“You bet it is—really something!”
How to handle this new information, that there had been a pair of brains? 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.
“Eeyore, you're alive because that other brain died. You need to take good care of the brain you have and do your best to live to a ripe old age!”
“Exactly! Let's do our best and live to a ripe old age! Sibelius was ninety-two, Scarlatti was ninety-nine, Eduardo Di Capua lived until he was one hundred and twelve! Oh boy, that was really something!”
“Does the young gentleman like music?” the cabbie asked in an attempt to recover lost ground, his eyes on the road ahead. “What kind of a musician was that Mr. Eduardo?”
“He wrote ‘O Sole Mio'!”
“You don't say! Isn't that something! You take good care of yourself!”
“Thank you very kindly, I'm going to do my best!”
I was picturing a desert landscape. A cold babe—a babe who was only a small-sized brain with a single eye opened in it—stands in the furious air. It screams, the kind of scream a babe who is only brain matter can scream:… the children of six thousand years / Who died in infancy rage furious a mighty multitude rage furious / Naked & pale standing on the expecting air to be delivered.
3: Down, Down thro' the Immense, with Outcry
About two years ago, when my son was still in the special class at middle school, there was a period when I was trying to teach him to swim. For several months in the autumn and winter of that year, I took him with me to my swimming club at least once and sometimes three times a week. I was prompted by a remark the physical education teacher made to my wife at Parents’ Day, about how difficult Eeyore was to handle during swimming drills. Apparently, the teacher had expressed his view that my son lacked the will to float, even the body's instinctive will to float—“It was a little like training a cup.” These thoughts were disturbing to my wife, but when she reported them to me I knew immediately what the teacher was talking about. And when I took my son to the pool, the nature of the poor fellow's distress became so clear to me that I had to laugh out loud. There was no question that this was going to be harder than teaching a cup to swim.
If you put a cup down on the water's surface, it will fill and sink. But if a cup had ears you might at least say, “C'mon! Let's try to stay afloat!” In my son's case, while it was clear that he did not float, it wasn't so easy to say with any finality that he sank. Standing in the pool I would give him instructions, and it appeared that he was doing his best to follow them obediently; at the same time he also appeared oblivious. Gradually, I stopped imagining the part-time phys ed teacher's irritation and began feeling my own.
“Again, Eeyore! Head in the water, arms out in front, and let's kick those feet as hard as we can!”
My son wasn't afraid of the water. He didn't hesitate for an instant. And he moved just as I told him to. It was just that he moved at a pace that had nothing to do with the standard I was vaguely expecting. Slowly. Like a viscous liquid sinking into a blotter, or a bivalve burrowing into the sand.
Lowering his head peacefully to the water and extending both arms in front of him, he lifts his feet from the bottom. He moves his arms in a manner that suggests he is picturing himself not only floating but swimming the crawl, but the motion is so thoroughgoingly gentle that his arms seem to encounter no resistance from the water. Meanwhile, his body gradually descends toward the depths. And at a certain point in the process, in an entirely natural move, Eeyore stands on the bottom again. He doesn't panic on the way down, there is no writhing or swallowing lungfuls of water. Since in the course of this series of actions he has advanced two or three feet, repeating the series will carry him, very slowly to be sure, from one end of the pool to the other. It appears he may even be thinking secretly that this is his way of swimming in the pool.
I called out to him constantly, “Dig your hands into the water” or “Try pushing forward with your feet,” and each time he responded in the same amiable way, “That's an excellent idea!”
But the minute he lowered his head to the water he began to move like a swimmer in a dream or an image in a slow-motion film and showed no sign of improving. Sometimes I put my goggles on and swam alongside to coach him along: underwater, his movements were calm, so very calm that I could see his deep-set, oval eyes wide open in an expression of quiet wonder and could see each bubble from his nose and mouth as it rose glintingly toward the surface. I found myself wondering whether this might not be the manner in which nature intended a person to behave underwater.
Though I took my son with me to the pool twice a week and sometimes more, there was no indication that his swimming style was changing. Since the swimmer himself appeared to be having a good time, there was nothing wrong with that; but on days when the pool was crowded, we had a problem. The club had two pools for competitive swimming and three deeper pools for diving and scuba training, but Eeyore could use only the twenty-five-meter main pool when a lane had been reserved for “leisure swimming.” When the main pool was occupied by swimmers from the swimming school or those practicing in the training lanes, the only other place available for him to swim was the twenty-meter pool reserved for club members.
But since mid-autumn, there had been times when the doors in the glass partition around the Members Pool had all been locked. It had been reserved, in other words, by a special group. Since they were never there for more than two hours, I would let Eeyore swim in a training lane in the twenty-five-meter pool when one happened to be open, or, failing that, we would wait for the group in the Members Pool to finish. Once Eeyore had put on his bathing suit and gone downstairs to the pools, there was no point in even mentioning that swimming might not be possible that day. On the other hand, if it came to waiting, my son would sit on the bench at poolside for as long as necessary without saying a word.
