Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
Beneath the light of the moon, the lamp suspended from the eaves in the front garden barely managed to cast a small, squalidly yellowed ring of light. For that reason I hadn’t noticed at first what it illuminated, but I suddenly saw the young man, utterly beaten, cringing in the trampled snow. Scattered about him were a bundle of blankets, padded
kimono, cooking utensils. The team had ejected him once and for all. With his head hunched between his shoulders, which were sunk into a strange saddle-shape, he crouched completely motionless, like a threatened wood louse. I promptly lost the mild sense of elation that the moonlit forest had awoken in me. I buried myself, head and all, in the dark, intimate warmth of the blankets, but even my own breath on my chest and knees wouldn’t halt the shivering of my body, and I could hear my teeth chattering. Before long I caught the sound of footsteps going round behind the storehouse and fading into the distance, moving not in the direction of the graveled road down to the valley but toward the trail rising to the forest. The faint but unmistakable creaking of the snow soon told me that this was no dog going up to the forest in search of wild hares sheltering in the snow.
The next morning, I was still asleep when my wife came with my breakfast. She told me of the incident late the night before in a voice full of loathing for this sudden eruption of naked violence. In violation of the football team’s rules, the young man had drained a small bottle of cheap liquor he’d brought surreptitiously from the supermarket, then taken Momoko into a small room in a distant part of the main house and tried to seduce her. Although he was drunk and it was late at night, Momoko had gone with him quite cheerfully, clad in a nightgown which she’d personally chosen at the supermarket, but which would have been more appropriate on a harlot in the
Arabian Nights
. Casting hesitation to the winds, the young man promptly set upon this provocative young woman from the big city. When she resisted fiercely and gave a series of lusty screams, he was so startled that even while he was being hit by Takashi he still hadn’t completely recovered from his uncomprehending amazement. The shock had set off hysterics in Momoko, who had gone to bed with face and body pressed up against the wall in the back room and hadn’t yet put in an appearance that morning. She had thrown out the nightgown that had caused such dire misunderstanding, and putting on all her clothes was lying there as though in armor, scarcely breathing. On her way to the storehouse, my wife had seen the young outcast’s weapon lying where it had fallen on the trampled snow. It was inscribed with the character “Mitsu.”
“Judging from the sound of his footsteps,” I said, “he seemed to go round the back of the storehouse and up the road to the forest. I wonder where he went?”
“Maybe he’s planning to go through the forest to Kochi, like the farm boy at the time of the 1860 rising who was thrown out for betraying the others.”
This element of fantasy in her interpretation somehow made me feel that she sympathized with the young offender rather than Momoko.
“You just don’t know how overgrown and impassable the forest is,” I said in an attempt to dispel her romantic notions. “To try and get through in the middle of the night in this snow would be suicidal. You’ve been too much influenced by Takashi’s talk about the rising. Even if the boy has been expelled from the football team, I don’t suppose it means it’ll be impossible for him to live in the valley. Takashi hasn’t got the necessary hold over the others. Last night, for example, as Taka was beating up that poor bastard for misinterpreting Momoko’s unconscious invitation, the other fellows might equally well have rebelled and beaten the daylights out of Taka instead.”
“But Mitsu, don’t you remember what Hoshi said to you that time when he got weepy at the airport?” she countered with sturdy self-confidence. “I suspect you don’t understand or even know much about Takashi as he is now. The simple, unsophisticated kid you used to know at home has survived things you couldn’t even imagine, let alone comprehend.”
“But even if the young man felt that being shut out of Takashi’s group made it emotionally impossible for him to stay in the valley, it’s more than a century since the rising, you know. Surely any fugitive would make his escape down the road to the coast? Why should he go into the forest?”
“That boy knows perfectly well that the chaos they’ve secretly contrived at the supermarket already constitutes a crime. If he went over the bridge and down the snow-covered road to the next town, he might get arrested by police lying in wait there, or the gang that they say the Emperor employs might set on him. At least, he could easily have convinced himself that that would happen, couldn’t he? I begin to suspect that in practice you don’t know much more about the group psychology of the team than you know about what really goes on inside Takashi.”
