Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (32 page)

I took refuge in Blake, lingering over minute details and losing my way in them. As I pored over the last prophecy,
Jerusalem,
reading Erdman's annotated text and studying a facsimile of Blake's own illuminations, I discovered a direct connection to my sort of poem about the rain tree. I didn't make the discovery entirely on my own; I was led to it by the music of my friend and mentor, the composer T. The first week Eeyore was away at the dormitory, a group of the best young musicians in the country performed an entire evening of T's works. The hall was in Yokohama; my wife and I had not been outside of Tokyo alone together since Eeyore had been born, and just stepping onto the train felt like a sort of renewal. My wife's buoyant mood was apparent in her unusual talkativeness even on the train. She told me about an elderly woman who had approached her after the ceremony when Eeyore had moved into the dormitory and said, “That school term when my child was in the dormitory was like the first vacation I ever had, and my last—”

“Does this feel like a vacation?” I responded.

“It does, because living with Eeyore is like living for two people,” my wife answered in the bright voice of someone luxuriating on a vacation.

But as the train crossed the Tama River we saw the expanse of water reflecting the unnatural color of the snowy sky and fell silent. I felt something powerful rise from the surface of the water to churn the darkness inside me. Before the concert, T appeared at the foot of the stage to introduce his suite in three parts for guitar and alto flute titled
To the Sea;
and when he mentioned, speaking about the section called “Cape Cod,” the darkness of the scenery along the coast of Nantucket, I thought I felt my wife's body shudder as she sat next to me. She shuddered again during the performance, which made me think that the dark surface of the Tama must have evoked something in her as well.

T's new piece for piano, “Rain Tree Sketches,” was performed by the female pianist A, who had recently softened the unique scientific precision of her style with something richer and more mellow. The piece was a lucid and persistent restatement of the rain tree theme T had already used in his chamber music, but, short as it was, it was more than simply a restatement—T's “rain tree” as musical metaphor had grown more luxuriant, extending further its leafy branches. As for myself, I felt ashamed to think that I had already uprooted my own rain tree metaphor, but also somehow encouraged.

The feeling stayed with me through the intermission. The second half of the concert began with a percussion solo titled “Munari by Munari” the score consisted of aphorisms and symbols T had written on a folded-paper creation by Munari, the Italian designer. The piece was an improvisation in his musical idiom by the speculative percussionist Yamashita. It was as if T's music from the first half of the concert were still reverberating, yet it was more than revival, it was new music in the process of creation. It was as if the percussionist were performing T's spirit and physical body, living in the present but moving toward the future.

The continuing music led me to a discovery. It was as though I had reencountered something dear and familiar to me that I had been missing keenly: Oh yes!, I seemed to say to myself, Blake's “tree of life” is precisely the “rain tree” I described having seen in a dark garden in Hawaii! Like the rain tree, its trunk soars upward darkly like a wall obscuring everything before it, and the colossal slab of its roots is identical.

At the beginning of the first story in my rain tree series, I described my encounter with the rain tree in the following way. With the clamor of a party at my back, I was peering out at a darkness with a rank smell:

When I got home from the concert, I opened the facsimile edition of
Jerusalem
to Plate 76 and wondered how I could have failed to see until now that it was unmistakably the rain tree I have described here. Jesus crucified on “the tree of life.” Standing at the base of the tree with his arms spread, the giant Albion, in whom all mankind is redeemed and embodied, directs his reverent gaze upward at Jesus. Albion radiates youth; Jesus appears to be approaching old age. This scene is intended as an illustration of the confident, beautiful dialogue between Jesus and Albion near the end of
Jerusalem:

In this way, reading Blake, I happened on
The Tree of Life,
an illustration that resembled my own image of the rain tree. And reading in the text of
Jerusalem
the lengthy dialogue between Jesus nailed to the tree and the youthful Albion, I made my way to the verses above. I realize it may sound far-fetched—and it is an odd thing to write in light of what I myself had said to H on his deathbed, that I did not believe in Christianity and had no knowledge of it—but I did feel in the presence of something like grace (I overcome my hesitation to use the word by telling myself that it was only through the agency of T's music that grace became possible). Nevertheless, it is, or feels like, grace that encourages me forward in the direction of the “forgiveness of sin” that is at the heart of Jesus’ thought in his dialogue with Albion. Looking at Plate 76, I recited Blake's verse aloud to myself repeatedly. And presently I became aware that “Beyond the Rain Tree” was resonating harmonically with Blake's lines.

Born into this world on earth, Eeyore had gained precious little through the power of reason, nor could it be said that he had labored to build anything in particular in the real world. But according to Blake the power of reason served only to lead man into illusion; this world itself was the product of illusion. And while Eeyore dwelled in this world, the power of his soul had not been corrupted by experience: in Eeyore, the power of innocence had been preserved. Eventually, Eeyore and I would proceed toward the rain tree, and move through it, united as one yet souls as free as they could be, to return to the world beyond. And who, speaking for Eeyore or for me, was to say that this was a meaningless process of life and death?

I returned in my mind once again to my conversation with H in his hospital room about the “forgiveness of sin.” Though I was still largely ignorant about Blake at the time, I had brought up his name, as though something were leading me in his direction. Had I known more about Blake, I might have responded to H's remark that believing in the “forgiveness of sin” made life easier by sending him the pages of the illustrated edition detached from their binding so he could rest them on his chest one plate at a time; useless now, the thought filled me with regret. It was in any event just another expression of a presentiment I had deep down, that I would be reading an unbound facsimile edition
of Jerusalem
on my own deathbed.

