Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
“Mitsu, as long as you don’t interfere, I’m sure I’ll be executed even if I survive tomorrow. Either way, whether I’m killed in the lynching or executed, I want to give you my eyes so you can use the retinas for an operation on your own. Then my eyes at least will survive and see lots of things after my death. It would be a consolation just to serve as a kind of lens. You’ll do it, won’t you, Mitsu?”
An overpowering urge to refuse shot through my body like a shaft of lightning. The crying of the forest ceased and the small black apparitions filling the storehouse vanished.
“No! Nothing would persuade me to take your eyes,” I declared in a voice shaking with indignation.
“Why? Why not? Why won’t you accept them?” Takashi shouted in a forlorn voice in which the note of self-pity dried up and was replaced by a growing, desperate suspicion. “Is it because you’re so angry with me about our sister ? But you only knew her when she was a small kid! While I was living with her in someone else’s house,
you
were here in the valley with Jin to do your bidding. And you used the money left to us to go to high school in the town and to university in Tokyo as well, didn’t you? If you hadn’t hogged the money for yourself, the three of us could have lived together in the valley. You’re not in a position to criticize me where she’s concerned. I didn’t tell the truth just to have you pass judgment on me about her!”
“And that’s not what I mean either!” I shouted back, cutting short his protest as a new and ferocious excitement started to grip him. “To begin with, I’m not prepared, emotionally, to accept your eyes. But on a more practical level what I mean is this: you won’t be lynched tomorrow morning, nor is any court going to sentence you to death. It’s just your sense of guilt—you’re hoping to punish yourself for the incest and the death of an innocent person that it brought about; and you’re hoping that the people here will install you among the valley ‘spirits,’ so that you’re remembered as a man of violence. I admit that if that fantasy
should
become a reality, the two sides of your personality would come together again in death. And in a hundred years you might even be looked on as a reincarnation of great-grandfather’s brother, your idol. But Taka—though you’re always playing at putting yourself in peril, you’re the type who invariably has a way out at the last moment. You acquired the habit on the day that sister’s suicide allowed you to go on living without either being punished or put to shame. I’m sure this time, too, you’ll work some
nasty little dodge to go on living. Then, having so shamefully survived, you’ll make your excuses to her ghost: ‘In fact,’ you’ll say, ‘I deliberately put myself in a tight corner where I had no choice but to be lynched or executed, but a lot of interfering bastards forced me to go on living.’ It was the same with your experiences of violence in America—you weren’t really committed at all. You merely hoped to find a pretext for carrying on for a while, free of your painful memories. All you did in practice was catch a touch of VD, thereby providing an excuse for not taking any further risks during your stay in the States. It’s the same with the grubby little confession you’ve just made: if I were to guarantee that even
that
wasn’t the absolute truth either, that one mention of it wouldn’t mean your being killed, or committing suicide, or going mad and turning into a monster, don’t you think you’d immediately feel saved ? It may have been unconscious, but didn’t you ramble on so long in the expectation that I’d accept you as you are, along with all your past experiences, thus releasing you at one stroke from your divided state? For example, do you think you’d have the guts to confess again in front of the valley folk tomorrow morning? That would
really
be taking a risk. But I don’t imagine you’ve got what it takes. You may not admit it consciously, but you’re expecting somehow to survive their kangaroo court. If you’re sent for trial, you’ll implore them to execute you with an air of sincerity convincing enough to deceive even yourself. But in fact you’ll be sitting pretty in your cell until investigation confirms that your only crime was mutilation of a body following accidental death. Don’t lie to me about giving me your eyes after you’re killed, as though you believed you only had a while to live! You know I’d be glad even of a dead man’s eyes; you’re just playing around with someone else’s disability!”
Takashi raised himself with obvious difficulty in the dark. He set the gun on his knees and, placing his finger on the trigger, turned to face me. I thought he might shoot me, but didn’t flinch; I felt too contemptuous, contemptuous of the way he always left himself some escape from any trap he allowed himself to fall into, to be impressed by this sudden vault into threatened violence. Even the sight of the gun and his small black head swaying in time with his heavy breathing left me untouched by fear.
