Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
Today, too, any grown-ups unfortunate enough to encounter the Emperor’s procession averted their faces or hung their heads like shy crabs longing to scuttle away into some convenient hole. On the day of the “rising,” they’d acquired a destructive impetus through their frank, head-on acceptance of the shame involved. It had brought them all together. But the shame tormenting them now that they’d capitulated wasn’t the right kind to provide fuel for hatred, but a squalid, impotent variety. Their individual “disgraces” were a series of stepping-stones across which the Emperor and his subordinates paraded ostentatiously. The discrepancy between the “spirit” of the Emperor in morning coat with no shirt, and the reality of the Emperor himself, made me speculate with a spasm of almost personal shame how it would have been if the young man dressed as the “spirit” had had to wait at the side of the road as the Emperor came by. The group of valley children who brought up the rear of the procession were silent, as though preoccupied with the howling of the fierce wind that came spiraling down from the upper reaches of the forest. They were the first to adapt to the new situation in the valley, just as I and my fellows had done in our childhood. But they too had been participants in the “rising,” and as such had lost their voices, troubled by as much shame as their childish heads could accommodate.
Before long, the Emperor became aware of my existence. After all, I was the only human being in the valley who waited for him with head erect, unafraid to meet his gaze. He halted in front of me, backed by the group of young men whose facial features showed so clearly
they were of the same race as himself, and stood there in silence, the skin between his eyebrows contracted in vertical wrinkles that indicated no more than careful concentration, gazing calmly at me with his large eyes. His followers likewise watched me in silence, and their heavy breathing formed white clouds in the cold air.
“My name’s Nedokoro,” I ventured in a voice that went husky against my will. “I’m the elder brother of Takashi, who made the deal with you.”
“I’m Paek Sun-gi,” said the Emperor of the Supermarkets. “I’m really sorry about your brother. Such a tragedy—he was a rather special young man.”
I surveyed him with a mixture of unexpected emotion and suspicion : the wide-open eyes watching me levelly with an expression of welling, unconcealed sorrow, the well-fleshed cheeks and jowls, the whole of the cheerful face. Takashi hadn’t told us the Emperor was like this. He’d taken us in, and the valley folk as well, by deliberately presenting the Emperor as a particularly contemptible “spirit.” In fact, I suspected he himself had been deeply impressed by the Korean, and had told him he was a “rather special” kind of person. So the Emperor had probably used the same expression as a private means of returning the compliment to the dead. His eyebrows were thick and broad and he had a strong nose, but the small lips were red and moist like a girl’s and the ears had an almost dewy look, which lent the whole face a youthful vitality. With a flash of white teeth, he gave a straightforward, decent-looking smile to encourage me as I stared at him in silence.
“I was coming down to make a request,” I said.
“And I was just on my way up to have a look at the storehouse,” Paek replied, still smiling and with the same wrinkles between his brows. “And to offer my condolences at the same time.”
“It’s about this kid’s family,” I went on. “They live in the outbuilding. The mother’s sick at the moment, so if possible I’d like you to leave the place for a while without knocking it down.”
“The patient’s getting so thin she says she’ll be dead by summer!” Jin’s son put in to supplement my account. “The canned stuff she ate affected her liver. She’s already gone down to about half her old size, and now she’s stopped eating. She won’t last long!”
Paek’s smile disappeared and he scrutinized Jin’s son carefully. Unlike me, the boy was not an outsider staying temporarily in the valley. He treated him accordingly with a sober interest that contrasted
with the easy, sociable tone of his conversation with me. Almost immediately, however, he recovered the affable smile with the small, almost self-reproachful frown and said :
“I don’t see why the people in the outbuilding shouldn’t stay there so long as it doesn’t interfere with the dismantling and removal of the storehouse. But they may have to put up with some inconvenience while the work’s in progress.” Then, with pauses between each phrase as though to impress what he said on the boy’s memory, he added, “However, if you stay on after the work on the storehouse is finished, I won’t pay you compensation for getting out.”
