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

surface of Eeyore's body and emotions. As he recovered from its aftereffects and, when spring break ended, returned to special class at middle school, he also seemed to regain his psychological well-being. Following the seizure, there was a time when even the way he listened to music had seemed abnormally off balance, but now his rapt attention conveyed once again an impression of unclouded pleasure.
    Nevertheless, there was no room for doubt that a concept of death, whatever its nature, had taken root in him. Every morning, when he finished dressing himself properly to go to school, Eeyore sat down on the rug in the living room. Spreading his plump thighs and dropping his rear heavily to the floor, he hunkered down 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 would 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, aged eighty-three. Ah! This gentleman was the founder of fugu-fish poisoning research, venal thrombosis, age seventy-four, lung cancer, age eighty-six. Ah! There was plenty of dying again! ”
    “People are always dying, Eeyore, but many more new people are born every day! Now off to school you go and don't worry! Be careful at the railroad crossing, otherwise—”
    Otherwise, you might die yourself—my wife had choked back the second half of her warning with a shudder.
    Eeyore became sensitive to reports of food poisoning on the evening news. Beginning in early June in the rainy season and into summer, there were a number of incidents. Each time, he would rush to the television set and parrot the newscaster at the top of his lungs, for example: “ Ah! An entire party at the Nippon outdoor market got food poisoning from their box lunches, the lunches were the tea-shop variety!'‘
    A week or two later, summer vacation having begun, we took a train to Gumma prefecture where we have a cabin in the mountains, and Eeyore wouldn't touch the box lunch they sold at the station that he looked forward to eagerly in a normal year. We repeatedly urged him 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 emphatic that strangers turned to eye us suspiciously, as if we were imposing a cruel punishment on our child. That summer, my son also stopped eating sushi, one of his favorites until then. Basically, he refused to put any raw fish in his mouth. Pigs’ feet, which he had always liked, became another of the dishes he declined to touch after overeating gave him diarrhea. The result was that he lost twenty-two pounds in just under a year. It seemed this was also a reaction to having been told by the school doctor that he would develop problems if he became obese.
    Because he has learned to take his medicine religiously, Eeyore hasn't suffered another major seizure like the one that terrified me, but there have been a number of episodes during the past two years that were like harbingers of a seizure. Whenever this happened and he had to stay home from school and spend the day on the couch, my son would mournfully announce a new abnormality in some organ of his body: “ Ah! There's not a sound coming from my heart! I think I'm dying! My heart isn't making a sound! ”
    My wife and I would fashion a stethoscope from a rubber tube and hold it to my son's chest and ear. Or provide an amateur consultation about coronary seizure, choosing words my son could handle, struggling somehow to ease his concern about death. At the same time, I would probe to discover, using the pain or the anxiety he was experiencing now as a bridge, the form in which he had been aware of these same feelings at the time of his first seizure. But in the