Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe
Quickly, in order to protect his friend from the revealing light, Bird stepped inside and closed the door. For an instant the cramped space of the vestibule felt like the inside of a hooded cage. Bird blinked rapidly while he took off his shoes, trying to accustom his eyes to the dimness. Himiko hovered in the darkness behind him, watching.
“I hate to disturb people when they’re sleeping,” Bird offered.
“You’re so timid today, Bird. Anyway, I wasn’t asleep; if I nap during the day I can never get to sleep at night. I was thinking about the pluralistic universe.”
Pluralistic universe? Good enough, Bird thought, we can discuss it over whisky. Glancing around him like a hunting dog nosing for a spoor, Bird followed Himiko inside. In the living room it might have been evening, and the gloom was dark and stagnant like a bed of straw for sick livestock. Bird squinted down at the old but sturdy rattan chair he always sat in and carefully lowered himself into it after removing some magazines. Until Himiko had showered and dressed and put on some make-up, she wouldn’t turn on the lights, much less open the curtains. Company had to wait patiently in the dark. During his last visit here a year ago, Bird had stepped on a glass and had cut the base of his big toe. Recalling the pain and the panic, he shivered.
It was hard to decide where to put the bottle of whisky: an elaborate confusion of books and magazines, empty boxes and bottles, shells, knives, scissors, withered flowers collected in winter woods, insect specimens, and old and new letters covered not only the entire floor and the table, but even the low bookcase along the window, the record player, and the television set. Bird hesitated, then shuffled a small space on the floor with his feet and wedged the bottle of Johnnie Walker between his ankles. Watching from the door, Himiko said as though in greeting, “I still haven’t learned to be neat. Bird, was it like this the last time you were here?”
“Damn right it was; I cut my big toe!”
“Of course, the floor around the chair there was all bloody, wasn’t it,” Himiko reminisced. “It’s been ages, Bird. But everything’s the same around here. How about you?”
“As matter of fact, I had a kind of accident.”
“Accident?”
Bird hesitated; he hadn’t planned to start right in with all his troubles. “We had a child but it died right away,” he simplified.
“No! Really? The same thing happened to friends of mine—two friends! That makes three people I know. Don’t you think fallout in the rain has something to do with it?”
Bird tried comparing his child who seemed to have two heads with pictures he had seen of mutations caused by radioactivity. But he had only to think to himself about the baby’s abnormality and a sense of extremely personal shame hotly rose into his throat. How could he discuss the misfortune with other people; it was inherent in himself! He had the feeling this would never be a problem he could share with the rest of mankind.
“In my son’s case, it was apparently just an accident.”
“What an awful experience for you, Bird,” Himiko said, and she looked at him quietly with an expression in her eyes that seemed to cloud her lids with ink.
Bird didn’t trouble himself with the message in Himiko’s eyes; instead, he lifted the bottle of Johnnie Walker. “I wanted somewhere to drink and I knew you wouldn’t mind even if it was the middle of the day. Have a drink with me?”
Bird sensed himself wheedling the girl, like any brazen young gigolo. But that was the way men whom Himiko knew generally behaved toward her. The man she had married, more openly than Bird or any of her other friends, had played up to her as though he were a younger brother. And suddenly one morning he had hanged himself.
“I can see the baby’s death is still close to you, Bird. You haven’t recovered yet. Well, I’m not going to ask you anything more about it.”
“That would probably be best. There’s almost nothing to tell anyway.”
“Shall we have a drink?”
“Good.”
“I want to take a shower, but you start. Bird! There are glasses and a pitcher in the kitchen.”
Himiko disappeared into the bedroom and Bird stood up. The kitchen and the bathroom shared the twisted space at the end of the hall that amounted to the tail of the little house. Bird jumped over a cat crouching on the floor, the bathrobe and underclothes Himiko had just thrown off, and went into the kitchen. On his way back with a pitcher of water, glasses and cups he had washed himself, two in each pocket, he happened to glance past the open glass door and saw Himiko showering at the back of the bathroom, where it was even darker than the hall. With her left hand upheld as if to check the black water pouring out of the darkness above her head and her right hand resting on her belly, Himiko was looking down over her right shoulder at her buttocks and slightly arched right calf. Bird saw back and buttocks and legs, and the sight filled him with a disgust he couldn’t repress; his flesh turned to goosepimples. Bird rose on his toes as if to flee a darkness alive with ghosts: and then he was running, trembling, past the bedroom and back to the familiar rattan chair. He had conquered it once, he couldn’t say when, and now it had reawakened in him: the juvenile’s disgust, anxiety ridden, for the naked body. Bird sensed that the octopus of disgust would extend its tentacles even when he turned to his wife, who now lay in a hospital bed thinking about the baby who had gone with its father to another hospital because of a defective heart. But would the feeling last for a long time? Would it grow acute?
