Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

by Kenzaburo Oe

  The doctor had suggested that Eeyore lacked the vision to see distinctly at a distance and apparently he was right, for Eeyore, unlike other children, was never fascinated by the scenery hurtling by outside. He took his enjoyment purely in the train’s vibration and acceleration, in the sensation of motion. And when they pulled into a station, the opening and closing of the automatic door became the focus of his pleasure. Naturally, Eeyore had to observe this from less than three feet away, so the fat man and his son always stood at the pole in front of the door, even when there were empty seats.

  Today, Eeyore was busily concerned with the fit of his new cap. And since his standard was not the cap’s appearance but how it felt against his skin, it was not until, after a long series of adjustments, he finally pulled it down over his ears and even his eyelids that he discovered the final sense of stability and comfort. The fat man followed suit, and felt indeed that a stocking cap could not possibly be worn in greater comfort. At the station where they had to change trains, as they walked along the underground passage and climbed up and down stairs, the fat man often was aware of eyes mocking them as an outlandish pair. But far from feeling cowed, when he saw their squat, bulky image reflected in a show window in the underground arcade, he stopped and shouted hotly, as if they had the place all to themselves,

  ____Eeyore, look! A fat Eskimo father and son; we look really sharp!

  Eeyore’s hand functioned as a wall against other people, turning the fat man, who had to take tranquilizers when he went out alone, into such an extrovert. Holding his son’s hand liberated him, allowing him to feel even in a crowd that they were all alone together and protected by a screen. Much to his father’s relief, as Eeyore shuffled along cautiously, staring down at his feet as if to determine with his poor eyes whether the checkerboard pattern of the passage continued on a level or rose into a staircase, he repeated civilly,

  ____Eeyore, we look really sharp!

  With the mediation of their hands, which were moist with sweat though it was before noon on a winter day, the fat man and his son were in a state of optimum communication when they reached the zoo at ten-thirty, so the fat man imagined to his satisfaction, exalted by the prospect of the experience still wholly in front of them. So when they approached the special enclosure called the Children’s Zoo, where it was possible to fondle baby goats and lambs and little pigs and ageing geese and turkeys, and saw that it was too crowded with children on a school excursion to permit a sluggish little boy like Eeyore to work his way inside, they were not particularly disappointed. It was the fat man’s wife who had wanted Eeyore to get within three feet of the animals in the first place, so he could observe and touch them. But the fat man had something different in mind. He intended to defy the eye doctor’s diagnosis by functioning as Eeyore’s eyes; he would focus sharply on the beasts in the distance and transmit their image to Eeyore through the coil of their clasped hands, whereupon his son’s own vision, responding to this signal, would begin gradually to resolve its object. It was the realization of this procedure so like a dream that had brought the fat man to the zoo. Accordingly, after one look at the children brandishing bags of popcorn and paper cups of mudfish as they clamored with excitement in their eyes around the pitiful, down-sized animals in the special enclosure, the fat man turned away from the Children’s Zoo and led Eeyore toward the larger, fiercer animal cages.

  ____Tell me, Eeyore! who comes to the zoo to see wild animals as friendly as cows! We’re here to see the bears and the elephants and especially the lions, wouldn’t you say, Eeyore? We’re here to see the guys who would be our worst enemies if they weren’t in cages! To this felt opinion the fat man’s son did not respond directly, but as they passed the lion cages, like an animal cub born and abandoned in the heart of the jungle scenting the presence of dangerous beasts, he seemed to grow wary, and the fat man thrilled to the feeling that he had been attended and understood.

  ____Look, Eeyore, a tiger! You see the great big guy with deep black and yellow stripes and a few patches of white, you see him moving over there? Well, that’s a tiger, Eeyore is watching a tiger! said the fat man

  ____Eeyore is watching a tiger, his son parroted, detecting the presence of something with a sense of smell which was certainly too acute and tightening his grip on his father’s hand while with one poorly focused eye, his flushed moon-face consequently a-tilt, he continued to gaze vacantly at the spot where the bars sank into the concrete floor of the cage.

