Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (14 page)

[[The “acting executor of the will” confers with a doctor who knows music, determines the title of the Bach cantata and borrows the record. I have the feeling this cantata is part of the reason I didn’t study German in college, “he” says, listening to the record and groping, guided by the verses printed on the jacket, for the lines that have been echoing in his internal ear for twenty-five years. I wonder if I wasn’t afraid subconsciously that, if I learned to understand German, the singing that day that remains in my head might not begin to convey a meaning just the reverse of
a certain party’s
explanation!]]

Though he had just taken his first step into that intricate passage that connects childhood and youth, he understood everything
a certain party
said atop the truck that day. In his small head inside a
fake
helmet, aflame not only with the heat but also the matter that had been enfolded in it, he understood.
A certain party’s
words ignited his child’s passion at its very source, and his ten-year-old body-and-soul, truly alive atop that speeding truck, shook, radiant and electrified, as though it had been struck by lightning. As the army truck emerged from the valley in the dense forest and started up ninety-nine-curve-pass,
they were released from the deep green darkness of the evergreen trees that had walled off their view, and could look out across an expanse of young deciduous woods that were dry beneath the summer sun but retained a pale green luster. And now he gazed at the scenery with the new eyes of a bird, a sharp-eyed bird, a hawk or a peregrine falcon. Tree-leaves, as far as he could see, were trembling ceaselessly. What he had never noticed while he lived in the valley surrounded by a forest, that tree-leaves trembled continuously even when the wind was still, he now perceived distinctly as he finally left the forest depths and at ten was about to end his life.
The leaves on the trees are always moving! I’ll remember that until I die, until I die fighting in the army a certain party is leading into revolt!
As he was thinking this, a fighter plane appeared from the direction of the provincial city, coming in low over the pass, and the soldiers began shouting,

____Look how reckless he is, he doesn’t care what happens any more!

____We’d better get the planes we need fast, before those bastards crash them!

____We need at least ten, then we can all fly over the palace and skyrocket ourselves!

____Our objective is
junshi
*
—death as allegiance—it’s
junshi
for us all!

It’s junshi for us all
—the hot thorns in the words pierced his small heart, lodged there and continued to burn. And the heat originating inside him empowered his strong eyes and he was able to see, from one corner to the other of the slopes that dropped steeply toward the pass which the fighter plane had just circled and left behind,
the hundreds of millions of leaves tilting upward in the strong wind that had risen and to see, vastly and distinctly, the undersides of those hundreds of millions of tilted leaves shining with a silvery gray light.
This must be a signal! A certain party will lead our army in an uprising and we will all die. And these soldiers are singing that they want to die as quickly as possible, and are waiting for his Majesty to wipe their tears away with his own hand.
His heart pumped vigorously and the pressure in his blood vessels surged until his eardrums sang and all he could hear on the other side of that curtain of piercing sound was the silence of all things. Like a ferret he lifted his head and rotated it, gazing at the soldiers with love and pity through eyes about to dissolve in tears. In contrast to all the other soldiers who had come to the valley during the war, including the cadets who had tapped pine tree roots for oil, who had treated “small citizens” with excessive kindness, the soldiers on the truck had been cold and rough with him from the beginning, had even behaved as if he were unclean. Also they had been drinking steadily in the storehouse since the previous night, and singing drunkenly, and were in general a far cry from the image of the soldier he had cherished until now. But such impurities as these he forgave and accepted with utmost tenderness, and saw in them the very model of “true” soldiers. For these were soldiers not merely unafraid of death but awaiting death eagerly, and he was able now to confirm unwaveringly a choice that had been made with them already somewhere along the way, that he was about to die as a member of their band, and thus effortlessly to transcend the source of his shame for several years, both the hesitation he could confess to no one in his regular answer to the daily classroom question Will you die happily for the Emperor?
Yes, I’ll die happily,
and his fear late at night when he pictured actual death in war. Before long he was even imitating the officers and soldiers and singing along in his shrill voice.