Bird broke the seal on the bottle with his fingernail and poured himself a drink. His arm was still shaking: the glass chattered at the bottle like an angry rat. Bird scowled thornily, a hermetic old man, and hurled the whisky down his throat. God, it burned! Coughing shook him and his eyes teared. But the arrow of red-hot pleasure pierced his belly instantly, and the shuddering stopped. Bird brought up a child’s belch redolent of wild strawberries, wiped his wet lips with the back of his hand, and filled his glass again, this time with a steady hand. How many thousands of hours had he been avoiding this stuff? Harboring something like a grudge against no one he could name, Bird emptied his second glass busily, like a titmouse pecking at millet seeds. His throat didn’t burn this time, he didn’t cough, and tears didn’t come to his eyes. Bird lifted the bottle of Johnnie Walker and studied the picture on the label. He sighed rapturously, and drank a third glass.
By the time Himiko came back, Bird was beginning to get drunk. As Himiko’s body entered the room disgust lifted its head, but its function was impaired by the poisons in the alcohol. Besides, the black, one-piece dress Himiko had put on diminished the threat of the flesh it covered: like a mass of shaggy hair, it made her look like a laughable cartoon bear. When Himiko had combed her hair she turned on the lights. Bird cleared a space on the table, set up a glass and a cup for Himiko and poured her whisky and a glass of water. Himiko sat down in a large, carved, wooden chair, managing her skirt with extreme care so that no more than necessary of her freshly washed skin was exposed. Bird was grateful. He was gradually overcoming his disgust, but that didn’t mean he had uprooted it.
“Here we are,” Bird said, and drained his glass.
“Here we are!” Himiko pouted her lower lip like an orangutan sampling a flavor, and took a tiny sip of whisky.
They sat there, quietly lacing the air with hot, whisky breath, and for the first time looked each other in the eye. Fresh from her shower, Himiko wasn’t ugly; the woman who had shrunk from the sunlight might have been this girl’s mother. Bird was pleased. Moments of regeneration as striking as this could still occur at Himiko’s age. “I thought of a poem when I was in the shower. Do you remember this?” Himiko whispered one line of an English poem as though it were a spell. Bird listened, and asked her to recite it again.
“ ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.’ “
“But you can’t murder all the babies in their cradles,” Bird said. “Who is the poet?”
“William Blake. You remember, I wrote my thesis on
“Of course, you were working on Blake.” Bird turned his head and discovered the Blake reproduction hanging on the wall that adjoined the bedroom. He had seen the painting often but he had never looked at it carefully. Now he noticed how bizarre it was. A public square walled in by buildings in the style of the Middle East. In the distance rose a pair of stylized pyramids: it must have been Egypt. The thin light of dawn suffused the scene—or was it dusk? Sprawled in the square like a fish with a ripped belly was the dead body of a young man. Next to him his distraught mother, surrounded by a group of old men with lanterns and women cradling infants. But the scene was dominated by the giant presence overhead, swooping across the square with arms outspread. Was it human? The beautifully muscled body was covered with scales. The eyes were full of an ominous dolor and were fanatically bitter; the mouth was a hollow in the face so deep it swallowed up the nose—a salamander’s mouth. Was it a devil? a god? The creature appeared to be soaring upward, reaching for the turbulence of the night sky even while it burned in the flames of its own scales.
“What’s he doing? Are those supposed to be scales or is he wearing a coat of mail like the knights in the Middle Ages?”
“I think they’re scales,” Himiko said. “In the color plate they were green and they looked much scalier. He’s the Plague! Doing his best to destroy the oldest sons of Egypt!”
Bird didn’t know much about the Bible; perhaps it was a scene from Exodus. Whatever, the creature’s eyes and mouth were virulently grotesque. Grief, fear, astonishment, fatigue, loneliness—even a hint of laughter boiled limitlessly from its coal-black eyes and salamander mouth.
“Isn’t he a groove!” Himiko said.
“You like the man with the scales?”
“Sure I do. And I like to imagine how I’d feel if I were the spirit of the Plague myself.”
“Probably so badly your eyes and mouth would start looking like his.” Bird glanced at Himiko’s mouth.
“It’s frightening, isn’t it? Whenever I have a frightening experience, I think how much worse it would be if I were frightening someone else—that way I get psychological compensation. Do you think you’ve made anyone else as afraid as you’ve ever been in your life?”
“I wonder. I’d have to think about it.”
“It’s probably not the sort of thing you can think about; you have to know.”
“Then I guess I’ve never really frightened another person.”
“I’m sure you haven’t—not yet. But don’t you suppose it’s an experience you’ll have sooner or later?” Himiko’s tone was reserved, nonetheless prophetic.
“I suppose murdering a baby in its cradle would terrify yourself and everyone else, too.” Bird poured himself and Himiko a drink, emptied his own glass in a swallow and filled it again. Himiko wasn’t drinking at such a fast clip.
“Are you holding back?” Bird said.
“Because I’ll be driving later. Have I ever given you a ride, Bird?”
“I don’t think so. We’ll have to go one of these days.”
“Come over any night and I’ll take you. It’s dangerous in the day because there’s too much traffic; my reflexes are much faster when it’s dark.”
“Is that why you shut yourself up all day long and think? You lead a real philosopher’s life—a philosopher who races around in a red MG after dark—not bad. What’s this pluralistic universe?”
