Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
“Jin referred to it as ‘Taka’s riot,’ you know,” I said. “If you’re going to keep the valley folks’ interest in it alive for as long as possible, you can’t let them use up the riot’s source of energy too soon, can you? So I imagine some supervision is definitely necessary.” I made no attempt to conceal my reactions to Takashi’s excited verbosity. But far from being disturbed, Takashi seemed to find this intriguing and kept the same provocative gaze on me as he said:
“I like that—‘Taka’s riot.’ Though she’s biased, of course. But you know, Mitsu, it isn’t just material greed or a sense of deprivation that’s got all these people, adults and children alike, so worked up. I expect you heard the Nembutsu drums and gongs going at it all today? Well, that’s helping to keep the pot boiling—it’s the riot’s emotional source of energy! The looting doesn’t really amount to a riot, Mitsu. It’s a piddling little storm in a teacup, as everyone taking part knows perfectly well. Even so, by taking part they’re going back a century in time and experiencing vicariously the excitement of the 1860 rising. It’s a riot of the
imagination
. Though I don’t suppose it ranks as a riot for you, does it ? Not if you’re unwilling to bring that kind of imagination into play.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“I see. . . .” said Takashi. Unexpectedly lapsing into a shut-in, somber mood, he fell silent and glowered, lips compressed, into the small square mirror propped up against the chair in front of him, as though he’d begun to be bored even by having his hair cut in the office now that it was under his control.
“I’ve found a can of kerosene, Mitsu,” put in Hoshio, who had been waiting behind me for a break in our conversation. “Jin’s son says he and his friends will carry it up to the house.”
“Thanks, Hoshi,” I said, turning round. “I’ll pay for it, of course. I’m an outsider, so the market hasn’t been profiteering at
my
expense. If there’s no one to take the money, leave it on the shelf where the can of kerosene was.”
Hoshio hesitated, embarrassed. He was about to take the bill I held out to him when his two friends, skipping round in front of him with startling alacrity, simultaneously thrust out hands blackened with mimeographing ink and gave his shoulders a violent shove. He fell backward, striking the crown of his head hard against the boarded wall. I stood there feeling foolish with my slender white arm still feebly holding out the money. Hoshio scrambled to his feet in a rage and, hissing like a snake through clenched teeth, glanced at Takashi for permission to counterattack. But his patron saint sat motionless, frowning at himself in the mirror as though he’d not even noticed the fearful clatter Hoshio had made in falling.
“That’s against regulations, Hoshi,” the girl by his side warned pertly in a high voice. To my astonishment, Hoshio suddenly went quite still and started weeping.
I walked out of the office seething with painful excitement. The Nembutsu music was still going on. It aggravated the pounding of my heart so much that I was forced to cover my ears as I walked. The young priest was waiting for me in front of the supermarket. Unwillingly, I lowered my hands from my ears.
“I went up to the house and one of Jin’s children told me you’d come down here,” he burst out. I realized immediately that the excitement animating him was more or less the reverse of the emotion nearly suffocating me. “I looked through the temple storehouse and found the documents the Nedokoro family left there for safekeeping!”
I took the large brown paper envelope he proffered. It was a shoddy envelope, reminiscent of the days of wartime austerity and
tattered and begrimed with age. Mother must have put it in the temple’s keeping just after the end of the war. However, it wasn’t the contents of the envelope that were exciting the priest.
“This is most interesting, Mitsu! Most interesting,” he repeated eagerly in a low voice. “Fascinating, I call it!”
His reaction was quite different from what I’d expected, and I gazed at him with deep suspicion. For a while I stayed silent and perplexed, pondering the meaning of his words.
“Let’s talk as we go,” he said. “All kinds of people are listening!” And he trotted off ahead of me with a briskness unbecoming in someone normally so diffident. I hurried after him, keeping one hand pressed on my overcoat in the region of my heart.
