New posters about the tenth anniversary of M's death were appearing in the streets every day. And one day a few of Mr. Shumuta's students deserted while they were at the club. This gave rise to new thoughts about the group. Although I wasn't there at the time, I happened to be present at a conversation about the incident between Mr. Minami and Mr. Shumuta and learned some of the details.
One afternoon early in November when I arrived at the club with Eeyore and we went downstairs, no one was swimming in the Members Pool. As we were on our way there after taking a shower, a student who was working at the club part-time came running over to let us know that it was closed. There had been an accident that morning, he said, and the wall of glass brick facing on the street had been broken. Peering through the glass on this side, I could see that the far corner of the exterior wall across the pool was caved in as though it had been tunneled. Three men in coveralls seemed to be inspecting the hole; they were probably estimating the cost of repair. Meanwhile, Mr. Shumuta was moving his hard, inflated-rubber-tire body busily back and forth, talking volubly in what appeared to be high spirits.
With no idea of what had happened, I took Eeyore to the main pool and waited for the break between swimming-school classes to let him practice his slow-motion underwater approach to swimming. Then I sat him down on a bench alongside the pool and swam some laps myself, kicking hard to save time.
When we went upstairs to the sauna, Mr. Minami and Mr. Shumuta were in the middle of a conversation they appeared to be enjoying. I sat down apart from them and began lathering Eeyore's body with soap to avoid having to say hello.
“Glass brick has gone way down! I thought we'd be looking at ten thousand but it's only a fraction of that and they're not even charging for the repair—I started feeling guilty …” As he spoke, Mr. Shumuta's head moved back and forth on a neck that was thick as a bull's and soaking wet with what was clearly sweat and not hot water from the tub.
“The important thing is that no one was injured,” Minami said woodenly, as though he were trying to distance himself from Mr. Shumuta.
“That's because they've been tempered! It would take a lot more than that to hurt them. Even if they couldn't avoid injury they wouldn't get into that much trouble. Light stuff, nothing major! Those bodies have been tempered! Now they're like me—an ordinary person would have lost a foot in that accident I had!”
“They say that two of them lifted the bench and the third guided it from the back and they slammed it into that wall to open an exit for themselves. Then apparently they used the bench as a bridge to the outside over the broken glass. They had a perfect plan, like pros!”
“Pros at running away are no use to anyone.”
“So what now? Did you inform the police?”
“Sensei, this is none of the police's business! Whoever wants to run away should do it. Boys like that would be of no use to us even if we brought them back. At my place, we have strict rules about how we live but nobody's watching to see that people don't run away.”
“Then why did they wait until they got to the pool to escape? I mean, shattering a glass wall with a bench and fleeing in a bathing suit is a dangerous stunt; one false move and they could have been seriously injured—”
“Those bodies don't make false moves.” Mr. Shumuta laughed his hearty laugh again. “I'm not sure why they didn't have the good sense to change clothes. Were they afraid of running into me upstairs? Or did that wild hair they caught when they were down at the pool feel like it just couldn't wait?”
“Probably both.” In Minami's curiously clipped reply there was no trace of the young girl's bashfulness that normally played around his eyes when he spoke.
“But look here, most of them stayed right where they were even though that wall was breached and I wasn't around—”
Without responding, Minami rose and headed for the locker room. Mr. Shumuta turned in my direction, his enigmatic eyes like deep wrinkles in a face that was otherwise illuminated by a meaningless smile, but I had no desire to take over the role of listener and kept my concentration focused on scrubbing Eeyore's hair.
“That's a big mistake, Sensei, that kind of coddling is no good for a retarded child! I bet he still wets his bed at night. You've got to give him a sense of independence, and that means you've got to temper him!” Mr. Shumuta knit his skimpy eyebrows in a scowl, but his face retained the look of a cheerful giant baby and the effect was merely grotesque. At that moment, Minami returned for his goggles and bathing suit and began to talk and, though I felt a little sorry for Mr. Shumuta, I took the opportunity to hurry out of the sauna with Eeyore in tow.
“Shumuta Sensei, shouldn't you be getting back to your students right away? How do you know the fugitives aren't plotting to sneak back and dragoon the others? There's a group that's using the photograph of M's severed head for a rally poster, and there's a rumor going around at school that they're plotting something for the tenth anniversary of the Ichigaya coup d'etat.
