Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
“What kind of life are you leading at the moment?” he asked earnestly as though he perceived my uncertainty.
“As soon as my friend died I gave up my job at the university where we’d been working as lecturers. Apart from that there’s no special change.”
Since graduating from the literature department of the university, I’d been making a living mostly by translating accounts of people trapping wild animals and keeping them in captivity. One animal book in particular had gone into several editions, and the royalties
guaranteed a basic livelihood for my wife and myself. Admittedly, we relied on her father for the house where we were living, not to mention the expense of keeping the baby in an institution. I imagined, too, that since I’d given up my lecturing job my father-in-law had been shouldering any unexpected household expenses. At first I’d felt some objection to the idea of having the house bought for me but, particularly since my friend had hanged himself, I hardly cared how much my wife relied on her father.
“What about your inner life? There’s something wrong, isn’t there? I got a nasty shock when I saw you sprawled asleep on that dirty floor. When you woke up, too, your face and voice were somehow different from what they used to be. To put it bluntly, you’re headed downhill : you give the impression of being on the skids.”
“I admit my friend’s death took the stuffing out of me. There was the business of the baby as well,” I said in hesitant self-justification.
“Don’t you think it’s going on too long, though?” pressed Takashi. “If it lasts much longer your face will get set in that downhill look. In New York I met a Japanese philosophy student living the life of a dropout, a kind of social pariah. He’d gone to America to study Dewey’s successors, completely lost his faith in life, and that’s how he ended up. You remind me of him, Mitsu—your face, your voice, your whole physical and mental bearing. They’re exactly the same.”
“Your bodyguard told me I was a rat.”
“A rat? The philosopher’s nickname was ‘Rat,’ too,” Takashi said. “I don’t expect you believe me, do you?” he added with an awkward smile.
“I believe you,” I said, and flushed at the obvious self-pity that suffused my voice.
It was true, no doubt. I’d been getting ratlike, just like the philosopher who had lost his faith in life. Ever since the hundred minutes I spent at dawn in the pit intended for the septic tank, I’d been ruminating on the experience. I was perfectly aware that physically and mentally I was going downhill, that the slope I was on must surely lead to a place where the stench of death was even more intense. By now I’d quite clearly elucidated the significance of what had first shown itself as those unexplained aches, all apparently unconnected, in various parts of my body. Not that becoming conscious of their psychological nature had conquered them: on the contrary, the attacks had just become more frequent. Nor had I yet recovered
that ardent sense of expectation.
“You’ve got to start a new life, Mitsu,” repeated Takashi, stepping up the pressure.
“Yes, you should do as he says,” said my wife, surveying us evenly through eyes narrowed against the light as we stood side by side against the window. “Even I can see that.”
By now Momoko had decked herself out like a miniature Indian bride, all in leather, even down to the ornament in her hair. My wife had just finished helping her into the outfit and was walking toward us. At that moment she wasn’t particularly unattractive, even in the morning light.
“Naturally, I would like to start a new life,” I said seriously. “The point is, where am I to find my thatched hut?” I felt, quite literally, that I needed such a hut with its well-remembered scent of green thatch.
“Why not give up everything you’re doing in Tokyo and come to Shikoku with me? That wouldn’t be a bad way to start, Mitsu,” said Takashi, doing his best to tempt me even as he clearly showed his fear that I would reject the idea outright. “After all, that’s why I took a jet home.”
“Taka—if we’re going to Shikoku, let’s go by car!” put in the youth. “It’ll take the three of us easily even with our luggage inside, and one of us could sleep in the back on the way. I bought a beaten-up old Citroen in case we went.”
“Hoshi’s been living and working at an auto repair place for the last two years,” volunteered Momoko. “He bought the old Citroen—it wasn’t much better than scrap—and fixed it up to make it more or less drivable. All by himself too!”
The young man’s cheeks and the skin round his eyes flushed to an almost indecent degree.
“I’ve already given in my notice at the shop,” he said with an extraordinarily naive air of excitement. “I told the manager the day that Taka’s letter arrived and Momoko came to tell me about it.”
Takashi, despite his embarrassment as he listened to this, had a certain childlike expression of satisfaction.
