Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburō Ōe Read Free Book Online Page A

epic poems. At the time of my first encounter, if I had possessed the city-boy poise to question “autodidact” about the verse when he returned to his seat, perhaps he would have touched on my own destiny in the course of his explanation. If his words had overlapped the augury of my future that I had read in the poetry myself, I might have believed his prediction—I have no idea how the other young men he encountered had reacted—and become his disciple. Sooner or later, of course, his homosexual advances in my direction would have put an end to the relationship.

    … & return / To the dark valley whence he came. The dark valley in this line, despite the negative adjective “dark,” filled me with powerful longing. After the birth of my eldest son, which seemed to make definite all over again the impossibility that I would return to my valley—what purpose could French possibly serve there?—I found myself unable to say my valley except in the domain of my imagination; nevertheless, there were times when I dreamed of returning with my son. I want to emphasize that I was not dreaming while asleep; these were reveries that had the curious quality of occurring in the brightness of consciousness while I was awake. I say this to readers who might otherwise be tempted to divine my fortune in these dreams as though they were of a variety familiar to them.
    My mother and other members of the family were assembled in the main room in what appeared to be the shadows of a dim light that gave their skin an inky look—this was literally a dark valley. I recall that my father, who had died when I was a child, was also sitting there somberly in formal Japanese robes and family crest. I had just returned to the dark valley with my son, his head still bandaged where the lump had been cut away (even in the reverie, my wife never appeared). The entire family, my mother included, viewed my handicapped son as the one and only asset I had managed to wrest from my life of Labour & sorrow in the great city. Under the circumstances, no one was cheering, but their expressions were saying “Congratulations!” and “Well done!” Over time, I returned to this scene frequently. As my son grew up, the pair of us appeared to alter, but my mother and the rest of the family in the dark valley never seemed to change. Thinking about it now, I see clearly that the image I created in the form of a daydream was connected to thoughts of death. That would explain why my father, who had died at about my current age, was the only one in the room wearing an old-fashioned formal kimono.

    A definition of death. To me, this was connected to multiple layers of experience from my early childhood in that valley in the forest on the island of Shikoku, and to the topography of the valley which, without reference to those experiences, I am unable to recapture in my mind. Naturally, in the more than thirty years that have passed since I left the valley I have accumulated other experiences having to do with death, but I realize, looking back, that these were secondary. It was in the valley that I encountered death as an equitable visitor to both my grandmother and my father, whom she had influenced so powerfully. And it was in this valley that I first saw a man who had hanged himself. In the latter case particularly, “in this valley” is a crucial signifier of the experience. When I recall the scene that day, centered around the corpse hanging by the neck, this becomes clear.
    The body was discovered behind the stone Jizo altar, in an enclosed area that was slightly lower than but abutted the woods around the Shinto shrine. The little man who was considered beneath notice even by the children when they ran into him along the main road had hung himself. My kid brother went to touch the body—"It was swinging like crazy,” he reported. I observed from behind the crowd that had gathered from the village and beyond. We were standing in an area used for airing sake