“Of course,” I said, retreating very slightly, “I don’t persuade myself that because I was born in the valley my ties with it are still valid, or that I can fully understand the young men who live here.
Just the reverse, if anything. I simply made a few objective, commonsense observations. If Takashi’s pep talks have induced group madness in his team, then obviously my observations don’t apply.”
“You shouldn’t dismiss something as madness just because you’re not involved yourself, Mitsu,” she persisted relentlessly. “When your own friend committed suicide, for example, you didn’t dismiss it in such simple terms, did you?”
“Then tell Takashi to send a search party into the forest,” I said, capitulating.
I went out to wash my face, going round the rear to avoid the entrance to the main house, and was on my way back when I encountered the young men spilling out excitedly into the front garden. A diminutive figure dressed in an old lumberman’s oilskin had come into the garden dragging a rough-and-ready sledge made by tying together bamboo stems with the leaves still on them. On the sledge was the young outcast, swathed to the neck like a bagworm in a garment stitched together from old rags. Takashi had just come out to meet them. The man had half turned, with the upper part of his body twisted back, as though he was afraid the young men dashing so energetically out of the house might be about to attack him, but Takashi was restraining him. Screwing up my eyes against the dazzling morning light reflected from the trampled snow, I made out a lean and ill-favored profile, the eye a mere slit, that swiftly identified itself with Gii the hermit as I remembered him from a dozen or more years earlier. His head was small, almost like a head shrunken by savages, while the stunted ears were little bigger than the first joint of one’s thumb, so there seemed to be an unnaturally large space all round them. The shallow pillbox hat on his tiny head made him look like an old-style postman. Caught between the sunbleached hat and the yellowish goatee, his small face, covered with blemishes and something gray like carpet fluff, was paralyzed with apprehension.
Takashi was holding his team in check behind him and speaking to Gii in the kind of quiet, friendly voice one might use to calm a frightened goat. With his body still twisted back and his eyes half closed, the old man answered Takashi, his lips twitching rapidly like two fingertips trying to pick something up, then shook his head in a way that suggested he heartily regretted dragging the sledge down from the forest and was ashamed, beneath the pervasive light, of everything to do with himself. At an order from Takashi, the young man covered in
rags was lifted from the sledge and taken indoors. Carrying him cheerfully, as though they were shouldering a portable shrine at some religious festival, the footballers were followed by Gii the hermit, who with Takashi’s arm encircling his puny shoulders was led, protesting feebly, into the kitchen. Left alone in the front garden, I gazed down at the bundle of new bamboo, caked with hard, frozen snow, where it lay abandoned on the softer snow. Bound round and round with coarse rope, the bundle looked as though it were awaiting punishment for some iniquity.
“Natsumi’s giving the hermit a meal, Mitsu.”
I turned. Takashi was standing there with his sunburned cheeks flushed a vivid rosy hue and a wild, almost drunken light in his brown eyes, and for a moment I had the illusion that a midsummer sea lay behind us as we talked.
“Gii was down in the valley as usual during the night. He was going back at dawn when he caught sight of a young man marching steadily into the forest. So he followed him until the boy was exhausted and came to a halt, then fetched him safely back again. Would you believe it, Mitsu, he was trying to cross the forest in all this snow and get to Kochi! He was identifying with the young fellow in the 1860 rising!”
“Natsumi came to the same conclusion even before Gii brought him back,” I said, and broke off.
As he struggled through the deep snow in the pitch-dark forest, driven on by shame and despair at being cast out by his comrades, he must have seen himself as the topknotted son of a peasant in 1860. And there was nothing, in fact, to convince the simpleminded youth, gripped by mounting panic as he plunged on through the darkness of the midnight forest, that a hundred years had really passed since that fateful year 1860. If he had fallen by the way and frozen to death, he would have died a death absolutely identical to that of the young man driven out in 1860. All those separate moments that coexisted in the heights of the forest would have poured into his dying head and taken possession of it.
