Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (32 page)

It was pitch black outside when the banker appeared in the door and called me. I eased my shoulder from under the worker’s head and stood up. The banker paid me my salary for the day and then let me into the room. D lay on his back with rubber tubes in his nostrils as in a joke. His face gave me pause: it was black as smoked meat. But I couldn’t help voicing the doubt that had me so afraid. I called out to my dying employer: “Did you hire me just so you could commit sucide? Was all that about Aghwee just a cover-up?” Then my throat was clogged with tears and I was surprised to hear myself shouting, “I was about to believe in Aghwee!”

At that moment, as my eyes filled with tears and things began to dim, I saw a smile appear on D’s darkened, shriveled face. It might have been a mocking smile and it might have been a smile of friendly mischief. The banker led me out of the room. The young man from the truck was stretched out on the bench asleep. On my way out, I slipped the thousand yen I had earned into his jacket pocket. I read in the evening paper the next day that the composer was dead.

And then it was this spring and I was walking down the street when a group of frightened children suddenly started throwing stones. It was so sudden and unprovoked, I don’t know what I had done to threaten them. Whatever it was, fear had turned those children into killers, and one of them hit me in the right eye with a rock as big as a fist. I went down on one knee, pressed my hand
to my eye and felt a lump of broken flesh. With my good eye I watched my dripping blood draw in the dirt in the street as though magnetically. It was then that I sensed a being I knew and missed leave the ground behind me like a kangaroo and soar into the teary blue of a sky that retained its winter brittleness. Good-bye, Aghwee, I heard myself whispering in my heart. And then I knew that my hatred of those frightened children had melted away and that time had filled my sky during those ten years with figures that glowed with an ivory-white light, I suppose not all of them purely innocent. When I was wounded by those children and sacrificed my sight in one eye, so clearly a gratuitous sacrifice, I had been endowed, if for only an instant, with the power to perceive a creature that had descended from the heights of my sky.

*
In January, 1946, Emperor Hirohito announced to the Japanese people that he was a mortal man and not a god.

*
Two impossible puns, “dates” on “tea-jar,” and “monkey” on “a well-known noble.” A medieval Japanese tale has a monkey cheating a crab out of some rice balls by offering the crab persimmon seeds which, the monkey assures him, will soon grow into delicious persimmons.

*
An outrageous pun,
tomin shite
(hibernate) on
tomite
(prosper).

*
The suicide in the emperor’s name that was the goal of the Kamikaze pilots.