Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
Paek stopped and watched for my reaction. I said nothing, but nodded as though to say, “Yes, I suppose you’re right. S was that kind of man,” and went into the main house, closing the door to shut out the dust that came after me. In a strained voice, I heard myself call “Taka!” into the gloom surrounding the open fireplace, but realized at once that Takashi was dead, and regretted his absence more keenly than at any time since he killed himself. It was he, more than anyone else, who deserved to hear the new facts about the storehouse. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, my wife’s puffy face, an almost perfect circle, gradually floated into view. She was watching me doubtfully.
“There’s a cellar under the storehouse,” I announced. “It seems great-grandfather’s brother was holed up there all the time, doing penance as leader of the rising that failed. . . . Taka died feeling ashamed for both great-grandfather’s brother and himself, but great-grandfather’s brother led a very different life from what we imagined. I only just found out. There was nothing for Taka to be particularly ashamed about, at least where his ancestor was concerned.” I spoke urgently, more and more convinced of the truth of what I said.
“But it was
you
who let Taka feel ashamed as he stood at the brink of death!” she shouted.
“You
who left him prey to his sense of disgrace. What’s the use of that kind of talk now?”
Bemused by my new discovery, I’d been hoping for some wifely words of consolation; it hadn’t occurred to me that she would choose that moment to turn on me instead. I found myself paralyzed, trapped between the effects of the discovery and her undisguised hostility.
“I don’t believe you actually drove him to suicide, but I do think you imposed on him the most beastly and shameful kind of death,” she went on with mounting intensity. “You kept shoving him down into his shame, till finally that wretched kind of death was the only possibility
left. Once he’d decided to die, I’m sure it was on you that he pinned his last hope of conquering his fear. But you refused the offer of his eyes, didn’t you? Even when he all but went on his knees and begged you to tell him why you hated him, you wouldn’t say, ‘I don’t hate you.’ No, you had to sneer at him and make him feel twice as ashamed as before. You deserted him, so that he had no choice but to shoot his face to shreds in that ghastly, pitiful way. And now that he’s dead and it can’t be undone, you start saying he needn’t have been ‘particularly ashamed’ about great-grandfather’s brother! Just to have known about the man, even if it didn’t show Taka a way to go on living, might at least have given him spiritual strength on that last day, in the moments before he killed himself. If you had told him then what you’re trying so smugly to get through to him now that he’s dead, his suicide needn’t have been so horrible!”
“The facts I’ve just told you weren’t discovered until the Emperor started his survey of the storehouse. That night, such a thing would have seemed impossible. But it’s quite clear now—great-grandfather’s brother shut himself up under the storehouse and lived there in isolation until his death.”
“Mitsu—now that Taka’s dead, what difference does it make to him what you didn’t know, or what you know now? You thrust people aside and leave them to die without hope, but all you can do to make up for it is cry out ‘I deserted you!’ in your dreams or weep tears of self-consolation. Now, just as in the past, and in future, and forever! New discoveries may renew your own tears, but they won’t console
them
for dying so horribly and in such despair!”
I gave up, and contented myself with watching her eyes, which were so rigid with hatred that the wrinkles about them looked like folds of stiff glue. I hadn’t told her about Takashi’s confession of incest. Even if I had, she would only have pointed out quite justifiably that if, after hearing his confession, I’d told him he had already made adequate amends by living so many years in the painful shadow of “the truth,” it would have alleviated to some extent the horror of his suicide.
Her eyes remained fixed on me, but the wrathful aura faded and, without losing the glint of hatred, they acquired a new shadow of sadness.
“But now,” she said, “anything new that shows he needn’t have killed himself in such a ghastly way only makes it all the more
horrible.” And she burst into a flood of tears, as though the hard shell of hatred had broken to release the yolk of grief within. After a while she recovered and unhesitatingly, with the obvious assumption that I’d already inferred the truth, said, “I’ve been debating for the past two weeks whether or not to have an abortion, but now I’ve decided to have Taka’s child. I can’t bring myself to permit yet another cruelty where he’s concerned.”