“Now that the first signs have shown in him, I’m sure the tendency to identify with the young men of 1860 will soon take hold among the team as a whole. I’m going to spread it among all the valley people. I want to start another rising here, to reproduce the rising of our ancestors a century ago even more realistically than the Nembutsu dance. Mitsu—it’s not impossible!”
“But what on earth’s the point, Takashi?”
“Point?” He laughed. “When your friend hanged himself, Mitsu, did you ask yourself what the point of it was ? Or do you ever ask yourself what the point of your own survival is ? Even if we achieve a new version of the rising, there mightn’t be any point to it at all. But at least I’ll be able to experience as intensely as possible what great-grandfather’s younger brother went through spiritually. That’s something I’ve been desperately wanting to do for a long time.”
Back in the storehouse, I found that the sound of dripping water, as the snow melted under the heat of the sun and began to run down through the thick layer remaining on the roof, surrounded the storehouse on all four sides like a bamboo blind. And I fancied I could use the sound to cut myself off, to defend myself from all that happened in the valley, just as great-grandfather with his gun had protected himself and his property from the modern world beyond the forest.
Imagination in Riot
T
HE
music for the Nembutsu procession, large and small hand drums with gongs, had been continuously audible since before noon. It had gone on insistently, slowly shifting its position. The same rhythm, if such it could be called—
bang
, bang, bang!
bang
, bang, bang!
bang
, bang, bang!—had continued now for four hours. I’d watched from the back window of the storehouse as hermit Gii went up the graveled road to the forest. He walked with his head cocked on one side as though deep in thought, yet climbed steadily up the steep, snowy trail, kicking strongly at the ground behind him, dragging the sledge bearing the new blanket that my wife had given him in place of his tattered old one. The music had begun shortly after that. By the time my wife came upstairs bringing rice balls and an unopened can of salmon for my lunch, the voice in which I asked her about the music was hoarse with annoyance at its inescapable persistence and sounded harsh and strange even to my surprised ears.
“Was it your leader Takashi’s idea to play the Nembutsu music out of season like this?” I asked. “Does he think the music’s going to remind people of the 1860 rising? If so, it’s a puerile idea that’ll only serve to annoy the neighbors. Takashi, you, and the rest are the only ones who’re carried away. Do you really think those stolid valley types are going to get excited over a few drums and gongs?”
“Well, it’s got you annoyed at least, Mitsu,” she pointed out calmly, “you who’re trying so hard to be indifferent to everything in the valley. The canned salmon, incidentally, is part of the spoils of war from the supermarket—the looting got going again this morning—so you’d better not eat it if you want to keep your hands clean of the affair. I can go and find you something else.”
I opened the can, not as an admission of complicity with Takashi, but to show my indifference to her sarcasm. I don’t even like salmon.
Where the ordinary inhabitants were concerned, the previous day’s looting at the supermarket hadn’t been premeditated. But according to my wife, Takashi and the others had been busy that morning spreading the idea that, since looting was illegal anyway, there was no reason for the valley folk not to go on with it once they’d started.
“Hasn’t anybody objected to these attempts by Takashi and the rest to stir them up?” I asked. “This morning, after they heard what had been going on behind the scenes, didn’t any of them have second thoughts and take back their looted goods ?”
“There was a village get-together in front of the supermarket, but no one made any such suggestion. You don’t suppose they’d go out of their way to return the goods, do you, when the girls in charge of accounts were giving juicy details of the profits the store had been making and the salesgirls were testifying to the shoddiness of the goods ? Even if some oddball had wanted to, the general atmosphere wouldn’t have let him go it alone.”
“It’s like conning a bunch of kids,” I said, chewing balefully on my salmon, which was dry and full of bones and other debris. “But the reaction will soon set in.”
“Anyway,” she said, “feeling’s running high against the supermarket. Several women who were searched in the past on suspicion of shoplifting were there, relating their experiences.”
“What a dumb crowd!” I said. The looted salmon seemed to stick in my throat.