Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
The children had already heard that the chickens belonging to the young people’s group had been wiped out. According to Jin’s sons, the young men were patrolling the chicken houses in case the valley folk came to steal the dead birds. What had once been the Korean settlement was like a filthy beehive, completely buried beneath the many-tiered dwellings of the chickens and the shelves for drying out their droppings, and the whole area was enveloped in a dense effluvia. That morning the unfortunate creatures lay dead, each in its own narrow compartment. Jin’s sons had been with the other children to have a look and had been driven away by the young men on patrol.
“They were so mad, you’d have thought
we’d
done it!” complained Jin’s eldest boy. “Who’d want to steal a lot of dead chickens, I ask you? Unless they’re so angry they did it themselves,” he added with an indescribable blend of mildness and guile.
And Jin’s skinny sons laughed in shrill unison. It was clear that their mocking laughter concealed the same cold indifference toward the young men’s group and its failure to raise chickens as shown by all the adults in the valley. For the first time I felt pity for the group, caught between the Emperor—who by now I’d come to think of as some cunning monster—and the equally cunning grown-ups in the valley. It had been the same with the group of young veterans whose violent activities had culminated in S’s death: the attitude taken toward them by the adults who had used them for their own purposes was founded in a deep-seated wariness and contempt. Not until I’d escaped to the outside world where I could look back on daily life in the village with objectivity—not until I myself had passed the age at which S had died—did I appreciate the truth of this. One difference, of course, was that in the past the children had gone against the adults and idolized the young men, whereas the kids today were as indifferent to the young men’s group as to the grown-ups themselves.
The bonfire burned itself out, leaving a warm black sore in the
frozen soil. The children, pointlessly, stamped it down.
“You can go indoors now,” said my wife, coming back from the outbuilding. “There are some rice cakes for you.”
But they ignored her well-meant information and went on stamping at the remains of the bonfire. They were too self-conscious, had too much pride concerning anything to do with food. I wondered if they might be thin because their mother, whose hatred of her own enormous appetite made her feel that all food bore the thorns of suffering, had implanted a dislike of it in them too.
“Jin was very pleased,” my wife said.
“She didn’t get angry?”
“When she first saw it she said you were ‘trifling’ with her, but I finally got her to understand that I was the one who’d ordered it. She actually used the word ‘trifle.’ ”
“Yes, she would. It used to be an everyday word here in the valley, at least until the time when I was a kid. Whenever I made a joke, mother would tell me off—said I was ‘trifling’ with my parents. How about it, though—do you think this controversial gadget will be any use to Jin?”
“I think so. She’ll have to be careful not to fall over sideways and hurt herself, but the first tryout at least was successful.” She refrained from further details on account of the children, who were obstinately hanging about with ears pricked, and said without warning, “Jin asked me, so I told her about the baby.”
“Ah, well. Anybody who’d taken along an appliance like that would naturally want to make some such confession of his own, if only to make the other person feel less embarrassed.”
“You won’t be so good-natured when you hear what Jin had to say about it. Not, of course, that I believe what she says.” She seemed to be fighting against some barrier as she spoke. “Jin said she wondered if the baby’s deformity was due to heredity on your side.”
A wave of burning anger swept through me. For a moment it was enough to purge my mind of the ominous shadow cast by the Emperor. I struggled to set my defenses in order, flushing with ill-focused apprehension, as though under attack by an unidentifiable enemy.
“The grounds for her suspicion are really terribly trivial,” she went on hastily, turning red in response to the flush that had spread over my whole face. “It’s just that once, when you were still too young to go to primary school, you had a bad fit of convulsions.”
“I had a fit and fainted while I was watching the school play,” I said with a sense of relief that was deep in proportion to the first shock, though I could still feel the lingering heat of anger in every corner of my body.