Your boys are cut off from news about the outside world, but what would happen if that poster were shoved in their faces? I wouldn't be surprised if the whole gang joined in!”
M had chosen to die by his own hand on November 25, the anniversary of the patriot Shoin Yoshida's death. The day arrived, and there were special programs about the incident on radio and television from morning till night. I had been out of the country at the time, but there were images and sound bites that brought back the moment with a vividness that made me feel I had witnessed it in person. I did observe that the horrific photograph of M's severed head did not appear on the television screen or in the newspapers, and that coverage of the student rally that had used the photo as a poster was also suppressed.
Early that afternoon, Eeyore returned from special school with a note from the physical education teacher. According to Eeyore's own report, which he delivered as though he were reciting it, he had been asked how his swimming was progressing and had replied only that he didn't remember. The teacher was recommending that we should resume swimming lessons, and when I suggested we might go to the pool that day, Eeyore was enthusiastic.
When we arrived at the club, as if Mr. Shumuta had accepted a challenge to bring his young men to a pool in the middle of the city on M's anniversary, his group (whose roll call must now have ended with doce) had already occupied the Members Pool and was thrashing around in the water. The swimming school was also in full session, and for the moment I was unable to find a lane that Eeyore and I could use. We sat down on a bench on the exit side of the showers to wait for the next recess in classes; winter weather had arrived, and it felt awkward and out of place to be sitting there naked without even going into the water while people outside in the street were in their overcoats against the cold. The bench was positioned above the pools: from where we sat we could survey the expanse of the twenty-five-meter pool on the left and the locked glass partition around the Members Pool. The deep, narrow pool reserved for diving and scuba diving was immediately in front of us.
At the far end, an instructor from the university who was also well known in the swimming world—I had used his book to correct my stroke in the crawl—was coaching a schoolgirl the club was grooming to be a competitive diver. Standing at the long edge of the pool, which put his back to the glass partition, the instructor had the girl dive repeatedly from a board that was adjustable with a round handle; but the basis of the judgments that caused him to nod or shake his head in the brief moment when the girl was in the air between the board and the water's surface was imperceptible to the eyes of a novice. Even so, there was something enthralling about watching her young body tense for an instant, contract, explode, and finally release into a state that appeared utterly relaxed.
Before long, Mr. Shumuta appeared at the instructor's side dressed in a training suit. In the same position as the coach, with his back to the young men in his charge, he observed the diving practice intently. Bringing the men to the club on the day of the rallies at all had been a
courageous move, but it appeared he wasn't comfortable about taking his time in the hot tub and the sauna while they practiced, as he normally did. On the other hand, he must have felt that standing guard at the Members Pool would have amounted to a loss of face and therefore had chosen instead to observe the diving practice in the neighboring pool.
Abruptly, a silent commotion broke out on the other side of the glass partition. A jostling throng of young men in khaki shorts gathered at the glass wall and appeared to be gesturing frantically. As I rose from the bench I saw Mr. Shumuta turn as though in panic to confront the disturbance on the other side of the glass. What had happened? At that moment I was in the grip of an urgency of my own that was entirely out of context; if M's severed head had incited those young men to riot I would neither cower nor step aside nor flee; I would take my own stand against the power of that severed head, however helpless I might be to oppose this robust private army, even if it meant taking a beating in front of Eeyore.
The next instant, one of the young men in the crowd cracked the glass with a resolute blow of his fist. Thrusting an arm now bloodied to the elbow through the opening, he gestured in this direction. Through the same break in the splintered glass the muffled voices of the young men in chorus struck at me like a blow to the stomach.
El niño, el muchacho, la piscina, difícil, enfermo . . . peligroso, anegarse!
In other words: the child, the young man, pool, difficulty, illness, dangerous, to drown—they were shouting whatever Spanish words they had at their command. With a move so very slow it felt contemptible even to myself, I turned around and verified that Eeyore was not sitting on the bench. As I stood there Mr. Shumuta sailed past me with astonishing agility for a body that bulged all over with muscles and I perceived for the first time, feeling released from a question that had been troubling me: So that's it! He looks like the Michelin tire man!
