Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
One day the previous summer, my friend had met my younger brother in a New York drugstore and had brought back his own
testimony concerning my brother’s life in America. Takashi had gone to America as a member of a student theater group. Their leader was a Diet member, a woman from the right wing of one of the progressive political parties. The troupe consisted entirely of students who had taken part in the political riots of June, 1960, but had since thought better of it. Their play was a penitential piece entitled
Ours Was the Shame
, and was followed by an apology to the citizens of America, on behalf of repentant members of the student movement, for having obstructed their President’s visit to Japan. When Takashi first told me that he was going to America with them, he’d said he planned to flee the troupe as soon as it arrived and go off and roam the country by himself. However, reading the semi-satirical, semi-embarrassed accounts of
Ours Was the Shame
sent by Japanese reporters from the States, I realized that he hadn’t yet brought himself to leave the troupe but was still appearing in performances of the play in Washington and cities as far away as Boston and New York. I tried to work out why he should have abandoned his original plan and gone on playing the role of a repentant student activist, but the task was beyond my imagination. I wrote a letter therefore asking my friend, who was in New York with his wife studying at Columbia, to look up Takashi at the troupe’s headquarters. But he’d been unable to contact them, and it was by sheer coincidence that he’d run into my brother. Going into a drugstore on Broadway, he’d come upon Takashi, his slight frame propped against the counter, drinking a lemonade with earnest concentration. Stealing up from behind, he’d silently grabbed Takashi’s shoulder. My brother swung round as though released by a spring, so suddenly that it was my friend who was taken aback. Takashi was grubby, sweating, pale, and tense. His whole appearance suggested a man taken unawares while plotting a single-handed bank robbery.
“Hi, Takashi. Mitsu wrote and told me you were in the States,” my friend declared. “Seems he no sooner got married than he got his new wife pregnant.”
“
I
haven’t got married, or got anybody pregnant,” said Takashi in a voice that was still not quite steady.
My friend laughed heartily as though he’d just heard a splendid joke. “I’m off to Japan next week,” he said. “Any message for Mitsu?”
“Weren’t you supposed to stay at Columbia for several years?”
“Not any more. I got myself hurt in the demonstrations. Not physically—something happened to my head. It’s not bad enough to
have them put me in a mental hospital, but they’ve decided I should shut myself up in a kind of sanitarium.”
At this point my friend noticed a profound embarrassment spreading like a stain over Takashi’s face, and suddenly felt he understood the significance of the abrupt start Takashi had given when taken by surprise. And being a kindly man, he couldn’t help feeling secretly sorry. He had prodded the other in what must be a reformed activist’s tenderest spot. Both fell silent, gazing at the tightly packed row of jars lining the shelf behind the counter—jars brimming with a pink liquid, sweetish and raw-looking as entrails. Their two images were reflected in the distorting glass of the bottles, and whenever they moved even slightly the pink freaks swayed in exaggerated fashion. One almost expected them to break into song at any moment.
Late one night in June when Takashi, still an unrepentant student activist, was outside the National Diet, my friend had gone there too—not so much from any political motive of his own as to accompany his new wife as she took part in a demonstration with a small drama group to which she belonged—and when a disturbance broke out had had his head bashed in by a police stave as he tried to protect his wife from the onslaught of the armed riot squad. The fracture wasn’t particularly serious in a simple surgical sense. But from the time of that late-night assault amidst the scent of young green leaves, something had been lacking inside my friend’s head, and an obscure tendency to manic depression had taken its place alongside his other attributes. There could hardly have been anyone whom a reformed student activist was more reluctant to meet.
Increasingly embarrassed by Takashi’s silence, my friend stared fixedly at the pink jars with the feeling that his own eyes, melting in the heat of his embarrassment, were being transformed into the same pink, viscous fluid as in the jars and were oozing out of his skull. He envisaged his melting pink eyeballs plopping hopelessly and irretrievably, like eggs dropped into a frying pan, onto the silver counter on which Americans of all extractions—southern European, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish—had their bare, sweaty forearms firmly planted. High summer in New York, with Takashi at his side noisily sucking up the last fragments of lemon through his straw and frowning as he shook the sweat from his forehead. . . .
