Read Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! Online
Authors: Kenzaburo Oe
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (33 page)
Accordingly,
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
is fiction. To be sure, Oe has grounded his chronicle in real-life incidents, and uses actual details to convey a picture of life at home with Eeyore that is comic and grotesque and poignant and, perhaps above all, confounding to his caretakers, Oe himself and his wife and two younger children, who live in the shadow of Eeyore's sprawling presence. In its candor, this account is also the bravest installment in the idiot-son narratives that are central to Oe's work. Here for the first time he broaches the taboo subject of sexual desire in his retarded son, a child in a man's body with a penis that springs from its confining diaper like “the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi baring its fangs to strike.” In a dream, the narrator encounters a malign, reptilian version of Eeyore with his penis bloodied. But he uses the freedom bestowed on him by this imagined moment to divert the implications of the scene away from Eeyore to himself:
But the malevolence of that image, no less than my bizarre scream, had its origin in me and no one else. This had nothing to do with my son. On the contrary, I felt like turning to myself and saying, “I see! So these are the twisted thoughts that occur at the outer limits of your consciousness when you consider the issue of your son's sexuality now that he's nineteen!”
Elsewhere, Oe levels a similarly unsparing eye on his own motives and behavior. In the kidnapping episode that is an elaboration of an incident that actually occurred, Oe criticizes his own righteousness with devastating accuracy in the student activist's diatribe:
And ten years from now will your thinking have changed one bit? That's what's so irritating about you—you're like molasses! And what grounds do you have for thinking you're fine just the way you are and will never have to change? We tried thinking about that from your point of view, and we concluded that your grounds are your handicapped child…. Your whole life revolves around your child, you've designed it that way, and your judgment is based on your experience, so outsiders can criticize you until they're blue in the face. Can you deny that?
There is no question that
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
is grounded in the reality of Oe's experience with his son. But even when the narrator is communicating “actual” moments from his life, he is transforming them in his imagination. Consider the episode in chapter 6 when he recalls his own father's humiliation at the hands of the local police chief. The prefectural governor has stopped at the village on tour in the last year of the war, and his father has been instructed to demonstrate the machine that is used to compress tree bark into bales. When he hesitates—because the press requires two men to operate and his partner is away at war—the police chief barks at him “‘You there!’” in a voice that has never been used in the valley before, “not even with the livestock.” Later, the youthful narrator deforms the images in his memory of the episode and reassembles them into a vision of social equality in which the humiliation that his father suffered could not have occurred:
The day the governor toured among his constituents and the police chief had lashed my father with his tongue and driven him to make a spectacle of his labor, what if, in that instant, the emperor's proclamation of the war's end had blared from a radio across the entire valley? Then my intrepid father in his cotton smock would have raised his hatchet high in his right hand and ordered the police chief and the governor to take their places at the crank handles and to begin the crunching and clanking. And three or so places back in the line, His Majesty the Emperor would have been removing his white gloves as he waited his turn to go to work….
Imagining an ideal world does not make it so: listening to a radio broadcast for “junior citizens” just after the war, the narrator realizes that “the social order with the emperor at its apex had not turned upside down entirely, at least not to the extent that His Majesty could now be forced to labor at a bark press.”
Nonetheless, as Blake demonstrated time and again, the moral man is obliged to oppose the reality of cruelty or injustice with a redeeming vision. When Eeyore prevents his father from taking the phone and expresses his own outrage at the student who kidnapped him—an act of defiance that lies far beyond the capacity of the actual Hikari!—his mother worries that his agitation will provoke a seizure, and Eeyore, in his desire to calm and console her, asserts an impossibility: “
He was a bad person. But you don't have to worry, Mama. I won't be angry anymore. There's no bad person anymore. Absolutely!
” Listening at his son's side, the narrator validates him: “Every man has the right to his own illusions even if they are nothing more than that, and the right to express them powerfully.” And having echoed a lesson learned from Blake, he quotes the poet exulting at an illusion of his own (that the French Revolution would make its way to England):
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night; / For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
In the original edition of
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
the lines of dialogue spoken by “Eeyore” are set in boldface type that leaps from the page. I recently asked Oe what effect he had intended to achieve with this. “My son's vision is very poor,” he replied, “and I wanted to make it easier for him to read his own dialogue.” I was surprised to see that he was in earnest, for no one knows better than Oe himself that Hikari does not read his father's books. Then I realized it was Eeyore he had in mind.
The principal focus of Oe's effort in
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
to redeem reality from itself is his handicapped son, Hikari. Born on September 19, 1963, with severe brain damage, Hikari was an enigma as a child, neither laughing nor crying, raptly focused on his own interior world. When he was thirteen, he began to compose short pieces for piano and flute or violin, which allowed him to express feelings for the first time in his life of joy and sadness (Hikari is the only idiot savant in medical history with perfect pitch who is able to compose in his head without first improvising on an instrument). But he remained, and remains today, at thirty-eight, much the same enigmatic presence he was as a child, responding to inquiries from the world outside himself, when he responds at all, with half-sentences that point tantalizingly toward a thought or feeling and then trail off.