Jin’s sons shrieked with laughter. Perhaps their childish clamor with its determination to insult both my wife and me served to settle our psychological account, for when I scowled at them they retreated hastily, still laughing and quite undismayed, in search of their corpulent mother and the rice cakes. We ourselves went back to the fireplace. I felt I must tell her the precise nature of the evil spirit that had visited me without warning as a small child when I was watching the school play, that I must destroy the seeds of suspicion that otherwise would surely grow inside her tonight when she got drunk.
The play in question, which was frequently talked about as the last to be given at the primary school until school theatricals were started again after the war, must have been the one held in the autumn of the year the war began. My father was in northeast China doing work of an unspecified nature that remained a mystery not only to us children but to grandmother, who was still alive then, and to mother as well. For the sake of that work, he would sell enough fields to provide the money to cross the straits and spend more than half every year in China. Our eldest brother was at Tokyo University and S at a middle school in the nearby town, so the family in the house in the valley consisted of grandmother and mother, Jin, and the children—myself, my younger brother, and our newly born sister. So it was Jin and we three children who set out that day, bearing the invitation to the school play that had been addressed to father. Takashi and I sat on either side of Jin, who had the baby on her back, our legs dangling from wooden chairs in the middle of the very front row in the largest classroom of the primary school. I could recall the scene as clearly as though I had a third eye up in the classroom ceiling that gave me a bird’s-eye view.
About a yard in front of us a stage had been made by placing two platforms together, and it was on this that the older pupils performed their play. It began with a number of them, wearing cotton towels round their heads (judging from the number of children in the advanced course, there couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen of them onstage, but to my childish eyes they were a small crowd), going through the motions of cultivating the fields. In short, they were
farmers in olden times. Soon they laid aside their spades and began practicing fighting, using axes and sickles as weapons. Their leader appeared, a youth of extraordinary beauty even to my immature eyes, and under his leadership the armed peasants trained for the battle in which they were to take the head of the most powerful man in the clan. A black bundle represented the head, and the farmers were divided into two groups who practiced seizing the dummy from each other. In the second act, a man appeared in splendid costume and warned the farmers against taking the notable’s head, but they were already too inflamed to listen to him, so he told them that he would take the head himself. A figure in a mask went past the dark place where the farmers lay in ambush, and without warning the character in the splendid costume fell upon him with his sword. The role of the man in the mask was played by a pupil wearing a black cloth over his head, with a black ball fastened to the top, making him a figure of terror considerably taller than the other actors. The “real” head of the man attacked with the sword tumbled to the stage with a loud thud, whereupon his assailant cried out to the farmers in hiding:
“Lo! My brother’s head!”
The farmers removed the mask, recognized the head of their young leader, and wept bitterly for shame.
Jin had already told me the plot and I’d seen the play many times in rehearsal, so I was completely familiar with the mechanics of the scene, but even so (either at the moment the “real” head made of a bamboo basket filled with stones fell to the stage, or when the cry of “Lo! My brother’s head!” so startled me, or again—to relate things exactly as I remember them—at the critical moment when the two things converged) I was seized with fear, collapsed screaming on the floor, went into convulsions and lost consciousness. When I came to, I’d already been carried home and grandmother was at my bedside saying to my mother, “Heredity’s a dreadful thing, even in a greatgrandchild.” I was so afraid that I kept my eyes shut and my body rigid, pretending still to be unconscious.
“Do you remember that when my first translation appeared I got a letter from a retired teacher at the primary school?” I said to my wife. “He was assistant principal at the time of the school play. His subject was mathematics, but he was also studying local history, and it was he who wrote the play. But the war began that winter. The following year the system changed to ‘national schools.’ There was
a fuss about the play, he said in his letter, and he was demoted to the rank and file of teachers. I wrote back asking him if great-grandfather had really killed his younger brother, and got a reply saying he now subscribed to the view that in actual fact my great-grandfather had allowed his younger brother, ringleader in the rising, to escape to Kochi. I also asked about the exact circumstances of my father’s death, but in his answer he said that my mother, who must have known something about it, was not only unwilling to understand its significance but tried her very best to forget it, so that by now there wasn’t a soul who knew anything definite about it.”