“They’re a useless crowd,” he said. “Never use their heads.”
“Give me some more practical details about this new life in Shikoku,” I said. “I don’t suppose you intend to set to work in the fields as our ancestors did?”
“Taka acted as interpreter for a group of Japanese tourists when they went round a supermarket in America,” Momoko said. “One of them was interested when he heard Taka’s surname. They got to talking and it seems he owns a chain of supermarkets in Shikoku. He’s terribly rich, by now he controls all your part of the country, and it turns out he’s set his heart on buying the storehouse at the place where you were born. He plans to have the whole building transported to Tokyo and make it into a restaurant serving country cooking.”
“In short,” my brother went on, “a local
nouveau riche
has turned up to take that dilapidated old wooden monstrosity off our hands. So if you agree to selling it, I think we ought to go and supervise the dismantling. Besides, I’d like a chance to ask around in the village about the true facts of the affair of great-grandfather and his younger brother. That’s another reason why I came back from America.”
I was not to be convinced in a hurry of the practicability of his plan. Even supposing he’d suddenly found in himself hidden talents as a businessman, he seemed unlikely to succeed in selling a run-down building to a man who, as proprietor of a supermarket chain, was presumably as up-to-date as anyone in his ideas. A restaurant serving country food? But the place didn’t have the kind of charm required; it was a storehouse dating back a good hundred years. What impressed me more than such talk was the interest with which Takashi still pursued the truth about our great-grandfather and his younger brother. One day, at a time when the family, though still living in the village in the valley, was on the verge of breaking up, my brother had caught wind of the scandal involving our family a century or so earlier.
“Great-grandfather killed his younger brother to settle the trouble in the village,” Takashi had said, repeating what he’d heard in a horrified voice. “And he ate a piece of the flesh from his brother’s thigh. He did it to prove to the clan officials that he had no connection with the trouble his brother had stirred up.”
I myself had no accurate information about the incident. Particularly during the war, the village adults gave the impression of shunning all mention of the affair, and our family too had tried to pretend the ugly rumor didn’t in fact exist. Even so, in order to counter his horror I’d told Takashi another, different rumor that I remembered having once been told in private.
“That isn’t true,” I’d said. “After the trouble, great-grandfather helped his brother get away through the forest and escape to Kochi. He went by sea to Tokyo, where he changed his name and did rather well for himself. A number of letters from him came for great-grandfather around the time of the Meiji Restoration. Great-grandfather kept quiet about it to the end, so people had to make up the kind of lies you heard. The reason he kept quiet was that a lot of people from the village had been killed through his brother’s fault, and he wanted to avoid arousing their families’ anger. . . .”
“Anyway, let’s go back to my place,” I proposed, recalling with nostalgia the enormous influence I’d wielded over my younger brother for a period of several years just after the war. “We can consider the plans for a new life when we get there.”
“All right. Since it means that the family storehouse will disappear from the village in the valley where it’s stood for a hundred years, it won’t do any harm to talk it over in a leisurely way.”
“If you two go by taxi, I’ll follow with Taka and Momoko in my car,” said the young man in a sharp maneuver to push my wife and me outside their tight little circle.
“I’d like to have just one drink before we get in the car,” said my wife, who by now had dropped any lingering wariness toward her brother-in-law. She poked regretfully with the toe of her shoe at the empty bottle where it lay on its side on the floor.
“I’ve got a bottle of tax-free bourbon I bought in the airport,” said my brother, promptly coming to the rescue.
“Have you taken up drinking again, then?” I ventured, secretly hoping to achieve a little iconoclasm where my brother’s bodyguards were concerned.
“If I’d ever been really drunk in America, I would almost certainly have got beaten to death in some dark corner. You know what I’m like when I’m drunk, don’t you, Mitsu?” He pulled a bottle of whisky out of his bag. “I bought this for my new sister-in-law.”
“You seem to have got to understand each other pretty thoroughly while I was asleep.”
“We had quite a long time for it. Do you always spend so long over your unpleasant dreams?” said Takashi, heavily countering my own sarcasm.
“Did I say anything while I was asleep?” I asked, again profoundly disturbed.
