Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
Gii the hermit was what they called in the village an “educated man” : he’d been to night school and had worked as a substitute teacher. On one occasion, a group of drunken louts just out of the army lay in wait for him as he roamed the valley late at night in search of food, and set up a hue and cry. A few mornings later they found that Gii the hermit had written a poem on a notice board set outside the village office for use in connection with the village democratization campaign. S insisted it was a poem by Kenji Miyazawa, though I have yet to come across it in his works:
Fine sport, I said, for you who join / In throwing stones—for me, it’s death. / You saw how grim my mouth was then, / How pale and strange my look?
As I read the poem among the cheerful crowd in front of the notice board, I wondered who it could be, if it was Gii who said it was death for him, that was watching the face “so pale and strange.” I asked S, but instead of giving me an answer he compressed his lips, scowled with a pale and strange face, and chased me away, shaking his fist.
“I asked Gii,” said Takashi, “if living a hermit’s life in the forest wasn’t awkward now that man is making such relentless advances there. But he denied it quite strongly. On the contrary, he said, the forest was steadily extending its power. He insisted that before long the village lying in the valley would be taken over by the forest. In actual fact, he said, the forest had got immensely stronger during the past few years and was beginning to engulf the valley. He claimed that one proof of this was the way the river, whose source is in the forest, had washed away the bridge for the first time in fifty years. If he’s in fact mad, I suppose one could see that kind of talk as a sign of his abnormality.”
“I don’t find it abnormal, Taka,” put in my wife, who had been silent until then. “Ever since that ride on the bus I’ve had a lingering feeling that the power of this forest is growing. I found it so oppressive I thought I was going to faint. If I’d been Gii the hermit, I would have avoided taking refuge in such a terrifying place and been only too glad to go into the army.”
“You might come to feel the same way, Natsu,” said Takashi. “One might think that someone so sensitive to fear of the forest was the exact opposite of the type who would go mad and take refuge in it.
But as I see it, psychologically speaking, the two are one and the same type.”
His words gave me a clue as to what could have happened if he hadn’t arrived in the jeep and the buds of fear that had been visible on my wife’s goose-fleshed, terrified face had been allowed to flower. Starting to visualize the scene as she fled insane into the forest, I hastily severed the chain of association. On the threshold of my thoughts had been something a well-known folklorist had once written: “a woman, naked but for a rag about her loins, her hair flaming, her eyes blue and gleaming … An extremely important clue here may be the fact that countrywomen who rushed off into the hills were often suffering from postnatal insanity.”
“Do you think they sell whisky at the village liquor store, Taka?” I asked, driven by the instinct of self-preservation.
“Mitsu’s trying to spoil my resolution to stay sober, Taka.”
“No, I’m not. I want a drink myself.
You
can join Taka’s sober bodyguard.”
“The only thing worrying me at the moment,” she said, “is whether I can sleep without a drink. It’s not as if I’ve been drinking every night lately just for the sake of getting drunk. What about Hoshi—didn’t he show signs of insomnia after he gave it up?”
“It’s not certain, you know, that he ever was such a great drinker,” said Takashi. “All that talk of his may mean that he’s never touched a drop in his life. He’s at the age when one wants to boast of one’s heroic past even if there’s nothing yet to back it up. There’s no telling how much of it may be lies. You should hear him lecturing Momoko about sex—it would make you laugh. He’s the type who likes to talk big, like an expert, even though he’s had absolutely no sexual experience himself.” He laughed.
“Well then, I’ll have to practice sobriety alone and unaided,” said my wife with unconcealed disappointment. Her remark had too frankly pitiful a ring to invite any further objection.
