Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

by Kenzaburo Oe

  ____Mother! Mother! Just like I thought, just like I thought, Mother, the army has come for a certain party just like I thought His voice as he spoke into the darkness was shrill with excitement, but his mother ignored his mood, answering only,

  ____Just as I thought, the least you can do is speak properly, you must have a little shame left!

  Yet he managed to contain forbearingly even the antagonism this venomous response provoked, and continued his appeal for a dialogue based on exultation they could share:

  ____Mother! Mother! I have a piece of paper hidden in a secret place with a list of all the people who said a certain party was a spy or who spread rumors that he wrote letters to the newspapers saying we would lose the war, and Mother! I’ve been thinking about that list ever since the soldiers came for a certain party just like I thought!

  ____A certain party doesn’t have the ability to be a spy. And he doesn’t have the gumption to come right out and say we’re going to lose the war, either! Oh, he wrote in to the papers all right, something about making Saipan and Tinian and Guam permanent strongholds against the enemy and moving the Imperial palace out there, even if it meant leaving all of Japan defenseless against the American attack, nonsense like that, Lord knows why or who he thought he was a-talking to, and then he hid himself in the storehouse because he was afraid the secret police would come to arrest him, but all that happened was a few country cops came out to tell him to stop it, yessir!

  ____Mother! Mother! The army came for a certain party, Mother, just like I thought! Just like I thought! When he had sung out these final words into the darkness that retained the heat of day where his mother sat motionless and probably sweating he dashed outside again into the early evening light and snuck around to the back of the storehouse, nimbly evading the soldiers despite the glare of the still-reddish sun which tightened his chest and stopped him in his tracks for just a minute, like a blind rat, then scrambled up onto the outhouse roof, got down on his hands and knees, and tried to catch a few words of the conference the officers were having with a certain party. Before long his leg was grabbed and he was pulled down off the roof by a soldier who had been walking around the storehouse, possibly to guard it, possibly because he was bored; unable to find another hiding place where he could continue to hold out alone against the world he raced back yet again, undeterred, to the dark kitchen entrance of the main house, and reported, in a voice so strained and shrill he might have seemed to be weeping, Mother! Mother! the situation has become critical so they’re going to revolt and a certain party is going to lead them, just like I thought, just like I thought, we’re in a crisis situation and they’ve chosen a certain party as their leader! We’d better have a good look at the list of people who said a certain party was a spy or someone who wanted us to lose the war, and we’d better total up their names, Mother, we’re going to have our hands full, because Mother, Mother, it’s just like I thought it would be!

  This ardent speech he delivered deliriously, but his mother might have been asleep, so complete was the indifference and silence in which she enclosed herself in the darkness where she sat on the wooden floor with her legs beneath her. Ignored, he rose and closed the door at the entrance to the kitchen from the inside, then sat down on the raised sill of the room with the wooden floor, his back to his mother, his bare feet dangling above the dirt floor a step lower, and, staring vacantly into space in front of him, his eyes rolled up and partly hidden beneath his lids, his hammer-head pulled down between his shoulders and angled obliquely upward, in just the pose his childhood pictures always caught him, he tried to daydream with a bit of concrete detail about his own role in this crisis situation as a youthful soldier armed with a bayonet, and began to wait. Dusk had suddenly descended and children’s voices and animal cries fallen silent in the valley below when one of the officers threw open the wooden door at the kitchen entrance and half leaned inside, his broad shoulders and head framed from behind in a faint, golden light adjacent to pitch darkness, his body black as night, and called out,

  ____Mrs.____, the Squire is asking for you!

  Mrs.____! It was a last name he had never heard. And he was about to announce that the name was a mistake, having finally been presented an opportunity to satisfy his longing to be of some real service to the soldiers, when unexpectedly his mother responded from the darkness with a perfectly commonplace reply, then stood up and seemed to be adjusting her kimono.

  [[Even now I remember perfectly clearly the way my mother emerged from that dark room, and the sound the stiff cloth of her obi made when she tightened it, and the soft fall of her footsteps. But when I try to focus on the uniforms those soldiers had on when they appeared, I see only a vague picture. Sometimes I think they must have been wearing army uniforms of that khaki cloth that seemed so very thick, and sometimes I’m sure they had on dark brown shirts open at the neck that were so stained with sweat they frightened us, with their stripes pinned on their collars. His brow knit, “he” speaks with effort, in a way that evokes the empty space in his imagination behind the underwater goggles where decision is being deferred. Since the last thing “he” expects with regard to this problem is an active response from the “acting executor of the will,” her attack comes as a complete surprise,

