by Kenzaburo Oe
“Eeyore, did you compose this piece for Mrs. Shigeto, to wish her a quick recovery?” I asked, my brain functioning a little faster than usual. “Mrs. Shigeto, I heard you fractured your clavicle, and I think Eeyore composed it out of worry about your injury. He somehow got ribs and clavicle mixed up. … Eeyore, it was her clavicle.”
“I think ‘Ribs’ is more interesting!” Eeyore said.
“You're a naming expert, Eeyore,” Mr. Shigeto said contentedly, his eyes carefully perusing the music. “Shall I play it now? It looks like a good one as far as music theory goes. I don't notice any weak points in it.”
“Thank you very much!” Eeyore exclaimed.
“The pleasure's ours,” Mrs. Shigeto called to Eeyore, bowing to him as he happily followed her husband into the music room.
Then I helped Mrs. Shigeto spice the lamb while she, rather pedantically, taught me the amount of each spice necessary for the mixture. In our spare moments, she continued with the nobody topic, which she talked to me about the last time we were there. And what follows is what I have written in “Diary as Home,” a recapitulation of what she told me during the moments we rested our busy hands—she appeared to tire easily from the effects that remained of her injury. My replies to her, too, are but a summary.
“Eeyore knew that I'd injured my clavicle, but he decided on ‘Ribs’ because he found the sound more interesting. Who else but Eeyore could think up such a title? Eeyore has his own world, which he protects in his own way. This doesn't mean he's locked up in his own little niche; he has a channel that's open to the outside world, through music and by communicating with you. I find this delightful.”
“Your words are most uplifting. But when I reflect upon myself. I have to admit that, all along, I've been keeping Eeyore locked up in a special place. I realized this when you told me what you had to say about nobodies. I was, indeed, putting him someplace where I was treating him as somebody special. And this specialness must be something an outsider would consider lower than nobody, as the word dropout so aptly indicates. But the thing is, I grew up thinking, ‘So what?’ For I love Eeyore despite his handicap: I love him together with his handicap. And from a certain point in time, I even began to brandish his handicap like a banner. …
“I still believe there's nothing wrong with such banner-waving in my encounters with the outside world. But I think I've become too accustomed to accepting him as a wonderfully interesting person at home. And because of this, I wonder if I've neglected to take a more realistic view of him. I've overlooked the fact that, if I disregarded his disorder, he'd be an ordinary nobody. Although I often discussed issues like the independence of handicapped people with other volunteers at college, I don't think I've ever imagined a relationship with Eeyore as an independent person.
“The other day, I watched, with one street between us, how Eeyore was passing out handbills to people he didn't know. I'd hardly ever observed him from that far for so long. Then I noticed that, though his movements were too slow, and the expressions on his face too naive, the people who received the fliers from him appeared to take him for an ordinary person. It was Eeyore's first experience in making direct contact with the outside world, but I felt that I'd discovered a genuinely ordinary nobody quality in him.”
“I don't think you were the only one who felt that way. Didn't the Polish economist receive a handbill from Eeyore? It's apparent from her letter that she thinks he and the math whiz are one and the same person.”
“I'm sure that if the lady had had more time to observe him, she'd have noticed his disorder. … But it's true that Eeyore does have an ordinary nobody side to him.”
Trying too hard to understand me, Mrs. Shigeto appeared to have lost track, for I must have caused her undue strain, answering her very haltingly, deliberating every word I spoke. Then I noticed that Mr. Shigeto had opened the music-room door, and I heard him sit at the piano again. The newborn “Ribs” now echoed high and clear, unlike the muffled way we had heard it until then. Mrs. Shigeto tugged at her clavicle cast from over her blouse as though she were scratching herself, but before long, the piano took told of her. The music evoked a chain of thoughts in me—thoughts that seemingly contradicted, but did not actually contradict, the words I had spoken: Eeyore is a nobody, or rather a nobody with something about him that's slower than an ordinary nobody; in spite of this, though, there's undoubtedly a mystifying side to him, an interesting person. “Ribs”!
sadness of the novel
With my parents in California, I can think of them with a natural distance between us. Especially Father. One favorable sentiment I have about my relationship with him concerns my memory of the time I read Ende's Momo. It was required reading at my middle school, and seeing how excited everyone had gotten, our teacher, perhaps because he felt the need to throw cold water on our childish frenzy, said, “But one little girl saving the whole world—in reality, it just couldn't happen.”