Bird watched with mild satisfaction as delight tightened Himiko’s face. This was restitution for the rudeness of his sudden visit and for all the drinking he planned to do: not that many people besides himself would lend an attentive ear to Himiko’s reveries.
“Right now you and I are sitting and talking together in a room that’s a part of what we call the real world,” Himiko began. Bird settled down to listen, carefully balancing a fresh drink on his palm. “Well it just so happens that you and I exist in altogether different forms in countless other universes, too. Now! We can both remember times in the past when the chances of living or dying were fifty-fifty. For example, when I was a child, I got typhoid fever and almost died. And I still remember perfectly well the moment when I reached a crossroads; I could have descended into death or climbed the slope to recovery. Naturally, the Himiko sitting with you in this room chose the road to recovery. But in that same instant, another Himiko chose death! And a universe of people with brief memories of the Himiko who died went into motion around my young corpse all inflamed with typhoid rash. Do you see, Bird? Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you; one loses all relation to you because you die, the other maintains its relation to you because you survive in it. Just as you would take off your clothes, you abandon the universe in which you only exist as a corpse and move on to the universe in which you are still alive. In other words, various universes emerge around each of us the way tree limbs and leaves branch away from the trunk.
“This kind of universal cell division occurred when my husband committed suicide, too. I was left behind in the universe where he died, but in another universe on the other side, where he continues to live without committing suicide, another Himiko is living with him. The world a man leaves behind him when he dies, say at a very young age, and the world in which he escapes death, continue to live—the worlds that contain us are constantly multiplying. That’s all I mean by the pluralistic universe.
“And you know something, Bird? You don’t have to feel so sad about your baby’s death. Because another universe has diverged from the baby, and in the world developing in that universe the baby is growing healthy and strong this very minute. In that world you’re a young father drunk on happiness and I’m feeling groovy because I’ve just heard the good news and we’re drinking a toast together. Bird? Do you understand?”
The smile on Bird’s face was peaceful. The alcohol had spread to the remotest capillary in his body and it was taking its full effect: pressure had been equalized between the pink darkness inside him and the world outside. Not that the feeling would last long, as Bird well knew.
“Bird, you may not understand fully but do you get at least the general idea? There must have been moments in your twenty-seven years when you stood at a dubious junction of life and death. Well, at each of those moments you survived in one universe and left your own corpse behind in another. Bird? You must remember a few of those moments.”
“I do, as a matter of fact. Are you saying I left my own corpse behind on each of those occasions and escaped alive into this universe?”
“Exactly.”
Could she be right? Bird wondered sleepily. Had another Bird remained behind as a corpse at each of those critical moments? And was there an assortment of dead Birds in myriad other universes, a frail and timid schoolboy, and a high-school student with a simple mind but a much stronger body than his own? Then which of those many dead was the most desirable Bird? One thing was certain: not himself, not the Bird in this universe.
“Then is there a final death when your death in this world is your death in all the others, too?”
“There must be: otherwise, you’d have to live to infinity in at least one universe. I’d say you probably die your final death of old age when you’re over ninety. So we all live on in one universe or another until we die of old age in our final universe—that sounds fair, doesn’t it, Bird?”
Sudden comprehension forced Bird to interrupt: “You’re still tormenting yourself about your husband’s suicide, aren’t you? And you’ve conceived this whole philosophical swindle in order to rob death of its finality.”
“Say what you want, my role since he left me behind in this universe has been to wonder constantly why he died. …” The gray skin around Himiko’s weakening eyes colored with ugly swiftness. “… now that’s an unpleasant role but I’ve stepped into it, I’m not shirking my responsibilities, at least not in this universe.”
“Please don’t think I’m criticizing you, Himiko, because I’m not. I just don??
“Maybe you’re right, Bird … can I have another glass of whisky, please.” Himiko’s voice was dry, empty of interest. Bird filled both their glasses and prayed that Himiko would drink away her memory of his spontaneous criticism and continue again tomorrow to dream about her pluralistic universe. Like a time-traveler visiting a world ten thousand years in the past, Bird was terrified of being responsible for any mishap in the world of present time. The feeling had been growing in him slowly since he had learned that his baby was a freak. Now he wanted to drop out of this world for a while, as a man drops out of a poker game when he has a bad run of cards.
In silence Bird and Himiko exchanged magnanimous smiles and drank their whisky purposefully, like beetles sucking sap. The noises from the summer afternoon street sounded to Bird like signals from a vast distance, unheeded signals. Bird shifted in his chair and yawned, shedding one tear as meaningless as saliva. He filled his glass again and drank down the whisky in a swallow—to ensure that his descent from the world would be smooth. …
“Bird?”
Bird started, spilling whisky on his lap, and opened his eyes; he could feel himself in the second stage of drunkenness.
“What?”
“That buckskin coat you got from your uncle—whatever happened to it?” Himiko moved her tongue slowly, working at accurate pronunciation. Her face, like a large tomato, was round and very red.
“That’s a good question; I used to wear it in my first year at school.”
“Bird! You still had it in the winter of your sophomore year—”