I discovered the verse in a folio-sized book that was lying open on the table next to where I was sitting. A number of other Western volumes were bundled in a partially untied silk cloth alongside the book, but there was no one seated in the chair in front of them. Lifting myself out of the chair I had just settled in, I peered over at the opened book and began to read, distracted by the direct and indirect quotation marks at the beginning of each line, the nearer, lower half of the right page. When I came to the lines quoted above, I sensed that I had been handed a decisive prophecy about my own life, only now entering a new phase—in truth, I sat there stunned. Just then, the owner of the book that had been left open—as I think about it, he must have been younger than I am now—a person who appeared despite his youth to be a professor or an assistant professor, returned to his seat. He stared at me unblinkingly, his eyes fastening themselves to me as though with glue, and as the thought flickered across my dazed brain that this was perhaps an area of the library that was reserved for the use of faculty, I left my seat as though to flee. The professor or assistant professor never took his eyes off me, and I wondered uneasily if he might be thinking that I had been trying to steal the Western books that belonged to him (in those days, imported texts were not readily available to students).
As for the verse which had caught my eye, I had not even asked the book's owner to confirm for me whose poetry it was or the work it came from—it had seemed to me to be a dramatic poem—but I was not about to forget lines which had shaken me in this way, and it was my thought that I would certainly be able to track them down again on my own. In those days, I tended to rely on the power of my memory; besides, the lines in question had lodged themselves firmly inside me. I had been sitting near a corner where a large Webster's dictionary had been installed on a high stand, another reason for supposing that I had chosen an area for use by researchers and scholars with special privileges, and had stood up reflexively; cutting diagonally across the vast hall of a reading room, I sat down in the opposite corner, and, without taking out the Gide novel I had been struggling my way through with the help of a dictionary, I cradled my head in my hands and lost myself in thought.
… & return / To the dark valley whence he came—I remember thinking first of all that I had never consciously considered the valley in the forest where I was born and raised a “dark valley.” The area in our village along the main road that included our place was known as “the Naru-ya” and since the word we used to denote flatness in our dialect was naru-i, I had taken the name to mean “flat.” But the children of the Korean laborers who had been brought to the village under coercion to haul lumber out of the forest said that naru was the word for sun, and ever after I had conceived of our valley as a sunny place.
Now, having left the valley for this great city, it occurred to me abruptly as I sat there in that large, impersonal building, holding my head in my hands next to a lamp attached to an even more impersonal cubicle, that my valley was in its way also a dark valley, although it was not only in the negative sense that I was thinking of the word “dark.”
That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget—the notion that “labour” and “sorrow” were not opposites but two adjacent aspects of life was not unpersuasive; it put me in mind of my mother's labor after my father's death when I was in my late teens. The words that followed struck me as a frighteningly accurate prophecy about my own future.
I had entered Tokyo University and was just beginning to study French. I had chosen the field after a year of deliberation following my graduation from high school, and I felt no hesitation about continuing it. Even so, I was aware of an undercurrent of incongruity. Now, through the agency of Blake's verse, I sensed I would be able to bring this uneasiness to the surface by thinking about its connection to having left my valley behind me. I had set out from a poignantly familiar place to live a marginal life in a corner of a giant city whose very topography was a mystery to me. I was studying French, but other than that, except for some part-time work, I was being spared from having to “labour” at anything. Which meant that, for the time being, I was also being spared “sorrow” I was living a life on a plane apart from Labour & sorrow, but only temporarily. To be sure, I was learning French, but before long I would forget it, I felt certain of that.
… & learn & forget—it was as if, in my case, I was learning only in order to forget. I had left the valley as though I were being chased away only to begin a life of seclusion in the giant city and this was the entirety of that life. In the end I would return to the valley. Whereupon the “labour” and “sorrow” I was being spared temporarily in my life in the city would begin in earnest.… & return / To the dark valley whence he came to begin his labours anew.
Slumped heavily in the chair, I sat without moving, my head in my hands. When it was time for lunch, I bought bread and a croquette at the stand at the entrance to the dorm and made a sandwich like everyone else, dousing the croquette with sauce—the student association had posted a notice at the stand that was a sign of how miserably poor the times were: “If you have not purchased croquettes, please refrain from pouring sauce on your bread!” I ate my sandwich standing among the crowd around the drinking fountain: I didn't have the money to buy milk. I surveyed the prospect of my life and had the feeling I was just now accepting the dismal view for what it was; the students all around me appeared naive as children.
As I had expected when I read those lines on the page opened next to me, I did after all discover on my own that the poet in question was Blake. To be sure, it was nearly ten years after my experience in the library at the Komaba campus, about a year before the birth of my eldest son. While I was a student of French literature, and for four or five years after I graduated, whatever reading in a foreign language I did was exclusively in French—I continued to feel that I was “learning in order to forget"—and always while sitting at a desk so that I could use a dictionary and make notes in the margins. Somewhere along the way, perceiving that I was not going to be a scholar of French literature—confirming an early sign of where & learn & forget was heading—I began including books in English in my reading once again; and, feeling free to lie sprawled on a couch, I made my way through a wide variety of English literature consulting the dictionary infrequently and writing nothing down. The change was due in part to a new lifestyle that came from being married.
