Kenzaburo Oe

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"Personal Matter"

"Bird, gazing down at the map of Africa that reposed in the showcase with the haughty elegance of a wild deer, stifled a short sigh. The salesgirls paid no attention, their arms and necks goosepimpled where the uniform blouses exposed them. Evening was deepening, and the fever of early summer, like the temperature of a dead giant, had dropped completely from the covering air. People moved as if groping in the dimness of the subconscious for the memory of midday warmth that lingered faintly in the skin: people heaved ambiguous sighs. June-half-past six: by now not a man in the city was sweating. But Bird's wife lay naked on a rubber mat, tightly shutting her eyes like a shot pheasant falling out of the sky, and while she moaned her pain and anxiety and expectation, her body was oozing globes of sweat."

"He had seen the painting often but he had never looked at it carefully. Now he noticed how bizarre it was. A public square walled in by buildings in the style of the Middle East. In the distance rose a pair of stylized pyramids: it must have been Egypt. The thin light of dawn suffused the scene-or was it dusk? Sprawled in the square like a fish with a ripped belly was the dead body of a young man. Next to him his distraught mother, surrounded by a group of old men with lanterns and women cradling infants. But the scene was dominated by the giant presence overhead, swooping across the square with arms outspread. Was it human? The beautifully muscled body was covered with scales. The eyes were full of an ominous dolor and were fanatically bitter; the mouth was a hollow in the face so deep it swallowed up the nose-a salamander's mouth. Was it a devil? A god? The creature appeared to be soaring upward, reaching for the turbulence of the night sky even while it burned in the flames of its own scales."

"Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you, one loses all relation to you because you die, the other maintains its relation for you to survive in it. Just as you would take off your clothes, you abandon the universe in which you are still alive. In other words, various universes emerge around each of us the way tree limbs and leaves branch away from the trunk".

"'What are the attributes of the vagina and the womb that frighten you?' ... 'I have this feeling there's what you'd call another universe back in there. It's dark, it's infinite, it's teeming with everything antihuman: a grotesque universe. And i'm afraid that if i entered it, i'd get trapped in the time system of another dimension and wouldn't be able to return - my fear has certain resemblance to an astronaut's fantastic acrophobia".

"From the external world he was letting in nothing to project its image on the screen of his consciousness. He was simply waiting, like a radio set equipped with a receiver only, for a signal from the distance which he wasn't even certain would be transmitted".

"More often than not he finds what he is looking for, and it destroys him."

"You always feel that a baby's cry is full of meaning... For all we know, it may contain all the meaning of all of man's words."

"They were glimpsing an infinitesimal crack in the flat surface of everyday life and the sight filled them with innocent awe."

"You're right about this being limited to me, it's entirely a personal matter. But with some personal experiences that lead you way into a cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone. And with that kind of experience at least the individual is rewarded for his suffering. Like Tom Sawyer! He had to suffer in a pitch-black cave, but at the same time he found his way out into the light he also found a bag of gold! But what I'm experiencing personally now is like digging a vertical mine shaft in isolation; it goes straight down to a hopeless depth and never opens on anybody else's world. So I can sweat and suffer in that same dark cave and my personal experience won't result in so much as a fragment of significance for anybody else. Hole-digging is all I'm doing, futile, shameful hole-digging; my Tom Sawyer is at the bottom of a desperately deep mine shaft and I wouldn't be surprised if he went mad!"

"Silent Cry"

"Still i find an endless nothing"

"From a point two meters in front of the dangling corpse she’d fled back to where the party had been held, her hair on end in her panic, her arms flailing above her head, her mouth shaping a voiceless cry, her little-girlish green shoes flapping as she trod back over the path of her own midnight shadow that no one else could see, like a film run in reverse. "

"No friend’s eyes would watch, no friend would understand the true meaning of what was happening when I closed my eyes for the last time and my flesh embarked on its own experience of dissolution."

"If I could get by in this way now, then I should be able to escape the poison until the massive counterattack when I would finally have to accept it as an experience."

