Читать книгу Crisis in Identity - Arthur G. Kimball - Страница 9

2

THE WAR AND THE CANNIBALS

Fumiko Hayashi's short story "Bones" records a nightmare:

The man woke up, aroused by his own cries. "Oh, I had a terrible dream," he said....

"What kind of a dream was it?" she asked.

"Well, I killed a soldier. I killed a dying man... fried his flesh and ate it...."¹

The apparition haunts the Japanese literary imagination in the immediate postwar era. The Japanese, however, are not alone. A host of more or less illustrious literary witnesses, from Montaigne to Mailer, testify that cannibalism continues to provoke men to creative response.² On one level, the taboo-ridden specter of humans eating human flesh calls to mind primitive rites of identification, the eating of something to become like the thing eaten, a practice which persists symbolically in the Christian sacrament. On another level, the one most exploited by modern writers, cannibalism is an emblematic projection of the darkness of man's mind, of all that resists the civilizing conventions of society, an actualization of the savage, sexually assaulting, death-dealing potential we sometimes suspect, but may deny, lies within us.³ At its dramatic worst, it is reversion to chaos, annihilation, the ironic vision of man consuming himself in an ultimate madness. Cannibalism, in the hands of the ironist, is a powerful theme, portraying man as glutton, rapist, madman, killer, and—under a compassionate touch—as man in need.

Part of the theme's shock value is that such an act, almost universally considered unnatural, can occur at all among modern, technologically advanced, "civilized" people. More jarring, however, is that modern man has provided the matrix, war, which generates the act. Wars and rumors of wars, from the "war to end all wars" to the current conflicts, give ample scope for commentary, and the frequency of the motif in 'twentieth-century literature is hardly accidental. For the Japanese who experienced the Pacific war, cannibalism has a special immediacy. Japanese troops trapped in the Philippines near the end of the conflict fled to the mountains and for agonizing months struggled desperately to survive. Some few, perhaps crazed by hunger, malnutrition, and disease, ate and, in their desperation, even hunted for human flesh.⁴ Three postwar Japanese literary works confront the reality and record the shock. Tadashi Moriya's No Requiem, Shohei Ooka's Fires on the Plain, and Taijun Takeda's Luminous Moss comment on man's confrontation with his man-eating self.⁵ The result is intriguing and ironic. The emphases differ, but one message comes through clearly: man's unnatural—or all too natural—penchant for violence has fostered the conditions which foster the act. Indeed, in view of man's predatory instincts, eating is but the logical next step after killing; there may be little or no moral distinction between the two deeds. Hypocritically, however, men condemn the one and condone the other. The authors dramatize the inconsistency.

They are not the first moderns, or Asians, to protest. In 1918, when the last mustard gas was dissipating over the fields of Europe, Lu Shun produced his condemnation of traditional Chinese society, indicting through his shaman-like mad sage a culture whose history was "a record of man-eating," and where "everyone wants to eat others but is afraid of being eaten himself." The leader of the man-eaters around him, he finds, is his older brother. A still deeper awareness comes when he suspects to his horror that he too may have eaten flesh, that of his younger sister.⁶ In similar fashion, Japan's entry into the modern, postwar literary era reveals a poignant soul-searching into the nature of man and society.

Mildest of the three books is Moriya's No Requiem. A more or less factual account, the story records author Moriya's life as an army doctor in the Philippines during the closing year of the war in the Pacific. According to the translator's preface, details of cannibalism were omitted in the Japanese original, but included in the revised English edition. The facts by themselves would be grim enough, with or without cannibalism, were it not for Moriya's genial tone and matter-of-fact acceptance of the events. A battalion of one thousand men is gradually reduced to fifty, mainly by disease and starvation; swollen and disfigured corpses are a common sight. Only a relatively dispassionate and low-keyed presentation could make "light literature," as the translator calls it, of such a subject. But the terror is played down, and the result is a very readable, though not emotionally demanding, account. It ends happily with the narrator safe in Japan, joyfully united with his family.