“If there’s anything for me to tell Mitsu …” my friend began by way of leave-taking.
“Tell him I’m going to run away from the troupe, will you? If I don’t make it, I’ll probably be deported, so either way I won’t be with the company any longer.”
“When are you quitting?”
“Today,” said Takashi with a great air of resolve.
It dawned on my friend with a sense of urgency, almost of panic, that my brother was actually waiting for something at the drugstore. The full implication of his display of surprise as he’d jumped like a suddenly released spring, the implication of his abrupt silence, the implication of the shreds of lemon so hastily sucked up, all linked up into a ring of actuality. But he felt relieved to detect in the signs of feeling welling up and disappearing again in my brother’s eyes—eyes with a dull, greasy film that brought to mind a professional wrestler—not merely a sense of constraint at having bumped into someone he would rather not have met, but an attitude of arrogant pity toward him.
“Is some secret agent coming here to help you escape?” my friend asked in an attempt at a joke.
“Shall I tell you the truth?” replied Takashi in a mock-menacing tone. “Do you see that pharmacist filling a little bottle with capsules over there on the other side of the medicine shelves?” Twisting his body round like my brother, my friend discerned, beyond the shelves with their countless bottles of drugs standing out against the dark background like a film negative of New York at the height of summer, a bald-headed man who faced away from them, concentrating intently on his delicate task.
“That medicine’s for
me
, for my inflamed, tortured penis. Once it’s safely in my hands I can make my escape from
Ours Was the Shame
and set off on my own.”
My friend sensed the Americans around them stiffen at the single English word “penis” set like a precious stone in the otherwise incomprehensible Japanese dialogue. The vast, alien exterior that lay all about them asserted its reality once more.
“Surely you can get hold of that kind of medicine easily enough?” said my friend with an earnest dignity directed against the new surveillance under which they had come from the people about them.
“Yes, if you go to hospital in line with proper procedure,” said Takashi, indifferent to the trivial psychological conflict going on in my friend. “But it’s a hell of a business here in America if you can’t.
The prescription I’ve given the pharmacist was forged for me by a nurse in the medical office at the hotel. If the trick came to light a young black nurse would get fired and I’d be deported, I imagine.”
Why hadn’t he followed the regular procedure? Because the trouble with his urethra was obviously gonorrhea, which, moreover, he’d picked up on his first night in America by having sex with a black prostitute of an age that allowed him to see her as a mother figure. Should the facts become known to the elderly Diet member who was leader of the troupe, she would obviously send Takashi back to the country from which he’d just taken so much trouble to escape. Besides, he’d fallen prey to a depressing suspicion that since his urethra had been invaded by gonorrhea he might also be infected with syphilis, a suspicion that had quenched any urge to devote his creative imagination to some new course of action.
Five weeks had passed since he’d visited that district where black and white merged in a complex range of shades, but no primary symptoms of syphilis had appeared. Moreover, he used a sore throat as a pretext for obtaining a succession of small doses of antibiotics from the medical orderly of the troupe, thanks to which the trouble in his urethra eased somewhat; only then did Takashi shake off his inertia. Having struck up an acquaintance with a nurse in the hotel medical office in the course of their long stay in New York (the base which the troupe used for its sorties into other centers), Takashi persuaded her to get hold of a form used by doctors for writing prescriptions. The nurse, a black girl with a limitless spirit of service to others, had not only entered on the form the type and amount of medicine most suited to the trouble in his urethra, but had directed him to a drugstore in a busy part of town where there was little likelihood of the irregularity being detected.
