Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Thereupon he began for the hundredth time the game that was his chief source of pleasure now, imagining, with all the fine precision of a timetable, his mother setting out from home on the occasion of his death. The plan was to go into operation just before he entered the final coma, when he had managed to ascertain from the doctors while still fully conscious that death was a certainty within the next few days, when, in other words, the final stage in the accomplishment of his death had been successfully completed.

  On that chosen morning, when a cable from the doctor was almost certain to persuade his mother, who never believed a word he said himself, of the objective necessity of setting out finally from the depths of the forest, he would first have the acting executor of the will place a long-distance call to the airport in the provincial city and verify that all flights were on schedule. And he would have her inquire about weather conditions, not only at Haneda airport in Tokyo but also at Itami in Osaka. All in order. He had heard that the pass known in his region as “ninety-nine-curve-pass” was paved now, which meant there was scarcely any likelihood of serious obstacles along the only route out of the valley in the forest to the provincial city on the plain. His mother would leave the valley in a three-wheel truck, emerge from the forest, speed across the plain at the bottom of the pass to the provincial city and be in time for her flight. She would change planes at Osaka on schedule and arrive in Tokyo on schedule, head upright, eyes closed, speaking to no one and, if some overfriendly passenger persisted in speaking to her, pulling from her tight sash the card that had arrived in the mail with her plane ticket. On the card was written: “This old woman does not speak to strangers. In case of emergency, please help her contact the following address.”

  When it was time at last he would telephone the valley deep in the forest and determine whether the three-wheel truck had left with his mother in it. If she had set out already, the house of his birth, known locally as “the Manor in the valley,” would be deserted. In that case the wife of the postmaster (he was also head of the telephone office), who sat all day in front of a switchboard that was still manual, would take his call.

  ____I can see the three-wheeler coming back across the wood bridge, yessir!, she was certain to report, amused by the strange request phoned all the way from Tokyo, to look and see whether a three-wheel truck was heading for the concrete bridge that crossed to the highway out of the valley. The old lady from the Manor house is setting in it, wearing her urn of ashes of her war dead in a wooden box upon her bosom. She must have went around by the Monkey Shrine to pay her respects before she leaves the village, yessir, and she just now came back across the wood bridge and now they’re a-heading out towards the highway, and the old lady from the Manor house is setting straight up alongside the driver, with her eyes closed, and that box upon her bosom, yessir!

  ____Does it seem as if her eyes are closed because she isn’t feeling well? he would ask with just a touch of eagerness, exposing a weakness he could never quite control where his mother was concerned.

  ____Goodness, no! That old lady doesn’t think anybody but herself is human, so she always closes her eyes when it appears she might have to meet somebody in the valley. The subtle, long-felt resentment in the postmaster’s wife would dash icy water on the tepid sentimentality rising in him. But there was no danger his happiness would be uprooted. That lady’s got no one left but only her one son, and they say he’s dying of cancer, so she’s leaving for Tokyo with that urn of ashes of her war dead that did her honor twenty-five years ago. And do you know she hasn’t shed a tear, and her head is straight up and her eyes shut tight—she’s a hard old lady! Of course, she’s not one to believe other folks, so she maybe thinks those doctors are wrong and her son doesn’t have cancer. And that’s what most of us around here think too, yessir!

  ____It’s cancer, all right, liver cancer, and it’s only a matter of days now! She just learned the truth, that’s what made up her mind to leave the valley.

  ____Have you heard that straight from the doctor? That he’s really got himself cancer? Because that’s what we’ve been hearing all along. …

  ____That’s right, cancer. And I don’t have to hear anything from the doctor because I’m the son from the Manor house and I’m dying of cancer right now! he would say, then signal the nurse to replace the receiver that had probably become too heavy for him to handle by himself.

  ____I surely want to beg your pardon, yessir! the voice would whine like a mosquito speeding away, weakly fade, and disappear.

  “Wearing” an urn of ashes “upon her bosom” meant that his mother had tied the ends of the white cotton cloth in which the urn was wrapped behind her neck. Toward the end of the war this had suddenly become a style frequently encountered in the valley. But the urn his mother would be taking with her was more than twenty-five years old. Shortly after the disastrous naval defeat at Midway this very urn and white wooden box and cotton cloth, still unusual at a time when the tide of the war had only just begun to turn against Japan, had come home to the village from the Chinese Mainland with a bit of dust representing the “repatriated bones” of his elder brother, the first war casualty in the valley, and had opened decisively the rift between a certain party and his mother which was never to close so long as they lived. At the time, a certain party had already withdrawn from the multifarious operations of the “committee” directly in league with the military based in Manchuria and was living in seclusion in his native village in the valley. When his eldest son, while attached to the very Japanese division on the Chinese mainland that formerly had been the chief sphere of a certain party’s activity and influence, had left the front and been shot by the enemy, or possibly a comrade, his mother’s hatred for a certain party had become manifest. Never again was the word “father” spoken in the house in the valley deep in the forest. Such was the special significance of the urn containing his elder brother’s ashes which his mother would now take out for the first time in nearly thirty years and “wear upon her bosom” as she set out for Tokyo in a three-wheel truck, across the dizzying ninety-nine-curve-pass, feeling, in her anxiety at having emerged from the forest, as if a vacuum had formed just behind her and was pulling her back.