“Mitsu, why do you hate me so much?” he demanded in a voice tearful with impotent grief, peering impatiently through the darkness
to ascertain the expression on my face, “Why have you always loathed me? You hated me, didn’t you, even before you knew what I did to our sister and Natsumi.”
“Hated? It’s not a question of what I feel, Taka. I’m simply giving my objective opinion that even someone like you who chooses to live in pursuit of a dramatic illusion can’t keep up the critical tension indefinitely unless, say, he actually goes insane. Take our eldest brother—he may have enjoyed violence on the battlefield, but if he’d come home alive I’m sure he would have discarded the memory and settled down again with the greatest of ease to a placid daily routine. If it weren’t so, the whole world would be swamped with violent criminals after every big war. As leader of the rising, great-grandfather’s brother, on whom you pin so much faith, was responsible for mass murder, and in the end he even abandoned his comrades to their fate so that he could get away through the forest. Do you think that after that he deliberately plunged into new perils and went on leading a brutal life simply to justify his pose as a man of violence? Well, he didn’t. I read the letters he wrote. They show that he stopped being a man of violence. What’s more, even in his own mind he lost the enthusiasm he’d had as a rebel leader. Nor was it a case of self-punishment. He simply forgot his experiences in the rising and spent his last years as a perfectly ordinary citizen. He tried all kinds of feminine wiles to help his beloved nephew dodge the draft, but he failed. And the one-time revolutionary seems to have died peacefully in his bed, brooding mournfully over the fate of that same nephew—no news had come from him since he was sent to fight at Weihaiwei. In practice he died a mere sheep of a man, absolutely unqualified to become any kind of ‘spirit.’ You too, Taka—you won’t be lynched tomorrow morning; you’ll go down to the valley to have your damaged fingers treated, you’ll be arrested, and after being put on probation or serving three years or so, you’ll take your place again as a perfectly well-behaved, ordinary member of society. All fantasies that ignore those facts are meaningless in the long run. You don’t have sufficient confidence in the facts. But you’re too old, Taka, to get burned up about heroic fantasies of this kind. You’re not a kid any more.”
I stood up alone in the darkness and, feeling for the top of the steps with my foot, went downstairs. Behind me, I heard Takashi’s unspeakably dismal voice again (and felt that this time I might really be shot, though fear of threatened violence refused to become a reality,
and I could only feel the discomfort of the fever within me and the nagging ache in each part of my body) :
“Mitsu, why do you resent me so much? Why have you always disliked me ? We two brothers are all that’s left of the Nedokoros, aren’t we?”
In the main house my wife was still drinking whisky, staring vacantly in front of her with eyes already bloodshot like the man-eating woman of Korean folklore. Beyond the open sliding doors, Hoshio lay next to Momoko, fast asleep on his face like a dog that has collapsed of exhaustion. I sat down within my wife’s field of vision, took the whisky bottle from between her knees, drank a mouthful straight from the bottle and had another fit of coughing; but she continued to drift on the stormy seas of drunkenness as though I didn’t exist. I watched as tears sprang into her dark, bloodshot eyes and ran down the dry skin of her cheeks. After a while, a shot rang out from the storehouse, its echoes reverberating interminably around the night-shrouded forest. As I ran barefoot across the yard, there was a second shot. Just then, Gii the hermit came rushing out of the storeroom in panic-stricken flight. We all but collided, and started back from each other in fright. At the foot of the steps, I called up to the room above. The light was on now.
“It’s me, Mitsu,” came Takashi’s voice, calm and psychologically armed once more. “I’m testing the power and spread of the different cartridges, ready to do battle tomorrow morning with my imaginary mob.” On my way back to the main house, I found Jin’s children standing still and silent in the yard and assured them that nothing had happened. My wife was staring fixedly at her glass in which whisky and water shone with a dark luster, equally indifferent to the shots and my sudden exit, her downturned face seemingly turned to bronze. Hoshio and Momoko stirred uncomfortably and went on sleeping. Thirty minutes later, there was another shot. I waited ten minutes for a fourth shot. Then I pulled boots onto my dirty feet and went over to the storehouse. Takashi didn’t reply when I hailed him from the foot of the stairs.
