Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
“You know, Mitsu, your wife sometimes hits the nail on the head,” Takashi began in an ingratiatingly compromising tone. “It’s true—I don’t want to save myself. I
want
to be lynched or condemned to death.”
“I know. You haven’t the courage to set up a violent crime, on your own, but given an accident that could be mistaken for one, you thrust yourself into the picture and do your level best to make sure you’ll be either lynched or executed. That’s how I see it.”
Takashi lay silent, breathing deeply, as though to encourage me to supplement my remarks. But I had nothing more to say. I was extremely cold and unutterably depressed. Eventually, he spoke again.
“Do you intend to stop them tomorrow?”
“Naturally. But I don’t know whether I can effectively interfere with your plan for self-destruction now that you’ve got so deeply entangled in it.”
“Mitsu, there’s something I want to tell you. I want to tell you the truth.” He spoke diffidently and shyly, half as though he doubted he would be taken seriously and half as though his attention were elsewhere. But the words came across strongly, setting up immediate echoes inside me.
“I don’t want to hear it, so don’t try to tell me,” I hastily protested, with a sudden urge to flee my memories of an earlier conversation with Takashi about “the truth.”
“I’m going to tell you, Mitsu!” he declared in an unpleasantly insistent tone that only intensified my desire to flee. I was shaken anew by his air of abject capitulation.
“If only you’d listen, I think you might cooperate, at least to the extent of standing by without interfering while I’m lynched.”
I abandoned any further attempt to keep him silent. Then with a preliminary sigh of exhaustion and despair, as though he had already told what he was about to tell and, deeply regretting it, sought frantically and in vain to take back his words, he began. At each word he seemed to be overcoming some resistance in himself.
“Mitsu … I’ve always said that I had no idea why our sister killed herself. Uncle’s family backed me up too, they said it was suicide
without any apparent motive. So I’ve always been able to keep the real reason to myself. Nobody ever attempted, in fact, to ask me about it seriously. I’ve kept quiet all along. Just once, in America, I told someone—a black prostitute, the merest stranger—but that was in my inadequate English. For me, talking to someone in English is like wearing a mask. So for all practical purposes I’ve never told anyone. It was a fake confession; it left me just as I was. Thanks to which, the only punishment I received was a mild dose of VD. Never once have I talked about it in the language I share with you and shared with our sister. It goes without saying that even to you I’ve never said a word about it. The only thing is, you may have dimly suspected there was something odd about her death from the way I always lost my cool if I felt you were dropping hints about it. That day you prepared the pheasants, for instance, you asked if ‘the truth’ had something to do with her. At that moment I was convinced you knew everything and were playing with me. I was so angry and ashamed I could have killed you. But then I told myself that you couldn’t know about it, and got myself under control. The morning she killed herself, before I went to tell uncle and the rest, I searched every corner of the outbuilding where she and I lived in case she’d left some message that would arouse suspicion. Then I began laughing and crying, torn between a new sense of guilt and relief at being released at last from the pressure of fear. I didn’t go to report her suicide at the main house till I was sure I’d got myself in hand and wouldn’t burst out in another fit of laughing. I found her that morning squatting in the toilet, dead from a dose of agricultural chemical. If you wonder why I felt such a deep sense of release once I was sure she’d left no last note, it was because I’d always been afraid that, being half-witted, she would give our secret away. I felt her death had somehow erased the secret, almost as though it had never existed at all. But reality, of course, refused to work out like that. On the contrary—her suicide implanted the secret deep down inside my body and mind, where it began steadily poisoning my daily life and the outlook for the future. All this happened when I was a junior in high school. Ever since, I’ve been torn in two by the memory.” He paused and began to sob: an indescribably gloomy, wretched sound, the memory of which, I foresaw, would plague me for the rest of my life with spells of depression that made survival itself a burden.