  ____Eeyore, look up at the sky You see the black, bushy monster on the round, brown thing; that’s an orangutan, Eeyore’s watching a big ape!

  Without letting go his hand the fat man stepped behind his son and with his free arm tilted back the boy’s head and held it against his thigh. Eeyore, required to look obliquely upward, squinted into the glare of the clear winter sky, screwing his face into a scowl of delicate wrinkles which made him look all the more like an Eskimo child. Perhaps it wasn’t a scowl at all but a smile of recognition, perhaps he had verified the orangutan squatting uneasily on an old car tire with the blue sky at his back, the fat man couldn’t be sure.

  ____Eeyore’s watching a big ape, the fat little boy intoned, his vocal cords communicating their tremor directly to his father’s hand cupped around his chin.

  The fat man maintained his grip on Eeyore’s head, gambling that the orangutan would go into action. It had rained until dawn and there was still a rough wind up high, which gave the blue of the sky a hard brilliance rare for Tokyo. And the orangutan itself was as giant and as black as it could be, its outlines etched vividly into the sky at its back. Furthermore, as the fat man knew from a zoology magazine, this was a lethargic orangutan, for it happened to be afflicted with melancholia so severely that it needed daily stimulants just to stay alive. So this particular orangutan had all the requisites for a suitable object of Eeyore’s vision. But unfortunately it appeared that the monkey’s melancholia was indeed profound, for though it frequently peered down with suspicious eyes at the pair waiting so forbearingly in front of its cage, it gave no indication that it was even preparing to move. Eventually the brilliance of the sky began to tire even the fat man’s eyes, until he was seeing the monkey as a kind of black halo. He finally led his son gloomily away from the orangutan’s cage. He could feel himself beginning to tire already, and he was afraid the feeling might reach his son through the conduit of their clasped hands. Dreamily he considered the quantity of drugs the orangutan would consume in a day, and was badly shaken to remember that he had forgotten to take his own tranquilizers before leaving the house that morning.

  But far from giving up, the fat man renewed his determination to function as a pipeline of vision connecting his son’s brain with the dangerous beasts in the zoo. Possibly he was spurring himself lest he communicate to his son—echoing his father mechanically as he directed his vague, misfocused gaze not at the animals so much as the sparse grass growing between the cages and the railings, or the refuse lying there, or the fat pigeons pecking at the refuse with their silly, blunted beaks—a mood developing in himself of submission to that eye doctor who had performed all manner of cruelties in his soiled, baggy gown, the smoked meat of his insect’s face twitching with tension, only to deliver his disheartening diagnosis. He was also resisting the deeprooted disgust which threatened to stain the twilight of his son’s spirit along with his own head. The truth was that the odor of countless animal bodies and their excrement had nauseated the fat man and given him the beginnings of a migraine headache from the moment before they had entered the zoo. An abnormally sensitive nose was certainly one of the attributes which testified to the blood bond between them. Nonetheless, in defiance of every one of these baleful portents, the fat man continued to wander around the zoo, gripping his son’s hand even tighter, addressing him with more spirit.

  ____Don’t forget, Eeyore, that seeing means grasping something with your imagination. Even if you were equipped with normal optic nerves you wouldn’t see a thing unless you
felt like starting up your imagination about the animals here. Because the characters we’re running into here at the zoo are a different story from the animals we’re used to seeing every day that don’t require any imagination at all to grasp. Take those hard, brown boards with all the sharp ridges that are jammed up in that muddy water over there. Eeyore! how would anybody without an imagination know those boards were crocodiles? Or those two sheets of yellow metal slowly swaying back and forth down there next to that mound of straw and dung, how would you know that was the head and part of the back of a rhinoceros? Eeyore! you got a good look at that large, gray, tree-stump of a thing, well that happened to be one of an elephant’s ankles, but it’s perfectly natural that looking at it didn’t give you much of an impression that you’d seen an elephant—tell me, Eeyore, why should a little boy in an island country in Asia be born with an imagination for African elephants? Now if you should be asked when we get home whether you saw an elephant, just forget about that ridiculous hunk of tree-strump and think of the nice, accessible elephants like cartoons that you see in your picture books. And then go ahead and say, Eeyore saw an elephant! Not that the gray tree-stump back there isn’t the real thing, it is, that’s what they mean by a real elephant. But none of the normal children crowding this zoo is using genuine imagination to construct a real elephant from what he observes about that tree-stump; no, he’s just replacing what he sees with the cartoon elephants in his head, so no one has any reason to be disappointed because you weren’t so impressed when you encountered a real elephant!