Komm, O Tod, du Schlafes Bruder,
Komm und führe mich nur fort;

[[Lying there in bed singing away like that I don’t know if this child is serious or what, but there’s no way
Heiland
can mean “emperor”! And as for having their tears wiped away, those soldiers had worked themselves up to where they were ready to bomb the personage that was supposed to do the wiping, yessir! When that officer came to the main house he called for me by the last name of my real father, which made me suspicious enough to go over to the storehouse, and when I got there
a certain party
couldn’t even look me in the face, because he was about to make an outrageous demand on top of having brought me there with his little trick. But the soldiers spun his barber’s chair around unsparingly, yessir! so he lowered his eyes right quick, and then drunkenly, his face beneath his stubble of beard beet-red from the
sak
é
they’d poured into him, he had the nerve to say to me,

____
We’ll accomplish what your father tried and failed to do. We’re going to steal ten fighter planes from the army airfield, and disguise them to look like American planes and bomb the Imperial palace. There’s no other way left to make the Japanese people rise up again and protect the true essence of our nation!
After all the bigshot talk about some crazy dream I wondered what was coming next, and the first thing I knew I was being asked to hand over my stocks for battle funds. Well, he was so mean and low I felt I couldn’t listen to
a certain party
a minute more, so I set my seal to the forms just as he asked me to, yessir! I didn’t know it at the time, because we still
couldn’t get telegrams or anything, but the day the Soviet Union had entered the war my foster father had shot himself in Harbin. It was my foster father who had given me the stocks! He’d chosen them because he figured they were stocks the government would help the stock exchange honor even if we lost the war. He must have had control over the bank in our region, he arranged for the bank to take care of everything. Well,
a certain party
had me put my seal on the papers that released those stocks, and he had me write a letter of agreement on top of that, and then he took the papers and those soldiers took him and carted him off in a ridiculous wooden box with sawed-off logs for wheels. He was hurting bad, and I suppose he must have taken the narcotic drugs he’d bought in China and maybe stuffed them in his nose, because he was reeling like a top, yessir! It was a cruel business, but I didn’t go out of my way to interfere. But in my heart I kept a-thinking to myself, Now you’ll see! Any minute now you’ll see! Ah, what a cruel business, how cruelly the bigshot is going to be used! The child, who of course had no inkling of any of this, he was clutching old diapers for to wipe away blood from
a certain party’s
bladder, his bayonet clanking at his side, so grim and determined he was pale, lord knows what he was thinking! Well, if you’re wondering whether the soldiers who took
a certain party
with them really drove that truck onto an army airfield and stole fighter planes and flew to Tokyo, they did no such thing! There was a shootout at the bank entrance, and
a certain party
and all the soldiers were killed, yessir! None of the officers was killed but they never turned up again, and I don’t know what happened to the stocks, maybe they couldn’t be sold in the confusion after the surrender and maybe they were sold and someone
made off with the money, no stocks or money turned up again so I reckon those officers took the money and ran. And I bet that’s what they planned to do all along, yessir! I think
a certain party
had sensed it, too, and what he planned to do was go through the motions of that
fake
uprising and then climb back into his wooden box and come home nursing his bladder and announce
The officers betrayed me, the boy knows the whole story!
and then hide away at the back of that storehouse again! But someone thought
a certain party
and his bunch had gone into the bank to rob it, or maybe they were planning to rob it themselves and thought someone was there ahead of them, anyhow, instead of notifying the police in that chaos after the surrender they drove up in their own army truck and shot down
a certain party
and his bunch as they came out of the bank. In his right hand
a certain party
held his army sword, and he was waving his left hand frantically as if he was shouting Stop! Stop! but they say he was shot down before he could actually shout a word, yessir!]]

