by Kenzaburo Oe
Once he stole a look at an old notebook of his mother’s and found the following poem:
Should some unlikely suitor make his way to me,
Tell him, pray,
That I am gone to the full-bellied sea,
With a cry of grief for the wind in my sails.
As he knew very little at the time he was unable to determine whether the poem had a classical source or had been composed by his mother herself. (Needless to say it would have been frightening and embarrassing if his mother had discovered him reading her notebook, which is why he had peeked only at the page to which it happened to be open.) But underneath the vision that had brought this poem into being he felt he could detect the presence of something somehow gamey and vulgar and exposed, something which might even be called desire: the stimulation of the poem seemed likely to affect whatever blood in his body he had inherited from his mother in such a way that he broke out in hives.
At the time, hoping to escape to the greatest possible distance from his mother’s domination, if only geographically, he was trying to get into a Tokyo university where the entrance fee was a mere few hundred yen and, as soon as matriculation had been completed, it was possible to apply for a tuition waiver and a scholarship. As preparation for the English entrance examination he had been reading paperback who-dunnits. Like the canned asparagus and canned butter which had also been left behind by the Americans who had come through the forest to the valley in a jeep and stayed briefly in the village in the fall of 1945, these paperbacks were abandoned “issue” of no value whatsoever to anyone in the valley. He had discovered them one day when he had been hired to clean up the storage room at the grange, and had found that he was able to assert himself effectively against their contents with nothing more than the linguistic power he had acquired at high school. In one there was a story about a retired ivory merchant living in London who is murdered by a bee found only in a narrow strip of jungle inland from the Ivory Coast. The first time a person is stung by such a bee he experiences severe pain only, but should he be unfortunate enough to be stung a second time, he must prepare himself for death.
In order to let the blood he had inherited from his mother he had taken every opportunity to rush into battle, and as if that were not enough, had even inflicted wounds upon his own person; but a portion of which he had not been able to purge himself remained, and the sting of his mother’s poem now caused this to quicken in him like the venom of the deadly bee. But he was not himself fully conscious that a long incubation period had been instantly spanned. And, it might be said for precisely that reason, he was never able to escape entirely from the hives of this strange poem. Years later he established a sexual relationship with a movie actress who had returned to Japan from Peking a very young woman at the end of the war, and at that time the hives of the poem burst into full blossom.
[[I suppose you think that’s a pathetic fib about a sexual relationship with an actress. But in this case my partner has to be an actress, and that’s what determines the reality of the past. Which can also mean that it had to be that way in reality too, don’t you see, “he” elucidates. The “acting executor of the will” appears unmoved.]].
The trouble began one day near the end of their relationship, when the actress said to him reproachfully in the middle of sexual intercourse,
____Is there something lewd about “a cry of grief for the wind in my sails”? Without that battle-cry you can’t even get it up with me anymore, can you! Until the actress had spoken he hadn’t even realized he was whispering the poem, which she now asked him to explain so she could also enjoy its “lewdness.” But at that instant a lightning bolt crashed across the vault of his slackened brain and, judging that considerable toil remained before the time of her orgasm, he descended toward his penis buried in his girlfriend’s genitals and all alone, a vague smile on his lips, ejaculated. Thereafter there was always something oppressive about sexual intercourse with the actress, as if a taboo were being violated, and after intercourse he was not only exhausted but his testicles ached for no good reason, as if they were being squeezed. Since the mere possibility that a man having intercourse with her could experience anything but undiluted sweetness terrified the actress as if she had seen a portent of the end of her career, they had finally separated. A number of years still later she appeared on his television screen in a late night movie playing a woman landlord, and he felt he was seeing a phantom of his mother and looked carefully around the room, his hair standing on end.
By the last year of the war, as he moved from childhood to boyhood, he had already sensed from short, hate-filled exchanges between a certain party and his mother that his maternal grandfather had been involved in a plot which had been exposed in 1912 and which, during the war, could not be mentioned. But his mother never volunteered any details, and since she maintained an even more adamant silence after a certain party’s death, there was no way of bringing the facts to light from inside the family. His mother had grown up on the Chinese mainland and had no relatives in Japan. He did remember that when he was a very small child a young man who said he was a monk from Wakayama prefecture had come to see his mother, but had been told that a certain party was in Manchuria and went away. Very likely this had something to do with whatever it was that was being concealed. After the war, when the “human emperor” * paid a visit to the provinces and a large number of students and teachers from his middle school traveled to the provincial city to welcome his Majesty, his homeroom teacher summoned him, though he had not managed to extract the money for the trip nor displayed any very active interest in going along, as if repelled by the negative magnetism the words “human emperor” communicated to the darkest recesses of his consciousness, and gently told him in a hoarse, artificial voice, never looking at him once, that he must not go with the others. He did not speak of this to his mother directly, yet several days later she set out for the teachers’ room to protest. And ever after, his homeroom teacher had ignored him entirely. Yet he never asked his mother what precisely it was she went to protest. It was not that he feared the derisive silence that would be her response to his inquiry, it was because he had sensed from the beginning that, with regard to this incident, his mother was justified. Even during the war years there was nothing in his house that had anything to do with the Imperial Family, not even portraits of the Meiji Emperor in magazine supplements. Though he was only a child he knew there were no other such houses in the valley, and in his child’s way he thought it strange, especially since a certain party was associated with the military and had endlessly asserted the importance of defending the “national polity.”
