死者の奢り・飼育 - Informal Reading Club

Hello and welcome to the Informal Book Club for

This book was written by 大江賢三郎, one of three Japanese authors who won the Literature Nobel Prize (only two of which write in Japanese, though), and the titular story 飼育 won the Akutagawa Prize in 1958.

The book contains the following stories:

  • 死者の奢り
  • 他人の足
  • 飼育
  • 人間の羊
  • 不意の唖
  • 戦いの今日

Please mark clearly which story your comments refer to, and use spoiler tags or put your comments in a “Hide Details” section.

Are you planning to read this book?

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  • I have finished this book
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If so, which medium/media do you use?

  • Paperback
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Thanks for setting this up!! I’m excited to discuss! :star_struck: I will share my thoughts on 死者の奢り and 他人の足 later today.

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These are my thoughts so far. The sections contain heavy spoilers, so please only open them if you are sure you want to read that.

死者の奢り

What a precious opening story! Not only was the description of the dead bodies mildly unsettling but then again very technical and scientific, also the curiosity with which our protag observed them was very interesting and felt natural.
In the end it was a story about what things mean to us. They moved the dead bodies carefully into the new alcohol basin, which was hard and unpleasant work, only to find out that there was some miscommunication and the bodies were meant to be thrown away instead. While at the same time the young female student, who seemed to be very unhappy about her pregnancy, later found out how precious the baby was to her when she fell and was in danger of losing it. Dense scenery and interesting thoughts between the lines.

他人の足

I had no idea how omnipresent tuberculosis was (and maybe still is) in Asia before I started to read Japanese literature. Here we learn about a hospital ward for teenagers with bone tuberculosis, which means they cannot walk any more and will probably never be able to again (and die young). We get a glimpse into their daily lives, being driven to the sun deck during the day and spending the nights in double rooms together with another patient. An interesting but very present detail was that the nurses would regularly give a hand job (or blow job? I was not sure about the details) to the boys so that they wouldn’t spoil their beds at night :thinking:
This peaceful life is somewhat disturbed by a slightly older boy who has ideas of revolution and who sends a readers’ letter to the local newspaper, with the support of some of the group. This causes quite some disruption, but it turns out that this boy seems to have had a different illness, and so at some point he is cured and walks out of the room. Which takes everybody back to their regular daily lives.

飼育

Like with the other stories, Oe’s writing is really beautiful, and he uses many amazing metaphors, like “something as sticky as the juice of a beetle that you crushed in your hand”.
In this story, the inhabitants of a remote village capture an Afro-American soldier whose plane had crashed in the nearby mountains during WWII. They first put him in a basement where everybody gazes at him through the small windows. The children - who have the job of cleaning the bucket he uses as toilet - carefully examine his feces and the effects of the food on them. After a while, he becomes friends with the children, and the adults start to trust him as well, so he is allowed outside, and he is taken to the village’s outdoor bathing place where he plays with the children. But this harmony is disturbed by the next larger town’s bureaucrat who orders them to report the prisoner and to have him taken away. When they try to shackle him, he acts up and takes one of the boys as hostage. When the boy’s father approaches him with an axe, he puts the boy’s hand on his own head to protect himself, but the father uses the axe to kill the man, which chops off (part of?) his son’s hand in the process. Later, the bureaucrat comes to visit the village, and he joins the children who are using one of the plane parts as a sledge. The bureaucrat slides down the hill, bumps into a big rock and is dead.

I was stunned by many of the events in the story, so I asked a Japanese friend to read it as well, and we discussed a little bit.

  • Regarding the chopping off of the boy’s hand: I was shocked how the father could do this to his son, but my friend said that the father was the only person who could possibly have done this… That was an interesting perspective.
  • Regarding the end: We were both confused as to why the bureaucrat dies at the end. Maybe it is a revenge of “the plane” (representing America) because he caused the disruption and the death of the soldier in the first place?

I hope I did not mess up too many of the details - it’s been almost 2 years since I read these stories. Happy to read everybody’s interpretations!

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I finished reading 飼育, so I am (finally) posting my consolidated thoughts on the first three stories. Warning: The drop-downs contain summaries with spoilers that I have not tagged!

死者の奢り

I was immediately drawn into this story from the first paragraph describing the floating corpses and their murmurs! The writing, especially the descriptions of the light and the bodies floating in the tanks, was so vivid and engaging. The contrast between the mundane work that the characters were doing and the grotesqueness of it was really gripping and I had a hard time putting this down.

In terms of the themes, the biggest feeling I got from this story was a sense of betrayal. The narrator and the female student were told one thing and expected a certain payment and then they found out it was potentially all for nothing - but still had to stick around and do the work, not knowing if the other end of the bargain would even be upheld in the end in the face of the bureaucratic authority of their university. This even came at a great cost to the pregnant student, since she falls and the shock also affects baby while she is working in this irrational situation. I thought the sense of betrayal and powerlessness and the almost absurd drudgery of the work, treating the corpses as objects, had some ties to the situation during the war in Japan and the betrayal the populace must have felt after the war ended and the messaging from the government about the country’s identity and status changed so quickly after so many were subjected to death or hardship.

I am thinking there are many other possible interpretations here and I am planning to try and find some online to see what thoughts other readers of this story had.

