The Silent Cry (20 page)

“Supposing, now,” he went on, “that this brother heard a rumor that John Manjiro, whom your great-grandfather had met at Kochi, was setting off for America again on the
Kanrin-maru
. Almost certainly he would have chafed at the bit to be confined in a small valley at a time when the sons of fishermen beyond the forest were living lives of adventure in a place open to whole new realms of experience. A report came at the beginning of summer that year, you see, that the shogunate had given permission for men from this clan to go and study at the Naval Academy, and he promptly campaigned, through the temple priest, to have himself selected as one of the students. My father used to say he’d read a copy of the application, so I imagine it would turn up even now if one made a thorough search of the temple storehouse. It shouldn’t have been impossible for the second son of a wealthy overseer to work his way into the lower ranks of the samurai. Why, it was just around that time that the sons of wealthy local landowners on the other side of the forest were active in the pro-Emperor, anti-foreign movement. Admittedly, his attempts didn’t succeed. And not so much because of any lack of ability on his part as from the clan’s own failure to show the spirit of adventure needed to send someone to the Naval Academy. As I see it, it was his sense of frustrated indignation that turned him into the kind of anti-establishment activist who would plan to give the village youths special training or undertake to represent the farmers in their attempt to get a loan from the clan. And the agent who came from the other side of the forest, together with the priest and your great-grandfather, took note of this dangerous young leader and set to work on him. That’s the conclusion my studies have led me to, at least.”

“It’s certainly the most appealing view of the 1860 affair I’ve
heard so far,” I admitted. “If you consider it together with the incident just after the war when S was killed, the role played by the young village thugs is consistent, and all kinds of things make sense.”

“To be honest,” the young priest also admitted candidly, “you might say it was a bright idea I had while watching the incident in the Korean village that led to my interpretation of the events of 1860. There were things in S’s behavior that could only suggest he had the 1860 rising in mind when he resolved on his own course of action. I don’t think I’m just forcing an analogy in linking 1860 and the summer of 1945.”

“Do you mean S was bothered because great-grandfather’s brother was the only rebel leader who escaped execution, and deliberately decided that, in contrast, he alone would be killed in the raid on the Korean settlement? If so, at least it’s the kindest interpretation now that he’s dead.”

“I was his friend, you see,” the young priest said with evident embarrassment, the small face flushing beneath the prematurely white hair. “Not a very useful friend, you must admit. . . .”

“Takashi is like S,” I said. “He seems to want his actions to be influenced by the 1860 affair. Today, for example, he’s started getting the young men of the valley together for football practice, just because he’s taken a fancy to the story of how great-grandfather’s brother cut a clearing in the forest as a training ground to prepare the young men to fight.”

“But the kind of rising that occurred in 1860 wouldn’t be possible today,” the priest replied, regaining his customary smile. “And the time’s past when a killing match between the Korean settlement and the valley folk could have taken place without any police intervention, as happened just after the war. In a peaceful age like the present, not even Takashi could set himself up as leader of a riot, so I shouldn’t really worry.”

“Incidentally,” I said, taking advantage of the smile to put out a feeler, “is there anything in this diary that might offend a good pacifist? If there is, I think I’d better give it to Takashi. Among the various human types found in the Nedokoro family, I’m the kind that refuses to be inspired to heroic thoughts by the 1860 business. It’s the same even in my sleep: far from identifying with great-grandfather’s intrepid brother, I have wretched dreams in which I’m a bystander cowering in the storehouse, incapable even of firing a gun like great-grandfather.”

“You think, then, it would be better to give the diary to Takashi, do you?” said the priest, whose smile had frozen momentarily.

I took the purple diary off my dead friend’s Penguin book and, putting it in the pocket of my overcoat, went down with the priest to the primary school playground where Takashi was practicing football with his new comrades.

