Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (23 page)

My memory resumes a year later, early in the spring before the end of the war, on the day that began with my mother coming downstairs early in the morning to announce that my father had let out a scream of rage in the middle of the night and died. I have no memory of the intervening year: as I recall what happened, the day of my father's humiliation in front of the governor's party is followed directly by the night of his angry scream and death. I have only a faint memory of what followed. I do recall my mother's reply to the head of the neighborhood association when he paid a visit to discuss arrangements for the cremation and observed as he expressed his regrets that my father's last year had been “a haze of drink.” My mother had been responding in a feeble, teary voice; now she pulled herself up to her full height and said in a curious basso, “My husband drank his fill at night; but early every morning before any of you was awake he read his books, and heaven knows he worked the long day—is that what you'd call ‘a haze of drink’?”

My other memory of that long day is that my head was filled with terrifying thoughts. Reviewing them now, in the light reflected by the episode in Blake's garden, I can organize them as follows. The police chief had ordered my father to the press as though he were scolding a dog, and my father had labored there. The machine had seemed about to come apart under the lopsided force he had applied to it, but it was actually the violence inside my father that was on the verge of exploding. To relieve the pressure, the violence had to be channeled outside his body. I wondered whether my mother might not have read in my father's movements and expressions that day an intention to stand up to his abusers no matter who they were, the police chief, our village headman, the governor, even His Imperial Majesty—I'll get to my basis for that notion in a minute—a determination to match their abuse with abuse of his own even if it meant wielding his hatchet. And whether that might explain how frightened she had seemed to be when he had moved toward us from the machine with his hatchet at his waist.

But my father had submitted to the police chief's scolding and had grappled with the bark press single-handedly. The machine had survived, but one year later the violence inside my father that had lost its outlet had broken the mechanism of his body and he had died with a bellow of anger. But what if he had raised his hatchet, I asked myself that day, and shouted back at the police chief? To the child that was me at the time, it seemed clear that he must have been killed on the spot by the police chief or tortured to death in jail. Because once he had begun to behave menacingly, opponents would have stepped between him and the adults, one after the other, in ascending order that reached all the way up to His Majesty the Emperor! My logic didn't present itself to me clearly in words, but when I assembled the thoughts that rose in me like bubbles that day, this is where they pointed.

The evening of the surrender, when my mother learned of the emperor's radio broadcast long after it was over—since my father's death, insisting there was no such thing as good news, she had stopped reading the newspaper or listening to the radio—she approached me with her cheeks flushed from agitation and whispered hotly in my ear, “It's just like your father said: The top are on the bottom now, and the bottom are on the top. It's just that way!”

A few days later, I had secluded myself in the river in the early afternoon; not only was I alone in the water, there wasn't a child in sight on the riverbank or on the bridge in the distance (the peculiarity of the circumstances suggests this may be the memory of a dream). And I was struck by a bizarre thought. 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.

About ten days later, when my mother permitted me to carry the radio into the big room on the occasion of a broadcast for “junior citizens,” I realized 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. My contemporary, the scholar K, must have been listening to the same broadcast because he later included it in his history of postwar education. I have copied out the portion that gave me the impression I have just described:

These experiences carved into my life a fundamental definition of violence that reading Blake has made me acutely aware of. There is something inside the body that resembles a condenser. When the electrical charge exceeds its capacity, the mechanism begins to warp and, as the strain increases, breaks apart from the inside out. The only way to control the distortion is to find some means of discharging the violence to the outside from time to time. I wondered whether the behavior I still referred to as “leap,” using my name for it as a child, wasn't a sort of drill or exercise that anticipated the future while my own charge was still relatively low? So far, I had done nothing even close to removing the hatchet at my hip and shouting back at the governor and his party as my father might have done that day. Did that mean that I was heading for the moment when I, too, would relinquish my body's mechanism to destruction from the inside following a scream of indignation? I was, after all, only one year older than my father's age when he died. Not long ago, as Eeyore lay on the couch recovering from a seizure, his face darkened with exhaustion and fever, I discovered something in his face that reminded me of my father. I was drawn to examine my own face in the mirror; I had always felt that I alone among my brothers didn't look like my father, but with my image of Eeyore's face as a guide I was able to see a resemblance to a photograph taken shortly after the governor's tour, the last photo of my father's life.

