Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
“No, I’m not saying my memories tally with the facts. But I didn’t consciously distort them, either. After all, I did once have roots here, so to fall in with the communal aspirations of the valley can hardly be called a kink in my personality, can it? After I was separated from the village, memory combined with the communal dream to form a kind of pure culture in my mind. As a kid I actually saw, in the Nembutsu dance at the Bon festival, the ‘spirit’ of S, in the winter jacket worn by naval air cadets, fighting the men from the Korean settlement at the head of a party of young men, until he was finally beaten to death, stripped of his jacket, and left lying face down in just his white undershirt and shorts. I told you, didn’t I, that his arms were raised as if he was dancing, with his legs spread like those of a hurdler in action ? That’s taken directly from a sudden moment of stillness in the Nembutsu dance, at the top of one of its wild leaps. The dance was performed in broad daylight at the height of summer, so even the white sunlight that illuminates my memory is part of what I experienced at an actual Bon festival. You see, it wasn’t a memory of the real-life raid on the Korean settlement, but an experience in the world of the dance, in which the facts were reworked in visible form through the communal emotions of the people of the valley. The boys in the team told me that even after I left the valley they saw S’s ‘spirit’ do the same dance as I remember at the Bon festival every year. All I did, in fact, was mix up the Nembutsu dance in the processes of my memory with the actual scene of the raid. That surely means that I’ve still got roots linking me to the communal sentiments of the valley. I’m certain of it. Mitsu must have watched the dance with me when I was a kid, and
being older he ought to have a clearer memory of it than me, but during the argument in the car he deliberately kept quiet to suit his own logic. He’s got a crafty side to him.”
“What was the Nembutsu dance like, Taka?” my wife asked. “Does ‘spirits’ mean spirits of the dead ?” But I got the impression that she’d already grasped the essential meaning of what he said, and understood perfectly well his pride at discovering, through dreams, his ties with the communal spirit of the valley.
“Why don’t you ask Mitsu? He’ll be jealous if I’m the one to tell you everything about the valley. I’m more interested in having you make lunch for the team again today. I’m thinking of having them here to live in while they train. It’s always been a valley custom for the young fellows to get together at the New Year and stay for a few days. So I’m going to arrange the same thing. I hope you’ll give us a hand, Natsumi.”
I didn’t catch her reply clearly, but it was plain to me that by now she belonged to Takashi’s inner circle. That afternoon, she asked me to tell her about Bon festival customs in the valley. She naturally made no mention of the word “jealousy” that Takashi had used, so I too kept quiet about overhearing her conversation with him early that morning, and told her about the Nembutsu dance.
Of all the evil beings that descended on the hollow bringing trouble with them, the most typical was the Chosokabe, an enemy with whom the valley folk would have no dealings whatsoever. But the hollow was also visited by another, different type of evil, or rather evildoers, who, since they had originally belonged among the valley folk themselves, could not by their very nature be dealt with by simple rejection and expulsion. Every year during the Bon festival, they came back to the valley in a single-file procession that followed the graveled road down from the upper reaches of the forest. I learned from an article by a well-known folklorist that these beings who came back from the forest to be greeted with such reverence by the inhabitants were “spirits” who sometimes exerted a harmful influence from the other world (the forest) on the present world (the valley). Any persistent floods that ravaged the valley, or any particularly virulent rice pest, were attributed to these “spirits,” and it was to placate them that people devoted so much energy to the Bon festival. During the typhus epidemic toward the end of the war, a particularly spectacular dance was performed in honor of the “spirits.” The Bon
procession that filed down from the forest that year, with a figure got up like a huge white cuttlefish in its midst, was an object of terror to the valley children. The figure probably represented the malevolent “spirit” of a louse—not a real louse, of course, but the “spirit” of one of the village-ancestors who had led a brutal life, or of some good man who had died an unhappy death, manifesting himself that year in the form of a louse in order to bring disaster to the valley. There was one villager who was an expert in the Nembutsu dance and always devoted great ingenuity to preparing the festival procession. He was a tatami maker by trade, but when, for example, an epidemic filled the isolation hospital in the great bamboo grove to overflowing, he would be preoccupied right from the beginning of spring with working out the staging of the next Bon festival. Even at times when he was busy in his workshop, he would call out in a loud, excited voice to passersby on the graveled road, asking their opinion on some idea or other.
