by Kenzaburo Oe
“Great-grandfather killed his younger brother to settle the trouble in the village,” Takashi had said, repeating what he’d heard in a horrified voice. “And he ate a piece of the flesh from his brother’s thigh. He did it to prove to the clan officials that he had no connection with the trouble his brother had stirred up.”
I myself had no accurate information about the incident. Particularly during the war, the village adults gave the impression of shunning all mention of the affair, and our family too had tried to pretend the ugly rumor didn’t in fact exist. Even so, in order to counter his horror I’d told Takashi another, different rumor that I remembered having once been told in private.
“That isn’t true,” I’d said. “After the trouble, great-grandfather helped his brother get away through the forest and escape to Kochi. He went by sea to Tokyo, where he changed his name and did rather well for himself. A number of letters from him came for great-grandfather around the time of the Meiji Restoration. Great-grandfather kept quiet about it to the end, so people had to make up the kind of lies you heard. The reason he kept quiet was that a lot of people from the village had been killed through his brother’s fault, and he wanted to avoid arousing their families’ anger. . . .”
“Anyway, let’s go back to my place,” I proposed, recalling with nostalgia the enormous influence I’d wielded over my younger brother for a period of several years just after the war. “We can consider the plans for a new life when we get there.”
“All right. Since it means that the family storehouse will disappear from the village in the valley where it’s stood for a hundred years, it won’t do any harm to talk it over in a leisurely way.”
“If you two go by taxi, I’ll follow with Taka and Momoko in my car,” said the young man in a sharp maneuver to push my wife and me outside their tight little circle.
“I’d like to have just one drink before we get in the car,” said my wife, who by now had dropped any lingering wariness toward her brother-in-law. She poked regretfully with the toe of her shoe at the empty bottle where it lay on its side on the floor.
“I’ve got a bottle of tax-free bourbon I bought in the airport,” said my brother, promptly coming to the rescue.
“Have you taken up drinking again, then?” I ventured, secretly hoping to achieve a little iconoclasm where my brother’s bodyguards were concerned.
“If I’d ever been really drunk in America, I would almost certainly have got beaten to death in some dark corner. You know what I’m like when I’m drunk, don’t you, Mitsu?” He pulled a bottle of whisky out of his bag. “I bought this for my new sister-in-law.”
“You seem to have got to understand each other pretty thoroughly while I was asleep.”
“We had quite a long time for it. Do you always spend so long over your unpleasant dreams?” said Takashi, heavily countering my own sarcasm.
“Did I say anything while I was asleep?” I asked, again profoundly disturbed.
“Don’t worry, I don’t think you would callously abandon people to their fate. Nobody thinks so,” he said, taking pity on my distress. “You’re different from great-grandfather—not the kind to do anything really terrible to other people.”
Seeing my wife drink a mouthful of bourbon straight from the bottle, I took the bottle from her and had a swig myself in order to hide my embarrassment.
“OK! Off we go to Hoshi’s Citroen!” Bubbling over with happiness, brave in her leather Indian outfit, Momoko gave the command and we, the reunited family, set off. Trailing along at the rear in my capacity as the eldest there, the one with the ratty, downhill appearance, I had a presentiment that in the end I would let myself be pushed into going along with Takashi’s extremely shaky plan. For the moment, I’d lost the sheer toughness needed for a confrontation with him. As the thought occurred to me, the warmth from the gulp of whisky suddenly promised to link up with a sense of expectation in the inner depths of my body. But when I tried to focus on it I was hindered by the sober good sense that sees so many perils in any attempt to achieve rebirth through self-release.
Mighty Forest
IN the very heart of the forest the bus halted without warning as though the engine had stalled. My wife was asleep in the back seat, wrapped in blankets from chest to toes, and as I stopped her mummylike form from rolling forward and restored her to her original position, I was suddenly afraid of the possible effects of this unnatural interruption of her slumber. The obstacle ahead of the bus was a young peasant woman with a large bundle on her back and something crouched perfectly still, like an animal, at her feet. Staring, I saw that it was a child squatting facing in the opposite direction. I could clearly distinguish the small, naked buttocks and, an unnaturally pale yellow against the dark setting of the forest, the small pile of excrement.
