Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
“Do you think I could have some food?” I asked, assuming the air of the unhappy, hungry husband in the hope that mounting scorn would induce the young men to ignore the intruder.
“Do you know how to prepare a pheasant, Mitsu?” said Takashi, addressing me in an easy voice. “The father of the kid who got stuck on the bridge yesterday went out early this morning with his friends and shot some for us.” In front of the team, his other self was to the fore, the one that wore a protective mail of self-confidence and authority, not the one that had rolled naked in the snow like a dog.
“I’ll have a try after I’ve had something to eat.”
Abandoning tolerance, the young men in unison heaved an exaggerated sigh of disgust. At one time, no self-respecting man in the valley would ever have prepared food himself. Even now, I suspected, the same tradition still survived. The young men had been treated to the spectacle of their leader twisting his elder brother round his little finger once again. The whole bunch of them, drunk with the snow, were in
high spirits and ready for any bit of light relief. In the same way, the entire population of the valley would always get inebriated with the first snow. They would stay like that for ten days or so, during which they would be prey to a constant urge to go marching out into the white drifts, careless of the cold, driven by the fires of intoxication inside them. But once that period was over, the hangover would set in and everyone would long just as intensely to get away from the snow. The inhabitants of the area had none of the toughness of people living in the true “snow country.” The fires within would soon spend themselves, leaving them powerless against the incursions of the cold, and people would begin to fall sick. Such was the pattern of the village’s encounters with snow. Privately I hoped that my wife’s infatuation with it would not affect her brain for long.
I sat down on the raised wooden floor where it projected into the kitchen, just as the tenants’ families had done in the old days when they came to pay their respects at the year’s end, and with my back to the open fireplace began my belated breakfast.
“The reason why the rising succeeded,” said Takashi, picking up the thread where it had been severed by my entry, “was that the farmers, not only in this village but in all the villages round about, saw the youths as a terrifying rabble, a dangerous bunch of misfits who’d commit arson or start looting without a second’s thought. I wouldn’t be surprised if the farmers were more scared of their own lawless leaders than of the enemy inside the castle gates in the town.” He was obviously trying to recreate a picture of the 1860 rising in the minds of the village youths and keep it fresh in their memories.
“Was it Takashi’s description of the rising that made the team laugh so happily?” I inquired in a low voice when my wife came with food. The thing that puzzled me most was that the role of the young men in the 1860 rising—as I understood it at least—had been distinguished solely by its brutal cruelty and was hardly something to evoke hearty laughter.
“Takashi cleverly worked in some amusing episodes,” she said. “There’s something essentially alive about him, I feel—he refuses to have preconceived ideas about the rising, or to see it as exclusively depressing, as you do.”
“Does the 1860 business have so many amusing episodes to offer, then?”
“That’s not something you should be asking
me
, surely?” she retorted.
But she gave an example even so. “He told them how the overseers and local officials in the villages on the way to the castle town were made to kneel by the roadside, so that each of the peasants could deal them a single blow on the head with his bare fist as he went past. That really had them laughing.”
Undoubtedly the cruel idea of everybody taking a swipe at these officials had the kind of crude humor to appeal to a bunch of dumb peasant boys from a farming village. Unfortunately, though, the men who had been hit by each member of a mob running to tens of thousands had died, their brains reduced to broken bean curd in their skulls.
“Didn’t Takashi tell them about the old people left dead on their faces after the mob had passed in procession?” I persisted, more from curiosity than any desire to criticize Takashi and his new friends. “Sprawled in front of their homes, all fouled up with piss and shit—that would have made our young athletes roar even more happily, surely?”
“Quite right, Mitsu!” she said. “As Takashi says, if the world is full of violence, then the most healthy and human reaction is not to stand in front of it moping, but to find something—anything—to laugh at.” And she went back to her place by the stove.
