by Kenzaburo Oe
The second letter was dated 1867. A new sense of vigor and freedom in the style showed that several years of life in the city had awakened a youthful, humorous quality that during his period on the whaler had still been bottled up in the young deserter from the forest. The letter included an amusing article which he’d read in Yokohama in the first newspaper he’d seen in his life, and which he copied out specially for the benefit of his elder brother back home in the valley in the wilds of Shikoku :
Today I have something that may amuse you. The newspaper in which I saw it forbids unauthorized reproduction, but I doubt that it applies to letters such as this. It seems that a man in Pennsylvania in the United States took his own life, possibly while out of his mind, as a result of unfortunate circumstances which his farewell note described as follows: “I married a widow with one daughter. My father fell in love with the daughter and married her. He thus became my son-in-law, and the daughter, being now my father’s wife, became my stepmother. Next, I had a son by the widow I had married. He became my father’s brother-in-law and also, being my stepmother’s brother, my own uncle. My father’s wife, my stepdaughter, also had a son, who was not only my stepbrother but also, being my stepchild’s child, my grandson. Thus the widow I married, as parent of my stepmother, became my grandmother. So I found myself to be my wife’s husband and grandson, and at the same time my own grandfather and grandson.”
The newspaper carries an advertisement saying: “Wish to instruct young Japanese gentlemen desirous of attaining proficiency in the English language.” Another says: “All aid and advice given to those visiting America for purposes of study, commerce, travel, or tourism.”
Between this letter and the next there was a gap of more than two decades. During those twenty-odd years, the boy whose excitement at finding himself liberated from everything related to life in the distant valley had once made him find that humorous article so fascinating, the boy who so obviously cherished a private ambition to go to America, may in fact have got there. Either way, the betrayal that had enabled him to survive the rising, leaving behind him in the valley so many savagely executed dead, had also, it seemed, secured him a new life of freedom.
This letter written in the spring of 1889, after so long an interval, revealed the style of a man of ripe wisdom. It was a soberly critical reply to a letter that great-grandfather at home in the valley had written to express his joy over the promulgation of the new Constitution. Wasn’t it somewhat hasty—the letter inquired rather depressingly—to become infatuated with the word “Constitution” without even finding out what its actual provisions were? It quoted the following passage from a work by a member of a former samurai family in Kochi prefecture—a possible associate, that is, of the agent from beyond the forest:
One can naturally distinguish two varieties of civil rights. Those of England and France may be called “recovered” rights since the lower orders wrested them from those above them by their own efforts. But there is another variety that may be called “conferred,” in that they are bestowed as a favor from above. Since “recovered” rights are won from below, their extent and nature may be determined at will by those receiving their benefit. “Conferred” rights, being bestowed from above, admit of no such decision; for their recipient to imagine that they may be instantly transformed into “recovered” rights is absurd.
The new Constitution, great-grandfather’s brother predicted disapprovingly, would grant only a few rights conferred as a favor from above, and he urged that some organization be formed to work for more progressive civil rights. As this letter showed, he viewed the political regime following the Restoration with the eyes of a man with a “cause,” in his case the cause of civil rights. It seemed likely, therefore, that the legend that he became a high official in the Restoration government was the exact reverse of the truth.
The last two letters, though written a mere five years later, suggested that his enthusiasm for the “cause” had already suffered a rapid decline. He was still the intellectual well versed in contemporary affairs that he’d been around 1889, but the desire to make assertions about the state of the nation had faded away. The overwhelming impression now was of an increasingly elderly, solitary man, anxious about the well-being of a close relative in distant parts. The Ikichiro mentioned in the letters is the name grandfather used in writing his “Account of the Farmers’ Rising in Okubo Village.” Great-grandfather’s younger brother had a deep affection for his only nephew, though it is doubtful whether they ever met in the flesh. He was very eager, via his letters, to help his nephew evade the draft, and when the boy unavoidably went to war he was equally concerned for his safety. It showed perfectly clearly that the brutal leader of the 1860 rising had also had, beneath the surface, a vein of gentle solicitude :
I thank you for your letter. I gather from it that you are thinking to request a draft deferment for Ikichiro whether he is accepted for the army or not. We had agreed that should he not be accepted there would of course be no need to present a deferment request. Possibly our letters crossed, but I had word from your wife that he had not been accepted, so instead of drafting the application as I should naturally have done, I determined to do nothing for the moment. Such being the case, there is no need for you to have anyone present the application. I hope to hear that you have understood and agreed.
