Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
Both men, who were respectable valley folk in late middle age, wore jackets and shirts without ties—the normal form of holiday wear in the valley—and had been drinking heavily. Their faces were coppercolored and shining with heat, and their breath came in great steamy gasps amidst the falling snow. They weren’t moving their lower halves at all—less, it seemed, from fear of treading in a patch of
deep, soft snow and losing their footing than from sheer grim determination. They were taking turns at hitting each other with clenched fists, one blow at a time: to the ear, the chin, the neck. They went at each other with the utterly patient, silent stupidity of fighting dogs. But as I watched, the intoxication obviously began to ebb from the face of the somewhat slighter man, and he seemed almost to shrink. I felt sure that at the next blow he received, a cry would break out like sweat all over the pale, dry skin of his tense face. But at that point he frantically drew something from the back pocket of his trousers and, clasping it tightly in his hand, lunged at his opponent’s mouth. There was a sound like an oyster shell being pried open with a hook, and a small fragment of something bathed in red foam came flying toward me. Covering the lower half of his face, which was still coppercolored from drinking, the injured man brushed past me with head down, and his assailant came running after him at full speed. Right next to my ear I heard the dismal, feeble groaning of the victim and the heavy breathing of the man chasing him; then I turned and watched them disappear into the distance. I squatted down and searched the snow at my feet for the thing that had fallen there. On the white surface of the snow, which was churned up but not muddied, I found a red depression about the size of an apricot stone, at the bottom of which lay something like the brownish yellow bud of a tree, a tiny lump with something a vivid pink in color and shaped like a Jew’sear attached to its root. I stretched out my hand, picked it up in my fingers, then flung it down again, my guts gripped in a spasm of revulsion. It was a dislodged tooth and part of the gum. Still crouched there, I looked about me with the feeble despair of a vomiting dog. The women still stood in front of the supermarket gazing blankly into space. The small children, who hadn’t yet recovered completely from their fear and still had fingers firmly entwined in the hems of their mothers’ shoddy overcoats, stole fearful glances at me as though I presented a fresh threat. And still the people in the houses round about, who must have witnessed everything as they peered out from the gloom beyond the glass sliding doors, stayed in hiding and made no move to come out. I fled the scene precipitately, making my escape up the graveled road with the same sense of helpless urgency as when one flees some horror in a nightmare, frequently stumbling off the center into the unstable, yielding places at the side where the snow had not been trodden down.
I was so disturbed that for the first time since I’d shut myself up in the storehouse I felt an urge to tell Takashi of my experience. Arriving at the main house, I called him outside. The young men staying there were working energetically in the kitchen, and I hesitated to go inside. But though Takashi listened attentively to what I had to say, my profound distress left him quite unaffected.
“There have been lots of fights in the valley since New Year’s Day, Mitsu,” he said. “The adults of the village have been badly on edge these last few weeks. What makes it worse is that they’ve had nothing to do during the New Year’s holiday except drink cheap liquor, and the wildest of the young men, who in normal years would soon have been at each other’s throats, have stayed here, training for all they’re worth. So the older men, who ought to know better, have been obliged to pick their own fights. The people who used to get rid of their pent-up aggression by watching or mediating in the kids’ fights and quarrels are busy fighting each other this time. And did you notice that even when they do start a fight nobody tries to stop them ? The older men’s quarrels are more involved than the youngsters’, and it’s difficult for outsiders to intervene. So their fights go on indefinitely and free of interference.”
“Be that as it may,” I insisted, unconvinced by the way Takashi’s analysis put everything within the framework of normal everyday life, “I’ve never seen two people from the valley hit each other so hard that one of them lost a tooth and part of his gum with it. They were punching each other in absolute silence, first one then the other, with all the force behind their fists. It’s not normal, Taka, even though they were drunk.”
