Personal Matter

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “I’ll never drink that way again,” Bird said. It was true that the tiger of a ferocious hangover had sunk its teeth in him, but he had torn himself away without recourse to more liquor. But how would it have been if Himiko hadn’t helped? Would he have begun once again to drift on that dark and agonizing sea tens of hours wide? He wasn’t sure, and not being able to mention Himiko made it difficult to convince his wife of his power to resist the whisky lure.

  “I very much want you to be all right, Bird. I think sometimes that, when a really crucial moment comes, you’ll either be drunk or in the grip of some crazy dream and just float up into the sky like a real bird.”

  “Married all this time and you still have doubts like that about your own husband?” Bird spoke playfully, but his wife did not fall into his saccharine trap; far from it, she rocked him on his heels with this:

  “You know, you often dream about leaving for Africa and shout things in Swahili! I’ve kept quiet about it all this time, but I’ve known you have no real desire to lead a quiet, respectable life with your wife and child. Bird?”

  Bird stared in silence at the soiled, wasted hand his wife was resting on his knee. Then, like a child weakly protesting a scolding though he recognizes that he has misbehaved, “You say I shout in Swahili; what do I say?”

  “I don’t remember, Bird. I’ve always been half-asleep myself; besides, I don’t know Swahili.”

  “Then what makes you so sure it was Swahili?”

  “Words that sound that much like the screaming of beasts couldn’t come from a civilized language.”

  In silence, Bird reflected sadly on his wife’s misconception of the nature of Swahili.

  “When mother told me two days ago and then again last night that you were staying at the other hospital, I suspected you’d gotten drunk or run away somewhere. I really had my doubts, Bird.”

  “I was much too upset to think about anything like that.”

  “But look how you’re blushing!”

  “Because I’m mad,” Bird said roughly. “Why would I run away? With the baby just born and everything—”

  “But, when I told you I was pregnant, didn’t the ants of paranoia swarm all over you? Did you really want a child, Bird?”

  “Anyway, all that can wait until after the baby has recovered—that’s all that matters now,” Bird said, breaking for easier ground.

  “It is all that matters, Bird. And whether or not the baby recovers depends on the hospital you chose and on your efforts. I can’t get out of bed, I haven’t even been told where the sickness is nesting in my baby’s body. I can only depend on you, Bird.”

  “That’s fine; depend on me.”

  “I was trying to decide whether I could rely on you to take care of the baby and I began to think I didn’t know you all that well. Bird, are you the kind of person who’ll take the responsibility for the baby even at a sacrifice to yourself?” his wife asked. “Are you the responsible, brave type?”

  If he had ever been to war, Bird had thought often, he would have been able to say definitely whether he was a brave type. This had occurred to him before fights and before his entrance examinations, even before his marriage. And always he had regretted not having a definite answer. Even his longing to test himself in the wilds of Africa which opposed the ordinary was excited by his feeling that he might discover in the process his own private war. But at the moment Bird had a feeling he knew without having to consider war or travel to Africa that he was not to be relied on: a craven type.

  Irritated by his silence, Bird’s wife clenched into a fist the hand she was resting on his leg. Bird started to cover her hand with his own and hesitated: it appeared to simmer with such hostility that it would be hot to the touch.

  “Bird, I wonder if you’re not the type of person who abandons someone weak when that person needs you most—the way you abandoned that friend of yours,” Bird’s wife opened her timid eyes wide as if to study Bird’s reaction, “… Kikuhiko?”

