Born in 1935, Kenzaburo Ōe is the leading Japanese writer of his generation. He spent the sixties in Paris where he came under the influence of Sartre. Winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenzaburo Ōe is one of the great writers of the twentieth century. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, The Silent Cry was identified as his key work. The Nobel Committee stated that ‘his poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicaments’.
Praise for Kenzaburo Ōe
‘Though thoroughly Japanese, Ōe, in the range of hope and despair he covers, seems to me to have in him a touch of Dostoevsky’ Henry Miller
‘Somehow – and this is what gives his art such unquestionable stature – Ōe manages to smuggle a comic thread in all this tragedy’ Independent
‘A new pinnacle in postwar Japanese fiction’ Yukio Mishima
A complete catalogue record for this book can
be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Kenzaburo Ōe to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 1967 Kenzaburo Ōe
Translation copyright © Kodansha International Ltd, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
First published as Man’en Gannen no Puttoboru in 1967 by
Kodansha Ltd, Tokyo
First published in this Serpent’s Tail Classic edition in 2011
First published in 1988 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 807 2
eISBN 978 1 84765 773 2
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY
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THE
SILENT CRY
AWAKENING in the predawn darkness, I grope among the anguished remnants of dreams that linger in my consciousness, in search of some ardent sense of expectation. Seeking in the tremulous hope of finding eager expectancy reviving in the innermost recesses of my being—unequivocally, with the impact of whisky setting one’s guts afire as it goes down—still I find an endless nothing. I close fingers that have lost their power. And everywhere, in each part of my body, the several weights of flesh and bone are experienced independently, as sensations that resolve into a dull pain in my consciousness as it backs reluctantly into the light. With a sense of resignation, I take upon me once more the heavy flesh, dully aching in every part and disintegrated though it is. I’ve been sleeping with arms and legs askew, in the posture of a man reluctant to be reminded either of his nature or of the situation in which he finds himself.
Whenever I awaken I seek again that lost, fervid feeling of expectation, the ardent sense of expectation that is no consciousness of lack but a positive actuality in itself. Finally convinced that I’ll not find it, I try to lure myself down the slope to second sleep: sleep, sleep!—the world does not exist; but this morning the poison tormenting my body is too virulent to permit retreat into slumber. Fear threatens to engulf me. Sunrise must be at least an hour away; till then, there’s no telling what kind of day it will be. I lie in the dark, knowing nothing, a fetus in the womb. There was a time when sexual habits were useful on such occasions. But now at twenty-seven, married, with a child put away in an institution, I feel shame welling up at the idea of masturbation, stifling the buds of desire. Sleep, sleep !—if you can’t sleep then pretend you’re asleep. Suddenly, in the darkness, I see the square hole the workmen dug yesterday for our septic tank. In my aching body the desolate, bitter poison multiplies, threatening to ooze out slowly, like jelly from a tube, from ears, eyes, nose, mouth, anus, urethra. . . .
Still in the guise of a sleeper, with eyes closed, I stand up and move sluggishly through the darkness. Each time I hit some part or other of my body against the door, the wall, or the furniture I give a painful, half-delirious moan. My right eye, admittedly, has no sight even wide open and in broad daylight. I wonder if I’ll ever know what lay behind the events whereby my eye got like that. It was a nasty, stupid incident: one morning, as I was walking along the street, a group of primary school children in a fit of hysterical fear and anger flung a chunk of stone at me. Struck in the eye, I lay where I fell on the sidewalk, unable to make out what had happened. My right eye, with a split extending horizontally from the white into the black, lost its vision. Even now, I’ve never felt I understood the true meaning of the incident. Moreover, I’m afraid of understanding it. If you try walking with one hand over your right eye, you’ll realize just how many things lie in wait for you ahead on the right. You’ll collide with the unexpected. You’ll strike your head and face repeatedly. Thus the right half of my head and face has never been without some fresh mark or other, and I’m ugly. Even before the eye injury I was already showing more and more clearly a quality of ugliness that often reminded me how mother had prophesied that, when we grew up, my brother would be handsome and I would not. The lost eye merely emphasized the ugliness each day, throwing it into constant relief. My born ugliness would have liked to hang back, silent, in the shadows; it was the missing eye that continually dragged it out into the limelight. Not that I neglected to assign a role to this eye : I saw it, its function lost, as being forever trained on the darkness within my skull, a darkness full of blood and somewhat above body heat. The eye was a lone sentry that I’d hired to keep watch on the forest of the night within me, and in doing so I’d forced myself to practice observing my own interior.
Passing through the kitchen, I feel for the door, go out, and finally open my eye to find the faintest whiteness spreading over the distant heights of a leaden, late autumn, predawn sky. A black dog comes running up and jumps at me. But instantly it knows itself rejected; without a sound it shrinks back into stillness and stands pointing its small muzzle at me like a mushroom in the darkness. Picking it up, I tuck it under my arm and walk slowly on again. The dog stinks. It remains still under my arm, panting heavily.
