Personal Matter

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Ignoring Bird completely, he chided Himiko in a gentle voice, peering all the while into the baby’s basket as though he were buying mackerel from a fish peddler:

  “You’re late, Himi. I was beginning to think you were having a little joke with me.”

  It was Bird’s overwhelming impression that the clinic vestibule was ruinous: he felt menaced to the quick.

  “We had some trouble getting here,” Himiko said coolly.

  “I was afraid you might have done something dreadful on the way. There are radicals, you know, once they’ve decided to take the step they don’t see any distinction between letting a baby weaken and die and strangling it to death—oh, dear,” the doctor exclaimed, lifting the baby’s basket, “as if he wasn’t in enough trouble already, this poor little fella is coming down with pneumonia.” As before, the doctor’s voice was gentle.

  13

  LEAVING the sports car at a garage, they set out in a cab for the gay bar Himiko knew. They were exhausted, anguished with a need to sleep, but their mouths were dry with an occult excitement that made them uneasy about returning all by themselves to that gloomy house.

  They stopped the cab in front of a clumsy imitation of a gas lantern with the word KIKUHIKO in blue paint written on the glass globe. Bird pushed open a door held together tenuously with a few boards of unequal length and stepped into a room as crude and narrow as a shed for livestock; there was only a short counter and, against the opposite wall, two sets of outlandishly high-backed chairs. The bar was empty except for the smallish man standing in a far corner behind the counter who now confronted the two intruders. He was of a curious rotundity, with lips like a young girl’s and misted sheep-eyes which were warily inspecting but by no means rejecting them. Bird stood where he was, just inside the door, and returned his gaze. Gradually, a memento of his young friend Kikuhiko permeated the membrane of the ambiguous smile on the man’s face.

  “Would you believe, it’s Himi, and looking a sight!” The man spoke through pursed lips, his eyes still on Bird. “I know this one; it’s been ages now, but didn’t they used to call him Bird?”

  “We might as well sit down,” Himiko said. She appeared to be discovering only an atmosphere of anticlimax in the drama of this reunion. Not that Kikuhiko was exciting any very poignant emotion in Bird. He was fatigued utterly, he was sleepy: he felt certain nothing in the world remained that could interest him vitally. Bird found himself sitting down a little apart from Himiko.

  “What do they call this one now, Himi?”

  “Bird.”

  “You can’t mean it. Still? It’s been seven years.” Kikuhiko moved over to Bird. “What are you drinking, Bird?”

  “Whisky, please. Straight.”

  “And Himi?”

  “The same for me.”

  “You both have that tired look and it’s still so early in the night!”

  “Well, it has nothing to do with sex—we spent half the day driving around in circles.”

  Bird reached for the glass of whisky that had been poured for him and, feeling something tighten in his chest, hesitated. Kikuhiko—he can’t be more than twenty-two yet he looks like a more formidable adult than I; on the other hand, he seems to have retained a lot of what he was at fifteen—Kikuhiko, like an amphibian at home in two ages.

  Kikuhiko was drinking straight whisky, too. He poured himself another drink, and one for Himiko, who had emptied her first glass in a swallow. Bird found himself watching Kikuhiko and Kikuhiko glanced repeatedly at Bird, the nerves of his body arching like the back of a threatened cat. At last he turned directly to Bird and said: “Bird, do you remember me?”

  “Of course,” said Bird. Strange, he was more conscious of talking to the proprietor of a gay bar (this was his first time) than to a sometime friend whom he hadn’t seen in years.

  “It’s been ages, hasn’t it, Bird. Ever since that day we went over to the next town and saw a G.I. looking out of a train window with the bottom half of his face shot off.”

  “What’s all this about a G.I.?” Himiko said. Kikuhiko told her, his eyes impudently roaming Bird.

  “It was during the Korean war and these gorgeous soldier boys who’d been all wounded in the field were being shipped back to bases in Japan. Whole trainloads of them and we saw one of those trains one day. Bird, do you suppose they were passing through our district all the time?”

  “Not all the time, no.”