The group that had chartered the Members Pool was unique to the club, and had its own unique pattern of activity. It consisted of fifteen young men in their late twenties. I can be definite about their number because we could hear them counting off before and after practice on the other side of the glass partition. For reasons I shall explain, the counting was in Spanish—uno, dos, tres, cuatro—and always ended with quince.
The young men were of course Japanese, and everything about them, from their bodies to the expressions on their faces to their most trivial movements, made it appear that they were being trained in the manner of our former military. Their roll call in Spanish was unmistakably military in style. Some time ago, I spent several months in Mexico City; and I remember waking on a Sunday or holiday morning to children outside the apartment shouting back and forth in a Spanish round with vowels that was so familiar it took me back in a flash to the Shikoku village of my boyhood and churned my dreams as I awakened—the Spanish of this roll call had nothing in common with the language of my youth; there was a growling coarseness to it that was the sound of a Japanese soldier.
There were other things about these young men that smacked of the military: their short crew cuts, the khaki bathing suits like short pants they wore when they came downstairs to the pool—when I ran into them as they were getting off the midsize bus like a patrol wagon that brought them to and from the club, they were wearing dark- and light-green-striped camouflage suits—and the identical look of their bodies. The swimmers from the university swimming club who worked out in the weight room on the third floor had skin and muscles that were the product of bringing excessive nourishment under control in the course of a pampered life of luxury. Theirs were privileged bodies, supple and abundant to a degree that was almost wanton. When they wer
en't exercising, their spoiled, juvenile faces had a way of looking slack and foolish. The military young men, partly because they were ten years older as a group, were another physical type entirely. Their bodies were also developed, but there was something hungry and reckless about them, as if they had earned their muscles doing hard labor like digging ditches. When they trained in the pool, they swam like amateurs, flailing the water powerfully but ineffectively with their hands and feet; and their leader, a man named Shumuta who had a national reputation as a swimming coach, seemed disinclined to correct them.
When the young men arrived in their lockup of a bus with its windows narrowed by wooden frames, they filed into the club through the employees’ entrance and changed in a corner of the swimming-school locker room that was reserved for their exclusive use when they were in the building. While they were swimming in the Members Pool, the glass partition was kept locked, and when they were finished they showered and drove away in the bus without ever using the steam room or the sauna. In other words, the sphere of their activity isolated them from the rest of the club, but some of the women members were openly resentful nevertheless: “It's like they come here to swim from prison. They don't even talk to each other, and those grim faces! Those guys aren't living in the same age as we are!” I remembered this last remark in particular because I had received the same impression; it felt to me as if the golden years of Japan's postwar resurgence would fit nicely into the gap in time that separated the college swimmers and the young men's group. Their leader, on the other hand, Mr. Shumuta, was a sunny, vivacious individual who seemed very much in the present, and while the young men were in the pool he would sit in the steam room or soak in the hot tub and strike up cheerful conversations with anyone in earshot. In fact, the contrast between Mr. Shumuta and the young men he led was so extreme it pointed in the direction of something almost grotesque about their relationship.
Although I didn't ask about details—Mr. Shumuta's background was apparently common knowledge among the regulars at the club and making outright inquiries felt awkward—there was no question that he had been an Olympic-class athlete in track and field. At the height of his career, several of his toes had been severed in an accident. The pink stubs seemed raw even now; when he sat soaking in the cold-water tub with his meaty but firm legs thrown out carelessly in front of him, it was impossible not to notice them. After the accident, he had apparently given up competition and built a successful career as a personal trainer to athletes, traveling as a regular member of the Japanese team to one Olympics after another. Until recently, he had also taught physical education at Keio University. The director of the athletic club at Keio had been his prize student during his college days, and as a result of that connection it seemed that Mr. Shumuta had been an adviser to our swimming club ever since it had been founded. Undoubtedly, it was this history that had persuaded the club, in a radical departure from its own policies, to allow private use of the Members Pool, albeit for limited periods of time.
His high, jutting forehead and two cheeks like three opposing hillocks in the face of a huge baby, Mr. Shumuta would install his large body in the sauna or the hot tub and fill the room with hearty laughter that echoed off the tile wall, yet when you actually spoke with him it was immediately clear that this was not a man who was characterized by youthful innocence. Notwithstanding that glistening face of a happy giant baby, the narrow eyes like wrinkles beneath wispy eyebrows made you wonder if a smile had ever crinkled them before.
“Sensei”—on his lips the word didn't sound like the standard salutation used among faculty colleagues to address each other; there was contempt in his emphasis, as though he were a day laborer with something gnawing at him speaking down to a man who earned his living in his study. When I went into the steam room alone, having left my son soaking in the tepid hot tub, Mr. Shumuta had called out as though he had been waiting for me.
“I heard about you from a friend in Mexico City. I've been going down there since the Mexico Olympics. Someone else I know, a Japanese, he owns a pretty big truck farm and I'll be taking some young fellas down there and moving in. The Mexicans are making a fuss about importing labor into the country but I expect that'll go away—as soon as I get them trained a little on the farm we'll take off for the wilderness. Anyways, Sensei, I was hoping you'd give my boys a talk about Mexico—it would be great if you could do it in Spanish!”