My armpit gets hot. Perhaps the dog has a fever. The nails of my bare toes strike a wooden frame. I put the dog down for the moment, grope about to check the position of the ladder, then encompass with my arms the darkness at the spot where I set the dog down; it still occupies precisely the same space. I can’t help smiling, but it’s not a smile that lasts long. The dog is sick, for certain. Laboriously I climb down the ladder. There are puddles here and there at the bottom of the pit, enough to cover the ankles of my bare feet: just a little water, like juices pressed from flesh. Sitting down directly on the bare earth, I feel the water seeping through my pajama trousers and underwear, wetting my buttocks, but I find myself accepting it docilely, as one who cannot refuse.
Yet a dog, of course, can refuse to get dirty. The dog, silent like one that can talk but chooses not to, perches on my lap, leaning its shivering, hot body lightly against my chest. To preserve this balance, it sets hooked claws into the muscles of my chest. I feel the pain as yet another thing that cannot be rejected, and in five minutes am indifferent to it. I’m heedless, too, of the foul water that wets my buttocks and comes seeping in between my testicles and thighs. My body—all 154 pounds and five feet six inches of it—is no different from the load of soil that the laborers dug yesterday from this very spot and discarded in some distant river. My flesh is assimilated by the soil. In my body and the surrounding soil and the whole damp atmosphere, the only signs of life are the dog’s heat and my nostrils. The nostrils become rapidly sensitive, and absorb the restricted smells at the bottom of the pit as though they were of unutterable richness. Functioning at full pitch, they assimilate odors too numerous to recognize individually. Almost fainting, I bang the back of my head (and feel it directly as the back of my skull) against the wall of the hole, then go on, indefinitely, absorbing the thousand and one odors and what little oxygen is available. The desolate, bitter poison still fills my body, but no longer seems to be seeping through to the outside. The ardent sense of expectancy hasn’t yet returned, but my fear has been alleviated. Now I’m indifferent to everything; indifferent, even, to the very possession of a body. My only regret is that there is no one and nothing to observe me in my total indifference. The dog? The dog has no eyes. Nor have I eyes in my indifference. Since I reached the bottom, my eyes have been shut again.
Next, I meditate on the friend whose cremation I attended. At the end of summer this year he daubed his head all over with crimson paint, stripped, thrust a cucumber up his anus, and hanged himself. His wife discovered the strange suicide on her return, spent as a sick rabbit, from a party that had lasted into the early hours. Why hadn’t he gone with her to the party ? He was that kind of man: no one would find it odd that he should let his wife go alone to a party while he remained in his study working on a translation (something, in fact, that we were collaborating on).
From a point two yards in front of the dangling corpse she’d fled back to where the party had been held, her hair on end in her panic, her arms flailing above her head, her mouth shaping a voiceless cry, her little-girlish green shoes flapping as she trod back over the path of her own midnight shadow that no one else could see, like a film run in reverse. After informing the police, she sobbed silently till they came from her family to fetch her. Thus, when the police had finished their inquiries, it was left to me and my friend’s sturdy old grandmother to perform the last offices for the naked, crimson-headed corpse with the last of its life’s semen drying on its thighs, a corpse surely beyond all salvation. The deceased’s mother had retreated into an imbecilic state and was useless. Just once, as we made to wash off the dead man’s disguise, she showed an unexpected determination and opposed the move. The old woman and I turned away all who came to express condolences, and alone, without interruption, the three of us held a wake for the dead man in whom the myriad cells, once treasurers of his uniqueness, were already in process of swift, furtive disintegration. Like a dam, the dry, parched skin held in the sweet-sour, rosy cells that had dissolved and changed into something indescribable. This crimson-faced corpse of my friend as it lay proudly remote, decomposing on an army-style cot, was filled with a more urgent sense of reality than it had ever had in twenty-seven years of life—life lived pitifully in a diligent effort to pass through the dark tunnel, only to end abruptly before emerging on the other side. The dam of the skin was sentenced to burst. Fermenting clusters of cells were preparing, as a wine is prepared, the real, physical death of the body itself. Those left behind must drink that wine. There was a fascination for me in the close-packed moments that my friend’s body marked off in its relationship with the lily-fragrant bacteria of corruption. As I watched the passage of this pure time on its once-only flight, I was made aware again of the fragility of that other kind of time, soft and warm as the top of an infant’s head, that admits of repetition.
I couldn’t help feeling envious. No friend’s eyes would watch, no friend would understand the true meaning of what was happening when I closed my eyes for the last time and my flesh embarked on its own experience of dissolution.
“When he came home from the clinic, I should have persuaded him to go back again,” I said.
“No—the boy couldn’t have stayed there any longer,” his grand-mother replied. “The other mental patients were so impressed with the fine things he’d done there that he couldn’t possibly have remained any longer. You shouldn’t forget that and blame yourself. What’s happened has made it quite plain—it was the best thing possible for him to leave the clinic and lead a free life. If he’d killed himself there, he could never have painted his face red and hanged himself naked, could he? The other patients wouldn’t have let him, they respected him too much.”
