by Kenzaburo Oe
“The facts I’ve just told you weren’t discovered until the Emperor started his survey of the storehouse. That night, such a thing would have seemed impossible. But it’s quite clear now—great-grandfather’s brother shut himself up under the storehouse and lived there in isolation until his death.”
“Mitsu—now that Taka’s dead, what difference does it make to him what you didn’t know, or what you know now? You thrust people aside and leave them to die without hope, but all you can do to make up for it is cry out ‘I deserted you!’ in your dreams or weep tears of self-consolation. Now, just as in the past, and in future, and forever! New discoveries may renew your own tears, but they won’t console them for dying so horribly and in such despair!”
I gave up, and contented myself with watching her eyes, which were so rigid with hatred that the wrinkles about them looked like folds of stiff glue. I hadn’t told her about Takashi’s confession of incest. Even if I had, she would only have pointed out quite justifiably that if, after hearing his confession, I’d told him he had already made adequate amends by living so many years in the painful shadow of “the truth,” it would have alleviated to some extent the horror of his suicide.
Her eyes remained fixed on me, but the wrathful aura faded and, without losing the glint of hatred, they acquired a new shadow of sadness.
“But now,” she said, “anything new that shows he needn’t have killed himself in such a ghastly way only makes it all the more horrible.” And she burst into a flood of tears, as though the hard shell of hatred had broken to release the yolk of grief within. After a while she recovered and unhesitatingly, with the obvious assumption that I’d already inferred the truth, said, “I’ve been debating for the past two weeks whether or not to have an abortion, but now I’ve decided to have Taka’s child. I can’t bring myself to permit yet another cruelty where he’s concerned.”
She turned away to face the still deeper gloom at the back of the room and drew a shutter down on herself, obviously determined to reject any response that went against her decision. I gazed at her broad-based back as she sat—the newly expectant mother—with the weight of her body resting firmly on her heels; something about it had the same air of absolute physical and mental equilibrium as when she was pregnant with my own child. And I understood her resolve to give birth to the child in her womb, to Takashi’s child: understood it with the same physical immediacy as one might a lump of rock lying before one’s eyes. The understanding settled firmly in my mind without creating the slightest emotional disturbance.
Going out into the garden again, I found the Emperor standing, legs braced apart, in the doorway of the storehouse, giving loud directions in Korean to those inside, while the watching children formed a tight, intent circle behind his, back. None of them paid any attention to me. I decided to visit the temple and tell the young priest of the discovery of the cellar and the revelation it had inspired in me, so I set off alone down toward the valley, walking rapidly in the teeth of a gusty, dust-laden breeze. While reading the “Account of the Farmers’ Rising in Okubo Village” given me by the priest, I’d come across a rather peculiar passage. The discovery of the cellar had abruptly thrown that passage into vivid relief, and it lay now at the very heart of my revelation, convincing me that great-grandfather’s brother had, in fact, lived in voluntary confinement in the storehouse.
Grandfather’s booklet was a collection, with commentary and notes, of various accounts of the 1871 disturbances as seen by the authorities and the ordinary citizen.
The incident—the booklet said—is usually referred to as the
“Okubo Disturbances.”
The inhabitants of Okubo cut down a large bamboo grove and made spears for everybody.
The cause of the disturbances lay in dislike of the new government, more particularly its compulsory smallpox vaccination and the word “blood tax” used in the official notification to refer to military service, which led to a rumor that blood was to be taken from the public for sale to foreigners. This rumor caused public alarm resulting in the rising.
No investigation was made of the ringleaders and others concerned in the rising, and no one was punished.
The passage giving the authorities’ account of the disturbances was as follows:
The order promulgated in July, 1871, abolishing the clans and establishing prefectures aroused opposition among the conservative-minded inhabitants of Okubo village, and in early August reports came that a conspiracy was afoot to resist the measures. An official was promptly dispatched to explain the measure, but they refused to be convinced. Inciting other villages to join them, the inhabitants assembled on the dry riverbed north of Ohama castle (one mile from the prefectural office) on the evening of the same day. Disaffection spread steadily until more than seventy villages were involved. By the 12th of the same month, the mob had reached nearly forty thousand. They occupied themselves firing their guns into the air, raising battle cries, and fabricating baseless rumors. Very soon they poured into Ohama, armed with bamboo spears and pistols, and took over the streets. The rumors they spread claimed that the former governor’s return to Tokyo was entirely engineered by the Chief Councillor, that the census was aimed at getting blood from the public and vaccination a ruse to poison the government’s opponents, and other fabrications too numerous to mention. Their behavior grew steadily wilder. The crowd stayed where it was, without presenting any demands, until the prefectural office was virtually under siege. The officials sent out to calm them eventually met the chief representative of the troublemakers, who insisted that the former governor should not go back to Tokyo, that the pre-Restoration form of government should be restored, that the present officials should be dismissed, and that the former administration should be reinstated in their place. On the 13th, when it seemed they were about to launch an assault on the prefectural office, it was decided to use troops to keep them in check; this made them hesitate, and the assault never took place. The prefectural assembly, however, was thrown into disorder. Its previous decision was reversed, many now opposing suppression by force, and it was decided to summon a number of pre-Restoration officials to take charge of the situation. On the 15th, the former governor appeared personally to reason with the mob, but still they refused to disband. At dusk that day the Chief Councillor suddenly left the prefectural office, and shortly afterward word came that he had taken his own life at his home.
