I nodded my agreement with Eeyore's brother's explanation. If the atmosphere in our family was normally like a festival, it was because Eeyore was the festival clown and high priest.
“And yet when you were traveling in Europe,” my wife continued, “he had us all walking on eggshells and we felt afraid to laugh in front of him.”
“I received a New Year's greeting from a Japanese student in Germany today, and he wrote that a writer I met in Hamburg was worried about Eeyore. Apparently, the student translated a short story of mine about Eeyore and showed it to the writer, and he said that his heart went out to Eeyore more than to you or me. This is a man who has special feelings about violence based on his own experience, so what he says has some weight. His name is Eppendorfer.”
With this giant of a man who was going bald but retained a youthful beauty around his eyes and mouth, I had ventured down into nuclear shelters in front of the Hamburg Central Station and in the entertainment district known as Reeperbahn. I had also participated in a symposium with Hamburg intellectuals that he chaired. This is how I introduced him in a pamphlet I wrote about my travels through Europe meeting people in the antinuclear and peace movements:
“There is something out of the ordinary I must explain about this writer who turned forty this year. It has to do with his approach to establishing a connection between nuclear violence on a global scale and the violence that resides in an individual. Eppendorfer is a writer who lives and works in Hamburg; but according to the autobiographical novel that may be his best work, The Leather Man, when he was a youth he murdered his girlfriend because she resembled his mother too closely. Subsequently, he spent ten years in prison. Currently he edits a magazine for homosexuals and works as a writer.”
“Eppendorfer is asking how we can control violence,” I said to my wife, “but he's coming from genuine sympathy for people who fall prey to violence or who can't deny the presence of violence in themselves. This is a man who was driven by sexual impulses to murder someone when he was about Eeyore's age. Maybe the latent violence in Eeyore reminded him of himself.” The needle in my wife's fingers stopped moving and she turned around to look at me without removing her reading glasses. I could feel interrogation on the way and felt myself wincing in advance.
“Maybe that's because you've described Eeyore in your novels in a way that leads in that direction. I don't think you distorted what you wrote on purpose. When I read what you had written, I imagined you were describing just what you saw and that shocked you so when you came back from Europe. It's just that the rest of us didn't see him in quite that way when he was behaving so badly while you were gone.”
My wife must have been referring to my description of what I had seen in Eeyore's eyes that first night, the beast in rut. “From the way you reacted, I was afraid something awful was happening that we'd never recover from. We had a terrible time with him while you were gone, but the worst part was the day you came home.”
“I can see how you might have felt that way …” My wife's resentment, appearing now after a yearlong reprieve, had shaken me. “I said that Eppendorfer was seeing himself as a young man in Eeyore, but when I got back from Europe I may have been projecting Eppendorfer's crime onto Eeyore.”
Something else at work beneath the surface had also affected how things had appeared to me, an experience I had had in Europe that I couldn't tell my wife. I watched her in silence as she went back to work on the labels, knitting her brow behind her reading glasses, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. Presently I withdrew and carried my glass of bedtime whisky upstairs to the room that was both my study and bedroom. Stopping at the door to my son's room, which was always partly open, I peered in at the bed where two days from now he would no longer be sleeping. His large head and the bowed arch of his nose visible in the pale light from the hall, he lay on his back looking straight up at the ceiling. The correctness of his posture despite his hulking body reminded me of my friend H lying on his deathbed. A sense of unredeemable loss assailed me. As I stood there, descending into a vast helplessness, Eeyore spoke to me in a gentle voice without turning his head or moving a muscle in his body: “Cant you sleep, Papa? I wonder if you'II sleep when I'm not here? I expect you to cheer up and sleep!”
There was another incident in Europe. We arrived in Vienna and joined a group of Japanese exchange students and some Austrians who were involved in the antinuclear movement. From Vienna we moved on to Hamburg, then took a night train south to Freiburg near the Swiss border to meet with activists and young politicians from the “alternative” party. From there our itinerary took us to Basel to speak with Swiss activists and then through Frankfurt and to our final destination, Berlin.
