Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
“Like Sarudahiko,” said his grandmother inconsequently.
Sarudahiko: the word, vaguely rustic and comic in its associations, was on the verge of suggesting some meaning, albeit vague, to my mind, but my faculties were already too dulled by fatigue to produce more than the faintest tremor, which failed to expand; the thread of meaning escaped me. Even as I shook my head in vain, the word Sarudahiko sank like a sounding line, the seal of meaning unbroken, down into the depths of memory.
But now that word, Sarudahiko, came rising to my mind, a clear outcropping of a vein of familiar memories, as I sat in the water at the bottom of the pit with the dog in my arms. The tissues of the brain
relating to this word, frozen ever since that day, had thawed out. Sarudahiko—Sarudahiko the divine—had gone to Amanoyachimata to meet the gods descending to earth. Amenouzume, who had engaged in negotiations with Sarudahiko as representative of the intruders, had gathered together the fish who were the original inhabitants of the new world in an attempt to establish his dominance, and with a knife had slashed open the mouth of the sea slug, who resisted in silence. Our gentle, twentieth-century Sarudahiko had been, if anything, a fellow to the sea slug whose mouth had been slashed. At the thought, the tears gushed from my eyes and, streaming down my cheeks and along my lips, dropped onto the dog’s back.
A year before his death, he’d cut short his studies at Columbia University and returned to Japan, where he entered a home for mild cases of mental disorder. Of the whereabouts of the home and his life there, I know nothing other than what he himself reported. Neither had his wife or his mother or grandmother actually visited the place, though it was said to be in the Shonan district. He forbade all those close to him to visit him there. Thinking about it now, I feel far from sure even that such a home existed. However, if one is to believe what he said, the place was called the Smile Training Center, and the inmates, who were given large doses of tranquilizers at every meal, spent all their time placidly smiling. It was a single-story building similar to the beachside hostels to be found all over the Shonan area, and half of it was taken up by a single, large sun-room. During the day most of the patients chatted amiably to each other, sitting on the swings that were installed in large numbers on the extensive lawn. Strictly speaking, the inmates weren’t even patients but travelers, as it were, on a prolonged stopover. Under the influence of the tranquilizers, they became more manageable than the most docile of domestic animals, and whiled away the hours in the sun-room or on the lawn exchanging happy, untroubled smiles. They were free to go out, and since no one felt he was being kept in confinement, no one ever ran away.
Coming home about a week after entering the home to get books and a change of clothing, my friend declared that he seemed to have adjusted to this odd place more swiftly and more comfortably than any of the placidly smiling patients who had entered before him. Three weeks later, however, on his next return to Tokyo, his smiles, though still there, looked faintly forlorn. And he confided in his wife and myself.
The male nurse who brought the patients their drugs and their meals was a brutal fellow who would often treat them abominably, since under sedation they were unable even to feel anger. Sometimes as he passed a patient he would deal him a hefty blow in the belly, quite without provocation. I suggested he should protest to those in charge of the center, but he said that if he did the director would only think he was inventing it out of boredom, or suffering from a simple persecution complex, or both. After all, no one, at least along the Shonan coast, could be as bored as they were, and they were all to a greater or lesser extent out of their minds. Besides, thanks to the tranquilizers, he himself hardly knew whether he was really angry or not. . . .
Nevertheless, it was only two or three days after this that he flushed down the toilet the tranquilizers doled out to him at breakfast, did the same at lunch, and again at suppertime. The next morning, having discovered that he was indeed angry, he lay in wait for the brute and—himself suffering a considerable amount of damage in the process—ended by half slaying him. As a result of this incident he won the sincere admiration of his gently smiling friends but, following a talk with the director, was obliged to leave. As he left the Smile Training Center, waving to the mental patients who saw him off with the same amiable, fatuous smiles on their faces, he experienced a profounder sadness than ever before.
“It’s as Henry Miller said. I felt the same kind of sadness as his. Actually, until that moment I’d never realized the truth of what he wrote: ‘I tried to smile with him, but I couldn’t. It made me terribly sad, sadder than I ever felt before in my life.’ It’s more than just a turn of phrase. . . . And there’s another phrase of Miller’s too that’s been haunting me ever since: ‘Let’s be cheerful, whatever happens.’ ”
From the end of his period at the Smile Training Center until his death by hanging, naked, with his head painted bright red, there’s no doubt that he remained obsessed by Miller’s words, “Let’s be cheerful, whatever happens.” His brief and premature last years were spent in unequivocal cheerfulness. He even lapsed into a particular sexual proclivity and explored its peculiar type of frenzy. I was reminded of it by a conversation with my wife when I returned home, stunned and exhausted, after the cremation. She was drinking whisky, alone, as she waited for me. That was the first day I saw her drunk.
