Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (28 page)

The wooden gate opens with a clatter that no one else produces. Large shoes shuffle down the path to the house and the front door slams open. Gym shoes are shaken off, first one foot and then the other, and thud to the concrete floor just inside, and finally Eeyore appears in the doorway to the family room in his student uniform as though he were stepping onto a stage, filling the space, a beaming smile on his face and his briefcase in his hand. This was a moment late in the afternoon, almost a ritual, that I awaited eagerly every Monday through Saturday.

One day early this year, as I lay on the couch reading Raine's new essay collection,
Blaike and the New Age,
a dictionary and pencils on top of a wooden box at my side—my son had spent a full year in his special class at middle school painting the box orange—Eeyore, who had appeared in the doorway as always, looked down at me with troubled and somehow mournful eyes and, with the merest nod at my words of welcome, hurried past me into the kitchen and reported the following to my wife:

“
It's my turn to go to the dormitory! Are we ready? I'm moving in next Wednesday!
” He paused, then continued: “
Will Daddy be all right while I'm away? Will he make it over this next hurdle?
”

At this my wife laughed aloud, but I was unexpectedly moved, and while I smiled involuntarily I believe I felt like sobbing.

“You sound like an announcer at a sumo match. But the pressure will be on you, not Daddy. You've been having seizures in the morning because you stay up so late—at the dormitory you'll have to take your medicine every morning as soon as you wake up!”

Each of the students at Eeyore's special school was required to spend one term in the dormitory on the campus. We had known for some time that Eeyore's turn was coming up, and he had been apprehensive about it. During the New Year's vacation, when we had assembled as a family for late breakfasts, his normal dispatch at table had gradually slowed until he was barely moving. He did manage to finish his meal, but the tension in his face as he lay on the couch after breakfast made him look like a different person—he appeared to have transformed all at once into a man past middle age with somehow ancient features. I found myself recalling the solemnity, I want to say the aboriginal solemnity, that appeared in Professor W's face when he was on his deathbed. Presently, a flush appeared in Eeyore's upper face, his eyes seemed to gleam with an amber light, and his expression revealed a suffering that he did not understand and thus could not complain about in words. When I placed my hand on his large, prominent forehead it felt hot with a leaden heat. He had forgotten to take his epilepsy medicine and was having a seizure. My wife had continued to insist that Eeyore was not epileptic, and although I knew that this kind of seizure was considered a form of epilepsy, I refrained from asserting what I had read.

The day he was to move in to the dormitory, as Eeyore studied the weekly FM program guide that was inserted in the newspaper, I tried to determine what was behind the words he had spoken to his mother. “Eeyore, you asked whether I would make it over this next hurdle. When was the last hurdle?”

I had half expected him to say “
I forget,
” his standard reply at times like this. But he lifted his face from the page and, narrowing his eyes in what appeared to be a glare as he rolled them upward at an angle, responded with a lucid answer: “
When Mr. H died of leukemia! Saku had cancer at the same time! It was a terrible thing. But you made it over
—
good work! It was a whole week around the twenty-fifth of January three years ago!
”

It turned out that Saku—Eeyore's younger brother—hadn't had cancer after all. He had urinated blood in sufficient quantity to notice it himself though he was only a child, and when tests at our local clinic came back positive for blood in the urine for several days in a row, we had begun commuting to Tokyo University Hospital. He was given a battery of tests which lasted for days but which failed somehow to prove conclusively that Saku was, in the words of the doctor in charge, “not guilty.” Even when Eeyore's younger brother had to endure an agonizing bladder examination, he was unfazed. I did less well; gradually our visits to the hospital together had worn me down.

We rode the train to the Ochanomizu station and then waited at the bus stop on top of the bridge for the bus to the campus. Twenty years ago, I had waited countless times in the same spot for the same bus with my classmate H, who now lay dying of leukemia in the hospital directly across the canal from the bus stop. For a time he had shown signs of recovering, but at the end of last year he had suffered a brain hemorrhage and had been in a coma ever since. When Eeyore's younger brother had finished his tests for the day, I sometimes left him in the outpatient waiting room at this hospital and paid my friend “a visit,” a conversation standing in the hall with his wife, wasted from the effort of nursing him and in a kind of frenzy, after which I returned gloomily to the waiting room downstairs.

