Personal Matter

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Sit still, please! I nicked you,” the barber hissed, resting his razor on the bridge of Bird’s nose and peering into his face. Bird touched his upper lip with the tip of his finger. He stared at the blood, and he felt a pang of nausea. Bird’s blood was type A and so was his wife’s. The quart of blood circulating in the body of his dying baby was probably type A, too. Bird put his hand back under the linen and closed his eyes again. The barber slowly, hesitatingly shaved around the cut on his upper lip, then scythed his cheeks and jaw with rough haste, as if to retrieve lost time.

  “You’ll want a shampoo?”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  “There’s lots of dirt and grass in your hair,” the barber objected.

  “I know, I fell down last night.” Stepping out of the barber chair, Bird glanced at his face in a mirror that glistened like a noon beach. His hair was definitely matted, crackly as dry straw, but his face from his high cheekbones to his jaw was as bright and as fresh a pink as the belly of a rainbow trout. If only a strong light were shining in those glue-colored eyes, if the taut eyelids were relaxed and the thin lips weren’t twitching, this would be a conspicuously younger and livelier Bird than the portrait reflected in the store window last night.

  Stopping at a barbershop had been a good idea: Bird was satisfied. If nothing else, he had introduced one positive element to a psychological balance which had been tipped to negative since dawn. A glance at the blood that had dried under his nose like a triangular mole, and Bird left the barbershop. By the time he got to the college, the glow the razor had left on his cheeks would probably have faded. But he would have scraped away with his nail the mole of dried blood by then: no danger of impressing his father-in-law as a sad and ludicrous hangdog. Searching the street for a bus stop, Bird remembered the extra money he was carrying in his pocket and hailed a passing cab.

  Bird stepped out of the cab into a crowd of students swarming through the main gate on their way to lunch: five minutes past twelve. On the campus, he stopped a big fellow and asked directions to the English department. Surprisingly, the student beamed a smile and singsonged, nostalgically, “It’s certainly been a long time, sensei!” Bird was horrified. “I was in your class at the cram-school. None of the government schools worked out, so I had my old man donate some money here and got in, you know, through the back door.”

  “So you’re a student here now,” Bird said with relief, remembering who the student was. Though not unhandsome, the boy had saucer eyes and a bulbous nose that recalled the illustrations of German peasants in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  “It sounds as if cram-school wasn’t much help to you,” Bird said.

  “Not at all, sensei! Study is never a waste. You may not remember a single thing but, you know, study is study!”

  Bird suspected he was being ridiculed and he glowered at the boy. But the student was trying with his whole large body to demonstrate his good will. Even in a class of one hundred, Bird vividly recalled, this one had been a conspicuous dullard. And precisely for that reason he was able to report simply and jovially to Bird that he had entered a second-rate private college through the back door, and to express gratitude for classes that had availed him nothing. Any of the ninety-nine other students would have tried to avoid their cram-school instructor.

  “With our tuition as high as it is, it’s a relief to hear you say that.”

  “Oh, it was worth every penny. Will you be teaching here from now on?”

  Bird shook his head.

  “Oh. …” The student tactfully expanded the conversation: “Let me take you to the English department; it’s this way. But seriously, sensei, the studying I did at cram-school didn’t go to waste. It’s all in my head someplace, taking root sort of; and someday it will come in handy. It’s just a matter of waiting for the time to come—isn’t that pretty much what studying is in the final analysis, sensei?”

  Bird, following this optimistic and somehow didactic former student, cut across a walk bordered by trees in full blossom and came to the front of a red-ochre brick building. “The English department is on the third floor at the back. I was so happy to get in here, I explored the campus until I know it like the palm of my hand,” the boy said proudly, and flashed a grin so eloquently self-derisive that Bird doubted his own eyes.

  “I sound pretty simple, don’t I!”

  “Not at all; not so simple.”

  “It’s awfully nice of you to say so. Well then, I’ll be seeing you around, sensei. And take care of yourself: you’re looking a little pale!”

  Climbing the stairs, Bird thought: That guy will manage his adult life with a thousand times more cunning than I manage mine; at least he won’t go around having babies die on him with brain hernias. But what an oddly unique moralist he had had in his class!

  Bird peered around the door into the English department office and located his father-in-law. On a small balcony that extended from a far corner of the room, the professor was slumped in an oak rocking chair, gazing at the partly open skylight. The office had the feeling of a conference room, far larger and brighter than the English offices at the university from which Bird had graduated. Bird’s father-in-law often said (he told the story wryly, like a favorite joke on himself) that the treatment he received at this private college, including facilities such as the rocking chair, was incomparably better than what he had been used to at the National University: Bird could see there was more to the story than a joke. If the sun got any stronger, though, the rocking chair would have to be moved back or the balcony shaded with an awning, one or the other.

  At a large table near the door, three young teaching assistants, oil gleaming on their ruddy faces, were having a cup of coffee, apparently after lunch. All three of them Bird knew by sight: honor students who had been a class ahead of him at college. But for the incident with the whisky and Bird’s withdrawal from graduate school, he certainly would have found himself in pursuit of their careers.

