When I came down with gout I was ruled entirely by the fiery red swelling at the base of my left big toe: as even the weight of a sheet was unbearably painful I lay in bed at night uncovered—sleeping only a little without the help of whisky—and sprawled on the sofa in the same state during the day, crawling to the bathroom with one leg in the air. At the time, Eeyore had just entered the special class at middle school, and, watching his father, who dwarfed him in height and weight, reduced to helplessness for days on end, made a deep impression. He did his very best to be useful to me. As I crawled down the hall obliged to learn how painful a shin bone could be, he would scamper after me like a sheep dog in pursuit of a stray sheep and more than once, tripping over his own chubby, clumsy body, would fall on my gout-ridden foot. I couldn't help screaming aloud, but the way he withered right before my eyes at my suffering was enough to fill me with a phantom doubt that perhaps I was a savage father who beat his son. And that thought incised itself into me like a wound. As the attacks gradually subsided, my son would stroke the rose-colored swelling at the base of my toe with slightly bent fingers—supporting himself with his other hand to keep from leaning his weight on me—and would speak aloud, addressing my foot, “Nice foot, are you all right, what a very nice foot you are!”
“There's no question that Eeyore was very bad, that he behaved badly, but I think that what was really going on was that he was understanding for the first time that his father would die,” I said to my wife after some reflection. “The part that's hard to understand is that he seems to be thinking that people who have died will return, but if we observe carefully I have a feeling we'll come to see what's behind that notion, too. Because Eeyore doesn't say things off the top of his head. Besides, when I was a child I think I had the same thought. At any rate, when I go away on a trip and stay away for what seems like forever isn't it natural that his thoughts should jump ahead to after my death? His father goes away to some distant place and the feelings he experiences are the same as if he had died, and on top of that, his mother attempts to run off and leave him behind—no wonder he was frantic. It was just a game, but to a child, games are models of reality. I thought about the knife, too, and I think the way he was holding it was meant to be defensive; maybe that's also why he was peering out into the garden. I wonder if he wasn't standing guard against an enemy in order to protect the family in my place now that I was dead?”
I continued, silently, not to my wife but to myself, as follows: Since my son had begun to ponder with his own kind of urgency what would happen following my death, was I not obliged as his father to prepare him, unflinchingly and without falling into idleness, for his relationship to the world, society, and mankind after that inevitable moment had arrived? As to whether I was capable of actually writing a complete guide to the world, society, and mankind in language he could easily understand that would keep my son from losing his way along the road of life following my death, I had the feeling it had already been made clear to me that this was in fact not possible. Nevertheless, somehow or other I must do what I can to attempt a book of definitions intended for him. Let me think of it not so much as being for him as for myself, a book of definitions that would cleanse and encourage me. My experience with gout provided my son with a precise definition of “foot,” and through his understanding I had been made aware of what constituted “nice foot.” Carried along by the momentum I had achieved on my trip, I was continuing to read Blake intensively—why couldn't I overlap my reading of the English poet with the writing of a book of definitions? And why not write it as a novel, this time without worrying about using language my son and his comrades could understand, about the experiences that had provided me with the definitions that were critical to my sense of self and about my longing to pass them on to innocent souls?
I had a fantasy once, and wrote about it, that on the day of my death the total accumulation of my experience would flow out of me into my son's innocent spirit. And if my fantasy should come to pass, when he had buried the handful of bone and ash that his father had become, my son would read the book of definitions I had yet to write. With this childish fantasy as something to cling to, in hopes of finding shelter from myriad thoughts about the difficulties my son would encounter in the outside world after my death, it seemed possible that I might sit down to work on this book of definitions.
River—the experience that gave me the definition is etched in my memory as vividly as the discovery of “nice foot” that I had shared with my son. It was a definition so precise and clear that the man who provided it scarcely needed words. At least ten years ago, I was on an airplane traveling east from New Delhi with the veteran writer, H. He had appeared to be asleep when suddenly, catching my attention with a brisk movement that made it clear that he was not, he pointed out the pressurized window at the river cutting a deep arc like a surgical scar across the clay-colored plain below. An instant later, he had sat back in his reclined seat and had closed his eyes again and I was leaning across his lap to survey the view through the window. (Before we boarded the plane there had been what I took to be a confrontation between us, and, though we had resolved it, his words and attitude just now had further heartened me.) As it happened, the plane was just banking into a turn as it began its descent: my field of vision was filled entirely by what could only be called the quintessential river in India, the true river among rivers. Until then, my archetype had always been the limpid river that ran through the valley in the forest in Shikoku where I grew up, but from that moment on I retained a second image of the essential river: clay-colored, just a shade paler than the color of the ground, doubtless flowing toward what must be a clay-colored sea but imperceptibly, in what direction, it was impossible to know. From the slightest movement of Mr. H's wrist and finger a minute before, and from the fluttering of his lip as he spoke as though it were a continuation of his silence or perhaps did not speak, I received and retain in memory to this day, together with the incidents that occurred before we boarded the plane, what I still consider to be the best possible definition of “river.”
On the day we traversed the Indian continent in a plane, Mr. H and I had spent a good ten hours waiting for our flight, the only Japanese among the Indians. In that entire time, other than the word “river” that may have been just the fluttering of his lips, and an invitation to read an article in the International Herald Tribune—"You might be interested in this"—and, before that, in the taxi on the way to the airport, an episode about dirty eyeglasses, he had not spoken a word to me. And until just before our flight to Calcutta finally departed, I had been feeling that his silence was due to anger at me for my compulsive-ness about time and my ignorance of how things were done in India. The truth was, if it hadn't been for my jumpiness, Mr. H might have spent the ten hours relaxing in our hotel instead of waiting around on an autumn day with nothing to do in an airport as drab and deserted as a warehouse.
In what I took to be his indignation, Mr. H was unapproachable as a fortress. Born into a merchant family that had been shipping agents on the Sea of Japan for generations (the only one of his brothers who had turned his back on the world of commerce, he had been the one to inherit what might be called the essence of his family's accumulated humanity), he had set out just after the war for the chaos that was China, as though in search of hardship, and had found what he was looking for. On his return, he had become an author and an intellectual with a style of his own, though very much in the postwar school. But there was something about him that had nothing to do with his family background or his lifetime experiences, an inherent personality that included stubbornness about his feelings that made it impossible for anyone to divert him once he had set his course. Particularly not the person responsible for his anger.
Before it had become plain that he was fuming, Mr. H had removed his International Herald Tribune from its paper cover and shown me an article whose contents I can convey vividly: it was about the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich's attack on the suppression of free speech in the Soviet Union. Still in Russia at the time, Rostropovich was dedicating himself to defending his comrade Solzhenitsyn, and I had copied his remarks in the flyleaf of the book I was reading that day: “Every human being must have the right to express without fear his own thoughts and his opinions about what he knows and has experienced. I am not talking about simply regurgitating with minor modifications opinions that have been fed to us …”
As Mr. H's anger gradually revealed itself,