. . .
Your letter reassures me at least of your continued existence, but leaves me thirsting for anything more detailed concerning the life you are leading in these days. Is there still no word of Ikichiro since his departure for China? The assault on Weihaiwei is still in progress, and I fear that at this very moment he stands in peril of his life. I am eager to know how he fares. I beg you, should a letter arrive, to let me know its purport with all haste.
This was the last of the letters. In all likelihood, great-grandfather’s brother had died still peering in vain for his young warrior nephew amidst the smoke of distant battle. Nothing remained to suggest that he had survived after that.
Just before noon, the Nembutsu music started up again. Today it came from a fixed spot in front of the supermarket, without inspiring other music from the valley folk as it had yesterday, when it had sprung from several places in turn. Takashi and his team must be playing all alone. I wondered whether they would have the energy to go on indefinitely with such monotonous music if there was no sympathetic response from the ordinary inhabitants of the valley. I had a feeling that the next time the music came to an end might well mark the moment when reaction against the “rising” set in.
When Hoshio brought my lunch, he looked haggard and feverish, and his eyes followed my every movement with almost hungry intensity. It was as though abject shame at being dropped from the “rising” had swelled up inside his head until it came oozing out of his eyes. But why, I wondered, did he need to feel so ashamed toward Takashi ? After deserting Hoshio when he was pushed over in the supermarket office for contravening “regulations,” Takashi was hardly qualified to criticize him for falling by the way. Hoshio, after all, had taken part in the “rising” of his own free will, and had given it practical assistance as technician, even though he hadn’t the slightest connection with the valley. The only possible bond tying him to the “rising” was Takashi’s kindness. With such ideas in mind, I said to him out of naive sympathy :
“It looks as though Taka’s ‘rising’ has quietened down a lot today, doesn’t it?”
But Hoshio stared at me in silent rebuff, trying to indicate that, though he’d finally dropped out of the affair, he had no wish to join a bystander like me in criticism of Takashi and his football team.
“There aren’t enough electrical appliances to go round,” he said, confining himself to objective analysis of the situation. “When it comes to actually deciding who’s going to take them, nobody has the courage to step forward.”
“Anyway, Taka started it, so it’s his job to carry it through,” I ventured in what was supposed to be the same objective spir
it. But the only effect was to heighten his irritation. The sense of shame that for some time had been wavering obscurely on his face suddenly reached explosive level, and an apoplectic rush of dark blood flooded his cheeks. When he finally raised his eyes and fixed their gaze on me, they had a steady gleam that looked as if everything they’d been concealing would spill out in a sudden burst. But he swallowed hard, like a child, and said :
“Will you put me up in the storehouse from tonight, Mitsu ? I can sleep downstairs, I don’t mind the cold.”
“Why?” I asked, vaguely taken aback. “What’s the problem?”
An almost obscene flush spread over the peasant-boy face. He pursed his heavily cracked lips, blew out strongly, then said, his whole face paling again as soon as he’d got it out:
“Taka does it with Natsumi, I don’t like sleeping there.”
I watched as the skin of his face, sunburned from the snow, went dry and seemed to break into a fine white powder. Until then I’d thought I was the observer, complacently attributing Hoshio’s abnormal show of embarrassment to his losing his place in Takashi’s “rising.” In fact, it was he who had been observing my own disgrace. But witnessing the discomfiture of someone whose wife had slept with another man had affected him in turn with an unbearable sense of almost personal shame. The realization promptly volleyed the ball of shame back to me again. A surge of hot moisture seemed to suffuse the very sockets of my eyes.