  ____It’s only natural you have no clear memory of how those soldiers were dressed. The day they came to the valley not one of them was in military uniform, full dress or combat or any other kind, not even the officers. Instantly “he” is aware of grave danger. A specific anxiety “he” has not tasted in a long time, the special tension of the feeling that an entangling malice was threatening to pulverize the very bedrock of his identity, an anxiety which, moreover, like the memory of an odor, could be revived inside him at any time by any one of numberless experiences of his childhood, now rises inside him to flood level along with something else that envelops and presently will transform it into a sense of utter helplessness. Wait a minute! “he” protests, his voice straining pitifully. If a group of soldiers had been traveling openly without their uniforms during the war, they would have been stopped by the police in the provincial city before they ever reached the valley. It also happens there was an army garrison in that provincial city, which means, for your information, that secret police must have been all over the place. And those soldiers didn’t make any attempt to hide the fact that they were soldiers! The war was over on that day. The war had just ended! You talk about leaving behind a “history of the age” like a last testament, with nothing in it but the truth, you slave away at it until your physical strength and your spirit are nearly worn away, and then in the most crucial part you imbed a lie that’s immediately apparent to the person you want to read it most—I can’t understand that either, says the “acting executor of the will.” I honestly can’t understand it either. Those soldiers drove up to the bridge leading into the valley in their army truck on the evening of August fifteenth. They couldn’t cross, because the bridge supports had been partly washed away in a flood at the height of the war and hadn’t been repaired. They took you and your father back to the provincial city with them the following day, August sixteenth. By the evening of August fifteenth, the war was over. That’s a fact as plain as day, so you can’t very well blame that particular mistake on your memory. It seems your descriptions of the wooden cart they took your father in and the clothes you were wearing when you left and all kinds of details like that are accurate, it seems you consciously distorted only the date. But why you would go to so much trouble to keep repeating a lie like that I can’t understand either! Lying in bed on his back alone and helpless, “he” longs to open a hole in the sheets, wriggling his neck and hips like the lowliest bugs that live in the soft, shallow earth, and burrow into the mattress. How long has it been since my mother arrived here at the hospital from the valley? Long enough for her to have read the entire account so far? “he” moans softly.]]

  VII

  [[The soldiers came on August fifteenth, yessir! That’s
a fact. And they left, with a certain party and this child, the morning of August sixteenth, yessir! The person crouching nearly to the floor in the far left corner of his sickroom speaks with calm detachment, in idiocentric accents which create the impression overall of chill objectivity despite the emphatic suffixes of his valley dialect. Not without surprise, “he” listens to the voice directly for the first time in just ten years and discovers not a trace in it of the veiled hostility and hinted ridicule that had saddled him for so long with the aftereffects of a persecution complex; the impression created is of a simple old country woman talking. There is a mild, respectable ordinariness about the voice, a feeling of benign old age, and “he” must wonder if the image of the aggressive mother that has cast its loathsome shadow over the better half of his thirty-five years is merely a delusion of his own. Nonetheless, “he” replies directly to no words that issue from his mother’s lips. In front of his mother “he” is embarrassed for the first time about wearing the underwater goggles covered with cellophane, but so long as “he” gazes up at the ceiling through the cylinder lenses she cannot possibly enter his field of vision. Perhaps, to that extent at least, “he” can refuse subjectively to accept her unexpected appearance. Not that his mother addresses him directly; she is speaking solely to provide the person taking down his “history of the age” with evidence, extremely negative evidence. His own main objective in interrupting her, similarly, is to educe and examine details of the “history” in order to corroborate them. It was early in the morning and they were singing all together, not an army song either but some song in a foreign language, maybe they were trying to say they weren’t soldiers anymore, and they loaded that tub of lard with bladder cancer into a wooden wagon and even took this child along, for a hostage maybe, it was mean and low! And they set out from the valley and even dragged this child along, with his fake helmet down over his ears and a rusty old broken bayonet tied at his side, lord knows what he was thinking! It was the morning of August sixteenth, and they were singing a Bach aria they’d learned off a record, yessir! Taking radios and phonographs apart and putting them back together was about the one thing a certain party could do a pretty decent job on—he was at least average when it came to working with his hands—and he had a radio and a phonograph in the storehouse. The night of August fifteenth everybody knew there wouldn’t be any more air raids, so the mood that was general all over the valley was lights uncovered and blazing away and folks gathered around their radios, but we were the only ones with a phonograph that wasn’t broken and even a few records, yessir! And that whole night long the soldiers who had come for a certain party listened to records while they drank the saké they’d brought with them in the truck. A certain party had been collecting Bach records since before the war, but he’d sold them or traded them for food and he couldn’t have had more than two or three left, but the record those soldiers listened to over and over until the next morning and even learned the simple chorus of it by heart before they left happened to be Bach, yessir! I say soldiers, but the young officers were just college boys and still making a big fuss over the Victor red label!]]

