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.
I must have omitted this dream from The Contemporary Game because, working on the book, I hadn't been thinking about death and rebirth as urgently as H as he lay in his sickbed with leukemia. And that had been his point, his final observation about me.
I was frequently criticized for stuffing The Contemporary Game with imagery and symbolism I had borrowed from mythology, folklore, and cultural anthropology. In fact, according to Y, from whose books I took most of what I learned, the imagery and symbolism at the heart of the novel were original to me. And certainly as I wrote I was aware of continually following hints and leads from a storehouse of dark dreams from my childhood days in the valley. As I put words to my dreams, I was thrilled to discover their connection beneath the surface to the mythologies of other places and other countries.
The imagery-symbolism at the core of the mythological world I depicted in The Contemporary Game appears as the reverie of a youth (who is myself) wandering in the night forest with a high fever and, at the same time, as a vision, which is actually observed. At the height of the war, the youth=myself explains the following notion to two astronomers who had evacuated to our village: “If it were possible to perceive all the galaxies in the universe at once in a single glance, perhaps we would discover an infinite number of worlds existing as units of space multiplied by time, and perhaps we would see inside the vastness of those units an infinite number of slight variations on our own world, though we believe it to be unique, whose histories were developing in parallel with our own. In other words, how do we know that what we consider history isn't simply a version of history selected at will by a godlike entity as if he were playing a game and revealed to us as if it were our own; how do we know that we ourselves aren't merely an element in the mechanism of that game?” Although I had spoken lightly of my notion as if it were a joke, it had obsessed me since I had become fascinated with astronomy as a child. The following passage, a scene which the youth=myself re-creates for his “sister” as though he has beheld it in a mind addled with fever, is in fact a summary of the dreams that had recurred to me over ti
me as a child in the valley, with only slight variations:
And then, sister, during those six days I experienced in the forest, I saw with my own eyes as a reality the vision I buf-fooningly described to Apogee and Perigee [the nicknames we had given the astronomers]. As I walked around covering up the fragments into which the Man who deconstructs had broken apart, a space as clear as the glass balls in the model of a molecule revealed itself to me, and inside that lucid space surrounded by trees and shrubs and bushes I could see the Herdsman and the Weaving Girl. In this way, in the spaces as clear as glass balls that continued to appear before me, I saw every one of the characters that are passed down to us in our local folklore. And I saw them to be existing simultaneously in the same moment, even those who will figure in episodes in the future. As I walked through the forest day after day and watched the figures revealed to me, I realized there was no need to search outside the Milky Way, that, just as Apogee and Perigee had said, everything that was and is and will be could be found right here in the forest. I understood that what was here in front of me now was precisely that panorama I had joked about, of close to an infinite number of units of space multiplied by time all viewed at a single glance. My understanding had nothing to do with words, the lesson was contained in the sum total of the vision that appeared before my eyes one scene after another. What's more, the mythology and history of our village-as-nation-as-universe, in which, as I now saw, everything was visible at the same time, coexisting at the same time, that very mythology and history was in and of itself a manifestation of the Man who deconstructs grown to giant proportions. It was for that reason that roaming through every darkest corner of our forest beholding my vision as I walked amounted to recreating the Man who deconstructs from the fragments into which he had broken apart….”
Recalling my friend H's observation, I noticed once again that I had written nothing about birth and death. I was speaking only of the Man who deconstructs, a corpse dismembered but still pristine, undecayed. Yet the dreams from my childhood that were the basis of the image were directly related to birth and death. The glass beads that floated among the dark trees in the depth of the forest, illuminated from the inside by a glowing light, contained every human being from the past, present, and future of our village-nation=small universe. I myself was inside a cocoon like a chrysalis in a state of suspended animation. Those who were to be born into the real world of our village-nation=small universe had only to leave their cocoons and descend into the valley, drifting down like gliders. At the time of death, gliders again, they would return to their cocoons in the forest. And in the fullness of time they would leave the cocoon for the valley again and yet again as rebirth occurs. And the sum total of the people who belong to the complete history of our village-nation=small universe, the sum total of the cocoons of glass beads in the forest, is the Man who deconstructs. The youth=myself who tried to cover every inch of ground in our forest was attempting by that fever-addled act to bring him back to life. And once he revived, every last man, woman, and child of the past, present, and future of our village-nation = small universe, all subsumed in him, were to enter a new stage. A premonition of that grand achievement was always present in my recurrent dream as fierce longing accompanied by terror. In The Contemporary Game, the youth=myself has the following to say about the experiment that brought him as close as possible to achieving his goal but left him short of its actual attainment. It also happens to be the conclusion of the novel:
Sister! The reason I was sobbing and screaming after the firemen in the rescue squad had pinned me down was that I was being forced to abandon the job of re-creating the physical body of the Man who deconstructs. I was giving up then and there the project that had been given to me as my personal trial. I was meant to make my way through all the units of space x time in the mythology and the history of our village-nation=small universe, and by dint of that effort I was to re-create the body of the Man who deconstructs that had come apart, the bones, the muscles, the skin, the eyes and teeth and even all the hair. I'd accomplished the better part of it! I was carried down into the valley wailing in agony at having had to give up attaining the goal that was my trial, and I have lived outside the forest ever since, ridiculed and reviled as the long-nosed forest goblin's fag….
Now then, this vision with its source in the dreams of my childhood maps onto Kathleen Raine's analysis of Blake's verse and the famous watercolor in the Petworth Collection, A Vision of the Last Judgment. And here again are grounds for considering as I do that perhaps everything I have felt and thought in my life, including areas close to my subconscious, was foretold in Blake. (The disjoined body of the Man who deconstructs mirrors symbolism which Blake used frequently and which Raine analyzes with reference to the Osiris myth that Martha Crowley had asked me about, and also to the myths of Dionysus and Orpheus. It might also be said that the youth=myself who transcends the realm of life and death to wander in the night forest is a variation of Blake's image of “the lost child, the discovered child”.)
Referring to the river of humans flowing upward toward a radiant Christ on his throne and descending toward Hell in A Vision of the Last Judgment, Raine asserts that Blake is not depicting individuals but rather “a cluster of cells circulating through the vital force of universal life.” She adds that the painting is Blake's version of Swedenborg's “great man,” “divine humanity” in his case, or “Christ=imagination,” that is, the one God in all things and all things in one God. In her view, A Vision of the Last Judgment with its close to numberless humans rendered in minute detail, represents, in its entirety, the one Jesus as imagination itself.
She refers the reader to the following passage:
This world of Imagination is the World of Eternity it is the Divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world [of Imagination] is Infinite & Eternal whereas the world of Generation or Vegetation is Finite & [for a small moment] Temporal. There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature.
All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the Divine body of the Saviour the True Vine of Eternity. The Human Imagination who appeared to Me as Coming to Judgment among his Saints & throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be established. Around him were seen the Images of Existence according to a certain order suited to my Imaginative Eye.
Raine sees the concept of “divine humanity” as the communal existence that also appears in The Four Zoas; she identifies verses in which Jesus manifests “the entirety of the world family as a single human being,” and views A Vision of the Last Judgment as the ultimate expression in painting of Blake's spiritual universe, that is, of Jesus as a universe consisting of a single human being. When I hold up against Raine's analysis what I felt and thought about the numberless clusters of glass beads in the forest—I could call them cells just as well—and about the Man who deconstructs as the sum total of those clusters of beads from the model of a molecule, many things become clear. If there was something lacking in my vision, it was simply the notion that the day the body of the Man who deconstructs, of the savior, of Jesus, was returned to its original state was in fact the day of “the Last Judgment.”
In one of Blake's most beautiful paintings, the pen and watercolor work titled The Sea of Time and Space, Raine sees the esoteric symbolism of the “cave of the nymphs.” In what may be considered a neo-Platonic category, birth into the actual world meant for Blake a process of becoming mortal that began with a fall from eternal life and an entry into flesh of this world to be generated and to vegetate. In The Book of Thel, the souls on high hear the anguish of those who have left eternal life and become dwellers in the temporary world below, and wonder why they had to descend to earth. The vision of humans whose mortal bodies are being woven for them on a loom in the cave that connects heaven and earth is ubiquitous in Blake's verse. The following stanza put me in mind of Eeyore's deformed head as an infant, a
nd there was a time when I was terrified my wife might discover it:
Thou Mother of my Mortal part,
With cruelty didst mould my Heart.
And with false self-deceiving tears,
Dids't bind my Nostrils Eyes & Ears.
The verse I read just after entering college that was such a shock to me before I even knew it was Blake—That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget, & return / To the dark valley whence he came to begin his labours anew—these lines were a grievous lament for the souls who must fall to earth repeatedly from the cave where their mortal bodies are woven. As a young man, I had been transported by these lines straight to the valley in the forest where I had been born and raised, and it seemed to me that the progress of my own life was being prophesied in them; my childhood reveries with that forest as their stage had the same roots as the cave where the nymphs wove mortal bodies for eternal souls. Until the moment of salvation arrived decisively—in Blake's symbolism, until the time of “the Final Judgment,” and in the symbolism of my dreams and my novel, until the Man who deconstructs is resurrected—the souls of all people would reside in the glowing glass beads among the trees in the forest and must time and time again fall into the valley woven into their mortal bodies.
Eeyore's move to the dormitory was only two days away. Busy all day with household chores, my wife was staying up until late at night labeling the things he was required to take with him. When she had apportioned his epilepsy medicine in powder form into daily doses wrapped in individual papers and had inscribed the date on each dose, she had to put his name on an astonishing variety and number of articles. And each label had to be sewn on: bedding and quilt, two sheets, pajamas (1 pair), pillow, a cloth for bundling the pillow and pajamas. Undershirts (3), underpants (4 pairs), shirts and trousers for everyday wear (2 each), uniform and uniform shirts (2), training pants, training shirt, shorts (1 each), handkerchiefs (5), socks (5 pairs), hangers (3), umbrella (1), slippers for the room, slippers for the halls, everyday canvas shoes (1 pair each), toothbrush, tooth powder, cup, soap, soap case, comb, plastic container, 1 large and 1 small washbasin, shampoo, washcloth, and bath towel (1 each). My wife tilted her head back as she squinted down through her reading glasses at her sewing needle. It was not the first time I had seen her in this pose, but my feelings as I watched now were new and unexpected. I am told frequently that I am somehow childish for my age. If my behavior has to do with my relationship with Eeyore, who retains the spirit of a preschool child, then the same effect should have been at work on my wife. And though she did take pleasure in the amusing quirks of Eeyore's speech and laughed aloud at them, I had always perceived in her a certain youthfulness of her own that predated Eeyore's birth and was essentially unchanged. When he went away to the dormitory would she turn into a woman who behaved as though the passage of time had left her girlishness behind, quiet and rarely laughing? I wondered the same thing about myself. Just then, without slowing the nimble needle in her hand, my wife said, as though she were thinking the same thing, “When Saku came home from his club meeting today you know what he said first thing? That we wouldn't laugh as much when Eeyore moved to the dormitory. He didn't mean that Eeyore did funny things that made us laugh, he said it was because Eeyore kept us cheerful so we were able to laugh at trivial things.”