Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness Read online

  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 Ōe’s imagination, his Yoknapatawpha county, a place to which his heroes are ineluctably drawn in search of themselves. In Ōe’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 Ōe’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 Ōe’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 Ōe’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. Ōe 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.”

  “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away” conveys more of Ōe’s essence than anything he has ever written. The astonishing power of the work is the energy that arcs between the poles of anger and longing that are the central contradiction in his vision. Its formidable privacy—which is what makes it so very difficult to follow and prevented many Japanese readers from finishing it—reflects the fierce privacy which has isolated Ōe and his son increasingly from the outside world. Like his narrator, intent on reliving a moment in the past existing only in his imagination, Ōe has become a miner digging straight down toward the pain at the center of his private world. In a lesser writer this would be a fatal limitation. But Ōe has the power to make us feel his pain. Life as we know it may not be so bleak as he perceives it to be. But the dislocation and the anger and finally the madness ever before his eyes is there for all of us, never so far removed from our own experience that we are at a loss to recognize it.

  A last word about Ōe and Grove Press. In the fall of 1965, when Ōe returned to Tokyo from his first trip to America, I was completing a translation of A Personal Matter. Since Alfred A.
Knopf had published all the important Japanese novelists in English, I had suggested we take the book to Knopf, and Ōe had agreed. Suddenly, in October, I received a telegram from Barney Rosset; someone had sent Grove my translation of an early Ōe story called “Lavish Are the Dead,” and Rosset was excited. He proposed to publish the story in Evergreen Review and wanted to know if there wasn’t an Ōe novel Grove could do. I was reluctant; I had written Harold Strauss at Knopf about A Personal Matter and he was eager to publish it; besides, I knew very little about Grove Press at the time and had never heard of Barney Rosset. I was therefore amazed at Ōe’s jubilance when I told him about the telegram. If Grove Press was interested in his book, it was unthinkable that we should send it anywhere else. Ōe immediately wrote Harold Strauss a letter which I never saw, but I have the note Strauss sent me by return mail:

  I have received several copies of Ōe’s KOJINTEKI NA TAIKEN [A Personal Matter] and I am well into it and like it very much. One of the copies came from Ōe himself, so he must at one time have contemplated being published by us. But today I received a most astonishing letter from him, telling me that he is going to accept Grove Press’s offer. “As an admirer of John Updike and a close friend of Kōbō Abé, I appreciate highly Alfred Knopf Inc. But I don’t hope to wedge myself into the line-up of Abé, Mishima, and Tanizaki. That is the reason of my determination.”

  Does he really mean this? If so it is certainly false modesty. I have never yet encountered an author who was unwilling to be published by the publisher of other well-known authors.

  But maybe there is some other reason behind this. … Since you are partly responsible for my interest in Ōe, I hope you will do me the very great favor of tactfully trying to sound out the situation….

  There was, of course, “some other reason.” It was Ōe’s admiration for Barney Rosset, whom he saw even then, before he knew the man, as an incarnation of his American hero. What he knew at the time, and had written, was that “Barney Rosset has waged the most courageous and persistent battle against literary censorship in America, beginning with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and has won.” Later, in 1968, when Grove published A Personal Matter, Ōe visited New York, witnessed Rosset fighting in court, with Norman Mailer’s help, to win the release of I Am Curious (Yellow), and confirmed his original intuition. On his return to Japan he wrote a long essay about America and called it “Huckleberry Finn Goes to Hell.” It began with Barney Rosset, the night of “the darkest day of his court battle,” cursing the “desolation into which American society had fallen” as he careened his car downtown with Ōe at his side. The connection Ōe intended is unmistakable, and what is more, I know he truly meant it: no contemporary American, fictional or real stands closer in his imagination to Huckleberry Finn than Barney Rosset. Ōe’s work belongs at Grove Press.

  —John Nathan

  Jewel Farm, Princeton

  December 20, 1976.

  THE DAY HE HIMSELF SHALL WIPE MY TEARS AWAY

  I

  Deep one night he was trimming his nose that would never walk again into sunlight atop living legs, busily feeling every hair with a Rotex rotary nostril clipper as if to make his nostrils as bare as a monkey’s, when suddenly a man, perhaps escaped from the mental ward in the same hospital or perhaps a lunatic who happened to be passing, with a body abnormally small and meagre for a man save only for a face as round as a Dharma’s and covered in hair, sat down on the edge of his bed and shouted, foaming,

  ____What in God’s name are you? What? WHAT? So startled that he yanked the clipper from his nose with several hairs still caught between the rotor and the blade, and, the pain adding an edge to his anger, he set the Rotex in rotary motion and hurled it at the hairy face, then screamed back, writhing with his chest and shoulders only because the other man’s weight on top of the blankets immobilized his legs,

  ____I’m cancer, cancer, LIVER CANCER itself is me! Throwing his robe open irritably he exposed the spidery welts that had appeared on his chest, then thrust in front of him both his bright red palms as well, whereupon the other man remarked, with a cool civility that can hardly have been normal,

  ____Sorry, I hadn’t realized you were bonkers! and abruptly vanished without a sound, like a drop of water sinking into sand.

  The only image he retained with eyes rendered uncertain by the tinted underwater goggles he always wore was the arabesque pattern the whirling Rotex had cut along the outer edges of the Dharma’s beard. Had the late night intruder already shaved his beard away, he was left without a clue to his identity or whereabouts. Objectively, such was the case, despite the fact that he was ever surer inside himself that he had perceived in the hairy Dharma’s features a resemblance to a certain party.

  [[Must I put down even that kind of silliness? asks the “acting executor of the will,” who is taking down his verbal account. As “he” has ceased to perceive those who share only present time with him as people living with him in this world, “he” makes no attempt to ascertain, nor is “he” the least concerned, whether she is his wife, a nurse, or simply an official scribe sent by the government or the United Nations solely to record the “history of the age” “he” is relating. To be sure, should the last possibility be correct, it would be awkward if, reeking of the garlic “he” has consumed in large quantity in an attempt to convert whatever surplus strength “he” possesses now, at thirty-five, as his life is about to end, to sexual energy, “he” attempted to drag her into his bed. But for the moment the entire energy of his body-and-soul is being channeled into talking, continuing to talk. Not even the doctors’ regular visits to his bedside, or the medicine the nurses administer to him, though “he” cooperates, are of any positive concern. Why, then, late at night, on July 1, 1970, at 2 A.M., had “he” taken cognizance of the intruder? Because even now it is not clear whether that hairy Dharma had actually appeared or had loomed out of certain hours of the past in his conscious-subconscious which constituted the only real world “he” wanted for his reality. And now, if you please, stop wasting time and get back to transcribing, you know my hours are numbered, I might go into the final coma tomorrow. When that happens you know what to do, it’s all in the “will,” just call the telephone company-post office in the valley in the forest right away and start the “tape on the occasion of entering the coma.” And don’t forget to arrange for the plane ticket, if I’m going to beat my mother to the punch once and for all and give her what she deserves, I need that ticket more than anything else, “he” says. Now then, push that pencil, don’t eat away the little time remaining this pitiful essence of liver cancer!]]

  If, as those in attendance around his bed maintained, the late night appearance of that intruder was a dream, it was his first dream to remain vividly in memory since he had moved to this “final abode” with, like any Bantu tribesman, his liver in ruins despite his tender age, and, he confidently imagined, would be his last.

  There were those who reported he often sobbed in his sleep and suggested he was confronting his own critical condition for the first time in his dreams. To be sure, these were the very people who insisted, on the other hand, that he was deluding himself about liver cancer, that all he really had was cirrhosis, and that, while recovery would not be easy, there was still room for hope. On his part, he maintained he remembered nothing of any dreams that would have made him sob. He even claimed he spent his waking hours enveloped in happy thoughts, breathing happiness. Frequently, for the benefit of those who came and went around his bed (who, although they were certain to outlive him, lying in his bed awaiting the moment of his own death as if it had been finally scheduled, were treated by him as if they were already among the dead), not necessarily to flaunt his happiness but simply to enjoy the sounds that reached his ears along his jawbone from his own eccentric vocal chords, and to revel in the furtive, complex sympathetic resonation of his internal organs, pregnant now with cancer cells, he would sing, in English, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Admittedly, since the refrain was s
trung with high notes, if he mistakenly began too high, his voice climbed to a shrillness that not only threatened those around him but created an uneasiness in himself that seemed to center in his innards. He firmly believed that his liver, soon to complete its transformation into a rocklike mass, functioned in its ample fullness as a speaker embedded in his body, resonating with even the highest notes and filtering the dissonance due primarily to organic factors out of the music of his vital organs. “Let us sing a song of cheer again,” he sang, “Happy days are here again,” and the refrain went as follows:

  And now, he thought, just as my Happy Days are about to revive at last and I pass the time in excited anticipation there is no one here who shared them with me, and the only person who actually witnessed them, my mother, remains secluded in the valley deep in the forest and continues to send the same high frequency signals principally of hatred to the antenna in my innards, which, now that I think about it, is probably the reason I got cancer, and since that’s the case I must be certain to record my Happy Days fully during this time I spend alone in a hospital bed, and, to place the record in perspective so that it can outlive my death, to record how, ever since the destruction of those former Happy Days, my imagination has been moving back in their direction as helplessly as a model airplane in a tailspin—and this he resolved to do.