Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
“Yes, you told the truth,” I admitted meekly beneath the gaze of the same family spirits who earlier had gazed on Takashi at his death, keenly aware as I did so of my own utter wretchedness. I felt an extraordinary sense of inadequacy, a sense that like the cold seemed to grow steadily deeper. In a half-masochistic, half-despairing frame of mind, I ventured a pathetic little whistle summoning the Chosokabe to come and destroy the storehouse and bury me alive beneath it. But of course nothing happened. I spent several hours in utter prostration, shivering like a wet dog. Eventually, the gap in the floorboards above me and the half-blocked secret windows at the side grew white.
The wind had dropped by now. Oppressed by a desire to urinate, I struggled up on frozen legs and thrust my head up through the floor. The forest that occupied almost all the space where the wall had been knocked down was still dark and mist-shrouded, with only the narrowest halo of purple reflecting the dawn, but up in the top right-hand corner of the hole the flame-red sky itself was visible. I’d seen the same flaming red on the backs of the dogwood leaves that daybreak as I lurked in my pit in the garden. It had summoned up memories of the painting of hell back here in the hollow, and impressed me as a kind of signal. The meaning of that signal, uncertain then, was readily understandable now. The “tender” red of the painting was essentially the color of self-consolation, the color of people who strove to go on quietly living their murkier, less stable, and vaguer everyday lives rather than face the threat of those terrifying souls who tackled their own hell head-on. Ultimately, I felt sure great-grandfather had commissioned the hell picture for the repose of his own soul. And the only people who had drawn consolation from it were those of his descendants who, like grandfather and myself, lived out their lives in vague apprehension, unwilling to allow the urgent inner demand for sudden, unscheduled leaps forward to grow to the point where action was necessary.
In the pale darkness just outside the entrance where several layers of doors had been, a dim figure stood gazing down at my head, which from there must have looked like a melon lying on the floor. The figure stirred. It was my wife. How does one offer casual greetings, how does one behave in a normal, everyday manner when discovered with one’s head poking out of a crack in the floor, staring at a patch of red in the morning sky? Petrified with embarrassment as though my head had literally become a melon, I could only gaze up at her.
“Hello, Mitsu,” she said, addressing me in a voice hard-edged with tension yet controlled so as to moderate my alarm at being taken unawares.
“Hello,” I said. “Don’t worry—I may have startled you, but I’m not mad.”
“I’ve known for some time that it’s your habit to go underground to think. You did it once in Tokyo, didn’t you?”
“I always thought you were asleep that morning,” I said, mortification adding to the burden of fatigue.
“I kept an eye on you from the kitchen window,” she said, “until
the milkman came and I was sure you’d be restored to life above ground. I was afraid something nasty might happen,” she added reminiscently. Then, as I stayed silent, she went on in a more energetic voice as though to encourage us both :
“Mitsu—wouldn’t it be possible for us to have another try together? Couldn’t we make a new start, bringing up the two babies together, the one in the institution and the one that’s not yet born? I’ve thought about it for a long time, and decided on my own that that’s what I want. I came to ask you whether it was totally impossible or not. And seeing you were down there thinking, I thought I’d better put it off till you came out of your own accord. So I’ve been waiting here. For me, it was more frightening than that time in the pit in the back garden. I was afraid the wind might bring the storehouse down—it’s so unsteady with the wall knocked out—and I was terrified when I heard whistling coming out of the depths! But I went on waiting, because I didn’t feel I had any right to fetch you out.”
She spoke slowly. Already she was pressing her hands to the sides of her belly in the cautious way of pregnant women; it gave the black silhouette of her body, even standing, a spindle-shaped stability, but I could see it trembling with suppressed tension. She stopped speaking and wept silently for a while.
“Let’s try. I’ll take on the English teaching job,” I said, breathing out heavily and using what little air remained in my lungs in an attempt to sound offhand. Nevertheless, the regret in my voice was obvious enough to set my own ears burning.
“No, Mitsu. I’m going to take the two children to stay with my family while you’re working in Africa. Why don’t you cable the expedition office? I think the need to oppose Taka has always made you deliberately reject the things that resembled him in you. But Taka’s dead, Mitsu, so you should be fairer to yourself. Now you’ve seen that the ties between your great-grandfather’s brother and Taka weren’t just an illusion created by Taka, why don’t you try to find out what you share with them yourself? It’s even more important to do so now, isn’t it, if you want to keep your memory of Taka straight?”
It occurred to me with wry self-derision that working as an interpreter in Africa wasn’t going to solve everything, but the feeling wasn’t strong enough to make me argue. My voice betrayed my inner uneasiness, but all I said was:
“If we fetch the baby back from the institution, do you think we can
get him to adapt to life with us ?”