“Although she was half-witted, she was really a rather special kind
of person. The one thing she cared for was beautiful sounds; she was happiest when she was listening to music. Sounds like an airplane’s engines or a car starting up would make her complain of a burning pain in her ears. And I’m sure they really did hurt her. You know that you can break glass by making the air vibrate? Well, it seems it was like that—a pain as though something delicate was breaking inside her ears. Anyway, there was no one else in the village where uncle lived who understood music and had an absolute need for it as she did. She wasn’t ugly, and kept herself spotless. She was almost unnaturally clean in her person; together with this abnormal fondness for music, it was one of the features of her idiocy. Some of the young fellows in uncle’s village would make a point of coming to gawk at her while she was listening. Once the music started, she was reduced to a pair of ears. Everything else was shut out, nothing else could penetrate her consciousness. So the peeping toms were quite safe—but if ever I found them at it I’d throw myself at them in a blind fury. For me, she was the one feminine thing in my life, and I felt I had to keep her safe. I didn’t, in fact, have anything to do with the other girls in uncle’s village; when I went to high school in the town, I never even talked to the girls in the same class. I made up a tale about us being a couple of aristocrats whose family had come down in the world, and took an exaggerated pride in our descent from greatgrandfather and his brother. If you took the sympathetic view, you might say I was doing it to shake off my inferiority feelings at being taken care of by uncle and his family. I told her we were a special elite of two, and we wouldn’t and mustn’t get interested in anybody apart from each other. The way we behaved made some nasty-minded adults start a rumor that we were sleeping together. I got my own back by throwing stones at the houses of people who said such things. But all the while, the rumors were exerting a power of suggestion over me. I was only a high school kid of seventeen with an unformed mind full of fanatical ideas and lonely enough to be susceptible to such persuasion. Late one afternoon in early summer, I suddenly got drunk. It was the day the last rice-planting was finished in uncle’s field, and a crowd from the village who’d been called in to help were drinking over in the main house. She and I, being ‘aristocrats,’ naturally hadn’t helped with the planting, but the young fellows hauled me in and gave me my first drink, which went straight to my head. Uncle found me drunk, told me off, and sent me back to the out-building.
At first, sister was amused and laughed at my drunkenness. But when the farmers got foully drunk and started singing and playing music in the main house, she suddenly got scared. She pressed her hands over her ears and hunched up into herself like a shellfish. Even so, it was more than she could take, and soon she was sobbing like a little kid. They went on and on singing their vulgar songs in their thick peasant voices until late at night. I got really mad; I hated society and anything to do with it. I held her to me, trying to calm her down, and as I did so I felt a queer kind of excitement. Before long, I’d had sex with her.”
We were silent, acutely embarrassed by each other’s presence as brothers. We lay still and withdrawn in the darkness, scarcely breathing, trying to hide from the huge and terrifying thing that was coming to denounce us. I wanted to cry out, “No! No!”—the same cry that, if Takashi was to be believed, the unfortunate girl had uttered at the point of death as the rock battered her head—but even that simple cry refused to emerge from a body in which the flesh and bones were independent and unrelated, aching with the dull pain of those evil awakenings.
“It’s absolutely no excuse to say I was drunk the first time we had sex,” Takashi went on slowly in a voice faint to the point of vanishing, “because the next day I repeated the same thing when I was sober. At first she didn’t like the sex for its own sake, and was scared too. But the idea of refusing me in anything was quite foreign to her. I wasn’t unaware that she was suffering pain, but I was too far gone in desire and anxiety to consider things from her side. In order to calm her fears about sex, I fetched some old erotic prints from uncle’s storehouse and persuaded her that all married people did the same thing. What worried me most was that she’d tell our secret to uncle’s family in the daytime, while I was at school and she was alone in the house. So I told her that if anybody else got to know what we were doing, they’d do frightful things to us. I hunted out some illustrations in the dictionary to show her, pictures of people being burned at the stake during the Middle Ages. And I told her that if we were careful not to let other people know, we could live together as brother and sister all our lives, doing the same thing without ever marrying anybody else. That was what we both really wanted, I said, so what did it matter as long as we managed not to get caught ?
