Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (14 page)

I witnessed another moment when I went to pick up Eeyore at middle school (as he was already beyond needing to be accompanied to and from school, it must have been an excursion day when he was coming home later than usual). In the evening shadows of the school yard, still excited from their outing and by the lateness of the hour, the children were taking reluctant leave of one another. Eeyore was bent over a girl perhaps two thirds as tall as he and less than half his weight who was crippled from polio, peering into her face as he repeated a leisurely farewell, “
Good-bye, good-bye, we leave you now, with a smile until tomorrow.”
Although the lower half of the girl's face was an acute triangle that seemed twisted, it was easy to read in her broad forehead and large eyes her regret about the intelligence that had been broken by the demon of disease. Eeyore was treating her as carefully as if she were a fragile doll, and I could see, though she said nothing, that she was also pleased by his attention. Suddenly, as I stood there observing them, a voice exploded convulsively in my ear: “Enough! This is sick, this is creepy!”

Next to me, surrounded by several mothers who also had come for their children, a young woman teacher was voicing her disgust at Eeyore's parting words, grinding her teeth. “I'd say he's overdoing it a bit, wouldn't you! Don't you feel like saying That'll do nicely thank you very much!’ This just makes me sick!”

I felt resigned; it was no surprise that this inexperienced young woman's feelings should by roiled by Eeyore's attitude, it was understandable. And so I stepped forward, spinelessly enough, to put an end to Eeyore's farewells, and saw the mothers lower their shoulders and hang their heads, as if the teacher's angry words themselves had slapped them in the face. I felt outrage seize me; the teacher, twisting atop her broad, firm hips a slender, comely back, glanced around at me defiantly, her face flushing darkly.

It seemed certain that this unmarried teacher had sensed the presence of a sexual motive in my son's behavior as he said his effusive good-byes. But I wondered if she wasn't simply frightened by the power of the sexual male who was growing up inside Eeyore's large body and would some day soon appear. As in my dream, this was a response rooted in the sexual darkness inside herself.

In addition to moments such as these, there was also the memory of an incident that had disturbed me deeply in my youth—as it happened, a mentally impaired person had been involved—but what made the incident important to me now was rather its bearing on my feelings about “place” and my sense that I would have to secure a “place” that could serve as a final abode for myself and Eeyore. It was the spring when I left the valley in the forest—I recall my feeling that this was a temporary move and that the time would certainly come when I returned to the village in the valley—and was boarding with a family in a provincial city. It was the final year of the Allied occupation of Japan, and there was a connection, at least in my imagination, between the incident and the presence of American soldiers.

The man of the house where I was staying, a career soldier who had lost his job when Japan was defeated, showed me a report of the incident in the local newspaper. On a small island in the Inland Sea, a youth with brain damage had murdered a little girl. With a long bamboo spear he had pierced her from her genitals to the back of her throat. When he was taken prisoner at the scene immediately after the crime, the perpetrator, who was my age, was wearing an imitation American GI cap made out of newspaper. A cap fashioned in this way had been in vogue for a time, and I also knew how to fold one.…

I remember the former colonel saying he hoped the incident wouldn't be putting ideas in our heads, but it wasn't the sexual details of the horror that upset me (to be sure, I was impressed, as by a new discovery, that the human genitals could be said to be connected, via the body's lumina, all the way to the back of the throat). It was the photograph of the crime scene appended to the article that rocked me on my heels—an island mountainside, a bamboo grove and tangled shrubbery, narrow fields that appeared uncultivated and, overall, part of the same hollow land that would be cold and damp the year round. It occurs to me now that my valley in the forest and this small island were topographically similar (even though the valley in its own sea of forest was to the island as hollow to rise); at the time, I had recognized that places like this were also to be found in the valley and had pictured them specifically. In this kind of “place,” people committed cruel and degraded acts like this one. Or, perhaps, the place itself made people commit them. The article described the youth as an idiot; perhaps his idiocy was in his failure to resist the magnetic power of this “place.” In my valley, the children avoided going to this kind of place, and the grown-ups who were obliged to labor there took themselves to work reluctantly with scowling faces. (Those whose livelihoods required them to cultivate the fields in those places seemed under a cloud, even to the children's eyes, and no one thought it strange when they died at an early age.)