“The young men were very brutal, I admit,” Takashi was saying, “but in a way their brutality served to give the ordinary farmers a kind of security. You see, whenever it became necessary to injure or kill the enemy of the moment, they could always leave it to the young men without dirtying their own hands. The arrangement meant that the rank and file of the farmers could take part in the rising without any fear of being charged with arson or murder afterward. In this particular rising, their dread of getting blood on their hands was disposed of right from the start. Apart from that one smart blow to the heads of the overseers, all direct violence and other unpleasantness was the responsibility of the young men—who were fitted by nature to carry it out with the utmost thoroughness. When the peasants on their way down to the castle town came across any village that refused to join them, the young men set fire to the first houses they encountered and cheerfully disposed of any farmers who came rushing out, or anyone who tried to prevent them from starting the fires. Those villagers who happened to escape death were so scared that they too joined the cause. You see, although both sides were peasants, in practice the young rebels, who were half crazy, used violence to force the respectable farmers to do their own wishes. The farmers were terrified of them.
As a result, there wasn’t one—from the valley all the way down to the castle town—who didn’t fall in step. Whenever a new village was recruited, they would select youths to form a young men’s organization there. There were no rules; they just had to swear loyalty to the young men’s group from this valley—the original revolutionary group, as it were—and agree to perform any violence without hesitation. So the rising consisted of the young men of this valley—you might call them staff headquarters—with a substructure based in the villages and composed of groups of young fellows from each of them. Whenever a village was newly liberated, the boys from this valley would summon the local hoodlums and have them report on any crimes committed by prosperous households, which they would then raid. Conveniently enough, they were convinced that most wealthy households were dens of iniquity anyway. In places near the castle town, people had already heard rumors of the rising, so some of the overseers had hidden their valuables or their documents and ledgers in the local temples. The village boys visited the rebel leaders at their camp to tell them about such cases, indulging their new freedom from the influence of the older people of decent, conservative views. Neither the chief overseer, whom the ordinary, respectable farmers for generations past had seen as a source of authority, nor the temples, which the farmers held in awe as responsible for matters relating to birth and death, meant anything at all to them. The upshot was that the temples were raided and the things hidden there burned in the precincts. Then these poor starving kids, who only the day before had been considered scarcely human, took power themselves and formed a new leadership in the village.
“As for why groups of young delinquents like them should have been chosen, you could explain it briefly like this: first, they were people who had no proper position in the village, who had always been treated as outside normal village life. So they weren’t like the older people who always went along with others of the same village and had an instinctive, unshakable suspicion of strangers. In their case, it was only with outsiders that they were capable of forming any relationship at all. On top of that, as soon as they went into action their basic instincts and newfound freedom made them do things—including arson and murder—that made it certain they wouldn’t be admitted to the village community again once the rising was over. This gave them a professional interest in seeing it continue. They felt safer in
league with outsiders, and the boys from our valley did, in fact, look after their interests well. Toward the end of the rising, there was an incident in which a number of youths who’d stayed behind to rape the daughters of local merchants were taken prisoner. It wasn’t the powers-that-be from the castle that arrested them, though. The mob had pressed on as far as the main gate, where they held negotiations with those inside, but they weren’t able to carry the assault into the interior of the castle, so the general attitude of the official police was to stand by without doing anything until the mob left town. Even after the main body of peasants had begun to go, however, a number of fellows still prowled the streets as though reluctant to leave. They’d probably never been in a castle town before, and were bursting with sexual frustration. It seems that for some reason or other they’d got themselves up in long, red, women’s under-kimonos that they’d looted from somewhere.” (At this his audience gave a half-excited, half-embarrassed laugh.) “It was then that they hit on the idea of raiding one of the houses that hadn’t made the rioters welcome in the town, and raping the daughter. So they burst into a cotton merchant’s. Unfortunately, an employee who realized that the other peasants had begun to leave got the daring idea of arresting these fellows in women’s clothing. He was chief watchman, so he mobilized the workers under him and they actually succeeded in taking the boys captive. One fellow managed to get away and report what had happened, whereupon the valley group gave the order to enter the castle town again. At very great risk to themselves, the boys from our valley went back to rescue the wretched would-be rapists. In no time the prisoners were released, the cotton merchant’s that had been the source of all the trouble was razed to the ground, the employees were punished, and the chief watchman’s house burned down. So he got what was coming to him!”
