Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (6 page)

My mother and other members of the family were assembled in the main room in what appeared to be the shadows of a dim light that gave their skin an inky look—this was literally a
dark valley.
I recall that my father, who had died when I was a child, was also sitting there somberly in formal Japanese robes and family crest. I had just returned to
the dark valley
with my son, his head still bandaged where the lump had been cut away (even in the reverie, my wife never appeared). The entire family, my mother included, viewed my handicapped son as the one and only asset I had managed to wrest from my life of
Labour & sorrow
in the great city. Under the circumstances, no one was cheering, but their expressions were saying “Congratulations!” and “Well done!” Over time, I returned to this scene frequently. As my son grew up, the pair of us appeared to alter, but my mother and the rest of the family in the
dark valley
never seemed to change. Thinking about it now, I see clearly that the image I created in the form of a daydream was connected to thoughts of death. That would explain why my father, who had died at about my current age, was the only one in the room wearing an old-fashioned formal kimono.

A definition of death. To me, this was connected to multiple layers of experience from my early childhood in that valley in the forest on the island of Shikoku, and to the topography of the valley which, without reference to those experiences, I am unable to recapture in my mind. Naturally, in the more than thirty years that have passed since I left the valley I have accumulated other experiences having to do with death, but I realize, looking back, that these were secondary. It was in the valley that I encountered death as an equitable visitor to both my grandmother and my father, whom she had influenced so powerfully. And it was in this valley that I first saw a man who had hanged himself. In the latter case particularly, “in this valley” is a crucial signifier of the experience. When I recall the scene that day, centered around the corpse hanging by the neck, this becomes clear.

The body was discovered behind the stone Jizo altar, in an enclosed area that was slightly lower than but abutted the woods around the Shinto shrine. The little man who was considered beneath notice even by the children when they ran into him along the main road had hung himself. My kid brother went to touch the body—"It was swinging like crazy,” he reported. I observed from behind the crowd that had gathered from the village and beyond. We were standing in an area used for airing sake barrels, in the only brewery in the village, already out of business by that time, an area the children were not normally allowed to enter. Looking past the stone Jizo and the Shinto shrine to the deeper green that lay beyond, surveying the forest, which was not a place where people lived, with the hanging corpse at the center of my field of vision, I was filled with admiration. Ah! A man picks a spot like this to hang himself! With the corpse as focal point, the significance of the valley's topography became clear to me (when I used this way of seeing things as the basis of an explanation of how our village was structured, the teacher at the Imperial public school, who was not from our region and required a context I couldn't create, laughed at me as though in pity).

A definition of death. I want to begin with another incident from my experience in the valley. This one left me with an actual scar on my body, and the scar allows me to feel as though the incident continues inside me even now.

It was already late in the war and I was a fourth-grader at the public school. Around the back of our house and down the narrow slope that separated us from the neighbor's, you came to the Oda River. To my mind, the river was an alternative to the main road that ran past the front of the house: when you put together a raft and floated downstream, meanings normally hidden became clear. One morning early in the summer, when the air and the water were still chilly and my friends had stayed away from the river, I waded in alone armed with a spear gun for fishing. Although it wasn't a distinct motive, I recall now that I was clearly being influenced, my pale, scrawny child's body-and-soul together, by the story of an accident that had occurred upriver two or three days earlier in the vicinity of Oda Miyama.

The particulars had made their way downriver to our village as idle conversation here and there along the roadside: a child had drowned in a pool of the upper reaches of the Oda River. The boy had dived deep with his spear gun; he was after the fish that schooled in the caves beyond the crevice in the rocks. Where the crevice opened, you tilted your head to one side and slipped through the first narrow barrier. From there, though your shoulders wouldn't clear, it was possible, if you shifted slightly to the side, to straighten your head and survey the cave and even to extend your arms into it. When you had your fish speared, if you reversed direction and backed through the barrier by tilting your head to the side again, you could float back to the surface. The boy had completed the better part of this process handily when he neglected to tilt his head at the last barrier. With his jaw and the top of his head clamped between the rocks above and below him, they had had a time of it raising his drowned body to the surface, so it was told. Even a grown man might forget a small thing like turning his head aside when he was out of air and fighting to reach the surface—the account of the accident came with a lesson. Alongside the adults, I was listening.

The next morning, wiping my goggles with a handful of punkweed, my useless spear gun in my right hand—the rubber bands of the sling were rotten—I kicked boldly across the sun-flooded surface of the water. I made my way upriver, to where the swift current created a deep pool at the base of the two rocks known as “the Couple,” one large, the other smaller.

We children seemed to know the name of every rock on the Oda River, and of every pool and every rapids. It was in that way, by putting it all in words, that we grasped the topography of the valley.

On this morning, although I had stayed away until now because I was not certain I had the lung power to sustain me to the necessary depth, I intended to dive all alone to a place I knew only from hearsay—the adults called it Carp Cave. I planned to have a look inside the crevice in the rocks; if you got deep enough, I had heard, you could squeeze through the barrier by that same tilting of the head to one side. I dived. As if I had tried this before, as if, just two or three days ago, I had tried it in this same water upriver, my dive carried me down to the rock barrier and I worked my head through by turning it and then shifted my position sideways, holding my body horizontal against the upward current. I straightened my head: in front of my nose, in a pristine space brimming with the faint light of the dawn, was a school of carp beyond counting. Unmoving carp, a still life. Of course they appeared still only in relation to the mass of the school; each fish was swimming ceaselessly upstream against the current, which moved even here at the bottom of the pool. Their pale, green flesh was lit from within and embedded with tiny silver points, which also gleamed. And the small, round, watery black eyes of each carp in that school of fish were returning my gaze. I extended my right arm and fired, but the cave was deeper than I thought, and the spear propelled by rotting rubber didn't even carry to the school. I wasn't disappointed; I even felt it was appropriate that the fish had not been disturbed. I would enter this cave smack in the middle of the river in the valley, this egg no matter how you looked at it, just as I was, and go on living here, breathing through gills.

