eye detected in the faint light from the window all kinds of vague black shapes looming about me. The whole interior of the storehouse was crowded with apparitions like serried ranks of dark, dwarfish Buddhist images, all whispering to each other : We heard, we heard!
I was seized with a sudden, uncontrollable fit of coughing. It felt as though the membranes of my throat, my bronchial tubes, even my lungs had suddenly erupted in a crimson rash. I had a fever; that was why I’d felt the flesh and bones of my whole body dismembered and plagued with sharp pains. I had barely recovered from the fit of coughing when Takashi, who showed signs of recovering at least slightly from the profound prostration of his spirit, spoke to me in a tone of utterly defenseless self-commiseration.
“Mitsu, as long as you don’t interfere, I’m sure I’ll be executed even if I survive tomorrow. Either way, whether I’m killed in the lynching or executed, I want to give you my eyes so you can use the retinas for an operation on your own. Then my eyes at least will survive and see lots of things after my death. It would be a consolation just to serve as a kind of lens. You’ll do it, won’t you, Mitsu?”
An overpowering urge to refuse shot through my body like a shaft of lightning. The crying of the forest ceased and the small black apparitions filling the storehouse vanished.
“No! Nothing would persuade me to take your eyes,” I declared in a voice shaking with indignation.
“Why? Why not? Why won’t you accept them?” Takashi shouted in a forlorn voice in which the note of self-pity dried up and was replaced by a growing, desperate suspicion. “Is it because you’re so angry with me about our sister ? But you only knew her when she was a small kid! While I was living with her in someone else’s house, you were here in the valley with Jin to do your bidding. And you used the money left to us to go to high school in the town and to university in Tokyo as well, didn’t you? If you hadn’t hogged the money for yourself, the three of us could have lived together in the valley. You’re not in a position to criticize me where she’s concerned. I didn’t tell the truth just to have you pass judgment on me about her!”
“And that’s not what I mean either!” I shouted back, cutting short his protest as a new and ferocious excitement started to grip him. “To begin with, I’m not prepared, emotionally, to accept your eyes. But on a more practical level what I mean is this: you won’t be lynched tomorrow morning, nor is any court going to sentence you to death. It’s just your sense of guilt—you’re hoping to punish yourself for the incest and the death of an innocent person that it brought about; and you’re hoping that the people here will install you among the valley ‘spirits,’ so that you’re remembered as a man of violence. I admit that if that fantasy should become a reality, the two sides of your personality would come together again in death. And in a hundred years you might even be looked on as a reincarnation of great-grandfather’s brother, your idol. But Taka—though you’re always playing at putting yourself in peril, you’re the type who invariably has a way out at the last moment. You acquired the habit on the day that sister’s suicide allowed you to go on living without either being punished or put to shame. I’m sure this time, too, you’ll work some nasty little dodge to go on living. Then, having so shamefully survived, you’ll make your excuses to her ghost: ‘In fact,’ you’ll say, ‘I deliberately put myself in a tight corner where I had no choice but to be lynched or executed, but a lot of interfering bastards forced me to go on living.’ It was the same with your experiences of violence in America—you weren’t really committed at all. You merely hoped to find a pretext for carrying on for a while, free of your painful memories. All you did in practice was catch a touch of VD, thereby providing an excuse for not taking any further risks during your stay in the States. It’s the same with the grubby little confession you’ve just made: if I were to guarantee that even that wasn’t the absolute truth either, that one mention of it wouldn’t mean your being killed, or committing suicide, or going mad and turning into a monster, don’t you think you’d immediately feel saved ? It may have been unconscious, but didn’t you ramble on so long in the expectation that I’d accept you as you are, along with all your past experiences, thus releasing you at one stroke from your divided state? For example, do you think you’d have the guts to confess again in front of the valley folk tomorrow morning? That would really be taking a risk. But I don’t imagine you’ve got what it takes. You may not admit it consciously, but you’re expecting somehow to survive their kangaroo court. If you’re sent for trial, you’ll implore them to execute you with an air of sincerity convincing enough to deceive even yourself. But in fact you’ll be sitting pretty in your cell until investigation confirms that your only crime was mutilation of a body following accidental death. Don’t lie to me about giving me your eyes after you’re killed, as though you believed you only had a while to live! You know I’d be glad even of a dead man’s eyes; you’re just playing around with someone else’s disability!”