“At first,” said Takashi, “I tried to talk about the unpleasant symptoms in my penis in an abstract, inorganic way—as a kind of detached description, you know. I’d no special grounds for believing so, but I felt the word gonorrhea might be too blunt and shock her, so first I said I thought it might be urethritis. But she didn’t get it. So I said I was suffering from ‘inflammation of the duct.’ You should have seen the fresh light of understanding that came into her eyes at that. Nothing could be less abstract and inorganic—it brought home to me all over again the sticky, fleshly reality of the suffering in my cock. And she said, ‘Is there a burning sensation in your penis?’ God, was I shocked!
The words conveyed the reality so well I felt my whole body burning—with flames of embarrassment, that is!”
He laughed out loud and my friend followed suit. The non-Japanese around them, whose ears had pricked up at the significant words in English that sprinkled Takashi’s conversation, gazed at them with deepening suspicion. The pharmacist appeared from behind the shelves, his lugubrious countenance bathed in sweat. The smile on Takashi’s sunburned, birdlike face was suddenly blotted out by a look sick with longing and anxiety. Watching him, my friend felt himself go tense, but the bald-headed pharmacist, who looked like an Irishman, merely said in a fatherly voice, “This number of capsules comes very expensive. Why don’t you take just one-third ?”
Recovering his poise instantly, Takashi gave a laugh. “It’s expensive, but anything’d be better than the agony in my tubes these past few weeks,” he said.
“I’ll buy them for you,” my friend said in a hearty voice. “To celebrate the start of your new life in America.”
Completely cheerful by now, Takashi took an affectionate look at the capsules gleaming softly in their bottle, then announced that he would pick up his belongings and set off on his solitary wanderings through America that very day. He and my friend left the drugstore, eager to get away from the scene of the crime as soon as possible, and walked together to a nearby bus stop.
“Once a problem’s solved, the things that have been plaguing you seem terribly stupid and trivial,” said my friend with a feeling almost of envy at the encounter between Takashi’s happy face and the capsules in the bottle.
“Any trouble seems trivial once it’s over, surely?” said Takashi aggressively. “It’s the same with you going home to a clinic, isn’t it? When the knots in your head are unraveled, maybe there’ll be nothing left but the feeling that it was all a lot of fuss about something silly and unimportant.”
“
If
they’re unraveled,” said my friend with unconcealed wistfulness. “If they’re not, the silliness and the unimportance will be the sum total of my life.”
“Just what are they, the knots in your head?”
“It’s hard to tell. If I
could
tell, I could conquer them and begin to regret having marked time for several years. On the other hand, if I gave way to them and set out on a course of self-destruction that
would really make them the sum total of my life, then that too would gradually make the true nature of the knots clear. Admittedly,” he complained with a sudden, sad intensity, “the understanding in that case wouldn’t be any use to me personally. Nor would there be any way of letting anyone else know that someone who’d apparently gone mad had seen the light
in extremis
.”
It seemed as if my friend had profoundly stimulated Takashi’s interest. But at the same time, my brother’s behavior showed signs of a desire to get away just as soon as possible, and it was from this that he realized that his appeal had touched some sensitive core in Takashi. At this point a bus drew up. Takashi got on it and, handing my friend a pamphlet through the window—in return, he said, for the cost of the medicine—was swallowed up without further ado into the vastness of the American continent. Neither my friend nor I had had any clear information about him since. True to the resolution he’d confided in my friend, he’d quit the company from that moment and set out alone on his travels.
Getting into a taxi, my friend immediately opened the pamphlet Takashi had given him. It was about the civil rights movement. The frontispiece was a photograph of a black, his body so scorched and swollen that the details were blurred like those of a crudely carved wooden doll, with a number of white men in shoddy clothes standing round him. It was comic and terrible and disgusting, a representation of naked violence so direct that it gripped the beholder like some fearful fantasy. Looking at it unavoidably brought one face to face with the abject certainty of defeat under the relentless pressure of fear. With the inevitability of two drops of water merging into each other, the sight linked itself immediately with the ill-defined trouble in his own head. It occurred to him that Takashi had left the pamphlet with him knowing full well the significance of giving it and its photograph to him rather than to anyone else. Takashi, in his turn, had seen into something essential in my friend’s mind.