  While the fat man continued in this vein, speaking sometimes to himself and sometimes to his son, they made their way gradually up a sloping walk and wandered into a narrow passage which had been built to look like a rock canyon. The fat man talked on, but he was aware of a precarious balance being maintained at the outer edge of his consciousness, now directed inwardly and sealed, by jubilation at having escaped the crowds, and anxiety of a kind that somehow tightened his chest. And all of a sudden there sprang up from the ground, where they had been sitting in a circle, a group of men dressed like laborers, shouting incomprehensibly, and the fat man discovered that he and his son had been surrounded. Even as panic mushroomed in the fat man, he wrested his consciousness away from Eeyore, where it wanted to remain, and cast it outward—not only had they left the crowds behind, they had wandered into a cul-de-sac like a small, stifling valley. It was the back of the polar bears’ enclosure; far below, on the other side of a cliff of natural stones piled up to look like mountain rock, was a steep ice-wall for the bears to roam and a pool for them to sport in. To someone looking up from the other side, this place would seem to be the peak of a high and unknown mountain beyond an ice-wall and a sea: the fat man and his son had wandered behind the set of a glacial mountain. This secret passageway was probably used by the keepers to gain entrance to the artificial Antarctic below when they wanted to feed the bears or to clean the pool and the icy slope, though it was hard to believe, judging from the stench, that much cleaning was done. Now that the fat man had his bearings, the stench emanating from the back of the zoo, the animals’ side, a very nearly antihuman stench, was assaulting his body like an army of ants.

  But who were these men? What were they doing squatting at the back of this passageway? And why had they surrounded the fat man and his son with such fierce hostility for simply wandering in on them? The fat man quickly concluded that they were young laborers who had hidden themselves back here to gamble. From the private room of his one-sided dialogue with Eeyore in which it had been locked, he had only to expand his consciousness outward to discover at once the signs of an interrupted game, so openly had they been playing. In the course of a dialogue entirely personal to themselves, a dialogue which turned about the axis of their clasped hands, the fat man and his son had already invaded too deeply their den, in animal terms, their territory, to avoid a confrontation with the gamblers.

