The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe Read Free Book Online Page A

blind with a great rattle. Suddenly, on his face appeared the first smile I’d seen there; his eyes shone with a brilliance detectable even in the gloom, and I realized that he was proud of this story.
    “Why did you stop drinking, then?”
    “I met Taka, and he said not to drink because you should tackle life sober. So I gave it up. I haven’t had a single dream since.”
    So Takashi had manifested the educative instinct: I’d never thought of him as that type before. Takashi could tell a teen-ager, with an air of great authority, not to drink because one should live life sober. That alone, it seemed, had been enough to make a young laborer give up his self-destructive way of life. The boy himself, moreover, could recall the episode with the most relaxed and confident of smiles.
    “As to whether Taka’s got courage or not …” he began, dragging up our earlier argument now that he saw the wonder our dialogue on drink had inspired in me. All the while he’d been lying on the floor like a dog he had obviously been racking his brains to find some way of restoring the honor of his guardian deity. “In the June demonstrations he did something completely different from the others, all by himself. You wouldn’t know about that.”
    Intent on challenging me with some new logic, he’d raised himself into a position where he could look me straight in the eye. I looked back with an obscure sense of doubt at eyes that were now no more than a pair of dark bullet holes.
    “One day he joined in with a gang and helped beat up his own side—the very people he’d fought with up till then and again fought with from the next day.”
    He laughed aloud. The laugh, with its ring of childishly furtive delight, was the stick that finally stirred up the muddy waters of my antipathy.
    “That ‘great exploit’ just shows that Taka’s a capricious, spoiled kid with no consistency in his actions,” I said. “It’s nothing to do with courage.”
    “You’ve got it in for Taka because your friend got hurt when he was hit in front of the Diet, and because you’ve just heard that Takawas using a stick on the side that did the hitting,” the youth replied with open hostility. “That’s why you won’t admit he’s brave.”
    “It was the police that hit my friend. It couldn’t have been Taka. There’s no connection between the two things.”
    “Who knows—with a free-for-all in the dark like that?” the youth insinuated slyly.
    “I don’t believe Taka could hit anyone’s head hard enough to crack the skull, hard enough for the man to go crazy and kill himself. Don’t forget I’ve known him since he was a kid. I know just how timid he is.”
    Even as I spoke, I was gradually losing my enthusiasm for such a pointless argument. Fatigue and an unexplained resentment made me feel as though a rotten tooth had overflowed; my mouth seemed filled with an unpleasant taste—the taste of futility. The memory of my dead friend awoke and rebuked me, asking whether this trivial argument with a kid was all I could do for the dead man who had meant so much to me. If anything, it suggested that there was nothing whatsoever that those left behind could do for the dead. For no definite reason, I’d been prey to a vague foreboding during the past few months. They were the months in which my friend had died, my wife had started her whisky-drinking, and we’d been forced to put our idiot child in an institution, though the foreboding might also relate to something that had been building up even before that. It had nourished in me a conviction that I would die in a way still more pointless, absurd, and ridiculous than my friend. I was convinced, too, that those who lived on afterward would fail to do the proper thing on my behalf.
    “You don’t understand Taka, you don’t know him at all,” he complained. “You’re not a bit like him. You’re just a rat . What did you come to meet Taka for today?” He spoke in a tearful voice that was