Free Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburō Ōe

girlfriend’s genitals and all alone, a vague smile on his lips, ejaculated. Thereafter there was always something oppressive about sexual intercourse with the actress, as if a taboo were being violated, and after intercourse he was not only exhausted but his testicles ached for no good reason, as if they were being squeezed. Since the mere possibility that a man having intercourse with her could experience anything but undiluted sweetness terrified the actress as if she had seen a portent of the end of her career, they had finally separated. A number of years still later she appeared on his television screen in a late night movie playing a woman landlord, and he felt he was seeing a phantom of his mother and looked carefully around the room, his hair standing on end.
    By the last year of the war, as he moved from childhood to boyhood, he had already sensed from short, hate-filled exchanges between
a certain party
and his mother that his maternal grandfather had been involved ina plot which had been exposed in 1912 and which, during the war, could not be mentioned. But his mother never volunteered any details, and since she maintained an even more adamant silence after
a certain party’s
death, there was no way of bringing the facts to light from inside the family. His mother had grown up on the Chinese mainland and had no relatives in Japan. He did remember that when he was a very small child a young man who said he was a monk from Wakayama prefecture had come to see his mother, but had been told that
a certain party
was in Manchuria and went away. Very likely this had something to do with whatever it was that was being concealed. After the war, when the “human emperor” * paid a visit to the provinces and a large number of students and teachers from his middle school traveled to the provincial city to welcome his Majesty, his homeroom teacher summoned him, though he had not managed to extract the money for the trip nor displayed any very active interest in going along, as if repelled by the negative magnetism the words “human emperor” communicated to the darkest recesses of his consciousness, and gently told him in a hoarse, artificial voice, never looking at him once, that he must not go with the others. He did not speak of this to his mother directly, yet several days later she set out for the teachers’ room to protest. And ever after, his homeroom teacher had ignored him entirely. Yet he never asked his mother what precisely it was she went to protest. It was not that he feared the derisive silence that would be her response to his inquiry, it was because he had sensed from the beginning that, with regard to this incident, his motherwas justified. Even during the war years there was nothing in his house that had anything to do with the Imperial Family, not even portraits of the Meiji Emperor in magazine supplements. Though he was only a child he knew there were no other such houses in the valley, and in his child’s way he thought it strange, especially since
a certain party
was associated with the military and had endlessly asserted the importance of defending the “national polity.”
    One day early in the war, when the family still held its position of prominence in valley society even though
a certain party
was away in Manchuria, the wife of the village chief who had succeeded
a certain party
paid a visit to introduce her new daughter-in-law, and boasted that the girl’s parents owned a
tea-jar
they had received from
a well-known noble.
He was not there to hear this directly, what he remembered was an episode already legendary in the valley which he had been told, not so much because he was the son of the principal figure in the legend as more generally, for his edification as a member of the new generation in the valley; his mother, it was said, using her visitor’s west-country accent to her own purposes, countered,
    ____You must mean persimmon seeds, not
dates!
If they got them from a
monkey
they