  “You used to hear stories about slave dealers catching Japanese high-school boys and selling them as soldiers, there were even rumors that the government was going to ship us off to Korea—I was terrified in those days.”

  Of course! Kikuhiko had been horribly afraid. The night they had quarreled and separated, he had shouted “Bird, I was afraid!” Bird thought about his baby and decided it was still incapable of fear. He felt relieved, a suspect, brittle relief. “Those rumors were certainly meaningless,” he said, trying to veer his consciousness from the baby.

  “You say, but I did all kinds of nasty things on account of rumors like that. Which reminds me, Bird. Did you have any trouble catching that madman we were chasing?”

  “He was dead when I found him, he’d hung himself on Castle Hill—I knocked myself out for nothing.” The taste of an old regret returned sourly to the tip of Bird’s tongue. “We found him at dawn, the dogs and I. Talk about something being meaningless!”

  “I wouldn’t say that. You kept up the chase until dawn and I dropped out and ran in the middle of the night and our lives have been completely different ever since. You stopped mixing with me and my kind and went to a college in Tokyo, didn’t you? But I’ve been like falling steadily ever since that night and look at me now—tucked away nice and comfy in this nelly little bar. Bird, if you hadn’t… gone on alone that night, I might be in a very different groove now.”

  “If Bird hadn’t abandoned you that night, you wouldn’t have become a homosexual?” Himiko audaciously asked.

  Rattled, Bird had to look away.

  “A homosexual is someone who has chosen to let himself love a person of the same sex: and I made that decision myself. So the responsibility is all my own.” Kikuhiko’s voice was quiet.

  “I can see you’ve read the existentialists,” Himiko said.

  “When you run a bar for faggots, you have to know where all kinds of things are at!” As though it were part of the song of his profession, Kikuhiko sang the line. Then he turned to Bird and said, in his normal voice, “I’m sure you’ve been on the rise all the time I’ve been falling. What are you doing now, Bird?”

  “I’ve been teaching at a cram-school, but it turns out that I’m fired as of the summer vacation—‘on the rise’ isn’t quite how I’d put it,” Bird said. “And that isn’t all; it’s been one weird hassle after another.”

  “Now that you mention it, the Bird I knew at twenty was never this droopy-woopy. It’s as if something has got you awfully scared and you’re trying to run away from it—” This was a shrewd and observant Kikuhiko, no longer the simple fairy Bird had known: his friend’s life of apostasy and descent could not have been easy or uninvolved.

  “You’re right,” Bird admitted. “I’m all used up. I’m afraid. I’m trying to run away.”

  “When he was twenty this one was immune to fear, I never saw him frightened of anything,” Kikuhiko said to Himiko. Then he turned back to Bird, and, provokingly: “But tonight you seem extra sensitive to fear; it’s like you’re so afraid you don’t have the foggiest notion where your head is at!”

  “I’m not twenty anymore,” Bird said.

  Kikuhiko’s face froze over with icy indifference. “The old gray mare just ain’t what she used to be,” he said, and moved abruptly to Himiko’s side.

  A minute later two of them began a game of dice and Bird was given his freedom. Relieved, he lifted his glass of whisky. After a blank of seven years it had taken him and his friend just seven minutes of conversation to eliminate everything worthy of their mutual cu
riosity. I’m not twenty anymore! And of all my possessions at the age of twenty, the only thing I’ve managed not to lose is my childish nickname—Bird gulped down his first whisky of what had been a long day. Seconds later, something substantial and giant stirred sluggishly inside him. The whisky he had just poured into his stomach Bird effortlessly puked. Kikuhiko swiftly wiped the counter clean and set up a glass of water; Bird only stared dumbly into space. What was he trying to protect from that monster of a baby that he must run so hard and so shamelessly? What was it in himself he was so frantic to defend? The answer was horrifying—nothing! Zero!

  Bird eased out of the bucket chair and slowly lowered his feet to the floor. To Himiko, questioning him with eyes slackened by fatigue and sudden drunkenness, he said: “I’ve decided to take the baby back to the university hospital and let them operate. I’ve stopped rushing at every exit door.”