Moriya mentions several instances of soldiers eating human flesh. The first is "a weird story" brought back by some men who go to bury a comrade. When they remove the cloth which is covering the corpse, they are horrified. "He couldn't believe his eyes, Maeda said. The dead body of Kawaguchi had turned to a sheer skeleton in one night, the flesh cut off clean. At once he suspected the 'Japan guerrilas' of such infamous act" (p. 288).⁷ These guerrillas, the author explains, were starving soldiers "hard put to it" to stay alive. "Extreme hunger had turned some of them to the living demons. They were driven to attack a solitary soldier and find the source of supplies of animal matter in the Hominidae. Homo homini lupers!" (p. 289). Though the reader may find this hard to believe, Moriya says, it is an undeniable fact of which he is ashamed. "I had to admit it when a Sergeant of the First Company was attacked by one of them and wounded on the thigh" (p. 289).

A soldier named Takahara reports the next instance. When he approaches a group of men cooking a meal, they try to hide the contents of the mess-tin. Takahara gets a look anyway. "A good deal of fat swam on the surface of stew they were cooking, and he saw at once it couldn't be the karabaw meat." Moriya follows this with two more examples. "Then I had the news that an officer of another unit was eaten up by his orderly as soon as he breathed his last. I believe the officer was so attached to his orderly that he bequeathed his body to his servant, and the devoted orderly faithfully executed the last will and testament of his lord and master, and buried him in his belly instead of the earth" (p. 290). The last evidence is the disappearance of a sailor who was returning to his hut ahead of his companions, carrying some of the carabao meat they had secured on a successful hunting foray. His disappearance is attributed to the Japanese guerrillas.

But though he cites the evidence, Moriya mitigates it in a number of ways. The "Japan guerrilas," for example, are "hard put" to exist, they are turned to demons by extreme hunger, they are driven to attack others by necessity. As the language suggests, the guerrillas too are victims, passive instruments of the wartime fate which controls them. Again, in the story of the officer and the orderly, the facts are softened by the author's attempt, though strained, at humor. Finally, Moriya finds a scapegoat in the military. Since the Japanese army in the Philippines had lost control over the troops, he says, "no surprise at all, if some of them had turned to the cannibals driven by a wolf in the stomach when they themselves were wolves by nature." The ultimate responsibility thus rests with the warlords. "For all these infamous brutalities the Japanese Army in the Philippines was absolutely responsible. Had they grasped the war situation accurately and taken proper measures to cope with it, casualties on the Philippine Front would have been far less. Nor would such a glaring stain of cannibalism have been imprinted on the history of Japan" (p. 291). One might well ask what sort of "grasp of the war situation" Moriya has in mind, but his attempt to fix the blame may be genuine, if unconvincing. He has, at least, tried to prepare the reader for this point of view by a number of moralizing asides blaming the Japanese military for the disasters he experiences. Thus ameliorated, cannibalism is portrayed as a mildly climactic event which is merely the inevitable worst of a series of desperate acts by desperate men. The reaction of "frozen horror" at the first encounter becomes, within two pages, "no surprise at all." If the reader has any second thoughts, he is left to indulge them on his own.

Fires on the Plain is a different matter. Like No Requiem, Ooka's narrative takes place in the Philippines during the close of the Pacific war; the protagonist tries desperately to keep from starving or being killed by the enemy Americans, hostile natives, and his own countrymen. Surrounded by the dead and dying, he spends much of his time searching for food. He eventually confronts the truth that men are eating human flesh. But the similarities, striking as they are, are less important than the differences.⁸ Fires on the Plain is a metaphysical quest, and Private Tamura makes the dark journey, familiar to literary tradition, into his own heart of darkness. There is little doubt that spiritual as well as material food is at issue. Along the way he confronts death continually, agonizes over his identity, and probes the implications of a flesh and blood communion. The heart of hearts, in this instance, is a clearing in an otherwise dense forest where an unlikely trinity of three fugitives, Yasuda (Nagamatsu calls him "Dad"), Nagamatsu ("adopted" by Yasuda), and the troubled Tamura, live in mortal fear of one another. After killing Nagamatsu, who has killed Yasuda, Tamura loses his memory and wanders off. He is wounded, captured, and returned to Japan, where he endures a schizophrenic existence in a Tokyo mental hospital.

