Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball Read Free Book Online Page A

his whole life. He was sick once as an infant. My wife denies it, but she is a moron. He cried once for two weeks straight and his head turned blue. He recovered, but he was never the same. He was always ill with this, whatever it was. He thought he could hear bells ringing all the time. It was part of his illness. That’s why he was always playing records. He wanted it out of his head.
    INT .
    No one else says anything about this.
    MR. ODA
    You shouldn’t listen to the others. This is what we are saying, that I am telling you the things now that you can use. We are talking about that.
    INT .
    I understand that. You said that already.
    MR. ODA
    Maybe others couldn’t see it, but I always could. I could always tell when he was about to do something stupid. He would get this blue look, this look that I recalled from his childhood. It would be like he was being strangled, but he wasn’t, and you would know, you would just know—he is going to do something now that everyone will regret. And then he would do it. Of course, he would never apologize either, afterward. He would do something like, for instance, he would forget to greet me when I came in. I would just stare at him and stare at him, waiting, and the longer I stared the more I could see it building up. Then, instead of saying anything, anything at all, he’d just up and run off out of the house. And Jiro would run off too. Anything he did, Jiro would do. Only Jiro didn’t have the sense that Oda sometimes had. Although now, it’s not easy to say which one turned out worse.
    INT .
    Are you angry at Jiro for something that he has done?
    MR. ODA
    You come here and it is like you are going to fix something, but either the thing that is broken is part of something that is gone, or you are doing no good with the thing that is still around. I don’t know why I came to talk to you.
    INT .
    Please, just let me ask you a few questions. You said at one point, after the accident, when you were in the hospital, you said …
    MR. ODA
    That is an invention of my wife’s. I was not in thehospital. I don’t know about that. She talks about it sometimes. I don’t know where she got that.
    INT .
    All right. Well. It is said that you forbade the family from visiting with or talking about Sotatsu. That you were very angry with Sotatsu and no longer wanted to have him be a part of your family, that you specifically told your daughter, your wife, and your son not to speak to him or visit him. Is that true?
    MR. ODA:
    I do not think that you, I think, I …
    [
Int. note
. Here, Mr. Oda got up and left the house in great confusion, stopping occasionally to tell me that I should not speak to his wife, his son, or his daughter, that his son was not to be believed, and that he did not understand why I had come in the first place. I apologized to him for making any difficulty, and told him that I was going to use his testimony as well as any other testimony I could find because I wanted the account to be complete. He said that this was an idea with no merit, that there wasn’t anything complete, that I should just leave.]



Int. Note: Regarding the Newspaper Coverage of the Trial
    For the next section, I will provide you with the serialized coverage of the Oda Trial that ran in many newspapers throughout Japan during that time. The writer, Ko Eiji, was a well-known journalist with a particular stylistic approach that endeared him to his audience. Nonetheless, during these proceedings he provided a mostly clear delineation of opinion and fact. I will not give all of his serialization, but enough to make events apparent. His serialization can be divided into:
    1. sketches of the main individuals involved
    a. Oda Sotatsu
    b. Judge X
    c. Judge Y
    d. Judge Z
    e. Prosecutor W
    f. Defense Counsel R
    2. descriptions of the emotional climate in which the trial took place
    3. daily account
    a. events in court
    b. notable events in jail
    c. sentencing, exit of Oda Sotatsu
    That Ko was biased