by Kenzaburo Oe
“Must be going, then,” said the official, straddling his bicycle. Somewhere in my attitude he’d sensed the peculiar mark of the outsider and, bringing the wisdom of his ancestors into play, sought to avoid getting embroiled. But the alien quality he detected in me wasn’t the distress of a man whose younger brother had privately sold off his house and land to strangers. Such an affair would have been the greatest possible scandal in a valley community, and if he’d caught even the faintest suspicion of it, he would have ensconced himself promptly in the pithole of my distress much as ticks worm their way into the ears of hunting dogs and refuse to budge. The face I showed him was something different: the face of a stranger totally unconcerned with him and the rest of the village and all its affairs. So he mounted his bicycle and pedaled off with enough energy to set his lanky upper half swaying, doubtless wondering bad-temperedly as he went whether he hadn’t been talking to an apparition after all. Quite unexpectedly, I’d turned into something as remote and meaningless to him as a rumor from a distant town.
“Well, good-bye,” I replied in a voice whose tranquillity sounded pleasant even to my own ears. But he refused to be addressed by an apparition and with head bent mournfully forward pedaled on up the slope into the distance. I walked on slowly, smiling to myself, an invisible man treading an unfamiliar path. Some small children who hadn’t reached the bridge in time gazed up at me, but I wasn’t dismayed any more by the resemblance of their grubby faces to my former self, nor did I feel particularly upset as I passed the brewers’ storehouse that had been ravaged to make the supermarket. The store was deserted today, and the bored young woman behind the cash register watched me go by with dull, filmy eyes.
“You’ve got to start a new life, Mitsu,” Takashi had suddenly sprung at me. “Why not give up everything you’re doing in Tokyo and come to Shikoku with me? That wouldn’t be a bad way to start.” It was then that the village in the valley had come back to me as a reality for the first time in a dozen or more years. So I’d returned to the valley in search of my “thatched hut.” But I’d merely been deceived by the unexpected veneer of sobriety that Takashi had acquired, like grime on the skin, during his wanderings around America. My “new life” in the valley was only a ruse devised by Takashi to forestall my refusal and clear the way for him to sell the house and land for the sake of whatever obscure purpose was firing him at the moment. From the very outset, the journey to the valley hadn’t really existed for me. Since I no longer had any roots there, nor made any attempt to put down new ones, even the house and land were as good as nonexistent; it was no wonder that my brother should have been able to filch them from me with only a minimal exercise of cunning.
Haltingly and unsteadily, I climbed back up the furrowed road that only a while before the memory of my childhood sense of balance had allowed me to run down so easily. It made me vaguely disturbed, of course, that the whole valley including this road should have become so remote, but on the other hand I’d been released from the feeling of guilt, which had pursued me ever since I came back to the valley, at losing the identity that should have been mine since childhood.
Now, even if the whole valley should charge me with being a rat, I could retort with hostility, “And who are you, to insult a stranger whose affairs are none of yours?” Now I was just a transient in the valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the power to summon up neither the memory nor the illusion of any other, truer self. As a passerby I had a right to insist on my identity. Even a rat has its identity as a rat. If I was a rat, then I had no need to be disturbed at being called one. I was a rat: a puny house rat running straight for its nest, heedless of the insults hurled after it. I smiled silently to myself.
