The Silent Cry (36 page)

The role of the second “spirit” who walked in his wake was played by the fleshy little girl I’d seen the day before in the supermarket office, now dressed in a pure white Korean costume. The two tapes fluttering from the high, tight waist of the blouse, and the long skirt that billowed gently in the slight breeze, awakened other memories of white silk. They still looked brand new: I wondered from what hiding place they’d unearthed them for use as a costume in the Nembutsu dance. Quite probably, the young men of the valley who raided the Korean settlement on the day S was killed not only plundered moonshine and candy but also took some Korean girl’s best clothes and kept them hidden for more than twenty years. I suspected that on the first raid they’d committed not only murder but some other dreadful act that S’s death alone could never atone for, and that it was knowledge of this that had driven S, even after he’d resolved to serve as sacrificial lamb on the second raid, to lie brooding in a state of despairing melancholy on the floor in the back room downstairs in the storehouse. So far as the murdered Korean was concerned, the presentation of S’s corpse by the valley folk had wiped the slate clean, so it seemed likely that some other crime must have lain behind the village’s sale to the Koreans of the land on which their settlement stood. Flushed pink and pretty from an almost indecently obvious excitement, the girl walked gracefully in the wake of the young man in homburg and morning coat, her small face smiling the thrilled, rapturous smile of the star of the moment, her eyes half closed in ecstasy, her body swathed in the white clothes that her elder brothers, in the summer of 1945, must have torn off the girl from the Korean settlement after they’d had their way.

The spectators too had an air of contented excitement. Shouts of joy—some innocent, some cruel—burst from their smiling faces. Among them I saw the women from the “country” who at dusk the day before had come, clothed once more in the working garb of the hollow, their whole beings exuding dark despair, to make their appeal. They were still in the same drab, indigo-striped peasant dress, but were now outdoing all the rest with their peals of cheerful laughter. The “spirits” of the Emperor and his wife in Korean dress had rekindled a new excitement in all these people from the valley and the “country” beyond.

I looked for Takashi among the throng, but the heaving of the crowd in response to the movements of the “spirits” and dogs within the
circle was so vigorous that to focus on them was physically trying. Turning my exhausted eye away, I caught sight of my wife standing on the threshold of the main house and stretching up to peer over the heads of the crowd into the circular clearing. With her right hand she supported herself against the doorpost, and with her left she was shading her eyes against the sun as she watched the dance. Her hand cast a shadow over her forehead, eyes, and nose so that I couldn’t judge the expression on her face. It was quite apparent, even so, that she was intensely feminine and relaxed, like the heavily pleated white silk skirt worn by the “spirit” of the Korean girl—a far cry from the exhausted, frustrated, unhappy woman I’d vaguely and quite groundlessly expected. I realized that thanks to Takashi she’d recovered from the sense of the impossibility of sex that had eaten at the heart of our married life like a cancer. For the first time since our marriage, I managed to see her as a truly independent being. The hand shading her eyes moved a fraction, threatening to expose to the sunlight the upper half of her tranquil, newly softened features. I drew back from the window in a reflex movement, as though scared that the direct sight of them might turn me to stone. Hoshio, who by now was more interested in the clamor outside the storehouse than his own anguish at being deserted, came up swiftly behind me and pressed his nose to the window in my place. I went and sprawled face up by the table, gazing at the black zelkova beams. Now that my companion, his back turned to me, was completely absorbed in the new dance, I found myself for the first time since the news of my wife’s adultery completely free from the gaze of others. I lay there breathing peacefully, sending the blood out from my heart seventy times each minute and drawing it back again, dimly aware of the 98° F of warmth within my body.