“You bear up so well, you’re a great help.”
“Everyone has to die. And in a hundred years nobody’s going to inquire just how most people died. The best thing is to do it in the way that takes your fancy most.”
At the foot of the bed my friend’s mother sat rubbing the corpse’s feet untiringly, her head hunched into her shoulders like a frightened tortoise, and showed no reaction to our conversation. The small features of the flat, vegetable face that so cruelly resembled her dead son were all slack, like melting candy. It seemed to me I’d never seen a face express so immediate or so utter a despair.
“Like Sarudahiko,” said his grandmother inconsequently.
Sarudahiko: the word, vaguely rustic and comic in its associations, was on the verge of suggesting some meaning, albeit vague, to my mind, but my faculties were already too dulled by fatigue to produce more than the faintest tremor, which failed to expand; the thread of meaning escaped me. Even as I shook my head in vain, the word Sarudahiko sank like a sounding line, the seal of meaning unbroken, down into the depths of memory.
But now that word, Sarudahiko, came rising to my mind, a clear outcropping of a vein of familiar memories, as I sat in the water at the bottom of the pit with the dog in my arms. The tissues of the brain relating to this word, frozen ever since that day, had thawed out. Sarudahiko—Sarudahiko the divine—had gone to Amanoyachimata to meet the gods descending to earth. Amenouzume, who had engaged in negotiations with Sarudahiko as representative of the intruders, had gathered together the fish who were the original inhabitants of the new world in an attempt to establish his dominance, and with a knife had slashed open the mouth of the sea slug, who resisted in silence. Our gentle, twentieth-century Sarudahiko had been, if anything, a fellow to the sea slug whose mouth had been slashed. At the thought, the tears gushed from my eyes and, streaming down my cheeks and along my lips, dropped onto the dog’s back.
A year before his death, he’d cut short his studies at Columbia University and returned to Japan, where he entered a home for mild cases of mental disorder. Of the whereabouts of the home and his life there, I know nothing other than what he himself reported. Neither had his wife or his mother or grandmother actually visited the place, though it was said to be in the Shonan district. He forbade all those close to him to visit him there. Thinking about it now, I feel far from sure even that such a home existed. However, if one is to believe what he said, the place was called the Smile Training Center, and the inmates, who were given large doses of tranquilizers at every meal, spent all their time placidly smiling. It was a single-story building similar to the beachside hostels to be found all over the Shonan area, and half of it was taken up by a single, large sun-room. During the day most of the patients chatted amiably to each other, sitting on the swings that were installed in large numbers on the extensive lawn. Strictly speaking, the inmates weren’t even patients but travelers, as it were, on a prolonged stopover. Under the influence of the tranquilizers, they became more manageable than the most docile of domestic animals, and whiled away the hours in the sun-room or on the lawn exchanging happy, untroubled smiles. They were free to go out, and since no one felt he was being kept in confinement, no one ever ran away.
Coming home about a week after entering the home to get books and a change of clothing, my friend declared that he seemed to have adjusted to this odd place more swiftly and more comfortably than any of the placidly smiling patients who had entered before him. Three weeks later, however, on his next return to Tokyo, his smiles, though still there, looked faintly forlorn. And he confided in his wife and myself. The male nurse who brought the patients their drugs and their meals was a brutal fellow who would often treat them abominably, since under sedation they were unable even to feel anger. Sometimes as he passed a patient he would deal him a hefty blow in the belly, quite without provocation. I suggested he should protest to those in charge of the center, but he said that if he did the director would only think he was inventing it out of boredom, or suffering from a simple persecution complex, or both. After all, no one, at least along the Shonan coast, could be as bored as they were, and they were all to a greater or lesser extent out of their minds. Besides, thanks to the tranquilizers, he himself hardly knew whether he was really angry or not. . . .
Nevertheless, it was only two or three days after this that he flushed down the toilet the tranquilizers doled out to him at breakfast, did the same at lunch, and again at suppertime. The next morning, having discovered that he was indeed angry, he lay in wait for the brute and—himself suffering a considerable amount of damage in the process—ended by half slaying him. As a result of this incident he won the sincere admiration of his gently smiling friends but, following a talk with the director, was obliged to leave. As he left the Smile Training Center, waving to the mental patients who saw him off with the same amiable, fatuous smiles on their faces, he experienced a profounder sadness than ever before.
“It’s as Henry Miller said. I felt the same kind of sadness as his. Actually, until that moment I’d never realized the truth of what he wrote: ‘I tried to smile with him, but I couldn’t. It made me terribly sad, sadder than I ever felt before in my life.’ It’s more than just a turn of phrase. . . . And there’s another phrase of Miller’s too that’s been haunting me ever since: ‘Let’s be cheerful, whatever happens.’ ”
From the end of his period at the Smile Training Center until his death by hanging, naked, with his head painted bright red, there’s no doubt that he remained obsessed by Miller’s words, “Let’s be cheerful, whatever happens.” His brief and premature last years were spent in unequivocal cheerfulness. He even lapsed into a particular sexual proclivity and explored its peculiar type of frenzy. I was reminded of it by a conversation with my wife when I returned home, stunned and exhausted, after the cremation. She was drinking whisky, alone, as she waited for me. That was the first day I saw her drunk.