“I wonder if Taka isn’t planning to meet that teacher,” my wife said.
“It’s true that Taka’s interested in ferreting out various secrets and facts about the people who died in our family, but I doubt whether the historian will be able to satisfy Taka’s taste for the heroic,” I said, and broke off the conversation.
At the outbreak of the war, father had let us know that he was abandoning his work in China and coming home, but had then disappeared without trace until three months later, when his body was handed over to my mother by the Shimonoseki police. The circumstances of his death were suspicious and rumors abounded: he’d been struck down by a heart attack on board the ferry; had thrown himself overboard just as they were entering harbor; or had died under investigation by the police. But my mother, returning to the village after going to fetch the body, refused to say anything about his death. After the war, brother S had been so irritated by the blank refusal he met every time he tried to worm details of father’s death out of her that it had provided the immediate motive, at least, for his plan to take her to the mental hospital and have her examined.
Around dusk a sudden breeze sprang up at the entrance to the valley, ruffling the spindle-shaped hollow as it came and bringing to the houses in the valley a strange stench, like mounds of burning animal matter, that induced an immediate physical distress and nausea. My wife and I went out into the front garden with handkerchiefs pressed over our noses and mouths and gazed down toward the valley and beyond, but all we could see was a little white smoke rising in the air. Even that wasn’t particularly distinct, and soon lost itself in the swirling billows of new mist, leaving nothing in the reddish black depths of the twilight sky but shreds of smoke that tried to rise
above the heavy layer of mist only to break and disperse. Where the black forest gave them a background, they stood out white and shining like gobs of saliva.
Jin’s husband and sons had come out of the outbuilding and were standing in a group a few paces behind us, also watching the lower reaches of the sky. The boys were busily snuffing the air trying to identify the smell. Their small noses, like dark fingers, noisily and vigorously asserted their existence in the steadily deepening gloom. In front of the village office, too, a number of black figures had appeared and were looking up at the sky.
It was completely dark by the time Takashi and his bodyguards came home. They were all equally grubby and exhausted, but Hoshio was silent whereas Takashi and Momoko were in high spirits. My brother had kept his promise and brought half a dozen bottles of whisky for my wife, who winced involuntarily at the sight of them standing there in a row. He’d also bought a leather jacket for Hoshio and a skirt for Momoko. But despite their new clothes, the same strange odor that had shrouded the valley hung about them even more closely, like a protective membrane.
“What are you two looking so doubtful about?” Takashi asked, deliberately misinterpreting our reaction to the smell they gave off. “Anyone’d think we’d been killed in an accident deep in the forest and come back to haunt you. Admittedly, we came at top speed along an icy trail and in mist, driving a ramshackle old truck with a lousy clutch, but Hoshi handled it like a genius. He took that dark forest road with as little trouble as a dog clattering along an icy road on its claws. A mechanical age obviously produces a special breed of men whose sixth sense is oriented to machines.”
He was clearly attempting to cheer Hoshio up, but the teen-age technician refused to show any favorable response. Either his nerves were frayed by the mad dash along that dangerous trail, or some other trying experience had sapped his immature energies.
“Taka,” I said outright, “you may not be a ghost, but you stink!”
“Who wouldn’t, after burning several thousand chickens?” He gave a short laugh. “We stripped all the boards off the chicken houses and burned everything—stiff chickens, soft shit and all. God, the stink! I’m sure it’s soaked right into our blood.”
“Didn’t you get any complaints from people?”
“You bet we did! But we just let them talk. In the end a cop came—after
all, it was quite a bonfire. But when he saw four or five of the group blocking the end of the bridge, he kept quiet and went home again. So the young men have discovered they’ve nerve enough to stand up to the police. They’re quite bucked about it. Several thousand chickens may have died and gone up in smoke, but thanks to them the group’s that little bit wiser. So it wasn’t all a waste.”