  When he had enjoyed the supreme game to this point in his conscious mind he decided on a whim to reinforce his pleasure in his subconscious. What if he couldn’t remember anything about his dreams when he awoke, assuming it was a fact that he did have dreams, he ought to accumulate at least the physical experience of dreaming while his condition permitted it.

  As he was falling asleep again on the single sleeping pill the nurse had given him he tried suggesting toward his subconscious that he would like particularly to dream about ninety-nine-curve-pass. Since childhood he had tried repeatedly to determine whether there were actually ninety-nine curves, but as he climbed the pass the curves and the numbers had always separated in his head. Now, the truth still undetermined, he was about to die. One day at the height of summer twenty-five years ago he had accompanied a certain party, unable to move on his own power because of a cancer hemorrhaging badly in his bladder on top of his abnormal corpulence, over the pass in an army truck with ten soldiers who had left the army and come all the way to the valley to entreat a certain party to join them, singing in German with the others. And ever since the doctors had begun the final stage of treatment, easing the pain in his innards and blurring his consciousness of grief, he had been returning to himself as a kid in that valley drenched in the light of the last summer of the war, and repeatedly had been seeing that little journey over the pass as vividly as if it were a daydream. And who said real dreams could not be dreamed in sleep? If his dreams of himself went beyond himself as a human and were unfathomable to him once he woke up, did that mean cancer itself was in firm control of his body-and-consciousness in his dreams? Even so, he still hoped to recall accurately, in a dream controlled by himself, the climb up that pass which was the only exit from the forest surrounding the valley to the outsid
e world. If this ambition was not entirely unrealistic, it was because he had already become a cancer man!

  Yet when he awoke again—can it be he hadn’t dreamed?—his body-and-consciousness retained no traces of a dream. 8 A.M.—he tried to determine whether he had been sobbing again, but the nurse would only say curtly, If you don’t remember yourself, don’t ask me!

  [[“If you don’t remember yourself there’s probably no point in my saying anything,” wasn’t it? Could we make that correction? the “acting executor of the will” interrupts, infuriating him. Correction? For whom and for what reason? If that one correction is made the poison will spread from there and my whole “history of the age” will be ruined. If you’re so obsessed with corrections how about imitating those Filipino psychic surgeons and using the spiritual power of that sharp tongue of yours as if it were a knife to correct the cancer in my vital organs! Not that I really want to get rid of it, since it’s cancer I managed to acquire myself. You said the doctors had begun the final stage of treatment in order to ease your pain and blur your consciousness of grief, but when I wrote that down I didn’t accept any responsibility for the truth of it, because you don’t HAVE cancer! I don’t know what you and the doctors and nurses hope to accomplish by conspiring to lie to me when I’m the patient and I want cancer, “he” says.]]

  When he asked the doctor on afternoon rounds,

  ____Why do all of you hide my cancer from me? The doctor flatly denied, as always, that he was hiding anything.

  ____But that nonsense aside, I see you have an astonishing number of scars and almost all of them look as if you made them yourself, am I right? He did not respond, but after the doctor left he had the acting executor of the will undress him and then carefully examined, using a hand mirror, the old scars that covered his back, buttocks, and thighs. Not that very many small scars could actually be discovered through underwater goggles covered with cellophane. It was rather the various scars in the flesh of his memory that he uncovered. Some dated from the brief period that began with his infancy and ended at the pinnacle of his Happy Days. But most were wounds he had received after the destruction of his Happy Days, particularly during the first year he had commuted on his bicycle to the postwar high school in the neighboring village. It was commuting on that bicycle that he invaded for the first time in his young life, unprotected and alone, a territory outside the valley where he was born and raised. Moreover, the strangers awaiting him outside the valley retained no psychological scars or aftereffects relating to a certain party, did not lower their eyes and turn away when they encountered someone a certain party had left behind. They were, in other words, total strangers, and it was moreover the most baldly violent group among them who surrounded him on the high school campus.

  The echoing effect of the postwar chaos on child society intensified in direct proportion to the children’s distance from a major city; and it was in this environment, where all varieties of violence were abundant, that his fearlessness about being wounded and even occasional need to do injury to his body with his own hands gained him for the first time a certain unique freedom. Its acquisition began with an incident just after he had entered high school, when he was summoned, alone, by the leader of the teen-age gang that dominated the school, to the auditorium-gymnasium where the gang waited. The reason for the summons was simply that he was unmistakably dirtier and poorer beyond comparison than any of his freshman classmates. Although his mother had given him registration fees and tuition, he had not managed to extract from her any additional money for a uniform or club activities. This struck him as unjust. So he sewed the high school badge on the uniform jacket he had been using in middle school and which had belonged to his brother who had been killed in China, and continued to wear it. Since middle school days, afraid the jacket might lead his mother into the clutches of fresh memories of his dead brother, he had kept it hidden, wrapped in newspaper, in a woodshed in back of the Manor house. When it turned cold enough to need a jacket, he would leave the house in his shirtsleeves, go around to the woodshed and hurry into the jacket before going to school. Consequently, he was not able to have the jacket washed or mended, and not only looked unclean but distinctly smelled. He was, furthermore, the only freshman without a uniform cap.

