Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
“There was no need to scare the cop away,” Hoshio broke in as though he couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “What’s the point, anyway? They got the better of him because he was alone, but if reinforcements had come they wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
I was reminded of his persistence in challenging me late that night when we were waiting for Takashi at the airport. Hoshio was obviously the sort of young man who insisted on his pet ideas not only in defense of his patron deity but even when they worked against him.
“But Hoshi—once it starts snowing and communications with the town and the village on the coast are cut, there’ll only be a single cop to deal with anyway. When you were a kid, I bet they threatened they’d ‘tell the policeman’ if you weren’t good.”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t fight the cops,” Hoshio countered stubbornly. “That June, I backed you up whatever you did, didn’t I ? But why get into trouble with the police just for a bunch of chicken farmers? That’s what gets me.”
Suddenly Momoko, who till then had been reading letters from her family, looked up and intervened in a mocking, singsong voice as if they’d been mere kids:
“Hoshi talks like that, you see, because he wants to monopolize you, Takashi. There’s no point in arguing, Hoshi will only go on bitching like a girl. Let’s have supper and go to bed. Natsumi’s cooked up something good.”
The young man turned pale and scowled at Momoko, but excitement had left him speechless, so the argument ended there.
“How about the negotiations with the Emperor?” I asked, though I was sure already, from Takashi’s reluctance to launch into his report on the main proceedings, that the answer would be unfavorable.
“No go. It looks as though the young men will have all their work cut out to avoid getting still further into his clutches. The only practical proposal he made was that we should burn the chickens, all of them. I imagine he was afraid the valley folk would eat the dead chickens and sales of foodstuffs would go down at his supermarket. When I
got back and said we were going to burn the chickens, some of the villagers gave me dirty looks, so it seems his fears were justified. If you ask me, though, the sheer futility of pouring gasoline on several thousand chickens and cremating them has done something, at least, to turn the self-indulgent greed in their soggy, half-baked brains into a sharper, tougher hatred.”
“I wonder what kind of happy ending they had in mind when they sent you to town?” I asked, heavy-hearted.
“They didn’t have anything in mind. They’ve no imagination at all. They probably expected me to use
my
imagination on their behalf. But my aim in going to town wasn’t to serve up my imagination on a plate. I wanted to open their bleary eyes to the truth and make them realize the desperate hunger in their bellies!” He laughed.
“Did you know the Emperor originally came from the Korean settlement?”
“He told me so himself today. He said he was in the settlement the day S was killed. So I’ve got a personal reason for joining the young men in opposing him.”
“But Taka—I get the impression that if, for example, you wanted to find justifications for ganging up with your group against that poor village policeman, you could find any number, both public and private,” I said, drawing the conversation back to his argument with Hoshio in an attempt to prevent his remarks from setting up new waves of anxiety in me concerning the supermarket tycoon. “To me, Hoshi’s approach seems fairer than yours.”
“ ‘Fair’? Do you still talk of justice?” he asked with an expression so despondent that even I felt chilled as I watched. And he suddenly fell silent, whereupon Momoko, who for some time past had been murmuring “Let’s eat” in an effort to get us to the table, finally seized the chance to address him directly.
“All of them back home have read the book on gorillas that Mitsu translated,” she declared. “They say they feel a lot happier now they know I’m under the same roof as such a distinguished scholar. Mitsu’s a real member of the establishment, isn’t he?” The show of being impressed was obviously phoney.
“Mitsu may have withdrawn from social life,” commented my wife, who had already downed her first glass of whisky, “but he’s still a member of the establishment all right. That should be obvious to someone like you, Taka, who’re just the opposite type.”
“Right,” said Takashi, averting his eyes from me. “Perfectly obvious. Great-grandfather and grandfather—and their wives too—were the same type as Mitsu. Almost all the other people in our family died prematurely, but they lived on comfortably and peacefully into old age. You know, Natsumi, Mitsu will be ninety before he so much as gets cancer. And then it’ll only be a mild case!”
