I returned in my mind once again to my conversation with H in his hospital room about the “forgiveness of sin.” Though I was still largely ignorant about Blake at the time, I had brought up his name, as though something were leading me in his direction. Had I known more about Blake, I might have responded to H's remark that believing in the “forgiveness of sin” made life easier by sending him the pages of the illustrated edition detached from their binding so he could rest them on his chest one plate at a time; useless now, the thought filled me with regret. It was in any event just another expression of a presentiment I had deep down, that I would be reading an unbound facsimile edition of Jerusalem on my own deathbed.
Late Saturday afternoon, with his brother and sister already home and awaiting him, Eeyore returned for his first weekend. It was immediately clear that even one week of dormitory life had made a difference in his behavior: there was no front gate clattering open, no sound of shoes being dragged down the walk, and no noisy entrance into the front hall. I was lying on the sofa reading Blake, as usual, and when I happened to look up Eeyore was coming through the door into the room with a large bag of dirty laundry on his shoulder. As I was lifting myself off the couch he quickly seized my left foot angled up at the ceiling and said, shaking it up and down in lieu of a handshake, “Nice foot, excellent foot, was everything all right? Have you been well?”
Lying on my back unable to move I burst out laughing, and so did Eeyore's brother and sister on their way downstairs from their rooms, and so did my wife in the kitchen. There was no question that Eeyore's behavior, not intentional but natural, brought levity to our family. But just now he was clearly exhausted, and gave no sign of responding to my wife's questions about life in the dormitory. Instead, he sat down in front of the hi-fi speakers with his rear end directly on the floor and appeared to be perplexed about which record to play first. His face had lost weight to a point where his profile was angular, and there was even an air of quiet wisdom around his double-lidded eyes. Instead of selecting a record on his own, he presently tuned the radio to Classical Requests on NHK FM. Until dinner was ready, as though his parched body and soul were gulping the water of the music, he sat there in silence, listening to the radio. Apparently, the challenge of playing the cassettes he had taken with him to the dormitory had proved too much for him.
He did stand at one point and go into the kitchen, and my wife told him to pour himself some juice from the refrigerator. Instead of obeying her as he normally would have done, he merely supplied the following information and returned to the radio, as though unwilling to miss a minute of the “short-tune request corner” at the end of the program. “They said we couldn't have tea at the dormitory but there was tea. It was barley tea!”
My wife and I and Eeyore's brother and sister waited until the radio program was ending to take our places at the dinner table, where Eeyore's favorite meal had been laid out, roast veal in cream sauce with spaghetti and potato salad. Though he had turned off the radio, Eeyore remained seated, removing records from the cabinet and replacing them. I called out to him, “Eeyore, dinner's ready. Come sit down.” But Eeyore's eyes never moved from the record player, and then the muscles in his broad, manly shoulders tensed and he said, as though announcing a considered decision: “Eeyore won't be coming. Since Eeyore isn't here anymore, altogether, he won't be coming over there!”
I could feel my wife watching me as I looked down at the table; the sense of loss assaulting me was so virulent I didn't think I could handle her gaze. What had happened just now? Had it actually happened, and would it go on happening? A need to stamp my feet was building in me, and though I managed to keep tears from my eyes I was unable to stop myself from flushing from my cheeks to my ears. “Eeyore, no way! You've come home so of course you're here!” His younger sister's voice was soothing, but Eeyore remained silent. Eeyore's younger brother followed his sister by the beat or two it had taken him to examine his own thought: “He'll be twenty in June, maybe he doesn't want to be called Eeyore anymore. I bet he wants to be called by his real name—that's what they must be using at the dorm!”
An irrepressible man of action once he has taken a logical stand, Eeyore's brother crossed the room and said, squatting at his brother's side, “Hikari, let's eat. Mom's made all your favorites!” “That should be fine. Thank you.” In contrast to his adolescent brother's cracking voice, Eeyore replied in the limpid voice of a young boy. The relief of the moment had something comical about it, like a joint abruptly dislocating, and it set my wife and Eeyore's sister to laughing aloud again.
Shoulder to shoulder despite the large difference in their height and girth, the two brothers came to the dining table. So this is it, I thought to myself as I watched them begin to attack their food, still feeling the shock of loss I had received a minute before: no more calling him Eeyore? The time was ripe, I supposed. My son, the time has surely come for us to cease calling you by your infant name and to begin calling you Hikari! You have arrived at that age. Before long, you, my son Hikari, and your younger brother, Sakurao, will stand before us as young men. Lines from Blake's preface to Milton, verses I had frequently recited to myself, seemed to rise up in me: “Rouse up O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.” With Blake as my guide, I beheld a phantasm of my sons as young men of a new age, a baleful, atomic age, which would require them the more urgently to set their foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings, and I could assuredly feel myself at their side, reborn as another young man. Presently, when old age approached and the time had come to endure the agony of death, I would hear the words proclaimed by the voice from The Tree of Life in encouragement to all Humankind as though they were spoken to me and to me alone: Fear not Albion unless I die thou canst not live / But If I die I shall arise again & Thou With me.