My next thought filled me with terror: I had left the valley to live in a stranger's “place” where there was no forest and no landmarks, only a river that was huge out of all proportion and unfamiliar trees. I had no means of distinguishing an ominous place anywhere in this provincial city. Which meant that I might wander into one at any time and wouldn't know it. Perhaps I was there even now.

Then I recalled a minor incident that had occurred two or three weeks earlier. The landlord and his wife had left on an excursion and I had spent the night alone in the house with their daughter, a year or two older than I. In the middle of the night, when I came downstairs to use the bathroom, the girl was slowly combing her hair in the sloping handmade bed in her room, naked to the waist, with the door open. I urinated and went back upstairs without giving it a second thought. When her parents returned the following morning, the girl carried on about having been afraid during the night. I considered only then, with contempt, that she had been trying to attract me: if this board-inghouse had been built in one of those “places,” I might have skewered her with a bamboo spear from her genitals to the back of her throat. I was aware of fear that made my head ring and of a twisted desire for dark passions. How I longed to return to the valley in the forest! To a world where every imaginable place was familiar to my body and spirit!

Years had gone by, and I had discovered for myself and Eeyore a place that was, in a sense, another valley in a forest, with topography that I could clearly read. That at least was what I had intended when I secured my own mountain bayberry on the slope of a hill bordered by virgin forest on the Izu peninsula, and built a house nearby. I sketched my image of a cabin and sent it to an architect I had known since my childhood. It wasn't until the actual cabin was finished that I realized with surprise that my image of a final abode had been unrealistic in the extreme. I had drawn a house beneath the luxuriant green of a large bayberry tree, but the lot was almost entirely on a slope, and the tree in question, together with a cypress at its side that had grown straight up through and above its leafy branches, were both located toward the bottom; the finished house looked down on the bayberry and the cypress from the living room on the second floor. This discrepancy served to teach me once again the sort of “place” I longed for.

We had planned to be at Izu on the Sunday that was the anniversary of the private middle school attended by Eeyore's younger sister and brother. But a large typhoon was approaching, and a weather report predicted the storm would move overland at precisely the Izu peninsula on the morning we would have been at the cabin. My wife and I abandoned the idea of the excursion and told the children. Eeyore was listening and did not react, so I assumed that a trip to the cabin was of no particular importance to him.

However, that Saturday, at just the time when we would have been leaving the house, Eeyore stood at the front door in the stiff, heavy leather shoes he normally refused to wear, a large pack on his back and a mountain-climbing cap on his head, and announced, as though he were trying to convince himself, “
Shall we get started? I'm on my way to the Izu house!”
In fact, by the time my wife came to me at my writing desk and said, after a silence when she seemed to be regaining her composure, “He seems to have reverted to—the way he was when you were away in Europe,” she and Eeyore had already been engaged in dialogue for close to an hour at the front entrance to the house, in voices hushed so as not to be audible to me in my room upstairs. My wife had pleaded and cajoled. In response, she reported, Eeyore would say only, “
No, I'm on my way to Izu!”
Finally, my wife had threatened him with a scolding from me if I heard him sounding so unreasonable while I was at work in my study, but far from panicking he had looked away from his mother and from his distressed brother and sister and, in a curious display of obstinacy, had gazed at nothing at all with empty eyes. Then he had said the following, with a forcefulness that had recreated instantly for my wife the despair she had felt during my absence last spring: “
No, Papa is dead! He died, you know. I'm on my way to Izu by myself. Because Papa is dead. Good-bye, everyone. Farewell!
”

