Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (3 page)

“The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away” conveys more of
Ō
e’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
Ō
e and his son increasingly from the outside world. Like his narrator, intent on reliving a moment in the past existing only in his imagination,
Ō
e 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
Ō
e 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
Ō
e and Grove Press. In the fall of 1965, when
Ō
e 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
Ō
e had agreed. Suddenly, in October, I received a telegram from Barney Rosset; someone had sent Grove my translation of an early
Ō
e 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
Ō
e 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
Ō
e’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.
Ō
e 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
Ō
e’s KOJINTEKI NA TAIKEN [A Personal Matter] and I am well into it and like it very much. One of the copies came from
Ō
e 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
Ō
e, 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
Ō
e’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,
Ō
e 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
Ō
e at his side. The connection
Ō
e 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.
Ō
e’s work belongs at Grove Press.

—John Nathan
Jewel Farm, Princeton
December 20, 1976.

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 strung 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.

However, since he was an invalid at the very brink of death, afflicted with, as he believed, liver cancer, or, at the very least, assuming only what was objectively recognized, an advanced cirrhosis, it was unthinkable that he should put pen to paper himself. At first, when he asserted this and asked for a stenographer, the voices around his bed replied that he was merely deluding himself, that if only he regained the “normal consciousness” that he was in the neurology and not the cancer ward and not so gravely ill that he could not hold a pencil, he would undoubtedly be
able to write for hours on end, and even with an instrument as heavy as that giant Pelikan fountain pen which was an ostentatious souvenir from some trip abroad. The fountain pen in question, as well as the discolored brass underwater goggles he wore almost constantly as he lay in bed (the oval glass lenses set into two short cylinders had been covered long ago, before the days of synthetic tape, with dark green cellophane, and were still used that way; clipping his nostrils late that night with the goggles on, he must have looked to the intruder like an alien from outer space, one short, conic, metal cylinder neatly extending from each of his eyes and one nostril), were both mementoes of someone long dead about whom he and his mother disagreed violently yet both referred to as
a certain party.
Not only had
a certain party’s
former belongings, now in his possession, been unspeakably insulted by the manner in which they had been described, it had also been insinuated that if he were really about to enter a coma and die, the personal record of his
Happy Days
would be a waste: his anger mounted.

Angrily, he emphasized once again that what he intended to relate was a “history of the age” that would transcend the arbitrary reminiscences of a mere individual. If
a certain party,
who figured in the history, had not been killed in a street battle in a provincial city just before the war ended, he would certainly have been required to testify before the extraordinary session of the Military Tribunal for the Far East that had been obliged to make its way to the valley deep in the forest; the story he was about to tell should, therefore, be of great concern not only to the United Nations but, in particular, to the current administration of his own country, a nation controlled by men who were clearly war criminals who had survived.