Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (2 page)

Ō
e’s early heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood, into a world that bears no relation to their past. The values that regulated life when they were growing up have been blown to smithereens along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki; what confronts them now, the postwar world, is a gaping emptiness, enervation, a terrifying silence like the eternity that follows death. They are aware of the consequences of submitting to life in such a world; the riddle they must solve if they are to survive, to discover freedom for themselves, is how to sustain their
hostility
in the face of bewilderment and, finally, apathy. Terrorism is a luminous prospect:
Ō
e’s protagonists dream of throwing hand grenades into the Emperor’s limousine, fighting at Nasser’s side, joining the Foreign Legion. But enacting fantasies like these is more than they can manage. A more accessible battleground is violent sex, antisocial sex, what one of
Ō
e’s characters calls “a fuck rife with ignominy.” Sooner or later
Ō
e’s heroes discover
that the only
territory
they can reach beyond the emptiness of everyday life is what their society deems “sexual perversion.” Consider J. in
Ō
e’s 1963 novel
Homo Sexualis.
J. is a playboy whose first wife has been driven to suicide by his flirtations with homosexuality. He becomes what the Japanese call a “subway pervert,” ejaculating against the raincoats of young girls in crowded rush hour trains. To himself he represents the peril he invites as a kind of atonement. In fact, like all of
Ō
e’s early heroes, it is in quest of his identity that he is driven to assert himself against the safety of his world. J. is perhaps the bravest of
Ō
e’s heroes, and one of very few who succeeds in the terms he proposes to himself. At the end of the novel, frightened and alone, he visits his industrialist father and asks to be restored to the family fold. His father happily consents and promises him a good job; J. leaves the office intending to move back into his father’s house. He is about to climb into his Jaguar when he finds himself moving toward the subway. He walks more quickly, races down the stairs, plunges into a subway and ejaculates against a high school girl. He comes to his senses as he is being led off the subway by a policeman, and the tears streaming down his cheeks are “tears of joy.…”

In 1964, when he was twenty-nine,
Ō
e’s first child was born with brain damage, and the baby boy, whom he called “Pooh,” altered his world with the force of an exploding sun. I won’t presume to describe
Ō
e’s relationship with the child, he has done that wondrously himself in a story included in this collection, “Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness.” Suffice it to say that over the years as Pooh grew up, a fierce, exclusive, isolating bond developed between father and son. In a fervent, painful way,
Ō
e and his fragile, autistic child became one
another’s best, embracing one another as if they were each other’s fate. Shortly after Pooh was born,
Ō
e ordered two gravestones erected side by side in the cemetery in his native village. He has told me many times that he would die when Pooh died.

Ō
e’s own perception of the child’s destructive force, the metaphor that first presented itself to him, was a nuclear explosion. The year Pooh was born he wrote two books at once and asked his publisher to release them on the same day. One was
A Personal Matter
(Grove Press, 1968), the first of a series of novels whose central character is the young father of a brain-damaged child. The other was a book of essays about the survivors of Hiroshima,
Hiroshima Notes.
Ō
e was of course asking that the books be considered together; in one he chronicled the survival of an actual atomic bomb, in the other he sought the means of surviving a personal holocaust.

The child’s tidal pull on
Ō
e’s imagination is already discernible in
A Personal Matter.
Bird, the protagonist, a stymied intellectual with a failing marriage, dreams of flying away to Africa for a “glimpse beyond the horizon of quiescent and chronically frustrated everyday life.” There is nothing new about this fantasy; it is evidence that Bird is descended from
Ō
e’s prototypical hero. But Bird’s wife gives birth to a baby with a “cave for a head,” a “monster baby” who threatens to destroy his dream. He arranges with a doctor in the hospital to water the baby’s milk, and while he waits for it to perish he seeks refuge with a “sexual adventuress” who encourages him to claim his freedom. But the baby thrives on its fatal diet; it becomes clear that Bird will have to make a more direct attack on the child’s life. This he resolves to do, with the help of his mistress; together they take the infant out of the hospital
and deliver it to a “shady” doctor who guarantees the child will shortly die. With the baby out of the way they plan to leave for Africa together. Then abruptly, and not very convincingly, Bird perceives that he must cease “running from responsibility.” Abandoning his hysterical mistress in a bar he goes back to the abortionist, picks up the baby, and returns it to the hospital. Several months later, in the two-page coda that ends the novel, Bird emerges from the hospital with his family reunited around him and the baby in his arms. They are on their way home, and the first thing Bird will do when he arrives is look up
forbearance
in a dictionary inscribed with the word
hope.

