Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (20 page)

Two days before Christmas Eve, when our musical was to be performed, Eeyore and my wife went to our cabin in the mountains. At the house for his final piano lesson of the year, Mrs. T had taken the time to remind Eeyore, who was restless with excitement about leaving, that the children performing Gulliver were not only amateur musicians but also handicapped, and that he must not be angry even if the beat were uneven and the singing off-key. On another occasion, conducting his own composition for chorus at his special class in middle school, Eeyore, who enjoyed watching not only concerts but orchestra rehearsals on television, had provoked complaints from school mothers by whipping the stand with his baton and shouting orders to repeat. Informed by Mrs. T that he would attend rehearsal as the composer but would not be conducting this time, Eeyore had indicated his agreement by removing the baton he had packed in his backpack. His compliance was almost certainly due to his high spirits at the thought of having his mother all to himself for the two days of their journey together.

Alone in the Tokyo house with Eeyore's younger brother and sister, I realized how long it had been since Eeyore and his mother had spent the night away. After an early dinner, my daughter remained at the dining table to do her homework and my son disappeared into his room and gave himself away with the stealthy beeping of a computer game. The house felt calm and orderly. Eeyore's sprawling absence here and there kept entering consciousness as an empty, chilly feeling that required us to acknowledge the degree to which his large body with arms and legs spasmodically akimbo like a baby's overshadowed our daily lives.

That evening, putting aside a letter “from a reader” that had continued to trouble me, I was making my way through Erdman's principally social and political critique of Blake. Somehow, a cloud of gloom seemed to be hanging over those of us in the family who had stayed at home. Recently, I had received a number of anonymous letters of the sort that people addressed to particular individuals because the media ignored their own assertions about this and that. While the letters were informed by feelings of victimization, they were also forceful and assertive in their way; today's, postmarked from Mikawa in the Yamaguchi prefecture, had been provoked by a collection of my speeches at student antinuclear protest meetings and handicapped children's parent associations. Those who were responsible for the nation and for society, the letter began, whether in America or Europe or Japan, must survive nuclear war by hiding in giant shelters so they would be able to rebuild the world after the Soviets had been destroyed. In normal times, entertainment may be important, but in times of crisis authors are useless parasites of society, and handicapped children the more so. In honesty, could an author and a handicapped child rebuild the world after a nuclear war? Wasn't it more likely that they couldn't build even a single house? Those who feel powerless tend to fall into defeatism. “And where do folks like that get off criticizing the leaders in the freedom camp who dedicate themselves each day to the inevitable nuclear confrontation with Soviet totalitarian fascism! I'm not suggesting that you and your retarded son commit suicide, but have you ever considered keeping your mouth shut instead of spewing your poison into our world?”

It wasn't as if I felt unable to refute the author. It was rather that his logic quickly detached from my consciousness, leaving behind only an image, assuming we had survived the nuclear war together, of building a hut for myself and Eeyore in which to escape the onslaught of the black rain. That night, we three house-sitters went off to our rooms to bed without so much as a decent good-night to one another. The following day, Saturday, happened to be the last day of school, and although we had not planned to attend the performance I arranged to meet the children at the station after their closing-day ceremony and we decided on the spot to join Eeyore and my wife.

Our cabin in Gumma looked naked and exposed; the silver birch had dropped their leaves, and the first typhoon of the summer had swept down from the plateau and uprooted the pines that grew in the shallow soil that covered the lava rock. We arrived at sunset and set out down the path toward the facility on the opposite slope, the leaves covering the ground beneath our feet glowing redly in the failing light. The view from the path that wound up through the mist from the last rays of light pooled at the stream in the bottom of the valley was so unnaturally clear that we could make out the figures of my wife and Eeyore returning toward us side by side, their eyes on the ground in front of them, from five hundred meters away.

“Let's call out to them,” Eeyore's sister suggested, but her brother stopped her: “He might think we're here because something bad has happened.” A sense of danger of this kind lurked in the children's minds at all times. This was the variety of daily life the family was taxed with, I thought to myself; but the children had already shifted to an untroubled mood and ran down the hill together, Eeyore's sister moving as always with the ease and grace of a prancing colt. Reunited, the four of them began climbing back to where I waited, looking up in my direction as they came; and in my lingering melancholy I imagined them as they would be when I was dead, just as they were now, gathered around Eeyore though he was the largest, protecting him, managing. Up the hill they marched in high spirits, singing, and in a minute I could hear the words:

When we had returned to the cabin, my wife told me about the dress rehearsal Eeyore had attended early that morning. In the very first scene, as he listened to the little people singing their chorus, his elbows had lifted and tightened against his sides and he had leaned forward from the waist with his head in his hands. “
Oh boy, this is surprising. This is a problem. What shall we do, Mama?
” This time, Eeyore wasn't venting his anger as a haughty composer; he was deeply perturbed. To an observer it might even have appeared that he was mortified about a mistake of his own. Nonetheless, the music teacher, a small man who seemed to have his wits about him, came down from the stage with the score in hand and explained to Eeyore that he had further simplified the arrangements during the rehearsals to match the children's ability to sing in chorus, and had even converted a number of solos into group recitations. My wife listened with growing apprehension, but Eeyore had surprised her by agreeing readily: “
I understand. There are times when the performer will leave out repeats, let's see, Glenn Gould is one; and in mono-aural Lupatti did the same thing!
”

The rehearsal had resumed, and this time Eeyore sang along as he watched—he had a beautiful singing voice, clear as a young boy's before it changed and without vibrato—but each time the action onstage was late or a new singer began off-pitch he shook his head discreetly. The music teacher also appeared to notice, and as the piano would have to be removed to the side of the stage on the day of the performance, the problems he and Eeyore had identified together seemed to concern him. At that point, at my wife's suggestion, Eeyore had accepted the job of prompter beginning at the rehearsal that afternoon, and had made a big difference. The place he had chosen to install himself was a surprise in store for us at tomorrow's performance. Eeyore's younger brother, whose model of the stage had been used in building the actual set, was certain he knew the answer to the secret.