“If you ask me, you’re a lot too eager to find types in our family line,” I countered, reluctant to give up. But no one apart from Hoshio paid any attention. “Unless you find you yourself are that type, all your efforts will have been directed at an imaginary world, and no real help at all.”
After supper, Takashi gave my wife half of the advance he’d got from the Emperor, but she was already drunk and showed no interest. I was about to pocket it myself when he said :
“Mitsu—how about contributing fifty thousand yen to the football team I’m forming to train the young men’s association? I bought ten balls in town; they’re in the Citroen. But expenses are piling up.”
“Are footballs so expensive?” I asked meanly. Takashi had been on his university football team.
“I bought the balls with my own money. But some of the prospective team members go to the next town every day to work as laborers, you see. If I don’t give them a daily allowance for a while, they won’t so much as look at a football.”
A Strange Sport
A
S
I slept I could hear, in the blackness enveloping my dark form, the sound of bamboo splitting in the cold. The sound turned into a sharp steel claw and left a scratch on my hot sleeping head. My dream shifted scenes; a series of images dealing with the peasant rising in the valley flowed uninterrupted into memories of the day near the end of the war when one adult from every household in the valley had been mobilized to go and cut bamboo in the great bamboo grove. Then the series ran back on itself in a new sequence that led once more to that fateful year of 1860. I sank again into the depths of sleep, indulging a craven, uneasy temptation to let the familiar bad dreams drag on indefinitely rather than waken and face the Emperor, with his sturdy Korean body and inscrutable expression, and all the other new worries that had risen to trouble me. . . .
In my new dream, poised in time between 1860 and the last days of the war, the farmers—dressed in the standard khaki civilian dress with steel helmets on their backs, but with their hair done up in old-fashioned topknots—were busy cutting huge quantities of bamboo spears. In their persons, the men who brandished these spears as they carried all before them in the battle of 1860 were coeval with those who in 1945 were to have made last-ditch assaults on the armor-plated flanks of planes and landing craft. My mother was there with them, damaging the roots of the bamboo as she swung her ax about. She was so scared of any kind of sharp instrument that just to take hold of an ax was enough to make her feel faint, so she hacked blindly at the bamboo, the sweat beading her ashen face, her eyes tight shut. The bamboo grew so close that an accident was inevitable. Quite suddenly mother gave a great flourish of the ax and promptly dashed the handle and the back of her hand against the bamboo behind her. The ax glanced off and struck the crown of her head with
a loud crack. Unhurriedly, she lowered the ax into the undergrowth, and in equally leisurely fashion put her hand to her head, then held it up before her eyes, gazing at the red stain—a bright red, like the colored cakes served at Buddhist memorial services—in the hollow of her palm. I stood rooted to the ground by a disgust and horror that reached down to the depths of my being. But mother on the contrary seemed to recover her vitality and said triumphantly to me: “I’ve hurt myself! Now I’ll be excused training!” Abandoning ax and damaged bamboo, she moved off down the slope, seeming almost to glide on her knees over the undergrowth.
As my mother and I lay low in the storehouse, a squad of villagers shouldering bamboo spears came climbing up the graveled road. Their commander was Takashi, of indeterminate age. Since he was the only person in the valley who had actually seen America and the Americans, they doubtless saw him as the most reliable man to lead them with their spears against the American forces soon due to land on the coast and attack the town. But the squad’s first objective was the storehouse in which mother and I were concealed.
“They can raze the main house to the ground, but the storehouse won’t burn! It didn’t burn in 1860, either!” said my mother, whose hair was thinning unpleasantly at the forehead above her broad face. “Your great-grandfather, you know, drove the rioters away by firing his gun through the loophole in the storehouse.”