他人の足

I loved this one! I somehow had a bad feeling the entire time i was reading it, but in a good way? The descriptions were so raw and there was a vague sense of discomfort throughout - the tension inside of the narrator between him and the outside world and newcomer patient, the way the other patients are described as giggling and whispering in the common room, the nurses coming around to sexual pleasure the boys every night out of an unspecified mix of what is perhaps both virtue and curiosity. 大江’s narrator describes the walls of the ward as “viscous”, and the world of the story certainly did feel very self-contained. Until the newcomer comes, that is. Upon his introduction, life in the ward changes in a big way when all of the other patients start becoming interested in life outside of the viscous walls and participating in political discussions and writing letters to newspapers. The narrator isn’t too happy about this, perhaps because he feels wary and abandoned by the outside world already - at one point he makes an offhand remake to the newcomer that he doesn’t remember the details of his illness but it doesn’t matter because the illness, and therefore also his body and disabled status in society, won’t forget him. Right when the narrator finally starts to feel a little uplifted by the recent changes in everyone around him, the newcomer patient has his cast removed and walks again, and quickly goes back to the outside world and abandons life in the ward. Without him, things quickly go back to normal.

I perceived a lot of anger and disappointment in this story, and again a sense of betrayal. Betrayal by society, by one’s own body, by other people, like the newcomer patient who encourages the patients to connect with the outside world - but in the end who also leaves once it becomes clear he doesn’t have to stay there. It turned out that the changes were only possible because of him and were unsustainable when he left, which is why I think the story was called 他人の足. There are a lot of situations in life where it takes someone else or some outside force to do something, and then momentum quickly dies when that element is removed. I appreciated 大江 capturing something like that in a story like this. Of course, that is just my personal interpretation and I think many others are possible too which is why it is so great!

飼育

Oh my goodness! I finished this just yesterday, so it is still extremely fresh in my mind and it is hard to even find the words to talk about the story. It was visceral and disturbing, but also very powerful in what it said and how it said it. I was disgusted by some of the animal-like descriptions of the black soldier in captivity and couldn’t stop reading during the climax when the narrator’s father comes with the axe. I won’t summarize the whole plot again, but I will just say that I can’t believe 大江 wrote that story when he was only 23! Just incredible.

My interpretation of this story was that it was one about power dynamics and the dark things humans can do to one another, told within the larger frame of a coming of age story. Like the first two stories, it also had themes of betrayal and separation from the outside world but explored in different ways. Here, the village that the narrator lives in is cut off from the outside world including the war, and only has contact with a nearby village that seems to hate them (I was not sure, but it seemed possible that they were some type of burakumin, or maybe they were disliked because they did not send people to participate in the war…or maybe it was simply because they were very rural and looked down on?). Within the small inside world of the narrators village there are various power dynamics that exist between the prefecture, village, the adults, black soldier, narrator, and his little brother and throughout the story they are constantly changing like a seesaw, especially in the case of the black soldier and narrator during the tragic climax scene.

The characters in this story use and abuse their power in different ways, reducing others to an animal state, causing physical harm and permanent damage, and finally, death. After what happens to the narrator, he awakens to the potential for darkness that humans have inside of them and loses his innocence, taking his first step into adulthood as a member of the bigger world outside of his village where there is a war happening, the meaning of which only becomes clear to him when the war came to him.

I am still thinking of what the death of the 書記 meant at the end… It seems like it could mean many things, but I am not sure yet how I would personally interpret it. I keep thinking on it for a while before I go off to see what other people on the internet have to say.

I would say that all three stories so far have been incredible, so I am looking forward to reading the rest of the ones in the book. :smile:

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Thank you so much for your reviews - made me remember some more subtle bits of the stories. I really like your interpretations!

Oh, and I totally forgot that I had already posted a more detailed review of 飼育over on WK:

(It should be accessible without subscription.)

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Of course!! I am really happy to be able to have some conversations about this book so thank you for starting the thread and also sharing your review from the WK forums!! :grin:

I read the next story, 人間の羊, this week and it was also very interesting. The style was definitely different from 飼育 and the other two stories, and felt more simplistic with more ひらがな words. I am having a really difficult time deciding which story I like the best so far because they are all so well-written and pointed in an extremely compelling way, so they make for a great reading experience (imo). :thinking:

Thoughts about 人間の羊

This story felt the most straight-forward so far, because of the direct inclusion of the American soldiers abusing the Japanese passengers on the bus as well as the way the teacher character reacted afterwards, crying that they shouldn’t get away with it. Notably, the teacher did not actually step in to stop the soldiers during the part where they actually made the passengers pull their pants down and kneel in the bus, but was then full of righteous indignation later as if it had happened to him although he was just a bystander. When the police asked the narrator for his name, the teacher even went as far as to start with 僕は and try to give his own name, as if he was the one who experienced that situation himself. Perhaps he did feel dehumanized from witnessing the unbalanced power dynamic and abuse of his fellow countrymen, but the gap between how the narrator felt (shame and a desire to forget) and how the teacher who was a passive bystander (righteous indignation and a desire to spread the news) was an interesting commentary on the different ways people interact with larger systems of oppression. In the end, the teacher starts directing his anger at the narrator and follows him all night with zero empathy for how he feels based on what he went through, inflicting another type of abuse - maybe not equal, but still abuse - on the narrator. It felt like a critique of those who are passive bystanders but don’t actually get involved to face a problem in critical moments, but then are all talk later (within the context of American occupied Japan after the war, but also in general). I think this story kind of crystallizes that negative aspect of human behavior, which is why I really liked it. I could think of many other situations where it’s possible to find someone like the teacher.

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