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

except that some volunteer informer always came up for a look when anything happened, even a small fire on the hillside, and how all there was to eat, since the farm families would not willingly supply
a certain party
with rice and wheat, were those special parts of ox and pig which people of this region did not generally eat, which he bought secretly at an outrageous price.
    ____The only place in this whole valley that had to swallow gruel without a grain of cereal in it for such a long time was the Manor house, yessir! his mother reminded him, then pointed out his meagre frame, his irregular, ugly teeth, and all the other physical characteristics that were the result of having scraped by on wild grasses and small portions of seed-potato gruel as a young boy, and told him mockingly that these aftereffects of poor diet in childhood would remain with him all his life.
    ____
But everybody in the village was concerned about a certain party, especially near the end of the war. They all tried to find out what he was thinking by giving me dried yams and things!
    ____Because they had you figured for the kind who’d blab his family’s shame for a dried yam, yessir! At the end of the war everything was going badly and village life began to come apart. Well, in this valley, when times are bad people always begin to pay attention to madmen and cripples and children who look as if they don’t have a chance to survive (the look his mother shot him here landed like a fist in his stomach, pinned as it was beneath the spectre of shameful death which had superimposed itself upon that other, of
a certain party
in the wagon oozing blood from his bladder, which had tormented him withthe fall of every night since his
Happy Days
had ended, because it seemed to say that he was certainly such a child himself) and try hard not to miss the omens of change that appear in them. Not because they believe such people are endowed with superhuman spiritual powers, but because they know perfectly well, cruel as it is, that omens of misfortune for the valley will appear earliest in the weakest people in the forest, such as madmen and cripples and children who look about to die, yessir!
    Insofar as he desired, young as he was, to maintain his sense of honor objectively, he was unable to argue with the force of a plunge off a cliff that
a certain party
most definitely had not been the object of this variety of concern. The difficulty was that he sensed his mother’s blunt assertions endowing each of the incidents of those last summers of the war, incidents which remained in earliest memory uninterpreted, in all their raw multiformity, with specific meaning that fit perfectly and was difficult to deny. But this was not to say he was also able to accept his mother’s “correctness” itself. For this “correctness,” an unreasonably combative “correctness” that hurt him fundamentally from inside and out at the same time, was every bit as horribly real and even palpable as her glancing eyes.
    ____
But a certain party wasn’t a madman or a cripple or a child about to die!
    ____A man who shuts himself up in a storehouse day and night is a madman, yessir! A man who’s bleeding from his sick bladder but can’t urinate by himself he’s so fat he can’t move is a cripple, yessir! And a man who’d set out on a long trip in a wooden box with some deserters when he had no possible chance of returning alive is even worse luck than a dying child, yessir! And for the crafty farmersof the valley to have taken an interest in him because he was that kind of pathetic character, that was a disgrace, don’t you understand that! Or is it foolish to talk about disgrace to someone who’s been picking up the garbage other folks threw away and eating it since he was a child, Ah!
    As he recalled the sound of his mother’s voice that day his emotions instantly rose, even as he lay abed with cancer, all the way to the desperately high water mark of the actual moment in