Bird is the first of
Ō
e’s heroes to turn his back on the central fantasy of his life, the first to accept, because he has no choice, the grim substitution of forbearance for hope. Until the advent of his first-born child, the quest for self-discovery took
Ō
e’s heroes beyond the boundaries of society into a lawless wilderness. Beginning with Bird, they turn away from the lure of peril and adventure and seek instead, with the same urgency, the certainty and consonance they
imagine
they experienced before they were betrayed at the end of the War. It was as if
Ō
e no longer had the heart to light out for the territory, not with the defenseless child that had become a part of himself. Since
A Personal Matter,
he has been drawn increasingly to a myth of “Happy Days” before that August day in 1945 when Hirohito renounced his divinity and innocence was rudely ended.

To be sure, longing for a
mythic homeland
was always there in
Ō
e; very likely it was engendered in him, along with his anger, even as he listened to the Emperor speak in the voice of a mortal man. Certainly it is to be felt in one of his first and most beautiful stories, “Prize Stock.” The
mountain village in which a black American soldier is being held prisoner exists nowhere in actual Japan. Instead of paddies there are “fields,” instead of hogs and cows, “wild mountain dogs.” The smell of dung and human fertilizer that hangs in the air of every rural village in Japan is replaced by the scent of old mulberry leaves, and grain, and apricot trees; the only village adult who appears is not a farmer but a hunter; the word
Ō
e uses for the village headman is an archaic word that means a tribal chieftain. But the surest proof that
Ō
e is rendering myth and not reality is the scene near the end of the story, just before the child narrator is betrayed by the black soldier, when the village children lead him by the hand to the village spring for a “primeval” bath:

To us the black soldier was a rare and wonderful domestic animal, an animal of genius. How can I describe how much we loved him, or the blazing sun above our wet, heavy skin that distant, splendid summer afternoon, the deep shadows on the cobblestones, the smell of the children and the black soldier, the voices hoarse with happiness—how can I convey the repletion and rhythm of it all? To us it seemed that the summer which had bared those resplendent muscles, the summer that suddenly and unexpectedly geysered like an oil well, spewing happiness and drenching us in black, heavy oil, would continue forever and never end.

The ecstasy of this moment, its “repletion and rhythm,” is the ecstasy of ritual, and ritual is the stuff myth is made of. Here for the first and only time in his telling of the story, the narrator must step outside the time frame in which the story occurs and cast his memory back in his attempt to convey the moment. That is because myth exists only in memory, in a remote “primeval” time before history, and can never be experienced.

In recent years, this mythical mountain village surrounded by a primeval forest has loomed ever larger in
Ō
e’s imagination, his Yoknapatawpha county, a place to which his heroes are ineluctably drawn in search of themselves. In
Ō
e’s first big novel after
A Personal Matter, Soccer in the Year 1860
(translated as
The Silent Cry),
the young father of a retarded child leaves his home in Tokyo and returns to the village of his childhood in hopes of discovering “a new life.” On his way to the village through the forest he stops for a moment at the same mountain spring that was the remote source of bliss in “Prize Stock.”

As I bent over the pool to sip at the spring water, a sensation of certainty gripped me. The pool was still lit, as if the light of the ended day resided only there, and I felt certain that I had seen, twenty years ago, each and every one of the small round stones bluish and vermillion and white on the bright bottom, and the same fine sand suspended in the water clouding it slightly, the faint rippling on the surface, everything. Even the ceaseless flow of water was the very same water that had welled into the pool at that time, the sensation was rich with paradox but absolutely convincing to me. And it produced the further sensation that the person bending over the pool now was not the child who once had crouched here on his bare knees, that there was no continuity between those two “me”s, that the self there now was alien to my real self, a perfect stranger. Here in the present, I had lost my true
identity.
Nothing inside me or on the outside pointed the way toward recovery.