And so it happened that I was reading an anthology of English poetry, which included Blake. As I read a stanza from one of Blake's Prophecies, I felt certain that the style, the shape, and the sentiments of the language were identical to the lines that had struck me so forcibly that day in the past as I was moving from boyhood to youth. I felt so certain that I went to Maruzen bookstore that same day and purchased Blake's complete poems in one volume. Moving from line to line with only a glance at the first few words, I began a search for that verse which was in my memory yet not literally memorized. By the following day, I had succeeded in identifying the lines in the long poem I have mentioned, The Four Zoas.
It was already the middle of the night, but I telephoned my friend Y, a classmate at Komaba who had gone on to graduate school in English literature and was now a lecturer at a women's college. I asked if he could think of a scholar who might have had a book open to Blake in the library and would have been a middle-aged professor or assistant professor in the days when we were students. If the scholar in question had published anything on Blake, perhaps there was a commentary on this section in The Four Zoas.
“Professors with some connection to Blake at Komaba in 1953 or ‘54, or on loan there from the main campus, right? That would be Professor S or Professor T, but the age doesn't fit. They would both have been over fifty in those days.” As long as I had known him, Y would always cite the objective facts before he was willing to speculate, which he now did as follows: “I suppose it's possible, and this is only conjecture, that it might have been a famous character who was known to people in English lit in our years as
the ‘autodidact.’ The story was that he got sick and had to drop out of the old Imperial Upper School. About the time we were there, he recovered and was trying to talk the university into readmitting him. There was no chance of it happening, the system was entirely different, and he had a history of mental instability, but apparently the Dean's Office was letting him hang around in the library. He'd show up with a volume of poetry, usually John Donne, and he'd ask a student to open to any page and then predict the student's destiny from the metaphors and symbols he found. I never met him in person.” I had received an unmistakable signal that it was precisely my own destiny that was foretold in the verse, in this case not from Donne but Blake, on the page opened on the desk next to me. I had retained this impression for close to ten years, and I had just now gone so far as to track down the lines.
“The nickname ‘autodidact’ came from Sartre, your specialty, I think from Nausea.” My friend sounded uncomfortable, but he also seemed to enjoy the revelation. “Apparently he proposed things, you know, in the nature of homosexual acts to the students he got to know when he predicted their destinies.”
“I wasn't good-looking enough to get into that kind of trouble. But I am thinking the man who opened his book to Blake next to me must have been this ‘autodidact.’ Which would mean the book must have been his own and not the library's, so there's probably no point in going there to look for it now—unless of course he still shows up with the same book—”
“He's dead. He got blatant about that behavior I mentioned and, just like the Sartre character, he was thrown out of the library—in Nausea I think he was arrested, wasn't he?—anyway, he wasn't permitted on the campus anymore and apparently that triggered his depression. Someone at the Dean's Office got worried and went to his apartment. He'd been dead two or three days when they found him. It was in the papers.”
The lines I had seen and remembered are a description of the “caverns of the grave” spoken by one of the wives of the divine figure who is a character unique to Blake's epic poems. At the time of my first encounter, if I had possessed the city-boy poise to question “autodidact” about the verse when he returned to his seat, perhaps he would have touched on my own destiny in the course of his explanation. If his words had overlapped the augury of my future that I had read in the poetry myself, I might have believed his prediction—I have no idea how the other young men he encountered had reacted—and become his disciple. Sooner or later, of course, his homosexual advances in my direction would have put an end to the relationship.
… & return / To the dark valley whence he came. The dark valley in this line, despite the negative adjective “dark,” filled me with powerful longing. After the birth of my eldest son, which seemed to make definite all over again the impossibility that I would return to my valley—what purpose could French possibly serve there?—I found myself unable to say my valley except in the domain of my imagination; nevertheless, there were times when I dreamed of returning with my son. I want to emphasize that I was not dreaming while asleep; these were reveries that had the curious quality of occurring in the brightness of consciousness while I was awake. I say this to readers who might otherwise be tempted to divine my fortune in these dreams as though they were of a variety familiar to them.
My mother and other members of the family were assembled in the main room in what appeared to be the shadows of a dim light that gave their skin an inky look—this was literally a dark valley. I recall that my father, who had died when I was a child, was also sitting there somberly in formal Japanese robes and family crest. I had just returned to the dark valley with my son, his head still bandaged where the lump had been cut away (even in the reverie, my wife never appeared). The entire family, my mother included, viewed my handicapped son as the one and only asset I had managed to wrest from my life of Labour & sorrow in the great city. Under the circumstances, no one was cheering, but their expressions were saying “Congratulations!” and “Well done!” Over time, I returned to this scene frequently. As my son grew up, the pair of us appeared to alter, but my mother and the rest of the family in the dark valley never seemed to change. Thinking about it now, I see clearly that the image I created in the form of a daydream was connected to thoughts of death. That would explain why my father, who had died at about my current age, was the only one in the room wearing an old-fashioned formal kimono.
