Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

by Kenzaburo Oe

“How about when you’re in a car?”

  “In a car or a train, as long as I’m next to an open window he’s likely to show up. There have been times when he’s appeared when I was in the house, just standing next to an open window.”

  “And … right now?” I asked uncomfortably. I must have sounded like the class dunce who simply cannot grasp the multiplication principle.

  “Right now it’s just you and me,” my employer said graciously. “Why don’t we ride in to Shinjuku today; I haven’t been on a train in a long time.”

  We walked to the station, and all the way I kept an eye peeled for a sign that something had appeared at my employer’s side. But before I knew it we were on the train and, so far as I could tell, nothing had materialized. One thing I did notice: the composer ignored the people who passed us on the street even when they greeted him. As if he himself did not exist, as if the people who approached with hellos and how-are-yous were registering an illusion which they mistook for him, my employer utterly ignored all overtures to contact.

  The same thing happened at the ticket window; D declined to relate to other people. Handing me one thousand yen he told me to buy tickets, and then refused to take his own even when I held it out to him. I had to stop at the gate and have both our tickets punched while D swept through the turnstile onto the platform with the freedom of the invisible man. Even on the train, he behaved as if the other passengers were no more aware of him than of the atmosphere; huddling in a seat in the farthest corner of the car, he rode in silence with his eyes closed. I stood in front of him and watched in growing apprehension for whatever it was to float in through the open window and settle at his side. Naturally, I didn’t believe in the monster’s existence. It was just that I was determined not to miss the instant when D’s delusions took hold of him; I felt I owed him that much in return for the money he was paying me. But, as it happened, he sat like some small animal playing dead all the way to Shinjuku Station, so I could only surmise that he hadn’t had a visit from the sky. Of course, supposition was all it was: as long as other people were around us, my employer remained a sullen oyster of silence. But I learned soon enough that my guess had been correct. Because when the moment came it was more than apparent (from D’s reaction, I mean) that something was visiting him.

  We had left the station and were walking down the street. It was that time of day a little before evening when not many people are out, yet we ran across a small crowd gathered on a corner. We stopped to look; surrounded by the crowd, an old man was turning around and around in the street without a glance at anyone. A dignified-looking old man, he was spinning in a frenzy, clutching a briefcase and an umbrella to his breast, mussing his gray, pomaded hair a little as he stamped his feet and barked like a seal. The faces in the watching crowd were lusterless and dry in the evening chill that was stealing into the air; the old man’s face alone was flushed, and sweating, and seemed about to steam.

  Suddenly I noticed that D, who should have been standing at my side, had taken a few steps back and had thrown one arm around the shoulders of an invisible something roughly his own height. Now he was peering affectionately into the space slightly above the empty circle of his arm. The crowd was too intent on the old man to be concerned with D’s performance, but I was terrified. Slowly the composer turned to me, as if he wanted to introduce me to a friend. I didn’t know how to respond; all I could do was panic and blush. It was like forgetting your silly lines in the junior high school play. The composer continued to stare at me, and now there was annoyance in his eyes. He was seeking an explanation for that intent old man turning singlemindedly in the street for the benefit of his visitor from the sky. A paradisical explanation! But all I could do was wonder stupidly whether the old man might have been afflicted with Saint Vitus’ dance.

  When I sadly shook my head in silence, the light of inquiry went out of my employer’s eyes. As if he were taking leave of a friend, he dropped his arm. Then he slowly shifted his gaze skyward until his head was all the way back and his large Adam’s apple stood out in bold relief. The phantom had soared back into the sky and I was ashamed; I hadn’t been equal to my job. As I stood there with my head hanging, the composer stepped up to me and indicated that my first day of work was at an end: “We can go home, now. He’s come down today already, and you must be pretty tired.” I did feel exhausted after all that tension.

