by Kenzaburo Oe
“You said, didn’t you, Mitsu, that the evening of the day S was killed I was standing perfectly still in the dark kitchen, eating candy?” (I remained silent, ignoring the appeal in Takashi’s eyes, so he feebly switched his gaze to Natsumi and addressed her instead. It showed me he was bothered by the trick he’d played, and considered himself guilty. In fact, though, the precise nature of his feelings was irrelevant to what I had experienced. His act hadn’t hurt me; on the contrary, it was thanks to my younger brother that I now found myself able to see things other than my own inner self.) “I’ve just remembered, Natsumi—remembered clearly what was going on both inside and outside me as the child in that scene. I was standing in the kitchen sucking happily on my candy. I moved my tongue about nimbly, keeping the passages between my gums and lips open to stop the saliva trickling down from the corners of my mouth. To a certain extent, Mitsu used imagination to embellish his memory too. He said that saliva brown with dissolved candy was dribbling from my mouth like blood, but it couldn’t have been. I was devoting my finest candy-eating techniques to seeing that it didn’t. You see, it was a kind of magic. . . .
“It was dusk, but as I looked toward the doorway from inside the dark kitchen the ground in the garden shone white—a more striking white, even, than the snow that’s fallen today. Mitsu had just brought back S’s body. Mother was in the front room, a lunatic who at any moment might open the sliding screens and start raving at imaginary tenants in the front garden. The front room, you see, was designed so that the master of the house could stay seated while he gave instructions to people standing outside.
“So, though I was only a kid, I found myself surrounded by terrifying violence: after all, corpses and madness represent violence in its ultimate forms. I was driven into a corner from which I couldn’t escape, no matter how clever I was. By sucking my candy so carefully I was really hoping to make my consciousness burrow down inside my body, turning its back completely on the violence outside, much as a wound buries itself in swelling flesh. It was then that I thought up my piece of magic. If things went well—in other words, if I managed not to dribble a single drop—I’d escape the awful violence that hung about me. You know, it may be naive of me, but I’ve always wondered at the way my ancestors managed to survive the violence all around them and hand on life to me, their descendant. After all, they lived in a savage age. It’s incredible to think of the massive violence that the people leading down to me had to fight against just so that I could be alive now.”
“Let’s hope you too can get the better of violence and do your bit in handing on life,” my wife added in a tone suggesting the same emotions as underlay Takashi’s own confession, and with the same air of simplicity.
“While I was lying on my belly on the temporary bridge today, watching that kid’s life hanging in the balance, I was thinking about the problem of violence, and remembered exactly how things were while I was eating candy in the kitchen. It’s not just another of my dreams.” He fell silent and glanced at me again questioningly.
I went back through the snow to the storehouse and, squatting like a monkey in front of the oil stove—the first Scandinavian oil stove, I told myself with gloomy amusement, ever to be lit in the valley—peered into the round window set in the black cylinder. Beyond the window, flames shivered incessantly, the color of the sea on a cloudless day. An unexpected fly set its sights on my nose, collided with it, and crashed onto my left knee. The air warmed by the stove had risen to the ceiling, stirring up the insects that ought to have remained snugly ensconced behind the great beams until spring. Plump and fat, the fly was of a size you would never have found in people’s homes in the old days. Others to match it might be found in a stable, perhaps, but it wasn’t that type; except for its size, it was quite clearly the usual kind of fly that gathered about human beings. With a single scoop of my palm about four inches in front of the fly, I caught it. I’m an expert fly-catcher, though I say it myself. The accident in which I lost the sight of my right eye happened at the height of summer, and hordes of flies came to mock me as I lay in bed recovering. So I took my revenge by perfecting my fly-catching techniques, thereby also helping develop a sense of perspective using only one eye.
I watched the fly for a while as it twitched between my fingertips like the knot in an artery. Then, with minimal pressure, the fly was crushed and my fingers were wet with its body fluids. I felt as though the pads of my fingers would never be clean again. Terror rose up around me, penetrating inside me like the warmth from the stove. But all I did was wipe the tips of my fingers on my trousers. I went on squatting there, quite still, my whole body paralyzed as though the dead fly had been a plug holding the motor center of my nervous system in place. My consciousness had identified with the flames flickering beyond the round window in the stove, so that my body on this side was no more than an empty hull. It was pleasant to spend time like this, shunning the responsibilities of the flesh. My throat grew dry and hot and began to tickle. The thought that I ought to put a kettle of water on the flat top of the stove made me realize that, far from leaving for Tokyo the following morning, I’d unconsciously resigned myself to spending a considerable number of days upstairs in the storehouse. By now my ears told me that the snow had come to stay. Even at the dead of night, there in the valley in the forest, one’s ears, as they grew used to the silence and developed an ability to respond to ever subtler noises, would detect a surprising amount of sound. Now, though, the valley gave off literally no sound at all. Over the entire hollow and the vast forest surrounding it the newly settled snow had spread a mantle of silence.
Gii the hermit, they said, was still leading his solitary life in the depths of the forest. But even he, who was presumably inured to its everyday silence, would surely find something new and incongruous in the total absence of sound of this snowy midnight. If he froze to death in the snowbound forest, would his body ever be found by the valley folk? What thoughts would pass through his mind as he lay in the silent darkness beneath the piling snow, face to face with such an ugly, unsociable death ? Would he be silent, or would he mutter incessantly to himself? For all I knew, he might have dug himself a deep, rectangular hole just like the pit that had been mine for a day, and be sheltering in it back there in the forest. I cursed myself again for having filled in my pit with anything so obvious as a septic tank; why hadn’t I appreciated it more ? I pictured to myself two pits dug in the depths of the forest, with the hermit in the older of the two and myself in the newer, both of us seated in the damp hugging our knees to our chests, placidly waiting till the danger passed. At one time, I felt, I would have used the term “waiting” in its more positive sense, but now it occurred to me stripped of all but its most negative significance, and I realized on reflection that I’d reached a frame of mind that could sanction—could accept with neither fear nor disgust—death at the bottom of a pit, buried beneath earth and stones pulled down by my own fingers. The trip to the valley had been a distraction, but all the while my private downhill journey had been steadily progressing. And it struck me that, living alone upstairs in the storehouse as I did now, I could if I wished paint my head crimson, thrust a cucumber up my anus, and hang myself without anyone interfering. The place, moreover, was conveniently equipped with great zelkova beams that had already lasted a hundred years. But the pursuit of this fantasy only aroused new fear and disgust, and I abruptly checked the movement of my head as I lifted it to look up and confirm the existence of the beams.
In the middle of the night there were sounds in the front garden like a horse pawing at wet ground. The sounds as they occurred were stamped into the soil in a series of dull thuds without the slightest reverberation. Wiping an oval patch like an old-fashioned mirror in the murky, narrow glass window (such modern improvements to the storehouse, including the windows at the back, had been made toward the end of the war, along with electric lighting and the toilet facilities at the side of the storehouse, in readiness for evacuees—who had been put off
, however, by rumors of my mother’s madness and never actually came), I looked down and saw Takashi, stark naked, running round and round in circles in the snow that had settled in the front garden. The lamp hanging from the eaves, aided by reflection from the snow lying on the ground, roof, and various small shrubs beneath the eaves, suffused the white garden with a luminescence that recreated the vague light of dusk. It was still snowing steadily. The effect was oddly static, as though the lines traced by the snowflakes at that moment would be maintained unchanging, permitting no other movement, just as long as snow continued to fall through the space over the valley. The essence of that moment would be drawn out indefinitely; direction in time was swallowed up and lost amid the steadily falling flakes, just as sound was absorbed by the layer of snow. All-pervasive time : Takashi as he ran stark naked was great-grandfather’s brother, and my own; every moment of those hundred years was crowded into this one instant in time. The naked figure stopped running and walked for a while, then knelt in the snow and ran both hands over its surface. I saw his gawky buttocks and his long, bent back, flexible as an insect’s with its countless joints.
