by Kenzaburo Oe
“But the kind of rising that occurred in 1860 wouldn’t be possible today,” the priest replied, regaining his customary smile. “And the time’s past when a killing match between the Korean settlement and the valley folk could have taken place without any police intervention, as happened just after the war. In a peaceful age like the present, not even Takashi could set himself up as leader of a riot, so I shouldn’t really worry.”
“Incidentally,” I said, taking advantage of the smile to put out a feeler, “is there anything in this diary that might offend a good pacifist? If there is, I think I’d better give it to Takashi. Among the various human types found in the Nedokoro family, I’m the kind that refuses to be inspired to heroic thoughts by the 1860 business. It’s the same even in my sleep: far from identifying with great-grandfather’s intrepid brother, I have wretched dreams in which I’m a bystander cowering in the storehouse, incapable even of firing a gun like great-grandfather.”
“You think, then, it would be better to give the diary to Takashi, do you?” said the priest, whose smile had frozen momentarily.
I took the purple diary off my dead friend’s Penguin book and, putting it in the pocket of my overcoat, went down with the priest to the primary school playground where Takashi was practicing football with his new comrades.
In a strong breeze that blew aimlessly about the valley beneath a blue sky, the young men were kicking the football around in silence and with suffocating intensity of purpose. The Sea Urchin in particular was dashing about desperately, a thick towel wound round the head that sat so incongruously large on his short trunk. He took repeated tumbles but, oddly enough, no one laughed. Even the village kids standing round the edge of the playground were sunk in a grave, earnest silence just the reverse of the gay vitality of city children watching sports.
Takashi and Hoshio, who were standing in the center giving them instructions as they rushed about, made no move to interrupt practice even when the priest and I signaled to them. Momoko and my wife, though, came over in the Citroen to talk to us, making a wide detour round the football-playing group.
“Isn’t it a terrifying sight?” I said. “Why are they throwing themselves into it so enthusiastically when they don’t really seem to be enjoying it?”
“Throwing themselves into everything is the only way they know. Momoko and I like football practice when it’s as serious as this. We’re going to come and watch every day from now on,” said my wife, refusing to share my scruples.
The ball came rolling out of the circle of youths in my direction. I tried to kick it back, but my foot contacted mostly air and the ball spun frantically before coming to rest only a short distance away. The women in the car watched me and the ball with complete indifference, not even smirking. The young priest wore his customary smile as though to smooth over my embarrassment, but it only served to fluster me still more.
After supper that evening, when we were all lying about near the fireplace, Takashi came up to me and, though he lowered his voice so as not to be heard by my wife, who was drunk, said in a tone that was ugly with cold emotion :
“Mitsu—there are terrible things in that diary.”
I stared into the darkness, avoiding facing him directly. Even before I heard his next words a sense of disgust was welling up inside me.
“He studied German at college, you know. He uses the word Zusammengewürfelt, says the forces are a bunch of slobs. Some fellow who was hit for breaking ranks during company training actually committed suicide, he says, leaving a sarcastic note apologizing to the company commander. The company commander was our brother. ‘Take a look at Japan today,’ he writes. ‘Utter chaos. Utterly unscientific, utterly unprepared. And half-baked into the bargain. Now look at Germany—the coupons for the rationing system actually in force at the moment were printed way back in 1933 when Hitler first came to power. I pray to God that the Soviet Union rains bombs on us. The Japanese have been poisoned by the dream of peace and got themselves in an unholy mess, but they’re still rushing round and round in circles.’ He also says that the only things he got out of the army were ‘a certain increase in staying power and greater physical strength.’ He thinks one should read widely and deeply in accordance with some objective, and he makes notes about some system of deep breathing. On one page he can write, ‘In such and such a unit on Hainan Island, the commander himself said it was all right to violate a young woman as long as one took the proper steps afterward—the proper steps meaning, of course, to kill her.’ And on the next page he can write in high moral tones, ‘He who would climb Mt. Fuji must start from the first station.’ Then he describes in detail the scene on Leyte when the unit commander executed a native, an alleged spy. ‘The unit commander who captured him apparently said at first that he’d have a recruit bayonet him, but then he took over himself and, wielding a Japanese sword for the first time in his life, cut off the native’s head.’ Do you want to read it, Mitsu?”