As soon as I got home I went and looked in the room she shared with our son. The child was still at home in those days. It was barely dusk, but the child lay on the bed looking up at me placidly with absolutely empty brown eyes, the kind of placidity with which a plant, if plants had eyes, might gaze back at someone peering at it. My wife was not beside him. If I remember correctly, she was sitting quite drunk in the gloom of the library when I found her, perched precariously on a step stool between the shelves like a bird on a swaying branch. I was so taken aback that I felt, if anything, more embarrassed for myself than for her. Getting the whisky bottle out of the niche inside the stool where I’d hidden it, she’d seated herself on its steps, taken a gulp straight from the bottle, and continued to drink little by little, getting steadily drunker as she went. Seeing me, she jerked back like a mechanical doll. Her upper lip was greasy with sweat. She couldn’t stand up. Her eyes, the color of plums, were feverish, but the skin of her neck and shoulders showing above her dress was rough with goose pimples. Her whole being suggested a dog driven by sickness to chew grass furiously only to vomit all the more.
“You’re ill, surely?” I asked, ridiculously.
“No, I’m not ill,” she replied with open scorn, swift to sense my embarrassment.
“Then you’re drunk, in fact.”
Squatting down facing her I watched, fascinated, a drop of sweat, quivering on the edge of her upper lip as she stared back at me suspiciously, roll down sideways as the lip curled. Her squalid breath, laden with the damp fumes of alcohol, swept over me. The exhaustion brought by the living from the deathbed of a friend seeped like a dye into every corner of my body, and I could have sobbed.
“You’re dead drunk, you know.”
“I’m not particularly drunk. If I’m sweating it’s because I’m scared.”
“What about? The kid’s future?”
“Scared that there should be people who kill themselves, naked, with their heads painted red.”
I had told her that much, passing over the part about the cucumber.
“That’s nothing for you to be particularly scared about, is it?”
“I’m scared that you might paint your head red and kill yourself, naked,” she said, and hung her head in a display of unconcealed fear.
With a shudder I saw for a moment, in the dark brown mass of her hair, a miniature of myself dead. The crimson head of Mitsusaburo Nedokoro in death, with lumps of partly dissolved powder paint dried behind the lobes of his ears, like drops of blood. Even as my friend’s body had been, so my own had the two ears left unpainted, token of the inadequate lapse of time between the conception of this bizarre suicide and its execution.
“I won’t kill myself. Why should I?”
“Was he a masochist?”
“What makes you ask me that, the very day after his death? Just curiosity?”
“Well, supposing,” she went on in a tone made excessively abject by the signs of anger in my voice (though an anger that wasn’t particularly clear even to myself), “supposing he did have some sexual perversion, there wouldn’t be any need for me to be afraid for you, would there?”
She jerked her head back again and stared at me as though demanding my agreement. The unspeakably naked sense of helplessness in her preternaturally red eyes shocked me. But she shut them almost at once, raised the whisky bottle, and took another gulp. The curves of her eyelids were dark like dirty finger pads. She coughed till the tears came to her eyes and whisky mingled with saliva dribbled from the corners of her mouth. Instead of being concerned on her behalf over the stain it would make on her new, off-white silk dress, I took the bottle from her hand—a hand scrawny and stringy as a monkey’s—and took a swig to cover my awkwardness.
It was true, as my friend had told me with a mixture of pleasure and sadness at a point midway in his sexual progress—a point, that is, on the slope of a tendency still vague yet clear enough to the person concerned, neither shallow enough to be of the kind that anyone might experience by chance nor sufficiently indulged to be absolutely past discussing with others—that he’d long been seeking masochistic experiences. He’d visited a private establishment where some ferocious female catered to masochists. There was nothing remarkable about what happened the first day. But on his second visit three weeks later, the stupid brute of a woman, remembering his tastes accurately, announced portentously that she would henceforth be indispensable to him. It wasn’t until the next stage, as he lay naked on his face and a knotted hemp rope landed with a thud beside his ear, that he realized that the great brutish female had indeed assumed a place in his world as an unarguable fact.
“It was as though my body was completely disassembled, all soft and limp in each part, something like a string of sausages, without any sensation at all. But my mind was floating somewhere way up above, completely cut off from my body.” And he’d fixed his eyes on me with an oddly weak, pained little smile.
I took another mouthful of whisky and, like my wife, was seized with a fit of coughing which sent lukewarm whisky through my undershirt to run down the skin of my chest and belly. Then as I gazed at her, sitting with her eyes still shut, the dark lids evoking another, false pair of eyes like the protective markings on the wings of certain moths, I was seized with an impulse to talk to her roughly.
