The Silent Cry (31 page)

“You know, Mitsu,” she said casually, “you really ought to go down to the valley yourself to see what’s going on!” And she went off down the stairs. I spat the half-chewed salmon and grains of rice into my hand.

The Nembutsu music nagged at me unceasingly, torturing my nerves, sapping my mental energy. Like it or not, my ears kept reminding me of the abnormal events taking place in the valley. Somewhere deep inside them, the “rising” was already an actuality. And by now the loathing the music aroused in me was irreparably tainted with the poison of curiosity, like a liver that once damaged can never recover. But I forbade myself to move from the storehouse until I found some routine reason to do so, some reason not directly related to the disorder sponsored by Takashi and his fellows. Until then, I wouldn’t set foot in the valley myself, nor would I send down any scouts. The music, which in its monotony contrived to suggest nothing more than emotional
poverty, might merely be Takashi’s way of boasting to me that his activities were still continuing. Any action from my side would be a craven capitulation to his vulgar psychological tactics. I would hold out. Before long, the sound of a car horn from the valley added to the noise. Takashi was probably driving around down there, with chains on the Citroen’s tires, putting on his own naive demonstration for the benefit of the children. Or perhaps—if the valley folk had in fact turned into a mob of rioters—he was reviewing them from the car. . . .

The stove, I noticed, was becoming less efficient. The oil in the tank was running out, and I’d already used up my reserves. The only alternatives were to send someone to the supermarket to buy some, or to go down into the valley and do so myself. At last, I was released from the agonizing bonds of endurance. Ever since the morning, for more than four hours now, I’d been tortured and ridiculed by the Nembutsu music.

In the main house I found my wife looking after Momoko, who was still in bed after her attack of hysterics. I couldn’t look to them for help. The young outcast had been moved to the local clinic with frostbite, and all the other members of the team had joined Takashi and Hoshio in masterminding the high jinks in the valley. The only people who could serve my purpose were Jin’s sons. I stood in front of the closed door of the outbuilding and called out, not with any idea that the children had resisted the lure of the music and were still shut up in the chilly gloom with their fat, depressing mother, but to confirm that all the conditions obliging me to go down to the valley had been fulfilled. Jin’s sons made no reply. I was about to withdraw in satisfaction from the closed door when, to my surprise, Jin herself hailed me in a firm, almost cheerful voice. I opened the door and peered in, my eyes darting about like a worried bird in the unfamiliar darkness, half hoping to find her husband rather than Jin herself.

“Oh, hello Jin,” I said apologetically. “I thought I’d get your boys to run down to the valley for me if they were here. I’m out of oil for my stove.”

“They’ve been down in the valley since this morning, Mitsusaburo,” she said with unusual affability as her massive body loomed slowly into view like some huge battleship appearing through mist over the sea. Her eyes directed their power straight toward me like two hot, shining magnets protruding from her round, swollen face. As her tone had already suggested, she was seated in solitary elation on the legless
throne. “And the young fellows under Takashi’s command came to fetch my husband, so he went down to the valley with them.”

“Takashi’s crowd came to fetch him?” I complained with a somewhat guarded display of sympathy for Jin’s husband. “But he’s such a gentle man—why do they have to drag
him
into it?”

The guardedness had been justified: Jin wasn’t looking to me to commiserate with her over her husband.

“The young fellows went round getting people out of all the houses in the village,” she said. “They made particularly sure to rope in families that hadn’t yet taken anything from the supermarket, so in the end the whole village turned out.” As she made an effort to smile, the narrow slits of her eyes flashed between the encroaching flesh, and sluggish ripples ran across the skin tightly encasing the thick layer of fat. Gone was the painful breathlessness that usually bothered her these days; she was the champion gossip again, sustained by an unquenchable curiosity. “The boys had gone off down to the valley long before, but my husband was still here, so two of the fellows came to the door and told him to go down to the supermarket. When the boys came back for a break, they were saying that with any family that hadn’t taken anything from the market, no matter how rich or important, a couple of the young fellows would go and call them out to the market. Apparently both the wife of the headman’s son and the postmaster’s wife went to get things. And it seems the headmaster’s daughter was very upset because she had to bring home a great box of detergent she didn’t need at all!” Suddenly she compressed her lips as though her mouth was full of water, and snuffled noisily; then the skin of the great moon face flushed in patches, and I perceived that Jin had laughed. “So it’s all fair, Mitsusaburo. Everybody’s disgraced themselves equally. Isn’t that nice ?”