Moriya, the narrator of No Requiem, is never without companions who appreciate him. As a medical man he is respected and needed. Most of the time his talents win him favored treatment. In contrast, Private Tamura of Fires on the Plain is an unwanted outcast; his diseased and hungry body only repel people. From the opening lines he bears the curse of the condemned man. "My squad leader slapped me in the face. 'You damned fool!' he said. 'D'you mean to say you let them send you back here? If you'd told them at the hospital you had nowhere to go, they'd have had to take care of you. You know perfectly well there's no room in this company for consumptives like you!" (p. 3). Thus cursed from the community—such as it is—Tamura begins the lonely search for his salvation. His only "friendship"—the tenuous link with Nagamatsu and Yasuda—ends in violent death and psychosis. Moriya reaches home and the arms of his loved ones; Tamura a sanitarium, his wife in the arms of another man. Unlike Moriya's expression of joy, Tamura's is a pathetic claim to immunity from hurt. With Swiftian fervor he asserts, "I don't care. Just as all men are cannibals, all women are whores" (p. 236).

Private Tamura's traumatic experience records the disintegration of a personality, the splitting of a self into selves with attendant psychotic confusion and frustration. The journey of discovery ends in madness. Ooka is putting the very concept "human" on trial. Early in his narrative Tamura notes the onset of the trouble: "Fundamentally, I suppose, my recent confusion of thought and feeling derived from the fact that the equilibrium between my inner consciousness and the outer world had begun to break down. This process had started when I was being transported across the ocean to fight and kill, and I suddenly had realized that I had not the slightest will either to fight or to kill" (p. 19). By the end of the novel he is obsessed with the problem of his identity and vacillates between his roles as "First-Class Private Tamura" and "an angel of God" (pp. 238, 242). Perhaps he has begun to internalize the external world; the madness of war has brought him to wonder if he too is meant to kill, ironically as a "destroying angel." Ooka provides considerable ironic depth and no little ambiguity for the record with his melange of Christian and Buddhist symbolism, descriptions of natural beauty, sexual reminiscences, and philosophical reflections on motion and "retrograde amnesia." At least part of the message, however, is clear enough. In an insane world, where death is the norm., where bloated, fly-ridden, mutilated corpses serve as caricatures of men, madness is the only logical response. When the life-process is inverted, when the community of men is a community of killers, the schizophrenic retreat is not only understandable but, ironically, the only appropriate action. Only madness can redress the balance.

The difference in the two books illustrates this point. The good doctor-author of No Requiem fills his narrative with quotidian details. If he notes the many deaths and hardships, he also provides the reader with numerous maps and charts which indicate even the sleeping positions of the men. Maps and charts are affirmations of order; they testify to locations and directions. One consults them to get his bearings. Perhaps even more reassuring are diagrams of shelters where even the locations of cauldrons, vegetable baskets, and mess-tins are considered worthy of mention. By contrast, the landscape of Fires on the Plain is dominated by images of death, from the darkly symbolic forests to the shattered corpses. When Tamura begins his journey, he enters the woods. "It was dark within the forest.... A death-like hush hovered over the enormous trees.... Here they had stood for decades and decades before I passed beneath them, and here they would continue to stand long after my death.... What was strange was the complete contradiction existing in my mind between the knowledge that I was passing here for the first time and the certainty that I would never pass here in the future" (p. 16). The gloomy forest and gloomy thoughts foreshadow the experience to follow, when death will dominate the scene. "Everywhere I saw bodies," Tamura recalls after an attack by enemy troops. "Their vivid guts and blood shone in the sun's rain washed beams, while on the grass their severed legs and arms looked like the remains of so many broken dolls. Only the flies were moving" (p. 172). And unlike the well-charted terrain of Dr. Moriya, the deathscape of Private Tamura sometimes becomes the nightmare projection of his own tortured psyche. "My next memory is an image of the forest seen from the distance. It was dark, like a Japanese cedar wood, and there was an insensate quality about the surroundings. It was hateful to me" (p. 224). 'Thus for the narrator of No Requiem, the external world retains a well-defined, objective validity, while for Private 'Tamura the world continually blends with his imagination, the mixture of dream and reality, vision and nightmare reflecting his troubled mind.

