Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

by Kenzaburo Oe

  With these words, the gang leader had presented him with a passport to his own violence, and now in order to validate it with his signature he ran around the room slashing with his sickle the stuffed mats covering the jumping platforms piled against the wall. The gym teacher, who was almost certainly a man of violence to the marrow of his bones, and who besides had been immediately informed of the identity of the criminal, made no accusations at the faculty meeting. One day when he was breaking another regulation by washing his hands at the drinking fountain, this teacher, a smallish man with a head like a shriveled pear and a beet-red face and a perfectly flat, fatless stomach of which he was very proud, bounded up like a long-distance runner and said, coquettishly, in a gentle voice but with exaggerated gestures that might have looked to an observer in the distance as if he were scolding the boy,

  ____I want you to think of me as a friend, OK? How about if I teach you some killer holds and throws so you won’t have to use a knife the next time you fight those punks?

  Assuming animals can be called violent, he was spoken of with distaste in and out of school as animally violent; only the leader of the juvenile gang had glimpsed, just behind the roughness he had displayed on the surface, a baffling internal passion by turns turbulent and still. And it appeared that he was instinctively wary of the weird energy he could sense arcing between those poles: in his instructions to his henchmen he put it plainly: watch out for him, he don’t care what happens to him; he’s like a kamikaze pilot that didn’t get to die! And so a precariously balanced peace was maintained between himself and the juvenile gang. Had he been judged remarkable for his violence only, the time would have come when the enemy shrewdly sensed they had regained the advantage where violence was concerned, and at that instant his own violence, in direct proportion to its absolute value, would have become a weight around his neck that dragged him gasping to the ground. However, the gang leader had seen in him something his hoodlum friends could never better no matter how they fought to compete, something incomprehensible. And so the gang adopted a compromise policy of considering him a creature beneath themselves, loathsome as the spirit of the plague, and pretended not to see him when he passed.

  The day he slashed his hand with a sickle it wasn’t long before the pain was hard to bear without crying out. When he wiped the blood away he could see bits of muddy dirt and whitish fat welling out of the wound, and no matter how often he wiped it the blood continued to flow. The bicycle he rode to school, a number 8 which people in the valley called simply “old eight” (he had no idea what the number measured), was the very same bicycle he had been riding since he was a child, on which he had had at least one accident that had very nearly cost him his life, and which even now that he had entered high school was too large for him. When he went to the back of the equipment room where he parked the bike he was so dizzy from loss of blood he couldn’t even stand, let alone straddle the high seat. Having gripped the handlebars once, he now stoically released them, so the bicycle would not fall, and then fell himself to the damp, clay floor patched, in just the way that blood vessel tumors would patch his chest when he got to be thirty-five and his liver sickened, with moss of a too brilliant, painful green to his dilated pupils. Struggling somehow to lift himself he grasped some thick weed stumps with his wounded hand, uttered a long, piteous moan, and went limp where he lay. As he watched, with one eye suspended three centimeters above the ground, the blood continue to flow from his hand and seep into the weeds, an extraordinary calm descended upon him and he felt ashamed of the innate violence that had surfaced shortly before with the violence he had consciously created. Shrinking not only with pain but also shame he spoke to a certain party again: Please drink the blood; it is for you! Surrounding him where he lay on the ground the other first-year students who also came to school on bikes looked on with unconcerned curiosity and disgust plain to see on their faces, as if they were observing a dog die of hunger. No one among them ran to the nurse’s office for his sake.

  ____There’s medicine in that weed, that’s why he’s pushing the hand he cut with the sickle in among the roots like that. Wild animals that have been wounded always do that way. One time there was even a deer that mended a broken bone by wading in a hot springs! The explanation came from the son of the doctor in his village, a freshman like himself who was certain to end up at the head of his class; when he struggled to his feet a minute later and the group fled in confusion the doctor’s son was in the lead.

  Thus it was that he created a unique lifestyle in the new institution known as the postwar high school. In fact, he had discovered a lifestyle suited to the real world wherever other people were not hampered by psychological scars relating to a certain party, everywhere, in other words, but the valley deep in the forest. It was a decisive discovery: not once in all the intervening years until at thirty-five he had been caught by the demon of liver cancer had he found it necessary to shift to any other lifestyle. And this made him think there must be a certain significance in the resemblance between the tumors now appearing on his chest and the pattern of the moss on that damp ground upon which he had fallen and rested while blood ran from his small body. Could it be that he had fallen bleeding onto his own chest covered with tumors now as he was about to die of cancer?

  [[I think the doctor had something else in mind, something more direct, the scribe interposes, deferentially to be sure, fatigued by his endless reminiscence. What do you mean, “direct”? I can’t say anything definite until I’ve checked with the doctor, she replies, sidestepping. The way you’re acting, “he” says with chagrin, challenging her, I have no confidence you’re accurately recording the hundredth part of what I say. I don’t abbreviate a single syllable, but the more passionately you speak the harder it is for me to know where your passion is coming from. If I said otherwise I really would be lying, so I want to make that clear to you.]]

