I remember the former colonel saying he hoped the incident wouldn't be putting ideas in our heads, but it wasn't the sexual details of the horror that upset me (to be sure, I was impressed, as by a new discovery, that the human genitals could be said to be connected, via the body's lumina, all the way to the back of the throat). It was the photograph of the crime scene appended to the article that rocked me on my heels—an island mountainside, a bamboo grove and tangled shrubbery, narrow fields that appeared uncultivated and, overall, part of the same hollow land that would be cold and damp the year round. It occurs to me now that my valley in the forest and this small island were topographically similar (even though the valley in its own sea of forest was to the island as hollow to rise); at the time, I had recognized that places like this were also to be found in the valley and had pictured them specifically. In this kind of “place,” people committed cruel and degraded acts like this one. Or, perhaps, the place itself made people commit them. The article described the youth as an idiot; perhaps his idiocy was in his failure to resist the magnetic power of this “place.” In my valley, the children avoided going to this kind of place, and the grown-ups who were obliged to labor there took themselves to work reluctantly with scowling faces. (Those whose livelihoods required them to cultivate the fields in those places seemed under a cloud, even to the children's eyes, and no one thought it strange when they died at an early age.)
My next thought filled me with terror: I had left the valley to live in a stranger's “place” where there was no forest and no landmarks, only a river that was huge out of all proportion and unfamiliar trees. I had no means of distinguishing an ominous place anywhere in this provincial city. Which meant that I might wander into one at any time and wouldn't know it. Perhaps I was there even now.
Then I recalled a minor incident that had occurred two or three weeks earlier. The landlord and his wife had left on an excursion and I had spent the night alone in the house with their daughter, a year or two older than I. In the middle of the night, when I came downstairs to use the bathroom, the girl was slowly combing her hair in the sloping handmade bed in her room, naked to the waist, with the door open. I urinated and went back upstairs without giving it a second thought. When her parents returned the following morning, the girl carried on about having been afraid during the night. I considered only then, with contempt, that she had been trying to attract me: if this board-inghouse had been built in one of those “places,” I might have skewered her with a bamboo spear from her genitals to the back of her throat. I was aware of fear that made my head ring and of a twisted desire for dark passions. How I longed to return to the valley in the forest! To a world where every imaginable place was familiar to my body and spirit!
Years had gone by, and I had discovered for myself and Eeyore a place that was, in a sense, another valley in a forest, with topography that I could clearly read. That at least was what I had intended when I secured my own mountain bayberry on the slope of a hill bordered by virgin forest on the Izu peninsula, and built a house nearby. I sketched my image of a cabin and sent it to an architect I had known since my childhood. It wasn't until the actual cabin was finished that I realized with surprise that my image of a final abode had been unrealistic in the extreme. I had drawn a house beneath the luxuriant green of a large bayberry tree, but the lot was almost entirely on a slope, and the tree in question, together with a cypress at its side that had grown straight up through and above its leafy branches, were both located toward the bottom; the finished house looked down on the bayberry and the cypress from the living room on the second floor. This discrepancy served to teach me once again the sort of “place” I longed for.
We had planned to be at Izu on the Sunday that was the anniversary of the private middle school attended by Eeyore's younger sister and brother. But a large typhoon was approaching, and a weather report predicted the storm would move overland at precisely the Izu peninsula on the morning we would have been at the cabin. My wife and I abandoned the idea of the excursion and told the children. Eeyore was listening and did not react, so I assumed that a trip to the cabin was of no particular importance to him.
However, that Saturday, at just the time when we would have been leaving the house, Eeyore stood at the front door in the stiff, heavy leather shoes he normally refused to wear, a large pack on his back and a mountain-climbing cap on his head, and announced, as though he were trying to convince himself, “Shall we get started? I'm on my way to the Izu house!” In fact, by the time my wife came to me at my writing desk and said, after a silence when she seemed to be regaining her composure, “He seems to have reverted to—the way he was when you were away in Europe,” she and Eeyore had already been engaged in dialogue for close to an hour at the front entrance to the house, in voices hushed so as not to be audible to me in my room upstairs. My wife had pleaded and cajoled. In response, she reported, Eeyore would say only, “No, I'm on my way to Izu!” Finally, my wife had threatened him with a scolding from me if I heard him sounding so unreasonable while I was at work in my study, but far from panicking he had looked away from his mother and from his distressed brother and sister and, in a curious display of obstinacy, had gazed at nothing at all with empty eyes. Then he had said the following, with a forcefulness that had recreated instantly for my wife the despair she had felt during my absence last spring: “No, Papa is dead! He died, you know. I'm on my way to Izu by myself. Because Papa is dead. Good-bye, everyone. Farewell!”
He had not unfurled this brand of ultimatum right away. He had merely positioned himself at the front door as if the family had not agreed to cancel the trip to the Izu peninsula. Then he had delivered himself of his first announcement in a loud voice and, when the rest of us failed to appear with our luggage, had continued waiting as though suspiciously. At that point, using their normal, everyday strategies, my wife and his sister and brother had attempted to convince him that the trip to the mountains had been canceled. My daughter used his interest in the weather map on television, reminding him of how he took notice every day of weather and average temperature in major cities all over the country: “Eeyore, a typhoon's coming! I wonder what the low will be—pretty cold I bet!” and so on. His brother shared knowledge, which he had probably acquired from a magazine, about the Izu peninsula having floated on the Pacific until it collided with its current location and became attached. “If that's the case, the peninsula might float back out into the Pacific someday. And we might never get back!” My son's response to this persuasion was simple and apposite and for that reason formidable: “/ have a winter sweater. I think we should get there before the Izu peninsula floats away. They say a typhoon is coming!”
Eeyore was already aware from watching television that a typhoon was approaching the Izu peninsula. As he intended to make the trip in spite of the storm, dissuading him with talk of a typhoon was out of the question. What was needed was some other terrifying monster to replace the image of a typhoon in his consciousness. But what a futile, not to mention disagreeable, effort!
My wife droned on, and her vitality appeared to ebb away. When she reached the point where Eeyore had begun to insist that his father was dead, she turned half away from me and spoke quietly to the bookshelves against the wall.
I looked out the window. Among the few trees in our garden, the dogwood, the birch, and the young stewartia were swaying in the wind. Only the camellia with its thick trunk and stiff foliage was still; yet if you looked closely even the camellia was moving, but at a different frequency. The wind whistled through the trees and above them, wheeling slowly through the sky and moaning. Since morning it had been a little windy, and raining in fits and starts; it was as if fat dewdrops were hanging heavily in the air. Through the window glass that was streaking with rain and then clearing I observed the world outside. In the distance, the sky was pitch-black and ominous; inside banks of dark clouds darker clouds boiled and billowed. Even so, the wind wasn't so strong you couldn't walk against it—that's what Eeyore wo
uld say—and it wasn't raining hard enough to require an umbrella. In fact, he had already walked to the bus stop that morning and made the trip to and from his special school.
I had been working on an essay for a series I was editing with some friends and I put it aside and stood up. I sensed my wife flinch as though startled—she was still turned away from me in silence—but I was not at that moment angry at Eeyore. I was merely perplexed. I was experiencing the same feelings as my wife, at least I should have been. Nevertheless, I headed for the stairs. I believe I was assuming it wouldn't be hard to bring Eeyore around so that we could remain in Tokyo while the typhoon passed. But when I looked down at his large head, and at the bulky knapsack on his back that was as broad now as any adult's, and saw the ancient doll strapped to his right shoulder and side as he stood planted fiercely in front of the door, I felt myself letting go of common sense with a shudder of abandon and I began steeling myself for a departure with Eeyore for the wind-whipped storm that awaited us in Izu.
The large doll he had lashed to his body, close to three feet tall with abundant black hair, ogling eyes, and an overbite, was Tiny Chiyo, a filthy, damaged doll that had been lying abandoned in the shed for four or five years: Eeyore looked like a warrior on his way to a final, desperate battle with his child at his side.
“When I told him none of us were going to Izu, he dragged out Tiny Chiyo"—my daughter had sounded embarrassed as she reported the old doll's involvement to her mother. Her younger brother also appeared to twist away from the doll's shuttered-open eyes.
“I'm going with him. I'll unpack everyone else's stuff.”
As I was repacking my suitcase in the living room, Eeyore's younger brother approached in silence and reached tentatively for his own things. Apparently he was prompted by feelings that accurately reflected my wife's own anxiety, which she now expressed: “That's a good idea; better that the three of you should go instead of just Papa and Eeyore!”
“No—Eeyore and I will go alone!” I said, aware that my loud voice seemed to be a hurtful blow to Eeyore's brother. I was asserting myself violently: the rest of the family, those who wish to continue existing in this world, are excused; Eeyore and I are free to behave as crazily as we want!
Eeyore's younger brother and sister, as if they were ashamed of themselves, though they had no reason to feel that way, retreated to their rooms. Without another word to my wife, in the grips of a “leap,” I set out from the house with Eeyore and his doll as though we were knights departing for the Crusades.
We took the Odakyu line from Seijo Gakuen to the Odawara station and rode standing, jammed in among the commuters who filled the train. With all eyes staring at him, Eeyore declined to remove Tiny Chiyo or even his knapsack; he looked obstinately at the floor, his head down, behaving as if he had left on a trip by himself, and I couldn't even bring myself to hoist his pack into the luggage net above our heads. We stood back to back as if we were strangers, but Eeyore's body odor was curiously strong and I could tell even turned away from him that he had not alighted at a station along the way and was still standing at my side.
At Odawara, we transferred to the National Railroad, and, as far as Atami, the train seemed normally crowded for the hour; when we changed to the Ito line after buying box lunches for supper, there were very few passengers. The sea was already dark, and the mountainside was also in heavy shadow, but there were instants when light glinted faintly off the trees as they bent to the wind. As we crossed an iron bridge I glimpsed a swollen river; the wind-whipped trees and the tumbling water took me back to stormy nights in the valley in the forest. Eeyore was in the next seat with his back to me and had placed his troublesome pack in the aisle seat; I sat as though alone at the window curtained by the rain and the darkness of the night and recalled the wind and rain in the forest. On stormy nights I had felt anxious and somehow horrified, but the people in the village in the valley had seemed united. In a novel I had read as soon as I could read French there was a scene the day the Great War began when people experienced “une grande communité,” and I was certain I had understood that moment perfectly. Thoughts about the future course of the life I was to lead were included in the exaltation and uneasiness of those stormy nights in the valley, but it had never occurred to me that a life as unseemly as mine was waiting. Ashamed of my sentimentality, I took from my suitcase The Life of William Blake by Mona Wilson, a name I had been hearing for some time.
When we reached Ito, we learned that the track ahead was impassable. Eeyore was continuing to behave as though he were traveling by himself, but as this included listening carefully to the announcements inside the station there was no need to explain to him. When we came out of the station, Eeyore following two or three steps behind me, I made a deal with one of the taxis waiting for passengers in what was now a downpour to take us to our mountain cabin in Izu Heights.
“Checking up on your place? Shall I stop for batteries for my flashlight?” the driver asked, trying hard not to stare at Eeyore. “If it gets really bad I'm turning around, I can't be letting you off and not getting back myself! They say the typhoon'll hit Izu right between the eyes! You leave your place open?”
The storm became violent as we drove, but the driver managed to deliver us to our cabin. He even lit the way for us with his headlights from behind as we walked the thirty or so feet to our front door and got soaking wet. The path beneath us remained in darkness; what the headlights lit so brilliantly it hurt the eyes was the deep ocean of leaf on the frenzied branches of the bayberry, which seemed about to go up in flames as the wind whipped it against the trunk of the cypress tree. Opening the wooden door at the front entrance, I managed to get Eeyore inside before the wind blew the door shut, then went around to the rear of the house for an armful of dead branches to use as firewood. On the way back, the wood I was carrying caught on the branch of a tree, which snapped back and struck me a blow across the face, knocking off my glasses and bloodying my nose. What unexpected force this storm had, to stop me in my tracks to wipe my lips and search for my glasses!
But once I had closed the door behind me, I experienced a certain peacefulness very different from my painful thoughts until then. For one thing, Eeyore had grown alert as soon as he got inside and, with the electricity off, seemed to be using the flashlight to move around upstairs from the dining room to the living room. I got towels from the bathroom and brought them upstairs along with a mattress from my bedroom, which was plenty large enough for both of us if we lay down side by side. I had Eeyore get undressed and dry himself while I went back downstairs for bedding and blankets; guessing my intention to build a fire and sleep in front of the fireplace, he positioned and straightened the mattress, propping Tiny Chiyo on the floor alongside it.
I placed a bundle of the wet branches in the fireplace and lit some torn magazine pages on top of the wood. As I hadn't opened the valve in the propane gas shed at the edge of the property, we couldn't boil water. I gave Eeyore the box lunch from the train station and a cup of water, poured the sake remaining in a two-liter bottle in the kitchen into my own cup, and began drinking as I tended the fire. Eeyore, his large body hunched over in the darkness, squinted into the lunch box to inspect the contents as he ate them. He ate in silence, taking a long time to finish, then lay down in the very center of the quilt on top of the mattress, placing Tiny Chiyo at his side, and fell asleep, snoring loudly, as he did immediately after a seizure. I was left alone in front of the struggling fire.
The wind and solid sheets of rain rattled the wooden shutters. A large wind dragon whirled through the leaves of the shrubbery surrounding the house. High in the sky and in the space that rose steeply from the road along the kitchen side of the house—beyond, on the land across the road, the space was wide enough to accommodate a pine tree in which large crows were always perched—I could hear the screeching of the unimpeded wind as it chafed against itself, layer upon layer. At some point I also heard a cracking as though a large tree had been sheared off
at the trunk (the following morning, because pines were scarce in this area, the only damaged tree, except for saplings, was the giant pine in front of the kitchen, yet the smell of resin was so strong it would give me a headache).
Eeyore's snores had changed as he slept to a sound like moaning. Lying flat on his back on the quilt atop the mattress on the floor where I was sitting, his legs straight out, he was like a mummy in its tomb. Next to him, his spring-loaded eyes also closed, Tiny Chiyo was a smaller mummy who had been interred with his master.
I banked the fire a little, so the wood would last, and read Mona Wilson by the light of the fire without the help of glasses, tilting the book toward the fireplace. I had reached the chapter where she interprets The Four Zoas, and I recalled my first encounter with this epic poem in my youth as I felt myself drawn into it again. Blake's pantheon of demigods explain that the world we know has fallen from primal bliss, and the two women among them, Ahania and Enion—they can be considered emanations of the principal demigods or brides to them, and also symbolize the various essences of this world—join each other in lament. They relate what happens in the “cosmic caverns of the grave.” They speak of Man, the eternal Man who must remain asleep so long as we mortals dwell in confusion.
The time comes when Man surveys, as though in a dream, the tree, the herb, the fish, the bird, and the beast. Collecting the scattered parts of his immortal body, he thinks to restore the elemental form from which all things grow. This eternal Man, with a capital M, as in That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget, & return / To the dark valley whence he came to begin his labours anew, was of course Albion, the ultimate human existence; there was a period in my youth when I saw my destiny in his, and in his grief my own. In the following passage, Albion laments the fate that requires him to suffer anew in this real world in order to redeem humankind through Christ, “the lamb of God”: