Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
The grotesque features of the young man talking to him were in complete contrast to the priest’s. Most faces in our valley can be classified into one or the other of two types, but the face now watching us warily as we alighted from the Citroen was in a class of its own.
“He’s the leading figure in the group of young men who’re keeping the chickens,” Takashi explained to my wife and me. Getting out of the Citroen, he walked up to the youth and started discussing something with him in a low voice; the young man, it seemed, had been waiting to meet him at the temple. The rest of us were obliged to stay in the background, exchanging vague smiles with each other, during this exclusive dialogue. The young man had an enormous round head, the broad, helmetlike curve of his forehead giving the whole head the appearance of being a continuation of the face. The cheekbones projecting outward on each side and the blunt, square chin reminded one of nothing so much as a sea urchin in human guise. His eyes and lips, moreover, were set close about his nose in a way that suggested the face had been dragged outward by some powerful tractive force. Not only his face but the flaunted arrogance of manner awakened something in me that was not a memory, perhaps, but a premonition of disaster. Admittedly, my increasing tendency to shut myself up emotionally was making me show much the same reaction to anything unfamiliar and strongly characterized. . . .
Takashi brought the young man over to the Citroen, talking all the while in the same low voice. The two teen-agers still lurked inside the car, their favorite lair. Takashi put the young man in the back seat, gave an order to Hoshio at the wheel, and without further ado the Citroen drove off in the direction of the entrance to the valley.
“The van they use for carrying eggs has broken down, so he came to ask Hoshi to repair the engine,” Takashi explained with naive pride in the fact that all contact with the young men’s group took place through himself. It obviously satisfied his childlike sense of competition, which had been hurt in the argument about great-grandfather’s journey to Kochi.
“Weren’t the chickens supposed to be starving to death?” I asked.
“That’s the trouble—the young people have got their priorities all wrong,” the priest replied for Takashi, with a shy smile as though, as an inhabitant of the valley, he was ashamed of himself as well as the young men. “Sales of eggs are going so badly they can’t find the money to buy feed, and they ought to be working out some basic policy to deal with the situation, but all they can think about is a van for transporting the eggs. Of course, if the van went out of action too, then everything really would be over.”
We stepped up into the main hall of the temple and inspected the painting of hell. For me its rivers and forests of fire recalled the flaming red I’d seen on the backs of the dogwood leaves as they caught the sun that cloudy dawn after my hundred minutes in the pit. In particular, the dark blotches splashing the scarlet waves of the river of flames linked up directly with my memory of the spots that had begun to stain the dogwood leaves now that autumn had passed its peak. I was immediately absorbed in the hell picture. The color of the river of fire and the soft lines of the waves, so painstakingly drawn, brought me a strange peace of mind. Peace in abundance poured from the river of flames into my inner being. Among the flames, the multitude of the dead cried out with arms lifted to the sky and hair on end as though fanned by some fierce wind. Some of them were invisible save for skinny, angular buttocks and legs sticking up into the air. Yet even their varied expressions of suffering contained something that brought me peace; for despite their manifest pain, the bodies that expressed this pain gave the impression of participating in some solemn sport. They seemed to be at home with suffering. The male ghosts, who stood on one bank with penises bleakly exposed as flaming rocks struck them on the head, belly, and buttocks, gave the same impression. The female ghosts being driven toward the forest of flames by demons brandishing iron clubs seemed almost intent on preserving the comfortably familiar chains—the bonds of tormentor and tormented—that tied them to the demons. I explained how I felt about it to the priest.
“The dead in hell have been suffering for such a terribly long time that they’ve got used to it by now,” the priest agreed. “It may be they’re putting on an appearance of suffering just to maintain the proper order of things. You know, the way the duration of suffering in Buddhist hells is calculated is most eccentric. For example, one day and night in this Burning Hell consists of sixteen thousand years of days and nights, each of which is equivalent to sixteen hundred years in the human world. That’s quite a long time! What’s more, the dead in this particular hell have to endure a full sixteen thousand years of those longest days and nights—plenty of time for even the most backward ghost to get thoroughly used to things!”
“You see this demon here who looks like a lump of rock—the one facing the other way, putting everything he’s got into his work? His body’s covered with black holes,” my wife said. “I don’t know whether it’s the shadow of his muscles or scars, but he looks very dilapidated, doesn’t he? That female ghost being beaten by him looks a good deal healthier. You’re right, Mitsu—the dead seem so used to the demons that they’re not scared any more.”
She went along with my views, but gave no sign of deriving the same sense of mental release from the picture. If anything, the radiant good temper she’d shown since that morning seemed to be fading. I noticed, too, that Takashi had turned away from everyone and stood stubbornly silent, facing the golden gloom of the temple’s inner sanctuary.
“What do you think, Taka?” I said, turning to him unceremoniously. He ignored my question and, looking round, said abruptly:
“Why don’t we get S’s ashes and go, without bothering about pictures.”
The priest told his younger brother, who had been watching us curiously from the veranda of the main hall, to take Takashi and get the urn.
“Taka always used to be scared of the hell picture, even when he was a kid,” said the priest. Then, turning the conversation back to the young villager who had come to see Takashi, he launched into a critique of everyday life in the valley. “Whatever the question facing them, the valley folk refuse to take a long-term view. They immediately get into deep water and start flapping about ineffectually—the way the young man came to get Takashi’s friend to mend the van is typical. They fuss for ages over trivialities, with the irresponsible notion that when things finally get quite out of hand the situation
will somehow change and solve their difficulties for them. The supermarket affair is a case in point. Every single shop in the village, with the exception of the liquor-and-sundries store—and only the liquor side, at that—has gone under to the supermarket. But they do nothing to protect themselves, and most of them are in debt to the supermarket in some way or other. I’ve an idea they’re expecting a miracle: just when the situation’s quite out of control and there’s no hope of paying off their debts, the supermarket vanishes in a puff of smoke and nobody presses for repayment any more. A single supermarket has driven them to the point where, if this were the old days, the only possibility left would be for the whole village to pack its bags and leave.”
At this point Takashi arrived back from the ossuary carrying a bundle wrapped in a white cotton cloth, his despondency and bad temper transformed into something close to elation.
“I found the steel frames of S’s glasses in the urn with his ashes,” he said to me. “They reminded me exactly of how he looked when he wore them.”
We got into the Citroen, which one of the young men had brought back to the temple grounds for Hoshio and Momoko.
“You hold S’s urn, will you, Natsumi? Mitsu’s not to be trusted with it,” Takashi said barefacedly. “He can’t even carry his own head around without bumping it.”
The impression he gave wasn’t simply of love and respect for S, but of wanting to keep me, the Rat, as far away from S as possible. He put my wife, with the urn in her arms, in the seat next to his and talked of S to her as he drove. Drawing up my knees, I lay down on the back seat and let my mind linger on the color of the flames in the picture of hell.
“Do you remember the cadets’ winter uniform, Natsumi? S came up the graveled road at the height of summer in his dark blue winter uniform, carrying a military sword and wearing calf-length flying boots. Whenever he met one of the valley folk, he’d click the heels of his boots like the Nazi military used to do. I can still hear the valley ringing to the click of the hard leather heels and his manly voice saying ‘Nedokoro S, back from the forces!’ ”
For all Takashi’s talk,
my
memory of S was quite remote from such bravado. When S was discharged, for example, he threw his cap, boots, and sword off the bridge into the water, removed his jacket, and climbed the graveled road with bent back, the jacket beneath his
arm. That, at least, was how
I
recalled his homecoming.
“I remember the day he was beaten to death still more vividly,” Takashi told my wife. “I often have dreams about it, even now. I can see the scene extraordinarily clearly.”
S, he said, had been lying face up on a surface of mud dried to fine white powder, with gravel crushed small and round by countless feet. In the limpid autumn sunlight, not only the road but the grass-covered riverbed far below were white with reflected light, and amidst all this whiteness the river was ablaze with the fiercest white of all. Even Takashi, who crouched a foot or two from S’s head where it lay, cheek against the earth, facing the river, and the dog which was dashing round and round him whining shrilly, were whitish too. All three—the corpse, Takashi, and the dog—were wrapped in a cloud of white light. A single tear made a black spot on the white film of dust covering a pebble that lay next to Takashi’s thumb. But it dried at once, leaving a chalky blister on the surface of the stone.
S’s bare, smashed head was like a flat black bag with something red protruding from it. The head itself and the stuff protruding were already dry like some fibrous matter left out in the sun. The only smell was that of sunbaked earth and stone. Even S’s broken head was as odorless as a sheet of new paper. His arms were raised limply above his shoulders like those of a dancer. His legs lay in the position of a hurdler in midair. And the skin of the neck, arms, and legs sticking out from the undershirt and shorts that naval air cadets wore for physical training was a uniform darkish color, like tanned hide, that highlighted the white of the mud stuck to it. Before long Takashi noticed a train of ants entering S’s head through the nostrils and emerging again from his ears, each bearing a small bead of red in its mouth. It occurred to him that it was due to these ants that the body was shriveled and thin and gave off no smell. S would probably go on drying up till he was as desiccated as a dried fish. The ants had completely eaten away the eyes behind the tightly closed lids, leaving red holes the size of walnuts from which a faint, reddish light guided the tiny feet of the ants as they marched to and fro, treading the trifurcated path of ears and nose. Through the thin film, semi-transparent like murky glass, that was the skin of his face, a single drop of blood could be seen in the process of drowning an ant. . . .
“You don’t mean to say you actually saw all this?” I demanded.
“Admittedly, it’s supplemented in part from my dreams. But by
now I’m not sure where the boundary lies between dreams and what I actually saw there on the road, a hundred yards downstream from the bridge, on the day S was beaten to death. Memory feeds on dreams, you know.”
Personally, I had no inner urge to dig up my recollections of S’s death. But for the sake of Takashi’s mental health I felt I should point out that by now a greater part of his memories than he himself realized was dependent on the fabrications of dreams.
“Taka,” I said, “the things you believe you really saw—the memories you’ve been constantly raking over—were nothing more than dreams all the time. The picture of S’s dried-up body must have been built up from seeing something else—a frog, say, run over by a car. Yes, the vision you conjure up of his head all smashed and blackened with stuff protruding suggests a squashed frog, a frog with its innards squeezed out and flattened.” With this general criticism, I proceeded to put the detailed case against his memories. “It’s just not possible that you could have seen S dead at all, much less lying in the road. The only people who saw him then were me, when I went with a cart to fetch his body, and the people from the Korean settlement who helped me lift it on. The Koreans may have beaten him to death, but once he was dead they were all consideration and gentleness; they treated the corpse so lovingly he might have been their own kith and kin. They gave me a white silk cloth, too. I covered him with it as he lay on the cart, and put a lot of small stones on it to stop it flapping about, then I pushed the heavy cart back to the valley. I pushed instead of pulling partly because with a heavy load it seemed easier to balance it that way, and partly because I wanted to keep an eye on the body in case it fell out or turned into a demon that got up and tried to sink its teeth in me.
“It was dusk by the time I got him back to the valley, but none of the adults came out of the houses lining both sides of the road. Even the children only peeped out, and hardly showed themselves. They were scared of having anything to do with the corpse and the misfortune it represented.
“I left the cart in front of the village office for a while and went home. I found you there, standing at the back of the kitchen with a big lump of candy in your mouth and dark brown dribble coming from the corners of your lips. The dribble made you look like a character in one of those old peep shows, with blood running through clenched teeth
after taking poison. Mother was sick in bed, and sister lying beside her, playing at being sick too. In other words I couldn’t look to anyone in the family for help. So I went for Jin, who was chopping firewood in the field behind the storehouse. She was still slim then, a strong, healthy girl. When we went down to the village office we found the white silk cloth had been stolen from the cart, leaving S’s body exposed. I can still see his corpse lying curled in on itself, looking no bigger than a sleeping child. He was smeared all over with dried mud and reeked of blood. Jin and I tried to get him up to the house by lifting him by the legs and under the arms, but he was too heavy. We got blood all over us, too. So Jin asked me to go back and get out the stretcher we used for air raid practice. I was struggling to hoist it down from where it hung under the eaves of the kitchen when I heard mother rambling on about my appearance and yours. I seem to remember that you were still too happily eating candy in the dark corner of the kitchen to pay any attention to me. It was night by the time we got S’s body up to the house by the path running round below the stone wall, and we took it straight to the storehouse; so right up to the end I don’t see how you can have seen anything.”