The Silent Cry

by Kenzaburo Oe

  The play in question, which was frequently talked about as the last to be given at the primary school until school theatricals were started again after the war, must have been the one held in the autumn of the year the war began. My father was in northeast China doing work of an unspecified nature that remained a mystery not only to us children but to grandmother, who was still alive then, and to mother as well. For the sake of that work, he would sell enough fields to provide the money to cross the straits and spend more than half every year in China. Our eldest brother was at Tokyo University and S at a middle school in the nearby town, so the family in the house in the valley consisted of grandmother and mother, Jin, and the children—myself, my younger brother, and our newly born sister. So it was Jin and we three children who set out that day, bearing the invitation to the school play that had been addressed to father. Takashi and I sat on either side of Jin, who had the baby on her back, our legs dangling from wooden chairs in the middle of the very front row in the largest classroom of the primary school. I could recall the scene as clearly as though I had a third eye up in the classroom ceiling that gave me a bird’s-eye view.

  About a yard in front of us a stage had been made by placing two platforms together, and it was on this that the older pupils performed their play. It began with a number of them, wearing cotton towels round their heads (judging from the number of children in the advanced course, there couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen of them onstage, but to my childish eyes they were a small crowd), going through the motions of cultivating the fields. In short, they were farmers in olden times. Soon they laid aside their spades and began practicing fighting, using axes and sickles as weapons. Their leader appeared, a youth of extraordinary beauty even to my immature eyes, and under his leadership the armed peasants trained for the battle in which they were to take the head of the most powerful man in the clan. A black bundle represented the head, and the farmers were divided into two groups who practiced seizing the dummy from each other. In the second act, a man appeared in splendid costume and warned the farmers against taking the notable’s head, but they were already too inflamed to listen to him, so he told them that he would take the head himself. A figure in a mask went past the dark place where the farmers lay in ambush, and without warning the character in the splendid costume fell upon him with his sword. The role of the man in the mask was played by a pupil wearing a black cloth over his head, with a black ball fastened to the top, making him a figure of terror considerably taller than the other actors. The “real” head of the man attacked with the sword tumbled to the stage with a loud thud, whereupon his assailant cried out to the farmers in hiding:

  “Lo! My brother’s head!”

  The farmers removed the mask, recognized the head of their young leader, and wept bitterly for shame.

  Jin had already told me the plot and I’d seen the play many times in rehearsal, so I was completely familiar with the mechanics of the scene, but even so (either at the moment the “real” head made of a bamboo basket filled with stones fell to the stage, or when the cry of “Lo! My brother’s head!” so startled me, or again—to relate things exactly as I remember them—at the critical moment when the two things converged) I was seized with fear, collapsed screaming on the floor, went into convulsions and lost consciousness. When I came to, I’d already been carried home and grandmother was at my bedside saying to my mother, “Heredity’s a dreadful thing, even in a greatgrandchild.” I was so afraid that I kept my eyes shut and my body rigid, pretending still to be unconscious.

  “Do you remember that when my first translation appeared I got a letter from a retired teacher at the primary school?” I said to my wife. “He was assistant principal at the time of the school play. His subject was mathematics, but he was also studying local history, and it was he who wrote the play. But the war began that winter. The following year the system changed to ‘national schools.’ There was a fuss about the play, he said in his letter, and he was demoted to the rank and file of teachers. I wrote back asking him if great-grandfather had really killed his younger brother, and got a reply saying he now subscribed to the view that in actual fact my great-grandfather had allowed his younger brother, ringleader in the rising, to escape to Kochi. I also asked about the exact circumstances of my father’s death, but in his answer he said that my mother, who must have known something about it, was not only unwilling to understand its significance but tried her very best to forget it, so that by now there wasn’t a soul who knew anything definite about it.”

  “I wonder if Taka isn’t planning to meet that teacher,” my wife said.

  “It’s true that Taka’s interested in ferreting out various secrets and facts about the people who died in our family, but I doubt whether the historian will be able to satisfy Taka’s taste for the heroic,” I said, and broke off the conversation.

  At the outbreak of the war, father had let us know that he was abandoning his work in China and coming home, but had then disappeared without trace until three months later, when his body was handed over to my mother by the Shimonoseki police. The circumstances of his death were suspicious and rumors abounded: he’d been struck down by a heart attack on board the ferry; had thrown himself overboard just as they were entering harbor; or had died under investigation by the police. But my mother, returning to the village after going to fetch the body, refused to say anything about his death. After the war, brother S had been so irritated by the blank refusal he met every time he tried to worm details of father’s death out of her that it had provided the immediate motive, at least, for his plan to take her to the mental hospital and have her examined.

  Around dusk a sudden breeze sprang up at the entrance to the valley, ruffling the spindle-shaped hollow as it came and bringing to the houses in the valley a strange stench, like mounds of burning animal matter, that induced an immediate physical distress and nausea. My wife and I went out into the front garden with handkerchiefs pressed over our noses and mouths and gazed down toward the valley and beyond, but all we could see was a little white smoke rising in the air. Even that wasn’t particularly distinct, and soon lost itself in the swirling billows of new mist, leaving nothing in the reddish black depths of the twilight sky but shreds of smoke that tried to rise above the heavy layer of mist only to break and disperse. Where the black forest gave them a background, they stood out white and shining like gobs of saliva.