  We rode back in a taxi with the windows rolled up, and as soon as I’d been paid for the day, I left. But I didn’t go straight to the station; I waited behind a telephone pole diagonally across from the house. Dusk deepened, the sky turned the color of a rose, and just as the promise of night was becoming fact, the nurse, in a short-skirted, one-piece dress of a color indistinct in the dimness, appeared through the main gate pushing a brand-new bicycle in front of her. Before she could get on the bicycle, I ran over to her. Without her nurse’s uniform, she was just an ordinary little woman in her early forties; vanished from her face was the mystery I had discovered through the annex window. And my appearance had unsettled her. She couldn’t climb on the bike and pedal away, but neither would she stand still; she had begun to walk the bike along when I demanded that she explain our mutual employer’s condition. She resisted, peevishly, but I had a good grip on the bicycle seat and so in the end she gave in. When she began to talk, her formidable lower jaw snapped shut at each break in the sentence; she was absolutely a talking turtle.

  “He says it’s a fat baby in a white cotton nightgown. Big as a kangaroo, he says. It’s supposed to be afraid of dogs and policemen and it comes down out of the sky. He says its name is Aghwee! Let me tell you something, if you happen to be around when that spook gets hold of him, you’d better just play dumb, you can’t afford to get involved. Don’t forget, you’re dealing with a looney! And another thing, don’t you take him anyplace funny, even if he wants to go. On top of everything else, a little gonorrhea is all we need around here!”

  I blushed and let go of the bicycle seat. The nurse, jangling her bell, pedaled away into the darkness as fast as she could go with legs as round and thin as handlebars. Ah, a fat baby in a white cotton nightgown, big as a kangaroo!

  When I showed up at the house the following week, the composer fixed me with those clear brown eyes of his and rattled me by saying, though not especially in reproof, “I hear you waited for the nurse and asked her about my visitor from the sky. You really take your work seriously.”

  That afternoon we took the same train in the opposite direction, into the country for half an hour to an amusement park on the banks of the Tama river. We tried all kinds of rides and, luckily for me, the baby as big as a kangaroo dropped out of the sky to visit D when he was up by himself in the Sky Sloop, wooden boxes shaped like boats that were hoisted slowly into the air on the blades of a kind of windmill. From a bench on the ground, I watched the composer talking with an imaginary passenger at his side. And until his visitor had climbed back into the sky, D refused to come down; again and again a signal from him sent me running to buy him another ticket.

  Another incident that made an impression on me that day occurred as we were crossing the amusement park toward the exit, when D accidentally stepped in some wet cement. When he saw that his foot had left an imprint he became abnormally irritated, and until I had negotiated with the workmen, paid them something for their pains and had the footprint troweled away, he stubbornly refused to move from the spot. This was the only time the composer ever revealed to me the least violence in his nature. On the way home on the train, I suppose because he regretted having barked at me, he excused himself in this way: “I’m not living in present time anymore, at least not consciously. Do you know the rule that governs trips into the past in a time machine? For example, a man who travels back ten thousand years in time doesn’t dare do anything in that world that might remain behind him. Because he doesn’t exist in time ten thousand years ago, and if he left anything behind him there the result would be a warp, infinitely slight maybe but s
till a warp, in all of history from then until now, ten thousand years of it. That’s the way the rule goes, and since I’m not living in present time, I mustn’t do anything here in this world that might remain or leave an imprint.”

  “But why have you stopped living in present time?” I asked, and my employer sealed himself up like a golf ball and ignored me. I regretted my loose tongue; I had finally exceeded the limits permitted me, because I was too concerned with D’s problem. Maybe the nurse was right; playing dumb was the only way, and I couldn’t afford to get involved. I resolved not to.

  We walked around Tokyo a number of times after that, and my new policy was a success. But the day came when the composer’s problems began to involve me whether I liked it or not. One afternoon we got into a cab together and, for the first time since I had taken the job, D mentioned a specific destination, a swank apartment house designed like a hotel in Daikan Yama. When we arrived, D waited in the coffee shop in the basement while I went up the elevator alone to pick up a package that was waiting for me. I was to be given the package by D’s former wife, who was living alone in the apartment now.

  I knocked on a door that made me think of the cell blocks at Sing Sing (I was always going to the movies in those days; I have the feeling about ninety-five percent of what I knew came directly from the movies) and it was opened by a short woman with a pudgy red face on top of a neck that was just as pudgy and as round as a cylinder. She ordered me to take my shoes off and step inside, and pointed to a sofa near the window where I was to sit. This must be the way high society receives a stranger, I remember thinking at the time. For me, the son of a poor farmer, refusing her invitation and asking for the package at the door would have taken the courage to defy Japanese high society, the courage of that butcher who threatened Louis XIV. I did as I was told, and stepped for the first time in my life into a studio apartment in the American style.

  The composer’s former wife poured me some beer. She seemed somewhat older than D, and although she gestured grandly and intoned when she spoke, she was too round and overweight to achieve dignity. She was wearing a dress of some heavy cloth with the hem of the skirt unraveled in the manner of a squaw costume, and her necklace of diamonds set in gold looked like the work of an Inca craftsman (now that I think about it, these observations, too, smell distinctly of the movies). Her window overlooked the streets of Shibuya, but the light pouring through it into the room seemed to bother her terrifically; she was continually shifting in her chair, showing me legs as round and bloodshot as her neck, while she questioned me in the voice of a prosecutor. I suppose I was her only source of information about her former husband. Sipping my black, bitter beer as if it were hot coffee, I answered her as best I could, but my knowledge of D was scant and inaccurate and I couldn’t satisfy her. Then she started asking about D’s actress girl friend, whether she came to see him and things like that, and there was nothing I could say. Annoyed, I thought to myself, what business was it of hers, didn’t she have any woman’s pride?

  “Does D still see that Phantom?”

  “Yes, it’s a baby the size of a kangaroo in a white cotton nightgown and he says its name is Aghwee, the nurse was telling me about it,” I said enthusiastically, glad to encounter a question I could do justice to. “It’s usually floating in the sky, but sometimes it flies down to D’s side.”

  “Aghwee, you say. Then it must be the ghost of our dead baby. You know why he calls it Aghwee? Because our baby spoke only once while it was alive and that was what it said—Aghwee. That’s a pretty mushy way to name the ghost that’s haunting you, don’t you think?” The woman spoke derisively; an ugly, corrosive odor reached me from her mouth. “Our baby was born with a lump on the back of its head that made it look as if it had two heads. The doctor diagnosed it as a brain hernia. When D heard the news he decided to protect himself and me from a catastrophe, so he got together with the doctor and they killed the baby—I think they only gave it sugar water instead of milk no matter how loud it screamed. My husband killed the baby because he didn’t want us to be saddled with a child who could only function as a vegetable, which is what the doctor had predicted! So he was acting out of fantastic egotism more than anything else. But then there was an autopsy and the lump turned out to be a benign tumor. That’s when D began seeing ghosts; you see he’d lost the courage he needed to sustain his egotism, so he declined to live his own life, just as he had declined to let the baby go on living. Not that he committed suicide, he just fled from reality into a world of phantoms. But once your hands are all bloody with a baby’s murder, you can’t get them clean again just by running from reality, anybody knows that. So here he is, hands as filthy as ever and carrying on about Aghwee.”

  The cruelness of her criticism was hard to bear, for my employer’s sake. So I turned to her, redder in the face than ever with the excitement of her own loquacity, and struck a blow for D. “Where were you while all this was going on? You were the mother, weren’t you?”

  “I had a Caesarean, and for a week afterwards I was in a coma with a high fever. It was all over when I woke up,” said D’s former wife, leaving my gauntlet on the floor. Then she stood up and moved toward the kitchen. “I guess you’ll have some more beer?”

  “No, thank you, I’ve had enough. Would you please give me the package I’m supposed to take to D?”

  “Of course, just let me gargle. I have to gargle every ten minutes, for pyorrhea—you must have noticed the smell?”

  D’s former wife put a brass key into a business envelope and handed it to me. Standing behind me while I tied my shoes, she asked what school I went to and then said proudly: “I hear there’s not even one subscriber to the T —— Times in the dormitories there. You may be interested to know that my father will own that paper soon.”

  I let silence speak for my contempt.

  I was about to get into the elevator when doubt knifed through me as though my chest were made of butter. I had to think. I let the elevator go and decided to use the stairs. If his former wife had described D’s state of mind correctly, how could I be sure he wouldn’t commit suicide with a pinch of cyanide or something taken from a box this key unlocked? All the way down the stairs I wondered what to do, and then I was standing in front of D’s table and still hadn’t arrived at a conclusion. The composer sat there with his eyes tightly shut, his tea untouched on the table. I suppose it wouldn’t do for him to be seen drinking materials from this time now that he had stopped living in it and had become a traveler from another.

  “I saw her,” I began, resolved all of a sudden to lie, “and we were talking all this time but she wouldn’t give me anything.”

  My employer looked up at me placidly and said nothing, though doubt clouded his puppy eyes in their deep sockets. All the way back in the cab I sat in silence at his side, secretly perturbed. I wasn’t sure whether he had seen through my lie. In my shirt pocket the key was heavy.

  But I only kept it for a week. For one thing, the idea of D’s suicide began to seem silly; for another, I was worried he might ask his wife about the key. So I put it in a different envelope and mailed it to him special delivery. The next day I went out to the house a little worried and found my employer in the open space in front of the annex, burning a pile of scores in manuscript. They must have been his own compositions: that key had unlocked the composer’s music.

  We didn’t go out that day. Instead I helped D incinerate his whole opus. We had burned everything and had dug a hole and I was burying the ashes when suddenly D began to whisper. The phantom had dropped out of the sky. And until it left I continued working, slowly burying those ashes. That afternoon Aghwee (and there was no denying it was a mushy name) the monster from the sky remained at my employer’s side for fully twenty minutes.

  From that day on, since I either stepped to one side or dropped behind whenever the baby phantom appeared, the composer must have realized that I was complying with only the first of his original instructions, not to act amazed, w
hile his request that I back him up with something affirmative was consistently ignored. Yet he seemed satisfied, and so my job was made easier. I couldn’t believe D was the kind of person to create a disturbance in the street; in fact his father’s warning began to seem ridiculous, our tours of Tokyo together continued so uneventfully. I had already purchased the Moscow edition of L’me Enchanté I wanted, but I no longer had any intention of giving up such a wonderful job. My employer and I went everywhere together. D wanted to visit all the concert halls where works of his had been performed and all the schools he had ever been to. We would make special trips to places he had once enjoyed himself—bars, movie theaters, indoor swimming pools—and then we would turn back without going inside. And the composer had a passion for all of Tokyo’s many forms of public transportation: I’m sure we rode the entire metropolitan subway system. Since the monster baby couldn’t descend from the sky while we were underground, I could enjoy the subway in peace of mind. Naturally, I tensed whenever we encountered dogs or officers of the law, remembering what the nurse had told me, but those encounters never coincided with an appearance by Aghwee. I discovered that I was loving my job. Not loving my employer or his phantom baby the size of a kangaroo. Simply loving my job.

  One day the composer approached me about making a trip for him. He would pay traveling expenses, and my daily wage would be doubled; since I would have to stay overnight in a hotel and wouldn’t be back until the second day, I would actually be earning four times what I usually made. Not only that, the purpose of the trip was to meet D’s former girlfriend the movie actress in D’s place. I accepted eagerly, I was delighted. And so began that comic and pathetic journey.

  D gave me the name of the hotel the actress had mentioned in a recent letter and the date she was expecting him to arrive. Then he had me learn a message to the girl: my employer was no longer living in present time; he was like a traveler who had arrived here in a time machine from a world ten thousand years in the future. Accordingly, he couldn’t permit himself to create a new existence with his own signature on it through such acts as writing letters.