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

end, I was never able to uncover any substantial information.
    I did manage in the process, indirectly, to extract Eeyore's assessment of certain behavior of his own that had baffled me until then. If I were to re-create the conversation that took place between us—actually, I made numerous inquiries over time, but if I were to summarize—our dialogue was as follows. My son's reply, obscure as it was, had about it a strange ring that did put me and my wife in mind of something.
    “Eeyore, a while before you had your seizure you remember pulling out your hair? You pulled out the hair above the plastic flap in your head, little by little, remember, and you made a round bald spot? You kept it up every day. Was that because it was itchy? Was the skin on top of the flap pulling? Did it hurt? Did it feel so bad inside your head you couldn't stand it if you didn't pull your hair out? You must remember? What was going on?”
    “ That was an interesting time! The old days were interesting! ” My son's smile was absent as he spoke, as though he had sent his thoughts to a distant place.

    As the rainy season ended and summer began in earnest, we took my son to Nihon University Hospital. I have described his violence while I was away in Europe, and assuming this had a physical cause he would have to be examined by a specialist. My wife went to the reception desk at brain surgery to present the usual card requesting an examination by Dr. M, and when she returned to the couch in one corner of the waiting room where I sat with my son she seemed dejected. “Dr. M turned sixty-five and had to retire. He's still here a few times a week and apparently he'll see patients who request a special appointment.”
    My son was in high spirits at the prospect of meeting Dr. M for the first time in a long while. Grasping right away that for some reason the doctor was not waiting in the examination room beyond the curtain—he was always swift to comprehend matters concerning himself—his vitality ebbed. My wife and I were stymied; it was as if we had never doubted that, so long as we showed up at the hospital, Dr. M would be there—eternally!—to give us reliable instructions about our son. Now we realized, looking back over those nineteen years, that while Dr. M's examination room and white smock, and his decisiveness and the well-bred humor beneath it, had never changed, his posture and appearance had been moving year by year toward old age. Images of the doctor played across our minds like flashbacks as we sat there in silence. But I was the most disheartened. When my son's name came over the speaker and my wife took him in to see the new doctor, I stayed behind on the pretext of looking after our belongings.
    Ten minutes later, he emerged from the examination room with his bright mood restored. My wife also seemed encouraged, but beneath her excitement I could sense that her mind was still wheeling, and her interior agitation prompted me to steel myself for the next revelation of difficulty. She reported that Eeyore had to have a number of tests; we were to do blood and urine first and then go to radiology.
    On our way to the lab, my wife told me that the new doctor had been assisting Dr. M ever since he had first operated on Eeyore nineteen years ago. And he had expressed doubt that the symptoms of recent years were related to epilepsy. As far as he could remember, Eeyore had been born with two brains separated by the defect in his skull. Having determined that the external brain was not functioning, Dr. M had excised it, but the portion of the living brain nearest the site of the surgery controlled the optic nerve. If the brain had been traumatized there, Eeyore might well suffer a loss of sight for brief periods of time, and the symptoms we had interpreted as epilepsy could be related to the same problem—
    I interrupted: “Two brains? They cut away the brain on the outside that wasn't working?”
    “The doctor said you definitely knew