It was after six o'clock and already pitch-dark when, following a report from my wife that Eeyore was still missing, I received a call from the student Inada. Beginning with “I thought I should let you know,” the student who had sat silently alongside the fluent Unami on the occasion of their visit delivered himself of the following account. His tone was somber but revealed no sense of guilt.
His friend Unami, acting entirely on his own and using information he had learned from my wife about our daily coming and going from school, had that afternoon taken charge of Eeyore. Unami was angry about my refusal to take political action, and angrier still that I used my handicapped child to justify my position righteously. He had decided, therefore, that by getting rid of the child he could force me into a place where I could no longer defend my lack of action or, alternatively, that he could extract from me a promise to take certain action as a condition of releasing Eeyore unharmed. He planned to retain my son while he opened negotiations to determine how far I would be willing to go. However, according to a communication Inada had just received, after trying without success to speak with me on the phone, Unami had given up in disgust and had taken the bullet train back to Kyoto, leaving Eeyore on his own in Tokyo Station. Although he had nothing to do with any of this, Inada thought it would be better to let me know.
My wife had just returned; she and the other mothers had taken a break from searching in the vicinity of the school, and she had decided to come home for an hour to prepare dinner. Probably she was worried about my ability to take proper care of Eeyore's brother and sister, who were still infants. I was able to control the anger that rose in me at the thought of Inada's opening and closing remark—I thought it would be better to let you know—but as I attempted to convey to my wife what I had just heard as she stood there giving off a frozen, metallic smell with snowflakes in her hair and on the shoulders of her coat, I could feel the miasma of blackness bubbling inside my chest spewing into the air together with my words. “The student who visited us, the one who talked a lot, kidnapped Eeyore. He planned to force me into action by finishing Eeyore off—by finishing Eeyore off!—or by releasing him under certain conditions. He kidnapped Eeyore to control me. But he gave up in disgust. He—gave up in disgust and went home on the bullet train.”
I was on my way out the door to Tokyo Station but my wife said she wanted to come with me and went next door to ask a woman we didn't know particularly well to look after the children. It didn't occur to me at the time, but she was terrified that if Unami reappeared, while I might not have killed him I would certainly have hurt him badly. So together my wife and I walked all over Tokyo Station looking for Eeyore, for more than three hours, and I had precisely the internal experience I described in The Pinch Runner Memorandum.
It was after ten o'clock and the station was nearly empty when we found Eeyore on the platform for the bullet train. Sitting on the concrete platform with his back molded to an indentation in the wall of a newsstand, he was quietly watching the snow falling heavily on the tracks. His boots were filled with urine that had wet his pants and run down his legs. When I squatted at his side and peered into his face he looked back at me blankly as always, as though unmoved, but tension melted from his face and body and the soft creature that always appeared in this way rose to view with a radiance that was blinding. We went home in a taxi through the night snow, stopping to outfit Eeyore in new pants and boots. Later, I vomited into one of the boots that was still soaked in urine and let out a scream of rage. When I had finished and was sitting limply in my chair, my wife told me that she had been light-headed with fear as we searched for Eeyore that I would attack and injure Unami and might even be sent to jail.
On the first day after the New Year holiday this year, in the early hours of the morning, a cram-school teacher and a civil service employee in the municipal office who lived in a bedroom town on the outskirts of Kyoto were bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe. I happened to be on a trip to Hiroshima and read about it in the Kyoto edition of the newspaper. I said nothing to my wife, who seemed unaware of what had happened after reading the Tokyo paper. According to the article, the victims, former members of a faction in the student movement, were Sankichi Unami and Akira Inada, both thirty years old. Three days later, just after six o'clock, when I was at my exercise club swimming, my wife received a long-distance phone call from Kyoto. “A friend and I paid you a visit about ten years ago,” the voice said tactfully. ‘I'm the one who called himself Unami.”
He explained that he was calling about the killings that seemed to be a carryover from the internal lynchings during the former days of the student movement. His purpose was to prevent a misunderstanding on our part. Reading in the paper that Unami and Inada had been murdered—as she related the phone conversation my wife told me for the first time that she had seen the article but had kept it to herself—we might be feeling the relief of knowing that poetic justice had befallen the men who had taken our child away and abandoned him. Or we might be sleeping uneasily because murder seemed excessive even for poetic justice. In any event, he wanted to correct a mistaken assumption. When he and his friend had visited our house, they had used the names of two activists in an opposing faction. The victims a few days ago were the real Unami and Inada. Perhaps they had been plugging away as political activists; more likely their past had caught up with them while they were in hibernation. The caller was still engaged in the movement. His current life had nothing to do with literature, but he gathered that my wife and I and our son were alive and well.
