by Kenzaburo Oe
“It’s me, Mitsu,” came Takashi’s voice, calm and psychologically armed once more. “I’m testing the power and spread of the different cartridges, ready to do battle tomorrow morning with my imaginary mob.” On my way back to the main house, I found Jin’s children standing still and silent in the yard and assured them that nothing had happened. My wife was staring fixedly at her glass in which whisky and water shone with a dark luster, equally indifferent to the shots and my sudden exit, her downturned face seemingly turned to bronze. Hoshio and Momoko stirred uncomfortably and went on sleeping. Thirty minutes later, there was another shot. I waited ten minutes for a fourth shot. Then I pulled boots onto my dirty feet and went over to the storehouse. Takashi didn’t reply when I hailed him from the foot of the stairs.
I ran up the steps, banging my head here, there, and everywhere as I went. A man sprawled half-propped against the wall directly ahead. The skin of his face and bare chest was torn and bloody as though studded with split pomegranates. He looked like a bright red, life-size plaster dummy dressed only in trousers. Starting automatically toward the figure, I grunted as a hunting gun tied to the great zelkova beam struck me heavily over the ear. A piece of gut connected the trigger to one of the red dummy’s fingers where they drooped on the tatami floor. And on the plaster and timber of the wall, at just the height where the dead man would have stood staring at the muzzle of the gun, the outline of a human head and shoulders was drawn in red pencil, with two great eyes carefully marked in on the head. I took another step forward and, with the feel of pellets and slippery blood beneath the soles of my feet, saw that the penciled eyes had been blasted full of shot, so that two leaden orbs seemed to stare out at me from the hollows. On the wall beside the head was written, in the same red pencil:
I told the truth
The dead man gave a deep groan. Kneeling in the blood, I touched Takashi’s crimson, shredded face, but he was definitely dead. I had a feeling, a spurious memory, of having encountered just such a dead man, and in this very storehouse, on countless occasions before.
Retrial
THE damp, heavy wind that all night long had circled the hollow in the forest came blowing in, forming constant small eddies of air in the cellar where I crouched. I awoke from a short, anguished sleep to find my throat painfully swollen and constricted but my drunkenness gone and my brain, which had been enlarged and feverish before my sleep, shrunken to its normal size, leaving a gap into which gloomy depression had wormed its way; my head was hopelessly, wretchedly clear. With one hand still clutching at the blanket which the instinct of self-defense had kept wrapped round my shoulders and waist even during my dreams, I stretched out the other into the darkness beyond my knees and, groping for the whisky bottle containing water, took a mouthful. The cold of the water seemed to soak right through to my lungs and my sadly oppressed liver. In my dreams, Takashi had stood in a mist about five yards in front of me, still looking like a crumbling red plaster dummy with his upper half split open like ripe pomegranates. Countless glittering pellets studded the sockets of his eyes, transforming him into an iron-eyed monster. He stood at one corner of a tall triangle of which I was the apex; at the remaining corner a bentbacked, sallow-faced man stood watching us in silence. Seen from my present position, hunched so close to the floor that my head was actually lower than my knees, they seemed to be standing on a high platform. I was sitting in the center of the front row of a theater whose ceiling was disproportionately high for its size, and the two ghosts were side by side up on the stage. High above their heads, as though the gallery were reflected in a mirror at the back of the stage, I could see a host of old men in dark suits with hats pulled down over their ears, looking like mushrooms clustering in some dark, damp spot. One of them had obviously once been the friend who painted his head crimson and hanged himself, another the baby who showed no more response than a vegetable. Up on the stage, Takashi opened wide the mouth that with lips shot away was no more than a gaping, reddish black hole and cried in triumphant hatred: Our retrial is your trial! And the old men in the gallery, whom I suspected in fact of being a jury organized by Takashi himself, removed their hats and waved them with menacing significance at the great zelkova beam directly above their heads. I awoke in exhaustion and despair.
The place where I now sat motionless—hugging my knees, just as I’d sat that autumn dawn the previous year in the pit for the septic tank in our back garden—was a stone cellar that the Emperor and his men had discovered and begun to rescue from its long oblivion when they came to make preliminary surveys for dismantling the storehouse. The inner space where I sat had an anteroom with a privy and even a well. It would have been possible for someone to live there in self-imposed confinement, though the well by now was blocked and gave off no smell of water, and the privy was unusable, caved in long ago. From both the square holes came the odor of millions of mold spores; there might even be some penicillin among them. I had eaten a smoked-meat sandwich, drunk some whisky, and dozed off where I sat. If I had tipped over sideways as I slept, I would have hurt my head against the wooden posts, countless as the trees of the forest, that supported the storehouse floor. Their corners were as hard and sharp as ever.