  Jin’s husband and sons had come out of the outbuilding and were standing in a group a few paces behind us, also watching the lower reaches of the sky. The boys were busily snuffing the air trying to identify the smell. Their small noses, like dark fingers, noisily and vigorously asserted their existence in the steadily deepening gloom. In front of the village office, too, a number of black figures had appeared and were looking up at the sky.

  It was completely dark by the time Takashi and his bodyguards came home. They were all equally grubby and exhausted, but Hoshio was silent whereas Takashi and Momoko were in high spirits. My brother had kept his promise and brought half a dozen bottles of whisky for my wife, who winced involuntarily at the sight of them standing there in a row. He’d also bought a leather jacket for Hoshio and a skirt for Momoko. But despite their new clothes, the same strange odor that had shrouded the valley hung about them even more closely, like a protective membrane.

  “What are you two looking so doubtful about?” Takashi asked, deliberately misinterpreting our reaction to the smell they gave off. “Anyone’d think we’d been killed in an accident deep in the forest and come back to haunt you. Admittedly, we came at top speed along an icy trail and in mist, driving a ramshackle old truck with a lousy clutch, but Hoshi handled it like a genius. He took that dark forest road with as little trouble as a dog clattering along an icy road on its claws. A mechanical age obviously produces a special breed of men whose sixth sense is oriented to machines.”

  He was clearly attempting to cheer Hoshio up, but the teen-age technician refused to show any favorable response
. Either his nerves were frayed by the mad dash along that dangerous trail, or some other trying experience had sapped his immature energies.

  “Taka,” I said outright, “you may not be a ghost, but you stink!”

  “Who wouldn’t, after burning several thousand chickens?” He gave a short laugh. “We stripped all the boards off the chicken houses and burned everything—stiff chickens, soft shit and all. God, the stink! I’m sure it’s soaked right into our blood.”

  “Didn’t you get any complaints from people?”

  “You bet we did! But we just let them talk. In the end a cop came—after all, it was quite a bonfire. But when he saw four or five of the group blocking the end of the bridge, he kept quiet and went home again. So the young men have discovered they’ve nerve enough to stand up to the police. They’re quite bucked about it. Several thousand chickens may have died and gone up in smoke, but thanks to them the group’s that little bit wiser. So it wasn’t all a waste.”

  “There was no need to scare the cop away,” Hoshio broke in as though he couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “What’s the point, anyway? They got the better of him because he was alone, but if reinforcements had come they wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

  I was reminded of his persistence in challenging me late that night when we were waiting for Takashi at the airport. Hoshio was obviously the sort of young man who insisted on his pet ideas not only in defense of his patron deity but even when they worked against him.

  “But Hoshi—once it starts snowing and communications with the town and the village on the coast are cut, there’ll only be a single cop to deal with anyway. When you were a kid, I bet they threatened they’d ‘tell the policeman’ if you weren’t good.”

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t fight the cops,” Hoshio countered stubbornly. “That June, I backed you up whatever you did, didn’t I ? But why get into trouble with the police just for a bunch of chicken farmers? That’s what gets me.”

  Suddenly Momoko, who till then had been reading letters from her family, looked up and intervened in a mocking, singsong voice as if they’d been mere kids:

  “Hoshi talks like that, you see, because he wants to monopolize you, Takashi. There’s no point in arguing, Hoshi will only go on bitching like a girl. Let’s have supper and go to bed. Natsumi’s cooked up something good.”

  The young man turned pale and scowled at Momoko, but excitement had left him speechless, so the argument ended there.

  “How about the negotiations with the Emperor?” I asked, though I was sure already, from Takashi’s reluctance to launch into his report on the main proceedings, that the answer would be unfavorable.

  “No go. It looks as though the young men will have all their work cut out to avoid getting still further into his clutches. The only practical proposal he made was that we should burn the chickens, all of them. I imagine he was afraid the valley folk would eat the dead chickens and sales of foodstuffs would go down at his supermarket. When I got back and said we were going to burn the chickens, some of the villagers gave me dirty looks, so it seems his fears were justified. If you ask me, though, the sheer futility of pouring gasoline on several thousand chickens and cremating them has done something, at least, to turn the self-indulgent greed in their soggy, half-baked brains into a sharper, tougher hatred.”

  “I wonder what kind of happy ending they had in mind when they sent you to town?” I asked, heavy-hearted.

  “They didn’t have anything in mind. They’ve no imagination at all. They probably expected me to use my imagination on their behalf. But my aim in going to town wasn’t to serve up my imagination on a plate. I wanted to open their bleary eyes to the truth and make them realize the desperate hunger in their bellies!” He laughed.

  “Did you know the Emperor originally came from the Korean settlement?”

  “He told me so himself today. He said he was in the settlement the day S was killed. So I’ve got a personal reason for joining the young men in opposing him.”

