Free Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburō Ōe Page A

must have been persimmon seeds, yessir! *
    The day he heard this story he asked his mother while they were having dinner why she had said such a thing, but she merely darted sidelong glances at him as if he were some kind of presumptuous stranger who hadbadly misbehaved by asking, and, sitting there properly with her legs tucked beneath her on the wooden floor of the kitchen in the semidarkness, ignored the question comprehensively.
    Among all the eyes he had encountered in his life now about to end, those glancing eyes of his mother’s conveyed to him the most sickening denial and mistrust; when those sidelong glances fell upon him, the fragile root of his existence as a human being shriveled like a cornstalk parched beneath the sun, and it was no longer possible innocently to assume his own membership in the human race. When he studied French philosophy at college and encountered the proposition that Man’s fundamental state was unhappiness, he had naturally comprehended the condition as that of which he had been obliged to be constantly aware while under his mother’s eyes. Even during his
Happy Days?
But that was a time before those glancing eyes had existed. Preparations for their appearance, however, were already complete, and on that summer day in 1945 this particular evil spirit of the eye suddenly appeared where Japanese and American planes were dogfighting low in the sky, swiftly descended to lodge in his mother’s eyesockets, and ever after abided there. When he was reading English poetry, again at college, and came across the following lines, he recognized instantly that these were precisely the glancing eyes that had been the object of his rancor for long years, and thus obtained the basis for a sound interpretation of a nightmare which had troubled him incessantly.
    Eyes I dare not meet in dreams,
In death’s dream kingdom.
    At the risk of repeating himself he wanted it clear that, unlike the “dreadful eyes” that appear in children’spicture books, clean, unblinking eyes or eyes like bottomless pools of darkness, these, that held a pale yellow light just like a monkey’s and stole quick looks in his direction, were the true “dreadful eyes.”
    Even after he had taken to his sick bed for this final time he often called up, from a pool of memory that could not be muddied, the image of his mother looking at him with those “dreadful eyes” and recreated his struggles with them, struggles which had always ended with his surrender, at various periods of his life, imitating his voice at the time in a strident falsetto.
    The villagers respected a certain party and they also relied on him. That’s why no one in the village contacted the police or the cadets tapping pine tree roots for oil when he left the valley in that wagon to lead an uprising. If anybody had leaked one word a certain party would have been caught in that wagon like a fat pig, no matter how hard those army deserters had fought to protect him. Because he couldn’t get away on foot.
    ____A wagon! You call that ridiculous box on top of two sawed-off logs a wagon, his mother said unsparingly. And so would someone else I know alongside those deserter hoodlums as they huffed and puffed and tugged that creaky box on logs along, with his
fake
helmet pulled down over his ears and his shirt of woven grass and his old trousers tied with a rope below his knees—lord knows why!—and his straw sandals, so would someone else I know have been caught, like a
little
pig, even if someone else I know had waved around that bayonet he was so proud of!
    Then his mother tried to make him recall how, after
a certain party’s
group had split over the ideal way to approach the army, he had come home alone to the valley and turned into what was called in valley dialect a“believer,” an alienated man who has lost everything as the result of some odd obsession, and had shut himself up in the storehouse, left alone by others so long as he did not bother them,