Jesse Ball - Silence Once Begun

Then the king is upon the courtyard of his own castle. He goes along the passages as a claimant, with the others who have things to ask. They are endless in number, it seems, and they are admitted, all at once, to an interior chamber where the king will appear and speak to them. The king himself is astonished. He has never spoken to claimants. He has never seen this room. But an hour passes and another, and a counselor comes out and sits in a high chair. I am the king, he says. I know you, thinks the king. You are but a counselor. And so the king makes himself the last of all those there, and waits, and when they have all spoken to the counselor, and when they have all gone away, he presents himself, saying, I have something to say to the king, but you are not the king. I am not the king, agrees the counselor, stepping down off the high chair, but we will go to him now. So, they go down more hallways and cross more courts, the counselor, the king, and the guards, and they enter another chamber, where another counselor, yet higher, sits. I have known these men all my life, thinks the king, and never did I know … but already he is brought forward. Here is the king, they say to him. Tell him what you will. You are not the king, he says. I have come to see the king. And so they draw back the cloth at the back of the room, the heavy, rich, banded cloth, and there is another passage, and they go down it, the king, the first counselor, the second counselor, and the guards, and they reach a place where the guards can go no farther, and the counselors lead the king on, one on each side. His clothes are so filthy, his face so etched with weather and sun, that they can scarcely bear to be beside him, yet they pass on together. Into the final chamber they go. There sits the king, and he knows himself. He has seen that face, so often! To him he goes, and when the king on his throne perceives the stonecutter’s robes, when he perceives the stonecutter’s hands, when he perceives that the stonecutter has passed all obstacles to come before him, he opens his eyes wide as any owl, and calls out. Who has let this man in? To the counselors, there is a lowly stonecutter, standing before their king. And this is what they see. The king holds out his hands and the stonecutter opens his robe and holds out his impossible puzzle, this fashioning of stone and light. The king receives it into his hands and there he makes it again the stone it was, and he sets it beside him, as it had sat in the field.

Then the king wakes, and it is morning. The lords have saddled their horses. Come, they say, come let us ride away. And the king rouses himself from the table where he was sleeping and he goes to his horse. Out from the hut comes the stonecutter and he looks into the king’s face. What passes between them then is neither for lords, nor for storytellers. Who can say what it means to be one person and not another? When they returned to the city, the king did nothing as he had before, and he led his kingdom into a new age, which even now has been forgotten. Of it, we have only this tale.

INT.

You felt before that all things were inevitable, that nothing could be done. But when you read that, you saw that there was a tiller? That things truly could be changed, and even one man could do it?

KAKUZO

Exactly. I felt I could be the stonecutter.

INT.

But there is no king. Even if you could be the stonecutter, I don’t see …

KAKUZO

The king is now in general. The kingship is held in general. It is what is tolerated by the people.

INT.

Then, to change their vision, you would need to …

KAKUZO

I needed to speak to everyone at once.

INT.

But you were young, and finding your way. How did you make your plans? How did you set them in motion? It was the middle of the 1970s. Perhaps — civil and legal formality was the farthest thing from anyone’s mind?

KAKUZO

Not so. There were some of us who were concerned. It seemed that Japan had the chance to become what no other nation was or has been: an actually fair place. I wanted that, more than anything. In my own way, I would say, though I’m sure others would disagree with me, I would say I am …

INT.

A moral man? A patriotic man?

KAKUZO

Maybe not in the sense of one who follows the emperor, who gives up everything for someone else’s cause. I gave up everything, but for my own cause.

INT.

Did you? Or did you convince Sotatsu to do so on your behalf?

KAKUZO

His life was a zero. He would have done nothing. Instead, look: someone is writing a book about it.

(Laughs, spits on the floor.)

INT.

I don’t …

KAKUZO

I had returned home from the city. I reconnected with a girl named Jito Joo. We were living together. She had been my girlfriend some years before that, but things hadn’t worked out. I left. Anyway, now that I had returned, we had ended up together again. Oda Sotatsu was an old friend. I started to see him. We were all feeling the same way, very restricted, very angry. Joo and I would stay up all night talking about things that we could do to escape, ways that things could change. I had a few friends who had ended up in jail and I was angry about the justice system. I felt we were very far behind the way it worked in other supposedly civilized countries.

INT.

So, that’s what hatched the idea of the confession?

KAKUZO

Partially, yes. It was partially that, and partially just anger.

INT.

Did you have any help in preparing the confession?

KAKUZO

A friend from Sakai, I won’t say his name, a lawyer. He helped draft it. The intention was that it be legally binding, to a degree. Of course, it is difficult to make it truly binding. But, as binding as we could make it, we did.

INT.

And had you targeted Sotatsu all along? You knew that he would be the one?

KAKUZO

I felt that, and I wasn’t alone in this — I felt that I was too important as the organizer to be the one who would be in prison. I didn’t see that as my part of the task.

INT.

You saw that as Sotatsu’s part?

KAKUZO

He was well suited to it. I knew him to be honorable, to have great inner resources. I also knew that he had obtained a very, I don’t know, bleak outlook. He was not very happy at that time, when I had returned. I was unsurprised when he agreed.

INT.

I should tell you that I have been in contact with many different people in my research for this. Among them, the entire Oda family, and Jito Joo.

KAKUZO

Joo also?

INT.

Yes.

KAKUZO

You have to be careful whom you trust. Everyone has a version, and most of them are wrong. In fact, I can tell you clearly: they are all wrong. I am in a position to help you understand what happened. You need to understand, Mr. Ball, the world is made up almost entirely of sentimental fools and brutes.

INT.

And which are you?

KAKUZO

(laughs)

INT.

Truly.

KAKUZO

A sentimental brute, I suppose. One who means well, but has no feeling for others.

[ Int. note . Here Kakuzo gave me the tape of the initial night — the actual tape of the moment when Sotatsu was lured into confessing. I was shocked. At first, I had trouble believing the truth of it, but when I listened, I knew it could be nothing else. Among the many things that were strange and beautiful, one was the manner in which the voices of Kakuzo and Joo were different from when I had spoken with them, but subtly. It was a weight of time — all the time that had passed since the tape had been made, and all the things that had happened.]

[After handing me the materials, Kakuzo did not want to be interviewed any more. He merely gave me the tape of that first interaction, and a series of statements. The statements I provide hereafter, verbatim (changed only as per my initial note). The statements were of drastically varying age, some even predating the events. I will enumerate them below.]