H died, and I accepted the role of host at his funeral. At the wake, as I sat on the porch around the house greeting guests in a cold wind, I was troubled by thoughts of my son still undergoing tests, and further troubled by a remark an older writer who was one of the guests was said to have made: “It's a terrible shame; this time it's his younger boy that's sick and not the older brother.” I must be honest, the remark seemed to have caught nimbly and skewered and pushed into my face a cruel thought that had glimmered for just an instant at the back of my consciousness: “Better Eeyore than his younger brother!”

At dinner that night, I asked Eeyore's brother a question. “When they tested your kidneys because they thought that might be where the trouble was, we discussed me or your mother or Eeyore giving you one of our kidneys if yours had to be removed. Which one of us would you have chosen?”

“Good question.” Eeyore's younger brother always paused to consider before speaking and now he was being even more deliberate than usual. “Eeyore's taking Hidantol …”

I seethed. How could he say such a thing! How could he be so egotistical! Maybe it was hard not to think about how healthy the donor's kidneys were, but to make that the basis of a judgment against his own brother! Abstracting somehow the words that rose in my gorge, I asked the following question: “So you're assuming that Eeyore's kidneys are damaged?” Once again Eeyore's brother paused to deliberate, visibly flushing. He must have been ashamed of the image of himself reflected in his father's misunderstanding. “Eeyore's taking Hidantol,” he repeated, wanting accuracy. “I assume that an epilepsy suppressant must be full of harmful ingredients. Wouldn't he need both his kidneys to process all that toxin?”

I apologized, and I acknowledged that his concern for his brother was appropriate. After dinner, Eeyore tried to respond to my suggestion that he choose the records he didn't have on tape so that he could record them and take them with him to the dormitory, where he would be allowed to use a tape recorder. But he seemed stymied by this task: sitting on the floor with his legs beneath him, he had been staring at the pile of records in front of him for more than an hour but hadn't selected a single album. “You can't dawdle this way when you're in the dorm or you'll be a nuisance to the others,” my wife cautioned. Eventually, his younger sister said, “To Eeyore the whole thing is music; maybe he can't choose a part of the whole.” “
That's right! Exactly! Thank you kindly!
” Eeyore said.

I told Eeyore's sister that I thought her observation was accurate. That night, before they went to sleep, the younger children were talking in the bedroom. Eeyore's sister seemed to be looking for confirmation from her brother that I had praised her. After his customary pause, I heard his response: “It felt good, didn't it! I was praised, too!”

Partly because of Eeyore's imminent move to the dormitory, my wife and I had been concentrating our attention on him. Apparently his younger brother and sister were feeling overlooked, by their father in particular. Downstairs, still seated in front of his records with his legs tucked beneath him, Eeyore was mumbling to himself as though he were speaking for me: “
This is a problem. This is truly a problem!
”

After H had been hospitalized with leukemia, during the period when he seemed to have survived the first crisis and had recovered however slightly, I visited him a number of times. The people around him, including his wife, had not informed him of his diagnosis, but I had the feeling he was signaling me obliquely that he knew. Shortly after he had gone into the hospital, he had shown me the bruises covering his still robust body. Sometime later, as a result of radiation therapy, his hair fell out and left his splendid skull exposed with just a few tough white hairs glistening on top of it. His eyes were frightfully clear, and they shifted restlessly as he spoke to me (in the brief interval when his wife had left the room): “We injure some people in the course of our lives, and we get injured by others. And we settle accounts along the way. We make it up to some and require others to compensate us. In that way we close the books—that's how the future appeared to me when I was a student. Now I realize it's not really about closing the books in the course of your life. In the end, all you can do is ask those you've injured to forgive you and of course forgive others in the same way. It seems to me there's no other choice. Take Jesus, he forgave the sins of mankind. They say that Christianity introduced that notion into European thought for the first time since ancient Greece. Have you ever thought about any of this?”