Takashi laughed, and the other men dutifully followed suit. I finished my meal, piled up the dirty dishes, and carried them to the sink, where my wife met me with a grimly defensive expression.
“If you object to what Taka does,” she said, “you’d better take it up directly with him and the young men, Mitsu.”
“Not me. I’ve no desire to interfere in his propaganda activities,” I said. “I’m only interested in getting the pheasants ready for cooking. Where are they?”
“Taka hung them on a big wooden peg at the back of the house,” Momoko replied in place of my wife. “They’re fine birds, fat as pigs.
Six of them, too!” She and Natsumi were cutting up large quantities of vegetables into a bamboo basket, preparing a lunch rich enough in vitamins to meet the needs of a team of hearty football players.
“At first,” Takashi went on, “the young men of the valley were objects of fear to the more level-headed farmers, but in the course of the rising they came to be respected, too—though it may only have been a surface respect compelled by their violent behavior. Either way, they found themselves popular heroes not only in the valley but throughout the country. So in the short period following the rising during which they were still free, they behaved more like a valley aristocracy than the village dropouts they’d been before. For a while, in fact, they could have had the peasants up in arms and out of the valley again whenever they chose. Elsewhere, too, groups of young thugs maintained their own strongholds from which they controlled their villages. When the rising dispersed, the valley group had exacted a pledge from participants in other villages that if the clan authorities began repressive measures, they would immediately reorganize their forces, and that any village hesitating to do so would be among the first to be destroyed. Such circumstances obliged the clan authorities to delay hunting down the leaders of the rising. During this happy period, the young villagers not only lived off the food and drink they’d looted but also seem to have been busy seducing the daughters and wives of the village. Of course, it may have been the daughters and wives who seduced
them
!” (The young men all laughed heartily again at this feeble quip.) “After all, the valley organization had started out as a bunch of hoods. It was virtually a period of anarchy for village society, with them swaggering about still armed and enjoying their authority. They mercilessly cut down people who got into disputes with them, and I’m sure there were some who, finding themselves none too popular with the women, made do in the meantime with rape. So when daily life returned to normal the farmers found they had a new set of tyrannical overlords. By the time the clan investigators came into the valley, the youths were already out of touch with the other inhabitants. In the end, they shut themselves up in the storehouse to resist the authorities, but were betrayed by the valley folk, who went back on all their promises of aid. . . .”
An indignant muttering rose from the circle around the open fireplace. With almost suspicious naiveté, the young men seemed to be identifying with the farm boys in the 1860 rising. Takashi’s ruse in
attributing leadership of the rising’ not to great-grandfather’s brother but to the whole group of young men from the valley had succeeded.
I stood warming myself in front of the kitchen stove, then went out round the back where I found six pheasants suspended from a row of long wooden pegs planted in a clapboard, on which rabbits and pheasants had been hung in the old days. It was the coolest place on our property; at the height of summer, the cats would always lie sprawled directly below the row of pegs. In every detail of daily life, Takashi was trying to follow the routine that had prevailed in the past, when the menfolk had still acted together smoothly as a group. The way the pheasants were strung up with straw round their throats showed an obsessive deference to the way grandfather and father had done it. The birds were even stuffed with seaweed at their rear ends, where the guts had been removed. Takashi had been too young to be aware of his surroundings during the period when the Nedokoros were leading a respectable life, so he must be devoting an extraordinary amount of study and hard work to recreating the traditional valley way of life and reexperiencing it again as a whole.