“I can't help you there! I only picked up a few words and phrases—”
“C'mon now, let's not be modest! A man of your background, I'll bet you speak like a native if you're in the country for half a year!”
“I did stay in Mexico City, but I didn't concentrate on learning Spanish.”
“You can say that till you're blue in the face, but I know how easy it is for a sensei like you to pick up a language. You take my boys, now that's a different story! As long as they're at training camp they're only allowed to use Spanish. It's a solid year with no furloughs and no Japanese books allowed in the dormitory. No newspapers or television either. Not even radios. There's a few of them have taken to speaking Spanish in their sleep. The trouble is, they wake up, you get my meaning? By now they must be starved for Japanese; someone got hold of a cartoon magazine one of the kids in swimming school had brought with him and the whole gang was all over it like sharks, tearing it out of each other's hands until pages went flying. I caught them in the act and threw the whole lot into the changing room and made them run the gauntlet buck naked. I was careful to make sure that none of the children were peeking in—the director here is pretty fussy about discipline. If you ask me, you can't do better than a little whomping on the buttocks, you get my meaning? Anyways, I'd really like you to speak to them in Spanish. About half this gang used to be right-wing fanatics, and the other half were Commie agitators. All of them would love to have a discussion with you, I'm not sure why. The ones who studied with M Sensei”—Mr. Shumuta abruptly mentioned the name of the famous novelist who had committed suicide a number of years ago—“are the keenest—”
“I really can't speak Spanish—I have enough trouble with English if I don't prepare in advance.”
“There you go again! You don't have to be so cautious. My boys are former radicals; now they've seen the light and they're off to Mexico in search of a new world, they're not into violence. It's debate they want, just debate, you get my meaning? Think it over—how about sometime around the tenth anniversary of M Sensei's suicide? Wouldn't that be something! I'd appreciate it!”
I noticed Eeyore's eyes peering anxiously in at us through the heat-resistant glass, as though disturbed by Mr. Shumuta's explosive laughter, and I stood up and left the sauna. I was feeling curiously guilty about the invitation he had offered me in a voice that was both amused and a challenge. The truth was, I did speak Spanish—I wondered whether it wasn't simple cowardice that was making me so cautious about these former rightists and leftists who were said to be interested in me?
Following my conversation with Mr. Shumuta, I couldn't help thinking about his young men, and my interest in them led directly to personal issues of my own. As it happened, the tenth anniversary of M's suicide was approaching, and posters for commemorative events to be sponsored by various groups on that day began appearing on street corners.
Meanwhile, one of the club's members had come to his own conclusions about Mr. Shumuta's group that cast them in a different light than their leader. He seemed to place particular importance on the tenth anniversary of M's death. This member's name was Minami, and while there were those who felt that his critique was based on negative rumors that were motivated by resentment of the group for monopolizing the Members Pool at designated times and locking others out, he was, after all, an assistant professor studying the physical and psychological dimensions of sports medicine at Keio University, where Mr. Shumuta had formerly taught, and this gave him a degree of credibility. On the other hand, he and the other regular members of the exercise club retained a certain happy
-go-lucky quality from their student days and teased one another in a manner that appeared jocular but concealed malice. All the while he spoke, sitting in the sauna—Mr. Shumuta happened not to be there—a smile had played around his gentle, feminine eyes in counterpoint to the murky darkness of his subject.
Minami held that it was not quite the case, as Mr. Shumuta had represented, that some of the young men in the group had studied with M. In fact, while it was true that the group was split between extreme positions on the Left and the Right politically, the bond that united all its members was their adherence to M's philosophy and M's action. Not all of them had belonged to his private army, but most of them in their individual loneliness had read and admired his writing, and had felt abandoned when he committed suicide. It wasn't until after his death that they had formed a group to study his thinking and his action. At some point, a student who had been a member of Mr. Shumuta's athletic club had served as the middleman in bringing his former coach and the group together. Mr. Shumuta had become friendly with M at the gym where he lifted weights.
Mr. Shumuta had been advising the group for ten years; but they had been training at a camp with their numbers reduced only since the end of the year before last. A majority of voices had called for culminating their activities on the tenth anniversary of M's suicide, and when they had dissociated themselves from those who demurred, the remaining number had built a training camp in the woods along the Odakyu train line with funds that Mr. Shumuta had raised from a powerful figure on the Right with whom he was also said to be friendly. Land in Mexico was indeed being held for them, and they were currently in training to immigrate there, which explained the emphasis on Spanish. As it happened, one of Minami's young colleagues was teaching Spanish at the camp. It was apparently true that only Spanish was allowed at the training site, but the instructor had reported that the young men were most zealous about weapons training with converted sheath knives and other gear. “I don't know what Shumuta is plotting, but I don't believe those young braves are intending to start all over in Mexico because things have gone from bad to worse in the ten years since M died—how do you know they're not thinking now is the time to rise up and use those knives they've been honing for ten years! When M was alive, he said more than once that he hated your politics, right? And after the incident you criticized his suicide. You show up to give a talk, what's to stop them from taking you down as first blood on their way to battle in the streets? They could even be planning to use their Spanish as code when they storm the Tokyo Garrison in Ichigaya to avenge M.…”