Jin’s son stalked away with his neck arched like a cockerel’s, a sign of his displeasure. Antagonism toward the Emperor had rekindled in his mind. At the same time, his rear view seemed to emphasize that my failure to object to Paek’s statement had lost me the last vestige of his friendship.
“We’re going to knock down part of the storehouse wall as a preliminary to dismantling it,” said Paek as we watched the boy disappearing into the distance. “I brought along some young men who’re studying architecture.”
We walked in a body up the road toward the storehouse. The students, who were all freckled and had wrestlers’ bodies topped with heads like cannon balls, were extremely uncommunicative and didn’t even whisper among themselves.
“If there’s anything valuable left in the storehouse, would you mind bringing it out?” said Paek when we arrived in the front garden.
For form’s sake I retrieved the fan painting, on which the letters written by John Manjiro were totally illegible by now. One of the young men got implements out of a sack he’d been carrying over his shoulder and spread them on the ground in front of the building. The watching children shrank back as though they’d been weapons. At first, the youths removed the doors of the storehouse and carried out the tatami and other movables with almost reverent care. But after a while Paek gave an order in Korean, and they suddenly began to look much more like demolition workers. As they knocked down the wall of the first floor facing the valley, the plaster and bamboo laths, crumbling to a powder after standing there for more than a century, rose into the air and rained down on the heads of myself and the valley children who had come to watch.
The youths taking turns at wielding the sledgehammer seemed almost
totally indifferent to the structure of the storehouse and its equilibrium once the wall had been knocked down. The same was true of Paek, who stood directing operations quite unconcerned by the dust. Somehow it felt like a deliberate gesture of violence toward the people of the valley. In hammering down the wall of this oldest surviving symbol of the valley’s traditional way of life, Paek and his followers were demonstrating that if they cared to they could destroy the valley folk’s whole livelihood. That much was clear to the children as they watched the operation with bated breath, and the adults must have sensed it too, for no one came up from the valley to protest about the waves of dust threatening to engulf it. Though the walls were crumbling with age, they still supported rooftiles as heavy as they’d been a century before, and I worried in case removing even part of them mightn’t bring the whole storehouse crashing down in the strong wind. A suspicion seized me that Paek had never had any intention of carrying away the framework of the storehouse with its great beams and setting it up again in the town, but had bought it simply for the pleasure of destroying it in front of the valley people.
Before long, almost a third of the wall facing the valley had been knocked open from ceiling to floor, and the pile of plaster left by the wind was removed with shovels. Standing behind Paek, the children and I peered into the interior of the storehouse, cruelly illuminated now by the naked light of day. It lay open to the valley with the air of a stage set—an impression that before long was to be reproduced in my dreams. It looked strangely cramped, and all the irregularities of its interior stood revealed. The memories of a century’s gloom had fled forever, and, as I looked, the memory of S lying there motionless, facing the rear of the room, became unreal and vanished too. The space where the wall had been knocked down afforded a view of the valley from an unexpected angle—the football ground where Takashi had put the young men through their paces, and the bed of the river, deep brown now that winter’s drought had taken over from the snow again.
“Do you have a crowbar anywhere?”
Paek had been talking in Korean to the architectural students, whose immediate task was finished. But now he came over, causing the watching children to shrink back as he passed through their midst, and spoke to me with a smile, though the vertical furrow still remained between his dust-caked eyebrows. “I’d like to take up some of the
floorboards to have a look at the cellar. Cellars in this kind of place have stone walls and floors, so we’ll need more laborers if we’re going to take it as well.”
“But there isn’t any cellar.”
“There must be,” one of the students, his face chalk-white with dust, said with a calmness that shook my confidence. “You can tell from the way the floor’s raised.”