“Don’t worry,
I
don’t think you would callously abandon people to their fate. Nobody thinks so,” he said, taking pity on my distress. “You’re different from great-grandfather—not the kind to do anything really terrible to other people.”
Seeing my wife drink a mouthful of bourbon straight from the bottle, I took the bottle from her and had a swig myself in order to hide my embarrassment.
“OK! Off we go to Hoshi’s Citroen!” Bubbling over with happiness, brave in her leather Indian outfit, Momoko gave the command and we, the reunited family, set off. Trailing along at the rear in my capacity as the eldest there, the one with the ratty, downhill appearance, I had a presentiment that in the end I would let myself be pushed into going along with Takashi’s extremely shaky plan. For the moment, I’d lost the sheer toughness needed for a confrontation with him. As the thought occurred to me, the warmth from the gulp of whisky suddenly promised to link up with a sense of expectation in the inner depths of my body. But when I tried to focus on it I was hindered by the sober good sense that sees so many perils in any attempt to achieve rebirth through self-release.
Mighty Forest
I
N
the very heart of the forest the bus halted without warning as though the engine had stalled. My wife was asleep in the back seat, wrapped in blankets from chest to toes, and as I stopped her mummylike form from rolling forward and restored her to her original position, I was suddenly afraid of the possible effects of this unnatural interruption of her slumber. The obstacle ahead of the bus was a young peasant woman with a large bundle on her back and something crouched perfectly still, like an animal, at her feet. Staring, I saw that it was a child squatting facing in the opposite direction. I could clearly distinguish the small, naked buttocks and, an unnaturally pale yellow against the dark setting of the forest, the small pile of excrement.
The forest road, hemmed in on both sides by close ranks of huge evergreens, fell gradually away from the front of the bus, and the woman and the child at her feet appeared to float about a foot above the ground. Without realizing it, I’d leaned the left half of my body out of the window as I watched. With a vague sense of fear, I was readying myself for some nameless, terrifying thing to come leaping upon us from behind the sunken boulders that my sightless right eye interposed darkly in my field of vision. The child’s evacuation dragged on pitifully. I sympathized with him, was overcome by the same need to hurry, the same fright and shame.
Above the forest road a narrow strip of wintry sky, walled in by the dense, dark foliage of evergreens as though it lay at the bottom of a deep ditch, stretched over our heads where we had halted. Slowly the afternoon sky sank toward us, fading as it came like a stream that changes color as it flows. At night, I told myself, the sky would close in on the vast forest as tightly as the shell of the abalone enfolds its flesh; the thought aroused claustrophobic feelings. Born and bred in the
depths of this forest, I still couldn’t escape the same stifling sensation whenever I passed through it on the way to our valley. At the core of that sensation lay emotions inherited from those long-perished ancestors who, driven on endlessly by the mighty Chosokabe, had plunged deeper and deeper into the forest until, coming upon a spindle-shaped hollow that had resisted its encroachment, they settled there; it had a spring of wholesome water. My suffocating sensation was still charged with the same feelings that inspired the leader of those fugitives, the “first man” of our family line, as he plunged into the menacing shadows of the forest in search of the hollow he saw in his imagination. The Chosokabe is a creature of terrifying size that exists everywhere in time and space. My grandmother would use it to threaten me whenever I questioned her authority. “The Chosokabe will come from the forest and get you!” she would say, and the sound of her words would bring home not only to the infant but to herself, old woman of eighty that she was, the ever-present reality of the monstrous creature that still lived in the same age as ourselves. . . .
The bus had been traveling for five hours since leaving its base in the provincial town. At the fork where the road went over the hills, all the passengers except my wife and me transferred to another bus that descended around the edge of the forest to the sea. The road that runs from the town, plunges into the densest part of the forest, comes to our hollow, then runs on downward beside the river flowing from the valley to rejoin the bus route that branches off earlier toward the sea, is gradually falling into disrepair. The thought that this road we were traversing through the heart of the forest was slowly decaying struck home with a dull, unpleasant shock somewhere at the back of my mind. A rat obsessed with a dying road, I felt the eye of the forest staring at me from among cedars, pines, and several species of cypress, all of a green so murky that one perceived it almost as black.