Free The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe

though it lay at the bottom of a deep ditch, stretched over our heads where we had halted. Slowly the afternoon sky sank toward us, fading as it came like a stream that changes color as it flows. At night, I told myself, the sky would close in on the vast forest as tightly as the shell of the abalone enfolds its flesh; the thought aroused claustrophobic feelings. Born and bred in thedepths of this forest, I still couldn’t escape the same stifling sensation whenever I passed through it on the way to our valley. At the core of that sensation lay emotions inherited from those long-perished ancestors who, driven on endlessly by the mighty Chosokabe, had plunged deeper and deeper into the forest until, coming upon a spindle-shaped hollow that had resisted its encroachment, they settled there; it had a spring of wholesome water. My suffocating sensation was still charged with the same feelings that inspired the leader of those fugitives, the “first man” of our family line, as he plunged into the menacing shadows of the forest in search of the hollow he saw in his imagination. The Chosokabe is a creature of terrifying size that exists everywhere in time and space. My grandmother would use it to threaten me whenever I questioned her authority. “The Chosokabe will come from the forest and get you!” she would say, and the sound of her words would bring home not only to the infant but to herself, old woman of eighty that she was, the ever-present reality of the monstrous creature that still lived in the same age as ourselves. . . .
    The bus had been traveling for five hours since leaving its base in the provincial town. At the fork where the road went over the hills, all the passengers except my wife and me transferred to another bus that descended around the edge of the forest to the sea. The road that runs from the town, plunges into the densest part of the forest, comes to our hollow, then runs on downward beside the river flowing from the valley to rejoin the bus route that branches off earlier toward the sea, is gradually falling into disrepair. The thought that this road we were traversing through the heart of the forest was slowly decaying struck home with a dull, unpleasant shock somewhere at the back of my mind. A rat obsessed with a dying road, I felt the eye of the forest staring at me from among cedars, pines, and several species of cypress, all of a green so murky that one perceived it almost as black.
    I saw the peasant woman, the upper part of her body dragged backward by her load so that only her head was bent forward, moving her lips in vigorous speech. The child straightened up, slowly pulled up his trousers and, looking down as he did so at his own waste, made to touch it with the tip of his shoe. Without warning, the woman boxed his ear. Then, prodding him roughly before her while he protected his head with both hands, she made her way round to the side of the bus. Taking its new passengers on board, the bus set off once more through the menacing silence of the forest. Woman and child camedeterminedly to the back of the bus and took the seat directly in front of ours. The mother sat down by the window and the child sat sideways, lolling over the wooden armrest next to the aisle, so that the shaven head and the little pallid face in profile forced themselves on our gaze. With bloodshot eyes, red like plums, in which the traces of intoxication still lingered, my wife took note of the child. I too found my eyes drawn irresistibly and with loathing toward him. His head and the color of his skin were such as to bring back our worst memories. I was sure that the head and the bloodless pallor of the skin were loaded with insidious stimuli to the things that already saturated her inner being, ready to crystallize at the slightest provocation. They were a direct evocation of the day when our baby had been operated on for the thing on his head.
    My wife and I had been waiting that morning in front of the patients’