Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (25 page)

Unami reported that he had found the professor outside in the pale winter sunshine, painting floor slats alongside a tiny pond in back of his house, and that it had been his impression that he lived more modestly than the French literature scholar in Kyoto who had his own Noh stage at home. By way of letting me know that he had read Lévi-Strauss's
Pensées Sauvages,
as yet untranslated into Japanese, he added how charmed he had been to see that Professor W had time for “bricolage.”

Getting down to business, Unami told me that his introduction to Professor W had been provided by the French literature scholar in Kyoto he had mentioned; the purpose of his visit had been to request a copy of the precis in French of my graduation thesis, and to ask for an introduction to the political scientist Masao Maruyama (the original connection between the two professors was their mutual friend Herbert Norman, the Canadian diplomat and Japanese history scholar who had committed suicide in Cairo toward the end of the McCarthy era). Professor W had told Unami that Professor Maruyama's poor health prevented him from receiving students; regarding my thesis, he had suggested that Unami approach the author directly.

As I listened carefully to what Unami was saying, I realized it was not precisely the case that he had come to me with an introduction. In any event, in the few days since his arrival in Tokyo from Kyoto, this student had met with a number of the scholars, writers, and critics who had championed postwar democracy in the academy and in journalism (I belonged to the generation who had grown up under their influence). “We've been meeting with people who are being held responsible by fighters on the front line for reducing democracy to a slogan,” he began. “What they've actually done is declare bankruptcy, surrendered in the middle of the battle. And to be honest, one of our standard tactics when we criticize their ideology is to hold up your essays as an example of what the Americans call a
laughing matter.
But as we see it, this battle is going to produce a backlash. And if it does, we may have to do some making up with the people on the other side of the fence who see us as having terminated relations with them. When we showed some professors we still know in Kyoto a rough plan for how to proceed, they were impressed with our ability to look forward to the darkness that lies ahead—we got all the introductions we wanted!”

In my diary entry that day I identified three distinct shifts in Unami's attitude as reflected in his language and delivery, I, II, and III, and the above appears at the beginning of II, shortly after my wife had coaxed Eeyore out of the room. Until then, Unami had spoken politely about his professors and had avoided mention of his fellow students’ evaluation of me.

“It's a fact that we consider your essays
laughing matters,
but since you don't touch political theory and you're not an activist, I personally think we're mistaken to make someone like you the object of doctrinaire criticism. But you do make us crazy! Because no matter how cold we are to you or how we mock you, you don't budge from your position, you just keep on writing the same stuff that was in your essays when we began reading you in high school. Nothing we say or do seems to smoke you out of your hole and move you any closer to the realists; but you don't step away from the phantom of postwar democracy and join us in battle either—who cares if people would call it an old man's folly! And ten years from now will your thinking have changed one bit? That's what's so irritating about you—you're like molasses! And what grounds do you have for thinking you're fine just the way you are and will never have to change? We tried thinking about that from your point of view, and we concluded that your grounds are your handicapped child. There's a movement we support, to put handicapped children in regular classes. I'm sure you know all about it, but you don't join, your child is enrolled in a special class that separates handicapped children from the others. And when we attack you for promoting discrimination, we get molasses again! There are different approaches to raising handicapped children; some should be enrolled in regular classes but special classes are better suited to your child's needs, isn't that how it goes? Your whole life revolves around your child, you've designed it that way, and your judgment is based on your experience, so outsiders can criticize you until they're blue in the face. Can you deny that? You've taken an oath to yourself that you're prepared to look after your handicapped child on your own steam no matter what happens to society, isn't that right? Anyone who reads
The Flood Has Risen
knows that. So as far as you're concerned, there's no reason to join the movement. That's what you do, you hunker down into a position like a hulk and you don't budge, that's what we mean by molasses!”

When Unami broke off, as if to observe my reaction, I asked the silent Inada whether he included himself in Unami's “we” and he spoke what may have been his only words that day: “I agree with everything he said, it's what we think.”

What could I say? And Unami's analysis of my state of mind at the time, that portion of it that I classified under II when I wrote it down, would feel like elaborately devised flattery in light of what was to come: before long, his tone shifted abruptly away from I and II to provocation as plain as raw meat. “We know you donated royalties from your books about the atom bomb to ‘Second-generation Survivors.’ The organization told reporters the money was being used to buy a vehicle for campaigning around the country. The truth is, they bought a jalopy with a fifth of the money. And when it broke down the day before they were supposed to leave, they came crying to you again for money to repair it. But what had happened to the money that was left over, did it occur to you it might have ended up in some pockets at the top of the organization? A while ago, they sent some students to Tokyo to demonstrate, and when it looked as though they might get themselves arrested, they asked you and the acting chancellor of Hitotsubashi University for plane fare so they could get back to Hiroshima. And you ended up paying for the whole thing, isn't that so? They were afraid the opposition party might get violent on them so they went crying home to Daddy and you paid for it! It seems there's no limit to the money you're willing to waste, but what about the other side? And speaking of money for buying cars, which you seem to have for them, how about donating a car to us? We're planning to install a short-wave transmitter in a minivan and broadcast live as we drive around. The crooks in the government and high finance get dragged into the Diet to testify but they hardly ever tell the truth. We plan to build a little torture chamber in our van and to broadcast our interrogation live. We're going to drive all over Tokyo grabbing politicians and industrialists and bureaucrats along the way and torturing them and broadcasting their testimony live while we're on the move. Our van is going to cost a lot more than the pocket change you gave the second-generation survivors, perhaps you'd consider coming up with some seed money?”

When I saw, without having to ask him again, that Inada concurred with everything Unami was saying, I lost the desire to continue the conversation. Unami was eerily well informed: he not only referred to things that were known only to those who had been in communication with me, but certain developments made sense to me for the first time in the light of his interpretation. Yet he was also perfectly aware, no matter how grounded in fact his argument was, that I was not about to take his proposal seriously. From the way he spoke it was clear that his intention was merely to provoke me, and he was succeeding at that. As I sat there wondering sullenly what I could do to get the students to leave, my wife, concerned that the lengthy visit might be leading me toward the excessive self-defense she worried about in those days, came back into the room. And the minute she appeared with tea on a tray and Eeyore in tow, Unami abruptly transformed back into a charmer. “Eeyore, while I was talking with your dad here I thought of another one for you. Ready? What's Mozart's smelliest key? It's simple: B-flatulence. Get it?” A minute later the students excused themselves and left.

In those days, my wife accompanied Eeyore to school in the morning and I went to meet him on my bicycle at the end of the day. Having started in elementary school when he was eight, he was now in a special class for third-graders. In response to his teachers’ concern that he might never develop the ability to go to school by himself if we continued accompanying him from door to door, we had been having him walk the last part by himself, gradually extending the distance along a route followed by other students on their way to the same school so there was no possibility that he might take a wrong turn. Down the hill from Seijo Gakuen where we lived there was an area of heavy traffic surrounding the empty lots that were a part of the Toho film studios, and the students had to take a pedestrian overpass across a main thoroughfare to reach the school just on the other side, but their route had been carefully considered. As I waited with my bicycle in front of the telegraph office at the top of the hill, Eeyore, looking smaller than he did at home, would climb slowly up the street in my direction with that unmistakable gait of his that appeared to be both casual and intent. Every day, joy rang out in me at the sight of him. Standing at the curb—he walked along the side of the road against traffic as he had been taught—I waited. Because the lenses in his glasses were still being adjusted, he didn't notice me until he was just ten feet away. His expression as he stopped in front of me was invariably flat, unmoved, but tension left his body like steam disappearing into the air and he turned back into a creature so soft that exposing him to the outdoors seemed unthinkable. Installing him in the metal seat attached to my handle bars, I would peddle home with his back against my chest.

That day, I waited at the telegraph office but Eeyore did not appear at the bottom of the hill. Gradually, the stream of children from the lower grades moving past me thinned out. Two girls who were older than Eeyore but in the same special class came up the hill holding hands and I asked if they had seen Eeyore, careful not to startle them, but they stiffened like boards and passed me in silence. I jumped on my bike and rode down the street past other children climbing the hill. Leaving my bike at the overpass, I ran through the tunnel to the school entrance, up the steps, and across the school yard to the special classes building. A young teacher was still there, working at her desk, and she told me that Eeyore had left thirty minutes ago. I ran all the way back to my bike and pedaled home along the route we always took, searching for a sign of Eeyore. When I reached the house, I learned from my wife that he had not returned.

My wife went into action immediately. She phoned the teacher in charge and reported that Eeyore was missing, and she contacted the network of mothers whose job it was to organize search parties of two and three parents when someone's child failed to appear. Until she set out to join the search, which was beginning in the immediate vicinity of the school, there was little I could do to help; as I knew that she and the network of mothers would operate more efficiently without me, I remained at home to look after Eeyore's younger brother and sister and to wait for calls from the teachers and parents.

Minutes after my wife had left, the phone rang once only. I remember glancing up at the clock as I started out of my chair and feeling inexpressible misery and rage at the same time when I saw that it was precisely three o'clock. Could it be starting again now, I remember thinking, at a time like this, could this be the literary hopeful with his familiar telephone routine, call after call all day long and silence at the other end when I answered until finally he cursed me and hung up? The student's fixated, tenacious personality was evident in the minute handwriting in hard pencil that made his letters impossible to read without holding them up to a light. He would begin calling at two or three in the afternoon and call every thirty minutes. Before long, he had conditioned me to the point where I was aware of the sound the telephone made in the instant before it rang, like a sudden intake of breath. With his sustained telephone attack, the student had instilled in me a fixation similar to his own.

That afternoon, when the phone rang a second time and then went silent I was seized by regret that made my head pound. What if the caller had Eeyore? This was the person, after all, who had written letters accusing us of caring about our own handicapped child to the exclusion of everyone else and who had heaped abuse on us for what he called the privileged life that allowed us to ignore uncaringly our obligation to others. It was clear that he had been hanging around the house: a few weeks earlier he had placed in our mailbox notices of having failed the employment exam at a savings bank and elsewhere. If I had questioned the silent caller just now, I might have gotten him to tell me “Yes, I have your son, and here are my conditions for his release.” What if this were his last phone call, his final appeal to me, and now he'd turned instead to acting on the horrific thinking in his letters?

If I wanted his address I had only to look at the letters I had stored in a manila envelope. But how would I convince the police of my suspicion? Standing at the phone, I counted out the thirty minutes. At four o'clock, the instant it rang, I seized the receiver and said my name. Silence at the other end. “Hello! Hello!” I said. A second later came a murmured “Yes—.” I searched for something to say, but before I could speak the youth said to me in a voice dark with anger, “You go to a fucking mental hospital!” and hung up. So he was cooped up in his house and engaged in the same telephone harassment as before! This was the first time I felt liberated by a phone call from him, and it would be the last.

It was after six o'clock and already pitch-dark when, following a report from my wife that Eeyore was still missing, I received a call from the student Inada. Beginning with “I thought I should let you know,” the student who had sat silently alongside the fluent Unami on the occasion of their visit delivered himself of the following account. His tone was somber but revealed no sense of guilt.