“Mitsu—” he went on, “if talk of this affair spreads, provincial supermarkets all over the country may well be attacked by the farmers. If that happens, the flaws in the economy will show up immediately. History’s on the move! People often say that in another ten years the Japanese economy will come to a dead end, but it’s difficult for laymen like us to see just where the collapse will begin, isn’t it? But now, here are discontented farmers attacking a supermarket without warning. Supposing, next, that several hundred thousand supermarkets were raided in succession—it would undoubtedly throw a spotlight on the deterioration and vulnerability of the economy. It’s all
most
interesting, Mitsu.”
“But an attack on a supermarket in this valley isn’t going to touch off a nationwide chain reaction,” I objected. “In two or three days, all the fuss will subside and the valley folk will go back to the same drudgery as before.” The unexpected excitement shown by this man who supposedly represented the decent intellectual side of the valley had depressed me to the point of real sadness. “I’ve no desire to interfere in the present business, but I
do
know that Takashi isn’t the kind to pull off anything that could affect the course of history. I can only hope the affair won’t leave him too wretchedly isolated. In practice, though, I feel that he hasn’t left himself any way out this time. Now that he’s made all the people in the valley share in the ‘disgrace,’ I don’t see how he can look to them for sympathy, like a reformed student activist. I keep wondering what it is that drives him so far, but I never arrive at any definite conclusion. The one thing I feel sure of is that his inner self is hopelessly split in two. I wouldn’t interfere with what he does, but I just don’t understand what’s made
him like this. I’ve a feeling, at least, that the turning point came when our sister—she was retarded, you know—killed herself while she was living with him.”
I fell silent, overcome by a boundless sorrow and fatigue as though I myself had been rioting all day. Although the young priest accepted what I said in silence, it was quite clear by now that just beneath the surface of his placid, impeccably decent face, there lay a protective layer of hypocritical defiance posing as good nature. After all, this same man had been tough enough to weather all the gossip in the valley after his wife ran away. His silence came from pity for my battered condition, not sympathy with my views. I realized that whereas I was concerned solely with the fate of my brother, he was preoccupied with the joint destiny of the young men of the valley. We walked together in silence, rubbing shoulders as though in deep understanding, past the men and women, old folk and children who still crowded the road and gave us friendly smiles as we went. When we reached the space in front of the village office, the priest said, by way of leave-taking :
“In the past, the young fellows were forever embarking on some foolish, shortsighted project, getting themselves into difficulties, then throwing in the towel. But this time at least they’re trying to overcome some larger difficulty with their own resources. Or should I say, they’ve created of their own free will a situation that can’t be cleared up by their own will, and have taken responsibility for it—which I find just as interesting. Really interesting ! If your great-grandfather’s younger brother were alive today, I’m sure he would have behaved like Taka!”
Head bowed, breathing in short gasps and worried about my heart, I climbed the graveled road, doubly dangerous now that the snow melted by the sun had begun to freeze again. Deep, reddish black forms crept up around me as I went: shadow, which had completely disappeared when snow had begun to fall, was returning to the valley. The wind had swept away the thinning clouds to reveal sunset skies. Shivering with the growing chill, I climbed between bushes weighed down with snow and anchored still more firmly to the ground by the reviving shadows. My skin, which had begun to sweat in the heat from the stove in the supermarket office, was rapidly capitulating to the cold. I could guess what kind of expression the reddish black shadows all about were engraving on the bristling skin of my face. I rubbed my cheeks with my hands, but try as I might I couldn’t alter
their rigid expression. I went on climbing sluggishly and mechanically like a train in the north that is forever late, overcome by such an enormous sense of fatigue that it seemed I would never reach home. Looking up, I saw the house, backed by the dark snowy slope, looking like a lump of tar surrounded by a red nimbus.
A small, dark knot of women clustered round the door of the main building. They had discarded the garish clothes with which the supermarket had filled the valley and, reverting as though by common accord to the old ways of the hollow, were dressed from head to foot in dull, indigo-striped working clothes which left no part of the skin directly exposed to the air except the face. As I entered the front garden, they turned in unison like a flock of ducks and surveyed me with faces that were expressionless and shadowed a darkish red. Then immediately they turned back to my wife, who was standing in the kitchen, and set up a clamor of complaint. They were housewives from the “country,” and they were insisting that Takashi throw away the negatives of the photographs he’d taken on the first day of the looting. When they arrived home from the looting and talked about Takashi’s pictures, their husbands and fathers-in-law had promptly demanded they should have the negatives destroyed. I imagined they were the first group of participants in the riot to have had second thoughts about their actions.