“Then you’d better bring your blankets over here while it’s still light, Hoshi. You can sleep upstairs with me. It’s too cold downstairs.” The hot defiance radiating from his eyes faded, leaving only a suspicious watchfulness. He looked at me and wondered, wavering between a naive suspicion that I hadn’t understood what he’d said and cowardly apprehension in case I suddenly lashed out at him. Then, still keeping an eye on my movements, he mumbled stupidly in a voice dulled by disgust and helplessness :
“I kept telling Taka not to, that he mustn’t and it was wrong, but he did it all the same.” A tear so tiny it looked like a fleck of saliva ran down the whitish, finely cracked skin of his cheek.
“Hoshi,” I commanded, “if this isn’t just imagination or wishful thinking, you’d better tell me exactly what you saw. Either that or keep quiet!” I knew in fact that unless he described it in detail the thing would have no reality for me and I wouldn’t be able to react properly. The blood had rushed to my head, where it pounded noisily, but my consciousness merely drifted about in it, unable to hitch itself either to jealousy or any other practical reaction.
Hoshi cleared his throat feebly in an effort to give more substance to his voice, then went on slowly, emphasizing the end of each phrase so as to impress on me what he was saying:
“I kept telling him not to. I said I’d hit him if he didn’t lay off. I got a weapon and was going to rush into the room where they were sleeping, but when I opened the door, Taka—he had just his training shirt on, and I could see his bare ass—looked round at me and said, ‘I thought you were the only member of the team that couldn’t handle a weapon.’ I just stood there, I couldn’t hit him, I kept saying ‘Don’t, don’t do it, you mustn’t!’ But Taka did it, he wouldn’t take any notice of me!”
Far from summoning up any concrete image of the sexual act between Takashi and Natsumi, Hoshio’s words only succeeded in stirring the shallower, rawer layers of memory and reviving with a new reality the word “adulterer” which Takashi had used here in the storehouse and whose faint echoes had seemed to ring on indefinitely beyond the sturdy black beams. Of the two adulterers, I’d thought that my wife had completely uprooted everything sexual within herself, so that though a fleeting desire might brush her occasionally she would be unable to transplant it to sexual soil where it could grow naturally. Once, when she and I stood shoulder to shoulder trying to move a potted plant from a corner of the cramped conservatory, we found ourselves—though we’d had almost no sexual relations since the baby’s conception, much less since the trauma of its birth—simultaneously overcome by desire, like a passing fever of the blood. Roughly she grasped my penis, which had risen stiff against the resisting stuff of my trousers, then frowned in distress and distaste and, walking with an odd shuffle, disappeared into the bedroom. Later, lying pale on the bed and sustained by aspirin, she’d made her excuses :
“The moment my hand touched you, I felt I’d gone back to carrying that great fetus again. I could feel my womb all big and tight, contracting and hurting with sexual excitement. I couldn’t breathe for fear; I was scared I’d miscarry, lose something big. I don’t suppose you can understand that, can you?”
But even as I listened to her I could feel, low in my belly, a lingering memory of the pain that a while earlier had taken a vicelike grip on the buried roots of my erect penis that ran from behind the testicles toward the coccyx. . . .
“Did he rape her, then?” I pressed in horror. “Did you go in to stop him because she cried in pain?” My head was swimming with renewed anger. But Hoshio, who until now had been racked with dry sobs, unexpectedly relaxed his expression, considered my words, and with every sign of surprise hastened to deny them.
“Oh, no! He didn’t rape her. When I first peeped through the sliding doors, I thought she was just too tired to stop him putting his hand on her breasts and between her legs, but by the time I opened the doors she was waiting for him to begin. I could see one of her bare soles sticking up straight and obedient-like on each side of his ass! So this time I said to her, ‘I’ll tell Mitsu if you don’t stop!’ But she just said, ‘I don’t mind, Hoshi,’ and didn’t turn a hair. Even when Taka actually started, the soles of her feet kept quite still; it didn’t look to me as if she was in pain.”
The adulterers were gradually becoming more real. In fact the reality was awakening a disgraceful, perverted lust in me.
