by Kenzaburo Oe
The snow settled on the row of pheasants where they lay with their down scorched off, their bodies fleshy and heavy. I took them up two at a time and banged them sharply together to shake off the snow. They made a dull thud that set up nasty echoes in the pit of my stomach.
“My friend said he suspected that on the day you said you would ‘tell the truth,’ just before he startled you by coming up from behind, you’d been studying that photograph of the charred body. He was right, wasn’t he ? You were sitting at the drugstore counter imagining telling your own truth and being turned into a blackened corpse like that.”
“Yes—I had a feeling that he understood to some extent. And I feel that I myself understand at least the significance of the way he chose to commit suicide.” He spoke straightforwardly, reawakening in me the emotion I’d felt on hearing his tribute to my dead friend at the airport. “It may seem funny that I should be so sure about something concerning a friend of yours, but I’ve been thinking over the implications of what happened ever since I heard about it from Natsumi. Before he painted his head red and hanged himself, naked,” (and—I thought—with a cucumber stuffed up his rear, though since my wife didn’t know this, Takashi didn’t either) “I’m sure he gave a last cry of ‘Shall I tell the truth?’ Even if he didn’t actually shout the words aloud, I feel that the very act of jumping, with the cold realization that a moment later his body would be hanging there naked and redheaded for all to see, irretrievably dead, was in itself just such a desperate cry. Don’t you agree, Mitsu? Don’t you think it takes terrific courage to make one’s final gesture with one’s own naked, crimson-headed corpse ? He told the truth through the act of dying. I don’t know just what truth it was he told, but the one absolutely certain thing is that he told it. When I heard about it from Natsumi, something inside me gave the signal, ‘OK, message received.’ ”
I understood what Takashi meant.
“It seems he made a sound deal when he paid for your medicine.”
“If the time ever comes for me to tell that kind of truth, I’d like you to hear it, Mitsu. It’s the sort that wouldn’t have its full effect unless I told it to you.” He spoke with the naive excitement of a child that knows it’s doing something risky.
“You mean, me as a close relative?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, your truth concerns our sister?” I asked, overcome by a stifling suspicion.
Takashi’s body went momentarily rigid, then he stared so fiercely that I was afraid he would lash out at me. But he was merely focusing on me with intense wariness in order to gauge accurately just what lay behind my words, and after a while his body suddenly relaxed and he averted his gaze.
We stared in silence at the new snow settling on the corpses of the pheasants. The dank cold chilled our bodies to the marrow. Like his comrade of the grotesque features and inadequate clothing, Takashi was shivering, his lips blue. I was eager to get back into the kitchen, yet at the same time wanted to round off our conversation amicably. Takashi, however, rescued us from our awkwardness while I was still groping vaguely for something safe to say.
“The reason I persuaded you to come back to the valley,” he said, “wasn’t just plain cunning. It wasn’t just so that, when I sold the storehouse and land, I could tell them at the village office that my elder brother up at the house had asked me to come and make arrangements. It’s also because I want you to be a witness when I tell the truth. I’m hoping that moment will come while we’re together.”
“The land and the house don’t matter now,” I said. “But neither do I believe you’ll ever tell anybody such a terrible truth—if, that is, you really have such a truth hidden inside you. In the same way, I don’t suppose I’ll ever find my new life, or my thatched hut. . . .”
So, side by side and chilled to the bone, we walked back into the house. It was lunchtime, and Momoko was just dishing out stew to the young men round the fireplace. For Takashi and his friends, living and training together like the young men’s New Year communes of an earlier generation, this would be their first meal under the same roof. The ever-industrious Hoshio sat in a corner, apart from the happy circle formed by his new comrades, with a large number of footballs which, one by one, he was assiduously polishing with oil to preserve the leather. I handed the corpses of the six pheasants to my wife, put on my new boots, and scuffled my way back through the snow to the storehouse.
The Freedom of the Ostracized
TIME passed, but the powdery snow went on falling, betraying my private hope that it would change into larger, petal-like flakes, and I remained alien to it. I stayed shut up in the storehouse, concentrating on my translation, never going out into the snow. My meals were brought to me there; the only time I returned to the main building was when I needed to replenish the water in the kettle on the stove. Whenever I went, I found Takashi and his companions in a state of childlike innocence, drunk with the snow and showing no signs as yet of the fatigue or wear and tear that goes with a hangover. New snow wiped out all traces of deterioration in what had already settled, constantly renewing the first impression, so there was no chance for the devotees in the main house to recover from their snowy infatuation. Eventually, I discovered that I could use melted snow in my kettle, and my daily life was cut off even more definitively from the main building. I spent three days enfolded in the driving, alien snow, savoring the sense of relaxation of one free from all surveillance, a sense so strong that I could tell that my own expression and movements were slackening and slowing up.