One day early in the war, when the family still held its position of prominence in valley society even though a certain party was away in Manchuria, the wife of the village chief who had succeeded a certain party paid a visit to introduce her new daughter-in-law, and boasted that the girl’s parents owned a tea-jar they had received from a well-known noble. He was not there to hear this directly, what he remembered was an episode already legendary in the valley which he had been told, not so much because he was the son of the principal figure in the legend as more generally, for his edification as a member of the new generation in the valley; his mother, it was said, using her visitor’s west-country accent to her own purposes, countered,
____You must mean persimmon seeds, not dates! If they got them from a monkey they must have been persimmon seeds, yessir! *
The day he heard this story he asked his mother while they were having dinner why she had said such a thing, but she merely darted sidelong glances at him as if he were some kind of presumptuous stranger who had badly misbehaved by asking, and, sitting there properly with her legs tucked beneath her on the wooden floor of the kitchen in the semidarkness, ignored the question comprehensively.
Among all the eyes he had encountered in his life now about to end, those glancing eyes of his mother’s conveyed to him the most sickening denial and mistrust; when those sidelong gla
nces fell upon him, the fragile root of his existence as a human being shriveled like a cornstalk parched beneath the sun, and it was no longer possible innocently to assume his own membership in the human race. When he studied French philosophy at college and encountered the proposition that Man’s fundamental state was unhappiness, he had naturally comprehended the condition as that of which he had been obliged to be constantly aware while under his mother’s eyes. Even during his Happy Days? But that was a time before those glancing eyes had existed. Preparations for their appearance, however, were already complete, and on that summer day in 1945 this particular evil spirit of the eye suddenly appeared where Japanese and American planes were dogfighting low in the sky, swiftly descended to lodge in his mother’s eyesockets, and ever after abided there. When he was reading English poetry, again at college, and came across the following lines, he recognized instantly that these were precisely the glancing eyes that had been the object of his rancor for long years, and thus obtained the basis for a sound interpretation of a nightmare which had troubled him incessantly.
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams,
In death’s dream kingdom.
At the risk of repeating himself he wanted it clear that, unlike the “dreadful eyes” that appear in children’s picture books, clean, unblinking eyes or eyes like bottomless pools of darkness, these, that held a pale yellow light just like a monkey’s and stole quick looks in his direction, were the true “dreadful eyes.”
Even after he had taken to his sick bed for this final time he often called up, from a pool of memory that could not be muddied, the image of his mother looking at him with those “dreadful eyes” and recreated his struggles with them, struggles which had always ended with his surrender, at various periods of his life, imitating his voice at the time in a strident falsetto.
The villagers respected a certain party and they also relied on him. That’s why no one in the village contacted the police or the cadets tapping pine tree roots for oil when he left the valley in that wagon to lead an uprising. If anybody had leaked one word a certain party would have been caught in that wagon like a fat pig, no matter how hard those army deserters had fought to protect him. Because he couldn’t get away on foot.
____A wagon! You call that ridiculous box on top of two sawed-off logs a wagon, his mother said unsparingly. And so would someone else I know alongside those deserter hoodlums as they huffed and puffed and tugged that creaky box on logs along, with his fake helmet pulled down over his ears and his shirt of woven grass and his old trousers tied with a rope below his knees—lord knows why!—and his straw sandals, so would someone else I know have been caught, like a little pig, even if someone else I know had waved around that bayonet he was so proud of!
Then his mother tried to make him recall how, after a certain party’s group had split over the ideal way to approach the army, he had come home alone to the valley and turned into what was called in valley dialect a “believer,” an alienated man who has lost everything as the result of some odd obsession, and had shut himself up in the storehouse, left alone by others so long as he did not bother them, except that some volunteer informer always came up for a look when anything happened, even a small fire on the hillside, and how all there was to eat, since the farm families would not willingly supply a certain party with rice and wheat, were those special parts of ox and pig which people of this region did not generally eat, which he bought secretly at an outrageous price.
____The only place in this whole valley that had to swallow gruel without a grain of cereal in it for such a long time was the Manor house, yessir! his mother reminded him, then pointed out his meagre frame, his irregular, ugly teeth, and all the other physical characteristics that were the result of having scraped by on wild grasses and small portions of seed-potato gruel as a young boy, and told him mockingly that these aftereffects of poor diet in childhood would remain with him all his life.