As soon as I got home I went and looked in the room she shared
with our son. The child was still at home in those days. It was barely dusk, but the child lay on the bed looking up at me placidly with absolutely empty brown eyes, the kind of placidity with which a plant, if plants had eyes, might gaze back at someone peering at it. My wife was not beside him. If I remember correctly, she was sitting quite drunk in the gloom of the library when I found her, perched precariously on a step stool between the shelves like a bird on a swaying branch. I was so taken aback that I felt, if anything, more embarrassed for myself than for her. Getting the whisky bottle out of the niche inside the stool where I’d hidden it, she’d seated herself on its steps, taken a gulp straight from the bottle, and continued to drink little by little, getting steadily drunker as she went. Seeing me, she jerked back like a mechanical doll. Her upper lip was greasy with sweat. She couldn’t stand up. Her eyes, the color of plums, were feverish, but the skin of her neck and shoulders showing above her dress was rough with goose pimples. Her whole being suggested a dog driven by sickness to chew grass furiously only to vomit all the more.
“You’re ill, surely?” I asked, ridiculously.
“No, I’m not ill,” she replied with open scorn, swift to sense my embarrassment.
“Then you’re drunk, in fact.”
Squatting down facing her I watched, fascinated, a drop of sweat, quivering on the edge of her upper lip as she stared back at me suspiciously, roll down sideways as the lip curled. Her squalid breath, laden with the damp fumes of alcohol, swept over me. The exhaustion brought by the living from the deathbed of a friend seeped like a dye into every corner of my body, and I could have sobbed.
“You’re dead drunk, you know.”
“I’m not particularly drunk. If I’m sweating it’s because I’m scared.”
“What about? The kid’s future?”
“Scared that there should be people who kill themselves, naked, with their heads painted red.”
I had told her that much, passing over the part about the cucumber.
“That’s nothing for you to be particularly scared about, is it?”
“I’m scared that
you
might paint your head red and kill yourself, naked,” she said, and hung her head in a display of unconcealed fear.
With a shudder I saw for a moment, in the dark brown mass of her hair, a miniature of myself dead. The crimson head of Mitsusaburo
Nedokoro in death, with lumps of partly dissolved powder paint dried behind the lobes of his ears, like drops of blood. Even as my friend’s body had been, so my own had the two ears left unpainted, token of the inadequate lapse of time between the conception of this bizarre suicide and its execution.
“I won’t kill myself. Why should I?”
“Was he a masochist?”
“What makes you ask me that, the very day after his death? Just curiosity?”
“Well, supposing,” she went on in a tone made excessively abject by the signs of anger in my voice (though an anger that wasn’t particularly clear even to myself), “supposing he did have some sexual perversion, there wouldn’t be any need for me to be afraid for you, would there?”
She jerked her head back again and stared at me as though demanding my agreement. The unspeakably naked sense of helplessness in her preternaturally red eyes shocked me. But she shut them almost at once, raised the whisky bottle, and took another gulp. The curves of her eyelids were dark like dirty finger pads. She coughed till the tears came to her eyes and whisky mingled with saliva dribbled from the corners of her mouth. Instead of being concerned on her behalf over the stain it would make on her new, off-white silk dress, I took the bottle from her hand—a hand scrawny and stringy as a monkey’s—and took a swig to cover my awkwardness.
It was true, as my friend had told me with a mixture of pleasure and sadness at a point midway in his sexual progress—a point, that is, on the slope of a tendency still vague yet clear enough to the person concerned, neither shallow enough to be of the kind that anyone might experience by chance nor sufficiently indulged to be absolutely past discussing with others—that he’d long been seeking masochistic experiences. He’d visited a private establishment where some ferocious female catered to masochists. There was nothing remarkable about what happened the first day. But on his second visit three weeks later, the stupid brute of a woman, remembering his tastes accurately, announced portentously that she would henceforth be indispensable to him. It wasn’t until the next stage, as he lay naked on his face and a knotted hemp rope landed with a thud beside his ear, that he realized that the great brutish female had indeed assumed a place in his world as an unarguable fact.
