Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! Read online

  Praise for Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!:

  “Exquisitely sensitive … Notable for [its] piercing emotional honesty … A hopeful book, one that beautifully charts K's evolution from a man ashamed of his son to one capable of celebrating the boy's unusual but complex humanity.”

  —John Freeman, Dallas Morning News

  “Wondering how Oe would pull this [book] off, I thought of Ingmar Bergman, who draws so clearly from his own life and produces profound cinema. Oe shares this great ability to grasp his characters’ psychology, supremely assured in his own artistic gifts to allow the inner drama of Eeyore's life to speak for itself.… In this fluent translation by John Nathan, Oe's novel stands out as a dark jewel, its maker, its master ecdysiast, hiding as much about himself as he reveals.”

  —Luis H. Francia, The Village Voice

  “There is nothing quite like it in the English language.… Compelling and strange. Oe is repeating no one and nothing.… [In] this story … ordinary events become extraordinary moments of aloneness where the father and the son merge into the same breath. Which is the opposite of loneliness. This is intimacy and art … Oe does what Blake did. He demonstrates time and time again that morality obliges us to oppose the reality or cruelty of injustice with a redeeming vision.”

  —Nasdijj, Raleigh News & Observer

  “Oe is cunning in his reliable/unreliable author guise, so that one sometimes doesn't know how ‘true’ to the facts he is being … but far from being an irritation, such tricks only lead one deeper into the poignant picture of the strange, burdensome, loving relationship between father and son. Sometimes hilariously funny, often dramatic, always seductively readable, this is a marvellous book, beautifully translated.”

  —Anthony Thwaite, Sunday Telegraph (London)

  “[A] moving novel … [that] ranks with such triumphs as Oe's The Silent Cry and Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness … A dazzlingly unconventional fiction, alive on every page with deeply considered ideas and restrained emotion, that's capable of frequently reducing the reader to helpless (albeit grateful) tears. Oe has been afflicted, and blessed, with a great theme that's entirely his own—and has made it the cornerstone of an irresistibly compelling body of work.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “The novel display[s] Oe's gift for the portrayal of the inevitable emotional blunders of human beings.… Over and over Oe presents examples of how real communication between people is almost impossible, in the end suggesting that maybe simple presence of mind and gentle care are the best we can do. Whether this is a first experience with Oe or not, the reader will be left with questions, many questions, and all good ones.”

  —Amy Havel, Review of Contemporary Fiction

  “Writing once again with depth and passion about his relationship with his brain-damaged son, the Nobel laureate transforms his musings into a full-blown narrative that becomes a thoughtful yet provocative study of the nature of human relationships.… A deceptively modest, powerful book by a master at the height of his literary powers. Whether he's expanding on a mystical or philosophical concept or painting an achingly poignant picture of a unique father-and-son relationship, Oe contrives intensely memorable images of these two special characters and their thoughts, insights and loves that will stay with readers.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Moving … This novel… ranks with Oe's best work.… Rouse Up is conversational in style, concise, full of literary allusions and revelations.… Poignant and memorable.”

  —The Sunday Star-Ledger (Newark)

  Also by Kcnzaburo Oc:

  FICTION

  Somersault

  A Personal Matter

  A Quiet Life

  Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

  The Pinch Runner Memorandum

  The Silent Cry

  Seventeen and J

  The Catch and Other Stories

  Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

  An Echo of Heaven

  The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the

  Atomic Aftermath (editor)

  NONFICTION

  Hiroshima Notes

  A Healing Family

  Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself

  Copyright © 1986 by Kenzaburo Oe

  English translation copyright © 2002 by John Nathan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Oe, Kenzaburo, 1935–

  [Atarashii hito yo mezameyo. English]

  Rouse up o young men of the new age! / Kenzaburo Oe.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 9780802195401

  I. Title.

  PL858.E14 A9313 2002

  895.6'35—dc21 001051298

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  03 04 05 06 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  1: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience

  2: A Cold Babe Stands in the Furious Air

  3: Down, Down thro’ the Immense, with Outcry

  4: The Ghost of a Flea

  5: The Soul Descends as a Falling Star, to the Bone at My Heel

  6: Let the Inchained Soul Rise and Look Out

  7: Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!

  1: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience

  When I travel out of the country for any length of time, including professional visits, I take one precaution against losing my presence of mind and emotional balance while I am a tumbleweed in an alien landscape: I make certain to take along the books I have been reading prior to my departure. Alone in a foreign country, as I am now, I have been able to encourage myself in the face of fear, aggravation, and despondency by reading on in the books I had been reading in Tokyo before I left. This spring I traveled to Europe, perhaps I should say careened from Vienna to Berlin with a television crew, along a route that was bare of blossoms on the trees and, except for the forsythia that turn riotous yellow before their leaves appear and the crocus buds thrusting above the ground, without flowers. I had taken along four volumes of the Penguin Classics edition of Malcolm Lowry, whom I had been reading continually for several years. I say reading, but I had also written a series of short stories constructed around metaphors that Lowry had inspired in me. My purpose in rereading Lowry while I was traveling was to allow me to say to myself at the end of the trip, Enough! As far as I'm concerned, I'm done with Lowry! And, as part of that process, I would present each of my companions on the road with one of the Lowry volumes. When I was young, my impatience had prevented me from staying with a single author for very long. As I was leaving middle age, the group of writers I would read attentively in my last years and until I died became visible to me. And so from time to time I felt obliged to set out consciously to finish off one writer or another.

  This time, in spite of the busiest schedule I have ever experienced, and managing even so to maintain a pleasant relationship with the TV crew, who moved according to the logic of their work, I read, on plane
s and trains and in my hotel rooms as we moved about, one after another of the Lowry novels I had underlined in red pencil at various times in the past. One day, just at sunset as our train was about to arrive in Frankfurt, I was reading Forest Path to the Spring, Lowry's most beautiful novella in my view, and felt myself being newly moved by the prayer the narrator had written down in search of encouragement for his work as a jazz musician.

  I say “newly” because I had been moved by this passage before and had even quoted the first lines of the prayer in a novel of my own. This time, it was the continuation of the portion I had thought important previously, at the end of the prayer, that caught my eye. After a failed attempt to create a musical theme to convey the feeling of his own rebirth into a new world, the narrator calls out, “Dear Lord God!,” and prays for help: “I, being full of sin, cannot escape false concepts, but let me be truly Thy servant in making this a great and beautiful thing, and if my motives are obscure, and the notes scattered and often meaningless, please help me to order it, or I am lost.…”

  It was this final half line, which I had set down in its original English, that tugged at me with particular force, needless to say in the context of the entire passage. I felt as if I had received a signal, as if the voice of my patron were saying, “Come along now, it's time to leave Lowry's work and to enter another world where you should also plan to remain for a number of years,” and gently pointing me in the direction of a certain poet and his work. It was a Sunday evening; the young draftees who had been home on leave since Friday were on their way back to army camp. Standing at the windows in the aisles of the sleeping cars, soldiers who looked like students were blasting a farewell to their city on little trumpets with compression valves; others, still on the platform, were being consoled by their girlish lovers and urged to board the train or, reluctant to take their leave, embracing them a final time. Stepping from the train into this particular crowd seemed to hone the sharpness of my own feelings of taking leave.

  As we left the station and headed for the hotel, I had with me the Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works of William Blake in one volume that I had found in the station bookstore while the crew was loading its cases of equipment. That night, I began devoting my attention to Blake for the first time in several years, no, in more than ten years. The first page I opened to was a verse that ends, “Or else I shall be lost”:

  Father, father, where are you going

  O do not walk so fast

  Speak father, speak to your little boy

  Or else I shall be lost.

  I had attempted a translation of my own fourteen years ago—it was not until I wrote just now “in several years, no, in more than ten years” that I realized, looking back, that it was in fact much longer ago than that, an experience I frequently have when speaking of the past these days—at a time when I was writing a novella in an attempt to get through a critical period of transition between a handicapped eldest son and his father, myself. Now I found myself drawn once again to the world of a poet who had influenced me under such unusual circumstances, and I wondered if my return to his world had to do with my sense that my son and I were entering once again a critical period of transition. How, otherwise, would I be feeling that Lowry's “or I am lost” led so directly to Blake's “Or else I shall be lost"? That night, unable to sleep in my Frankfurt hotel room though I turned off the bedside lamp any number of times, I returned once again to Blake—on the red paper cover of my book the falling figure of a naked man was printed in India ink—and pondered this and other uneasy thoughts.

  The second stanza of “The Little Boy Lost” from Songs of Innocence is as follows:

  The night was dark no father was there

  The child was wet with dew.

  The mire was deep, & the child did weep

  And away the vapour flew.

  Nightfall was still bringing fog into the streets of Frankfurt—Blake might have said “vapour"—even though it was the end of March. Easter was only a week or two away; until now, the holiday had been just a concept to me, the origin of the braiding together of death and rebirth that underlay the grotesque realism of European folk culture, but now for the first time I felt I understood the eagerness with which it was awaited as a celebration. The giant horse chestnuts that lined the streets were bare of even the youngest buds; standing sleeplessly at the window I watched the fog, glowing with light from the streetlamps, wrap itself around their dark trunks.

  When I arrived at Narita Airport, Japan was in full spring, and I could feel the brightness of the air relaxing my mind and my body, but my wife and my second son appeared to be at odds with my feelings. Even after we were in the car the television station had sent for me (normally we would have taken the airport bus to Hakozaki), neither of them said a word. They sat slumped against the seat, as if they had been forced to continue fighting a difficult battle even though they were exhausted. My daughter, in her last year of a private middle school, was overwhelmed by homework and preparations for high school entrance exams and I had not expected to see her, but neither my wife nor my second son had a word to say about why my eldest child had not accompanied them to meet me.

  For a time I stared out the window, not searching for lingering flower blossoms so much as simply enjoying the vivacious budding of the shrubbery in the fading light, but soon enough I began to recall uneasily how many times I had been assaulted by the feeling while reading Blake during the last part of my trip, or losing myself between the lines of his poetry, that my eldest son and I, and my entire family along with us, were on our way into a period of critical transition. And I recognized, as I continued gazing out the window in silence at the buds on the trees, that I was preparing to defend myself against my exhausted wife's account of what was in store for me by putting off as long as possible the question “And how was Eeyore?” (as in some of my novels, I intend using the nickname “Eeyore” for my handicapped son).

  But the journey from Narita to our house in Setagaya is a very long ride. At some point my wife had to break her silence. And once she began, she could not avoid speaking about the situation that seemed to have enveloped her spirit in pitch-darkness. And so, in barely audible despondency and a tone of voice that sounded helpless as an infant's, she finally reported, “Eeyore was bad! Very bad!” In a manner I could tell was carefully restrained, partly out of concern that the driver might be listening, she then related the following story. Five days after I had left for Europe, as though he had been seized by an idee fixe—fearing that it would strike others as bizarre, my wife would not describe it in the car or even at home until after she had diapered my son and put him to bed—Eeyore had become violent. It was spring break between his first and second year of high school at the facility for handicapped children, and there had been a gathering of former classmates who would now be separating. The students had assembled at Kinuta Family Park, near the school, and presently had begun a game of tag, with each child chasing his own mother. When my wife ran off with the other mothers, she apparently had been able to see even at a distance that my son had become furious. Terrified, she had stopped where she was, and my son had run up to her and kicked her feet out from under her with a judo move he had learned in gym class. My wife had fallen flat on her back and not only gashed her head but sustained a concussion and was unable to stand by herself. The teachers in charge and some other mothers had surrounded Eeyore with demands that he apologize, but he had remained fiercely silent, his legs spread wide and planted, glaring at the ground.

  Beginning that day, my wife had observed Eeyore uneasily at home and saw that he was tormenting his younger brother, invading his room and pushing him around. But my second son was too proud to cry out loud or to tell on his older brother; even now, as he listened to what his mother was saying in the car, his body stiffened and he lowered his eyes as though he were ashamed in front of her, but he made no attempt to correct the substance of her story. My daughter looked after her handicapped elde
r brother in every imaginable way, including helping with his diapers, and her solicitude seemed to irritate him to the point where my wife had witnessed him punching her in the face. This kind of incident had accumulated until my son's intimidated, angry family was no longer troubling itself with him and he was spending his spring vacation at home playing records at an unbearable volume from morning till night.

  Then, about three days ago, and this was something my wife waited until late at night my first day home to reveal, the family was gathered in one corner of the dining room eating dinner after my son had finished his dinnertime ritual of stuffing everything on his plate into his mouth at one time and gulping it down when he emerged from the kitchen with a butcher knife gripped in front of his chest with both hands, moved to the curtain in the corner opposite the family, and appeared to lose himself in thought as he gazed out at the darkness of the garden behind the house.

  “I thought we might have to commit him! There's nothing we could do ourselves, he's as tall and as heavy as you are!”

  My wife fell silent again. And together with my son, who had said nothing, we endured the long car ride that remained, withered as though we were in the shadow of something dark and looming. Although I was still to hear about the chilling episode with the knife, not to mention the bizarre fixation that had my son in its grip, I was already feeling overwhelmed by the accumulated fatigue of my trip to Europe. At moments like this, my first response tends to be avoidance: before I faced squarely what my wife had told me, I chose the detour afforded by consideration of another Blake poem (in defer-ence to my wife, sitting there with my son between us, I refrained from pulling my copy of Blake's poems from the knapsack on my lap).