“I couldn’t care less about his diary, Taka,” I said roughly. “And I don’t want to read it. It was because I had a feeling it would contain that kind of stuff that I handed it on to you. But what’s all the fuss about ? Is it anything more than a perfectly ordinary set of war reminiscences ?”
“For me at least it is something to make a fuss about,” he said, firmly rejecting my criticisms. “It means I’ve found one close relative at least who maintained his ordinary approach to life even on the battlefield, yet was an effective perpetrator of evil. Why—if I’d lived through the same times as him, this might have been my own diary. The idea seems to open up a whole new perspective in my view of things.”
His voice must have had the force to impose itself momentarily even on my wife’s drink-befuddled brain. When I turned to look at him, she too had raised her head and was gazing intently at his face as he stood there, fiercely animated yet somber, with the air somehow of a violent criminal.
Procession from the Past
THE next morning, on waking, I realized at once that I was sleeping alone as I normally did in Tokyo, that I could twist and turn in response to the pains scattered among the various parts of my body and the desolate lack deep down behind my ribs without that feeling of base panic lest my wife, sleeping by my side, should see me. It brought a definite, physical sense of release. I was, in fact, lying with all my frailties in full view, as careless of others’ eyes as I always was when I slept quite alone. At first, I’d tried to avoid identifying the memory that was the original inspiration for my posture. But I admitted now that it was the memory of that grotesque, utterly abject thing existing in its wooden cot, the thing that we’d gazed down at so blankly when we went to the institution to get our baby back. The doctor had wondered if the baby might not die of shock if his environment changed again. But the real reason we’d left him there was that we ourselves might well have died of the disgust and shock inspired by that horrifying object. Our behavior of course was quite unjustifiable; if he’d died and come back a frail, wasted ghost to savage us to death, I for one would have made no attempt to escape.
The night before, my wife, disliking the idea of retiring to my side of the sliding doors, had slept by the open fireplace with Takashi and his bodyguards. In her whisky-heated brain she’d mulled over our conversation upstairs in the storehouse concerning the new life, disintegration, and death, carrying its implications still further until she’d finally taken a resolute stand.
“Let’s go to bed,” I’d urged her. “You can go on drinking there.” But she refused, in a clearer voice than I, in view of the nature of the subject, would have wished, even though she was too drunk to talk loudly for the special benefit of Takashi and the others.
“You talk about going back and having another baby as if it had nothing directly to do with you. But it would mean starting again yourself, too. In practice, you’ve no intention of doing so. Why should I have to obey your orders, then, and creep in between the blankets like a faithful pet?”
With a private f
eeling of relief I’d left her and retired alone. Takashi made no move to intervene in our petty conflict. Encouraged by the unfamiliar voice of his eldest brother echoing from the pages of the purple diary, he was straining to twist himself, like a sharp-edged screw, deeper still into the murky recesses of his own peculiar problems. I myself had no desire to be influenced by the ghost of this brother of ours, nor had the diary disturbed me particularly. I preferred to dismiss it as a perfectly commonplace account of wartime experiences. It was much safer to go to sleep with a gap in my imagination than to summon up the ill-omened figure of our brother standing bloody on unfamiliar battlefields.