The sky, trapped between the great trees whose upper branches the wind had trained to lean in the same direction, was steadily developing a blackish red tinge that reminded me of scorched flesh. Wisps of mist moved low over the trail. A miasma welling up from the depths of the undergrowth hemming in the road, it crept along slowly at the level of the jeep’s wheels. We would have to get out of the forest before it rose to eye level. Takashi accelerated cautiously. Eventually
the jeep left the trees and emerged, unexpectedly and with a sudden widening of the field of vision, onto a small plateau. We parked the jeep and gazed out over the spindle-shaped hollow encircled by dense forest that stretched as far as the eye could see in uniform, deep brown shadow beneath a somber red sky. The trail along which we had driven the jeep made a right-angled turn at the plateau, then descended in a straight line following the slope of the forest to the neck of the valley; here it encountered the junction between the graveled road that crossed the bridge and plunged into the valley, and the asphalt road that followed the river rising in the hollow as it rounded the foot of the plateau and flowed on down to the coast. Seen from our vantage point, the valley road seemed to climb up the hollow only to disappear abruptly, like a river running onto sand, on the far edge where the forest began. From the plateau, the cluster of human dwellings and the fields and paddies surrounding them looked small enough to be clutched in one hand, such was the power of the dense, deep forest to distort the perception of size. Our hollow, as the crazy hermit had rightly observed, was a feeble presence pitting itself against the eroding power of the forest. It was more natural, in fact, to see the spindle-shaped hollow not as a presence in its own right but as an absence of the massed trees that were elsewhere. As one grew used to the idea that the surrounding forest was the only unequivocal reality, one could almost see a vast lid of oblivion closing in on the hollow.
Mist was rising from the river at the bottom of the valley, cleaving the center of the hollow, and the village by now lay in its depths. Our family home stood on a small hill, but all about it was blurred and vague, so that the white of the long stone wall was all that the eye could detect. I wanted to point out to my wife where our house lay, but the dull ache in my eye was too bad to let me go on gazing at the spot for long.
“I think I’ll see if I can find a bottle of whisky, Mitsu,” she said in a timid, conciliating tone.
Taka looked round at us with profound interest.
“Why don’t you try some water instead?” I urged her. “There’s a spring here that the valley folk say gives the best water in the whole forest. That’s if it hasn’t dried up.”
It hadn’t dried up. At the foot of the slope on the forest side of the road, an unexpected outflow of water formed a pool about as big as the circle of a man’s arms. The water—too copious, almost, to have
sprung from such small beginnings—made a channel that ran down to the valley. Beside the pool stood a number of outdoor hearths, some new, some old, the clay and stones charred black and hideous inside. In my childhood, my friends and I had built just such a hearth by the spring, and cooked rice and made soup there. In a twice-yearly ritual, each of us chose the group he would camp out with, thereby determining the division of forces among the children of the valley. The outing lasted only two days each spring and autumn, but the influence of the groups thus formed by the children remained valid throughout the year. Nothing was so humiliating as to be expelled from the group one had joined.
As I bent down over the spring to drink from it directly, I had a sudden sense of certainty : certainty that everything—the small round pebbles, grayish blue and vermilion and white, lying at the bottom of water whose brightness seemed still to harbor the midday light; the fine sand that swirled upward, clouding it ever so slightly; and the faint shiver that ran over the surface of the water—was just as I’d seen it twenty years before; a certainty, born of longing yet to myself, at least, utterly convincing, that the water now welling up so ceaselessly was exactly the same water that had welled up and flowed away in those days. And the same certainty developed directly into a feeling that the “I” bending down there now was not the child who had once bent his bare knees there, that there was no continuity, no consistency between the two “I’s,” that the “I” now bending down there was a remote stranger. The present “I” had lost all true identity. Nothing, either within me or without, offered any hope of recovery.
I could hear the transparent ripples on the pool tinkling, accusing me of being no better than a rat. I shut my eyes and sucked up the cold water. My gums shrank, leaving a taste of blood on my tongue. As I stood up, my wife bent down in obedient imitation, as though I was an authority on how to drink from the spring. In fact, I was as complete a stranger to the spring by now as she, who had just come through the forest for the first time. I shuddered. The bitter cold penetrated my consciousness again. Shivering, my wife stood up too and tried to smile to show that the water had tasted good; but her teeth as her purple lips shrank back merely seemed to be bared in anger. Shoulder to shoulder, silent and shuddering with cold, we returned to the jeep. Takashi averted his eyes as though he’d seen something too pitiful to look on.