“It was as though my body was completely disassembled, all soft and limp in each part, something like a string of sausages, without any sensation at all. But my mind was floating somewhere way up above, completely cut off from my body.” And he’d fixed his eyes on me with an oddly weak, pained little smile.
I took another mouthful of whisky and, like my wife, was seized with a fit of coughing which sent lukewarm whisky through my undershirt to run down the skin of my chest and belly. Then as I gazed at her, sitting with her eyes still shut, the dark lids evoking another, false pair of eyes like the protective markings on the wings of certain moths, I was seized with an impulse to talk to her roughly.
Even assuming he was a masochist—I would say—it wouldn’t mean you’d have nothing to be afraid of. It wouldn’t justify your making a distinction between him and me and telling yourself I would never paint my head red and kill myself, naked. Sexual peculiarities aren’t very important in the long run; they’re only one distortion caused by something grotesque and really frightening coiled up in the depths of the personality. There was some enormous, uncontrollable, crazy motive force lurking in the depths of his soul, and it happened to induce a particular distortion called masochism—that’s all. It wasn’t his involvement with masochism that gave birth to the madness leading to his suicide, but the reverse. And I too have the seeds of that same, incurable madness. . . .
But I said nothing of all this to my wife, nor did the idea itself send its fine tendrils down into the folds of my brain, blunted by exhaustion. The fancy, like bubbles rising in a glass, fizzed for a while then vanished. Such notions pass without leaving any experience behind. This is particularly true when one remains silent about them; all one needs to do is wait till the undesirable notions pass away without damaging the walls of the brain.
If I could get by in this way now, then I should be able to escape the poison until the massive counterattack when I would finally have to accept it as an experience. Curbing my tongue, I put my hands under my wife’s arms from behind and hoisted her to her feet. It felt like sacrilege to support my living wife—the mystery and vulnerability of a body made to give birth in peril and in stress—with arms contaminated by lifting the body of a dead friend; yet of the two bodies, equal burdens, it was to my dead friend’s that I felt closer.
We advanced at a slow pace toward the bedroom where the baby
awaited us; but by the bathroom her progress was arrested like that of a ship that has lowered anchor, and cleaving her way through the dusky, lukewarm, summer-evening air of the room, she vanished into the toilet. She was there for a long while. When finally she reemerged, breasting the now deeper gloom, I took her to the bedroom and, giving up the idea of undressing her, laid her on the bed just as she was. Heaving a great sigh as though to expel her very soul, she fell fast asleep. Some yellow fibrous substance that she had vomited clung about her lips, fine as the hairs on a flower petal yet clearly shining in the twilight.
The baby gazed up at me as ever with wide-open eyes, but whether he was hungry or thirsty or felt some other discomfort I couldn’t tell. He lay with eyes open and expressionless, like a marine plant in the water of the dusk, simply and placidly existing. He demanded nothing, expressed absolutely no emotion. He didn’t even cry. One might even wonder if he were alive at all. Supposing my wife had been drunk all day since my early morning departure and had left the baby to its own devices, what should I do? At the moment she was nothing but a drunken slut in a deep sleep. I had a strong premonition of disaster. But as with my wife, I shrank from the sacrilege of stretching out contaminated hands and touching the baby. And to the baby, too, I felt less close than to my dead friend. However long I gazed down at him, he went on staring at me with utterly expressionless eyes. Finally, a drowsiness that drew one along with the irresistible force of a tidal wave came welling from those brown eyes. Without even fetching a bottle of milk for him, I curled up to sleep. On the threshold of unconsciousness, I told myself with a fresh sense of shock that my only friend had painted his head bright red and hanged himself, that my wife had got herself suddenly and quite unexpectedly drunk, that my son was an imbecile. To crown everything, I was about to go to sleep, jammed in an inadequate space between my wife’s and son’s beds, without locking up, without taking my tie off, my person still defiled from contact with the dead. All judgment suspended, like an insect impaled helpless on a pin. . . . Shrinking before a sense that I was being slowly eroded by a power that was unquestionably dangerous yet hard to identify, I drifted off to sleep. And by the morning I could no longer quite recall what I’d felt with such conviction the night before. It had failed, in short, to constitute an experience.