When the festival procession reached the front garden of our house, it would form a ring and dance, then step up into the storehouse and spend a while commenting politely on the interior, until everybody was given something to eat and drink. So where watching the Bon procession was concerned at least, I’d been in a privileged position compared with the other valley children.
The most striking change that I remember in the processions I witnessed was the sudden appearance, one summer during the war, of “spirits” in army uniform. They were the ghosts of men drafted from the valley who had been killed in battle. The number of them in uniform increased every year. The “spirit” of a young man who had been working in a Hiroshima factory and was killed by the atomic bomb came down from the forest with his whole body blackened like a lump of used charcoal. At the Bon festival the summer after S died, the tatami maker came to borrow a cadet uniform, so without telling mother I lent him the jacket of the winter uniform. The next day, the party that came down the graveled road from the forest included a “spirit” wearing the jacket, dancing for all it was worth. . . .
“It wasn’t fair to Takashi not to mention that in the Citroen.”
“But I didn’t keep quiet about it deliberately. You see, I
know
S wasn’t the leader of the young men in the valley, and I’ve got my own powerful memory of S’s body lying where he’d been beaten to death. So I just couldn’t connect up such a heroic and attractive ‘spirit’ with S’s actual death.”
“All that means is you’re cut off from what Taka calls the ‘communal sentiments’ of the valley folk.”
“If I’m really cut off from the valley, then any trouble the ‘spirits’ bring here has nothing to do with me, thank God,” I said, nipping in the bud the attack concealed in her seemingly harmless words. “As you’ll soon realize if you actually see the Nembutsu dance, the dance of the ‘spirit’ in cadet uniform is performed in a ring and involves a lot of spectacular movement, but in the procession that came from the forest it was a low-ranking ghost tagging along somewhere near the back. The ‘spirit’ who led the procession, the spectacular central figure who was looked up to both by the spectators and the other performers, was that of the leader of the 1860 rising. In other words, the ‘spirit’ dressed up as great-grandfather’s younger brother.”
“Did the custom of performing the Nembutsu dance start with the 1860 rising, then?”
“No. It existed before that—and the ‘spirits,’ I imagine, have been in the valley ever since people first settled here. For several years, or even several decades following the rising, the ‘spirit’ of great-grandfather’s brother was probably only a beginner who took his knocks at the very end of the procession, just like the ‘spirit’ of S. One folklore expert referred to new ‘spirits’ as ‘novices’ and labeled their training in the Nembutsu dance as a kind of ‘testing’ period. The dance involves a lot of violent movement wearing costume. It’s quite hard work, so besides training the ‘spirits’ themselves, it must put quite a strain on the village youths who dress for the parts. Particularly when there’s some trouble or other affecting life in the hollow, they perform with almost terrifying abandon.”
“I’d like to see it once,” my wife said wistfully.
“You’re going to watch Takashi and the others at football practice every day, aren’t you? If Takashi’s activities are really rooted in the ‘communal sentiments’ of the valley, then that’s a new form of Nembutsu dance in itself. Even if the ‘spirits’ don’t actually take possession of them, it gives them plenty of training and toughens them up physically, so half the effect of the dance is achieved at least. At the very worst, it means that after all this football practice they won’t get out of breath when they perform the dance in the summer. I’m only hoping that Takashi’s football lessons are aimed chiefly at such peaceful purposes, and aren’t the kind of training great-grandfather’s brother
gave his young men on the parade ground cleared in the forest. . . .”
On the day before New Year’s Eve, I saw actual evidence that Takashi’s training was having a beneficial effect on life in the valley. That afternoon, warm air was drifting through the window set in the solid storehouse wall, lapping round me like lukewarm water and thawing out the frozen hunks of head, shoulders, and sides till I gradually became one with dictionary, Penguin book, and pencil, and all my other selves evaporated, leaving only the one pressing ahead with the translation. It occurred to me vaguely as I went on with my task that if things always went like this I might even last till I died of old age, never experiencing the hardships of labor, never doing work of any particular importance. Suddenly, a cry struck at my warm, lethargic ear:
“Man in the river!”