Even assuming he was a masochist—I would say—it wouldn’t mean you’d have nothing to be afraid of. It wouldn’t justify your making a distinction between him and me and telling yourself I would never paint my head red and kill myself, naked. Sexual peculiarities aren’t very important in the long run; they’re only one distortion caused by something grotesque and really frightening coiled up in the depths of the personality. There was some enormous, uncontrollable, crazy motive force lurking in the depths of his soul, and it happened to induce a particular distortion called masochism—that’s all. It wasn’t his involvement with masochism that gave birth to the madness leading to his suicide, but the reverse. And I too have the seeds of that same, incurable madness. . . .
But I said nothing of all this to my wife, nor did the idea itself send its fine tendrils down into the folds of my brain, blunted by exhaustion. The fancy, like bubbles rising in a glass, fizzed for a while then vanished. Such notions pass without leaving any experience behind. This is particularly true when one remains silent about them; all one needs to do is wait till the undesirable notions pass away without damaging the walls of the brain.
If I could get by in this way now, then I should be able to escape the poison until the massive counterattack when I would finally have to accept it as an experience. Curbing my tongue, I put my hands under my wife’s arms from behind and hoisted her to her feet. It felt like sacrilege to support my living wife—the mystery and vulnerability of a body made to give birth in peril and in stress—with arms contaminated by lifting the body of a dead friend; yet of the two bodies, equal burdens, it was to my dead friend’s that I felt closer.
We advanced at a slow pace toward the bedroom where the baby awaited us; but by the bathroom her progress was arrested like that of a ship that has lowered anchor, and cleaving her way through the dusky, lukewarm, summer-evening air of the room, she vanished into the toilet. She was there for a long while. When finally she reemerged, breasting the now deeper gloom, I took her to the bedroom and, giving up the idea of undressing her, laid her on the bed just as she was. Heaving a great sigh as though to expel her very soul, she fell fast asleep. Some yellow fibrous substance that she had vomited clung about her lips, fine as the hairs on a flower petal yet clearly shining in the twilight.
The baby gazed up at me as ever with wide-open eyes, but whether he was hungry or thirsty or felt some other discomfort I couldn’t tell. He lay with eyes open and expressionless, like a marine plant in the water of the dusk, simply and placidly existing. He demanded nothing, expressed absolutely no emotion. He didn’t even cry. One might even wonder if he were alive at all. Supposing my wife had been drunk all day since my early morning departure and had left the baby to its own devices, what should I do? At the moment she was nothing but a drunken slut in a deep sleep. I had a strong premonition of disaster. But as with my wife, I shrank from the sacrilege of stretching out contaminated hands and touching the baby. And to the baby, too, I felt less close than to my dead friend. However long I gazed down at him, he went on staring at me with utterly expressionless eyes. Finally, a drowsiness that drew one along with the irresistible force of a tidal wave came welling from those brown eyes. Without even fetching a bottle of milk for him, I curled up to sleep. On the threshold of unconsciousness, I told myself with a fresh sense of shock that my only friend had painted his head bright red and hanged himself, that my wife had got herself suddenly and quite unexpectedly drunk, that my son was an imbecile. To crown everything, I was about to go to sleep, jammed in an inadequate space between my wife’s and son’s beds, without locking up, without taking my tie off, my person still defiled from contact with the dead. All judgment suspended, like an insect impaled helpless on a pin. . . . Shrinking before a sense that I was being slowly eroded by a power that was unquestionably dangerous yet hard to identify, I drifted off to sleep. And by the morning I could no longer quite recall what I’d felt with such conviction the night before. It had failed, in short, to constitute an experience.
One day the previous summer, my friend had met my younger brother in a New York drugstore and had brought back his own testimony concerning my brother’s life in America. Takashi had gone to America as a member of a student theater group. Their leader was a Diet member, a woman from the right wing of one of the progressive political parties. The troupe consisted entirely of students who had taken part in the political riots of June, 1960, but had since thought better of it. Their play was a penitential piece entitled Ours Was the Shame, and was followed by an apology to the citizens of America, on behalf of repentant members of the student movement, for having obstructed their President’s visit to Japan. When Takashi first told me that he was going to America with them, he’d said he planned to flee the troupe as soon as it arrived and go off and roam the country by himself. However, reading the semi-satirical, semi-embarrassed accounts of Ours Was the Shame sent by Japanese reporters from the States, I realized that he hadn’t yet brought himself to leave the troupe but was still appearing in performances of the play in Washington and cities as far away as Boston and New York. I tried to work out why he should have abandoned his original plan and gone on playing the role of a repentant student activist, but the task was beyond my imagination. I wrote a letter therefore asking my friend, who was in New York with his wife studying at Columbia, to look up Takashi at the troupe’s headquarters. But he’d been unable to contact them, and it was by sheer coincidence that he’d run into my brother. Going into a drugstore on Broadway, he’d come upon Takashi, his slight frame propped against the counter, drinking a lemonade with earnest concentration. Stealing up from behind, he’d silently grabbed Takashi’s shoulder. My brother swung round as though released by a spring, so suddenly that it was my friend who was taken aback. Takashi was grubby, sweating, pale, and tense. His whole appearance suggested a man taken unawares while plotting a single-handed bank robbery.