It was still the middle of the night. Since early morning, when word had come that the Emperor was making his first personal visit to the valley since the “rising,” the southerly winds heralding the end of winter had swept the forest and the hollow, and they had raged on unabated into the small hours. If I peered through the crack in the floor above my head, toward the gap made in the first-floor wall of the storehouse facing the valley, my line of vision was blocked by pitch-black forest. During the morning the sky had been free of clouds, but dust from the continent had hung a deep, yellowish brown shadow about it, weakening the sun’s rays. The same darkness had persisted even after the wind grew stronger, and had finally sunk unrelieved into night. As the gale mounted, the forest gave off a deepthroated roar like a stormy sea, the sound swelling till the very soil seemed to cry out. Here and there, I could distinguish isolated voices rising like flecks of foam to the surface : the great trees towering over the belt of land between the forest and the valley were moaning in the wind, calling to me in individual tones that awoke vivid early memories. Like recollections of old folk in the valley to whom I’d spoken once or twice in childhood and remembered ever after, the giants of the forest were still alive in me: not in any complex or profound way yet with individual characters of their own. One day when I was small, an old worker from the soy sauce store, who lived at a different stratum of valley society from myself and with whom I’d never before exchanged a single word, had taken me unawares on the path leading down to the river past the storehouse where they brewed the sauce. Twisting my arm while I raged and struggled helplessly, he’d poured into my ears a torrent of coarse abuse about my mother’s insanity. And just as I clearly remembered the old man’s great doggy face, so I could see now the aged horse chestnut that grew on the hillside behind the house. As I listened to its sound, the whole tree surged into sight in vivid detail on the screen of my memory, bending and shouting in the gale.
Even during the morning, when the wind hadn’t been so fierce, I’d lain in the gloom by the open fireplace, listening to the great trees sounding in the wind. Brooding vaguely I’d wondered, among other things, whether to visit the trees for one last look before I left the hollow. It occurred to me that once I left I should never see them again, a thought which made me extremely doubtful about the reliability of my sight on that last occasion, and made me directly and vividly aware in turn of the death that awaited me some day. My main preoccupations, though, were two letters offering me jobs. One was from the professor of my old department in Tokyo, the other from the office of an expedition going to Africa to catch animals for an open zoo to be set up somewhere in the country. The professor offered me both lectureships in English literature that had been held ready at private universities for myself and the friend who had hanged himself. T
he offer carried the promise of a stable future. The letter from the expedition office was a hasty summons, reeking unmistakably of danger, from a scholar, a man of about the same age as S would have been, who had given up a post as assistant professor of zoology in order to organize the zoo. It was he who had praised my translation of the book on trapping in the book-review section of a leading newspaper. I’d met him several times; he was the kind of man who would board a sinking ship as its new captain after even the rats had left. Now he wanted me to join the expedition as its official interpreter.
The first of the two letters probably represented my only remaining chance to return to that kind of post; when my friend died, I’d thrown over the lectureship my old university had given me, without even consulting the professor of my department. Moreover, since Takashi hadn’t left me any of the money he’d got from the sale of the house and land, I would have to decide on some occupation sooner or later. The lectureship was ideal, but still I hesitated. My wife, with whom I hadn’t yet discussed the question of my next job and who only learned of the two offers because of the telegrams that came pressing for answers, had said quite coolly:
“If you’re interested in the work in Africa, why don’t you go, Mitsu ?” I immediately had a crushing premonition of all the difficulties and discomforts such unfamiliar work would entail.
“I’m sure that ‘official interpreter’ means not only paper work but giving orders to native porters and camp workers,” I said. “I can just see myself shouting ‘Forward march!’ and the like in abominable Swahili!” I spoke in tones of utter depression, but in my mind’s eye I saw a still more dismal vision: of myself all bloody from banging my temple, my cheekbone, even my sightless eye on African trees with iron bark and African rocks hard enough to contain diamonds. I saw myself finally falling victim to acute malaria, groaning under a high fever that made me resent even the indomitable zoologist’s scoldings and exhortations, and stretched out exhausted on the marshy ground, crying in Swahili to the bitter end, “Tomorrow we leave!”
“But surely it would at least give you more chance of a new life than lecturing in English at a university?”
“Taka, of course, would have gone and carved out a new life for himself immediately. According to Momoko, the kind of people who’d go all the way to Africa to catch elephants were humanity’s only hope in his eyes. He had a vision of the first man going into the wilds of Africa to catch elephants after all the zoos had been destroyed in a nuclear war. His elusive ‘Mr. Humanity.’ ”
“Yes, Taka would have leaped at the offer. But I realize now that you’re the type who’d never, deliberately at least, choose any work that might involve constant risks. You leave those jobs to other people. Then, when they’ve survived the dangers, got over their exhaustion, and written a book about their experiences, you step in and translate it.”
She might have been making an objective appraisal of some complete stranger. But dismayed though I was to find such dispassionate powers of observation in her, I reflected that she was probably right. I was the type who, rather than discover a new life for himself, rather than build a thatched hut of his own, would choose to live as a lecturer in English literature, without a single student who pinned any serious hopes on his classes, fated to be disliked by them all unless he missed at least one lecture every week or so, living in seedy bachelorhood (for there was point in going on with this marriage) and labeled “Rat” by his students, like that philosopher whom Takashi had met in New York. Set, in short, on a course in which the only changes remaining were old age and death.