In a strong breeze that blew aimlessly about the valley beneath a blue sky, the young men were kicking the football around in silence and with suffocating intensity of purpose. The Sea Urchin in particular was dashing about desperately, a thick towel wound round the head that sat so incongruously large on his short trunk. He took repeated tumbles but, oddly enough, no one laughed. Even the village kids standing round the edge of the playground were sunk in a grave, earnest silence just the reverse of the gay vitality of city children watching sports.

Takashi and Hoshio, who were standing in the center giving them instructions as they rushed about, made no move to interrupt practice even when the priest and I signaled to them. Momoko and my wife, though, came over in the Citroen to talk to us, making a wide detour round the football-playing group.

“Isn’t it a terrifying sight?” I said. “Why are they throwing themselves into it so enthusiastically when they don’t really seem to be enjoying it?”

“Throwing themselves into everything is the only way they know. Momoko and I like football practice when it’s as serious as this. We’re going to come and watch every day from now on,” said my wife, refusing to share my scruples.

The ball came rolling out of the circle of youths in my direction. I tried to kick it back, but my foot contacted mostly air and the ball spun frantically before coming to rest only a short distance away. The women in the car watched me and the ball with complete indifference, not even smirking. The young priest wore his customary smile as though to smooth over my embarrassment, but it only served to fluster me still more.

After supper that evening, when we were all lying about near the fireplace, Takashi came up to me and, though he lowered his voice so as not to be heard by my wife, who was drunk, said in a tone that was ugly with cold emotion :

“Mitsu—there are terrible things in that diary.”

I stared into the darkness, avoiding facing him directly. Even before I heard his next words a sense of disgust was welling up inside me.

“He studied German at college, you know. He uses the word
Zusammengewürfelt
, says the forces are a bunch of slobs. Some fellow who was hit for breaking ranks during company training actually committed suicide, he says, leaving a sarcastic note apologizing to the company commander. The company commander was our brother. ‘Take a look at Japan today,’ he writes. ‘Utter chaos. Utterly unscientific, utterly unprepared. And half-baked into the bargain. Now look at Germany—the coupons for the rationing system actually in force at the moment were printed way back in 1933 when Hitler first came to power. I pray to God that the Soviet Union rains bombs on us. The Japanese have been poisoned by the dream of peace and got themselves in an unholy mess, but they’re still rushing round and round in circles.’ He also says that the only things he got out of the army were ‘a certain increase in staying power and greater physical strength.’ He thinks one should read widely and deeply in accordance with some objective, and he makes notes about some system of deep breathing. On one page he can write, ‘In such and such a unit on Hainan Island, the commander himself said it was all right to violate a young woman as long as one took the proper steps afterward—the proper steps meaning, of course, to kill her.’ And on the next page he can write in high moral tones, ‘He who would climb Mt. Fuji must start from the first station.’ Then he describes in detail the scene on Leyte when the unit commander executed a native, an alleged spy. ‘The unit commander who captured him apparently said at first that he’d have a recruit bayonet him, but then he took over himself and, wielding a Japanese sword for the first time in his life, cut off the native’s head.’ Do you want to read it, Mitsu?”

“I couldn’t care less about his diary, Taka,” I said roughly. “And I don’t want to read it. It was because I had a feeling it would contain that kind of stuff that I handed it on to you. But what’s all the fuss about ? Is it anything more than a perfectly ordinary set of war reminiscences ?”

“For me at least it
is
something to make a fuss about,” he said, firmly rejecting my criticisms. “It means I’ve found one close relative at least who maintained his ordinary approach to life even on the battlefield, yet was an effective perpetrator of evil. Why—if I’d lived through the same times as him, this might have been my own diary.
The idea seems to open up a whole new perspective in my view of things.”

His voice must have had the force to impose itself momentarily even on my wife’s drink-befuddled brain. When I turned to look at him, she too had raised her head and was gazing intently at his face as he stood there, fiercely animated yet somber, with the air somehow of a violent criminal.