  “But Taka—I get the impression that if, for example, you wanted to find justifications for ganging up with your group against that poor village policeman, you could find any number, both public and private,” I said, drawing the conversation back to his argument with Hoshio in an attempt to prevent his remarks from setting up new waves of anxiety in me concerning the supermarket tycoon. “To me, Hoshi’s approach seems fairer than yours.”

  “ ‘Fair’? Do you still talk of justice?” he asked with an expression so despondent that even I felt chilled as I watched. And he suddenly fell silent, whereupon Momoko, who for some time past had been murmuring “Let’s eat” in an effort to get us to the table, finally seized the chance to address him directly.

  “All of them back home have read the book on gorillas that Mitsu translated,” she declared. “They say they feel a lot happier now they know I’m under the same roof as such a distinguished scholar. Mitsu’s a real member of the establishment, isn’t he?” The show of being impressed was obviously phoney.

  “Mitsu may have withdrawn from social life,” commented my wife, who had already downed her first glass of whisky, “but he’s still a member of the establishment all right. That should be obvious to someone like you, Taka, who’re just the opposite type.”

  “Right,” said Takashi, averting his eyes from me. “Perfectly obvious. Great-grandfather and grandfather—and their wives too—were the same type as Mitsu. Almost all the other people in our family died prematurely, but they lived on comfortably and peacefully into old age. You know, Natsumi, Mitsu will be ninety before he so much as gets cancer. And then it’ll only be a mild case!”

  “If you ask me, you’re a lot too eager to find types in our family line,” I countered, reluctant to give up. But no one apart from Hoshio paid any attention. “Unless you find you yourself are that type, all your efforts will have been directed at an imaginary world, and no real help at all.”

  After supper, Takashi gave my wife half of the advance he’d got from the Emperor, but she was already drunk and showed no interest. I was about to pocket it myself when he said :

  “Mitsu—how about contributing fifty thousand yen to the football team I’m forming to train the young men’s association? I bought ten balls in town; they’re in the Citroen. But expenses are piling up.”

  “Are footballs so expensive?” I asked meanly. Takashi had been on his university football team.

  “I bought the balls with my own money. But some of the prospective team members go to the next town every day to work as laborers, you see. If I don’t give them a daily allowance for a while, they won’t so much as look at a football.”

  A Strange Sport

  AS I slept I could hear, in the blackness enveloping my dark form, the sound of bamboo splitting in the cold. The sound turned into a sharp steel claw and left a scratch on my hot sleeping head. My dream shifted scenes; a series of images dealing with the peasant rising in the valley flowed uninterrupted into memories of the day near the end of the war when one adult from every household in the valley had been mobilized to go and cut bamboo in the great bamboo grove. Then the series ran back on itself in a new sequence that led once more to that fateful year of 1860. I sank again into the depths of sleep, indulging a craven, uneasy temptation to let the familiar bad dreams drag on indefinitely rather than waken and face the Emperor, with his sturdy Korean body and inscrutable expression, and all the other new worries that had risen to trouble me. . . .

  In my new dream, poised in time between 1860 and the last days of the war, the farmers—dressed in the standard khaki civilian dress with steel helmets on their backs, but with their hair done up in old-fashioned topknots—were busy cutting huge quantities of bamboo spears. In their persons, the men who brandished these spears as they carried all before them in the battle of 1860 were coeval with those who in 1945 were to have made last-ditch assaults on the armor-plated flanks of planes and landing craft. My mother was there with them, damaging the roots of the bamboo
as she swung her ax about. She was so scared of any kind of sharp instrument that just to take hold of an ax was enough to make her feel faint, so she hacked blindly at the bamboo, the sweat beading her ashen face, her eyes tight shut. The bamboo grew so close that an accident was inevitable. Quite suddenly mother gave a great flourish of the ax and promptly dashed the handle and the back of her hand against the bamboo behind her. The ax glanced off and struck the crown of her head with a loud crack. Unhurriedly, she lowered the ax into the undergrowth, and in equally leisurely fashion put her hand to her head, then held it up before her eyes, gazing at the red stain—a bright red, like the colored cakes served at Buddhist memorial services—in the hollow of her palm. I stood rooted to the ground by a disgust and horror that reached down to the depths of my being. But mother on the contrary seemed to recover her vitality and said triumphantly to me: “I’ve hurt myself! Now I’ll be excused training!” Abandoning ax and damaged bamboo, she moved off down the slope, seeming almost to glide on her knees over the undergrowth.

  As my mother and I lay low in the storehouse, a squad of villagers shouldering bamboo spears came climbing up the graveled road. Their commander was Takashi, of indeterminate age. Since he was the only person in the valley who had actually seen America and the Americans, they doubtless saw him as the most reliable man to lead them with their spears against the American forces soon due to land on the coast and attack the town. But the squad’s first objective was the storehouse in which mother and I were concealed.

  “They can raze the main house to the ground, but the storehouse won’t burn! It didn’t burn in 1860, either!” said my mother, whose hair was thinning unpleasantly at the forehead above her broad face. “Your great-grandfather, you know, drove the rioters away by firing his gun through the loophole in the storehouse.”