“When I was in Boston I went to see the President’s birthplace,” he said. “The whole cast of
Ours Was the Shame
was taken there. On the way back, the small bus carrying us passed through the ghetto and we saw two young blacks quarreling. One of them was swinging a brick above his head, threatening the other. His shoulders were narrower and less muscular. The other man, who wasn’t worried in the slightest, was jeering at him from a safe distance. But in the short time it took our bus to go by, he relaxed his guard and went just that bit too near. Immediately, the other man cracked him on the head with the brick. His head literally split wide open, so you could see the inside. And all the while the people living nearby just went on watching quite quietly, sitting on the porches of their houses in their rocking chairs
or those rattan chairs with the big armrests. In this valley, violence means a piece of gum missing at the most—you don’t get any murders. Perhaps the Japanese keep some sense of proportion when they fight, or maybe they don’t have the strength. Psychologically speaking, though, the valley could be becoming something of a ghetto.”
“You may be right. To the best of my recollection, you would never have seen such naked violence here in the old days, especially in the morning. At one time, even with a quarrel much less serious than that, the children would have run straight to the police station. This morning, though, everybody just stayed indoors and watched.”
“The policeman’s not at the station. He had a telegram summoning him to the town late at night on the day it started snowing, and he’s been there ever since. No buses can get through, and the telephone wires came down along with the trees felled by the snow. So nobody here knows how the policeman’s spending his New Year.”
I detected a possible desire to provoke suspicion in the way Takashi spoke, but suppressed the temptation to inquire further. I badly wanted to stay detached from everything Takashi and his team did. To play Takashi’s game by getting involved in the puzzling hints he doled out piecemeal was both dangerous and tedious. Besides, I had already abandoned any idea of criticizing him, whatever happened.
“Surely the supermarket’s closed for the New Year’s holiday?” I said, changing the subject. “The shutters were down, but there was a group of women from the ‘country’ in front of the entrance. I wonder what they’re up to? You’d think that during New Year’s week at least they could manage for food without depending on the supermarket. What was even odder was that they were standing so perfectly still in front of the closed doors.”
“Oh, were they there already?” he said, perhaps trying to stir up my suspicions again. “We’re putting on a bit of a show at the supermarket this afternoon. Why don’t you come along and watch, Mitsu?”
“I don’t feel like it,” I said, all my basic wariness to the fore.
“Quite the little hermit, isn’t he!” said Takashi. “Convinced from the start he doesn’t want to come, without even asking what kind of show it is.”
“That’s right!” I said. “I’ve absolutely no desire to go out of my way to watch anything that happens in this valley.”
“So you’ve no positive desire to watch anything here—let alone
take part in anything, of course. In fact, you might just as well not be here at all.”
“Look,” I said, “I’m staying against my will, because of the snow. Whatever peculiar things happen here, all I ask is first to get out, then to forget about this hole in the forest once and for all.”
Takashi smiled equivocally as though mocking me, then shook his head two or three times in silence and retired into the kitchen without more ado. I had a feeling he was anxious to keep my eyes off the work the young men were doing in the kitchen. But I had no wish to interfere either, and went back to the storehouse.
When Momoko brought my lunch, she tried to coax me into looking out of the storehouse window to see the new banners on the roof of the supermarket. Charmed by the childlike tension with which she set this obvious trap, I hadn’t the heart to refuse. Two different kinds of banners, in cheerful yellow and red, fluttered on top of the storehouse that now formed the supermarket. The snow falling steadily in the valley made the whole scene resemble something out of an old and battered movie. Turning away from the window, I found Momoko watching me intently, her eyes full of undisguised expectation. Naturally, I had no idea what the two sorts of banners signified.
“Now, I wonder why you’re so pleased about those banners?” I said.
“Why?” repeated Momoko and shuddered, with an almost wild look in her eyes, torn between taboo and the desire to tell all. “Aren’t you happy about them, then?”
“When I get back to Tokyo, I’ll send you some really nice ones, Momoko,” I said to tease this junior member of Takashi’s bodyguard, and set about eating my lunch.
“If you come down to the valley at four o’clock, you might find out what’s going to happen, Mitsu—even a member of the establishment like you! Remember—four o’clock! I bet you’d like to know what’s brewing. But I can’t tell you—I can’t let the team down.”
