by Kenzaburo Oe
“Did the custom of performing the Nembutsu dance start with the 1860 rising, then?”
“No. It existed before that—and the ‘spirits,’ I imagine, have been in the valley ever since people first settled here. For several years, or even several decades following the rising, the ‘spirit’ of great-grandfather’s brother was probably only a beginner who took his knocks at the very end of the procession, just like the ‘spirit’ of S. One folklore expert referred to new ‘spirits’ as ‘novices’ and labeled their training in the Nembutsu dance as a kind of ‘testing’ period. The dance involves a lot of violent movement wearing costume. It’s quite hard work, so besides training the ‘spirits’ themselves, it must put quite a strain on the village youths who dress for the parts. Particularly when there’s some trouble or other affecting life in the hollow, they perform with almost terrifying abandon.”
“I’d like to see it once,” my wife said wistfully.
“You’re going to watch Takashi and the others at football practice every day, aren’t you? If Takashi’s activities are really rooted in the ‘communal sentiments’ of the valley, then that’s a new form of Nembutsu dance in itself. Even if the ‘spirits’ don’t actually take possession of them, it gives them plenty of training and toughens them up physically, so half the effect of the dance is achieved at least. At the very worst, it means that after all this football practice they won’t get out of breath when they perform the dance in the summer. I’m only hoping that Takashi’s football lessons are aimed chiefly at such peaceful purposes, and aren’t the kind of training great-grandfather’s brother gave his young men on the parade ground cleared in the forest. . . .”
On the day before New Year’s Eve, I saw actual evidence that Takashi’s training was having a beneficial effect on life in the valley. That afternoon, warm air was drifting through the window set in the solid storehouse wall, lapping round me like lukewarm water and thawing out the frozen hunks of head, shoulders, and sides till I gradually became one with dictionary, Penguin book, and pencil, and all my other selves evaporated, leaving only the one pressing ahead with the translation. It occurred to me vaguely as I went on with my task that if things always went like this I might even last till I died of old age, never experiencing the hardships of labor, never doing work of any particular importance. Suddenly, a cry struck at my warm, lethargic ear:
“Man in the river!”
Hauling up my flabby, waterlogged body on the hook of consciousness much as one might reel in a dead sea toad, I clattered wildly down the staircase. It was a miracle that I didn’t fall. In the gloom at the foot of the stairs, belated fright at what I’d done caught up with me, bringing me to a halt. Simultaneously, I had second thoughts: it was unlikely that anyone would be carried away in midwinter when the river was almost dry. But then I heard, this time close at hand, the voices of Jin’s children echoing each other, shouting “Man in the river!”
Going out into the front garden, I watched as the boys, baying like hounds after their quarry, went running down the graveled road then, almost instantly, disappeared from view. The skill with which they kept their balance as they ran, or bounced, down the steep, narrow trail furrowed by long use aroused vivid memories deep inside me, memories of feet running and men drowning. Every year during the period of late summer and early autumn floods, and especially after the indiscriminate wartime felling of trees in the forest, some unfortunate soul would be carried away in the swollen waters of the river. The first to discover him would cry at the top of his voice, “Man in the river!” Those who heard would take up the cry, forming a group that ran for all its worth down the road beside the river. But there was no way to rescue the victim as he drifted downstream. All the grown-ups did was race along the graveled road and its by-lanes, crossing the bridge and going on running even after they joined forces again on the paved road, in the vain hope of overtaking the flood in its furious onrush. The chase would go on with great commotion until even the stoutest of them collapsed of exhaustion, yet not a single practical attempt at rescue would be made. The following day, when the river had receded slightly, the adults, dressed in firemen’s livery and moving sluggishly and reluctantly, wasting as much time as possible, would start off on their difficult and doubtful journey, prodding with bamboo poles the soft mud that covered thickets of bamboo and pussy willow, unable to go home until they’d discovered the drowned body.
I was firmly convinced already that I’d been mistaken about the cry, but the fact remained that it had awoken in me—even though my work upstairs in the storehouse had relaxed me into a soft mass of flesh—a reflex action that was almost as though I were a member of the valley community. The idea excited me. In order to slow down the rate at which the excitement faded, I decided to assume that I’d really heard the words “Man in the river!” and accept them at their face value. Either way, I had plenty of time on my hands. So, taking a cue from my days as a valley kid like Jin’s sons, I ran down the graveled road, pressing the soles of my feet flat against the sloping sides of the furrow and flailing my arms about so as to keep my balance. By the time I reached the space in front of the village office I was almost blacking out, my breathing was labored, and both my knees were numb. All the while I was running I could hear the flapping of my own flabby body. Even so, I pressed on toward the bridge, chin thrust out like a man left far behind in a long-distance race, breathing frantic, my mind disturbed by the bulk of my heart pressing against my ribs. As I watched women and children outstripping me and disappearing ahead, I was reminded that it was several years since I’d last had to run.
