by Kenzaburo Oe
The man decided not to write a biography of his dead father. Instead, he sent repeated letters to the Man, whose existence nowhere was evident now, “Teach us to outgrow our madness,” and jotted down a few lines which always opened with the words “I begin my retreat from the world because …” And as if he intended these notes to be discovered after his death, he locked them in a drawer and never showed them to anyone.
AGHWEE THE SKY MONSTER
Alone in my room, I wear a piratical black patch over my right eye. The eye may look all right, but the truth is I have scarcely any sight in it. I say scarcely, it isn’t totally blind. Consequently, when I look at this world with both eyes I see two worlds perfectly superimposed, a vague and shadowy world on top of one that’s bright and vivid. I can be walking down a paved street when a sense of peril and unbalance will stop me like a rat just scurried out of a sewer, dead in my tracks. Or I’ll discover a film of unhappiness and fatigue on the face of a cheerful friend and clog the flow of an easy chat with my stutter. I suppose I’ll get used to this eventually. If I don’t, I intend to wear my patch not only in my room when I’m alone but on the street and with my friends. Strangers may pass with condescending smiles—what an old-fashioned joke!—but I’m old enough not to be annoyed by every little thing.
The story I intend to tell is about my first experience earning money; I began with my right eye because the memory of that experience ten years ago revived in me abruptly and quite out of context when violence was done to my eye last spring. Remembering, I should add, I was freed from the hatred uncoiling in my heart and beginning to fetter me. At the very end I’ll talk about the accident itself.
Ten years ago I had twenty-twenty vision. Now one of my eyes is ruined. Time shifted, launched itself from the springboard of an eyeball squashed by a stone. When I first met that sentimental madman I had only a child’s understanding of time. I was yet to have the cruel awareness of time drilling its eyes into my back and time lying in wait ahead.
Ten years ago I was eighteen, five feet six, one hundred and ten pounds, had just entered college and was looking for a part-time job. Although I still had trouble reading French, I wanted a cloth-bound edition in two volumes of L’me Enchanté. It was a Moscow edition, with not only a foreword but footnotes and even the colophon in Russian and wispy lines like bits of thread connecting the letters of the French text. A curious edition to be sure, but sturdier and more elegant than the French, and much cheaper. At the time I discovered it in a bookstore specializing in East European publications I had no interest in Romain Rolland, yet I went immediately into action to make the volumes mine. In those days I often succumbed to some weird passion and it never bothered me, I had the feeling there was nothing to worry about so long as I was sufficiently obsessed.
As I had just entered college and wasn’t registered at the employment center, I looked for work by making the rounds of people I knew. Finally my uncle introduced me to a banker who came up with an offer. “Did you happen to see a movie called Harvey?” he asked. I said yes, and tried for a smile of moderate but unmistakable dedication, appropriate for someone about to be employed for the first time. Harvey was that Jimmy Stewart film about a man living with an imaginary rabbit as big as a bear; it had made me laugh so hard I thought I would die. “Recently, my son has been having the same sort of delusions about living with a monster.” The banker didn’t return my smile. “He’s stopped working and stays in his room. I’d like him to get out from time to time but of course he’d need a—companion. Would you be interested?”
I knew quite a bit about the banker’s son. He was a young composer whose avant-garde music had won prizes in France and Italy and who was generally included in the photo roundups in the weekly magazines, the kind of article they always called “Japan’s Artists of Tomorrow.” I had never heard his major works, but I had seen several films he had written the music for. There was one about the adventures of a juvenile delinquent that had a short, lyrical theme played on the harmonica. It was beautiful. Watching the picture, I remember feeling vaguely troubled by the idea of an adult nearly thirty years old (in fact, the composer was twenty-eight when he hired me, my present age), working out a theme for the harmonica, I suppose because my own harmonica had become my little brother’s property when I had entered elementary school. And possibly because I knew more about the composer, whose name was D, than just public facts; I knew he had created a scandal. Generally I have nothing but contempt for scandals, but I knew that the composer’s infant child had died, that he had gotten divorced as a result, and that he was rumored to be involved with a certain movie actress. I hadn’t known that he was in the grips of something like the rabbit in Jimmy Stewart’s movie, or that he had stopped working and secluded himself in his room. How serious was his condition, I wondered, was it a case of nervous breakdown, or was he clearly schizophrenic?
“I’m not certain I know just what you mean by companion,” I said, reeling in my smile. “Naturally, I’d like to be of service if I can.” This time, concealing my curiosity and apprehension I tried to lend my voice and expression as much sympathy as possible without seeming forward. It was only a part-time job, but it was the first chance of employment I had had and I was determined to do my accommodating best.
“When my son decides he wants to go somewhere in Tokyo, you go along—just that. There’s a nurse at the house and she has no trouble handling him, so you don’t have to worry about violence.” The banker made me feel like a soldier whose cowardice had been discovered. I blushed and said, trying to recover lost ground, “I’m fond of music, and I respect composers more than anyone, so I look forward to accompanying D and talking with him.”
“All he thinks about these days is this thing in his head, and apparently that’s all he talks about!” The banker’s brusqueness made my face even redder. “You can go out to see him tomorrow,” he said.