As soon as I got home from school, I complained to Mother about it, all but tugging at her sleeve, as she prepared dinner in the kitchen. Mother was discreet, and said she would prefer not to comment, not having read the book yet. But Father, who had been reading on the living room sofa, walked into the kitchen, on the pretext of wanting a glass of the mineral water we kept in the refrigerator, and this is what he said.
“Ma-chan, dear, I would think the world's been saved by one little girl a number of times. It's just that no legend of their feats has been handed down to us. In the first place, the girls themselves probably didn't quite understand what they'd accomplished. … But, Ma-chan, the moment your heart started beating fast as you lay in bed reading Momo, and when you, too, wished to save the world by retrieving time from the men in gray, well, that was the sign, the sign that a little girl could save the entire world. So, Ma-chan, if you ever end up saving the world, remember what you do and tell me about it. If you find it too much of a hassle to tell me, tell Eeyore. He's a better listener than Momo.”
Father had written to me about Ende in a couple of his earlier letters from California. And because I'm sure we had also talked about The Neverending Story, I regard Ende as a writer who mediates a rare channel of communication between Father and me.
“While walking with Mama through the campus with its big differences in elevation, and looking at the variety of trees, beginning with those originally from Australia, we both draw sketches in our minds of Eeyore, you, and O in our house in Tokyo; and in those moments, my heart sometimes savors a kind of remote calm, a haven from the feelings of urgency that routinely hound me. I feel as though I were looking through a special prism, at a view of us progressing along the natural flow of years, and of your life continuing steadfastly from day to day. I don't think this is just my imagination, because you're already doing a fine job at seeing to it that everything at our home in Tokyo is well. I want you to know, Ma-chan, that I'm really grateful to you for this. I thank you.
“Well, I decided to write to you at some length today. Yet as I prepared to do so, various images of you kept floating into my mind. And it is mainly about these images that I am going to write. One scene is about something that happened when you were around three years old, a scene you couldn't, possibly remember. I was reading a book, lying on my side as usual, with my knees sticking out from the sofa, in the shape of a slanted L. And you, pressing your underbelly against the lowest part of my bent knees, were standing beside me with a dreamy expression on your face. … I had always been preoccupied with the care of Eeyore, and you weren't very attached to me then, so this remains a memory of an almost mystical moment.
“Yet another scene I recall is of when you were already in your late teens, at a time when you had further estranged yourself from me, but surprisingly, you came to me to discuss a book you were reading. I had given you my opinion of Momo once before. So I immediately presumed that you would say something along the same lines, for you had Ende's book, the one with the copper-colored silk binding, The Neverending Story
, pressed firmly to your bosom.
“At the time, I thought that if you were going to ask me something about The Neverending Story, in the vein of our discussion of Momo, then it had to be about the dialogue between the Old Man of Wandering Mountain and the Childlike Empress, who was in a desperate situation. The Old Man said, ‘Do you really intend to entrust everything to the hands of one human child?’ And the Childlike Empress replied, ‘I do.’
“However, you directed at me not a question, but rather something in the nature of a comment. You had been taken in by Ende's artful buildup to the climax in the middle of the story—of as far as you had read—and were so unable to contain your excitement that you had to talk to somebody about it. You chose to talk to me, and not to Eeyore, because it dawned on you that, in this case, it was more appropriate to talk to your father, a writer of novels. And this is what you said:
“‘Bastian is a reader until the middle of the story, then at last he himself enters into the story and becomes part of it, right? Me firmly believes that, if the Childlike Empress is to save Fantastica, her new name should be Moon Child. Up to the page before this, I wondered how he'd become part of the story. I really didn't think such a thing would be possible. But as soon as he spoke the name Moon Child, he was already in Fantastica, and everything that took place afterwards seemed so natural. … And then I realized that everything about a tale depends on how you tell it.’
“‘I agree,’ I replied, though to tell you the truth, I was a bit surprised. ‘But the same may be said of all manner of novels. From the writer's side, however, you could say that everything depends on how a narration is heard by readers. This is fundamental to writing. I have been writing novels for a long time, and especially when I was young, I was dissatisfied with most of the reviews I got. But these days, whatever evaluation a work gets, if the reader says, “This is how I heard it,” I almost always feel that's what I narrated.’
“You then said, again with mystical eyes that reminded me of when you were three, ‘It would be nice if you had a reader like Bastian.’
“Almost every day these days, I think of these words you spoke to me. And as I contemplate, in faraway California, the new novel I plan to write, I keep wishing I could become a reader-listener like Bastian, and get him to lend an attentive ear to the story I'm about to tell. I do, in fact, resemble the Bastian who is still on this side of the world, in the sense that I'm short-legged and a bit on the corpulent side.”
To my surprise, soon after I received this letter, I learned that Father was going to meet the author of Momo and The Neverending Story for a Japanese TV station.
“… A large-scale exhibition in memory of Edgar Ende, Michael Ende's father and a painter who suffered oppression in the midst of the rise of Nazi power, was held in San Francisco, and arrangements were made that I would interview Michael Ende on his visit here for the occasion. I am forwarding you the catalogue together with this letter, hoping that you will see the paintings yourself, at least their photographic versions. I say this because, while I was preparing for the interview, which somehow turned out to be a heavy, cheerless one—it's going to be aired in Japan soon—I found these words by Michael Ende in a record of his dialogues: ‘But if, because of our discussion, a viewer of a painting were to strive on his own and continue to look at it, and then chance upon a door through which he could enter it, we shouldn't forestall him by offering too many explanations, and otherwise stand in his way to discovery.’
“Although this pertains to something quite different from what I wrote in my previous letter, talking to Ende, I again recalled the words you spoke to me. They concern what The Neverending Story started you thinking about. After entering Fantastica, Bastian quickly starts losing memories of this world. For every wish that comes true in the new world, he loses one memory of the old—and he doesn't realize that he's forgetting. You then told me you were afraid, because even if you were going to be reborn in the new world, if in the process you were going to forget all about yourself in the old world, then it would be the same as if you had turned into nothing; and if, in the new world, you didn't know that you had lived in the old one, then it would be the same as if your present self were dead. …
“Ma-chan, you said something to this effect, but for some reason or other, I didn't try hard enough give you an adequate answer. Reflecting on this, I tell myself I should have realized that what you had on your mind was the question of death and what comes afterwards: a question that, strangely enough, has frightened me ever since I was a child. I remember that I replied, but it wasn't much of an answer, and now, with a feeling that again depresses me, I apologize, or perhaps I should say, I feel ashamed of myself.
“Ma-chan, what has become of your own discovery of the question of rebirth? I hope that it has changed to a somewhat brighter hue.”
At the time, I did indeed spend whole days thinking about the fearfulness of death, however childish these thoughts may have been. But I now know, from what Mr. Shigeto has told me, that this has been the very question Father had been trying to answer since his youth. And I recall an occasion that revealed to me that this question must always have been an inner problem for him. After all, my fear of death is connected with Father's crying over Dr. W's death, his drinking and crying over it every night until early morning, his face beet red. Mother had the habit of scurrying off to her own bedroom and entrenching herself there, instead of keeping Father company while he drank. I slept on a futon spread out beside Mother's bed, and I couldn't sleep, hearing Father moving around in the kitchen when he was drunk. I was furious, thinking that Mother probably couldn't sleep either. Once she told him in a rather stern voice to go upstairs to his study-cum-bedroom, and do his drinking there. To which I heard Father, though definitely trying to control himself, fire back, in a menacing voice, “On one occasion I heard Dr. W say this. … He said that with more friends and acquaintances now on the other side, he felt a closer affinity there than here, and was therefore no longer afraid of death, but wished to go without having to suffer too much. But Dr. W died of lung cancer,” Father continued, “so he must have tasted excruciating pain!”