Hauling up my flabby, waterlogged body on the hook of consciousness much as one might reel in a dead sea toad, I clattered wildly down the staircase. It was a miracle that I didn’t fall. In the gloom at the foot of the stairs, belated fright at what I’d done caught up with me, bringing me to a halt. Simultaneously, I had second thoughts: it was unlikely that anyone would be carried away in midwinter when the river was almost dry. But then I heard, this time close at hand, the voices of Jin’s children echoing each other, shouting “Man in the river!”
Going out into the front garden, I watched as the boys, baying like hounds after their quarry, went running down the graveled road then, almost instantly, disappeared from view. The skill with which they kept their balance as they ran, or bounced, down the steep, narrow trail furrowed by long use aroused vivid memories deep inside me, memories of feet running and men drowning. Every year during the period of late summer and early autumn floods, and especially after the indiscriminate wartime felling of trees in the forest, some unfortunate soul would be carried away in the swollen waters of the river. The first to discover him would cry at the top of his voice, “Man in the river!” Those who heard would take up the cry, forming a group that ran for all its worth down the road beside the river. But there was no way to rescue the victim as he drifted downstream. All the grown-ups did was race along the graveled road and its by-lanes, crossing the bridge and going on running even after they joined forces again on the paved road, in the vain hope of overtaking the flood in its
furious onrush. The chase would go on with great commotion until even the stoutest of them collapsed of exhaustion, yet not a single practical attempt at rescue would be made. The following day, when the river had receded slightly, the adults, dressed in firemen’s livery and moving sluggishly and reluctantly, wasting as much time as possible, would start off on their difficult and doubtful journey, prodding with bamboo poles the soft mud that covered thickets of bamboo and pussy willow, unable to go home until they’d discovered the drowned body.
I was firmly convinced already that I’d been mistaken about the cry, but the fact remained that it had awoken in me—even though my work upstairs in the storehouse had relaxed me into a soft mass of flesh—a reflex action that was almost as though I were a member of the valley community. The idea excited me. In order to slow down the rate at which the excitement faded, I decided to assume that I’d really heard the words “Man in the river!” and accept them at their face value. Either way, I had plenty of time on my hands. So, taking a cue from my days as a valley kid like Jin’s sons, I ran down the graveled road, pressing the soles of my feet flat against the sloping sides of the furrow and flailing my arms about so as to keep my balance. By the time I reached the space in front of the village office I was almost blacking out, my breathing was labored, and both my knees were numb. All the while I was running I could hear the flapping of my own flabby body. Even so, I pressed on toward the bridge, chin thrust out like a man left far behind in a long-distance race, breathing frantic, my mind disturbed by the bulk of my heart pressing against my ribs. As I watched women and children outstripping me and disappearing ahead, I was reminded that it was several years since I’d last had to run.
Eventually, I caught sight of a crowd clad in bright colors standing at the end of the bridge. In the old days, a group of villagers would have worn the somber hues of a shoal of sardines, but the flow of shoddy clothing from the supermarket had changed all that. The people in the group were gazing ahead of them, enveloped as in a net by a dense, almost tangible silence. I stepped into the clumps of withered grass by the roadside as the children had done, and the operation in progress around the broken support of the bridge came into view.
The central pillar had given way under the pressure of water, so that the part where it had been attached to the body of the bridge now thrust out numerous joints in all directions like twisted fingers.
Each of the broken joints, though skewered by its reinforcing rods, was a free-swinging mass of concrete; force applied to any part of it would send it into a complex and dangerous spin packing a tremendous punch. On one of these lumps of concrete, a child lay oddly silent with his hat pulled down over his eyes. He might already have been unconscious, so strong was the impression of stillness. Slipping down through a gap in the planks of the temporary bridge, the terrified child had clutched hold of the block of concrete, but even his weight was enough to set it rocking, and he had no alternative but to cling to it perfectly motionless.