Eventually, I caught sight of a crowd clad in bright colors standing at the end of the bridge. In the old days, a group of villagers would have worn the somber hues of a shoal of sardines, but the flow of shoddy clothing from the supermarket had changed all that. The people in the group were gazing ahead of them, enveloped as in a net by a dense, almost tangible silence. I stepped into the clumps of withered grass by the roadside as the children had done, and the operation in progress around the broken support of the bridge came into view.
The central pillar had given way under the pressure of water, so that the part where it had been attached to the body of the bridge now thrust out numerous joints in all directions like twisted fingers. Each of the broken joints, though skewered by its reinforcing rods, was a free-swinging mass of concrete; force applied to any part of it would send it into a complex and dangerous spin packing a tremendous punch. On one of these lumps of concrete, a child lay oddly silent with his hat pulled down over his eyes. He might already have been unconscious, so strong was the impression of stillness. Slipping down through a gap in the planks of the temporary bridge, the terrified child had clutched hold of the block of concrete, but even his weight was enough to set it rocking, and he had no alternative but to cling to it perfectly motionless.
The young men were trying to rescue the petrified figure. From the scaffolding supporting the temporary bridge, two logs, bound together, had been lowered by rope beside the central pillar. One of the men, standing barefoot in the shallow water, was tugging at a rope tied round the middle of the logs to prevent their touching the pillar. Two other youths were riding on the logs, moving gradually closer to the boulder that held the child captive. They edged their way along the logs, making the kind of soothing noises people make to a frightened animal.
As the young man in front arrived directly beneath the child, his companion behind him grasped him firmly round the waist with both arms, at the same time maintaining the balance of his own body by wrapping his legs round the logs. Then, as though whisking a cicada from a tree, the first man swept the child to safety. A roar went up from the onlookers. At that instant, the lump of concrete on which the child had been went into a bouncing, twisting motion and collided with the jagged corner of the main body of the broken bridge, sending up a heavy thud that rang through the valley and rose up over the forest. Takashi, who had been lying on his belly directing the young men
’s movements from the temporary bridge immediately above the lump of concrete, stood up and gave instructions for those supporting the rope to haul the three youths on the logs up to the level of the temporary bridge. The shock waves from the collision jarred fiercely and persistently inside me. Their effect stemmed in part from a deep, almost sickening sense of relief on realizing that a close relative had just come through a major crisis safely, but this was swallowed up in turn by a still more intense sense of despair at the brutality of life when I considered what would have happened if he hadn’t succeeded. If the rescue operation had failed and the child’s body had been dashed against the jagged surface along with the concrete boulder, Takashi, as the man responsible for the carnage, would inevitably have been driven down onto the lump of concrete as it swung like a weight on a line, there to smash his own head in. In fact, a still more cruel and disgusting punishment might have been meted out on the man who had murdered a community member of such tender years. However much I reassured myself that Takashi had in fact succeeded, I couldn’t repress the bilious taste of fear that came rising into my throat. Why, I wondered with a sense of unfocused anger, had Takashi voluntarily put himself in such danger? The crowd, which the other members of the football team had been holding back until now so as to allow the rescue work to proceed effectively, pressed round the rescued child. As I turned away and set off toward the village, I remembered Takashi’s somberly tense, somehow defiant face in the days when he’d insisted he wasn’t scared of violence in any form, or of physical pain, or even of death, but would throw up at the sight of a drop of blood oozing from the ball of his finger. Supposing he’d seen the body of the child squashed before his very eyes, a foot or so below him as he lay on his belly on the temporary bridge, while fragments of concrete mixed with blood and bits of flesh sprayed him full in the face—had he thought that a quick vomit would let him escape from reality again?
A festive medley of excited laughter and war whoops arose behind me. Spurred on by them, I walked rapidly ahead, breathing heavily with an excitement quite different from theirs. “Man in the river”—but it was Takashi himself who had been caught in the most perilous flood of all. Now, though, the incident would probably give him and his team a certain power over the valley. It would give him confidence, at least, and make him feel that he’d put down firm roots there. The actuality of what was taking shape in his world would gradually impress itself more and more clearly on my wife, convincing her still more finally of the unlikelihood of anything ever happening to me. For the first time, the word “jealousy” that Takashi had used to my wife acquired a definite content. Just before I left, I caught sight of the Citroen parked at the back of the crowd. If I’d pushed my way through to it I could have joined up with my wife and the others. But I ignored the car and turned my back on the crowd. Crackling sparks from the word “jealousy,” charged with a new meaning now, informed me that I hadn’t wanted tq join my wife in witnessing Takashi’s success. . . .
A man with unnaturally long legs overtook me on a very ancient bicycle, riding as though practicing for a slow cycling competition, then put one foot to the ground in leisurely fashion and looked round.
“Your brother’s quite a leader, Mitsusaburo.” He didn’t sound particularly impressed. It was the way all those of any consequence in the valley spoke. Being extremely wary, they always wore a mask of cool detachment from behind which they craftily tried to sound out the other man’s feelings. At the time that I’d left the valley, the man had been assistant at the village office. By now he’d got fat and his complexion suggested kidney trouble, but the bike he was straddling as he watched with an ambiguous expression for my reaction was the same old village office machine.