“Hi, Takashi. Mitsu wrote and told me you were in the States,” my friend declared. “Seems he no sooner got married than he got his new wife pregnant.”
“I haven’t got married, or got anybody pregnant,” said Takashi in a voice that was still not quite steady.
My friend laughed heartily as though he’d just heard a splendid joke. “I’m off to Japan next week,” he said. “Any message for Mitsu?”
“Weren’t you supposed to stay at Columbia for several years?”
“Not any more. I got myself hurt in the demonstrations. Not physically—something happened to my head. It’s not bad enough to have them put me in a mental hospital, but they’ve decided I should shut myself up in a kind of sanitarium.”
At this point my friend noticed a profound embarrassment spreading like a stain over Takashi’s face, and suddenly felt he understood the significance of the abrupt start Takashi had given when taken by surprise. And being a kindly man, he couldn’t help feeling secretly sorry. He had prodded the other in what must be a reformed activist’s tenderest spot. Both fell silent, gazing at the tightly packed row of jars lining the shelf behind the counter—jars brimming with a pink liquid, sweetish and raw-looking as entrails. Their two images were reflected in the distorting glass of the bottles, and whenever they moved even slightly the pink freaks swayed in exaggerated fashion. One almost expected them to break into song at any moment.
Late one night in June when Takashi, still an unrepentant student activist, was outside the National Diet, my friend had gone there too—not so much from any political motive of his own as to accompany his new wife as she took part in a demonstration with a small drama group to which she belonged—and when a disturbance broke out had had his head bashed in by a police stave as he tried to protect his wife from the onslaught of the armed riot squad. The fracture wasn’t particularly serious in a simple surgical sense. But from the time of that late-night assault amidst the scent of young green leaves, something had been lacking inside my friend’s head, and an obscure tendency to manic depression had taken its place alongside his other attributes. There could hardly have been anyone whom a reformed student activist was more reluctant to meet.
Increasingly embarrassed by Takashi’s silence, my friend stared fixedly at the pink jars with the feeling that his own eyes, melting in the heat of his embarrassment, were being transformed into the same pink, viscous fluid as in the jars and were oozing out of his skull. He envisaged his melting pink eyeballs plopping hopelessly and irretrievably, like eggs dropped into a frying pan, onto the silver counter on which Americans of all extractions—southern European, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish—had their bare, sweaty forearms firmly planted. High summer in New York, with Takashi at his side noisily sucking up the last fragments of lemon through his straw and frowning as he shook the sweat from his forehead. . . .
“If there’s anything for me to tell Mitsu …” my friend began by way of leave-taking.
“Tell him I’m going to run away from the troupe, will you? If I don’t make it, I’ll probably be deported, so either way I won’t be with the company any longer.”
“When are you quitting?”
“Today,” said Takashi with a great air of resolve.
It dawned on my friend with a sense of urgency, almost of panic, that my brother was actually waiting for something at the drugstore. The full implication of his display of surprise as he’d jumped like a suddenly released spring, the implication of his abrupt silence, the implication of the shreds of lemon so hastily sucked up, all linked up into a ring of actuality. But he felt relieved to detect in the signs of feeling welling up and disappearing again in my brother’s eyes—eyes with a dull, greasy film that brought to mind a professional wrestler—not merely a sense of constraint at having bumped into someone he would rather not have met, but an attitude of arrogant pity toward him.
“Is some secret agent coming here to help you escape?” my friend asked in an attempt at a joke.
“Shall I tell you the truth?” replied Takashi in a mock-menacing tone. “Do you see that pharmacist filling a little bottle with capsules over there on the other side of the medicine shelves?” Twisting his body round like my brother, my friend discerned, beyond the shelves with their countless bottles of drugs standing out against the dark background like a film negative of New York at the height of summer, a bald-headed man who faced away from them, concentrating intently on his delicate task.
“That medicine’s for me, for my inflamed, tortured penis. Once it’s safely in my hands I can make my escape from Ours Was the Shame and set off on my own.”
My friend sensed the Americans around them stiffen at the single English word “penis” set like a precious stone in the otherwise incomprehensible Japanese dialogue. The vast, alien exterior that lay all about them asserted its reality once more.
“Surely you can get hold of that kind of medicine easily enough?” said my friend with an earnest dignity directed against the new surveillance under which they had come from the people about them.
“Yes, if you go to hospital in line with proper procedure,” said Takashi, indifferent to the trivial psychological conflict going on in my friend. “But it’s a hell of a business here in America if you can’t. The prescription I’ve given the pharmacist was forged for me by a nurse in the medical office at the hotel. If the trick came to light a young black nurse would get fired and I’d be deported, I imagine.”