“Doesn’t anybody sympathize with the Emperor, Jin?” I said, more or less sidestepping what I vaguely sensed to be a dangerous trap set by this pathologically obese middle-aged woman with her talk of “disgrace,” and putting a question more remote from her bellicose chatter.

“Sympathize with that Korean?” she flashed back indignantly. Until yesterday, like most of the valley folk, she’d never so much as hinted that the all-powerful supermarket owner who had wrought such havoc in the valley was a Korean. But now she deliberately stressed the word “Korean,” unhesitatingly broadcasting his nationality as
though to emphasize how the looting of the supermarket had reversed the balance of power in one fell swoop.

“The valley folk have had nothing but trouble ever since the Koreans came here,” she went on. “After the war ended, they climbed up in the world by grabbing the valley’s land and money. We’re only trying to get a bit of it back, so what’s sympathy got to do with it?”

“But Jin, they didn’t come here voluntarily in the first place. They were slave labor brought from their own country against their will. Besides—so far as I know at least—they’ve never gone out of their way to make trouble for the people here. Even with the postwar disposal of the land where the Korean settlement stood, no individual in the valley ever suffered any direct loss, surely ? Why do you deliberately remember things all wrong?”

“S was killed by the Koreans!” she said suspiciously, rapidly recovering her wariness of me.

“That was in revenge for the killing of a Korean by S’s friends just before. You know that perfectly well, Jin.”

“Everybody feels things have gone to pieces since the Koreans came. They should kill ’em all off!” she declared with extraordinary intensity, flogging herself on in her irrationality. Her eyes had gone dark with hatred.

“But Jin, the Koreans have never willingly inflicted any harm on the people living here. The trouble just after the war was the fault of both sides. Why say such things when you know the facts as well as I do?” But she suddenly lowered her great, mournful head against my accusations. Her only visible response came from the nape of her neck, which from where I was standing looked like the neck of a seal and heaved in time with the labored breathing that had overtaken her again. I sighed in a wave of frustrated annoyance and resentment.

“It’ll be the valley people who pay dearly for starting such a foolish disturbance, Jin,” I said. “I don’t imagine the looting of one of his chain stores will hurt the Emperor much, but most people in the valley will go on feeling wretched with guilt over the stuff they swiped. What do they think they’re up to—even the older people, who ought to know better—letting themselves be put up to such things by someone like Takashi who’s only just back from abroad?”

“I’m glad all the valley folk have disgraced themselves equally!” Jin repeated, talking as though it had nothing to do with her personally and stubbornly refusing to raise her head and look me in the eye.
It convinced me that the word “disgrace” had some very special meaning in her vocabulary.

Now that my eyes could penetrate the recesses of the gloom, I could see various kinds of cheap canned goods piled in a ring round Jin’s chair within easy reach. Steadfast and obedient, they stood there waiting, soldiers of a trusty relief force ready to do battle with a hunger that could never be cured. They were Jin’s private “disgrace”—a whole army of private “disgraces” drawn up in tidy ranks for all to see, their true nature blindingly obvious even to the casual observer. I was gazing at them at a loss for words when, with a defiant display of honesty, Jin took from between the great mounds of her knees a half-opened can whose lid stuck up in a semicircle like an ear and began to wolf its unidentifiable contents. I remembered that animal protein had a bad effect on Jin’s liver, but couldn’t bring myself to mention it and said simply :

“Shall I draw some water for you while I’m here, Jin ?”

“Don’t imagine I’m going to eat so much I’ll make myself thirsty!” she retorted. But her next words had an emotion more straightforward than anything I’d heard from her since the days when she and I together were keeping the Nedokoro family going. “You know, Mitsusaburo,” she said, “thanks to Takashi’s riot, for the first time I’ve got more food than I can eat. It’s only canned stuff, but there’s more than I can manage, really! If only I could get it all down, I wouldn’t need to eat anything more. I’d go back to being thin like I used to be, then I’d weaken and die.”