The religious theme gives ironic depth to the narrative. Attracted by the sight of a cross on a church steeple, 'Tamura, clutching his rifle, descends to the village to "resolve the religious doubt" that has visited him at the "end of his life" (p. 86). He has previously dreamed about the church, and witnessed his own funeral with a "coffin draped in black" where one of his selves lies, while another "I" observes the proceedings. When he reaches the village, images of death greet him. A "black swarm of carrion crows" perches on the church roof and arms of the cross; the church doors are black. At the foot of the church steps lie rotting corpses, "grotesque transfigurations of putrescence." Surprised by a young couple who have returned to the deserted town for a hidden cache of salt, Tamura murders the woman in the presbytery of the church, and adds one more "self" to his already confused identity. "I had to acknowledge that I was now no more than a brutish soldier who, far from being able to communicate with God, could not even mix with his fellow creatures" (p. 115-16). Private Tamura ends his curious confrontation with the Western passion symbol feeling that he no longer belongs to humankind.

Near the climax of the novel, Tamura encounters a dying officer crazed from suffering. The helpless man is covered with flies and leeches. As a symbol, the officer is an ironic composite, half Christ-figure, half Beelzebub.⁹ Appropriately, when he offers his flesh to Tamura shortly before dying, the offer is a mixture of blessing and temptation. The analogy with Christ and the Mass is made explicit after the officer's death. "I remembered Jesus' arms, strained from hanging, which I had seen in the seaside village," Tamura says. But the demonic possibility too is suggested. "I was obsessed by the words that he had murmured before his death. For some reason these words, intended as an invitation, acted instead as a ban" (p. 184). Tamura's divided mind finds physical expression. His left hand seizes his right, and prevents it from using his bayonet on the dead man. After this experience Tamura has a strange religious vision (or hallucination) of an "unknown tropical flower" which says, "You may eat me if you like!" He then imagines great masses of flowers falling from the sky and hears what he takes to be the voice of God saying, "Consider the lilies of the field" (pp. 190-91). Much of the time he feels, as he has felt so often during his wilderness trek, that he is being watched. This feeling (do the "eyes" represent a projection of his guilt? a paranoid fear? a feeling of God's presence?) keeps the reader aware that the point of view here is that of a deranged mind.

The eyes finally assume human form in the person of Nagamatsu, who rescues Tamura, revives him with water and what turns out to be human flesh (an ironic communion?), and keeps him alive until the climax when Nagamatsu kills Yasuda and is in turn killed by Tamura. The meaning of the religious motif is difficult to determine; the point of view (a sick mind) keeps one from being dogmatic. But part of the significance, at least, emerges from the ironic juxtaposition of redemption and destruction, feeding and killing, living and dying. Can these seeming opposites be reconciled? Can twentieth-century man, postwar man, with new and ever more sophisticated means of serving either end-eating or killing-find his role in his world? Can he count on divine aid? Tamura's religious yearnings are roused only when he faces death; when he confronts the crucified Christ (the crucifix in the church), he becomes a murderer. The profound import of the Communion gift of body and blood is only apparent (and then only to a distorted mind) when he sees that men must literally eat one another to stay alive. Perhaps the book's ironic possibilities are best summed up in the ubiquitous and symbolic fires on the plain. They suggest that man's response to his world may be natural or unnatural; they may be "genuine bonfires" for burning waste husks, or guerrilla signals to mark human targets. They may also be God's purifying fire of judgment. If so, then Tamura's last remarks are more than mere hallucinatory ramblings. Perhaps he speaks as an inspired shaman-sage, mad with the truth.¹⁰ If man's insanity is somehow compatible with divine purpose, then indeed "glory be to God."