But that summer when the war ended, alone and away from the eyes of the other children, in the river in what may have been a dream, I had resolved in my imagination an approach to dealing with violence that was neither being destroyed by it internally nor releasing it savagely to the outside world. If I had to express in words the passions that live in my memory of that moment, I could hardly do better than the Blake verse I have already quoted:

And then:

Eeyore continued to commute between home and the occupational therapy center and presently he was put to work assembling the paper boxes used by the Nakamura-ya restaurant in Shinjuku for take-out picnic lunches. When spoken to by one of the teachers or a handicapped adult he replied politely, forming his words with deliberate care. At recess, he listened carefully and applauded when one of the little girls played the piano or sang a song in the rumpus room. Sometimes he even corrected her fingering or showed her a chord to play with the melody until before long she and the others were relying on him. Observing this side of Eeyore's behavior, the teacher in charge summoned my wife for a conference. Eeyore was considerate of his comrades and worked hard at his job, but at the end of the day, when it was time to clean up, he would seize a broom or a mop as if he were eager to get started and then stand there doing nothing. Was he lazy, or was this kind of work simply too much for him?

Shocked, my wife immediately began training Eeyore to clean at home. My son was by this time a large man, tall and hulkingly built, yet I observed him puzzling over fallen leaves on the stepping stones in the garden, or scattering leaves he had swept carefully into a corner. Now that it had been noticed by someone on the outside, it was impossible not to see that something was lacking in the competency training we had given Eeyore at home.

One day when my wife was groaning with a cold and a toothache, I went in her place to wait for Eeyore at the bus stop in front of the therapy center. I got there early, and began walking up and down the street to keep warm in the chill wind that was blowing as the sun went down. There was another reason I preferred not to linger at the sign in front of the bus stop. A woman fifteen or so years younger than I was already standing there; her corpulent body was wrapped in a bulky overcoat buttoned up to her chin, her face was sallow, and she gave off an air of enclosed, unapproachable melancholy that told me right away she must be a mother with a child at the facility.

Recently, there had been two deaths at Eeyore's special school. One of the children had gone with his father to watch the parade of portable shrines at a neighborhood festival, eaten some grilled beef, and gone to sleep with his father lying at his side. The next morning he had appeared to sleep late, and when his father had gone in to wake him just before it was time to leave for school, he was already cold. Reading the principal's announcement, I was moved by the quiet time the boy had spent with his father on his last evening, and by what felt to me like the merest whisper that was his death, like a faint light going out at a great distance. The other child, who wore his hair in a Mohawk that looked as though he had been his own barber, I remember with a smile; having reached a point where he was able to bathe himself, he had suffered an epileptic seizure when he was alone in the tub and had drowned.

When news of one or the other of these deaths reached the school my wife happened to be there, getting ready for the annual bazaar. The discussion turned to organizing a consolation visit to the family and a young mother had said, “Let's make that on a volunteer basis—what happened was a blessing!”

When my wife reported the young mother's words to me she communicated not so much disapproval as a feeling of misery she shared with the younger woman. I suggested to her, as she appeared to be turning the words over in her mind, that the young mother had spoken in that instant out of the despair that repeatedly renews itself and is always unexpected; if she hadn't cared about the community of handicapped children why would she have volunteered to work at the bazaar? What she had said was better forgotten if possible—no doubt the speaker would remember the line longer than anyone who had heard it.

For no good reason, I had the feeling that the woman leaning despondently against the bus stop sign in her bulky overcoat was that same young mother. As I walked past the entrance to the center for the second or third time, I ran into three even younger women peering in at the main building through the gate. They appeared to be a team and were dressed alike, in suede coats and reddish-brown boots, a fashion choice designed to accent the reddish tint they all wore in their hair—stylish, vivacious girls. As I passed them they were commenting emphatically, as though speaking among themselves but clearly with the intent of influencing passersby, “Do you believe how fancy it is!” “Like a palace or something!”

As I returned along the same course, past the center to the crosswalk at the intersection and across the street, I thought idly about the curious remarks I had just heard. Then I realized there was nothing curious about them, or the least bit unclear. The young women's observations about the building being too fancy had seemed strange to me because I had assumed they were here as parents intending to enroll their own handicapped children. On the contrary, they were almost certainly critical of municipal policy on welfare facilities and were reconnoitering the center before organizing a protest. If that were the case, the remarks they were grandstanding to anyone within earshot made perfect sense: my wife in particular had been thrilled the first time she had seen the welfare center; it was a beautiful building.

At just this moment, Eeyore happened to appear at the front gate and, as I watched from across the street, was surrounded by the three young women and began responding to them with what appeared from his gestures to be his customary politeness. I continued on my circle past the school to the corner, across the street and back again without even quickening my step, observing the scene from a distance. Eeyore was talking, shaking his head slowly as he spoke, and then he stopped: hunching his shoulders and thrusting out his chest he appeared to stiffen into something as implacable as a wall and went silent, his head hanging. As if they hadn't noticed, the three women went on talking at him, preventing him from moving away. By now, other children had emerged from the center, but the women continued to direct their inquiry at Eeyore alone.