Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (31 page)

That summer vacation I went home to the forest in Shikoku, and Ki-ko traveled to Hokkaido to stay with relatives from whom she had been estranged ever since her mother had married a Korean. I had proposed that we live apart for those forty days and consider where each of us was going in our lives. Early in the fall, when I returned to Tokyo and stopped in at the boardinghouse with the Gallimard editions of Sartre that I had read in the valley in a pack on my back, a handsome young man wearing Ki-ko's sweater who appeared to be from Southeast Asia was watching the room for her, sitting on the tatami uncomfortably just as she did, his back against a rolled-up futon mattress. I went to I's room with my head spinning and unpacked my Sartre books one at a time and expounded on them and listened to his comments until I felt calm enough to return to my own rooming house. All that fall and into the winter I continued to surprise myself with the intensity of my own youthful suffering.

Through the information pipeline between Ki-ko and H, which remained open—his actual relationship to her was never clear: toward women with a certain kind of quirkiness he displayed a combination of intense devotion and thoroughgoing indifference that seemed to coexist without contradiction; since his death, I have encountered any number of women who profess to miss him keenly although their connection to him is a mystery—I was able to learn that Ki-ko had separated from the exchange student from Singapore and not long after had married a communications engineer who had been sent from Germany to train in Japan and had hired her as his interpreter, and that she had dropped out of college and returned with him to Europe.

Shortly after Eeyore was born with a deformed head, when I was deep in despair and bewilderment, Ki-ko had abruptly contacted me, as always, through H, and I had visited her in her room at the International House of Japan in Tokyo. My wife was still in the hospital. I have already mentioned that Ki-ko had turned into a gorgeous woman since I had seen her last, a transformation that was unexpected yet easily traced back to her appearance as a girl. And the treatment I received from her that day—I would have to call it sexual therapy—was a consolation to me. It also filled me from start to finish with a feeling of sin-fulness so raw I might have been copulating with my sister, and churned to life in me something grotesque that resembled, in the poet Homei's words, “a desperate savageness.” These feelings enabled me to understand, looking back, that I had been moved when I was twenty-one to propose that we spend the summer apart thinking about our own lives because my relationship with Ki-ko, whom I felt was younger than myself in those days, had also felt incestuous to me, as though I had been sleeping with my younger sister. This revival, nearly ten years later, of a sexual connection to Ki-ko was the basis for the scene in
A Personal Matter
when the hero has sex with a classmate who wrote her thesis on Blake. I understood perfectly well the importance of the haven Ki-ko had selflessly offered me, but I was just as egocentric at twenty-nine as I had been in my early twenties, and while I saw the scar across her right wrist I did not ask her about it—the fact that she was left-handed had intensified the ungain-liness of her large body when she was a girl of eighteen or nineteen—did not inquire, that is, about what had happened during the nearly ten years she had spent in Europe. She was in Tokyo for two weeks, and, when she returned to Germany, the anguish I had experienced ten years earlier all that fall and into the winter struck me once again an unexpected blow. Scrawling these memories on the page as fast as my pen can move I am assailed by the feeling that I have yet to confront squarely the spoiled, indulgent cruelty of my younger years.

The teach-in proceeded according to schedule. During a break to adjust the time in the satellite broadcast that was beaming live to Japan, the group advocating the nuclear-free zone whom I had met just after arriving in Berlin approached me at the podium to reproach me gently for failing to appear in support of the antinuclear activists in East Berlin. Expecting that we would be meeting a group of clerics from various churches, they had even distributed copies of the English translation of my book of essays,
Hiroshima Notes.
I was moved to learn that the people I was supposed to have met intended to pray for the health of my handicapped son.

