When my son was born with a bright-red lump the size of a second head attached to the back of his skull, I found myself unable to reveal the actual situation to either my wife or my mother and, having installed the baby in intensive care at N. University Hospital, I wandered despondently in circles. Two and a half months later, I asked Dr. M., who had been caring for my son—and looking after me as I struggled to recover from the shock of his birth—to perform surgery.
My terrified mother arrived in Tokyo the day before the operation, and that evening my wife tried to cheer her; still in her twenties and not yet fully recovered from the difficulties of the birth, she resembled a baby chick being blown around in the wind. I sat there, in our combination living-and-dining room, banging my rattan rocking chair against a glass cupboard and feeling out of place as I watched the women talk. They sat on the synthetic rug on the wooden floor of the adjoining room, facing each other across a small trunk, their heads nearly touching. Strangely, for two people with such a difference in age and no blood ties, they looked very much alike.
My wife spoke absently, her voice thin and frail. “Eeyore doesn’t respond to his parents’ voices like a normal baby,” she said, using the nickname I had chosen for the baby. “If there’s a time during the surgery when life and death meet, we won’t be able to call him back to the side of life. It worries me sick.” She had been saying the same thing for days, and my response had been that a normal child wouldn’t be much better off if that happened, and that all we could do was leave it to the surgeon and hope for the best. But my mother’s agitation resonated with my wife’s and amplified it. With emphatic nods that shook her skinny neck, she said, “That’s exactly how it is! In our region, the voice of a relative has often brought a person who was about to die right back to life—” She inhaled sharply and seemed to bite down on her tongue.
In an attempt, selfish when I think about it now, to find someone with whom I could discuss the abnormality of my son’s birth, I had gone earlier to talk to my mentor, Professor W. He had flushed bright red from his face to his neck. “In these times it’s not always clear that it’s better to have been born than not to have been born,” he whispered, in the tone of voice he might have used to tell a joke about a sad and painful incident.
“If the body itself incorporates qualities that lead toward life and toward death, and if a baby reaches the border between the two, let’s honor the baby’s freedom,” I suggested to my mother and my wife. “It’s not always clear that it’s better to have been born than not to have been born in times like these!” But they both ignored these words, which I had spoken diffidently as I banged my chair against the wall in the cramped room.
Thanks to Dr. M. and his assistants, the long operation was a success, my son was liberated from the glistening lump, and my wife and my mother were understandably overjoyed. As a young father, I was also very happy, but when I remembered the conversation of the night before the operation I felt constrained and embarrassed about showing my joy.
While Eeyore was still a child, my wife and I often discussed his apparent inability to dream. And as he grew older I repeatedly tried to engage him in conversation about it.
“Eeyore, do you really not dream? You go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning; hasn’t it ever seemed that sometime in between maybe you’re at a concert? Don’t you ever remember anything like that when you wake up?”
“My gosh, that’s difficult! I forgot!”
“It has happened but you’ve forgotten? Or you don’t remember because nothing like that has ever happened? You take your medicine at night and go to sleep and nothing happens? Or while you’re sleeping you have a feeling you’re listening to music, anything like that? Eeyore, that’s called having a dream.”
“Listening to music—Mozart wrote a song called ‘Dream Picture,’ K. 552. Gosh! I haven’t heard it. I’m sorry!”
Fruitless as it was, at least my son participated willingly in this exchange. This was the rare exception. As I repeatedly tried to discuss dreams with him, he began to protest adamantly: “That’s enough. I want to stop now!”
