by Kenzaburo Oe
IV
The examples of a certain party’s hand he had discovered in photostat copies of various so-called secret military journals were easy to read, even though they had been reduced in printing, because they were written in phonetic script in the style of the great calligrapher Hekigodo. There was a period when the area inside and around the forest surrounding his valley was alive with amateur calligraphers in the school of Hekigodo or Fusetsu. To say that he came from a long line of calligraphers would have been a silly boast: a certain party’s style had not evolved down through successive generations of the family but was simply an example of an amateur style to be found all over the region. The clearly dated entries had been written at the end of that year when the war, which had sustained around itself a vast feeling of mutuality based upon the phantom of nation that covered the entire sky he could see from his valley, and which indeed had made him long, notwithstanding his secret fears and misgivings, to die a mutual death, had unmistakably been placed in a noose by the defeat of the Imperial navy at Midway and the still more pitiful devastation at Guadal Canal. The date immediately evoked for him concrete images of a moment in the past which existed for both himself and a certain party. For it was on New Year’s Day of the following year, 1943, that a certain party had unexpectedly appeared in the valley again, gone straight into seclusion in the storehouse and stayed there, fattening from insufficient exercise and a monomaniacal appetite, losing finally even the strength to stand by himself as his bladder cancer progressed, not to appear again before the people of the village until a few days before the defeat, when he had left the valley in a wagon together with the ten deserters who had come for him and his young son.
Neither the boy he was at the time nor, he supposed, his mother, had any idea of the circumstances which suddenly had brought a certain party back from Manchuria on New Year’s day. He was of course equally ignorant of a certain party’s reasons for walking straight into isolation, as if his long journey home ended with a final step into the darkness of the storehouse. In fact, he now realized, for as long as a certain party’s self-confinement in the storehouse had lasted, his young brain had been entirely occupied by the actual presence of that giant body; by the time he had begun directing his brain to active thoughts about a certain party himself, a certain party no longer existed, an emptiness with the volume of one obese adult had opened in this world, and he had discovered with his entire small, thin body that this emptiness was packed with nothing more than August heat and light. Once this void began searching for a meaning, it proved to be a vacuum powerful enough to pull in all of his thirty-five years of life that protruded from his Happy Days.
However, since his mother was ignorant of the meaning of a certain party’s extraordinary behavior toward the end of the war, or at least insisted she was ignorant and then lapsed into silence, a performance she maintained for as long as he was in the valley, there was no possibility of uncovering any new facts while he remained in the depths of the forest. Accordingly, it was not until he had moved away to a big city that he had the pleasure of encountering for the first time, albeit in suspicious books such as An Unofficial History of Manchuria, not only examples of a certain party’s hand but a variety of brand-new information.
Late in 1942, burdened with the hopes and expectations of those “loyal subjects of Empire” who were the invaders in Manchuria, a certain party had boarded a special plane and secretly had returned to Japan as a member of an underground group determined to bring about a meeting between Prime Minister Tojo and General Ishiwara, who had already left the army and was living in seclusion in the country. The core of the group were those former Kempei [secret police] officers who had massacred proletarian activists at the time of the 1923 earthquake. A meeting was in fact held, but it began and ended as a kind of zen dialogue which yielded not the smallest hint about anything practical to be done; the former Kempei officers and their subordinates flew back to Manchuria at once and adopted the new strategy of spreading false rumors that Prime Minister Tojo and General Ishiwara were working together.
Of the entire group, only a certain party had taken leave of his “comrades” and remained in Japan, never to visit Manchuria again. How had he separated from them? When the meeting was over a certain party, representing the “Manchurian Committee to revere Basho the Master,” had traveled to Iga-Ueno, Basho’s birthplace. There he had drafted with ink and brush the inscription for the memorial the Committee was planning to erect. His composition, which had survived in a photostat but had never been inscribed on any stone, was as follows:
What kind of frog or possibly toad
Did the Master follow down country back road
Through hilly daley and ferny frondy
To that ancient, waiting pondy?
Or was it no frog at all but a wop
Who dived in with that eternal plop?
Reading this doggerel he remembered the day the son of one of the tenant farmers who worked for his family, a man who had made a good business of doing piecework for a munitions factory in his small machine shop, came to request a sample of a certain party’s calligraphy to frame. It was during that brief interval just after a certain party had confined himself in the storehouse, when he still commanded the dregs at least of general respect rather than what his mother called “concern for the weakest man around,” a time just before the abrupt commencement of his Happy Days when communication between his mother and a certain party had not yet run dry. When the villager had been led by his mother as far as the high threshold at the entrance to the storehouse he called out solemnly,
____Squire, I’d be obliged if you’d write me out “Prosper but be not proud.” However, when his mother presently emerged from the storehouse trying so hard not to laugh that all the skin of her narrow, egg-shaped face was stretched across her cheekbones almost to transparency, she held a piece of Chinese drawing paper on which was written in large characters in the style of Hekigodo, “Hibernate but be not proud.” * Admittedly, this memory, like others, was certain to be a compound of something he had actually witnessed as a young boy and valley legend ingested at a later time.
