by Kenzaburo Oe
What appeared to him in his memory, as if in an overexposed photograph, was a huge frying pan in heavy shadow on top of a stove that glowed ruby red in the fading light, and the face, also in deep shadow, and shiny white helmet of a certain party, his large head lowered mournfully as he peered down into the frying pan through his underwater goggles, which must have been fogged by the rising steam. Several steps behind a certain party, his head and body bared to the sun, he listened to the meaty, sizzling joints of oxtail jump and bump in the pan, and smelled, with revulsion, the indescribably cruel, animal odor of the meat. Sweat rolled continuously down his back and felt as if the pointed ridges on a dinosaur’s back were being chiseled into his own. For a long time he stood this way, stock still beneath the summer sun, and presently, as always happened in the valley, the sun’s position passed a certain point above the forest, dusk came and was gone in a flash and heavy darkness abruptly fell, the fire in the cooking stove glowed even redder, and the scrawny dogs that had gone wild and lived in a pack at the edge of the forest began to howl.
Finally a certain party turned around to him, his shadowed face pitch-black except where the rims of his underwater goggles bluntly gleamed, and asked in a perfectly sober voice, as if his raptness over the cooking stove had been the work of some entrancing demon that now had dropped away, Can you support my weight? Shivering in the chill wind from the valley below he stepped forward tensely, still aware in his nakedness, though his sweat had dried long ago, of what felt like the scars of those ridges on the dinosaur’s back. A certain party placed his hand on the top of his head as though he were grasping the end of a pole, and began walking, step by step, toward the entrance to the storehouse. Even now he could recall, with extreme vividness and reality, thinking his neck must break beneath the weight if he continued walking this way, and, ridiculous as it was, wanting to shout Long live the emperor! so that a certain party would acknowledge that it was his young son who was the true heir to his blood.
[[The “acting executor of the will” begins to fidget and “he” asks reproachfully, Do you think I’m making this up? I’m a man dying of liver cancer, why should I have to tell made-up stories? Furthermore, I’m coming to the part about how the valley doctor discovered that a certain party had bladder cancer. When I’m getting ready to talk about cancer it seems to me you could show a little respect, not to me but to my cancer!]]
Slowly they advanced toward the entrance to the storehouse, but a certain party’s feet, ponderously lifting and lowering like the leg of a circus elephant stepping up onto a barrel, simply could not step across the broad, high threshold of the many-layered fire door. And when the boy dropped to his knees on the ground that retained the midday warmth and threw his arms around the calf of the thick pole of a leg a certain party was still laboring patiently to lift and tried to lend him strength, a certain party fell over on his back as unceremoniously as an infant but with a thud that shook the ground. Then his large, pitch-black penis sprang from the long-since buttonless fly of his “people’s” overalls, and he energetically urinated. The boy remained on his knees, chilled with a sense of failure, and the smelly urine wet his naked side and right buttock. Hesitantly he had wiped his fingers, and then, because they were sticky, had rubbed them on his chest and was just perceiving uneasily that something thicker and more mucous than urine remained, when a certain party, lying on his back on the ground and attempting with one hand somehow to put away his penis shrunken now after urinating and hard to distinguish on top of his wet trousers, spoke an order in a voice more than ever sober and composed: Fetch that quack doctor and tell him my bladder is bad. Jumping to his feet he raced down the stone path just as he was, not stopping to rest until he reached the doctor’s house, and when he saw in the light that spilled through the glass door from inside that his naked body was drenched in blood he burst into tears.