To my wife, who listened in silence, his resoluteness was terrifying. I suppose she was afraid that the day would come when Eeyore would close his mind to all things in the world, our family foremost among them, with a final “That’s enough. I want to stop now!” I tried to console her, but I, too, fretted. I was made uneasy by another image of dreams and of fathers and sons. I had not created the image—which was of Abraham and his son, Isaac—but it had planted itself inside me in the form of words:
I had sometimes called to mind this glorious dialogue when, alone in the middle of the night and buoyed by the power of alcohol, I was confronted by a thought that I could only let pass through me like a storm, with my face flushed and my head bowed, a thought that will circle around me my entire life. For the first five weeks or so following my son’s abnormal birth, I had longed for his death. My longing was not based on the kind of revelation that appeared to Abraham in a dream, or on my son’s complicity; it was merely the egotistical desire to protect a future for myself and my wife, a longing that was searingly urgent, like hot coals beneath my feet.
If, during those five weeks, I had found the accomplice I was looking for in the hospital where the baby was kept, would I have succeeded in eliminating my son and extinguishing his brief memories of life?
I somehow managed to recover. Since then we have survived, and my son has now made it past his nineteenth birthday. Even so, no powerful detergent has allowed me to wash those disgraceful weeks out of my life, nor do I ever expect to do so. Given this history, as my son developed his intellectual power step by deliberate step, I was prepared for the day when he would say the following (I imagined that his voice would be soft, as it was at age five or six when, able to distinguish as many as a hundred different bird calls, he would murmur, for example, “Kingfisher, red kingfisher”): “Father, to tell the truth, since I was very small I’ve been having the same dream. In my dream, I’ve just been born, and you’re trying hard to find a way to murder me.”
My wife happened to be out when Eeyore had his first major seizure, two years ago. It began not with screaming or spasms but, rather, with an unusual atmosphere that I can best describe as the obverse of those more familiar symptoms. We were in the living room; I lay reading on the couch as always, and my son was sprawled on the rug listening to Mozart. Eventually, instead of putting on a new record, he pushed the pile he had selected away from his body with both elbows, like an infant with no appetite weakly rejecting his food. This stuck in my consciousness like a small thorn. But I continued to read. Before long, I had a sense of interruption and suspension. I looked up. All expression had left my son’s face as he lay there, propped up on his elbows. His open eyes were like stones. Saliva was drooling from between his slightly parted lips.
“Eeyore! Eeyore! What’s wrong?” I called to him. But he was completely engaged with the trouble inside him. As if to say that this was no time to be responding to the exterior, not even to the voice of his father, he remained motionless, his head resting heavily in his hands, his face a void.
Continuing to call to him, I jumped up, and, in the brief moment it took me to move to his side, he began slapping the floor with his left hand and arm, not wildly but with deliberate force. Slap, slap, he struck the floor, and then his eyes rolled up and showed white.
“Eeyore! Eeyore! Are you all right? Does it hurt?” As I shouted meaningless questions I wrapped a handkerchief I took from my pocket around my left thumb and forced it between my son’s teeth. He immediately bit grindingly down on the joint. I moaned as though for him, suffering silently. A minute or two later he stopped slapping the floor and slackened his clenched teeth. I lifted him as he rolled over onto his back, and when I laid him on the couch he fell deeply asleep, snoring with a volume that was menacing.
For several days after this seizure, my son was withdrawn, doleful, and silent, as though the knot inside his body had yet to untangle. He was lying on the couch watching the news on television one evening when, suddenly, at the newscaster’s mention of the death of a certain elderly master in the world of Japanese classical music, he sat up with surprising agility and shouted emotionally, “Oh! He died! He’s dead! He’s completely dead!”
There was something in my son’s poignant lament, full of grief, that was a shock to me. I was caught off guard; it was almost comic.
“What’s wrong, Eeyore? Did you like him that much?” As I questioned him, I felt as if I might burst out laughing. I’m sure I was smiling.
But my son didn’t respond; falling back onto the couch, he covered his face with both hands and went rigid. It was too late to take back my words, though I did lose my smile. I moved to the couch, continuing, “Eeyore, c’mon, is it that surprising that he died?” Kneeling at his side, I tried shaking my son by the shoulders, but he only stiffened his body more. I tried to pull at his hands, but they covered his face with the firmness of a steel lid that had been welded in place. All I could do was kneel there staring at his ten fingers; alone they revealed a sentient fineness that isolated them from the rest of his body.