For the first time in many a month I thrust my head beneath the blankets and sniffed at the warm odor of my own body. It was like nuzzling down into one’s entrails. I was a coelenterate five feet six inches long, plunging my head into my intestines to close the comfortable circle of my own flesh. It was almost as though the dull ache in the several parts of my body, and the sense of lack, had been transformed into an obscure and guilty feeling of pleasure, a pleasure arising from awareness that I was free from the eyes of others, that the pain and the sense of lack were at least my own. I felt I might even become pregnant with these sensations and, like the lowest order of creatures, achieve unicellular reproduction. Bearing with the difficulty in breathing, I kept my head buried in the warm, smelly darkness between the blankets, trying to picture myself suffocating to death there, the smell of my own body in my nostrils, my head painted crimson and a cucumber stuffed up my anus. With increasingly intense reality the outlines of the scene began to take shape. . . .
On the verge of suffocation, the skin of my face hot and puffy with blood, I thrust my head with terrific force into the cool air outside the blankets, to be greeted by the sound of Takashi and my wife talking in low tones beyond the sliding doors. Takashi’s voice had the same elated quality as the previous night. I hoped my wife was listening with her face turned toward the shadows: not that I wanted to keep secret the signs of degradation that must be so apparent on her newly awakened face, but the idea of my brother’s eyes intruding thus on our “family” inevitably damaged my self-respect. He was speaking of memory, the world of dreams and the like. Gradually, the fragments coalesced into a kernel of sense that reminded me of the argument in the Citroen.
“… pointed out the distortions, to be honest I couldn’t reply. Remember? It took all the fight out of me, left me in a state of doubt and self-questioning, but what the football team told me … recovered, Natsumi.”
“… Taka, your memory … than Mitsu’s,” my wife said in a flat, lifeless voice. Far from indicating inattention, the voice was a sign that my wife, a good listener when sober, was concentrating on what he said.
“No, I’m not saying my memories tally with the facts. But I didn’t consciously distort them, either. After all, I did once have roots here, so to fall in with the communal aspirations of the valley can hardly be called a kink in my personality, can it? After I was separated from the village, memory combined with the communal dream to form a kind of pure culture in my mind. As a kid I actually saw, in the Nembutsu dance at the Bon festival, the ‘spirit’ of S, in the winter jacket worn by naval air cadets, fighting the men from the Korean settlement at the head of a party of young men, until he was finally beaten to death, stripped of his jacket, and left lying face down in just his white undershirt and shorts. I told you, didn’t I, that his arms were raised as if he was dancing, with his legs spread like those of a hurdler in action ? That’s taken directly from a sudden moment of stillness in the Nembutsu dance, at the top of one of its wild leaps. The dance was performed in broad daylight at the height of summer, so even the white sunlight that illuminates my memory is part of what I experienced at an actual Bon festival. You see, it wasn’t a memory of the real-life raid on the Korean settlement, but an experience in the world of the dance, in which the facts were reworked in visible form through the communal emotions of the people of the valley. The boys in the team told me that even after I left the valley they saw S’s ‘spirit’ do the same dance as I remember at the Bon festival every year. All I did, in fact, was mix up the Nembutsu dance in the processes of my memory with the actual scene of the raid. That surely means that I’ve still got roots linking me to the communal sentiments of the valley. I’m certain of it. Mitsu must have watched the dance with me when I was a kid, and being older he ought to have a clearer memory of it than me, but during the argument in the car he deliberately kept quiet to suit his own logic. He’s got a crafty side to him.”
“What was the Nembutsu dance like, Taka?” my wife asked. “Does ‘spirits’ mean spirits of the dead ?” But I got the impression that she’d already grasped the essential meaning of what he said, and understood perfectly well his pride at discovering, through dreams, his ties with the communal spirit of the valley.
“Why don’t you ask Mitsu? He’ll be jealous if I’m the one to tell you everything about the valley. I’m more interested in having you make lunch for the team again today. I’m thinking of having them here to live in while they train. It’s always been a valley custom for the young fellows to get together at the New Year and stay for a few days. So I’m going to arrange the same thing. I hope you’ll give us a hand, Natsumi.”