I have the feeling I did in fact stay underwater for a very long time. I even feel that I'm still there, it's as though my whole life until now were summed up in what I read in the ceaselessly shifting pattern created by the carp as they adjusted their positions. Nevertheless, at a certain moment I moved backward from the direction I had taken through the rocks and suddenly my jaws and head were clamped tight in the narrow passageway. What remains in memory after that is flailing around in terrible fear and choking on the water I had swallowed. Then I remember powerful arms thrusting me forward deep inside the cave, in the direction opposite my struggle to extricate myself, then hauling me out with my legs in a tangle. Blood spreading like smoke from the cut in the back of my head. I had been released from the rocks and the grip of hands, and now the current dragged me, still underwater, toward a shallow rapids. As I write, I stroke the back of my head with the fleshy pad of my left thumb and locate the scar from that gash on the rocks. If I had remained there in the cave I would have no wound in my head, I would have stayed on as I was in the valley, naked as the day I was born like a fiend hid in a cloud, without tasting labor and sorrow, not learning and not forgetting—in the grip of these often repeated and familiar sentiments, I trace the line of the scar with my thumb.…

The phrase I just quoted as it came to mind, “like a fiend hid in a cloud,” also happens to be Blake. The association is rooted in having recalled while reading Blake later the boldness and bravery of that experience, the feeling I had had of thumbing my nose at the world and everything in it with a grin on my face. The poem is a well-known work titled “Infant Sorrow” (I translate
piping loud
as “screaming in a high voice” rather than the more conventional “crying with voice raised”):

When I read these lines about the birth of a child, they evoked for me the ruinous exuberance of that morning. Churning the light of the river's surface with joy, I had set out for the pool at the Couple in a direction that was exactly opposite that of a newborn baby's cry (as though I had affixed a minus sign to it). Symbolically, I was trying to return to my mother's womb along a road in the opposite direction of birth (by advancing in the direction of the minus sign I had installed). But the groaning occasioned by the pain of birth, related neither to grief nor to joy, is neutral; there should be no need to convert it with a minus sign. Dead already and therefore on the other side, my father would welcome his son's return. From the dangerous world, I was returning to the place of safety where I had begun.
Helpless, naked, piping loud; / Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

That is what I took away from the experience, brought to clarity through the mediation of Blake; and implicit in it was yet another definition of death that was dear and familiar to me. That morning, it was my mother who had discovered me, awash in the shallows like a wounded fish, bleeding, my body thrust up at an angle to the river's surface, and who had taken me to the hospital. Apparently, suspicious of her son's odd agitation that morning, she had followed me from the moment I descended the slope to the river. Which seemed to mean that it must also have been my mother who had pulled me up from the depths of the pool at the Couple after first pushing me, as though in punishment, back into the cave. Through the water clouded with blood (like amniotic fluid!) I have the feeling I may have seen a woman in her late thirties with dark eyebrows arched in an inverted V like a cat's back, her narrowed, angry eyes glaring at me. But could a woman underwater have been capable of that tremendous strength? From the beginning, I had been aware in a child's way that there were elements of this experience that were difficult to talk about. As a result, I said nothing about the incident even to my mother, who, for her part, told me only that she had discovered me bobbing up and down in the shallows, and, to this day, has said nothing more. If it was my mother who came to my rescue at the bottom of the river, it was also my mother who gave me the wound in the back of the head, which remains as a scar even now. What I remember about that wound is that I became feverish and unable to move, and that my mother cradled my upper body in her lap and repeated, as she changed my bandages, “It's too cruel, too cruel…” Even for a child, it was not possible to interpret this exclamation as being limited to the wound in plain sight; as I turned the experience of that day over in my mind, it became increasingly difficult to ask my mother about it.

As time passed, I became convinced that the image of my mother's angry face in the water was merely an echo from a dream I had had later while feverish, a conclusion that was part of a process that released me from my mother. The dream was recurrent, but, for precisely that reason, I was able to conclude to myself every time I awoke that it was in fact a dream and not reality.

However, when I married and my first child was born impaired, the image in my dream was exposed to a new light of reality. This was due partly to my mother's attitude and her habit of consciously alluding to things in fragments, and partly to memories she called up in me with her insinuations.

When my son was born with a bright-red lump the size of a second head attached to the back of his skull, I found myself unable to reveal the true situation to either my wife or my mother, and, having installed the baby in critical care for infants at Nihon University Hospital, I wandered around in a daze. Meanwhile, not only the actual head but also the lump appeared to be well nourished and growing; the lump in particular was beginning to radiate vitality that was obvious at a glance even through the glass partition around the critical-care ward. Two and a half months later, I asked Doctor M, who had been caring for my son—and looking after me as I struggled unavail-ingly to recover from the shock of his birth—to perform surgery.

My mother had arrived in Tokyo the night before the operation intending to help and, having decided before lifting a hand that her presence would be if anything a burden to my wife, was preparing to return to the valley in the forest in Shikoku the following morning after accompanying us as far as the hospital in Itabashi. She was terrified, and my wife, who was no less afraid, was trying to comfort her. Still in her twenties and yet to recover from her debilitation at the time of the birth, I recall that my wife was like a baby chick being blown in the wind. I sat there, in our combination living and dining room, banging my rattan rocking chair against a glass cupboard and feeling out of place as I watched the women. They were sitting on the synthetic rug on the wooden floor of the adjoining room, facing each other across a small trunk, their heads nearly touching as they spoke. Strangely, for two people with such a difference in age and no blood ties, they looked very much alike.