It was completely impossible to reach my son. He remained closed inside himself and did not respond in any way to my inquiries. I had nothing to guide me toward an understanding of what could have produced that heart-piercing cry of bereavement. How in the world had he managed to create such strong feelings about death?
I was to be given an answer to this question soon enough. That same week, my son, still deep in the lassitude that had persisted after his seizure, was listening to an FM broadcast with the volume turned way up. This continued for hours, until everyone in the family lost patience. “Eeyore, could you please turn it down a little?” his younger sister finally said. Eeyore’s sister was half his size and he made her cower with a wildly menacing gesture.
“Eeyore! You know better than that!” my wife said. “After Papa and I are dead, your brother and sister will have to look after you. If you behave this way no one will like you and how will you get along after we’re dead?”
So that was it, I acknowledged to myself regretfully. In this way we had repeatedly introduced my son to the question of death. But this time his response to our refrain was something entirely new.
“It’s all right! Because I’ll die. I’ll be dying soon. So it’s all right!”
For an instant there was a pause, like an intake of breath—which meant that my wife had been as startled as I had at the conviction of his unexpected declaration, despite the subdued voice in which he had delivered it—then she continued, speaking now in a tone that was more conciliatory.
“Of course you’re not going to die, Eeyore. What makes you think you’re going to die? Who told you that?”
“I’ll be dying right away. Because I had a seizure! It’s all right. Because I’ll be dying!”
I moved to my wife’s side where she stood at the couch and looked down at my son: he was covering his face firmly with both hands, his dark eyebrows and the sharply raised bridge of his nose, which resembled his movie-actor uncle’s, visible between his fingers. New words seemed to stick in our throats, as if we both felt how futile they would be. His voice had been so forceful, yet he was perfectly still, not a muscle moving.
Thirty minutes later, as my wife and I sat in silence, facing each other at the table in our dining room, my son shuffled past us on his way to the bathroom. He was still covering his face with both hands. His sister, feeling responsible for the situation earlier, was at his side, clinging to him as she spoke.
“Eeyore, be careful! If you cover your face while you walk you’ll bump into things. You could trip and hit your head!” Eeyore’s younger brother also fell into step and followed him to the bathroom. Through the unclosed door came the sound of long and copious urination. Finished, my son headed straight into his mother’s bedroom across the hall.
“I think it’s bad to talk that way,” my daughter said, returning. “It makes Eeyore lonely to think of the future.” Her face, as if covered in goose pimples, seemed pinched and small.
Forlornly, ashamed of ourselves, my wife and I were both recalling the words we had repeated endlessly until now—Eeyore, what will become of you after we die? What will you do? For my own part, I was also realizing that, inasmuch as I had never really considered how those crucial words might echo deep in my son’s heart, I had also not yet arrived at a definition of what death meant to me, let alone what it meant to him.
As he recovered from the effects of the seizure and went back to his special class at middle school, my son seemed to regain his psychological well-being. Nevertheless, it was clear that a concept of death, whatever its nature, had taken root in him. Every morning, when he finished dressing himself for school, he went into the living room. Spreading his plump thighs and dropping his rear heavily to the floor, he sat down on the rug and opened the morning paper to read the obituaries. Encountering the name of a new illness, he would hold his breath as he deciphered the Chinese characters he had learned by showing them to my wife and me, and then recite with feeling, “Ah! There was lots of dying again this morning! Pernicious pneumonia. Age eighty-nine. Coronary infarction. Age sixty-nine. Bronchial pneumonia. Age eighty-three. Ah! This gentleman was the founder of fugu-fish-poisoning research. Lung cancer. Age eighty-six. Ah! There was plenty of dying again!”
He also became sensitive to stories of food poisoning on the evening news. Beginning in the rainy season, in June and into the summer, a number of incidents were reported. Each time he would rush to the television and repeat at the top of his lungs, for example, “Ah! An entire party at the Nippori Outdoor Market got food poisoning from their bento lunches. The bentos were of the tea-shop variety!”
