by Kenzaburo Oe
It was in this manner that a cruel freedom was enforced on the fat man. It came his way just four years and two months after the abnormal birth of Mori, his son.
The fat man’s this-time conscious battle for yet another freedom did elicit a printed notice from his mother, but beyond that the front did not advance; for she would not respond further, and continued to ignore her son’s repeated letters and phone calls. She refused to accept the letters, and would not come to the phone when he called.
Late one night after several weeks of this, the fat man renewed his determination and once again telephoned his mother. The village operator took the phone call in standard, formal Japanese, but when she came back on the line after a minute of silence, she addressed the fat man directly by name (since he was the only Tokyo resident to place long-distance calls to this little valley, the operator knew from whom and to whom the call came as soon as she heard the number being called, and would probably eavesdrop, something which occurred to the fat man but which he was too distracted to pursue), and then apologized to him in excessively familiar dialect which conveyed her sympathy and confusion:
____There’s no answer again tonight, no matter how many times I ring. She (meaning the fat man’s mother, living alone in the family house) never goes anywhere, and it’s the middle of the night besides—she doesn’t come to the phone on purpose every time you call! That isn’t right, you want me to hop over on my bike and wake her up?
So the fat man asked this special favor of the operator and before long the phone was answered. Not that his mother said anything, merely lifted the receiver and held it in silence. As soon as he had cleared his mind of the friendly operator, who had probably hurried back to the switchboard on her bicycle (professional duty!) and was listening in, the fat man began a somehow persuasive, somehow threatening speech to his silent mother:
____Who did you think was going to believe the lies in that announcement? And sending it to my wife’s relatives! Mother, if I’m crazy from a disease I picked up abroad and if the baby was born abnormal as a result, then the baby’s mother has to be infected too, isn’t that so? But you sent your announcement directly to my wife, the baby’s mother, Mother! Now that’s all I need to tell me that you don’t even believe yourself what you insinuated about my disease and my madness.… Or have you gone into that old act about being mad yourself? Well that routine is too old, you won’t fool anybody that way. And let me tell you something, if you can pretend to be mad well enough to fool someone again then you’re not pretending anymore, you really have gone mad! … Mother, why won’t you speak? You’re hiding my notes because you’re afraid if I publish something about Father every one who knows the family will think he was mad, and that his blood runs in all the children, and that my son is the living proof of that, isn’t that so? And you’re afraid of the humiliation that would be to my brothers and sisters, isn’t that so? But don’t you realize that pretending to be crazy and advertising that an evil disease has made me mad is going to result in something even worse? … Mother, I haven’t made up my mind that Father died of madness, I just want to know what really happened. My older brothers were in the army and the others were just kids, so I’m the only one of the children who remembers Father letting out a scream all of a sudden and then dying in that storehouse he’d locked himself in, that’s why I want to know what that was all about. You ask why it’s only me, only me of all the children who keeps worrying about Father’s last years and death, I’ll tell you why, Mother, because I really have to know. You used to say to me when you brushed me aside, “The other boys have important things on their minds, and you ask questions like that!” but to me it is important to know what really happened.… Mother, if I don’t find out, I have a feeling that sooner or later I’ll confine myself in a storehouse of my own, and one day I’ll scream all of a sudden and the next morning my wife will be telling Eeyore just what you once told me and nothing more, “Your father has passed away, you mustn’t cry or spit or make big or little business thoughtlessly, especially when you’re facing West!” … Mother, you must remember a lot about Father…. Didn’t you ask my wife not to take “sonny boy” seriously if he started glorifying his father’s behavior during his last years? My father happens to have spent his last years sitting in a storehouse without moving, with his eyes and ears covered—didn’t you tell my wife not to believe for a minute that he’d done that as a protest against the times, because he wanted to deny the reality of a world in which Japan was making war on the China he revered? Didn’t you tell her it was simply madness that made him do what he did? Didn’t you even say that Father had been as fat as a pig when he died because he’d been stuffing himself with everything he could lay hands on without moving anything but his mouth, and then insinuate that he had hidden himself in that storehouse because he was ashamed of being the only fat man around at a time when food was so scarce? You tell my wife all that and you won’t talk to me at all, you even steal the notes I’ve made about things I’ve managed to remember by myself, how can you do that Mother? … That morning my wife had the illusion I was about to hang myself, you told her my father was never in earnest; that he knew everything he did was fake, because he told himself he was not in earnest whenever he began something, but he didn’t notice the effect it was actually having on him however little at a time, wasn’t conscious of it, and that it was too late when he did notice. Tell me, Mother, what is it my father did that was not in earnest? What was too late? … Mother, if you intend to continue ignoring me, I have some thoughts of my own: I’ll sit down in a dark room just as Father did, with sunglasses on and plugs in my ears, and I’ll show you what fat can really be, I’m already a tub of lard, you know, and when I eventually let out my big scream and die, what do you intend to do, Mother, console my wife by telling her again that “sonny boy” and his father