Having contained herself to this point, my wife now revealed her anger: the student had done a terrible thing to our son; what if he had fallen off the platform onto the tracks, or what if he had wandered onto a train leaving for some distant place and we had never been able to find him! But the man calling himself Unami who had opened a cruel wound in our memory shot back: “Mrs.! Frankly speaking, wouldn't it have been better that way! You'd have been spared ten years of bondage to your son and might have enjoyed your life! And think of your husband, he's still singing the same old tune we pointed out ten years ago, maybe he would have found a way to break out of his rut. Mrs., everybody knows that a child with a damaged brain can't ever be productive. You might say his social metabolism doesn't work quite right. But your husband uses the child as justification for not facing the tumult in society head-on. In ten years, he hasn't changed one bit! Isn't that what a critic wondered about him recently, whether he intended to go to his grave just as he is, without ever growing up philosophically? Your husband tells himself he's living life for two, himself and his child, but the truth is that in their codependence they manage to avoid putting in the effort and the suffering that even one life would normally require. For my part, I've transcended politics and social upheaval and reached the next stage. I head up the young men's association in a religious group, putting everything I have into figuring out how to save a human soul. When your husband was my age, he was writing really irritating things like Come to think about it, there is such a thing as salvation. … But your husband doesn't seek salvation with any urgency, he prefers to stand on this side in peace and quiet and feel uneasy. The political battle ten years ago was child's play compared to our struggle to find salvation for the soul. We're talking life and death, and without salvation we can't even die in peace. And I'm responsible for the young people who have suffered through that battle and come out the other side. But I need to say this to your husband directly—he'll be back by ten, won't he? I read in the evening paper, maybe it was last year, that he goes to his swimming club in the evening. I'll call again around ten.”
I swim 1000 meters freestyle at my swimming club every evening and then come home and begin drinking the whisky I need to fall asleep. For close to seven years, this has been my daily routine. But if I had started drinking that night, I would have been drunk by ten o'clock. And although Eeyore's brother and sister would have gone to their rooms, it was likely they would still be awake and
able to hear their drunken father's angry voice. I wanted to avoid this. I lay down on the sofa and glanced at pages in Erdman's book that I had already annotated, too distracted to read ahead. Eeyore, who had been in the family room with his brother and sister when my wife was recounting the phone call to me, went upstairs to his own room at nine. Lying there watching the clock and waiting for the phone to ring revived memories of the long telephone siege that had climaxed ten years earlier, and I felt once again the stirring of enlarged paranoid feelings and the latent aggressiveness that accompanied them.
While I rejected the fake Unami's appraisal of Eeyore, it was certainly true that we had been fettered by his presence for the past ten years, or for that matter for the past twenty years since the moment of his birth. Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field: / Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air; / Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing, / Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years; / Rise and look out—. Reading the Blake verse in the darkness I felt as though I were in chains. Eeyore would never be free of brain damage; for Eeyore and his mother, escaping the whip of that oppressor to return happily could never be. They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream. / Singing. The sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning. But Blake had come to realize that his joyous certainty was only an illusion, freedom and emancipation would not appear in this world, and this awareness had led to his long silence as a poet.
My wife's frazzled nerves had sent her upstairs early to bed, but she came into the family room at two minutes before ten, or so I thought. When I looked up from my book, it was Eeyore in a nightshirt from throat to feet that made him look like a foot soldier in a medieval scroll. “Did you forget your medicine? Take it now and go back to bed.”
Eeyore turned obediently toward the kitchen. But he was taking his time, and at the moment I read the intention in his hesitation the phone began to ring. By the time I was on my feet Eeyore had planted himself between me and the phone, and as I reached for the receiver he threw his weight against me with a grunt. It was after a long swim and I should have been quick on my feet, but the body blow threw me off my balance and I fell backward against the dining table. I noticed as I fell that my wife had hurried into the room from her bed and was observing the effect of Eeyore's violence with a frightened look in her eyes. “Yes, yes, this is Eeyore.” Pushing into the wall with his head so as to avoid our eyes, the receiver tight against his ear, Eeyore was speaking into the phone. There was a pause. Then he spoke again, more forcefully than usual: “You are a bad person! Why are you laughing? I cant talk anymore. Absolutely, I can't do anything!”
Eeyore slammed down the receiver as if it were a blunt weapon. His head still leaning against the wall, he appeared to be waiting for something that had boiled up deep inside him to subside. I sat down in a chair at the overturned dining table and my wife stood at my side, shivering with cold in her pajamas, and tried to comfort Eeyore in a voice that sounded like a throttled scream. It was like the sound she had made when she saw me emerge from the house late that night, and it also put me in mind of the sound that had emerged from my mother in that instant when my father had approached the authorities with his hatchet. “If you get so angry you'll have a seizure! Eeyore, do you remember him? Are you that angry about something that happened ten years ago?”
“Are you able to grow so angry?” is what I heard. “Do you have the capacity to get angry about something you remember?” My wife turned to me as if in an appeal, her fear deepening as she spoke: “I'm worried! He could have a seizure over this, or he might injure someone. Why is he so angry? If he does remember what happened at least he'll be careful not to go off with anyone again—he never mentioned what Unami did to him but he remembers, and he's furious about it—”
Eeyore stepped back as though he were peeling his head away from the wall and turned to face us. I realized that what had seemed strange about him when he had come downstairs in his nightshirt was his tension, but now the tension seemed to have melted away, and there was even an echo of confident consolation in the words he spoke to my wife: “I always remembered! He was a bad person. But you don't have to worry, Mama. I wont be angry anymore. There's no bad person anymore. Absolutely!”
