by Kenzaburo Oe
Yes, I thought, if all the trees in the forest enclosing the valley were damaged by frost, a stench like the clammy mouths of a million dogs would engulf the villagers. The idea made me feel that I too might lose my balance on the crumbling ice needles. Retiring to the house together in horror-stricken silence, we finished our breakfast in a gloom utterly different from the atmosphere earlier, when Takashi had been at the center of our group.
In the afternoon, the postman brought a letter for Momoko and informed us that we had a parcel waiting at the post office. It contained an “Easy Stool” device that my wife had read about in a magazine advertisement and asked her family to buy. According to the catalog, it was rather like a chair without a seat. Placing it over a Japanese-style toilet, the user could evacuate in the same posture as on a Western one, with no strain on the knees. She’d conceived the idea of presenting Jin with one, thus relieving “Japan’s Fattest Woman” of the strain that the weight of her enormous body must impose on her at such times. Admittedly, there was some doubt whether the light metal tubes of which the Easy Stool was constructed would stand up to a weight of 290 pounds or more, and whether the old-fashioned Jin could ever be persuaded even to use such a thing. But the arrival of the Easy Stool whetted our interest and, bored with morbidly waiting at home for the others, we set off at once down the stone-strewn trail.
As we passed the supermarket we stopped to look at the unusual bustle of people there. The lively atmosphere immediately reminded me of the crowds at the shrine festival during my years in the valley. A little apart from the throng at the doors of the supermarket, some children in their best kimonos were engrossed in an old-fashioned stonekicking game; their gaiety, too, linked up with my memories of the festival. One small girl was dressed in a scarlet kimono with a woven gold and green phoenix design. The kimono, which must have passed into her parents’ hands during the food shortage in return for a certain amount of rice, was tied with a silver sash, and there was a great gold-colored spherical bell the size of a man’s fist at the back. She wore a crimson collar of imitation fur round her neck. Each time she kicked a stone, the bell set up a noisy jangling that startled the other children with her. A bright red banner hung from the eaves of the storehouse, whose walls had been knocked out and replaced with plastic. The banner bore in green letters the legend:
3S2D, the store with everything,
The store that everyone’s talking about,
Announces now, in gratitude for your patronage,
A fabulous grand sale!?
Don’t miss this last special sale of the year!
Store heated throughout.
“ ‘Store heated throughout’—” I said, “that’s really something, isn’t it?”
“All it means is they’ve got a few potbellied stoves around the place,” said my wife, who had already taken Momoko there several times to buy supplies.
The women who had done their shopping made no move to leave, but hung around in front of the broad glass window that stretched between the exit and entrance (the glass was covered with the prices of various articles, written in white paint, so that we couldn’t see inside from where we stood). One of the group had her forehead pressed against the pane, peering in beyond the maze of white lettering. Before long, a farmer’s wife came out wearing a multicolored blanket over her shoulders and head like a South American Indian woman and carrying in her arms a bag full of purchases. An eddy of envious sighs swirled up from the women stationed outside. As the women around her stretched out monkey-paws to touch the blanket, the farmer’s wife, a smallish woman, wriggled and squealed with high-pitched, excited laughter as though they were tickling her. Having been away from the valley for a long time, I had the impression that they must all be strangers to the village, but that could hardly be the case; this type of behavior must have developed spontaneously among the inhabitants of the valley.
We were moving away in silence when we saw the young priest from the temple coming out behind the women, likewise clutching a bundle of shopping to his chest. The flush on his good-natured, smiling face deepened steadily as he noticed us and came walking over. Beneath the close-cropped, prematurely gray hair carefully rinsed to a silvery sheen, the rosy blush on his cheeks and around his eyes gave his whole face the air of a newborn rabbit.
“I came to buy rice cakes for the New Year,” he explained, looking greatly embarrassed.
“Rice cakes? Have the parishioners dropped the custom of bringing them to the temple?”
“None of the families in the valley pound rice to make their own cakes nowadays, you see. People either get them at the supermarket in exchange for the special rice used in them, or they buy them for cash. It’s typical of the way the basic units of life in the valley are gradually breaking down, a bit at a time. It’s like the way the cells of a blade of grass break up. You must have seen a blade of grass under a microscope when you were at school, Natsumi?”
“Yes.”
“If you remember, each cell in the blade has a fixed shape. When it collapses and becomes soggy and formless it means the cell is either damaged or dead. As these formless cells increase, the blade of grass rots. It’s the same with life in the valley, isn’t it? You can hardly expect it to go on when each of the basic elements gradually loses its shape. But I can’t very well tell the village people they ought to start sweating over their rice-pounding again, using the same old pestles and stone mortars that their fathers used. They would only assume I said it because I wanted the cakes!” He gave a little laugh.