I ran up the steps, banging my head here, there, and everywhere as I went. A man sprawled half-propped against the wall directly ahead. The skin of his face and bare chest was torn and bloody as though studded with split pomegranates. He looked like a bright red, life-size plaster dummy dressed only in trousers. Starting automatically toward
the figure, I grunted as a hunting gun tied to the great zelkova beam struck me heavily over the ear. A piece of gut connected the trigger to one of the red dummy’s fingers where they drooped on the tatami floor. And on the plaster and timber of the wall, at just the height where the dead man would have stood staring at the muzzle of the gun, the outline of a human head and shoulders was drawn in red pencil, with two great eyes carefully marked in on the head. I took another step forward and, with the feel of pellets and slippery blood beneath the soles of my feet, saw that the penciled eyes had been blasted full of shot, so that two leaden orbs seemed to stare out at me from the hollows. On the wall beside the head was written, in the same red pencil:
I told the truth
The dead man gave a deep groan. Kneeling in the blood, I touched Takashi’s crimson, shredded face, but he was definitely dead. I had a feeling, a spurious memory, of having encountered just such a dead man, and in this very storehouse, on countless occasions before.
Retrial
T
HE
damp, heavy wind that all night long had circled the hollow in the forest came blowing in, forming constant small eddies of air in the cellar where I crouched. I awoke from a short, anguished sleep to find my throat painfully swollen and constricted but my drunkenness gone and my brain, which had been enlarged and feverish before my sleep, shrunken to its normal size, leaving a gap into which gloomy depression had wormed its way; my head was hopelessly, wretchedly clear. With one hand still clutching at the blanket which the instinct of self-defense had kept wrapped round my shoulders and waist even during my dreams, I stretched out the other into the darkness beyond my knees and, groping for the whisky bottle containing water, took a mouthful. The cold of the water seemed to soak right through to my lungs and my sadly oppressed liver. In my dreams, Takashi had stood in a mist about five yards in front of me, still looking like a crumbling red plaster dummy with his upper half split open like ripe pomegranates. Countless glittering pellets studded the sockets of his eyes, transforming him into an iron-eyed monster. He stood at one corner of a tall triangle of which I was the apex; at the remaining corner a bentbacked, sallow-faced man stood watching us in silence. Seen from my present position, hunched so close to the floor that my head was actually lower than my knees, they seemed to be standing on a high platform. I was sitting in the center of the front row of a theater whose ceiling was disproportionately high for its size, and the two ghosts were side by side up on the stage. High above their heads, as though the gallery were reflected in a mirror at the back of the stage, I could see a host of old men in dark suits with hats pulled down over their ears, looking like mushrooms clustering in some dark, damp spot. One of them had obviously once been the friend who painted his head crimson and hanged himself, another the baby who showed no
more response than a vegetable. Up on the stage, Takashi opened wide the mouth that with lips shot away was no more than a gaping, reddish black hole and cried in triumphant hatred:
Our retrial is your trial!
And the old men in the gallery, whom I suspected in fact of being a jury organized by Takashi himself, removed their hats and waved them with menacing significance at the great zelkova beam directly above their heads. I awoke in exhaustion and despair.
The place where I now sat motionless—hugging my knees, just as I’d sat that autumn dawn the previous year in the pit for the septic tank in our back garden—was a stone cellar that the Emperor and his men had discovered and begun to rescue from its long oblivion when they came to make preliminary surveys for dismantling the storehouse. The inner space where I sat had an anteroom with a privy and even a well. It would have been possible for someone to live there in self-imposed confinement, though the well by now was blocked and gave off no smell of water, and the privy was unusable, caved in long ago. From both the square holes came the odor of millions of mold spores; there might even be some penicillin among them. I had eaten a smoked-meat sandwich, drunk some whisky, and dozed off where I sat. If I had tipped over sideways as I slept, I would have hurt my head against the wooden posts, countless as the trees of the forest, that supported the storehouse floor. Their corners were as hard and sharp as ever.