Free Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburō Ōe

glimpse into eternity.) And now I was similarly lost, with no basis for even guessing at the thoughts about death that could have produced that heartrending cry of grief and loss. Where had such strong feelings about death come from?
    I was to be given an answer soon enough. That same spring break, still wrapped in the gloominess that was an aftereffect of his seizure, my son was listening to an FM broadcast with the volume turned way up. This had continued for hours until everyone in the family was out of patience. Finally, Eeyore's sister, half his size, had requested him to turn the volume down a little and he had made her cower with a 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. What will you do then? How are you going to get along after we're dead?”
    So that was it, I acknowledged to myself with a feeling of regret. In this way, repeatedly, we had been introducing my son to the issue of death. But this time his response to our refrain was something 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—my wife had been thrown by this subdued assertion no less than it had dazed me—and then she continued, speaking now in a tone of voice that was more soothing than reproachful:
    “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 resolutely 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 to say seemed to stick in our throats, as if we both felt how futile they would be. His voice had been so forceful just now, yet already he was perfectly still, not a muscle moving.
    Thirty minutes later, as my wife and I sat in silence and for some reason facing each other across 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 before, 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 stuff. You could trip and hit your head!” Probably, this was also intended as a criticism of her mother's approach to scolding earlier. Eeyore's younger brother fell into step and moved off with him to the bathroom. Through the unclosed door came the sound of copious urinating. Finished, Eeyore seemed to go straight into his mother's bedroom across the hall.
    “I think it's bad to talk like that,” my daughter said when she returned. “It makes Eeyore feel lonely when he thinks of the future.” Her face seemed pinched and small, as though covered in goose pimples.
    Standing side by side with his sister, her younger brother spoke, revealing that he, too, had evolved a position that was independent of his parents’: “Eeyore was wiping his tears with his forefinger straight out and horizontal, like he was slicing across his eye with a knife. That's the proper way of wiping tears. Even though nobody else does it that way.”
    Forlornly, ashamed of ourselves, my wife and I were recalling the words we had repeated endlessly until now—"After we die, Eeyore! What will become of you? What will you do!” For my own part, I was also realizing that, inasmuch as I had never considered carefully how these crucial words might echo deep in my son's heart, I had not yet arrived at a definition of death, not even at a definition of what it meant to me let alone to him!
    Like an earthquake, the epileptic seizure had produced tremors beneath the