With a wisdom about the world that was the obverse of her eccentricity, Ki-ko had predicted correctly that a change in the TV crew's schedule would result in my trip to East Berlin being canceled. She had now installed herself in what would have been the best seat in the house at a concert, directly in front of the main stage, and was sitting there as majestically as always. With the exception of a small number of resident Japanese who had read about the event in the newsletter of the Japanese embassy, the audience filling the hall consisted of activists in the peace and antinuclear movements from all over West Germany. Many of them also belonged to the so-called alternative movement, which included the advocates of planned simplicity as an approach to conserving our natural resources. Sitting in that crowd with a mink coat draped around her shoulders, Ki-ko was, to say the least, conspicuous, but not quite alone: one of the panelists on the stage, the theologian daughter of Ruprecht Heineman, West Berlin's only president to have visited Hiroshima, was also wearing a mink coat. The blond, blue-eyed daughter of the former president and Ki-ko with her jet-black hair heaped on her head as before appeared to confront each other from above and below the dais like two soaring mountain peaks. Clearly, Ki-ko had become a middle-aged woman, yet despite the striking appearance that was the result of hard work, I was aware of the same droll surprise at herself she had never been able to conceal as a girl of eighteen or nineteen. When our eyes met, she acknowledged me with an antique gesture that predated our generation. There was something like darkness in her glance, and as she tilted her head forward the upper portion of her face from her brow to her nose appeared to be shadowed by gloom. Later in the evening, as the teach-in intensified, I ceased to be aware of her. Afterward, there were farewells to be exchanged with my fellow panelists and discussions with the Japanese in the audience who came up to point out mistakes the German interpreter had made. I was aware, as of a battleship making its way into port, of Ki-ko's presence slowly approaching, but when I had a minute to look up and scan the auditorium she was nowhere to be seen.

It was close to midnight when I got back to my hotel room after dinner at the Japanese legation in Berlin, and the phone rang almost at once. It was Ki-ko calling to propose that we meet right away. She explained that she had been staying in a room on the top floor of my hotel for three days. She had been phoning every ten minutes to see if I had returned, yet it was at least an hour until she opened the door I had left unlocked without knocking and, looking calm and composed, stepped into the room. She was wearing a Korean dress I remembered having seen, of dazzling pale green silk, that reached to her ankles, and, on her bare chest just below her throat, a chrysanthemum. I realized once again that other than crocuses and forsythia I had not seen a single flower during my stay in Europe.

I had been lying on the bed with my shoes on, reading, and as I sat up, Ki-ko sat down on the empty bed across from me, and for a moment we just looked at each other appraisingly. Then I stood up and went to the refrigerator for little bottles of whisky and glasses, and Ki-ko, who already had alcohol on her breath, gave me her critique of the interpreter's German translation. It was her feeling that the real and current threat of nuclear attack that had been the point of my remarks had been somewhat blurred, and that the Soviet threat as outlined by Ishihara, the novelist who was also an LDP member of the Diet, had been glossed over out of consideration for the Soviets. “In other words, the arguments that got through to the German audience were less tense and confrontational than you intended. I guess that's part of the balancing act that professional interpreters do—”

As she spoke, just as when she had visited my rooming house as a young woman, Ki-ko picked up the books on my nightstand and examined them carefully—Blake,
The Golden Age of Russian Theater,
and a Penguin collection of Orwell essays. When I handed her a glass she was browsing in the Orwell, and, sitting down on the bed again with both her drink and the book gripped in her left hand, she said the following in the haughty tone of a female teacher:

“When H was here to research extremist groups he told me about your son. He must be almost an adult? Have you thought about what you're going to do when he goes
must
? He'll be a handful!”

I must have turned white with anger; as I sat there unable to say a word, my tongue paralyzed, Ki-ko's large face contorted stupidly with fear and sadness as if it were being slapped by each one of her cosmetic efforts. It was then that I saw for the first time the darkness of her mottled skin beneath the thick makeup.

“You're suggesting that my son will go
must
like an elephant or a camel but it won't do to shoot him, is that it? You're quoting from ‘Shooting an Elephant.’ Well here's another one of Orwell's words: ‘I thought you were a more
decent
human being!’”

We sat in silence, looking down at our drinks. Presently Ki-ko placed her glass on the floor with a clumsy, somehow girlish movement of her left hand, then stood up, cleared her throat of phlegm with a groan, and said sourly, “Let's call it a night—I seem to have made a mistake that's not really like me. I'll show you around Berlin tomorrow.” I could see the pitch-darkness into which I was about to plummet right before my eyes, but my tongue seemed paralyzed once again and I didn't even look up as she left the room.

