Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
My wife brought my dinner herself. Around her head she wore a turban of the same kind of neurotically gaudy print that I’d seen on the women in the crowd at the end of the bridge. She probably hoped to reproduce the charm of the young, dim-witted valley girls, but the turban only served to emphasize the breadth of her well-shaped forehead and give her, if anything, an air of sober maturity. Moreover, she hadn’t yet started on the whisky this evening.
“A bit young for you, isn’t it, that outfit?” I said. “Or are the high spirits of the football team restoring your youth?” Immediately, I could have bitten off my tongue in disgust at the vulgar overtones of the jealous husband in my remark. She gazed calmly at my face as I went red with shame and resentment, then, with the almost obsessive imperturbability that had become one of her qualities when she wasn’t drunk—though definitely only since she’d taken to drinking—she launched directly into the subject that I’d hesitated to broach though it bothered me so much.
“They gave me this cloth at the supermarket, Mitsu,” she said. “Did you see the banners over the roof? They were a sign that the Emperor was going to present every regular customer with one free article from the store. It was terrible at four o’clock when they opened. I imagine you heard the shouting even up here at the storehouse, didn’t you? They all made a rush for the entrance—first the women from the ‘country,’ then the valley women, then the children, and finally even the men, so you can imagine the crush. I nearly fainted with the fight I had to put up just to get this turban.”
“Very self-sacrificing of you,” I said. “What do you mean though, ‘one free article’? Surely you couldn’t just help yourself to any item in the store, could you?”
“Takashi was in front of the supermarket taking photos of everybody as they came out with their spoils. Most of the women seemed to have got clothing or food. But after it got dark some of the men started carrying off bigger things. Apparently the ones who brought out bottles of liquor in the first struggle got drunk and went in again under cover of darkness. At first, the goods to be given away were all stacked together in a separate place from the ordinary shelves. But actually the rush was so terrific, especially the women from the ‘country,’ that things got out of hand almost at once.”
I was about to retreat into the wry, shrinking smile of the feeble outsider so shocked by the very fact of a display of power that he loses all desire to discuss its nature and purpose, when an unsavory thought occurred to me and hauled me back unwillingly to face a more concrete suspicion. Simple surprise ebbed from my mind, and a premonition of danger with overtones of needless complications flowed in to take its place.
“But surely they didn’t stock alcohol at the supermarket, did they?” I said.
“It seems that people who went into the store a while before order began to break down saw bottles lined up on the shelves along with the free gifts. Anyway, the fact is that there were any number of bottles of whisky, saké, and so on standing there.”
“Was Taka responsible?” I asked. I spoke my brother’s name with a feeling in which obscure nausea combined with a desire to reject the whole unpleasant world of reality and retreat into childhood.
“Yes, Mitsu, he was. Takashi bought up all the valley liquor dealer’s stock and took it to the supermarket beforehand. But it seems the original plan to let every customer have one free gift really came from the Emperor himself—he does it at all his chain stores on January 4th every year. The arrangement is that you show the salesgirls your receipts for purchases during the second half of the year, and they give you some trifling article of food or clothing. The only special idea Takashi had was to slip the alcohol in among the other gifts, then increase the confusion by delaying the opening of the store, and give the customers a free hand by having the salesgirls desert their posts as soon as they began to come in. But the chaos that it actually caused made me feel Takashi has a real gift for organized troublemaking.”
“But how did Taka manage to get a hold over the people in the store itself?” I asked. “Surely the truth of the matter is that the free-for-all occurred spontaneously, and Taka realized it would be a good chance to blow his own trumpet.”
“The Emperor, you see, wanted to employ the young men to replace the salesgirls and warehouse guards who’d gone home for the New Year’s holiday. He hoped to squeeze as much unpaid work as possible out of the people who’d been running the chicken farm, to help make up the loss on several thousand dead chickens. It was after he’d made the proposal that Takashi and the others got their idea. Anyway, it’s surely not a bad thing that the women should have had a chance to get back a bit of what the supermarket’s done them out of in the past.”