“If he’d failed, he would probably have been lynched,” I said in a voice as calm as his but filled with distaste. The man must have realized that I wasn’t ignorant of the basic stratagems of conversation among the grown-ups of the valley. He gave a kind of grunt, noncommittal but with a lurking, private contempt.
“If he’d done his growing-up in the valley,” I went on, “he would never have done anything rash like that. It was asking for trouble, like deliberately walking around the edge of a trap. He just doesn’t know the valley folk.”
“Oh, come now!” Somewhere behind the ambiguous smile lurked a suggestion of both timidity and untrustworthiness. “The valley folk aren’t all as bad as that, you know!”
“Why did they leave the bridge unrepaired ?” I asked, walking beside him as he pushed his bicycle.
“The bridge, eh—” he began and broke off, refusing to go on for a while. Then, in the mocking tone that was equally a habit of speech among the crafty valley adults, he added, “Early next year we’re being merged with the neighboring town. Till then, there’s no point in the village repairing it by itself.”
“What’ll happen to the village office if you’re merged?”
“Well, for one thing, they won’t need an assistant,” he said. It was his first straightforward reaction. “Even now the office hardly does any work at all. The forestry cooperative was amalgamated into a group of five towns and villages ages ago, and the agricultural cooperative’s gone broke, so the village office is practically deserted. The headman’s lost interest in his work—stays indoors all day watching television.”
“Television ?”
“The supermarket, you know, set up a communal antenna at the highest point in the forest and started selling sets. Thirty thousand yen for use of the antenna. Even so, ten families in the hollow have got it.”
It seemed that though the village as a whole might be on its last legs economically, there were at least ten prosperous families that hadn’t gone under to the supermarket but were enjoying their own version of the consumer life—though those same ten families (if one was to believe the young priest’s pessimistic theories) might well be in debt to the supermarket for part of the antenna fee and the cost of the television sets.
“Nobody pays any television fees. They say they can’t get JBC programs with the supermarket antenna.”
“What do they watch then, the commercial programs from the town?”
“Oh, no. Actually, JBC comes through best of all.” He showed slight signs of pleasure.
“Do they still do the Nembutsu dance?”
“No, they haven’t done it these five years,” he said, handling the new subject warily. “There’s nobody but the caretaker at your place, and the tatami maker skipped out one night. When people build a new house in the village nowadays they make Western-style rooms and don’t use tatami.”
“Why exactly did the Nembutsu procession have to do a dance in the garden of our house? They could equally well have chosen the garden of the headman’s house or the owner of the forest land. Is it because our house is on the way from the forest down to the valley?”
“But surely, it’s because it’s the home of the Nedokoro family—because it’s where the soul of the valley folk has its roots. When your father gave a talk at the primary school he said that in Okinawa, where he worked before he went to Manchuria, there was a local word nendokoru which meant just that—‘the soul’s roots.’ He made a present to the school, too. Twenty tubs of molasses.”
“My mother scoffed at his nendokoru theory and wouldn’t hear of it,” I replied. “As for the molasses, she said they made a laughingstock of father in the valley. I imagine the immediate reason for poking fun at him was the idea of a man whose family was on the verge of ruin making such presents.”
“No, no, certainly not!” the man said, withdrawing the malicious trap that he himself had set with such apparent innocence. To the valley, the Nedokoro-nendokoru theory had in fact been a source of fun of the most spiteful and nasty kind. When the villagers whiled away their time by relating the many and varied failures in the life of my father, who had always been too easily carried away by what others said, this anecdote regularly served as a kind of climax to the merriment. For years afterward, they’d made fun
of father as the man who had used twenty tubs of molasses in an attempt to establish his monopoly of the souls in the valley. If I’d let the man from the village office tempt me into affirming the Nedokoro-nendokoru theory, he and his friends would almost certainly have fabricated a new anecdote showing how much the Nedokoro boy took after his father.
“You’ve sold the storehouse and the land, haven’t you, Mitsusaburo? I’ll bet you made quite a bit out of it!”
“I haven’t officially sold it yet. I probably won’t sell the land, anyway. Jin and her family are there, for one thing.”
“You don’t have to pretend, Mitsusaburo—I’m sure you got a good price for them,” he insisted. “Takashi and the manager of the supermarket came to the village office to register the sale of the land and buildings, so I know most of the details.”
I went on walking: quietly, calmly smiling, so as to keep my physical reactions under the control of my mind. The graveled road beneath the soles of my shoes was suddenly heavily pitted and dragged wearisomely at my feet. The eyes of the women and old folk, watching us so vigilantly from the shadows behind filthy glass doors still splashed with dried-up mud from rains of long before, had suddenly acquired the sharpness of the eyes of strangers. The village official walking by my side was representative of them all. The forest about us was sunk in gloom, the sky overcast and threatening snow. But quite suddenly the whole scene had become absolutely alien to me. Calmly I worked to maintain my placid smile, worked with the absolute calmness I’d seen in the eyes of our baby who had failed, in the long run, to establish any ties of understanding with the real world. I had shut myself up, had no interest in, couldn’t be disturbed by, anything in the valley. I wasn’t there on the graveled road, not there for any of the strangers who lived along it. . . .