Takashi raised himself with obvious difficulty in the dark. He set the gun on his knees and, placing his finger on the trigger, turned to face me. I thought he might shoot me, but didn’t flinch; I felt too contemptuous, contemptuous of the way he always left himself some escape from any trap he allowed himself to fall into, to be impressed by this sudden vault into threatened violence. Even the sight of the gun and his small black head swaying in time with his heavy breathing left me untouched by fear.
“Mitsu, why do you hate me so much?” he demanded in a voice tearful with impotent grief, peering impatiently through the darkness to ascertain the expression on my face, “Why have you always loathed me? You hated me, didn’t you, even before you knew what I did to our sister and Natsumi.”
“Hated? It’s not a question of what I feel, Taka. I’m simply giving my objective opinion that even someone like you who chooses to live in pursuit of a dramatic illusion can’t keep up the critical tension indefinitely unless, say, he actually goes insane. Take our eldest brother—he may have enjoyed violence on the battlefield, but if he’d come home alive I’m sure he would have discarded the memory and settled down again with the greatest of ease to a placid daily routine. If it weren’t so, the whole world would be swamped with violent criminals after every big war. As leader of the rising, great-grandfather’s brother, on whom you pin so much faith, was responsible for mass murder, and in the end he even abandoned his comrades to their fate so that he could get away through the forest. Do you think that after that he deliberately plunged into new perils and went on leading a brutal life simply to justify his pose as a man of violence? Well, he didn’t. I read the letters he wrote. They show that he stopped being a man of violence. What’s more, even in his own mind he lost the enthusiasm he’d had as a rebel leader. Nor was it a case of self-punishment. He simply forgot his experiences in the rising and spent his last years as a perfectly ordinary citizen. He tried all kinds of feminine wiles to help his beloved nephew dodge the draft, but he failed. And the one-time revolutionary seems to have died peacefully in his bed, brooding mournfully over the fate of that same nephew—no news had come from him since he was sent to fight at Weihaiwei. In practice he died a mere sheep of a man, a
bsolutely unqualified to become any kind of ‘spirit.’ You too, Taka—you won’t be lynched tomorrow morning; you’ll go down to the valley to have your damaged fingers treated, you’ll be arrested, and after being put on probation or serving three years or so, you’ll take your place again as a perfectly well-behaved, ordinary member of society. All fantasies that ignore those facts are meaningless in the long run. You don’t have sufficient confidence in the facts. But you’re too old, Taka, to get burned up about heroic fantasies of this kind. You’re not a kid any more.”
I stood up alone in the darkness and, feeling for the top of the steps with my foot, went downstairs. Behind me, I heard Takashi’s unspeakably dismal voice again (and felt that this time I might really be shot, though fear of threatened violence refused to become a reality, and I could only feel the discomfort of the fever within me and the nagging ache in each part of my body) :
“Mitsu, why do you resent me so much? Why have you always disliked me ? We two brothers are all that’s left of the Nedokoros, aren’t we?”
In the main house my wife was still drinking whisky, staring vacantly in front of her with eyes already bloodshot like the man-eating woman of Korean folklore. Beyond the open sliding doors, Hoshio lay next to Momoko, fast asleep on his face like a dog that has collapsed of exhaustion. I sat down within my wife’s field of vision, took the whisky bottle from between her knees, drank a mouthful straight from the bottle and had another fit of coughing; but she continued to drift on the stormy seas of drunkenness as though I didn’t exist. I watched as tears sprang into her dark, bloodshot eyes and ran down the dry skin of her cheeks. After a while, a shot rang out from the storehouse, its echoes reverberating interminably around the night-shrouded forest. As I ran barefoot across the yard, there was a second shot. Just then, Gii the hermit came rushing out of the storeroom in panic-stricken flight. We all but collided, and started back from each other in fright. At the foot of the steps, I called up to the room above. The light was on now.