[[And from that summer in 1944 until that special day the following summer when the soldiers who had left their barracks came for him, a certain party didn’t venture a single step out of the storehouse. That night, when the old doctor from the valley who had been examining his bladder since before the war arrived at the storehouse, he informed a certain party immediately, with a mournful helplessness in his voice, Squire, you’ve finally gone and fetched yourself bladder cancer, yessir! “he” says. When the blood in a certain party’s urine got all over my hand, which was when the commotion that went on most of that night began, I had a premonition that it must be some kind of important omen, and then twenty-five years later when I found out cancer had caught me, too, I took a careful look at my hands, which had turned bright red, and I understood the significance of that omen in blood. My life has a splendid continuity, don’t you agree, especially in the details? What happened to the food? The food? The question catches him by surprise and flusters him. To cover his embarrassment, and because “he” is still unsettled, his head a blank, unable to form words clearly, “he” begins to laugh. Ha! Ha! Ha! Your job requires that a person be realistic above all, I realize. Still, if you’re not aware of any difference in importance between bladder cancer and stew because you think everything I tell you is made up and take it all relatively, no matter how bloody, that’s a bit of a problem! But you know I love oxtail stew, I’ve helped you fix it many times. And as long as that saucepan full of oxtail is still on the fire, it’s on my mind. Ha! Ha! Ha! People who still have a long life ahead of them are so cheerful and easygoing, their feet are so firmly on the ground! “he” says. My mother was that way too, that night, someone with a long life ahead of her, who didn’t come to the storehouse to visit the invalid even though the doctor had announced that he had bladder cancer, but was thoughtful enough to see to the oxtail stewing in the cooking shed. Even though she had no desire to see anything as horrifying as oxtail, she was probably moved by the respect paid to food in general in those days. The next morning, when I went out at a certain party’s bidding to look in the cooking shed, the stew was ready. Since I had no idea how to serve it out of the smaller pot my mother had put it in, I carried it pot and all to a certain party where he lay in the storehouse in the room with the wooden floor. Then I wanted to take care of my own stomach and had no choice but going to the kitchen in the main house. Since my mother had continued to prepare noon and evening meals for the recluses in the storehouse, my share of the previous night’s meal, of which I had eaten nothing, should have been waiting for me that morning. I went in through the kitchen and found my mother in the adjoining room, repairing and polishing the ornaments to be used in the autumn festival at the monkey shrine. Ever since my brother’s ashes had come home, my mother had cast a cold eye on the valley and everything in it, even the scenery, she scarcely even lifted her eyes to see where she was going, but she had begun to look after the monkey shrine with real devotion, and to this day she still does! When I asked for my breakfast, my mother answered me stiffly, as if she’d rehearsed the lines, lifting her eyes only to dart glances at me as she spoke,
____The vegetables I set aside to make enough gruel for the whole family to eat were all thrown into that pot of filthy oxtail consequently there is nothing left for us. So I grabbed two chunks of something that passed for bread, finely ground corn steamed with just a touch of wheat flour, and took them out into the garden, thinking I would eat them with the vegetables that should have sunk to the bottom of the broth remaining in the large pot. But when I stuck my hand into the pot I found that everything in that muddy broth had cooked away, leaving only bunches of fiber, and for just an instant the horror seeping through my fingers stirring around at the bottom of that pot came close to making me sympathize with my mother’s outrage. As a matter of fact, even after I had finished washing down that corn bread like board planks with some water I drew from the well, I didn’t go back to the storehouse for a while. Partly it was a certain party tearing into the oxtail stew the morning after his bladder cancer had been discovered, lifting those joints of oxtail whose baleful odor had overwhelmed
the bouquet garni I had gathered at the edge of the forest, holding them by the ends between his thick, round thumb and first finger, ripping the meat away from the bone and devouring them one after another without offering to share the smallest morsel with me; partly I was afraid that, eaten in a valley surrounded by a forest, and early in the morning besides, the smell of a thing like that would draw down upon us all those ghostly creatures that had dwelled for years in the forest’s depths. After that, on the rare occasions when we got hold of an oxtail, and even when all we had was pigs’ feet, I had to do the cooking myself, because a certain party’s physical condition no longer permitted him to leave the storehouse to cook or do anything else. To be sure, I followed his instructions, and the procedure was simple enough: all I did was throw the meat into a large pot of boiling water in chunks, just as it came from the butcher, wait a while, add barley or some other grain, whatever vegetable scraps I could sneak away from my mother, who was no longer ever careless about leaving her onions and carrots unattended, some salt, and a few beans of a substance that never under any circumstances made its way into my mother’s kitchen, garlic. Possibly a certain party’s instructions for that simplified cooking were a reduction of his experiences on the Chinese mainland designed to permit him to relive them in the valley; certainly there was no one anywhere in the valley whose diet was closer to that of the Korean forest workers. The Koreans held up well under labor conditions that would have to be called harsh, and a certain party, too, despite his advancing bladder cancer, grew, thanks to that unique meat-pot with garlic, in the manner of a landslide, fatter and fatter until there was no covering him, “he” says.]]