At the very center of my head I seemed to feel the blood, heated rather above body temperature, rushing round and round murmuring in a tiny whirlpool. Then two unrelated images appeared, and sending the eye of consciousness down where the darkness in my head was faintly illuminated by their light, I closed my other, seeing eye. One image was a scene that took place at dawn on the day father left for China on the last journey of his life. Mother was standing on the threshold of the house as she directed the workmen who were to carry his luggage to the town on the coast. When father discovered where she was standing, he knocked her down in a fit of rage, then set off, leaving her senseless and covered with blood from her nose, while grandmother
explained to us children that whenever a woman stood on the threshold some disaster invariably befell the head of the family. Mother always refused to accept this piece of folklore. Quite simply, she hated father for leaving on such a violent note, and despised grandmother for trying to defend her son’s action. Even so, when father died as an outcome of that journey, I couldn’t help feeling a mysterious sense of awe toward mother. I wondered if in fact she believed in the taboo even more firmly than grandmother and had deliberately stood on the threshold. I wondered, too, whether awareness of her intention had made father behave so brutally and stopped grandmother and the workmen from making any move to restrain him.

The other image was a vague, futile groping for the shape and color of my wife’s naked body. I tried to picture something beautiful and erotic, but the only clear visions I achieved—both calculated to inspire a deeply instinctive distaste—were of the soles of her feet, given reality thanks to the testimony of the witness to her adultery, and of her anus, where a split caused by a passing fancy on our part to try some deviant sex had left a ridge of flesh. Jealousy, moreover, was gradually becoming a positive fact, sticking hot and rough in my bronchial tubes as though I’d inhaled poison gas. The same irritating vapor attacked the eye of my consciousness, so that the details of her naked body were lost in a reddish obscurity. I had a sudden, startling feeling that I’d never really possessed her. . . .

“Mitsu!” called a hearty voice full of animal good spirits and confidence from downstairs. It was Takashi.

I opened my eyes to see Hoshio’s back stir and draw into itself where he stood glued to the window. By now the Nembutsu music, the barking of the dogs, and the cheerful clamor of people were on their way down to the valley.

“Mitsu!” called Takashi in a voice still more heartily extrovert than before. Ignoring Hoshio, who made a reflex movement to stop me, I went halfway down the stairs and sat down. Standing in the entrance with the outside light behind him, Takashi was fringed with a halo like rainbow-hued wool. Not only his face and body, which were turned toward me, but his outspread arms as well were completely shadowed. If I was to deal with him on equal terms, I would have to keep my own face strategically buried in the darkness too.

“Mitsu, did Hoshi tell you what I did?” the black figure asked me, glittering all around with tiny bubbles of light like sunshine refracted
on a rippling sea. It made the silhouette look like a salamander rising from water.

“Yes, he told me,” I said calmly. I wanted to show how unemotional I was compared with him, this younger brother of mine now preparing to flaunt his adultery before the cuckold with much the same eagerness as the child who once begged me to watch while he let a silly little centipede attack his own finger.

“I didn’t do it just for the sex. It was a way of getting at the meaning of something very important to me.”

I shook my head in silence to indicate my doubts about what he’d said. Takashi, just like the dogs barking at the “spirits,” was wavering between excitement and tense apprehension, and this dart of ill will struck straight home.

“It’s true, it wasn’t for the sex!” he protested indignantly. “Actually, I didn’t feel any desire at all. I had to do all kinds of things by myself to get properly worked up.”

For a moment I felt my face flush hot with a mixture of rage and a desire to laugh. It freed me from all feelings of jealousy. So he’d had to do all kinds of things “by himself,” had he? The anger made me tremble, and at the same time I had to clench my teeth to keep back the laughter. How hard he must have worked at it, all “by himself”! Why, the vulgar kid—little did he realize that, if anybody, it was my wife who as a sexually mature human being (if she had in fact shaken off that sense of sexual impossibility) had achieved something “by herself.” How desperately he must have worked on his first act of adultery, scared in case failure to ejaculate in the proper way should afflict him with a stifling sense of shame not only toward his fellow in adultery but toward me as well! The whole thing had the effect of some dreary memory from adolescence.

“Mitsu, I’m going to marry Natsumi. I hope you won’t interfere with us,” he said, shaking the black silhouette of his head exasperatedly.

“Are you going to try all kinds of things ‘by yourself’ even after you’re married?” I asked mockingly. “Without even wanting it?”

“That’s up to me!” he shouted, covering his humiliation in a show of anger.

