Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
Dreams within Dreams
O
N
the morning of our first day in the valley we ate breakfast around the open fireplace in the board-floored room next to the spacious earthen-floored kitchen of the main building, which had a stove and a well covered with heavy planks. Unnoticed at first, Jin’s four children had turned up in the murky recesses of the kitchen and stood in a row gazing at us with eyes that looked unnaturally large in the inverted triangles of their thin faces. When my wife invited them to eat with us they gave a concerted groan which imperceptibly changed to explicit refusal. Only then did the oldest boy announce that Jin wanted to talk to me.
I’d already met Jin the evening before. As Takashi had said, she was enormous yet, certain moments apart, in no way ugly. Her doleful eyes, blurred in outline and brimming with whitish tears, were like fish-eye lenses in the great, pallid moon of her face. The shining of her eyes was the only trace of the Jin I’d once known. She gave off an animal odor, so that before long my wife felt faint and slumped forward, and we were obliged to retire to the main building. Hoshio and Momoko, who wanted to observe Jin at leisure, had remained. Pink-faced, holding their noses, pinching each other’s sides to prevent themselves from bursting into laughter, they let their eyes run curiously over the whole of Jin’s body in a way that seemed to have aroused her children’s hostility. Probably it was the presence of the two ill-mannered teen-agers sitting there smirking silently to themselves that had made the four skinny children refuse my wife’s invitation that morning. When the meal was over, Takashi took my wife and the teen-agers to see the interior of the storehouse, while I went with the children to the outbuilding where Jin and her family lived.
“Hello, Jin, dia you sleep well?”
I greeted her standing in the entrance. Her large, round, mournful
face loomed at me out of the shadows just as it had done the previous night.
Surrounded on all sides by dirty pots and pans, like a potter with his work ranged about him, Jin lay on her back looking uncomfortably up into the air, her chin resting on the pouch of fat at her neck. She remained ostentatiously silent. In the morning light that passed over my shoulder and fell on her capacious lap, I could tell that she was sitting sideways on a homemade legless chair like a horse’s saddle turned upside down. The evening before, when I’d taken it for a part of Jin’s fat body, she’d looked like a conical stone mortar. Her husband, kneeling beside the chair as though about to get to his feet, stayed poised there, still and silent. Last night too he’d waited in silent attendance, his haggard face pensive, ready to spring up with unnecessary alacrity and feed Jin grayish pellets of buckwheat dough whenever a sluggish gesture showed she wanted to eat. It may have been that Jin’s appetite gave her no respite even in the bare five minutes that we were with her, but to me it looked more like a show put on for our benefit as practical evidence of the dire straits in which she found herself.
Eventually, Jin laboriously expelled a large volume of air from her lungs and said, gazing at me resentfully :
“No, I didn’t sleep well! Nothing but wretched dreams, dreams of being left without a house!” I realized at once why Jin had wanted to meet me and why her husband was kneeling next to her, staring dolefully at my face.
“It’s only the storehouse that we’re taking down and shifting to Tokyo,” I said. “There’s no special reason to knock down the main house and outbuilding.”
“You’re selling the land, aren’t you?” Jin pressed.
“I’ll leave the land, main house, and outbuilding as they are until the question of where you’re to live is settled.”
Jin and her husband gave no special sign of relief, but the four children, who had come round to stand behind their parents and keep an eye on me, told me by the concerted smile they gave that the fears of Jin’s family had been allayed for the time being at least. I felt gratified.
“What will you do about the family grave, Mitsusaburo ?”
“We’ll have to leave it as it is, I imagine.”
“I suppose you know that S’s ashes are at the temple?” said Jin.
But this much conversation had already exhausted her; dark shadows that somehow inevitably inspired disgust had gathered round her eyes, and her voice rattled as though countless air holes had formed in her throat. There was no denying that at such times Jin was grotesque in a way that went beyond normal human ugliness. I averted my eyes, reflecting with a sense of horror that in the end Jin would probably die of a heart attack. She’d already told Takashi, in fact, about her premonitions of death and how she’d been worrying whether her bloated body would fit into the furnace at the crematorium.