VI
[[Once August begins, “he” is in a state of constant agitation. Apparently not even sleep releases him, for although “he” no longer sobs aloud as before, it seems that “he” repeatedly cries out as though in great anger. However, “he” insists to a dubious “acting executor of the will” that “he” continues to have no memory whatsoever of his dreams. These past few days you’ve frequently expressed concern over whether your mother will be able to survive the heat of this summer, I wonder if your dreams might have something to do with that? It could be, now when I’m finally in a position to really let my mother have it for the first time in my life, I don’t know what I’d do if she died a step ahead of me, “he” replies with objective calm. But a minute later “he” is agitated once again. The fact is, my mother could decide to violate our contract and commit suicide cleverly enough to make it look like natural death of old age and I wouldn’t even be able to go into the field to investigate. She’s easily capable of starving herself and starting whatever organs inside her were sufficiently weakened rolling down a gentle slope they could never get back up, she has more than enough malice for that! “he” says resentfully. You and your mother promised one another you wouldn’t commit suicide? When I was in high school my mother made certain I would never be able to try suicide by hurting and humiliating me so deeply my basic attitudes toward society around me were bent all out of shape. How can the force she had to exert against me to achieve that not bounce back at her? And doesn’t that amount to having entered into a contract? But in order to denounce her effectively for her contract violation I’d have to catch her in the act of attempting suicide just the way she caught me! As the day in August approaches when twenty-five years ago the ten officers and soldiers who had deserted from the army led him and a certain party out of the valley in a wagon, his agitation is high from before dawn until late at night and the “acting executor of the will” must go to the nurses’ station frequently to request treatment to calm him down. Insisting that he must re-experience that midsummer day under weather and atmospheric conditions as similar as possible, “he” has the air-conditioning in his private room turned off. You know I can never experience that summer day again just as it was, how can you try to cheat me out of that final summer? “he” says. But in the un-airconditioned hospital room his exhaustion accelerates, “he” spends the entire day sighing, then tires and falls asleep without having narrated a word, dreams, and cries out in anger. The morning after such a night, “he” complains of a kind of difficulty “he” has never before admitted. When I try as hard as I can to remember clearly the officers and soldiers who loaded a certain party into a wagon in spite of the bleeding cancer in his bladder and hauled him out of the valley as if they were pulling a root up out of the ground they sometimes appear in my memory, especially the officers, dressed just like Occupation GI’s! I’ve always had a double image of soldiers, part Japanese infantry just before the war and part GI during the Occupation. And while the two images are separate they have a way of merging subtly, I could never describe the uniforms of those young officers and soldiers who came to the valley with any concrete accuracy. Yet that part is crucial! Without it I can’t make you accept what I say as anything but make-believe! The radiant culmination of my Happy Days originates there, everything I ever did from that time on was affected by the force emanating from there, even my death so close at hand glistens in the light from there and nowhere else! Thus “he” laments, and, helpless to control his mounting agitation, trembles. Yet when the “acting executor of the will” tries to help, hunting up, for example, photograph collections of wartime styles and manners so that “he” can verify his memory objectively, “he” is, if anything, resentful. I intend to narrate a “history of our age” which I myself have experienced definitively, the experience of which continues to live inside me; if I start dressing up my own uncertain memory with photographic records made by someone I don’t even know, you tell me how I’m going to produce a “history of our age” with any real power over me and my mother! “he” shouts in irritation, his eyes red as plums. The truth is, it’s not easy, all these years later, to reproduce in words just how it felt late that afternoon at the height of summer, when those officers and soldiers appeared in the valley and crossed the bridge from the highway and drew up in a solid