Afterword
The Imagination is not a State:
it is the Human Existence itself.
—WILLIAM BLAKE
Small wonder that Kenzaburo Oe chose William Blake as his ally in Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! Blake was a fervent champion of the imagination's power to transfigure reality, and transfiguration was what Oe set out to achieve. His method is similar to Blake's own: he deploys his imagination against the reality of his severely handicapped son. The father-narrator who is his alter ego is not a disinterested observer; on the contrary, he is an imagination warrior who deforms in order to transform and liberate himself from the circumstances he perceives even as he describes them.
Accordingly, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is fiction. To be sure, Oe has grounded his chronicle in real-life incidents, and uses actual details to convey a picture of life at home with Eeyore that is comic and grotesque and poignant and, perhaps above all, confounding to his caretakers, Oe himself and his wife and two younger children, who live in the shadow of Eeyore's sprawling presence. In its candor, this account is also the bravest installment in the idiot-son narratives that are central to Oe's work. Here for the first time he broaches the taboo subject of sexual desire in his retarded son, a child in a man's body with a penis that springs from its confining diaper like “the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi baring its fangs to strike.” In a dream, the narrator encounters a malign, reptilian version of Eeyore with his penis bloodied. But he uses the freedom bestowed on him by this imagined moment to divert the implications of the scene away from Eeyore to himself:
But the malevolence of that image, no less than my bizarre scream, had its origin in me and no one else. This had nothing to do with my son. On the contrary, I felt like turning to myself and saying, “I see! So these are the twisted thoughts that occur at the outer limits of your consciousness when you consider the issue of your son's sexuality now that he's nineteen!”
Elsewhere, Oe levels a similarly unsparing eye on his own motives and behavior. In the kidnapp
ing episode that is an elaboration of an incident that actually occurred, Oe criticizes his own righteousness with devastating accuracy in the student activist's diatribe:
And ten years from now will your thinking have changed one bit? That's what's so irritating about you—you're like molasses! And what grounds do you have for thinking you're fine just the way you are and will never have to change? We tried thinking about that from your point of view, and we concluded that your grounds are your handicapped child…. Your whole life revolves around your child, you've designed it that way, and your judgment is based on your experience, so outsiders can criticize you until they're blue in the face. Can you deny that?
There is no question that Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is grounded in the reality of Oe's experience with his son. But even when the narrator is communicating “actual” moments from his life, he is transforming them in his imagination. Consider the episode in chapter 6 when he recalls his own father's humiliation at the hands of the local police chief. The prefectural governor has stopped at the village on tour in the last year of the war, and his father has been instructed to demonstrate the machine that is used to compress tree bark into bales. When he hesitates—because the press requires two men to operate and his partner is away at war—the police chief barks at him “‘You there!’” in a voice that has never been used in the valley before, “not even with the livestock.” Later, the youthful narrator deforms the images in his memory of the episode and reassembles them into a vision of social equality in which the humiliation that his father suffered could not have occurred:
The day the governor toured among his constituents and the police chief had lashed my father with his tongue and driven him to make a spectacle of his labor, what if, in that instant, the emperor's proclamation of the war's end had blared from a radio across the entire valley? Then my intrepid father in his cotton smock would have raised his hatchet high in his right hand and ordered the police chief and the governor to take their places at the crank handles and to begin the crunching and clanking. And three or so places back in the line, His Majesty the Emperor would have been removing his white gloves as he waited his turn to go to work….
Imagining an ideal world does not make it so: listening to a radio broadcast for “junior citizens” just after the war, the narrator realizes that “the social order with the emperor at its apex had not turned upside down entirely, at least not to the extent that His Majesty could now be forced to labor at a bark press.”
Nonetheless, as Blake demonstrated time and again, the moral man is obliged to oppose the reality of cruelty or injustice with a redeeming vision. When Eeyore prevents his father from taking the phone and expresses his own outrage at the student who kidnapped him—an act of defiance that lies far beyond the capacity of the actual Hikari!—his mother worries that his agitation will provoke a seizure, and Eeyore, in his desire to calm and console her, asserts an impossibility: “He was a bad person. But you don't have to worry, Mama. I won't be angry anymore. There's no bad person anymore. Absolutely!” Listening at his son's side, the narrator validates him: “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 having echoed a lesson learned from Blake, he quotes the poet exulting at an illusion of his own (that the French Revolution would make its way to England): And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night; / For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
In the original edition of Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! the lines of dialogue spoken by “Eeyore” are set in boldface type that leaps from the page. I recently asked Oe what effect he had intended to achieve with this. “My son's vision is very poor,” he replied, “and I wanted to make it easier for him to read his own dialogue.” I was surprised to see that he was in earnest, for no one knows better than Oe himself that Hikari does not read his father's books. Then I realized it was Eeyore he had in mind.