noticed whatever it is they noticed too late? Do you intend to say Foolishness! again, and play the Grand Lady? … I’ve only learned this recently, but it seems my son can get along without me, as an idiot in an idiot’s way, and that means I’m free now, I’m as good as liberated from my son, so from now on I can concentrate exclusively on my Father; I’m free to sit myself in a barber’s chair in a dark storehouse until the day I die just as Father did…. Mother, why do you keep repudiating me with silence? I keep telling you, I only want to get at the truth about my Father’s last years…. I don’t really care about writing his biography, even if I do write something I’ll promise never to have it published if that’s what you want, do you still refuse to talk to me? … If you won’t be convinced that I’m telling the truth when I say I only want to know what really happened, then let me tell you something, Mother, I can write up a biography of Father that chronicles his madness and ends in suicide any time I want, and I can have it published, too. And if I did that, you could spend every penny of your estate on paper and printing and mailing announcements, and people in numbers you couldn’t possibly match would believe what I had to say and not you! What I’m telling you is that I don’t care so much about getting back my manuscript, I just want to hear the truth from you, because I have to have it, Mother, I need it…. Believe me, there’d be no problem if it were the manuscript I needed, I can probably recite it for you right now, listen: “My father began his retreat from the world because …”
Quietly, but firmly, the phone was hung up. The fat man returned, pale with cold and despair, to his bed, pulled the covers over his head and for a long time lay trembling. And he wept furtively, as he had wept that night after his experience above the polar bears’ enclosure. He remembered how long it had been since he had actually heard his mother’s voice. This last time it was through his wife that he had finally managed to learn what she had said about his dead father. When it came to talk of his father in particular, he couldn’t even recall when last he had heard his mother’s voice. When she spoke to his wife, she had apparently referred to his father as “the man.” The Man. The fat man was reminded of a line from a
wartime poem by an English poet, actually it resided in him always, as if it were his prayer. Like the Pure Land hymns which had resided in his grandmother until the day she died, it was part of his body and his spirit. And the poem itself happened to be a prayer spoken at the height of the very battle in which his father had lost his Chinese friends one after the other. The voice of Man: “O, teach us to outgrow our madness.” If that voice is the voice of the Man, then “our madness” means the Man’s and mine, the fat man told himself for the first time. In the past, whenever he whispered the poem to himself as though in prayer, “our madness” had always meant his own and his son Eeyore’s. But now he was positive that only himself and the Man were included. The Man had deposited his massive body in the barber chair he had installed in a dark storehouse, covered his eyes and ears, and tirelessly prayed, “Teach us to outgrow our madness, mine and his!” The Man’s madness is my madness, the fat man insisted stubbornly to himself, his son already banished beyond the borders of his consciousness. But what right did his mother have to obstruct the passageway leading from himself toward the Man’s madness? The fat man wasn’t weeping any more, but he was still trembling so that the sheets rustled, not with cold but rage alone.
Once he had adjusted his perspective in this way, the fat man no longer equated himself and Eeyore, even when he considered the hoodlums’ attack above the polar bears’ pool. He was even able to feel, precisely because it had liberated him from bondage to his son, that the experience had been beneficial. What kept his already ignited anger aflame was his knowledge that his own mother had so long prevented him, in danger even now of being hurled to a polar bear of madness, from discovering the true meaning of that appeal to which the Man may have been so close to hearing an answer at the end of his life, “Teach us to outgrow our madness.”
The fat man finally fell asleep, but his fury survived even in his dream: his hot hand was clutched in the hand of a hippopotamus of a man sitting with his back to him in a barber chair in a dark storehouse, and fury flowed back and forth between them as rapidly as an electric current. But no matter how long he waited, the fuming giant continued to stare into the darkness and would not turn around to face the fat child who was himself.
When the fat man woke up, he readied himself for a final assault on his mother and swore to begin a new chronicle of the Man’s madness in his last years and to undertake an investigation into outgrowing “our madness,” the Man’s and his own. But once again he was beaten to the offensive. During the night, while he had been weeping and raging and having dreams, his mother had been so prudent as to contrive a strategy of her own, and by dawn had even drafted a new announcement in which she broke a silence of twenty years and spoke of her dead husband. Only two days after his phone call, the notes and incomplete manuscript for the biography in which he had attempted to reconstruct an entire image of his dead father arrived at the fat man’s house, registered mail, special delivery. That same week, delayed by only the number of days it had taken the printer to fill the order but unquestionably written the same night as the fat man’s call, a new announcement also arrived, addressed to the fat man’s wife, registered mail, special delivery:
Recently it was my duty to inform you that my third son had lost his mind. I must now announce that I was mistaken in this, and ask you kindly to forget it. Apropos this season of the year, I am reminded that my late husband, having had an acquaintance with the officers involved in a certain coup d’état, was led upon its failure to the dreadful conclusion that no course of action remained but the assassination of his Imperial Majesty. It was the horror of this which moved him to confine himself in a storehouse, where he remained until his death.