Back in the house that my brother had already sold to the Emperor, the house that no longer belonged to me or any of my family, I packed my belongings into a suitcase. If Takashi had in fact sold not only the buildings but the land as well, he must have received many times the amount he’d reported to my wife and me as money paid in advance. What’s more, he’d taken back over half my share of the spurious “advance” as a contribution to the football team. I could see him relating with naive pride to the members of his team how he’d not only grabbed the house and land from me but even got me to make a contribution from the fake advance. No doubt my contribution to the football team had served as a humorous denouement to the comedy in which Takashi, in his role as the cunning rogue, outmaneuvered the slow-witted man of virtue that I was supposed to play. I went and fetched the Penguin book and dictionaries, the notebooks and papers from the storehouse, packed them in the same suitcase, then settled down to await the return of my brother and his bodyguards, including the latest recruit, my wife. I would return to Tokyo, where every morning as I awoke I would feel again that dull, persistent ache in each part of my body. My face and my voice would deteriorate steadily until my mouth grew pointed like a real rat and I began to talk in low, squeaky whispers. I would dig a pit in the back garden, this time for the sole purpose of creeping into it at dawn. I would have my own hole for meditation much as some Americans have their own fallout shelters. But my personal shelter would help me approach death as calmly as possible. I wouldn’t be trying to secure myself a base in which to outlive the deaths of others, so neither neighbors nor milkman would have cause to resent my unconventional habits. My decision, admittedly, would cut me off effectively from all future possibilities of a new life or of finding a “thatched hut,” but it would give me a chance to get a deeper understanding of the details of my own past, and with it the words and behavior of my dead friend.
When Takashi and the others got back, I was asleep by the fireplace. The way I lay must have carried a strong hint of the regressive tranquillity in my mind, for as I awoke I heard Momoko complain:
“While Taka and the rest were doing such great work, a certain member of the establishment was lying peacefully in the warm like a superannuated cat!”
“A superannuated cat who’s just a rat?” I inquired, sitting up. “You’ve got your metaphors a bit mixed, haven’t you?”
Momoko naively flushed a tomato red. “Taka and the others …” she persisted defiantly to cover her embarrassment, but my wife stopped her.
“Mitsu knows perfectly well what happened,” she said. “He was watching Taka and the others from the back of the crowd. Even so, he didn’t congratulate the team—he ran off without saying a word. It’s no wonder he went to sleep!”
I noticed that Takashi’s attention kept straying to my suitcase, which stood at the edge of the raised floor next to the kitchen.
“I saw the assistant from the village office going after Mitsu on his bicycle,” he said, carefully and probingly. “I noticed specially, because Mitsu and he were the only two who went off without waiting to see the child we’d rescued.”
“He wanted to ask me about the deal on the house and land. How about it, Taka—did you make a pile on it?” I said, recapturing the lordly mood of childhood when I’d deliberately asked awkward questions to annoy him.
Takashi jerked his head up like some fierce bird of prey and glared at me. But when I looked back undismayed, he feebly averted his gaze and, as the blood rose frankly to the small, sallow face just as it had to Momoko’s, he shook his head in the manner of a distressed child and said in a timid voice :
“Are you going back to Tokyo, then, Mitsu?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’ve played my part, haven’t I?”
“I’m staying here, Mitsu,” my wife interposed determinedly. “I want to help Taka and the others while they’re in training.”
Takashi and I gazed at my wife, one from either side, equally struck by the unexpectedness of this. In fact, I hadn’t considered the possibility of her departure when I packed my own suitcase, but neither had I expected her to show such positive determination to stay behind with Takashi and the others.
“Anyway, you won’t be able to leave the valley for a while, Mitsu,” sa
id Takashi. “It’ll start snowing tonight.” He poked lightly at my suitcase with the toe of the gym shoes he’d been wearing for football practice. For the first time since I learned of his trick, anger, like a drop of red molten iron, ran from my head down through my body, but it soon disappeared.
“Even if we’re snowbound I’ll sleep in the storehouse, independent of the rest of you,” I said. “You can use the main building as you like,” I conceded with the feeble generosity of spent indignation, “to house your team during training.”
“If you’re going to be independent, I’ll have to bring you your meals, Mitsu,” said my wife.
“Won’t it be cold in the storehouse at night and early in the morning?” asked Hoshio, the only one to show any sympathy. He’d been listening to our conversation in depressed silence, taking no part in it, as though even Takashi’s success earlier that day had left him somehow doubtful.