Like No Requiem and Fires on the Plain, Takeda's Luminous Moss centers around an incident which takes place during the last year of the war in the Pacific. In an introductory narrative-essay, the author tells of his trip to Rausu in Hokkaido. Amid signs of postwar prosperity, he is guided to Makkaushi Cave, where he sees the famous "luminous moss." He also learns of a wartime incident of cannibalism which occurred in the vicinity. At the "apex of the War" a small ship had been wrecked in a storm; the captain and a crew member had straggled ashore on a "storm-driven, snow-laden beach." Two months later, the captain had appeared, sole survivor of the tragedy. But after fishermen had discovered evidences of cannibalism and the captain had confessed to having eaten his dead comrade, the "beautiful wartime drama" had become in the eyes of the people a tale of terror, the "courageous captain" a beast-like criminal. Author Takeda follows his essay with an imaginative recreation of the "incident" and the captain's trial in the form of a closet drama.

As in the other works, men, dying of starvation, resort to eating human flesh to stay alive. Like Ooka, Takeda has a symbol of the human heart, though more obvious, in the Makkaushi Cave. Both Takeda and Ooka get considerable ironic mileage from the identity motif and religious symbolism. But differences are again considerable. Whereas in No Requiem Moriya oversimplifies the problem of cannibalism (the Japanese military is blamed), and Ooka gives it a personal, mystical slant in Fires on the Plain, Takeda endeavors in a number of ways to universalize his message. He invites the reader to see himself, like the protagonitst, as Everyman, not only capable of, but deeply involved in, the act. Thus, Takeda explains that he chose the closet drama form of the play in order to "best allow the reader's everyday feelings to enter into and merge with the situation." In fact, the reader is invited to imagine himself as "producer" of the drama. Obviously, the significance is that one contributes not only in a literary but in a moral way. Lest the reader miss the point of his involvement, Takeda states the reader-producer analogy three times.

In other ways too Takeda stresses the involvement of all men. The introductory narrative has a peacetime setting with civilian characters, including the junior high school principal (his "educative" function becomes apparent when he is identified with the captain in act 2). Even the notorious "incident" involves not just military men, but "military civilians," and while the incident occurs at the apex of the war, the shipwreck results from a natural disaster, a snowstorm typical of the area, which could have occurred at any time. Allusions to Buddha, Christ, Bosch, Breughel, medieval Japanese scrolls, the Ainu, and contemporary Soviet-Japanese relations further stress the idea of universality. But most obvious of the universalizing devices are the symbolic luminous moss and the figure of the captain. In the "play," when Hachizo first sees the "ring of light, like the halo of the figure of Buddha" behind Nishikawa, he says, "They say—an' it's handed down from way back-that a man that's ate a man's flesh has a ring of light come out from behind his neck. A golden green light. A ring a pale, pale light comes out. Anyway, they say it looks like somethin' called 'luminous moss'" (p. 127). Hachizo's remarks point forward and backward: forward to the play's end, where, in a crucifixion scene, the spectators all appear with halos of light, and backward to the introductory essay, where the narrator tells of going to find and of seeing the luminous moss. Since those who are themselves "human flesh eaters" can't see the light, by the end of the work nearly everyone (it's a closet drama, so the reader can't see the light either) becomes, as Takeda might put it, a producer. Takeda clearly calls for a moral happening.

