Dangling on a Thread

I am about five pages away from the end of Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry. A curious moment, the one when you know you are about to finish a book. Its world is dangling on a thread, and once your eyes scan the last few lines, hitting the final period, it's as if you were cutting the thread with a pair of scissors. That is not to say that I will be particularly at a loss once I've cut the thread of Oe's Cry, letting it drop -- where, exactly? Into the abyss of all the read books? (An image worth working on some more, I suppose). On the whole, the book didn't get to me -- or perhaps it is I who didn't get into it. But there were a couple of very powerful images in this novel, which will stay with me even long after The Silent Cry has hit that rockbottom in the abyss -- this is where, for me, Oe's true strength lies.

Take, for example, the opening. Tokyo, the 60s. A man, 27 years old, blind in one eye, whose one child is no more than a vegetable placed in an institution for retarded infants, whose wife has turned into an alcoholic, and whose very good friend just committed suicide (after painting his head crimson red, sticking a cucumber up his behind, and hanging himself), wakes up to a predawn sky and takes his sick dog out. Outside is the square hole the workmen dug the day before for the septic tank. Holding the dog in his arms, he climbs down the ladder and into the pit, filled with puddles here and there. "Sitting down directly on the bare earth, I feel the water seeping through my pajama trousers and underwear, wetting my buttocks, but I find myself accepting it docilely, as one who cannot refuse." For minutes on end, he sits there with the dog clawing anxiously into the muscles of his chest, keeping its balance.

There is something simply striking about this scene. It oozes despair, lack of alternatives, quiet sadness, letting things overtake you -- like that water slowly soaking the pajama trousers... This is not how I ever want to wake up.