The rioters were much moved on hearing this report. The crowd began gradually to disperse. By the afternoon of the 16th the situation was in hand, and the officials sent to deal with the affair were able without exception to return to the prefectural office.
The other account, written from the common man’s point of view, treated the disturbances less as history than as a rather romantic tale. The leader who figured in it—the man who negotiated with the authorities as “chief representative”—was described as “a large man of unknown origins, easily six feet tall and with bushy hair.” Another passage said: “The strange man with long hair often mentioned in this account was a quite extraordinary creature : large in build, standing over six feet tall, with bent back and deathly pale countenance. Yet despite the oddity of his appearance he astonished all with the eloquence of his tongue and his outstanding ability in everything he did.” As for the unlikelihood of participants in a rising within such a small provincial community having no idea who their leader was, grandfather contented himself with adding the following, extremely implausible footnote: “Most of the participants had blackened their faces with soot, so that it was impossible to tell one man from the other. Ed.” He thus failed completely to elucidate the question, which he himself had raised, of exactly who the “extraordinary creature” was. The final passage relating to the stranger read: “Following the report of the disbanding of the dissidents at the entrance to Okubo village on the 16th, their ringleader disappeared as though wiped off the face of the earth.” After this came silence.
The outstanding qualities of leade
rship in the big man with bent back and pale face were already apparent in the skill with which he had the prefectural office surrounded—thereby putting pressure on the foe without ever provoking the army into action—and maintained a delicate balance of power between people and authorities until the course of debate in the assembly finally changed. But grandfather also had this to say in his praise: “What is most remarkable, looking back on the disturbances, is that not a man should have suffered a scratch. It argues extraordinary powers of leadership that he should have staged such a mighty upheaval without getting a single man injured.”
So my “revelation” became in turn a conviction that the tall man with stooping shoulders and ashen face was great-grandfather’s younger brother, suddenly reappearing above ground after ten years spent in solitary meditation on the rising of 1860. He’d invested everything won during more than ten long years of self-criticism in a second and successful rising utterly different from the first. The first rising had been bloody and doubtful in its achievement. In the second, no one was killed or injured either among the rioters or the bystanders. In effect it drove the Chief Councillor, the target of attack, to suicide. And all the rioters, moreover, got away scot-free.
In the main hall of the temple, where the picture of hell that I’d come to see with Takashi and my wife still hung on the wall, I told the young priest what I felt, and in the process convinced myself still more strongly of its truth.
“Is it likely that the farmers at that period of change, when the wounds of the 1860 rising had made them so suspicious, would entrust the leadership of their new cause to some stranger of unknown origin ? I doubt it. The thing that moved them to act was undoubtedly the reappearance of a ‘specialist’ in risings—in other words, the legendary leader of the 1860 affair. Judging from the actual outcome, the central aim of the 1871 rising was the political one of removing the Chief Councillor from office. That almost certainly means that someone had concluded this was absolutely necessary if living conditions were to be improved for the farmers. But such an abstract idea wouldn’t have been enough in itself to stir up the peasants. So the recluse in the cellar, who’d been reading the latest publications, took advantage of the vaccinations and the ambiguity of the term ‘blood tax’—though he himself was quite free of any misconceptions—to incite the local inhabitants and organize the disturbances that ended in the defeat of the Chief Councillor sent by the new government. That done, he went back to his cellar and disappeared for good, spending his last twenty years or so in deliberate isolation. That’s what I believe. Takashi and I were always trying to find out what kind of man great-grandfather’s brother became after the 1860 rising, but we never discovered anything substantial, the reason being that we were chasing a phantom—the man who got away through the forest.”
The priest, who had maintained his smile throughout my long discourse, his small, eminently decent face flushed a bright red, made no immediate move either to affirm or to deny what I’d said. His own undisguised elation during the days of the “rising” still bothered him when he was with me, and he contrived an almost exaggerated composure toward my own excitement now. After a while, however, he came up with an idea that corroborated my theory.
“Come to think of it, Mitsu, the legend of the man with the stoop in the 1871 disturbances is so well known in the valley that you’d expect him to be included among the ‘spirits’ of the Nembutsu dance, wouldn’t you? Perhaps they deliberately left him out because he would have duplicated the ‘spirit’ of your great-grandfather’s brother. Of course, that would only be negative proof, but …”
“Speaking of the Nembutsu dance,” I said, “the performers go into the storehouse, make a few formal comments in praise of the interior, then have something to eat and drink there, don’t they? Mightn’t that be connected with the fact that one of the most important ‘spirits’ once spent years of confinement beneath it? If so, it would be a piece of positive proof. As I see it, when grandfather annotated this booklet, he knew perfectly well that the strange figure with the stoop was his own uncle, and was secretly expressing his affection for him.”