When we took a trip, a week or two later, he wouldn’t touch the box lunch at the train station which he usually looked forward to so eagerly. We urged him repeatedly to eat. Before long his eyes became severely crossed, and, covering his mouth with one hand, he thrust the other out in front of him defensively. This rejection was so urgent that strangers turned to eye us suspiciously, as if we were imposing some cruel punishment on our child. That summer, my son also stopped eating sushi, one of his favorites until then. Pigs’ feet, which he’d always liked, became another of the dishes he refused to touch, after overeating gave him diarrhea. The result was that he lost twenty-two pounds in just under a year.
Because he was meticulous about taking his medicine, he suffered no more major seizures, but there were, over the next year, a number of episodes that seemed to be the precursors of a seizure. Each time this happened, staying home from school and spending the day on the couch, my son would mournfully announce a new physical symptom:
“Ah! There’s not a sound coming from my heart! I think I’m dying!”
My wife and I would fashion a stethoscope from a rubber tube and hold it to my son’s chest and one of his ears. Or we would provide some basic information about coronary seizure, choosing words he could accept, struggling somehow to ease his concern about death.
Last autumn, my wife and I made plans to take the children to our cabin in the mountains of Izu. We had decided to leave on a Saturday, but a large typhoon was approaching and a weather report predicted that its eastward course would bring it to the Izu Peninsula the following morning—precisely when we would have been at the cabin. We abandoned the idea of the excursion and told the children. Eeyore listened and did not react, so I assumed that a trip to the cabin was of no particular importance to him.
However, that Saturday, at just the time when we would have been leaving the house, Eeyore stood at the front door in the stiff, heavy leather shoes he normally refused to wear, a large pack on his back and a mountain-climbing hat on his head, and announced, as though he were trying to convince himself, “Shall we get started? I’m on my way to the Izu house!” When the rest of us failed to appear with our luggage he continued waiting, suspiciously. At that point, my wife and his sister and brother tried to convince Eeyore that the trip to the mountains had been cancelled. My daughter used his interest in the weather map on television. “Eeyore, a typhoon’s coming! I wonder what the low will be—pretty cold, I bet!” His brother shared knowledge, which he had probably acquired from a magazine article, about the Izu Peninsula’s having floated on the Pacific until it collided with its current location and became attached. “If that’s the case, the peninsula might float back out into the Pacific someday. And we might never get back.”
My son’s response to this persuasion was simple and apposite and for that reason formidable. “I have a winter sweater. I think we should get there before the Izu Peninsula floats away. They say a typhoon is coming!”
In the end, my wife threatened him with a scolding from me if I heard him being so unreasonable while I was trying to work in my study, but, far from panicking, he looked away from my wife and from his distressed brother and sister and, in a curious display of obstinacy, gazed at nothing at all with empty eyes. Then he said, “No, Papa is dead! He died, you know. I’m on my way to Izu by myself because Papa is dead. Goodbye, everyone. Farewell!”
When my wife told me this a few minutes later, I looked out the window. There were few trees in the garden, but among them the dogwood and the birch were swaying in the wind. Only the camellia, with its thick trunk and stiff foliage, was still; or, rather, if you looked closely even the camellia was moving, but on a different frequency than the young trees. Since morning it had been a little windy and had rained in fits and starts; it was as if fat drops of dew were hanging heavily in the air. In the distance the sky was pitch black and ominous; inside banks of dark clouds darker clouds boiled and billowed. Even so, the wind wasn’t so strong you couldn’t walk against it—which is what Eeyore would say—and the rain wasn’t hard enough to require an umbrella. In fact, he had already walked to the bus stop that morning and made the trip to and from his school.