“But I don’t imagine the matter will just blow over, will it?” I said. “Especially if the men who were drunk carried off expensive items—it amounts to wholesale robbery involving the entire district.” I felt a stale gust of depression sweep through my body.
“Of course, Takashi doesn’t for a moment think it’ll blow over. His football team kept the manager of the supermarket shut up in his house all day today. It won’t be till tomorrow that Takashi’s real
activities begin. And the team members are really looking forward to that!”
“I wonder why they were so easily led on by Taka’s talk,” I complained pointlessly with a trace of resentment.
“Ever since their failure with the chicken farm, the young men of the valley have felt trapped,” she said, slowly giving rein to the excitement that till then she’d been controlling by her own private means. “They may not show it, but there’s no doubt they’re nursing a serious grievance. And the future here looks pretty bleak even for the most sober, industrious boy. They haven’t been kicking a football around for fun—they were kicking it out of despair, because they’d absolutely nothing else to do.”
Her eyes glittered feverishly and were moist right to the corners, as though with desire, but with no trace of the redness that usually afflicted them at such times. I realized that since I’d retired to the storehouse she had overcome the vague, deep-rooted fear preceding sleep without recourse to alcohol. As a result, she was no longer prey to insomnia or depression either, and had obviously planted her feet on the slope leading upward to recovery. Like Takashi’s youthful bodyguard, she’d obeyed the warning to stop drinking and live life sober. Moreover, she was in the process of bridging the perilous gulf without any aid from me, her husband. Feeling like a whipped dog, I longed for the Natsumi who had got drunk while we waited for Takashi at the airport, the Natsumi who had so resolutely disavowed any desire to be reeducated.
“If you’ve any intention of interfering in what Takashi’s doing,” she said, skillfully putting her finger on what my retrogressive attempt at fraternization was hoping for and reacting immediately with a steely stare, “you’ll have to approach him carefully so you don’t get caught by the team.” As she spoke she had an air of youth and sturdiness that reminded me of how she’d been before the unhappy childbirth. “On our way back from the supermarket I saw the priest. It looked as if he was coming to consult you about today’s incident. He soon ran home, though, when the boys threatened him with those awful weapons of theirs. Do
you
still have confidence in your physical strength, Mitsu?”
Much as one hauls the flesh of a shellfish out of the depths of its shell, so she was dragging my self-respect—which I’d squashed up as small as possible and tucked away inconspicuously—out into the
light for the sole purpose of inflicting damage. Anger stirred me to life.
“Everything that happens in this valley is irrelevant to me. It’s due neither to antipathy toward Takashi nor the reverse, it’s just that I’ve waived all desire to criticize the behavior of him and his team. Whatever crops up here, I intend to leave the valley just as soon as communications get back to normal, and to forget all about everything.” I spoke emphatically to reassure myself that this was really how I felt. Even if those cries so strangely disturbing in their suggestion of shameful desire should come welling up from the valley again tomorrow, I intended to ignore them and get on with the translation, my inner dialogue with the friend who had killed himself. Each time I groped for a word, I would ask myself what
he
would have used at that point, and enjoy the momentary sensation of communion with the dead. At such times, my friend was physically closer to me than anyone alive.
“I’m staying behind with Takashi,” said my wife. “Perhaps I’m attracted by his behavior because I myself have never once broken the law. Everything I’ve ever done has been within the laws of the state—right down to standing by and watching my own baby turn into little more than an animal.”
“I quite agree,” I said. “I’ve lived the same way myself. To tell the truth, I’ve essentially neither the desire nor the qualifications to criticize anything that anyone else does. It’s just that I sometimes forget.” We lapsed into an awkward silence, our eyes averted from each other. Then she said, timidly bringing her face close to my knee :
“So it
was
a dead fly stuck there, Mitsu. Why don’t you take it off?”
Her voice had become mild and feminine, tinged with the excessive tenderness of someone who is ashamed of herself. In a corresponding mood of infinite docility, I scraped the tiny, black, dried-up blob from my knee with an ink-stained nail. When all was said and done, I reflected, we were still man and wife, with no alternative but to go on with our joint life indefinitely in this way. We were saddled with two minds that were in too bad a state and, within that state, too entangled with each other to allow divorce.