Why hadn’t he followed the regular procedure? Because the trouble with his urethra was obviously gonorrhea, which, moreover, he’d picked up on his first night in America by having sex with a black prostitute of an age that allowed him to see her as a mother figure. Should the facts become known to the elderly Diet member who was leader of the troupe, she would obviously send Takashi back to the country from which he’d just taken so much trouble to escape. Besides, he’d fallen prey to a depressing suspicion that since his urethra had been invaded by gonorrhea he might also be infected with syphilis, a suspicion that had quenched any urge to devote his creative imagination to some new course of action.
Five weeks had passed since he’d visited that district where black and white merged in a complex range of shades, but no primary symptoms of syphilis had appeared. Moreover, he used a sore throat as a pretext for obtaining a succession of small doses of antibiotics from the medical orderly of the troupe, thanks to which the trouble in his urethra eased somewhat; only then did Takashi shake off his inertia. Having struck up an acquaintance with a nurse in the hotel medical office in the course of their long stay in New York (the base which the troupe used for its sorties into other centers), Takashi persuaded her to get hold of a form used by doctors for writing prescriptions. The nurse, a black girl with a limitless spirit of service to others, had not only entered on the form the type and amount of medicine most suited to the trouble in his urethra, but had directed him to a drugstore in a busy part of town where there was little likelihood of the irregularity being detected.
“At first,” said Takashi, “I tried to talk about the unpleasant symptoms in my penis in an abstract, inorganic way—as a kind of detached description, you know. I’d no special grounds for believing so, but I felt the word gonorrhea might be too blunt and shock her, so first I said I thought it might be urethritis. But she didn’t get it. So I said I was suffering from ‘inflammation of the duct.’ You should have seen the fresh light of understanding that came into her eyes at that. Nothing could be less abstract and inorganic—it brought home to me all over again the sticky, fleshly reality of the suffering in my cock. And she said, ‘Is there a burning sensation in your penis?’ God, was I shocked! The words conveyed the reality so well I felt my whole body burning—with flames of embarrassment, that is!”
He laughed out loud and my friend followed suit. The non-Japanese around them, whose ears had pricked up at the significant words in English that sprinkled Takashi’s conversation, gazed at them with deepening suspicion. The pharmacist appeared from behind the shelves, his lugubrious countenance bathed in sweat. The smile on Takashi’s sunburned, birdlike face was suddenly blotted out by a look sick with longing and anxiety. Watching him, my friend felt himself go tense, but the bald-headed pharmacist, who looked like an Irishman, merely said in a fatherly voice, “This number of capsules comes very expensive. Why don’t you take just one-third ?”
Recovering his poise instantly, Takashi gave a laugh. “It’s expensive, but anything’d be better than the agony in my tubes these past few weeks,” he said.
“I’ll buy them for you,” my friend said in a hearty voice. “To celebrate the start of your new life in America.”
Completely cheerful by now, Takashi took an affectionate look at the capsules gleaming softly in their bottle, then announced that he would pick up his belongings and set off on his solitary wanderings through America that very day. He and my friend left the drugstore, eager to get away from the scene of the crime as soon as possible, and walked together to a nearby bus stop.
“Once a problem’s solved, the things that have been plaguing you seem terribly stupid and trivial,” said my friend with a feeling almost of envy at the encounter between Takashi’s happy face and the capsules in the bottle.
“Any trouble seems trivial once it’s over, surely?” said Takashi aggressively. “It’s the same with you going home to a clinic, isn’t it? When the knots in your head are unraveled, maybe there’ll be nothing left but the feeling that it was all a lot of fuss about something silly and unimportant.”
“If they’re unraveled,” said my friend with unconcealed wistfulness. “If they’re not, the silliness and the unimportance will be the sum total of my life.”
“Just what are they, the knots in your head?”
“It’s hard to tell. If I could tell, I could conquer them and begin to regret having marked time for several years. On the other hand, if I gave way to them and set out on a course of self-destruction that would really make them the sum total of my life, then that too would gradually make the true nature of the knots clear. Admittedly,” he complained with a sudden, sad intensity, “the understanding in that case wouldn’t be any use to me personally. Nor would there be any way of letting anyone else know that someone who’d apparently gone mad had seen the light in extremis.”
It seemed as if my friend had profoundly stimulated Takashi’s interest. But at the same time, my brother’s behavior showed signs of a desire to get away just as soon as possible, and it was from this that he realized that his appeal had touched some sensitive core in Takashi. At this point a bus drew up. Takashi got on it and, handing my friend a pamphlet through the window—in return, he said, for the cost of the medicine—was swallowed up without further ado into the vastness of the American continent. Neither my friend nor I had had any clear information about him since. True to the resolution he’d confided in my friend, he’d quit the company from that moment and set out alone on his travels.