Eeyore—or Mori or Jin as he is variously known—was born and raised in Oe's imagination. He, too, is severely retarded, but he transcends his limitations in ways that Hikari is unable to do: most dramatically, he is able to express himself in words, conveying wit and tenderness and compassion and his own brand of reductive wisdom about the world as he experiences it. It is this wisdom that enables him to help his father find his way in a manner that recalls Blake's “lost child.”
The premise of
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
is that the father-narrator is at work on a guidebook to life for the benefit of his severely handicapped son. In fact, it is the idiot son who turns out to be the teacher. The lessons he delivers are about discovering the promise of renewal in a cruel and apparently unredeemable world. At the end of chapter 3, for example, on the way home from Eeyore's narrow escape from drowning in the diving tank emblematically known as the “dark pool,” the father is overwhelmed by his chagrin at having failed to act decisively in the moment of his son's crisis, and Eeyore shows him a way out of his despair:
“Eeyore, what's wrong? Are you still feeling bad?”
“
No! I'm all better,
” he replied emphatically. “
I sank. From now on I'm going to swim. I'm ready to swim now!
”
This is more than consolation: Eeyore's eagerness to succeed where he has failed and his unassailable certainty of success are an inspiration to his father. In a similar moment of revelation in chapter 2, it is Eeyore who gives his father the perspective he needs to live with the fact that the lump that was surgically removed from his son's skull as an infant was a second brain:
I sat vacantly, unable to resolve my feelings, and Eeyore's cheerful surprise at learning the truth, his exultation, provided me with a hint. What reason did I have not to be as encouraged as he was by this new knowledge? My son had come into the world burdened with two brains, but he had survived surgery and the aftereffects—doing his best though it was extremely painful—and he was standing on his own two feet.
In the second half of the book, Eeyore's relationship to his father undergoes a change. He has already been transformed from a menace into a source of consolation and a mentor; now, as if he has stepped into Blake's vision of Albion, the Everyman in whom all mankind is redeemed, he seems to hold out the promise of redemption, very much as if he were his father's savior. In the beatific dream in which Eeyore appears as a radiant youth, the narrator is given to understand that his son has the power to reveal to him the hidden meaning of his life. And on Christmas Eve, as Eeyore leads the handicapped children in a final chorus from inside Gulliver's papier-mâché foot, his father believes that connecting to his son will give him the courage he will need to combat his own destiny:
Until now, it had been my goal to provide definitions of things and people for Eeyore's sake; but at this moment it was Eeyore, presenting me with a stanza from Blake's
Milton
as a lucid vision, who was creating a definition for his father:
Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star, Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift; And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter d there
This vision went on, however, to unfurl an urgent, baleful image of a black cloud redounding from my right foot to cover Europe, my contemporary world. And as if in hopes of finding courage to confront that ominous image, I lifted my own voice and truly began to sing.
In the concluding chapter, as in a grand fugue, Oe achieves an ecstatic resolution of the two incompatible domains that are the subject of his chronicle, the historical reality in which Hikari resides and the pure land of the imagination, a land of possibility and promise, represented by Eeyore. But first he must discover access for himself and his father-narrator to the faith that informs Blake's own visions. Earlier, the father has “superimposed” the figure of his son on “the radiantly joyful figure of Albion, that most good and beautiful form of humankind itself.” Now he steps inside the faith he needs by superimposing his “rain tree” on Blake's “tree of life”:
In this way, reading Blake, I happened on
The Tree of Life,
an illustration that resembled my own image of the rain tree…. I realize it may sound far-fetched—and it is an odd thing to write in light of what I myself had said to H on his deathbed, that I did not believe in Christianity and had no knowledge of it—but I did feel in the presence of something like grace (I overcome my hesitation to use the word by telling myself that it was only through the agency of T's music that grace became possible). Nevertheless, it is, or feels like, grace that encourages me forward in the direction of the “forgiveness of sin” that is at the heart of Jesus’ thought in his dialogue with Albion.
In the culminating scene of the book, the idiot son rejects the name “Eeyore” and declines to join his family at the dinner table until his brother addresses him as Hikari. Watching his sons approach the table, the narrator's thoughts turn to Blake's preface to
Milton:
With Blake as my guide, I beheld a phantasm of my sons as young men of a new age, a baleful, atomic age, which would require them the more urgently to set their foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings, and I could assuredly feel myself at their side, reborn as another young man. Presently, when old age approached and the time had come to endure the agony of death, I would hear the words proclaimed by the voice from The Tree of Life in encouragement to all Humankind as though they were spoken to me and to me alone:
Fear not Albion unless I die thou canst not live / But If I die I shall arise again & Thou With me.
Hikari means “light.” When Eeyore steps into the radiance that is his birthright, he liberates his father into an ecstatic vision of renewal and redemption that enfolds not only the fic-tive father and son but Oe and Hikari and his brother as well, and which indeed extends to all Mankind. Once and for all, triumphantly, the superior power of the imagination over grim reality has been proclaimed and demonstrated.
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night; / For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
John Nathan
Montecito, California
June 21, 2001