“Schopenhauer said, didn’t he, that you can squash a fly, but the ‘thing in itself’ doesn’t die,” she whispered, gazing intently at the black speck. “You’ve only killed the fly phenomenon. Dried up like this, it really does give the feeling of being a ‘thing in itself.’ ” They
were the first words she’d spoken that showed a letting-up of tension, that concealed no barb.
Late that night as I lay half asleep, I heard a loud cry in a girl’s voice; the sound seemed almost to come from my own head, and I couldn’t tell whether the cry was one of fear or of extreme rage. By relegating it skillfully to a point somewhere between daytime memories and the world of dreams, I disposed of it and prepared to go on sleeping. At the second cry, however, memories and dreams both retreated and, like an image on a screen, I saw Momoko in vivid detail, her mouth wide open, shrieking for all she was worth. From the main house came indications of a large number of people in fearsome commotion. I got up and without turning on the light shuffled toward where the window stood out faintly in the darkness. I looked down in the direction of the house.
The snow had stopped, and in the front garden where the light of the lamp in the eaves lit a vivid patch of fresh snow, Takashi in undershirt and training pants was standing with a young man in a short cotton kimono that left his chest and lower legs bare. Beneath the eaves, the members of the football team stood in a row with their arms folded, all wearing similar padded jackets as though they were in uniform. The young man facing Takashi, the only one who had been stripped of his jacket, gave every indication of having just been ejected from the group. He was explaining himself abjectly and at great length to Takashi. My brother, stooping forward with his long arms hanging limp at his sides, seemed at first to be listening intently to what the youth said, but in fact he was making no attempt at all to understand the weaker man’s excuses. At unpredictable intervals, he started up and dealt the young man a hefty blow on the side of the head, as if something intensely brutal had run through the center of his body and spent itself in a dangerous flash of purple lightning. Unresisting, the youth allowed himself to be struck repeatedly by Takashi, who was far shorter and narrower in the shoulders, edging away feebly until he finally lost his footing in the snow and toppled over backward. But even then, Takashi fell on him where he lay and went on hitting him. A sense of real physical horror at seeing a close relative in the act of violence thrust down hard and massive into my stomach. With the sad taste of bile on my tongue, I dropped my gaze and retired through the darkness to my blankets. This brother who went on pounding an unresisting younger man in the face had ceased
to be an amateur in violence; his spasmodic brutality and vindictive persistence were the marks of a criminal. The aura of criminal violence that I’d detected about Takashi grew steadily larger and shone more brightly, till it illuminated the whole valley like a menacing aurora in the light of which the affair at the supermarket assumed quite a new aspect. Only retreat into the purely personal confines of sleep offered any hope of escape from the detested light of violence; but sleep refused to make its usual encroachments on my mind, which was like a potful of food in which heat had brought all the scum to the surface. All efforts proving in vain, I opened my eyes in the depths of the darkness and gazed at where the window loomed a milky white. At times the faint light would grow deeper, at others fade completely till it was no more than the lid on a pit of darkness. Light and darkness, moreover, succeeded each other at a bewildering pace. . . .
I wondered if something had gone wrong with my one good eye after several days in the harsh light of the snow. The fear of blindness created a moment’s vacuum, serving as a relaxant for my exhausted and overheated brain; and lonely physical apprehension unexpectedly enabled me to put the poison of my brother’s violence out of my mind. Staring at the alternating light and darkness of the window, I surrendered to worry pure and simple. Before long, however, the light that went past the long, narrow window was so bright that I realized it was no illusion due to failing eyesight but simply the moon shining on the other side. I got up again and went to gaze at the snow-covered forest beneath the moonlight. The surface of the forest was divided into two parts, one standing out brilliant with snow, the other a correspondingly black depression, a shadowy area where countless wet animals seemed to crouch together. Each time the moon was covered by racing clouds, the flock of animals took on a bronze tinge that deepened till they finally retreated out of sight into the darkness. Then almost at once, as the snow on the pointed part of the forest began to shine again in the moonlight, the flock of animals, recovering their wet-looking sheen, would slowly and with heads hanging come marching out once more.