The forest road, hemmed in on both sides by close ranks of huge evergreens, fell gradually away from the front of the bus, and the woman and the child at her feet appeared to float about a foot above the ground. Without realizing it, I’d leaned the left half of my body out of the window as I watched. With a vague sense of fear, I was readying myself for some nameless, terrifying thing to come leaping upon us from behind the sunken boulders that my sightless right eye interposed darkly in my field of vision. The child’s evacuation dragged on pitifully. I sympathized with him, was overcome by the same need to hurry, the same fright and shame.
Above the forest road a narrow strip of wintry sky, walled in by the dense, dark foliage of evergreens as though it lay at the bottom of a deep ditch, stretched over our heads where we had halted. Slowly the afternoon sky sank toward us, fading as it came like a stream that changes color as it flows. At night, I told myself, the sky would close in on the vast forest as tightly as the shell of the abalone enfolds its flesh; the thought aroused claustrophobic feelings. Born and bred in the depths of this forest, I still couldn’t escape the same stifling sensation whenever I passed through it on the way to our valley. At the core of that sensation lay emotions inherited from those long-perished ancestors who, driven on endlessly by the mighty Chosokabe, had plunged deeper and deeper into the forest until, coming upon a spindle-shaped hollow that had resisted its encroachment, they settled there; it had a spring of wholesome water. My suffocating sensation was still charged with the same feelings that inspired the leader of those fugitives, the “first man” of our family line, as he plunged into the menacing shadows of the forest in search of the hollow he saw in his imagination. The Chosokabe is a creature of terrifying size that exists everywhere in time and space. My grandmother would use it to threaten me whenever I questioned her authority. “The Chosokabe will come from the forest and get you!” she would say, and the sound of her words would bring home not only to the infant but to herself, old woman of eighty that she was, the ever-present reality of the monstrous creature that still lived in the same age as ourselves. . . .
The bus had been traveling for five hours since leaving its base in the provincial town. At the fork where the road went over the hills, all the passengers except my wife and me transferred to another bus that descended around the edge of the forest to the sea. The road that runs from the town, plunges into the densest part of the forest, comes to our hollow, then runs on downward beside the river flowing from the valley to rejoin the bus route that branches off earlier toward the sea, is gradually falling into disrepair. The thought that this road we were traversing through the heart of the forest was slowly decaying struck home with a dull, unpleasant shock somewhere at the back of my mind. A rat obsessed with a dying road, I felt the eye of the forest staring at me from among cedars, pines, and several species of cypress, all of a green so murky that one perceived it almost as black.
I saw the peasant woman, the upper part of her body dragged backward by her load so that only her head was bent forward, moving her lips in vigorous speech. The child straightened up, slowly pulled up his trousers and, looking down as he did so at his own waste, made to touch it with the tip of his shoe. Without w
arning, the woman boxed his ear. Then, prodding him roughly before her while he protected his head with both hands, she made her way round to the side of the bus. Taking its new passengers on board, the bus set off once more through the menacing silence of the forest. Woman and child came determinedly to the back of the bus and took the seat directly in front of ours. The mother sat down by the window and the child sat sideways, lolling over the wooden armrest next to the aisle, so that the shaven head and the little pallid face in profile forced themselves on our gaze. With bloodshot eyes, red like plums, in which the traces of intoxication still lingered, my wife took note of the child. I too found my eyes drawn irresistibly and with loathing toward him. His head and the color of his skin were such as to bring back our worst memories. I was sure that the head and the bloodless pallor of the skin were loaded with insidious stimuli to the things that already saturated her inner being, ready to crystallize at the slightest provocation. They were a direct evocation of the day when our baby had been operated on for the thing on his head.