Procession from the Past

T
HE
next morning, on waking, I realized at once that I was sleeping alone as I normally did in Tokyo, that I could twist and turn in response to the pains scattered among the various parts of my body and the desolate lack deep down behind my ribs without that feeling of base panic lest my wife, sleeping by my side, should see me. It brought a definite, physical sense of release. I was, in fact, lying with all my frailties in full view, as careless of others’ eyes as I always was when I slept quite alone. At first, I’d tried to avoid identifying the memory that was the original inspiration for my posture. But I admitted now that it was the memory of that grotesque, utterly abject thing existing in its wooden cot, the thing that we’d gazed down at so blankly when we went to the institution to get our baby back. The doctor had wondered if the baby might not die of shock if his environment changed again. But the real reason we’d left him there was that we ourselves might well have died of the disgust and shock inspired by that horrifying object. Our behavior of course was quite unjustifiable; if he’d died and come back a frail, wasted ghost to savage us to death, I for one would have made no attempt to escape.

The night before, my wife, disliking the idea of retiring to my side of the sliding doors, had slept by the open fireplace with Takashi and his bodyguards. In her whisky-heated brain she’d mulled over our conversation upstairs in the storehouse concerning the new life, disintegration, and death, carrying its implications still further until she’d finally taken a resolute stand.

“Let’s go to bed,” I’d urged her. “You can go on drinking there.” But she refused, in a clearer voice than I, in view of the nature of the subject, would have wished, even though she was too drunk to talk loudly for the special benefit of Takashi and the others.

“You talk about going back and having another baby as if it had nothing directly to do with you. But it would mean starting again yourself, too. In practice, you’ve no intention of doing so. Why should I have to obey your orders, then, and creep in between the blankets like a faithful pet?”

With a private feeling of relief I’d left her and retired alone. Takashi made no move to intervene in our petty conflict. Encouraged by the unfamiliar voice of his eldest brother echoing from the pages of the purple diary, he was straining to twist himself, like a sharp-edged screw, deeper still into the murky recesses of his own peculiar problems. I myself had no desire to be influenced by the ghost of this brother of ours, nor had the diary disturbed me particularly. I preferred to dismiss it as a perfectly commonplace account of wartime experiences. It was much safer to go to sleep with a gap in my imagination than to summon up the ill-omened figure of our brother standing bloody on unfamiliar battlefields.

For the first time in many a month I thrust my head beneath the blankets and sniffed at the warm odor of my own body. It was like nuzzling down into one’s entrails. I was a coelenterate five feet six inches long, plunging my head into my intestines to close the comfortable circle of my own flesh. It was almost as though the dull ache in the several parts of my body, and the sense of lack, had been transformed into an obscure and guilty feeling of pleasure, a pleasure arising from awareness that I was free from the eyes of others, that the pain and the sense of lack were at least my own. I felt I might even become pregnant with these sensations and, like the lowest order of creatures, achieve unicellular reproduction. Bearing with the difficulty in breathing, I kept my head buried in the warm, smelly darkness between the blankets, trying to picture myself suffocating to death there, the smell of my own body in my nostrils, my head painted crimson and a cucumber stuffed up my anus. With increasingly intense reality the outlines of the scene began to take shape. . . .

On the verge of suffocation, the skin of my face hot and puffy with blood, I thrust my head with terrific force into the cool air outside the blankets, to be greeted by the sound of Takashi and my wife talking in low tones beyond the sliding doors. Takashi’s voice had the same elated quality as the previous night. I hoped my wife was listening with her face turned toward the shadows: not that I wanted to keep secret the signs of degradation that must be so apparent on her newly
awakened face, but the idea of my brother’s eyes intruding thus on our “family” inevitably damaged my self-respect. He was speaking of memory, the world of dreams and the like. Gradually, the fragments coalesced into a kernel of sense that reminded me of the argument in the Citroen.

“… pointed out the distortions, to be honest I couldn’t reply. Remember? It took all the fight out of me, left me in a state of doubt and self-questioning, but what the football team told me … recovered, Natsumi.”

“… Taka, your memory … than Mitsu’s,” my wife said in a flat, lifeless voice. Far from indicating inattention, the voice was a sign that my wife, a good listener when sober, was concentrating on what he said.