“I really believed what I said. I believed that if only she and I resolved
to go on living in joint defiance of society, we’d be free to do everything we most desired. Until then, it seemed she’d been worried at the idea that sooner or later I’d get married and leave her to live alone. I reminded her, too, how mother before she died had told her to stick close to me always. She was vaguely convinced that she’d never get along apart from me. So when I persuaded her, in terms she could understand, that we should turn our backs on everyone else and go on living together, brother and sister, in league against the world, she was genuinely delighted. Before long, she stopped being reluctant about sex and started initiating it herself. At one period we were leading a more or less completely self-sufficient life, like a pair of lovers, just happy to be together. I at least have never been so happy as I was in those days. Once she’d made up her mind, she was strong and unwavering. She was proud of the idea that she’d do everything with me until we died. And then … she got pregnant. Our aunt realized it first. When aunt warned me about it, I was half crazy with anxiety. I felt sure that if my sexual dealings with her came to light, I’d die of shame on the spot. But aunt didn’t suspect me in the slightest, so in the end I committed an unforgivable act of treachery. I was a vile schemer without an ounce of courage in me. I didn’t deserve such a straightforward sister.
“I ordered her to say she’d been raped by some unknown young man from the village. She did as I said. So uncle took her into town and not only made her have an abortion but had her sterilized, too. When she came back she was completely prostrate, not just from the experience of the operation but from the menacing roar of car engines in the town. But she’d courageously obeyed my instructions and hadn’t breathed a word about me to anyone, even at the inn when uncle apparently pressed her—she, who’d never told a lie!—to recall any distinguishing features of the man who’d raped her.”
He stopped and sobbed for a while. Then, still not completely free of his fit of weeping and interspersing his account with little moans, he related the crudest experience of his life. I lay listening to him with utter passivity, wretched and shrunken like a dried fish, overpowered by the cold and the aching in my head.
“It happened that night. Too frightened to be able to pull herself together, she was looking to me to rescue her. How could you blame her? And since sex was already a habit between us, she took it into her head to find comfort there. But even someone with as little accurate
sexual knowledge as I had in those days knew that sex was impossible immediately after that kind of operation. I felt fear at the idea of her sexual organs all wounded deep down inside, and a sense of physiological disgust too. You could hardly blame me either, could you? But she couldn’t grasp what would seem obvious to ordinary people. When I refused her—the first time ever—she suddenly turned stubborn. She crawled in beside me and tried to touch my prick. So I hit her—the first time she’d ever been hit in her life. I’ve never seen a human being look so startled, or so sad and forlorn. . . . Then after a while she said: ‘It wasn’t true what you said, Taka. It was wrong, even though we kept it secret.’ And the next morning she killed herself.
It wasn’t true what you said
,
Taka
.
It was wrong
,
even though we kept it secret. . . .”
Not the faintest sound arose from the valley. Any noise would have been smothered at once by the blanket of snow that lay, still undisturbed, over the forest. Even the snow that had begun to thaw had frozen again in the cold. Yet all the while a shrill voice, its frequency too high to be caught by the human ear, seemed to skirl between the high, black walls of the surrounding forest. It was the cry of the huge creature whose coiled body filled the void that lay above the hollow. One midwinter in my childhood, after a night of that voice whose presence was so intensely experienced though never heard, I discovered the trail of some huge snake on the shallow bed of the clear stream flowing along the bottom of the valley, and shuddered to think it was the mark of the monster I’d heard crying all night long. Now once again I felt the overpowering presence of that soundless howling.
Growing used to the dark, my eye detected in the faint light from the window all kinds of vague black shapes looming about me. The whole interior of the storehouse was crowded with apparitions like serried ranks of dark, dwarfish Buddhist images, all whispering to each other :
We heard
,
we heard!
I was seized with a sudden, uncontrollable fit of coughing. It felt as though the membranes of my throat, my bronchial tubes, even my lungs had suddenly erupted in a crimson rash. I had a fever; that was why I’d felt the flesh and bones of my whole body dismembered and plagued with sharp pains. I had barely recovered from the fit of coughing when Takashi, who showed signs of recovering at least slightly from the profound prostration of his spirit, spoke to me in a tone of utterly defenseless self-commiseration.