Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
I concentrated on the translation, trying to ignore the voices of my family ancestors that filled the storehouse with their cries of “rat, rat!” In the distance, I seemed to hear bloodcurdling yells and the sound of a ball being kicked about, but it might just have been a noise in my own head.
In the afternoon, Jin’s youngest boy dropped in to say that the young priest from the temple had come to see me. Going back to the main house, I found the kitchen full of billowing steam with a fragrance of bamboo grass. My wife was just taking an old and well-remembered steamer off a great pot on the hearth, while two of Jin’s sons and the priest watched, enveloped in steam up to head or chest, depending on their size. Coughing loudly, the boy who had come to fetch me went back to his elder brothers and disappeared into the steam.
“You’ll burn yourself!” Jin’s boys called in lofty warning as my wife, whose cheeks and ears were bright red, put out a hand toward the contents of the steamer. And when her fingers shot back to her lips they roared with good-natured laughter.
“What are you making?” I asked with a sense of relief as I joined the steamy circle around her.
“Rice dumplings in bamboo leaves. Jin showed me how. The children
got the leaves from the woods for me.” Her voice had a youthful élan that it had lacked completely during our conversation in the storehouse. “They seem to have turned out quite well. Do you remember them, Mitsu?”
“The valley folk always took them when they went to cut trees in the forest,” I said. “Jin’s father was originally a lumberman, so her recipe’s sure to be genuine.”
She gave each of us one of her “genuine” dumplings, which were twice the size of a man’s fist. The priest and I broke them into pieces on plates before eating them, so for us the bamboo leaves still dripping with hot water were redundant, but Jin’s children held the dumplings in their hands, rolling them about on wet palms as they skillfully chewed at them from the edges without spoiling their shape. They consisted of balls of glutinous rice flavored with soy sauce and stuffed with a paste of pork and fresh mushrooms. The leaves of bamboo grass in which they were wrapped were dry and whitish around the edges, but tattered though they were it must have cost the children quite an effort, if not actual fear, to gather them at this season. Watching the expert way they ate their dumplings, I couldn’t believe that the valley children’s traditional dislike of going into the forest in winter had changed either.
“These dumplings aren’t at all bad, but they taste of garlic,” I said critically. “When
I
was living here, people never put garlic in any food, let alone dumplings.” She was taking the remainder out of the steamer and transferring them to long, shallow boxes of a kind also familiar to me from childhood. Both steamer and boxes had been brought out of the storehouse at Jin’s suggestion.
“What?” she exclaimed suspiciously. “Jin told me specially to put some garlic in, so I bought a supply when I went to the supermarket to get the pork.”
“There you are, Mitsu—” said the priest, a fragment of food poised in his fingers, “that’s typical of the way life’s changing in the village. Before the war, garlic played no part in village life at all. I don’t suppose most people even knew there was such a plant. But the villagers discovered it when the war began, all because of the settlement built by the Korean laborers who came to fell timber in the forest. It was their contempt for a people who could eat such a smelly root that first made them aware of garlic. You know the kind of thing I mean, don’t you, Mitsu? Well, when the villagers took the Koreans to do
forced labor in the forest, they deliberately told them some nonsense about not being allowed into the forest unless they took some dumplings with them. It was a way of asserting their own superiority. So the Koreans began to make dumplings too, and hit on the idea of putting garlic in to suit their own taste. That influenced the villagers in reverse, who started using it for flavoring dumplings they made themselves. It just shows how the locals’ stupid pride and lack of principles bring about changes in the customs of the valley. The village never used to use garlic as a flavoring, but by now it’s a best seller at the supermarket. So the Emperor has double or triple cause to be pleased with himself.”
“I don’t care, so long as the ‘lack of principles’ works out all right in my cooking,” my wife said aggressively. “Even if I
am
going against tradition.”
“It’s worked out fine,” I said. “If you’ll permit the usual sentimental assessment, they’re better than mother used to make.”