My wife and I had been waiting that morning in front of the patients’ elevator on the same floor as the operating theater. Eventually the outer doors had opened to announce the arrival of the iron cage of the elevator, but the second set of doors on the green wire-netting cage inside resisted the nurse’s efforts and refused to open.
“Baby doesn’t want to be operated on,” said my wife, peering through the wire even as she recoiled in horror as though tempted to run away.
Through the green wire mesh, in a dim, greenish light like sunlight filtering through summer foliage, we saw the baby’s head, shaven like a criminal’s, as he lay on the castered bed from the children’s ward. His tight-shut eyes were slits in skin that was whitish and dead-looking as though powdered. Standing on tiptoe, I could see on the far side of the head, in total contrast to its look of debility and uneasy tension, the orange-colored excrescence bulging with blood and spinal fluid, a living thing in vigorous yet mindless association with the baby’s head. The lump was awe-inspiring, a vivid witness to the presence of some grotesque power harbored within yet uncontrollable by the self. Might not we too—the pair who had given birth to this baby and to this growth filled with a power beyond his control—awaken one morning to find similar excrescences, crying out with life, protruding from our heads, while the spinal fluid metabolized rapidly and in great quantities between the lumps and all the organs associated with our souls? Might not we in our turn proceed to the operating theater, feeling with our shaven heads like brute criminals ? … The nurse gave the wire-mesh door a determined kick. The jolt made the baby open his mouth wide, all toothless and dark red like a wound, and start to cry. At that time, he still had the ability to express himself by crying.
“I feel as though the doctor’s going to come along and say, ‘Well, here’s your baby back,’ and present us with the amputated growth,” said my wife as the nurse bore off the baby’s bed through countless doors to the operating theater.
Her words brought home to me that both of us, she as much as myself, had felt a more positive reality in the swollen orange excrescence than in the pale, limp-limbed baby lying there with closed eyes.
The operation went on for ten hours. As we waited exhausted for it to end, I—not my wife—was summoned three times to the operating theater to give blood transfusions. The last time, the sight of the baby’s head all besmeared with his own blood and mine made me feel that he was being cooked in some bubbling mess of broth. So weakened were my mental faculties by loss of blood that an odd equation formulated itself in my mind : the removal of the baby’s lump was equal to the physical amputation of some part of my own body. I actually felt a sharp pain deep down inside me and had to struggle with an urge to demand of the doctors, so doggedly continuing the operation, “Are you sure you’re not robbing me and my son of something really vital?”
Eventually the baby came back to us, a creature no longer capable of any human reaction apart from gazing back at one with placid brown eyes, and I felt that I too had had a whole group of nerves cut away, thereby acquiring a profound insensitivity as a new characteristic. Nor was the loss apparent only in the baby himself and me; if anything, it was still more directly visible in my wife.
As the bus had plunged into the forest she had fallen silent, drinking whisky steadily from a pocket flask. Her behavior, I knew, would spread a ripple of scandal among the respectable provincials riding the bus, but I had no desire to stop her. Before going to sleep, however, she’d determined that she should be sober to begin the new life in the village in the valley, and had thrown the remainder of the whisky, flask and all, well back among the trees. I’d hoped that the moment of intoxication then leading her into sleep would be the last of its kind. Now, though, feeling beside me the hot reality of her eyes, still bloodshot with sleep, fixed rigidly on the peasant boy’s head, I abandoned any overoptimistic expectation that she would really start the new life sober. My one wish was to prevent an acute revival, here and now, of the dangerous emotional state associated with the baby’s tumor. But it was increasingly borne in on me that this wish wasn’t to be granted either. I keenly regretted the whisky she’d thrown away.