  Kikuhiko! Bird thought. A friend from his days as a tough kid in a provincial city, younger than himself, Kikuhiko had tagged along wherever Bird had gone. One day, in a neighboring town, they had had a bizarre experience together. Accepting a job hunting down a madman who had escaped from a mental hospital, they had roamed the city on bicycles all night long. Whereas Kikuhiko soon grew bored with the job, began to clown, and finally lost the bicycle he had borrowed from the hospital, Bird’s fascination only increased as he listened to the townspeople discussing the madman, and he kept up his ardent search all through the night. The lunatic was convinced that the real world was Hell, and he was terrified of dogs, which he took to be devils in disguise. At dawn, the hospital’s German shepherd pack was to be loosed on the man’s trail, and everyone agreed that he would die of fright if the animals brought him to bay. Bird therefore searched until dawn without a moment’s rest. When Kikuhiko began to insist that they give up the hunt and return to their own city, Bird, in his anger, shamed the younger boy. He told Kikuhiko he knew of his affair with an American homosexual in the CIA. On his way home on the last train of the night Kikuhiko sighted Bird, still bicycling through the night in his eager search for the madman. Leaning out of the train window, he shouted, in a voice that had begun to cry, “—Bird, I was afraid!”

  But Bird abandoned his poor friend and continued the search. In the end he succeeded only in discovering the madman hanging by the neck on a hill in the middle of the town, but the experience marked a transition in his life. That morning, riding next to the driver in the three-wheel truck that was carrying the madman’s body, Bird had a premonition that he was soon to say good-by to the life of a delinquent; the following spring, he entered a university in Tokyo. The Korean war was on, and Bird had been frightened by rumors that young men on the loose in provincial cities were being conscripted into the police corps and shipped off to Korea. But what had happened to Kikuhiko after Bird had abandoned him that night? It was as if the puny ghost of an old friend had floated up from the darkness of his past and said hello to him.

  “But what made you feel like attacking me with past history like Kikuhiko? I’d forgotten I’d even told you that story.”

  “If we had a boy, I was thinking of naming him Kikuhiko,” his wife said.

  Naming him! If that grotesque baby ever got hold of a thing like a name! Bird winced.

  “If you abandoned our baby, I think I’d probably divorce you, Bird,” his wife said, unmistakably a line she had rehearsed in bed, her legs raised in front of her, gazing at the greenery that filled the window.

  “Divorce? We wouldn’t get divorced.”

  “Maybe not, but we’d argue about it for a long time, Bird.” And in the end, Bird thought, when it had been determined that he was a craven type not to be relied on, he would be turned out to live the rest of his melancholy life as a man unfit to be a husband. Right now, in that overbright hospital ward, that baby is weakening and about to die. And I’m just waiting for it to happen. But my wife is staking the future of our married life on whether I take sufficient responsibility for the baby’s recovery—I’m playing a game I’ve already lost. Still, for the present, Bird could only perform his duty. “The baby’s just not going to die,” he said with many-faceted chagrin.

  Just then his mother-in-law came in with the tea. Since she was trying not to telegraph their grim exchange in the corridor, and since Bird’s wife was determined to conceal from her mother the enmity between herself and Bird, their little conversation over tea was comprised, for the first time, of ordinary talk. Bird even attempted some dry humor with an account of the baby without a liver and the little man who was its father.

  Just to make certain, Bird looked back at the hospital windows and verified that all of them were masked behind trees in lush leaf before he approached the scarlet sports car. Himiko was fast asleep, wedged under the steering wheel as if she were bundled into a sleeping bag, her head on the low seat. As Bird bent forward to shake her awake, he began t
o feel as if he had escaped encirclement by strangers and had returned to his true family. Guiltily, he looked back at the branches rustling high at the top of the ginkgo trees. “Hi, Bird!” Himiko greeted him from the MG like an American co-ed, then wiggled out from under the steering wheel and opened the door for him. Bird got in quickly.

  “Would you mind going to my apartment first? We can stop at the bank on the way to the other hospital.”

  Himiko pulled out of the driveway and immediately accelerated with a roar of exhaust. Bird, thrown off balance, told Himiko the way to the house with his back still pinned against the seat.

  “You sure you’re awake? Or do you think you’re flying down a highway in a dream?”

  “Of course I’m awake, Bird! I dreamed I was making it with you.”

  “Is that all you ever think about?” Bird asked in simple surprise.

  “Yes, after a trip like last night. It doesn’t happen that way often, and even with you that same tension isn’t going to last forever. Bird, wouldn’t it be great to know just what you had to do to make the days of marvelous lays go on and on! Before we know it, even you and I won’t be able to stifle the yawns when we confront each other’s nakedness.”

