The Silent Cry Read Online Free PDF

incomprehensible. If my friend, instead of painting his head crimson and hanging himself, had bequeathed so much as a brief cry over the telephone, there might have been some clue. It may well be, of course, that the crimson head, the cucumber in the anus of the naked body, and the death by hanging were themselves a kind of silent cry; but if so, then the cry alone was not enough for those left behind. The clues were too equivocal for me to pursue any further.
    Nevertheless, none of the survivors was in a better position to understand my dead friend than myself. Ever since our first year at university he and I had been together in everything. Our classmates used to say we were like identical twins. In appearance even, I was more like my friend than my brother. Takashi bore no resemblance to me whatsoever; and indeed there were some things in my younger brother’s head as he roamed about America that I sensed as less accessible to me than things that had once had a place in my dead friend’s mind. One autumn evening in 1945—the evening of the day that S, the second of my elder brothers and the only one to return alive from the front, was beaten to death in the Korean settlement that had grown up like a wen just outside the valley where our village stood—mother, lying on her sickbed, turned to our sister and madethis appraisal of Takashi and myself, the only men left to our family :
    “They’re still children, their faces aren’t formed yet. But by and by Mitsusaburo will be ugly and Takashi will be handsome. People will like Takashi and he’ll lead a successful life. You should get on good terms with him while you can and stick with him even after you grow up.”
    When mother died, our sister was adopted by an uncle along with Takashi, thus in effect following mother’s advice; but she killed herself before reaching adulthood. Though her retardation wasn’t as serious as that of my own child, she was backward to the extent that, as mother had said, she was incapable of surviving without attaching herself to someone else. Only to music, or rather to sounds as such, did she show any real response. . . .
    The dog barked. The outside world sprang to life once more, closing in on me at the bottom of my pit from two sides at once. My right hand, rounded into a scoop, was scraping at the wall of the pit in front of me; already I’d clawed down toward my lap five or six pieces of brick buried till now in the Kanto loam, and the dog was pressing itself against my chest to avoid them. Urgently, my hand scraped at the side of the pit once, twice more; and I realized that someone unknown was peering down into it from above. I drew the dog close with my left hand and looked up from the hole. The dog’s terror infected me: I was afraid with a truly animal fear. The morning light was clouded like an eye with a cataract. The sky that at dawn had been high with a whitish tinge now hung low and leaden. If only my eyes had both had vision, the morning light might have filled the scene more amply (I’m frequently prone to this kind of misconception), but to the one remaining eye it was a dark morning of unrelieved desolation. I sat, heedless of the dirt covering me, in a position more degraded than that of any normal inhabitant of that morning city, scrabbling with bare hands at the earthen wall, assailed by an overwhelming cold from without and a burning shame from within. Like a tower about to topple and blot out the leaden sky, the squat, broad silhouette of a human being once more blocked the entrance to the pit. It brought to mind a black crab reared up against the sky on its back legs. The dog went wild, and I was paralyzed with fear and shame. A clattering of innumerable glass objects wafted down into the pit like a flurry of hail. I strained my eyes in an effort to make out the features of the giant who peered down godlike at me,and, dazed with shame, allowed myself to give a faint, fatuous smile.
    “What’s the dog’s