“Jin’s so fat she can hardly do any work,” Takashi had said sympathetically. “Yet still she’s obliged to eat enormous amounts every day and get fatter and fatter. She feels her whole life is quite meaningless. It’s something of a revelation to hear a horribly fat woman of forty-five say that her days spent solely in eating are pointless. It’s not just a passing mood of hers, either—she’s quite convinced, from every point of view, that her existence is useless. And still she has to go on eating those stupid mountains of food from morning to night. Now, there’s someone with
real
grounds for pessimism.”
“I’ll get S’s ashes from the temple,” I promised Jin as I went out of the kitchen. “I’ll go and ask for them today—I want to see the picture of hell they have at the temple while I’m at it.”
“If S was alive, he would never have sold the storehouse,” she muttered at my departing back in a hoarse, reproachful voice. “But then, what can you expect with Mitsusaburo as head of the family?”
I ignored her and went to look for the others in the storehouse, which stood at the rear of the courtyard enclosed by the main house and the outbuilding. The doors were open—not just the thick outer doors with fire-resistant plaster set into them, but the inner doors of board and wire netting as well. The two downstairs rooms were full of afternoon light that threw the black of the zelkova timbers and the white of the walls that enclosed them into sharp contrast. I stepped up inside and examined the numerous sword marks that scarred the woodwork. They still exuded the same harsh message that had intimidated me in my childhood. The fan painting that hung in the alcove in the room beyond bore a Roman alphabet, crudely written in Chinese ink and barely distinguishable by now against paper browned with age. Twenty years before, when S had first taught me how to read it, the signature “John Manj” in the bottom right-hand corner had already been hard to make out. Great-grandfather
had met the castaway on his return from America when he slipped out of the forest and made his way to Nakanohama in Kochi. According to S, the inscription was one great-grandfather had got Manjiro to write for him on that occasion.
A faint sound like someone marking time came from upstairs. I set off up the narrow staircase and immediately banged my right temple on the hard end of a projecting beam. I groaned with pain, and red-hot particles flew about inside the spherical darkness of my sightless eye like the tracks of fission fragments in a cloud chamber. It recalled too the sense of taboo that had always kept me out of the storehouse.
For a moment I stopped, stunned, then put up a hand to wipe my cheek; it came away with blood on it as well as tears. I was pressing a handkerchief to my head when Takashi’s face peered down at me from the second floor.
“When your wife’s alone with another man, do you always warn them by knocking on the wall and waiting, Mitsu?” he said teasingly. “You’d be the ideal husband for adulterers!”
“Aren’t your bodyguards here, then?”
“They’re seeing to the Citroen. Teen-agers in the 1960s aren’t exactly interested in roof construction in traditional wooden buildings. I told them this was the only storehouse of its kind in the whole forest area, but they couldn’t have cared less.” His remark revealed the naive pride he took in showing off the architecture to his sister-in-law, who stood in the background.
I went upstairs and found my wife gazing up at the great beams of zelkova wood that supported the framework of the roof—too intent on them, in fact, to notice the blood flowing from the wound on my temple. Since I’ve always been prey to an irrational sense of shame whenever I bang my head against something, I was grateful. Eventually, she heaved an admiring sigh and turned round.
“What wonderful great timbers! They look as if they’d last another hundred years.”
I noticed that both their faces were flushed. It made me feel that the faintest echo of the word “adulterer” used by Takashi was still drifting about somewhere up in the rafters of the storehouse. But the feeling, I told myself, was unfounded. My wife was so aware of what had happened to the baby that, ever since, she’d promptly nipped in the bud any hint of sex. For both of us, to touch on sexual
matters meant imposing on ourselves a shared sense of disgust and misery which neither was prepared to face. So any suggestion of it was immediately dropped.
“With a limitless supply of zelkova like this in the forest, you could build a storehouse for almost nothing,” she said.
“Don’t you believe it!” I replied in as casual a voice as I could muster, unwilling to let her know how determinedly I was suppressing the pain from the gash on my head. “It seems that building this one put quite a strain on great-grandfather. In fact, I’d say the construction was pretty unusual. Even if there was plenty of timber, remember it was built at a time when the village’s resources were utterly exhausted. I’m quite sure everyone found it very special. There was a farmers’ rising, in fact, in the winter of the very year it was built.”