He had not unfurled this brand of ultimatum right away. He had merely positioned himself at the front door as if the family had not agreed to cancel the trip to the Izu peninsula. Then he had delivered himself of his first announcement in a loud voice and, when the rest of us failed to appear with our luggage, had continued waiting as though suspiciously. At that point, using their normal, everyday strategies, my wife and his sister and brother had attempted to convince him that the trip to the mountains had been canceled. My daughter used his interest in the weather map on television, reminding him of how he took notice every day of weather and average temperature in major cities all over the country: “Eeyore, a typhoon's coming! I wonder what the low will be—pretty cold I bet!” and so on. His brother shared knowledge, which he had probably acquired from a magazine, about the Izu peninsula having floated on the Pacific until it collided with its current location and became attached. “If that's the case, the peninsula might float back out into the Pacific someday. And we might never get back!” My son's response to this persuasion was simple and apposite and for that reason formidable: “/
have a winter sweater. I think we should get there before the Izu peninsula floats away. They say a typhoon is coming!
”

Eeyore was already aware from watching television that a typhoon was approaching the Izu peninsula. As he intended to make the trip in spite of the storm, dissuading him with talk of a typhoon was out of the question. What was needed was some other terrifying monster to replace the image of a typhoon in his consciousness. But what a futile, not to mention disagreeable, effort!

My wife droned on, and her vitality appeared to ebb away. When she reached the point where Eeyore had begun to insist that his father was dead, she turned half away from me and spoke quietly to the bookshelves against the wall.

I looked out the window. Among the few trees in our garden, the dogwood, the birch, and the young stewartia were swaying in the wind. Only the camellia with its thick trunk and stiff foliage was still; yet if you looked closely even the camellia was moving, but at a different frequency. The wind whistled through the trees and above them, wheeling slowly through the sky and moaning. Since morning it had been a little windy, and raining in fits and starts; it was as if fat dewdrops were hanging heavily in the air. Through the window glass that was streaking with rain and then clearing I observed the world outside. In the distance, the sky was pitch-black and ominous; inside banks of dark clouds darker clouds boiled and billowed. Even so, the wind wasn't so strong you couldn't walk against it—that's what Eeyore would say—and it wasn't raining hard enough to require an umbrella. In fact, he had already walked to the bus stop that morning and made the trip to and from his special school.

I had been working on an essay for a series I was editing with some friends and I put it aside and stood up. I sensed my wife flinch as though startled—she was still turned away from me in silence—but I was not at that moment angry at Eeyore. I was merely perplexed. I was experiencing the same feelings as my wife, at least I should have been. Nevertheless, I headed for the stairs. I believe I was assuming it wouldn't be hard to bring Eeyore around so that we could remain in Tokyo while the typhoon passed. But when I looked down at his large head, and at the bulky knapsack on his back that was as broad now as any adult's, and saw the ancient doll strapped to his right shoulder and side as he stood planted fiercely in front of the door, I felt myself letting go of common sense with a shudder of abandon and I began steeling myself for a departure with Eeyore for the wind-whipped storm that awaited us in Izu.

The large doll he had lashed to his body, close to three feet tall with abundant black hair, ogling eyes, and an overbite, was Tiny Chiyo, a filthy, damaged doll that had been lying abandoned in the shed for four or five years: Eeyore looked like a warrior on his way to a final, desperate battle with his child at his side.

“When I told him none of us were going to Izu, he dragged out Tiny Chiyo"—my daughter had sounded embarrassed as she reported the old doll's involvement to her mother. Her younger brother also appeared to twist away from the doll's shuttered-open eyes.

“I'm going with him. I'll unpack everyone else's stuff.”

As I was repacking my suitcase in the living room, Eeyore's younger brother approached in silence and reached tentatively for his own things. Apparently he was prompted by feelings that accurately reflected my wife's own anxiety, which she now expressed: “That's a good idea; better that the three of you should go instead of just Papa and Eeyore!”

“No—Eeyore and I will go alone!” I said, aware that my loud voice seemed to be a hurtful blow to Eeyore's brother. I was asserting myself violently: the rest of the family, those who wish to continue existing in this world, are excused; Eeyore and I are free to behave as crazily as we want!