The Silent Cry (35 page)

Far from summoning up any concrete image of the sexual act between Takashi and Natsumi, Hoshio’s words only succeeded in stirring the shallower, rawer layers of memory and reviving with a new reality the word “adulterer” which Takashi had used here in the storehouse and whose faint echoes had seemed to ring on indefinitely beyond the sturdy black beams. Of the two adulterers, I’d thought that my wife had completely uprooted everything sexual within herself, so that though a fleeting desire might brush her occasionally she would be unable to transplant it to sexual soil where it could grow naturally. Once, when she and I stood shoulder to shoulder trying to move a potted plant from a corner of the cramped conservatory, we found ourselves—though we’d had almost no sexual relations since the baby’s conception, much less since the trauma of its birth—simultaneously overcome by desire, like a passing fever of the blood. Roughly she grasped my penis, which had risen stiff against the resisting stuff of my trousers, then frowned in distress and distaste and, walking with an odd shuffle, disappeared into the bedroom. Later, lying pale on the bed and sustained by aspirin, she’d made her excuses :

“The moment my hand touched you, I felt I’d gone back to carrying that great fetus again. I could feel my womb all big and tight, contracting and hurting with sexual excitement. I couldn’t breathe for fear; I was scared I’d miscarry, lose something big. I don’t suppose you can understand that, can you?”

But even as I listened to her I could feel, low in my belly, a lingering memory of the pain that a while earlier had taken a vicelike grip on the buried roots of my erect penis that ran from behind the testicles toward the coccyx. . . .

“Did he rape her, then?” I pressed in horror. “Did you go in to stop him because she cried in pain?” My head was swimming with renewed anger. But Hoshio, who until now had been racked with dry sobs, unexpectedly relaxed his expression, considered my words, and with every sign of surprise hastened to deny them.

“Oh, no! He didn’t rape her. When I first peeped through the sliding doors, I thought she was just too tired to stop him putting his hand on her breasts and between her legs, but by the time I opened the doors she was waiting for him to begin. I could see one of her bare soles sticking up straight and obedient-like on each side of his ass! So this time I said to her, ‘I’ll tell Mitsu if you don’t stop!’ But she just said, ‘I don’t mind, Hoshi,’ and didn’t turn a hair. Even when
Taka actually started, the soles of her feet kept quite still; it didn’t look to me as if she was in pain.”

The adulterers were gradually becoming more real. In fact the reality was awakening a disgraceful, perverted lust in me.

“I started to shut the door because I couldn’t stand watching Taka do it, but without stopping he twisted his head round to look at me and said, ‘Tomorrow, go and tell Mitsu everything you saw.’ His voice was so loud I was really scared in case it woke Momoko. She’d taken sleeping pills because her hysteria kept her awake, and she’d only just got to sleep.”

Hoshio had awoken in the middle of the night and realized that Takashi, who had been sleeping beside him, had slipped out of his blankets. Then he heard his voice next to Natsumi, who was sleeping with Momoko beyond the sliding doors. “I felt I was being torn apart,” Takashi was saying. “It was the same during my travels in America, of course. . . .” But what came next, Hoshio’s still drowsy ears had been unable to follow completely. At first he heard only isolated words whose meaning would become clear sporadically without his understanding the drift of what was being said. Then gradually he became more receptive, until he could catch everything without gaps. The strange sense of urgency that replaced the sleep in his head had compelled him to do so.

“… arrival … kept under supervision … not out of desire, just the reverse if anything … ghetto … cabdriver tried to warn me against it … but I felt I was being wrenched in half. Unless I gave both the forces tearing me apart some substance and assessed them … realize now I’ve been torn all along between the desire to justify myself as a creature of violence and the urge to punish myself for it. Seeing that’s how I’m made, can you blame me for hoping to go on living just as I am? At the same time, though, the stronger the hope got, the more urgently I felt the need to wipe out that terrible side of myself, and the more serious the split became. The reason why I deliberately chose to get mixed up in violence during the campaign against revision of the Security Treaty—and the reason why, when I found myself associated with the violence of the weak forced into opposition against unjust violence, I chose to ally myself with unjust violence, whatever its purpose—was that I wanted to go on accepting myself as I am, to justify myself as a man of violence without having to change. . . .”

“Why do you say ‘myself as I am,’ Taka?” my wife put in sadly.
“Why do you say ‘myself as a man of violence’?”

“She wasn’t drunk?” I asked, interrupting Hoshio’s account. But he promptly squashed the faint hope sustaining my pitifully urgent voice.

“She never drinks nowadays,” he said.

“It’s tied up with the kind of experience I can never talk about so long as I intend to go on living,” Takashi went on after a silence during which the eavesdropper waited with bated breath. “But you don’t have to hear about it provided you believe that I really am torn between two things.”

“I suppose so. . . . As long as I know you’re strongly divided, there’s no need to know just how it happened.”

“Right. Anyway, the one certain thing is that I’ve had a split personality all along. Whenever life’s calm for a while, I get an urge to stir myself up deliberately just to confirm the split. And it’s like drug addiction—the stimulus has to be progressively stronger. Every year the stirring-up has had to be that little bit more violent.”

“If you went to the black ghetto on the night you arrived in America just to ‘stir yourself up,’ what exactly were you expecting?” Natsumi asked.

“I didn’t have any clear idea of what would happen. I just had this intense feeling that if I went there I’d probably be given a thorough shaking-up. In the end I spent that ‘special’ night in bed with a decrepit old black woman as fat as Jin. But don’t get the idea it was sex as such that drove me to the ghetto in the first place. Even if it was a kind of desire, it was far deeper than sex. The cabdriver tried to stop me getting off there. He said it was dangerous at night, and actually offered to take me to a safe place if I wanted to sleep with a black prostitute. I refused. We had an argument, with the result that I got out in front of a saloon. Inside, the place had a fantastically long bar stretching away into the darkness, and a row of drunks sitting in solemn silence facing it—all blacks, of course. I sat down on a stool too high for a Japanese, and found there was a mirror behind the bar and that all the fifty-odd blacks reflected in it were staring at me malevolently. I had a sudden, strong desire for a double vodka—and realized for the first time that my mind was aching for self-punishment. You see, whenever I drink any hard liquor I get high and want to beat the hell out of everybody. But if some Oriental weirdo like me went into a bar in the ghetto specially to pick a fight, he’d almost certainly end up getting himself beaten to death. So when this giant of a bartender
came over, I asked for a ginger ale. Along with the urge for punishment, I was scared blind. I’m always scared of death, and that kind of violent death in particular. It’s a trait I’ve had to fight ever since the day S was beaten and killed. . . .”

“That was the first time—when he said he was afraid—that I had my doubts about Taka,” said Hoshio in a voice charged with a black resentment inappropriate to his years. “So I peeped through the sliding doors. I could see because they kept the small light on for Momoko; she’s still scared of going to sleep in the dark. All the time he was talking, Taka kept putting his hand on her breasts and between her legs. That was when I thought Natsumi was just letting him do it because she was too tired to push his hand away. . . .”

“I sipped my ginger ale till it was all gone,” Takashi continued, “then went out and started walking down the dark street. There were only a few streetlights on here and there. It was late at night, and lots of blacks were sitting out in the cool, on fire escapes and on the stoops of big, dark, old-fashioned buildings. I could hear them talking about me as I went past, and occasionally I’d catch a few words like ‘goddamn Chink …’ I automatically walked faster, imagining the sweaty great blacks coming after me, cracking my skull open, and leaving me to die where I fell on the filthy sidewalk. But even as I oozed with fright I was turning off into some still darker and more dangerous backstreet. You should’ve seen how I sweated—even the black woman I slept with later said it was unusual for a Japanese to smell so much, though she herself stank to high heaven. I even barged into the courtyards of apartment blocks, my forehead burning this time with the idea that I’d be shot! And all through this forced march of mine the one thing that obsessed my brain was a ridiculous cautionary tale that the woman Diet member who headed our troupe had told us on the ship across the Pacific, hoping to ensure our good behavior in America. I expect it was in the papers at home—a Tokyo bank clerk who’d been sent to America fell to his death from the twelfth floor of a New York hotel after only one month there. An old American lady of eighty sleeping in the next room woke up in the middle of the night and found a naked Japanese on all fours on the narrow parapet outside the window, scrabbling at the windowpane with his nails. Nobody knows why he was naked and scratching at the glass—he wasn’t even drunk, the Diet woman said. But I felt sure it was the act of a man using an excessive fear of death to punish
himself with. And as I hurried through the dark of the ghetto late at night, I was just like that man crawling naked toward the old lady’s room along that narrow ledge twelve floors up—only in my case, you see, there wasn’t any stranger to wake up and give the scream that would send me to my death. After a while, I happened to come out on a wider, rather better lit street, with a cab heading in my direction. I waved at it frantically like a castaway sighting a ship. . . .

“Once one strand gives way, the whole thing collapses, you can’t stop it: thirty minutes later, I was safely inside the prostitute’s room, telling her my most shameful secrets in English and asking her to pretend she was giving me the punishment I deserved. I was quite shameless, begged her to act like she was a great black man raping a young Oriental girl. ‘Anything, so long as you gimme the money,’ she said. . . .”

“Hoshi,” I put in, checking his complaint in full flood, “you’re wrong if you feel guilty for not being able to stop Taka. By the time you called out ‘Don’t, don’t, you mustn’t!’ it was already too late, and when you saw them having sex, it was the second time, after they’d had a rest. I’m sure they’d already finished once while you were still asleep. Otherwise Taka wouldn’t have confessed to her the kind of things you’ve just told me. It simply wouldn’t do as a prelude to seduction.”

“Aren’t you angry, Mitsu?” queried Hoshio, as though his own moral sensibilities found my attitude inexcusable.

“It’s too late for that, too,” I said. “What earthly good would it do now if
I
started saying ‘Stop, stop! Don’t do it, you mustn’t!’?”

Hoshio stared at me with a loathing so concentrated it was like virulent poison seeping from his eyes. Then suddenly he abandoned all attempt at concern for or interest in the cuckold and, withdrawing into the solitary confines of his own mind, hugged his knees to him, hung his grubby head, and complained in a pitiful copy of the distressed wails of the farmers’ wives the evening before :

“Oh hell, what a mess! What am I going to do? I’ve spent my savings on the Citroen and I can’t go back to my job at the repair shop. What the hell am I going to do? What a goddamn mess!”

I heard, coming up toward the house, a medley of sounds: Nembutsu music, the uneasy barking of dogs poised for flight, laughter and cries from people of all ages. All the while Hoshio had been talking, I’d been aware of them as a kind of auditory hallucination, but by now
they were quite obviously real and advancing on the house. The music and human clamor had just the opposite atmosphere from the subdued “rising” of that morning. As a change from commiserating with my young companion who felt himself abandoned by everything sound and healthy in the world, I got up and peered down from the window at the yard below.

Before long, two “spirits” appeared, heading a company of musicians, dogs, and spectators more numerous than at any Nembutsu dance I’d seen in my childhood. They poured into the yard, filling it completely. In the small, round clearing they left in the center, the “spirits” began a slow, circular movement. The musicians—members of the team—were playing their instruments with steady concentration, their shoulders hunched against the press of spectators behind them. Barking wildly, two ginger dogs rushed round and round inside the circle after the “spirits,” leaping back each time they were struck across the head. The “spirits” themselves seemed to consider it part of the Nembutsu performance to lash the dogs to new heights of frenzy. Each time a dog was struck, a shout of cruel delight rose from the spectators.

The “spirits’ ” costumes were of a kind I couldn’t recall seeing in any of the varied dances of the old days. The man wore a homburg with a black morning coat and a black vest to match, but with a wide expanse of naked chest showing beneath. It was grandfather’s evening dress: I’d seen it before, tucked away in the storeroom along with a starched dickey. I wondered why they’d omitted the shirt from the “spirit’s” formal getup. Didn’t it fit the performer? Or was the fabric rotten? Or had it been rejected in accordance with the habits of the player wearing the suit, who was the grotesque young man who had so prided himself on being lightly clad? The hat had numerous slits cut in it to make it fit the crown of his head, which was fat and round like a helmet. Through the slit at the very back, which had opened into an equilateral triangle, one caught an unexpected glimpse of white neck, topped with shaggy black hair. He walked with body bent forward in an aristocratic stoop, making repeated, dignified little bows to the spectators about him as he went. He was driving the dogs frantic by suddenly flashing at them a filthy fragment of dried fish which he kept in the pocket of his morning coat. The dogs rushed about madly, tearing with sharp claws at the dark, downtrodden snow and barking furiously.