As a composite Christ-Everyman figure (cf. Ooka's dying officer), the captain further points up the universality of human involvement in flesh eating. The Christ analogy is made clear in ac 2 of the drama, which the production notes say is to have the atmosphere of a Passion Play. The captain's face is to be "like that of Christ" (as well as that of the junior high school principal). The spectators at the end of the play "look like the ring of spectators surrounding Christ as he was being taken to Golgotha for execution." As Everyman (as well as Christ), he is tried and convicted for the crimes of which all are guilty. His role is further suggested by the difference in his appearance between acts 1 and 2. In act 1 he is to appear as "the most sinister-looking man the reader can imagine"; in act 2, the "vicious look" is replaced by one of Christ-like calm, and he is identified with the angel-like junior high school principal and guide (" as he went on ahead of me, he made his lean body waver somewhat as if he were floating" [p. 97]). Perhaps the result is meant to be akin to what Renaissance writers portrayed so vividly: man's paradoxical ability to ascend to angelic heights or descend to bestial depths.¹¹

The theme of Takeda's work is judgment, as the court-room drama suggests, and Everyman is on trial. If Fires on the Plain stresses the journey to discovery, in Luminous Moss the journey has already been made, man's deepest secrets discovered, and the heart itself, accordingly, become the courtroom. The "producer" is invited to weigh the evidence of his own heart. The unspoken warning is "Judge not that ye be not judged." Takeda, at any rate, is blunt enough in his indictment of societies of men who condone war but pretend shock at cannibalism: "As a proud manifestation of the power of civilization, weapons of war and their mass production are openly displayed in the newsreels. Cooking utensils for human flesh, on the contrary, are no longer seen in the flatware sections of department stores or in the special exhibit rooms of museums. Of these two types of criminal tools, one has successfully won popular support and is being improved from moment to moment, whereas the other is about to be erased from memory as a secret weapon whose recollection sends a shudder of horror through the human heart" (pp. 114-15). The hypocrisy is pointed up with irony during the trial in the prosecutor's statement (greeted with applause) that "never must any comparison be permitted in the same breath between those loyal war dead who fought the hardest and starved to death for the sake of our country and this detestable, egocentric defendant!" (p. 136). Given the court's blindness, we thus find the captain, like Meursault in Camus's The Stranger, on trial for the wrong reasons. By act 2, the captain has thus become a scapegoat-Christ, bearing the sins of the world, not least of which is its refusal to acknowledge its motives.¹²

The central idea is bolstered by numerous small ironies. For example, Takeda capitalizes on Japanese prejudice against the Ainu by subtle comparisons. Before the incursion of the Japanese, he writes, "the aboriginal Ainu not only had fish but plenty of meat to devour to their hearts' content" (p. 95). Near the end of act I stage directions call for sacred music from a song of the Ainu bear festival. It is, Takeda explains, "a warm and devout piece of music expressing joy over being blessed with meat as well as a wish that the god return safely to his home" (p. 133). Since the music is heard from the time Nishikawa conceives the idea of murdering the Captain, the "primitive" Ainu appear in anything but an inferior light. More subtle is the narrator's remark when he leaves the Makkaushi Cave. He looks back and sees the "faint traces of the black footprints" left by his shoes in the moss which later becomes a symbol of man's killer-cannibal potential. "So it's all over the place," he says. "We've been stepping on National Treasures!" (p. 100).

But since the moss is indeed "all over the place," man needs a scapegoat victim upon whom he can project his cannibal potential. Ironically, he will not only project and condemn it, but will yet fail to really see what he has done. For this reason the ambiguous last words of the captain, "Please look at me. Please, look at me closely" (p. 145), are both accusation and invitation. The reader is meant, of course, to see himself, and thus recognize one of those "fantastic creatures" of whom the junior high principal spoke. The truth may be a jolt. In the play, since neither judge, prosecutor, nor spectators can see the luminous light, all are by implication "flesh-eaters." The captain's plea thus contains horror, for if none can see, then indeed "a terrible thing is happening!" All are guilty, but ignorant of their guilt. But his words may also be an invitation to hope. If the luminous halo is a symbol of sin, it is by tradition, whether Buddhist or Christian, a mark of the saint. The two are not incompatible. The Christ-like captain is "bearing up" after all. Perhaps through the insistent "look at me" Takeda suggests that if there is to be salvation for modern man, it must begin with recognition. "Luminous moss" is then appropriately a symbol of illumination. The quest for identity begins with soul-searching.