I had an old-fashioned musket in my hands, but for all my mother’s incitements I hadn’t the faintest idea how to handle it. In no time the main house was destroyed and the outbuilding set on fire; I could see Jin’s obese form rolling about in the light of the flames, all escape cut off, the liquid streaming from her suffering body. Takashi, who as leader of the mob was by now completely identified with great-grandfather’s younger brother in 1860, bawled out challenges to mother, myself, and the family spirits as we lurked in the storehouse. The followers massed around him were members of the young men’s association whom he’d trained with his football practice. Sea Urchin and the other youths were dressed in uniforms consisting of old-fashioned, horizontally striped pajamas, and had large, shiny black topknots. And with one voice the mob joined in singling me out for attack:
“You’re just a rat!”
Until then, my consciousness in the dream had consisted of a pair of healthy eyeballs that swept high over the valley, trailing beneath
them a short coil of nerves rather like a microphone. But their jeering brought the eyeballs crashing down, and with them my physical self as I sat helpless in the storehouse with the musket on my knees.
I awoke groaning. Even then, the emotional distress of the dream persisted throughout my body; moreover, now that the dream offered no corresponding actuality, the gloomy unease remained disproportionately large, oppressing my waking self. I longed desperately for my rectangular pit—now, alas, occupied by a septic tank and covered with a lid of concrete. My wife lay stiff and still in sleep by my side, hot as a small child with the lingering effects of alcohol and the heat of slumber, but now that I was awake my own body grew steadily colder.
Farther back up the valley, away from the central part of the hollow, the river plunges into hidden folds of forest that press in on either side, so that to an observer on the rising ground at the entrance to the valley it seems as though the valley is closed off at that point. From there on upstream, the bed of the river turns to exposed rock, and a great grove of bamboo closes in on both sides, forcing the graveled road to leave the riverside and climb steeply uphill. The people who live in the small clusters of houses dotted here and there along the road as it climbs are called “the country folk” by the inhabitants of the hollow. The great bamboo grove forms a broad belt that joins at right angles the gash formed by the protrusion of the spindle-shaped hollow into the forest, separating the hollow and the “country.” Once, when the valley folk had been drawn up in the yard of the national school, armed with spears culled from the great bamboo grove, the minor official who had come from the prefectural office to take a look at them training had infuriated the headman and other village worthies by carelessly remarking that the people of Okubo village “were used to making bamboo spears.” As a result, the headman had gone into town to complain and the official had been relieved of his post.
To the village children, the sudden rage that had led the normally docile adults to pit themselves against the almighty prefectural office and, quite miraculously, defeat it was an inexplicable mystery. Every morning when I accompanied mother—who just as in my dream was afraid of axes and all sharp instruments—into the great bamboo grove with the other adults, and the renewed sound of splitting bamboo echoed steadily and imposingly around me, bringing to life again the memory of the grown-ups’ fierce wrath, an indefinable
fear would fill my childish mind. It was only after the end of the war, in a social studies class at school, that I heard about the farmers’ rising in 1860 for the first time. The teacher made a special point of how the bamboo spears the farmers had used as weapons had been cut from the bamboo grove, and I understood at last what had made the headman and the others so angry. The bamboo grove was the most incontrovertible reminder of the 1860 rising, whose memory, during the war, had been viewed as a slur on all the inhabitants of the valley. The valley folk, unfortunately, had been set to work cutting bamboo in that same grove and made to fashion it into identical spears. It wasn’t likely that they would let the official get away with a remark that reawakened so sharply the old sense of shame. By dutifully whittling spears in the service of the state, the headman and others of a similarly conformist bent, ashamed that their ancestors should have cut bamboo for use in a rebellion against the establishment of the day, were hoping to dispel the shadow of 1860 that still hung over them.
Mother’s words in my dream had likewise reproduced, after more than two decades, words that I’d once heard in reality. After father’s death, my eldest brother left college and shortly afterward joined the army, while S had volunteered as a naval air cadet; whereupon mother, in whom too many such disappointments had produced delusions of persecution, began from time to time to predict that the villagers would attack our house, smash it up, and set fire to it. We must get ready, she said, to take flight and install ourselves in the storehouse as soon as the raiding party was sighted. When I objected, she told me of the outrage that had been perpetrated against our house in 1860, hoping thus to communicate her own fears to her infant son.