Every man has the right to his own illusions even if they are nothing more than that, and the right to express them powerfully: And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night; / For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
7: Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
I have braided my life with my handicapped son and my thoughts occasioned by reading William Blake into a series of short pieces. My purpose, on the occasion of my son's twentieth birthday this coming June, was to survey the entirety of our—mine and my wife's and his younger brother's and sister's—days together with him until now and into the future. I also wanted a book of definitions of the world, society, and mankind based on my own life. Attempting now to complete the series, I have been thinking about the rain tree, my subject in an earlier book of short stories. I have a feeling it has its own place in the circle connecting my son and Blake. I have been led to that discovery by a sort of poem, “Beyond the Rain Tree,” that I wrote when I was in Java.
When I published my rain tree stories in a single volume a certain critic wrote that I had created a metaphor for universal-ism but had failed to carry it outward to a place where it would have relevance for anyone but myself. “You say you've seen the universe in the rain tree. I'll give you that, because you also wrote that your metaphor reached the composer, T, and came back as an abundant echo. The problem is, you remain unchanged even after the rain tree has been lost from this earth. In other words, the ‘rain tree’ in your vision neither evolves nor expands. What do you intend to do, hold onto your aging rain tree metaphor as if it were a talisman until the moment of your own death?”
I had finished serializing my rain tree stories and could only respond with silence. Presently, I sensed my thoughts turning to another rain tree about which I had not written. The actual rain tree. When, standing in a grove of tall trees, I had heard a guide say rain tree, as though by way of explanation, I had glanced quickly over my shoulder in the direction of the voice. In that instant my next action, directly connected to my son, was determined, and I conceived the sort of poem I have just mentioned.
The place where I gazed at the rain tree from a distance in this manner was the Bogor Botanical Gardens. If I ever revisit Indonesia with Eeyore along, I shall go straight to those gardens and almost certainly confirm that the tree in question was a samaan tree of the genus Samanea. This is the tree the Japanese refer to by a variety of names, including the American mimosa; in America, it is commonly known as the monkey-pod or rain tree. It is possible that the tree I had in mind was the American mimosa after all, but I preferred to think of it as a samaan because what I had read of the American mimosa, that it folds its leaves before a rainfall, created a problem for me. I doubted that such a tree would be capable of storing raindrops as they fell, and, as is clear in the following lines from my novel, my image of the rain tree required that special quality: “It's called a rain tree because when it pours during the night the tree sheds raindrops from its foliage until past noon the following day, as if it were still raining. Other trees dry right away, but the rain tree's branches are covered in tiny leaves the size of the pad of a finger and each one can hold a few drops of water. It's a clever tree, wouldn't you say?”
I had spent three hours alone in the Bogor Botanical Gardens on my way home from a trip to Bali with friends. My encounter with the climate and topography and the mythological folk arts of that astonishing island, and being in the presence, even as a passerby, of natives who seemed descended from the universe itself, had triggered in me what I can only describe as a transcendental experience that involved both my spirit and my emotions. I was also aware of a connection being made deep down with Eeyore, from whom I
had been separated for ten days for the first time in a long while. I felt the connection being made at the Buddhist excavation at Borobudur, on the way to Bali, and, after arriving at the island, at the “temple of death” in Pura Darem—moments that seemed to strike at my very soul. Later, when I had left my traveling companions and was visiting the Bogor Botanical Gardens on my own, the distillation of my accumulated experiences on the trip flared up to compel me toward a choice. In the instant I learned that the rain tree I had been longing to see was right next to me, I chose to walk in the opposite direction, toward the maze created by a variety of other trees growing in orderly rows.
With no map to guide me I had been wandering through the gardens, making my way down one path or another when my intuition told me it would lead to trees I wanted to see. I had come upon an area that seemed more like an English garden than a tropical island, bright and open rather than lushly overgrown, and was standing in front of a baobab tree. A group of refined-looking men and women who appeared to be American tourists, the men in linen suits, the women in white summer dresses, was halted down the path in front of me. Their guide, speaking heavily accented English with a confidence that suggested his pride in the job, said with emphasis, as though he were interrupting himself to make an announcement, “This is the famous rain tree.” In the bright Java sunlight I shuddered. For an instant, I squinted up into the sun at the airy canopy of slender branches that had shed their leaves, then lowered my head and moved away in the opposite direction. I had to see this rain tree with Eeyore, I thought, I couldn't look at the tree alone having abandoned him. Beneath the thought was another, that eventually I would be leaving Eeyore behind and setting out alone for a more peaceful world. I felt certain that looking closely at the rain tree without Eeyore at my side to bear me up would be more than I could endure; I felt wobbly on my feet.