A definition of death. To me, this was connected to multiple layers of experience from my early childhood in that valley in the forest on the island of Shikoku, and to the topography of the valley which, without reference to those experiences, I am unable to recapture in my mind. Naturally, in the more than thirty years that have passed since I left the valley I have accumulated other experiences having to do with death, but I realize, looking back, that these were secondary. It was in the valley that I encountered death as an equitable visitor to both my grandmother and my father, whom she had influenced so powerfully. And it was in this valley that I first saw a man who had hanged himself. In the latter case particularly, “in this valley” is a crucial signifier of the experience. When I recall the scene that day, centered around the corpse hanging by the neck, this becomes clear.
The body was discovered behind the stone Jizo altar, in an enclosed area that was slightly lower than but abutted the woods around the Shinto shrine. The little man who was considered beneath notice even by the children when they ran into him along the main road had hung himself. My kid brother went to touch the body—"It was swinging like crazy,” he reported. I observed from behind the crowd that had gathered from the village and beyond. We were standing in an area used for airing sake barrels, in the only brewery in the village, already out of business by that time, an area the children were not normally allowed to enter. Looking past the stone Jizo and the Shinto shrine to the deeper green that lay beyond, surveying the forest, which was not a place where people lived, with the hanging corpse at the center of my field of vision, I was filled with admiration. Ah! A man picks a spot like this to hang himself! With the corpse as focal point, the significance of the valley's topography became clear to me (when I used this way of seeing things as the basis of an explanation of how our village was structured, the teacher at the Imperial public school, who was not from our region and required a context I couldn't create, laughed at me as though in pity).
A definition of death. I want to begin with another incident from my experience in the valley. This one left me with an actual scar on my body, and the scar allows me to feel as though the incident continues inside me even now.
It was already late in the war and I was a fourth-grader at the public school. Around the back of our house and down the narrow slope that separated us from the neighbor's, you came to the Oda River. To my mind, the river was an alternative to the main road that ran past the front of the house: when you put together a raft and floated downstream, meanings normally hidden became clear. One morning early in the summer, when the air and the water were still chilly and my friends had stayed away from the river, I waded in alone armed with a spear gun for fishing. Although it wasn't a distinct motive, I recall now that I was clearly being influenced, my pale, scrawny child's body-and-soul together, by the story of an accident that had occurred upriver two or three days earlier in the vicinity of Oda Miyama.
The particulars had made their way downriver to our village as idle conversation here and there along the roadside: a child had drowned in a pool of the upper reaches of the Oda River. The boy had dived deep with his spear gun; he was after the fish that schooled in the caves beyond the crevice in the rocks. Where the crevice opened, you tilted your head to one side and slipped through the first narrow barrier. From there, though your shoulders wouldn't clear, it was possible, if you shifted slightly to the side, to straighten your head and survey the cave and even to extend your arms into it. When you had your fish speared, if you reversed direction and backed through the barrier by tilting your head to the side again, you could float back to the surface. The boy had c
ompleted the better part of this process handily when he neglected to tilt his head at the last barrier. With his jaw and the top of his head clamped between the rocks above and below him, they had had a time of it raising his drowned body to the surface, so it was told. Even a grown man might forget a small thing like turning his head aside when he was out of air and fighting to reach the surface—the account of the accident came with a lesson. Alongside the adults, I was listening.
The next morning, wiping my goggles with a handful of punkweed, my useless spear gun in my right hand—the rubber bands of the sling were rotten—I kicked boldly across the sun-flooded surface of the water. I made my way upriver, to where the swift current created a deep pool at the base of the two rocks known as “the Couple,” one large, the other smaller.
We children seemed to know the name of every rock on the Oda River, and of every pool and every rapids. It was in that way, by putting it all in words, that we grasped the topography of the valley.
On this morning, although I had stayed away until now because I was not certain I had the lung power to sustain me to the necessary depth, I intended to dive all alone to a place I knew only from hearsay—the adults called it Carp Cave. I planned to have a look inside the crevice in the rocks; if you got deep enough, I had heard, you could squeeze through the barrier by that same tilting of the head to one side. I dived. As if I had tried this before, as if, just two or three days ago, I had tried it in this same water upriver, my dive carried me down to the rock barrier and I worked my head through by turning it and then shifted my position sideways, holding my body horizontal against the upward current. I straightened my head: in front of my nose, in a pristine space brimming with the faint light of the dawn, was a school of carp beyond counting. Unmoving carp, a still life. Of course they appeared still only in relation to the mass of the school; each fish was swimming ceaselessly upstream against the current, which moved even here at the bottom of the pool. Their pale, green flesh was lit from within and embedded with tiny silver points, which also gleamed. And the small, round, watery black eyes of each carp in that school of fish were returning my gaze. I extended my right arm and fired, but the cave was deeper than I thought, and the spear propelled by rotting rubber didn't even carry to the school. I wasn't disappointed; I even felt it was appropriate that the fish had not been disturbed. I would enter this cave smack in the middle of the river in the valley, this egg no matter how you looked at it, just as I was, and go on living here, breathing through gills.