by Kenzaburo Oe
“What will you do about the family grave, Mitsusaburo ?”
“We’ll have to leave it as it is, I imagine.”
“I suppose you know that S’s ashes are at the temple?” said Jin. But this much conversation had already exhausted her; dark shadows that somehow inevitably inspired disgust had gathered round her eyes, and her voice rattled as though countless air holes had formed in her throat. There was no denying that at such times Jin was grotesque in a way that went beyond normal human ugliness. I averted my eyes, reflecting with a sense of horror that in the end Jin would probably die of a heart attack. She’d already told Takashi, in fact, about her premonitions of death and how she’d been worrying whether her bloated body would fit into the furnace at the crematorium.
“Jin’s so fat she can hardly do any work,” Takashi had said sympathetically. “Yet still she’s obliged to eat enormous amounts every day and get fatter and fatter. She feels her whole life is quite meaningless. It’s something of a revelation to hear a horribly fat woman of forty-five say that her days spent solely in eating are pointless. It’s not just a passing mood of hers, either—she’s quite convinced, from every point of view, that her existence is useless. And still she has to go on eating those stupid mountains of food from morning to night. Now, there’s someone with real grounds for pessimism.”
“I’ll get S’s ashes from the temple,” I promised Jin as I went out of the kitchen. “I’ll go and ask for them today—I want to see the picture of hell they have at the temple while I’m at it.”
“If S was alive, he would never have sold the storehouse,” she muttered at my departing back in a hoarse, reproachful voice. “But then, what can you expect with Mitsusaburo as head of the family?”
I ignored her and went to look for the others in the storehouse, which stood at the rear of the courtyard enclosed by the main house and the outbuilding. The doors were open—not just the thick outer doors with fire-resistant plaster set into them, but the inner doors of board and wire netting as well. The two downstairs rooms were full of afternoon light that threw the black of the zelkova timbers and the white of the walls that enclosed them into sharp contrast. I stepped up inside and examined the numerous sword marks that scarred the woodwork. They still exuded the same harsh message that had intimidated me in my childhood. The fan painting that hung in the alcove in the room beyond bore a Roman alphabet, crudely written in Chinese ink and barely distinguishable by now against paper browned with age. Twenty years before, when S had first taught me how to read it, the signature “John Manj” in the bottom right-hand corner had already been hard to make out. Great-grandfather had met the castaway on his return from America when he slipped out of the forest and made his way to Nakanohama in Kochi. According to S, the inscription was one great-grandfather had got Manjiro to write for him on that occasion.
A faint sound like someone marking time came from upstairs. I set off up the narrow staircase and immediately banged my right temple on the hard end of a projecting beam. I groaned with pain, and red-hot particles flew about inside the spherical darkness of my sightless eye like the tracks of fission fragments in a cloud chamber. It recalled too the sense of taboo that had always kept me out of the storehouse.
For a moment I stopped, stunned, then put up a hand to wipe my cheek; it came away with blood on it as well as tears. I was pressing a handkerchief to my head when Takashi’s face peered down at me from the second floor.
“When your wife’s alone with another man, do you always warn them by knocking on the wall and waiting, Mitsu?” he said teasingly. “You’d be the ideal husband for adulterers!”
“Aren’t your bodyguards here, then?”
“They’re seeing to the Citroen. Teen-agers in the 1960s aren’t exactly interested in roof construction in traditional wooden buildings. I told them this was the only storehouse of its kind in the whole forest area, but they couldn’t have cared less.” His remark revealed the naive pride he took in showing off the architecture to his sister-in-law, who stood in the background.
I went upstairs and found my wife gazing up at the great beams of zelkova wood that supported the framework of the roof—too intent on them, in fact, to notice the blood flowing from the wound on my temple. Since I’ve always been prey to an irrational sense of shame whenever I bang my head against something, I was grateful. Eventually, she heaved an admiring sigh and turned round.