  But we’ve only just begun!—Bird started to say, but with Himiko’s frantic hand on the wheel, the MG was already churning the gravel in Bird’s driveway and then nosing deeply into the garden.

  “I’ll be down in five minutes; and try to stay awake this time. You can’t dream much of a lay in five minutes!”

  Upstairs in the bedroom, Bird threw together a few things he would need right away for a stay at Himiko’s house. He packed with his back to the baby’s bassinet: it looked like a small, white coffin. Last of all he packed a novel written in English by an African writer. Then he took down his Africa maps from the wall and, folding them carefully, thrust them into his jacket pocket.

  “Are those road maps?” Himiko asked as her keen eye lighted on Bird’s pocket. They were under way again, driving to the bank.

  “They certainly are; maps you can really use.”

  “Then I’ll see if I can find a shortcut to the baby’s hospital while you’re at the bank.”

  “That would be a good trick: these are maps of Africa,” Bird said, “the first real road maps I’ve ever owned.”

  “May the day come when you’ll be able to use them,” Himiko said with a touch of mockery.

  Leaving Himiko wedged beneath the steering wheel and beginning to drop off to sleep, Bird went in to arrange for the baby’s hospitalization. But the baby’s lack of a name created a problem. Bird answered endless questions for the girl at the reception window and finally had to protest: “My infant son is dying. For all I know he may be dead already. Now would you mind telling me why I am obliged to give him a name?” he said stiffly.

  Miserably rattled, the girl yielded. It was then that Bird sensed, for no special reason, that the baby’s death had been accomplished. He even inquired about making arrangements for the autopsy and cremation.

  But the doctor who met Bird at the intensive care ward disabused him instantly: “Where do you come off waiting so impatiently for your son to die? Hospitalization here isn’t that high, you know! And you must have health insurance. Anyway, it’s true that your son is weakening, but he’s still very much alive. So why don’t you relax a little and start behaving like a father? How about it!”

  Bird wrote Himiko’s number on a page of his memo book and asked the doctor to phone him if anything decisive happened. Since he could feel everybody in the ward reacting to him as something loathsome, he went straight back to the car, without even pausing to peer into the incubator at his son. No less than Himiko, who had been asleep in the open car, Bird was drenched in sweat after his run through the sun and shadow of the hospital square. Trailing exhaust fumes and an animal odor of perspiration, they roared off to sprawl naked in the hot afternoon while they waited for the telephone call that would announce the baby’s death.

  All that afternoon, their attention was on the telephone. Bird stayed behind even when it was time to shop for dinner, afraid the phone might ring while he was out. After dinner, they listened to a popular Russian pianist on the radio, but with the volume way down, nerves screaming still for the phone to ring. Bird finally fell asleep. But he kept waking up to the ringing of a phantom bell in his dream and walking over to the phone to check. More than once the boundaries of the dream extended to lifting the receiver and hearing the doctor’s voice report the baby’s death. Waking yet another time in the middle of the night, Bird felt the suspense of a condemned murderer during a temporary stay of execution. And he discovered encouragement of unexpected depth and intensity in the fact that he was spending the night with Himiko and not alone. Not once since becoming an adult had he so needed another person. This was the first time.

  9

  NEXT morning, Bird drove Himiko’s car to school. Parked in the schoolyard full of students, the scarlet MG smelled vaguely of scandal, something that didn’t worry Bird until he had put the keys into his pocket. He sensed that lacunas had formed in each of the pleats of his consciousness since the trouble with the baby had begun.

  Bird pushed through the crowd of students milling around the car with his face in a scowl. In the teachers’ room, he was informed by his department chairman, a little man who wore his loud jacket askew in the manner of a nisei, that the Principal wanted to see him. But the report merely burrowed into the corroded portion of his consciousness and left Bird undisturbed.

