Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburō Ōe

Author:Kenzaburō Ōe [Ōe, Kenzaburō]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780714529974
Google: jEZkAAAAMAAJ
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Published: 1995-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

As we were already used to digging holes, the work went well. We slogged on, divided into teams swinging hoes and raking the earth. Insects crawled out from under the surface, and we stamped on them at once. Li and the others must have been talking things over with the girl in front of the corpse in the warehouse, and didn’t come back for quite a while. After a long time had passed, we heard loud voices from the road. I left the group to finish off and went up the muddy path, which was just drying off after the quaggy thaw of the frost in the meadow.

Sure enough, Minami and his aides came marching along the road, bearing the dead woman on their shoul­ders, wrapped in blankets and white sheets, as if carrying a broken-legged calf. The others lent support with out­stretched arms. And the tall Li was bending down to talk to the girl, who kept apart from the pack but followed them intently. The pallbearers passed me as I stood beside the flagstones looking on. Then the girl came by, palefaced, with cracked lips and eyes filled with tears. She paid no attention to me, her eyes set straight ahead, her shoulders trembling with suppressed sobs.

‘Look, it can’t be helped, she’s dead,’ Li earnestly con­soled her. ‘Your mother’s dead, isn’t she? She stinks. We’ve got to bury her.’

I went straight down after them. My group was silently and diligently digging up the earth. Perhaps because they felt some diffidence towards the girl, and because they had nothing else to do, Minami’s party stood holding the corpse in their arms. The girl halted at the top of the meadow, ignoring Li’s calls, sat down, and wouldn’t go anywhere near the hole. She watched the work with tears running down her cheeks and her shoulders shaking with sobs.

Deft as undertakers, our comrades laid the corpse in the bottom of the hole and covered it with earth. The girl whimpered with her face buried in her knees. Li and I felt uneasy standing by. So we left the crying girl and went down to the scene of operations.

‘Shall we put stones on them?’ Minami asked Li as he came up. ‘I don’t know what to do after burials n’ things.’

‘Pack down the earth,’ Li said. ‘Stamp on it and pack it down.’

We hesitated. Then we gingerly got up on the soft, not especially tall earth mounds over the doubled-up corpses. We split up into three gangs for the three mounds. My brother, unable to stand aside, went and joined the oth­ers who were trampling down the animals’ grave.

As we followed Li’s example and began slowly stamping down the earth, the mountain ranges all round the valley sank into deep red and only the evening sky over the quiet village remained white. The swiftly falling dusk endowed our labour of foot-stamping with a solemn and definite significance. It was the same as the unbearable image of ‘death’ which visited me only at night, constricting my chest and bringing the sweat out all over my skin.

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