The setting sun flared up orange, then rapidly faded. “Taka decides everything,” my wife was repeating patiently in a flat, weary-sounding voice. “I can’t make Taka change his mind. I’ve no power to influence what he thinks. He always decides for himself.”
Without warning the music of the Nembutsu dance, which like a spring had been welling up steadily from the bottom of the valley, ceased, and together with the brick-colored haze a sharp sense of absence pervaded the hollow within the pitch-black forest.
“Oh God, whatever shall we do ?” wailed one young farmer’s wife. The open despair in her voice made my wife falter for a moment, but it was not enough to make her change what she said.
“I go along with whatever Taka decides. Taka decides everything. He always decides for himself what he does.”
The Power of the Flies
T
HE
following morning, the “rising” was still in progress, but the music of the Nembutsu dance was not to be heard, and the whole valley was wrapped in somber silence. When Momoko brought me my breakfast, I found that her experience of violence and the persistent hysterics that had followed it had left her, oddly enough, with a kind of maturity. She kept her face—pale now, and with an appropriately feminine placidity—turned downward, stubbornly refusing to meet my gaze, and spoke throughout in a small, hesitant, husky voice. That morning, Takashi’s bodyguards had discovered that the manager of the supermarket had eluded the watchful eyes of the lookout at the end of the bridge and escaped from the valley. Hoping to contact the Emperor and the gang under his control, he had crossed the river, now dangerously swollen with thawing snow, and, heedless of his dripping clothes, had set off running down the snow-covered road that led to the sea. The same morning, the father whose boy had been saved from death on the broken bridge had privately brought Takashi a hunting gun and several kinds of cartridge.
“He lent it to Taka to fight back with when the Emperor’s gang comes to attack,” Momoko said. “Though if you ask me, a gun makes it all the more dangerous.” She spoke in the depressed, slightly fearful tone of someone who no longer takes the slightest pleasure in violence.
My own interpretation of the intended role of the gun was different from Momoko’s, but I remained silent for fear of terrifying her still further. The gun, I felt sure, was not for Takashi to use, side by side with his bodyguards and the village folk, against the Emperor and his gang, but a weapon for that moment when he finally found himself utterly deserted by his fellows and obliged to defend himself alone in a hostile valley. (Admittedly, he’d made at least one ally in the valley,
an ally self-sacrificing enough to lend him his precious gun.) Takashi himself, finding that none of the farmers had come down from the “country” to start looting again that morning, had put chains on the Citroen and set off to do some campaigning in the area beyond the great bamboo grove.
Having passed on these news items, Momoko suddenly asked me, with a younger sister’s meekness that bore no resemblance to the Momoko of old, whether I thought there were still any decent people left in the world. The unexpectedness of the question took me aback, and I was still hesitating when she went on.
“We’d been driving all night on the way here to Shikoku. When dawn came, we found we were going along by the sea somewhere and Takashi suddenly said to us, ‘I wonder if there’s really any good left in people?’ But before we could answer he said yes, there was. He knew there was, he said, because people still went all the way to the plains of Africa to catch elephants, and took the trouble to send them home by sea to be kept in zoos. When he was a kid, he used to tell himself that if ever he got rich he’d keep his own private elephant. He’d have a cage built onto this house to keep it in, and would cut down all the tall trees below the stone wall, so that wherever children were playing in the valley they’d only have to glance up to see the elephant.”
After all, it seemed, Momoko hadn’t been hoping for an answer from me as a “member of the establishment.” She’d merely used the question as a pretext for the elephant story. Ever since the unexpected brush with violence had made her shrink into herself, she’d been dwelling nostalgically on the gentleness that had existed in Takashi before he started directing his rough “rising.” Momoko, I suspected, represented the first member of Takashi’s personal bodyguard to drop by the wayside.