The certainty that grips the speaker is shared by all of
Ō
e’s recent heroes. But none is more passionately certain that salvation is to be discovered in a mythic version of his past than the narrator of “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away,” the longest story in this collection and
Ō
e’s most difficult and disturbing work to date. The narrator lies in a hospital bed eagerly waiting to die of liver cancer, probably imagined. He wears a pair of underwater goggles covered in dark cellophane which prevent him from seeing much, but that is no matter to him, for he has “ceased to exist in present time.” In these days he insists are his last, his entire consciousness is channeled into reliving a moment in his past, just before the War ended, when he accompanied his mad father on a suicide mission intended to rescue Japan from defeat. On August 15, 1945 (that most emblematic day in
Ō
e’s early life), his father has lead a band of Army deserters out of their mountain village to the nearbye “provincial city” which is to be the scene of their insurrection. On their way up the pass out of the valley to the “real” world, they sing, in German, the refrain from a Bach cantata they have learned from a record the night before, “And He Himself shall wipe my tears away.” When the narrator asks the meaning of the words, his father explains that “
Heiland”
(German for “Saviour”) refers to “His Majesty the Emperor.”

TRÄNEN means “tears,” and TOD that means “to die,” it’s German. His Majesty the Emperor wipes my tears away with his own hand, Death, you come ahead, you Brother of Sleep you come ahead, his Majesty will wipe my tears away with his own hand, we wait eagerly for his Majesty to wipe our tears away.

This first of many absurd distortions is meet, for the rebels intend to sacrifice themselves in the Emperor’s name and believe, the small boy accompanying them most fervently of all, that the Emperor who is a living god will not only accept but consecrate their sacrifice. The culmination of the episode, which lives in the narrator’s imagination as
the single, exalting moment in his life when he knew precisely who he was and what he was about, occurs when his father,
a certain party,
is shot down, and a sign that his death has indeed been consecrated is mystically revealed:

Leaping beyond his limitations as an individual at the instant of his death,
a certain party
rendered manifest a gold chrysanthemum flower 675,000 kilometers square, surrounded and surmounted by, yes, a purple aurora, high enough in the sky to cover entirely the islands of Japan. Because the other, attacking army opened fire on their truck first, the soldiers nearby the boy were immediately massacred and he alone survived.
A certain party
had requested this of the gods on high, for it was essential that someone, someone chosen, witness the gold chrysanthemum obliterate the heavens with its luster at the instant of his death. And, in truth, the boy did behold the appearance high in the sky, not blocking the light as would a cloud but even managing to increase the glittering radiance of the sun in the blue, midsummer sky, of a shining gold chrysanthemum against a background of purple light. And when the light from that flower irradiated his
Happy Days
they were instantly transformed into an unbreaking, eternal construction built of light. From that instant on, for the twenty-five years that were to be the remainder of his life, he would constantly inhabit this strong edifice of light that was his
Happy Days.

In part, the fulsome prose is parody.
Ō
e wrote this in 1972, in the shadow of Yukio Mishima’s suicide by harakiri. On one level it is an angry parody of Mishima, a remorseless grotesqueing of the mini-insurrection which made it possible for Mishima to “cut open his belly and die.” But there is more to this than anger. There is also longing, not so different in quality from Mishima’s own, for the sweet certainty of unreasoning faith in a god. As
the narrator reconstructs the details of his
Happy Days,
he is confronted with other testimony, more objective than his own, which compells him to acknowledge finally that his own version is entirely false. But he is undaunted, because it is not history that he has been reliving but a radiant myth of belonging—of identity itself. And because he knows, in what may or may not be his madness, that cancer soon will place him out of time’s reach, eating away “the useless layers of body-and-soul which have concealed his true essence since that August day in 1945,” whispering, “in a voice that pierces all the way from the root of his body to his soul,
Now then, this is you, there was no need for you to have become any other you than this, Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy Days are here again.”