In the culminating scene of the book, the idiot son rejects the name “Eeyore” and declines to join his family at the dinner table until his brother addresses him as Hikari. Watching his sons approach the table, the narrator's thoughts turn to Blake's preface to Milton:
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.
Hikari means “light.” When Eeyore steps into the radiance that is his birthright, he liberates his father into an ecstatic vision of renewal and redemption that enfolds not only the fic-tive father and son but Oe and Hikari and his brother as well, and which indeed extends to all Mankind. Once and for all, triumphantly, the superior power of the imagination over grim reality has been proclaimed and demonstrated. And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night; / For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
John Nathan
Montecito, California
June 21, 2001
Kenzaburo Oe, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
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