  Bird knocked at the open door, stepped into the room, and greeted his three seniors. Then he crossed the room to the balcony; his father-in-law twisted around to watch him as he approached, his head thrown back, balancing himself on the rocking chair. The assistants watched too, with identical smiles of no special significance. It was true that they considered Bird a phenomenon of some rarity, but at the same time he was an outsider and therefore not an object of serious concern. That funny, peculiar character who went on a long binge for no reason in the world and finally dropped out of graduate school—something like that.

  “Professor!” Bird said out of habit established before he had married the old man’s daughter. His father-in-law swung himself and the chair around to face him, the wooden rockers squeaking on the floor, and waved Bird into a swivel chair with long arm rests.

  “Was the baby born?” he asked.

  “Yes, the baby was born—” Bird winced to hear his voice shrivel into a timid peep, and he closed his mouth. Then, compelling himself to say it all in one breath: “The baby has a brain hernia and the doctor says he’ll die sometime tomorrow or the day after, the mother is fine!”

  The taffy-colored skin of the professor’s large, leonine face quietly turned vermilion. Even the sagging bags on his lower eyelids colored brightly, as though blood were seeping through. Bird felt the color rising to his own face. He realized all over again how alone and helpless he had been since dawn.

  “Brain hernia. Did you see the baby?”

  Bird detected a hidden intimation of his wife’s voice even in the professor’s thin hoarseness, and, if anything, it made him miss her.

  “Yes, I did. His head was in bandages, like Apollinaire.”

  “Like Apollinaire … his head in bandages.” The professor tried the words on his own tongue as if he were pondering the punch line of a little joke. When he spoke, it was not so much to Bird as to the three assistants: “In this age of ours it’s hard to say with certainty that having lived was better than not having been born in the fir
st place.” The three young men laughed with restraint, but audibly: Bird turned and stared at them. They stared back, and the composure in their eyes meant they were not the least surprised that a queer fellow like Bird had met with a freak accident. Resentful, Bird looked down at his muddy shoes. “I’ll call you when it’s all over,” he said.

  The professor, rocking his chair almost imperceptibly, said nothing. It occurred to Bird that his father-in-law might be feeling a little disgusted with the satisfaction the rocking chair gave him ordinarily.

  Bird was silent, too. He felt he had said everything he had to say. Would he be able to conclude on such a clear and simple note when it came time to let his wife in on the secret? Not a chance. There would be tears, questions by the truckload, a sense of the futility of fast talk, an aching throat, and a flushed head: finally a rope of screaming nerves would fetter Mr. and Mrs. Bird.

  “I’d better be getting back; there are still papers to be signed at the hospital,” Bird said at last.

  “It was good of you to come over.” The professor showed no sign of getting out of his rocking chair. Bird, feeling lucky not to have been asked to stay longer, stood up. “There’s a bottle of whisky in that desk,” the professor said. “Take it along.”

  Bird stiffened, and he could feel the three assistants tense. They must have known as well as his father-in-law about that long, disastrous drunk; now he sensed their eyes beginning to track the development of the incident. Bird, hesitating, recalled a line from the English textbook he was reading with his students; a young American was speaking angrily: Are you kidding me? Are you looking for a fight?

  Nevertheless, Bird bent forward, opened the top of the professor’s desk, and lifted out the bottle of Johnnie Walker with both hands. He was crimson even to his eyeballs, yet he felt a twisted, feverish joy. Ask a man to trample a crucifix and make him prove he’s not a Christian: well, they wouldn’t see him hesitate.

  “Thank you,” Bird said. The three assistants relaxed. The professor was working his chair slowly around to its original position, his head erect, his face still slack and scarlet. Bird glanced at the younger men, swiftly bowed, and left the room.

  Down the stairs and into the stone courtyard, Bird kept a prudent grip on the whisky bottle, as though it were a hand grenade. The rest of the day was his to spend as he liked by himself—the thought merged in his mind with an image of the Johnnie Walker and foamed into a promise of ecstasy and peril.

  Tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe after a week’s reprieve, when my wife has learned about the wretched baby’s death, the two of us are going to be locked up in a dungeon of cruel neurosis. Accordingly—Bird argued with the bubbly voice of apprehension inside himself—I have a perfect right to today’s bottle of whisky and liberating time. Quietly the bubble collapsed. Fine! Let’s get down to drinking. First Bird thought of going back to his apartment and drinking in his study, but clearly that was a bad idea. If he returned, the old landlady and his friends might besiege him, by telephone if not in person, with detailed questions about the birth; besides, whenever he looked into the bedroom, the baby’s white enamel bassinet would tear his nerves like a gnashing shark. Shaking his head roughly, Bird drove the notion from his mind. Why not hole up in a cheap hotel where only strangers stayed? But Bird pictured himself getting drunk in a locked hotel room and he felt afraid. Bird gazed enviously at the jolly Scotsman in the red cutaway striding across the Johnnie Walker label. Where was he going in such a hurry? All of a sudden, Bird remembered an old girlfriend. Winter and summer alike, during the day she was always sprawled in her darkened bedroom, pondering something extremely metaphysical while she chain-smoked Players until an artificial fog hung over her bed. She never left the house until after dusk.