  Since his elder brother’s ashes had returned, his mother had scarcely ever walked the stone path down to the valley. Besides, the radios that survived the war in that valley in the depths of the forest were in general capable of producing only a noise no bigger than the whining of a mosquito. How, then, from Manor-house-rise, can his mother have heard those radios in front of which people had gathered in a mood that was “general all over the valley”?

  [[Late the night of the fifteenth I went around to four or five houses in the valley, that had bicycle carts, and each place I stopped I says Tomorrow morning those former soldiers who just lost the war will be coming to commandeer your cart! hide it in the forest! in China it used to happen all the time! There was supposed to be an important broadcast on the fifteenth so most families sat outside on the porch listening to their radios most of the night. Naturally there were no interesting programs, there sure as fire wasn’t any broadcast with enough truth to it to teach anybody in that forest what he ought to do from then on. But folks wouldn’t leave their radios, because every once in a while a little bit of voice would work its way through the static. When I made my rounds everybody did as I suggested and hid their carts, which is why early the next morning the soldiers had to saw logs into wooden wheels and attach them to a wood fertilizer box and line it with pillows and load him into that. If it had been any time before August fifteenth, the folks in the valley would have had their lights masked and they would have been listening to the radio quietly away at the back of the house, and the general mood in the valley would have been entirely different, yessir!]]

  Then yield for the moment, assume those soldiers who refused to accept defeat rose up with a certain party as their leader on August sixteenth. Young as he was, his sense of date cannot have been very certain, after all. But that in no way changed the essence of the incident. Young officers unwilling to acknowledge the war’s end and the men who followed them formed a group that refused to accept defeat and came in quest of a certain party’s leadership—surely there was nothing unnatural about that! And considering that vast amounts of data and evidence were destroyed during the Occupation, it is not at all unlikely that on August sixteenth a triumphant American pilot buzzing a surrendered city should have strafed an odd wooden cart carrying a man dressed up in a “people’s jacket” and even holding a military sword. In short, the basic problem was not affected by the fact that the incident occurred on August sixteenth and not before the fifteenth. As a matter of fact, officers and soldiers were more likely to have entrusted the leadership of an uprising to a civilian after the war, dissatisfied with the surrender, than to have left their unit to join a civilian while on active duty in wartime.

  Anyway, one morning in August before the sky was even pale, the boy and the soldiers loaded a certain party into the wooden wagon they had improvised and set out across the pitch-black valley at a turtle’s pace, one step at a time. At the mouth of the valley they hoisted a certain party into a truck, wooden wagon and all, and started up ninety-nine-curve-pass, now a band of insurgents. And while the truck sped along, the soldiers sang in chorus, in no particular order, over and over again, the bits and pieces they had learned of a song in a foreign language. The only one who could not join in at first, the boy wiped, again and again, with old diapers he had carried in by the armful and even stuffed into cracks in the wagon, the sticky urine and hemorrhaging blood that kept soaking a certain party’s abdomen and crotch. But he could not wipe around his obese, planted buttocks without help from the soldiers, and before long, the pillows on the floor between a certain party’s buttocks and his thighs were submerged in a pond of faintly evil-smelling blood. He was terrified that all the blood in a certain party’s body would drain away, but it was impossible to communicate his fear to the men, for, although they continued to support the swaying, creaking wooden box on the truck bed on all four sides, they had temporarily turned their attention away from a certain party with soldierly courageousness and were singing at the top of their voices. The pain must have been severe, but a certain party endured in silence, his eyes closed, his obese body crashing back and forth against the walls of the box like a rubber ball inside a cube. Afraid he was dead already, the boy pressed his face against a certain party’s thick neck, his nose filling with the odd sweetness that underlay the sickening odor of sweat and blood, and shouted What’s the song mean, huh? Whereupon a certain party, who not only had never answered his questions during their time together in the storehouse but had seemed unlikely to allow him even to ask a question, with beads of sweat sliding down the unwrinkled porcelain of his wan face, his eyes still closed, his huge body smashing against the wooden boards as before, unexpectedly explained with fatherly care. To be sure, what he retained directly in memory was only a small portion of what was said. TRÄNEN means “tear,” and TOD that means “to die,” it’s German. H
is Majesty the Emperor wipes my tears away with his own hand, Death, you come ahead, you brother of Sleep you come ahead, his Majesty will wipe my tears away with his own hand, that’s what they’re singing. I wait eagerly for his Majesty the Emperor to wipe my tears away with his own hand, they’re singing!

  [[The “acting executor of the will” confers with a doctor who knows music, determines the title of the Bach cantata and borrows the record. I have the feeling this cantata is part of the reason I didn’t study German in college, “he” says, listening to the record and groping, guided by the verses printed on the jacket, for the lines that have been echoing in his internal ear for twenty-five years. I wonder if I wasn’t afraid subconsciously that, if I learned to understand German, the singing that day that remains in my head might not begin to convey a meaning just the reverse of a certain party’s explanation!]]