She turned away to face the still deeper gloom at the back of the room and drew a shutter down on herself, obviously determined to reject any response that went against her decision. I gazed at her broad-based back as she sat—the newly expectant mother—with the weight of her body resting firmly on her heels; something about it had the same air of absolute physical and mental equilibrium as when she was pregnant with my own child. And I understood her resolve to give birth to the child in her womb, to Takashi’s child: understood it with the same physical immediacy as one might a lump of rock lying before one’s eyes. The understanding settled firmly in my mind without creating the slightest emotional disturbance.
Going out into the garden again, I found the Emperor standing, legs braced apart, in the doorway of the storehouse, giving loud directions in Korean to those inside, while the watching children formed a tight, intent circle behind his, back. None of them paid any attention to me. I decided to visit the temple and tell the young priest of the discovery of the cellar and the revelation it had inspired in me, so I set off alone down toward the valley, walking rapidly in the teeth of a gusty, dust-laden breeze. While reading the “Account of the Farmers’ Rising in Okubo Village” given me by the priest, I’d come across a rather peculiar passage. The discovery of the cellar had abruptly thrown that passage into vivid relief, and it lay now at the very heart of my revelation, convincing me that great-grandfather’s brother had, in fact, lived in voluntary confinement in the storehouse.
Grandfather’s booklet was a collection, with commentary and notes, of various accounts of the 1871 disturbances as seen by the authorities and the ordinary citizen.
The incident—the booklet said—is usually referred to as the
“Okubo Disturbances.”
The inhabitants of Okubo cut down a large bamboo grove and made spears for everybody.
The cause of the disturbances lay in dislike of the new government, more particularly its compulsory smallpox vaccination and the word “blood tax” used in the official notification to refer to military service, which led to a rumor that blood was to be taken from the public for sale to foreigners. This rumor caused public alarm resulting in the rising.
No investigation was made of the ringleaders and others concerned in the rising, and no one was punished.
The passage giving the authorities’ account of the disturbances was as follows:
The order promulgated in July, 1871, abolishing the clans and establishing prefectures aroused opposition among the conservative-minded inhabitants of Okubo village, and in early August reports came that a conspiracy was afoot to resist the measures. An official was promptly dispatched to explain the measure, but they refused to be convinced. Inciting other villages to join them, the inhabitants assembled on the dry riverbed north of Ohama castle (one mile from the prefectural office) on the evening of the same day. Disaffection spread steadily until more than seventy villages were involved. By the 12th of the same month, the mob had reached nearly forty thousand. They occupied themselves firing their guns into the air, raising battle cries, and fabricating baseless rumors. Very soon they poured into Ohama, armed with bamboo spears and pistols, and took over the streets. The rumors they spread claimed that the former governor’s return to Tokyo was entirely engineered by the Chief Councillor, that the census was aimed at getting blood from the public and vaccination a ruse to poison the government’s opponents, and other fabrications too numerous to mention. Their behavior grew steadily wilder. The crowd stayed where it was, without presenting any demands, until the prefectural office was virtually under siege. The officials sent out to calm them eventually met the chief representative of the troublemakers, who insisted that the former governor should not go back to Tokyo, that the pre-Restoration form
of government should be restored, that the present officials should be dismissed, and that the former administration should be reinstated in their place. On the 13th, when it seemed they were about to launch an assault on the prefectural office, it was decided to use troops to keep them in check; this made them hesitate, and the assault never took place. The prefectural assembly, however, was thrown into disorder. Its previous decision was reversed, many now opposing suppression by force, and it was decided to summon a number of pre-Restoration officials to take charge of the situation. On the 15th, the former governor appeared personally to reason with the mob, but still they refused to disband. At dusk that day the Chief Councillor suddenly left the prefectural office, and shortly afterward word came that he had taken his own life at his home.