  Bird stopped to wait for a cab just outside the college gates. Through the large window in the coffee shop across the street he could see his former student sitting at a table with some friends. The student noticed Bird at once and began like an affectionate puppy to send sincere, ungainly signals. His friends, too, regarded Bird with vague, blunted curiosity. How would he explain Bird to his friends! As an English instructor who had drunk himself out of graduate school, a man in the grip of an unexplainable passion, or maybe a crazy fear?

  The student smiled at him tenaciously until he was in the taxicab. Bird realized as he drove away that he felt as if he had just received charity. And from a boy who in all his time at the cram-school had never learned to distinguish English gerunds from present participles, a former student with a brain no bigger than a cat’s!

  Bird’s friend lived on one of the city’s many hills, in a quarter ringed by temples and cemeteries. The girl lived alone in a tiny house at the end of an alley. Bird had met her at a class mixer in October of his freshman year. When it was her turn to stand and introduce herself, she had challenged the class to guess the source of her unusual name: Himiko—fire-sighting-child. Bird had answered, correctly, that the name was taken from the Chronicles of the ancient province of Higo—The Emperor commanded his oarsmen, saying: There in the distance a signal fire burns; make for it straightaway. After that, Bird and the girl Himiko from the island of Kyushu had become friends.

  There were very few girls at Bird’s university, only a handful in the liberal arts who had come to Tokyo from the provinces; and all of those, as far as Bird knew, had undergone a transmutation into peculiar and unclassifiable monsters shortly after they had graduated. A certain percentage of their body cells slowly overdeveloped, clustered and knotted until the girls were moving sluggishly and looking dull and melancholic. In the end, they became fatally unfit for everyday, postgraduate life. If they got married, they were divorced; if they went to work, they were fired; and those who did nothing but travel met with ludicrous and gruesome auto accidents. Himiko, shortly after graduation, had married a graduate student, and she hadn’t been divorced. Worse, a year after the marriage, her husband had committed suicide. Himiko’s father-in-law had made her a present of the house the couple had been living in, and he still provided her every month with money for living expenses. He hoped that Himiko would remarry, but at present she devoted her days to contemplation and cruised the city in a sports car every night.

  Bird had heard open rumors that Himiko was a sexual adventuress who had broken out of conventional orbit. Even rumors that related her husband’s suicide to her deviate tastes. Bird had slept with the girl just once, but both of them had been terribly drunk and he wasn’t even certain coitus had been achieved. That was long before Himiko’s unfortunate marriage, and though she had been driven by keen desire and had pursued her pleasure actively, Himiko had been nothing more in those days than an inexperienced college girl.

  Bird got out of the cab at the entrance to the alley where Himiko lived. Quickly, he calculated the money remaining in his wallet; he shouldn’t have any trouble getting an advance on this month’s salary after class tomorrow.

  Bird twisted the bottle of Johnnie Walker into his jacket pocket and hurried down the alley, covering the neck of the bottle with his hand. Since the neighborhood knew all about Himiko’s eccentric life, it was impossible not to suspect that visitors were observed discreetly from windows here and there.

  Bird pushed the buzzer in the vestibule. There was no response. He rattled the door a few times and softly called Himiko’s name. This was just a formality. Bird walked around toward the back of the house and saw that a dusty, secondhand MG was parked beneath Himiko’s bedroom window. With its empty seats exposed, the scarlet MG seemed to have been abandoned here for a long time. But it was proof that Himiko was at home. Bird propped a muddy shoe on the badly dented bumper and brought his weight to bear. The MG rocked gently, like a boat. Bird called Himiko’s name again, looking up at the curtained bedroom window. Inside the room, the curtains were lifted slightly where they met and a single eye looked down at Bird through the narrow peephole. Bird stopped rocking the MG and smiled: he could always behave freely and naturally in front of this
girl.

  “Hey! Bird—” Her voice impeded by the curtain and by the window glass, sounded like a feeble, silly sigh.

  Bird knew he had discovered the ideal spot for beginning a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the middle of the day. Feeling as though he had entered just one more plus on the psychological balance sheet for the day, he walked back to the front of the house.

  4

  I HOPE you weren’t asleep,” Bird said as Himiko opened the door for him.

  “Asleep? At this hour?” the girl teased. Himiko held up one hand against the midday sun but it didn’t help; the light at Bird’s back descended roughly on her neck and shoulders, bare where her violet terrycloth bathrobe fell away. Himiko’s grandfather was a Kyushu fisherman who had taken as a wife, abducted really, a Russian girl from Vladivostok. That explained the whiteness of Himiko’s skin; you could see the web of capillary vessels just beneath the surface. In the way she moved, too, was something to suggest the confusion of the immigrant who is never quite at ease in his new country.

  Wincing in the rush of light, Himiko stepped back into the shadow of the open door with the ruffled haste of a mother hen. She was in that meager stage of womanhood between the vulnerable beauty of a young girl, which she had lost, and the mature woman’s fullness still to come. Himiko was probably the type of woman who would have to spend a particularly long time in this tenuous state.