The cause of death, let me conclude, was heart failure; the death certificate is on file at the county office. Begging to inform you of the above, I remain,
Sincerely yours,
Signed
winter, 196—
But who will save the people?
I close my eyes and think:
A world without conspirators!
—Choku
Although she had not appeared much moved by the first announcement, this one jolted the fat man’s wife surprisingly. For most of an evening she read it over to herself and only then, having reached no conclusions of her own, informed the fat man that it had arrived and showed it to him. Only when the fat man had read it over to himself and was simply standing in silence with the announcement in his hand did she speak up and disclose the substance of her agitation:
____You remember your mother asked me not to take you seriously if you started glorifying your father’s last years? Do you think she decided to bring all this to light because you’ve finally made her begin to hate you with your attacks on her? Do you think your mother has made up her mind to renounce you, and this is her way of saying, imitate your father all you want, nothing you do is her responsibility any more?
Since the shock which the fat man had received himself came from an entirely different aspect of the announcement, he could only pursue his own distress in silence. The minute he read it he had sensed that this blow, like the blow he had received through Eeyore, was aimed at something fundamental in himself and could be neither countered nor returned. For several days he tried to discredit his mother’s account of his father by checking it against what he remembered from his childhood and what he had heard. But among all the details he had collected in order to write the biography, he could find nothing which mortally contradicted the announcement.
His grandmother had said more than once that his father had been attacked by an assassin with a Japanese sword, and that he had managed to escape harm by sitting perfectly still in the dark storehouse without offering any resistance. The assassin was probably one of the band which had been associated with his father through the junior officers in the revolt. And he must have been a man with no more stomach than his father for an actual uprising or for individual action in the next stage of the revolt. He had tracked down a craven like himself to the place where he was living in self-confinement, and brandished his Japanese sword and threatened emptily, but that was all he had ever intended to do.
Then there was the drama commemorating a certain coup d’état, one of the fat man’s reveries since his youth, in which the widows of the junior officers who had been involved, old women now and incarcerated in a rest home, playing themselves as young wives thirty-five years earlier, attacked with drawn daggers a man seated with his back to them in a barber chair, “the highest Authority to have abandoned the insurgents; or—a private citizen who sympathized politically, provided funds, and was generally in league with the junior officers until the day of the revolt, finally betrayed them, dropped out of the uprising, and spent what remained of his life hiding in a storehouse in his country village.” The idea undoubtedly had its distant source in things the fat man had been told as a child, probably in such a way as to hint even that long ago at the contents of his mother’s announcement. At any rate, he must have known vaguely that there was some connection between his father and that attempted coup, for he had spoken about it to his wife. It was on a stormy night some time ago, and he had been relating a perfectly normal memory which had renewed itself in him, of his father telling him as a child, on another stormy night, that life was like a family emerging from the darkness, coming together for a brief time around a lighted candle, and then disappearing one by one into their own darkness once again.
For a week, the fat man studied his mother’s announcement and pored over the notes and fragments of manuscript which he had written for his dead father’s biography. And then early one morning (he hadn’t been to sleep at all; that entire week he had slept only four or five hours a night and, except for quick meals, had remained in his study) he went into the garden in back of his house and incinerated a sheaf of pages which contained every word he had written about his father. He also burned a picture card which had been thumbtacked above his desk ever since he had brought it back from New
York, of a sculpture, a plaster-of-Paris man who resembled his father as he fancied him, about to straddle a plaster-of-Paris bicycle. He then informed his wife, who was out of bed now and getting breakfast ready, that he had changed his mind about a plan which until then he had opposed. It was a plan to get eyeglasses for Eeyore and to place him in an institution for retarded children. The fat man knew that his wife had gone back to that eye doctor without his permission and persuaded him to prescribe a special pair of glasses, probably by groveling in front of the little man, which she was secretly training Eeyore to wear. The fat man had been severed from his son already, they were free of one another. And now he had confirmed that, in the same way, he had been severed from his dead father and was free. His father had not gone mad, and even if he had, insofar as there was a clear reason for his madness, it was something altogether different from his own. Gradually he had been giving up his habit of bicycling off with Eeyore to eat pork noodles in broth; and although, as he approached the age at which his father had begun his self-confinement, his tastes had inclined toward fatty things such as pigs’ feet Korean style, he was losing once again almost all positive desire for food.
The fat man began taking a sauna bath once a week and sweating his corpulence away. And one bright spring morning he had come out of the sauna and was taking his shower when he discovered a swarthy stranger who was nonetheless of tremendous concern to him standing right in front of his eyes. Perhaps his confusion had to do with the steam fogging the mirror—there was no question that he was looking at himself.
The man peered closely at the figure standing alone in the mirror and identified several portents of madness. Now he had neither a father nor a son with whom to share the madness closing in on him. He had only the freedom to confront it by himself.