The next day, dispiritedly, Ki-ko and I did some odd sightseeing in Berlin. Partly because the schedule had changed again and I was leaving for Frankfurt at three that afternoon, there was only time for each of us to choose one place to visit. Having seen while I was in college a photograph of a yellow electric eel that was supposed to be there still, I chose the aquarium on Budapest Strasse. The eel turned out to be a disappointment and so did the rest of the fish, but the plant life that had been installed dramatically to re-create their habitats was worth seeing. Ki-ko displayed no interest in the fish or the plants, and, unwilling to climb the stairs, had a lengthy conversation with an aging guard on the first floor.

Ki-ko's choice was a porn film, something she had become even more curious about since her German husband had refused to take her. We found an X-rated theater within walking distance of the aquarium, in the basement of one of the shops that lined the Kurfurstendamm in the middle of the entertainment district. When you bought your ticket you were also given a miniature bottle of whisky. Negotiating with the young man at the counter in fluent German that was emphatically upper class, Ki-ko also received two small bottles of gin and a can of beer for each of us; as we sat down in the theater she took a swig of the beer and filled the can back up with the gin. I did the same, but we didn't stay long enough to empty an entire bottle. Back up on the street, Ki-ko said she wanted to shop for some ingredients for Korean food and we headed east along the Ku-damm toward a department store that contained the most varied food gallery in Berlin. We spoke only a few words along the way, but our conversation was painful to me. I began with a comment on the film: “The lead girl had so much sex it was cruel; but that was a funny scene when she cooled her genitals with an ice-bag.” “When we were just children we had sex repeatedly,” Ki-ko replied. “So much it was cruel, as you'd say—worse than cruel, if you ask me….” Ki-ko also critiqued my remarks at the teach-in: “You were saying a nuclear war won't happen in the near future because it hasn't ever happened yet, am I right? Unfortunately, I don't agree. I think the world has already been destroyed any number of times. I think a small number of people survived, and they rebuilt this miserable world we live in now. But what didn't survive was the lesson to be learned, that's my conclusion after living in Europe for years. I think the destruction of Germany in World War Two—look over there, that's what's left of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church!—was equivalent to the apocalypse. I wonder if the same gang isn't planning to use nuclear weapons to destroy the world and then rebuild it again? A nuclear bomb shelter is a reality—we built one at home.”

“If it's possible,” I said, “to rebuild the world.”

“Even if they couldn't rebuild it, I think they'd insist that was okay, too—these are people who believe in ‘the last judgment.’”

“That's not how Blake viewed the last judgment,” I started to say, but I had no heart for continuing a debate with Ki-ko.

It was time to shake hands good-bye, and in the dry, German atmosphere beneath a cloudy sky, as she extended her left arm in a gesture familiar from years before, the face that Ki-ko turned directly toward me for the first time that day, while it retained its dignity and radiance, was clearly the face of a Korean woman nearing the end of middle age. When I returned alone to my hotel, the young men on our TV crew were piling gear into a mountain of cases just outside the front entrance—I expect they must have seen a Japanese man who was also nearing the end of middle age and who appeared to be consumed with grief. I had begun writing my series of stories about the symbiosis between Blake's Prophecies and my handicapped son by linking the grief of an aging writer and my son's unacted animal impulses. Here in Europe, could I deny that it was in me that both grief and animal impulses had been lodged? And wasn't that the reason I had been so shaken to discover the same sentiments in Eeyore when I returned to Japan?

By the time I woke up, my son had already left for the dormitory. That Monday with Eeyore gone, the space inside the house seemed vast and unfamiliar; even more unexpectedly, I felt as though I had more time on my hands than I knew how to fill. I wandered around the house looking for my wife. I wanted to talk to her about my feeling of being suspended helplessly in a thirty-hour day, but it was as though the house's interior had been enlarged and I had difficulty finding her. I felt apprehensive. Apparently my wife was also feeling at loose ends: in our winter-withered garden, she was clipping berry-covered vines out of the shrubbery to decorate a wreath of dried flowers.