“What wonderful great timbers! They look as if they’d last another hundred years.”
I noticed that both their faces were flushed. It made me feel that the faintest echo of the word “adulterer” used by Takashi was still drifting about somewhere up in the rafters of the storehouse. But the feeling, I told myself, was unfounded. My wife was so aware of what had happened to the baby that, ever since, she’d promptly nipped in the bud any hint of sex. For both of us, to touch on sexual matters meant imposing on ourselves a shared sense of disgust and misery which neither was prepared to face. So any suggestion of it was immediately dropped.
“With a limitless supply of zelkova like this in the forest, you could build a storehouse for almost nothing,” she said.
“Don’t you believe it!” I replied in as casual a voice as I could muster, unwilling to let her know how determinedly I was suppressing the pain from the gash on my head. “It seems that building this one put quite a strain on great-grandfather. In fact, I’d say the construction was pretty unusual. Even if there was plenty of timber, remember it was built at a time when the village’s resources were utterly exhausted. I’m quite sure everyone found it very special. There was a farmers’ rising, in fact, in the winter of the very year it was built.”
“That’s certainly strange.”
“I imagine it was precisely because he foresaw the possibility of a rising that great-grandfather felt it necessary to build a fireproof building.”
“Great-grandfather makes me sick, Mitsu,” said Takashi. “He was so conservative, so careful, so farsighted. I’m sure his younger brother felt the same about him as I do. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gone against his brother and become a leader of the farmers. He was one of those who resisted, who had an eye on the trends of the times.”
“Don’t you think great-grandfather had his eye on the trends just as much as his brother? He went all the way to Kochi, didn’t he, just to pick up the latest knowledge from the West?”
“Surely it was the brother who went to Kochi?” Takashi objected. That was what he wanted to believe, so he was almost consciously ignoring the fact that it was wrong.
“No. It was great-grandfather who went to Kochi first, not his brother,” I said, taking a malicious pleasure in sabotaging his mistaken memory. “It’s just that some people say that later, after the rising, his brother fled to Kochi and never came back. If it’s true that one of the two brothers left the forest, met John Manjiro, and brought back the new knowledge, then it can be proved that it was greatgrandfather. John Manjiro was only in Kochi for a year after returning to Japan, from 1852 to 1853. At the time of the trouble in 1860, great-grandfather’s brother was eighteen or nineteen, so if he went to Kochi in 1852 or 1853 it means he left the forest around the age of ten or so. It’s not possible.”
“But,” said Takashi, shaken but persistent, “it was the younger brother who cleared a space deep in the forest and trained a batch of hotheaded farmers’ sons for the rising. The training methods must have been based on the knowledge of things Western that he brought back from Kochi. It isn’t likely, is it, that great-grandfather, who sided with those who suppressed the rebellion, would have taught his brother the necessary guerilla tactics? Or do you think the two opposing sides conspired to start the trouble ?”
“Perhaps,” I said with a conscious show of detachment, though I could hear my own voice sharpen with irritation. Ever since we were children I’d had to fight against my brother’s tendency to attribute scenes of heroic resistance to great-grandfather’s younger brother.
“Why, Mitsu—you’
re bleeding,” my wife exclaimed, her eyes on my temple. “How can you get so wrapped up in these old legends when you’re hurt and bleeding?”
“There’s something to be learned even from legends,” Takashi said irritably. It was his first open display of bad temper toward her.
She took the handkerchief still clasped in the hand hanging at my side, wiped my temple, and wetting her finger with saliva transferred it to the wound. My brother stared as though watching some obscure meeting of the flesh. Then the three of us went down the stairs in silence, keeping each other at a distance as if to avoid bodily contact. The storehouse wasn’t at all dusty, yet after some time spent inside it my nostrils felt dry and clogged, as though a film of dust were clinging to them inside.