“I don't know a thing about Christianity,” I had replied, appalled at how spineless I sounded. “But Blake goes even further; in his view, sin is merely a reflection of presumptuous reason, an illusion mankind labors under, so that denouncing or retaliating against sin is meaningless—the only thing of any importance is Jesus Christ's forgiveness of sin.”

“Christ's forgiveness? I suppose thinking that way would make things easier. Our sins against others and the sins that others commit against us are painful, and so is rancor that burns and is never extinguished.”

After his death, I heard that H had turned to his wife when he had fallen ill and said to her: “I made your life a mess, didn't I!” At the time, I recalled our conversation. When I heard a rumor about a physical fight between H's widow and the proprietress of his favorite bar—who held the opposing view that H's life had been ruined by his wife and apparently had said so to his widow when she showed up at the bar one night—I recalled our conversation again with a bitter taste in my mouth.

I remember another conversation that we had late in the fall of the year when my friend got sick, when it seemed clear that he was on his way to recovery and his hair had grown back. Learning that I had finally managed to publish a novel I had been working on forever,
The Contemporary Game,
he expressed a desire to read it immediately. But he was under doctor's orders to moderate his reading, and as it seemed to me that reading this thick volume while lying in bed on his back would drain his energy, I had promised to take a volume apart and bring it to him in lighter sections without covers after the New Year. But I went to visit him one day and discovered that he had sent his wife out to buy the book and had already read it from cover to cover. With a smile in his eyes that had stopped darting but remained so crystal clear they were bizarre, he praised the book generously. Later, he recounted a memory, which had meant nothing to me at the time, of something that had happened when we were students. “When we were on the bus on our way to support the Sunakawa strike, you said it wouldn't bother you even if you got smashed in the head with a billy club and died, and then you talked about practicing ‘soul takeoffs’ when you were a kid. You had the whole bus laughing, and I remember wondering if maybe you were just a clown. Why did you leave that episode out of the novel? When I think back about it now, it strikes me as a story with some urgency about it, not just funny but poignant, and I missed it in the novel.”

It wasn't until several weeks later, when H was critically ill again with no prospect of recovery and I was paying him a visit in his cramped hospital room, having retraced my steps to the Ochanomizu station after taking Eeyore's younger brother to the university hospital and then dropping him at home, that I finally remembered clearly the story he had been referring to. Complaining of a violent headache, H had slipped into a coma several days earlier, and although his kidneys had now ceased to function—when I learned this my thoughts shifted to Eeyore's brother—he was still receiving Ringer's solution intravenously and his whole body was swollen with fluid. Later, the autopsy revealed that blood vessels had burst in both H's brain and his lungs and that blood with nowhere to go had pooled in heavy, sloshing balloons throughout his body. Even so, the heart that had been conditioned by playing rugby at Hibiya High School was still beating inside his chest, and the respirator that looked like the handiwork of an amateur with its hard rubber valves and soft accordion rubber tubes continued to hiss like a bellows.

As I gazed down at H in this condition, the meaning of his words to me two weeks earlier became clear. I had for a fact told my friends on the bus on the way to Sunakawa about practicing “soul takeoffs” as a child. But that was a memory of a dream in a sequence of dreams that had appeared to me when I was young. Gathering here and there along the road where it climbed the hill, the children from the valley in the forest were practicing running down the road and soaring upward into the sky as if they were on gliders. We were practicing “soul take-offs” to ensure that our souls would be well prepared to escape from our bodies when death arrived. When the soul broke away from the body, it climbed into the sky above the valley and glided through the air as it observed family and friends below disposing of the husk of the corpse that it had shed. Presently, it soared higher in larger circles until it reached the very tops of the trees in the forest that surrounded the valley. And there it resided biding its time until the day when it glided down into the valley to enter a new body; it was to ensure that this process of death and rebirth would proceed smoothly that we practiced “soul takeoffs,” extending our arms from our sides as we ran down the road making a noise like a diving plane.