“At—your house?”
“That’s right, did you think he was in an asylum?” From the banker’s tone of voice I could only suppose that he was at bottom a nasty man.
“If I should get the job,” I said with my eyes on the floor, “I’ll drop by again to thank you.” I could easily have cried.
“No, he’ll be hiring you (All right then, I resolved defiantly, I’ll call D my employer), so that won’t be necessary. All I care about is that he doesn’t get into any trouble outside that might develop into a scandal…. There’s his career to think about. Naturally, what he does reflects on me—”
So that was it! I thought, so I was to be a moral sentinel guarding the banker’s family against a second contamination by the poisons of scandal. Of course I didn’t say a thing, I only nodded dependably, anxious to warm the banker’s chilly heart with the heat of reliance on me. I didn’t even ask the most pressing question, something truly difficult to ask: This monster haunting your son, sir, is it a rabbit like Harvey, nearly six feet tall? A creature covered in bristly hair like an Abominable Snowman? What kind of a monster is it? In the end I remained silent and consoled myself with the thought that I might be able to pry the secret out of the nurse if I made friends with her.
Then I left the executive’s office, and as I walked along the corridor grinding my teeth in humiliation as if I were Julien Sorel after a meeting with someone important I became self-conscious to the tips of my fingers and tried assessing my attitude and its effectiveness. When I got out of college I chose not to seek nine-to-five employment, and I do believe the memory of my dialogue with that disagreeable banker played a large part in my decision.
Even so, when classes were over the next day I took a train out to the residential suburb where the composer lived. As I passed through the gate of that castle of a house, I remember a roaring of terrific beasts, as at a zoo in the middle of the night. I was dismayed, I cowered, what if those were the screams of my employer? A good thing it didn’t occur to me then that those savage screams might have been coming from the monster haunting D like Jimmy Stewa
rt’s rabbit. Whatever they were, it was so clear that the screaming had rattled me that the maid showing me the way was indiscreet enough to break into a laugh. Then I discovered someone else laughing, voicelessly, in the dimness beyond a window in an annex in the garden. It was the man who was supposed to employ me; he was laughing like a face in a movie without a sound track. And boiling all around him was that howling of wild beasts. I listened closely and realized that several of the same animals were shrieking in concert. And in voices too shrill to be of this world. Abandoned by the maid at the entrance to the annex, I decided the screaming must be part of the composer’s tape collection, regained my courage, straightened up and opened the door.
Inside, the annex reminded me of a kindergarten. There were no partitions in the large room, only two pianos, an electric organ, several tape recorders, a record player, something we had called a “mixer” when I was in the high-school radio club—there was hardly room to step. A dog asleep on the floor, for example, turned out to be a tuba of reddish brass. It was just as I had imagined a composer’s studio; I even had the illusion I had seen the place before. His father had said D had stopped working and secluded himself in his room, could he have been mistaken?
The composer was just bending to switch off the tape recorder. Enveloped in a chaos that was not without its own order, he moved his hands swiftly and in an instant those beastly screams were sucked into a dark hole of silence. Then he straightened and turned to me with a truly tranquil smile.
Having glanced around the room and seen that the nurse was not present I was a little wary, but the composer gave me no reason in the world to expect that he was about to get violent.
“My father told me about you. Come in, there’s room over there,” he said in a low, resonant voice.
I took off my shoes and stepped up onto the rug without putting on slippers. Then I looked around for a place to sit, but except for a round stool in front of the piano and the organ, there wasn’t a bit of furniture in the room, not even a cushion. So I brought my feet together between a pair of bongo drums and some empty tape boxes and there I stood uncomfortably. The composer stood there too, arms hanging at his sides. I wondered if he ever sat down. He didn’t ask me to be seated either, just stood there silent and smiling.
“Could those have been monkey voices?” I said, trying to crack a silence that threatened to set more quickly than any cement.
“Rhinoceros—they sounded that way because I speeded the machine up. And I had the volume way up, too. At least I think they’re rhinoceros—rhino is what I asked for when I had this tape made—of course I can’t really be sure. But now that you’re here, I’ll be able to go to the zoo myself.”
“I may take that to mean that I’m employed?”
“Of course! I didn’t have you come out here to test you. How can a lunatic test a normal person?” The man who was to be my employer said this objectively and almost as if he were embarrassed. Which made me feel disgusted with the obsequiousness of what I had said—I may take that to mean that I’m employed? I had sounded like a shopkeeper! The composer was different from his businessman father and I should have been more direct with him.
“I wish you wouldn’t call yourself a lunatic. It’s awkward for me.” Trying to be frank was one thing, but what a brainless remark! But the composer met me half way, “All right, if that’s how you feel. I suppose that would make work easier.”
Work is a vague word, but, at least during those few months when I was visiting him once a week, the composer didn’t get even as close to work as going to the zoo to record a genuine rhino for himself. All he did was wander around Tokyo in various conveyances or on foot and visit a variety of places. When he mentioned work, he must therefore have had me in mind. And I worked quite a lot; I even went on a mission for him all the way to Kyoto.
“Then when should I begin?” I said.