“Death cuts abruptly the warp of understanding. There are things which the survivors are never told. And the survivors have a steadily deepening suspicion that it is precisely because of the things incapable of communication that the deceased has chosen death. The factors that remain ill defined may sometimes lead a survivor to the very site of the disaster, but even then the only thing clear to anyone concerned is that he has been brought up against something incomprehensible”

"His words showed that he'd grasped the existence of something in the depths of all who had died— died in the grip of a fear they could communicate to no one else."

We stepped up into the main hall of the temple and inspected the painting of hell. For me its rivers and forests of fire recalled the flaming red I'd seen on the backs of the dogwood leaves as they caught the sun that cloudy dawn after mv hundred minutes in the pit. In particular, the dark blotches splashing the scarlet waves of the river of flames linked up directly with my memory of the spots that had begun to stain the dogwood leaves now that autumn had passed its peak. I was immediately absorbed in the hell picture. The color of the river of fire and the soft lines of the waves, so painstakingly drawn, brought me a strange peace of mind. Peace in abundance poured from the flames into my inner being. Among the flames, the multitude of the dead cried out with arms lifted to the sky and hair on end as though fanned by some fierce wind. Some of them were invisible save for skinny angular buttocks and legs sticking up into the air. Yet even their varied expressions of suffering contained something that brought me peace; for despite their manifest pain, the bodies that expressed this pain gave the impression of participating in some solemn sport. They seemed to be at home with suffering. The male ghosts, who stood on one bank with penises bleakly exposed as flaming rocks struck them on the head, belly, and buttocks, gave the same impression. The female ghosts being driven toward the forest of flames by demons brandishing iron clubs seemed almost intent on preserving the comfortably familiar chains - the bonds of tormentor and tormented - that tied them to the demons.

"A single tear made a black spot on the white film of dust covering a pebble that lay next to Takashi’s thumb. But it dried at once, leaving a chalky blister on the surface of the stone."

"Before long Takashi noticed a train of ants entering S’s head through the nostrils and emerging again from his ears, each bearing a small bead of red in its mouth. It occurred to him that it was due to these ants that the body was shriveled and thin and gave off no smell. S would probably go on drying up till he was as desiccated as a dried fish. The ants had completely eaten away the eyes behind the tightly closed lids, leaving red holes the size of walnuts from which a faint, reddish light guided the tiny feet of the ants as they marched to and fro, treading the trifurcated path of ears and nose. Through the thin film, semi-transparent like murky glass, that was the skin of his face, a single drop of blood could be seen in the process of drowning an ant..."

"Encouraged by the unfamiliar voice of his eldest brother echoing from the pages of the purple diary, he was straining to twist himself, like a sharp-edged screw, deeper still into the murky recesses of his own peculiar problems."

"She sank to her knees and one round breast slipped out through the front of her night kimono like an undamaged part protruding from a broken machine".

"I sat hunched up, scarcely breathing, as though I were indeed crouched alone before the judges and jurors of my dream, my eyes shut against the darkness to avoid the other eyes fixed on me, my head a strangely alien sphere cradled in the overcoat and blankets that wrapped my arms. Must I then live out my days to no positive purpose - vague, indeterminate, depressing days, remote from the sure sense of existence of those who had risen above their private hells? Or was there perhaps some way of letting go and retreating into a more comfortable darkness? As in a sequence of photograph stills, I saw another me slip free trom my drooping shoulders as I sat hunched like a body in a burial urn, and, rising, crawl through the gap in the floorboards, then go climbing up the steep staircase, the clothes bundling its body fluttering in the gusts of wind that blew straight up from the valley. As mv ghostly self reached the point on the stairs where it could see the valley stretching out below the hole knocked in the wall, I could suddenly feel, still crouched at the bottom of the cellar though I was, the sickening vertigo that seized the figure standing there halfway up the stairs, defenseless and paralyzed before the deep, black, wind-filled space: and I pressed my fingers to my temples to soothe the dull ache in the core of my head. But when the apparition arrived directly below the great wooden beam, I suddenly realized in terror that I still hadn’t grasped the "truth" which, as I hanged myself, I would cry aloud to those who went on living; and the apparition promptly vanished from sight."