“That’s certainly strange.”
“I imagine it was precisely because he foresaw the possibility of a rising that great-grandfather felt it necessary to build a fireproof building.”
“Great-grandfather makes me sick, Mitsu,” said Takashi. “He was so conservative, so careful, so farsighted. I’m sure his younger brother felt the same about him as I do. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gone against his brother and become a leader of the farmers. He was one of those who resisted, who had an eye on the trends of the times.”
“Don’t you think great-grandfather had his eye on the trends just as much as his brother? He went all the way to Kochi, didn’t he, just to pick up the latest knowledge from the West?”
“Surely it was the brother who went to Kochi?” Takashi objected. That was what he wanted to believe, so he was almost consciously ignoring the fact that it was wrong.
“No. It was great-grandfather who went to Kochi first, not his brother,” I said, taking a malicious pleasure in sabotaging his mistaken memory. “It’s just that some people say that later, after the rising, his brother fled to Kochi and never came back. If it’s true that one of the two brothers left the forest, met John Manjiro, and brought back the new knowledge, then it can be proved that it was greatgrandfather. John Manjiro was only in Kochi for a year after returning to Japan, from 1852 to 1853. At the time of the trouble in 1860, great-grandfather’s brother was eighteen or nineteen, so if he went to Kochi in 1852 or 1853 it means he left the forest around the age of ten or so. It’s not possible.”
“But,” said Takashi, shaken but persistent, “it was the younger brother who cleared a space deep in the forest and trained a batch of hotheaded farmers’ sons for the rising. The training methods must have been based on the knowledge of things Western that he brought back from Kochi. It isn’t likely, is it, that great-grandfather, who sided with those who suppressed the rebellion, would have taught his brother the necessary guerilla tactics? Or do you think the two opposing sides conspired to start the trouble ?”
“Perhaps,” I said with a conscious show of detachment, though I could hear my own voice sharpen with irritation. Ever since we were children I’d had to fight against my brother’s tendency to attribute scenes of heroic resistance to great-grandfather’s younger brother.
“Why, Mitsu—you’re bleeding,” my wife exclaimed, her eyes on my temple. “How can you get so wrapped up in these old legends when you’re hurt and bleeding?”
“There’s something to be learned even from legends,” Takashi said irritably. It was his first open display of bad temper toward her.
She took the handkerchief still clasped in the hand hanging at my side, wiped my temple, and wetting her finger with saliva transferred it to the wound. My brother stared as though watching some obscure meeting of the flesh. Then the three of us went down the stairs in silence, keeping each other at a distance as if to avoid bodily contact. The storehouse wasn’t at all dusty, yet after some time spent inside it my nostrils felt dry and clogged, as though a film of dust were clinging to them inside.
Late that afternoon Takashi, my wife, and I, together with the teen-age couple, went to the temple to retrieve S’s ashes. Jin’s sons had run on ahead to let them know, so they could get out the picture of hell that great-grandfather had presented to the temple and display it just as they did on the Buddha’s Birthday. When we reached the Citroen parked in the open space in front of the village office, the local children amused themselves by poking fun at the car’s age and making snide remarks about the broad strip of tape over my right ear. We all ignored them except my wife, who with the good temper that went with a period of “recovery”—she hadn’t drunk anything since the previous night—seemed rather to enjoy it all, even the insults that the children hurled after the Citroen as it started off.
As we drove into the temple grounds the priest, who had been at school with S, was standing in the garden talking to a young man.
His appearance, I noticed, was no different from what I remembered. A close-cropped, gleaming head of prematurely white hair crowned a good-natured, smiling face as smooth and antiseptic as an egg. He’d married a teacher from the primary school, but she’d run off to the town with a former colleague, not before having stirred up a scandal so open that everybody in the valley had known about it. He managed to maintain a smile like a sickly child’s throughout the whole episode, a fact that would have particularly impressed anyone who knows the cruel effect of such a misfortune on someone living in a valley community. Either way, he weathered the crisis without once losing that mild smile.