I couldn’t help smiling at her. She looked like some comical, out-of-date female terrorist in her leather Indian outfit which, despite the snow, she still wore proudly without any underwear as on the first day at the airport. By now it was not only a mass of wrinkles but was coming apart at the seams to reveal expanses of sallow flesh.
“I couldn’t be less interested in what’s going to happen, Momoko. You don’t have to let anybody down.”
“Oh, you establishment people are such a
bore
!” she said with mingled regret and annoyance, and set off back to her unbetrayed comrades.
At four o’clock that afternoon a great, repeated cry from countless throats rose from the bottom of the valley and came slowly twisting up in a spiral of sound. A mighty cry combining urgency with a lurking, pleasurable excitement, it titillated the most shameful part of the psyche—a fold, as it were, in its bright red, engorged mucous membrane. The sound provoked an unjustified panic in me, as though I’d been caught disgracing myself in some obscene, exhibitionistic act. At the same time, I found myself asking aloud, “What is it? What the hell is it?” Immediately, something nameless would have answered me from the corner of the storehouse, but I cried “No! No!” in fresh panic, shaking my head. The cries swelled up and swelled again, on and on, in waves. Then after a while the shouting died down and a quieter ground swell took its place, a kind of pulsating murmur like the whirring of innumerable bees’ wings punctuated from time to time by brutal, throaty voices that refused to be buried beneath it and vied with the high-pitched screams of children and cries of joy. So long as the sound rose and fell in even cadences, I managed somehow to get on with my translation, but once these sharp cries, intermittent and unidentifiable, began to intervene I could concentrate no longer. Eventually I got up, went to the window and, feeling the chill radiating from the icy pane on my eyes and flushed cheeks, peered out through the clouding glass into the space over the valley, where evening was already at hand. By now only a trace of the finest snow was falling. The forest lay in deep shadow about the valley, which seemed to be filling with a murky, milky mist; even the sky with its snow clouds was like a vast, dark brown hand blotting out the valley below. As I strained my smarting eye to make out the banners of the supermarket, they gradually emerged through the mist, hanging limp and disconsolate like birds with folded wings, their color vague and pallid as fragments of china lying beneath muddy water. I had no idea what was going on at the supermarket; but the memory of the women who during the silent contest between the two middle-aged men had stayed unmoving and equally silent before the shutters lingered undigested in my mind, now threatened anew by the cries from the valley. Before long I went back to my desk, troubled by an uneasy sense of inadequacy. I had succeeded in maintaining my self-imposed ban on
going down to the valley, but the ban didn’t prevent me from reflecting that something odd had obviously occurred there, and that almost as obviously it had some connection with Takashi and his football team. Unable to get back to my translation, I took a tail joint left over from the oxtail stew I’d eaten for lunch, and occupied myself by sketching it in carefully shaded detail. The bone, the same color as the flesh of an oyster, had all kinds of protrusions and indentations running in complex directions, as well as round, jellylike flaps attached to both sides of the joint and small cavities like termites’ holes whose function in the workings of the animal’s tail while it was alive and active were impossible to guess at. I went on interminably with this idle sketching, but finally put down my pencil and gnawed at the flaps of jellylike substance in an attempt to recapture the remembered taste. The only taste left, though, was of cold fat and the bouillon cubes used in making the stock. My sense of impotence plumbed unfathomable depths, and I found myself floundering in a pit of depression with no hold to heave myself out by. At five o’clock, darkness fell outside the window, but I could still hear a dense clamor mingled with occasional excited cries. More and more frequently, too, I heard explosive noises of the kind that men make when they’re drunk. With a sound of heavy metal objects clanking against each other, Jin’s sons came home to the outbuilding, talking to each other rapidly and animatedly in voices quivering with excitement. Normally, they would have lowered their voices timidly as they went past the storehouse in deference to my work, but this time they plainly couldn’t have cared less about the man sitting upstairs in solitary state. Like the grown-ups, they gave the impression of having just participated in some activity of valid consequence for the village community. Before long, Takashi and his team returned to the house, and for a while the front garden was clamorous with voices. Even late at night I sometimes heard mingled cries rising from the valley as though several groups of drunken men were fighting simultaneously.