The rioters were much moved on hearing this report. The crowd began gradually to disperse. By the afternoon of the 16th the situation was in hand, and the officials sent to deal with the affair were able without exception to return to the prefectural office.
The other account, written from the common man’s point of view, treated the disturbances less as history than as a rather romantic tale. The leader who figured in it—the man who negotiated with the authorities as “chief representative”—was described as “a large man of unknown origins, easily six feet tall and with bushy hair.” Another passage said: “The strange man with long hair often mentioned in this account was a quite extraordinary creature : large in build, standing over six feet tall, with bent back and deathly pale countenance. Yet despite the oddity of his appearance he astonished all with the eloquence of his tongue and his outstanding ability in everything he did.” As for the unlikelihood of participants in a rising within such a small provincial community having no idea who their leader was, grandfather contented himself with adding the following, extremely implausible footnote: “Most of the participants had blackened their faces with soot, so that it was impossible to tell one man from the other.
Ed
.” He thus failed completely to elucidate the question, which he himself had raised, of exactly who the “extraordinary creature” was. The final passage relating to the stranger read: “Following the report
of the disbanding of the dissidents at the entrance to Okubo village on the 16th, their ringleader disappeared as though wiped off the face of the earth.” After this came silence.
The outstanding qualities of leadership in the big man with bent back and pale face were already apparent in the skill with which he had the prefectural office surrounded—thereby putting pressure on the foe without ever provoking the army into action—and maintained a delicate balance of power between people and authorities until the course of debate in the assembly finally changed. But grandfather also had this to say in his praise: “What is most remarkable, looking back on the disturbances, is that not a man should have suffered a scratch. It argues extraordinary powers of leadership that he should have staged such a mighty upheaval without getting a single man injured.”
So my “revelation” became in turn a conviction that the tall man with stooping shoulders and ashen face was great-grandfather’s younger brother, suddenly reappearing above ground after ten years spent in solitary meditation on the rising of 1860. He’d invested everything won during more than ten long years of self-criticism in a second and successful rising utterly different from the first. The first rising had been bloody and doubtful in its achievement. In the second, no one was killed or injured either among the rioters or the bystanders. In effect it drove the Chief Councillor, the target of attack, to suicide. And all the rioters, moreover, got away scot-free.
In the main hall of the temple, where the picture of hell that I’d come to see with Takashi and my wife still hung on the wall, I told the young priest what I felt, and in the process convinced myself still more strongly of its truth.
“Is it likely that the farmers at that period of change, when the wounds of the 1860 rising had made them so suspicious, would entrust the leadership of their new cause to some stranger of unknown origin ? I doubt it. The thing that moved them to act was undoubtedly the reappearance of a ‘specialist’ in risings—in other words, the legendary leader of the 1860 affair. Judging from the actual outcome, the central aim of the 1871 rising was the political one of removing the Chief Councillor from office. That almost certainly means that someone had concluded this was absolutely necessary if living conditions were to be improved for the farmers. But such an abstract idea wouldn’t have been enough in itself to stir up the peasants. So the
recluse in the cellar, who’d been reading the latest publications, took advantage of the vaccinations and the ambiguity of the term ‘blood tax’—though he himself was quite free of any misconceptions—to incite the local inhabitants and organize the disturbances that ended in the defeat of the Chief Councillor sent by the new government. That done, he went back to his cellar and disappeared for good, spending his last twenty years or so in deliberate isolation. That’s what I believe. Takashi and I were always trying to find out what kind of man great-grandfather’s brother became after the 1860 rising, but we never discovered anything substantial, the reason being that we were chasing a phantom—the man who got away through the forest.”
The priest, who had maintained his smile throughout my long discourse, his small, eminently decent face flushed a bright red, made no immediate move either to affirm or to deny what I’d said. His own undisguised elation during the days of the “rising” still bothered him when he was with me, and he contrived an almost exaggerated composure toward my own excitement now. After a while, however, he came up with an idea that corroborated my theory.