“I was thinking about that for ages last night, Mitsu, and I began to feel that if only we have the courage we can make a start on it at least,” she said in a voice pathetic in its obvious physical and spiritual exhaustion. Afraid she might faint and fall, I wriggled and kicked down with my feet, struggling to haul myself up onto the floor as quickly as possible. But I got stuck, and it was a long time before I finally scrambled up to ground level. Then, as I walked toward her, I heard a voice inside me reciting quite simply what Takashi’s bodyguards had said when they announced their plan to get married: “Now that we don’t have Taka, we’ll have to manage by ourselves.” And I had no mind to squash the voice into silence.
“I made a kind of bet with myself—that if only you came out of there safely you’d accept my suggestion. I was on tenterhooks all night long,” she said in a tearful, naively apprehensive voice, and trembled more violently than ever.
One day soon after, my wife, who was wary of traveling in case it affected the unborn baby, made up her mind to cross the bridge, on which repair work had already started, and leave the hollow. That morning, a man came from the valley to say good-bye to us, bringing with him a newly made wooden mask. It represented a human face like a split pomegranate, and the closed eyes were studded with countless nails. The man was the tatami maker who had once absconded from the valley and had been summoned back from the town to help revive the Nembutsu dance that summer. Now he was working again, making mats for the valley assembly hall, which was due to be restored with funds specially allotted at the time of the merger, and for various other places where jobs had been found for him. And at the same time he was planning different costumes for each of the “spirits” Li the dance. We presented him with the jacket and trousers that Takashi had had on when he came back from America, for use by the performer who wore the mask of Takashi’s “spirit.”
“Lots of young fellows have said they want to come down from the forest in this mask,” the tatami maker said proudly. “They’re already arguing about it among themselves.”
We passed through the forest, my wife and the unborn baby and I, as we left the hollow in which, in all probability, we would never set foot again. As a “spirit,” Takashi’s memory was the common property of the valley; there was no need for us to tend his grave.
The work awaiting me away from the hollow, in the days while Natsumi tried to bring our newly reclaimed son back into our world and simultaneously prepared for the birth of the other child, would mean a life of sweat and grime in Africa. Shouting commands in Swahili from beneath my sun helmet, typing English day and night, I would be too busy to consider what was going on inside me. As chief interpreter for the expedition, I could hardly persuade myself that an elephant with “Expectation” painted on its huge gray belly would come lumbering out before my eyes as we lay in wait among the grass of the plains, but now that I’d accepted the job there were moments when I felt that, at any rate, it was the beginning of a new life. It would be easy there, at least, to build myself that thatched hut.
BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB
Waguih Ghali
Born and brought up in Cairo, Waguih Ghali spent much of his adult life in Europe. His stay in London and his suicide in 1969 were described in
After a Funeral
, by Diana Athill.
Beer in the Snooker Club
is his only novel. First published in 1964, it is a classic of migrant literature. Known and loved by readers and writers since first publication, it is now a Serpent’s
Tail Classic, with a new foreword by Diana Athill.
‘Beer in the Snooker Club
is one of the best novels about Egypt ever written. In the protagonist, Ram, a passionate nationalist who is nonetheless an anglophile, Waguih Ghali creates a hero who is tragic, funny and sympathetic. Through him we are presented with an authentic and acutely observed account of Egyptian society at a time of great upheaval’
Ahdaf Soueif
‘This is a wonderful book. It makes
The Alexandria Quartet
look like the travel brochure it is’ Gabriel Josipovici
THE PIANO TEACHER
Elfriede Jelinek
A haunting tale of morbid voyeurism and masochism,
The Piano Teacher
is one of the greatest contemporary European novels. Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. But by night she trawls the porn shows of Vienna while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her. Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies’ man, Walter Klemmer. With Walter as her student, Erika spirals out of control, consumed by the ecstacy of self-destruction. First published in 1983,
The Piano Teacher
is Elfriede Jelinek’s masterpiece. Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. In 2004 Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Michael Haneke’s
film won the three major prizes at Cannes in 2000.
‘In this demented love story the hunter is the hunted, pain is pleasure, and spite and self-contempt seep from every pore’
Guardian
‘With extraordinary linguistic zeal
The Piano Teacher
reveals the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power’ The Nobel
Prize Academy
A LESSON BEFORE DYING
Ernest. J. Gaines
In the tradition of Harper Lee’s
To Kill A Mockingbird
and Toni Morrison’s
Beloved, A Lesson Before Dying
is a richly compassionate and deeply moving novel. In a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, a young black man named Jefferson witnesses a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed. The only survivor, he is accused of murder and sentenced to death. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it is now published as a
Serpent’s Tail Classic, with a new introduction by Attica Locke.
Ernest J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. His novels include
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Of Love and Dust, Catherine Carmier, Bloodline, A Gathering of Old Men
and
In My Father’s House
. He lives in Louisiana.
‘Ernest J. Gaines has created a powerful and loving portrait…
A transcendent and heartfelt novel of redemption’
Guardian
‘Like the best country songs, straight and true, unafraid of sentiment’
Independent
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