On the other side of the showers against a pillar was a tank six feet across but forty-five feet deep that was used for underwater practice. Normally it was covered with a net, but I had a feeling I might have seen it open on my way in this morning. I hurried after Mr. Shumuta; he was planted in front of the tank, peering down into it, and then I saw him strip off his training suit in two motions. He eased himself gingerly into the water, feet first. Before the ripples had spread across the surface, I glimpsed Eeyore, his mouth wide open, slowly sinking as though he were swimming in space. “Down, down thro’ the immense, with outcry, fury & despair"—the line occurred to me out of context as I leaned over the tank with both hands on the rim. In front of my nose, Mr. Shumuta's large, red foot with the missing toes was thrust above the water as he spiraled perpendicularly down toward the bottom of the tank.
On our way home that day, Eeyore and I sat side by side on the train as forlornly as two children who had almost drowned. My own gloom was partly due to something Mr. Shumuta had said to me when he had finished helping Eeyore cough up the water he had swallowed.
“Taking care of the children is sure a major pain in the rear! But it's not as though we can leave off in the middle once we've started!” There was nothing high-handed about his tone of voice this time, as when he had scolded me for coddling a retarded child, but his words still struck me like a coup de grâce—in that moment of emergency, the only thing I had been able to do was recall a line of Blake!
At times like this, there was only one person in the world who could encourage me, and he was sitting at my side. I was aware of Eeyore stealing looks at me, as if he were trying to measure in his own way whether it would be appropriate for him to speak up uninvited. Pulling myself together, I asked, in a hoarse voice that sounded too dispirited even to my own ears, “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!”
4: The Ghost of a Flea
This July, a young American came to see me. A graduate student at the University of Virginia, she was writing her master's thesis on two Japanese authors, M and me, and so our conversations were a kind of field work for her research. At a public seminar at the university where she had enrolled, she had spoken about researching the Japanese approach to the themes of sex and violence, and late that same night, probably because she was delicate, with the sort of build and features that appealed to the Japanese, she had received a phone call from a man with a creepy voice who inquired if she were Ms. Martha Crowley and explained that he shared her interest in sex and violence and wondered if they could meet alone for a conversation?
Martha inquired about me and about my work, but she also questioned me closely about my impressions of M based on having known him while he was alive. At some point, I observed that while he was famous for having built himself up with weight lifting, M had actually been short even for a Japanese.
“Now that you mention it, I always had trouble picturing his aesthetics of death and violence as the writing of a big man with bulging muscles.”
This indication from Martha that M's stature made sense to her was abruptly interrupted by my son in a voice so loud that he startled the American student:
“He was really very short! He was about this size.” Extending his arm palm down, Eeyore held it about ten inches above the floor and peered beneath it as if he were observing something tangible.
“Eeyore! I didn't think you remembered M! You've never said a word about him until now! I'm really surprised.”
In fact, I had realized right away what my son had been indicating just now by his remark and gestures. Invading the Eastern Division Headquarters of the National Self Defense Forces in Ichigaya, M had committed hara-kiri—Eeyore was picturing in his mind the severed head that had been propped on the floor in the newspaper photo of the scene. In what form had the memory of that photograph been preserved, for more than ten years, inside my son's damaged mind? Until now I had never once spoken a word about M, yet Eeyore appeared to be firmly in touch with the actual presence of that severed head beneath his palm. I noticed that Martha must also have figured out what his gestures represented; the expression on her face, deeply terrified, made me wonder whether this was how she had looked when she had received the phone call from that stranger.
Two years earlier at my swimming club, in a forty-five-foot-deep tank of water—I learned from a notice that was posted after the accident warning of danger that it was called the “dark pool"—my son had nearly drowned. I have already described how the young man who had thrust his arm through a glass wall to alert me, and his companions, and their leader, who had actually brought Eeyore up to the surface from a depth of thirty feet, had all had something to do with M's thought and action while he was still alive. But even then it had not occurred to me that my son would remember the name associated with that newspaper photograph of a suicide by hara-kiri, an incident that had occurred when he was a little boy just entering the special class at elementary school.