I enjoyed and was stimulated by the fever pitch at which the TV crew operated, driving themselves unsparingly according to the peculiar logic of their profession. Since we covered all this ground in just one week, our days began early in the morning and ended with dinner in the middle of the night. But our hectic schedule left me little time for feeling low.
In the medieval university town of Freiburg on the edge of the Black Forest, overlooking the Rhine from the slopes of the Schwarzwald, we had lunch at a ski lodge on the outskirts of the town. As I gazed out at the fir and beech woods in the noonday sun I saw the specter of a vast forest being consumed by a raging nuclear fire, such was my state of mind from confronting the reality of nuclear armament day and night. When I awoke in the middle of the night, I read some Blake in the Keynes edition I had bought on the road and felt as if I were clinging to the verse.
Our first night in Berlin, we attended a meeting of a group of students at Berlin Freedom University who had formed a movement to create a nuclear-free zone in Europe; the group had connections to the movement in East Berlin. The urban sophistication and composure of their arguments were an interesting contrast to the passionate gathering in Freiburg. Late that night, we ate what must have been an example of genuine Korean food intended for the Korean laborers in Germany, cold noodles served without broth and smeared with hot mustard, and, having once again confirmed that dinner as a group was an essential part of the process of a day's work together, I returned to my hotel.
It was already past two in the morning when the telephone at my bedside rang. With the curious combination of fluency and awkwardness that occurs when a Japanese who has been living in a foreign country attempts to speak her mother tongue, a middle-aged woman introduced herself. The instant I heard the voice I knew who the speaker was though I hadn't seen her in twenty years, and I could feel her reviving in my memory exactly as she had been the first time I had met her in our college days. Her father was a Korean who had taken a Japanese surname when his country had been annexed, then had graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and married a Japanese woman, and, on the occasion of Japan's defeat in 1945, had reclaimed his Korean surname, Ri. From the two elements used in writing the Chinese character for the surname Ri, “tree” and “child,” I had derived the nickname “Ki-ko” for his daughter, who was now implying by her attitude on the phone that our connection, though no longer close, did at least require that we meet once when we found ourselves in the same city. It occurred to me that my choice of a Korean restaurant immediately after arriving in Berlin may have had something to do with subconscious thoughts about her. “Maybe you're not thrilled by a call from me out of the blue, but this is, you know, Ki-ko. My last name is different from last time, but it's a German name that wouldn't mean anything to you anyhow. I heard you were coming to Berlin at the same time I found out that H had died of leukemia, it's so sad. Anyhow, let's get together tonight.”
“Tonight feels pretty much over,” I said, recognizing her insistence on unconventionality as unchanged from the past (had I known where she was phoning me from I might have agreed, but I was only aware in a vague way that she was somewhere in the city). “Tomorrow morning I have a meeting with the TV crew, and then we'll be in East Berlin for the rest of the day. The day after tomorrow we're j
oining the Berlin antinuclear teach-in at the Otto Braun Hall, and then we finish up that night with a reception at the Japanese legation—”
“You don't sound very friendly, but I won't take it personally. I'll try getting into the teach-in. And don't you be ogling the crowd from the stage looking for a middle-aged woman who reminds you of Ki-ko when she was young! About the time you get back from dinner with the minister or whoever, I'll get in touch. If you've been traveling with a TV crew I bet you haven't been able to go looking for friendly ladies—you should be happy I turned up!”
The way she spoke fit perfectly the image of her that I retained from close to thirty years ago, though we had met more recently just once, and at the same time, in the voice she was affecting to help her bridge the gap of time passed, I could hear something aged. When I hesitated for an instant, Ki-ko spoke to me in a different tone of voice and then hung up: “I bet your trip to East Berlin tomorrow will be canceled—it's the day before the teach-in, right, that's been publicized all over the place? Anyway, I'm looking forward to the day after tomorrow.”
Ki-ko's rooming house, near the Hongo campus of Tokyo University, had been enlarged repeatedly since it had been built before the war, and by the time she lived there it was filled with dark halls that ascended and descended at angles like passageways on a ship. There seemed to be no limit to the number of boarders it could house: I was constantly encountering new faces in the vestibule, which was cavernous in contrast to the rest of the cramped space, and around the main stairway. The mutual friend who was my connection to H was a student named I, now a Balzac scholar, who lived in a pentagonal room that was our gathering place. H's lover, a beautiful girl who was a classmate, shared a room in the same boardinghouse with several other girls from school. As a result of a simple misunderstanding between them—looking back, I can see that this sort of thing had frequently created turning points in H's life—she had rushed into the arms of a graduate student who was already producing superior work as a poet. (After H's funeral, a woman who had roomed with his erstwhile lover and who happens to be the wife of someone who was ahead of us in the department of French literature remarked, putting me in mind just now of the quaint phrase “rushed into his arms,” that her friend had “jumped to the wrong conclusion” when she broke up with H: “The graduate student's room was on the same floor, and from that night on she just never came back!”) Not that any of this affected me at the time; the only interest I took in my friends’ love affairs was I's relationship to a high school girl whom he was grooming to pass the entrance exams to Tokyo University of the Arts. Partly because I alone lived in a different rooming house and partly because they treated me as the youngster of the group, though I spent time with H and the others in his three-way menage, I was excluded from the romantic aspect of their lives.
Then a young girl moved into an isolated room like a lookout tower. She had grown up in Berlin, where her Korean father and Japanese mother still worked for a German construction company, and had returned to Tokyo in order to attend a Japanese university. Having graduated from a boarding school, she spoke adequate German and English, but her capacity to understand complex Japanese sentences was limited. The offer of a job tutoring her in reading Japanese made its way to me. As it happened, H's father was an executive in a Japanese construction company that was involved in a joint venture with the company in Berlin, and he had asked his son to look after the girl. It was H who had moved her into the rooming house from the apartment that the company had provided its foreign employees, insisting she would have no chance in such a place to experience Japanese student life firsthand. At the time, he was caught up in his three-way relationship and must have lacked the emotional leeway to assume the responsibility of a tutoring job.
I was twenty and Ki-ko was two years younger. Meeting her, I was impressed by her cheery drollness and by the curious degree to which she seemed physically off-balance, from her features to her body to the awkward way she sat on the floor of her room that made it clear this was her first experience of living on tatami mats (ten years later, when she had left her German husband and family in Europe and was living in Tokyo alone, the disjointed look of her late teens had transformed into an appearance and bearing I am tempted to call regal). Her hair, heaped above her head, was outlandishly abundant, and her features—crescent-moon eyebrows that recalled the princess in an historical drama, big bright eyes, a round nose, and a pert little mouth with thick lips—were set at odd angles one to the other in a large face with prominent cheekbones. The wry smile she wore may have been a reflection of her self-consciousness about her looks. Her body was large and ungainly, her legs in particular, which appeared far too substantial to belong to an Asian body and which she concealed beneath a thick skirt that reached to her heels and that she hugged to her chest. During our lessons she kept her long arms locked around her knees to balance herself on the tatami floor, otherwise she would have fallen backward. Her voice, which I had recognized the minute I heard it on the telephone in Berlin, made her sound like a small child, nasal and wheedling, but her subject matter and logic were thoroughly realistic.
If I felt there was something comical about Ki-ko, I'm sure she felt the same way about me. Years later, H revealed that Ki-ko had stipulated that he choose his most amusing friend to be her tutor, and I know she was pleased by the funny nickname I gave her. In view of H's very proper upbringing, his behavior strikes me as strange as I recall it now, but he had said to me, provocatively I thought, or possibly mockingly, that Ki-ko had grown up in a land that was sexually unrestrained and consequently that she was liberated to a degree that was unimaginable by our own Japanese standards. I did not shift responsibility to H at the time nor do I intend to now, but I will say that my subsequent behavior, not surprisingly for a young man with no experience, was profoundly influenced by the innuendo in what he had told me: I began tutoring Ki-ko in April when the new term began and stopped a year later when she was admitted to International Christian University, and for that entire year, except when she was having her period, we met every day for the exclusive purpose of having sex.
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 sin
ce 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.