I put aside the essay I had been working on and stood up. I sensed my wife flinch—she was still turned away from me in silence—but I was not at that moment angry at Eeyore. I was merely perplexed. As I headed for the stairs, I still assumed that it wouldn’t be hard to convince Eeyore that we should remain in Tokyo until the typhoon passed. But when I looked down at his large head, at the backpack on his back which was now as tall and as broad as any adult’s, and saw an ancient doll strapped to his side as he stood planted fiercely in front of the door, I felt myself letting go of common sense with a shudder of abandon and began to prepare myself for a departure with Eeyore for the wind-whipped storm that awaited us in Izu.
The large doll he had lashed to his body, almost three feet tall with abundant black hair, ogling eyes, and an overbite, was Tiny Chiyo, a filthy, damaged doll that had been abandoned in the shed for four or five years. Eeyore looked like a warrior on his way to a final, desperate battle with his child at his side.
“When I told him none of us were going to Izu, he dragged out Tiny Chiyo.” My daughter sounded embarrassed. Her younger brother also twisted away from the doll’s open-shuttered eyes.
“I’m going with him,” I said.
As I was packing my suitcase in the living room, Eeyore’s brother approached in silence with his own things. Apparently his impulse accurately reflected my wife’s own anxiety, which she now expressed: “That’s a good idea—better that the three of you should go than just Papa and Eeyore!”
“No. Eeyore and I will go alone!” I said, aware that my loud voice was a hurtful blow to Eeyore’s brother. I was asserting myself violently: The rest of the family, those who wish to continue existing in this world, are excused. Eeyore and I are free to behave as crazily as we want.
Eeyore’s brother and sister, as if ashamed of themselves, though they had no reason to feel that way, retreated to their rooms. Without another word to my wife, Eeyore and I set out from the house like knights departing for the Crusades, all eyes on him as we went, the doll still lashed to his body.
From Seijo Gakuen to Odawara we rode standing, jammed in among the commuters who filled the train. As people stared, Eeyore declined to remove not only Tiny Chiyo but even his backpack; he looked stubbornly downward at the floor, his head bowed, behaving as if he were travelling by himself; and I couldn’t even bring myself to hoist his pack into the luggage net above our heads. We stood with our backs to one another as if we were strangers. Eeyore’s body odor was curiously strong, and I could tell even while turned away that he had not alighted at a station and was still standing at my side.
At Odawara we transferred to the National Railroad, and as far as Atami the train seemed normally crowded for the hour; when we changed to the Ito line after buying box lunches for supper, there were very few passengers. The sea was already dark, and the mountainside was also in heavy shadow, but there were instants when light glinted faintly off the trees as they bent to the wind. As we crossed an iron bridge I glimpsed a swollen river.
When we reached Ito we learned that the track ahead was impassable. Eeyore was continuing to behave as though he were travelling alone, but as this included listening carefully to the announcements there was no need to explain anything to him. We came out of the station, Eeyore following two or three steps behind me, and I made a deal with one of the taxis waiting in what was now a pouring rain to take us to our mountain cabin.
“Checking up on your place? Shall I stop for batteries for my flashlight?” the driver asked, trying hard not to stare at Eeyore. “If it gets really bad I’m turning around. I can’t let you off and not get back myself! They say the typhoon’ll hit Izu right between the eyes.”
As we drove, the storm increased in violence, but the driver managed somehow to deliver us to our cabin. He even lit the way for us with his headlights. By the time we reached the front door, thirty feet away, we were soaking wet. The path at our feet remained in darkness; what the driver’s lights caught and lit so brilliantly that it hurt the eyes was the deep ocean of leaf on the frenzied branches of the mountain peach tree, which seemed about to go up in flames as the wind whipped it against the trunk of a cypress tree. Struggling with the door against the buffeting wind, I managed to get Eeyore inside, then went around to the rear of the house for an armful of dead branches to use as firewood. As I came back, the wood I was carrying caught on the branch of a tree, which snapped back and struck me across the face, knocking my glasses off and leaving me with a bloody nose.