“Professor, your essay on M and Malcolm Lowry never quite made sense to me,” Martha said calmly, as if to explain the internal circumstances of the surprise she had revealed—though I was the object of her research and not her teacher, she used the English word “professor” as a convenient term of respect toward older Japanese—“but now I understand. M's severed head must have brutalized the spirit of children like Eeyore. And when they grow up, that severed head might influence their lives like a shadow they have to live in, something they can't conceptualize.…”
“I don't think so in Eeyore's case,” I objected. But my chest was pounding in the darkness inside me, in this son of mine in particular with a mind that would always be a child's and a body on its way to becoming an adult's with the bone structure of a large man; the power of that image of the severed head could manifest itself gigantically. I glanced down helplessly at the corpulent figure with his outstretched hand still leveled just above the floor.
The essay Martha mentioned, my thoughts on the M incident and
on the explicit violence of M's self-expression, was a commentary I was writing for a collected edition, difficult to obtain for a student outside of Japan, which I had copied and sent to her. I had titled my piece “The Politics of a Severed Head and the Tree of Life,” and although it's an unusual thing to do in a novel I want to quote a passage from it that bears directly to what Martha was saying.
I began, “M's performance, from agit-prop speech to suicide by hara-kiri, staged for a large audience of SDF troops and for the benefit of the television coverage he had anticipated, was the most beautifully elaborated political spectacle we have beheld since the end of the war. Even the photograph of his severed head standing erect on the floor, said to have been taken by chance, may well have been a part of his overall scheme. This, too, was a performance designed to tighten focus on the details of the human body itself against the background of a universe structured by Imperialism.” I wrote “this, too” because I was contrasting M's actions with Account of an Elegant Dream, a work of fiction by another writer, a book that had been annihilated by political power and that, though it pointed to an interpretation in a direction entirely opposed to M's actions—it was here that we could see the bottomless polysemy of image and performance in a work of literature—had achieved an expression of the same thing. “However, this performance of M's, in which the details of the physical body as represented by a bloody, severed head propped on the floor were installed against the background of a universe structured by Imperialism, was taken seriously, at face value, by none of us, not by those who supported the demonstration based on M's suicide nor by those who rejected it. Upon reading the word M had chosen for the banner he displayed, ‘manifesto,’ a word with univalent significance only, we wrapped everything that was happening into a univalent package, the ‘M Incident.’ For better or for worse, this is what we did, whether we supported the demonstration or rejected it, at least insofar as what was communicated in the mass media. The fate of that photograph taken as though by accident provides a concrete example of this interpretation. When the photograph in question received a prize for journalistic photography, the newspaper and photographer involved declined to accept because they feared it would mean they would have to exhibit the photo again. And so the photo was consigned to darkness.… Why, after the furor that surrounded the Incident had quieted, did the mass media decline to bring to the foreground the minutiae of death as performed by M? Because the social repercussions created by Account of an Elegant Dream had already taught them a lesson: to cover comprehensively a performance that emphasized details of the human body against the background of a universe based on an Imperialistic system, conveying its multilevel significance with its full power of provocation intact, was to risk the danger, even under a constitution affirming the Imperial system, of real violence. And this, as he played out his exquisitely conscious performance unto death, was M's only miscalculation: expecting the power of his performance in a political space to express its manifold levels of meaning despite the limit imposed by a word like ‘manifesto,’ unique among literary expressions in its intractable univalence. But media coverage of M's suicide by hara-kiri deleted the multivalence of his performance and simplified it into an image of M haranguing the troops below him in his private army uniform, a fanatic's headband around his head, and continued to recess the image until even the sound of his voice was lost in the background and all that remained for us to see was an empty ‘manifesto’ dangling on a banner.… To those who affirmed M's suicide, this meant that a powerfully evocative physical reality generated by an Imperialist ethos had failed to materialize. In other words, the ‘M Incident’ had been deprived of the momentum required to trigger a chain reaction of explosions by superimposing the Imperialist ethos on contemporary society. Undoubtedly, there were those who regretted the stripping of power that caused the Incident to misfire. Conversely, those who decried the Incident, while they succeeded in exposing the manifesto's conceptual univalence and refuted its assertions, were not able to avenge the Account of the Elegant Dream incident by exposing and superseding the Imperialist ethos it once again evoked. This amounted to a failure to exploit the opportunity M presented to grasp firm hold of a new image of Japan's future. This process of failure was initiated by the removal from our sight of that bloodied head by the seasoned, cunning hand of a powerful figure.…”