  III

  [[I’ve just been talking with the doctor, says the “acting executor of the will.” Since “he” is meant to be the only speaker in his reality “he” is disconcerted and annoyed that his scribe’s mind has been alive and active while his own was at rest. Just what did you discuss? As long as it wasn’t discontinuing my “morphine.” The doctor inquired about those scars all over your body because he wanted to find out whether you might be suicidal. If it turned out you were, we’d naturally have to arrange for night nurses. Released from one piercing instant of tension “he” begins to laugh, Ha! Ha! Ha! is how it sounds to his own ears, a variety of laughter “he” is aware has never issued from him in all his thirty-five years but which recalls unmistakably a friend of his, a young American Jew from Harvard who had become deeply embedded in his life and who burst into nearly hysterical, self-derisive laughter whenever he was caught in an embarrassing situation he could not explain away. Suicide? Ha! Ha! Ha! This bed I’m sharing with my cancer is as far away as it’s possible to be from the need for suicide, “he” says, gradually accustoming himself to this new style of laughter like a stinging in the core of his brain, though clearly the “acting executor of the will” is suspicious. Not that “he” is able to sustain interest in the reactions of those who actually surround his bed. Presently, to regain the breath “he” needs to continue his narration, “he” tries to bring an end to the laughter. But for a time alphabet letters no bigger than ants continue to spill from his lips as faint sounds, ha!-ha!-ha!]]

  When he pictured himself facing his mother and informing her gravely that suicide’s objective was about to be attained though he was not even considering suicide, a life force opposite in direction from the life force of cancer that was rapidly destroying him but equally alive with motor energy welled up, particularly from the vicinity of his feverish, itching liver. Mother! I have no need for suicide anymore, now I can sail right past you without having to make that kind of special effort and die legally and morally in every sense! The words were like a musical passage that persisted in moving the performer no matter how often he rep
eated it. In fact, he had enjoyed this private music of his own words countless times.

  ____Mother, you didn’t knock me flat on my back and rub my humiliation in my face as I lay there, and you weren’t able to make me feel instantly with one of those sidelong glances of yours and nothing more that I would never be free no matter where I ran, so that I lost the energy I needed to make the leap to a new world as a new person, Mother, until after you caught me in the act trying to commit suicide when I was almost out of high school. It was like being caught masturbating, and told Look here! a monkey masturbates just the way you do, and having a monkey that was actually jacking off thrust under your nose, a dirty, dwarf monkey with its fur falling out from age and its body misshapen and only that crippled organ wounded in countless battles for male supremacy retaining its vividness as actual flesh and in consciousness, that was the form of humiliation you chose for me, wasn’t it, Mother! You did everything in your power to make me feel just how low and shameless a thing it would be for me to commit suicide and leave you behind, and then because you were afraid I might not have received the message clearly enough you continued to beat it into me. You stole my will, didn’t you, that they showed you at the police station in the neighboring town Maybe you’ll protest, the way you did before, that, unlike me, you’re no thief, but even assuming the police did release that notebook to you as my “guardian,” it actually belonged to me, which means you stole it from its rightful owner. Then you let yourself into the mimeograph room in the new middle school in the valley and printed it and sent it to my high school teachers and classmates, didn’t you! And in order to emphasize mercilessly how self-indulgent and unpleasant a high school student about to attempt suicide could be, and how many incorrect characters he could write badly in just a few sentimental pages of a will, so that you could double and triple my humiliation, you wrote sic all over the stencil before you ran it off. When I found out and went nearly mad with embarrassment and rage and protested, you didn’t say a word, just listened in silence and darted glances at me, and the next morning you wrote in the margin of a newspaper with a hard pencil that needed sharpening so I had to hold the newspaper at an angle to the light or bend it backward to read it, “You have neither the right nor the qualifications to do a thing like that, and you lack the conviction!” until, by the time you were through, you had me so mortified I was nearly epileptic. Now that I think about it, I had only the vaguest notion beforehand of what might have happened if I failed to hang myself and was severely criticized by you. And then I did fail and you devastated me and after that just thinking about suicide was enough to focus my consciousness on my own softness and immaturity, and suicide became the most unnavigable straits for me. You saw that, didn’t you, and you lived your life calmly in the valley all those years supposing you had me bound hand and foot. But now all of a sudden the tables are turned, I don’t have to commit suicide or anything else, all I have to do to liberate myself is lounge in bed here! Because my faithful dog Cancer is working around the clock to transform my liver into a pretty fair-sized rock! And you can’t combat its vigor, not if you roust up the monkey deity, that Japanese amalgam of Buddhism and Taoism on the hill like an isolated island above the valley that the family has venerated for generations as a private guardian, you’re just no match!

  [[Does that mean you’re not only as far as you can be from the possibility of suicide now but also that you’ve never really attempted suicide? Ha!-Ha!-Ha! Please don’t oversimplify. If a little experiment in suicide that I didn’t understand very well myself at the time had succeeded, I would certainly have given my mother the knockout punch she deserves, and almost unconsciously.]]