But once I had closed the door behind me I experienced a certain peacefulness that was very different from the painful state of mind I had been in until then. For one thing, Eeyore had grown alert as soon as he got inside and, with the electricity off, seemed to be using the flashlight to move around upstairs from the dining room to the living room. I got towels from the bathroom and brought them up along with a mattress from my bedroom which was plenty large enough for both of us. I had Eeyore get undressed and dry himself while I went back downstairs for bedding; guessing my intention to build a fire and sleep in front of the fireplace, he positioned and straightened the mattress, propping Tiny Chiyo on the floor alongside it.
I placed a bundle of the wet branches in the fireplace and lit some torn magazine pages on top of the wood. As I hadn’t opened the valve in the propane-gas shed at the edge of the property, we couldn’t boil water. I gave Eeyore his box lunch from the train station and a cup of water, poured sake from a five-litre bottle in the kitchen into my own cup, and began drinking as I tended the fire. Eeyore, his large body hunched over in the darkness, squinted into the lunchbox to inspect its contents as he ate them. He ate in silence, taking a long time to finish, then lay down in the very center of the quilt on top of the mattress, placing Tiny Chiyo at his side, and fell asleep, snoring loudly, as he did after a seizure. I was left alone in front of the struggling fire.
The wind and heavy raindrops rattled the wooden shutters. At some point I heard a cracking, as though a large tree had been sheared off at the trunk. Eeyore’s snores changed to a sound like moaning as he slept. Lying on his back on the quilt, his legs straight out, he was like a mummy in its tomb. Next to him, its spring-loaded eyes also closed, Tiny Chiyo was a smaller mummy who had been buried with his master.
I read by the light of the fire without the help of glasses. I grew drowsy. The sum total of my work as a writer seemed shallow and simplistic. Moreover, I felt that time was running out and that I had not accomplished a single thing I should truly have been doing. I had declared my desire to define everything in and of this world for my son’s sake, but hadn’t managed to do so. What if Eeyore were a college sophomore today, his brain undamaged, and came to me with a question: “Father, as honestly as you can, please tell me the definition of death you’ve managed to derive from all your years of life.” Obviously if I were posed this question by a son with a healthy mind, I couldn’t very well sit there lost in thought while he peered at me.
I thought of William Blake, of the god Tharmas in “The Four Zoas.” At the beginning of this epic poem, a manifestation of the confusion of the world, Tharmas and his lover Enion must separate, and their song of grief at the moment of separation haunts me. There is a special poignancy in Tharmas’s lines as he sits weeping in his clouds, trembling and pale, “& I am like an atom, / A Nothing, left in darkness; yet I am an identity: / I wish & feel & weep & groan. Ah, terrible! terrible!”
In the grips of the premise that I had a healthy son, a college student in his second year who had asked me a question, I said, “Eeyore! At the moment of death perhaps we can only repeat the lament of Tharmas! Pale and trembling, the high hospital bed feeling like our clouds.”
To be sure, the noise of the storm, which seemed unabated, was all around me, but even so the fact that I spoke these words aloud must have meant that I was drunk. I think I was also half asleep. Suddenly I felt the touch of a calm and gentle hand which was scarcely a touch at all on my shoulder and my arm and around my chest, waking me, and I heard a voice: “It’s all right! It’s all right! It’s a dream. You’re just dreaming! There’s nothing at all to be afraid of. It’s just a dream!”
And even so I seemed to go on with what I was saying, lifting my voice against the noise of the wind, continuing to speak to the half-phantom that was my son. When I opened my eyes, Eeyore was kneeling at my side, quieting my body with both arms outstretched, holding me in the gaze of his ink-colored eyes beneath eyebrows that were thick and dark in the light of the fire. As I sat up, Eeyore moved backward with the quick agility he sometimes demonstrated and, moving Tiny Chiyo aside, created a place for me to sleep. Then he laid himself down again, on his back, and I lay down beside him, also on my back, and pulled the quilt over both of us.