  “Bird, you are really quelque-chose, toi,” the chairman said pleasantly, as though in jest, even while he inspected Bird with keen eyes. “I don’t know if you’re brave or just brazen, but you’re certainly plenty bold!”

  Naturally, Bird couldn’t help wincing as he entered the large lecture room where his students were waiting for him. But this was a group from a different class; most of them wouldn’t know about yesterday’s dishonorable incident. Bird encouraged himself with the thought. During the lesson he did notice a few students who evidently knew, but they were from city high schools, cosmopolitan and frivolous; to them, Bird’s accident was merely ludicrous and just a bit heroic. When their eyes met his own, they even flashed teasing, affectionate smiles. Bird of course ignored them.

  When Bird left the classroom, a young man was waiting for him at the top of the spiral stairs. It was his defender from the day before, the student who had protected him from the violence of that rancorous class. Not only had the student cut his own class in some other room, he had been waiting for Bird directly in the sun. Beads of sweat glistened on the sides of his nose, and his blue denims were smirched with mud from the step he had been sitting on.

  “Hi!”

  “Hi!” Bird returned the greeting.

  “I bet the Principal called you in. That horse’s ass really did go to him with a story, he even had a photograph of that vomit, took it with a miniature camera!” The student smirked, exposing large, well-cared-for teeth.

  Bird smiled too. Could his accuser have carried a miniature camera around with him all the time, in hopes of catching Bird in a weak moment and then taking the case to court?

  “He told the Principal you came to class with a hangover, but five or six of us want to testify that you had food poisoning instead. We thought it would be a good idea to get together with you first and, you know, get our stories straight,” the boy said craftily, a smug conspirator.

  “I did have a hangover, so it’s you fellows who are wrong. I’m guilty as accused by that puritan.” Bird slipped past the student and started down the stairs.

  “But sensei!” the boy persevered, climbing down the stairs after Bird, “you’ll be fired if you confess to that. The Principal is the head of his local chapter of the Prohibition League, for God’s sake!”

  “You’re joking!”

  “So why not let it go as food poisoning? It’s just the season for it—you could say the pay here is so bad you finally took a bit
e of something—old.”

  “A hangover isn’t something I feel I have to cheat about. And I don’t want you to lie for me.”

  “Humm!” was what the boy was brash enough to say.

  “Sensei, where will you be going when you leave here?”

  Bird decided to ignore the student. He didn’t feel up to involving himself in any new plots. He discovered that he had become extraordinarily diffident; it had to do with those faults in his consciousness.

  “You probably don’t need a job at a cram-school, anyway. The Principal is going to feel pretty silly when he has to fire an instructor who drives a red MG. Hah!”

  Bird walked straight away from the student’s delighted laughter and went into the teachers’ room. He was putting away the old chalk box and the reader in his locker when he discovered an envelope addressed to him. It was a note from the friend who sponsored the study group; the others must have decided at their special meeting what to do about Mr. Delchef. Bird had torn open the envelope and was about to read the note when he remembered from his student days a funny superstition about probability—when you were faced with two errands at the same time and didn’t know what either held in store, one would always be pregnant with good fortune if the other turned out calamitously—and stuffed the letter into his pocket unread. If his meeting with the Principal went very badly, he would have a valid reason for expecting the best of the letter in his pocket.

  One look at the Principal’s face as he looked up from his desk told Bird that this meeting would be pregnant with disaster. He resigned himself; at least he would try to spend whatever time the interview took as pleasantly as he could.

  “We have a little mess on our hands here, Bird. To tell the truth, it’s awkward for me, too.” The Principal sounded like the keen tycoon in a film about a business empire, at once pragmatic and austere. Still in his mid-thirties, this man had transformed an ordinary tutoring service into this full-blown preparatory school with its large and integrated curriculum, and now he was plotting to establish a junior college. His bulky head was shaved clean and he wore custom-made glasses—two oval lenses suspended from a thick, straight frame—which accented the irregularities of his face. In the guilty eyes behind the bluff and bluster of his glasses, however, was something that never failed to move Bird to mild affection for the man.