“No doubt about it!” chimed in the priest. She gave us a suspicious glance, however, and refused to be mollified.
“But I didn’t really come here for a free meal,” the priest said, turning to me. His small round face, normally a model of amiability, puckered with embarrassment. “The thing is, I came across your eldest brother’s diary which S left with me, so I brought it over.”
“Come and have a talk upstairs in the storehouse,” I said. “I’m not going to football practice, so I’ve nothing to do.” I wasn’t just trying to cheer him up; I really wanted to talk. “Do you happen to be interested in the 1860 rising?”
“Yes—I studied it a bit and made some notes on it myself,” he said eagerly, with obvious pleasure at being rescued. “You see, the second most important role in it—after your ancestors, that is—was played by one of my predecessors at the temple, though there’s no blood relationship.”
Ignoring the self-preoccupied sensitivity of the priest’s reactions, my wife was already giving energetic instructions to Jin’s sons. They were to take some dumplings to their mother and to go and tell Hoshio, who was at the primary school playground, to come for the food in the Citroen. Then, just as the priest and I were leaving the main house she called out defiantly after us :
“I’m going to watch football practice this afternoon too, Mitsu. I want to hear what they think of the dumplings.”
The embarrassed young priest and I set off for the storehouse, breathing garlic fumes like fire-belching monsters in a science-fiction movie. The diary he’d brought was a small book bound in dark purple cloth. My eldest brother had been a remote being who was usually away from home, either at his hostel in town or in lodgings in Tokyo, and rarely came back even on vacations. My only clear-cut memory concerning him was of the unpleasant impression created by the village grown-ups who, when he died less than two years after leaving the university, had moralized on the futility of investing in higher education for a son. I took the diary and placed it on top of the Penguin book left by my dead friend. I had a feeling that the priest was rather disappointed that I didn’t start reading it then and there. But the truth was that my eldest brother’s testament, far from inspiring my mind to a lively curiosity, chilled it with some imprecise yet ominous foreboding. I determined to behave as though entirely uninterested in the diary, and without waiting went on:
“Mother used to say that great-grandfather kept the mob at bay by firing a gun from the second-floor window of the storehouse. This window is, in fact, shaped just like a loophole; it makes the story seem so probable that I’m inclined, on the contrary, to doubt it. What do you think? She said the gun was one great-grandfather had brought back from his trip to Kochi. I wonder if it’s possible that a peasant in Ehime in the year 1860 should have been armed with a gun?”
“The term ‘peasant’ hardly applies,” said the priest. “Your greatgrandfather was the richest overseer in the area, and there’d be nothing odd about his having a gun. It seems more likely, though, that he didn’t bring it back from Kochi himself, but that it was supplied by someone from Kochi who infiltrated the village just before the riots. My father’s theory was that a man from Kochi stayed at the temple and worked on your great-grandfather and his brother, through the priest of the time, to start the riots. The interloper may have been a samurai of the Tosa clan, but there’s no conclusive proof. Either way, he was someone from the other side of the forest. Since it was the priest who put him in contact with your great-grandfather and his brother, he may have come through the forest dressed as a wandering monk. At that time, not only the valley but the whole clan was affected by unrest, which would have given scope for the activities of an agent sent by forces from beyond the forest, the kind of forces that would profit from anything likely to upset the ruling regime. I imagine that the priest and
your great-grandfather shared the view that only a rising could bring any relief to the valley peasants. The priest took neither side, while the overseer was on the side of the establishment—but ruin for the masses would have meant their both going under too. So the real question plaguing them was what kind of rising to instigate and where. The easiest course, you see, would be to provide some outlet for the violent energies building up to a rising before things got so bad that the attack was concentrated on the overseer himself, and to keep violence in the valley to a minimum while diverting the rest to the castle town. Now, a rising needs a group of leaders, but whatever kind of success this particular rising achieved, its leaders were bound to be seized and put to death. How were they, then, to select this group that was fated eventually to be sacrificed yet, during the rising itself, would exercise control over the farmers not only of the valley but of the whole area as far as the castle town? This was the point at which people began to take notice of the band of young men that your great-grandfather’s brother was training. Though they may have included a few eldest sons due to inherit their father’s land, most of them were second or third sons—surplus population with no prospect of ever having land of their own. To sacrifice such a group would be no particular blow to the valley. If anything, it would help get rid of a public nuisance.”