“Right. It’s up to you and Natsumi. But that assumes you can somehow survive the collapse of your ‘rising’ and get out of the valley safely, taking her with you.”

“Look, the rising is thoroughly back in its stride. You saw how wild both the valley and ‘country’ folk were about the ‘spirits,’ didn’t you? We’ve given the rising a transfusion. We’ve restored its strength with a stiff shot of the blood of imagination!” His voice had recovered the excitement it had had when he first called upstairs to me. “They were afraid our violence mightn’t carry the same authority as the Emperor’s gang. But having a good laugh at the two ‘spirits’ has given them the emotional strength to despise him! They’ve got the guts again to see that the man they call the ‘Emperor of the Supermarkets’ is only an ex-lumberjack, a Korean who happened to amass a certain amount of wealth. So they promptly showed their bullying contempt and twisted self-interest by stripping the store of its electrical appliances and everything else in sight. Once they decide the enemy’s a helpless weakling, they feel they can trample all over him. And the crucial fact here is that the Emperor’s a Korean. They’ve always been thoroughly aware how wretched their lives were. And they’ve always kept low, feeling they were the most insignificant species in the forest. But now they remember the delicious superiority they felt toward the Koreans before and during the war. They’re intoxicated at rediscovering the existence of outcasts even worse off than themselves, and they’ve begun to see themselves as almighty. They’re like a lot of flies—I only need to organize them and I’ll be able to carry on resisting the Emperor indefinitely. They may be small and nasty like flies, but that’s just what gives a lot of them together a special power of their own.”

“But do you imagine your ‘flies’ are never going to realize how much you despise the people here ? Wait and see—you’ll find the power of the flies directed against yourself one day! In fact, maybe your ‘rising’ won’t be complete until that happens.”

“That’s just the false perspective of a pessimist looking down on the valley from his house on high,” declared Takashi, who had acquired a certain ease of manner by now. “The rising of the past three days, you see, has revolutionized the outlook of the fly elite, who are a cut above the rank-and-file flies. By ‘elite,’ I mean the owners of forest land. They always used to believe that even if life in the valley came to a dead end and all the inhabitants of the hollow moved out or died off, they at least would only need to wait till the trees had grown big enough to make lumbering possible again. But this rising has given them practical proof that flies driven by despair are something to be
feared. It’s been a practical lesson in the history of the 1860 affair. Moreover, the moment they realized as a concrete fact—admittedly, the concreteness was a fraud, but anyhow—when they realized that the ‘spirit’ of the Emperor was only a pathetic Korean, they all became patriots overnight. Psychologically, it was just the same kind of patriotism, in a rigid, strictly local sense, as shown by their lousy ancestors who took seats in the prefectural assembly—once cutting down part of the forest had given them the funds—even though they had no practical political program to offer. They’re getting ideas of wresting economic control of the valley back into the hands of the Japanese. And fortunately for them, the enemy is that stupid old Emperor who walks in procession in an old-fashioned morning coat without even a shirt, much less a tie and gloves. . . . So the idea, which has turned into a definite plan, is to have several of them put up the funds to take over the supermarket, including its losses from the looting, and to have it run jointly by the valley storekeepers who’ve gone out of business. The young priest has been rushing all over the place preparing the ground. You know, Mitsu, that priest is more than a mere philosopher—he’s got the enthusiasm of a revolutionary who’s keen to put his cherished fantasies into practice. What’s more, he’s the only person in the hollow who hasn’t the slightest trace of egotism. He’s our surest ally!”

“I agree that he’s quite selfless in taking the side of the ordinary people of the valley,” I said, “because, Taka, that’s been the priest’s job at the temple for generations past. But don’t assume he’s on the side of people like you, who thoroughly despise the valley folk.”

“I don’t care. I’m leading a rising, a successful one too. I’m an ‘effective evildoer,’ like our eldest brother on the battlefield.” He laughed. “I don’t
need
real allies. All I need is the appearance of cooperation.”

“You know best, Taka, so you’d better get back to your battlefield,” I said, getting up. “I can’t share your sense of humor about it, I’m afraid.”