The plant analogy had a dire effect on us, and all we could manage was the feeble smile my wife gave in response to the priest’s laugh. Two or three more women came out of the supermarket and were greeted by the others waiting outside, but one of them, a middle-aged peasant whose face was flushed a deep copper color with excitement suddenly exclaimed, “What junk!” in a voice harsh with self-derision. Frowning and giggling at the same time, she was brandishing a blue plastic toy in the shape of a golf club.
“A golf club’s no use in this valley, is it?” my wife said wonderingly, “even a toy one. I wonder why she buys such things.”
“She didn’t buy it,” the priest said, turning his face away from us. “The things they’ve got that aren’t in bags are gifts. The blanket, the toy—the whole lot of them, they’re all gifts. There’s a lottery stall just inside the exit where you can win all kinds of stupid prizes. That’s why even those who’ve finished their shopping hang around, just to keep an eye on other people’s little windfalls.”
As the priest and I walked toward the post office with Natsumi between us, we discussed the disaster that had befallen the chickens and the young men’s association. He already knew about the death of the birds, but he turned pale when he heard that Takashi had gone into town to discuss ways of handling the disaster with the Emperor.
“If they were going to ask Takashi to do that, why didn’t they contact the Emperor before the chickens died? But then everything they do is at sixes and sevens! They only act when it’s already too late.”
“Perhaps they wanted to stay as independent of the Emperor as possible,” I ventured in my capacity as neutral observer, “even if they had to create a situation where they were forced into total submission to him.”
“Actually, the real cause of their failure in the first place was that they didn’t want a contract to hand over all the eggs directly to the supermarket, and tried to hold on to their right to expand sales routes to other markets and retail stores. It was an odd idea to begin with. You see, the land and building where they kept the chickens both belong to the owner of the supermarkets. In theory, the land where the Korean settlement stood was sold after the war to the Koreans who’d been doing forced labor in the forest, but before long one of them got a monopoly on the land by buying it up from the rest. He went on developing and developing, and the result is the Emperor you see today.”
I felt a deep sense of shock. Even after they’d heard that Takashi
and I were selling the storehouse to the owner of the supermarkets, neither Jin’s family nor our other old acquaintances in the valley had said anything about the Emperor’s earlier career.
“I only hope Taka’s aware of the circumstances in negotiating with the Emperor,” my wife said. “I’m worried whether the young men’s group has really told Takashi the whole story.” She was quite obviously suspicious of the Sea Urchin for having conferred with Takashi in a low voice, resolutely ignoring us.
I had too much to occupy me, however, to wonder idly what petty frustrations Takashi might meet in his positive attempt to cooperate with the Emperor. What oppressed my whole mind was the complete silence of the villagers concerning the real nature of the Emperor.
“Even if he’s taken Japanese nationality by now, to give a man of Korean origin the title ‘Emperor’ suggests some deep-rooted malice,” I said. “It’s just the kind of thing the valley folk would do. But I wonder why nobody ever told me ?”
“It’s simple, Mitsu,” said the priest. “The valley folk don’t want to admit at this stage that they’re under the economic control of a Korean who was felling timber as a forced laborer in the forest only twenty years ago. And I imagine the same feeling, shut up inside them, is what made them deliberately choose to call him Emperor. The valley’s hopelessly decadent.”
“You may be right,” I agreed somberly. I had to admit that there were suggestions of a very pervasive decadence. Something indefinably murky and vicious seemed to lie at the heart of the relationship between the villagers and the Emperor. “But there’s been nothing directly indicating decadence, at least in what I’ve seen and heard since I came back to the valley.”
“They’ve got used to it,” said the priest. “And they’ve learned the art of concealing it from outsiders.” He spoke as though divulging some secret.
“Just what kind of man is this Emperor?”
“You mean, is he a villain or not? I have to admit, Mitsu, I’ve nothing directly against him. Where business practices are concerned, the valley folk are, if anything, worse than him. All the same, though, it’s they who feel the pinch in the long run. The chickens are a case in point. Sometimes I get anxious, wondering what he might be plotting for the people in the valley, but at the moment that’s as far as it goes, so I can’t say anything.”
“All the same, it’s very unpleasant. It makes me increasingly aware there’s something wrong with the valley as a whole.”
“For us it’s more than just unpleasant.” His eyes rested on me for a moment with a sharp look, then he went on sadly, “I can’t explain it, Mitsu. The one thing that’s certain is that the valley’s decadent.”
He adjusted the bag of rice cakes in his arms and walked off briskly as though afraid of what I might ask next.
I walked on rapidly down the road. My wife, left behind, came trotting after me. We got the parcel containing the Easy Stool at the post office and went back up the graveled road again. At the supermarket my wife stopped and bought rice cakes for us and Jin’s family. Though not completely untouched by the sense of outrage and resistance I felt toward the storehouse remodeled into supermarket, she at least didn’t find it an insuperable obstacle. She came out bearing a green plastic frog that she’d won.
“To think I’d get this in the first lottery I’ve won since we were married!” she complained disappointedly.