Early on New Year’s Day, even so, my hermit’s existence had been disturbed by Jin and her family. The first intrusion came around dawn, when Jin’s eldest son woke me to say that Jin wanted me, as present head of the Nedokoro family, to go and draw the “first water.” The boy was as tense as one of the old folk, who were easily swayed by such peasant customs, and scowled as he held out toward me an advertising leaflet on the back of which, in a half-illegible scrawl done with a hard pencil, a map had been drawn. By the dim light of the bulb at the bottom of the staircase, and beneath the watchful gaze of the boy’s small, shadowy eyes, I tried to take in this year’s route for fetching the “first water,” which Jin had worked out herself, but gave up and going back upstairs wrapped myself in my overcoat. The unfortunate boy, who had apparently been ordered to accompany me on the expedition, stood still and silent, shivering like a dog with wet fur as he waited.
Looking in at the main house, I found Takashi and my wife asleep side by side near the open fireplace in which a few embers still gave off a red glow. Hoshio lay beyond Takashi, and Momoko under the same blanket as my wife, but Takashi’s arm, which was obviously stretched out to touch my wife’s side beneath the blanket, gave the impression that the two were sleeping quite alone. As I stood at the entrance to the kitchen, half embarrassed, half unable to draw my gaze away, Jin’s nimble offspring unearthed a deep bucket—the bucket destined to play such a sacred if short-lived role—from beside the stove. Then together we plunged into the snow-filled darkness. The snow driving against my face told me that the skin was burning and suffused with blood, but my emotional responses were steady to the point of inertia. Sadly I recalled the fatal sense, grown like a cancer between my wife and me, of the impossibility of any sexual activity. Surely, I told myself, it was a desirable thing in the long run that we should seize any chance to escape, dragging heavy feet like exhausted warriors, from that clogging mire of impossibility ? Even so, I wasn’t admitting the possibility of direct sexual relations between her and Takashi; all that had happened was that my mind, empty of everything but the pressing need to hasten on through the dark snow, was seized from time to time by a mysterious fantasy in which the powerful magnetic force I’d sensed so stoically repressed in Takashi’s erect penis, as he stood naked and covered with snow, transmitted itself somehow to my sleeping wife through the fingers laid against her flank.
The snow on the road leading down to the riverbank from the main road through t
he valley was still soft. Jin’s son must have watched intensely at his mother’s side as she thumbed through her almanacs and charts of directions, working out the route for the “first water,” for he plowed his way through the knee-deep snow with complete confidence. As the river came into sight, I halted in my tracks, shocked at the sight of the black water hemmed in by snow. At once, the fragments of fantasy floating about the space inside my still incompletely awakened brain condensed and fell to earth. You’re an outsider, you’ve no connections with the valley, I repeated to myself like a spell to ward off the terrifying things that the black waters threatened to awaken in me. But though I might succeed in denying it all meaning, the black river imprisoned in snow was still the most threatening sight I had encountered since coming back to the valley. Assuming from my petrified air that I was stuck, afraid of losing my footing in the deepening snow, Jin’s son waited for a while, but finally seized the bucket from my hand and went down to the water’s edge alone, gliding knee-deep down the snowy slope. There was a furtive, almost guilty splashing, then the boy came struggling back up the slope with the water he’d drawn from the river, and I saw that besides my bucket he was carrying an old dried-milk can which he’d found somewhere and reverently filled with river water.
“You could have had some of our ‘first water’ if you wanted!” I said. But the boy abruptly covered the can with both palms as if to. protect it from attack.
I realized what stubborn idea had just taken shape in his small head. I hadn’t drawn my “first water” myself, but had let him get it for me. That made it a fraud, whereas the water that filled his own can was true “first water,” since he’d drawn it for himself. Until now, Jin’s family had always shared the Nedokoros’ “first water,” and if I had gone down to the water’s edge to draw it myself he would probably have been content with a share of our “genuine” water. However, once I’d got stuck and allowed it to be drawn fraudulently in my name, he’d had the idea of drawing some of his own and taking it home. If the son of a mother so hopelessly and incurably obese could still become such a stubborn mystic, then there must be some powerful reality underlying the process. Now that my mind was completely awake, I began to feel it had been foolish and pointless to come down to the river at dawn like this, and I trudged back along the graveled road in a disgruntled mood. The task of drawing “first water” would have suited Takashi better than me. I handed the bucket to Jin’s son in front of the main house so that I shouldn’t have to see the people asleep in there again, told him to take it into the kitchen, and went back to the storehouse. But the ache in my half-frozen shoulders distorted the dreams of my resumed slumber, and I had a nightmare in which I struggled and cried out, my shoulders caught in the grasp of two enormous hands of terrifying prehensile power that emerged from the black waters of the river.