“The Emperor told me he’s got some imported oil stoves to put on display in the supermarket, though he was sure he wouldn’t sell a single unit. I’ll buy one,” said Takashi recovering his energy. “There’s no need to worry about the cost, at least,” he added, his eyes on me with the fleeting shadow of a defiant smile.
For some time now I’d heard the young men at work in front of the house. Probably they refrained from coming into the kitchen in recognition of the alien element, myself, established by the fireplace. Before long, there came the sound of metal being hammered on an anvil. As I went out carrying my suitcase on my way to the storehouse, my new home, I found them squatting around the anvil. They twisted their heads lazily to look up at me, but their faces remained set and expressionless as though they were trying to prevent me from reading any meaning there. They were pounding with hammers and chisels at small iron implements of the kind known in the area as “mitsumata strippers.” Already the upper side of the scissorlike arrangement had been detached from a number of them, and the lower halves were laid out on the ground, looking like fire hooks with the handle, the central blade, and the sharply pointed tip bent at right angles to the blade.
“Mitsumata stripping” consisted of fixing the pointed tip firmly into the tree to hold the instrument, gripping the bark, and peeling off its upper layer. Everything about the “fire hooks” as they lay on the ground—the handle, the blade, the pointed tip—blatantly proclaimed that they were intended as weapons. I was seized with an impulse to self-defense, but went on toward the storehouse without inquiring further into its significance. By now I was a stranger to anything that might happen in the valley.
Both the hollow in which the village lay and the “country” had always yielded high-quality mitsumata. In the old days, the bundles of bark peeled from the trees and dried after cutting and steaming were gathered and stowed away in the mitsumata storehouse belonging to our family. These would be separated up again, soaked in the river, stripped of the black surface with the strippers, and dried. For long years it had been the Nedokoro family’s task to sort them, put them in a press to form rectangular blocks of raw material for paper, and supply them to the Government Printing Office. Stripping off the outer bark had been the principal source of extra income for the farmers of the hollow. The cart that I’d hauled along with me when I went to fetch S’s body had been used for carrying the unstripped bark to the farms and collecting the bundles after stripping. The farms responsible for the work were entrusted with bark strippers specially made by the valley blacksmith. Chiseled on the handle of each instrument was a single character, which served as the business mark of the family who used it. The number of bark strippers was fixed, in order to protect the interests of the farming families who for generation after generation had relied on the work to supplement their incomes. Thus, at least until a while after the end of the war, possession of a bark stripper with one’s family mark on it had been a kind of status symbol in the valley community. I remember seeing a farmer, whose implement had been taken from him on account of a poor yield of white bark, squatting in the kitchen pleading with my mother. Just before she died, mother had handed over to the farmers’ cooperative all rights associated with producing mitsumata for the Government Printing Office. The young men had brought the strippers out from under the floorboards of the main building, where they’d been put after being reclaimed from the farmers. Almost every one of them could have found a stripper with his own father’s mark chiseled on it—a weapon (since no other use for these objects seemed possible) bearing a mark that had been his family’s for generations past. Was Takashi thinking, perhaps, of distributing one to each member of his football team as a kind of ID card and instituting a system whereby—just as grandfather and father had done in their day—he would take it away from any black sheep discovered in his new community? But all this too was irrelevant to me now. Even if a “fire hook” turned up with the character for my own name, “Mitsu,” carved on it, I had no desire whatever to accept it.