There obviously wasn't anything I could do about this, except to sink my head under the pillow, though by the time Mother returned, I was sleeping. The Neverending Story reminded me of what I had heard that night, and despite his bewilderment at my question, the very asking of which was a rare occasion, I followed it up with another the next day.
“Oh really?” he replied. “So after Dr. W passed away, it wasn't only Mama who heard me expound on the pain of death. … Come to think of it, though, my anxiety over such pain was very vague in those days. The simple fact that Dr. W died a painful death was the sole cause of such fear in me. Beyond this, though, I believe the core of my fear at the time consisted of the thought that, after death, I would turn into nothing.”
“Me, too,” I said. Frankly, I am no good at communicating with Father, but feeling encouraged by The Neverending Story, which I held in my hands, I was ready to at least ask him this, even for the mere sake of asking. “I'm afraid of becoming nothing, too,” I said, “but I have a friend who says she shudders at the thought of her having been nothing for billions of years before she was born.”
“Oh? That is a problem, isn't it?” he said. “For my part, I don't much think about it anymore; not that I have gained any wisdom to encourage you with, but only because age has made me insensitive to the fear of my becoming zero. In terms of the scale of human history, though, I would say that people have always contemplated the rebirth of their dead.”
“Even if there were rebirth,” I said, “if you remember nothing of your previous existence, it's the same as turning into nothing, isn't it? Bastian in The Neverending Story is the same way.”
Nevertheless, when I think of rebirth these days, I feel it's better to become a new person—perhaps an animal, some vegetation, or anything that has life—who's totally oblivious to who I am now. I don't feel that i
f I forget this existence, I'm going to turn into nothing. Rather, I find it comfortable to think that, after being reborn, I won't remember anything of my previous life; and during this lifetime, I'll never know what form of life I'm going to assume next time around. …
If there are such rebirths, then Eeyore, O-chan, and I must have experienced many lives before this one, about which we remember nothing. And we're going to chance upon many more that we can't even imagine. If so, there couldn't be any profound meaning in our family feeling mortified over—as though there were no possible atonement for—Eeyore's brain, which had accidentally been destroyed when he came into this world this time.
When Father published Eeyore's music, at his own expense, and distributed copies to his friends and acquaintances, not a few of them said that they had heard in it a mystical voice that transcended the limitations of human beings. Such sentimental impressions, I thought, though as usual these were words I uttered only in my heart. Eeyore starts working on each piece after carefully deliberating what he wants to express in it, which is what he did even for pieces like “Summer in Kita-Karuizawa” or “Requiem for M.” He's accumulated his technique through years of listening to FM programs and records, along with Mrs. T's patient instruction. He can't comment on his music the way ordinary musicians so cloquently do about theirs, but I think he creates his music by employing the themes and syntax of the music of the people who walk or have walked this earth, and not at the suggestion of any heavenly will.
To use Father as an example of someone who writes, it was after several years of reading Blake—in his study or on the living room sofa, from morning to night—that he wrote a set of short stories about Eeyore by overlapping images from the poet's Prophecies together with events that delineate Eeyore's growth and development. Characters based on me and O-chan are portrayed in them. So I said to O-chan, “A pain in the neck, don't you think, even if it's been done favorably, that he writes about us from his one-dimensional viewpoint? It's all right with my friends who know me, but it depresses me to think that I'm going to meet some people who, through his stories, will have preconceived ideas of me.”