[[Your whole family loves puns, don’t they, says the “acting executor of the will.” Don’t think I didn’t know where you’re aiming those roundabout missiles of yours, “he” replies. They say that certain manic-depressives are fascinated by puns and anagrams. You’re suggesting I’m that type of madman, and that all my chatter until now has been nothing more than a madman’s raving, that everything recorded here about my past is therefore untrue, that even my insistence here in the present that my liver is a stronghold for cancer is merely a madman’s delusion—that’s the elaborate logic you’d like to apply, isn’t it! I meant something much less elaborate, says the “acting executor of the will.” But “he” laughs-Ha! Ha! Ha!-and keeps her at a distance. The reason there are so many puns in my account is that nearly all my childhood memories are influenced by oral legend from my valley. In a valley surrounded by a forest, every little scrap of inside information gets turned into a new legend as people pass it back and forth among themselves and fiddle with it. And silly puns are the only rhetorical ornaments they have to dress a legend up with as they pass it on. If someone like my mother actually makes a clever pun, that in itself is enough to make whatever it is she may have said the most fashionable legend in the valley for a time. The importance the valley still places on puns got me into all kinds of trouble when I was studying foreign languages at college, I kept getting tangled up in silly associations that never bothered students from the city, and they’d occupy my head and lead me off on daydreams. For example, all I had to do was see the word mori in Latin class and I was off and flying back to the “forest” [in Japanese, “mori”]. For all I know, whatever rhetorical skill I may have even now originates in simple puns. Still, I’d appreciate it if you’d put me down on paper just as I speak, without changing my rhetoric into something more creative than it is. Maybe I have liver canc
er and maybe I’m just a madman obsessed with anagrams, either way I’m pathetic enough to deserve sympathy, don’t you think? Ha! Ha! Ha! That isn’t what I was trying to say, either. Even at the height of the war there was at least one moment of harmony in your family, and it occurred to me that it might have been built around your parents’ special gift for puns. I imagine in the beginning it was probably your father who loved puns, and as your mother went out of her way to accommodate his tastes she must have developed her own skill at that special kind of mental gymnastics. And in that way, two of the very few educated people in the valley shut off from the world by a forest, and bitterly critical of everything around them, your parents did try to maintain a unique style of life in their isolation—that’s what I wanted to say. It just doesn’t seem possible to me that they always felt the intense hatred for one another that colors your whole story, as if they were sworn enemies from the beginning. Could it be that you leave out the positive aspects when you talk because you don’t want to recognize any link between your parents that had nothing to do with you? Beginning a rare slide down an incline toward foul humor, “he” braces himself against his hands resting atop his hardened liver and digs in his heels. Even if you’re right, that wouldn’t affect my Happy Days! As if to demonstrate the truth of this, “he” softly sings a bit of his specialty, Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy Days are here again!]]
He did not intend to deny that there was a period when his mother and a certain party had a perfectly normal relationship as man and wife. But except for his memory of having approached madness when he was close to three, he had almost no memories of life at home during that period. Nor was this simply because he was too young. It was as if, in the gloom, even in daytime, of those rooms beyond the earth-floor entrance of the house of his birth, known as the Manor house, the child he was had not yet truly existed. Direct memories that felt real and had substance began at the moment of a certain “birth” which suddenly had illuminated that gloom of nonexistence and had transformed it into a solid consisting of tangled memories in lurid color. Memories which preceded the moment of this “birth” were therefore all legends in the valley which he had recreated as memory in his own body-and-soul. Once, he had tried stirring up the depths of memory rooted in his very flesh itself, hoping to revive some direct proof of his existence prior to those several festival days during which the “birth” was accomplished. It was a long and difficult experiment in which he employed mnemonics and other techniques, and at the end of his labors the pallid memory that finally appeared in the darkness as though in the beam of a distant flashlight was of himself as a part of the entirety of the valley, organic and inorganic objects included, that did not possess consciousness, a part of what the French philosopher called the être-en-soi. A small child, submerged in a pool in the river that ran along the bottom of the valley, he was peering, with eyes so shadowed they merged with the dark water, at the freshwater fish known as ida in his region, that lived in the cracks between the rocks and the sandy river bottom. The school of minnows had aligned their bodies, their pursed, gill-breathing mouths all pointing toward the faint current flowing behind the rocks. Their eyes, lit with a pale, yellow light the color of saffron, seemed uneasy about the boy observing them, suspended there as long as his breath held out, his uncovered eyes opened wide in the water, and again seemed completely indifferent. In fingers long since bleached and puffy from the water the little boy grasps a spear gun, but the harpoon tip is not attached and the rubber bands on the firing mechanism have rotted away. And so he only stares at the minnows, unblinkingly, a pale yellow light gradually appearing in his own shadowed eyes, and, as if he is already beyond the need to breathe, makes corrections ever so slight in the alignment of his body so as to remain facing the current that flows into his nostrils and communicates the smells of all the numberless, vital substances of the valley. The child in this very earliest memory of himself, he had recognized, was actually not even so much a child as a fetus before the “birth,” and with this realization he had lost interest in uncovering memories that preceded the “birth.”