Unwrapping the Easy Stool, we discovered a simple apparatus made by bending two tubes into U-shapes and connecting them with supports. The reality gave us food for thought : to persuade Jin to use such an object was going to be no easy matter. She might well dismiss it as “junk” with a venom many times more intense than the woman standing outside the store had injected into the same word; or she might assume it was a laborious attempt on my part to poke fun at her. So I left it to my wife to explain the Easy Stool. In the meantime I summoned Jin’s children into the front garden and made a small bonfire of the rope and cardboard in which it had been packed. As I did so, I was busy pinching out disturbing sparks of speculation concerning this Emperor whom I had yet to meet.
The children had already heard that the chickens belonging to the young people’s group had been wiped out. According to Jin’s sons, the young men were patrolling the chicken houses in case the valley folk came to steal the dead birds. What had once been the Korean settlement was like a filthy beehive, completely buried beneath the many-tiered dwellings of the chickens and the shelves for drying out their droppings, and the whole area was enveloped in a dense effluvia. That morning the unfortunate creatures lay dead, each in its own narrow compartment. Jin’s sons had been with the other children to have a look and had been driven away by the young men on patrol.
“They were so mad, you’d have thought we’d done it!” complained Jin’s eldest boy. “Who’d want to steal a lot of dead chickens, I ask you? Unless they’re so angry they did it themselves,” he added with an indescribable blend of mildness and guile.
And Jin’s skinny sons laughed in shrill unison. It was clear that their mocking laughter concealed the same cold indifference toward the young men’s group and its failure to raise chickens as shown by all the adults in the valley. For the first time I felt pity for the group, caught between the Emperor—who by now I’d come to think of as some cunning monster—and the equally cunning grown-ups in the valley. It had been the same with the group of young veterans whose violent activities had culminated in S’s death: the attitude taken toward them by the adults who had used them for their own purposes was founded in a deep-seated wariness and contempt. Not until I’d escaped to the outside world where I could look back on daily life in the village with objectivity—not until I myself had passed the age at which S had died—did I appreciate the truth of this. One difference, of course, was that in the past the children had gone against the adults and idolized the young men, whereas the kids today were as indifferent to the young men’s group as to the grown-ups themselves.
The bonfire burned itself out, leaving a warm black sore in the frozen soil. The children, pointlessly, stamped it down.
“You can go indoors now,” said my wife, coming back from the outbuilding. “There are some rice cakes for you.”
But they ignored her well-meant information and went on stamping at the remains of the bonfire. They were too self-conscious, had too much pride concerning anything to do with food. I wondered if they might be thin because their mother, whose hatred of her own enormous appetite made her feel that all food bore the thorns of suffering, had implanted a dislike of it in them too.
“Jin was very pleased,” my wife said.
“She didn’t get angry?”
“When she first saw it she said you were ‘trifling’ with her, but I finally got her to understand that I was the one who’d ordered it. She actually used the word ‘trifle.’ ”
“Yes, she would. It used to be an everyday word here in the valley, at least until the time when I was a kid. Whenever I made a joke, mother would tell me off—said I was ‘trifling’ with my parents. How about it, though—do you think this controversial gadget will be any use to Jin?”
“I think so. She’ll have to be careful not to fall over sideways and hurt herself, but the first tryout at least was successful.” She refrained from further details on account of the children, who were obstinately hanging about with ears pricked, and said without warning, “Jin asked me, so I told her about the baby.”
“Ah, well. Anybody who’d taken along an appliance like that would naturally want to make some such confession of his own, if only to make the other person feel less embarrassed.”
“You won’t be so good-natured when you hear what Jin had to say about it. Not, of course, that I believe what she says.” She seemed to be fighting against some barrier as she spoke. “Jin said she wondered if the baby’s deformity was due to heredity on your side.”
A wave of burning anger swept through me. For a moment it was enough to purge my mind of the ominous shadow cast by the
Emperor. I struggled to set my defenses in order, flushing with ill-focused apprehension, as though under attack by an unidentifiable enemy.
“The grounds for her suspicion are really terribly trivial,” she went on hastily, turning red in response to the flush that had spread over my whole face. “It’s just that once, when you were still too young to go to primary school, you had a bad fit of convulsions.”
“I had a fit and fainted while I was watching the school play,” I said with a sense of relief that was deep in proportion to the first shock, though I could still feel the lingering heat of anger in every corner of my body.
Jin’s sons shrieked with laughter. Perhaps their childish clamor with its determination to insult both my wife and me served to settle our psychological account, for when I scowled at them they retreated hastily, still laughing and quite undismayed, in search of their corpulent mother and the rice cakes. We ourselves went back to the fireplace. I felt I must tell her the precise nature of the evil spirit that had visited me without warning as a small child when I was watching the school play, that I must destroy the seeds of suspicion that otherwise would surely grow inside her tonight when she got drunk.