Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
I saw the peasant woman, the upper part of her body dragged backward by her load so that only her head was bent forward, moving her lips in vigorous speech. The child straightened up, slowly pulled up his trousers and, looking down as he did so at his own waste, made to touch it with the tip of his shoe. Without warning, the woman boxed his ear. Then, prodding him roughly before her while he protected his head with both hands, she made her way round to the side of the bus. Taking its new passengers on board, the bus set off once more through the menacing silence of the forest. Woman and child came
determinedly to the back of the bus and took the seat directly in front of ours. The mother sat down by the window and the child sat sideways, lolling over the wooden armrest next to the aisle, so that the shaven head and the little pallid face in profile forced themselves on our gaze. With bloodshot eyes, red like plums, in which the traces of intoxication still lingered, my wife took note of the child. I too found my eyes drawn irresistibly and with loathing toward him. His head and the color of his skin were such as to bring back our worst memories. I was sure that the head and the bloodless pallor of the skin were loaded with insidious stimuli to the things that already saturated her inner being, ready to crystallize at the slightest provocation. They were a direct evocation of the day when our baby had been operated on for the thing on his head.
My wife and I had been waiting that morning in front of the patients’ elevator on the same floor as the operating theater. Eventually the outer doors had opened to announce the arrival of the iron cage of the elevator, but the second set of doors on the green wire-netting cage inside resisted the nurse’s efforts and refused to open.
“Baby doesn’t want to be operated on,” said my wife, peering through the wire even as she recoiled in horror as though tempted to run away.
Through the green wire mesh, in a dim, greenish light like sunlight filtering through summer foliage, we saw the baby’s head, shaven like a criminal’s, as he lay on the castered bed from the children’s ward. His tight-shut eyes were slits in skin that was whitish and dead-looking as though powdered. Standing on tiptoe, I could see on the far side of the head, in total contrast to its look of debility and uneasy tension, the orange-colored excrescence bulging with blood and spinal fluid, a living thing in vigorous yet mindless association with the baby’s head. The lump was awe-inspiring, a vivid witness to the presence of some grotesque power harbored within yet uncontrollable by the self. Might not we too—the pair who had given birth to this baby and to this growth filled with a power beyond his control—awaken one morning to find similar excrescences, crying out with life, protruding from our heads, while the spinal fluid metabolized rapidly and in great quantities between the lumps and all the organs associated with our souls? Might not we in our turn proceed to the operating theater, feeling with our shaven heads like brute criminals ? … The nurse gave the wire-mesh door a determined kick. The jolt made the
baby open his mouth wide, all toothless and dark red like a wound, and start to cry. At that time, he still had the ability to express himself by crying.
“I feel as though the doctor’s going to come along and say, ‘Well, here’s your baby back,’ and present us with the amputated growth,” said my wife as the nurse bore off the baby’s bed through countless doors to the operating theater.
Her words brought home to me that both of us, she as much as myself, had felt a more positive reality in the swollen orange excrescence than in the pale, limp-limbed baby lying there with closed eyes.
The operation went on for ten hours. As we waited exhausted for it to end, I—not my wife—was summoned three times to the operating theater to give blood transfusions. The last time, the sight of the baby’s head all besmeared with his own blood and mine made me feel that he was being cooked in some bubbling mess of broth. So weakened were my mental faculties by loss of blood that an odd equation formulated itself in my mind : the removal of the baby’s lump was equal to the physical amputation of some part of my own body. I actually felt a sharp pain deep down inside me and had to struggle with an urge to demand of the doctors, so doggedly continuing the operation, “Are you sure you’re not robbing me and my son of something really vital?”
Eventually the baby came back to us, a creature no longer capable of any human reaction apart from gazing back at one with placid brown eyes, and I felt that I too had had a whole group of nerves cut away, thereby acquiring a profound insensitivity as a new characteristic. Nor was the loss apparent only in the baby himself and me; if anything, it was still more directly visible in my wife.