At the time of his suicide, Takashi had transferred all the notes and coins left in his pockets to an envelope addressed to Hoshio and Momoko and put it away in a desk drawer where his blood wouldn’t get on it. Immediately after his funeral (we buried him in the only vacant lot left in the family graveyard, and S’s ashes with him), Hoshio got the Citroen unaided over the temporary bridge, refusing all offers of help from the young men, and with Momoko by his side moved off down the paved road, driving carefully over the half-thawed slush still covering it. Before his departure, he delivered the following speech to my wife and myself while Momoko, standing docile and extremely feminine at his side, kept up a succession of small nods in support of his remarks :
“Now that we don’t have Taka, Momo and me will have to manage by ourselves. So I’m marrying her. After all, we’re both past the legal age of consent. We can make a living together—I can find a garage somewhere and Momo can get a job as waitress in a coffee shop. I’m hoping to have my own gas station someday. Taka used to say I should try the kind of station he saw in America, the sort that can handle quite serious repairs and serve snacks as well. Now that he’s dead, Momo and me have to go it alone, there’s no one else we can look to.”
My wife and I would have left the hollow with them, begging a lift in the back of the Citroen at least as far as the small town by the sea, but I had a feverish cold. Even after that, my hands had a hot, prickly feeling that lasted for three weeks, as though they’d developed a spongy layer that prevented me lifting anything. Then, when I got better, my wife started saying she wasn’t up to a long journey. She was, in fact, suffering frequent spells of nausea and faintness. I had no trouble in deducing what she was preparing herself for psychologically, what she was hoping for with her whole body, but I had no desire to discuss it. For us, it fell into the category of things already settled.
With a vague sense of resignation, I brooded over this question of my new job, while Natsumi sat in the gloom on the other side of the fireplace looking like a doll firmly weighted at its base. There was no one left in the main house to interrupt our dialogue. But nowadays she would lapse almost at once into a profound silence, fleeing beyond the sphere of conversation. For a while after Takashi’s death, she’d been in a state of constantly renewed drunkenness. Before long, however, she voluntarily disposed of all the remaining bottles of whisky and took to spending her time, except when she was asleep and at mealtimes, sitting silent and correct on her heels, with her hands folded over her belly and her eyes half closed. I suspected that for her the suggestion about Africa had been no more than a disinterested comment on the choices facing some complete stranger. I no longer cast any deep shadow across the world of her awareness, nor she on mine.
In the afternoon, Jin’s eldest son crept into the kitchen, moving quietly in deference to my wife’s silence.
“The Emperor’s crossing the bridge,” he reported. “He’s got five young guys with him.”
By now, none of the valley folk believed the Emperor would bring a gang with him. As soon as the thaw set in, he’d sent a representative who settled all the complex questions created by the “rising” in as simple a fashion as possible. Specifically, he’d piled goods onto the first heavy truck to enter the valley, and reopened the supermarket. He demanded no compensation for the looting, nor did he report the matter to the police. The plan put forward by the young priest and the Sea Urchin for getting the more prosperous inhabitants to put up the funds to take over the supermarket, losses and all, was dismissed out of hand. There was a rumor, in fact, that no formal proposal had ever been made to the Emperor at all. Within a short time after Takashi’s death, the forces behind the “rising” had collapsed at the center. They’d lost all power to influence the Emperor by threatening to rekindle the riot. The housewives of the valley and the “country,” filled with abject gratitude and satisfaction at not being questioned about the looting, were quite happily buying foodstuffs and household goods costing an average twenty or thirty per cent more than before the trouble. As for the electrical appliances and other larger articles that had been looted, people came, one by one and in secret, to return them to the supermarket, where they were put on sale again as damaged goods and sold out at special discounts in no time at all. The women from the “country” who had taken part in the “rising” and fought with each other over cheap articles of clothing now proved to have appreciable sums of c
ash hidden away, and were among the most eager customers at the sale. And the owners of forest land shut themselves up again in their snug shells with audible sighs of relief.
I walked down to the valley behind Jin’s son, my eyes stung by the thick dust whipped off bare fields by the boisterous wind. Everything around me—the dark brown stretches of withered grassland where the snow had completely vanished, leaving the soil parched and powerless as yet to put forth new life, even the somber evergreen heights of the forest beyond the groves of great deciduous trees—had an air of indefinable loss, like the dead ruin of a human being, that awoke an obscure uneasiness in me as my gaze roved across the hollow. I dropped my eyes and saw the back of the boy’s neck, where grime had made a splotchy pattern. For hours on end he had crouched on top of the great boulder where the wretched little sexpot had met her end, braving the buffets of the dust-laden wind in order to catch sight of the Emperor making his entry into the valley. The boy walked hurriedly with drooping head, his rear view exuding an air of fatigue that was strange in a child. It was the fatigue of a member of a family that had finally surrendered. I felt sure that the whole valley awaited the arrival of the Emperor and his subordinates with the same weary air. The hollow had capitulated.