The principal focus of Oe's effort in Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! to redeem reality from itself is his handicapped son, Hikari. Born on September 19, 1963, with severe brain damage, Hikari was an enigma as a child, neither laughing nor crying, raptly focused on his own interior world. When he was thirteen, he began to compose short pieces for piano and flute or violin, which allowed him to express feelings for the first time in his life of joy and sadness (Hikari is the only idiot savant in medical history with perfect pitch who is able to compose in his head without first improvising on an instrument). But he remained, and remains today, at thirty-eight, much the same enigmatic presence he was as a child, responding to inquiries from the world outside himself, when he responds at all, with half-sentences that point tantalizingly toward a thought or feeling and then trail off.
Eeyore—or Mori or Jin as he is variously known—was born and raised in Oe's imagination. He, too, is severely retarded, but he transcends his limitations in ways that Hikari is unable to do: most dramatically, he is able to express himself in words, conveying wit and tenderness and compassion and his own brand of reductive wisdom about the world as he experiences it. It is this wisdom that enables him to help his father find his way in a manner that recalls Blake's “lost child.”
The premise of Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is that the father-narrator is at work on a guidebook to life for the benefit of his severely handicapped son. In fact, it is the idiot son who turns out to be the teacher. The lessons he delivers are about discovering the promise of renewal in a cruel and apparently unredeemable world. At the end of chapter 3, for example, on the way home from Eeyore's narrow escape from drowning in the diving tank emblematically known as the “dark pool,” the father is overwhelmed by his chagrin at having failed to act decisively in the moment of his son's crisis, and Eeyore shows him a way out of his despair:
“Eeyore, what's wrong? Are you still feeling bad?”
“No! I'm all better,” he replied emphatically. “I sank. From now on I'm going to swim. I'm ready to swim now!”
This is more than consolation: Eeyore's eagerness to succeed where he has failed and his unassailable certainty of success are an inspiration to his father. In a similar moment of revelation in chapter 2, it is Eeyore who gives his father the perspective he needs to live with the fact that the lump that was surgically removed from his son's skull as an infant was a second brain:
I sat vacantly, unable to resolve my feelings, and Eeyore's cheerful surprise at learning the truth, his exultation, provided me with a hint. What reason did I have not to be as encouraged as he was by this new knowledge? My son had come into the world burdened with two brains, but he had survived surgery and the aftereffects—doing his best though it was extremely painful—and he was standing on his own two feet.
In the second half of the book, Eeyore's relationship to his father undergoes a change. He has already been transformed from a menace into a source of consolation and a mentor; now, as if he has stepped into Blake's vision of Albion, the Everyman in whom all mankind is redeemed, he seems to hold out the promise of redemption, very much as if he were his father's savior. In the beatific dream in which Eeyore appears as a radiant youth, the narrator is given to understand that his son has the power to reveal to him the hidden meaning of his life. And on Christmas Eve, as Eeyore leads the handicapped children in a final chorus from inside Gulliver's papier-mâché foot, his father believes that connecting to his son will give him the courage he will need to combat his own destiny:
Until now, it had been my goal to provide definitions of things and people for Eeyore's sake; but at this moment it was Eeyore, presenting me with a stanza from Blake's Milton as a lucid vision, who was creating a definition for his father:
Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star, Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift; And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter d there
This vision went on, however, to unfurl an urgent, baleful image of a black cloud redounding from my right foot to cover
Europe, my contemporary world. And as if in hopes of finding courage to confront that ominous image, I lifted my own voice and truly began to sing.
In the concluding chapter, as in a grand fugue, Oe achieves an ecstatic resolution of the two incompatible domains that are the subject of his chronicle, the historical reality in which Hikari resides and the pure land of the imagination, a land of possibility and promise, represented by Eeyore. But first he must discover access for himself and his father-narrator to the faith that informs Blake's own visions. Earlier, the father has “superimposed” the figure of his son on “the radiantly joyful figure of Albion, that most good and beautiful form of humankind itself.” Now he steps inside the faith he needs by superimposing his “rain tree” on Blake's “tree of life”:
In this way, reading Blake, I happened on The Tree of Life, an illustration that resembled my own image of the rain tree…. 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.