  By disciplining this youth who was violating school regulations so blatantly at the beginning of the first term, the leader of the gang probably hoped to create the impression among the freshman that he and his friends were not merely ruffians disliked in and out of school but vigilantes upholding justice on campus. Although he forbade the freshmen to enter the auditorium during the disciplining, he required them to gather at all the windows outside. Betraying no sign they felt the slightest affiliation with their lone classmate about to be chastised, idiotic expressions on their faces one and all as they struggled to maintain a balance between cowed curiosity and dull fear, the freshmen gathered around the windows to observe the drama of one-sided violence about to begin inside.

  And in the beginning it was one-sided. Seating himself on top of the parallel bars, the prosecutor began by pointing out that his feet inside his torn tennis shoes were bare, in violation of school regulations. Next he charged that beneath his jacket, which was not even a proper high school jacket, he was wearing the most strictly forbidden of all things, a black shirt (he had sewn it himself out of a large black flag, he had no idea what it stood for, which he had pulled from a box full of his brother’s personal effects). When the gang leader had admonished him for these and other specific offenses, all of which doubtless had been whispered into his ear by informers among the freshmen, he climbed slowly down from the parallel bars and punched him in the temples, leaving the ground with each blow though he was the taller of the two. Encouraged by the total nonresistance he encountered he then became even more highhanded:

  ____Your eyes don’t show you’re truly ashamed even after having been disciplined by an upperclassman, and, sighing theatrically,

  ____It’s really tough to have underclassmen like this; we’re the ones who get blamed in the end, right! and fell to punching him again. At this point, the defendant judged it would not do to have his temples beaten further. It was Saturday, and because that afternoon the new students had been assigned the chore of weeding the playing field he had a small sickle wrapped up with his books and notebooks. He stooped and took it out; then he looked the gang leader straight in the eyes and dug the blade with damp earth still clinging to it into the skin between the thumb and first finger of his left hand. Blood gushed, but he did not move an eyebrow. To the leader of the gang glaring at him in confusion the eyes staring back through a mucous film must have seemed incomprehensibly calm. But the effect was that of seeming motionlessness that occurs at the peak of high-speed revolutions: inside he was fighting for consciousness in a frenzy. Submerging then into the quiet revery at the extreme limits of duress he faced a certain party and screamed, in a voice so high it could only have registered on a canine ear, Please drink the blood; it is for you! and all of a sudden was waiting once again, with those soldiers who had left the army, on the road along the moat that led into the provincial city and the bank, armed with his own bayonet, sweat that was unmistakably from the heat of that midsummer day beading his grimy forehead.

  Outwardly, he was confronting the leader of the juvenile gang, lowering the arm that gripped the sickle and extending his wounded, bleeding hand in an ambiguous movement that might have been an attempt to strike back or an overture to shaking hands; internally, he was composed of a lucid part at the clear surface of his consciousness and a murky part that had precipitated down close to the dark bottom yet remained distinct from his subconscious. In the swift wounding of his own flesh on a bewildering impulse from the hot, pitch-black core of himself he had felt a deep joy which was not only unperceived by the hoodlums surrounding him but which he himself was not even conscious of as joy. At the same time, however, his head cleared by the blood that had been let as if the sickle were a medieval s
urgeon’s knife, he made the fully conscious, practical calculation that it would not do to let things stand if he hoped to finish off this opponent from whom he had managed to wrest the advantage, that, in fact, if he allowed time to pass without altering his strategy he would find himself in a position more dangerous than before. To be sure, he had managed to shock the hoodlums by wounding himself, producing a queasiness perhaps in each of their stomachs, but none of them had grasped the lasting significance of that shock. Consequently, as soon as the momentary physical uneasiness had passed, given their stolidity and forgetfulness, they could be expected to recover themselves and resume hostilities. It was therefore essential that he contrive a means of indicating a way out so simple it would be understood by the leader of the gang even in his somewhat dazed condition. Once he had the solution in mind he was merely playacting, an irrecoverable distance now from that hot, black something that had surged in him a minute earlier.

  He stared at the bloodstained sickle, then thrust it under his opponent’s nose and screamed, as wildly as he could sound,

  ____Shall I cut your hand too? I’ll fight with this sickle even though you don’t have one! And if I start to lose I’ll cut my own throat! With that he deliberately lifted the sickle and held it against his throat, whereupon his opponent, with a swift shrewdness more than worthy of someone esteemed as a leader, even by a gang of hoodlums, solved the riddle he had concealed in his screaming. Turning to his comrades he signaled an end to the formal disciplining.

  ____He says he’s going to fight with that sickle even though I’m empty-handed! And he threatens to cut his own throat if we knock him down. Let’s get out of here! There’s no use talking to a dirty, wild kid like this. He’s a crazy dog, no rules! If you hit him too hard you’ll catch germs!