It was truly a pitched battle in the streets, and overhead, fighter planes, possibly Japanese and possibly American, probably both, swooped so low their roar shook the streets. The only one who experienced the entire battle and understood its significance fully was himself. And now, examining once again, in light of the true significance of that battle, the fact that the uprising actually occurred on August sixteenth, he saw for the first time the importance of that date and no other and understood more clearly than before the structure of the festival culmination of his
Happy Days.
August fifteenth, 1945, the Emperor swiftly descended to earth to announce the surrender in the voice of a mortal man. August sixteenth, his Majesty was circling upward in a swift
ascent again. Though it was inevitable that he die in a bombing once, now truly he would revive as the national essence itself, and more certainly than before, more divinely, as a ubiquitous chrysanthemum, would cover Japan and all her people. As a golden chrysanthemum illuminated from behind by a vast purple light and glittering like an aurora, his Majesty would manifest himself. Who is to say that the many gods who have figured in the history of our land did not on that day require of the Emperor who had descended to speak in a mortal voice, in order that the dignity of our national essence be elevated once again, the ritual purification of death by bombing at the hands of martyrs in a plane?

In fact, the palace was not bombed. Instead,
a certain party,
leading a small, select unit, not on horseback to be sure but in a wooden box mounted on sawed logs like pulleys, confronted the enemy head on, military sword held high, and was shot down. And what if the battle did take place in front of a bank from which some funds had been peacefully withdrawn and not at an airfield where fighter planes to be disguised were being seized, how much can that have depreciated it? Was there a street battle fought anywhere else in all Japan on August sixteenth, 1945, even if it was at the entrance to a bank, that could have resulted in
a certain party’s
death? Although they would have been justified in resorting to any means whatsoever to raise the money they needed to achieve their objective,
a certain party
and his army went in to get it lawfully. Whether they succeeded is unknown, for as they emerged from the bank with the wooden wagon bearing
a certain party
in the lead, another army that had driven up in a different army truck opened fire, even the fighter plane flying low overhead joined the attack, and
a certain party’s
army was annihilated. Why did the other army attack? Wasn’t it really a unit controlled by spies of the Allies, afraid their maneuvering to end the war might backfire in the final stage?
A certain party
was planning to disguise Japanese fighters as American planes, why shouldn’t someone else have tried the opposite experiment? Very likely
a certain party
was strafed, and killed, by a plane disguised to look like a Japanese fighter but flown by an American. It was probably the very plane that had appeared as they were crossing ninety-nine-curve-pass, which had continued following them and finally had attacked.

And
a certain party,
leaping beyond his limitations as an individual at the instant of his death, rendered manifest a gold chrysanthemum flower 675,000 kilometers square, surmounted and surrounded by, yes, a purple aurora, high enough in the sky to cover entirely the islands of Japan. Because the other, attacking army opened fire on their truck first, the soldiers nearby the boy were immediately massacred and he alone survived.
A certain party
had requested this of the gods on high, for it was crucial that someone, someone chosen, witness the gold chrysanthemum obliterate the heavens with its luster at the instant of his death. And, in truth, the boy did behold the appearance high in the sky, not blocking the light as would a cloud but even managing to increase the glittering radiance of the sun in the blue, midsummer sky, of a shining gold chrysanthemum against a vast background of purple light. And when the light from that flower irradiated his
Happy Days
they were instantly transformed into an unbreaking, eternal construction built of light. From that instant on, for the twenty-five years that were to be the remainder of his life, he would constantly inhabit this
strong edifice of light that was his
Happy Days.
Half-standing in the cart, his sword held high in his right hand, his left hand thrust out in front of him and spread so wide that each white, fat finger was distinctly visible,
a certain party
faced his chosen son and spoke as follows, heedless of the enemy firing into him,
Have you seen what must be seen? For the next quarter-century that you will live remember always what you have seen, All has been accomplished, you have seen what must be seen, Survive and remember, that is your role, Do nothing else! All has been accomplished!
When
a certain party
finished speaking a fighter plane dived, machine guns ringing, and the head protruding from the wooden cart became a round, bright red pomegranate full of cracks, the mouth, still full of reddish darkness at the back, wrenched open by an unuttered scream.