____But everybody in the village was concerned about a certain party, especially near the end of the war. They all tried to find out what he was thinking by giving me dried yams and things!
____Because they had you figured for the kind who’d blab his family’s shame for a dried yam, yessir! At the end of the war everything was going badly and village life began to come apart. Well, in this valley, when times are bad people always begin to pay attention to madmen and cripples and children who look as if they don’t have a chance to survive (the look his mother shot him here landed like a fist in his stomach, pinned as it was beneath the spectre of shameful death which had superimposed itself upon that other, of a certain party in the wagon oozing blood from his bladder, which had tormented him with the fall of every night since his Happy Days had ended, because it seemed to say that he was certainly such a child himself) and try hard not to miss the omens of change that appear in them. Not because they believe such people are endowed with superhuman spiritual powers, but because they know perfectly well, cruel as it is, that omens of misfortune for the valley will appear earliest in the weakest people in the forest, such as madmen and cripples and children who look about to die, yessir!
Insofar as he desired, young as he was, to maintain his sense of honor objectively, he was unable to argue with the force of a plunge off a cliff that a certain party most definitely had not been the object of this variety of concern. The difficulty was that he sensed his mother’s blunt assertions endowing each of the incidents of those last summers of the war, incidents which remained in earliest memory uninterpreted, in all their raw multiformity, with specific meaning that fit perfectly and was difficult to deny. But this was not to say he was also able to accept his mother’s “correctness” itself. For this “correctness,” an unreasonably combative “correctness” that hurt him fundamentally from inside and out at the same time, was every bit as horribly real and even palpable as her glancing eyes.
____But a certain party wasn’t a madman or a cripple or a child about to die!
____A man who shuts himself up in a storehouse day and night is a madman, yessir! A man who’s bleeding from his sick bladder but can’t urinate by himself he’s so fat he can’t move is a cripple, yessir! And a man who’d set out on a long trip in a wooden box with some deserters when he had no possible chance of returning alive is even worse luck than a dying child, yessir! And for the crafty farmers of the valley to have taken an interest in him because he was that kind of pathetic character, that was a disgrace, don’t you understand that! Or is it foolish to talk about disgrace to someone who’s been picking up the garbage other folks threw away and eating it since he was a child, Ah!
As he recalled the sound of his mother’s voice that day his emotions instantly rose, even as he lay abed with cancer, all the way to the desperately high water mark of the actual moment in the memory, when he had seized a hoe without a handle that was lying nearby and tried to attack his mother. The sudden climb produced a disorder related to hysteria in his eyes behind the underwater goggles, and he began to see everything as tiny particles like poppyseeds. Despite the resistence of the goggles themselves, which were cutting red circles into his skin, he shut his eyes tightly and silently rolled the words upon his parched tongue: yes, I was the young boy who picked up seed-potatoes discarded along the edges of certain fields I can still recall, and who cut the good parts out and used them in gruel, but you ate them too, Mother! Perhaps it was foolish to speak of disgrace to someone like himself, his mother had moaned as if stricken with grief, but the truth was he had already developed his own unique sense of honor, and it was that which finally had prevented him from speaking the words the day of their dispute. Thereafter, for more than twenty years, time and time again, trembling with chagrin, he had tasted the flavor and overtones of those words he had been unable to utter that day.
[[Why do you keep calling him a certain party? Can’t I change to “father”? When you say “a certain party” he sounds like an imaginary figure in a myth or in history, says the “acting executor of the will.” My mother ma
y have insisted on calling him a certain party beginning on a certain very special day precisely because she wanted to debase him to the level of an imaginary figure. When I left the valley once and for all and moved to a place where there were no traces of a certain party, I gradually began to wonder myself, possibly because I’d been influenced by my mother’s repudiation of him, if I hadn’t created a certain party entirely in my imagination. But even if he was a product of the imagination he still managed to be infinitely troublesome. At times I’ve thought to myself maybe I have been mad since I was three just as my mother says, and someday if I recover my sanity the phantom tormenting me I call a certain party will disappear. But I feel differently now; if I’m a madman, fine, I’m resolved to stay that way and continue sharing life with my favorite phantom, a certain party. Ha! Ha! Ha! But you know something? As time passed after the surrender and various military journals began surfacing, official and unofficial, particularly in reactionary quarters, and being published, I came across a certain party’s name frequently in accounts of anti-Tojo operations within the Kanto army. I even saw a photostat of one of his poems, which couldn’t have had less to do with the military by the way, written in his own hand with brush and ink. There’s never been anything special about my family, but we have produced a number of calligraphers; a certain party must have been proud of his calligraphy. Anyway, if I truly exist here and now, and I do, a certain party certainly existed, too. To make someone sound like an imaginary figure can be a way of debasing him, but it can also be a way of exalting him into a kind of idol. So please don’t change to “father,” keep on writing a certain party. I wish you’d even write thick characters and blacken them with your pencil until they look like gothic type.]]