The Silent Cry (22 page)

The young men were trying to rescue the petrified figure. From the scaffolding supporting the temporary bridge, two logs, bound together, had been lowered by rope beside the central pillar. One of the men, standing barefoot in the shallow water, was tugging at a rope tied round the middle of the logs to prevent their touching the pillar. Two other youths were riding on the logs, moving gradually closer to the boulder that held the child captive. They edged their way along the logs, making the kind of soothing noises people make to a frightened animal.

As the young man in front arrived directly beneath the child, his companion behind him grasped him firmly round the waist with both arms, at the same time maintaining the balance of his own body by wrapping his legs round the logs. Then, as though whisking a cicada from a tree, the first man swept the child to safety. A roar went up from the onlookers. At that instant, the lump of concrete on which the child had been went into a bouncing, twisting motion and collided with the jagged corner of the main body of the broken bridge, sending up a heavy thud that rang through the valley and rose up over the forest. Takashi, who had been lying on his belly directing the young men’s movements from the temporary bridge immediately above the lump of concrete, stood up and gave instructions for those supporting the rope to haul the three youths on the logs up to the level of the temporary bridge. The shock waves from the collision jarred fiercely and persistently inside me. Their effect stemmed in part from a deep, almost sickening sense of relief on realizing that a close relative had just come through a major crisis safely, but this was swallowed up in turn by a still more intense sense of despair at the brutality of life when I considered what would have happened if he hadn’t succeeded. If the rescue operation had failed and the child’s body had been dashed against the
jagged surface along with the concrete boulder, Takashi, as the man responsible for the carnage, would inevitably have been driven down onto the lump of concrete as it swung like a weight on a line, there to smash his own head in. In fact, a still more cruel and disgusting punishment might have been meted out on the man who had murdered a community member of such tender years. However much I reassured myself that Takashi had in fact succeeded, I couldn’t repress the bilious taste of fear that came rising into my throat. Why, I wondered with a sense of unfocused anger, had Takashi voluntarily put himself in such danger? The crowd, which the other members of the football team had been holding back until now so as to allow the rescue work to proceed effectively, pressed round the rescued child. As I turned away and set off toward the village, I remembered Takashi’s somberly tense, somehow defiant face in the days when he’d insisted he wasn’t scared of violence in any form, or of physical pain, or even of death, but would throw up at the sight of a drop of blood oozing from the ball of his finger. Supposing he’d seen the body of the child squashed before his very eyes, a foot or so below him as he lay on his belly on the temporary bridge, while fragments of concrete mixed with blood and bits of flesh sprayed him full in the face—had he thought that a quick vomit would let him escape from reality again?

A festive medley of excited laughter and war whoops arose behind me. Spurred on by them, I walked rapidly ahead, breathing heavily with an excitement quite different from theirs. “Man in the river”—but it was Takashi himself who had been caught in the most perilous flood of all. Now, though, the incident would probably give him and his team a certain power over the valley. It would give him confidence, at least, and make him feel that he’d put down firm roots there. The actuality of what was taking shape in his world would gradually impress itself more and more clearly on my wife, convincing her still more finally of the unlikelihood of anything ever happening to me. For the first time, the word “jealousy” that Takashi had used to my wife acquired a definite content. Just before I left, I caught sight of the Citroen parked at the back of the crowd. If I’d pushed my way through to it I could have joined up with my wife and the others. But I ignored the car and turned my back on the crowd. Crackling sparks from the word “jealousy,” charged with a new meaning now, informed me that I hadn’t wanted tq join my wife in witnessing Takashi’s success. . . .

A man with unnaturally long legs overtook me on a very ancient bicycle, riding as though practicing for a slow cycling competition, then put one foot to the ground in leisurely fashion and looked round.

“Your brother’s quite a leader, Mitsusaburo.” He didn’t sound particularly impressed. It was the way all those of any consequence in the valley spoke. Being extremely wary, they always wore a mask of cool detachment from behind which they craftily tried to sound out the other man’s feelings. At the time that I’d left the valley, the man had been assistant at the village office. By now he’d got fat and his complexion suggested kidney trouble, but the bike he was straddling as he watched with an ambiguous expression for my reaction was the same old village office machine.

“If he’d failed, he would probably have been lynched,” I said in a voice as calm as his but filled with distaste. The man must have realized that I wasn’t ignorant of the basic stratagems of conversation among the grown-ups of the valley. He gave a kind of grunt, noncommittal but with a lurking, private contempt.

“If he’d done his growing-up in the valley,” I went on, “he would never have done anything rash like that. It was asking for trouble, like deliberately walking around the edge of a trap. He just doesn’t know the valley folk.”

“Oh, come now!” Somewhere behind the ambiguous smile lurked a suggestion of both timidity and untrustworthiness. “The valley folk aren’t all as bad as that, you know!”

“Why did they leave the bridge unrepaired ?” I asked, walking beside him as he pushed his bicycle.

“The bridge, eh—” he began and broke off, refusing to go on for a while. Then, in the mocking tone that was equally a habit of speech among the crafty valley adults, he added, “Early next year we’re being merged with the neighboring town. Till then, there’s no point in the village repairing it by itself.”

“What’ll happen to the village office if you’re merged?”

“Well, for one thing, they won’t need an assistant,” he said. It was his first straightforward reaction. “Even now the office hardly does any work at all. The forestry cooperative was amalgamated into a group of five towns and villages ages ago, and the agricultural cooperative’s gone broke, so the village office is practically deserted. The headman’s lost interest in his work—stays indoors all day watching television.”

“Television ?”

“The supermarket, you know, set up a communal antenna at the highest point in the forest and started selling sets. Thirty thousand yen for use of the antenna. Even so, ten families in the hollow have got it.”

It seemed that though the village as a whole might be on its last legs economically, there were at least ten prosperous families that hadn’t gone under to the supermarket but were enjoying their own version of the consumer life—though those same ten families (if one was to believe the young priest’s pessimistic theories) might well be in debt to the supermarket for part of the antenna fee and the cost of the television sets.

“Nobody pays any television fees. They say they can’t get JBC programs with the supermarket antenna.”

“What do they watch then, the commercial programs from the town?”

“Oh, no. Actually, JBC comes through best of all.” He showed slight signs of pleasure.

“Do they still do the Nembutsu dance?”

“No, they haven’t done it these five years,” he said, handling the new subject warily. “There’s nobody but the caretaker at your place, and the tatami maker skipped out one night. When people build a new house in the village nowadays they make Western-style rooms and don’t use tatami.”

“Why exactly did the Nembutsu procession have to do a dance in the garden of our house? They could equally well have chosen the garden of the headman’s house or the owner of the forest land. Is it because our house is on the way from the forest down to the valley?”

“But surely, it’s because it’s the home of the Nedokoro family—because it’s where the soul of the valley folk has its roots. When your father gave a talk at the primary school he said that in Okinawa, where he worked before he went to Manchuria, there was a local word
nendokoru
which meant just that—‘the soul’s roots.’ He made a present to the school, too. Twenty tubs of molasses.”

“My mother scoffed at his
nendokoru
theory and wouldn’t hear of it,” I replied. “As for the molasses, she said they made a laughingstock of father in the valley. I imagine the immediate reason for poking fun at him was the idea of a man whose family was on the verge of ruin making such presents.”

“No, no, certainly not!” the man said, withdrawing the malicious trap that he himself had set with such apparent innocence. To the valley, the
Nedokoro-nendokoru
theory had in fact been a source of fun of the most spiteful and nasty kind. When the villagers whiled away their time by relating the many and varied failures in the life of my father, who had always been too easily carried away by what others said, this anecdote regularly served as a kind of climax to the merriment. For years afterward, they’d made fun of father as the man who had used twenty tubs of molasses in an attempt to establish his monopoly of the souls in the valley. If I’d let the man from the village office tempt me into affirming the
Nedokoro-nendokoru
theory, he and his friends would almost certainly have fabricated a new anecdote showing how much the Nedokoro boy took after his father.