“Don’t be silly, Jin,” I said comfortingly, with the first feeling of reconciliation since my return to the valley.

“It’s not silly! Wretched creatures like me have a feeling for these things. Even at the Red Cross hospital they told me it was my mind, not my body, that made me eat so much. If only I could get so I didn’t want to eat any more, I’d start losing weight the same day. I’d go back to what I used to be. And then there’d be nothing left to do but die!”

Without warning, I was seized with a childlike sadness; after mother’s death, it was Jin’s help alone that had seen me through the trials of boyhood in the valley. Shaking my head without speaking, I stepped out into the snow and closed the door, shutting “Japan’s Fattest Woman” away in the peaceful darkness, alone with her happiness and “disgrace,” amidst the great pile of food that might well fatally damage her liver. . . .

The hard-trodden snow on the graveled road had softened to a grayish color and turned slippery. I went down it cautiously. I had no intention of interfering in the looting of the supermarket; I’d simply made up mind on no account to get involved in Takashi’s actions. If the supermarket should prove to have lapsed into complete anarchy, it would be impossible to buy oil according to the normal procedure. So my plan was quite simple: I would hand Takashi or his associates the right amount of money for any can of oil that might have survived the looting, and leave at once. I, at least, wasn’t going to share in the communal “disgrace.” Besides, the instigators of this minor riot had deliberately omitted to haul me off to the market, which meant I was an outsider from the start and as such not required to share their “shame.”

As I arrived in the open space in front of the village office, Jin’s eldest son appeared out of the blue and started walking in front of me like a dog out with its master. Swiftly realizing from the look on my face that it wasn’t the time for conversation, he restricted the expression of his inner excitement to a peculiarly bouncy way of walking. The houses on either side of the road, so long shut up, lay wide open today, and their inhabitants stood in the snow in front of their homes, talking animatedly or hailing each other in loud voices. The whole valley was in a state of cheerful excitement. Even the people who had come down from the “country” were standing on the road in scattered groups, joining in the conversation or drifting slowly from one spot to another. Their arms were full of spoils from the supermarket, but they still hung about, making no move to return to their homes. When a mother from the “country” asked permission for her child to use the toilet, the valley wives agreed openheartedly. Not even on festival days had I ever seen valley and “country” mingling with such freedom and tolerance, since even in my childhood the valley festivals had already lost their traditional power to shatter barriers. The children were treading down the snow on the graveled road to make slides, or mimicking the Nembutsu music, which had continued all the while. Jin’s son would amuse himself by joining in the sport first at one point then at another, but soon ran back to my side again. Various adults hailed me with affable smiles as they stood talking.

It was the first time since my homecoming that they’d relaxed the barriers against me in this way. I couldn’t respond immediately to their unexpected overtures and hurried past them nodding vaguely, but
they were too intoxicated by their newfound sociability to be put out. My inner amazement took deeper root, put forth sturdy branches, burst into luxuriant foliage. A tall man, who had taught Japanese history as a substitute during the wartime shortage of school staff and worked since the war as secretary to the farmers’ cooperative, was brandishing an open ledger above his head, explaining its contents to the people gathered about him. The young team members stood by him in silent attendance—from which I gathered that he’d been roped in as special adviser to the group sponsoring the new “rising,” and in that capacity was publicly denouncing the iniquities of the supermarket management. As he caught sight of me, a warped smile, a mixture of stagy wrath and natural pride, spread over his face.

“Hey, Mitsusaburo!” he called to me in a loud voice, interrupting his lecture. “I’ve been exposing the way they fake the store’s accounts. If the tax office gets wind of this, the Emperor’ll have to kiss his throne good-bye!” Far from being dismayed by this unexpected interruption, the audience turned to look at me and made happily derisive gestures of protest against the tax-evading supermarket. There were an unusual number of old folk among them, and it struck me that the same was true of the knots of people I’d seen as I walked down the graveled road. Until only the day before, their lives had been spent huddled in darkness behind grimy windows, but today they’d achieved self-liberation with the rest and been restored to their positions as full members of the valley community.