The priest made no direct reply, almost as though he were reluctant to see his own hypothesis enlarged by my imagination, and turned instead to the picture of hell.
“If your theory is correct,” he said, “I suppose it means that your great-grandfather had this picture painted for his brother while he was still living in the cellar.”
The painting brought me the same profound sense of peace as when Takashi, my wife, and I had seen it together, but the peace this time wasn’t something passively evoked in my own mind, but was essential to the picture itself. It was there on the paper, independent of me. In a word, the thing that radiated so positively from it was tenderness. In all probability, it was this—the ultimate essence of tenderness—that the man who commissioned the painting had asked the artist to portray. Since the picture was aimed at giving peace to his brother’s soul as he grappled in his self-imposed confinement with his own private inferno, it must of course portray hell. But the red of the river of fire was to be the red of dogwood leaves catching the morning sun in autumn, and the waves of fire were to be done in lines soft and gentle as the folds of a woman’s skirt. In practice, the effect of the river of flames was to be one of absolute gentleness. In his own person great-grandfather’s brother had comprised both the dead man shrieking in agony and the devil who tortured him, and since the picture was designed to bring repose to this soul run wild, it must depict the sufferings of the dead and the cruelty of the demons with equal accuracy. Yet dead and demons, however intent on the expression of agony or the infliction of torture, were at the same time to be bound spiritually by a serene tenderness. Quite probably, one of the men with disheveled hair who lay spread-eagled on the red-hot boulders, or thrust the withered triangles of his buttocks out of the river of flames toward the fire raining out of space, was a portrait of great-grandfather’s brother himself. Indeed, once the idea had occurred to me I began to feel that all the faces of the dead had the same characteristic air, and a nostalgic glow of recognition stirred somewhere in the depths of my consciousness as though they were my own kin.
“The sight of this picture always put Taka in a bad temper, didn’t it?” the priest said reminiscently. “He’d been frightened of it ever since he was a kid.”
“I tend to think he wasn’t so much afraid of the picture as opposed to the gentleness of the hell it shows,” I said. “That’s how it seems to me now, at least. He had such an urge to self-punishment, such a feeling that he ought to be living in a cruder hell than he was, that I suspect he wanted to reject this mild, comforting kind of torment as false. He worked hard in his own way to preserve the harshness of his personal hell.”
The meaningless smile on the young priest’s small face gradually disappeared, to be replaced by a definite air of wariness. I knew from experience that if his views were challenged his face, which never on any account showed doubt, would assume a shut-in, half-defiant look. But I had no desire to give him any further account of my inner problems, since ultimately he wasn’t really interested in anything apart from the lives of the people in the valley. For me, at least, the hell painting was further, positive proof, and with my other evidence would amply justify a review of the verdicts I’d hitherto pronounced on great-grandfather’s brother and Takashi.
As he walked with me as far as the main gate of the temple, the priest updated me on the activities of the young men of the valley since the “rising.”
“You remember the spartan young man who worked with Taka? They say he’ll get a seat on the council when the first elections since the amalgamation of the villages are held. Taka’s rising might seem to have been a complete failure, but at least it served to shake the valley out of its rut. The young men who formed what was, at first, essentially Taka’s group have extended their own influence relative to the older, conservative-minded bosses, to the point of getting one of their members onto
the local council. So where the future of the valley as a whole is concerned, the rising was effective after all. It did something to reestablish vertical communication within the valley community, and to firm up horizontal communication among the younger people. You know, Mitsu, I feel that a definite prospect for future development in the valley has opened up at last. I feel sorry for S and Taka, but they both played their part.”
When I got back, the Emperor was no longer at the storehouse, and the children I’d left gazing at the hole in the wall and the gap in the floor were scampering off down the graveled road like birds alarmed by the first signs of dusk. Even when I was a kid the children of the valley—unlike the “country” children who went on with their play even after it was dark—would rush home breathlessly the moment dusk began to fall, unless it were a festival or some other special occasion. Today’s children might not be scared of the Chosokabe who lived in the forest, but their habits at least hadn’t changed.
For my evening meal my wife had left by the fireplace a plate of sandwiches made with smoked meat, of which she’d bought a stock at the supermarket, and had gone to lie down in the back room, presumably to devote herself to the welfare of the baby in her womb. Wrapping the sandwiches in wax paper, I thrust them into the pocket of my overcoat and went round the back to hunt out two whisky bottles, one full and one empty. I washed the empty bottle and filled it with hot water, though I knew it would soon be cold enough to sting the gums like iced water. Guessing that it would be chilly during the night, I crept past where my wife lay, intending to get some extra blankets out of the closet. But she hadn’t been asleep, and said suddenly:
