The teach-in proceeded according to schedule. During a break to adjust the time in the satellite broadcast that was beaming live to Japan, the group advocating the nuclear-free zone whom I had met just after arriving in Berlin approached me at the podium to reproach me gently for failing to appear in support of the antinuclear activists in East Berlin. Expecting that we would be meeting a group of clerics from various churches, they had even distributed copies of the English translation of my book of essays, Hiroshima Notes. I was moved to learn that the people I was supposed to have met intended to pray for the health of my handicapped son.
With a wisdom about the world that was the obverse of her eccentricity, Ki-ko had predicted correctly that a change in the TV crew's schedule would result in my trip to East Berlin being canceled. She had now installed herself in what would have been the best seat in the house at a concert, directly in front of the main stage, and was sitting there as majestically as always. With the exception of a small number of resident Japanese who had read about the event in the newsletter of the Japanese embassy, the audience filling the hall consisted of activists in the peace and antinuclear movements from all over West Germany. Many of them also belonged to the so-called alternative movement, which included the advocates of planned simplicity as an approach to conserving our natural resources. Sitting in that crowd with a mink coat draped around her shoulders, Ki-ko was, to say the least, conspicuous, but not quite alone: one of the panelists on the stage, the theologian daughter of Ruprecht Heineman, West Berlin's only president to have visited Hiroshima, was also wearing a mink coat. The blond, blue-eyed daughter of the former president and Ki-ko with her jet-black hair heaped on her head as before appeared to confront each other from above and below the dais like two soaring mountain peaks. Clearly, Ki-ko had become a middle-aged woman, yet despite the striking appearance that was the result of hard work, I was aware of the same droll surprise at herself she had never been able to conceal as a girl of eighteen or nineteen. When our eyes met, she acknowledged me with an antique gesture that predated our generation. There was something like darkness in her glance, and as she tilted her head forward the upper portion of her face from her brow to her nose appeared to be shadowed by gloom. Later in the evening, as the teach-in intensified, I ceased to be aware of her. Afterward, there were farewells to be exchanged with my fellow panelists and discussions with the Japanese in the audience who came up to point out mistakes the German interpreter had made. I was aware, as of a battleship making its way into port, of Ki-ko's presence slowly approaching, but when I had a minute to look up and scan the auditorium she was nowhere to be seen.
It was close to midnight when I got back to my hotel room after dinner at the Japanese legation in Berlin, and the phone rang almost at once. It was Ki-ko calling to propose that we meet right away. She explained that she had been staying in a room on the top floor of my hotel for three days. She had been phoning every ten minutes to see if I had returned, yet it was at least an hour until she opened the door I had left unlocked without knocking and, looking calm and composed, stepped into the room. She was wearing a Korean dress I remembered having seen, of dazzling pale green silk, that reached to her ankles, and, on her bare chest just below her throat, a chrysanthemum. I realized once again that other than crocuses and forsythia I had not seen a single flower during my stay in Europe.
I had been lying on the bed with my shoes on, reading, and as I sat up, Ki-ko sat down on the empty bed across from me, and for a moment we just looked at each other appraisingly. Then I stood up and went to the refrigerator for little bottles of whisky and glasses, and Ki-ko, who already had alcohol on her breath, gave me her critique of the interpreter's German translation. It was her feeling that the real and current threat of nuclear attack that had been the point of my remarks had been somewhat blurred, and that the Soviet threat as outlined by Ishihara, the novelist who was also an LDP member of the Diet, had been glossed over out of consideration for the Soviets. “In other words, the arguments that got through to the German audience were less tense and confrontational than you intended. I guess that's part of the balancing act that professional interpreters do—”
As she spoke, just as when she had visited my rooming house as a young woman, Ki-ko picked up the books on my nightstand and examined them carefully—Blake, The Golden Age of Russian Theater, and a Penguin collection of Orwell essays. When I handed her a glass she was browsing in the Orwell, and, sitting down on the bed again with both her drink and the book gripped in her left hand, she said the following in the haughty tone of a female teacher:
“When H was here to research extremist groups he told me about your son. He must be almost an adult? Have you thought about what you're going to do when he goes must? He'll be a handful!”
I must have turned white with anger; as I sat there unable to say a word, my tongue paralyzed, Ki-ko's large face contorted stupidly with fear and sadness as if it were being slapped by each one of her cosmetic efforts. It was then that I saw for the first time the darkness of her mottled skin beneath the thick makeup.
“You're suggesting that my son will go must like an elephant or a camel but it won't do to shoot him, is that it? You're quoting from ‘Shooting an Elephant.’ Well here's another one of Orwell's words: ‘I thought you were a more decent human being!’”
We sat in silence, looking down at our drinks. Presently Ki-ko placed her glass on the floor with a clumsy, somehow girlish movement of her left hand, then stood up, cleared her throat of phlegm with a groan, and said sourly, “Let's call it a night—I seem to have made a mistake that's not really like me. I'll show you around Berlin tomorrow.” I could see the pitch-darkness into which I was about to plummet right before my eyes, but my tongue seemed paralyzed once again and I didn't even look up as she left the room.
The next day, dispiritedly, Ki-ko and I did some odd sightseeing in Berlin. Partly because the schedule had changed again and I was leaving for Frankfurt at three that afternoon, there was only time for each of us to choose one place to visit. Having seen while I was in college a photograph of a yellow electric eel that was supposed to be there still, I chose the aquarium on Budapest Strasse. The eel turned out to be a disappointment and so did the rest of the fish, but the plant life that had been installed dramatically to re-create their habitats was worth seeing. Ki-ko displayed no interest in the fish or the plants, and, unwilling to climb the stairs, had a lengthy conversation with an aging guard on the first floor.
Ki-ko's choice was a porn film, something she had become even more curious about since her German husband had refused to take her. We found an X-rated theater within walking distance of the aquarium, in the basement of one of the shops that lined the Kurfurstendamm in the middle of the entertainment district. When you bought your ticket you were also given a miniature bottle of whisky. Negotiating with the young man at the counter in fluent German that was emphatically upper class, Ki-ko also received two small bottles of gin and a can of beer for each of us; as we sat down in the theater she took a swig of the beer and filled the can back up with the gin. I did the same, but we didn't stay long enough to empty an entire bottle. Back up on the street, Ki-ko said she wanted to shop for some ingredients for Korean food and we headed east along the Ku-damm toward a department store that contained the most varied food gallery in Berlin. We spoke only a few words along the way, but our conversation was painful to me. I began with a comment on the film: “The lead girl had so much sex it was cruel; but that was a funny scene when she cooled her genitals with an ice-bag.” “When we were just children we had sex repeatedly,” Ki-ko replied. “So much it was cruel, as you'd say—worse than cruel, if you ask me….” Ki-ko also critiqued my remarks at the teach-in: “You were saying a nuclear war won't happen in the near future because it hasn't ever happened yet, am I right? Unfortunately, I don't agree. I think the world has already been destroyed any number of times. I think a small number of people survived, and they rebuilt this miserable world we live in now. But wha
t didn't survive was the lesson to be learned, that's my conclusion after living in Europe for years. I think the destruction of Germany in World War Two—look over there, that's what's left of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church!—was equivalent to the apocalypse. I wonder if the same gang isn't planning to use nuclear weapons to destroy the world and then rebuild it again? A nuclear bomb shelter is a reality—we built one at home.”
“If it's possible,” I said, “to rebuild the world.”
“Even if they couldn't rebuild it, I think they'd insist that was okay, too—these are people who believe in ‘the last judgment.’”
“That's not how Blake viewed the last judgment,” I started to say, but I had no heart for continuing a debate with Ki-ko.
It was time to shake hands good-bye, and in the dry, German atmosphere beneath a cloudy sky, as she extended her left arm in a gesture familiar from years before, the face that Ki-ko turned directly toward me for the first time that day, while it retained its dignity and radiance, was clearly the face of a Korean woman nearing the end of middle age. When I returned alone to my hotel, the young men on our TV crew were piling gear into a mountain of cases just outside the front entrance—I expect they must have seen a Japanese man who was also nearing the end of middle age and who appeared to be consumed with grief. I had begun writing my series of stories about the symbiosis between Blake's Prophecies and my handicapped son by linking the grief of an aging writer and my son's unacted animal impulses. Here in Europe, could I deny that it was in me that both grief and animal impulses had been lodged? And wasn't that the reason I had been so shaken to discover the same sentiments in Eeyore when I returned to Japan?
By the time I woke up, my son had already left for the dormitory. That Monday with Eeyore gone, the space inside the house seemed vast and unfamiliar; even more unexpectedly, I felt as though I had more time on my hands than I knew how to fill. I wandered around the house looking for my wife. I wanted to talk to her about my feeling of being suspended helplessly in a thirty-hour day, but it was as though the house's interior had been enlarged and I had difficulty finding her. I felt apprehensive. Apparently my wife was also feeling at loose ends: in our winter-withered garden, she was clipping berry-covered vines out of the shrubbery to decorate a wreath of dried flowers.
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:
That the darkness in front of me was mostly filled by a single, giant tree was to be inferred from the layered mass of roots faintly reflecting light and radiating outward in this direction. Gradually, I perceived that this black mass like an enclosure of boards was glowing palely with a grayish-blue luster of its own. This centuries-old tree with its welter of well-developed roots above the ground rose into the darkness obscuring the sky above and the sea below the cliff.
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:
Jesus replied Fear not Albion unless I die thou canst not live
But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me
This is friendship & Brotherhood without it Man is Not
So Jesus spoke! The Covering Cherub coming on in darkness
Overshadowed them & Jesus and Thus do Men in Eternity
One for another to put off by forgiveness, every sin.
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.
Toward the rain tree
And through it to the world beyond
Our spirits merged, consubstantial,
Yet selves as free as they can be
We return. …
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?