“Right away if it suits you. Now.”
“That suits me fine.”
“I’ll have to get ready—would you wait outside?”
Head lowered cautiously, as though he were walking in a swamp, my employer picked his way to the back of the room past musical instruments and sound equipment and piles of manuscript to a black wooden door which he opened and then closed behind him. I got a quick look at a woman in a nurse’s uniform, a woman in her early forties with a longish face and heavy shadows on her cheeks that might have been wrinkles or maybe scars. She seemed to encircle the composer with her right arm as she ushered him inside, while with her left hand she closed the door. If this was part of the routine, I would never have a chance to talk with the nurse before I went out with my employer. Standing in front of the closed door, in the darkest part of that dim room, I shuffled into my shoes and felt my anxiety about this job of mine increase. The composer had smiled the whole time and when I had prompted him he had replied. But he hadn’t volunteered much. Should I have been more reserved? Since outside might have meant two things and since I was determined that everything should be perfect on my first job, I decided to wait just inside the main gate, from where I could see the annex in the garden.
D was a small, thin man, but with a head that seemed larger than most. To make the bony cliff of his forehead look a little less forbidding he combed his pale, well-washed, and fluffy hair down over his brow. His mouth and jaw were small, and his teeth were horribly irregular. And yet, probably due to the color of his deeply recessed eyes, there was a static correctness about his face that went well with a tranquil smile. As for the overall impression, there was something canine about the man. He wore flannel trousers and a sweater with stripes like fleas. His shoulders were a little stooped, his arms outlandishly long.
When he came out of the back door of the annex, my employer was wearing a blue wool cardigan over his other sweater and a pair of white tennis shoes. He reminded me of a grade-school music teacher. In one hand he held a black scarf, and as if he were puzzling whether to wrap it around his neck, there was perplexity in his grin to me as I waited at the gate. For as long as I knew D, except at the very end when he was lying in a hospital bed, he was always dressed this way. I remember his outfit so well because I was always struck by something comical about an adult man wearing a cardigan around his shoulders, as if he were a woman in disguise. Its shapelessness and nondescript color made that sweater perfect for him. As the composer pigeon-toed toward me past the shrubbery, he absently lifted the hand that held the scarf and signaled me with it. Then he wrapped the scarf resolutely around his neck. It was already four in the afternoon and fairly cold out-of-doors.
D went through the gate, and as I was following him (our relationship was already that of employer and employee) I had the feeling I was being watched and turned around: behind the same window through which I had discovered my employer, that forty-year-old nurse with the scarred—or were they wrinkled?—cheeks was watching us the way a soldier remaining behind might see a deserter off, her lips clamped shut like a turtle’s. I resolved to get her alone as soon as I could to question her about D’s condition. What was wrong with the woman, anyway? Here she was taking care of a young man with a nervous condition, maybe a madman, yet when her charge went out she had nothing to say to his companion! Wasn’t that professional negligence? Wasn’t she at least obliged to fill in the new man on the job? Or was my employer a patient so gentle and harmless that nothing had to be said?
When he got to the sidewalk D shuttered open his tired-looking eyes in their deep sockets and glanced swiftly up and down the deserted, residential street. I didn’t know whether it was an indication of madness or what—sudden action without any continuity seemed to be a habit of his. The composer looked up at the clear, end-of-autumn sky, blinking rapidly. Though they were sunken, there was something remarkably expressive about his deep brown eyes. Then he stopped blinking and his eyes seemed to focus, as though he were searching the sky. I stood obliquely behind him, watching, and what impressed me most vividly was the movement of his Adam’s appl
e, which was large as any fist. I wondered if he had been destined to become a large man; perhaps something had impeded his growth in infancy and now only his head from the neck up bespoke the giant he was meant to be.
Lowering his gaze from the sky, my employer found and held my puzzled eyes with his own and said casually, but with a gravity that made objection impossible, “On a clear day you can see things floating up there very well. He’s up there with them, and frequently he comes down to me when I go outdoors.”
Instantly I felt threatened. Looking away from my employer, I wondered how to survive this first ordeal that had confronted me so quickly. Should I pretend to believe in “him,” or would that be a mistake? Was I dealing with a raving madman, or was the composer just a poker-faced humorist trying to have some fun with me? As I stood there in distress, he extended me a helping hand: “I know you can’t see the figures floating in the sky, and I know you wouldn’t be aware of him even if he were right here at my side. All I ask is that you don’t act amazed when he comes down to earth, even if I talk to him. Because you’d upset him if you were to break out laughing all of a sudden or tried to shut me up. And if you happen to notice when we’re talking that I want some support from you, I’d appreciate it if you’d chime right in and say something, you know, affirmative. You see, I’m explaining Tokyo to him as if it were a paradise. It might seem a lunatic paradise to you, but maybe you could think of it as a satire and be affirmative anyway, at least when he’s down here with me.”
I listened carefully and thought I could make out at least the contours of what my employer expected of me. Then was he a rabbit as big as a man after all, nesting in the sky? But that wasn’t what I asked; I permitted myself to ask only: “How will I know when he’s down here with you?”
“Just by watching me; he only comes down when I’m outside.”