“You’ve sold the storehouse and the land, haven’t you, Mitsusaburo? I’ll bet you made quite a bit out of it!”

“I haven’t officially sold it yet. I probably won’t sell the land, anyway. Jin and her family are there, for one thing.”

“You don’t have to pretend, Mitsusaburo—I’m sure you got a good price for them,” he insisted. “Takashi and the manager of the supermarket came to the village office to register the sale of the land and buildings, so I know most of the details.”

I went on walking: quietly, calmly smiling, so as to keep my physical reactions under the control of my mind. The graveled road beneath the soles of my shoes was suddenly heavily pitted and dragged wearisomely at my feet. The eyes of the women and old folk, watching us so vigilantly from the shadows behind filthy glass doors still splashed with dried-up mud from rains of long before, had suddenly acquired the sharpness of the eyes of strangers. The village official walking by my side was representative of them all. The forest about us was sunk in gloom, the sky overcast and threatening snow. But quite suddenly the whole scene had become absolutely alien to me. Calmly I worked to maintain my placid smile, worked with the absolute calmness I’d seen in the eyes of our baby who had failed, in the long run, to establish any ties of understanding with the real world. I had shut myself up, had no interest in, couldn’t be disturbed by, anything in the valley. I wasn’t there on the graveled road, not there for any of the strangers who lived along it. . . .

“Must be going, then,” said the official, straddling his bicycle. Somewhere in my attitude he’d sensed the peculiar mark of the
outsider and, bringing the wisdom of his ancestors into play, sought to avoid getting embroiled. But the alien quality he detected in me wasn’t the distress of a man whose younger brother had privately sold off his house and land to strangers. Such an affair would have been the greatest possible scandal in a valley community, and if he’d caught even the faintest suspicion of it, he would have ensconced himself promptly in the pithole of my distress much as ticks worm their way into the ears of hunting dogs and refuse to budge. The face I showed him was something different: the face of a stranger totally unconcerned with him and the rest of the village and all its affairs. So he mounted his bicycle and pedaled off with enough energy to set his lanky upper half swaying, doubtless wondering bad-temperedly as he went whether he hadn’t been talking to an apparition after all. Quite unexpectedly, I’d turned into something as remote and meaningless to him as a rumor from a distant town.

“Well, good-bye,” I replied in a voice whose tranquillity sounded pleasant even to my own ears. But he refused to be addressed by an apparition and with head bent mournfully forward pedaled on up the slope into the distance. I walked on slowly, smiling to myself, an invisible man treading an unfamiliar path. Some small children who hadn’t reached the bridge in time gazed up at me, but I wasn’t dismayed any more by the resemblance of their grubby faces to my former self, nor did I feel particularly upset as I passed the brewers’ storehouse that had been ravaged to make the supermarket. The store was deserted today, and the bored young woman behind the cash register watched me go by with dull, filmy eyes.

“You’ve got to start a new life, Mitsu,” Takashi had suddenly sprung at me. “Why not give up everything you’re doing in Tokyo and come to Shikoku with me? That wouldn’t be a bad way to start.” It was then that the village in the valley had come back to me as a reality for the first time in a dozen or more years. So I’d returned to the valley in search of my “thatched hut.” But I’d merely been deceived by the unexpected veneer of sobriety that Takashi had acquired, like grime on the skin, during his wanderings around America. My “new life” in the valley was only a ruse devised by Takashi to forestall my refusal and clear the way for him to sell the house and land for the sake of whatever obscure purpose was firing him at the moment. From the very outset, the journey to the valley hadn’t really existed for me. Since I no longer had any roots there,
nor made any attempt to put down new ones, even the house and land were as good as nonexistent; it was no wonder that my brother should have been able to filch them from me with only a minimal exercise of cunning.

Haltingly and unsteadily, I climbed back up the furrowed road that only a while before the memory of my childhood sense of balance had allowed me to run down so easily. It made me vaguely disturbed, of course, that the whole valley including this road should have become so remote, but on the other hand I’d been released from the feeling of guilt, which had pursued me ever since I came back to the valley, at losing the identity that should have been mine since childhood.