The conductress advanced toward the rear of the bus with her stomach thrust forward to preserve her balance. The young peasant woman ignored her and scowled forbiddingly, gazing out of the window. The child made no response to the conductress either, but I could tell, having had him under constant observation, that he was getting steadily tenser and tenser. It looked as though they had come and sat in the seat by ours in order to avoid the conductress.
“Tickets,” prompted the conductress. For a while the woman ignored the appeal, then suddenly broke into voluble speech. She attacked the conductress for demanding the prescribed fare for the whole run from the top of the hill down to the valley; she and the child had already walked two-thirds of the distance from the top; if the child hadn’t complained of bellyache (at this point she poked at the child’s shoulder as he clung to the wooden armrest), they could have walked all the way back. The conductress explained that the distance from the top down to the valley had recently been made the new minimum fare. It was a new policy of the bus company’s necessitated by poor returns on this route—another sign, I told myself, of the decay of the road through the forest. The conductress’s logic seemed temporarily to overwhelm the young countrywoman. But then there appeared on her ruddy plebeian face, hitherto so aflame with indignation, a reaction that struck me with mingled surprise and amusement. With a little giggle, she declared in a self-assured tone :
“Ain’t got no money.”
The boy was of course as pale and tense as ever. The conductress hesitated for a moment then, once more the helpless countrygirl, went to discuss the matter with the driver. It occurred to me that I might take advantage of the peasant woman’s odd little giggle as a first step to releasing the tension in my wife. I looked round at her and smiled, but saw that her neck and the lower part of her face were covered with goose pimples, even though the eyes fixed on the boy’s head gleamed with a feverish light. Seeing trouble in the offing, I hesitated, at a loss. Annoyance jumped about inside me with the aimless frenzy of a firecracker: why hadn’t I stopped her from throwing away the whisky bottle ? In desperation I took the plunge and made a choice.
“Let’s get off,” I said. “Taka will probably be at the bus stop to meet us, so we can ask the conductress to tell him to come and pick us up in the car.”
My wife looked at me doubtfully and inclined her head slowly, a diver moving against water pressure in the depths of fear. I could sense her mind teetering between the fear within herself and fear of being deserted by the bus in the heart of the forest.
Realizing that I wanted somehow to persuade her before terror of the forest as such grew and pinned her to her seat in the bus, I had to admit that, of the two of us, it was I who was frantically trying to flee from the phantom of the baby evoked by the peasant boy’s shaven head and
sickly skin.
“What if the telegram hasn’t arrived and Taka and the others aren’t there to meet us?”
“Even if we have to walk we can get down to the valley by nightfall. The kid was going to walk, wasn’t he?”
“Then I’d like to get off,” she said with an air of liberation mingled with an indefinable lingering apprehension that made me feel both relief and pity.
I signaled to the conductress, who was talking busily to the driver, all the while keeping a self-consciously vigilant eye on the moneyless peasant woman and her son.
“My brother should be waiting for us at the bus stop in the valley,” I said. “Would you give him our baggage and tell him to come to meet us in the car, please? We’re going to walk from here.” Under the stare of the conductress, in whose eyes a dull cloud of surprise had begun to form, I realized with consternation that I hadn’t thought up any pretext for our action that would seem reasonable to an outsider.
“I’m suffering from motion sickness,” said my wife, quickly sensing my predicament. But the conductress still looked dubious—or rather, went on chewing over what I’d just said, trying to understand.
“The bus doesn’t go into the valley,” she said. “The bridge was washed away in the flood.”
“Flood? In winter?”
“It was washed away in the summer.”
“Has it been left like that ever since?”
“The new bus stop is on this side of the bridge. The bus goes as far as that.”
“Then my brother will be waiting there,” I said. “The name’s Nedokoro.” But I wondered why they should have neglected until winter a bridge destroyed by summer floods.
“I know him, he came in a car,” put in the countrywoman, who had been eagerly listening to our conversation. “If he’s not at the stop, the boy can run up there. He knows the Nedokoros at Storehouse.”