  “What are you talking about?” Himiko said suspiciously. “Bird! What’s happened to you! What kind of a time is this to start talking about an operation!”

  “Ever since the morning my baby was born I’ve been running away,” Bird said with certainty.

  “But you’re having that baby murdered right this minute, dirtying your hands and mine. How can you call that running away? Besides, we’re leaving for Africa together!”

  “I left the baby with that abortionist and then I ran away, I fled here,” Bird said obstinately. “I’ve been running the whole time, running and running, and I pictured Africa as the land at the end of all flight, the final spot, the terminal—you know, you’re running away, too. You’re just another cabaret girl running off with an embezzler.”

  “I’m participating, Bird, dirtying my own hands along with yours. Don’t you say I’m running away!” Himiko’s shout echoed in the caves of her hysteria.

  “Have you forgotten that you drove the car into a pothole today rather than run over a dead sparrow? Is that what a person does just before he cuts a baby’s throat?”

  Himiko’s large face flushed, swelling, then darkened with fury and a presentiment of despair. She glared at Bird, shuddering in vexation: she was trying to fault him and couldn’t find her voice.

  “If I want to confront this monster honestly instead of running away from it, I have only two alternatives: I can strangle the baby to death with my own hands or I can accept him and bring him up. I’ve understood that from the beginning but I haven’t had the courage to accept it—”

  “But Bird,” Himiko interrupted, waving her fingers threateningly, “that baby is coming down with pneumonia! If you tried to take him back to the hospital he’d die in the car on the way. Then where would you be? They’d arrest you, that’s where!”

  “If that happened, it would mean that I’d killed the baby with my own two hands. And I’d deserve whatever I got. I guess I’d be able to take the responsibility.”

  Bird spoke clamly. He felt that he was now evading deception’s final trap, and he was restoring his faith in himself.

  Himiko glowered at Bird with tears collecting in her eyes; she appeared to be groping frantically for a new psychological attack, and when at last a strategy occurred, she leaped at it: “Let’s say you let them operate and saved the baby’s life, what would you have then, Bird? You told me yourself that your son would never be more than a vegetable! Don’t you see, it’s not only that you’d be creating misery for yourself, you’d be nurturing a life that meant absolutely nothing to this world! Do you suppose that would be for the baby’s good? Do you, Bird?”

  “It’s for my own good. It’s so I can stop being a man who’s always running away,” Bird said.

  But Himiko still refused to understand. She stared distrustfully at Bird, challenging him still, and then she labored to smile despite the tears welling in her eyes and mockingly said: “So you’re going to manhandle a baby with the faculties of a vegetable into staying alive—Bird! is that part of your new humanism?”

  “All I want is to stop being a man who continually runs away from responsibility.”

  “But … Bird …” Himiko sobbed, “… what about our promise to go to Africa together? What about our promise?”

  “For God’s sake Himi, get ahold of yourself! Once Bird here begins worrying about himself, he won’t hear you no matter how loud you cry.”

  Bird saw something akin to raw hatred glitter in Kikuhiko’s clouded eyes. But his former friend’s command to Himiko was the cue she had been waiting for: once again she became the Himiko who had welcomed Bird several days before when he had arrived so forlornly at her door with his bottle of Johnnie Walker, a girl no longer young, infinitely generous: tender, placid Himiko.

  “That’s all right, Bird. You don’t have to come. I’ll sell the house and property and go to Africa anyway. I’ll take that boy who stole the tire along for company. Now that I think about it, I’ve been pretty horrid to him.” The tearfulness remained, but there was no mistaking that Himiko had ridden the storm of her hysteria.

  “Miss Himi will be all right now,” Kikuhiko prompted.

  “Thank you,” Bird said simply, meaning it, no more to one than to the other.

  “Bird, you are going to have to endure all kinds of pain,” Himiko said. It was meant as encouragement. “So long, Bird. Take care of yourself!”

  Bird nodded, and left the bar.

  The taxi raced down the wet streets at horrendous speed. If I die in an accident now before I save the baby, my whole twenty-seven years of life will have meant exactly nothing. Bird was stricken with a sense of fear more profound than any he had ever known.