His memory of the “birth” itself, at least of its sharply defined beginning, must have been a dramatic reconstruction he had later incised upon his memory. In actuality, he was far too young to have perceived immediately the significance of the arrival of the telegram delivery man; nonetheless, when he poured fresh blood into his memory of the “birth,” the opening scene that instantly rose to his mind was a bird’s eye view, as if seen through a telephoto lens, of the delivery man puffing up the rise at a slow, persistent trot from the boat-bottom flat of the valley toward the Manor house. Assuming the angle was possible in reality he must have been looking down at the man from the village office where formerly a certain party had served as the youngest village chief in the prefecture, atop the only other rise in the valley, or peering into the distance from the top of the hill which his mother regularly climbed in order to maintain the monkey shrine. However, since even the inside of the storehouse in which a certain party sat facing the other way in his mechanical barber’s chair was distinctly visible despite the gloom, it was clear that the bird’s eye view in his memory was imaginary. Because he has read the telegram, the delivery man lurches up the hill without giving his short legs a minute’s rest though he is gasping for breath, but clearly he would love the opportunity to race back down the steep stone path into the soft, planted fields and from there to flee, with the fabulous speed of the kangaroo that once visited the valley with a circus troupe, into the depths of the forest, as if it were a certainty that he would be ambushed and killed by the people of the Manor house. No longer a baby and not quite a boy, about to experience the true “birth,” he looks down from the rise and, as if he were tracking the man with a directional microphone, distinctly hears him utter the lament reserved by people in the valley for moments of direst emergency. Lordy! We’ve gone and fetched it now! It says right here the eldest son at the Manor house has deserted in China. Lordy! We’ve gone and fetched it now!
[[That’s it! That’s the other thing you shout when you cry in your sleep! says the “acting executor of the will.” It’s such a disheartening thing to hear at night, it makes me feel like running out into the moonlight in the hospital courtyard and screaming myself. But you know, that delivery man’s distress can’t have infected me, because unlike everybody else at the Manor house, I was as lively and full of spirit as a river shrimp just netted after that telegram arrived. The first thing that happened was that I was sent running to send cables to Manchuria, by a certain party and my mother separately. It was the first time I had been recognized in my own house as a person who could have some actual effect, it was my “birth” in that sense, too. What struck me as peculiar in my child’s way was that my mother and a certain party were each trying to help my deserter brother in their own way, by separate routes. It was one thing for a certain party to have contacts in Manchuria, I was amazed that my mother seemed to know people too, and inside the Kanto army! Of course I know now that she was raised in Peking as the foster daughter of a man who took her in despite the fact that she had some connection with an act of rebellion against the emperor, and that a certain party, who had been smitten by her on his very first journey across the sea, had brought her back to the valley and married her formally as soon as he had left his wife from his days as a young village chief. Then, when he had seen to it that she was securely tethered in the depths of the forest for the rest of her life, he set out for China again and remained there, active at something in Manchuria for years. My mother’s telegram must have been directed at contacts related to her foster father. Before long, she and a certain party began shouting at each other in the storehouse, for the first time. My memory of that quarrel is a reconstruction later, when I finally managed to form a clear impression of what they were talking about by relying on rumors in the valley, but the way I “remember” it now, my mother said,
____If he doesn’t get over to the
other side quickly, he’ll be killed and burst into tears. A certain party became furious, and shouted back,
____What are you saying! This only happened because I permitted him to be raised by the likes of you, with a traitor’s blood in your veins! I’m doing everything in my power to have him shot quickly and treated as if he’d died in action so at least his ashes will come home to us.
____You’re trying to have that child killed before he reaches the other side? You want your own child shot in the back on orders from hoodlums like ____ and ____ and that’s what you requested in your cable? That child is running as hard as he can, all alone, trying to reach the other side, and you want him shot in the back! my mother shouted, still crying bitterly, and it went on that way. Much later, when I began reading military journals, I discovered that the names my mother had mentioned were the last bigshots in the Kanto army. To tell the truth, I was too young to grasp the real meaning of “the other side.” A child who’d been raised during the war may have known what “enemy” meant, but he simply didn’t have the imagination to resolve an image of real people and a real society on “the other side” of the front. All I could picture to myself was a cliff rising straight up on the horizon of a vast plain. One alone young soldier runs as hard as he can toward that cliff. If he can reach it, not only will all values be reversed and everything instantly allowed, the soldier will be extravagantly praised and find salvation—that was the scenario I wrote in my mind. Anyhow, a certain party had only two children, myself and my older brother, and my brother happened to be the child of his first wife, the woman he had divorced. In other words, my mother seemed to be working herself into a frenzy over her stepson! But this heated family battle lasted only a week. A notice arrived, and silence fell over the Manor house and hung there. Then, early one morning, my mother set out in mourning, and just before nightfall she returned with the ashes of the valley’s first war casualty in a white wooden box tied around her neck with a piece of white cotton cloth, “he” says.]]