Suddenly, Takashi gave a series of sharp grunts and rolled over and over in the snow. He stood up with snow clinging to his naked body and walked slowly back toward the area where the lamp shed more light, his disproportionately long arms dangling disconsolately like a gorilla’s. I saw that he had an erection. His penis had the same air of power stoically controlled and the same odd pathos as the swelling muscles of an athlete’s upper arms. He made no more attempt to conceal his erect organ than he would his biceps. As he entered the open doorway, a young woman who had been waiting inside the kitchen stepped out and enveloped his naked body in the bath towel she held spread out. My heart contracted with pain. It wasn’t my wife, though, but Momoko. Unflinching, she held out the towel to receive him as he approached without concealing his erection, shivering from cold. Like a virgin-pure younger sister, I thought. Without speaking they went inside and the door closed on them, leaving nothing but the summation of stilled movement on the snow, one hundred years enclosed within a moment.
I felt I had penetrated the depths concealed within Takashi to a level that my eyes had never reached before—if not with understanding of their significance, then at least with confirmation of their existence. I wondered whether the marks where the snow was churned up by his naked body would be enfolded in new snow by the morning. Normally, only a dog or some such animal would expose its erect penis so frankly and to so pathetically little purpose; Takashi’s experiences in a world of darkness unfamiliar to me must have given him the utter frankness of a lone mongrel. And just as a dog is unable to express its melancholy in words, there was something heavy and knotted at the center of Takashi’s mind that no shared language could ever unravel.
I went to sleep wondering how it would feel in practice to be invaded by the soul of a dog. It wasn’t difficult in the darkness to conjure up a specially fabricated beast, the body of a large, fat, ginger-haired dog with my own head grafted on it. Its tail, which was round, plump, and springy like a long whip, was curled between its back legs to hide its genitals, and it gazed at me inquiringly as it floated limp in the darkness—definitely not the kind of dog to indulge its exhibitionistic tendencies in the snow at the dead of night. “Woof!” I barked to drive it away, and went back to sleep, taking great care not to summon up ginger dogs from the darkness again.
It was near noon when I awoke: New Year’s Eve, with the laughter of a large group of young men coming from the main house. It was cold, but not piercingly so; snow was still falling and the sky was dark, but the earth gleamed with a gentle, bright light. The dwellings in the valley, seen far below in distant miniature, were so simplified by the snow that the sight no longer threatened to root up twisted things lurking in the depths of memory. In the same way the snow had diminished the dark, ferocious reality of the forest that lay all about. The forest seemed to have retreated, and the hollow, though still filled with driving snow, had become more spacious. I felt I was dwelling in unfamiliar surroundings where everything had a comfortably abstract quality. The spot where my brother had rolled about in the snow the previous night looked like a scale model of some archaeological site. Undisturbed by boot marks, its hollows and mounds were faithfully reproduced by the newly fallen snow that enfolded them. I gazed down at it for a while, listening to the laughter that rose from the kitchen and made the house sound like a students’ hostel.
When I walked over to the main house and went inside, the young men of the football team, who were sitting round the open fireplace, abruptly fell silent. I felt self-conscious, an alien intrusion on the happy family circle about Takashi. My wife and Momoko were busy working beside the stove. I moved toward them in the vague hope of finding succor there, and found them still intoxicated with the valley’s first snow.
“I got your boots, Mitsu!” said Momoko with innocent cheerfulness. “I went to buy them at the supermarket this morning. They had a big delivery of new stuff, ready for the snow. They say the van that brought it is stuck in the snow on the other side of the bridge. Poor, homesick Mitsu—everything seems against you leaving, doesn’t it?”