Using wood from the pine trees that had been felled by the typhoon early that summer and was still green, I managed with difficulty to light a fire, and the family sat around it in a semicircle and ate the vegetable rice and chicken in ceramic pots that we had bought at the Yokohama station. I felt content, but it was a different sort of contentment than when Eeyore and I had traveled to Izu in the typhoon. As we continued our conversation, Eeyore jumped up with the agility he possessed when engaging in an action that pleased him and opened wide the window on the valley side of the cabin. The deep, silent chill that precedes snow on the plateau flowed into the room. Shivering, I was about to instruct Eeyore to close the window when he silenced me by exclaiming, with a theatrical gesture, “
Shhh! Listen everyone!
”

From the facility on the slope across the valley, the sound of singing voices reached us faintly through the stillness of the resort community. It was the first chorus Eeyore had composed, to words I had written right after we had decided to collaborate on a musical play. I reproduce here the score in its original form:

Inasmuch as the music teacher is preparing to publish an account of the entire project that goes back to asking me and Eeyore to become involved, I shall be brief about the actual performance of “Gulliver's Foot and the Country of the Little People” that Christmas Eve. I shall limit myself to certain impressions of the individuals onstage that moved me, and to Eeyore's behavior that day.

Mr. M's mise-en-scène was based on his interpretation of the country of the little people as literally a gathering of handicapped children. Although they were costumed as peasants from medieval Europe, the children made no attempt to conceal their handicaps, appearing onstage in their wheelchairs, or on crutches, or not so much sitting as having slumped to the floor; and as their performances appeared to be merely an extension of their everyday behavior, it was rather like watching an ordinary holiday celebration at the facility. When handicapped children are overcoming their handicaps to behave normally, the more so if a group of them is involved, they infuse the space around them with a deep humanity and with a vitality that feels valiant. Here, too, the choruses had force and presence precisely because each of the singers was overcoming his own difficulty to achieve a natural performance as he moved about or sat motionless on the stage.

Our play was put to use to demonstrate how the children were dealing with their individual handicaps. One example was the casting of the king, performed by an infinitely lovable Down's syndrome child with a round, pudgy face. He was resplendent in the reddish berries of the wild briar that was a familiar sight in the thickets in this area, not only in his crown but garlanding his shoulders and his chest. For this child, ascending a ladder appeared to be a major undertaking that only recently had become possible at all with great effort. In the scene where the king climbs the ladder leaning against Gulliver's foot, everyone onstage cheered him on, and when his round, cautious legs and feet finally disappeared behind the curtain, the play was interrupted by applause. It therefore seemed entirely natural in the finale that the king, who had been driven off by his little subjects, should appear among the crowd together with his ministers waving farewell to the envoy from the neighboring country.

When it was time for curtain calls, Mr. M rose from where he had been playing the piano to one side of the stage, beneath the large fir that had been cut nearby for a Christmas tree, and said, addressing Gulliver's papier-mâché foot, “I'd like to introduce the composer—would you please join us.”

The audience filling the chairs that had been set up in the front half of the gymnasium seemed to go silent with expectation: handicapped children from the lower grades, parents who had come to pick them up for the New Year's holiday, and adults and children from the settler families clearing land for farming nearby. They were waiting for Eeyore to appear from inside the paper foot where he had successfully accomplished his task as prompter. Sitting next to me in a row, my wife and Eeyore's younger brother and sister were also waiting with a bright and eager excitement in their faces that I had not observed for a long time. As the back of the foot was open, Eeyore might easily circle around to the front of the stage whenever he chose. Mr. M called out a second time: “Please hurry out now—we're all waiting.” But from inside the foot Eeyore's loud voice replied with conviction:

“
I think I'll stay in here, thank you very much!
”

The laughter that erupted was good-natured: the rest of the family and I laughed along. Shaking his head as though nonplussed despite his own laughter, Eeyore nonetheless waited for Mr. M to return to the piano and for the laughter to subside before speaking out in a booming voice one final time. He began by addressing the handicapped children onstage who were kindred to him, then spoke to the entire room, lifting his voice another level: “
For a curtain call let's sing the sad chorus at the beginning. Then well sing the last chorus in our biggest voices. After that we hope the audience will join us in ‘Silent Night.’
”

The chorus rang out, and at just the moment when the key changed, the spotlight on Gulliver's foot was turned off and handheld lights illuminated waveringly the giant foot of paper stretched over a wooden structure and bamboo ribs. Inside, his hulking body seeming to occupy the entire space, Eeyore like the other performers was waving his right arm slowly back and forth above his head as he sang along. As the shadow puppet that was Eeyore appeared, the applause swelled, filling the space in front of the stage that was meant to be the sea the envoy sailed across on his journey home.