  It was the end of autumn. When Bird came downstairs after saying good-by to the surgeon, his parents-in-law greeted him with a smile in front of the intensive care ward; his wife stood between them with the baby in her arms.

  “Congratulations, Bird,” his father-in-law called. “He looks like you, you know.”

  “In a way,” Bird said with reserve. A week after the operation the baby had looked almost human; the following week it had begun to resemble Bird. “That fault in the baby’s skull was only a few millimeters across and it seems to be closing now. I can show you when we get home, I borrowed the X rays. It turns out the brain wasn’t protruding from the skull; so it wasn’t a brain hernia after all, just a benign tumor. There were apparently two hard kernels as white as ping-pong balls in that lump they cut away.”

  “This is one family that has a lot to be grateful for.” The professor had been waiting for a lull in the rush of Bird’s talk.

  “Bird gave so much of his own blood for all those transfusions during the operation, he came out looking as pale as a princess after a date with Dracula.” A rare attempt at humor from Bird’s exuberant mother-in-law. “Seriously, Bird, you were as courageous and untiring as a young lion.”

  Frightened by the sudden change in environment, the baby lay in shriveled and unmoving silence, observing the adults out of eyes which must still have been nearly sightless. Since the women stopped repeatedly to cluck and coo over the baby, Bird and the professor gradually drew ahead as they talked. “This time you really met your problem head on,” the professor said.

  “As a matter of fact, I kept trying to run away. And I almost did. But it seems that reality compels you to live properly when you live in the real world. I mean, even if you intend to get yourself caught in a trap of deception, you find somewhere along the line that your only choice is to avoid it.” Bird was surprised at the muted resentment in his voice. “That’s what I’ve found, anyway.”

  “But it is possible to live in the real world in quite a different way, Bird. There are people who leap-frog from one deception to another until the day they die.”

  Through half-closed eyes Bird saw again the freighter bound for Zanzibar that had sailed a few days before with Himiko on board. He pictured himself, having killed the baby, standing at her side in place of that boyish man—a sufficiently enticing prospect of Hell. And perhaps just such a reality was being played out in one of
Himiko’s universes. Bird opened his eyes, turning back to the problems in the universe in which he had chosen to remain. “There is a possibility that the baby’s development will be normal,” he said, “but there’s an equal danger that he’ll grow up with an extremely low I.Q. That means I’m going to have to put away as much as I can for his future as well as our own. Naturally, I’m not going to ask you to help me find another job, not after the mess I made of the one I had. I’ve decided to forget about a career in college teaching—I’m thinking of becoming a guide for foreign tourists. A dream of mine has always been to go to Africa and hire a native guide, so I’ll just be reversing the fantasy: I’ll be the native guide, for the foreigners who come to Japan.”

  The professor started to say something in reply when they both had to step aside for a youth with his arm in an exaggerated sling who was being hurried down the corridor by a gang of his friends. The boys swept by, ignoring Bird and his father-in-law. They all wore soiled, shabby jackets which already looked too light for the chilliness of the season. Bird saw the dragons emblazoned on their backs and realized that this was the gang he had battled that night in early summer when his baby was being born.

  “I know those boys, but for some reason they didn’t pay any attention to me,” he said.

  “In a few weeks’ time you’ve become almost another person; that probably explains it.”

  “Do you suppose?”

  “You’ve changed.” The professor’s voice was warm with a relative’s affection. “A childish nickname like Bird doesn’t suit you anymore.”

  Bird waited for the women to catch up and peered down at his son in the cradle of his wife’s arms. He wanted to try reflecting his face in the baby’s pupils. The mirror of the baby’s eyes was a deep, lucid gray and it did begin to reflect an image, but one so excessively fine that Bird couldn’t confirm his new face. As soon as he got home he would take a look in the mirror. Then he would try the Balkan dictionary that Mr. Delchef had presented him before his legation had shipped him home. On the inside cover, Mr. Delchef had written the word for hope. Bird intended to look up forbearance.