As the bus had plunged into the forest she had fallen silent, drinking whisky steadily from a pocket flask. Her behavior, I knew, would spread a ripple of scandal among the respectable provincials riding the bus, but I had no desire to stop her. Before going to sleep, however, she’d determined that she should be sober to begin the new life in the village in the valley, and had thrown the remainder of the whisky, flask and all, well back among the trees. I’d hoped that the moment of intoxication then leading her into sleep would be the last of its kind. Now, though, feeling beside me the hot reality of her eyes, still bloodshot with sleep, fixed rigidly on the peasant boy’s head, I abandoned any overoptimistic expectation that she would really start the new life sober. My one wish was to prevent an acute revival, here and now,
of the dangerous emotional state associated with the baby’s tumor. But it was increasingly borne in on me that this wish wasn’t to be granted either. I keenly regretted the whisky she’d thrown away.
The conductress advanced toward the rear of the bus with her stomach thrust forward to preserve her balance. The young peasant woman ignored her and scowled forbiddingly, gazing out of the window. The child made no response to the conductress either, but I could tell, having had him under constant observation, that he was getting steadily tenser and tenser. It looked as though they had come and sat in the seat by ours in order to avoid the conductress.
“Tickets,” prompted the conductress. For a while the woman ignored the appeal, then suddenly broke into voluble speech. She attacked the conductress for demanding the prescribed fare for the whole run from the top of the hill down to the valley; she and the child had already walked two-thirds of the distance from the top; if the child hadn’t complained of bellyache (at this point she poked at the child’s shoulder as he clung to the wooden armrest), they could have walked all the way back. The conductress explained that the distance from the top down to the valley had recently been made the new minimum fare. It was a new policy of the bus company’s necessitated by poor returns on this route—another sign, I told myself, of the decay of the road through the forest. The conductress’s logic seemed temporarily to overwhelm the young countrywoman. But then there appeared on her ruddy plebeian face, hitherto so aflame with indignation, a reaction that struck me with mingled surprise and amusement. With a little giggle, she declared in a self-assured tone :
“Ain’t got no money.”
The boy was of course as pale and tense as ever. The conductress hesitated for a moment then, once more the helpless countrygirl, went to discuss the matter with the driver. It occurred to me that I might take advantage of the peasant woman’s odd little giggle as a first step to releasing the tension in my wife. I looked round at her and smiled, but saw that her neck and the lower part of her face were covered with goose pimples, even though the eyes fixed on the boy’s head gleamed with a feverish light. Seeing trouble in the offing, I hesitated, at a loss. Annoyance jumped about inside me with the aimless frenzy of a firecracker: why hadn’t I stopped her from throwing away the whisky bottle ? In desperation I took the plunge and made a choice.
“Let’s get off,” I said. “Taka will probably be at the bus stop to meet
us, so we can ask the conductress to tell him to come and pick us up in the car.”
My wife looked at me doubtfully and inclined her head slowly, a diver moving against water pressure in the depths of fear. I could sense her mind teetering between the fear within herself and fear of being deserted by the bus in the heart of the forest.
Realizing that I wanted somehow to persuade her before terror of the forest as such grew and pinned her to her seat in the bus, I had to admit that, of the two of us, it was I who was frantically trying to flee from the phantom of the baby evoked by the peasant boy’s shaven head and sickly skin.
“What if the telegram hasn’t arrived and Taka and the others aren’t there to meet us?”
“Even if we have to walk we can get down to the valley by nightfall. The kid was going to walk, wasn’t he?”
“Then I’d like to get off,” she said with an air of liberation mingled with an indefinable lingering apprehension that made me feel both relief and pity.
I signaled to the conductress, who was talking busily to the driver, all the while keeping a self-consciously vigilant eye on the moneyless peasant woman and her son.
“My brother should be waiting for us at the bus stop in the valley,” I said. “Would you give him our baggage and tell him to come to meet us in the car, please? We’re going to walk from here.” Under the stare of the conductress, in whose eyes a dull cloud of surprise had begun to form, I realized with consternation that I hadn’t thought up any pretext for our action that would seem reasonable to an outsider.
“I’m suffering from motion sickness,” said my wife, quickly sensing my predicament. But the conductress still looked dubious—or rather, went on chewing over what I’d just said, trying to understand.
“The bus doesn’t go into the valley,” she said. “The bridge was washed away in the flood.”
“Flood? In winter?”