  Since childhood he had ridden a bicycle well, but just once, in his first year at postwar middle school, when he was only barely managing to reach the pedals on a full-size bicycle, he had rammed into the sparkling, flecked-with-mica concrete railing of the large bridge at the valley exit. Because the front wheel wedged itself into a crack in the railing, and because he happened to clasp the bike tightly with his legs at the instant of impact, he only struck his chest and chin against the railing, but if these improbable coincidences had not occurred he would certainly have jumped the bridge head over heels, tumbled down the steep slope through hissing stalks of dog-fig that pushed their leaves and poor, nectarless fruit through cracks in the rocks, and crashed to instant death against the boulders jutting from the quarried river bed below.

  Afterward, he stored away in memory a record of the accident which broke it down into details lasting only fractions of a second, like a slow-motion film. At the soft, moist core of the memory was an area of blackness incomprehensible to him at the time but somehow urgent and incalculably sweet, a mood he was able to recreate easily and which led him back to the memory time and time again. And then three years later, when he was a student in high school, he suddenly discovered late one night that he had been attempting suicide on that speeding bicycle, holding himself in a state of vague, near-sub-consciousness as he carefully pumped the pedals, lest consciousness act to restrain him. As the bike accelerated around the steep, downhill curve that became the approach to the bridge his consciousness was screaming Put on the brakes! Turn the handlebars! but his body was numb, heedless of the warnings, and he had perceived the bicycle crash into the railing with detachment. The real significance of the separation of body and consciousness was a surprising discovery, and once he was aware of the simple beauty of the mechanism, his attempt to hang himself three years later seemed awkward and transparently fake.

  Since he had discovered this all by himself, and just one month after having once again attempted suicide inconclusively, the discovery itself signified his uncoerced endorsement of his mother’s earlier insight about him. When he became clearly conscious of his defeat, the catalog of things his mother had been taunting him with ever since his suicide attempt filled him anew with rage which burned the more hotly and unextinguishably now that he understood how unreasonable it was. When he had emptied a tin measuring cup full of ethyl alcohol he had stolen from the high school science materials room, thinking it was methyl alcohol, he left the storehouse where he slept alone now that a certain party was gone, stepped into the heavy shadows of the kitchen in the main house and, knife in hand, stood over the even darker mass that was his mother asleep on the wooden floor with the bedclothes pulled over her head. But from his lips, which felt about to sag heavily as a result of the alcohol, even as the boy drunk thought to himself with a false sense of control to spare At least my palate is still alive and my tongue still works, the following words issued,

  ____Mother, you and I are the sole survivors here, we must marry secretly and have many children and strangle the abnormal fruit of our incestuous marriage while they are still mewling infants and keep only the hale and healthy and provide for the prosperity of our heirs and thus, Mother, we must make amends for having killed a certain party.

  Then he began to spin in a truly fantastic whirlpool of bewilderment and fear unlike anything that had ever happened to him right down to the present day, a hole opened in the bottom of his closely cropped head and the blood drained down through his hollow neck and although his conscious world went quite black, his body, invigorated by this superabundance of fresh blood, began to pulse and then to throb and finally to move with a vitality that was as if an arm were growing from his chest, another leg extending from his belly, and was entirely beyond his control ….

  His mother maintained he had actually been mad since he was three, that although his madness may have been exacerbated by a certain party’s death, it was important to realize that he had been quite mad since childhood. As he was made to listen again and again to his mother relating, with hatred and contempt, the incident that was “proof” of this, he came to feel that he had stored it away in memory himself, as a very small boy, at the time it had happened. Even now he was able to recall the incident sharply, down to the smallest detail, as something he had experienced personally.<
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  Three years old, he stares at his small hands and stands, not only unable to move but all his fragile muscles taut, riveted with horror. As he stares now at his hands, large and angry-red from cirrhosis yet resembling the child’s, he recreates, in the high-noon space in that valley in the forest in the depths of his consciousness at thirty-five, the small child that was himself, musing that if he climbed aboard a time machine and returned to the side of that terrified child in the valley and embraced those small, stiffened shoulders his own hands in present time would also lose their angry redness. Needless to say, since he desperately wants to die an agonizing death from cirrhosis caused by cancer and to deal his mother a blow that will last for all eternity, no time machine of any kind will actually be used.

  The small child that is himself has just noticed that his own hands are grotesque, alien, terrifying “things,” and, unable to throw them away, stands paralyzed. Immediately he pales, his eyes recede into their sockets and roll upward, exposing the white, while the skin around his eyes beads with sweat like delicate milk. His beautiful mother, in her early thirties, her manner unlike that of the people in the valley because she has grown up in China, holds out her own hands and tries to distract the child,

  ____Look, mine are the same, the same human hands!

  At that instant the grotesque, alien, terrifying “things” press in inescapably, and their number has doubled. The child screams, Aah! and chokes. At the same time, the thirty-five-year old screams in a small voice, Aah! and goes limp with a kind of happiness about nothing in particular.

  [[What do you mean by “screams in a small voice”? You seem to have a great deal of common sense where semantics is concerned! I was trying to say “he” pretended to scream, in a small voice! Aah! Aah! Aah! Aah! But what you really wanted to ask was whether I actually went mad at the age of three, am I right? I can tell you this, nobody in that valley would have compared me and my mother and said I was “the crazier,” “he” says.]]