Late that afternoon Takashi, my wife, and I, together with the teen-age couple, went to the temple to retrieve S’s ashes. Jin’s sons had run on ahead to let them know, so they could get out the picture of hell that great-grandfather had presented to the temple and display it just as they did on the Buddha’s Birthday. When we reached the Citroen parked in the open space in front of the village office, the local children amused themselves by poking fun at the car’s age and making snide remarks about the broad strip of tape over my right ear. We all ignored them except my wife, who with the good temper that went with a period of “recovery”—she hadn’t drunk anything since the previous night—seemed rather to enjoy it all, even the insults that the children hurled after the Citroen as it started off.
As we drove into the temple grounds the priest, who had been at school with S, was standing in the garden talking to a young man. His appearance, I noticed, was no different from what I remembered. A close-cropped, gleaming head of prematurely white hair crowned a good-natured, smiling face as smooth and antiseptic as an egg. He’d married a teacher from the primary school, but she’d run off to the town with a former colleague, not before having stirred up a scandal so open that everybody in the valley had known about it. He managed to maintain a smile like a sickly child’s throughout the whole episode, a fact that would have particularly impressed anyone who knows the cruel effect of such a misfortune on someone living in a valley community. Either way, he weathered the crisis without once losing that mild smile.
The grotesque features of the young man talking to him were in complete contrast to the priest’s. Most faces in our valley can be classified into one or the other of two types, but the face now watching us warily as we alighted from the Citroen was in a class of its own.
“He’s the leading figure in the group of young men who’re keeping the chickens,” Takashi explained to my wife and me. Getting out of the Citroen, he walked up to the youth and started discussing something with him in a low voice; the young man, it seemed, had been waiting to meet him at the temple. The rest of us were obliged to stay in the background, exchanging vague smiles with each other, during this exclusive dialogue. The young man had an enormous round head, the broad, helmetlike curve of his forehead giving the whole head the appearance of being a continuation of the face. The cheekbones projecting outward on each side and the blunt, square chin reminded one of nothing so much as a sea urchin in human guise. His eyes and lips, moreover, were set close about his nose in a way that suggested the face had been dragged outward by some powerful tractive force. Not only his face but the flaunted arrogance of manner awakened something in me that was not a memory, perhaps, but a premonition of disaster. Admittedly, my increasing tendency to shut myself up emotionally was making me show much the same reaction to anything unfamiliar and strongly characterized. . . .
Takashi brought the young man over to the Citroen, talking all the while in the same low voice. The two teen-agers still lurked inside the car, their favorite lair. Takashi put the young man in the back seat, gave an order to Hoshio at the wheel, and without further ado the Citroen drove off in the direction of the entrance to the valley.
“The van they use for carrying eggs has broken down, so he came to ask Hoshi to repair the engine,” Takashi explained with naive pride in the fact that all contact with the young men’s group took place through himself. It obviously satisfied his childlike sense of competition, which had been hurt in the argument about great-grandfather’s journey to Kochi.
“Weren’t the chickens supposed to be starving to death?” I asked.
“That’s the trouble—the young people have got their priorities all wrong,” the priest replied for Takashi, with a shy smile as though, as an inhabitant of the valley, he was ashamed of himself as well as the young men. “Sales of eggs are going so badly they can’t find the money to buy feed, and they ought to be working out some basic policy to deal with the situation, but all they can think about is a van for transporting the eggs. Of course, if the van went out of action too, then everything really would be over.”