“That suggests, doesn’t it, that from the very beginning the man from beyond the forest, and the priest and great-grandfather, treated the younger brother as something dispensable?”
“It seems likely to me that the brother, unlike the rest, had a secret agreement that after the rising he would escape to Kochi and cross from there to Osaka or Edo. The outsider would have been the one responsible for seeing that the promise was carried out. You’ve heard the popular theory, haven’t you, that your great-grandfather’s brother left the forest, took a different name, and became a high official in the Restoration government?”
“That would mean, then, that he was one of the traitors from the beginning. Either way, it seems I’m descended from a line of traitors.”
“How can you say that, Mitsu? The reason why your great-grandfather went so far as to fire his gun during the raid was almost certainly that he’d begun to doubt whether the agreement with his brother about the storehouse not being set on fire would really be observed. Even agreed that the main building had to be destroyed—since if the Nedokoro house hadn’t been attacked at all your great-grandfather
would have been held responsible by the clan officials—I suspect it was that doubt that made him keep the weapon supplied from outside without handing it over to the young men. And the young men did in fact occupy the storehouse themselves later. As a result of the rising, which lasted five days and nights, the ‘advance tax’ system was abolished just as the farmers had demanded, and the official Confucian scholar who’d recommended it to the lord of the clan was executed. Then, following that, your great-grandfather’s brother and his group put up a fight in the storehouse to avoid having some of their number made into scapegoats. Fighting together in the rising, the leaders must have developed a sense of solidarity focused on the figure of your great-grandfather’s brother.”
Following the end of the rising, great-grandfather’s brother and the group formed round him had shut themselves in the storehouse and defied the clan investigating officers. Armed and apprehensive, it was they who out of frustration at being besieged in the storehouse had slashed at the woodwork, leaving the sword marks that had so often inspired my childish mind with bloodthirsty fantasies. Since the farmers failed to give food and water to the group that had been their leaders until only the previous day, the besieged men found themselves isolated. They gave in, were enticed out of the storehouse, and beheaded on the small rise that now forms the open space in front of the village office. The man directly responsible for tricking the thirsty and starving youths out of the storehouse was great-grandfather. He got the village girls to dress up in their best and set up a temporary kitchen in front of the storehouse, then brought in investigators to seize the young men once they’d fallen into a drunken sleep. Grandmother used to relate the episode proudly as testimony to the resourcefulness of her Nedokoro forebears. I remember mother telling me, too, that when she first came to the valley as a bride one of the girls used in great-grandfather’s ruse was still alive. At the time of the slaughter, great-grandfather’s brother was the only one to escape execution and get away into the forest. In the end, he’d abandoned even the comradeship with his fellow rebels that the young priest spoke of—assuming he’d ever had it—so as a member of the same family line I wasn’t likely to be very reassured by what the priest said. I wondered if great-grandfather’s brother, as he fled into the forest, didn’t perhaps turn when he reached the highest point and, looking back at the hollow, see his unhappy fellows below, their
drunken sleep rudely interrupted, being beheaded on the mound in the valley. At that same moment great-grandfather, too, must have been either present at the execution or looking down on it from a vantage point on the stone wall.
“As for why the younger brother began giving the young men special training, I imagine it was because the
Kanrin-maru
had set sail for America,” said the young priest, sensing my depression and delicately changing the subject. Despite the sensitivity this showed, it was the same man who had managed to live down all the different stories, including a malicious rumor that he was sexually impotent, that flew about the valley following his wife’s elopement.