I didn’t catch her reply clearly, but it was plain to me that by now she belonged to Takashi’s inner circle. That afternoon, she asked me to tell her about Bon festival customs in the valley. She naturally made no mention of the word “jealousy” that Takashi had used, so I too kept quiet about overhearing her conversation with him early that morning, and told her about the Nembutsu dance.
Of all the evil beings that descended on the hollow bringing trouble with them, the most typical was the Chosokabe, an enemy with whom the valley folk would have no dealings whatsoever. But the hollow was also visited by another, different type of evil, or rather evildoers, who, since they had originally belonged among the valley folk themselves, could not by their very nature be dealt with by simple rejection and expulsion. Every year during the Bon festival, they came back to the valley in a single-file procession that followed the graveled road down from the upper reaches of the forest. I learned from an article by a well-known folklorist that these beings who came back from the forest to be greeted with such reverence by the inhabitants were “spirits” who sometimes exerted a harmful influence from the other world (the forest) on the present world (the valley). Any persistent floods that ravaged the valley, or any particularly virulent rice pest, were attributed to these “spirits,” and it was to placate them that people devoted so much energy to the Bon festival. During the typhus epidemic toward the end of the war, a particularly spectacular dance was performed in honor of the “spirits.” The Bon procession that filed down from the forest that year, with a figure got up like a huge white cuttlefish in its midst, was an object of terror to the valley children. The figure probably represented the malevolent “spirit” of a louse—not a real louse, of course, but the “spirit” of one of the village-ancestors who had led a brutal life, or of some good man who had died an unhappy death, manifesting himself that year in the form of a louse in order to bring disaster to the valley. There was one villager who was an expert in the Nembutsu dance and always devoted great ingenuity to preparing the festival procession. He was a tatami maker by trade, but when, for example, an epidemic filled the isolation hospital in the great bamboo grove to overflowing, he would be preoccupied right from the beginning of spring with working out the staging of the next Bon festival. Even at times when he was busy in his workshop, he would call out in a loud, excited voice to passersby on the graveled road, asking their opinion on some idea or other.
When the festival procession reached the front garden of our house, it would form a ring and dance, then step up into the storehouse and spend a while commenting politely on the interior, until everybody was given something to eat and drink. So where watching the Bon procession was concerned at least, I’d been in a privileg
ed position compared with the other valley children.
The most striking change that I remember in the processions I witnessed was the sudden appearance, one summer during the war, of “spirits” in army uniform. They were the ghosts of men drafted from the valley who had been killed in battle. The number of them in uniform increased every year. The “spirit” of a young man who had been working in a Hiroshima factory and was killed by the atomic bomb came down from the forest with his whole body blackened like a lump of used charcoal. At the Bon festival the summer after S died, the tatami maker came to borrow a cadet uniform, so without telling mother I lent him the jacket of the winter uniform. The next day, the party that came down the graveled road from the forest included a “spirit” wearing the jacket, dancing for all it was worth. . . .
“It wasn’t fair to Takashi not to mention that in the Citroen.”
“But I didn’t keep quiet about it deliberately. You see, I know S wasn’t the leader of the young men in the valley, and I’ve got my own powerful memory of S’s body lying where he’d been beaten to death. So I just couldn’t connect up such a heroic and attractive ‘spirit’ with S’s actual death.”
“All that means is you’re cut off from what Taka calls the ‘communal sentiments’ of the valley folk.”
“If I’m really cut off from the valley, then any trouble the ‘spirits’ bring here has nothing to do with me, thank God,” I said, nipping in the bud the attack concealed in her seemingly harmless words. “As you’ll soon realize if you actually see the Nembutsu dance, the dance of the ‘spirit’ in cadet uniform is performed in a ring and involves a lot of spectacular movement, but in the procession that came from the forest it was a low-ranking ghost tagging along somewhere near the back. The ‘spirit’ who led the procession, the spectacular central figure who was looked up to both by the spectators and the other performers, was that of the leader of the 1860 rising. In other words, the ‘spirit’ dressed up as great-grandfather’s younger brother.”