In my drunken momentum I fell right to sleep, without reflecting on the strangeness of Eeyore’s words. For just an instant I seemed to be aware of something quietly receding through the dining area that adjoined the living room and through the door that had been left open into the darkness of the stairs beyond.
When I woke up, Eeyore’s body was not beside me and the window farthest away from the fireplace where I was lying had been opened and light was coming in. Piercing the smell of smoke that filled the room, the acrid scent of pine was so raw it made my head pound. I twisted my body toward the light and discovered a darkly silhouetted figure slumped forward in one of the chairs between me and the whitened window. As I gazed for a moment at what appeared to be my wife, I noticed that there was something out of the ordinary, something deficient about the view through the frame of the sunlit window. Moreover, something black and flat appeared and disappeared in that lucid space, as though it were being thrown upward, then thrown again. Groping out of long habit in the area around my head, I found the eyeglasses which should not have been there and recognized the black object as a crow, a great fat crow, an old bird I knew well. It would perch in our giant pine and take flight at times as if to get some exercise, glide out of sight, and then return and rest its wings. Now the exposed branch near the top of the tree where it was easy to perch was gone, and gone with it was the entire pine.
“Eeyore found your glasses and wouldn’t let anyone else bring them to you,” my wife said. “They’re all outside cleaning up. They want to store the broken branches to use for firewood.”
“The big pine must be down! Such an ancient tree—it survives everything and then one night it just suddenly snaps. It’s strange.”
“It fell right across the road and brought down the phone lines. You must have heard the noise.”
“I did. Didn’t you?”
“We just got here this morning.”
“You did? Late last night I thought you were standing in the corridor.”
For an instant the silhouetted body seemed to tighten; then, in a voice that struggled to contain strong feelings, my wife said, “There is no way I could have been standing there watching you. The three of us stayed in a business hotel in Ito.”
After Eeyore and I had left, my wife and the two younger children had set out for Izu themselves via the bullet train from Tokyo Station. But even the bullet train was slowed down as a result of the typhoon, and by the time they reached Ito it was close to ten o’clock. The taxi they found in front of the station happened to be the same one that had brought me and Eeyore to our mountain cabin. The driver was not unwilling to bring them as well if they insisted, even though the wind-driven rain was worse then than it had been two hours before, but he did want to stop at the police station on the way to register us as a potential family suicide. . . . He then took my thoroughly disheartened wife and children to a business hotel alive with commuters from Izu and helped them to check in.
“Family suicide, what a cheery fellow!” I tried to cover with a laugh, but my wife’s shadowed profile remained taut.
I lay back again. My wife spoke the words she must have been considering deep inside herself until now: “Yesterday Saku”—our younger son—“said Eeyore would probably calm down when he got to the house, but there was no way of knowing what Papa might start thinking when he got to Izu. ‘So we’d better go after them,’ he said, ‘because of Papa!’ ”
I could hear what was now a dry and even wind and the children’s voices, particularly Eeyore’s self-important shouting as he instructed his younger brother and sister to gather small pieces of wood while he took charge of the heavier ones. I lay there, puzzling over how I was going to stand before my wife and explain why half my face was swollen. Given my behavior the day before, I would have to start trying immediately to restore my relationship with my wife and the other children. I sat up toward the light and said the following, as if in encouragement of myself and others, aware of my wife flinching as she noticed the swelling in my face: “Eeyore doesn’t dream, but he does know that people have dreams. As he grows older, if the day finally comes when he dreams, I think he’ll be able to tell it was a dream. Learning that made last night worth it.”
I had feared that Eeyore’s first dream would be a painful one and that I might no longer be alive and would therefore be unable to stand by his side to help him. But now I knew that, if it happened, Eeyore would be able to say, turning to himself as dreamer, “It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s just a dream.” Why should I torment myself? Eeyore would be able to turn to himself and continue, “You’re just dreaming! There’s nothing at all to be afraid of. It’s just a dream.” ♦
(Translated, from the Japanese, by John Nathan.)
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