Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!. Kenzaburo Oe

well to survive the surgery, and I had come to feel respect for his symptoms, as though the recent appearance of epilepsy were a medal for his vitality. Further, and I realize this is hardly more than a mystical reverie, I felt at times as though my son were standing in for me, taking on the epilepsy that might have been produced by the head wound I received at the time of my narrow escape at Carp Cave. At those moments, as I fingered the scar that was in the same place on my head as was the fault on my son's skull, it seemed to me that the huge power that had manifested underwater at Carp Cave was connected directly to whatever it was that had caused my son's abnormal birth.

      Eeyore was lying on the couch watching the news on television—for several days after his first seizure, as though the twisting inside his body had yet to untangle, he had been withdrawn, doleful, and silent—when suddenly, as the newscaster reported the death of a certain elderly master in the world of Japanese classical music, he sat up with surprising agility and shouted, emotionally, “Oh! He died! He's dead, he's completely dead!”

      The poignancy of my son's lament was a shock to me. It came from somewhere so unexpected and took me so completely by surprise that it was also comical.

      “What's wrong, Eeyore, what happened? Did he die? Did you like him that much?” As I questioned him, I felt I might burst out laughing. I'm sure I was smiling.

      But Eeyore didn't respond; he fell back on the couch and covered his face with both hands and went rigid. Halfway to the couch I could only keep moving, though I did lose the smile from my face, and continued, “C'mon, Eeyore. You don't have to be so upset.” Kneeling at his side, I shook him by the shoulders, but he went even more rigid. For no reason, I tried pulling his hands away from his face, but they were locked into place like a steel lid—I recall that it was around this time that his strength was developing to a point that was beyond our ability to manage—and I could only kneel there staring at his fingers, sentient and refined in a way that seemed to set them apart from the rest of his body.

      The comprehensive impossibility of approaching my son. I had experienced the same feeling after his epileptic seizure. He had been used up, as though his entire body had been involved in frantic exercise. Just before he had fallen asleep and begun to snore, and again afterward, when he had awakened, I had repeatedly asked, “Eeyore! Were you in pain? Was it hard to breathe? Were you nauseous? Were you in pain?” but he had remained locked away inside himself, disgruntled and feeble and refusing to respond to my inquiries. Then and now, on two occasions since his seizure, I had experienced my son as an individual whose interior world was closed to me.

      In the past, I had always assumed I knew everything that was happening inside him. But I had been unable to discover a single thing about the panorama that must have unfurled as he lay there slapping the floor with his eyes rolled up. (When he had fallen asleep and begun to snore it was as if he were exhausted from having worked on a great project that included beholding a momentous vision. I even fantasized, as when I had peered into Carp Cave long ago, that his vision had included a glimpse into eternity.) And now I was similarly lost, with no basis for even guessing at the thoughts about death that could have produced that heartrending cry of grief and loss. Where had such strong feelings about death come from?

      I was to be given an answer soon enough. That same spring break, still wrapped in the gloominess that was an aftereffect of his seizure, my son was listening to an FM broadcast with the volume turned way up. This had continued for hours until everyone in the family was out of patience. Finally, Eeyore's sister, half his size, had requested him to turn the volume down a little and he had made her cower with a menacing gesture.

      “Eeyore! You know better than that!” my wife said. “After Papa and I are dead, your brother and sister will have to look after you. If you behave this way no one will like you. What will you do then? How are you going to get along after we're dead?”

      So that was it, I acknowledged to myself with a feeling of regret. In this way, repeatedly, we had been introducing my son to the issue of death. But this time his response to our refrain was something new. “It's all right! Because I'll die. I'll be dying soon, so it's all right!”

      For an instant there was a pause like an intake of breath—my wife had been thrown by this subdued assertion no less than it had dazed me—and then she continued, speaking now in a tone of voice that was more soothing than reproachful:

      “Of course you're not going to die, Eeyore. What makes you think you're going to die? Who told you that?”

      “I'll be dying right away, because I had a seizure! It's all right, because I'll be dying!”

      I moved to my wife's side where she stood at the couch and looked down at my son: he was covering his face resolutely with both hands, his dark eyebrows and the sharply raised bridge of his nose, which resembled his movie-actor uncle's, visible between his fingers. New words to say seemed to stick in our throats, as if we both felt how futile they would be. His voice had been so forceful just now, yet already he was perfectly still, not a muscle moving.

      Thirty minutes later, as my wife and I sat in silence and for some reason facing each other across the table in our dining room, my son shuffled past us on his way to the bathroom. He was still covering his face with both hands. His sister, feeling responsible for the situation before, was at his side, clinging to him as she spoke: “Eeyore, be careful! If you cover your face while you walk, you'll bump into stuff. You could trip and hit your head!” Probably, this was also intended as a criticism of her mother's approach to scolding earlier. Eeyore's younger brother fell into step and moved off with him to the bathroom. Through the unclosed door came the sound of copious urinating. Finished, Eeyore seemed to go straight into his mother's bedroom across the hall.

      “I think it's bad to talk like that,” my daughter said when she returned. “It makes Eeyore feel lonely when he thinks of the future.” Her face seemed pinched and small, as though covered in goose pimples.

      Standing side by side with his sister, her younger brother spoke, revealing that he, too, had evolved a position that was independent of his parents’: “Eeyore was wiping his tears with his forefinger straight out and horizontal, like he was slicing across his eye with a knife. That's the proper way of wiping tears. Even though nobody else does it that way.”

      Forlornly, ashamed of ourselves, my wife and I were recalling the words we had repeated endlessly until now—"After we die, Eeyore! What will become of you? What will you do!” For my own part, I was also realizing that, inasmuch as I had never considered carefully how these crucial words might echo deep in my son's heart, I had not yet arrived at a definition of death, not even at a definition of what it meant to me let alone to him!

      Like an earthquake, the epileptic seizure had produced tremors beneath the surface of Eeyore's body and emotions. As he recovered from its aftereffects and, when spring break ended, returned to special class at middle school, he also seemed to regain his psychological well-being. Following the seizure, there was a time when even the way he listened to music had seemed abnormally off balance, but now his rapt attention conveyed once again an impression of unclouded pleasure.

      Nevertheless, there was no room for doubt that a concept of death, whatever its nature, had taken root in him. Every morning, when he finished dressing himself properly to go to school, Eeyore sat down on the rug in the living room. Spreading his plump thighs and dropping his rear heavily to the floor, he hunkered down and opened the morning paper. To read the obituaries. Encountering the name of a new illness, he would hold his breath as he deciphered the Chinese characters he had learned by showing them to my wife and me, and would then recite with feeling: “Ah, there was lots of dying again this morning! Pernicious pneumonia, age eighty-nine, coronary infarction, age sixty-nine, bronchial pneumonia, aged eighty-three. Ah! This gentleman was the founder of fugu-fish poisoning research, venal thrombosis, age seventy-four, lung cancer, age eighty-six. Ah! There was plenty of dying again!”

      “People are always dying, Eeyore, but many more new people are born every day! Now off to school you go and don't worry! Be careful at the railroad crossing, otherwise—”

      Otherwise, you might die yourself—my wife had choked back the second half of her warning with a shudder.