“Haven’t you been cold in the storehouse ?” my wife asked. “Do you think you’ll be all right living there for a while?” Her eyes were bloodshot from the snow, but betrayed somewhere a gleam of energy that was lacking when they were red from drink. In all likelihood she’d had no whisky the night before, and had slept soundly too.
“I’ll be all right, I suppose,” I said in a flat, depressed voice. My reply, I sensed, aroused both scorn and satisfaction in the young men round the fireplace, who had been awaiting it with dispassionate curiosity. In their eyes, probably, I was just a dull oaf, the only person in the valley to remain unexcited on the day the snow came.
“Do you think I could have some food?” I asked, assuming the air of the unhappy, hungry husband in the hope that mounting scorn would induce the young men to ignore the intruder.
“Do you know how to prepare a pheasant, Mitsu?” said Takashi, addressing me in an easy voice. “The father of the kid who got stuck on the bridge yesterday went out early this morning with his friends and shot some for us.” In front of the team, his other self was to the fore, the one that wore a protective mail of self-confidence and authority, not the one that had rolled naked in the snow like a dog.
“I’ll have a try after I’ve had something to eat.”
Abandoning tolerance, the young men in unison heaved an exaggerated sigh of disgust. At one time, no self-respecting man in the valley would ever have prepared food himself. Even now, I suspected, the same tradition still survived. The young men had been treated to the spectacle of their leader twisting his elder brother round his little finger once again. The whole bunch of them, drunk with the snow, were in high spirits and ready for any bit of light relief. In the same way, the entire population of the valley would always get inebriated with the first snow. They would stay like that for ten days or so, during which they would be prey to a constant urge to go marching out into the white drifts, careless of the cold, driven by the fires of intoxication inside them. But once that period was over, the hangover would set in and everyone would long just as intensely to get away from the snow. The inhabitants of the area had none of the toughness of people living in the true “snow country.” The fires within would soon spend themselves, leaving them powerless against the incursions of the cold, and people would begin to fall sick. Such was the pattern of the village’s encounters with snow. Privately I hoped that my wife’s infatuation with it would not affect her brain for long.
I sat down on the raised wooden floor where it projected into the kitchen, just as the tenants’ families had done in the old days when they came to pay their respects at the year’s end, and with my back to the open fireplace began my belated breakfast.
“The reason why the rising succeeded,” said Takashi, picking up the thread where it had
been severed by my entry, “was that the farmers, not only in this village but in all the villages round about, saw the youths as a terrifying rabble, a dangerous bunch of misfits who’d commit arson or start looting without a second’s thought. I wouldn’t be surprised if the farmers were more scared of their own lawless leaders than of the enemy inside the castle gates in the town.” He was obviously trying to recreate a picture of the 1860 rising in the minds of the village youths and keep it fresh in their memories.
“Was it Takashi’s description of the rising that made the team laugh so happily?” I inquired in a low voice when my wife came with food. The thing that puzzled me most was that the role of the young men in the 1860 rising—as I understood it at least—had been distinguished solely by its brutal cruelty and was hardly something to evoke hearty laughter.
“Takashi cleverly worked in some amusing episodes,” she said. “There’s something essentially alive about him, I feel—he refuses to have preconceived ideas about the rising, or to see it as exclusively depressing, as you do.”
“Does the 1860 business have so many amusing episodes to offer, then?”
“That’s not something you should be asking me, surely?” she retorted. But she gave an example even so. “He told them how the overseers and local officials in the villages on the way to the castle town were made to kneel by the roadside, so that each of the peasants could deal them a single blow on the head with his bare fist as he went past. That really had them laughing.”
Undoubtedly the cruel idea of everybody taking a swipe at these officials had the kind of crude humor to appeal to a bunch of dumb peasant boys from a farming village. Unfortunately, though, the men who had been hit by each member of a mob running to tens of thousands had died, their brains reduced to broken bean curd in their skulls.