Getting into a taxi, my friend immediately opened the pamphlet Takashi had given him. It was about the civil rights movement. The frontispiece was a photograph of a black, his body so scorched and swollen that the details were blurred like those of a crudely carved wooden doll, with a number of white men in shoddy clothes standing round him. It was comic and terrible and disgusting, a representation of naked violence so direct that it gripped the beholder like some fearful fantasy. Looking at it unavoidably brought one face to face with the abject certainty of defeat under the relentless pressure of fear. With the inevitability of two drops of water merging into each other, the sight linked itself immediately with the ill-defined trouble in his own head. It occurred to him that Takashi had left the pamphlet with him knowing full well the significance of giving it and its photograph to him rather than to anyone else. Takashi, in his turn, had seen into something essential in my friend’s mind.
“One sometimes realizes after the event,” my friend said, “that one’s consciousness has caught something unexpected on its very outer edge, as though two things had somehow got superimposed. Ferreting around in the dimmer corners of my memory, it came to me that when I went up behind Takashi he was staring at that photograph as he drank his lemonade. He seemed to be wrestling with some colossal problem. I think he wasn’t really worrying about that business of the antibiotic prescription that he talked about in such detail, but about some essentially much more serious matter. Do you think Takashi’s the kind of guy who’d make a fuss about a slight dose of the clap? It gave me a peculiar shock when he said, ‘Shall I tell you the truth?’ and I suspect that what he had in mind was something quite different from what he actually told me. I wonder what it was, though?”
Seated at the bottom of the pit on that autumn dawn, the dog on my lap, I couldn’t tell what it had been—that thing in my brother’s mind whose existence, if nothing else, my friend had made clear. Neither could I tell what it was that, growing and growing in his own head, had finally led him to death in such a bizarre guise. Death cuts abruptly the warp of understanding. There are things which the survivors are never told. And the survivors have a steadily deepening suspicion that it is precisely because of the things incapable of communication that the deceased has chosen death. The factors that remain ill defined may sometimes lead a survivor to the very site of the disaster, but even then the only thing clear to anyone concerned is that he has been brought up against something incomprehensible. If my friend, instead of painting his head crimson and hanging himself, had bequeathed so much as a brief cry over the telephone, there might have been some clue. It may well be, of course, that the crimson head, the cucumber in the anus of the naked body, and the death by hanging were themselves a kind of silent cry; but if so, then the cry alone was not enough for those left behind. The clues were too equivocal for me to pursue any further.
Nevertheless, none of the survivors was in a better position to understand my dead friend than myself. Ever since our first year at university he and I had been together in everything. Our classmates used to say we were like identical twins. In appearance even, I was more like my friend than my brother. Takashi bore no resemblance to me whatsoever; and indeed there were some things in my younger brother’s head as he roamed about America that I sensed as less accessible to me than things that had once had a place in my dead friend’s mind. One autumn evening in 1945—the evening of the day that S, the second of my elder brothers and the only one to return alive from the front, was beaten to death in the Korean settlement that had grown up like a wen just outside the valley where our village stood—mother, lying on her sickbed, turned to our sister and made this appraisal of Takashi and myself, the only men left to our family :
“They’re still children, their faces aren’t formed yet. But by and by Mitsusaburo will be ugly and Takashi will be handsome. People will like Takashi and he’ll lead a successful life. You should get on good terms with him while you can and stick with him even after you grow up.”
When mother died, our sister was adopted by an uncle along with Takashi, thus in effect following mother’s advice; but she killed herself before reaching adulthood. Though her retardation wasn’t as serious as that of my own child, she was backward to the extent that, as mother had said, she was incapable of surviving without attaching herself to someone else. Only to music, or rather to sounds as such, did she show any real response. . . .
The dog barked. The outside world sprang to life once more, closing in on me at the bottom of my pit from two sides at once. My right hand, rounded into a scoop, was scraping at the wall of the pit in front of me; already I’d clawed down toward my lap five or six pieces of brick buried till now in the Kanto loam, and the dog was pressing itself against my chest to avoid them. Urgently, my hand scraped at the side of the pit once, twice more; and I realized that someone unknown was peering down into it from above. I drew the dog close with my left hand and looked up from the hole. The dog’s terror infected me: I was afraid with a truly animal fear. The morning light was clouded like an eye with a cataract. The sky that at dawn had been high with a whitish tinge now hung low and leaden. If only my eyes had both had vision, the morning light might have filled the scene more amply (I’m frequently prone to this kind of misconception), but to the one remaining eye it was a dark morning of unrelieved desolation. I sat, heedless of the dirt covering me, in a position more degraded than that of any normal inhabitant of that morning city, scrabbling with bare hands at the earthen wall, assailed by an overwhelming cold from without and a burning shame from within. Like a tower about to topple and blot out the leaden sky, the squat, broad silhouette of a human being once more blocked the entrance to the pit. It brought to mind a black crab reared up against the sky on its back legs. The dog went wild, and I was paralyzed with fear and shame. A clattering of innumerable glass objects wafted down into the pit like a flurry of hail. I strained my eyes in an effort to make out the features of the giant who peered down godlike at me, and, dazed with shame, allowed myself to give a faint, fatuous smile.
“What’s the dog’s name?” said the giant.