  Still gripping his son’s hand, the fat man began to back off, at a loss for the words he needed on the spur of the moment. But one of the men was already in position behind him, and another was pommeling him even while he attempted the move. A severe interrogation began, while several pairs of rough arms poked and pushed the fat man around. Are you a cop? An informer? Were you doing all that talking into a hidden mike so all your copper friends could hear you? As he was kicked and punched around, the fat man tried to explain, but what he said only angered the men. You were blabbing a mile a minute just now, and serious too, that’s the way you talk to a kid like this? The fat man protested that his son was nearly blind in addition to being retarded, so that he had to explain their surroundings in detail or nothing made any sense. But how could a little idiot make sense of all those big words, and this kid really is an idiot, look at him, he don’t look as if he understands a word we’re saying! The fat man started to say that they communicated through their clasped hands, then simply closed his punched and swollen mouth with a feeling of futility. How could he hope to make these hoodlums understand the unique relationship he shared with his son! Instead of trying, he drew Eeyore protectively to himself, started to, when suddenly his hand had been wrenched away from the boy’s hot, sweaty hand and he had been seized by the wrists and the ankles and hoisted into the air by several of the men, who continued to shower him with threats as they began to swing him back and forth as if to hurl him down to the polar bears. The fat man saw himself being swung back and forth as passively as a sack of flour at this outrageous height, saw clearly, if intermittently, the revolving sky and ground, the distant city, trees, and, directly beneath him, now at the hellishly deep bottom of a sheer drop, the polar bears’ enclosure and pool. His panic and reflexive fear were buried under an avalanche of despair more grotesque and fundamental; he began to scream in a voice which was unfamiliar even to his own ears, screams that seemed to him must move all the animals in the zoo to begin howling in response. As he was swung out over the pool on the hoodlums’ arms and reeled in and cast out again (the vigor of this seemed to anticipate hurling him all the way down to the polar bear submerged to its muddy yellow shoulders in the pool below), the fat man perceived, with the vividness of a mandala in which, like revelation itself, time and space are intermingled in a variety of ways, the despair gripping him as a compound of the following three sentiments: a) Even if these hoodlums understood that I’m not an informer, they could easily throw me to the polar bear for the sake of a little fun, just to protract their excitement. The fact is, they’re capable of that; b) I’ll either be devoured by a polar bear whose anger will be justified because its territory really will have been invaded, or I’ll be wounded and drown in that filthy water, too weak to swim. Even if I escape all that, I’ll probably go mad in thirty seconds or so—if it was madness that drove my father to confine himself for all those years until he died, how can I escape madness myself when his blood runs in me? c) Eeyore has always had to go through me to reach his only window of understanding on the outside world; when madness converts the passageway itself into a ruined maze, he’ll have to back up into a state of idiocy even darker than before, he’ll become a kind of abused animal cub and never recover; in other words, two people are about to be destroyed.

  The tangle of these emotions confronted the fat man with a bottomless darkness of grief and futile rage and he allowed himself to tumble screaming and shouting into its depths and as he tumbled, screaming into the darkness, he saw his own eye, an eye laid bare, the pupil which filled its brown, blurred center expressing fear and pain only: an animal eye. There was a heavy splash, the fat man was soaked in filthy spray, the claws and heavy paws of maddened, headlong polar bears rasped and thudded around him. But it was a piece of rock broken from the cliff which had been dropped, the fat man was still aloft in the hoodlums’ arms. He was becoming a single, colossal eye being lofted into the air, the egg-white sphere was the entirety of the world he had lived, the entirety of himself, and within its softly blurred, brown center, fear and pain and
the stupor of madness were whirling around and around in a tangle like the pattern inside a colored glass bead. The fat man no longer had the presence of mind to trouble himself about his son. No longer was he even the fat man. He was an egg-white eye, a one-hundred-and-seventy-pound, enormous eye.…

  Night had fallen on the zoo when the fat man completed his gradual return from a giant eye to himself (he assumed from the savage odor of his skin and clothing, which was like a dirty finger probing in his chest, that he had actually fallen into the pool, and learned only later that he had been splashed by a rock), and began to enquire frantically about his son, who, for all he knew, having become a kind of animal cub, was already dead of frenzy. But the veterinarian (!) taking care of him at first insisted there had been no talk about a small boy, and then tried to use the subject to make the fat man remember what had happened to himself. According to this animal doctor, he had been discovered after closing time when the zoo was being cleaned, weeping in a public toilet in roughly the opposite direction from the polar bears’ enclosure, and for several hours thereafter had only mumbled deliriously about his son. The fat man insisted he had no memory of his movements during the nine or so hours of his madness. Then he grabbed the veterinarian and begged him to find the little boy either dead of frenzy already or soon to be dead. Presently an employee came in to the office where the fat man had been stretched out on a cot (there were several kinds of stuffed animals in evidence), and reported that he had himself taken a stray child to the police. His panic unabated, the fat man went to the police station and there re-encountered Eeyore. His fat son had just finished a late supper with some young policemen and was thanking them individually:

  ____Eeyore, the pork noodles in broth and Pepsi-Cola were good! Asked for proof that he was the child’s guardian, the fat man finally had to telephone his wife and then wait in the police station until she arrived to take them home.