Peering out through the narrow window of the storehouse, I could see the forest already sunk in a gloom that contrasted with the pale pink wall of sunset in the lofty sky above and the equally pale gray-blue of the more distant sky enfolding it. The sky now seemed somehow brighter than the snow clouds that I’d gazed up at during the day, but the feeling of snow was still strong in the air. In the front garden, Hoshio was repairing the lamp hanging from the eaves, which had long been broken, in order to provide light for the young men as they worked. The hammers rang against the iron, and the color of the forest suddenly began to fade. The whole forest, though still the same faded dark green all over, was quivering: snow had begun to fall up there in the high parts and was driving down toward the valley. I felt an indescribable depression settling over me. Now that I found myself freed from things outside me, I realized that my depression was a purely personal thing. If it progressed any further, it was quite clear what work my fingers would set about when I found myself sitting once more in a pit at dawn with a hot, smelly dog in my arms. Again I was overcome by the memory of that shivering and aching that had refused to go away even after I’d returned to my bedroom that morning. For me, the valley held in store neither new life nor thatched hut. I was alone and forlorn again, with no hope in sight, in the grip of a depression clearly deeper than before my brother’s return to Japan. I experienced the full meaning of that depression.
Truth Unspeakable
AS Takashi and Hoshio came into the storehouse carrying the oil stove, which was totally enclosed and remote in color from any associations of warmth, I saw powdery snow, dry and hard like sand, lying on their shoulders. My wife and Momoko, excited by the snow, were late with the evening meal. By the time I went over to the main building for dinner, the front garden was already covered. So far, however, it was no more than a fragile, impermanent-looking layer. The driving snow and darkness blocked my poor vision so impenetrably that when I looked up and took the elements full in my face I seemed to be drifting in a boat on a sea of falling snow, and it was difficult to keep my balance. Fine, powdery flakes stung my eyes to mechanical tears. I seemed to remember that in the old days snow in the valley had always come in damp flakes as big as the ball of one’s thumb. I sorted through various memories associated with snow, but my recollection of it in the valley was blurred, buried beneath a host of memories from the towns I’d lived in. Either way, the powdery snow I felt against my skin at that moment was as remote as any that had fallen on those alien towns. I kicked aside the settled flakes with a fine carelessness as I walked. In my childhood, I’d always rushed eagerly to devour a handful of the first snow to fall in the valley; it seemed to taste of all the minerals in the atmosphere, from the heights of the sky overlying the valley right down to the earth that I trod. Takashi and the others had left the door open, and in the faint light of the lamp that hung from the eaves were watching the white flakes streaking the darkness. They were all beginning to get drunk on the snow; but I was sober.
“How’s the oil stove?” my wife asked. “There weren’t any
in a color that would have looked better in the storehouse.” Though she might be drunk with snow, she hadn’t yet started on the whisky tonight.
“I’m not taking up permanent residence there. I’d leave tomorrow if only the snow would let up, so there won’t be time to worry whether the stove matches the room or not.”
“Taka,” she said, turning to my brother since I showed so little interest, “don’t you think it’s odd that they should bring imported stoves from Scandinavia all the way to a place like this?”
“By displaying goods that no one here could ever hope to buy, the Emperor’s thumbing his nose at the whole village,” said Takashi.
It occurred to me that Takashi could use that kind of theory to incite the young members of his football team, but I didn’t pursue the idea. I’d lost my enthusiasm for thinking about relations between Takashi and the valley. I ate in silence, as though I weren’t really there by the open fireplace at all. Takashi’s bodyguards seemed, in the natural course of events, to be realizing the qualitative change that had occurred in me; the conversation proceeded over my head as if straddling a void, without resistance and with no sense of awkwardness. From time to time Takashi, who alone among them seemed subtly disturbed by my silence, would try to draw me into the flow of the conversation, but I rejected the bait. There was no underlying motive for my refusal; it was simply that they failed to arouse my interest. Earlier, as we brought S’s ashes home in the Citroen, Takashi’s distorted memories had succeeded in provoking me out of my silence, but that was because I too had been desperately trying to connect up inside myself the concrete details of past and present in the valley, intent on finding some way to a new life there. By now I’d lost all such motivation, and for the first time clearly understood the events I hadn’t grasped before. Takashi was talking as though the conversation were a triangle with me at one corner and himself and my wife linked by the side opposite. But I had no wish to be a factor in any three-sided relationship. I was utterly isolated, faced with a growing depression that dragged at my limbs as in some nightmare.