line, and I heard them declare, as I stood among the adults who had evacuated to the valley and were too lazy to work and the other valley kids, that they had come for none other than a certain party, and then ask to be taken to him, and happiness seemed to charge me with static electricity so that every particle of my flesh and blood stood on end, even though I was thunderstruck by that sudden and unexpected development. And going back through the way those soldiers moved, their stiff quickstep even when they only had a few paces to go or their no-nonsense voices when they shouted orders to themselves, to the valley boy inside myself that was me in August, 1945, and reviving him gradually with fresh blood until he has regained his former health entirely is no easy job, either. For one thing, my mother attacked precisely that ecstatically happy boy inside me with such persistence she finally drove him to the edge of extinction. For a long time it was as if destroying him was the sole objective of her remaining years, she went about it with a fury worse than the cancer gnawing at my liver! But you must have resisted? So if you recall all the things inside yourself you tried to protect from your mother as a child and talk about them one by one wouldn’t that give you all the leads you need? Say, I notice recently you’ve been doing more for my “history of the age” than just transcribing it! For very nearly the first time since taking to his sick bed “he” expresses something like genuine gratitude. In his excitement and irritation “he” is also revealing an unexpected openness. Because I’m afraid if you lost interest in this project now you’d sink so deeply into the liver cancer in your imagination you’d never surface again, says the “acting executor of the will.” Ha! Ha! Ha! Once again on guard, and cunning, “he” tries kicking sand with his hind leg to cover the openness “he” has just revealed. I didn’t realize you could be so exquisitely sentimental! Now “he” has regained his grip on what he needs to speak about himself with cool objectivity, and in the process, no doubt aided by his desire to oppose the “acting executor of the will,” a measure of vitality as well. For the moment, however, “
he” will reply on this vitality to help him fall asleep. When “he” awakens from this shallow sleep and his strength and spirits are at such low ebb “he” cannot fall asleep again, in the middle of the night, if his scribe on her cot next to his bed will also wake up and keep him company, “he” will resume his account.]]
As he led the officers and soldiers up the stone path toward the Manor house at the top of the rise, followed by nearly all the children in the valley, whose friendliness toward him had been instantly restored by the appearance of the strangers, he perceived, with a flicker of uneasiness that intruded for just an instant on the excitement rioting in his head, that his mother was hurriedly closing the double rain doors ordinarily used only a few times a year when a typhoon was approaching, not only on the ground floor but on the second floor where no one lived and even in the attic, as if it were an attacking army he was leading up from the valley, and, hoping to preserve his high spirits, he lowered his eyes to the path as he climbed. At the roofed gate at the entrance to the Manor house, one of the officers yelled at the children to go back. There was nothing unusual in the valley about voices being raised, but if someone did shout, in any situation except a family quarrel, he shrank with shame at his raised voice, which had reached the ears of the things lurking in the forest depths, and ultimately compromised himself though he may have been entirely in the right. The other party, however, no matter how large a concession may have been made to him, far from forgetting that he had been shouted at, retained the memory rancorously. In the communal society of the valley, the label “the one who raises his voice” amounted to an official coup de grace administered to someone who had been judged irretrievably antisocial. The sound of voices being raised quite shamelessly by outsiders at a crowd of valley children thus filled him with resentment and disgust and a certain sense of injustice, and then at the entrance to the storehouse where he was living with a certain party it was his turn to be told in a loud voice, Stay Out Even so, he somehow managed to contain, temporarily, his anger, and humiliation at this outrageous impropriety and, when he had opened the kitchen door to the main house by lifting the latch inside with an old nail, he went in to “challenge” his mother where she huddled motionlessly in the darkness of the adjoining room.