“I started to shut the door because I couldn’t stand watching Taka do it, but without stopping he twisted his head round to look at me and said, ‘Tomorrow, go and tell Mitsu everything you saw.’ His voice was so loud I was really scared in case it woke Momoko. She’d taken sleeping pills because her hysteria kept her awake, and she’d only just got to sleep.”
Hoshio had awoken in the middle of the night and realized that Takashi, who had been sleeping beside him, had slipped out of his blankets. Then he heard his voice next to Natsumi, who was sleeping with Momoko beyond the sliding doors. “I felt I was being torn apart,” Takashi was saying. “It was the same during my travels in America, of course. . . .” But what came next, Hoshio’s still drowsy ears had been unable to follow completely. At first he heard only isolated words whose meaning would become clear sporadically without his understanding the drift of what was being said. Then gradually he became more receptive, until he could catch everything without gaps. The strange sense of urgency that replaced the sleep in his head had compelled him to do so.
“… arrival … kept under supervision … not out of desire, just the reverse if anything … ghetto … cabdriver tried to warn me against it … but I felt I was being wrenched in half. Unless I gave both the forces tearing me apart some substance and assessed them … realize now I’ve been torn all along between the desire to justify myself as a creature of violence and the urge to punish myself for it. Seeing that’s how I’m made, can you blame me for hoping to go on living just as I am? At the same time, though, the stronger the hope got, the more urgently I felt the need to wipe out that terrible side of myself, and the more serious the split became. The reason why I deliberately chose to get mixed up in violence during the campaign against revision of the Security Treaty—and the reason why, when I found myself associated with the violence of the weak forced into opposition against unjust violence, I chose to ally myself with unjust violence, whatever its purpose—was that I wanted to go on accepting myself as I am, to justify myself as a man of violence without having to change. . . .”
“Why do you say ‘myself as I am,’ Taka?” my wife put in sadly. “Why do you say ‘mys
elf as a man of violence’?”
“She wasn’t drunk?” I asked, interrupting Hoshio’s account. But he promptly squashed the faint hope sustaining my pitifully urgent voice.
“She never drinks nowadays,” he said.
“It’s tied up with the kind of experience I can never talk about so long as I intend to go on living,” Takashi went on after a silence during which the eavesdropper waited with bated breath. “But you don’t have to hear about it provided you believe that I really am torn between two things.”
“I suppose so. . . . As long as I know you’re strongly divided, there’s no need to know just how it happened.”
“Right. Anyway, the one certain thing is that I’ve had a split personality all along. Whenever life’s calm for a while, I get an urge to stir myself up deliberately just to confirm the split. And it’s like drug addiction—the stimulus has to be progressively stronger. Every year the stirring-up has had to be that little bit more violent.”
“If you went to the black ghetto on the night you arrived in America just to ‘stir yourself up,’ what exactly were you expecting?” Natsumi asked.
“I didn’t have any clear idea of what would happen. I just had this intense feeling that if I went there I’d probably be given a thorough shaking-up. In the end I spent that ‘special’ night in bed with a decrepit old black woman as fat as Jin. But don’t get the idea it was sex as such that drove me to the ghetto in the first place. Even if it was a kind of desire, it was far deeper than sex. The cabdriver tried to stop me getting off there. He said it was dangerous at night, and actually offered to take me to a safe place if I wanted to sleep with a black prostitute. I refused. We had an argument, with the result that I got out in front of a saloon. Inside, the place had a fantastically long bar stretching away into the darkness, and a row of drunks sitting in solemn silence facing it—all blacks, of course. I sat down on a stool too high for a Japanese, and found there was a mirror behind the bar and that all the fifty-odd blacks reflected in it were staring at me malevolently. I had a sudden, strong desire for a double vodka—and realized for the first time that my mind was aching for self-punishment. You see, whenever I drink any hard liquor I get high and want to beat the hell out of everybody. But if some Oriental weirdo like me went into a bar in the ghetto specially to pick a fight, he’d almost certainly end up getting himself beaten to death. So when this giant of a bartender came over, I asked for a ginger ale. Along with the urge for punishment, I was scared blind. I’m always scared of death, and that kind of violent death in particular. It’s a trait I’ve had to fight ever since the day S was beaten and killed. . . .”