Shortly before noon the boy came to summon me again, announcing that Jin had come at the head of her entire skinny brood to extend her New Year’s greetings. Going downstairs I found Jin, more incredibly fat than ever, seated on the edge of the raised floor in the entrance, facing the heavily falling snow outside like some enormous sphere that had rolled in from nowhere in particular. I stepped down into the entrance to save her the trouble of turning her body, and stationed myself, along with the family, in front of her and somewhat to one side. Her face, lit evenly all over by the shadowless light reflected from the snow, had an odd youthfulness. A quiver ran over the skin drawn taut and wrinkle-free across the great metal basin of her face, but she just stared at me and went on breathing heavily and painfully without speaking. The few yards’ walk from the outbuilding had reduced her to something resembling a moribund porpoise. Her family refused to say anything as long as she remained silent, and having stepped down into the entrance in a mood of vague tension, I found myself strangely at a loss. Apart from Jin herself, who was enveloped in a kind of shapeless black bag with neither front nor back, top nor bottom, the family was dressed up in what was more or less the conventional New Year’s outfit, but I still wore the corduroy shirt and sweater in which I’d gone to sleep, and hadn’t even shaved. I began to worry in case Jin felt her effort in coming specially to offer her greetings was not receiving due recognition. However, after an interminable period spent regaining her breath, she finally cleared her throat hoarsely and feebly and began, with a generous display of goodwill:
“A Happy New Year to you, Mitsusaburo!”
“And a Happy New Year to you too, Jin!”
“Some hope!” she declared, immediately stiffening her attitude. “What’s happy about it for a wretched creature like me? Suppose the whole village was to clear off again—how would I get away, I’d like to know? I’d be left to be eaten by the dogs or die of starvation.”
“Why bring up that old story now ?” I said. “The last time the whole village checked out was before the 1860 rising, surely?”
“Don’t you believe it—I saw them go myself!” she countered in a voice full of stubborn, foolish confidence. “Just after the defeat, when the occupation forces came in jeeps. Don’t you remember? All the ablebodied folk ran off into the forest, leaving the old people and disabled behind in the valley. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“But you’re wrong, Jin,” I said. “I know, because I was in the valley when the first jeep arrived. A GI gave me a can of asparagus, but the grown-ups didn’t know whether it was something to eat or what it was, so in the end I left it in the teachers’ room at the primary school.”
“No—they cleared out, the whole lot of them!” Jin insisted calmly.
“Mitsusaburo,” interposed her taciturn spouse, “Jin’s begun to go funny in the head.”
The remark upset the children, who showed signs of painful anxiety obvious even to a bystander.
I couldn’t help recalling how, in my dream of the attack on the storehouse, Jin had figured as someone with no hope of escape. And yet, as I watched her sitting there—the eyes, which were small and sunken like navels in the swelling flesh of her face, still further narrowed against the dazzling snow; the small lips sucked in between her gums; the dirty, scaly-looking ears sticking out like handles on a full moon—she had an air of sturdy sanity that belied the disproportion of her flesh. The show of mental disturbance, I suspected, was a new tactic designed to stop me putting the outbuilding up for sale. Unfortunately, though, it was Takashi and not me at whom she should have directed her cunning—and Takashi had in fact already sold all the Nedokoros’ land and buildings, including Jin’s home. If anything really qualified Takashi for the role of effective evildoer, it was the flaw in his sensibility that allowed him so easily to betray the pitiful plans of a middle-aged woman trapped by her abnormal bulk in this godforsaken valley.
“Okubo village is going to the dogs,” she announced. “People have lost their sense of decency. Take last night—it was New Year’s Eve, but a crowd of complete strangers from both the village and the ‘country’ dumped themselves on the houses that have TV. Stopped them making their preparations for the New Year or doing anything else. Disgusting, I call it!”
“Did you go and watch television?” I asked the boys.
“Mm, we went and saw the New Year’s Eve Show,” the second son replied proudly. “Some houses were watching TV on the sly with the place all shut up, so the crowd got mad and rattled the shutters! Most of the kids went round from one place to the next and didn’t go home till everybody’d put their sets away in the back room.”
I went back to my lair on the second floor of the storehouse while Jin and her family made their infinitely leisurely progress through the snow toward the main house, on their way now to offer greetings to Takashi and the rest. As I peered from the window, Jin’s body looked like a swaying snowman. I could see where the top of her round head was going bald in the center. I watched again a little later as several young men supported her on her way back to the outbuilding. The “evildoer” bounced around the bearers as they went, scattering the snow and directi
ng operations in a piercing voice until it suddenly seemed too much for everybody, including Jin’s children, and they burst into innocent laughter.
On the morning of January 4th, I went down to the valley for the first time to make a long-distance telephone call. Snow had been falling steadily for several days, but the narrow road that led to the open space in front of the village office wasn’t difficult to negotiate, since there was a foundation of hard-packed snow beneath the thin new layer on the furrowed trail. The young members of the football team had occupied the first few dozen hours of the year—which the older men of the valley had spent dead drunk—in vigorous training, running up and down the path and treading down the snow as they went. As I passed by the supermarket I saw a vaguely disturbing sight. The store was closed temporarily behind a great shutter done in yellow and grayish green camouflage like a tank, but a number of farmers’ wives from the “country” were standing perfectly still beneath the eaves, each accompanied, as if by arrangement, by a single infant. Empty baskets on their arms suggested they were waiting for the store to open in order to do some shopping or other. They must have been patiently waiting there for a considerable time already, though, for some of the children were squatting wearily in the snow. The supermarket had been closed since New Year’s Day. The doors were still in fact locked, and there was no sign of any employees near them. Why should the women from the “country” be standing there with their empty shopping baskets? I walked on past them, still wondering.