Late Saturday afternoon, with his brother and sister already home and awaiting him, Eeyore returned for his first weekend. It was immediately clear that even one week of dormitory life had made a difference in his behavior: there was no front gate clattering open, no sound of shoes being dragged down the walk, and no noisy entrance into the front hall. I was lying on the sofa reading Blake, as usual, and when I happened to look up Eeyore was coming through the door into the room with a large bag of dirty laundry on his shoulder. As I was lifting myself off the couch he quickly seized my left foot angled up at the ceiling and said, shaking it up and down in lieu of a handshake, “
Nice foot, excellent foot, was everything all right? Have you been well?
”

Lying on my back unable to move I burst out laughing, and so did Eeyore's brother and sister on their way downstairs from their rooms, and so did my wife in the kitchen. There was no question that Eeyore's behavior, not intentional but natural, brought levity to our family. But just now he was clearly exhausted, and gave no sign of responding to my wife's questions about life in the dormitory. Instead, he sat down in front of the hi-fi speakers with his rear end directly on the floor and appeared to be perplexed about which record to play first. His face had lost weight to a point where his profile was angular, and there was even an air of quiet wisdom around his double-lidded eyes. Instead of selecting a record on his own, he presently tuned the radio to
Classical Requests
on NHK FM. Until dinner was ready, as though his parched body and soul were gulping the water of the music, he sat there in silence, listening to the radio. Apparently, the challenge of playing the cassettes he had taken with him to the dormitory had proved too much for him.

He did stand at one point and go into the kitchen, and my wife told him to pour himself some juice from the refrigerator. Instead of obeying her as he normally would have done, he merely supplied the following information and returned to the radio, as though unwilling to miss a minute of the “short-tune request corner” at the end of the program. “
They said we couldn't have tea at the dormitory but there was tea. It was barley tea!
”

My wife and I and Eeyore's brother and sister waited until the radio program was ending to take our places at the dinner table, where Eeyore's favorite meal had been laid out, roast veal in cream sauce with spaghetti and potato salad. Though he had turned off the radio, Eeyore remained seated, removing records from the cabinet and replacing them. I called out to him, “Eeyore, dinner's ready. Come sit down.” But Eeyore's eyes never moved from the record player, and then the muscles in his broad, manly shoulders tensed and he said, as though announcing a considered decision: “
Eeyore won't be coming. Since Eeyore isn't here anymore, altogether, he won't be coming over there!
”

I could feel my wife watching me as I looked down at the table; the sense of loss assaulting me was so virulent I didn't think I could handle her gaze. What had happened just now? Had it actually happened, and would it go on happening? A need to stamp my feet was building in me, and though I managed to keep tears from my eyes I was unable to stop myself from flushing from my cheeks to my ears. “Eeyore, no way! You've come home so of course you're here!” His younger sister's voice was soothing, but Eeyore remained silent. Eeyore's younger brother followed his sister by the beat or two it had taken him to examine his own thought: “He'll be twenty in June, maybe he doesn't want to be called Eeyore anymore. I bet he wants to be called by his real name—that's what they must be using at the dorm!”

An irrepressible man of action once he has taken a logical stand, Eeyore's brother crossed the room and said, squatting at his brother's side, “Hikari, let's eat. Mom's made all your favorites!” “
That should be fine. Thank you.
” In contrast to his adolescent brother's cracking voice, Eeyore replied in the limpid voice of a young boy. The relief of the moment had something comical about it, like a joint abruptly dislocating, and it set my wife and Eeyore's sister to laughing aloud again.

Shoulder to shoulder despite the large difference in their height and girth, the two brothers came to the dining table. So this is it, I thought to myself as I watched them begin to attack their food, still feeling the shock of loss I had received a minute before: no more calling him Eeyore? The time was ripe, I supposed. My son, the time has surely come for us to cease calling you by your infant name and to begin calling you Hikari! You have arrived at that age. Before long, you, my son Hikari, and your younger brother, Sakurao, will stand before us as young men. Lines from Blake's preface to
Milton,
verses I had frequently recited to myself, seemed to rise up in me: “Rouse up O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.” With Blake as my guide, I beheld a phantasm of my sons as young men of a new age, a baleful, atomic age, which would require them the more urgently to set their foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings, and I could assuredly feel myself at their side, reborn as another young man. Presently, when old age approached and the time had come to endure the agony of death, I would hear the words proclaimed by the voice from The Tree of Life in encouragement to all Humankind as though they were spoken to me and to me alone:
Fear not Albion unless I die thou canst not live / But If I die I shall arise again & Thou With me.

Afterword

S
mall wonder that Kenzaburo Oe chose William Blake as his ally in
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
Blake was a fervent champion of the imagination's power to transfigure reality, and transfiguration was what Oe set out to achieve. His method is similar to Blake's own: he deploys his imagination against the reality of his severely handicapped son. The father-narrator who is his alter ego is not a disinterested observer; on the contrary, he is an imagination warrior who deforms in order to transform and liberate himself from the circumstances he perceives even as he describes them.