We went down into the valley through a mist that grew steadily thicker and deeper. In the hush as we carefully let the jeep coast downhill, the only noises about us were the sound of the tires sending small stones flying, the sound of the hood whistling in the wind, and the faint hiss of leaves falling in the open woods—of tall oak and beech with the merest sprinkling of red pine—which covered the ground sloping sharply down from the track to the paved road in the valley. Driven by a force that swept them horizontally, the leaves scattering from the uppermost branches seemed not so much to fall as to drift slowly sideways, setting up the constant tiny rustling as they went.
“Can you whistle, Natsu?” Takashi asked quite seriously.
“Yes, why?” she replied warily.
“If you whistle here after dark the valley folk get mad, really mad. Do you remember that old valley taboo, Mitsu?” he asked with a subdued air not out of harmony with my own present mood.
“Yes, I remember. They believe that if you whistle after dark a supernatural creature will come out of the forest. Grandmother used to tell us the Chosokabe would come.”
“Did she? Now that I’m here in the valley I realize I don’t really remember anything much. Even when I seem to remember something, I can’t be sure of its accuracy. In America I often heard the word ‘uprooted,’ but now that I’ve come back to the valley in an attempt to make sure of my own roots, I find they’ve all been pulled up. I’ve begun to feel uprooted myself. So now I’ve got to put down new roots here, and to do so I naturally feel some action is necessary. What that action is I don’t know; I just have an increasingly strong premonition that action will be necessary. . . . Anyway, to come back to the place where you were born doesn’t mean you’re going to find your roots there, conveniently buried in the right place. You may think I’m being sentimental, Mitsu, but the thatched hut of the old days has gone.” He spoke with an air of hopeless fatigue that ill suited his age. “I didn’t even remember Jin really clearly. Even if she hadn’t got so fat, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to recognize the Jin I knew. When she began to cry because she detected in me some signs of the kid she once looked after, I was actually afraid in case this great stranger of a woman might put out her lumpy arms and try to hug me. I only hope my nasty little fear wasn’t apparent to Jin herself.”
Down in the valley it was already dark. From the other side of the
temporary bridge twisting its way over the concrete supports, the teen-agers signaled to us with a cheerful tooting of the Citroen’s horn, but it was impossible to make out the car in the darkness. Takashi, who had been to the forest ranger’s lodge to return the jeep and the oilskin, was dressed in the hunting-type outfit he’d worn on his return from America, but looked pinched and small, as if he’d suddenly shrunk. I tried in vain to picture the same Takashi playing a repentant student activist in front of an American audience. . . . And yet, I reflected, the black forest seen from down in the valley was more over-whelming than any audience, and it was I, not my brother, who had to put up with its jeers when it called, “You’re just a rat!”
Tense as I helped my wife over the dangerous temporary bridge, I felt the buds of pleasure at returning to the valley obstinately shriveled up inside me. The breeze blowing up off the dark waters directly beneath us stabbed at my eyes with its icy thorns, threatening to blind even the good one. From behind and below, the sudden cackle of some unidentifiable bird came wafting up to us.
“Chickens,” Takashi said. “The village young men’s association has a chicken farm where the Korean settlement used to be.”
About a hundred yards from the bridge, down the paved road that went to the sea, lay a huddle of houses that had once sheltered Koreans doing forced labor as lumbermen in the forest. We’d just reached the center of the bridge, and the clucking of the chickens farther downstream reached our ears without any intervening obstacle.
“Do chickens normally cluck at this time of night?”
“People say they’re nearly dead of starvation, several thousand of them. They’re probably complaining of hunger.”
My wife was shivering ceaselessly in my encircling arm.
“The young men of the valley can’t do anything worthwhile without a leader,” said Takashi with unconcealed disgust. “They’re helpless until someone like great-grandfather’s younger brother comes along. They’re incapable of getting themselves out of a fix by their own efforts. When I got back to the valley, Mitsu, that’s the first thing I realized about the strangers who have been living here all the time.”