“It was washed away in the summer.”
“Has it been left like that ever since?”
“The new bus stop is on this side of the bridge. The bus goes as far as that.”
“Then my brother will be waiting there,” I said. “The name’s Nedokoro.” But I wondered why they should have neglected until
winter a bridge destroyed by summer floods.
“I know him, he came in a car,” put in the countrywoman, who had been eagerly listening to our conversation. “If he’s not at the stop, the boy can run up there. He knows the Nedokoros at Storehouse.”
She obviously thought that “Storehouse” was the geographical name of the piece of high ground on which our house stood. I’d often found a similar misapprehension among the children I used to play with twenty years earlier. Anyway, I felt a sense of relief. If we’d had to go on walking through the forest until dark, the experience would almost certainly have implanted seeds of new trouble in my wife’s mind. And if there were a mist at night, the pitch-black forest would inevitably have plunged her into a panic of some kind or other.
As the bus trundled away leaving us on the road, the faces of the peasant woman and conductress appeared side by side at the rear window, watching us. The boy’s face was not to be seen; presumably he was still slumped pallidly over the armrest. We nodded to them, and the conductress waved happily in response, but the young peasant woman, still giggling to herself, clasped one forefinger in the palm of the other hand in a lewd gesture directed at us. I felt my own face flush with irritation and embarrassment, but to my wife the insult seemed to come as something of a relief. A great part of her mind was obsessed with the need for self-punishment, and the young mother in charge of the child with shaven head and lackluster skin, the child who sat as motionless as our baby, had satisfied a certain part of that need.
Hugging our own bodies through our overcoats in the damp, cold, heavily scented breeze that swept our flanks, we made our way through the rotting leaves covering the red clay of the forest road. Whenever the toes of our shoes kicked up the fallen leaves the bare earth beneath was revealed, a striking vermilion like the belly of a newt. Today, even the red earth seemed to hold a threat it never had in my childhood memories. It was to be expected, now that I’d become such a ratlike, vacillating, suspicious kind of creature, that the forest I had fled and was now seeking to rejoin should look on me with suspicion. So strong were the signs of surveillance that the passage of a group of birds screaming high above the trees was enough to make me feel the red earth rising up to clutch at my legs.
“I wonder why Takashi didn’t tell us on the phone that the bridge had been washed away by the flood.”
“He had quite enough to talk about even without that, didn’t he?” said my wife, rallying to his defense. “It’s hardly surprising it didn’t occur to him to mention the bridge’s state of repair when he had such an odd story to tell.”
Takashi had set off for the valley two weeks earlier than us. He’d gone in the Citroen with his bodyguards and made a long car trip of it. All day long and all through the night he and Hoshi took turns at the wheel, driving swiftly and without a break apart from the one hour on the car ferry to Shikoku. They arrived at the village in the valley two days later. A long-distance telephone call made from the post office was our first news of a peculiar business that had made an immediate impression on him. It concerned a middle-aged farmer’s wife called Jin who acted as caretaker of our house in return for permission to cultivate what little farmland was left to us. She’d come to us as a nursemaid when Takashi was born and had stayed with the family ever since. Even after her marriage, she still lived on in the house with her husband and children.
Parking the Citroen in the open space before the village office in the center of the valley, Takashi and his friends shouldered their belongings and were climbing up the steep, narrow, graveled road to our house when they were met by Jin’s husband and children coming down all out of breath to meet them. Takashi and the others were taken aback by their skinniness, the unhealthy tinge of their skin, and in particular the large fishlike eyes of the children, whose expressions reminded them of refugee children from Central or South America. These same frail children, however, fell on their baggage, wrested it from them, and bore it off up the hill, whereupon Jin’s melancholy-looking spouse tried to explain something to them in a brooding, angry-sounding voice. He was so overcome with shame, however, that all Takashi could gather was that he wanted to explain to them, before they actually met Jin, something extraordinary that had happened to her. Eventually, with every sign of reluctance, he produced from his pocket a cutting, folded in four, from a local newspaper and showed it to Takashi. The piece of newsprint, whose folds were frayed and grubby, bore a photograph so large that it must have badly disrupted the layout of the paper on the day it appeared.