We stepped up into the main hall of the temple and inspected the painting of hell. For me its rivers and forests of fire recalled the flaming red I’d seen on the backs of the dogwood leaves as they caught the sun that cloudy dawn after my hundred minutes in the pit. In particular, the dark blotches splashing the scarlet waves of the river of flames linked up directly with my memory of the spots that had begun to stain the dogwood leaves now that autumn had passed its peak. I was immediately absorbed in the hell picture. The color of the river of fire and the soft lines of the waves, so painstakingly drawn, brought me a strange peace of mind. Peace in abundance poured from the river of flames into my inner being. Among the flames, the multitude of the dead cried out with arms lifted to the sky and hair on end as though fanned by some fierce wind. Some of them were invisible save for skinny, angular buttocks and legs sticking up into the air. Yet even their varied expressions of suffering contained something that brought me peace; for despite their manifest pain, the bodies that expressed this pain gave the impression of participating in some solemn sport. They seemed to be at home with suffering. The male ghosts, who stood on one bank with penises bleakly exposed as flaming rocks struck them on the head, belly, and buttocks, gave the same impression. The female ghosts being driven toward the forest of flames by demons brandishing iron clubs seemed almost intent on preserving the comfortably familiar chains—the bonds of tormentor and tormented—that tied them to the demons. I explained how I felt about it to the priest.
“The dead in hell have been suffering for such a terribly long time that they’ve got used to it by now,” the priest agreed. “It may be they’re putting on an appearance of suffering just to maintain the proper order of things. You know, the way the duration of suffering in Buddhist hells is calculated is most eccentric. For example, one day and night in this Burning Hell consists of sixteen thousand years of days and nights, each of which is equivalent to sixteen hundred years in the human world. That’s quite a long time! What’s more, the dead in this particular hell have to endure a full sixteen thousand years of those longest days and nights—plenty of time for even the most backward ghost to get thoroughly used to things!”
“You see this demon here who looks like a lump of rock—the one facing the other way, putting everything he’s got into his work? His body’s covered with black holes,” my wife said. “I don’t know whether it’s the shadow of his muscles or scars, but he looks very dilapidated, doesn’t he? That female ghost being beaten by him looks a good deal healthier. You’re right, Mitsu—the dead seem so used to the demons that they’re not scared any more.”
She went along with my views, but gave no sign of deriving the same sense of mental release from the picture. If anything, the radiant good temper she’d shown since that morning seemed to be fading. I noticed, too, that Takashi had turned away from everyone and stood stubbornly silent, facing the golden gloom of the temple’s inner sanctuary.
“What do you think, Taka?” I said, turning to him unceremoniously. He ignored my question and, looking round, said abruptly:
“Why don’t we get S’s ashes and go, without bothering about pictures.”
The priest told his y
ounger brother, who had been watching us curiously from the veranda of the main hall, to take Takashi and get the urn.
“Taka always used to be scared of the hell picture, even when he was a kid,” said the priest. Then, turning the conversation back to the young villager who had come to see Takashi, he launched into a critique of everyday life in the valley. “Whatever the question facing them, the valley folk refuse to take a long-term view. They immediately get into deep water and start flapping about ineffectually—the way the young man came to get Takashi’s friend to mend the van is typical. They fuss for ages over trivialities, with the irresponsible notion that when things finally get quite out of hand the situation will somehow change and solve their difficulties for them. The supermarket affair is a case in point. Every single shop in the village, with the exception of the liquor-and-sundries store—and only the liquor side, at that—has gone under to the supermarket. But they do nothing to protect themselves, and most of them are in debt to the supermarket in some way or other. I’ve an idea they’re expecting a miracle: just when the situation’s quite out of control and there’s no hope of paying off their debts, the supermarket vanishes in a puff of smoke and nobody presses for repayment any more. A single supermarket has driven them to the point where, if this were the old days, the only possibility left would be for the whole village to pack its bags and leave.”
At this point Takashi arrived back from the ossuary carrying a bundle wrapped in a white cotton cloth, his despondency and bad temper transformed into something close to elation.
“I found the steel frames of S’s glasses in the urn with his ashes,” he said to me. “They reminded me exactly of how he looked when he wore them.”
We got into the Citroen, which one of the young men had brought back to the temple grounds for Hoshio and Momoko.
“You hold S’s urn, will you, Natsumi? Mitsu’s not to be trusted with it,” Takashi said barefacedly. “He can’t even carry his own head around without bumping it.”