I took him to the storeroom to fetch the iron bars the valley folk used whenever they turned out together to repair the graveled road. At the entrance to the storeroom lay a neat pile of bark strippers. The team had abandoned the weapons in the front garden when they defected, and I’d gathered them together and left them there the morning after Takashi’s death. We dragged out a rust-covered bar from under the storeroom floor. Then, still not convinced of the possible existence of a cellar, I stood beside Paek in the doorway of the storehouse, watching as the young men pried up the floorboards. Rotten with age, the boards soon gave way, and the onlookers frequently had to turn aside to avoid fresh clouds of dust. Then suddenly a black mist of fine, damp dust, like the cloud of ink I’d seen ejected by an octopus in some movie of underwater life, arose from the back of the storehouse and slowly advanced toward us. We shrank before it, but could hear the young men levering the floorboards wider open still. When the dust finally settled and Paek and I went inside, we found a long gap running continuously from the alcove at the back of the room to the edge of the raised floor in the entrance. A young man’s innocently smiling face emerged from the opening. Calling to Paek in cheerful-sounding Korean, he handed him the worm-eaten front cover of a book.
“He says there’s a well-made stone cellar under the floor,” said Paek happily. “Did you really not know about it? There are a lot of wooden posts that make it difficult to move about, but it has two rooms, and the front one even has its own toilet and well. He says it’s full of books and old papers like this one. I wouldn’t be surprised if they once kept a lunatic or deserter down there.”
On the dirty cover he held in his hand I could read the title,
A Catechism of Government by the Three Inebriates
, and the words “published by Shuseisha, Tokyo.” Caught thoroughly off guard, I drifted away on waves of amazement. The shock forced up something inside me which rapidly expanded and finally assumed the form of a revelation. And it was the same revelation that lay behind my preoccupations
as I sat now in the cellar by night.
“There are lots of holes to let light in on the side where the stone wall is,” Paek went on, translating a report from another young man down in the cellar. “I suppose they’re undetectable from outside. Do you want to go in and have a look?”
I shook my head in silence, still drunk with my revelation, which was taking increasingly well-defined shape. The central core of it, the realization that after the 1860 rising great-grandfather’s brother had not in fact abandoned his fellows to their fate and set off through the forest in search of a new world, was already unshakable. Though he’d been unable to prevent the tragedy of their decapitation, he himself had carried out his own punishment. On the day of the final annihilation, he’d shut himself up in the cellar and there maintained his integrity as leader of the rising, albeit in a negative way, without ever going back on his beliefs. The various letters that had survived him must have been written in his hideout and handed to those who passed his meals down to him. He must have penned them in the intervals of reading, as he imagined to himself the kind of letters he would have sent if he could have spent his life in some other place, and progressed slowly from youthful dreams of high adventure to the sadder, more realistic visions of maturity. The absence of any sender’s address on the letters confirmed that the writer had never left his cellar. From great-grandfather’s side, too, contact had presumably been exclusively through letters. For a man living this life of voluntary imprisonment, for a man who pored for hours on end over printed matter thrust down to him in his cellar and whiled away his days in such flights of imagination as the invitation to study in America or the whaling episode off the Bonin Islands, more realistic questions would have been correspondingly remote. It must have been difficult for him to be sure, even, what perfectly ordinary, trivial events were taking place right next to his hideout. Down in his cellar he would have strained his ears to catch what was going on. And anxious about the safety of the soldier nephew whom he would probably never meet though they lived so close, he had written his message to those who lived in the world above: “I beg you, should a letter arrive, to let me know its purport with all haste.”
My head feverish with these new revelations, I was about to retire to the main house when quite unexpectedly Paek began to talk about the incident of the summer of 1945. The impulse must have overtaken him as he tried to fathom the real reason for my tense silence, which
was too marked to be accounted for by simple surprise at the discovery of the cellar.
“About the death of your brother in the Korean village after he came home from the army—no one can say for sure, you know, whether it was we or the Japanese who killed him. There was a great mix-up, both sides hitting each other with sticks; he came unarmed into the thick of it and stood stock-still with his arms at his sides till he was killed. In a sense, we and the Japanese killed him together. He was another rather special young man, you know!”